Henry Rousso. The Latest Catastrophe: History, the Present, the Contemporary.

Abstract

Originally published in French in 2012, Henry Rousso’s The Latest Catastrophe: History, the Present, the Contemporary is a polemical apologia in defense of contemporary history (or history of the present time or immediate history). It answers arguments against the feasibility, legitimacy, methodologies, and scope of contemporary history, originating especially in the Annales School and pre–World War II French historiography. Rousso, a gifted and groundbreaking historian of Vichy-era France, defends contemporary history by showing that throughout its own history it has not been significantly different from or inferior to other branches of historiography. Historiography began as contemporary because it had reliable evidence for nothing else. The French Revolution distinguished the historical past from the present. The conceptualization of “present time” and historiographic periodization are closely related. Rousso notes that the more recent the history is, the more intricate its historiographic periodization is. He leaves open the question of whether historiographic periodization follows acceleration of historical change or growth in evidence. The book’s methodology and title are indebted to François Hartog’s “regimes of historicity” (Régimes d’historicité: Présentisme et expériences du temps [2003]) and catchy, though not all-catching, characterization of contemporary history as starting with the latest catastrophe. That characterization fits Western European history; but contemporary Chinese and East European histories started with the anti-catastrophic 1979 economic reform and the revolutionary carnivals of 1989.