Jonathan Dewald

"A la Table de Magny": Nineteenth-Century French Men of Letters and the Sources of Modern Historical Thought

In 1938, the philosopher Raymond Aron sought to define the essential qualities of historical thought. "The biographer interests himself in the private man," he wrote, "the historian primarily in the public man. An individual enters history only by his impact on collective development, by his contribution to the moral future."¹ Aron's definition of history as the study of public realms derived from ancient traditions, which gave primacy to the history of political life. Although his own views allowed for some forms of social history, and indeed highlighted the importance of economic development and social class as forces in humanity's collective evolution, they excluded both private experience and the many social groups that failed to have an impact on humanity's development. Despite Aron's magisterial assurance, however, these topics already interested some historians in 1938, and they have become central to historical thought since World War II. Contemporary historians insist that as much attention be given to private persons and intimate doings as to those of public significance, and that apparently marginal groups matter within the larger historical record. Emerging from these commitments, their studies of sexuality, childhood, deviance, women, and a long list of other topics have changed interpretations of most periods. Despite occasional protests, this vision of the historian's task has today become a norm guiding both professionals and the broader public in their understanding of the past.²

This essay explores some of the origins of this redefinition of knowledge about the past.³ The question is an important one in the intellectual history of modern Europe, and of course there exist already coherent and plausible answers to it. Concern with events, politics, and great men (it is commonly agreed) dominated historical practice into the early twentieth century. Nineteenth-century scholars were obsessed with the nation-state, and they wanted to understand how this (to them, essential) fact of modern life had come into being.⁴ Following the example of Leopold von Ranke and other founders of professional history, they turned to the public archives, in which the state's progress could be traced; and their efforts produced the first solidly documented, scientific historical writing. Around the time of World War I, however, confidence in this project waned. New social conditions and groups seemed to demand attention; new developments in physics and other sciences challenged nineteenth-century ideas about what a scientific history should be; and the war itself undermined faith in the state as a force for human progress. Between the wars, there were calls for "a new kind of history," in the words of the French historian Lucien Febvre, and they resulted in a burst of scientific progress. New problems became legitimate subjects of inquiry, and new kinds of documents demanded attention. Narrative became less central as a mode of historical representation, because historians now attended to questions that had little to do with the established stories of national development. A history focused on problems in turn required new methods: quantification, comparison across national boundaries, insights derived from geography, sociology, psychology, and anthropology.

Even though it had sources in several historical traditions,⁵ it is generally agreed that this revolution in historical studies found its most influential advocates in France, under the leadership of Febvre and the medievalist Marc Bloch. War veterans and colleagues at the University of Strasbourg, they had begun planning their journal Annales d'histoire économique et sociale almost immediately after their return to civilian life; it finally appeared in 1929. Over the following decades, the Annales group offered both programmatic statements in favor of new methods and examples of what such research might produce. In a 1944 book, for instance, Febvre drew historians' attention to the importance of studying human personality in the past; the changing nature of personality, he wrote, represents for historians "an enormous problem ... I don't see that anyone, ever, has clearly laid it out: not among the philosophers, who study personality as it is today; nor among the historians, who don't ask themselves this kind of question."⁶ Such insistence that historians give more attention to the real life of past societies (it is argued) aroused suspicion among the political historians who dominated European universities, and Febvre and Bloch faced a difficult struggle in establishing the legitimacy of their enterprise. Peter Burke has recently described them as leading a "small, radical and subversive" band, "fighting a guerrilla action against traditional history, political history, and the history of events."⁷ Georg Iggers describes Febvre and Bloch as occupying "a somewhat marginal position in the 1930s," as "they pursued their conflict with [historian Charles] Seignobos and the traditional political historians at the Sorbonne."⁸

But after World War II, the situation changed dramatically. Historians associated with the Annales acquired increasingly absolute preeminence within the French historical profession, and their example resonated abroad, among North American, British, and German historians. Both supporters and critics have stressed the force of this international influence. In 1972, J. H. Hexter humorously noted his "eerie feeling that ... the Annalistes are on a march that by friendly persuasion is about to conquer the historical world."⁹ Fifteen years later, in an essay mainly concerned with Anglo-Saxon historical writing, Gertrude Himmelfarb suggested that "even some of the Annalistes are beginning to suspect that they have unleashed a force that they cannot control. The very disciplines they have used to subvert the conventions of the old history threaten to subvert history itself."¹⁰ Whether as subversion or inspiration, observers have repeatedly stressed the centrality of the Annales group to historical consciousness throughout the twentieth-century West.

In this essay, I seek to complicate the narrative of intellectual transformation that Burke, Iggers, Himmelfarb, and others have recounted. Like them, I focus on France, as a center from which crucial elements in the contemporary Western understanding of history emerged, but I argue that these changes need to be set more firmly within their cultural background. Nineteenth-century French scholars in fact gave considerable attention to the history of societies. They assumed that history should be the story of societies, and they understood that history to include women as well as men. Their work, too, had considerable international resonance; these scholars, like their Annaliste successors, should be understood as contributing to a Europe-wide historical consciousness, rather than to purely French developments. Students of historiography have tended to neglect this line of historical thought because much of it arose outside university history departments. It was the work of literary critics, philosophers, and antiquarians, at least as much as of university historians. Taking note of their writings does not diminish the importance of Febvre, Bloch, and the other Annalistes as scientific innovators, but it does redefine the nature of their innovations. Rather than inventing altogether new subjects of study, I argue, they took up themes that had already been widely debated in the nineteenth century and that held a prominent place in the background of their own era. When they added their own contributions to these debates, they spoke to and helped shape the larger culture.¹¹

An 1887 letter from Friedrich Nietzsche conveniently lists the writers on whom I will focus—and suggests how intently their work was followed outside France. "The second volume of the Journal des Goncourts has appeared—a most interesting new publication. It concerns the years 1862–65; in it, the famous dîners chez Magny [a Parisian restaurant] are described in an extremely vivid way, the dinners at which the most intelligent and skeptical troupe of Parisian minds at that time met together (Sainte-Beuve, Flaubert, Théophile Gautier, Taine, Renan, the Goncourt brothers, Schérer [sic], Gavarni, sometimes Turgenev, and so on). Exasperated pessimism, cynicism, nihilism, alternating with a lot of joviality and good humor; I would have been quite at home there myself—I know these gentlemen by heart so well that I have actually had enough of them. One should be more radical; at root they all lack the principal thing—'la force.'¹² Nietzsche's reservations about these men of letters matter less for now than his conviction that they in some sense anticipated his own vision of the world, and that they had an important and unsettling effect on contemporary intellectuals.

Nietzsche's cast of characters began meeting in 1862, at a restaurant favored by the literary critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, one of the group's organizers. The biweekly meetings quickly acquired some fame for their mixture of personal confession, scabrous atheistic talk, and literary seriousness. The Goncourts' Journal described the group discussing classical literature, recent works, and recent historical writing. But it also quoted Sainte-Beuve confessing "a secret despair, buried but still alive; he wished he were handsome, having, as he put it, a physique" that would instantly attract women. In the next year, they described an intoxicated Hippolyte Taine vomiting out the window, then turning back in to continue an argument about religious belief. Two weeks later, there were debates about the psychological effects of visiting whorehouses, with Taine arguing (against Flaubert, who insisted on the necessity of personal engagement) that real benefits came from venal sex. New members regularly joined, usually after having already attained literary prominence; others eventually left as a consequence of evolving personal enmities. Sainte-Beuve's death in 1869 and the fall of the empire the following year accelerated this turnover among the diners, and in 1874 Edmond de Goncourt (another of the original organizers) noted sadly that the dinners had lost much of their interest, having become mainly the preserve of political figures.¹³ While the empire lasted, however, ties among the diners were reinforced by their encounters in other settings, and these balanced the dinners' bohemian tone. Most important, Sainte-Beuve, the Goncourts, Taine, Renan, Flaubert, and others met one another frequently in the salon of the princess Mathilde, Napoleon III's cousin, who provided a haven for liberal artists and writers, and used her influence on their behalf when they ran into political difficulties.

