Fashionings

DC: Let’s leave off for the time being the various characters you encountered and shift our discussion now to a related dimension in this history of your life as a historian. I would briefly like to return to this impulse to direct your historical writing to consider how the horrors of the twentieth century, in effect, represented a rejection of history as well as fed your interest in confessional violence in Lyon from the early 1540s to the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in Lyon. Were you recalling, when you worked on the Holocaust, all the heartbreaking tragedies that gave it such poignancy, and don’t we touch here on the beginning of your own self-fashioning?

NZD: Ah, yes…

DC: But at the same time—and I believe it’s the power of this kind of analysis—we don’t immediately see that you write with these memories in the back of your mind. It’s up to the reader, again, to intuit it in your writing and even realize that danger, for you, is not unique to the tragedies of the twentieth century but is rather also latent in other historical periods when societies fell prey to the most horrible slaughter. Surely, you write history as a way to search for hope.

NZD: It is certain, even many decades afterward, that the Holocaust, the mass murders, and extraordinary violence of the 1930s and 1940s influenced me. The Holocaust has always been at the back of my mind, and it was there when in 1970 to 1971, I began the reflection that led to “The Rites of Violence.” But, curiously enough, I’d stress the back of my mind, for the events up front that aroused most immediately my thinking about religious violence in the sixteenth century were those of the 1960s and early 1970s. There was the Vietnam War, with all its horrors, the resistance against that war, in which I participated, and the debates within the Left and opposition movements. I was troubled by the violence, including even that sometimes unleashed in our own demonstrations. I kept asking myself, “What does this mean?” And that opened the path for me to thinking about the character of violence during the Holocaust…

DC Your analysis of sixteenth-century religious sedition has led you to signal the importance of the crowd which, according to you, sometimes appropriated the state’s rites of punishment to legitimate to the broader public its own aggression and desire to eliminate the “pollution” caused by its adversaries in order to restore the world to its lost pristine purity. However, these are not the same techniques as those used in the Holocaust where the vast bulk of the violence was the work of machines within the closed confines of the camps, nowhere more than in the enclosures of the gas chambers…In Lyon or in Paris around 1562, the Protestants died in public in a ritualistic spectacle in words and images that formed a language to explain why, in the minds of the torturers, it was necessary to put them to death so theatrically and also why they lacked humanity and thus worth.

NZD: Of course, there are many differences between the ideology and practices of the Nazis and those of violent religious crowds in the sixteenth century: among others, the technological and bureaucratic character of Nazi extermination in the gas chambers is different from the multiple forms of destruction, assault, and murder carried out by Protestant and Catholic rioters. But there are what you might call structural similarities, forms of ritual and symbolic behavior, that seem to appear whenever we humans engage in extreme violence connected with deep issues of boundaries and identity. The repetitive practices in the concentration camps—the queues, the removal of all clothes, and the rest—are not just bureaucratic routine; they have a ritual quality, dehumanizing the Jews and the political enemies of Nazism and investing the murderers with power. In the Nazi films, Jews are “rats”; in the Catholic tracts, Protestant heretics are “vermin” (albeit “vermin” who can return to humanity by conversion). In some places in Eastern Europe, the villagers executed their Jewish neighbors themselves, accompanying them with rituals of humiliation, as Huguenots did to priests before killing them.

Right after I wrote this essay, I had the students read it in one of my undergraduate classes at Berkeley. We had quite a debate in class—and its theme is still a current one today, with all that’s going on around al-Qaeda…I had wanted to propose an explanation for violence: not a pardon or justification, but a social and cultural explanation for such extreme forms of aggression. I did not want to attribute them to a demonic force lying in human beings, and that was very important to me. I recall that one of my students—she was Jewish like me—was very bitter about the Nazi murders, for which she saw Zionism as the only solution. She announced, “The purely demonic acts in history, without any explanation. There are evil people, people possessed.” For me the idea that the final explanation for an event is absolute evil is unacceptable.

DC: This anecdote raises the question of knowing whether the demonic can be reduced simply to irrationality and if irrationality can actually be considered a causal factor in history, especially of reason unhinged by our own desire for rationality…

NZD: Irrationality can be a way of finding an explanation, for example, by having recourse to psychoanalysis. There is an explanatory role for the irrational in history. But the affirmation of the demonic, the claim that there are some people simply possessed by evil, constitutes for me a path toward exclusion and genocide. It is too cruel to prejudge that there are people so possessed. History is full of atrocious actions, but they are perpetrated by people born (as Pico della Mirandola¹ said five hundred years ago) with the potentiality for good or for evil. The historian seeks either some way to explain that choice or some way to narrate it.

DC: Finally, I would tend to think that the concept of evil shouldn’t be invoked in history except with a great deal of prudence. Victims as well as everyone else are caught up—involuntarily for the former, voluntarily for the latter—in the sociocultural dynamics of panic, that history is quite rightly a sad pursuit because of this terrible logic that requires, in certain situations, that everything be overturned by the desire for exclusion. There are moments that go beyond all normality because individuals suffer and express their suffering of who they are and wish to be by slipping into violence, by destroying everything that might increase their sense of helplessness and anguish or could be the cause of their suffering, for the time being and in the immediate future. Sadly, evil forms part of a whole logic. That’s why when I worked, after you, on sedition during the French Reformation, I underscored the importance of eschatology as a factor. There seemed to me to be a kind of cycle under way from the 1480s to the 1520s in which the Last Judgment appeared extremely close at hand. Every Christian had to live in tense expectation of an event that would bring history to an end, pursuing penitence and self-improvement with the feeling that at any moment he could find himself face-to-face with God who would excuse no fault, no sin, or any residue of doubt. This sense of guilt arose and drew strength from preaching as well as the circulation of astrological leaflets. Ira dei super nos.² To a degree more or less conscious, a sense of disquietude upset people’s imaginations and led Christians to doubt themselves and their capacity to live up to the demands of a wrathful God. Evangelical reform powerfully responded to this anguish by assuaging it. I hypothesized that those persons who refused to become mired in this sense of guilt found in Calvinism an outlet, an inner place free of anguish because the return to evangelical purity was finally at hand after so many centuries of darkness and neglect of the Truth, because the destruction of papal Babylon was imminent. I further hypothesized that the individuals who remained in the grips of this panic over the end times became even more obsessed with it the more they saw those they called Lutherans as false prophets of the Apocalypse whom God commanded them to chase and destroy. Moreover, those who remained faithful to traditional religion became set on edge by the image of the eschatological monstrousness of the “heretic,” so much that they hardly hesitated to eradicate and annihilate them to appease a wrathful God, whereas those who joined the evangelical faith aimed to bring down the Roman Church, to wipe out all those tonsured heads, the priests. Each side sought confrontation as the moment of God’s supreme test…Wasn’t there in this historical case a demonstration of how history sometimes becomes caught up in an antagonism’s very logic that arises out of a sense of anguish, the reduction or assuagement of which is the motor force of history itself, a force all the stronger because it encourages the very conditions for the total negation of another person. Apparently not that violence should play a necessary role because history is absolutely contingent, but rather to underscore the emergence of a state of breaking norms, of transgression that might convert horrible acts into expressions of liberation, to contend that after a certain moment misfortune can loom up in history to animate people like marionettes. In point of fact, misfortune is simultaneously a common fear of history and a desire shared with history…Anyway, a “human” history—rather than a “humanist” one, a hackneyed term for sure—mustn’t it aim to understand in human terms this misfortune, along a spectrum that would consider some criminals and others as victims? Doesn’t history produce and resolve anguish, create misfortune, lead some to play the role of victims and others to become executioners? Not that history aims to pass judgment, that it tries to weigh this transgression for all the participants in their respective roles as victims and executioners?

