What is a chrononym? The representation left in the vocabulary by a historical moment: “Restoration”, “Spring of Nations”, “Thirty Glorious Years”, “Years of Lead”, etc. What if history liked to be called all the names?
Through the notion of “chrononyms”, Dominique Kalifa, surrounded by thirteen historians, intends to propose a rereading of the representations left in the common vocabulary by certain historical moments. These ready-made expressions are of two kinds: endogenous chrononyms, produced by contemporaries themselves, and later ones, resulting from a retrospective and revealing look at the relationship of one era to another era.
All names
Only four cases here fall into the first type: “Restoration”, “Risorgimento”, “fin de siècle” and “Transition”. For the second category, the distance separating the period of birth from the period in question is very variable: very short for the ” roaring twenties “, an expression that we encounter as early as 1931, while the fortune of the “roaring twenties”, which concerns the same period, is much later, according to Emmanuelle Retaillaud (end of the 1950s). The same Franco-American contrast for ” gilded age » and « Thirty Glorious Years », this time in reverse.
The first expression, present in the title of a novel by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, The Gilded Age: A Story of Today (1871), only took shape retrospectively in the 1920s, under the pen of reformist intellectuals. They took up the expression negatively to demand reforms that would break with the abuses of an era outrageously dominated by the rich. This explains its reuse in the contemporary United States.
As Pascal Ory points out, the “Thirty Glorious Years” have a very precise date of birth, with the work of Jean Fourastié from 1979 and an ability to find a dating very close to the facts themselves, provided however that we accept Fourastié’s presupposition: indexing historical time on the economic situation. This coloring by the economic approach to history is however rather rare and recent.
Most of the era names draw their resonance from politics (Restoration, Risorgimento, Victorian Age, Spring of Nations, Years of Lead, Dark Years, transition) or the chronology of wars (inter-war, Hours Zero). Above all, they refer to the cultural and social atmosphere, sometimes linked to political history (fin de siècle, movida, Roaring Twenties, Russian Silver Age, gilded age).
This privilege granted to an aspect of visible historical reality partly explains the unequal capacity of these chrononyms to resist the wear and tear of time. Those with political resonance endure the best, as the common imagination and transmission through school remain structured by this traditional grid. The same goes for chrononyms linked to warlike ruptures. However, as Dominique Kalifa shows with regard to the “inter-war period”, the expression does not have the same presence and significance depending on the country. In Italy, the notion of ” ventennio “fascist prevails. In Germany, the division is made between the two regimes, Weimar Republic and Hitler’s regime, which strongly structure the period.
The spatiality of chrononyms
Finally, there are few period names that are able to transcend both conventional temporal boundaries and national boundaries. Despite the internationalization of research and the current vogue for transnational history, the construction of chrononyms is generally linked to each national space, and each one has difficulty in going beyond the boundaries, even if it is part of the cultural atmosphere.
There is no “Silver Age” (1900-1914) in France as there is in Russia. Conversely, the “fin de siècle” is very French, even if it has an Anglophone extension. Its extension to Central Europe, through the title of the famous work by Carl E. Schorske (Vienna end of the century), is the result of a learned and very later historiographical operation. This nationalization of chrononyms (of which the “Victorian age” is undoubtedly the expression par excellence) seems to be a specificity of so-called contemporary history.
The criticism of the chrononyms thus constructed is almost as general as their national character. It denounces this precisely falsely national and all-encompassing trait stated by the name of the period considered: the Belle Époque was “beautiful” only for a few; the “fin de siècle” is only an invention of a narrow intellectual or artistic fringe in Paris, London and New York; the madrid movida (Jeanne Moisand) limited herself to avant-garde sectors that were not representative of Spanish society; the “Roaring Twenties” were sad years for the mass of families grieving the loss of a loved one. The “Thirty Glorious Years” were only perceived late, in the 1960s or 1970s and, again, in an unequal way depending on the places and circles concerned, as Rémy Pawin has demonstrated in detail (History of happiness in France since 1945Robert Laffont, 2013).