The group included five writers whose careers included significant works of history and who will be the focus in what follows. The oldest of these (he was born in 1804), Sainte-Beuve exemplified much about Parisian intellectual life during the first two-thirds of the century: modest origins; an unrelenting struggle for success in the world of literary journalism, and thus an abundant stream of books and reviews; disappointed hopes of success as a poet and novelist; and a disorderly personal life, which included one duel and an affair with the wife of Victor Hugo, at the time his closest friend. He never married, and only after 1840 did his life settle down somewhat, as a series of honors and government pensions brought him financial security and social standing. He was named director of the Mazarin library in 1840, to the Académie Française in 1844, and in 1854 to the Collège de France, where radical students hooted him off the podium; in 1865, with Mathilde's support, he received appointment to the imperial Senate, a mainly honorific position that brought the considerable salary of 30,000 francs.¹⁴

The others on Nietzsche's list were a full generation younger. They had come of age in the years around 1848, and they embodied new career paths and sensibilities. Sainte-Beuve himself described them as more serious and less sociable than his own coevals, and less susceptible to romantic follies: "a generation shaped by solitude, books, sciences." Having to absorb modern science and scholarly methods, "they had at the outset a heavy weight to lift; they devoted themselves entirely to the task, and succeeded at it."¹⁵ In keeping with this more scholarly orientation, Hippolyte Taine and Ernest Renan both sought conventional academic careers; after intensive preparations, Taine at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Renan at the seminary of Saint-Sulpice, both took the aggregation in philosophy, and both wrote dissertations. In fact, neither's career progressed so tranquilly as he had hoped, since each encountered accusations of atheism and suspicions within the imperial administration; the more combative, Taine failed his examinations, condemning himself to a year teaching provincial high school students. But they quickly established themselves as leading writers and triumphed after 1871, winning election to the Académie Française and a series of lofty institutional positions; Renan became head of the Collège de France, while Taine was among the founders of the Institut des Sciences Politiques. In contrast to Sainte-Beuve's bohemian tendencies, they married prudently and in middle age enjoyed domestic calm, complete with children and country houses.¹⁶ The Goncourts' story was closer to Sainte-Beuve's, in that they had no interest in advanced academic degrees and university positions, and neither married. But they, too, sought to apply scientific method to social and cultural issues, and to establish the intellectual as a respectable public figure. Late in life, established in an elegant suburban villa, Edmond (Jules had died young, of syphilis) enjoyed considerable public eminence.¹⁷

Magny was thus characterized by its blurring of the lines that divided intellectual life elsewhere in nineteenth-century Europe. It brought together men who were in some ways cultural outsiders, including several prominent victims of the imperial regime: the government had prosecuted Flaubert for obscenity, dismissed Renan from his academic position, and blocked Taine's career. Yet these same figures occasionally encountered the emperor himself at Mathilde's salon and regularly socialized there with some of the regime's leading administrators. The diners represented widely differing literary genres—including history, literary criticism, philosophy, and fiction—and several of them mixed these literary genres in their own careers. Sainte-Beuve wrote poetry and novels, and only reluctantly decided that his primary vocation was as a literary historian; the Goncourts first became known for their historical writing, then shifted to fiction; Taine and Renan both wrote works of fiction, although this was never their primary focus, and Taine wrote studies of psychology and philosophy, as well as history. One boundary remained largely intact. George Sand appears to have been the only woman to attend. But in other settings, members of the group had intense intellectual contacts with women. From the 1840s, Sainte-Beuve corresponded regularly with his former lover Hortense Allart, who spent most of her time in the countryside near Paris. She commented on his recent work, urged that he take up particular topics, and described her other reading, abruptly mixing these literary discussions with stories from her own love life and inquiries about his, much in the spirit of the Magny discussions.¹⁸ Renan's researches in Palestine were carried out in close partnership with his sister, and they corresponded about both personal and intellectual matters until her death, in 1861. In these encounters as among themselves, the Magny writers repeatedly considered the relatedness of their professional scholarship to their personal lives. "Cold, lifeless, unphilosophical, all that littérature universitaire," Renan confided to his journal, in 1846; "have these men no other purpose in their literary exercises than to produce good professors?"¹⁹ This was a rhetoric of intellectual activity that differed sharply from that of the historical seminars that had already developed in contemporary Germany, and that would emerge in France and the United States during the 1880s and 1890s. But at the same time, the Magny writers stressed the seriousness and fruitfulness of their discussions. The Goncourts quoted Sainte-Beuve's claim that his weekly articles emerged from discussions at the dinners and added their own comment: "it's true, Magny will be seen to have been ... one of the last centers of real liberty of thought and speech."²⁰

Given their prominence, these men of letters offer an obvious test case for an argument about the nineteenth century's contribution to the twentieth century's historical outlook, but they also illustrate the difficulties with such an argument. None of the group trained as a professional historian or taught history in the university, and even their nonfiction was often written with a mass audience in mind; all of them needed to make money through literary journalism, writing for such middle-brow periodicals as the Revue des deux mondes. These literary orientations were at the core of the historian Alphonse Aulard's critique of Taine, first presented in 1905–1906 as a course at the Sorbonne, where Aulard held France's first chair in French Revolution studies. Taine failed to meet the standards of professional historical study, argued Aulard; his citations were sloppy and partial, and he failed to confront questions that mattered to professionals. "At the Sorbonne," Aulard proclaimed, asserting the importance of professional boundaries, "a candidate for a diploma in historical studies or a doctorate would disqualify himself if he cited Taine as an authority on a historical question."²¹ Insofar as contemporary historical thought rests on clearly defined standards of professional expertise, its origins would seem to lie elsewhere.

A more serious problem with connecting the Magny group to contemporary historical practice lies in its ideas about human nature: most of the group believed in racialist explanations of social phenomena. The Goncourts publicly voiced their antisemitism and made it the subject of one of their novels (Manette Salomon); they dedicated it "à la table de Magny," implying that the group as a whole had some sympathy for their views.²² Privately, their language was even stronger, and Edmond responded enthusiastically to Edouard Drumont's La France juive when it appeared in 1885; its claims about Jewish power over Parisian newspapers, he thought, might explain unsympathetic reviews of his own work since Manette Salomon.²³ Taine and Renan adopted the rhetoric of scientific racism, and both applied Darwinian ideas to social phenomena very soon after The Origin of Species first appeared. "A race like the Aryan people," wrote Taine, "scattered from the Ganges to the Hebrides, established under all climates, ranged along every degree of civilization, transformed by thirty centuries of revolutions, shows nevertheless in its languages, in its religions, in its literatures, and in its philosophies, the community of blood and of intellect which still today binds together all its offshoots. However much they may differ, their parentage is not lost." Such racism led Taine to hierarchical judgments about different cultures' possibilities, contrasting the limited aptitudes of "the semitic races" and the Chinese with those of "the Aryan races."²⁴ Renan drew out the practical consequences of these views. In response to the crisis of 1870–1871, among other recommendations, he urged colonialism as "a political necessity of the absolutely first order ... [T]he regeneration of inferior or corrupted races by superior races is a part of the providential order of humanity." China and Africa offered the logical targets for this activity, he believed, since their inhabitants were naturally suited to manual labor. In contrast, even working-class Europeans descended from "a race of masters and soldiers." With its factories and offices, modern society restricted these masterly men "to labors contrary to [their] race," and socialist agitation inevitably ensued. Far better, Renan thought, to send them off on colonizing missions, where their innate heroism could serve the larger good.²⁵

Racism of this kind allied closely with the mistrust of democracy, which they saw advancing all around them and whose impact seemed especially frightening after the crisis of 1870–1871. Sainte-Beuve followed a complicated political evolution, and late in life became a left-wing hero for urging liberal reforms on the empire. But his works included enough criticism of democracy that the nationalist antisemite Charles Maurras could claim them as sources of his own views. In 1898, he argued that in Sainte-Beuve "one would find the first indications of that resistance to the ideas of 1789 that, later, would bring honor to such figures as Taine and Renan." The literary group around Sainte-Beuve, he added, "brings together everything ... solid and healthy in our nature. It includes nearly all those writers of our century who do not go on all fours"; and thus the Action Française sought to establish a national holiday in his honor.²⁶

Having witnessed the Paris Commune, Taine and Renan were more explicit in their anxieties. Taine's Les origines de la France contemporaine famously argues that the Revolution of 1789 was made by men who had found themselves unable to succeed in the Old Regime; the revolution resulted from bitterness and envy, rather than reason and philosophy. Individual revolutionary leaders such as Jean-Paul Marat showed as well the destabilizing effects of their mixed racial backgrounds, but such leadership was not surprising in democratic situations; "universal suffrage," he wrote of his own times, "has had the effect of pushing aside the true notables, ... the men who by their education, their preponderant role in taxation, their still-greater influence on production, work, and business, are the social authorities and ought to be the legal authorities."²⁷ Renan spoke still more bluntly. "Democracy," he wrote in response to the calamities of 1870–1871, "causes our military and political weakness, our ignorance, our silly vanity; together with our backward Catholicism, it causes the inadequacy of our educational system."²⁸ The Goncourts, whose family claimed eighteenth-century ennoblement and who prided themselves on never having voted, shared both this fear of democratic government and a related fear that Europe was being Americanized. "It is the barbarians of civilization who will swallow up the Latin world, just as the horde of uncivilized barbarians devoured it in a former age."²⁹ Renan envisioned the same prospect, with greater resignation. "The world is headed toward a form of Americanism that wounds our delicate ideas but that, once the current crises have passed, may well be no worse than the Old Regime for the only thing that matters, that is, the freedom and the progress of the human soul."³⁰