NZD: Your description of the spiral of religious violence in the sixteenth century is extraordinary in its psychological richness, and moving and persuasive. And it’s an interpretation, an effort at explanation that does not divide the world into black and white, bad and good. If you divide the world into the demons and the others, there’s no room left for responsibility. Your path, which I hope is also my own, tries to explain or interpret the facts: the idea of a tragic history that you can examine attentively and get some diagnosis as a human history. It doesn’t necessarily give you any perfect assurance about being able to change things, but it does bring some perspective for today: it allows one to recognize the force and grandeur of eschatological hopes and the extreme dangers inherent in them. Tragic history, sorrowful history is important for us, because it reminds us that we are all human beings, in danger…

DC: Do you defend history because you see it as a source of social or ethical utility, in the sense it could help orient us in history…

NZD: I would say “useful” in a very special sense. What human beings have done in the past, the enormous range in ways of living and possible actions, is a source both of hope and despair. How fascinating it is to consider this variety in human events. We can draw hope from it in the sense that if things have been different in the past, perhaps we’re in a position to make them a little different today [laughter]—at least a little bit different. When I say “usefulness,” I don’t mean that history offers us models that we can apply—the details of different situations are too unlike each other. History offers us ideas, points of view, perspectives, landmarks, indices—possibilities.

DC: Yes, history as an introduction to an epistemology of difference, of diversity. Let’s return to this crisis of religion in France in the middle of the sixteenth century. You suggest that acts of violence had been extraordinarily intense in terms of the treatment of bodies, in the presentation of bodies to crowds, and in the depiction of the gestures of the persons who tortured them. You show it very well: there’s a seductive quality about horror that must come into play in order to cut down an adversary and those who share his faith. It’s for that reason that I thought about a “history of misfortune”: these journeymen printers whom you saw in the 1550s and 1560s as Calvinists and who all truly shared a hope in the coming at last of a godly kingdom on earth after a long period of blindness under the Roman Church. Later we rediscover these same men, at least those who didn’t choose the path of exile, in the 1580s and 1590s back in the bosom of the church, just as if violence had succeeded in turning them away from their dreams, to the point where they next fell prey to similar fantasies such as the eschatology of the Catholic League.³ It’s quite striking to see how history can be not only a great leveler of dreams, but also a form of discourse that notes the irony of events and sets of beliefs.

NZD: This is true of all movements for historical transformation. You can see this in connection with revolutions, and even in connection with a simple change in government. One hopes for, even expects all kinds of improvement, even on the morrow of an ordinary election…and then one perceives how difficult it is to change the order of things. The moment of hope, the happy sense of full possibility, lasts for about two hours. [laughter] But we must rejoice in those two hours, savor and remember the feeling of possibility. The vision is never fulfilled; things never work out in the grand manner; the future is full of difficulty and sometimes terrible consequences and disappointments. But without the memory of the dream, nothing hoped for would happen at all.

People respond to such disappointment in different ways—an ironic stance, as you say, but there are other possibilities. I’ve often thought it would be interesting for someone to make a systematic study of French Protestants who abjured their faith and returned to Catholicism in the last part of the sixteenth and early seventeenth century. As far as I know, this hasn’t been done. I wonder what one would find if one looked at patterns of marriage, networks, friendships, and sensibilities; I should think that the Protestant years would have left their mark. I’m not thinking so much of Jansenism, which has been much discussed, but of what such people may have brought to the various Catholic positions of the time. Interesting studies have been made of Jews converted to Catholicism and Protestantism in Europe, marriage patterns, associations, and the like.⁴ There’s been speculation about the extent to which earlier Jewish tradition may have influenced some of these converts. Teresa of Avila,⁵ for example: could there have been any influence from the Jewish past of her family on her mystic sensibility? What’s been done for these Jewish converts—even those who stayed within the Christian fold—could be done for the French Protestants returning to the Mother Church.

DC: Some have tried to make this kind of analysis for the former members of the Catholic League by examining how, in the early seventeenth century, they reinvested their involvement with a sacrificial faith in the practice of pious foundations. There again, it seems, the dominant impression would be that of extremely varied and variable experiences that merge together but can never be fully explained in isolation from each other.

NZD: That shows the care one must use in making generalizations.

DC: At the same time, there exists on both sides a desire not to remain in a state of lifelessness, to not be erased away…To return to the Protestants, there’s one character about whom you’ve written sublimely by endowing him with such personal complexity. It’s Jean de Coras. I had the impression that with Jean de Coras you had touched upon what constitutes the core of Protestant subjectivity or the embrace of Protestantism, in other words an approach to a crisis of identity, of the reality an individual can give himself and others, during a precise time in which the immediate aspects of one’s self-image disintegrate. Where is the reality of the self? That’s the question that Jean de Coras, a convert to the new thinking, seems to confront when staring at the Janus-faced man with two potential identities, Arnaud du Tilh/Martin Guerre. A past, repudiated identity and another stolen and assumed. Couldn’t you have gone further, in the end, by asking if the Reformation offered a response to the desire to cut free from one’s sense of self, a subjectivity yearning toward a dream of escape? In your book on gifts, you explain very well how Calvin created a destructive critique of the whole system of reciprocity upon which, in society, identity operates but only insofar as it’s a social identity.

NZD: You ask me a complex question there. I don’t think the Reformation offered a response to the desire to be cut free from one’s sense of self, but rather offered ways to change that sense and relieve the self from endless anxiety and obligation. You’ll notice I’m using “self” and “sense of self” here rather than “identity”: “identity” is a later word and when we use it for the sixteenth century, I think we should confine it to external marks that are part of social relations—he is a noble, she is a Savoyarde, I am a goldsmith, you are my cousin—rather than extend it, as we do today, to cover inner issues of subjectivity. The crisis of the self in the first half of the sixteenth century was “overdetermined”—a term from psychoanalysis, I think—by which I mean there were multiple pressures on the self at the same time across the social spectrum, in family life, in intimate life, in social life, especially in situations where there was social mobility, pressing toward obligation, duties, achievement, including sexual achievement, control for some, fertility for others. This endless taking on of obligation was acted out in the obsessive performance of Catholic devotion and liturgy: it provided the formative model for understanding and shaping social life. (As in Clifford Geertz’s definition, religion both shapes and is shaped by social experience.) And this situation was important for the person’s sense of self not only in relation to other people, but also in the supremely important relation with God: “How do I situate myself in relation to God?”

