Chapter Three

EGO- HISTORY

THE FIRST signs of a shift appeared in the 1980s. At the begin-

ning, there was a spectacular rise in studies of memory and the
linguistic turn, which brought the questioning of identity into
the humanities and social sciences. This coincided, on the polit-
ical level, with the neoconservative turn embodied by Ronald
Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: as public discourse focused on
victims and human rights, historians began to abandon the ana-
lytical categories that had dominated the two preceding
decades, especially those of class and collective action. With the
fading of the great structuralist wave, the subject was coming
back with force and reclaiming its rights. At the end of the
decade, the fall of communism tipped the world into the twenty-
first century, deeply shaking all its traditional identity bench-
marks. The return of subjectivity also reflected this disorienta-
tion and entry into a world that previous interpretive keys no
longer allowed us to understand. In 1979, Lawrence Stone
 EGO- HISTORY

published a noted article in which he announced, as a vision-

ary, a “return to narrative”: without calling into question the
achievements of their discipline—notably its analytical
character—historians rediscovered a taste for narration.1
In 1987, three years after inaugurating his major historio-
graphical project on Realms of Memory, Pierre Nora gathered
essays of “ego-history” by seven French scholars in a collection.
The title was evocative, but, by his claims, the book was not very
popular. It foreshadowed a trend that had not yet taken form.
In the introduction, he rightly presented this enterprise as “a
laboratory experiment in which historians attempt to turn into
historians of themselves.”2 Of course, this did not mean reveal-
ing their private lives; it was more about the reconstruction of
their academic trajectories, the exploration of their personal
workshops, their intellectual customs, and their methodologi-
cal choices, thus encouraging them to reconsider their careers
and their works, which could prove fruitful. In order to avoid
misunderstandings, Nora set limits upon this exercise: “These
are not phony literary autobiographies, pointless intimate con-
fessions, abstract professions of faith, or attempts at basic
psychoanalysis.”3
Unlike his nineteenth-century predecessors who tended to
hide behind their archival files, or even “to hide their personal-
ity behind their knowledge,” explained Nora, the contemporary
historian now had to be ready to “admit there is a close and quite
intimate link between themselves and their work.” It was still
just a hypothesis, a path to explore, but it had to be tried. This
self-awareness was basically a safer and more effective “shelter”
than conventional oaths of objectivity. The merits of the

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enterprise were evident: “The unveiling and analysis of existen-

tial involvement, rather than moving away from some impar-
tial investigation, becomes instead an instrument for improv-
ing understanding.”4 The goal was not therefore to question the
principle of objectivity, which remained at the heart of the dis-
cipline, but rather to note that historical objectivity required
mature scholars aware of their personal involvement, capable of
seeing themselves in the mirror amidst their work, and warned
of the naive and illusory character of historiographical positiv-
ism. The project was ambitious, nonetheless, since Nora defined
it as the elaboration of “a genre: ego-history, a new genre for a
new period of historical consciousness.”5
The Essais d’ego-histoire bring together texts by Maurice
Agulhon, Pierre Chaunu, Georges Duby, Raul Girardet,
Jacques Le Goff, Michelle Perrot, and René Rémond. In the
1980s, feminism certainly had a history, but gender parity had
not yet entered into academic mores. The creation of this col-
lection was no easy task, since there were many refusals, as Nora
himself notes in his preface, even if nobody denied “the meth-
odological interest of the proposal.” For many historians, writ-
ing in the first person meant breaking a taboo. Paul Veyne—
who would later write his memoirs— explained his refusal as
such: “I cannot; and it is not for lack of trying.”6 Future memo-
rialists such as Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Annie Kriegel also
refused. After beginning his text in the third person, by the
same token, Pierre Goubert gave up. Recently, Patrick Bouch-
eron found, at the Institute for Contemporary Publishing
Archives (IMEC), a first version of Georges Duby’s essay, dated
1983. It is significantly different from the one published four

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years later, and, notably, it is written in the third person. This

