ABSTRACT
‘The history of France, such as it has been written by modern authors is not the true history of the country, the national, the popular history’ (DAEH, 214). 1 It was in this spirit that Augustin Thierry, in 1820, called for a renewal of historical writing in France. He was convinced that earlier historians had transmitted to posterity not only an incomplete but a false representation of events. He argued that the past was not something to be repudiated or disowned; rather, it was to be reclaimed so that the degrees of relation between present and past could be understood in a manner which accelerated positive change. Inaccurate and distorted accounts of past events had acquired the status of truth because they had been relentlessly rehearsed by generations of uncritical historians. Thierry judged that these texts functioned as a source of authority and provided intellectual legitimation for forces which he found uncompromisingly reactionary. He therefore set out to propose a new mapping of the historical field which would render the earlier accounts definitively obsolete. He grasped the supremely political significance of history, that the discourse on the origins and growth of the nation could be enlisted to endorse and justify the political arrangements of those in power. Historical truth in this sense was not something fixed or unchanging. Thierry understood that theories of history were to be related to the social and political conditions which supervened at the time of their elaboration. However, this degree of self-awareness should not be construed as indicating a thoroughgoing relativism. All histories were not contrived fictions. Thierry wrote as a committed member of the liberal opposition, holding that the new type of history which he supported corresponded to the institutional critique that was being developed by his contemporaries. The new historical 46method was at one and the same time a political strategy which served the causes of liberalism and constitutional reform and an intellectual project understood as a return to fact, to truth. The unmasking of the past amounted to the establishment of a genealogy of liberalism: ‘Men of freedom, we too have forebears’ (DAEH, 183). In order to be effective the political opposition needed to appropriate the historical field and ascribe to it a different set of meanings. The implication of this approach was clear: political freedom did not burst upon France in 1789: it was more accurate to envisage the Revolution itself as the culmination of the general movement of French history. Thierry called for a new understanding of the past which would be liberating in its consequences. What he proposed amounted to a politics—and perhaps by extension a morality—defined by a concept of history.