There are different ways of getting around the guilt and anxiety aroused by such pressure, the “works-righteousness” that Luther decried. One way is to open up the self so widely that the individual boundary disappears—the mystic seeking union with God, the fusion of a collective eschatological movement. I talked about this option in my book on the gift. This would be the closest to your “desire to be cut free from one’s sense of self.” But it’s not something that many people can follow, and it’s not something that can last very long. The quest for fusion finally founders on the existence of the individual soul: God gives it to each person and it lasts in the next world till the end of time. (I made this point some years ago in response to Stephen Greenblatt’s claim that my Martin Guerre book demonstrated that identity and the self were totally social constructs in the sixteenth century; the belief in the existence of the soul and its relation to God puts a limit on that idea.)

The major solutions were the Protestant and Catholic reforms, which at their best relieved the pressure in different ways and offered persons different subjective states in regard to God. An especially interesting contrast, I think, is the different role allotted to other persons and to hierarchical relations in the arrival at a sense of self in relation to God. If I may simplify here and use a kind of Weberian ideal type: the individual Catholic is willing to place himself or herself in a dependent relation with figures who carry both maternal and paternal features and to open intimate subjectivity to another person; the individual Protestant has the Bible and his or her pastors or preachers for guidance, but finally holds the doors of the subjective self open only to God. We have two different models of the boundaries of the self here, and in both religions, they would have different implications for men and for women in the sixteenth century.

DC: Yet when all is said and done, if you were to offer an explanation for the religious split in the sixteenth century, would you first see it in existential terms? Is self-fashioning, as you describe it, the need to fashion a sense of self already in crisis, one that suggests or is open to suggesting in that moment alternative paths with respect to the one earlier taken?

NZD: I would rather save the phrase “self-fashioning” for the social relations people had, especially those associated with geographical or social mobility, and use more collectively infused language to talk about religious change and the negotiations concerning the soul. I suppose you can call a conversion experience or joining the Jesuit or Ursuline orders a kind of self-fashioning, but these changes are so guided by rules for performance that it’s probably better not to put them all under the same rubric.

I’ve described a possible existential or psychological source for the religious split and alternate solutions to a crisis of the self. Let me say a word about the social side of the same story: at the heart of the split are the privileged position of the Catholic clergy and the theology of merit, works, and the possibility of perfect sanctification associated with it, including the possibility of celibacy and the full control of sexuality. This is a world where the socioemotional axis of clergy and laity is as important as the socioeconomic one of noble and commoner, and where political power is tied up in both sets of relations. Pressures built up across the clergy/laity axis, due among other things to the exorbitant demands of the clergy for exclusive obedience from the laity (perhaps connected with associated demands from parents on their children—but that would have to be researched); extravagant demands that some individual Christians placed on their bodies and sentiments; and, of course, the aspirations of kings and other political authorities. And the gulf opened between what the ecclesiastical authorities were requiring be put into practice—say, in regard to the way charity was expressed in Christian life—and what the faithful could see was being done. At this juncture (and I return to the image of overdetermination, all these pressures and perceptions at once), you have a real crisis of credibility. (The credibility gap reminds me of what we saw in 1989, with the fall of the Communist regimes, especially in the Soviet Union.)

Out of this pressure, both psychological and social, on the Catholic system emerged two forms of Christian faith and religious practice, both viable. To give an example, the Protestant system accepts the presence of sexuality as a permanent desire in men and women and insists that pastors and preachers marry. The reformed Catholic system affirms the possibility and superiority of the celibate state, but reduces the distance between it and the “pollution” of sexuality and marriage, in several ways, including the greater prestige accorded Joseph, Mary’s husband, and the greater spiritual role accorded to widows.

DC: But don’t you think that, in this context, an individual reacts—as you have shown—through his social experience as part of a group to which he belongs and that permits him to share common values, or is it rather that at the end of the day the individual is alone in his choice? In effect, in your studies, there’s often this shift back and forth between a social experience that defines a group and a biographical impulse that renders the individual alone when he sets about to write or faces his judge, a solitude that you recount.

NZD: The contingent qualities particular to an individual life can always come into play and lead to surprising decisions by an individual, unexpected by those around him or her. But even then, the constraints the person has to face and the resources available for fashioning that surprising decision come from the surrounding culture. There’s a movement between social experience and what you’ve called the “biographical impulse.”

Michel de Montaigne provides a nice example of individual choice within a cultural field…and by the way, I should mention that he talks of the omnipresence and dangers of “self-fashioning” [se façonner] in his day with great sharpness. In my book on the gift, I distinguished three forms of human exchange: contractual modes, where in principle all the obligations are clearly spelled out; coercive modes, where services and goods are taken by force or constraint; and gift modes, where things pass in principle with polite ambiguity via networks of reciprocity or outward waves of gratitude.

Now Montaigne knew the world of political gift and favor perfectly: he was a judge, and mayor of Bordeaux, and diplomatic go-between during the Wars of Religion; but in his Essais, he rejects that mode. His friendship with his beloved late friend La Boétie⁶ is “beyond gifts,” so close were they. In more ordinary circumstances, he says he finds the fulsome language accompanying gift presentation and the quest for favor hypocritical. But even more, he doesn’t want his conscience to be caught in the unceasing obligations of gratitude and honor that come when one receives a gift. “I’d rather buy a [royal] office than be given one, for buying it, I just give money. In the other case, I give myself.” He’d rather be throttled by a notary than by his own conscience. Though Montaigne himself went right ahead in the world of gifting, he put his finger on a major danger of his time.

DC: Yes. I find that, for historians, Montaigne is an extremely difficult writer to decipher, even more than Erasmus.⁷ He’s in fact the most difficult when writing about the history of subjectivity because his interior life was so complex it could not be readily articulated in thought or words.

NZD: He’s an extraordinary figure.

DC: Because he goes right to the edge, to the crisis point of the contradictory, often quite negative tensions that had been worked out and reflected upon in the Christian West since the 1490s, first in Italy then France, the Holy Roman Empire, and England. Montaigne succeeded in “domesticating” these tensions through a sort of experimental method of self-definition, even in the use of paradox or recourse to what resembles, without truly being it, a mode of skepticism. He goes far beyond Calvin and Rabelais in his invention of a conscious reflexivity, always in flux, always in search of its own displacement. Forming identity in the sixteenth century was analogous to the process used in developing a photograph. A person’s subjectivity needed some kind of fixing agent. Some found it in the different religious faiths, while others strove to create their own personal systems of belief.

