A contemporary historian in the Pléiade: this is a first. It salutes the centenary of the great medievalist, historian of mentalities, but also of women and more generally of the silences of history, who knew how to popularize knowledge. A specialist in Duby, Felipe Brandi edited and annotated the volume.
Georges Duby (1919–1996), professor at the Collège de France, member of the Académie française, considerably renewed medieval studies. His immense work, which skillfully articulates economic realities, social structures and systems of representation, also won the favor of the general public, thanks to a fluid and accessible writing, without anything heavy or posed. The volume of the Pléiade which appears on the occasion of his centenary contains: Medieval societies, inaugural lecture at the Collège de France ; Bouvines Sunday, The time of the cathedrals, The three orders or the imagination of feudalism, Guillaume le Maréchal, Ladies of XIIe century and other scattered texts. It is presented by Pierre Nora, with an introduction and critical apparatus by Felipe Brandi.
Shooting: C. Guesde. Editing: A. Suhamy.
Interview Transcript
La Vie des idées: A historian in the Pléiade? Isn’t it a collection of writers?
Felipe Brandi: Georges Duby is not the first historian to enter the Pléiade. Before him, there was Thucydides, Herodotus, Froissart, Michelet, whose new edition of the Revolution has just been published. But Georges Duby is a contemporary historian, an academic historian. And that is a first. In fact, his entry into the Pléiade is rather, I believe, in the wake of the great essayists of the human sciences, such as Claude Lévi-Strauss who entered the Pléiade in 2008, Michel Foucault, shortly after, Michel Leiris too. Why Georges Duby in the Pléiade? There is most certainly the joy of writing, the formal quality of his works, which makes his work a formidable expression of the important place that the essay occupied in the world of letters in France in the last third of the XXe century. I also think that his entry into the Pléiade is justified by the originality, by the modernity of his historical thinking, by the way in which he practices a history which reflects at all times on the make historyon his own practice.
La Vie des idées: The paradox is that the Pléiade edition, which is intended for the general public, includes a critical and scholarly apparatus that the originals did not contain. Why?
Felipe Brandi: His books – and this is his conception of historical narrative – are stripped of any critical apparatus: no bibliography, no notes. So I wanted to add the notes that did not exist. The Pléiade edition allows this, because the notes do not come at the bottom of the page, but at the end of the volume. Thus the reader can read Duby’s narrative as Duby conceived it, but this time – for the first time – he has the opportunity to discover, let’s say, the backstage, the “historian’s workshop”, to use Dominique Iogna-Prat’s beautiful expression, and also discover the theoretical and scholarly framework that supports all of Georges Duby’s writings.
La Vie des idées: What is Georges Duby’s Middle Ages?
Felipe Brandi: It is France from the year 1000 to Bouvines, – that is to say from the year 1000 to the beginning of the XIIIe century (1214). It is a French Middle Ages, centered on Northern France for some books, on Burgundy (Cluny and Mâcon) for other studies, and also the South of France.
In other works, he goes a little outside this framework. In Rural Economy and Country Life in the Medieval West (1962) and Warriors and Peasants (1973), he left for England, for the regions of the Empire, and also for the Scandinavian regions; in The Cathedrals Timehe ventures as far as Italy at the beginning of the Quattrocento. Nevertheless, he was very careful not to stray too far from his framework. He is very attentive to what he calls the “fringes of interpenetration”: the correlation between several simultaneous, contemporary phenomena, on the economic level, on the social level and on the level of mental representations. He is a little cautious with regard to transhistorical, transdiachronic approaches, which wander over the long term, and he prefers to be what he calls “synchronist”, that is to say focused on a very delimited spatiotemporal framework, as precise as possible, to see the horizontal and vertical interferences between the phenomena.
La Vie des idées: What remains of the history of mentalities? Where is it today?
Felipe Brandi: The history of mentalities is all the less visible today because it is everywhere. In fact, the history of mentalities remains, today, a dated formulation, from the 1960s and 1970s. But when we follow the evolution of these studies, we realize that on the eve of the 1980s, the formulation “history of mentalities” was diffracted into a multitude of new names: the history of the imagination, the history of representations, the history of ideological systems, cultural history… “Historical anthropology” itself and religious history remain dependent on the contribution and achievements of the history of mentalities.
The history of mentalities remains present each time there is an approach which articulates the social, material, socio-economic field with mental systems, ideological systems, immaterial representations.
