La Renaissance dans l’histoire. L’historiographie philosophique française du XIXe siècle

In the nineteenth century, four nations defined the contours of a Renaissance that its historians conceived of as an essentially European phenomenon: Italy, France, the Germanic countries, and Flanders. In this contribution, I focus on a little-known world, overshadowed by the impact of Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy and, in France, by the centrality of Michelet: French philosophical historiography, a constellation of intellectual actors who differed from Michelet in their uses of the Renaissance. The investigation begins in 1828–1829 with Victor Cousin’s Course of the History of Philosophy and ends in the late 1860s with the works of Renan and Taine. I investigate the constructions and uses of the Renaissance within philosophical historiography through the interdisciplinary interactions and competition between the history of philosophy, history, the history of culture, and the emerging history of science. In that context, the Renaissance became a strategic subject in the confrontations between intellectual traditions and institutions

Archaeology · Art · Art history · Civilization · Economic history · Historiography · Humanities · Intellectual history · The Renaissance · Classics · European Political History Analysis · Historical and Literary Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Philosophy