is how it starts: “In the summer of 1914, a few days before the
general mobilization, Georges Duby’s parents celebrated their
marriage. Their only child was born on October 7, 1919, in Paris,
in the 10th arrondissement. The father was 36 years old, the
mother 29.” 7 The style is refined, literary, and enjoyable to read.
Far from the bursts of intelligence, passion, erudition, and crit-
ical thinking that fill the pages of History Continues (1991),
which deals with the profession of the historian, this first essay
on ego-history seems insipid: the polite, detached narrative, a
bit bootlicking and self-satisfied with a brilliant academic
career.8 Fascinated from early on by Marc Bloch’s The Royal
Touch: Monarchy and Miracles in France and England and Feudal
Society, he tells how this reading “unintentionally made him into
a medievalist.”9 In the late 1930s, G.D.— as he calls himself
throughout the text—would have settled nicely in Besançon:
“He liked the city, simple, robust, devoid of bourgeois affecta-
tion.”10 The essay ends with his accession to the Collège de
France thanks to the intervention in his favor by Paul Lemerle
and Fernand Braudel. “G.D. was not without astonishment at
the grace which the institute bestowed upon him in welcoming
him,” he writes with a very bourgeois preciosity, concluding
with an equally conventional admission of modesty: “Very sen-
sitive to this kind of honors, yet he is sometimes surprised to
hold for another the one spoken of around him by pronouncing
his name.”11 It gives the impression, at moments, of reading Vol-
taire’s Mémoires (1776), also written in the third person: “The
King of Prussia thus called Mr. Voltaire to him.”12

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Visibly disappointed with this first version, a CV in literary

form, and “fearing to appear affected,” Duby decided to rewrite
his text in the first person, but not without warning the reader
first. He would not tell his life story in it: “I will only show part
of me in this ego-history. The ego-laborer, if you will, or the ego-
faber.”13 He would not say anything about what he liked, would
not speak, for example, of his passion for the theater or for
music, to the point of underscoring the censorship he imposed
on himself: “It is quite evident that the essential here is silent.”
He warned the readers that they would only find his “public life”
there, and even advised them to “cast a wary gaze” on what
would follow. Despite this admission of modesty and self-
censorship, Duby wrote a much more lively and personal text.
However, he could not help but express his mistrust of the exer-
cise he had just completed in his conclusion. His dissatisfac-
tion was not so much about his text or his accomplishments; it
was due to his skepticism toward the very possibility of histori-
ans writing their own history. The “new genre” that Nora called
for did not arouse his enthusiasm. He does not feel that “the
historian is better placed than anyone to explore the memories
that concern him” and calls upon the intransigence of poster-
ity: “If by chance someone later seeks to inquire about what was
in France, in the second third of the twentieth century, the pro-
fession of the historian, may he severely criticize this testi-
mony.”14 A refusal, therefore, to deliver his private life as well
as a failure of an attempt at an intellectual self-portrait.

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Pierre Nora probably did not imagine that his “laboratory

experiment” simply announced an autobiographical wave. Even
without doing an inventory, as Jeremy Popkin and Jaume Aurell
have attempted, one might sketch its typology by distinguish-
ing four main categories. The first includes works in which the
authors recount their lives, both public and private, bringing
together intimate moments and professional experiences (Bene-
dict Anderson, Saul Friedländer, Peter Gay, Eric J. Hobsbawm,
Tony Judt, Mario Isnenghi, Walter Laqueur, George L. Mosse,
Pierre Nora, Paul Veyne, and Eli Zaretsky).15 The second gath-
ers the autobiographies written as stories of oneself—Aurell
calls them “monographic approaches to the self ”16 —based on
carefully verified sources and personal archives, in which inti-
macy coexists with a presentation of the work accomplished, all
supported by a rich apparatus of bibliographic notes (Annie
Kriegel and Pierre Vidal-Naquet).17 Vidal-Naquet’s memoirs,
which are based, beyond his own memories, on his father’s
letters and diary, describe the method. As he specifies in the
foreword to the first volume, it is “a history book as much as a
memory book, a history book of which I am both the author
and the object.”18
The third category includes autobiographies that, centered on
an intellectual trajectory, explain certain methodological choices
and develop a self-reflexive approach on the transformations
that have affected historiography itself (Georges Duby, Geoff
Eley, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Tulio Halperín Donghi, Raul Hilberg,
Dominick LaCapra, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Gérard
Noiriel, Zeev Sternhell, and others).19 They can take the form

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of an intellectual fresco, describe the birth of a historian’s

vocation, or retrace a singular itinerary, impervious to both
external fashions and academic conformism (Hilberg). They
shape a particular genre that Carl E. Schorske calls the “pro-
fessional self-portrait,”20 which, as Eley underscores, avoids
the pitfalls of total self-referentiality.21
Finally, the fourth group is made up of autobiographies
anchored in foundational historical experiences such as wars,
genocides, or revolutions, which have deeply marked both col-
lective and individual life. This is the case with the autobiogra-
phies generated by the involvement of their authors in World
War II (Paul Fussell, Richard Pipes, and Fritz Stern), 22 the
Holocaust (Friedländer’s first self-portrait),23 or the revolts of
the 1960s and 1970s (Anna Bravo, Giovanni De Luna, Luisa
Passerini, Sheila Rowbotham, Benjamin Stora). 24 Some texts
are unclassifiable, for example, Landscape for a Good Woman by
Carolyn Steedman (1986). Anticipating by several decades a
trend that is now widespread, Steedman weaves biography and
autobiography into the same story, her own story and that of
her mother, by introducing first-person writing into a period
painting that depicts, according to the methods of British social
history, the life of the working classes of south London in the
1950s and 1960s.25 In most cases, however, these autobiographies
were written on the fringes of a scholarly work carefully adher-
ing to the norm of third-person narrative. In short, these were
authorized “transgressions,” more or less recognized as such. If
we attempt a comparison with literature and philosophy, we
could say that these personal narratives occupy, in the pathways

