|
|
|
Featured Review
André Burguière. L'École des Annales: Une histoire intellectuelle. (Histoire.) Paris: Odile Jacob. 2006. Pp. 366. €29.90.
Jonathan Dewald. Lost Worlds: The Emergence of French Social History, 1815–1970. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. 2006. Pp. xi, 241. $50.00.
|
| Two books, two master craftsmen, same topic: French social history. Their conclusions diverge, due less to their authors' different nationalities, although that is probably a factor, than to their methodological distance. Jonathan Dewald has produced a dispassionate pastiche of sometimes unrelated essays that look briskly, comparatively, and disparately at the whole genus of French social history across a century and a half. André Burguière painstakingly, almost intimately, glosses the gaggle of geniuses representing one gospel to whom and to which he feels "profoundly tied" (p. 18). Neither man, it might be said, elects a really Annaliste approach, deploying social science vocabulary to analyze both mentalité and structures of social insertion and practice. Dewald comes closer, with his occasionally comparative look over a longue durée and his occasional remark about an individual's sociopolitical background. Burguière, for his part, executes something more like a eulogistic, "old-fashioned" intellectual history on the textual production over an intense period of six decades, 1925–1985. This is unusual coming from a practitioner whose "school" belittles such an approach. The results in the case of both books, thus, run rather against Marc Bloch's admonition that historians should cease seeking so much "to know" as to "understand." |
1
|
|
This being said, these books are laden with knowledge and insight, and one learns a great deal from them—particularly if one is not himself a scholar of French social history, as this reviewer. Dewald opens his book at the table down at Magny's, the place where Edmond and Jules de Goncourt and Gustave Flaubert and Ernest Renan and Hippolyte Taine and Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve dwelled, and proceeds to make an extended and interesting case for the revisionist thesis that the academic study of French social history, including its later Annales version(s), finds its fons et origo in a gaggle of brilliant writers who often dined together. They had familiar names, and they wrote for, and were highly rewarded by, the grand public. These men wrote an enormous amount of history, yet they were not "professional historians" in the way that a small academic elite was defining (and would continue to define) "history." That said, however, apart from the punctilious Alphonse Aulard, most contemporary professionals read and generally applauded their work. |
2
|
|
The historical books (often big sellers) turned out by these famous and gifted amateurs—including a bit later, Alfred Franklin—eschewed traditional political narrative in favor of "everything in human history [that] interests the psychologist and provides him with documentation." Although most of these authors were "frightened of democracy and advocated racist ideas of social differences" (p. 11), their historical writing nevertheless provides ample proof—this is a major Dewald thesis—that these men are the unacknowledged precursors, virtually progenitors, of Annaliste historiography. That is to say, they established and delighted in the "otherness" of the past, while yet orienting their books to serve the present ("as all good history must," Dewald adds [p. 15]). These writers laid claims to being "scientific" and thus utilized archives and other primary sources, while banishing God from the horizon of causality in human affairs. Dewald's point is that "Lucien Febvre and his colleagues entered an already existing field of inquiry, rather than creating something altogether new" (p. 15). Perhaps Dewald's best illustration of unjust Annaliste pretension is his long dissection of the voluminous study of private life by the Third Republic librarian, Franklin, which goes shamefully unacknowledged in Georges Duby's and Philippe Ariès's voluminous history of private life. |
. . . |
There are about 2363 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|