NZD: That’s what’s so prodigious about him: you think at one moment that you’ve got completely hold of his thought, and then a minute later, as you read on, he’s slipped away and turned the argument on its head. But I think Rabelais is close to his achievement, while choosing another form of fashioning, that is, the comic mode—also elusive but endlessly rich. Between the two of them, the reader is constantly led into new vistas.

DC: There are chameleons who certainly write different chronologies, but who play with this sense of mobility, resorting to techniques where the senses and subjects shift back and forth to better lose the reader in the labyrinth of their writing, who cast a spell over their imaginations, in order to make a person better understand the need to avoid, no matter what, the tyranny of firmly held beliefs.

NZD: I respect them as superb observers of their own times, differing in some ways, alike in others. Whenever I have an idea about something happening in sixteenth-century France, or an interpretation of some event or expression, I run it by Rabelais and Montaigne. Usually I find some sign of what I’m looking for. If I get no whiff of it from them, I’ll rethink and re-check what I’m doing—between them, they hardly miss a thing. Since I’m interested in the history of women, I’ve also put Marguerite de Navarre in that category of privileged witness to her times, not only as a woman observer (albeit highly placed as the sister of King François I⁸), but also as author of a genre in which you hear women and men in discussion. In the Heptameron, each story is told by one of her well-born travelers, caught as they are by floods in the Pyrénées. But then each tale is followed by a conversation between the women and men about what they’ve just heard. They’re not in agreement—including the women, who argue among themselves even on such matters as unfaithful husbands. Such debates are not found in Boccaccio’s Decameron⁹ or other earlier collections of tales; Marguerite was the innovator here. She’s a terrific witness for the range of attitudes in her day.

DC: This brings us back to the fact that, in the whole history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which is basically a long shift from unity to division as well as the erection of confessional communities to which men and women end up belonging for better or worse, the historian is almost led to the individual, to a model inherently biographical. From Martin Guerre to the lives of three Women on the Margin and Leo Africanus, the individual is there. But is he only there as an animating device because it’s easier, in terms of documentation, to recreate a unique experience? Or because, for you, it’s an ideal way to reconnoiter a society, its tensions, and its dreams, to investigate those particular places where it’s most vivid and establishes a sense of control?

NZD: I do savor the individual persons I write about, but I’m probably more interested in the way the individual life is an opening toward the society around him or her. Even while trying to make everything I’ve learned about them work for my story, I never have the feeling that I’m writing a biography.

DC: Don’t you write what I would call reticent biographies in the sense that you only look at your subject from a certain angle, rather than research it in all its fullness and linearity?

NZD: I have enormous respect for the life of my subjects, but my interest in them is always triggered by some prior question that I think I can fathom better through their lives. In a “pure” biography, I believe there’s a quest for exhaustiveness, with the stages of life itself the central narrative thread. Even in my Women on the Margins, where I tried to find everything about the women’s lives from birth to death, I was using the lives to illustrate varieties of women’s experience and adventure. With Judge Jean de Coras, I put what I discovered about him—his intellectual precocity, his movement into the world of ennobled judges, his attraction to Protestantism, and his affectionate relations with his wife—to work for matters of identity: that is, the possibility of his drawing some resonance from the imposture of the talented peasant Arnaud du Tilh and Arnaud’s intimacy with Bertrande de Rols for his own self-fashioning. As for al-Wazzn, whom I’m writing about right now, any scrap I find about his life is precious, but it and the extensive manuscripts I have located are especially being used to explore how a person moves between cultural worlds.

DC: But shouldn’t we turn the problem around? Wouldn’t “true” biography disclaim to be totalizing, that it would instead strive to be abiographical in the sense that it would eschew any linear or integrative goal?

NZD: I’m not one to pronounce on a single correct form for writing a life. The classic biography itself ordinarily has an interpretive edge, and it is surely better when it’s acknowledged. The main thing is to encourage a range of writing about lives and to welcome new forms.

DC: Why then have you gone outside the French framework?

NZD: It was my work on the Amerindians of Québec, whom Marie de l’Incarnation wanted to convert, and the African and Indian slaves of Suriname, whom Maria Sibylla Merian used as her helpers and informants in her search for insects and plants, that set me off in this direction. At the same time I was writing that book, I was reading scholars in postcolonial countries, especially India. They were pointing out that the new national histories being written there remained “European,” even though their cast of characters were Indians and the narrative thread was the quest for and achievement of independence. The histories, it was claimed, were still using the same categories, posing the same questions, using the same frames as European and North American historians. Now all this suggested to me that I try for a real shift in my consciousness. I was telling my story from the point of view of these European women, and I wanted at least for some pages to see the whole thing from the non-European point of view, indeed, even imagine non-European forms of narration.

I participated recently in a colloquium with Dipesh Chakrabarty, one of the founders of the school of Subaltern Studies in India.¹⁰ He has taught in India and Australia and is now a professor at the University of Chicago. In his book Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, which appeared in 2000, he shows the limits of European historical thought, especially in regard to the use of its ideas of “modernity” as a system of universal description. The European model for modernization is taken as the standard, and other countries’ history is written—including by historians within that country—in terms of “catch-up” or “not-yet.” Europe always gets there first. Chakrabarty acknowledges willingly the importance of European historical philosophers for his own thinking—including Karl Marx on capital—but challenges their claim to universality. They must be reconsidered and reformulated in terms of experiences elsewhere. He even raises the question of different modes for extracting evidence and acknowledging truth that grow out of the Indian experience and that are at odds with Western systems of social science.

It’s a very interesting book, and my own earlier work on the European subaltern classes—artisans, printing workers, peasants, women—prepared me for his approach. I had already taken issue with the assessment of charivaris and journeymen’s compagnonnages [associations] as simply pre-political forms that needed to catch up to be meaningful—rather than understanding how they worked in their own day and noting how they continued as a mode of relevant action. And I’ve already mentioned my critique of evolutionary theories about the Reformation. So I felt I had started out on Chakrabarty’s route. When I told him this, he laughed and said once again, I was claiming that the West got there first. Anyway, from his perspective, it’s not enough simply to add non-European or non-Western countries to the agenda: we must decenter the West—make it one example among many as a pattern of change—and enlarge our field of vision to include categories and modes of thought used by people in these other lands. It’s very difficult, but that’s what I mean when I say that I no longer feel myself a “historian of Europe.” The transformation is in the way one locates oneself: even when I’m writing about Europe, I try not to perceive myself as centered in Europe. Rather I locate myself sometimes close to Europe, sometimes far from Europe.

DC: How do you think you can acquire or fashion the tools necessary to illuminate this dual perspective?

