Counterfactual history is written with ifs. What if the Allies had lost World War II? What if there had been no Atlantic slave trade? Two French historians analyze the knowledge-providing virtues of this use of the past, long appreciated by the Anglo-American world.
There are works of historiography that promise a lot and then give birth to nothing. There are others that announce a lot and… give enough – but not necessarily where we expected them: For a history of possibilities is an investigation based on a seminar, a bibliography, a teaching experience and a test. It is therefore an ambitious and, let us add, courageous dossier because the two authors do not simply indicate the rich horizons of historical science to come: they confront them.
What is it? So-called “counterfactual” history, also called in English-speaking countries where it is widely used “counterfactual history”. What if History “, or even “uchronia”, “alternative stories”, “history with what ifs”, etc. Little appreciated and relatively little practiced in France until recently, it nevertheless occupies, and has for a long time, an important space in the writing and use of the past, between history and fiction, all over the world, especially in the United States, the United Kingdom and in the formerly imperial spaces, dominions, colonies of Her Majesty. It is a literary genre that flourished in XIXe century, then moved to the XXe century in a very fashionable type of popular historiography (what if Napoleon had won at Waterloo? What if the Allies had lost the Second World War?), whose knowledge virtues have only been perceived by American and English historians. To a large extent, the argument of Quentin Deluermoz and Pierre Singaravélou, both historians specializing in the XIXe century, consists of a national catch-up: taking seriously this apparently unserious history and agreeing that counterfactual history is a good lever for “questioning the frameworks of knowledge production in the discipline.”
Reflection on causalities
The first and most explicit issue of the book is therefore epistemological. It bears witness to the historiographical enthusiasm that currently reigns in France in the discipline: a programmatic intoxication expressed by a generation of French historians, reasoning broadly, speaking foreign languages, reading the international bibliography (especially English-speaking however) showing a reflexive appetite and a theoretical ambition and questioning their writing practices. They react for the best to the form of demobilization that characterized the end of the XXe century, after a season of brilliance in the 1970s and 1980s, marked by the inability of historians to speak to the masses or to make themselves heard in the public space. In recent years, thanks to the imagination and audacity of these young hussars, the trend seems to be turning around, proposing an alliance between the most demanding history and the most voluntary inclusion in civic debate.
Upon reading, we are quickly convinced of the value and plurality of uses and levels of scale of the application of counterfactual reasoning: imagining that another outcome could have taken place leads to directly questioning the types of causalities set in motion, their hierarchy, and finally, pure contingency – an insurmountable horizon, even though the discipline has been working for two centuries to erase it. Historical science, as it is constructed at the end of the XIXe century and in most of the XXe century, aims to reveal the laws of historical development on a model analogous to that of the laws of nature. Chance, the grain of sand that derails, should have no place there. In fact, punctual counterfactual reasoning is indeed at work in Fernand Braudel (“let us suppose that the easily accessible mines of the New World” had been taken from Castile, then…) or in what the authors call “hidden counterfactuals” (because not made explicit), which are nothing other than historiographical prejudices (such as, for example, Western superiority or the evolutionist mental framework). Reflexive hygiene, counterfactual reasoning, engaged over a short period, allows to highlight “the constraints, the reproduction mechanisms and the routines that organize social worlds”. Finally, he renews the program of micro-history by tying together the notions of causality and contingency in a different way, by explaining, like Roger Chartier for the French Revolution, that it could not have been, while enclosing socio-cultural, politico-economic developments in logics of intelligibility which explain them.
This practice of counterfactual history breaks with its traditional right-wing usage (neo-conservative in the United States) where the paradigm of Cleopatra’s nose imposes the contingency and freedom of actors as the Alpha and Omega of historical accomplishment. It also breaks with a more contemporary left-wing usage, particularly in vogue in imperial historiography: what would have been the fate of India outside the British colonial state? When the question dictates the answer, productivity is zero, the contribution trivial and purely ideological: criticism of colonialism and Western supremacy. This is shown in the chapter “Testing the Empire” which reviews, rather than works on, the different types of counterfactual approaches in imperial history. This is the first exploratory part of the book. The second, around the days of February 1848, proposes a more targeted and effective use of counterfactual reasoning, without the results being entirely convincing. There is a question of writing and plotting here which undoubtedly hinders the full mobilization of this tool, but it does not matter here, because the authors assume the experimental nature of the approach. Others will take over.
Pasts that are still alive
The second side of the book is almost more astonishing. It unearths a rich genealogy of the counterfactual genre (in historiography, from Thucidydes to Niall Ferguson and Robert Fogel, as well as in literature), but, above all, introduces the reader to a cultural history of the uses of the past, by linking the current craze for this production to a new sensitivity to times, what François Hartog had called the regime of presentist historicity and whose implications Jérome Baschet, in a fascinating new book, seeks to unfold. Because it is only too obvious that these dreams of alternative history are children of their time: they betray the frustrations of a present clouded by worries about the future, solicited and crushed by the immediatist tyranny where the past is intensely recycled in plural and sometimes contradictory forms, painful memories or participatory or playful practices, a past commemorated, a past made heritage, or a past replayed so that nothing has yet been played.
While in France we know about the success of Puy du Fou founded in 1978 by Philippe de Villiers, we are often unaware (or scornful) of the vitality and expansion of these historical reconstruction phenomena today: in the United States, the experiences of ” Living History » related to the Civil War represent a budget of 1.4 billion dollars, or twice the annual revenue of Broadway (p. 287)! The counterfactual intersects this relationship to the past insofar as restitution is often added the unprecedented outcome: the battle reenactment leaves the end of the fight open to the imagination of the actors (professional actors or, more often, amateurs grouped in associations) free to change the scenario. Similarly, the practice of role-playing games since the 1970s, or the world of video games – the world’s leading cultural industry – largely invest in the historical or fictional-historical universe, such as the medieval-fantasy genre (Heroic fantasy). So the famous game Civilization where the player takes the place of an iconic leader – Moctezuma, Caesar, Napoleon 1er – and must lead its civilization from the Stone Age to the conquest of space. Historical experimentation and the pathological hypertrophy of the ego happily unite there. Psychologists define these counterfactual games as “the “adult” version of children’s games”. It could not be better said that there is here, undeniably, a symptom of generalized infantilism that also defines our era.
However, the book ends with a reflection on the educational uses of counterfactual history by reporting on a workshop held in Grenoble in 2011, where the public was invited, under the benevolent but firm guidance of the two historians, to reflect on two alternative scenarios: the absence of the Atlantic slave trade, on the one hand; the successful flight of King Louis XVI in June 1791, on the other hand. The result is very productive, including for those who are not the obligatory leaders of the new educational techniques. The public, mastering a certain threshold of knowledge all the same, constructs hypotheses, thinks out loud and collectively in a relevant way.
Beyond the heuristic interest, the possible educational use, we understand, thanks to Quentin Deluermoz and Pierre Singaravélou, the depth of the topicality of this history of possibilities because, by bringing out this “possible” that has partly disappeared from our sensitive radars, it contributes to an urgent task: loosening the stranglehold of time – what Jérôme Baschet otherwise calls the “tyranny of the present”. This is why this book, despite its imperfections and its possibilities that have not happened, is a beautiful history book.