History and Theory 53 (February 2014), 105-118 Wesleyan University 2014 ISSN: 0018-2656

DOI: 10.1111/hith.10698





TWO CONTRASTING FRENCH APPROACHES TO HISTORIOGRAPHY
LHISTORIOGRAPHIE. By Nicolas Offenstadt. Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France. 2011. Pp. 109.
LHISTORIOGRAPHIE. By Charles-Olivier Carbonell. Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France. 1981. Pp. 128.
ABSTRACT
This essay reviews two books in the French Que Sais-je? series by Charles-Olivier Carbo-
nell in 1981 and by Nicolas Offenstadt in 2011 on the topic of historiography. Offenstadts
volume is intended to bring Carbonells up to date, but goes in very different directions.
There is general agreement among historians that a fundamental reorientation has taken
place in historical thought and writing in the past half century, about which quite a bit has
been written in recent years in the West, including in Latin America, East Asia, and India.
But this is not the theme of either of these volumes. Carbonell tells the history of history
from the ancient Greeks to the twentieth-century Annales; Offenstadt is not interested in
examining major trends in historiography as much of the historiographical literature has
done, but in analyzing the changes that the key concepts that guide contemporary histo-
rical studies have undergone. For Carbonells chronological narrative of the history of
historical writing, theory has no place; for Offenstadt, who proceeds analytically, history
and theory are inseparable. He deals specifically with changes in conceptions of historical
time, of the role of documents, of the place of history within the social sciences, of the
centrality of narrative, and finally of historical memory.
Keywords: Annales school, Begriffsgeschichte, Fernand Braudel, global history, discourse,
narrative, Marxism, history and literature
I
For over seventy years the Presses Universitaires de France have published a
series of inexpensive paperbacks, Que sais-je? (What Do I Know?), intended
for broad circulation to inform the French reading public about the status of
knowledge in fields ranging from the humanities to the natural sciences. In 1981
a volume on historiography was published, followed thirty years later by a second
volume intended to bring the first up to date. The first was authored by Charles-
Olivier Carbonell (19302013), who had written an important book, Histoire et
historiens, une mutation idologique des historiens franais: 18651885
1
on the
reorientation of historical studies in France in the second half of the nineteenth
century. Carbonell had been the moving spirit in the foundation in 1980 of the
1. Charles-Olivier Carbonell, Histoire et historiens, une mutation idologique des historiens fran-
ais: 18651885 (Toulouse: Edouard Privat, 1976).
GEORG G. IGGERS
106
International Commission for the History of Historiography and the launching of
the international journal Storia della Storiografia, published in Italy with articles
in English, French, German, and Italian. Nicolas Offenstadt (b. 1967) had pub-
lished extensively on medieval studies and on the First World War. Offenstadts
book opens with a reference to Carbonells 1981 volume; he sees his own as a
replacement (relve) of Carbonells. In a way the two books are intended to be
read together. Yet they are totally different in their conception of what constitutes
history and their approach to writing a history of historiography.
Carbonell makes his position very clear in the preface. He stipulates a sharp
division between history and theory. He sees his task as dealing with historians
in their function as historians, reporting on the past as they see and reconstruct it.
He is not interested in literary and aesthetic aspects of historical writing, but most
of all rejects the introduction of philosophical considerations into history. As he
writes in the preface, his presentation will give more consideration to Herodotus
than to Plato, to Suetonius than to Cicero [whom he considers a literary figure
rather than a historian], to Mabillon than to Rousseau, to Momm sen than to Dil-
they, to Lucien Febvre than to Raymond Aron (4). It was only after Carbonell
distanced himself from the international historiographical commission that the
commission changed its name to International Commission for the History and
Theory of Historiography. Although he was writing this book at the beginning
of the 1980s, he failed to reflect on the profound reorientations that had taken
place since the 1960s; he even seems to have been unaware of them. Whereas
Offenstadt focuses on this reorientation, Carbonell devotes only one relatively
brief chapter to the twentieth century, which he identifies almost exclusively with
the New History (Nouvelle Histoire) of the Annales school, largely ignoring
the discussions that took place outside of France. His chapter on the nineteenth
century, however, gives major attention to the Ranke school and the professional-
ization of historical studies, first in Germany and then leading to Charles Seigno-
bos (18541942) and Charles-Victor Langlois (18631929) in France and their
manual LIntroduction aux tudes historiques (1898).
2
Within the short space
of 128 pages, he attempts a history of history from its early, preliterate, mytho-
logical beginnings to the present, stressing, however, that history only began
with writing and that unwritten oral history based on memory gives a distorted
picture of the past. Herodotus thus appears as the father of history, but he still
writes historiesa large variety of narrativesrather than history. It is with
Thucydides that history first becomes a science. Interestingly, like Offenstadt,
Carbonell sees discourse at the center of history, but for both it is a discourse
that has little to do with the linguistic turn, which Carbonell does not mention.
He makes the obvious observation that history needs language to transmit histori-
cal reality, and is firmly convinced that such a reality exists. The book itself tells
the story of the evolution of history from its Greek antecedents to a science of
history. In a sense, the Roman and particularly the theologically oriented Middle
Ages constitute regressions, but with Lorenzo Valla and the Italian humanists a
return to a more scientific, that is, realistic approach to history, takes place, lead-
2. Charles Seignobos and Charles-Victor Langlois, LIntroduction aux tudes historiques (Paris:
Hachette, 1898).
