1. It must have been 1977 or 1978 when I heard of “microhistory” for the first time from Giovanni Levi, and I adopted this previously unheard-of word without asking what it meant literally; I suppose I contented myself with the reference to a reduced scale suggested by the prefix micro-. I well remember, too, that in those early conversations we spoke of “microhistory” as if it were a label attached to an empty vessel waiting to be filled.1
Sometime later Levi, Simona Cerutti, and I began working on a series entitled precisely Microstorie for the Einaudi publishing house in Turin. Twentyodd volumes by both Italian and foreign authors have appeared; a few of the Italian works have been translated into other languages. In some quarters there has been talk of an Italian school of microhistory. Recently, thanks to a small retrospective investigation into terminology,2 I discovered that this word, which we thought was free of connotation, had already been used by others.
2. To the best of my knowledge, the first person to dredge up the word microhistory as a self-defined term was an American scholar, George R. Stewart, in 1959. Stewart, who lived from 1895 to 1980, and who for many years was a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, must have been an exceptional person. The vast bibliography of this liberal polymath includes, in addition to various novels (which I have not read), a precocious ecological manifesto (Not So Rich as You Think, 1968); a recapitulation of universal history in the form of an autobiography of the human species (Man, an Autobiography, 1946); a chronicle, written in collaboration with others, of the resistance by Stewart and colleagues, including Ernst Kantorowicz, to the loyalty oath imposed by the University of California during the McCarthy era (The Year of the Oath, 1950).3 Stewart’s best-known books (Names on the Land, 1945, 1967; American Place-Names, 1970) are dedicated to the toponymy of the United States.4 In a lecture, taking as his point of departure the place-names mentioned in a Horatian ode, he asserted that to interpret a literary text it is necessary first of all to decipher the background references—places, vegetation, meteorological conditions—that it contains.5 Stewart’s passion for microscopic detail also inspired the book that interests me here: Pickett’s Charge: A Microhistory of the Final Charge at Gettysburg, July 3, 1863 (1959). In it Stewart analyzed minutely for over three hundred pages the decisive battle of the American Civil War. The title refers to an event lasting only about twenty minutes: the desperate, unsuccessful assault led by a Confederate battalion under Major General Edward Pickett. The account unfolds within a narrow time frame, a period of fifteen hours. The maps and diagrams that accompany the text have captions such as “The Cannonade (1:10-2:55 P.M.).” The outcome of the battle of Gettysburg is played out in a matter of seconds, between a clump of trees and a stone wall.6 Within this compressed compass in time and space, Stewart analyzes in almost obsessive detail what he defines as “the climax of the climax, the central moment of our history”—and, as such, part of universal history. If George Edward Pickett’s failed charge had instead succeeded, Stewart suggests, the battle of Gettysburg might have ended differently, and “the existence of two rival republics would probably have prevented the United States from turning the balance of two World Wars and becoming a global power.”7 Stewart’s dogged kind of microhistory might induce a contemplation of Cleopatra’s nose.
3. A few years later, wholly in de pen dently of Stewart, a Mexican scholar, Luis González y González, inserted the word microhistory into the subtitle of a monograph published in Mexico City in 1968 (Pueblo en vilo: Microhistoria de San José de Gracia [A village in tumult]). The book investigates, within the span of four centuries, the transformation experienced by a tiny “forgotten” village. But the minute dimensions are redeemed by its representative characteristics. Besides the fact that González y González was born and lived there, this is the element that justifi es the choice of San José de Gracia over a thousand other villages just like it. Here microhistory is synonymous with local history, written, as González y González stressed, citing Paul Leuilliot, from a qualitative rather than a quantitative perspective.8 The success enjoyed by Pueblo en vilo (reprinted and translated into English and French) persuaded its author to theorize about its methodology in two essays, “El arte de la microhistoria” and “Teoria de la microhistoria,” which were included in two collections entitled, respectively, Invitación a la microhistoria (1973) and Nueva invitación a la microhistoria (1982). In these pages, echoes of which are discernible in other Mexican publications from these years,9 González y González distinguished microhistory from the anecdotal and discredited petite histoire; and he reiterated its identity with what in England, France, and the United States was called “local history,” and which Nietz sche had defined as “antiquarian or archeological history.” Finally, to counteract the objections provoked by the word microhistory, González y González suggested two alternatives: matria history, suitable for evoking that “small, weak, feminine, sentimental world of the mother” which revolves around the family and the village; and yin history, the Taoist term that recalls all that is “feminine, conservative, terrestrial, sweet, obscure and painful.”10
4. Even while claiming for himself the basic paternity of the word microhistory, González y González recalled that it had already appeared in Fernand Braudel’s introduction to the Traité de sociologie edited by Georges Gurvitch (1958), but “sin significación concreta reconocida.”11 Actually, for Braudel microhistoire had a precise but negative connotation. It was synonymous with that “history of events” [histoire événementielle], with that “traditional history,” that saw the “so-called history of the world” dominated by protagonists who resembled orchestra directors. Braudel held that, within the limits of brief and convulsive time, this traditional history was less interesting than microsociology on the one hand, and econometrics on the other.
