Guy Thuillier: "Paris will save nothing."

There is something out of the ordinary about this prodigiously energetic historian and French patriot who taunts Paris, where he lives and works, with the cry, "Paris will save nothing." At the core of Thuillier's great passion is the province of the Nivernais, his commitment to regional and local history, and his desire to take history back from the nation's professional historians. Although Thuillier is no separatist, he finds in the provinces the richness of France, a key to understanding the modern world and its dramatic transformation of societies and cultures, and a subject capable of leading historians to the writing of a less ideological and faddish history.

A conversation with Thuillier is marked by loquacity, energy, and imagination. Moment by moment he stands history on its head with a succession of new subjects and approaches to the past, while hesitating occasionally only to persist, "After all, monsieur, you must understand, I am not really a university historian. I am only an amateur historian who works as un petit fonctionnaire."

This humble functionary is anything but that. Born in 1932 in Vaucouleurs, in Jean d'Arc's Lorraine, he is a graduate of Institut d'etudes politiques de Paris, Ecole pratique des Hautes Etudes, and Ecole nationale d'administration. An officier de l'ordre national du Merite, he serves as a conseiller maitre in France's national accounting office the Cour des comptes, where he began his career in 1961. Explaining in large part Thuillier's remarkable capacity to point out and assimilate whole uncharted domains of history, his career has led him from the auditing of French prefecture in Saida, Algeria, to serving as an auditor, technical advisor and public auditor to the national offices of election, labor, education, public health, social security, the National Assembly, and the Cour itself.

While pursuing a successful administrative career, Thuillier has served as Director of Studies at Ecole pratique des Hautes Etudes (IVe section) and, incredibly, has written 35 books and approximately 300 articles on French history, politics, and administration. His books, which only partially indicate the diversity of his interests and writing, range from the history of administrative training, bureaucracy, fiscal policy and money itself; the history of shipping, drugs, health, work, and women in administration; and the history of everyday life, local and regional history, and life in almost all aspects of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Nivernais, where he still continues to do research. The worth of his contributions to history of administration, especially his unique quest to demonstrate the existence of administrative cultures, will have to be judged by others. I believe the value of his theoretical and applied contribution to the history of local and regional history is beyond question. It began in 1959 with his Georges Dufaud et les debuts du grand capitalisme dans la metallurgie en Nivernais au XIXe siecle (1959), and continues since his 1986 La vie quotidienne des ouvriers des forges en Nivernais au XIXe siecle. Eugen Weber, who acknowledges Thuillier's influence on him as being only second to that of Marc Bloch, believes that Thuillier is the most creative living practitioner of nineteenth- and twentieth-century regional history.

In the last two years Thuillier has continued to work with his long-term collaborator and colleague from the IVe, Jean Tulard. Also a prolific historian and one of the great masters of the Napoleonic period (on which he has written some thirty volumes) Tulard is a professor at the Universite de Paris-Sorbonne and a long-time member of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique. With Tulard, Thuillier has published three works for the popular French paperback Que sais-je series of the Presse Universitaires de France: Histoire local et regionale, (Fall, 1992), Le metier d'historien (1991), Les ecoles historiques (1990). These three works--preceded by an earlier volume in the series, La methode en histoire (1986)--serve well as introduction to the works of Thuillier, who unfortunately is almost unknown in England and the United States.

Recent Writings

In Les ecoles historiques Thuillier, focusing exclusively on French history, concludes supporting, faute de mieux, a type of neo-positivism. In his opinion, historians moved by a neo-positivism will better preserve the richness of the past and the freedom of historical inquiry than historians motivated by ideologies of right and left, schemes of abstract quantification, and fashionable historical theories that intermittently sweep the ranks of professional and professorial history. He rues the fact that so much contemporary history is a "mixture of 'structuralism,' psychoanalysis, and sociology |sociologisme~ that at best offers imperfect or esoteric products with little staying power." He rejects the ideological currents which are found in Annalist founder Lucien Febvre's ferocious attacks against biography and political history, and still are on full display with second-generation Annales leader Ferdinand Braudel whose Marxist preferences put him on the side of a history preferring explanations based on long-term cycles and underlying structures rather than reconstructing narratives of distinct historical events and changes.

