Private Lives

Abstract

Private lives have, on the whole, been an area into which historians have not penetrated, and certainly not systematically. This is due partly to tradition, to a convention inherited from public figures who have mutually conceded each other immunity outside the arena of politics and war. Any approach to a study of private lives must first explain what people's attitude to the subject was, since the facts about them can be seen only through this veil that envelops them. There is no book about biography in France in this period, but it is important to investigate its prestige and its function in the writing of this period. Secondly, we need to discover the relationship between biography and the way character and personality were interpreted. What, in other words, were the psychological assumptions that biographers made, and how did the development of scientific and medical knowledge alter views about motivation and behaviour? Psychology in the mid-nineteenth century was still largely a branch of philosophy, and philosophy — or at least the ‘philosophical approach’ — was the principal enemy of biography.