Their confident expression of such ideas suggests the distance separating the Magny writers from twentieth-century assumptions about historical explanation. But there are also reasons for looking more closely at the group's influence. In the first place, history held a central place in its thinking and writing. "History is the real philosophy of the nineteenth century," wrote Renan at the start of his career, in 1849. "Our century is not metaphysical ... Its great concern is history, and above all the history of the human mind ... In our times, one is defined by the way one understands history."³¹ Taine agreed. In 1858, he summarized the mood of his contemporaries as so deeply historical as to crowd out the philosophical approaches of earlier eras. The eighteenth century's classics of social theory, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Social Contract "are now just decorations for the library," and any modern who attempted the genre would join these classics in oblivion. Hence the writer with sociological theories to advance "discovers an excellent method, the use of history."³² "Everyone knows," he added a few years later, "that this science is the greatest concern and the greatest achievement of the century. It's our contemporary; in Voltaire's day, it was barely imagined; in [Bishop] Bossuet's, it didn't exist."³³

In establishing this outlook, Taine argued, Sainte-Beuve had played a central role.³⁴ Although he practiced as a literary critic, Sainte-Beuve gave more attention to historical and social questions than to literature. A survey of the 640 essays that he produced for his weekly newspaper column between 1849 and 1869 finds only 150 literary topics, and even fewer instances of pure literary criticism;³⁵ and his greatest work remains his history of Port-Royal. To the American critic and Harvard professor Irving Babbitt, writing in 1912, Sainte-Beuve illustrated the larger confusion of nineteenth-century thought, its refusal of disciplinary conventions: "Criticism in Sainte-Beuve is plainly moving away from its own centre towards something else; it is ceasing to be literary and becoming historical and biographical and scientific. It illustrates strikingly in its own fashion the drift of the nineteenth century away from the pure type ... towards a general mingling and confusion of the genres. We are scarcely conscious of any change when Sainte-Beuve passes ... from writers to generals or statesmen."³⁶ If we are to understand the historical culture of the late nineteenth century, it clearly matters to understand these writers.

This is all the more important in that they had an immense influence on their contemporaries. Taine wrote of Sainte-Beuve that "we are all his pupils," and Anatole France called him the Thomas Aquinas of the nineteenth century.³⁷ Despite Aulard's criticisms, leading academic figures also read Taine's work carefully. Gabriel Monod, among the architects of French academic history, founder of the Revue historique, and superviser of Lucien Febvre's dissertation, had an altogether different political outlook from Renan and Taine's; but he nonetheless counted them as two of the three most important French historians (the other was Jules Michelet). "To Taine goes the glory of having understood, better than any other, the state of his generation's soul and mind; philosopher, aesthetician, literary critic, historian, he displayed all of his generation's tendencies, with rigor, brilliance, and force; he had a profound influence on it."³⁸ From another wing of the Sorbonne, the philosophy professor Lucien Lévy-Bruhl added his assessment of Renan and Taine's intellectual impact—and Lévy-Bruhl was also an important influence on Febvre, who cited him often and with respect. (Some years later, Lévy-Bruhl invented the term mentalité, which was to have such an impact on Febvre's thinking.) Taine's "influence upon minds has perhaps been equal to that of Renan, and still makes itself strongly felt even in his very adversaries."³⁹

Their effect on the larger reading public was comparable, appropriately, given their efforts to reach that public. Renan's Life of Jesus was one of the great bestsellers of the nineteenth century, allowing its author to respond with perfect indifference when the imperial government stripped him of his academic position. Taine was almost as popular. By 1923, his Les origines de la France contemporaine had reached a twenty-eighth edition, and his literary criticism was almost as widely read. This popularity only added to Alphonse Aulard's vexation as he looked critically at Taine's work: although university historians had begun questioning it, "neither in France nor abroad has the larger public yet been alerted."⁴⁰ Even the Goncourts, whose historical works sold badly, had considerable impact on their literary contemporaries. Their study of eighteenth-century society, wrote the often critical Edmond Scherer, was "one of the works that best allows us to understand the century, ... which at least best helps us enter into its intimate life."⁴¹ Their influence was especially strong on Emile Zola, who acknowledged that he had adapted their concept of the novel as an exploration of societal patterns. In 1896, only two years before he intervened in the Dreyfus Affair, Zola presented the principal eulogy at Edmond de Goncourt's funeral; despite Goncourt's antisemitism and his own concerns about antisemitic injustice, Zola described him as having a "noble gallantry of mind"; his "errors, if he were guilty of any, were errors arising only from his burning passion for literature."⁴² For better and worse, ideas from the Magny group loomed large in the intellectual landscape of pre–World War I France, the era in which Febvre and Bloch began their studies.

Nor was the group's impact limited to France. Already in 1866, the Goncourts noted the presence at a Magny dinner of "an American passing through, some kind of Yankee journalist"; he had been attracted by the group's widening reknown and was especially voluble in his admiration for Taine, commenting even on Taine's forthcoming studies of psychology.⁴³ Nietzsche had reservations about the group as a whole and especially disliked Renan, but he had enormous admiration for Taine, whom he described as "the educator of all the more serious learned characters in France" and as one of the few contemporary intellectuals who formed the true audience for his own ideas.⁴⁴ In Vienna, the novelist and cultural critic Stefan Zweig wrote his 1904 doctoral dissertation on Taine's philosophy; the dissertation was hastily thrown together and remained unpublished, but (scholars have suggested) Taine had an important influence on Zweig's later thinking.⁴⁵ The American critic Babbitt devoted one of the ten chapters in his 1912 book The Masters of Modern French Criticism to Taine and another to Renan; as the leading critic of his age, Sainte-Beuve received two.⁴⁶ In England, Matthew Arnold expressed his admiration, and the literary critic Edmund Gosse noted Sainte-Beuve's influence on his own work and that of other British critics, adding that "all the world has read him."⁴⁷ In Italy, Benedetto Croce criticized Taine's methods and argued that his influence had been destructive, partly because of the pessimism that Nietzsche so admired; but criticism was necessary, he explained, forty-four years after Taine's death, because of "the widespread celebrity of his work ... Taine's is an example that everyone remembers."⁴⁸ For Alfonse Aulard as well, the "servile admiration" of Italian and German scholars for Taine heightened the need for critical review.⁴⁹

To understand this influence, it is helpful to start with the Magny group's conception of historical inquiry itself. Despite differences among them, these writers were alike in stressing the novelty of their approaches to the past, in terms that foreshadow Febvre's own idea of a new history. "The political history of the Revolution has been done and is being redone every day. The social history of the Revolution has been attempted for the first time in these studies," wrote the Goncourts in the preface to a new edition of their 1854 book. "For this new history, we have had to discover new sources of Truth."⁵⁰ "Through psychological analysis," they wrote in another work, "through observing individual and collective life, and assessing habits, passions, ideas, moral as well as material fashions, we intend to reconstitute a whole vanished world, from the base to the summit, from the body to the soul."⁵¹ They thus claimed innovation in regard to subject matter, methods, and sources alike, and in each domain they contrasted themselves to the political historians around them. They did not dismiss political history as irrelevant, but they argued that it could give only a partial representation of the past and that its methods were unsuited to explicating other domains of life.

Taine used similar language: a new kind of history needed to be written that would deal with the real life of the past, rather than its politics or ideas. "We too often forget it these days: questions of finances, tactics, politics, administration, the details of beliefs, philosophy, arts, science—all these ought to enter the portrayal of human life, but only to serve the depiction of the human passions; the true subject of history is the soul."⁵² Both admirers and critics understood that this represented a new and important approach to the past. In The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche contrasted Leopold von Ranke's arid "prudence" with Taine's willingness to confront the frightening psychological realities of the past. Only "with a Taine-like dauntlessness, out of strength of soul" would history of real significance be written.⁵³ Less enthusiastic, Edmond Scherer saw Taine's study of English literature (first published in 1864) as "not just a history, but also and above all a manner of seeing history," which was now to focus on "everything that constitutes social life." Scherer believed that the method "changes the idea of history ... History ... as it has always been understood, is above all a narrative. It proposes to make known men's actions. It does indeed seek the causes of those actions, ... but it inquires only into causes that are witnessed and documented ... Moreover, what will become of narrative in the midst of these researches?"⁵⁴

As with the Goncourts, Taine's choice of subject matter had implications for his approach to documents: this kind of history required a wider and more heterogeneous range of sources. In 1899, the novelist Paul Bourget admiringly summarized this situation: "For M. Taine, everything in human history interests the psychologist and provides him with documentation. From people's ways of furnishing a room and serving a meal, to their manners of praying to God and honoring their dead, there is nothing that does not merit examination, commentary, and interpretation, for there is nothing in which men do not engage some aspect of their intimate being ... no evidence, no matter how small, is absolutely insignifiant or negligible."⁵⁵ Aulard also noted Taine's readiness to use unconventional sources, but believed that they deformed his historical understanding. Taine's vision of the early revolution, resting as it did on extreme events recounted in popular pamphlets, had no more value than would a description of France in 1907 based on "a selection of horrifying faits-divers published by the Petit Journal or the Petit Parisien."⁵⁶ At the same time, Taine had given more thought than the Goncourts to the new methods that such different kinds of documentation required. Whether literary or archival, he wrote in 1864, a document resembles "a fossil shell ... one of those forms embedded in a stone by an animal which once lived and perished. Beneath the shell was an animal and behind the document there was a man. Why do you study the shell unless to form some idea of the animal? In the same way do you study the document in order to comprehend the man; both shell and document are dead fragments and of value only as indications of the complete living being. The aim is to reach this being; this is what you strive to reconstruct ... True history begins when the historian has discerned ... the living active man, endowed with passions, furnished with habits."⁵⁷ History needed to concern itself with real life rather than institutional abstractions.

