What is French social history?

Dr Chris Pearson

Contact details

• Email: C.J.Pearson@warwick.ac.uk

• Phone: x23398

• Office: 329 Humanities building

• Office hours: Tuesdays 2-3pm, Thursdays 11am-12pm

Some housekeeping...

• Seminar group 1 meet in H3.55 not H305

• 1 volunteer each from seminar groups 1 and 2 to move to group 3 (12-1pm)

Module handbook

www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/undergraduate/modules/hi104/

Lectures

• Tuesdays 4pm-5pm, R1.03

• Weekly, except reading weeks (week 6)

• Please switch off mobile phones!

Seminars

• You must read the core readings and come prepared to discuss them in the seminars

• Student presentations most weeks

• Aim to make at least one contribution every week

Reading• Reading lists for all weeks on the module

handbook

• You must read all the core readings each week

• Core readings are available as either ejournal articles, ebooks, or scanned extracts

• Try to read at least one other item from the ‘further reading’ section

Books you may want to buy...

• Roger McGraw, France 1800-1914: A Social History

• Robert Gildea, Children of the Revolution: The French, 1799-1914

Assessment:

First Year Students and Part-time Level 1 Students:

Three 2,000 word essays (best two contribute 50% of final mark) and one 4,500 word paper (which makes up the other 50% of your final mark).

Second Year Students and Honours Level part-time Students: 

Three non-assessed 2,000 word formative essays and:

EITHER: 1 three-hour (three question) exam OR:  1 two-hour (two question) exam and one 4,500 word assessed essay.

Although the short essays are non-assessed, they are required for completion of the course.

Deadlines!

• Short Essay 1: Monday, Term 1, Week 7

• Short Essay 2: Monday, Term 2, Week 2

• Short Essay 3: Monday, Term 2 Week 7

• Long assessed essay: please refer to History department website

• Exams will be held in summer term

Any questions?

G.M. Trevelyan (1942) on social history: ‘the history of a people with the politics left out’

King Louis-Philippe: ‘He was gossiping, fussy, undignified, and with is pear-shaped

face a gift to caricaturists’ - Cobban

Lucien Febvre (1878-1956)

Marc Bloch (1886-1944)

The Annales approach

• The history of civilisation

• Total history: climate, geography, birth an death rates, demography, economic cycles

• Mentalités – deep-seated beliefs

• Close links with social sciences – sociology and geography

Structural history

Braudel on the geographical structures of society: ‘all change is slow, a history of constant repetition, ever-recurring cycles’

The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II

Ernest Labrousse: ‘the real founding father of French social history’ (according to Antoine Prost)

Labrousse

Like the Annales, interested in demographic and economic structures….

… but he placed class consciousness and class struggle as the motor of history (Communist/Marxist history)

French social history in its ‘golden age’ (according to Prost)• Quantitative: systemic analysis of “hard”

data, such as tax records, to determine characteristics of the social group under study

• Sedate: long-term evolutions and patterns rather then short term changes

• Total or global history: all-encompassing approach to the past – links economic, social, and political history

‘The working class did not rise like the sun at an appointed time. It was present in its own making’

The Making of the English Working Classes (1963)

Social history beyond class

• “History from below” – the experience of marginal groups

• The importance of political, religious, regional, professional divisions within classes (Zeldin’s History of France 1848-1945)

• Newer Annales influenced history – greater focus on mentalités

• Impact of women’s history

Postmodernism’s challenge to social history

• Postmodernism – complex range of theories that critique the modernist project

• Emerged 1970s onwards

• Associated with figures such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida

Postmodernist critique of history

• History is not an objective depiction of past realities. Instead it is a form of narrative or fiction

• ‘Society’ is not an objective reality. Instead, it is a cultural and linguistic construct created by state officials and experts, as part of the modernization process

‘Il n’y a pas de hors-texte’ (‘there is nothing outside the text)’ - Jacques Derrida

Class: reality or construct?

• For postmodernists, class is not a “given” or the inevitable result of economic conditions (as Marxists would have it)

• Instead, class is a cultural construct created to serve political and ideological ends

• In other words, political and ideological discourse creates ‘class’, rather than other way round.

Cultural history• Influenced by postmodernism and

anthropology

• Interest in representations, meanings, and identities

• ‘It emphasises what people make of the world, that is to say the construction of meaning, rather than the world itself’ (Jordanova, History in Practice, p.73)

• Jacques Rancière’s La nuit des prolétaires (1981)

‘For Labroussian history, social groups were given before any historical investigation and they were defined from outside. When one takes into account the culture of these groups, their definition appears to result from an historical process of self-representation. Groups are not given; they are constructed by their members.’

Prost, ‘What has happened to French Social History?’ p. 678

‘[The] most effective social history is that which manages to explain the way people responded to the world around them by using the benefits of a longer-term perspective, but without ever losing sight of the fact that the past was the present to those who lived within it’

Peter MacPhee, A Social History of France, 1789-1914