The Latest Catastrophe

History, the Present, the Contemporary

Henry Rousso, Jane Marie Todd

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780226165233, 9780226165066
• eBook ISBN: 9780226165370
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

The writing of recent history tends to be deeply marked by conflict, by personal and collective struggles rooted in horrific traumas and bitter controversies. Frequently, today's historians can find themselves researching the same events that they themselves lived through. This book reflects on the concept and practices of what is called "contemporary history," a history of the present time, and identifies special tensions in the field between knowledge and experience, distance and proximity, and objectivity and subjectivity.

Henry Rousso addresses the rise of contemporary history and the relations of present-day societies to their past, especially their legacies of political violence. Focusing on France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States, he shows that for contemporary historians, the recent past has become a problem to be solved. No longer unfolding as a series of traditions to be respected or a set of knowledge to be transmitted and built upon, history today is treated as a constant act of mourning or memory, an attempt to atone. Historians must also negotiate with strife within this field, as older scholars who may have lived through events clash with younger historians who also claim to understand the experiences. Ultimately, The Latest Catastrophe shows how historians, at times against their will, have themselves become actors in a history still being made.

CHAPTER ONE

Contemporaneity in the Past

AN OLD PROBLEM?

Every school and current of contemporary history has for the past thirty years undergone a development that was still unforeseeable in the 1970s. But that does not mean that the field is an innovation with no antecedents. “The history of the present time is an old story!” writes Antoine Prost.1 That remark comports with one of the most widespread obsessions in the historian’s craft: that of reducing every innovation to something we have already seen before and providing an inexhaustible list of antecedents that point out how pretentious it is to see the brand-new where there is only repetition. But the affirmation also expresses a certain reality that not only has never been disputed but, on the contrary, has often been invoked to ground the new history of the present time in a long tradition. For historians, the practice of writing the history of their own time is as old as their appearance on the scene as scholars, at least at first glance. It has been a key characteristic of their art or discipline, whatever their status over the ages. Once we are reminded of that obvious fact, there would be no reason to inquire about the particulars of that history; on the contrary, there would be good reasons to fall back into line without further delay.

There is a great distance, however, between what appears to be obvious and a more precise observation. Thucydides and Eric Hobsbawm may have both written about their own eras, but they did so with a few differences: after all, classical Greece and post-1945 Europe provide dissimilar contexts. Likewise, the place of contemporary history in scholarly studies and in its relation to power and society has not remained so immutable over three millennia that we need only point out a permanence, an invariability. As for the obvious—so far as it goes—historians have always focused on the history of their own time but have not done so in the same manner, with the same methods, or to the same ends. To this day, there is no comprehensive scholarly study on how the history of the near past has been conceived and received, intellectually and socially, across time. Although there has long been an interest in the history of the perception and measurement of time, there are no or very few systematic studies on the specific history of contemporaneity, a problem rarely raised as such in historiographical studies. In his Douze leçons sur l’histoire (1996; Twelve Lessons on History), one of the key works in French on the epistemology of history, Antoine Prost does not say a word about the notion, even though the emergence of the history of the present time constituted an important phenomenon in European historiography during the writing of the book and gave rise to a number of debates and controversies, especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall.2 It is therefore pointless to maintain that the practice of a history of the present time has existed for all eternity, unless one is prepared to outline, at least sketchily, a history of the notion of present time itself. A tall order, to be sure, given the erudition required, even if one limits oneself to the Western world.3 There are too many differences in the conceptions and perceptions of time over the longue durée for the notion of contemporaneity to be easily compared from one age to another. Yet that digression is indispensable for understanding certain recent debates, or in any case, for situating them within the longue durée. In what follows, I shall respond in part to the reproach sometimes made of historians of the present time, namely, that they never take into account that longue durée and situate themselves almost exclusively within the short term of the event.4 That reproach can sometimes lead to odd accusations: if we are to believe the report commissioned in 2008 by the Ministry of Culture, a preliminary version of the plan (eventually aborted) for a “House of French History” desired by President Nicolas Sarkozy, the history of the present time, merely by virtue of its existence, has slowed the development of research on the longue durée. Supposedly, it is even one of the causes of the difficulty the French have had “in taking on their history in its entirety”: “Research and debates on ‘the history of the present time’ have sometimes overshadowed analyses of phenomena over the longue durée and have given rise to epistemological and methodological disputes. The transfer to all historical periods of the methods specific to the ‘history of the very contemporary,’ especially in the case of political and social history, has tended to render null and void the old frames of reference: chronology, epistemology of sources, historical geography, and so on.”5

Philippe Pétain’s negative legacy has thus allegedly overshadowed the positive legacy of Joan of Arc, and the history of the present time has made us lose interest in chronology. As for epistemological debates, they are said to constitute in and of themselves a threat to national history. The argument could be shrugged off if that report had not served as the basis for one of the most controversial cultural projects of recent years on the part of the French government, and if it were not an example of recurrent criticisms of the history of the present time, which struggle to come up with serious arguments.