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of their authors, an isolated and singular position, a bit like the

Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter by Simone de Beauvoir (1958),
The Words by Jean-Paul Sartre (1963), and, more recently, Auto-
ritratto nello studio by Giorgio Agamben (2017).26
While there are several studies on female autobiographical
writing,27 feminist historians who have chosen to express them-
selves in the first person (Anna Bravo, Luisa Passerini, Sheila
Rowbotham, Carolyn Steedman) remain few in number. The
fundamental place they grant to the question of the body is a
central point of their works. The movements of the 1960s and
1970s—a founding experience for many of them—were an arena
of discovery of collective action in which, beyond the utopian
imagination and the critique of domination, sexual liberation
was theorized and practiced. The social fabrication of gender is
inscribed in the body, as are certain more individual and inti-
mate existential turns. Steedman’s life stories explain, among
other things, her own refusal of biological motherhood. Passer-
ini gives several examples of her way of somatizing certain
affects; when her father dies, she is seized by a feeling of guilt—
the fear of not having been a good daughter—which leads her
to the edge of the “abyss”: “I felt a bundle of muscles between
my stomach and abdomen relax and contract. Spasms, shaking,
and sobs.”28 With age, she also becomes aware of her resem-
blance to her mother: “Every day I discover new sides of my
mother: I remember her slender but strong hips, the solidity of
the abdomen that carried me and to which I can entrust myself,
I feel that she cared about me, I rediscover the security of being
loved.”29 She believes that she is able to “speak to her inner image
which I carry within myself.” 30 Recalling with Joan Wallach

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Scott that the very notion of “women” is a cultural construct,

Passerini does not make the female body the sign of destiny;
rather, she sees it as a sort of interface, a place of interaction
between the biological and the cultural, between the material
and symbolic dimensions of a life. This experience of the body
being shared explains a certain feminist reluctance to say “I,” a
pronoun more often replaced, as in the case of Wallach Scott,
by an “ego-historical plural” in which the “we” sometimes des-
ignates female historians and feminists and sometimes women.31

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Of course, the typology I have established is not exhaustive. Its

selective character is due, among other things, to the limits of
my linguistic knowledge and fields of competence, but it brings
together the most well-known figures and constitutes a signifi-
cant sample all the same. The “geopolitical” dimension of these
historian autobiographies is not without interest. The vast
majority of them come from the Anglo-American world and,
to a lesser extent, from France. Among them we find a consid-
erable number of Jewish authors, a collection of fractured lives
and unconventional pathways, and, as a result, a powerful desire
to save the legacy of a submerged world. On the other hand,
these life stories bring out a characteristic feature of Western
culture at the start of the twenty-first century: when an auto-
biographical story sets out to account for an intellectual jour-
ney and to place its existential dimension in a historical con-
text, especially that of the interwar period, it is the author’s
status as “victim” (or as close to victims) that seems to give it

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legitimacy. It is striking to note that, compared to the consider-

able number of memoirs of exiles, there are few autobiographies
of historians who have experienced fascist regimes in situ. The
autobiographies of German Jewish exiles far exceed those of
their colleagues in the Federal Republic, who nevertheless con-
stitute an incomparably larger cohort. The era when Friedrich
Meinecke wrote his memoirs as a sort of academic Bildungsro-
man is over.32 Today, the autobiographies of German histori-
ans are exceptions (like that of Nicolaus Sombart) or bear wit-
ness to other unsettled lives, 33 such as those of “survivors” of
the Democratic Republic of Germany (for example, Jürgen
Kuczynski and Hans Mayer, who, however, were also exiled
Jews).34 In Italy and Spain, autobiographies of historians are
almost nonexistent, even among those who had to flee fascism
(Gaetano Salvemini is an exception). 35 This is a shame,
because the transition of Delio Cantimori from fascism to
communism, the exile and antifascist choice of Arnaldo
Momigliano, the expatriation of Juan-José Carreras, or the
training in Francoist Spain of a Marxist historian such as Josep
Fontana would undoubtedly have given rise to fascinating
stories.36
While these “transgressions” remain isolated moments in a
historian’s itinerary, recognition of the subjective dimension
implicit in historical research, of the fact that historians inject
a part of themselves into their works, has been far more frequent
in the past twenty years. This admission that once seemed
almost obscene, like the violation of a taboo or the confession
of sin, has gradually been accepted as a form of intellectual hon-
esty. Thus, at the start of his The Age of Extremes (1994), Eric J.

