   
The Social Foundations of Nineteenth-Century
French Historical Thought
Charles-Olivier Carbonell, Histoire et historians: une mutation
idéologique des historiens français, 1865-1885 (Toulouse:
Privat, 1976), pp. 589
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The study of historical thought has been frowned upon in France since
the days of Augustin Thierry. The result is that the research on how thinking
about the French past refracts the social, ideological, and philosophical
ferment of the times in which it is written has been carried out by Italian,
English, and American scholars. Whether because of Annales' positivist
foundations or because of the determinisms of both leftist and rightist French
historians, the French historians have commonly resolved to look forward
and avoid the questions provoked by looking back at their own discipline.
Philippe Ariès's Le Temps de l'Histoire (Monaco, 1954) was
scarcely read by professional historians; Paul Veyne's Comment on écrit
l'histoire (Paris, 1971) shook the foundations of the historical
establishment just a bit (see Raymond Aron's review in Annales, E. S.
C., 26, 1971, pp. 1319-1354); and George Huppert's The Idea of Perfect
History (Chicago, 1969) finally began to acquaint French historians with
their ancestors. So did the recently published lectures on historiography
by George Lefebvre. Appearing as it does now, Carbonell's pioneering thesis
may have a deeper impact and stimulate more research in historiography if
it is read by the dozen or so historians who today in Paris make up the
"Establishment" that virtually determines future avenues of research and
publications.
Carbonell's work is really two books in one. The first is a major statistical
study of publication in history by year, region, subject, century, and by
the social status, professions, and ages of the historians who published
all these works. The approach is reminiscent of what H.-J. Martin accomplished
in his monumental study of seventeenth-century book publishing, and of Daniel
Roche's thesis on the provincial academies in the eighteenth century. Like
Martin's, Carbonell's findings are so new and massive that it will take at
least a decade for historians to digest and interpret them by altering the
general framework of French history to take these findings into account.
Carbonell demonstrates that the writing of history remained overwhelmingly
in the hands of learned nobles, clergy and notables who were historians by
avocation. These elites continued, as their forebears had done in the eighteenth
century, to seek in the past the origins of their own families, parishes,
towns, dioceses, and medical-legal professions. Down to 1885 the bulk of
French historical scholarship, then, reflected socially what Carbonell defines
as a "persistance des ordres," a phrase that will warm Roland Mousnier's
heart. The discovery of this deep structural relationship between society
and historical thought does not so much surprise us as disconcert us. Nourished
as we all are by ideologies about freedom of choice, and by the growth of
liberalism in the nineteenth century, it is sobering to learn that the so
frequently studied bourgeois and liberal nineteenth century takes its place
beside the Enlightenment and the Renaissance as an essentially minority culture
that is a harbinger of the future. In the overwhelming mass of historical
writing of the late nineteenth century, the bourgeois scarcely has a place,
either as writer or subject — do his values — any more than do
the peuple and theirs.
Alongside the dominant older elites new cadres had long since begun to appear
(lycée professors, departmental archivists, and university
professors), but their overall contribution to historical scholarship remained
slight until after 1871. The great textual publications financed by the Second
Empire remained, for example, still largely in the hands of individuals having
sufficient income from other sources to permit them the leisure of historical
research. Indeed, when the university professors finally made a significant
appearance it was, at least numerically, as writers of textbooks.
Among all those teaching in universities, it was not only those who taught
history who published history; mathematicians, engineers, philosophers, and
physicians did so as well. Added to theirs were publications from those in
government service, the army officers and civil servants being notable examples.
Works by what would later be categorized as "professional" historians remained
small in number.
Carbonell does not draw any conclusions about the relationships between learning
and the elites who wrote history, but for this reviewer it seems apparent
that the venerable humanist tradition sustained by the still very classical
education of the nineteenth century flowered to make history still an avocation,
not a profession or a job. Who in the nineteenth century might have put down
"historian" as a profession on his passport? For the writers of history also
wrote poetry, essays on moral philosophy, memoirs, works of piety, and
translations of the classics. History was one genre, among many, in a still
humanist culture where learning was ennobling and immortalizing. The pursuit
of gloire through writing remained a powerful motivating force in the nineteenth
century. Carbonell suggests by his findings that most of those who published
history were in their sixties and seventies. They had written verses in their
youth, for was there not a genre appropriate to each stage of the life cycle?
Clearly the still humanist learning of the nineteenth century is yet another
world that has been lost, as historical scholarship has been professionalized.
When French elites turned later in life to historical scholarship, it was
in order to do research on their families, a kind of searching for ancestors
that may not have totally disappeared in the twentieth century as social
mobility has increased and the peasants and working people have become favorite
subjects.
Here and there Carbonell categorizes a writer as a journalist. This is
anachronistic. What was a historian in 1865? Carbonell cannot seem to refrain
from imposing his own rather unexamined assumptions about what history is.