TWO CONTRASTING FRENCH APPROACHES TO HISTORIOGRAPHY
107
ing to its apex in the nineteenth century with the professionalization of historical
studies and finally to the expansion of the historical perspective in the Annales.
There is little new in this presentation. Herbert Butterfield (19001979) in his
article in the Dictionary of the History of Ideas in 1974
3
had undertaken something
similar only a few years before the publication of Carbonells book. Yet the inter-
esting section of Carbonells book is the one in which, ironically, he deals with
the theoretical assumptions that are to guide his presentation. He considers the
existing histories of history to be elitist, concentrating on geniuses (gnies) and
master works (chefs-doeuvre) (3). Instead he wants to write a history focusing
on collective representations (3) and place historical works and historians in
their temporal and spatial environment (4). To an extent he does this. But his his-
toriographical narrative still proceeds around leading historians and their works.
He is interested in history primarily as a form of scholarship. In a way he comes
much closer to what he says he intends to do in his earlier Histoire et historiens
on how historical studies were carried on in France in this twenty-year period. He
deals here much more extensively with historians outside the academy, with ama-
teurs if you wish, and with settings such as historical associations, many of them
Catholic, in which normal citizens devoted themselves to their local past at a time
that coincided with the foundation of the Revue historique in 1876 and the profes-
sionalization of historical studies, accompanied by the breakthrough of a secular,
republican outlook. All of this is missing in his LHistoriographie volume, which
tells a story about great historians and their works, although placing them in the
context of their time. Carbonell in the Preface rejects an outlook dedicated to the
progress of historical knowledge as a science of the past (3), yet the story he tells
about the course of historical thought and writing in the past two and half thousand
years points in the direction of such progress. He operates with a norm of what
constitutes historical science. Thucydides and Ibn Khaldun foreshadow it before
their time. The humanists, in freeing their writing of theological presumptions,
point in the direction of history as a scientific enterprise, yet are still too closely
attached to archaic notions from the ancient world. And this norm is essentially
Western, as becomes very apparent in two chapters that deal with historical writ-
ing outside the West, in China and in the Arab world. Carbonell recognizes that
both have long traditions of historical scholarship, in China going back to Sima
Qian (14587 BCE), whom, rather than Confucius (c. 571479 BCE), he consid-
ers the first authentic Chinese historian, but who in his eyes is nevertheless not
comparable to Greek historians, least of all Thucydides. Chinese historians, he
argues, have nothing to offer except imperial biographies and dynastic histories.
They fail to go beyond chronological compilations. Moreover, although they work
with sources, they accept them at face value without examining their validity. He
is unaware of the tradition of critical examination of sources in Chinese scholar-
ship, which was well developed by the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries,
4

a development in some ways similar to, although separate from, the transforma-
3. Herbert Butterfield, Historiography, in Dictionary of the History of Ideas (New York: Scrib-
ner, 1974), II, 464-499.
4. Benjamin Elman, From Philosophy to Philology; Intellectual and Social Aspects of Change in
Late Imperial China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).
GEORG G. IGGERS
108
tion of European erudition in that period. Carbonells account of Arab historical
writing ends early with Ibn Khaldun (13321406), whom he rightly considers an
outstanding historian, who alone in his time rose to an authentic philosophy of
history joining a methodological reflection with a global explanation that already
possessed modern features. But he overlooks that Islamic historiography did not
end in the fourteenth century. This inclusion of ancient, but only ancient, Chinese
historiography together with a focus on Ibn Khaldun parallels Butterfields His-
toriography article, but Butterfield, unlike Carbonell, recognizes the Chinese
commitment to textual criticism.
5
Yet Carbonells best chapter, in my opinion,
deals with the nineteenth century. Here he deals not only with professionalization
in Germany and throughout Europe with its stress on source criticism, but also
on the impact that romanticism had on historical studies and the close relation of
literature and scholarship. The century was not only the age of Leopold von Ranke
(17951886) but also of Jules Michelet (17981874). Carbonell introduces a very
important note, the extent to which the faith in science was met by increasing
doubt, and ideas of progress with pessimism (100-101), a note that he did not pur-
sue in his chapter on the twentieth century. After a separate chapter on the impact
of Marxism on the reorientation of historical writing, he turns to the twentieth
century in which he deals almost exclusively with the French Nouvelle Histoire
initiated by the Annales school. Although he distances himself from Marxist dog-
matism, he gives Marx and the Marxist tradition credit for having paved the way
for the Nouvelle Histoire by moving history away from its traditional focus on
events and politics and laying the foundations for a social and economic approach
to history, and most importantly for opening the field to material culture (114),
all central elements of the Nouvelle Histoire.
What Germany was for historical scholarship in the nineteenth century, France
was in the twentieth century. And for Carbonell, this history is the history of the
Annales. The Nouvelle Histoire for him is ultimately identified with quantifica-
tion, which finds its high point in the histoire srielleincluding the applica-
tion of computerized, quantitative methods to the study of mentalities, such as
changing attitudes about death reflected in the computerized analysis of wills
over a given period. He virtually ignores historians outside of France, except
for a brief mention of the Cambridge demographic school in Great Britain and
the counterfactual economic history of Robert Fogel (19262013) in the United
States as representatives of this new quantitative orientation, mentioning Fogels
work on the construction of the railroads,
6
but not his much more important and
controversial study on the profitability of American slavery.