This internal criticism, made at the time or a posterioriis found in all the chapters of the book. It is the favorite exercise of distinction of historians, but its effectiveness is very variable. The “Belle Époque” is still going strong, as Dominique Kalifa has shown (The True Story of the Belle ÉpoqueFayard, 2017). The “fin de siècle”, initially sulphurous and denigrated by the right-thinking, has experienced several returns to grace and even a rehabilitation by historians, even a global fortune beyond its Parisian cradle. The fortune of the “Spring of Peoples”, whose late, difficult and rather Germano-centric genesis Jean-Claude Caron recounts, has also recently experienced new variations (“Arab Spring”, “Maple Spring”).
This gap between scholarly history and perceived history is not specific to the contemporary era. It is perhaps more acute there, because of the acceleration of history and especially the inability of historians to impose their ideas or research beyond academic circles.
Fortunes and misfortunes
One of the contributions of the book is to outline the reasons for the fortune or misfortune of certain chrononyms. Certain decades have been promoted to this rank in XXe century (the “20s”, the sixties). Others, particularly in XIXe century, have failed to generate a lasting representation. Thus, the 1830s, despite their founding character in many sectors. The chrononyms specific to the XXe century are more firmly framed by dates than those of the XIXe century. The Victorian age, despite its seemingly indestructible classicism, was gradually subdivided into different phases and according to inflections unrelated to the eponymous queen, but rather to economic developments or the political and cultural atmosphere.
This acceleration of time, this discordance of chrononyms according to places and environments, this permanent contestation of the limits assigned to them doubtless explain one of the questions raised by the epilogue of the book. Have we entered the era of the “post” and the inability to construct new qualifications of the present time, or will we still have to wait, as for other eras, for other later historians to show imagination?
The end of XXe century has already seen several competing readings succeed one another. This uncertainty does not only refer to the difficulty of thinking together about very different spaces but in increasing interaction, due to what was called “globalization” at the same time. The bipolar vision of the world that structured the history of international relations and the history taught in high school programs no longer takes into account an increasingly fragmented world with staggered rates of evolution.
The prospect of the year 2000 had once been the stuff of dreams for science fiction writers and optimistic modernizers of the 1960s. It has been replaced by what Eric Hobsbawm has called “the short XXe century”, completed ten years before 2000. One of the fetishes left by the legacy of the XIXe century, this division into centuries so significant for previous eras (“century of Enlightenment”, “century of progress”, etc.) was called into question. The XXIe century, he has passed the age of majority, but he still has not found a provisional identity. We fall back again, as in XXe century, over decades or over economic and political crises to mark recent history.
The end of period names?
This example illustrates a central problem of historiography in the era of transnationalism and globalization. The desire to understand history globally comes up against the difficulty of finding qualifiers that are broad enough not to appear narrow, while nevertheless offering meaningful reading keys.
Eric Hobsbawm, one of the last global intellectuals to attempt to propose new qualified periodizations, violently attacked all representatives of postmodernism, seeing them as liquidators of the Enlightenment’s effort to think about history and the world. Dominique Kalifa notes that an “after” has even been proposed for postmodernism, while this confusion of times, seen in the past before they even took place, reflects the loss of reference authorities.
It may be recalled, however, that the same uncertainty reigned during the transition to the new century. The 1900 exhibition intended to take stock of the previous century and to announce, for the next, the ambition to continue and amplify the race for progress launched in XIXe century. But when one consulted witnesses from different horizons, a great deal of uncertainty reigned: between those who announced difficult times and total wars, those who already noted the “damage of progress”, those who discovered the crimes and horrors of colonial domination, etc.
It is logical that with the extension of geographical and historiographical horizons and the multiplicity of stakeholders in the public space, uncertainty has only increased over the past century. This is why laziness of mind leads to resorting to analogies by drawing on the now very vast repertoire of older chrononyms, hence the vogue of “neo” alongside that of “post”. These indirect comparisons risk being even more misleading than the initial expressions themselves and of redouble the dangers of the initial chrononyms by additional schematizations.
Now one of the missions of historians is to shake up these false certainties and these unthought-of fixed expressions. With the exception of a few paroxysmal moments (wars, revolutions, cataclysms, epidemics), there are few groups and peoples who share the same history. Unless we give up any rational approach, the historian must face the task of proposing the least bad keys to help those who do not make history, or sometimes make it, but without knowing what history they are making.