The Present of the Historian

Abstract

For the last thirty years, the conditions for practicing the historian’s craft have changed and they continue to change in front of our very eyes. One often reads the handy formula of crisis as an explanation of this: a “crisis” of history, “disoriented” history, it has been said, while our relationship to time has continued to change. With our future closed off, the past has been engulfed in shadow and the present has become our sole horizon. In a world that now privileges the dimension of the present alone, a world that proclaims itself globalized and sometimes thinks of itself (notably in Germany) as post-national, what becomes of the place and function of the person who, in the nineteenth century (when history saw itself as a science and was organized as a discipline), had defined himself as the mediator between past and present through the major if not unique object of the nation or state? Did we not learn that the modern historian was obliged to begin by positing a strict separation between the past and the present, even if he often just as quickly forgot it? In effect, history was supposed to be the science only of the past: a pure science according to Fustel de Coulanges, one that decodes documents in the silence of the archives. With Fernand Braudel in the middle of the twentieth century, the historian of the longue duree saw himself yet again as someone who benefited, if only implicitly, from a gaze from above on what lay beneath. In Europe, one of the first signs that the world emerging after the war was full of doubts, a sign quickly perceived and articulated by certain historians, was the rise of memory. This phenomenon was both an expression of and an answer to the rise of the present. With the notion of collective memory first elaborated by the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, the historian had choice access to this phenomenon. Broadly speaking, the historian occupied four positions over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He was a prophet (with Jules