1 - Historicity, Violence, and the Medieval Francophone World: Mémoire Hystérisée

Summary

This infinite passage through violence is what is called history.

Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference

In the 1869 preface to his Histoire de France (1833–67), the great Romantic historian Jules Michelet declares that, prior to the composition of his magnum opus, France “avait des annales, et non point une histoire” [had annals but not a history]. In his view, annals are to history as mere facts are to life itself: while the former do little more than compile information about great men, pivotal events, and dominant institutions, the latter captures the national spirit and life in its totality: “la vie historique … en toutes ses voies, toutes ses formes, tous ses éléments” [historical life … with all its paths, all its forms, all its elements] (p. iii). Positing history “comme résurrection de la vie intégrale” [as the resurrection of the whole of life] (p. iv), he proposes a set of obligations for the historian: he must penetrate beneath the “surface” of past events in order to access France's social, cultural, and political endeavors in their “infini détail” [infinite detail] (p. i); embrace “l'unité vivante des éléments naturels et géographiques qui l'ont constituée” [the living unity of the natural and geographical elements that constituted her] (p. i); delve into the “sources primitives” (p. i) that abound in her manuscript collections and archives; and study the somatic, humoral, and pathological conditions of the population, thereby apprehending France itself “comme une personne” [as a person] (p. xxiii).