One result of these orientations was an interest in the history of women. The subject had surprising popularity among nineteenth-century writers, sufficiently so that in 1844 controversy erupted between two literary eminences over priority in the field. In that year, both Sainte-Beuve and Victor Cousin (France's leading philosopher, a dominant figure at the Sorbonne, and a minister under Louis Philippe) published studies of women during the Old Regime. Sainte-Beuve was especially irritated by the overlap, and asserted his own methodological originality in terms similar to those used by Taine and the Goncourts. "I have preserved these technical details," he wrote of an erudition-filled footnote that he included in the republished version of an essay on the duchesse de Longueville, because they "indicate my priority in this kind of research, which has since been so worked over."⁵⁸ In 1862, the Goncourts also contributed to the genre, with their La femme au dix-huitième siècle, and that work also attracted significant attention. The princess Mathilde, whom they had met only once before, used her reading of the book as the occasion for a dinner invitation, and Jules Michelet himself cited it with praise in a new volume of his history of France.⁵⁹ Sainte-Beuve's review suggested the breadth of topics that seemed worth pursuing in this kind of history. The Goncourts, he wrote, had depicted women "of all ranks and all classes, ... at every level of society, every hour, and every age. The book is a mine of information."⁶⁰

Bonnie G. Smith has shown that during the first half of the nineteenth century numerous female scholars explored women's history, and it is likely that Sainte-Beuve and Cousin were influenced by these efforts.⁶¹ But the question of Sainte-Beuve's originality matters less here than his approach to the topic. His studies insisted that women's history belonged in the mainstream of historical analysis, and they gave serious attention to women's place within the modern world. There was nothing inevitable about this approach. Cousin, for instance, idolized the aristocratic ladies of the seventeenth century and expressed horror at the public roles that women had come to exercise in his own times. "Woman is an être domestique, as man is a public personage," he wrote; "what are we to say of the femme auteur? What! a woman who, thanks to God, has no public cause to defend, throws herself into the public sphere, and her modesty is not revolted at revealing to all eyes, selling to the highest bidder ... her most secret beauties, her most mysterious and touching charms, her soul, her sentiments, her sufferings, her inner struggles. Though we see this every day, and even among the most honest women, it will be eternally impossible for us to understand."⁶²

At points, Sainte-Beuve used condescending language in discussing women's history, and his friend Hortense Allart complained that the studies were too delicate in tone, failing to convey the intellectual force of his best work.⁶³ But in contrast to Cousin, he consistently stressed the severe limitations under which even the most free-spirited women labored during the seventeenth century, and he contrasted these with the liberating effects of modernity. The seventeenth-century duchesse de Longueville, for instance, lacked "a will of her own," however dazzling her personality, and could scarcely distinguish among religion, flirtation, and politics.⁶⁴ Conversely, he treated the revolutionary leader Madame Roland as a heroic figure, "one of the most eloquent and honest representatives for studying that political generation that wanted 1789, and that 1789 neither wearied nor satisfied"; and he expressed no doubts about the legitimacy of her ambitions to participate in public affairs.⁶⁵ He praised Germaine de Staël in similar terms for her determination to enter the male public world. He spoke of her "male and serious outlook," noted that she adopted "an openly, nobly ambitious state of mind and inspiration," and placed her in a line of leading male writers.⁶⁶ Her fiction, centering on the situation of the creative woman trapped by romantic feeling, especially stimulated Sainte-Beuve's enthusiasm: her novel "Corinne is precisely the image of the sovereign independence of genius, even in a time of the most complete oppression."⁶⁷ Politics lurked in this literary assessment, drawing attention as it did to the Napoleonic repression under which de Staël suffered, and Sainte-Beuve insisted on the fruitfulness of her engagement in the politics of her era. Her posthumous Considérations sur la Révolution française had an enormous influence on political debate in the early Restoration, he wrote; and her death in 1817 deprived liberals of an important influence.⁶⁸ At a less lofty level, he offered the example of Pauline de Meulan, who would become François Guizot's first wife. Because of her family's financial collapse, de Meulan supported herself for a decade as an unmarried femme journaliste (her own term). Having quoted at length her defense of that position against others' pity, Sainte-Beuve concluded by praising her commitment to "the ideas of duty and work, such as the new society increasingly demands"; de Meulan offered "a model of the strong, sensible, hard-working woman, in the front rank of the middle class." In precise opposition to Cousin, Sainte-Beuve's Portraits de femmes argued for the value of women's entry into the public sphere.⁶⁹

Their literary orientations and mass audience did not prevent the Magny group from claiming scientic status for their approaches to the past, which (as they stressed) distinguished these from the flimsy or fictional accounts produced by some of their literary friends. Renan's views were the most ambiguous. As a skilled linguist and diligent editor of ancient inscriptions, he in some ways exemplified the nineteenth century's ideas about scientific history. But the very fervor of his belief in the natural sciences led him to stress the gap between their methods and those of historical investigation. "The natural sciences remained for me the sole source of truth," he recalled in his memoirs; had he followed his interest in them, he would have studied physiology and perhaps arrived at "several of Darwin's results, that I had some inkling of." The natural sciences remained the model of real knowledge, which historical study could never fully attain.⁷⁰ The Goncourts wrote history in a more literary and impressionistic manner, but they too insisted on rigorous methods, demanding that "at each step the historian remove prejudices [and] return to the facts" concerning eighteenth-century women; "the novel has given a false idea of everything."⁷¹

Of the group, Taine expressed the greatest enthusiasm for applying science to historical study, arguing that these were overlapping rather than contradictory modes of investigation. His 1853 dissertation made the point bluntly: "We may view man as something of a superior animal, which produces philosophies and poems in about the same way as silkworms make their cocoons and bees their hives." Toward this idea-making animal, he proposed taking the stance of a naturalist, who would dissect the writer and make clear how his or her various parts functioned together.⁷² He returned to the image in the preface to his literary essays of 1858, describing himself as an anatomist of human systems, probing beneath the surface beauties of works of art to get at their underlying structures. "History's aim is not to drown us in detail, as it is commonly thought today," but rather to understand the "main forces" that govern each era, uniting the diversity of its surface manifestations. Only when thus pursued "will history cease being a compilation and become a science; only then will we be able to perceive and measure the secret forces that move us; then perhaps will we be able to predict."⁷³ His history of English literature (1864) likewise opens with a vigorous invocation of scientific method. "Vice and virtue," his introduction declares, "are products like vitriol and sugar; every complex fact grows out of the simple facts with which it is affiliated and on which it depends. We must therefore try to ascertain what simple facts underlie moral qualities the same as we can ascertain those that underlie physical qualities ... There is, then, a system in human ideas and sentiments."⁷⁴ Objections that scientific history produced ugly writing or unsettling moral implications, "which could be sustained in the Middle Ages, cannot today be applied to any science, no more to history than to physiology or chemistry, since the right to determine human beliefs has passed entirely to the side of empirical experience, and since precepts and doctrines, instead of founding observation, [now] derive from it their own plausibility."⁷⁵ This remained his position in old age, despite the political shocks of his later years. "It's certain," he wrote Bourget, "that everything—physiology, psychology, history—can and should be seen from a deterministic, mathematical, geometrical viewpoint," although this did not (he added) preclude ethical and aesthetic judgments.⁷⁶ "The more I study moral issues," he noted in the same year, "the more I find at base mathematical ideas ... the essential notion in the moral sciences is that of quantity."⁷⁷

Taine believed that race science supplied one such underpinning to historical analysis, but this was not the only resource he offered. Thus his Les origines de la France contemporaine asked what linguistic possibilities France had available to it in the eighteenth century and what forms of thought this linguistic apparatus permitted. During the two centuries leading up to 1789, he argued, French writers had sought to purify their language of uncouth words and to give it clarity and balance. The culture that resulted allowed only certain worldviews and prohibited others; having cut away the linguistic richness inherited from the Middle Ages, classicism produced an intellectual impoverishment that eventually allowed "only a portion of the truth, a miserable portion." In turn, linguistic poverty helped explain the Enlightenment's fatal inability to ground its social theories in human realities. In this case, Taine turned to quantification to prove his point, comparing the limited number of acceptable words in French with the abundance of contemporary German and English.⁷⁸ A note to the text indicates another approach to establishing the history of culture on scientific foundations. "For the past twenty years," he wrote with regard to the workings of religious belief, "thanks to the researches of psychologists and physiologists, we are beginning to understand the subterranean regions of the soul and the latent work [travail latent] that goes on there. The storage, residues, and unconscious combining of images ..., the composition, disassociations, and sustained doubling of the self [moi] ... the physical effects of mental sensations ... —all these recent discoveries add up to a new conception of the mind, and psychology thus renewed offers strong insights for history."⁷⁹ For Taine, scientific psychology was to illuminate the historian's practice, by allowing understanding of the irrational and mysterious in human behavior. In particular, the historian could come to understand "latent" ideas that guide social actors, without their knowledge.