NZD: Of course, that’s the major problem, including all the languages and other background one must acquire. One can’t just suddenly become a master of all learning, especially when you’re as old as I am. We all have our limits, but still we must do as much as we can, and use translations if that’s all that’s possible.

DC: Aren’t translations already directed to alter this exterior aspect as a result of linguistic bias? What you propose is attractive, but the tools that you use are fragile, no? Wouldn’t you lapse into a false comforting myth to believe you can slip into the worldview of another? Even words are the enemies of such epistemological projects, aren’t they?

NZD: Surely, one must be wary of translations, and we hear many warnings about the “violence” that translations can do to a text. I’ve felt this acutely in my current research on al-Wazzn. To start with, I’ve followed his repeated struggle with Italian words as he tried to describe his North African world to Europeans: for instance, he ended up using “sacerdote” or “priest” for “imam,” which gives the wrong impression of the role of the Muslim leader who directs men in prayer. I’ve learned to recognize Arabic letters and individual words and have a good Arabic-English dictionary always at hand; but for the most part I depend on translators and translations. Most of al-Wazzn’s writings are in Italian or Latin, else I would not have taken him on. But to read the books he read and cited and the authors and texts that shaped his vision, I have depended on translations—which are fortunately very plentiful. The great Orientalists of the past have done their work, especially in France, and today there are multilingual people from Arab lands preparing translations in English and French. Once I get hold of a reliable translation, made by someone close to the culture, I use it as a model for others. At the very least, these translations serve as an entry into the worlds in which the original works were once written. One reads them knowing one’s limitations and reminds oneself how difficult it is “to slip into the worldview of another.” We know that it’s already difficult enough to do this for sixteenth-century France!

One of the best ways to face this difficulty is through collective work with historians from other backgrounds—that is, to read their accounts of their own lands and of our lands and to collaborate with them in different forms. Let me give an example of a book that I thought a very good start, though it needed to go farther to live up to Chakrabarty’s criteria. When I was in Tokyo in 1997, I visited the museum of the Edo dynasty. It’s an immense and wonderful museum, where among other things a whole quarter for printing and bookselling has been recreated. I immediately thought of the printing industry in our France, the printer’s quarter of Lyon in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Then I went to a performance of Kabuki theatre, and besides marveling at it from start to finish, I thought of Molière,¹¹ especially during the comic interludes—though, of course, there were differences as well. Upon my return to North America, I came across a recent book, Edo and Paris: Urban Life and the State in the Early Modern Era, an excellent collection of essays by historians from the United States, France, and Japan making the precise comparison between Edo Japan of the seventeenth century and the France of Louis XIV.¹² In terms of country, the West was not given pride of place; both histories were treated with respect. But the problematic of the book, the questions posed, seemed all to emerge from the historiography of France in the seventeenth century: the organization of government, resistance to government. Edo Japan was presented according to that problematic. I wondered what would happen if some of the questions structuring the book, both the presentation of Japan and France, had emerged from writing and perception distinctive first to Japan. For instance, Japanese literature and woodcuts of the Edo period offer a fascinating portrait of what is called “the floating world”—a world gravitating around artists, geishas, theatres, intellectuals. What if you started off with the questions inspired by the floating world? That problematic generated by the Japanese experience and writing might lead to new insight into urban life and politics.

DC: But at the same time, don’t you believe that the Western way of writing history has changed a lot, and extremely quickly, and can despite all its shortcomings continue to change? Don’t you consider it possible that this kind of history can serve as a tool to unlock mysteries that the Japanese or Indians, for example, wouldn’t even be aware of but for the influence on them of the English, French, and American schools of historiography? We can no longer put our heads in the sand. Aren’t the multiple methods of understanding identity from a historical standpoint that you call for a byproduct of this same Western historiography due to its inherently critical stance? Wouldn’t this all in the end simply be a hermeneutical illusion?

NZD: Of course, Western historiography has changed in many directions, and I’m not in any sense speaking against the central rules of my craft or its potential for continuing growth in research strategies and narrative expressiveness. And, of course, non-Western scholars have learned from our schools of historical scholarship, in some cases while receiving their doctoral training in Europe or North America. Chakrabarty expresses his gratitude to David Hume,¹³ Hegel,¹⁴ and Heidegger,¹⁵ along with Marx. But some of the transformations in Western historiography have come precisely through the experience of conquest and the histories of colonized peoples, and from contact with non-Western traditions and scholars from non-Western countries. The exchange of “tools to unlock mysteries” is two-way.

DC: It’s always been cross-fertilized. Xenophon¹⁶ and Thucydides¹⁷ always exercised a powerful influence over Roman history, and this cross-fertilization in Greco-Roman history has, in turn, influenced the writing of history in the Renaissance…

NZD: Cultural mixture, intellectual métissage, has a long history behind it. In recent decades, there was a period where this side of encounters between colonized people and the colonizers or between conquered peoples and their conquerors was downplayed in favor of theories of incomprehensibility and opacity. One focused on violence and resistance, but not exchange or crossovers. And yet violence itself is a form of communication. Ideas, objects, languages, customs get picked up, adapted, and transformed, even in the most tragic of circumstances. The historian should be attentive to relations of power and relations of exchange both.

Chakrabarty makes one critique of universal theories that I don’t think is fruitful for cross-fertilization in historical practice. It has to do with systems of proof in Western historiography: he challenges the universal application of “scientific” and “rational” methods of proof, and argues for the coexistence of “rational” and “magical” paths to proof. Now as choice for personal life, let it happen; I’m not addressing that here. As a path to establishing truth for, say, healers, from shamanic to psycho analytic, fine—there are different languages and intuitions, and “truth” can be arrived at in various ways, especially if the healer knows his or her community or subject well.

But for historians trying to find agreement about our craft, I don’t think it’s good advice. I say this even while being fully in accord with Steven Shapin’s¹⁸ views on the social factors that shape acceptance of “truth” in science, and with due recognition of the power of accepted paradigms in persuading us what’s “true” in a given situation. Historians throughout the world can extend our notions ever wider about what constitutes sources or objects or evidence from the past and how to interpret them—including magical practices; we can argue about what the evidence means, we can carry along different interpretations about, say, the spread of slavery and many other disagreements, but we should have a common goal in regard to how we might accept a conclusion as established. If you say, “I want to establish a picture here through the incidence of legal prohibitions,” and I say, “I want to establish a picture here through marriage patterns,” we have a common language to use to argue about it. We may not agree, but we still seek common rules for how to prove a historical case that allows the argument to go on. If you affirm you have a form of proof from a realm into which I cannot enter (your special “magic” as compared to our shared “reason”), then there’s no ground for us to debate as historians.