Throughout his career, Georges Duby never stopped reformulating his program. He was the author – we tend to forget this – of one of the first cultural history programs in 1969, which appeared in the Higher Education Review ; then in 1974 he reformulated his program, under the title “Social History and Ideologies of Societies”, therefore a history of ideologies. Then, he was one of the first to use the notion of “imaginary” in the title of one of his works. He was therefore the author of the manifesto of the history of mentalities and, at the same time, one of the first historians to get rid of it, to replace the formula of “history of mentalities” with others which seemed to him more up to date, more precise, less vague.
La Vie des idées: Which books should be selected in an anthology? Is there a more important title in the work of Georges Duby?
Felipe Brandi: We made a selection of Georges Duby’s major works. Some that seemed to us, precisely, to transmit his global vision of history: a kind of history that articulates all the levels (economic, social, ideological, religious), instead of privileging, for example, works where it is economic history that takes precedence, or social history, or art history. All the works that we have chosen remain anchored in his vision of the correlations between the different “instances” of social life.
What is the most important or best book by Georges Duby? This is a difficult question. Bouvines Sunday Or The Cathedrals Time are great history books. We can say the same about his synthesis on Rural Economy and Country Lifewhich did not enter the collection precisely because it is very anchored in the material life and rural life of the Middle Ages. The Three Orders or the Imaginary of Feudalism has a very important place in Georges Duby’s work because it is his only book, along with his thesis, that was not commissioned by a publisher. It is a book that is a sort of culmination of his first work, his doctoral thesis on Mâcon society. This time, he tries to take up his model again, a quarter of a century later, by introducing all the knowledge acquired from the history of mentalities and the contribution of anthropology and related social sciences to understand the way in which feudal society was constructed; or how the power relations between classes were established, in XIe and to XIIe centuries, thanks to a mental framework which legitimized the power of some and the exploitation of others.
La Vie des idées: A history of women practiced by a man: an original approach?
Felipe Brandi: In his time, yes, it was an original approach. Women’s history had been practiced – first in the United States, then in England, then in France – since the 1960s and 1970s. We think of the work of Michelle Perrot, among many others. But during the 1970s and 1980s, women’s history was mainly practiced by female historians. Georges Duby became interested in women’s history because of his research on marriage and the relationships between the sexes, between the masculine and the feminine – it was through a history of love that he became interested in women and femininity.
What is very striking, very present in Georges Duby’s approach to women, is the attention he pays to the silences of women, to the silences of history. He works essentially – and he has been criticized for this – on male testimonies: clerics, bishops and monks of the XIe and XIIe century who were, according to him, the shapers of the ideology of the ruling class at that time. He always asked himself the question, and it is an originality of his approach: he himself, as a man, how does he practice a history of women? He says somewhere: “I too am a man” – that is to say, “I too am haunted by the image of the feminine that the society to which I belong conveys”. So, his approach is very interesting, in the sense that he takes into account the mental frameworks, the ideological frameworks that imprison him in a way. This “doubtful” approach, to make a pun on his name, is part of the unfolding, the construction of Georges Duby’s story. So much so that it serves as a guarantee for his words. In fact, it is by highlighting his doubts, his own hesitations, that he gains the reader’s trust.
La Vie des idées: Two years ago, you defended a doctoral thesis on the work of Georges Duby. What is your thesis about, more precisely, and what did you want to show?
Felipe Brandi: In my doctoral thesis, I wanted to understand the way in which Georges Duby developed, throughout his career, a personal project of social history. A project that he never stopped refining and retouching for three decades, and which gives his entire production, his work, a remarkable unity and impeccable coherence. This project of social history that is his own can be presented, roughly speaking, by two main features. On the one hand, by a totalizing ambition, paying careful attention, book after book, to defining the terms by which historians could reflect on the correlations existing between the concrete, material level of social life (economic, technical) and that of immaterial realities, of mental representations. On the other hand, by the desire to have the originality and importance of the part that historians play in the reflection on the human sciences of his time recognized: the formation of relations of domination between social groups, the establishment and triumph of unequal models of society, the power of symbolic violence and ideologies. These are major theoretical, collective challenges of the human sciences. Georges Duby’s ambition being, in my opinion, to show that the contribution of historians – with their attention to chronology, their taste for an empirical approach and their expertise in the criticism of testimonies – was not only indispensable, but could also serve as a model for neighboring disciplines. Which can be a way of claiming for history a unifying role as a pilot science at the center of the social sciences.