History as a Kind of Writing: Textual Strategies in Contemporary French Historiography by Philippe Carrard (review)

Most historians cheerfully discuss their methodologies and can offer tips on ‘writing up’ so as to achieve clarity and directness of exposition. But they invariably get fretful when asked about the epistemological status or literary qualities of their work. Philippe Carrard provides a congenial and highly illuminating pathway into a fraught field by focusing on what he calls the ‘poetics of history’—which he defines as ‘the study of the rules, codes and conventions that operate in a given set of texts’ (p. xiii). The approach draws on historians’ own reflections on their practice, but it is very heavily seasoned with insights from the fields of philosophy, linguistics, rhetoric, literary theory, and book history (he makes considerable play, for example, of authorial peri-texts such as titles, subtitles, prefaces, acknowledgements, graphs, and images). Carrard’s corpus comprises a representative sample of historical works (all books, in fact) written by French historians since 1945, covering the pre- and post-Annales era as well as the era of the journal’s historiographical hegemony. Most works considered are canonical and/or books that achieved popularity or notoriety. Carrard divides his work into three parts. (As an anglophone who is unfailingly struck by the way in which French colleagues dependably divide their expositions into three points or parts, I note that this tripartite tendency is one of very few rhetorical devices to escape his close analysis.) Carrard’s opening section, entitled ‘Dispositions’, discusses whether history can be considered as a form of narrative—an intriguing question that covers both the move away from the histoire événementielle, which was one of Fernand Braudel’s favourite bugbears, into a more ‘structural’ history that eventually spurred a ‘return of narrative’. The second part, ‘Situations’, explores the varying ways that historians adopt a ‘speaker’s position’ in presenting their arguments. Carrard shows, for example, that historians have developed manifold ways of transcending the customary effacement of the use of ‘I’ on grounds of the demands of historical objectivity. The third part, ‘Figures’, explores the rhetorical devices that historians conventionally adopt in order to convince readers of the veracity of their accounts: his account of uses (and abuses) of the footnote is an especial delight. Carrard writes with a dry, faux-naïf, Candide-in-the-land-of-historians wit and he takes special pleasure in mildly skewering historians when what they say they are doing diverges markedly from what they do. By bringing to the surface and holding up to the light the conventional writing practices most historians almost mechanistically adopt, Carrard is performing an invaluable, thought-provoking service to the historical profession. Although his corpus is entirely French, the practices he analyses are widely and in some cases universally used across the profession. His analysis is thus both a source of instruction and a prompt to reflexivity and the making of better history.