DC: Don’t you think that, despite all this, we still come close to the edge of an abyss? History as it’s generally developed to the present day has often wanted to be, often without always declaring it overtly, a school of freedom. It’s a school because the historian exercises her critical freedom to seek understanding, that is, to make and unmake the past. She knows she should strive to stifle in herself every tendency to be reductive, to simplify, or to overly generalize. It’s a school because, as you’ve said, it’s always necessary to seek out new methods of questioning the past. It thus relies on a logic that refuses to accept received opinions, definitions, and goals. It’s not all positive on the outside. I think about what can happen today in certain Muslim countries where history cannot be written except along prescribed theological and teleological lines, where anything can be said so long as it conforms to this preordained way of thinking, even to the point of using the Protocols of the Elders of Zion¹⁹ as a way to prove one’s case… Can’t another’s different way of looking at history thus be more troubling than stimulating, or isn’t it at least becoming so? Wouldn’t we therefore run a risk if we wished to think like a different person?

NZD: From what I’ve just said, it’s clear that I’m advocating critical freedom in researching and writing about the past. And learning about various forms of popular or polemical writing about the past—which we see in textbooks all over the world and which provides us evidence for, say, political movements and governmental policy—is not the same thing as taking seriously the different forms of historical thought generated in different cultures. In the same Arab lands where some extremists are using the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion to make outrageous claims, important new conceptualizations are emerging about the late medieval philosopher Ibn Khaldun;²⁰ just as in Israel, where extremists are claiming that the Jews have always had the legal right to the land from the Jordan River to the sea since God gave it to them, innovative writing is being done about forms of religious exchange among Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the medieval and modern period.

Let me give another example of the difference between a historical source and a historical proof. Chakrabarty discusses the role that dreams have in India as proof. In fact, dreams have played such a role in many other settings. The Indians of North America took their dreams seriously as a form of reality and as carriers of commands for their future actions. Jewish and Christian prophets used them in a similar way. The boundary between a dream and a vision was porous. The dreams certainly provide a way to talk about the self and the world, and Jean-Claude Schmitt has shown us beautifully how we can use them as sources for medieval discourse.

To give another example that comes to my mind as we speak: in the history of American memoirs written by slaves or former slaves, there are relatively few writings that give much full detail on the Middle Passage, the Atlantic crossing between Africa and the Americas and the Caribbean. The suffering was immense, as we know from other sources (boat lists, captains’ journals, and the like): with many deaths, desperation, degradation, sometimes uprisings—an experience of trauma. In the nineteenth century, that experience was more often expressed through dance, legends, songs, and stories, animal tales. It was Toni Morrison,²¹ the great novelist, who first talked to me about this; her novel Beloved was partly a symbolization of the Middle Passage, as the mysterious Beloved emerges out of the sea with strange memories. But earlier, in his 1953 novel In the Castle of My Skin, the Barbadian writer George Lamming²² broached the Middle Passage through an old man talking in his sleep. After World War II, the Afro-American poet Robert Hayden²³ interspersed poems about the Holocaust with those about the Middle Passage.

So here we have an important body of sources, including dreams and dance, that can be explicated to understand the impact of slavery, traces of the past, and expressions of sensibility. We use them as such.

DC: It’s what poets known as the grands rhétoriqueurs did at the end of the fifteenth and the early sixteenth centuries. They told a story by turning it into a dream. For example, a funeral lament for the Constable de Bourbon²⁴ became thus recast after his death before the walls of Rome for his sister, the Duchess of Lorraine.²⁵ As the story went, the chronicler, while dozing in his bed (evidently, it’s a convenient fiction), dreamed that the recently deceased constable came to him covered with luminous, brilliant jewels. One dream arises out of another, since the chronicler’s own dream enabled him to enter into the supposedly “real” dream about the life and afterlife of the dead hero. Life returns and everything happens in such a way that what the constable couldn’t express while alive now becomes distinct the moment he ceased to exist. The Constable de Bourbon tells the chronicler, in effect, that after his death he was led away by Mercury, the symbol of reason and language, to hell. But this hell is not the hell of Virgil²⁶ or Dante²⁷ but rather a succession of desolate places with hideous old women who represent worldly sins, such as envy, avarice, and so on. Charles III of Bourbon descends all the way to the cave of Pluto, king of the underworld. It’s there that the literary strategy of the false dream becomes interesting. In reality, Bourbon presents here his description of François I’s court, a place of vice and passion. His dream is a huge allegory about why he left the court and why he refused to remain obedient to his king and instead joined the service of Charles V.²⁸ He wanted to become the man who refused to submit to passion, the pure man who resisted all compromises in order to obey God. Next, after his journey to these dark, dank, and noisy reaches ended, he came to the Island of the Fortunate in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean where he was welcomed by the Famous Lady who promoted him to become her lieutenant for all eternity. The dream allowed the poet to make sense of a make-believe purity that would have ruled the constable’s life, to almost make live again the truth of a person’s inner self haunted by the search for an honor that derived from the will to obey God, to accomplish his designs. But this inner self would not have spoken of it, because a gentleman in the Renaissance speaks by his actions and not his words. Thus, the techniques of writing or rather the revealing of history through a dream became bound up in certain moments with historiography…But we’re in the literary realm of a made-up dream, for sure.

NZD: A splendid tale: your poet/chronicler constructs a dream setting in which an allegorical interpretation of the Constable de Bourbon’s actions is put into the constable’s mouth. And you and I can take it seriously as a sixteenth-century source and discuss the constable through its lens.

DC: Just as dance is a theatrical allegory, the dream itself takes form through a succession of allegories. But, as I’ve indicated, here we’re dealing with a kind of writing whose main conventions depict the dream as a means of transference in the psychoanalytical sense. The deceased person returns and articulates what he could not say during his life through the power of the chronicler who dreamed of him. We’re now dealing with a system of multilayered representations in 1527, the year this funeral lament was composed, in which the subject, even when living, was not supposed to speak about himself or even have others speak on his behalf. It thus fell to the chronicler, through whom the subject returned to fashion, in this dreamlike fiction, the final verdict about himself. It’s all a game that plays with the truth and reality established by the dream, a game of illusions in which the ego cannot be realized through its own voice but rather only by the intervention of another person…But the truth and reality of people in the sixteenth century is not the same as those of historians in the early twenty-first century! Individual identity comes through the discourse of another person and history thus obeys particular constraints. It’s by another person that one can begin to come into touch with oneself, that the other person is the central vector for self-fashioning. The “proof” thus acquires a specific status…

NZD: I surely agree that the “truth and reality of people in the sixteenth century” are not the same as they are for us historians at the opening of the twenty-first century. We must develop the best methods we can, stretch our scholarship and imagination to be able to discover, understand, and describe their sense of “the true and the real.” But we must not abandon our practices of proof. We can be open to new definitions of what constitutes a proof, but we must stay faithful to the ideal of proof, that is, to the ideal possibility—always receding, never fully achieved—of forms of common knowledge in this world of differences, a shared knowledge. If you had a dream that the Constable de Bourbon had spoken to you, it would give me knowledge about you, but I’d want a sixteenth-century source for further knowledge about him. The imaginary dialogue that opens my Women on the Margins was to give my readers information about me and a chance to reflect on my intentions; it might lead my readers to think a little about my three women, but it offered no proof about them.

