Sensing, Measuring, Writing: On Recent French Historiography of the Nineteenth Century

ABSTRACT

This essay surveys recent francophone historiography of the Nineteenth Century. It focussed on three areas of research in particular: the french tradition of l’histoire des sensibilités; historical works that grapple with time, space, and scales of analysis; and the poetics of writing history in dialogue with literature. In each of these areas, the essay finds evidence of innovative and creative scholarship that is changing our understanding of nineteenth-century France and the French empire.

KEYWORDS:

• France
• sensibilités
• empire
• history
• literature

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the many anonymous librarians at Columbia University and other institutions who, through ILL and Borrow Direct, made it possible to gather many of the books discussed here in very challenging circumstances.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Note on the contributor

Thomas Dodman Assistant Professor of French History at Columbia University. He is the author of What Nostalgia Was: War, Empire and the Time of a Deadly Emotion (Chicago, 2018) and he coedits the journal Sensibilités: Histoire, Critique & Sciences Sociales (Anamosa).

Notes

1 Dominique Kalifa was a mentor, a colleague, and a friend. Most importantly, he was a passeur who built bridges between scholars. This essay is a modest tribute to his legacy.

2 With a few exceptions, I have focused on books written in French, by francophone historians based in France. English translations are indicated where available. I should point out that I am partial to a lot of this work, having been myself trained with one foot in the historiographical traditions examined here. I also collaborate regularly with several of the historians mentioned in the following pages, not least as coeditor of the interdisciplinary journal Sensibilités: histoire, critique & sciences sociales. Finally, l’histoire des sensibilités, questions of scales of analysis and of forms of writing, are very much at the heart of my own scholarship as a French historian based in a north-American francophone language department, and as director of a History and Literature MA degree.