Rutgers
University will be holding its 54th annual meeting of the Society of
For French Historical Studies in April 2008. Two French researchers,
Myriam Cottias and Denis Crouzet will take part in this forum along
with renowned American historian of France Natalie Davis. Could you
present the project of the colloquium and explain the importance of
work of these scholars?
Matsuda: For the
annual meeting we chose the theme “Histoire
Engageé,” to focus on the ways French scholarship
intersects and informs questions of rights and human principles.
Professor Crouzet is a scholar of the Renaissance and Early Modern
politics, with expertise in the ways communities and individuals
experience religious belief and deal with persecution, conflict,
violence and apocalyptic traditions. Professor Cottias is a specialist
in histories of slavery, abolition, and colonial empire, and has
brought some of her concerns to the French public in television dramas
like Tropiques Amers.
Jones:
Together, we felt that Professors Crouzet and Cottias would cover a
wide range of historical experiences. In addition, we know that almost
no American French historian has been more engaged in the last four
decades than Natalie Davis. Her work on politics, religion, gender, and
ethnicity have pushed the boundaries not only of how we think about
identities in the Early Modern world, but in the contemporary world as
well. Almost all of us have studied her classic texts, and with her
work on historiography and film, and her activism on a broad range of
issues both inside and out of the university, she is the many ways the
model of the scholar activist.
Many American historians have
chosen France as a field of study. Some have in fact brought new
insight on French history and allowed for an interesting and fruitful
collaboration. Do you observe a significant interest about France in
the new generations of historians today and what fields seem to be
grabbing their attention?
Matsuda:
We see renewed interest in France among a new generation of American
historians. Works on the Revolution, bourgeois culture, nationalism,
feminism, and Vichy, to name a few, are being re-thought in terms of
imperialism, postcolonialism, and identity and ethnic issues. Recent
debates in France, especially focused on immigrant communities, have
drawn the attention of scholars exploring new models of citizenship and
French revolutionary traditions. The idea of
“globalization” has expanded the focus on France as
nation into studies of a larger Francophone world from Africa to Asia.
Jones: For
American historians, and even the American public in general, France
continues to be of major interest because France as a western nation
has a culture that is both so similar and so different from our own:
whether it is the headscarf debate, the question of parité,
or debates about Americanization in the recent French presidential
election, Americans continue to follow and to be perplexed and
intrigued by French politics and culture. For several centuries now the
French and Americans have found each other “good to think
with.”
Cornell University Press has
released in 2006 a book "Why France", edited by Stéphane
Gerson and Laura Lee Downs, in which American historians reflect on
their intellectual, political, and personal engagements with France and
its past. What did you think of the book and how do you relate the
subject? (Could you tell us, in a few words, how you were drawn to
France as a field of studies?)
Jones:
We’ve seen from “Why France?” that there
are many different experiences of becoming French historians. Many of
our colleagues were transformed by study abroad experiences in college
during which they began a life-long love affairs with French culture
and language. Some were drawn to French culture as a kind of rebellion
against the parochialism of their own families. But for many it was
more serendipity, or almost accidental. I had never been to France when
I decided to study French history in graduate school – it was
purely the excitement of French history, and particular books by
Natalie Davis, Robert Darnton and Daniel Roche, that pulled me in.
Matsuda:
Reading “Why France?” is like sitting down with
friends and teachers and hearing the stories of struggle and humor
behind the scholarship. Much of the way we respond is generational -
fascination and surprise hearing about the travails of our senior
colleagues who have been our idols, as well as sympathy with many of
our own close friends. I personally came to French history because it
was where so much of the most exciting critical theory and thinking was
when I was in college. That and listening to the storytelling of
teachers like Eugen Weber.
It seems that there is a renewed
or even a new interest in colonial and postcolonial studies in France.
Having touched upon this field of study what do you think of all the
new input and data, which is becoming increasingly available in that
field?
Jones: As we
mentioned, new colonial and postcolonial studies are being driven by
scholars who identify with France not as le hexagone but as
the cultural and political focus of a larger francophone world. West
and North Africa, Southeast Asia and Oceania, the Middle East and the
Americas are all being studied in terms of colonies, communities, and
migrations extending far beyond Europe. At the same time, immigration
into France, particularly from North Africa, has concentrated new
interest on ethnicity, identity, and a questioning of
France’s universalist principles of citizenship.