Thuillier argues history would be better served by pursuing the more prudent ends of being tolerant, avoiding bias, and recognizing that as a craft its first obligation is to the past. This history would, among other things, 1) recognize that "all schools of history are possible and legitimate"; 2) "there is no history without documents"; 3) "there is," he quotes Febvre, "no history without a project," without reflection on methodology, ends, and limits of history. Further: 4) Every work of history, Thuillier deduces, is consequently incomplete and destined to be obsolete. 5) History has nothing to do with the beliefs of militants or the convictions of believers. 6) "History," he quotes his favorite thinker Paul Valery, "has no lessons to teach. . . . He who wants to possess the truth, judge and condemn, does philosophy, not history." 7) In contradiction to the common belief that history amounts to only the shuffling of note cards, Thuillier insists that, to the contrary, the historian must have tenacity, courage, good judgment, and a certain flair.

Expressing what has been a standing concern about the condition of the historical craft in France, Thuillier repeatedly criticizes professional historians for their indifference of the contribution of amateurs and learned societies to all phases of historical creation. He additionally underlines the host of worthy scholarly and non-scholarly publications that go unpublished because of a shortage of money; diminishing support of history in many sectors of society; the unfocused character of historical work due to disordered specialization; and the decline of research as scholars are increasingly absorbed in teaching and administration, while historians almost collectively ignore the questions of who are the present and future consumers of history and what role historians should play in the transmitting and propagating national and local memory.

The quality of Thuillier's passion for history reveals itself in Le metier d'historien. He takes issue with ideological self-indulgence of historians since the Dreyfus Affair; he chides those who unreflectively assume they know which subjects are worthy of study and are without doubt about the causal connections that govern them. Drawing on Paul Valery and Paul Veyne, Thuillier sees the goal of historians to write a narrative of the singular and unique experiences and events; their challenge is to assemble their curiosity, intuition, and discoveries into meaningful projects and good books.

Thuillier sees historians locked in battle with several opponents. Externally, lacking certain support and often subject to the vagaries of fickle patronage, historians must resist the temptation of passing fashions and avoid competitive rivalries, jealousies, and wily practices (roueries) that can damage the historian and the history he writes. More subtly, the historian must battle against temptation arising out of solitude and self-doubt, and the ennui and the lassitude that accompany long-term historical projects. There is always the temptation to conclude that his work is unworthy and his life, consequently, wasted.

The historian encounters death at the center of his preoccupations. Making the practice of the craft an extended memento mori, Thuillier depicts historians as searching through dead things and vanished ideas to reflect upon an irrevocable and unrecoverable past times. Constantly exposed to the irreversible flight of time, he comes face to face with three different deaths: the loss of power to perform one's own craft, the certainty of one's own physical death, and the vanishing of even the memory of one's work. "We risk understanding nothing about the psychology of the historian, his subtle and complicated guileful attempts to escape his destiny in order to leave his mark, if we neglect," Thuillier argues, "his worry about death: le souci de la mort. I dedicated X years of my life to this research--it must make sense."

Thuillier's advice to us mortal historians is stoic. He concludes Le metier enumerating the duties of the craft. Good historians must reflect on history's relation to other disciplines, aid young historians, and help prepare materials for future historians. The most basic duties are owed to their readers, and they are to be "clear," "honest," "objective," "innovative," and "passionant."

Regional and Local Writings

Himself the son of a talented regional historian, Thuillier's first passion was local and regional history. He has made it and its practitioners the fundamental object of his most spirited defense as well as the subject of his most exciting and important books, Pour une histoire du quotidien au XIXe siecle (1976) and L'imaginaire quotidien au XIX siecle (1986).

In 1966 Paul Leuillot, who for some years was secretary of the Les Annales, contributed a manifesto-like essay, "Defense et illustration de l'histoire locale," as a preface to Thuillier's Aspect de l'Economie Nivernaise au XIXe siecle (1966). As much as anyone else, in this period Thuillier initiated a renewal of local and regional history in the 1970s and since then he has continued to argue its case as he does in his recently published L'histoire locale and regionale.

In contrast to the fad-driven, generalization-preoccupied, ideologically-motivated, and quantitatively-shaped history of ambitious professional university historians, Thuillier contends that the practitioners local and regional are motivated by higher values. They take pleasure in knowledge, and they have a true fidelity to place and a real sense of continuity (duree). These are precious values in a society in which the ephemeral, the immediate, and the spectacular dominate, and everywhere leveling homogenizing forces are in ascent.

