From American Studies to American History: A French Point of View

Abstract

Answering the query of theJournal ofAmerican History is a perilous exercise: one must avoid the pitfalls of fashionable ego-histoire and unravel the many threads that make up one's intellectual life. Doing history-and specifically American historyis the product of many choices, shaped by personal and political preferences and by perspectives that are part of one's national culture.' We know what complexities lie behind each of these terms, so any reconstruction of this type must be tentative at best. Before specializing in American social history, I studied English and sat for the competitive exam of the agregation in English and American literature (1954) in order to teach in a lycee and later in the university. In 1949 I applied for a scholarship to go to the United States, and I spent two years (1950-1952) there as a graduate student, one at Bryn Mawr College and one at Yale University. There was terrific curiosity about the United States in France after World War II -because of events and of many personal contacts with Americans-and my experience there led me to specialize in American studies, which was then a somewhat more marginal and more adventurous field than English. From 1956 on I prepared my doctorat d'etat (in those days nearly a lifelong undertaking, especially if you were a woman and had children) entitled Social Protest in the American Novel, 1875-1915. Meanwhile I taught American literature and civilization in the English department of the University of Lille. I became increasingly involved in the study of American social history, but only in 1969, when Vincennes (which later became the University of Paris-VIII) was created as an experimental university, was it possible for me to teach in a history department. I have written mostly for scholarly journals, and thus my articles address other Americanists, but I have occasionally published articles in union and left-wing journals. My books are read mostly by students. It has always seemed important to me to keep up with what is being published in the United States but to be critical, if necessary, of the methods and concepts used by American historians and their excessive specialization.