University of Helsinki

Graduate Student, Department of History

Other Affiliations: University of Helsinki, Department of History, Philosophy, Culture and Art Studies

Doctoral candidate

Thesis Title: Etudier la Révolution française (1945-2000). Essai de socio-histoire.

About

Who were the historians specialised in the study of the French Revolution during the second half of the XXth century? How did they define themselves? How was their field conceived and perceived? My Ph.D deals with the historians of the French Revolution after 1945 and more precisely with those who have interpreted the Revolution as a “bourgeois revolution” according to the Marxian terminology. In line with what the French historian Gérard Noiriel has established as “socio-histoire” (Noiriel, 2006), I am interested to increase the historical understanding of the sociology of revolutionary historiography in the academic world by using tools borrowed from sociology and critical epistemology. Thus my research takes place at a meeting point of several different disciplines: history of historiography, intellectual history and sociology of professions. Furthermore I wish to improve our understanding of the attempts made during the last decades of the XXth century to update the classical Marxist interpretation of the French Revolution by promoting methodological innovations such as discourse analysis and lexicology, or by importing critical philosophy such as Gramscian philosophy into the interpretation of the Revolution.
In my study I explore how social networks have been formed, regrouping historians across national borders to work together on the question of the French Revolution, and how these forms of collaboration have influenced the historiographical scene. I am especially interested in examining the history and influence of the Société des études robespierristes, a learned society dedicated to the study of the French Revolution, and the role it has played structuring the historiography after the Second World War. Through the study of the SER and its key actors (Georges Lefebvre, Albert Soboul and its numerous pupils) the research offers a refreshing prosopographical analysis.
Moreover the research aims at historicising how historians have used historically-loaded terms to define and redefine their field of speciality, their position in this field, and their counterparts expecially in the context of the famous controversies launched after the publication of François Furet’s books in 1965 and in 1978. For example, one of the most crucial question I address in my research is “what do historians mean when they use the word ‘jacobin’?” I consider that by deconstructing the current terminologies it is possible to gain a more nuanced and complex understanding of the field.

Key-words : historiography, historiography of the French Revolution, Georges Lefebvre, Albert Soboul, marxism, communism, learned societies, socio-histoire, history from below, bourgeois revolution, discourse analysis…