Emphasizing the enduring attachment to historiography's moral function
in post-Machiavelli France, this talk will focus on the ways in which
humanist national histories sought to "move" their readers before,
during and after the Wars of Religion.
Emphasizing the enduring attachment to historiography's moral function
in post-Machiavelli France, this talk will focus on the ways in which
humanist national histories sought to "move" their readers before,
during and after the Wars of Religion. The talk contrasts
historiographical examples from the sixteenth century that exploit the
rhetoric of tragedy (a technique with ancient precedents in Thucydides
and Tacitus) as a means both to subject people and events to a moral
judgment and to incite political action on the part of the reader, on
the one hand, to the writings of seventeenth-century royal
historiographers charged with translating the post-war monarchical
politics of "oubliance" into a historiographical practice, on the other.
The talk aims to show that even if these latter writers reshape what
had been primarily a historiographical discourse of the "memorable" into
something that appears closer to critical historiography, in which the
"memorable" gives way to the "true," they do so under the pressure of
the politics of reconciliation. As a result, in the period following the
civil wars, national history aimed less to move readers to political
action than it did to cultivate in them a shared horror of their
civil-war past, and thus to "move" them in a primarily affective sense
that ultimately encouraged political passivity.