Matsuda: Conference
programs show increasing numbers of studies of comparative religious
questions - especially the historical relationships of Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam. Scholars increasingly follow these
leads by exploring archives from Vietnam and French Polynesia to
Martinique, Senegal, and Madagascar the ways an earlier generation of Annales scholars
mined provincial, clerical, and family archives in France. Previously
available sources are now being reexamined with new methodologies from
anthropology, literary criticism, women’s studies, and
political theory.
What history books published in
French or published in English about France recently grabbed your
attention?
Jones : My
particular fields of interest are the Enlightenment and the French
Revolution. For my own research I continue to turn to the work of
Arlette Farge, who for more than twenty years has been my guide to
uncovering the daily lives of ordinary Parisians by careful research in
the archives. This summer I’ve been reconnecting with her
work by reading two of her most recent books, Le bracelet de parchemin:
L’écrit
sur soi au xvième siècle and L’enfant dans la ville.
Farge ‘reads’ scraps and fragments of the archive
to answer profound questions about the lives of children, the
connection of the illiterate to print culture, and the voices of the
voiceless. Long before questions about the
“subaltern” became fashionable, Farge was already
asking them about the marginal women who gossip and the homeless
children who played in the streets of eighteenth-century Paris.
Matsuda: To keep up
with recent work, I have the privilege of being able to consult with
graduate students about what to be reading. The work of Patrick Weil, La République et sa
diversité, Immigration, Intégration,
Discriminations
is certainly up there, as are Christophe Charle’s
most recent books La
crise des sociétés impériales,
(1900-1940) and Le
Siècle de la presse (1830-1939).
We’ve already mentioned Cottias and Crouzet; I’m
also a big fan of François Vergès for Monsters and Revolutionaries
and Abolir
l’esclavage. Among works published in English,
Gary Wilder’s The Imperial French Nation State figures in
strongly, as well as Richard Jobs’ Riding the New Wave: Youth and
Rejuvenation of France after the Second World War.
What would you say is known about
French historians here in the United States?
Matsuda:
Academically speaking, historians of France in the United States are
very well versed in French scholarship, usually within their
specialties. This includes both their research and general teaching
areas. Most will also have good contacts with certain thematic subjects
- e.g. imperial history, women’s history, and so forth. As
for general public knowledge, that is probably fixed on a few
distinctive names like Fernand Braudel, Georges Lefebvre, Roger
Chartier, and Alain Corbin. In English, ranging over generations,
notable authors include academics such as Eugen Weber, Robert Paxton,
R.R. Palmer, Joan Scott, Robert Darnton, Colin Jones, and Lynn
Hunt. Authors such as Simon Schama, Theodore Zeldin, and,
most recently, Caroline Weber, manage to reach both academic and more
general audiences.
Jones: French
history for a wide audience can be quite popular, especially in
biographies such as Antonia Fraser’s Marie Antoinette and
epic presentations such as Simon Schama’s Citizens. To give
some specific recent examples, two new “trade”
books by British scholar David Andress’s The Terror: The Merciless War
for Freedom in Revolutionary France (Farrar, Straus and
Giroux: 2005) and American scholar David A. Bell’s The First Total War
(Houghton Mifflin: 2007) suggest that there is still a broad audience
for French history. In the 1980s and 1990s, in the wake of
François Furet’s pathbreaking,
revisionist, Interpreting
the French Revolution (1981), the new emphasis by
professional historians on discourse, the public sphere and political
culture, may have revolutionized the scholarly field, but left many
undergraduate and general readers, who were looking for human heroism
and blood, cold. The new books are accessible and place war at the
center of understanding the French Revolution and Napoleonic periods.
Particularly for a post-9/11 generation of undergraduates, the
rethinking of the French Revolution as a total war based on terror, and
contingency as well as ideology, is compelling.
Matt
K. Matsuda
is a full professor in the History department at Rutgers University in
New Brunswick, NJ and author of The Memory of the Modern (1996) and
Empires of Love: Histories of France and the Pacific (2004)
Jennifer
M. Jones
is an associate professor in the History department at Rutgers
University in New Brunswick, NJ and author of Sexing la Mode: Gender,
Fashion, and Commercial Culture in Old Regime France (2004).
They
are co-organizers of the Society for French Historical Studies
conference at Rutgers in April 2008.
For further
information about the 54th annual meeting of the Society of For French
Historical Studies held at Rutgers University in April 2008, please go
to: http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~jemjones/sfhs2008.html
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