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Robert Forster's Introduction to Orest Ranum's "Swan Song" Address to the Department of History, December 13, 1999

Orest Ranum and I first met in front of a bookstore in Paris in 1962. We agreed that printed collections of French administrative correspondence were very hard to come by. That very day Orest invited Elborg and me to his Paris apartment for a glass of wine (It may have been a Sancerre) and a light souper, a mark of Orest's expansive sense of hospitality which I have always admired and envied. We became colleagues at Johns Hopkins in 1968. Since then we have worked together in many ways. I spoke last spring about our common enterprise editing and translating with our spouses seven volumes of articles from the Annales, the well-known French journal. Together we trained 31 grad students in modern French history, most of whom are now teaching in colleges and universities here or abroad. Of the countless seminars we attended over 30 years together in the department (Orest never missed a seminar) the ones I enjoyed most were those where I could parade my interest in money-making and Orest his in the symbolic aspects of money-making.

I am not going to present a cold list of Orest's publications, (two of his books have been translated into French), his research grants, scholarly and teaching awards both here and in France, his seminars in Berlin and the Collège de France, and his many services to the department. Orest has a keen sense of collegiality and he often thinks of the department as a corps, not unlike the Parlement of Paris in the 17th century.

Recall that Orest had a long and close association with one of the greats of our generation - Philippe Ariès. This association had much to do, I'm sure, with Orest's interest in the history of privacy and of patriarchy, of Baroque Catholicism and Jesuit education, of reading paintings, 17th-century letters, wardrobes, and gestures. Orest had a great interest in the "culture of appearances" even before Daniel Roche's recent book. Carnival masks, a bishop's mitre and crimson robe, the harlequin colors of an outdoor market in southern France - the shadow of Ariès is there. And so is theatre. In the film "King of Hearts" The seasoned Frenchman confronts Alan Bates, the eager young Scotsman: "Mais Monsieur, vous n'aimez pas le theâtre - le Ministère, le Vatican, la Garde Républicaine?" You are missing half of life. Orest takes this admonition to heart.

Allow me now to present a brief resumé of what I consider Orest's special skills as an historian. It is hardly exhaustive and perhaps a bit pretentious on my part, but what are friends for, après tout. First, his sense of place. Orest's evocative skill serves him especially well in two of his books, Paris in the Age of Louis XIV and The Fronde: A French Revolution. The first time I heard Orest present a paper at thre AHA he captured my imagination in his description of Paris streets. The tour of the Ile de la Cité from the Pont Neuf to Notre Dame with a stop along the way at the Palais de Justice - the Parlement of Paris in 1600 is worth quoting:

"To the Palais scurried a population as diverse in interests and status as Paris itself. There were probably four or five thousand magistrates, clerks, copyists, and minor officials such as huissiers who together made up the personnel of the sovereign courts. In addition to these, merchants, booksellers, paper and ink sellers, prostitutes, singers, letter writers, and beggars among others, daily set up shop or frequented the dozens of stalls displaying such items as cloth, mirrors, dolls, knives, lace, and purses. In this maze of corridors and chambers the principal attraction remained the grande salle itself, with its marble floor, heavy columns lined with the statues of French kings, and gold ceiling. It was considered smart to go to the grande salle for it was a favorite meeting place for distinguished people.... " (Paris, 12)

The streets of Paris come to life again in Orest's book on the Fronde. The mentality of the Parisians on the Day of the Barricades is probed with imaginative skill. He reminds us that the defensive reaction of the city markets and cabarets, that is the Parisian peuple, to military threat would last for centuries. (Fronde, 151)

Second, Orest's sense of personality, not Freudian analysis, but a placing of the individual in his or her milieu which recalls Taine's still valid dictum of grasping the individual through "his race, milieu, and moment" (nature, nurture, moment in history). Only by contextualizing can we begin to understand the baroque and theatrical quality of the people Orest has lived with for so many years. An example among so many candidates: Cardinal de Retz in full ecclesiastical regalia trying to calm the crowd of rioters while hearing confession from a Parisian dying from wounds inflicted by the mounted police. Or his comparison between the political styles of cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin are both evocative and perceptive. (Fronde, 157-158, 51-52)

I have often felt that even the most zealous members of the Jacobin clubs during the French Revolution of 1789 were less theatrical, less flamboyant than Orest's caste of characters; at least the Jacobins were predictable. But dramatic personalities were not only apparent during The Fronde - Condé, Gaston d'Orleans, the Grande Mademoiselle, Duchesse de Longueville, Retz, Turenne. What a cast ! But even the very emblems of administrative sobriety and order, Richelieu, Mazarin, Colbert were flambotant in their manner. Here is Orest on Colbert:

"The draper's son, Colbert, has often been pictured as a plodding, bourgeois, bureaucrat, but he was in fact a visionary imbued with extraordinary creative powers and administrative genius. His vision of a well-ordered, prosperous, and monumental Paris was particularly important because it was precisely in and from the capital that he had the power to realize that vision...." (Paris, 259)

Power and clientage. In his third book, Artisans of Glory, Orest confronts the practice and price of clientage as it effected a group of men of letters, royal historiographers sworn to praise, edify, and exalt the reign of the Sun King. With disarming candor Orest makes a strong defense of the study of the non-hero in history:

"Poor devils, these men of letters, we say; and because of ideological elements and the mediocrity of their works we prepare to drop them from our own genealogy of historians. Yet just as we are about to forget them for all time, we remember that the genealogy of historians, like any family history, ought to include the failures and the mediocre generations.... And it is also possible to learn from essentially negative and unedifying exempla. After all, the lessons about the duties of kingship that Louis may have learned from his ancestors ...could have been as influential upon his education as the historicized conquering hero." (Artisans, 338)

In his first book, Richelieu and the Councillors of Louis XIII, Orest treated a whole code of behavior whose leitmotifs were honor, fidelity, clientage, patronage, and the political and symbolic importance of the "créature."

"It is particularly convenient that in the seventeenth century the word créature was common usage in the French upper classes. As a term of politeness, it is frequently found in thank-you letters and the long and formal closing of sentences of day-to-day correspondence. In addressing expressions of affection to the king. Richelieu often referred to himself as a creature of Louis XIII.... The other ministers also used the term quite naturally when writing...to anyone having a rank in society superior to theirs.... The relationships between Richelieu and the other ministers were unlike those usually found in modern times. (Councillors, 28-29)

In 1994 Orest was honored by an invitation to teach at the Collège de France. In his inaugural address he challenged his French academic audience to give politics, power, and formal institutional history a place in their historical research and teaching equal to role that demography, economics, sociology, and anthropology have played since the 1920s. Needless to say, his challenge was presented in elegant French, but what I appreciated most was his warning that the historian must never stifle the voice of individual participants of their time with too heavy a dose of literary theory or social science. History is after all about real people in all their irrepressible ambiguity and in their special milieu.

Orest Ranum's lecture today is entitled "The Police Eye the Book Sellers, especially the Women Book Sellers, in 18th-Century Paris."

NOTE: the lecture is available on this WebSite, among Orest's "Articles and Syllabi"