Commentaries on the Papers of William Doyle and Michel Vovelle

One is bound to remark, by way of preface, on the exceptional difficulty faced by these two authors in trying to present in such confined space their views of thirty years of historiographical controversy. This is all the more true in that they have both intervened at length in that controversy and have developed complex and nuanced interpretations. Under these conditions, the papers here are inescapably summary, in places to the point of caricature. It is as well not to linger too literally upon the reductionism that affects their characterization of their own and others' arguments. Indeed, these papers were intended as mere prolegomena to a debate in which we would all have been able to engage in a richer vein of thought. The absence of both authors from the conference leaves these comments equally preliminary. On the face of it, there was much to be gained from getting each author to address himself to a critique of the views of which the other is taken to be a prime exponent. However, such a critique does require some significant exposition of one's own theses. Doyle and Vovelle reconcile this with the constraints of space in quite different ways. Doyle concentrates his fire on the orthodox Marxist interpretation, especially in its mid-twentieth-century, Soboulian form. This allows him to devote over half his text to his own thesis. Vovelle, on the other hand, tries to survey the whole range of revisionist writing, and more particularly the writing of the 1980s. There are two consequences of this. First, Vovelle does not have the space to present his own definitions, to tell the reader what exactly l'histoire jacobine/sociale now

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