As we know, Braudel had declared his hostility with regard to histoire événementielle, identified with political history, even from the time of his Méditerranée (1949). Ten years later he once again demonstrated his displeasure. But he was too intelligent, too impatient to content himself with repeating what had now become for many, because of his own authority, an accepted truth. Suddenly putting aside what at this point seemed to him “old misunderstandings,” Braudel wrote: “The incident (if not the event, the sociodrama) exists in repetition, regularity, multitude, and there is no way of saying absolutely whether its level is quite without value or scholarly promise. It must be given closer examination.”12 Twenty-five years had to pass before this suggestion would be acted upon.13 Braudel excluded the possibility of scholarly recognition of singularity: the incident, the fait divers, could, perhaps, find acceptance simply because it was considered repetitive—an adjective that in González y González became “typical.” But microhistory remained condemned.14 The word, obviously modeled on microeconomics and microsociology, remained clothed in a technicist aura, as emerges from this passage of Les fleurs bleues, arguably Raymond Queneau’s finest novel. The two speakers are the duke of Auge and his chaplain:
“What is it exactly that you want to know?”
“What you think about universal history in general and of general history in particular. I’m listening.”
“I’m really tired,” said the chaplain.
“You can rest later. Tell me, for example, is this Council of Basel universal history?”
“But of course: it is universal history in general.”
“And what about my small cannon?”
“General history in particular.”
“And the marriage of my daughters?”
“Scarcely ‘the history of events.’ At the most, microhistory.”
“What kind of history?” the duke of Auge stormed. “What the devil kind of language is this? What is today anyway? Pentecost?”
“Please excuse me, sire. The effects of exhaustion, as you can see.”15
The duke of Auge, probably just like many readers of Queneau in 1965, had never heard of microhistory. For this reason, perhaps, ignoring the chaplain’s precise classification, the publisher of the 1977 French translation of González y González’s Pueblo en vilo did not hesitate to substitute in the subtitle and in the text the words histoire universelle for microhistoire, with unintended comic effects.16
5. Microhistory, microhistoria, microhistoire: from which of these independent traditions did the Italian microstoria derive? On the level of strict terminology that has occupied us thus far, the answer would seem to be clear: from the French microhistoire. I am thinking first of all of the splendid translation by Italo Calvino published by Einaudi in 1967 of Les fleurs bleues (I fiori blu); second, of a passage in Primo Levi in which, to the best of my knowledge, the word microstoria appears in Italian for the first time in an autonomous manner.17 It occurs at the beginning of the chapter titled “Carbon,” with which The Periodic Table concludes:
The reader, at this point, will have realized for some time now that this is not a chemical treatise: my presumption does not reach so far—”ma voix est faible, et même un peu profane.” Nor is it an autobiography, save in the partial and symbolic limits in which every piece of writing is autobiographical, indeed every human work; but it is in some fashion a history. It is—or would have liked to be—a micro-history, the history of a trade and its defeats, victories, and miseries, such as everyone wants to tell when he feels close to concluding the arc of his career, and art ceases to be long.18
There is nothing in these calm and melancholy words to suggest that twelve years later their author would take his life. The reduction of scale suggested by the word microhistory fits in with the acknowledgment of the limits of existence, with the sense of one’s own capacities that dominates this passage. Primo Levi probably encountered it in Calvino’s Italian translation, which he may have checked against Queneau’s original text. That Levi knew of Calvino’s version of Les fleurs bleues seems certain given the closeness between the two men; moreover, the last page of “Carbon” in The Periodic Table echoes closely the last page of Calvino’s Il barone rampante.19 A fresh encounter between Calvino and Primo Levi, by way of Queneau, occurred a few years later due to the Italian translation of the latter’s Petite cosmogonie portative.20
Shortly after its appearance in The Periodic Table, the word microhistory entered Italian historical usage, losing, as often happens, its original negative connotation. Giovanni Levi (a distant cousin of Primo Levi) was undoubtedly behind this transposition.21 Microhistory rapidly replaced microanalysis, which had been used in these years by Edoardo Grendi, more or less with the same meaning.22
6. There is a point that still needs defining: the history of a word, obviously, determines its possible application only in part. This is proved indirectly by the “Zaharoff lecture” that Richard Cobb dedicated to Raymond Queneau in 1976—a species of historiographical manifesto that fits none of the usages discussed thus far. Cobb began with the ironic sympathy felt by Queneau for the timid, modest, provincial personages in his novels. He appropriated their words in order to counterbalance news of local happenings—the only ones that were of interest—with political events; and he concluded by assuming as his own slogan the colorful curse hurled by Zasie at Napoleon.23 Basically, this is an exaltation of minor historiography (Cobb does not use the term microhistory) against that of the great and the powerful. The naïveté of this interpretation is obvious. Queneau does not identify in any way with his characters. The fondness he felt for the provincial life of Le Havre coexisted in him with an omnivorous, encyclopedic passion for the most random knowledge. His mocking curiosity for the faits divers did not stop him from proposing a drastic remedy for the prescientific nature of historiography, and he elaborated a rigorous mathematical model in which to trap the disordered course of human acts.24 But neither the author of Une histoire modèle nor the auditor and later editor of Alexandre Kojève’s courses on Hegel’s Phenomenology appears in the portrait simplified by Cobb to the point of distortion. Totally missing is the tension that runs through all of Queneau’s work between the warmth of the narrator’s intimate glance and the coldness of the scientist’s detached observation.25
