Writing History in the Third Republic
Author: Isabel Noronha-DiVanna
Date Of Publication: Apr 2010
Isbn13: 978-1-4438-1934-3
Isbn: 1-4438-1934-4
Writing History in the Third Republic offers new insight to the historiographical output of French historians between 1860 and 1914, a period often referred to as of positivistic historians or the école méthodique. Asserting their independence from Germanic influence by emphasising the French element in their work, historians in the period described their approach as methodical and positivistic and maintained that this was a distinctively French way of studying history. A heightened concern with sources, with facts as basis for all true knowledge, and with truth itself were unifying elements of the historiography of those historians now called école méthodique. The école represented the most sophisticated theoretical considerations about history and a method for historical studies in French academia in the late nineteenth century. The purpose of this book is to reassess whether or not this school is legitimately to be seen as having emerged in the Third Republic in response to political developments of nineteenth-century France, or if the so-called méthodiques share more in terms of philosophy of history and methodology than previously emphasized by scholars. This book contributes to the debate surrounding the role of history and its method, offering a counter-argument to postmodernist scholars while reassessing the contribution of twentieth-century theorists of history to the history of historiography.

Isabel DiVanna is a College Teaching Officer at Clare College, University of Cambridge. She was previously a Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Cambridge, where she researched the role of positivism as a moral and political philosophy in France and Latin America. She completed two doctorates, one at the University of Manchester, where she examined the medievalism of Gaston Paris, and one at the University of Cambridge, where she developed a study of the so-called “école méthodique.” She co-edited Historicising the French Revolution and is the author of Reconstructing the Middle Ages, both from Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

“Anyone interested in the intellectual history of the Third Republican France should read Isabel DiVanna on the period’s history and historians. She casts aside old ideas about their work as merely ‘methodical’ and overly determined by the tumultuous politics of the era and shows that they were more than mere handmaidens of Republican ideology. The result is a readable and learned account of their diversity and richness.”

—Ruth Harris, author of Dreyfus and Murders and Madness: Medicine, Law, and Society in the Fin de Siècle

“Isabel DiVanna’s book deepens our knowledge of French historical writing and thought at a time when historians were asserting their intellectual and professional independence. She explores the historiographical dimensions of Positivism, the characteristic philosophy of the early Third Republic. The authors she discusses wrote some of the most famous and influential works of French history. They had a formative influence on teaching in schools and universities during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and consequently on the elaboration of national and republican identities.”

—Robert Tombs, Professor of French History, University of Cambridge

Price Uk Gbp: 39.99
Price Us Usd: 59.99

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