The Politics of the Young Philippe Aries

Abstract

In an autobiographical memoir written late in life (1980), the historian Philippe Aries (1914-84) evokes his discovery of the writings of the Annales historians during the dark days of Vichy France, when Paris was under the occupation of the German army. Conscripted immediately at the outset of the war in September 1939 and as precipitously demobilized after the armistice of June 1940, he returned to Paris, his life disrupted and his plans for the future uncertain. Still hoping to pass his agregation, the qualifying examination for an appointment to the university faculty, he turned once more to his studies in history. Since classes at the Sorbonne were few, he spent his days beneath the high, vaulted ceilings of the beautiful reading room at the Bibliotheque nationale. I lived at the Bibliotheque nationale as if it were a monastery, he reminisced years later.1 There he first read the works of Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, who during the 1930s had pioneered a new kind of social history not yet appreciated within the university, and of Maurice Halbwachs, a sociologist of the Durkheim school whose investigations of social structures were poignantly ignored in the intellectual circles of the extreme right in which he moved. These readings fired Aries's imagination as a historian, just as the legends of Capetian kings and their courtiers had first kindled his interest in his nation's past when he had been a child. They set him on his course toward becoming one of the most original pioneers of the history of mentalities during the 1960s.