What is French social history?

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What is French social history?

• Dr Chris Pearson

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Contact details

• Email C.J.Pearson_at_warwick.ac.uk
• Phone x23398
• Office 329 Humanities building
• Office hours Tuesdays 2-3pm, Thursdays 11am-12pm

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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)

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Module handbook

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

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Lectures

• Tuesdays 4pm-5pm, R1.03
• Weekly, except reading weeks (week 6)
• Please switch off mobile phones!

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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

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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

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Books you may want to buy...

• Roger McGraw, France 1800-1914 A Social History
• Robert Gildea, Children of the Revolution The
  French, 1799-1914

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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).

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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.

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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

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• Any questions?

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G.M. Trevelyan (1942) on social history the
history of a people with the politics left out
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(No Transcript)
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King Louis-Philippe He was gossiping, fussy,
undignified, and with is pear-shaped face a gift
to caricaturists - Cobban
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Lucien Febvre (1878-1956)
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Marc Bloch (1886-1944)
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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

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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

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

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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

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• 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)

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Social history beyond class

• History from below the experience of marginal
  groups
• The importance of political, religious, regional,
  professional divisions within classes (Zeldins
  History of France 1848-1945)
• Newer Annales influenced history greater focus
  on mentalités
• Impact of womens history

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Postmodernisms 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

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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

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Il ny a pas de hors-texte (there is nothing
outside the text) - Jacques Derrida
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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.

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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 Rancières La nuit des prolétaires (1981)

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• 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

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• 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