There is nothing strange about this. Cobb is an empiricist who claims to be superior to theoretical questions; and, after all, for him the use of Queneau is a mere pretext.26 But the proposal of a minor historiography made in the name of Queneau has a symptomatic importance that Cobb, confirmed cultivator of his own eccentricity, would be the first to reject. The contrast between Historiography with a capital H and Zasie’s “Napoléon mon cul” might suggest, apart from the obvious difference in tone, the contrast between storia patria and storia matria as outlined by Luis González y González. To be sure, the latter’s microhistoria focuses on typical phenomena, whereas Cobb’s petite histoire focuses on the unpredictable and the unrepeatable fait divers. But in both cases the choice of a circumscribed and close-up perspective reveals a dissatisfaction (explicit and aggressive in Cobb’s case, tactful and almost imperceptible in the case of González y González)27 with the macroscopic and quantitative model that dominated the international historiographical scene between the mid-1950s and mid-1970s, primarily through the activities of Braudel and the historians of the Annales school.
7. None among that relatively heterogeneous group of Italian scholars of microhistory would recognize himself in George Stewart’s close-up “history of events,” in the local history of González y González, or in the petite histoire of Richard Cobb. However, it cannot be denied that even Italian microhistory, though very different (beginning with its theoretical goals), originated in opposition to the historiographical model just mentioned. The latter was presented in the mid-1970s, with Braudel’s backing, as the culmination of the functional-structural approach, the supreme historiographical paradigm, the third to have occurred in the course of the more than two millennia that began with Herodotus.28 But a few years earlier, the ceremony marking the publication of the Mélanges honoring Braudel (1973) revealed the existence of hidden tensions and anxieties at the very moment of the celebration. A parallel reading of two essays published on that occasion—”Un nouveau champ pour l’histoire sérielle: Le quantitatif au troisième niveau,” by Pierre Chaunu; and “Histoire et ethnologie,” by François Furet and Jacques Le Goff—seems instructive twenty years later. In both cases a historiographical program was being introduced and justified by some general historical reflection.29 Chaunu spoke of the end of the anticolonial wars (referring only to France) and to student revolts (in America and in Europe); of a disoriented Roman Church following Vatican II; of an economic crisis in the most advanced countries that brought into question the very idea of progress; of a challenge to the ideals of the Enlightenment that he interpreted consistently as a secularized transposition of an eschatological ideal. Furet, with words that we can suppose were shared by Le Goff, observed that the worldwide phenomenon of decolonization had placed the great nineteenth-century historiography, in its Manchesterian and Marxist versions, face-to-face with nonhistory: progress and change had run into inertia, stagnation. Common to both essays was a clear-cut rejection of theories of modernization (such as W. W. Rostow’s, then in vogue, mentioned by Furet and Le Goff) that in Chaunu was coupled with a repudiation of modernity tout court. The research projects resulting from these essays varied greatly. Chaunu proposed analyzing the traditional societies of the Ancien Régime, observing that the “great continuity of Latin Christendom which has unconsciously . . . been transformed into a Europe of the West” was “infinitely more attractive than the Nambikwaras or the Dogons”—a statement that lumped together disdainfully peoples from various continents being studied by ethnologists (Claude Lévi-Strauss and Marcel Griaule, respectively) from very different intellectual worlds.30 Instead, Furet and Le Goff suggested reconnecting the long-sundered bonds between history and ethnology by adopting a generally comparative perspective based on the explicit rejection, especially by Le Goff, of a Eurocentric approach. But at this point the two positions began to converge: both Chaunu and Furet were aiming at a “serial history” based on the analysis of phenomena, according to Furet, “selected and constructed as a function of their repetitive character.”31 Le Goff subscribed to the rejection of the single event on the part of the ethnologists and their concentration on “events repeated or awaited”: Le Roy Ladurie’s analysis of the carnival in Romans, though praised, was evidently considered an exception. Chaunu insisted that after studying economies and societies, the time had come, using similar methods, to deal with the third level, that of civilizations; and he spoke with strong approval of Michel Vovelle’s examination of Provençal testaments. Le Goff stressed that the attention to everyday man suggested by ethnology “naturally leads to the study of mentalities, considered as ‘that which changes least’ in historical evolution.”32 Both essays ended up supporting the validity of the Braudelian paradigm, at the same time extending the range of its applicability.
