Regimes of Historicity by François Hartog

Author:François Hartog
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS016000, LITERARY CRITICISM/Semiotics & Theory, HIS016000, HISTORY/Historiography
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2015-02-23T16:00:00+00:00

National Histories

Throughout the nineteenth century, in which the idea of the Nation played such a pivotal role, the development of national histories in fact went hand in hand with discourses claiming to speak in the name of the future. In France, that future had already taken place, but it had somehow also been missed, had gone astray, or got lost—in any case, it was unfinished. 1789 was in the past, but the promise it held was still to come. Here again, we find a situation that is somewhere between the already and the not yet.

Let us start with the 1820s generation of liberals, who raised high the flag of historical reform precisely in the name of the Nation. These young thinkers ushered in a vibrantly inventive period, intellectually innovative, if naive, in which history as a science and no longer as one of the arts was first elaborated and advocated. For this generation, the Nation was at once a self-evident fact, a political weapon, a cognitive architecture, and a historical program. A self-evident fact, because the whole purpose of the Revolution was to replace the king—in whose person, as it was said, “the nation resided in its entirety”—with the nation as the “mystical receptacle of sovereignty.”90 The sudden substitution of one absolute for another created (enduring) problems of representation, with the question of how to understand this absolute, how to serve it, and how to embody it. Throughout the century, historians grappled with trying to understand this founding moment by putting it in perspective and making sense of it in the broader context of the history of France, in the light of what came before, but also afterward. This work was really where the modern concept of history and the definition of the historian’s task (or even mission) originated. And this was also François Furet’s starting point in his project of “thinking” (penser) the French Revolution, through rereading the nineteenth-century historians.91

The nation was also a weapon. It was vital to show that “the people of the nation in their entirety” were agents of history, and in particular that, although the 1814 Charter described an essentially if not exclusively monarchic history of France, the long march of the Third Estate had begun already in the twelfth century. Another continuity was at work, it was claimed, far more charged with history and above all harboring much greater potential for the future than dynastic succession alone. In Augustin Thierry’s view, 1789 recalled the “revolutions of the Middle Ages,” and 1830 was in the process of providing an “extreme” vantage point from which Thierry believed one could see “the providential termination of the labour of the centuries which had elapsed since the twelfth.”92 July 1830 fulfilled July 1789. History became intelligible in the passage from the present—which only yesterday was the future—to a very distant past, with 1830 figuring as roughly the end of history. On this particular point a political program (the establishment of a constitutional monarchy) and a new historical methodology were in harmony, and each could henceforth corroborate the other.

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