French National Myth
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French National Myth
The historiography of France examines how historians have interpreted and written about French history over time, reflecting shifting political, cultural, and intellectual contexts. It can refer to the different ways that French and foreign historians have perceived French history, the role that perceptions of history have played in French politics and wider culture or the historiographical schools, such as the Annales School, which started or developed in France. During the Ancien Régime, historical writing often served dynastic or religious purposes, exemplified by court historians and church chroniclers who promoted the monarchy and Catholic orthodoxy. The Enlightenment introduced a critical shift, with thinkers like Voltaire and Montesquieu seeking to explain historical change through a more secular analysis. The French Revolution and the early to mid nineteenth century saw more nationalist narratives with the growth of an enduring national myth with historians such as Jule ...
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Historiography
Historiography is the study of the methods used by historians in developing history as an academic discipline. By extension, the term ":wikt:historiography, historiography" is any body of historical work on a particular subject. The historiography of a specific topic covers how historians have studied that topic by using particular sources, techniques of research, and theoretical approaches to the interpretation of documentary sources. Scholars discuss historiography by topic—such as the historiography of the United Kingdom, of historiography of World War II, WWII, of the Pre-Columbian era, pre-Columbian Americas, of early historiography of early Islam, Islam, and of Chinese historiography, China—and different approaches to the work and the genres of history, such as political history and social history. Beginning in the nineteenth century, the development of academic history produced a great corpus of historiographic literature. The extent to which historians are influence ...
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Marc Bloch
Marc Léopold Benjamin Bloch ( ; ; 6 July 1886 – 16 June 1944) was a French historian. He was a founding member of the Annales School of French social history. Bloch specialised in medieval history and published widely on France in the Middle Ages, medieval France over the course of his career. As an academic, he worked at the University of Strasbourg (1920 to 1936 and 1940 to 1941), the University of Paris (1936 to 1939), and the University of Montpellier (1941 to 1944). Born in Lyon to an History of the Jews in Alsace, Alsatian Jewish family, Bloch was raised in Paris, where his father—the classical historian Gustave Bloch—worked at Sorbonne University. Bloch was educated at various Parisian lycées and the , and from an early age was affected by the antisemitism of the Dreyfus affair. During the First World War, he served in the French Army and fought at the First Battle of the Marne and the Battle of the Somme, Somme. After the war, he was awarded his doctorate in 1918 ...
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Taylor & Francis
Taylor & Francis Group is an international company originating in the United Kingdom that publishes books and academic journals. Its parts include Taylor & Francis, CRC Press, Routledge, F1000 (publisher), F1000 Research and Dovepress. It is a division of Informa, a United Kingdom-based publisher and conference company. Overview Founding The company was founded in 1852 when William Francis (chemist), William Francis joined Richard Taylor (editor), Richard Taylor in his publishing business. Taylor had founded his company in 1798. Their subjects covered agriculture, chemistry, education, engineering, geography, law, mathematics, medicine, and social sciences. Publications included the ''Philosophical Magazine''. Francis's son, Richard Taunton Francis (1883–1930), was sole partner in the firm from 1917 to 1930. Acquisitions and mergers In 1965, Taylor & Francis launched Wykeham Publications and began book publishing. T&F acquired Hemisphere Publishing in 1988, and the compa ...
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Histoire/Geschichte
"Histoire/Geschichte" is a series of Franco-German history coursebooks, published since 2006. The projects aims to create a "shared vision" between French and Germans regarding the history of Europe since Antiquity. The project originated from the "Franco-German Youth Parliament" in Berlin on 21 January 2003 which gathered 500 young pupils from the French and German upper secondary school at the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the Franco-German Élysée Treaty, later taken up by German Department for Foreign Affairs and French Ministry of Education. They suggested the development of a "history coursebook having the same content in both countries so that negative preconceptions caused by mutual ignorance might be avoided". This coursebook has been available since September 2006 for grade 12 students (Klasse 12/13 in Germany). It is published jointly by Editis in France and Ernst Klett in Germany. A coursebook for grade 11 has also been produced. The set of three coursebooks will ...
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Nouvelle Histoire
The term ''new history'', from the French term ''nouvelle histoire'' (), was coined by Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Nora, leaders of the third generation of the ''Annales'' school, in the 1970s. The movement can be associated with cultural history, history of representations, and '' histoire des mentalités''. The new history movement's inclusive definition of the proper matter of historical study has also given it the label total history. The movement was contrasted with the traditional ways of writing history which focused on politics and " great men". The new history rejected any insistence on composing historical narrative; an emphasis on administrative documents as basic source materials; concern with individuals' motivations and intentions as explanatory factors for historical events; and the old belief in objectivity. The approach was rejected by Marxist historians because it downplayed what Marxists believed was the central role of class in shaping history. History in ...
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Historiography Of Vichy France
The historiography of Vichy France, is the study in which historians and researchers in the Human science, human sciences analyse the regime of Vichy France (which de facto governed the metropolitan territory of France from June 1940 to August 1944), was one of the most debated topics in French historical research during the 1980s and 1990s. The major stages of historiography The historiography of the Vichy regime can be divided into three main stages. This phase is marked by the work of the essayist and academic Robert Aron (''History of Vichy'', 1954), who focuses particularly on Vichy's relations with Germany, and the sociologist and geographer André Siegfried (''From the Third to the Fourth Republic, 1956''), who is more attached to the internal functioning of the regime. With hindsight, its main characteristic seems to be to distinguish between a "good Vichy", dominated by the figure of Marshal Pétain (1940-1942) and who would have played a kind of double game with Germany, ...