7

Offenstadts book could be seen as a continuation of Carbonells. Carbonell
had brought the history of historiography up from the Greeks to 1981; Offen-
stadt deals with the period since then. But in fact their books are very different,
not only in terms of the content with which each deals, but also in their overall
5. Butterfield, Historiography, 480.
6. Robert Fogel snd Douglas North, Railroads and American Economic Growth: Essays in Econo-
metric History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1964).
7. Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro
Slavery (Boston: Little Brown, 1974).
TWO CONTRASTING FRENCH APPROACHES TO HISTORIOGRAPHY
109
approach. For Offenstadt, history and theory are inseparable. In his view, the new
edition of the Que sais-je? volume is needed because of the fundamental changes
that have marked historical thinking and writing since the 1981 edition, changes
that go back beyond 1981 to the 1960s. His book is about these changes. This is
a period marked by tremendous increases in the number of students and teaching
staff, accompanied by technological innovations, including not only the computer
but, most important, the internet and the digitalization of sources. But the scope
of history has also changed radically. New areas of study have been opened,
reflecting the changed social context in which history is written. The important
changes had already occurred in the 1960s with the emergence of feminism,
the movement for racial equality, the inclusion into history of segments of the
population previously marginalized, and the turn away from the concentration
on the highly developed Western nations to the rest of the world. He is fully
aware of these changes, as are several books on contemporary historical writing
with which I shall deal later in this essay. But his book is different from all these
books. They all offer an overview of main trends in contemporary historiography.
Offenstadt avoids this. His approach is much more analytical. Without losing
awareness of these trends, he analyzes various concepts and methods that are
common to them and examines how they underwent change.
One limitation of the book is that Offenstadt restricts himself to professional
historians. Here he does not differ from the other histories of contemporary his-
tory with which we shall compare his contributions. One theme that Offenstadt
discusses throughout the book is the relation of history to literature. He is fully
aware that a strict separation between the two cannot be drawn, that historiogra-
phy ever since its Greek origins had a literary function. Yet at the same time, he
does not agree with Hayden White that history is pure literature and that there
is thus no distinction between historical imagination and historical realism. In
the nineteenth century, he sees a great deal of history that is inseparable from
literature; the prime example is Michelet. Nevertheless, he decides to deal only
with historians who are a part of the historical discipline as it emerged in the
nineteenth century with the professionalization of historical studies. Since then
history has been practiced primarily in universities and research institutions such
as the Conseil National de Recherches in France. Martin Nissen in a recent book
8

has shown how, side by side with professional scholarship in the nineteenth cen-
tury, even in Germany where professionalization was most advanced, a great deal
of serious history was written by nonprofessional, so-called amateur historians.
Despite the trend toward specialization, which became greater as the century
progressed, professional historians too from Ranke and Michelet to Theodor
Mommsen (18171903), who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1902 the
second time it was given, wrote for a broad, nonprofessional public.
After touching on these problems in the Introduction, Offenstadt then devotes
seven of the eight chapters to basic concepts and methods that guide professional
historical writing, stressing the changes they undergo in time. Unlike all other
histories of recent historiography, he does not outline major new trends in his-
8. Martin Nissen, Populre Geschichtsschreibung: Historiker, Verleger und die deutsche ffent-
lichkeit (18481900) (Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna: Bhlau Verlag, 2009).
GEORG G. IGGERS
110
torical writing but instead examines the basic concepts they have in common and
the changes that these concepts have undergone in recent years. Offenstadt relies
heavily on Reinhard Kosellecks (19232006) Begriffsgeschichte.
9
It rests on lan-
guage but sees language very differently from the advocates of the linguistic turn.
Whereas the latter deny any autonomous historical reality, the history of concepts
as seen by Koselleck or Offenstadt reflects real social changes best understood by
examining the concepts that they reflect.
After this Introduction, Offenstadt proceeds to examine changing concepts of
time that are fundamental to the writing of history. Well into the twentieth cen-
tury, historians worked with a single, linear conception of time, as did physicists
and even the writers of literature, for example, novelists. In the twentieth century
the conception of unitary time was increasingly replaced by what Offenstadt calls
multiple temporalities (21). In the field of history the best known example of the
replacement of a chronological narrative by an analytical history that takes place
on several distinct temporal levels is, of course, Fernand Braudel in his well known
The Mediterranean and the World of the Mediterrannean in the Age of Philip II.
10

There Braudel divides his subject matter into three separate parts, each operating
with a different conception of time, the almost immovable time (longue dure) of
the geographical setting of the Mediterranean, the cyclical conjunctures of econom-
ic activities and social structures of long duration (conjonctures), and finally the
history of short-term political events. Historians are keenly aware that time is not an
abstract universal but is conceived differently in different cultural contexts.
11
Two
examples not mentioned directly by Offenstadt immediately come to mind, Jacques
Le Goffs (b. 1924) classic essay Merchants Time and Churchs Time in the Mid-
dle Ages.
12
from within the Annales school, and E. P. Thompsons (19241993)
Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism
13
from a Marxist perspective.