Here, as in his more extended writings on questions of psychology, Taine stressed the mutability of the self, its provisional status. By its nature, the soul was a historical phenomenon, heavily subject to outside influences. "What do we mean by a self [moi—the term used in French psychoanalytic writing for our "ego"], in other words, by a person, a soul, a mind?"⁸⁰ That the question required asking, amidst the supposed self-assurance of the late Victorian era, is itself significant, as is the equivalence that Taine saw among his terms; for him, "soul," "person," "self," and "mind" all pointed to the same reality. Rigorously materialistic, Taine answered his question by arguing that the self had no real existence. It was merely the space within which the impressions of life were registered, an interior that remained amidst the continual flux of exterior impressions. Thus such stability as it had derived from its placement, not its content. Its coherence rested on memory, the series of sensations built up over a life. This vision led Taine to an interest in the circumstances that might disrupt the continuity of selfhood: false memories, delusions, insanity, and cerebral disturbances, concerning which he undertook researches with specialists at Parisian asylums.⁸¹ He concluded from these that no firm boundary separated madness from sanity, because selfhood had no firm ontological status. "Our idea of our selfhood [notre personne] actually refers to a group of coordinated elements, whose mutual associations, constantly under attack, constantly triumphing, hold together so long as our reason watches over them ... But madness is always at the mind's door, just as sickness is always at the body's; for the normal combination is only an achievement [réussite]; it only results from, and renews itself by, the defeat of opposing forces."⁸² Taine thus pioneered the later nineteenth century's critique of the bounded, freely reasoning, freely choosing individual of mid-Victorian ideology. But in this respect as in others, his scientific argument accorded with the larger outlook of the Magny group. In 1847, Sainte-Beuve had already written that "often, if I may say so, there is no deeper reality [fond véritable] in us, only an infinite array of surfaces."⁸³

These orientations placed the Magny group in a complex relationship to other historians of their day. Although they believed that their contemporaries had dramatically improved the methods of historical study, they also expressed reservations about contemporary historical writing; and these doubts applied even to Jules Michelet, whose interest in social history might seem akin to their own.⁸⁴ Sainte-Beuve produced immediate and enthusiastic reviews of books by Taine, the Goncourts, and Renan, but he declined an informal invitation to review early volumes of Michelet's History of France and never devoted a column to its later installments.⁸⁵ Trivial causes help to explain this failure. Even though the two enjoyed cordial relations, Sainte-Beuve was a notoriously unhelpful friend in literary matters, and he disliked Michelet's flamboyant prose style.⁸⁶ More important, however, he disagreed with Michelet's conception of historical change itself. In an 1850 review of a work on Rabelais, Sainte-Beuve made fun of Michelet for "pursuing, three centuries after the fact, that war against the Middle Ages, which he believes still threaten us." For Michelet, Rabelais (like Voltaire) was to be understood as a warrior for cultural progress. For Sainte-Beuve and his colleagues, there could be no such simple progress through history, indeed, no clear identification of a successful endpoint to historical development. "Every century has its mania," he wrote; "ours ... is the humanitarian mania, and we think we honor Rabelais in attributing it to him." Although it expresses admiration for Rabelais's educational ideas, the essay ends by stressing his mysterious qualities, the gap that separates contemporary readers from an author in the past.⁸⁷ Taine extended this idea further, to something like a structuralist view of the differences between historical eras. Seventeenth-century style and sentiments, he wrote, "are so distant from our own that we understand them with difficulty ... A transformed society has transformed the soul ... each century, with its own conditions, produces feelings and beauties particular to it."⁸⁸ These views directly expressed the "exasperated pessimism, cynicism, nihilism" (in Nietzsche's phrase) that characterized the Magny group. As moral relativists, doubting the reality of historical progress, and reluctant to see in past societies prefigurations of contemporary achievements, they could not accept Michelet's vision of how past and present interacted. They shared his interest in the history of society but disagreed with him as to what that history meant.⁸⁹

Sainte-Beuve, Taine, and their associates, I have argued, believed that history was a central method for understanding the human condition, and that, as such, it needed to move beyond its fixation on politics, institutions, ideas, and narrative. Because this new history concerned itself with private persons and inner lives, it also demanded new sources and techniques of analysis, notably through the development of a scientific psychology. But this claim raises two further questions, both of them suggested in somewhat different terms by Alphonse Aulard in his 1905–1906 critique of Taine. One concerns the apparent contradiction between the innovations that the Magny group called for in historical method and its difficulties with the modern world itself. In one way or another, all may be described as social conservatives; why, then, did they turn so readily to novel conceptions of the past, conceptions that (as they emphasized) differed sharply from traditional ways of relating past to present?

In answering this question, it is important to note that the group was not unambiguous in its conservatism. The Magny diners were notorious for their atheism, and as such were treated as a social menace by conservatives during the Second Empire.⁹⁰ Their comments on the Old Regime also tended to be negative, and they vigorously defended the culture of the nineteenth century. The aristocratic Goncourts, to be sure, viewed themselves as "deep within, immigrants from the eighteenth century ... déclassé contemporaries of that refined, exquisite, supremely delicate society."⁹¹ Yet even they, it has been seen, enjoyed cordial intellectual relations with Michelet and Zola, pillars of republican culture during the late nineteenth century. Sainte-Beuve questioned the value even for the seventeenth century of "a brilliant, ephemeral, artificial, superficial monarchy, without deep links to the past or future of France, or even to the manners of its own time."⁹² He suggested that "our century's style ... will be less correct and less learned, freer and more daring" than that of the seventeenth-century classics—but it would nonetheless produce its own masterpieces.⁹³ Taine made clear his contempt for the old French aristocracy, both before and after the crises of 1870–1871. During the Old Regime, he wrote in 1858, they had been ready traitors to the larger nation, "paid thugs" of foreign kings against their fellow countrymen; "within the country, they had power only to ruin the people and and pillage the state's finances. They were the enemies of civilization, of order, of public peace. Every wound they received was a blessing for the country."⁹⁴ "If you mean by [revolution]," he wrote a friendly critic in 1881, "the abolition of the Old Regime (arbitrary kingship, feudalism), nothing more reasonable; not only in France, but in Italy, in most of Germany and in Spain, the old machine was rotten and called only for overthrowing."⁹⁵ Even his studies of academic philosophy brought forth defense of bourgeois society. "When a society's law establishes unequal conditions, no one is exempt from insults; ... human nature is humiliated at every level, and society is only an exchange of affronts." Insofar as the revolution established legal equality and ended aristocratic power, Taine approved of it.⁹⁶ Renan also praised the revolution—and even some aspects of the ongoing revolutions that he witnessed during the nineteenth century. They showed the emergence of new societal energies and the consequent need for new social arrangements.⁹⁷

Nor were these writers altogether critical of modernity. "I envy the future," wrote Renan in his memoirs. "It's to one's advantage to arrive on this planet as late as possible ... We must not, because of our personal tastes, stand in the way of what our era is achieving."⁹⁸ In an early work that he published only in 1890, two years before his death, he stressed his faith in material progress and its cultural benefits: "the human spirit will not be altogether free until it is perfectly freed from the material needs that humiliate it and block its development ... Everything that serves the progress of humanity, however humble and profane it may seem, is by that fact deserving of respect and sacred."⁹⁹ Taine spoke more straightforwardly. He believed the nineteenth century to have been far more inventive and productive than its predecessors, and he viewed inventiveness as a critical sign of a society's health. "It's invention that measures moral force," he wrote in 1858; "To search, to discover, to apply, one must want with passion. The decay of invention among the Romans demonstrated their failure of nerve; our fecundity of invention shows our internal energy. This century, which is not yet finished, has produced more than its predecessors"; and he offered a list of what the sciences had recently achieved and seemed on the verge of discovering. These changes affected the humblest in French society: "the new science and industry have reached into the most distant villages, feeding, clothing, transporting, agitating men." But change extended well beyond the material realm, to include philosophy and culture as well: in this respect again following Sainte-Beuve, he argued that nineteenth-century literature was "as abundant in thought, as rich in masterpieces as its predecessors, appropriate in both ideas and form to the class and civilization that have produced it." If it was cruder than that of previous centuries, it was also more alive: "hardier, less enslaved to the proprieties, more universal ... more passionate."¹⁰⁰