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Hobsbawm remembers having lived the twentieth century as

an adult: “My own lifetime coincides with most of the period
with which this book deals, and for most of it, from early teen-
age to the present, I have been conscious in public affairs, that
is to say I have accumulated views and prejudices about it as a
contemporary rather than as a scholar.”37 As a historian, he spec-
ifies, his “period” is the nineteenth century, and therefore his
book is ultimately a departure from his disciplinary choices. In
short, the reader should know that he wrote his work as a “com-
mitted spectator” as much as a historian: “No one who has
lived through this extraordinary century is likely to abstain from
judgement. It is understanding that comes hard.”38
In his preface to The Passing of an Illusion (1995), François
Furet admits the “biographical connection” in the theme of his
book. “My subject is thus inseparable from my existence,” he
writes, adding that he intensely experienced the “illusion” whose
course he traces in order to analyze it.39 Four decades after his
break with the Communist Party, he thus reconsiders his “erst-
while blindness with neither indulgence nor acrimony.” With-
out indulgence, because his aim is anything but apologetic—
his book will be the culmination of a vast anticommunist
campaign after the fall of the USSR—and without acrimony,
because he was able to learn the lessons of that “unfortunate
engagement” of his youth.
Paul Fussell, author of The Great War and Modern Memory
(1975), a work that introduced cultural history into military stud-
ies, underscores the extent to which his own experience as an
American soldier wounded in the south of France during World
War II allowed him to explore the corporeal dimension of

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modern warfare.40 Omer Bartov, to whom we owe a reference

work on the German soldiers mobilized on the Eastern Front
between 1941 and 1945, admits to having also forged an “empa-
thetic” connection with the subjects of his study. “My personal
experiences as an Israeli soldier and citizen,” he writes in the
preface to Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third
Reich (1991), “have had a substantial, if indirect impact on my
views as a historian. When writing about the Wehrmacht I
found myself drawing on my own experiences.”41 This helped
him understand the mental world of the German military,
although he obviously could not identify with the purpose of
their war.
From the observation of the subjectivity inherent in their
works, some historians have tried to integrate it as a legitimate,
not to mention necessary, dimension of their methodology.
One can easily perceive the traces, in this effort, of the influ-
ence of psychoanalysis, which enabled historians to become
aware of the moments of “transfer” that intervene in their
approach to the past. In his introduction to the second volume
of Nazi Germany and the Jews (2007), Saul Friedländer empha-
sizes that the historicization of National Socialism must give
way to the memory of victims, which requires the intervention
of the subjectivity of the historians themselves. Conducting
their investigation, the latter tend to construct a “protective
shield” that separates them from their object, thus establishing
the distance that is the very premise of historical knowledge.
However, it happens this screen is suddenly torn by the discov-
ery of a source—a document, a letter, an image, any material

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object, including the most banal—that arouses an intense

emotion, generates in them a strong empathetic identification,
and thus throws disorder into their tidy workshop. This kind of
“transfer” is both an epistemological obstacle and an advantage
for historians working on the twentieth century. If they man-
age to master and surmount it, the emotional turmoil can
prove fruitful, especially if they work with experiences filed in
administrative archives that tend to reify, fix, and “freeze”
the past.
According to Friedländer, the emergence of an “individual
voice” can “tear the seamless interpretation” and call scholarly
“detachment” and “objectivity” into question. This “disruptive
function,” which endangers the linearity of the narrative, he
believes, can become “essential to the historical representation
of mass extermination and other sequences of mass suffering
that ‘business as usual historiography’ necessarily domesticates
and ‘flattens.’ ”42 Mobilizing the psychoanalytic lexicon,
Friedländer defines the search for a balance between distanc-
ing and empathic identification as a process of “working
through” (Freudian Durcharbeitung),43 which makes it possible
to avoid the impasses— contradictory but convergent—where
the emotional surge leads like cold and soothing reification,
memorial fetishism like the naivety of linear narratives.
The emergence of the “I” narrative in contemporary histori-
ography might be seen, in several respects, as a response to this
methodological questioning. A response from a generation that,
unlike Hobsbawm, Furet, or Friedländer, did not live through
the time it was studying and should therefore make no effort to

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keep it at a distance. The part of subjectivity it injects into the

narrative of the past becomes a modality of interpretation; it is
no longer the result of a confrontation between lived experience
and knowledge, even less of the working through of a trauma
suffered.

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