Offenstadt does not endorse any specific conception of time or methodology but
indicates that the concept of time has become increasingly complex in the twentieth
century; he sees not only the continuities in history but also the ruptures.
He next proceeds to the changing role that documents play in historical study.
For Langlois and Seignobos in their Introduction aux tudes historiques, history
as a field of knowledge (connaisssance) rested on documents. Without documents
there was no history. But the question remained what constituted documents. For
Langlois and Seignobos, the answer was as simple as it had been for Ranke and
his school. For the most part, the documents were to be found in the archives and
consisted largely of written records deposited by governmental authorities. But as
a good deal of historiography in the twentieth century turned away from narrative
9. Reinhart Koselleck, Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, 8 vols. (Stuttgart, 19721997); Koselleck,
Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985).
10. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the World of the Mediterrannean in the Age of Philip
II [1949] (Paris: Hachette, 1966).
11. See Time and History: The Variety of Cultures, ed. Jrn Rsen (New York: Berghahn Books,
2007).
12. In Jacques Le Goff, Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1980).
13. E. P. Thompson, Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism, Past and Present 38
(December 1967), 56-97.
TWO CONTRASTING FRENCH APPROACHES TO HISTORIOGRAPHY
111
accounts of political and diplomatic events to social, and ultimately cultural, his-
tory, historians had to turn elsewhere. Social-science-oriented historians employ-
ing impersonal statistics worked with very different sources and documents and
were ultimately replaced by cultural anthropologists and by small-scale histories,
the latter (microstoria) relying at times on personal testimonies. And finally
Offenstadt suggests that false testimonies and forgeries should not be totally dis-
counted; they too may offer glimpses into historical realities (33).
This leads to the changing conceptions of science that have guided historical
study. A variety of historical theorists, including the whole spectrum from Com-
tean positivists to Marx and Engels, wanted to transform history into a science
committed to laws resembling those of the natural sciences. None of these histori-
ans and theorists of history were located in academic institutions. The profession-
alization of historical studies initiated by Ranke operated with a different concep-
tion of what constitutes historical science. For Langlois and Seignobos historys
scientific character rests not in the search for laws and generalized explanations
but in rigorous methodology (rigoeur de mthode) (43). Seignobos frankly
stated that history is not a science but only a procedure for gaining knowledge
(lhistoire nest pas une science, elle nest quun procd de connaissance)
(36). Yet this focus on method and written sources was questioned by thinkers
like Wilhelm Dilthey (18331911), who viewed history very differently, neither
as a science comparable to the natural sciences nor as a social science defined by
its methodology, but as a humanistic science (Geisteswissenschaft), the core of
which consisted in the understanding (comprhension, Verstehen) of social and
cultural complexes, a position that Henri-Irne Marrou (19041977) embraced
more than half a century later in his De la connaissance historique (1954) (36),
and which ultimately became important for cultural studies.
This contrasts with a position espoused by Emile Durkheim (18581917) and
Karl Marx (18181883) and Marxism, or rather varieties of Marxism, which
sought broad explanations of social phenomena and which in different ways
affected historical writing in the twentieth century. Marxism, which began as
a form of economic determinism, was fundamentally transformed when, in the
crucial 1960s, it recognized the cultural complexities of all modern societies.
Offenstadt completes the chapter by stressing that although professional histori-
ans were committed to value-neutrality, in practice they permitted their ideologi-
cal and political biases to influence their research findings. Thus the emergence
of history as a scholarly discipline in the nineteenth century was closely linked to
nationalist causes, so that much scholarship that considered itself strictly objec-
tive in fact created national myths, or in Offenstadts terms, national novels
(roman national) (40-42).
Offenstadt then examines the changing role of narratives (rcits) (56-58).
From antiquity until well into the twentieth century, style and rhetoric have
played a central role in historical writing (criture). For most of this time, history
was considered a form of belles lettres. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries
have seen two developments away from this. The professionalization of histori-
cal studies carried with it the conscious attempt to draw a line between history
and belles lettres and with it the liberation of history from rhetoric. Yet this
GEORG G. IGGERS
112
separation was never complete. Even Ranke recognized that history was both a
science (Wissenschaft) and an art (Kunst).
14
But a much more radical effort to
purge history of literary aspects was represented by the quantification that was
at the core of a great deal of social-science-oriented history in the years between
1945 and 1970. The last forty years have seen increasing criticism of this sup-
posedly scientific historiography and of what Lawrence Stone (19191999) in
1979 termed a return to narrative.
15
An extreme reaction against any attempt
at historical objectivity was Hayden Whites (b. 1928) argument that history was
purely a work of the poetic imagination, denying that there is any distinction
between history and fiction. Offenstadt then follows the French discussions on
this theme. Although thinkers like Roland Barthes (19501918), Michel Foucault
(19261984), and Jacques Derrida (19302004) held views similar to those of
White, distinguished French thinkers like Paul Ricoeur (19132005) and Paul
Veyne (b. 1930) recognized that narrative is at the core of historyfor Veyne,
history is narrative, un vrai roman (57)without denying reality all together
as White did. For Roger Chartier (b. 1945) history cannot be reduced purely to
literature as White has done (59).