Among the group's writings, Taine's Les origines de la France contemporaine (written with explicit reference to the crises of 1870–1871) raised the deepest questions about both democracy and the processes by which it had been established. The book pleased conservatives, and they responded by electing both Taine and Renan to the bastion of French conservative culture, the Académie Française. Yet even this passionate critique of democracy neither defended the Old Regime's social order nor criticized the modern world. Rather, Taine's primary concern lay in the problem of revolutionary violence. He sought first to depict violence and then to explain it; in both efforts, he focused on its irrational qualities, the fact that so much of it was ill connected to the real problems and dangers that the revolution faced, and that it so often involved dramatic cruelties. These interests led him to pay close attention to the gruesome details of revolutionary violence, such as the symbolic indignities to which crowds subjected Bernard-René Jordan de Launay, Louis Bertier de Sauvigny, Joseph Foullon, and other victims before and after their deaths: he described the seventy-four-year-old Foullon, for instance, being marched to Paris "a bundle of hay on his head, a necklace of thistles around his neck, his mouth stuffed with hay."¹⁰¹ For Alphonse Aulard, Taine's deployment of such lurid detail conformed to the other weaknesses in his work. Seeking after literary effect and lacking professional training, Aulard argued, Taine heaped up examples of violence without considering their larger contexts. Like the tabloid journalists from whom he drew many examples, he retold horrific particulars with excessive relish, dwelling on the victims' sufferings while ignoring the real dangers under which the revolutionary leadership worked. Taine failed as a historian because he focused on details and neglected the larger circumstances from which they emerged.¹⁰²

Reviewing the debate in 1909, the conservative historian Augustin Cochin drew attention to the importance within it of the concept of otherness. Aulard, he suggested, explained the revolutionaries' choices as utilitarian political responses to extraordinary threats, to the principles of 1789, and to the nation itself, whereas for Taine the revolution could not be understood as an extension of ordinary life or as following its rules. Understanding the revolution therefore demanded a new kind of science, the application of psychological theory and comparison, rather than the common-sense reasoning that ordinarily characterized historical explanation; and contemporaries recognized the book as a "work of historical psychology."¹⁰³ Cochin was not altogether happy with this psychological approach and argued that Taine had posed an intellectual problem without having the analytical framework needed to resolve it. Wanting to understand the revolutionaries' behavior, Taine focused on their failings as individuals, which obscured from his view the systems that determined behavior. He could only understand the revolutionary leaders as criminals, their actions to be explained by particular facts in their backgrounds and personality.¹⁰⁴ The criticism applies even more strongly to Taine's friends. Sainte-Beuve's work was primarily biographical, a compilation of individual stories and a summary of individual works. Renan himself noted the irony that his plan to write a large-scale history of Mediterranean religion had culminated in a Life of Jesus, although he also defended the choice.¹⁰⁵ Historical psychology of the sort that they practiced seemed to have confined history to mere biography.

Cochin suggested an alternative source of interdisciplinary inspiration in the newly founded sociology of Emile Durkheim; as François Furet noted, he appears to have been the first French historian to propose that academic sociology might supply useful guidance to research.¹⁰⁶ But despite his questions about method, Cochin applauded Taine's definition of the problem and adopted it as his own: the phenomenon of revolution confronted historians with extraordinary behavior, which could not be explained in terms of utilitarian calculations of means and ends. Understanding it required new sources and methods, which would draw historians' attention to irrationality and allow them to make sense of it. Cochin, Taine, and the other conservative historians considered here thus turned to social history partly because of their very fears about modernization. These posed for them the problem of the irrational in history, forcing them to ask about the nature of social differences and about the force of unconscious motivations. Like other aspects of modern culture to which scholars have recently drawn attention, these historians' modernism had complicated linkages with conservative, even reactionary, politics.¹⁰⁷

The second question that Aulard raised in 1905–1906 concerned professional standards and the relationship between literature and scientific history. To what extent, he asked, could literary figures like the Magny diners be compared to the highly professionalized historians of the twentieth century?¹⁰⁸ For Aulard and his colleagues, the answer was clear. An enormous gap separated university historians, who devoted themselves to scientific method and the establishment of verified facts, from the amateurs who (in the words of two other Sorbonne historians) "consider history an art rather than a science, an exercise within the competence of any dilettante, and who, instead of confining themselves to the critical and exact determination of the facts, lose themselves in vain political or religious declamations." Rather than follow scientific procedures, the amateurs left everything "to individual caprice, passions, and above all, the interests of the writers."¹⁰⁹ But during these years, the boundaries between amateur and professional approaches were less clearly marked than such comments suggest. For one thing, as noted above, Taine and his fellows proclaimed their own allegiance to scientific methods, and in fact their efforts appear roughly to have met professional standards. Cochin verified a large sample of Taine's citations and found them as accurate as Aulard's own; some of Taine's free transcriptions of them merely reflected literary conventions of his age. As for Aulard's complaint about Taine's readiness to use local histories and memoirs rather than the documents produced by governmental authorities, precisely this made his work original and fruitful.¹¹⁰ Nor were the standards of university history always very high during the years before World War I. Following a thorough and sensitive overview of the university historians between 1870 and the war, William R. Keylor concludes by noting how "exaggerated and premature" were their assertions of scientific method, given "the egregious absence of it in much of their written work."¹¹¹ Aulard himself had trained in literature, with a dissertation on Italian poetry. Ernest Lavisse's early career was based on his personal connections with the Bonaparte family and with leading figures in the imperial administration, rather than on scientific attainments; and one of his students described him as "not a scholar," though "a great historian."¹¹² Similar disparities between the rhetoric and the realities of scholarly training have been noted for Germany and the United States in these years.¹¹³ Through World War I, the professors' vision of a scientific history was more ideological assertion than accurate description.

As important for an evaluation of Aulard's critique is an assessment of the relative places of academics and men of letters within French intellectual life at the end of the nineteenth century. Christophe Charle and others have drawn attention to the lofty standing that Parisian professors enjoyed during the nineteenth century and to their close connections with other elites; claims to professional expertise, like Aulard's, helped sustain this position.¹¹⁴ But the professors' position was hardly so secure as they would have liked, and a countervailing tradition mocked the narrowness of their outlook and their lack of creativity. In 1863, the Goncourts recorded their salon encounter with a philosophy professor, "typical of that horrible race, the jolly university professor ... he makes professorial jokes and defends labored paradoxes ... There is in his whole person a certain low and disgusting smell of the provincial schemer."¹¹⁵ In the next generation, Marcel Proust included a fictionalized version of the professor in his novel. His Professor Brichot is a pathetically subservient figure in the salon that he frequents, and is so poor that he considers marrying his servant. He nonetheless draws from his salon attendance "a glamour that set him apart from all his Sorbonne colleagues. They were dazzled by his descriptions of dinners to which they would never be invited."¹¹⁶ Such images survived intact through World War II, and in 1954 Philippe Ariès offered a sweeping overview of the situation that the Goncourts and Proust claimed to have observed in particular cases. "We must think of the social origins of those who taught or wrote [history]," he explained. "During the second half of the nineteenth century, the bourgeoisie turned away from university careers ... Even today, recruitment is loftier in the law schools and at Saint-Cyr than in the humanities." Intellectually able young men from the lower middle class "had few chances to shine in the literary salons ... The Académie Française snubbed them, as did the cultivated public. In contrast, the upper university offered a field open to their ambitions. So, rather quickly, the professors' audience became one of future professors"—and the professors' writing (as Ariès saw it) became correspondingly narrow and dull.¹¹⁷

Early in the twentieth century, then, historical writing was less a defined field of expertise than a focal point for contesting visions of intellectual life, and even leading advocates of professionalization had difficulty with the alternatives that these visions placed before them. Ernest Lavisse, Charles Seignobos, and Charles-Victor Langlois all complained in these years about the narrowness of much historical research and urged historians to address larger questions.¹¹⁸ Lucien Febvre himself returned frequently to this theme, and from 1929 on he and Marc Bloch made it an important component of their journal Annales d'histoire économique et sociale. The journal's prospectus insisted on its engagement with the contemporary world and on the need for exchanges between historians and those dealing with contemporary problems. It proclaimed that even the distant past could not be understood without "study of today's living reality." At the same time, politicians and managers needed the perspectives that history could supply: "here we will assist men of action only by offering them the means to a better understanding of their own times; it is permitted to think that this is in itself a great deal."¹¹⁹ In keeping with its manifesto, the Annales devoted far more space to contemporary history than its competitors: between 1929 and 1939, over one-third of its articles dealt with the period since 1871, as opposed to 8 percent in the Revue historique, and Febvre and Bloch both wrote articles on contemporary subjects.¹²⁰ In 1933, in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, Febvre pursued the theme, arguing that historical education neglected the contemporary world and suffered as a result.¹²¹ Febvre and Bloch stressed the technical competence that they expected even in discussions of modern society, and they had harsh criticisms of literary approaches to historical study. But the widening influence of their journal ensured a measure of institutional permanence for the tradition of criticizing university history writing. Alphonse Aulard's vision of an entirely professional historical practice had failed to captivate even French academics.

