Cultural history

The Histoire Culturelle is one of the branches of the historical research.

Historiography

The concept of cultural history gradually was essential since the middle of the years 1980, on a French scale, but also within several national historiographic traditions ( Cultural history in the Anglo-Saxon world, Kulturgeschichte in Germany). Proposed by modernistic historians (Roger Chartier, Daniel Roche), relayed soon by contemporaneists (Jean-Pierre Rioux, Jean-François Sirinelli, Pascal Ory, Dominique Kalifa), the denomination of cultural history is standardized; not without meeting a certain skepticism in particular on behalf of certain medievists. Girl of the history of mentalities (Robert Mandrou, Philippe Ariès), it profits from her assets while wishing to exceed the limits and ambiguities of this one. The recent publications of Pascal Ory ( cultural History , 2004) and of Philippe Poirrier ( Stakes of the cultural history , 2004) testify to an increasing institutionalization. In the same way, creation in 1999 of the Association for the development of the cultural history (ADHC) underlines this increasing visibility within the French landscape historiographic.

The assertion of the cultural history was for certain historians a strategy aiming at leaving the paradigms of economic and social history strongly coloured by serial approaches. The decline of the Marxism and the thoughts of the socio-economic determinism in general accelerated this process. The cultural history is posted like a renewed history of the institutions, executives and objects of the culture. It can be defined as a “social history of the representations” (Pascal Ory). The method of investigation privileges the phenomena of mediation, circulation and reception of the goods and cultural objects. Also, it is as much a field of research which testifies to the widening of the territory of the historian that a glance likely to fertilize other approaches: cultural history of the policy, cultures of war…

This cultural history is declined for some in the form of under-disciplines, more or less institutionalized: history of the institutions and the cultural policies, history of the media and the media culture, history of the symbols, history of the sensitivities, history of the memory, Histoire of sciences… Of others, like Dominique Kalifa, invited to less regarding the cultural history as the analyze-inventory of the forms of the culture that like a glance or a questioning, of anthropological nature, related to the whole of the human activities.

This cultural history takes part fully of the international exchanges. For this reason, it divides some of the problems usually arranged under the heading of farming New history (Lynn Hunt, Peter Burke, Robert Darnton) Some French historians, like Roger Chartier, contributed to the formulation of this transnational current and to make known it in France. However, the cultural history is posted still largely like a method of the social history. For this reason, the French historians who claim cultural history, like Pascal Ory or Roger Chartier, remain rather reticent vis-a-vis the currents marked by the Linguistic turn and the “post-modern” theories of the North-American universities. In the same way, the cultural history practiced in France did not tie a true dialog with the Cultural Studies even if work of the British founders (Richard Hoggart and Edward Thompson) were mobilized, but often tardily.

The cultural history takes part of the great inflections which marked the discipline history since after 1945. Slip operated by French historiography, of economic with the social one, then the social one towards the cultural one, of the “cellar to the attic” (Michel Vovelle), was carried out in same time when economic voluntarism did not have any more value of creed and where a broader place was made, within the French company, with the interrogations on the “memory” and the “inheritance”.

Books of French cultural history

Handbooks and syntheses

Pascale Goetschel and Emmanuel Rent, cultural History of France, the Beautiful Time at our days , Armand Colin, 2005.
Philippe Poirrier, Company and culture in France since 1945 , Paris, threshold, 1998.
Jean-Pierre Rioux and Jean-François Sirinelli (ED.), cultural History of France , Paris, Threshold, 1997-1998.

Major works

Robert Mandrou, Introduction to the modern French history, 1500-1640. Historical test of psychology , Albin Michel, 1961.
Georges Duby, Sunday of Bouvines. July 27th, 1214 , Gallimard, 1973.
Maurice Agulhon, Marianne with the combat, the imagery and symbolic system republican of 1789 to 1880 , Flammarion, 1979.
Michel Vovelle, revolutionary Mentality. Company and mentalities under the French revolution , social Editions, 1985.
Jean-François Sirinelli, intellectual Generation. Khâgneux and normaliens in the inter-war period , Beech, 1988.
Roger Chartier, cultural Origins of the French revolution , Threshold, 1990.
Pascal Ory, the Beautiful Illusion. Culture and policy under the sign of the Popular front. 1935-1938 , Plon, 1994.
Dominique Kalifa, Ink and Blood. Accounts of crimes and companies at the Beautiful Time , Beech, 1995.
Pierre Nora (to dir.), Places of memory , Paris, Gallimard, 1997.
Alain Corbin, Le Monde found of Louis-François Pinagot. On the traces of an unknown , 1798-1876, Flammarion, 1998.
Stephan Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker, 14-18. To find the war , Gallimard, 2000.
Michel Pastoureau, Blue. History of a color , Paris, Threshold, 2000.

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