Fixing History

Narratives of World War I in France

Bibliographic Data

ID4495759
AuthorsAnn‐louise Shapiro (Wesleyan University, corresponding author)
Year1997
Volume36
Issue4
Pages111-130
Publication date1997-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueHistory and Theory (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0018-2656 • E-ISSN: 1468-2303
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/0018-2656.00034
OpenAlexW2026740019
LanguageEN
Citations received10

For nearly a century, the French have entertained an unshakable conviction that their bility to recognize themselves-to know and transmit the essence of Frenchness-depended on the teaching of the history of France. In effect, history was a discourse on France, and the teaching of history-"la pédagogie centrale du citoyen"-the means by which children were constituted as heirs and carriers of a common collective memory that made them not only citizens, but family. In this essay, I examine the rhetorical and conceptual effects on history writing that emerge out of this preoccupation with the elaboration of a continuous, coherent national identity.Focusing on schoolbooks, I begin by looking at the dominant, nearly hegemonic model of French history created by Ernest Lavisse in the 1890s-a model informed by the dream of a unified, unitary French nation, embodied in and articulated through the history of France-and at the disruption of this paradigm in the aftermath of the Great War. I then consider a text written in the 1990s specifically to repudiate the kind of nationalist narratives that prevailed for most of this century-a new supranational history of Europe. I argue that, in their different experiments with fixing history, both Lavisse and the contemporary textbook authors did not so much repair a deficient history as produce a historical fixation, creating mythicized histories that are complete, closed, predictable, and at bottom ahistorical. Finally, I turn to a recent World War I novel, A Very Long Engagement by SébastienJaprisot, in order to suggest ways in which the narrative strategies of a fiction writer may be useful to historians in thinking about a different kind of historical project

Aesthetics · Art · Collective memory · Conviction · Economic history · Epistemology · Hegemony · Historical Thinking · Identity (music) · Intellectual history · Literature · Narrative · Narrative history · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Rhetorical question · Sociology · World history · Cultural Identity and Heritage · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · World Wars: History, Literature, and Impact