Social History

The social history is one of the principal branches of the historical research; it is interested in the history of the company or one of its components.

Social history like claim with the total history

In first half of the XIXe century, François Guizot, Augustin Thierry, Adolphe Thiers and Jules Michelet is the first historians to grant in their works an important place to the social history. Historiography was up to that point dominated by a political vision. The class struggle at Guizot, of the races at Augustin Thierry, of the people at Michelet replace the kings like engines of the history. This reading does not give any more the first role to the prince but to a collective actor (the middle-class, the Francs, the Gallic ones…).

Marx takes up with Guizot the idea of “Class struggle”. For him, any historical phenomenon can be regarded as the expression of conflict relationship between a dominant class and a dominated class. The class being defined from an economic point of view (it has or not the means of production and exchange) and sociological (it is aware of its unit, of its shared interests).

The Marxist vision thus gives the primacy to an economic and social reading of the history. It influences many historical work in France. In its thesis on the crisis of the French economy at the end of the Old Mode , Ernest Labrousse sets up social groups (farm, paid operating cities, owners, nonoperating owners…) starting from their level of fortune and their place in the reports/ratios of production. He interprets the release of the French revolution like the consequence of the degradation of income at some of these groups. The economic one and the social one is thus closely dependant to explain the political Histoire.

The paradigm labroussien allures many French historians post-war period. The theses of economic and social history, enriched by statistical analyzes, abound: Pierre Goubert, Beauvais and Beauvaisis of 1600 to 1730 , 1960, Emmanuel Roy Ladurie, Country of Languedoc , 1966, Pierre Vilar, Catalonia in modern Spain , 1962, Pierre Chaunu, Seville and the Atlantic (1504-1650) , 1969, Gabriel Deserted, a rural company of the 19th century: peasants of the Apple-brandy (1815-1895) , 1971…

The dynamism of the social history is symbolized by the development of research in historical Démographie. The registry offices are stripped in order to draw statistical pictures on the birthrate, mortality, fruitfulness, the marriage rate or the elimination of illiteracy. In 1965, the first number of the review Annals of historical demography appears.

Decline of the paradigm labroussien

This social history born against a too political vision of the history falls in its turn in excess. She forgets the individual as if each one is carried by stronger forces: the class or the economic conjuncture. So much so that one can ask for the share of freedom of the men in the achievement of their history.

At the end of the years 1980, the collapse of Communism causes a discredit of all that recalls closely like by far the Marxisme. The paradigm labroussien becomes the object of contempt. The historians are diverted concepts of class and class struggle.

Slip towards a sociocultural history

Like other branches of the historical research, the orientation towards the Histoire of mentalities (become the cultural History) renews the social history as of the years 1960. The social groups are not seen any more solely under the economic angle. The historians are interested in their culture, their practices, their beliefs and their attitudes. One wonders about the cultural exchanges of the popular classes and that of the elites (practice of sports for example). One tries to determine the identity construction of certain categories.

Another change of the social history: it pays its attention on groups whose base is not economic. They are also often forgotten groups of research: women, immigrants, elderly, commuters…

Some historians attack the rigidity of social classifications. By studying the Parisian middle-class of the XIXe century, Adeline Daumard hustles the postulate defining the middle-class. Is it so monolithic? Does it have truly a class consciousness? Jean-Luc Pinol seeks him to entirely extirpate these classifications. To seize the social mobility in the town of Lyon, it is located on the scale of the individual (and not of the group or the class) and follows their course throughout their existence.

Multiplication of the subjects, bursting of the history

In the same idea, Antoine Prost notes that the social history evolves to the reconstitution of coloured universes, cordial, tasty, giving place to an almost anthropological description. The monographs make us penetrate in the intimacy of a social or individual operation. It is indeed the object of a historical current called the microstoria. Carlo Ginzburg involves us for example in the universe of a miller of the Rebirth and Giovanni Levi in that of an exorcist of village. In France, Le Monde found of Louis-François Pinagot (1998) of Alain Corbin is located in the same vein since he proposes to recreate the environment of an unknown: a simple sabot-maker of the Pole. In this kind, the explanation, the investigation into the causes becomes less interesting.

In the history in crumbs (1987), François Dosse regrets this evolution. The historians of the social history do not claim any more with one total explanation of the companies. They seldom try great syntheses as in the years 1970 and 1980 ( rural French history , urban French history , economic and social Histoire , Histoire of the French ) and are delayed on the contrary on microcosms. They do not dare any more to launch out in total stories which would embrace the political aspects, cultural, social and economic but prefer to study subjects of reduced range.

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