After the controversies between historians and Durkheimiens at the start of XXe century, after the great years of history “ economic and social “, After the” Back to storytelling In the 1980s, the time has come to reconcile historians with quantitative methods. A manual opportunely comes to develop.
The problem of quantification could now be addressed with pragmatism by a new generation of researchers, in reverse of the debates which led the world of French historians for a long time. The magic of figure and long statistical series exerted in fact with intensity in the 1960s and 1970s, after the history “ literary And events had undergone a triple assault: that of the sociologist François Simiand in 1903, then the offensive of Annals From 1929, finally a criticism “ marxising In the aftermath of the Second World War.
The favor of quantitative history then was part of a scientific context marked by the influence of Ernest Labrousse and the creation of the Vie Section of the Practical School of Advanced Studies (Future School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences). After that we had challenged its quality of science in its own right, history – that of cycles, long time – could now claim the status of crossroads of social sciences: this dignity assumed that it abandoned the land of events and individuals. We know that this attention to the long term ordered work whose contribution remains considerable, even if the handling of mathematical tools was not always accompanied by the necessary circumspection. Anachronism was watching those who intended to identify “ middle classes “In modern times, or measure the” working time »Craftsmen and their apprentices in the Middle Ages.
The history of mentalities and reflections led by Anglo-Saxon researchers played a big role in the “ Back to storytelling »From the mid -1970s. Works like Montaillou, Occitan village Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie foreshadowed a renewal of scientific interest in monograph, even microhistory – although the latter can use quantitative tools in order to provide context elements. But the transition from the reign of quantitative history to the principal of narration and the individual was perhaps sketched in France in the early 1980s. As early as 1982, the participants of the first international conference of quantitative history endeavored to take into account the criticisms addressed to them. The movement was to accelerate with the “ Critique ” of the Annals In 1989. The cultivated public could conclude that historians chose this moment to throw the quantitative baby with Marxist bath water: the link between quantitative history and marxizing researchers was however nothing systematic before, as the Ego-Histories of Maurice Agulhon (former communist adept at the qualitative) and the theoretical (conservative but theoretical global weighing »).
Yesterday hegemonic, quantitative history today suffers from an abandonment where we must make the share of university modes and pragmatism – the shortened doctoral thesis lends itself less to vast archival companies than the state thesis. A historian as recognized as Antoine Prost recently illustrated the interest of statistics to test the hypothesis of a “ consent To the violence of soldiers of the First World War on the Western Front. Knowing that 15 % of soldiers on average made use of their weapon during the French campaign and that the Great War was, much more than that of 1940, a war of artillerymen, he concluded that “ If the experience of immediately threatening death was general, the experience of the death given was infinitely rarer In 1914-1918 on the western front. Except to annex history to literature, it is difficult to see what would prohibit historians from handling encrypted data …
Claire Lemercier and Claire Zalc came to quantitative methods as part of their research work, respectively on the Paris Chamber of Commerce from 1803 to 1952 and on the small foreign entrepreneurs of the Seine department in the interwar period. They do not engage a quarrel in scientificity with the followers of the “ qualitative Absolute, but intend to deliver historians from passive fascination for figures, as well as the repugnance of principle to any quantification test. Neither fetishism of the number, nor exclusive against him: that could summarize their ambition. The development of suitable IT tools allows any researcher who borrows the worthy of the validity of certain hypotheses or to consider others. Claire Lemercier and Claire Zalc wanted to arouse the interest of historians for quantitative methods, which explains that their work hardly enters into detail of the calculations necessary for obtaining encrypted data. The reader will be able to feel a form of frustration, after accessing both technical explanations and as deprived of concrete expression.
The book, on the other hand, draws an itinerary of the researcher towards intelligent use of mathematical tools. It is important above all not to lock yourself in a given quantitative method, but to choose an analysis model as a function of the type of history that we plan to do, and the sources available. Having abandoned in the locker room any dream of completeness, the historian concerned with quantification must therefore think from the documents and types of samples that they can provide him. The distinction between a seizure phase (the most tedious in appearance) and data coding operations is essential, in order to obtain results offering some scientific guarantees.
Besides well known approaches, but too little used, such as factorial analyzes, particularly suitable for corpus with very many variables, or lexicometry, Claire Lemercier and Claire Zalc give professional sequences of the life of individuals or examples of techniques applied to the study of networks. The analysis of networks was thus used in psychology and sociology, before rare social historians were of its interest in their discipline. It presents a major constraint: to be able to judge the position (central, marginal, etc.) of an individual within a given network, it is necessary to “ Find trace of all the possible relationships between all the individuals concerned ». Does a researcher never have private correspondence from all the characters on which his study bears ? We understand that this type of technique is mainly valid for the history of the elites in modern or contemporary times, and that the groups studied cannot exceed a certain size. Claire Lemercier has thus studied a research group, the historic research center (CRH) of the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences, from 1974 to 1995 by carrying out a network analysis: the results obtained made it possible to distinguish people with the most links with other members of the center (a work manager and two contractual technicians) and the researchers ensuring the link between two given groups, that is, positions of power and/or vulnerability (the director of the laboratory and two master-assistants). The analysis of networks could also be of great interest to political historians, who have paid particular attention to the study of “ surroundings And decision -making mechanisms for a few years.
Claire Lemercier’s work and Claire Zalc presents himself as a manual for researchers who extend to describe and explain a phenomenon without proving to use techniques borrowed from the hard sciences or other human sciences. His reading is very stimulating, and that is perhaps the essential: many historians will come out with the desire to subject their hypotheses to the test of quantitative fire.