I often tell my students that “making history” really means entering into a conversation about the past that began long ago and, thankfully, will never end so long as people remain willful and unpredictable. How lucky we are to be able to listen in on this conversation between Natalie Zemon Davis and Denis Crouzet, two historians who make history so masterfully. I am sure that students and scholars alike will learn or be reminded that the pursuit of history is a matter for both the heart and the mind. The idea for an American edition of this eavesdropping project began with Anne Jacobson Schutte, who brilliantly alerted the press to the opportunity upon reading the French original. Solène Chabanais at Albin Michel offered her kind offices in helping Truman State University Press secure rights to an English translation, while Geneviève Douillard at the Archives départementales de la Haute Garonne generously donated the cover image of a document from the Martin Guerre case. Chandler Davis provided timely expertise and sound counsel throughout the project, for which we are all most grateful. And I wish in particular to thank Orest Ranum, my mentor and friend (as he is Natalie’s and Denis’s), for setting the stage with his wonderful avant-propos. Our appreciation also goes to Nancy Rediger, director and editor-in-chief of the press, and Barbara Smith-Mandell, head copy editor, who so patiently and ably guided the text on to publication. The translation reflects a collaborative effort, as Natalie quite rightly translated her original French into her native English and translated the document on the cover, which she discovered when researching The Return of Martin Guerre. She also expanded the text in several places for the benefit of English-language readers. I tackled the translation of Denis’s questions and comments, leaning heavily on both him and Natalie for clarification when necessary. Finally, I prepared the accompanying notes, again with much assistance from Natalie, which we hope will help our readers follow and enjoy even more this thrilling conversation.
Michael Wolfe, Editor
Queens, New York
November 2009
She’s done it again! Natalie Zemon Davis places her mind squarely between past and present, and she dares to be her candid, learned, and adventurous self. No other historian is so authoritative and free, so professional and engaged in the research and writing of humanist history.
Denis Crouzet has done what great and very accomplished teachers do: he puts himself in a position of intellectual vulnerability in order to prompt Davis to go deeper and deeper about her nature [sic] as a historian. There is no boilerplate in this dialogue. It is truly a dialogue, and it absolutely convinces the reader that Davis is saying exactly what she thinks on all the key questions about method, choice of research topics, and her deeply personal sense of adventure in politics and in practicing history. There is no dumbing down.
Most dialogues involve one person and an imagined other. Not so here. Denis Crouzet is genuinely curious about the mind, life, and writings of Natalie Zemon Davis, and the result is a major addition to the humanist culture of the twenty-first century.
Some individuals can cross oceans and frontiers without any apparent need to reflect on the shifts and exchanges between places and cultures; others are prompted to write, to inventory, to note down the ordinary things in life. Still others are prompted to try to capture vast continental histories and cultures. Natalie Zemon Davis finds these writer-explorer-historians to be her windows onto different times and places. When they fall silent, as Leon the African does when he returns to his native culture, she finds this difficult to accept. But she also understands how these silences have meaning. But what meaning?
Her engagement in feminist history became very strong during the years at Berkeley. Christine de Pizan had deeply interested her as a student, but the subject lacked significance in those years just prior to the rise of feminist history. After the glassworkers of Carmaux, and beyond printers, and beyond peasants who stopped the shipping of grain from their villages, Joan Scott, Natalie Zemon Davis, and Louise Tilly turned to constructing the field in which the life and works of Christine would have the preeminence of a Pico, a Poggio, a Lefebvre d’Étaples. Few historians participate in the creation of a whole new field of history; and without the intense engagement that characterized the earlier work, and without its continuing learned intensity, women’s history might not have gained the vitality and legitimacy it has today.
There are occasional seemingly offhand remarks, really categorical statements about how Davis has learned to practice history. While grounded in personal experience, they are in fact loci, or commonplaces that, taken together, constitute a body of principles about the practice of researching, analyzing, and writing history. While history brings to the fore diverse modes of existence, these may be either discouraging to a reader or hopeful. Then, on reflection, Davis adds that while past and present human experiences may appear to be the same, they never are. For a historian who has sought to interpret historical thinking that is proverbial, the reader may be certain that what seems personal is really a coherent body of principles that are as social-scientific as they are humanist, and that constitute true understanding of verstehen. Just how these loci are formulated is evident in the exchange about Dipesh Chakrabarty’s relativist (my term) questioning of the general scientific and rationalist “system” of proof agreed upon among most historians. Why not let the rationalist and the magical systems of proof coexist! Davis grounds her rejection of this proposal on the principle of exchange, in this instance, exchange between historians. How can there be fruitful debate over the facts of history, she asks, if there is no agreement on the “rules of the game”? The implication that Western historical thought cannot be validly developed about non-Western cultures is rejected, because since antiquity this so-called Western historical thought has constantly incorporated into it the facts not only of non-Western history but also of non-Western systems of validation. After grounding her argument on the need for rules of exchange, Davis then turns to ethics, stating that it is her “duty” to search for consensus about the rules of historical proof.
