ABSTRACT
What specific sense does the concept of experience have for historians? What is constructed, and what is given in historical experience? Is the very idea of an experience of the historical past meaningless? Whether it bears on the present or the past, all experience seems to be an experience of something (its “object”) by someone (its “subject”). Who is the subject of an historical experience? Is it something strictly individual, or can it also be collective? And correlatively, what could the object of such a historical experience possibly be? Events? Processes? Epochs? Inversely, what is beyond all experience? Structures? Periods? These questions will be dealt with within the frame of the theory of history. After having outlined the polysemy of the concept of experience, we will proceed from the most singular forms of experience to examine the different generalizations to which it gave rise: The experience of events by agents and witnesses (from lived history to remembered history), the experience of society by a group formulated in narratives (related history), the experience of historical time, of an epoch, the experience as learning from history (the practical past) and as a special knowledge of the past.
