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Review
| Philippe Ariès and the Politics of French Cultural History, by Patrick H. Hutton. Amherst and Boston, Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004. 244 pages. $24.95, paper.
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| Patrick Hutton has written an interesting and challenging intellectual biography of an influential and controversial historian of French culture and society, Philippe Aríes (1914–1984), author of Centuries of Childhood (New York, 1962; originally L'Enfant et la vie familiale sous l'Ancien Régime (Paris, 1960)) and The Hour of Our Death (Oxford, 1981; originally L'Homme devant la mort (Paris, 1977). Hutton places Ariès's scholarly works in the context of Ariès's political commitments: support for Action Française both before and after World War II; initial support for the Vichy regime; support for de Gaulle in the retreat from Algeria. Hutton describes Ariès's acceptance into the inner circle of the Annales School and the French academic system in the 1970s and 1980s and analyzes the intellectual controversies entered into by Ariès's subject, most his debate with Michelle Vovelle on the changing meaning of death in the early modern period. |
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Broadly speaking, this is a book about the decline and disappearance of 19th- and early 20th century royalist politics in France and its curious reappearance in the cultural history of the late 20th century. In showing the hidden royalist influence on the later generations of the Annales School, Hutton provides a useful supplement to Peter Burke's The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School, 1929–89 (Stanford, CA: 1990). Where Burke credits Ariès with drawing popular attention to the school with his books on childhood and death (Burke, 67–69), Hutton focuses on how Ariès was excluded from the Annales inner circle until the 1970s when recognition abroad and a changing of the scholarly guard in France led to Ariès's acceptance by the academic world. Along the way, this shows how the French academic system dealt with the ongoing controversy over the Vichy regime, and how those who participated (one might write "collaborated") were able to resume their intellectual lives post-WWII. |
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Hutton relies on a formidable array of archival and printed sources and on interviews with 16 individuals who knew Ariès. Hutton appears to have read everything Ariès wrote and attempts to weave a narrative of Ariès's intellectual development that includes his time in journalism as well as his academic writing. The central point of Hutton's analysis is the role that WWII and the Vichy regime played in the development of Ariès's later scholarly project. Hutton argues that the royalist cause had been fatally compromised by its association with Vichy, and that after the war Ariès gradually abandoned a political commitment to royalism in favor of "a cultural history that exposed the inadequacy of the politics of the welfare state" (87). Or, as Hutton argues, in founding a new form of history, "Ariès showed a route for rescuing the right from the ignominy with which it had lived since the Second World War..." (186). |
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Hutton takes pains to show how Ariès was a careful, methodical and innovative historian. But Hutton also tries to apologize for Ariès's many unsavory entanglements, including ties to the Camelots du Roi, to vitriolic anti-Semites, to avid supporters of Vichy, and to the postwar remnants of Action Française. All of this is explained as a tendency to follow strong leaders with whom Ariès had ties of friendship, but not intellectual allegiance (see especially chapters 3 and 4 on royalist politics before and after WWII). I find Hutton's analysis somewhat unconvincing. Could Ariès really have associated with such a rogues' gallery without having some intellectual sympathies beyond an abstract attachment to royalism? As Hutton amply demonstrates, Ariès did not so much distance himself from his royalist and ultra-rightist views as much as he worked them into his scholarship. And as Hutton repeatedly notes, it is "ironical" that the cultural history associated with the center-left in France and with the left in America draws much inspiration from an open and avowed royalist who used a history of private life as a way to highlight and criticize what was wrong with the modern world around him. |
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This is a book best skimmed rather than savored. Generally well written and very informative, the main themes and arguments are made clear early in the work and then elaborated upon and developed. This seems a necessary work for anyone teaching courses on right-wing politics in Europe or in France. One could also use it in courses at the undergraduate or graduate level in Modern French history, as Hutton summarizes the historiographical debates of 20th century French history in an admirably concise manner. |
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| Hampden-Sydney College |
Robert H. Blackman |
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