16
Elsewhere, Saul Friedlnder (b. 1930) has
pointed to the dilemma of Whites position, who is forced to recognize that there
was indeed a Holocaust, an admission that contradicts his theoretical denial of a
real historical past.
17
Offenstadt concludes that throughout history the historian,
while committed to establishing truthful accounts of the past, must nevertheless,
to cite Marrou, aspire to be a great writer (grand crivain) (53).
This leads to the question of the role of history among the social sciences. For
the past century history has been closely related to the other human and social sci-
ences. The question now arises whether its difference from these sciences involves
primarily the occupation of history with the past or its methods. As for methods,
with the increasing economic, social, and cultural orientation of history they have
essentially become similar to those of other human sciences. Durkheim early
raised the question about the relation of history and sociology. Insofar as history
rejects abstractions, it is in his view no science at all. Nevertheless, he writes, it
[history] is the science of social facts and thus becomes indistinct from sociol-
ogy (64, 65). This is also the position of the Annales, except that the relation
between sociology, or rather the human sciences, and history is reversed. History
is an all-encompassing human science, but the human sciences are in fact seen in
terms of historical change. Offenstadt recognizes the influence of Marxist ideas in
the turn of the Annales to economics and sociology without accepting the system-
atic character of Marxist ideology. Beginning in the 1970s the Annales increas-
ingly turned away from a concentration on economics and sociology to historical
14. Ranke, Idee der Universalhistorie, in Historische Zeitschrift 178, ed. Eberhard Kessel
(Munich: Cotta Oldenbourg, 1954), 290.
15. Lawrence Stone, The Revival of Narrative: Reflections on a New Old History, Past and
Present 85 (November 1979), 3-24.
16. See Roger Chartier, Quatre questions Hayden White, Storia della Storiografia 24 (1993),
133-142.
17. Hayden White, Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth, in Probing the Limits of
Representation: Nazism and the Final Solution, ed. Saul Friedlnder (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1992), 37-53.
TWO CONTRASTING FRENCH APPROACHES TO HISTORIOGRAPHY
113
anthropology. This turn to anthropology and away from the impersonal structures
that the Annales had inherited from Marxism and Durkheimian sociology marked
the new interest in everyday life (Alltagsgeschichte) in Germany (77-78) and the
concentration on individuals (Microstoria) in Italy (90-92), which opened new
perspectives for the writing of social history.
Offenstadt then considers how the scope (chelle) of history has both expanded
and contracted in recent historiography. There is the extension of history to
global history (85-87), but at the same time new subjects enter into history that,
in Foucaults words, have no existence of their own (en soi), but are the products
of the discourses held about them (86), and it is these discourses that produce
(fabriquent) truths (87). Sentiments now enter historical discourse. Offenstadt
once more turns to microstoria and the Italian journal Quaderni storici. These
concerns are also central to the Indian Subaltern Studies group (95-97), deeply
influenced by a Marxism given a cultural perspective by the work of Antonio
Gramsci and E. P. Thompson.
Finally, Offenstadt turns to the role of memory in history. The idea of col-
lective memory was initiated by Maurice Halbwachs (18771945), a student of
Durkheim, in the 1920s. It gained a major place in the French historiographical
scene with Pierre Noras (b.1930) project Les Lieux de Mmoire (19841992)
involving large numbers of historians and seeking to reconstruct French national
history through collective memory. The bicentennial of the French Revolution
shows how politicized memories reflect the ideological divisions in contempo-
rary France. Offenstadt approaches with a great deal of skepticism the use of
memory as a historical tool. He again goes back to showing how professional,
supposedly value-neutral, scholarship from the very beginnings in the nineteenth
century created memories and myths that served the national cause instead of
contributing to an honest, truly scholarly, reconstruction of the past.
II
The question arises whether, thirty years apart, these two books represent a differ-
ent historiographical climate or reflect the personal peculiarities of their authors.
Carbonells contribution in particular must be seen in the latter light. This leads
us to reflect on the question of where historiographical studies stood at the time
Carbonell and Offenstadt wrote their respective volumes. Undoubtedly, a funda-
mental historical reorientation took place worldwide in the 1960s, a reorientation
of which Offenstadt was very much aware and which Carbonell largely ignored.
The year 1968 has become symbolic of these changes with the May riots in Paris,
the unrest in American universities from Berkeley to the rest of the country, the
massacre of students in Mexico City, and the Prague Spring, not to mention the
Chinese Cultural Revolution, which does not fit easily into what happened in
the cultural revolutions that occurred elsewhere. These upheavals in the long
run largely failed on the political level, except for the success of the civil rights
movement in the United States, which had begun earlier in the 1950s. But there
were important changes in attitudes that persisted. And there were changes in
the universities, of which Offenstadt is very much aware, which affected the
GEORG G. IGGERS
114
way history was conceived and written, most of all in the United States, but
also elsewhere. There was a considerable expansion of the size and number of
universities, and changes in the social and ethnic recruitment of students and
faculty, especially women. It is important, however, that we do not restrict our-
selves to historiographical works written in the Anglophone world and Western
and Central Europe, but include important studies in Latin America, Eastern
Europe, and Russia, not to forget China, both the Peoples Republic and Taiwan,
few of which have been translated into English, French, or German.