In 1942 and 1944, Lucien Febvre published two great works on the psychology of the sixteenth century. Together with Marc Bloch's Les rois thaumaturges and La société féodale, these books founded the Annales school's interest in the history of mentalities. They presented one of Febvre's most powerful ideas, that historical eras had fundamentally different mental tools from one another, and thus lived in essentially different mental worlds. Scientific atheism, the example on which he focused, was basic to the modern world but literally unthinkable in the sixteenth century; more fundamentally, human personality itself had been different. In fact, I have argued here, ideas of this kind were not so new as Febvre suggested. As early as the 1840s, French intellectuals had developed elements of a robust history of mentalities, much of it focused on the otherness of past societies. They sought explicitly to get at the psychological realities of lives in the past, through understanding the details of daily life and through an exploration of unconscious and semi-conscious motivations. In one sense, we might say, there was scarcely need for an Annales historical revolution.

But this conclusion only reorients our understanding of Febvre and Bloch's contributions to historical thought rather than denying them. For Febvre and Bloch did not merely transmit the intellectual traditions of the later nineteenth century. Rather, they reconstructed elements of them to suit new societal and intellectual needs. For one thing, they adapted what had been a broad theme in later nineteenth-century culture to the needs of a developing academic history. More important, Febvre and Bloch redefined the relations between social history and the experiences of modern life itself. The Magny group was driven to its study of the past partly by its fears of the present; and Taine stressed the intellectual impoverishment brought on by some of modernity's most important intellectual movements, classicism and the Enlightenment. In contrast, Febvre and Bloch consistently celebrated modernity, which they viewed as providing Europeans a previously unknown assurance in dealing with the world; and Febvre at least saw its origins in seventeenth and eighteenth-century philosophy. For Febvre and Bloch, the history of mentalities thus served in part as a defense of modern thought itself, which had permitted escape from the constraints of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. For my purposes here, though, these specifics matter less than a broader point: the Annales historians need to be read from a literary as well as a scientific perspective. Like writers of all categories, they recycled and transformed the intellectual traditions around them. Writing about the past was for them (as for their predecessors) a way to think about large problems of human existence—in part through their very reworking of long-established themes. Incorporating figures like Sainte-Beuve, Taine, and their colleagues into our genealogy of contemporary historical practice can help us bring to light these essentially artistic functions of current historical writing, as a process that seeks to shape the present as much as to understand the past.

Earlier versions of this article were presented to the Department of History at the University of Waterloo and to the Seminar on French History jointly sponsored by the University of Toronto and York University. I have benefited greatly from the comments and suggestions that colleagues offered on those occasions and from discussion of related aspects of this project at Rutgers University, the University of California–Irvine, the Baltimore-Washington Old Regime Group, Georgetown University, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, and the British Society for French History. My research in these areas has been generously supported by the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, the Max Planck Institut für Geschichte, Göttingen, and the Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst.

Jonathan Dewald is UB Distinguished Professor of History at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he has taught since 1990. His books include Aristocratic Experience and the Origins of Modern Culture: France, 1570–1715 (1993) and The European Nobility, 1400–1800 (1996); he is also the editor-in-chief of Europe 1450–1789: Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World, a six-volume collection forthcoming this year. His current research examines how ideas about European social history evolved between 1815 and about 1970.

Notes

¹� Raymond Aron, Introduction à la philosophie de l'histoire, new edn. (Paris, 1986; first published 1938), 97.

²� Among numerous examples, see the articles and reflections collected in Jacques Revel and Lynn Hunt, eds., Histories: French Constructions of the Past (New York, 1995); François Dosse, New History in France: The Triumph of the "Annales," Peter V. Conroy, Jr., trans. (Urbana, Ill., 1994); Philippe Carrard, Poetics of the New History: French Historical Discourse from Braudel to Chartier (Baltimore, 1992). For a critical view that nonetheless stresses the prevalence of these ideas, see Gertrude Himmelfarb, The New History and the Old (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), esp. 4–5, 18, 25–26; for related ideas from a more sympathetic perspective, see Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth about History (New York, 1994).

³� I discuss related aspects of this question in "'Lost Worlds': French Historians and the Construction of Modernity,"French History 14 (December 2000): 424–42.

⁴� See, for instance, Charles-Olivier Carbonell, Histoire et historiens: Une mutation idéologique des historiens français, 1865–1885 (Toulouse, 1976), 586–87: French historical writing of the period "se moque de 'l'histoire sociale,' qu'elle confond, les rares fois qu'elle s'y intéresse, avec une histoire polissonne des moeurs de jadis ouavec l'étude de quelques familles distinguées d'autrefois."

⁵� See most recently Roger Chickering, Karl Lamprecht: A German Academic Life (1856–1915) (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1993).

⁶� Lucien Febvre, Amour sacré, amour profane (Paris, 1944), 297. I discuss these texts and the issues they raise in" 'Lost Worlds.'"

⁷� Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School 1929–89 (Stanford, Calif., 1990), 2. Burke offers some nuances to this position (7–10) but also argues that the Annales represented first "the substitution of a problem-oriented analytical history for a traditional narrative of events. In the second place, the history of the whole range of human activities in the place of a mainly political history. In the third place ... a collaboration with other disciplines" (2).

⁸� Georg Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge (Hanover, N.H., 1997), 54. Compare Jacques Revel, "Histoire et sciences sociales: Les paradigmes des Annales," Annales: ESC 34 (November–December 1979): 1347–59; and André Burguière, "Histoire d'une histoire: La naissance des Annales," ibid., 1360–75, each noting Febvre and Bloch's closeness to the center of contemporary academic influence. See also Gérard Noiriel, Sur la "crise" des histoires (Paris, 1996), 220–29, for nuances to conventional descriptions of Seignobos's"positivism."

⁹� J. H. Hexter, On Historians (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), 83.

¹⁰� Himmelfarb, New History and the Old, 8.

¹¹� The argument suggested here owes much to the influence of Bonnie G. Smith, The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice (Cambridge, Mass., 1998). However, the argument also diverges from Smith's in suggesting that among nineteenth-century male scholars there existed important and influential alternatives to the Rankean model of historical research.

¹²� Christopher Middleton, ed., Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche (Chicago, 1969), 275.

¹³� Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt, Journal: Mémoires de la vie littéraire, Robert Ricatte, ed., 3 vols. (1956; rpt. edn., Paris, 1989), 1: 886 (on first meeting), 1: 897 (on Sainte-Beuve), 1: 1039 (on Taine), 1: 1047 (on sex), 1: 1082 (on notoriety), 2: 614 (on decline), 2: 668 (November 30, 1875), on the dinners as tout politique.

¹⁴� Nicole Casanova, Sainte-Beuve (Paris, 1995), esp. 418. For an important recent effort to assess Sainte-Beuve's importance within modern culture, see Wolf Lepenies, Sainte-Beuve, auf der Schwelle zur Moderne (Munich-Vienna, 1997).

¹⁵� Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Nouveaux lundis, 13 vols. (Paris, 1868–84), 8: 79, 8: 81.

¹⁶� For appreciative overviews of their careers, see Gabriel Monod, Les maîtres de l'histoire: Renan, Taine, Michelet, 3d edn. (Paris, 1895). For an important recent effort to situate Taine, especially within contemporary intellectual life, see Christophe Charle, Paris fin de siècle: Culture et politique (Paris, 1998), 97–123.

¹⁷� Their careers are summarized in André Billy, The Goncourt Brothers, Margaret Shaw, trans. (New York, 1960).

¹⁸� See Hortense Allart de Méritens, Lettres inédites à Sainte-Beuve (1841–1848), Léon Séché, ed., 2d edn. (Paris, 1908). At the end of her life, Allart apparently destroyed Sainte-Beuve's side of this correspondence.

¹⁹� Ernest Renan, Histoire et parole: Oeuvres diverses, Laudyce Rétat, ed. (Paris, 1984), 210.

²⁰� Goncourt and Goncourt, Journal, 2: 107. On Mathilde's salon, see, for instance, Journal, 1: 1179.

²¹� Alphonse Aulard, Taine historien de la Révolution Française, 2d edn. (Paris, 1908), viii; see also 50, for stress on Taine's literary, rather than historical, interests.

²²� As an example of the specifically racial nature of their antisemitism: "Des entrailles de la [future] mère, la juive avait jailli. Et la persévérance froide, l'entêtement résolu, la rapacité originelle de sa race, s'étaient levés des semences de son sang ... Comme toutes ses pareilles, elle avait ce restant de croyances, la foi insolente dans sa chance, la certitude religieuse de son bonheur, del'arrivée de tout ce qu'elle désirait." Manette Salomon (1867; rpt. edn., Paris, n.d.), 351–52. On Renan's complicated attitude toward Jews, see Georges Sorel, Le système historique de Renan (1905–06; rpt. edn., Geneva, 1971), 69–70.

