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Diplomacy and the History of International Relations: Redefining a Conflictual Relationship

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Diplomacy and the History of International Relations: Redefining a Conflictual Relationship diplomatica 1 (2019) 33-39 brill.com/dipl Diplomacy and the History of International Relations: Redefining a Conflictual Relationship Laurence Badel Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University, France [email protected] Abstract Because of Pierre Renouvin’s key role in defining the history of international relations, French historians have long nurtured a complex relationship with this academic field. Since the early 2000s, there has been a new commitment in this field, marked by both a sociological and cultural approach. Keywords P. Renouvin – Annales School – J.-B. Duroselle – diplomatic history – international relations Diplomacy occupies a simple, and yet complex place in the history of interna- tional relations, particularly in France. More than in other countries, undoubt- edly, the majority of French historians have, with rare exceptions, long kept away from this field of research as they were deeply concerned, in a more or less conscious way, about a new assimilation to an object, diplomatic history, conceived as an interstate history, with which Pierre Renouvin, the “founding father” of the History of International Relations defined as a history of rela- tions between peoples, had wanted to break. Pierre Renouvin’s successor at the Sorbonne, Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, wrote the history of the break-up: fo- cusing his attention on the four volumes written by Renouvin himself in the Histoire des relations internationales, published between 1953 and 1958 by Ha- chette, he comments emphatically: “Comparing his four volumes to Emile Bourgeois’s Manuel d’histoire de politique étrangère actually means moving © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/25891774-00101006Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 10:50:49AM via free access <UN> 34 Badel into another universe. From a two-dimensional world, we move on to the three-dimensional universe.”1 Emile Bourgeois’s Manuel historique de politique étrangère, whose four volumes were released between 1893 and 1926, Albert Sorel’s L’Europe et la Révolution française, published in nine volumes between 1865 and 1911, and Antonin Debidour’s Histoire diplomatique de l’Europe, which came out in two volumes between 1891 and 1916, were the three reference works in the history of international relations in France, under the Third Re- public and until the early 1950s. The Dramatization of Distance The History of International Relations coordinated by Pierre Renouvin, and published by Hachette between 1953 and 1958, represented an actual break insofar as it sought to embrace a plurality of factors to explain the evolution of relations between peoples. But this rupture was the subject of a linear dis- course, enclosing the new discipline in a reductive face-to-face confrontation. Just as the opposition between “New Diplomacy” and the “Old Diplomacy” of the 19th century had been conceptualized by the diplomats who had experi- enced the 1919 Paris Peace Conference to eventually become a cliché of the histories of diplomacy until the 2000s,2 so the history of international relations was presented as the inverted and positive image of the “old diplomatic his- tory.” Robert Frank, holder of the Chair in the history of international relations at the Sorbonne from 1994 to 2012, still speaks teleologically of a “reflection begun in 1931, clarified in 1934 with the explicit mention of ‘underlying forces’ (the so-called forces profondes), developed in [a] text of 1953, [and which] finds its culmination in 1964.”3 The break with diplomatic history was staged all the more forcefully as the history of international relations also had to assert itself, simultaneously, in a conflictual relationship with the Annales School. The genesis of the Annales has often been presented in John Harvey’s words as “a chivalric narrative of French history by pitting academic innovation against walls of national rivalry 1 Duroselle, Jean-Baptiste. “De ‘l’histoire diplomatique’ à ‘l’histoire des relations internation- ales.’” Études d’histoire des relations internationales (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1966), 1–15, here p. 4. 2 Anderson, Matthew S. The Rise of Modern Diplomacy, 1450–1919 (London: Longman, 1993); Hamilton, Keith and Richard Langhorne. The Practice of Diplomacy. Its Evolution, Theory and Administration (London: Routledge, 1994). 