The process of acceptance and/or rejection of the principal concepts developed by social scientists has culminated in an imaginative, integrated, and personal vision of the human and social. She lays no claims to originality, as she occasionally uses quotation marks to indicate to her readers (e.g., “distance,” page 53) that the meaning is technical and goes beyond the usages in Webster’s dictionary.
The family members who pull together to help one of their own construct a story that possibly will convince a judge to be lenient, is not history, any more than the procès-verbal of the court is history. What is history is carefully studying the evidence in all surviving sources and constructing a plausible narrative that can be questioned by another historian who has examined the same evidence. The thousands of references that characterize all of Davis’s writings awe readers and convince them of the accuracy of her historical narratives.
By now the reader has inferred that, in Davis, the autobiographical is never just that. Her joy in sharing her learning, her enlightening personal history, has no equal in twenty-first-century thought. What may seem casual is certainly the most serious and professional aspect of this dialogue. Davis literally offers her life and her works as exemplary. This primordial (pace Geertz!) mode of teaching is as pervasive in twenty-first-century cultures around the world as it was in all ancient societies. Montaigne offers an impressive critique of the ethical status of exemplarity, but he became an exemplum in his own lifetime. Huizinga called these role models “historical ideals of life.” Recently, they have been particularly effective in African-American and women’s movements. Exemplarity is not merely implicit in Davis’s writing. In the 1980 interview and also in 2004, she recognizes Eileen Power and Sylvia Thrupp as more than historians whose works she admires: they were an inspiration for her, as would be the life and works of Simone Weil. And yes, naming her children after ancestors and heroines is also characteristic of exemplarity.
Binary types of cultural analysis often lead to superficiality, and what follows is no exception. In the great heritage of radical revolutionary and/or reformist movements centered on the Internationals of the late nineteenth century, two complementary but distinct strategies were proposed for changing the world. One was more quantitative and social-scientific, and it was grounded on studies of increasingly poor working conditions, lower wages for workers, and exploitation of children and indigenous populations across the world. Would a proletarian Spartacus come forth? In her earliest studies of the sixteenth-century printers at Lyon, Natalie Zemon Davis respected but remained unsatisfied with this overly mechanical approach to reform and revolution. Ideas, including radical religious ideas, seemed to be part of the equation.
A second approach, one that also emerged from divisions developed during the Internationalist moment, was more humanistic but no less social-scientific in its analysis of individual and collective motives for action, alike. This approach led to cultural studies with themes articulated through the artistic, the ritualistic, and the historical.
Through her speeches and her talent as an organizer and writer, Rosa Luxemburg worked out a powerful alternative model for revolution and reform that had history, ideology, and heroes, as well as collective and individual leaders to inspire workers to strike and to become politically engaged in workers’ parties. The quantitative social-scientific approach was not so much rejected by Luxemburg and her movement as it was subsumed through fostering personal initiative and a deepening sense of the important roles played by union and political-party organizations. All the venerable cultural modalities could be revived to convey messages that had deep social and emotional resonances. Using the saints of the early church as a point of departure, in The Battleship Potemkin Sergei Eisenstein created the martyrdom of a sailor killed in a just cause and memorialized by candlelit holiness around his body. In Ariane Mnouchkine’s Molière, the picnic meal of peasants and actors on the arid Larzac plateau (a sacred site for protesters) was inspired by the ideal of fraternization between workers and artists, or between peasants and actors that was longed for by so many on the cultural Left. In The Return of Martin Guerre, when Bertrande learns to sign her name, it is an exemplary historical cultural action on behalf of women’s power. Rosa Luxemburg, like Jaurès, showed almost messianic confidence in the powers of history to move minds, history firmly grounded on fact and accessible to general readers. Differences between the ideals and careers of Luxemberg and Natalie Zemon Davis come immediately to mind. Human experiences never are really the same.
Natalie Zemon Davis’s professional career as a teacher, historian, advisor for films, and member of university councils and fellowship committees, shares some affinity with the daring marching protester, feminist, and historian that was Luxemburg. In his sketch for Davis’s 1980 interview with Judy Coffin and Robert Harding, in Radical History, Josh Brown captured her in the guise of Delacroix’s famous Liberty Leading the People. She holds books in her left arm, as she lifts the tricolor high with the right arm. The Phrygian bonnet and the skirt held up by a sash counterbalance her vision fixed ahead, on the horizon. She does not stumble over the bodies of the dead beneath her bare feet. Pastiche sometimes can be serious play.
Natalie Zemon Davis’s joy at being an exemplum to the fullest, a living historical ideal of life that inspires her readers, her students, and her friends, leads on and exhorts us to follow her.