²³� Goncourt and Goncourt, Journal, 2: 1242: "le livre de Drumont m'a causé une certaine épouvante par la statistique et le dénombrement de leurs forces occultes."

²⁴� Hippolyte Taine, History of English Literature, H. van Laun, trans., 2 vols. (New York, 1900), 1: 12, 1: 10.

²⁵� Renan, Histoire et parole, 628, 629.

²⁶� Charles Maurras, Trois idées politiques [1898], rpt. in Maurras, Romantisme et révolution (Paris, 1922), 259.

²⁷� Hippolyte Taine, Les origines de la France contemporaine, 2 vols. (Paris, 1986), 2: 97–100, 2: 598–99.

²⁸� Renan, Histoire et parole, 618.

²⁹� Quoted Billy, Goncourt Brothers, 189.

³⁰� Ernest Renan, Souvenirs d'enfance et de jeunesse, Henriette Psichari and Laudice [sic] Rétat, eds. (Paris, 1973), 42; see also 45.

³¹� Renan, L'avenir de la science, in Histoire et parole, 261.

³²� Hippolyte Taine, Essais de critique et d'histoire, 14th edn. (Paris, 1923), 258.

³³� Hippolyte Taine, Les philosophes classiques du XIX^e siècle en France, 4th edn. (Paris, 1876), 303.

³⁴� Taine, History of English Literature, 1: 7.

³⁵� René Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism: 1750–1950; The Age of Transition (New Haven, Conn., 1965), 56.

³⁶� Irving Babbitt, Masters of Modern French Criticism (1912; rpt. edn., New York, 1963), 161. Compare the similar assessment offered by René Wellek: Sainte-Beuve "should be described as the greatest representative of the historical spirit in France in the sense in which this spirit is understood by modern German theoreticians such as Meinecke" (Wellek, History of Modern Criticism, 36–37).

³⁷� Taine, History of English Literature, 1: 7; Anatole France quoted in Maurras, Trois idées politiques, 257.

³⁸� Monod, Les maîtres de l'histoire, 140.

³⁹� Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, History of Modern Philosophy in France (1899; rpt. edn., Chicago, 1925), 435.

⁴⁰� Aulard, Taine historien, ix. Their closeness to the mood of their middle-brow contemporaries may help explain Nietzsche's sense that the group lacked his own critical seriousness.

⁴¹� Edmond Scherer, Nouvelles études sur lalittérature contemporaine, 2d edn. (Paris, 1876), 96; on the Goncourts' disappointment with their book sales, see Billy, Goncourt Brothers, 176–77.

⁴²� Quoted in Billy, Goncourt Brothers, 334–35.

⁴³� Goncourt and Goncourt, Journal, 2: 60 (December 31, 1866).

⁴⁴� Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen, trans. (Indianapolis, 1998), 114 (Third Treatise, section 27) (on Renan); Selected Letters, 276, 279 (on Taine).

⁴⁵� Robert Dumont, Stefan Zweig et la France (Paris, 1967), 28–29; D. A. Prater, European of Yesterday: A Biography of Stefan Zweig (Oxford, 1972), 24–25.

⁴⁶� Babbitt, Masters.

⁴⁷� Matthew Arnold, quoted in Casanova, Sainte-Beuve, 355; Edmund Gosse, "The Prince of Critics," in Gosse, More Books on the Table (New York, 1923), 13–18.

⁴⁸� Cecil Sprigge, ed., Philosophy, Poetry, History: An Anthology of Essays by Benedetto Croce (London, 1966), 597 (from the essay "History Prepares Action without Determining It," 1938).

⁴⁹� Aulard, Taine historien, ix, n. 1.

⁵⁰� Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt, Histoire de la société française pendant la Révolution, "édition définitive" (Paris, n.d.), v.

⁵¹� Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt, La femme audix-huitième siècle, "édition définitive," 2 vols. (1862; Paris, n.d.), 1: 8.

⁵²� Hippolyte Taine, Essai sur Tite Live, 7th edn. (Paris, 1904), 359. Taine's argument is the more striking in that he had prepared his essay for a contest sponsored by the conservative Académie Française, and in that the Académie awarded him its prize. It could be assumed by a very young and ambitious author that such sentiments would find positive responses.

⁵³� Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, 100 (Third Treatise, section 19).

⁵⁴� Edmond Scherer, Etudes sur la littérature contemporaine, 2d edn., 6 vols. (Paris, 1882), 6: 112–14.

⁵⁵� Paul Bourget, Oeuvres complètes (Paris, 1899), 1: 174–75. In 1864, Fustel de Coulanges' La cité antique provided yet another example of the nineteenth century's hospitality to such views. Fustel opened with a ringing statement of historical difference, "the radical and essential differences that once and for all separate those ancient peoples from modern societies." His work also demonstrated the nineteenth century's interest in such ideas; published in a tiny initial printing, by a young and unknown author, the book reached its twenty-second edition in 1912: see Numa Fustel de Coulanges, La cité antique, François Hartog, ed. (Paris, 1984), 1, vi–vii.

⁵⁶� Aulard, Taine historien, 84.

⁵⁷� Taine, History of English Literature, 1: 1, 2.

⁵⁸� Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Portraits de femmes, in Oeuvres, Maxime Le Roy, ed., 2 vols. (Paris, 1960), 2: 1288.

⁵⁹� Goncourt and Goncourt, Journal, 1: 901, 1: 1031. When the brothers paid him a grateful visit, he offered further praise, and urged on them additional research in the area: "you sirs, who are observers, you should write a history of chambermaids ... It's a remarkable and important thing, the role of domestic servants in history." They ignored the advice but took it seriously enough to note it verbatim in their journal.

⁶⁰� Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Nouveaux lundis, 13 vols. (Paris, 1864–70), 4: 1 (December 1, 1862).

⁶¹� Smith, Gender of History, 50–59. Consisting of essays written from 1829 on, it is worth noting, Sainte-Beuve's studies of women come early in the sequence of studies that Smith cites.

⁶²� Victor Cousin, Jacqueline Pascal: Premières études sur les femmes illustres et la société du XVII^e siècle, 9th edn. (Paris, 1878), 28, 31. (In this quotation as throughout, I have eliminated paragraph breaks.) For Sainte-Beuve's critique of Cousin's approach as sentimental and superficial, see Portraits de femmes, 2: 1293–95, footnote.

⁶³� Allart de Méritens, Lettres inédites, 140–41.

⁶⁴� Sainte-Beuve, Portraits de femmes, 2: 1280. Compare Cousin, Jacqueline Pascal, 25–26.

⁶⁵� Sainte-Beuve, Portraits de femmes, 2: 1140, 2: 1155.

⁶⁶� Sainte-Beuve, Portraits de femmes, 2: 1090, 1099, 1098.

⁶⁷� Sainte-Beuve, Portraits de femmes, 2: 1123.

⁶⁸� Sainte-Beuve, Portraits de femmes, 2: 1132. Only in recent years have feminist scholars such as Nancy Miller and Bonnie Smith restored assessments of de Staël to so positive a level: see Nancy K. Miller, Subject to Change: Reading Feminist Writing (New York, 1988), 162–203; Bonnie G. Smith, "History and Genius: The Narcotic, Erotic, and Baroque Life of Germaine de Staël," French Historical Studies 19 (Fall 1996): 1059–81.

⁶⁹� Sainte-Beuve, Portraits de femmes, 2: 1194, 2: 1195. See Smith, Gender of History, 59, for the claim that in this period "the insider/male history written by both men of letters and professionals was based on the activities of great men and set in political and military narrative about them."

⁷⁰� Renan, Souvenirs, 158, 163, 164.

⁷¹� Goncourt and Goncourt, La femme au dix-huitième siècle, 1: 25.

⁷²� Hippolyte Taine, La Fontaine et ses fables, 25th edn. (Paris, n.d.), v.

⁷³� Taine, Essais, ix, x, xi, xvi (preface to the 1st edition), emphasis in original.

⁷⁴� Taine, History of English Literature, 1: 7, 9.

⁷⁵� Taine, Essais, xxi, preface to the 2d edition.

⁷⁶� Hippolyte Taine, Sa vie et sa correspondance, 4 vols. (Paris, 1902–07), 4: 171 (November 1, 1883).

⁷⁷� Taine, Sa vie et sa correspondance, 4: 159–61 (April 22, 1883) (see also 4: 109, for another example).

⁷⁸� Taine, Les origines de la France contemporaine, 1: 145.

⁷⁹� Taine, Les origines de la France contemporaine, 2: 670, n. 3.

⁸⁰� Hippolyte Taine, De l'intelligence, 2 vols., 5th edn. (Paris, 1888), 2: 203.

⁸¹� Taine, "Note sur les éléments et la formation de l'idée du moi," in De l'intelligence, 2: 465–74.

⁸²� Taine, De l'intelligence, 2: 230–31.

⁸³� Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Portraits littéraires, Gérard Antoine, ed. (Paris, 1993), 929 ("M. de R