The adjective “contemporary,” taken from the Latin contemporaneus—cum plus tempus, “pertaining to a single shared time”—appeared in about 1475, if we are to believe the Trésor de la langue française (Treasury of the French Language). The term “contemporary history” seems to be of later date, at least in its modern sense: an instance of it can be found, notably, in Pascal’s Pensées, a point to which I will return. The term became widespread much later, however—in the nineteenth century, after the cultural and cognitive shock of the French Revolution. Balzac’s novel L’envers de l’histoire contemporaine (The Wrong Side of Contemporary History) appeared in 1848, and Taine published his Origines de la France contemporaine (Origins of Contemporary France) beginning in 1875. It was then that the meaning now familiar to us emerged, namely, the study of a time that is the observer’s own and of a distinct historical sequence that gradually came to complete the tripartite scheme of Western historiography (ancient, medieval, and modern) articulated around two major breaks: the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the Renaissance. Although the respective dating of these two events continued to change depending on the school or author, the demarcation itself assumed the dimension of a canonical periodization.6 It emerged in the mid-fifteenth century among the Italian humanists, who wanted to mark the clear distance of their own age from a past they called the “Middle Ages,” a term that appeared in 1469 in the writings of the pontifical librarian Giovanni Andrea dei Bussi. That division was popularized in historiographical studies of the late seventeenth century, notably in the writings of the German Cristoph Keller, known as Cellarius.7 It is therefore a long tradition that has survived to our time, having been complemented in the nineteenth century by a fourth period—“contemporary”—it too elaborated to create distance from a “modernity” that had grown old and changed in nature after the Revolution of 1789. That traditional periodization, however, has been subject to constant criticism. Reinhart Koselleck, for example, sees it as an illusion of a linear and a homogeneous time, which keeps us from seeing “the contemporaneity of the noncontemporary in history” even though “every one of us can see that we still have contemporaries living in the Stone Age.”8 Jack Goody denounced that demarcation and its global interpretation of history as having been imposed by European civilization on the rest of the world, especially during the phase of colonial expansion.9 Hence the other illusion: that civilizations existing in a single time, even though they are dissimilar, must inevitably go through the same evolution toward progress, democracy, and the market. They are required to “catch up,” thanks in part to the aid of the Western world, which is supposed to show them the way. That illusion has sometimes had lethal consequences, including, quite recently, in Iraq and Afghanistan. The very notion of a regime of historicity has had the effect of deconstructing the idea of an equivalence among biological, social, and cultural time while further accentuating the ambivalence and ambiguities of the word “contemporary.” A single time does not mean a single space; a single era does not cover a single cultural universe; and within a single age, structures, ideas, and practices that have evolved differently with respect to a past stand side by side, and that past itself must be analyzed in terms of a differentiated evolution.

In spite of all that, the traditional periodization persists in the discipline of history. In addition to suiting the professional habitus, it undoubtedly responds to a more general need, as Michel de Certeau writes: “Historiography first separates its present from a past. But everywhere it repeats the gesture of dividing. Hence its chronology is composed of ‘periods’ (for example, Middle Ages, Modern History, Contemporary History), between which the decision is made to be other or no longer what has been until then (the Renaissance, the Revolution). One by one, every ‘new’ time has given rise—has give a place—to a discourse that treats as ‘dead’ what preceded but which receives a ‘past’ already marked by prior breaks.”10

We are undoubtedly contemporaries with individuals or groups still living in the Stone Age, but the very act of identifying them as such, hence of casting them back to an other time because of their differences, illustrates the need for a distinction between today and yesteryear that characterizes modern historicity. Although doing the history of one’s own time is a practice that appears very old at first sight, the singularization, then the conceptualization, of an explicitly contemporary history—not to mention of the very notion of contemporaneity—in reality developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

