Still a Science? A paradigmatic change in French History

François-Joseph Ruggiu (1)

1 CRM - Centre de Recherche Roland Mousnier Histoire et Civilisation

The beginning of the 2010s has seen in France a blossoming of publications devoted to the fate, or to the future, of French history as a discipline and as an academic career. Titles with a question mark, like A quoi sert l’histoire aujourd’hui ? or À quoi pensent les historiens ? , have flourished. Leading senior historians, like Jean-François Sirinelli (Sciences Po), expressed their doubts about the role of the French history in the world, in link with the vanishing place of French as an international academic language, but also about the status of history in the French academic landscape as well as in French society . In the summer 2013, the prestigious monthly journal, Le Débat, dedicated an issue to the « difficile enseignement de l’histoire » , especially in high schools. It includes a paper on the hotly debated question of the Maison de l’Histoire de France, created, amongst protestations, by President Nicolas Sarkozy and then suppressed by President François Hollande. Faced with this situation, others historians, like Christophe Charle (University Panthéon-Sorbonne) or François Hartog (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales) , felt obliged to express their confidence in the global situation of French history. This paper try to explain how such a debate has arisen on history, hitherto one of the most respected and prestigious disciplines in France, and what it tells us about the anxieties that historians experience perhaps more profoundly than others specialists of humanities and social sciences.

Mots clés: historiography

Domaines: Histoire

François-Joseph Ruggiu. Still a Science? A paradigmatic change in French History. 25th Anniversary Conference of the Academia Europaea, Sep 2013, Wroclaw, Poland. ⟨halshs-01539740⟩