Du bon usage de l’histoire: histoire, morale et politique à l’âge classique (review)

As we know, the course of true history never does run smooth, and this certainly turns out to be the case with history writing in seventeenth-century France. Throughout the period of the classical age, starting here with sixteenth-century humanism and finishing in the early eighteenth century, this weighty volume demonstrates how various historiographical trends and conceptions competed with each other to the extent that, as Béatrice Guion remarks, the history of history writing — we might add like history itself in one perspective — is far from linear. Guion’s aim, in broad terms, is to trace the transition from historical production as adhering to the rhetorical framework of exempla to the more modern idea of history as constituting a body of verifiable knowledge anchored in an anthropological approach. However, the tenacity of history as embodying moral example never disappeared, and jurists called for a history based on the recording of variations in law and customs as early as the sixteenth century. Indeed, Guion investigates in detail the slippery epistemological status of history writing as it varies between useful versions involving the promotion of ‘prudence’, the tensions between idealism and pragmatism in what the examples of history offer, and the emergence in the second half of the seventeenth century of a history sceptical of moral and political partisanship, where attempts to construct universal laws of one sort or another yield to the recognition of historical specificities and to a sort of historical relativism. Along with all that, historians either welcome or reject the intrusion of more literary influences, especially as one feature of history at this particular time is the importance attached less to the public face of events and important causes of effects and more to the private sphere of the ‘cabinet’ and to causes deriving from movements of the passions or from the syndrome of Cleopatra’s nose. While Guion explicitly excludes religious history from her perspective, she takes careful account of the onslaught of Augustinianism on the positive promotion of exemplary lives, as well as the ‘libertin’ critique surrounding the evidence of the unbelievable. Of particular interest is the place of ancient historical models such as Tacitus, much admired for his practical realism but then reviled for his apology of tyranny. Those readers seeking a strong conceptual guidance in an understanding of classical history writing will be enormously disappointed. In many respects this volume tells it as the writers of history tell it, with accompanying comment, often enlightening certainly, on similarities and differences between them. But the approach according to categories of history suffers in a sense from the porousness of those very categories, leading to a great deal of repetition across the sections and within them, since Guion never trusts two or three similar opinions to stand for the rest. In addition, when Guion recognizes the importance of profound conceptual issues, they are left hanging without further elucidation. This is a very useful book in which the reading is thankfully done for us, but it requires patience.