The Ranums' Panat Times
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The Ranums' Panat Times |
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Robert Forster on the Forster-Ranum translations of articles from the Annales E.S.C.
Given at the FHS, sponsored by George Mason. March 19, 1999. I have known Orest Ranum for 35 years. We met outside a Paris bookstore in 1964, both of us looking for Boislisle's administrative correspondence. We have worked together since 1967 when Orest came to Johns Hopkins. Together we trained over thirty PhDs in French history. I could say a great deal about the seminars, conferences, distinguished foreign visitors, books and articles we shared. But today I shall restrict my comments to our common project: Selections from the Annales. We agreed that when all our other efforts at scholarship are forgotten, this collection of English translations of articles from the well-known French journal might remain. Now what was our purpose and how did we go about it? First let me say that the project involved four of us. Elborg Forster and Patricia Ranum translated all the articles; Orest and I made the final choice of articles and took turns writing the introductions. In terms of hours of effort our spouses deserved the bolder type on the covers — which the publishers did not give them. Alas. We wanted to find examples of articles that captured the distinctive features of the Annales. Leaving aside the issue of whether the Annales is a "school" in any strict sense, the Annales editors claimed to emphasize interdisciplinary history and under Fernand Braudel's leadership it stressed the longue durée and a history layered by three different notions of time that the Master likened to the deep sea currents, the tides, and the white-caps. Yet few French historians achieved the temporal and geographic range that Braudel proclaimed as the goal of the Annales. For the most part, the Annalists wrote more temporally and spatially limited articles. However, three distinctive features pervaded these articles. The problem, the source, and the approach were to be original, if possible imaginative, and melded into a harmonious whole. And if the harmonizing of the three features seemed unexpected or unlikely, so much the better. The Annales strove for éclat. Orest was especially good at spotting those articles which came closest to achieving the combination of problem, source, approach and éclat. We published seven volumes of articles, each volume containing from seven to eleven articles. We published one volume a year from 1975 to 1981. This period was significant in the evolution of the Annales so that almost unconsciously the four of us made selections that reflected that evolution. We moved from an emphasis on serial history with heavy doses of charts and graphs to a more qualitative and cultural approach that also reduced the earlier spatial and temporal dimensions. The earlier emphasis on sociology was slowly replaced by anthropology; grosso modo, formal structure — geography, demography, economics, social groups — was replaced by mentalities, values, representations. Of course this is to oversimplify. The Annalists continue to insist on the use of a full range of sources and "ancillary disciplines." Yet the problems and approaches have changed appreciably and even the same sources have been used differently in the last decades. The titles of our seven volumes reflect this change of emphasis, though each volume contains articles that employ both sociological and anthropological approaches. The first three volumes — Biology of Man in History, Family and Society, Rural Society in France — owed much to an older Annales tradition that went back to Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre. The demographic phase of the 1960s obviously had ties to biology, from famine amenorrhoea to geographic hematology. Family drew upon customary law, notarial archives, and oral history, producing Bourdieu's marriage strategies in Béarn and Depauw's illicit sex in 18th-century Nantes. I mention these two articles because they became seminal — one leading to Bourdieu's larger study of "cultural capital" and the other leading to Edward Shorter's controversial thesis about the emancipation of women through greater sexual freedom at the end of the 18th century. Rural society of course was essential to understanding the Annales message. "Deserted Villages" by Pesez and LeRoy Ladurie, with six centuries of longue durée and the use of archeological remains and place names was a classic that Marc Bloch would have loved. We also included Jolas and Zonabend, "Tillers of the Fields and Woodspeople" an in-depth study of two neighboring communities, hostile rivals in their economies and life styles, but momentarily united by the village fête. Functional anthropology was very much in evidence here. Volume 4, Deviants and the Abandoned, was very much Orest's volume. He has a certain flair for this kind of history. As he wrote in the introduction: "Social historians... are often reluctant to embrace the study of marginal groups. Often eager to bring evidence to bear on some theory of society or community or to build toward an analysis of behavior on the basis of the study of occupations, incomes, and social mobility, they find it difficult to fit deviants into social history as it has been classically defined. They are almost obsessed with the search for typicality. Thus historians who study the history of prostitutes and tramps, for example, have — politely — been accused by their colleagues in social history as erring on the side of the arcane, lewd, and antiquarian." (viii) And so we entered the world of "les marginaux" with such articles as Delasselle on abandoned children, Nicole Castan on "Summary Justice," and Michelle Perrot on "Delinquency and the Penitentiary System." Foucault was then in full stride