Lost Worlds: The Emergence of French Social History, 1815–1970

4. Lost Worlds: Lucien Febvre and the Alien Past

1. The term derives, of course, from the British historian Peter Laslett, whose The World We Have Lost o¤ered an especially forceful articulation of this view. In this chapter I explore an idea that was central to French historical writing in the twentieth century : the idea that fundamental di¤erences of experience, feeling, thought, and personality divide contemporary society from what came before it, making the past so unlike the present as to constitute a “world we have lost.”1 I seek here to understand how this idea came into widespread use and to explicate some of the discussions that it has occasioned. A vision of the past as alien territory, I argue, was central to the development of French historical thought during the Wrst half of the twentieth century, and it prompted some of the century’s most innovative research. It remains important in much contemporary scholarship. Inevitably, however, developing and documenting this idea of di¤erence have 4 lost worlds: lucien febvre and the alien past required historians to step beyond the limits of mere science. These questions call forth historians’ assumptions about their own modernity and demand that they make claims about what we are, we who di¤er in such basic ways from the men and women of earlier times. Exploring the gap between modernity and its antecedents has thus implicitly meant exploring the modern self, and as such it has drawn on cultural resources well outside the discipline of historical research, on ideologies, experiences, and literature. Ideas about historical di¤erence thus reveal with particular clarity interactions between historical knowledge and its cultural surroundings. In this chapter I develop four arguments about the character of that interaction in twentieth-century France. First, I want to show the importance of the question itself in the process by which distinctive historical approaches deWned themselves in the early twentieth century. Far more than any differences about the value of social history, the di¤ering views of the otherness of the past that were held by rival historical schools served to set them apart, and in particular served to deWne the Annales school, the century ’s most inXuential group of historians. Second, in this as in the other topics investigated in this book, twentieth-century historians worked in a complex but mostly tacit dialogue with their predecessors, a dialogue that included borrowing, adaptation, and criticism. In this domain as in others, Annales historians reused old ideas, while Wtting them to new demands and addressing new circumstances in the contemporary world. Third, I argue here for the importance of these contemporary circumstances in shaping the scholarship of twentieth-century historians. For French historians , this meant above all the presence of colonialism, and I seek to show here the strong presence of colonial imagery in their writings about the history of their own nation. The twentieth-century colonial world supplied them with metaphors for understanding the social structures of preindustrial Europe, and it supplied incentives for doing so, because the urgency of contemporary colonial encounters encouraged viewing historical data as knowledge that had real-world uses. Finally, I suggest that the force of such contemporary concerns encouraged French historians to reXect on the boundaries between their own practices and those of other intellectual disciplines. Precisely because their scholarship touched on the ideologies and experiences of contemporary life, they found themselves forced to deWne the speciWcities of their own form of knowledge. As throughout this book, my approach here is primarily textual, with little reference to the backgrounds or personal lives of the scholars I 98 lost worlds consider, and indeed with little reference to any but their published work. This method obviously precludes some lines of inquiry—and may seem perversely ill suited to an investigation of social history, which has so often sought to link private life with public utterance.2 Yet an approach via the history of ideas and images serves one of my primary aims throughout the book, that of understanding how intellectual traditions, interacting in complicated ways, have shaped professional historical practices, in some instances despite the practitioners’ own plans. My refusal of intentionality applies especially to the historian on whom the inquiry focuses, the sixteenth-century specialist and Annales school cofounder Lucien Febvre. Febvre almost inevitably occupies this focal role, for the problem of anachronism , of di¤erences between past and present, concerned him during much of his career; and his reXections on...