The Craft of History

I have several connections with Marc Bloch, the French historian who was shot in 1944 for being in the Resistance during the war.  My great-uncle studied briefly with him in Paris in 1938 just after Bloch moved from to the capital from his position as Professor of Medieval History at the University of Strasbourg and who always proclaimed he was the ‘best’ historian he’d ever worked with.  His La Societe feodale was one of the first books I read at university in the late-60s though in a translation that betrayed the elegance of the original and several years ago I acquired a copy of a book on medieval France that Bloch had signed and which, presumably came from his own library.  Although medieval history had come a long way in the past seventy years, Bloch remains an important historian who is still worth reading even if some of his conclusions are now open to question.  Very few academics revolutionise the way in which History is studied, but Bloch did that, helping to create the hugely influential Annales school, which argued compellingly in favour of the study of ‘history from below’—of everyday life, that is, studied in the context of geography and the social environment and over la longue durée, the long term: typically a thousand years or more.

 

His Apologie pour l’histoire ou métier d’historien was first published in England as The Historian’s Craft in 1954, an American edition had appeared the previous year.  Written between 1941 and 1943 ‘as a simple antidote by which, amid sorrows and anxieties, both personal and collective’, it was never completed and was ‘reconstructed’ from three draft copies by his friend Lucien Febvre.  It lacks any references –Bloch intended to add these later—and whether what we have is what Bloch would have ultimately published is debatable.  It was a work in progress but despite this it has proved a popular and widely read study that has been translated into eight languages.  In 1952, Italian and Spanish translations appeared,  soon followed in 1953 by an English translation. Other translations have appeared: in Germany, Estonia, Hungary, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Czechoslovakia and the USSR. The total circulation of the book is over 450,000 copies worldwide.

The Historian’s Craft  was a response to Bloch’s son’s question ‘What is the use of history?’ and is divided into an introduction and five chapters: the past and history, evidence, historical criticism, historical analysis and causation.  For Bloch, history is the science of men in time.  Time is a continuum and the past can only be explained in terms of the present and the present in terms of the past.  This was echoed several decades later by Arthur Marwick when he called history ‘a social necessity’.  The reciprocal relationship between past and present, Bloch argued, can be penetrated by the use of tools of the historical dialectic such as observation, criticism, analysis and the concept of causation.  Observation was a complex search for ‘tracks’ often partially obliterated or wholly destroyed while evidence changes its character and meaning and can only be interpreted by rigorous criticism.  Perhaps the most important chapter is on historical analysis.  For Bloch, if historians are to fulfil their real function, they must be able to see what is behind the record, to fathom what is never recorded in so many words.  There must be a victory of mind over material.

Bloch’s focus is on professional practice based on a division of labour and specialisation and cooperation of all those who practice’ .  The originality of the work lies in the consideration of the new developments in the history of epistemology and philosophy of science. Bloch placed considerable emphasis on communication issues: communication with the community of historians demanding a common language and communication with the public through a language accessible to everyone. Bloch was convinced that the historian’s function was to strive to enrich the collective memory, not simply in the service of a country and that historians alone were willing to serve all humanity. 

What are turning points in history?

Martin Luther nailing his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of Wittenberg Cathedral in 1517, the Renaissance, the battle of Trafalgar in 1805, Waterloo a decade later, the outbreak of the First World War in 1914….are all regarded by historians (well at least some of them) as ‘turning points’ in history. But what does this actually mean?  In Martin Luther’s case, his actions precipitated the Reformation; the Renaissance marked the divide between medievalism and modernism; Trafalgar and Waterloo were landmark battles that marked Napoleon’s final defeat on sea and land; while the First World War marked the end of autocratic regimes and the beginnings of European-wide democratic systems of government.  But this is a retrospective judgement, a construct historians use to delineate the distinction between events and those events that have a retrospective significance.  Take, for instance, Luther’s action.  There had been criticism of the Papacy almost since it was established a thousand years earlier: it was too worldly, too corrupt, too concerned with economic and political aggrandisement than spiritual purity.  In nailing his list of criticisms to the cathedral door, Luther was doing what others had done in the past and would do so in the future: he was suggesting that some reform of the Church was necessary to make in more spiritual and concerned with the spiritual needs of the people.  It was a petition seeking support, comment and debate.  Luther may have been seeking a re-formation of the Church as an institution but only later did he seek a doctrinal reformation.  Had Luther’s criticism been addressed by the Church would there have been a Reformation at all?  Possibly but equally possibly not.

So what is a turning point in history?  If one accepts that the past is a linear progression from A to B (and it’s a pretty messy linear progression anyway), then a turning point marks the point at which individuals, groups, nations or states move in a radically different direction.  It’s a bit like going up the M1 and intending to come off at junction 25 but deciding, for whatever reason, to leave at junction 23.  You may not have planned it -- and turning points are almost always not planned – but it seemed a good idea at the time.  Only later do you realise that it literally marked a turning point.  Life, now as then, is made up of choices and possibilities and we all have pasts that could have led to different presents.  Individuals in the past had myriad possibilities just as we do and it is historians who judge whether decision C marked a turning point or not and inevitably historians disagree over this and there is further confusion since what are turning points change over time.  Take, for instance, the Suffragette movement.  The early historiography of the movement established a linear connection between its growing militancy and women (some at least) obtaining the vote in 1918.  More recently historians have suggested that militancy far from helping this process of voting changes possibly delayed it and that the role of non-militant suffragists was far more important in persuading male politicians that giving women the vote did not threaten Britain’s emerging democracy.  So which was the turning point, the formation of the Nation Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies in 1897 or the formation of the Women’s Suffrage and Political Union six years later?  The significance of particular events in the Second World War also illustrates the problem of defining turning points.  Which of the following marked a turning point? The defeat of the U-boat threat in the Atlantic, the Battle of Britain, Pear Harbor, El Alamein and D-Day.  All? Some? None? Or were they simply part of the process that led to the real turning point: the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945? 

The use of turning points is a historiographical short-hand for something of significance, a point where things change irremediably. But it is always a matter of debate and argument.  If there ever was a collective noun for historians, it would be a disagreement.