DC: But from this perspective, your method always remains trapped by the idea that, in a given society, prevailing verities matter less when explaining change than the questions that often arise along that society’s margins. These questions may be dimly evident at the time and only become more crucial much later on. Isn’t the historian’s quandary to investigate questions that become more essential, even in an ontological sense, the more they seem peripheral and lacking significance to mainstream historical approaches? Doesn’t the historian have to accept, sometimes by seeming to be naïve, to work on subjects that lack historical determinacy but that still can, despite their hidden or misleading nature, open up the critical places and moments when an entire era and society changes?

NZD: Sometimes you can find revelation at the margins, sometimes at the center, sometimes in “subjects that lack historical determinacy” (whatever you mean by them), sometimes in subjects classically clear. It depends on the historian, the sources sought, the interpretations put to work. To me an important entry into a period is through its arguments and debates, the unresolved questions that keep being tossed about, the issues on which a consensus seems impossible. Central conflicts or axial debates are great markers or signposts for a period. For the Old Regime in France, it has seemed to me that a central debate, one that stirred up passions and arguments for three or four centuries, was whether one advanced in the world by merit, personal qualities, and virtue; or by friendship and favor, important people you knew; or simply by purchasing advance, buying it. I followed this especially in regard to the argument about royal offices, when I was working on gifts, but the argument goes well beyond offices. It reached out to many other areas, symbolic and social. You can see the connection with religious conflict: how do you advance in God’s eyes?

I don’t think we formulate the issue today in these early modern terms, or at least, I don’t think it’s as central, as axial. For early modern France, rather than saying “this is a society that believed absolutely in hierarchy and was founded upon it,” you could say “this is a society for which the central question was quarreling about hierarchy.” Central disagreements are a good way to characterize a society or a time period.

This recalls a disagreement I had with Michel Foucault.²⁹ Clearly there’s much we all drew from his writings, but I was not in accord with his concept of an unconscious and consensual episteme on which every period is based and that he as a philosopher somehow could extract and describe. (He just gave examples from western Europe, of course.) I raised this question in a talk at a memorial service for him at NYU right after he died, even while speaking of him with admiration and affection. To give one example, if you looked at how some women wrote about ways of knowing and ways of ordering in the seventeenth century, you’d find profoundly divergent views expressed from those he saw as epistemic. There are always these deep discords; the “unity” comes from being bound together in an argument. I’ve even wondered about this in regard to Thomas Kuhn’s celebrated paradigms, which, to be sure, he limited to the way knowledge moves in the history of science.³⁰ But even there, I’ve wondered whether there aren’t always serious disagreements pushing at the edges of paradigms or gnawing from within, and whether the force of the paradigm and its potential for change doesn’t come from an ever-present simmering discord rather than a sudden breakdown when the paradigm is perceived to have lost its explanatory power.

I suppose these views of mine are part of my habits developed when I began as a student of the lower orders. Even when there are issues on which everyone seems in agreement and even though there is exchange across the lines of social class, conflicts and contestation persist. And I suppose, too, that this habit of looking for points of difference goes back to my girlhood as a Jew in a world where I shared many of the views, practices, and customs of those around me, but still felt that I was positioned in it differently and had my own critical views. Perhaps this youthful experience predisposed me to expect that not everyone was in agreement with a seemingly dominant view and that one should seek the points of friction.

DC: Did this critical dissent you felt only focus on the Jewish middle class to which you belonged, or did it have other targets?

NZD: [laughter] There was, indeed, a Jewish middle class, a Jewish bourgeoisie, in Detroit, whose penchant for speaking mostly about automobiles or clothing and the like led me to critical dissent. But here I was speaking of the impact of a larger experience: that of being Jewish in a community that was primarily Christian and with which I did not see eye-to-eye. This kind of experience prepares the way for a different perception from that of Foucault, who, except perhaps in his last work on sexuality in antiquity, focused so on the principle of domination that he lost sight in his writing—if not in his actual life—of the facts of resistance, of a refusal ever to bend.

DC: In these acts of resistance, these refusals of the conscience, you seem to distinguish two forms: first a theatrical one that is open, violent, collective, and another made up of processes revolving around symbols, which can go from a burning desire to write to adopting alienated yet highly singular modes of behavior…

NZD: Yes, I make the distinction between outer social forms of resistance and those that are interior or particular to the individual life. And thinking of the interior life, I’d make the same suggestion about it as I have about historical periods. Rather than always looking for the way power and domination are reinscribed in the individual consciousness the way Foucault does, I think we should look for subjective conflicts. Because we certainly have subjective conflicts. [laughter] Rather than seeking the overall unity in a life, we can see it as marked by interior conflict—sometimes unresolved until death. Surely that’s the drama in the lives of great spiritual figures.

DC: They remain almost attached to the self. Even among those who appear to have realized a way of living that gives them the greatest stability, the greatest assurance. Calvin would attest to it, for the reformer compared himself to a vigilant sentinel watching to prevent the faithful from succumbing to the repeated assaults of Satan, ceaselessly denouncing the sins that could return in them, speaking and writing ferociously against vice. Calvin thus lived a life of obsessive struggle, committed before God never to bend, never to stop speaking out. Calvin was almost tragically forced to surrender every moment of his life, from early morning to late at night, to the apostolic mission he knew God had willed for him, to never interrupt his watch. Calvin, who seemed intensely strong, exclusive, even totalitarian—if I may use that anachronistic term—and who hid his immense fragility, his anxiety that became all the more tragic because it concerned not only his own salvation, but that of the new children of Israel called by God, after centuries of corruption of the faith, to return to him. But didn’t these debates he had with himself, consciously or not, shape his entire life because they remained unresolved? Aren’t contradiction and the questions it raised in the sixteenth century, beyond even what Lucien Febvre wrote about them as instruments rather than urges to understand and to know, the sources of the self’s creative energy and thus the motor force of history? This question of creative energy goes right to the heart, in my opinion, of an analysis centered on individual existence. What is it that makes a person act, think, and escape the confines of thought and action in which he or she is supposed to remain? And this in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to remain in the time period you prefer?

NZD: I very much like what you say about creative energy and innovation having its source in inner conflict. It’s hard to give a general theory about what makes a person escape the confines of thought and action in which they’re supposed to remain. Whenever I’ve come across this in the figures I’ve written about—and they mostly end up escaping some kind of confine—I’ve tried to look for a conjuncture between cultural resources around them from which they could draw and elements in their own life or situation that allowed or encouraged a creative use of those resources.

