Propaganda Within a "Research Workshop": Refashioning the Society for Modern History, 1918-1939
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Propaganda within a "Research Workshop": Refashioning the Society for Modern History, 1918-1939 John L. Harvey St. Cloud State University As demonstrated by the recent golden anniversary meeting of the Society for French Historical Studies in Paris, international collaboration and cosmopolitan learning have long been a cornerstone of our profession. Historians from David Pinkney to Keith Baker have identified transatlantic exchange as a metric to gauge a "path of professionalization" in the American study of French history.1 Despite the general postmodernist critique of classical erudition and scientific authority in the writing of history, scholars still tend to view "internationalism" as an inherently progressive counterweight to nationalism and narrowly conceived academic discourse. Recent attention in French scholarship to "the historian and society" reflects a similar conceptual linkage between the propagation of 1 See especially the long debate over David Pinkney's "thesis," which bound the success of American professors of French history to their reception – or lack thereof – in review pages of Parisian academic journals: Pinkney, "The Dilemma of the American Historian of Modern France," French Historical Studies 1 (1958): 11-25; and remarks by Eugen Weber, "Les études historiques aux États-Unis: Une histoire sans histories," Revue historique 225 (1961): 354-56; and Jeremy Popkin, "«Made in USA»: Les historiens français d'outre-atlantique et leur histoire," Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine 40 (1993): 308-13. 346 Propaganda within a "Research Workshop" 347 academic universalism and the modernization of academic history during the twentieth century.2 During the Third Republic this nexus of internationalism and professionalization met most explicitly, both in research and institutional interaction, within the country's professional historical organization open to general membership, the Society for Modern History (Société d'histoire moderne). Between the world wars, the Society functioned as a singular "clearing house" of historical exchange in France through its monthly assemblies and Bulletin, its sponsored conferences, and a quarterly Revue.3 The interwar years were indeed a "golden era" of international expansion for the Society, which defended ideals of democratic liberalism and scientific objectivity, even as the interwar political climate endured increasing radicalization. The evolution of the Society between the world wars is thus an opportunity to investigate how a unique organizational power of French historical practice wedded academic internationalism with a firm dedication to the interests of the constructed homeland. It can suggest whether international cooperation 2 Proponents of an idealistic internationalism include Daniel Rogers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998) and the introductions to European research by Julian Jackson, Peter Schöttler, and Hugo Frey in Writing National Histories: Western Europe since 1800, eds. S. Berger, M. Donovan, and K. Passmore (New York: Routledge, 1999). For the social context of historians, see François Bédarida, ed., The Social Responsibility of the Historian (Providence, RI: Berghahn, 1994). 3 Addressing the history of the Society is complicated by the loss of its institutional papers and those of its two interwar historian- administrators: the general secretary Léon Cahen (1874-1945), and Joseph Letaconnoux, who served as adjunct-secretary (1920-1926) and editor of its Bulletin. Volume 32 (2004) 348 John L. Harvey within academic history has acted as an inherent milestone of common professional progress or whether internationalism functions as a neutral mechanism, available to political agendas applicable to the state. As European governments accepted responsibility for public education and the training of instructors before 1914, professional historians affiliated with universities, state archives, and research centers offered their political fealty to their respective state interests. To invest these national characteristics with the legitimizing power of public authority, French savants enrobed their professional identity through an epistemological ideal of objective truth and progressive science.4 If the "Republic of Merit" rested on universal ideas of male civic equality, then historical science had to fashion a national historical past while declaring a loyalty to neutral detachment and intellectual if not gendered diversity. Thus academic historians by the First World War tended to historicize the French nation as a symbol of consensual republicanism, concerned with the latent threat of German power and increasingly