and the articles showed it. No one could ignore the "Grand Renfermement" back there in 1978. But Orest gave a word of caution about the sources employed. "The historian must be skeptical and very cautious in reading these sources. This is what Perrot suggests when she distinguishes the "positivistic" way of reading the sources from the cautious, tentative approach she uses. For in one sense the statistics about criminals reveal what the legal system, the judges, and lawyers deemed to be crime. And, as Nicole Castan shows, the comparison of these statistics over time, and for different regions, suggests both changing levels of crime and changing social conditions. Beneath this literal way of reading the sources, however, lies the more fundamental problem of discerning the nature of deviant behavior in any given society without the ideological and cultural presuppositions of those who tried the criminals and recorded them in the registers now being read by historians." (xi) Volume 5, Food and Drink in History, is something we francophiles delight in. We packed eleven articles into this volume, but most of them do not treat "haute cuisine." Jean-Paul Aron's "Art of using Leftovers in Paris" came closest, but the author's purpose was to demonstrate the mimetic qualities of the aspiring petty bourgeoisie rather than to stimulate the palate with the ecstacy of leftover coq au vin or crême caramel. Our most well-known piece was Jean Soler's "The Semiotics of Food in the Bible," which found its way into the New York Review of Books. This textual study of the Bible to determine the origin of Jewish dietary laws was in striking contrast to Morineau's potato, an "open field crop," in an article replete with hash-marked maps of the Hexagon. By this time our meld of problem, source and approach, and of the older and newer Annales was firmly fixed. Volume 6, Medicine and Society in France responded to a number of currents, including the desire to get at victims, the sick and vulnerable of this world, the continued influence of Foucault, and perhaps a desire to show our colleagues in the history of medicine at our Med School that they might join us in directing theses in history. In this we were not very successful. Perhaps Orest's words about the heroes of medical research explain our failure to reach the historians of medicine. "More is known about the pioneers in medicine and surgery, with their "breakthroughs" in health care, than about the routine care offered by the small town physician or the advice given by a quack. More is known about the civil servants who insisted that midwives be better trained than about the actual competence of the midwives themselves. Still less is known about the healers who lived down the path, it seems, in virtually every town and parish and who advised the wearing of copper bracelets to reduce rheumatic pains." (vii) And at the end of the introduction, Orest adds: "A distinguished historian of medicine was asked ...'At what time in history did it become statistically safer ... to call a doctor to seek health care than not to call one ?' The historian reflected a moment and replied, 'About 1925'."(ix) Not surprisingly, then, this volume focuses on the sad state of medicine in preindustrial France. Farge's "Work-Related Diseases among Artisans," Laget's "Childbirth in 17th and 18th-century France" or Jean-Pierre Goubert's, "Learned Medicine, Popular Medicine" capture this melancholy long chapter in human history. Volume 7, like volume 4, is very much Orest's volume. I don't think I could have concocted such a title, Ritual, Religion, and the Sacred. Now there is a title with Annales éclat. But more important, Orest has a certain talent for "reading" a painting, an altarpiece, or church facade. He learned this skill in part surely from his long friendship with the late Philippe Ariès. What could be more appropriate than an article by Klapisch-Zuber, "Rites of Marriage in Tuscany from Giotto to the Council of Trent" ! Relating representations of the Marriage of the Virgin to subtle changes in Florentine synodal statutes crosses the disciplines artfully. Or consider Froeschlé-Chopard, who analyzes the altarpieces of Provençal churches and chapels to chart counter-reformation devotions as part of a "new clerical religion" that gradually replaced older lay practices such as those attempting to reach God directly via the saints. Iconography takes its place here alongside of that array of other ancillary disciplines long in the Annales repertoire. Orest commented on the reverse side of the Sacred: "At various points in these articles there is also an implicit recognition that popular beliefs included belief in the Devil. Attitudes toward evil were linked as directly to cosmic forces as were attitudes toward good. Baptisms ought not to take place on certain days of the week because these were associated with disaster, bad luck, or some other expression of evil. Medicine did its work better at certain hours and on certain days, and couples performed special rituals to reduce the possibility of sterility." (xi) What would Orest and I have done if we had been asked to edit another seven volumes? What would the titles have been? "The Culture of Appearances," "The Gesture," "The Event," "Narrativity," "Political Culture," "Femininity and Feminism," "Realms of Memory?" Some or all of these surely. We would have welcomed the opportunity to put another seven collections together. Few collaborative scholarly efforts have moved along so smoothly. Orest and I would not pretend to have the stature of a Bloch and Febvre, but we shared their commitment, not to theoretical disquisitions about history, but to achieved results. After all, the mark of the historian's métier is the crafted product of which the Annales is justifiably proud.
Robert Forster, Emeritus
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