ABSTRACT
In Nora's view, the recognition that history is a construct calls for a new attitude on the part of those who construct. He encourages historians to be historians of themselves as he launched his call for Essais d'ego-histoire.It was a "tentatice de laboratoire", as he wrote in his introduction to the volume, that aimed to produce "a new genre for a new age of historical consciousness. He convinced them with the argument that, though ego-history was a form of the first-person narrative, it excluded much of the personal and subjective normally associated with autobiography: "No falsely literary autobiography, or unnecessarily intimate confessions, no abstract profession or principles, no attempt at amateur psychoanalysis". He analyzes Fernand Braudel's autobiographical essay Personal Testimony", a prototype of both the ego-historical and interventional styles. With the spread of ego-history, for the first time historians wrote their autobiography as historians, not as humanists or intellectuals engaged in scholarship.