3 See Frank, Robert, ed. Pour l’histoire des relations internationales (Paris: puf, 2012), 12. diplomaticaDownloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 1 (2019) 33-39 10:50:49AM via free access <UN> Diplomacy and the History of International relations 35 and conservatism.”4 In fact, one of the promoters of this French “New Histo- ry,” Lucien Febvre, did not deprive himself of ruthless accounts of books from diplomatic history such as Emile Bourgeois’s Manuel historique de politique étrangère, already cited, or the collective work edited by Henri Hauser, His- toire diplomatique de l’Europe published in 1929, the year in which the Annales d’histoire économique et sociale journal was launched.5 The third academic field in which the history of emerging international relations had to stand out was that of a new discipline in political science that became institutionalized at the end of the First World War (namely ir), with its first think tanks and its first academic chairs. Like their Anglo-Saxon counterparts, French diplomatic historians have suffered from being reduced, over time, to the role of “hewers-of-wood” and “drawers-of-waters” by politi- cal scientists, those who provided the materials for the latter’s conceptual reflection.6 In this context, working on diplomacy became suspicious. The tradition of diplomatic history, understood as a history “from the top,” apprehended by the analysis of the actions and representations of its diplomatic and governmen- tal elites, has been maintained by French historians across generations (Jean- Baptiste Duroselle, Jean-Claude Allain, Maurice Vaïsse, Georges-Henri Soutou, Stanislas Jeannesson). Georges-Henri Soutou, now a member of the Académie des Sciences morales et politiques, has always proclaimed his attachment to Al- bert Sorel, the founder of diplomatic history in France.7 Sorel entered the Quai d’Orsay by co-optation, where he was entrusted with collecting documents at- testing to German abuses on French territory during the 1870 conflict; he was then placed on leave in 1872 to inaugurate the brand new chair of diplomatic history at the Ecole libre des sciences politiques, where he taught until 1904. Sorel, a law graduate, had trained in diplomatic history through his diplomatic practice and reading diplomatic archives (in May 1874 he joined the ministry’s diplomatic archives commission). In the article “Teaching Diplomatic History,” he stated that “the history of diplomacy [is] the history of relations between 4 Harvey, John L. “An American Annales? The aha and the Revue internationale d’histoire économique of Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch.” The Journal of Modern History 76 (3) (2004), 578–621, here p. 584. 5 See Febvre, Lucien. “Histoire ou politique? Un problème d’orientation.” Revue de synthèse, 51. Synthèse historique 1 (1) (1931), 9–14. 6 Hunt, Michael H. “The Long Crisis in u.s. Diplomatic History: Coming to Closure.” Diplomatic History 16 (1) (1992), 115–16. 7 Soutou, Georges-Henri. “Die französische Schule der Geschichte internationaler Beziehun- gen.” In Internationale Geschichte: Themen - Ergebnisse - Aussichten, eds. Wilfried Loth and Jürgen Osterhammel (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2000), 32–44. diplomatica 1 (2019) 33-39 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 10:50:49AM via free access <UN> 36 Badel nations and states […]” and that its materials fall into two categories: “diplo- matic documents proper: treaties, protocols, notes, instructions, dispatches, reports” and “personal documents, intimate correspondence, the memories of actors and witnesses.”8 Like his British counterpart John R. Seeley, Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University, who defended history as a “school of the statesman,”9 Sorel intended to train future diplomats through history: “This science is par excellence a state science. The teaching of diplomatic history provides future diplomats with a series of well-defined experiences and a series of concepts that are essential to them. […] The history that is being made for the future lives on no other elements than that made in the past.”10 At the Ecole libre des sciences politiques, he taught his students the negotiations of the past and or- ganized role-playing games, but did not devote a book or an article as such to diplomatic practices. And, conversely, it is still a particular feature of the training of French diplomats at the beginning of the 20th century that ap- prentices are required not only to acquire good historical knowledge, but also to do an internship at the Department for Diplomatic Archives. The study of sources should enable the future diplomat to acquire the diplomatic language and style, to learn the procedure of negotiation, to know the traditions and characteristics of each Court. This intimacy between history and diplomacy was reinforced by the creation of a Société d’histoire diplomatique founded in May 1886 and by the edition of the Revue d’histoire diplomatique, which was both a veritable conservatory of the practices of the “Old diplomacy” and a lucid observatory of current developments, welcoming articles from diplomats and historians alike. A Two-step Process of Renewed Interest Paradoxically, it was the French historian who had theorized the “rupture,” J.-B. Duroselle, who became Renouvin’s successor at the Sorbonne in 1964, and who relaunched the history of diplomacy by focusing on administrative structures – ministerial offices – and staff – diplomats – nonetheless still ap- prehended “from the top.” The standard analysis was developed in the chapter 8 Sorel, Albert. “L’enseignement de l’histoire diplomatique.” In Nouveaux essais d’histoire et de critique 3rd. ed. (Paris, Librairie Plon, 1888), 75–84. 9 Seeley, J. R. “A Historical Society.” Macmillan’s Magazine (November 1881), 43–55, here 51. 10 Sorel, Albert. “L’enseignement de l’histoire diplomatique,” 84.
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