Thuillier finds other reasons to praise local and regional historians content to labor in their own vineyards. In Thuillier's idealization, their methodologies are based on a preference for studying diversity and detail, a concern for preservation, and useful resistance to abstract models and recent fashions. In counter-distinction to university historians, they are depicted as primarily interested in the qualitative, experimental, and contingent. Starting with a particular subject in the here-and now, be it a chateau, a church, a parish, a region, a village, or a city, their strategy is to work from the present back to the past. The object of their love often has a longer history than the nation itself.

Unlike their university cousins, local historians are not preoccupied with doctrinal battles, the dogmatism of the day's fashion (le dogmatisme des modes du jour). They are not moved by the quest to stake out personal territories, or even tempted to write of every particularity as part of the flow of universal history.

Thuillier makes their passion to preserve particular parts of the past his own. Utilizing the hypothetical needs of the future historians of the twenty-first century, who wish to understand the second half of the twentieth century, Thuillier argues that local and regional historians should broaden their interests. They should survey departmental and private archives, as well as the records of businesses, hospitals, and other institutions. They should create data banks, work in cooperation with other cultural agencies, undertake the most extensive oral collections, develop scholarship programs, exploit the media, work with school curricula and engage in archaeological and historical preservation of buildings such as quickly perishing nineteenth-century industrial structures.

Prescribing favorite subjects, most of which he himself has already tackled at least in outline, Thuillier encourages local and regional historians to collect materials that shed light on the everyday lives of ordinary and extraordinary people. Part of his long-standing interest, he argues that the everyday life of women opens the door to the changing character of domestic and public life. He also suggests that the history of changing professions are worthy of present documentation. (His list of professions includes the doctor, the pharmacist, the mid-wife, the director of the religious hospital, engineers, and, voicing his interest in economics and fiscal matters, the banker, the insurance agent, the business entrepreneur and, the president of Chamber of Commerce.) Specific topics he proposes for contemporary documentation are electricity in all its facets, technical histories of accounting, information systems, nuclear sites, fiscal affairs, social security, local and professional administrations.

An even wider and brilliant range of such topics underpined Thuillier's imaginative reconstruction of everyday life in his Pour une histoire du quotidien au XIXe siecle and L'imaginaire quotidien au XIX siecle. In these works, he categorizes topics worthy of exploration as falling under 1) the realm of everyday worry and concern (souci), among whose subtopics he lists gestures surrounding waking and going to sleep, eating, work, dress, fatigue, communications, the gaze, noises, etc.; 2) the realm of desire and choice, which involves dreams of money, ambition, and daydreaming, pleasures, feasts, jewelry, and diverse actions like smoking, vacationing, playing games, and carrying out childhood and adolescent rites; 3) the realm of fatality to whose sphere belongs sickness, suffering, loneliness, tears, death, suicide, old age and aging and perception of fleeing time; 4) and the history of technologies and media that shape everyday life, which include photography, electricity, the bicycle and the automobile, and the radio, newspapers, movies, advertisements, and more. Thuillier suggests two additional fields which, though often overlooked, help complete the analysis of everyday life and mind. The first is the regulated life--la vie normee--as expressed in customs, sanctions, constraints, and institutions like the convent and the prison; and the disordered life--la vie anarchique--represented by the excluded, the marginal, law breakers, loners, the poor, poachers, prostitutes, deserters, the young mothers, and so forth.

In any place, locale, or region, Thuillier believes that there exist whole worlds to be studied and preserved. These worlds--and here we reach the center of Thuillier's passion--though born in modern and contemporary France are in the process of disappearing. They are lost to time itself, the flux and reflux of passing fancies and fashion, the great powers of change inherent in commercial, national, and mass society, and finally they are lost because of the indifference of abstract and remote professional historians.

Thuillier's message is clear: Paris cannot save France and France's history cannot be preserved by its professoriate alone. Thuillier's dilemma, which is surely not his alone, is equally clear. It is Parisians who must first admit that France cannot be saved by Paris.

Those of us who practice regional history in the United States have a great deal to learn from Thuillier--and also a little to suffer with him. It could not be otherwise, given our desire to understand and preserve small places in a world dominated by vast agencies and legions of bureaucracies and professional hierarchies.

History Department Marshall, MN 56258