worried 4 William R. Keylor, Academy and Community: The Foundation of the French Historical Profession (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 75-89; Martin Siegel, "Clio at the Ecole Normale Supérieure: Historical Studies at an Institution in France, 1870-1904," Storia della Storiografia 8 (1985): 37-46; and the comparative works by Fritz Ringer, Fields of Knowledge: French Academic Culture in Comparative Perspective 1890-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 225-35; Christian Simon, Staat und Geschichtswissenschaft in Deutschland und Frankreich 1871-1914. Situation und Werk von Geschichtsprofessoren an der Universitäten Berlin, München, Paris, 2 vols. (Bern: P. Lang, 1988), 1:519-73; Gabrielle Lingelbach, Klio macht Karriere: Die Institutionalisierung der Geschichtswissenschaft in Frankreich und den USA in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003), 285-330. Proceedings of the Western Society for French History Propaganda within a "Research Workshop" 349 about the relative diminution of its traditional global power status.5 This identification of science in service of the nation made French scholars vulnerable to unrestrained germanophobia during the Great War. Historians are divided about how wartime experiences determined the wider social self-perception of French professional historians after the war, however. One branch of this research basically agrees that interwar French historians, reflecting the political polarization of the Republic after 1919, departed from ideals of intellectual objectivity in a retrenchment of national chauvinism. This national commitment was embedded in hidebound political historiography, a postwar German menace, and the longer- term loss of individual autonomy by professors in modern mass culture, even among a younger generation of socio- cultural scholars.6 Historians who concentrate primarily on 5 Lutz Raphael, "Epochen der französischen Geschichtsschreibung," in Geschichtsdiskurs, vol. 1, Grundlagen und Methoden der Historiographiegeschichte, eds. Wolfgang Küttler, Jörn Rüsen, and Ernst Schulin (Frankfurt am Main: Taschenbuch Verlag, 1993): 111-15; Evelyne Hery, Un Siècle de leçons d'histoire. L'histoire enseignée en lycée de 1870 à 1970 (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 1999), 66-82; and Alice Gérard, "Philippe Sagnac revu et corrigé par Ernest Lavisse: un modèle de cesure discrète," Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine 48 (2001): 123-59. For French academia's gendered inequality, Bonnie Smith, The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 6 See Michael Jeismann, Das Vaterland der Feinde. Studien zum national Feindbegriff und Selbstverständnis in Deutschland und Frankreich 1792-1918 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1992), 364-73; Sergio Luzzatto, L'Impôt du sang. La gauche française à l'épreuve de la guerre mondiale 1900-1945, trans. Simone Carpentari Messina (Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 1992), 105-9; Franziska Wein, Deutschlands Strom-Frankreichs Grenze: Geschichte und Propaganda Volume 32 (2004) 350 John L. Harvey historiography propose in contrast that French scholars redoubled their sponsorship of scientific neutrality and became notably skeptical of participation in public interest associations. French professors defended their corporate autonomy from intensifying political and methodological crises through a "taboo of engagement" with politics and a turn toward "disarmed history."7 "Neither dominating nor conquering," they rallied around the myth of the Union sacrée, sought a peaceful resolution to interwar differences, and offered a critique of Italian and German fascism during the 1930s. Such different interpretations tend to reflect how intellectual history and biography, usually based on published works, often derive conclusions from the relative selection of represented historians or texts, as well as am Rhein 1919-1930 (Essen: Klartext, 1992), 15-89; Martha Hanna, The Mobilization of Intellect: French Scholars and Writers during the Great War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 14, 210, 224-26; Christophe Prochasson and Anne Rasmussen, Au Nom de la patrie: les intellectuels et la première guerre mondiale (1910-1919) (Paris: La Découverte, 1996), 257-60, 280-84. 7 Olivier Dumoulin, Le Rôle social de l'historien: De la chaire au prétoire (Paris: A. Michel, 2002), 222-27; Jean-François Condette, "Les enseignements d'histoire et de géographie à la faculté de Lille sous la Troisième République (1887-1940)," Revue du Nord 83 (2001): 65- 100; J.-J. Becker, "La question des responsabilités allemandes au lendemain de la guerre mondiale, l'implication des historiens dans l'expertise et l'émergence d'une école historique," Sociétés contemporaines 39 (2000): 85-94; and Lutz Raphael,