18
The last
few years have seen considerable historiographical interest in Spain and Latin
America. A new international journal, Historiografa: Revista de histria y teoria
with contributions in Spanish, French, and English began publication in Spain.
Among important Spanish-language works, Fernando Snchez Marcos (b. 1943),
Las huellas del futuro: Historiografa y cultura histrica en el siglo XX (2012)
19

and Jaume Aurell et al., Comprender el pasado: Una historia de la escritura y
el pensamiento histrico (2013),
20
with articles by Peter Burke (b. 1937), about
modern and contemporary historiography, and the first comprehensive history of
Latin American historiography, by Felipe Soza, should be mentioned.
In comparing Carbonell and Offenstadt I am particularly interested in how Car-
bonells treatment of twentieth-century historiography compares with other stud-
ies that were available at the time. In his bibliography he lists the French edition
of Geoffrey Barraclough, Main Trends in History (1979) and Georg G. Iggers,
New Directions in European Historiography (1975); otherwise, books listed
include only works that deal with contemporary French historiography, foremost,
as is to be expected, La Nouvelle Histoire (1978), edited by Jacques Le Goff, R.
Chartier, and Jacques Revel (b. 1942). There are similarities between Carbonells
volume and Butterfields article. Both are organized chronologically and cover
largely the same material. Even the inclusion of classical Chinese and Arabic
historiographies is similar, the latter centering on Ibn Khaldun and not going
beyond. Although Butterfields article appeared in 1974, it seems that it was writ-
ten earlier. There is nothing about historical writing or thinking after Durkheim
and Max Weber (18641920). Barracloughs just cited Main Trends in History
does deal with main currents in twentieth-century historiography, focusing on
the impact of the social sciences with little awareness of counter-currents that led
Lawrence Stone in 1979 to write of the Revival of Narrative. The search for
quantity, Barraclough wrote also in 1979, is beyond all doubt the most power-
ful of the new trends in history, the factor above all others which distinguishes
historical attitudes in the 1970s from historical attitudes in the 1930s.
21
He
lists Emmanuel Le Roy Laduries (b. 1929) highly quantitative Les Paysans de
Languedoc (1966) and Histoire du climat depuis lan mil (1967) but not his fully
18. Dominic Sachsenmaier, in Global Perspectives on Global History (Cambridge, UK: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2011), 42, notes that during in the 1990s thirteen times as many books in the
social sciences and the humanities were translated from English into Chinese than vice versa.
19. Fernando Snchez Marcos, Las huellas del futuro: Historiografa y cultura histrica en el siglo
XX (Barcelona: Universidad de Barcelona, 2012).
20. Jaume Aurell et al., Comprender el pasado: Una historia de la escritura y el pensamiento
histrico (Madrid: Ediciones Akal, 2013).
21. Geoffrey Barraclough, Main Trends in History (Teaneck, NJ: Holmes and Meier, 1979), 89.
TWO CONTRASTING FRENCH APPROACHES TO HISTORIOGRAPHY
115
nonquantitative, anthropologically oriented Montaillou: Village occitan (1975).
There is no mention of the innovative work of Carlo Ginzburg (b. 1939), which
appeared in the 1970s, and no reference to the beginnings of feminist and gender
historiography. Guy Bourd and Herv Martin, Les coles historiques (1983),
contains all the shortcomings of the works that preceded Carbonells 1981 vol-
ume. It is narrowly focused on French discussions. It contains a valuable part in
its concluding chapters on the theoretical discussions on the nature of historical
knowledge between Veyne, Michel de Certeau (19251986), and Marrou, but
interestingly not including Ricoeur, who does not even appear in their index.
It is striking that Carbonell, Butterfield, and Barraclough all stress the impor-
tance of Marxist conceptions of history for historiography in the twentieth cen-
tury, and Carbonell and Barraclough emphasize the influence Marxist ideas had
on the Annales. Butterfields essay stops before the Annales were founded. None
of the three could be considered a Marxist in a political sense. Nevertheless, But-
terfield, easily the most conservative of the three, wrote the system that Marx
producedhowever much it owed to antecedent writersmust be regarded as
one of the most remarkable and powerful contributions ever made to the inter-
pretation of the past . . . which came to have an important influence even on his-
torians who were not themselves Marxists.
22
And Barraclough noted: Though
non-Marxists and anti-Marxists may be reluctant to accept the fact, it would be
difficult to deny that Marxism is the only coherent philosophy of the evolution
of human history in society, which exercises a demonstrable influence on the
minds of historians today.
23
Carbonell dedicates a separate chapter to Marxist
historiography between his chapters on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
the latter devoted almost exclusively to the Annales. But all three see Marxism as
an essentially intellectual orientation overlooking its revolutionary aspects. At the
core of Marxism for all three is its doctrine of historical materialism. The fact that
the Annales originally called its journal Annales dhistoire conomique et sociale
speaks to this for Carbonell (112). He identifies Marxist historiography with
what he has labeled as the Nouvelle Histoire. For Barraclough, Marxism affected
the thinking of historians in its investigation of complex and long-term social
and economic processes, its awareness of the material conditions of peoples
lives . . . in the context of industrial relations, and most important because it
aroused new interest in the theoretical premises of historical study.
24
The last
observation may be true, but the Annales showed little interest in the context of
industrial relations and instead focused on the premodern, pre-industrial period.