You refer in passing to Lucien Febvre’s writings about what was possible and impossible to think in sixteenth-century notions of God and the universe. I’ve actually given some thought to conflicts and creative energy in Lucien Febvre’s own life and also in that of Marc Bloch. I wrote about how they tried to situate themselves both at the creative margins and the powerful center, to think of new directions from both positions. In some ways I think it’s true of me as well, a back and forth between margin and center. This is a psychological state that is both fruitful and uncertain.

DC: My question is perhaps absurd: would you prefer Lucien Febvre or Marc Bloch? You have been a bit hard on Lucien Febvre…I have myself always been very skeptical when reading Lucien Febvre, who has seemed to me, since my student days, to have become less readable over the years and weighed down more by a somewhat turgid, dated style. Moreover, people suspected his ambivalence toward Marc Bloch during the war or even the nastiness that often came through in his writings, a nastiness that I now actually find fairly refreshing…When re-reading him, I ask myself if Febvre’s position can’t be explained by identifying him with his subjects, Rabelais and then Erasmus, if in fact he didn’t become another Erasmus or Rabelais by refusing to enter the fray, by preferring to work for the survival of intelligence in barbarous times, by preferring thus to write and join in another kind of possible resistance.

NZD: My personal identification, as I suggested earlier, is with Marc Bloch, but I’ve tried to understand both men and their goals. Febvre wanted to be a fighter and saw himself as such, a strong fighter for cultural reform. He was not a megalomaniac, but some of his projects were grandiose. On the one hand, his book on Martin Luther was truly innovative when he published it in 1928, as I mentioned earlier—trying to understand Luther in a German urban milieu. And his Problème de l’incroyance au XVIe siècle (The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century), published first in 1942, right in the midst of the German Occupation, was very important. It’s true that he underestimated the possibilities for denying the presence of God in the sixteenth century, but his effort to paint the mental universe of sixteenth-century people and their categories for understanding the world was pioneering. He opened a historical-anthropological route for inquiry. On the other hand, his tone became pompous, and a project like the Encylopédie, which he started with Anatole de Monzie³¹ to synthesize all human knowledge, was grandiose.³²

DC: It’s somewhat maddening that he wasted his time in this almost mystical endeavor and that he did not write the other volumes of L’Évolution de I’humanité that he had envisioned…

NZD: I see two sides to Lucien Febvre. The first, the Encylopédie, founded in 1932 under the aegis of Monzie, the Minister of National Education, an effort to reform culture from the center. The second, the Annales, co-founded in 1929 with Marc Bloch, an audacious and innovative periodical, which provided a genuine challenge from the margins. Regarding his conduct during the Occupation, I think he was sincere in believing that “one must keep a French voice alive” during the German Occupation through publishing the Annales, even if it meant removing the name of the Jewish Marc Bloch from the cover: it was a way to show that the Germans had not succeeded in silencing the French. And after much disagreement between the two men, Bloch finally agreed and, as I was able to show from Bloch’s correspondence, Bloch even said that the Annales issues being published during the Occupation were “a fine success” (“un beau succès”). Articles by Bloch were published under a pseudonym, and he sometimes blew his cover by referring to his own Feudal Society. But for Bloch, this was not the only way to oppose the Germans and he finally became part of the Resistance. Febvre was more timid. He liked to think of himself as a fighter and he had ambitious ideas, but he was also very prudent and fearful…

DC: He was, we mustn’t hesitate to say, a true believer that history was a science that enabled a person not only to think about himself in terms of his past, but also to gain gradual access to an idea of universality that transcended violence and strife. Does this mystical dimension account for this ambivalence?

NZD: Possibly that’s a key. In his Problème de l’incroyance, Febvre presented an Erasmian defense of keeping quiet when necessary and of adapting one’s expression to the necessities of a situation of repression—as the Erasmians and Rabelais had done in the sixteenth century, so he believed, and as he liked to think of himself as doing during the Occupation.³³ But this didn’t come without some inner turmoil for him. Also his personal life was full of conflict: his romantic affair with the refugee historian Lucie Varga and his efforts to make it up with his wife, to whom in 1944 he dedicated his book on Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron, a gift to ask for forgiveness.³⁴ And I think he was truly torn apart by Marc Bloch’s death at the hands of the Nazis. There were so many years of friendship between them: one can see it in their correspondence, those letters of friendship, sometimes teasing, but honest. He surely took Marc Bloch’s death as a hero of the Resistance as a kind of reproach to himself, to his own claimed “Erasmian path.” Lucien Febvre was a human being with his weaknesses and his strengths. Bloch is easier to admire: he had fewer pretensions, was enormously creative, found a way to resist after he was banned from teaching as a Jew. Febvre was professor at the Collège de France to the end.

DC: Febvre truly had a sense of mission that recalls the mission of the religious reformers in the sixteenth century…

NZD: But it was an intellectual mission—through the writing of history, to which he may have given a more grandiose role than history books can play by themselves.

DC: Yes, we discover in him a form of language that’s almost mystical, or at least idealistic. The speech he gave in 1941 to the École normale supérieure on the Rue d’Ulm is over the top—when we look at it today—in its enthusiasm for history. It’s history that will save the world from its difficulties, horrors, and conflicts. And when he founded the Cahiers d’histoire mondiale in 1953, which seemed like the beginning of a new idea of history, the notion that guides him is still that of humanity’s future reconciliation…

NZD: Whereas in 1940, following his military service, Bloch wrote Strange Defeat (L’Étrange Défaite)—a work oriented toward practice and action, a realistic analysis of why France had lost so easily to the Germans.

DC: While Febvre never literally spoke of defeat, he spoke about misfortunes that were shattering and tragic. Wouldn’t he have assumed an Erasmian stance in order to avoid talking about what really happened?

NZD: Erasmus himself wrote directly on political matters: think of his writing on peace and the satire of his Praise of Folly. Febvre was certainly very interested in current politics, but it is not centered in his writing, even in his correspondence. In his book on Rabelais, Febvre praised the prudence of the Erasmians of the 1550s, who knew how to be quiet when necessary and, when possible, expressed critical ideas in ways that could get by the censors. I think that’s what he thought he was doing during the Occupation.

DC: At the same time, the Cahiers d’histoire mondiale became conceived as a laboratory that could create the conditions for peace among the people of the world, which thus elevated history into a discourse about peace…

NZD: In that sense Febvre was following an Erasmian hope, but he never had Erasmus’s sense of humor.

DC: That’s why we must, in the end, read and re-read Febvre more than one does today. You’ve shown the reasons why, in his case, we must avoid the risks of overstatement. He can serve for us as a transition point insofar as he was the sort of individual historian who assumes the identity of the past he studies and writes about when, say, dealing with Erasmus or Rabelais, and because he confronted the demands of his own times by using these historical figures as his models. He understood them so much better because he leaned on them when analyzing them.