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Historiography Of The Battle Of France
The historiography of the Battle of France describes how the German victory over French and British forces in the Battle of France had been explained by historians and others. Many people in 1940 found the fall of France unexpected and earth shaking. Alexander notes that Belgium and the Netherlands fell to the German army in a matter of days and the British were soon driven back to the British Isles, Contemporary comment While the French armies were being defeated, the government turned to elderly warriors from the First World War. At a time many civilians felt there must be a wicked conspiracy afoot, these new leaders blamed a leftist culture inculcated by the schools for the failure, a theme that has repeatedly appeared in conservative commentary since 1940. General Maxime Weygand said as he took over in May 1940, "What we are paying for is twenty years of blunders and neglect. It is out of the question to punish the generals and not the teachers who have refused to develop ...
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Historiography Of The Paris Commune
In the history of labor, socialism, and revolutions, the historiography of the Paris Commune connects its 1871 events with the revolutions of 1848 and 1917. Historical interpretation of the Commune influenced subsequent revolutionary ideology and sociopolitical events. As of the late 20th century, there were two main historiographical schools of thought: the political interpretation, that the Commune was a patriotic eruption of fury in response to circumstantial hardship following the Siege of Paris; and the social interpretation, that the Commune was the result of macro socioeconomic forces boiling over, e.g., that it was a war of class struggle. Histories in the latter interpretation have used the Commune's events to make ideological points on behalf of their authors, either that the Commune was an illegitimate, criminal aggression, or that the Commune was the consummation of revolutionary momentum. Similarly, historians within both the political and social interpretations ha ...
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Pierre Nora
Pierre Charles Nora (; 17 November 1931 – 2 June 2025) was a French historian elected to the Académie Française on 7 June 2001. As editor at Éditions Gallimard, he established the ''Library of Social Sciences'' in 1966 and the ''Library of Histories'' in 1970. He was director of studies at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences from 1977 for four decades. Nora is known for having directed , four volumes focused on places and objects of remembrance which incarnate the national memory of the French, writing a new history (). Early life and education Nora was born in Paris on 17 November 1931, the youngest son of four children – the others were Simon, Jean and Jacqueline – born to Gaston Nora, a prominent Parisian urologist, and his wife, Julie Lehman. During the war, he became acquainted with intellectuals Jean Prévost and Jean Beaufret, who was to become a major figure in the introduction of Heidegger's philosophy to France. In the 1950s, ...
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Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie
Emmanuel Bernard Le Roy Ladurie (, 19 July 1929 – 22 November 2023) was a French historian whose work was mainly focused upon Languedoc in the ''Ancien Régime'', particularly the history of the peasantry. One of the leading historians of France, Le Roy Ladurie has been called the "standard-bearer" of the third generation of the ''Annales'' school and the "rock star of the medievalists", noted for his work in social history.Huges-Warrington, Marnie, ''Fifty Key Thinkers on History'', London: Routledge, 2000 page 194. Early life and career Le Roy Ladurie was born in Les Moutiers-en-Cinglais, Calvados. His father was Jacques Le Roy Ladurie, who would become minister of Agriculture for Marshal Philippe Pétain and subsequently a member of the French Resistance after breaking with the Vichy regime. Le Roy Ladurie described his childhood in Normandy growing up on his family estate in the countryside as intensely Catholic and royalist in politics. The Le Roy Ladurie family were o ...
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Georges Duby
Georges Duby (; 7 October 1919 – 3 December 1996) was a French historian who specialised in the social and economic history of the Middle Ages. He ranks among the most influential medieval historians of the twentieth century and was one of France's most prominent public intellectuals from the 1970s to his death. In 2019, his work was published in the '' Bibliothèque de la Pléiade''. He is one of the rare historians to benefit from such an honor, with Herodotus, Thucydides, Ibn Khaldoun, Froissart and Michelet. Early life and education Born in Paris to a family of craftsmen of Burgundian and Alsacian origin, Duby was initially educated in the field of historical geography before he moved into history. He earned an undergraduate degree at Lyon in 1942 and completed his graduate thesis at the Sorbonne under Charles-Edmond Perrin in 1952. Career He taught first at Besançon and then at the University of Aix-en-Provence before he was appointed in 1970 to the Chair of ...
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Longue Durée
The (; ) is the French Annales School approach to the study of history. It gives priority to long-term historical structures over what François Simiand called ("evental history", the short-term time-scale that is the domain of the chronicler and the journalist). It concentrates instead on all-but-permanent or slowly evolving structures, and replaces elite biographies with the broader syntheses of prosopography. The crux of the idea is to examine extended periods of time and draw conclusions from historical trends and patterns. Approach The is part of a tripartite system that includes short-term and medium-term conjunctures (periods of decades or centuries when more profound cultural changes such as the industrial revolution can take place). The approach, which incorporates social scientific methods such as the recently evolved field of economic history into general history, was pioneered by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre in the Interwar period. The approach was carried on by ...
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