The Triumph of the Academy: French Style

Abstract

Need a solid historiographical essay on the social history of British America? On African American or American religious history? On the foreign relations of the United States? Or on ten other specialized topics in American history? Read French? Then Chantiers d'histoire americane is just the volume for you. While the essays in the volume edited by Jean Heffer and Franpois Weil vary in quality, they are completely up-to-date in their scholarship, asking the same questions and citing the same books and articles as similar essays published in the United States. Should we celebrate this mastery of the idiom of American scholarship by these French scholars, nearly all of whom hold academic positions in French universities? Or should we lament the increasing homogeneity of scholarly discourse? In making themselves experts in American history, the authors have inbibed the terms of reference and the intellectual assumptions of their American colleagues. The major difference is their relative detachment from the passions of American historiographic debates, which enables them to assess the strengths and the weaknesses of the contending arguments. Thus, Laurent Cesari offers a fine critique of various approaches to United States diplomatic history (Progressive idealism, balance-ofpower realism, Wisconsin revisionism, and recent postrevisionist and corporatist interpretations) without endorsing any perspective. Like other authors in this volume (for example, those who deal with controversial questions in labor history or in the social history of early America), Cesari assumes an Olympian stance, disparaging monocausal interpretations and celebrating the wisdom of additional research and complex eclectic explanations. Only rarely in this collection do we hear a voice with a distinct and insistent French methodological edge or point of view, as in Pierre Gervais's critical assessment of the empiricist epistemology of much of American social history. What holds for the scholarly essay applies as well to the French survey text on American history. The two volumes written by Pierre Melandri (one in collaboration with Jacques Portes) tell the story of American history much in the manner of an American author writing for an American audience. That is, the French texts assume that the student has a basic familiarity with the historical figures, characters, institutions, and events that dot the narrative. They do not pause to comment in detail on distinctive features of government in the United States, such as the division of power between the state and federal governments; nor, with a few exceptions, do they invoke French examples or analogies. Thus, the discussion by Melandri and Portes of the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment and the subsequent imposition of a modest graduated income tax (to cover the loss of tariff revenues stemming from the Underwood Act) makes no reference to parallel developments in Europe,