only through the mediation of texts relating what they are supposed to have
heard, said, or done, the views of the burghers, administrators, and Philosophes
are available to us in the first person in texts wholly organized according to
strategies of writing with their own specific objectives (recasting social order,
keeping track of the literary world, substituting the authority of the Philosophes
for that of the theologians, remaking individual lives through a reading of
Rousseau). This perhaps explains the contrast between Darnton's treatment
of Contat's narration, which is obliterated as a narration and held to be a
transparent account of the massacre it recounts, and his treatment of the
other texts, considered, to the contrary, in their full textuality and analyzed
for their conceptual categories and the rhetorical formulas that shape their
intended effects.
We can now return to the three questions posed earlier, beginning with the
one raised by Darnton's attempt to define a French identity on the basis of
practices or texts that he qualifies as alien to us and opaque. This objective
might appear astonishing and provocative, given that it aims at tracing national
continuity in cultural forms that owe nothing either to the centralized state
or to a sense of homeland. French historians, ill accustomed to associating
popular culture and national history, might well find this unsettling. The
heritage of a social history that gave priority to regional and local divergences
and an awareness that the same rituals or the same motifs existed in the
various societies of other European anciens regimes have helped remove the
study of cultural practices from the framework of the state. More recently,
the return to national history that inspires several ongoing projects (one by
Fernand Braudel) presupposes an emphasis on the role of the state in centralizing
and unifying the country, while cultural traditions may well appear, in this
view, as holding back or shackling the foundation of a feeling of belonging
to a nation. Darnton's objective is thus more novel than it seems when he
calls for a reevaluation of the national traits that make French folk tales
different from their German or Italian counterparts based on the same story,
for example. What is still difficult to sustain, however, is the double and
contradictory affirmation of a radical discontinuity between old and new
ways of thinking about the world and of acting on it and a discernible continuity
of a French "cultural style." Either this continuity exists, in which case the
old ways of thinking are not so strange, or else those old ways were truly
different from our own, in which case they could never be found in our
present world. "Frenchness exists," sans doute, but certainly not as an entity
that spans the centuries.
The second question Darnton's book raises is whether a strict conformity
to a program for histoire se'rielle austroisieme niveau is a necessary characteristic
of French cultural history. A pronouncement of the sort seems to
take little account of the discussions under way or the fields of research under
investigation today. Some of the scholars most firmly rooted in the Annales
tradition have themselves raised questions concerning the choice of categories
and the methods once considered obligatory to the study of mentalite's. A
quantification that reifies what is contained in thought has been criticized as