It may seem presumptuous to retrace the history of these notions over the longue durée, even in broad outline, but I believe it is necessary if we are to understand the emergence of a new history of the present time in the late 1970s. The question then arose whether a new practice, a new way of doing history, had to be invented from whole cloth within a context where the entire discipline was in intellectual turmoil, or whether an abandoned tradition had to be revived. Some sought legitimacy for that practice in a tradition as old as history itself, while others insisted on its innovative character. But both claimed a place for it within a profession that assigned to it a certain institutional marginality, when it did not view it with suspicion. In 1978 a collection was published on the “new history,” a coinage by the publishers that designated the profusion at the time of a constantly changing historiographical practice but one that continued to embrace the Annales School. In that collection, both Jean Lacouture and Pierre Nora argued for the constitution of a historiography of the contemporary, but they adopted different attitudes.11 In the article devoted to “immediate history,” another new term to designate contemporary history (also the name of a collection brought out by Éditions du Seuil, to which I shall return in chapter 4), Lacouture invokes Thucydides and Julius Caesar, Ibn Kaldūn and Charles de Gaulle, and the chroniclers Joinville, Froissart, and Commynes, as well as Michelet and Lissagaray, authors who all produced works “openly rooted in the present, a present they had experienced not only as witnesses but also as actors, sometimes as protagonists.”12 He nevertheless defends the idea that this form of history is truly novel, even as he recalls that understanding history in general (and not just contemporary history) as “a science of the past [that] finds its raison d’être, its nobility, and its justification only in the laborious extraction of its resources from the mountain of archives,” is itself “a rather recent dogma,” having appeared near the end of the French Second Empire. Nora, in his article “Présent” (an original choice of subject in the historiographical context of the time) takes little interest in contemporary history as it may have existed before the nineteenth century: “Was there a ‘contemporary history’ in the past? Saint Augustine, the Renaissance humanists, and Voltaire certainly had the sense they were living in a new era, but without its being linked, as it is for us, to the consciousness of a particular historical outlook.”13 He reminds us that the practice was in fact partially excluded from the field of history, which, by the 1870s, was becoming a full-fledged scientific discipline. Paradoxically, he identifies this as a founding moment, so as to better situate his own approach a century later. The debate attracted new interest in the 1970s and 1980s, when that exclusion became the negative reference point par excellence for the new history of the present time, which justified itself first and foremost by challenging the arguments on which the exclusion had relied. Nora even adopted a hypothesis to which I shall return in more detail: it was at the very moment when the notion of contemporaneity began to take root in the mental universe of the nineteenth century that the discipline of history, in the process of being professionalized, decided to separate contemporary history off from the rest of history, granting it a singularity because the identity of the discipline itself was reinforced by that act of exclusion.

In retrospect, and with the experience of a history of the present time now comfortably installed in the historiographical landscape, I believe the question needs to be asked differently. Why, in the late 1970s, did the development of contemporary history constitute an innovation within a discipline that was rapidly expanding and being rapidly reconfigured, whereas, a century earlier, in a more or less comparable context of innovation, contemporary history was instead perceived as a break, so much so that it was exiled into a sort of purgatory? Why did what seemed innovative in the late twentieth century arouse mistrust in the late nineteenth? Why, within a century, did contemporary history move from the margins to the center of the discipline? How, in the evolution of that practice, are we to sort out the structural elements linked to the position of historians working on “their” time, and the conjunctural elements belonging to different and changing contexts?

“EVERY HISTORY WORTHY OF THE NAME IS CONTEMPORARY”

The famous formulation by the Italian historian and philosopher Benedetto Croce that every history worthy of the name is contemporary has become almost a cliché. It means that any historical writing, whether about the recent or the remote past, has its source in the present: “If contemporary history springs straight from life, so too does that history which is called non-contemporary, for it is evident that only an interest in the life of the present can move one to investigate past fact. Therefore this past fact does not answer to a past interest but to a present interest, in so far as it is unified with an interest of the present life. This has been said again and again in a hundred ways by historians in their empirical formulas, and constitutes the reason, if not the deeper content, of the success of the very trite saying that history is magistra vitae.”14

Croce points out one of the characteristic traits of any historical approach, which contemporary history is not alone in taking into account: the exemplary role of history and the fact that knowledge of the past must guide the actions of the present. Cicero had identified that trait nearly two thousand years before: “History . . . bears witness to the passing of the ages, sheds light upon reality, gives life to recollection and guidance to human existence [magistra vitae], and brings tidings of ancient days.”15 That idea of history as life guide created an inextricable link within the tradition between the past and the present. But that link also has a history. The formulation thus points out the degree to which history, as a process of knowing and understanding the world, is not a gratuitous, disinterested activity located outside the time of the person writing. It gives primacy to the historian over the historical object. Croce establishes a distinction between what he calls the “chronicle” and history: “The truth is that chronicle and history are not distinguishable as two forms of history, mutually complementary, or as one subordinate to the other, but as two different mental attitudes. History is living chronicle, chronicle is dead history; history is contemporary history, chronicle is past history; history is principally an act of thought, chronicle an act of will. Every history becomes chronicle when it is no longer thought, but only recorded in abstract words, which were once upon a time concrete and expressive.”16

To write history is thus an intellectual act that extends beyond the mere narration of the facts and takes as its object the general; history stands opposed to the chronicle, which confines itself to the particular. Croce is defending an idealist conception in which, by virtue of traces—themselves living and present by definition—history precedes the chronicle (“first comes history, then chronicle”) and even gives it a semblance of consistency: “external things do not exist outside the mind.”17 Robin G. Collingwood comments that Croce’s notion is “a perfect synthesis of subject and object, inasmuch as the historian thinks himself into the history, and the two become contemporary.”18 Based on a reading of that famous passage from Croce, one can therefore conclude that history in general (and not only contemporary history in the strict sense) is contemporary in three ways. First, it is founded on traces accessible to observation and analysis, which, in their present state, provide the historian with a view of past entities whose original integrity is by definition inaccessible—even within the positivist conception, which postulates that this reality existed before the historian observes it. Second, it is an act of thinking that unfolds in the present, thanks to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER ONE
• CHAPTER TWO
• CHAPTER THREE
• CHAPTER FOUR
• CONCLUSION
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index