What is apparent among the so-called journalists is a greater emphasis in
their writing on the period after 1789. Contemporary history in popular form
was a "growth" industry among nineteenth-century writers, and what was said
in popular form deserves to be analyzed with perhaps more sophisticated
techniques of analysis than the essentially philological method used to access
so-called learned works. But do such distinctions stand up under scrutiny?
With the statistical studies behind him to demonstrate the continuities,
Carbonell then turns to the roles of individuals and the effects of religious
and political debates upon historical thought. The short sections exploring
the influences, or rather the demonstration of the non-influence of Taine,
Renan, and Fustel de Coulange reveal Carbonell's own philosophical
presuppositions more clearly than anywhere else in the book. Has anyone ever
claimed that these writers had a powerful influence on the mass of historical
writing of the late nineteenth century? I doubt it. In these discussions
the import is almost too philosophical to catch the range of influence that
are commonly discerned in intellectual history.
Renan's writings were perceived as part of the secularizing stimulus that
the founders of the ultramontane Catholic scholars who created the Revue
des Questions historiques sought to curb. A religious-political paradigm
of values and ideologies shared by the governing elites had been attacked
by Renan, and Marius Sepet, Léon Gauthier, and their Catholic colleagues
felt the need to reply to the challenging historicity of Renan and other
like-minded secularists. The historical thought of the governing elites as
described in Part I of the book was hagiographical and exemplary. Catholic
writers sought to edify readers by recounting the piety, charity and miracles
of deceased churchmen. How could such Catholic historical thought survive
in a capital of intellectual ferment after Renan? Fustel's role was more
complex, largely because of the divisions of opinion and moral doubts provoked
by the Franco-Prussian war.
Until that war historical thought as practiced by the Parisian university
professors was heavily influenced by German historical scholarship. To accomplish
for France what Ranke was accomplishing for Germany seemed to be the wave
of the future to the professionalizing historians being produced by a bourgeois
society and state. But what occurs when this increasingly influential minority
suddenly finds that the scholarship they are emulating has been in the service
of a state that has defeated France? Fustel's anti-Germanism in the
Cité antique revealed the new mood after the defeat of Prussia
and signaled an effort to establish an autonomous French national history.
A lesson, a terrible lesson would be learned, and not without causing such
influential historians as Gabriel Monod to perceive that there was a danger
in emulating any foreign scholarly tradition in historical thought. Henceforth
French historiography was not only autonomous but unwilling to look back
upon the stormy period when rampant nationalism threatened to destroy the
historical thought of the professional elite. Had the new professional elite
of historians failed, French historical thought would have become a humanistic
relic like history in Spain -- a humanist scholarly tradition in the service
of national myths. The Germanophilia, Carbonell shows, had been located in
Paris. The provinces, where such men as Tamizey de Larroque went right on
editing texts pretty much as their ancestors had done during the eighteenth
century, were not yet under Parisian intellectual or professional influences.
Monod and his colleagues recovered their nerve, thanks largely to the ardent
ultramontanist and royalist scholarship of the Revue des questions
historiques. The Protestant Monod and the reformist republican Catholic,
Fagniez, could collaborate to found the Revue Historique. The new
professional cadre found inspiration and cohesion in replying obliquely to
ardent Catholicism and royalism through their journal. One could have wished
that Carbonell had measured each factor in the blend of Protestantism,
republicanism, and professionalism that finally made up the intellectual
foundation for a nationalist French historiography. When Fagniez withdrew
were his reasons primarily religious, political or professional? Just what
role did Protestants play in historicizing republican values from Guizot
through Monod? As one draws near the end of the book the reasons for the
taboo against the study of historical thought become apparent. Sepet, Monod,
Fagniez, and others of the nineteenth century are not ancestors for historians
currently at work in France in the way that Henry Adams, A. B. Hart, E. Channing,
and A. Dunning are in American historiography. The upheavals of the twentieth
century have created new historiographies in France whose ancestors are Saussure
and Durkheim.
Finally, it should be noted that Carbonell does not entirely abandon statistical
studies in the second part. His ingenious method for counting key adjectives
and descriptive or analytical categories used by historians in writing about
the Communards and the Germans adds yet another chapter to Michel Foucault's
general synthesis about the relationships between the new elites of the
nineteenth century, professionalization and scientism. The Germans are described
in numerous works as beastly, barbaric, delirious, rabid, and insane, as
were the Communards. In other words, the scientism that provoked the "Grand
Renfermement" could be extended to the international insane as well. All
this demonstrates how pitifully narrow the horizons and languages of historians
may appear when their writings are scrutinized to reveal the place of historical
thought in a society where a traditional value system and elite came apart
in the 1870s and was displaced by a burgeoning sectarian and "professionalized"
school of international historians that was part of that "scientizing" elite
seeking to implement the values of Enlightenment.
Orest Ranum
The Johns Hopkins University
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