Chapter Seven - History, Gallantry, and National Identity

Summary

HISTORY, ESPECIALLY THE history of France, was already popular when it experienced an explosion of interest at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The much-loved genre then underwent a transformation, dividing over the following decades into two quite clearly demarcated versions, popular and scholarly, which came to be distinguished by distinct protocols, standards of proof, aims, and style. At the same time, history and literature, which had converged in the historical fictions of late seventeenth-century writers like Mesdames de Villedieu, La Roche-Guilhem, and Durand, as we saw in Chapter Six, came to be defined in opposition to each other. It is true that certain earlier historians had reflected critically on their materials, Dom Mabillon, for example, publishing in 1681 his De re diplomatica on how to authenticate documents. However, the professionalization of the field of history was different in quality and quantity, the process visible in the institutions established to support it: the École des Chartes, founded in 1821 to train archivists, paleographers, and librarians; the Société de l’histoire de France, created in 1833 to regenerate historical scholarship by editing and publishing a wide variety of medieval and early modern French texts; the École pratique des hautes études, established in 1868 to fix history definitively as a science; and, more generally, from the 1870s, the newly invigorated university system.

Professional historians in France committed themselves “to saying only how it actually was,” in Ranke's immortal words. And yet, in reality, their scholarship was shaped to a large extent by their nationalism. The French history absorbed into school curricula and circulated among scholars and the educated reading public wove events recorded in archives with myths about the patrie that were stored in the cultural memory, myths about the origins of the nation, universalism, monarchy. In this way, scholarly history reflected and contributed to the patriotic discourses that sustained citizens who saw their government careen from one extreme to another, from imperial to monarchical to republican. In what follows I explore the story of Agnès among nineteenth-century historians, focusing on this intersection between scholarly history and nationalism.

Agnès, as we have seen, was a perennial figure in chronicle and history from the fifteenth century onward, and she remained popular into the nineteenth century in a variety of genres.