There is little indication in Carbonells or Barracloughs discussions of Marxist
historiography of the transition of Marxist thought toward emphasis on the role
of culture. Carbonell mentions Antonio Gramscis (18911937) stress on the
autonomy of the superstructure, and Barraclough includes E. P. Thompson, The
Making of the English Working Class, in his bibliography without at any point
discussing it and instead dedicating undue space to the official historiography
22. Butterfield, Historiography, 495.
23. Barraclough, Main Trends in History, 164.
24. Ibid., 17-18.
GEORG G. IGGERS
116
of the Soviet Union.
25
Carlos Antonio Aguirre Rojas (b. 1955), from an openly
Marxist perspective, seeks to establish the close connection between various
Marxist orientations and the Annales in Itinerarios de la historiografa del siglo
XX: De los differentes marxismos a los varios Annales, published simultaneously
in 1999 in Mexico City and Havana, Cuba.
26
All of the new trends are covered extensively in a number of histories of his-
toriography that have appeared in the last fifteen years.
27
It is striking how much
attention has been devoted in recent years to historiographical topics. The Inter-
national Commission for the History of Historiographynow the International
Commission for the History and Theory of Historiographywhich began as a
small association mostly of European historians, now involves active participants
in Latin America and East Asia. Its next international conference will be held in
China. As I mentioned, in addition to History and Theory and Storia della Sto-
riografia there is the trilingual journal Historiografa Revista de historia y teora,
located in Spain. A large number of books on contemporary historiography have
been published in the last fifteen years. I shall list the most important East Asian
ones in the footnotes.
28
Yet the most comprehensive survey of modern historiogra-
phy is found in volume 5, Historical Writing Since 1945 of The Oxford History
of Historical Writing (2011).
29
Offenstadts book is unique among these books
in not presenting a survey of main orientations of historical thought in the last
25. Ibid., 17-28.
26. Carlos Antonio Aguirre Rojas, Itinerarios de la historiografa del siglo XX: De los differentes
marxismos a los varios Annales (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autnoma de Mxico; Havana,
Cuba: Centro de Investigacin y Desarollo de la Cultura Cubana, 1999).
27. I shall list the most important Western-oriented surveys of contemporary historiography here
and those with a global perspective in a separate footnote. Michael Bentley, Modern Historiography:
An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1999); Anne Green and Kathleen Troup, The Houses of His-
tory: Critical Reader in Twentieth-Century History and Theory (New York: New York University
Press, 1999); Lutz Raphael, Geschichtswissenschaft im Zeitalter der Extreme: Theorien, Methoden,
Tendenzen von 1900 bis zur Gegenwart (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2003); Georg G. Iggers, Historiography
in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge (Middletown, CT:
Wesleyan University Press, 2005), updated Spanish edition, La historiografa del siglo XX: Desde la
objetividad cientfica al desafo posmoderno (Santiago, Chile: Fondo de Cultura Econmica, 2012);
Norman J. Wilson, History in Crisis? Recent Directions in Historiography, 2d ed. (Upper Saddle
River, NJ: Pearson Education, 2005); Donald R. Kelley, Frontiers of History: Historical Inquiry
in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006); The Modern Historiography
Reader: Western Sources, ed. Adam Budd (New York: Routledge, 2008); Caroline Hoefferle, The
Essential Historiography Reader (Boston: Prentice Hall, 2011).
28. Among recent Chinese publications on global historiography the following titles should be
mentioned, none of which have been translated into English (I have provided English translations
of the titles): Huang Chin-hsing, Postmodernism and Historiography (Taipei: Sanmin shuju, 2006);
Ku Wei-ying, Postmodernism and Historiography: A Chinese and Western Comparison (Jinan:
Shandong University Press, 2003); Postwar New Developments in Euro-American Historiography,
ed. Chen Qineng (Jinan: Shandong University Press, 2005). Recent Japanese publications include:
Narita Ryuichi, Positions of Historiography (Tokyo: Azekura Shobo, 2006); Kaneko Taku, Histo-
riography and Memory (Tokyo: Kodansha, 2011); Kinbara Samon, Modernity and Historiography
(Tokyo: Chuo University Press, 2000); Historical Understanding across Borders, ed. Sugahara Kenji
(Tokyo: Aoki Shoten, 2002); Sato Masayuki, Historiographical Time and Space (Tokyo: Chisen
Shokan, 2004); Sato Masayuki, History of Chronologies in World Historiography (Tokyo: Yamaka-
wa Shuppansha, 2010) There is a special Indian edition of Iggers, Wang, and Mukherjee, A Global
History Of Modern Historiography (New Delhi: Dorling Kinderley India Pvt. Ltd., 2010).
29. The Oxford History of Historical Writing, 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010
2012).
TWO CONTRASTING FRENCH APPROACHES TO HISTORIOGRAPHY
117
half-century. He is fully aware of the literature of this period and cites it, but cuts
across the various orientations to find what they have in common in terms of basic
conceptions and methods. It is the only truly analytical book within this literature.
