Another Short post after a long Passover seder!
I don't think that Contat was as much of a historian as he was a story teller. He told a story that changed history but not History. The story he told is not one much other then his own experience of something. This delemma is what I have been struggling with the entire Mod. Is some ones experience also their truth? And then does that make it their history (with a little h)?
Well, I think we've all concluded that, no Contat was not a historian but a historical story teller. He's not historian because within the story we read, he hasn't analyzed any actions of the characters. He mostly tells it how it is. This does not mean we can't learn and extrapolate things about the time period from what he wrote (we'll probably do some of this tomorrow).
Is the account History? - Well, seeing that the question has been posed with a big "H" and not a little "h" makes me think that you mean the discipline. Again, I'll have to answer this question, no. This passage is history. It is a retelling of events that may or may not have happened. It doesn't tell us how the event effected the surrounding world and it leaves most of the details up for interpretation.
Is Contat a historian? Why or why not?
Is the account History? Why or why not?
I don't think I'm going to be adding a whole lot of new material to the discussion that isn't already here- I agree with a lot of points that other people have made. This account of the past is history but not History, considering it is of dubious truthfulness. Going off of that, I feel like I would consider Contat a historian but not a Historian, if that's valid at all. Yes, what he wrote down tells us valuable information about underclass workers in 1740's Parisian printing shops, but it is not necessarily historically accurate. It doesn't have a methodology or goals/purpose.
Like other people have been saying, I don't believe Contat was an historian. However, I don't think this has anything to do with the reliability of his story or because he was trying to be artistic. I think it is simply because he was not trying to write history. He was telling a somewhat fictionalized version of his own life, and that is never considered history; it is considered a memoir.
I do however think that his account can be considered History in the same way letters and journals can be. It is a primary source, even though we have to remember that it might be more relevant for studying the late 1750s than the late 1730s. Since everyone seems to disagree with me on this though, maybe I'm still confused about the difference between history and History. But it seems to me that an account of something that happened can't be history unless you're just looking at the act of Contat writing it down...
I would definitely echo everything that Jeremy mentioned, in particular the initial hesitancy in definitively asserting Contat as a historian (or not). I think Jeremy raises a really key point of the extent to which we must consider the methodologies of a discipline as rigid and absolute, and I guess I'd like to elaborate on that by saying that I think maybe the methodologies change when we try to apply an existing body of work to them instead of the other way around. That's pretty convoluted. What I mean is that if we apply the existing work - Contat's account - to the methodology, instead of using the methodology to create the account, I think our definition of what is and isn't a valid method of creating History has to change, because our process of creating History has changed. (From using the method to create the work to accepting the work against a set of methods).
I'd also reiterate the importance of a historian distancing themselves from what they write, and tie it back to our recent readings. While I think Darwin and Marx attempted this, they eventually were intricately wound up in their works: their lives really inspired what they wrote about. This is a theme I've been really honed in on throughout the mod - a history belongs exclusively to the people who created it, and any attempts to detach oneself from relaying that history are therefore always going to be flawed/impossible. In the same vein, any attempts to access past people's history will always contain a margin of error - the events of a people are always 100% theirs, and any retellings/accounts will never allow a future people to have that 100% knowledge; it might be 99.99999% (etc), but it will never be absolutely complete.
I hesitate to fully discredit him as a historian because I don't agree with the idea that written history needs to be absent of any personal touches or flourishes. I don't think that capital H History requires nothing but cold hard analysis, and by simply writing something I think that the author includes something that isn't unbiased.
Also the fact that it's from his personal experience doesn't discredit it at all for me. Some of the most interesting historical (whether or not they were actually historical is something that I'm still unclear on) books I've read are memoirs or personal accounts.
I think one of the larger questions that this raises for me is the idea of scale. Do people not consider this History or history because the incident is small in scale? Is a qualification for History that it is the retelling and analysis of a large event or time period or can history be something small and seemingly insignificant?
A quote that stood out to me and sort of inspired these ideas and questions is when Danton says, "So Contat wrote about a burlesque of a burlesque and in reading it one should make allowances for the refraction of cultural forms across genres and over time." (100)
While it might not be academic history maybe it is a version of common or everyday history that can carry a significance equal to History that follows the standard methodology. It may use the customary tones but it still is aiming to deliver the same message.
Is Contat a historian? Why or why not?
Is the account History? Why or why not?
His writing may have historical relevance in some context, but Contat is in no way a historian. He was not studying the past, but penning an oddly shaped "quasi-fictional autobiography" (89) potentially for the common people and no doubt for entertainment at some level. A historian seems to be someone who reports on a subject with authority and confidence in the truth behind their writings. How can this apply to Contat when he has presented "direct" quotes 20 years after the event took place? By simply altering the name of the protagonist from his own, Contat has created a false history, an unmasked non-truth at the center of his account. How can this be History? Is every autobiographer also a historian? Does fundamental bias discount something as history? Something about this reminds me of Herodotus' tangents and the relevance of folklore and tales surrounding a culture to its history. This certainly adds to the History of a people, but in a different context. One cannot build up History with these as the factual cornerstone.
One cannot be a historian without intention. (I haven't actually thought this through enough but for the moment it feels true.) Though no historian can actually fully remove themselves from their accounts, without the writer actively attempting to show no bias, they cannot claim the title.
That being said, to entirely discount the only account of any event would leave detrimental and gaping holes in History. But how can one prove or disprove that something actually occurred? If you can't prove it directly through another account, I guess you could show that the social/cultural/economic/political atmosphere could call for an event to take place. Darnton's attempt to ground this event felt like a bullshit paper written by someone who should have asked for an extension. Not only were his ties to historical themes incredibly strained, but his "concrete" historical facts were both vague and phrased without conviction. I would even be wary to call this man an historian, though no doubt he names himself as such.
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