Nevertheless, he shares with the other histories that I have just listed (except
the five volumes of the Oxford History of Historical Writing) a Euro-, or better
said, Western-centric orientation. He does have a section on global and post-
colonial history, as do the other works I have cited. But the only non-Western
historiographical group he mentions is that of Indian Subaltern Studies. One
may ask whether the Subaltern Studies group does not really belong to the West,
The concept subaltern being derived from Antonio Gramscis Marxism. The
proponents of the group, although born in India, are predominantly located at
Western institutions, and with English being their sole language of scholarly
communication, participate in Western postmodernist discussions. Almost all the
books I have cited above deal primarily with Western historical literature and at
most very marginally with non-Western historiography.
The past decade has, however, seen a turn to global approaches to historiogra-
phy, a serious attempt to deal with historical thought and writing across national
borders. This first took the form of anthologies that contained individual chapters
on historiography in non-Western countries. This was the case with International
Handbook of Historical Studies (1979), edited by Harold Parker (19072002)
and Georg G. Iggers (b. 1926), with an important contribution by two leading
Nigerian historians, J. F. Ade Ajavi (b.1929) and E. J. Alagoa. In the course of the
late 1990s and the early 2000s several important anthologies appeared that went
beyond the West to deal with non-Western historical outlooks.
30
Still lacking
were comprehensive histories of historical writing from a comparative perspec-
tive. The first important book to attempt this was Markus Vlkers Geschich-
tsschreibung: Eine Einfhrung in globaler Perspektive (2006),
31
which includes
sections on the Islamic world, China, Japan, India, and sub-Saharan Africa,
which, however, treats these in isolation from one another and says very little
about the interaction among these historiographical traditions. The interaction
between Western and non-Western historiographies in the modern period is the
central concern of Georg G. Iggers, Q. Edward Wang, and Supriya Mukherjee, A
Global History of Modern Historiography (2008).
32

30. Die Vielfalt der Kulturen, ed. Jrn Rsen, Achim Mittag, and Wolfgang Kttler (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 1998); An Assessment of Twentieth-Century Historiography, ed. Rolf Torstendahl
(Stockholm: The Royal Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities, 2000); Western Historical
Thought, ed. Jrn Rsen (New York: Berghahn Books, 2002); Turning Points in Historiography: A
Cross Cultural Perspective, ed. Q. Edward Wang and Georg G. Iggers (Rochester, NY: University
of Rochester Press, 2002); Eckardt Fuchs and Benedikt Stuchthey, Across Cultural Borders: Histori-
ography in Global Perspective (Latham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002); very briefly in Eileen
Ka-May Cheng, Historiography: An Introductory Guide (London: Continuum, 2012).
31. Markus Vlker, Geschichtsschreibung: Eine Einfhrung in globaler Perspektive (Cologne:
Bhlau, 2006).
32. Georg G. Iggers, Q. Edward Wang, and Supriya Mukherjee, A Global History of Modern
Historiography (Harlow, UK: Pearson/Longman, 2005). It has since been translated into Chinese
(Beijing: Peking University Press, 2011); into Russian (Moscow: Kanon Publ. House, 2012); and
German (Gttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013).
GEORG G. IGGERS
118
A comparative approach also marks Daniel Woolf, A Global History of His-
tory (2011).
33
Thus there has been a clear shift in historiographical interest. More
attention is being paid to non-Western historiography. As we noted, there is also
considerable interest in global, including Western, history in the Peoples Repub-
lic of China and Taiwan. Here Sachsenmaier, Global Perspectives on Global
History (2011)
34
should be mentioned, which compares the work being done in
global history in the United States, Germany, and China.
Where do the two books under review fit into the changed historiographical
context of their time? There certainly was a turn in historiography between 1981,
when Carbonells book appeared in the Que Sais-je? series, and 2011, when
Offenstadts book was publishedas a matter of fact, more than one turn. One
turn that is reflected in almost every work on historiography in the last decade and
a half, but that began much earlier, in the 1960s, well before Carbonell wrote, and
of which neither he nor Barraclough were fully aware, was the turn away from the
empirical, quantitative social sciences to cultural and linguistic approaches, from
male orientation to feminist and gender history, from nation-oriented, Western-
centered history to intercultural history; the other, which came more slowly,
was the turn to global history. Both reflected the fundamental changes that had
taken place socially, culturally, economically, and politically since the 1960s,
but particularly since the 1990s. Offenstadts work very much reflected the first
turn, much less the second. The Annales and the Nouvelle Histoire, which for
Carbonell represented the international high point of historical studies, had made
an important contribution to the move away from the traditional politics-centered
history to an interdisciplinary science of man. For Peter Burke it represented a
historical revolution.
35
This suggests that it had a major impact on the develop-
ment of historiography outside of France. This may overstate the influence of the
Annales, which was immense in Latin America, but limited elsewhere. In fact the
cultural turn that marked much historical writing internationally after the 1960s
was not born with the Annales. Rather the Annales followed the general world-
wide trend of historical thought and writing in this period.
To sum it up, as I already suggested, Offenstadts contribution does not consist
in his presentation of a history of contemporary historiography in the years since
the publication of Carbonells volumethat was done by othersbut rather in
his analysis of the changing basic conceptions and methods that have guided his-
torical studies in this period. In this way his small volume is unique and deserves
to be translated into English.
GEORG G. IGGERS
Williamsville, NY
33. Daniel Woolf, A Global History of History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
2011).
34. Cited in note 18.
35. Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School 19291989 (Cambridge,
UK: Polity Press, 1990).