8. It is not a simple matter to evaluate the import of this “at the same time.” In all institutions, innovations, while rupturing with the past, make headway by means of the reaffirmation of a certain continuity with what has gone before. In the years that followed, precisely while Braudel’s work was being translated into many languages (beginning with English) and was reaching a public far beyond the world of specialists, the paradigm that for the sake of convenience I have called Braudelian was rapidly declining. After Le Roy Ladurie had proclaimed that the French historical school founded by Bloch and Febvre must accept the American challenge and convert to the computer, he published the enormously successful Montaillou: a piece of research conducted in craftsmanlike fashion on a medieval village, population two hundred.33 Even Furet was dedicating himself to these themes of political history and the history of ideas that he had previously judged intrinsically resistant to serial history.34 Questions that had been considered peripheral were cropping up at the center of the discipline, and vice versa. The pages of the Annales (and the journals of half the world) were beset by themes proposed by Le Goff in 1973: the family, the human body, relations between the sexes, age groups, factions, charismatics. Studies on the history of price fluctuations went into a brusque decline.35
In France one has spoken of nouvelle histoire to describe this change in the intellectual climate that coincides significantly with the end of the long period of economic development that had begun in 1945.36 The term is debatable, but the basic characteristics of the phenomenon are clear. In the course of the 1970s and 1980s the history of mentalities to which Braudel attributed a marginal significance grew in importance, often under the name “historical anthropology.”37 The ideological “ambiguity” emphasized by Le Goff in 1974 undoubtedly contributed to this success.38 Philippe Ariès has devoted some telling words to the subject: “The criticism of progress has passed from a reactionary right that had, moreover, abandoned it, to a left, or, rather, a leftism with poorly drawn borders, rough, but vigorous. I do indeed believe (it’s a hypothesis) that there is a connection between the new reticence of the 1960s in regard to development, progress, modernity, and the passion brought by young historians to the study of preindustrial societies and their mentalities.”39
These words were implicitly autobiographical; as a young man Ariès had been a follower of Charles Maurras and active in the ranks of Action Française. Beginning in the 1970s this “Sunday painter” (historien du dimanche), as Ariès ironically described himself, gradually became integrated into the group of Annales historians; he even was elected to the École Pratique des Hautes Études.40 This academic event can be viewed as one of the many symptoms of a much greater transformation that was neither solely French nor academic. The frequently unconscious resumption of the themes of romantic opposition to capitalism on the part of leftist ecological currents is a component of it.41
The “new reticence” to which Ariès alluded could become transformed into divergent positions. It may be remembered that Furet had proposed fighting the ethnocentric abstraction of theories of modernization with a dose of ethnology.42 Chaunu had suggested throwing overboard the ideals of modernity tied to the Enlightenment together with theories of modernization. The latter alternative—more radical than the ideological point of view—refused to bring the historian’s research tools into the discussion. The former alternative was moving in this direction but stopped halfway. Retrospectively, speaking primarily from my personal experience, I think that Italian research into microhistory began from a diagnosis that agreed in part with Furet’s but that arrived at a totally different prognosis.
9. The element of agreement lies in the rejection of ethnocentrism and of the teleology that for Furet characterized the historiography transmitted by the nineteenth century. The affirmation of a national entity, the advent of the bourgeoisie, the civilizing mission of the white race, and economic development furnished to historians a unifying principle of both a conceptual and a narrative order, depending on the point of view and the scale of observation adopted. Ethnographic history conceived along serial lines proposed breaking with this tradition. Here the paths traveled by serial history and microhistory diverge—a divergence that is at once intellectual and political.
To select as a cognitive object only what is repetitive, and therefore capable of being serialized, means paying a very high price in cognitive terms. First of all, on the chronological plane, ancient history, as Furet himself observed, precludes such treatment;43 and medieval history renders it very difficult (for many of the themes suggested by Le Goff the documentation is fragmentary). Second, on the thematic level, areas such as the history of ideas and political history (again as Furet would have it) by definition elude this type of investigation. But the most serious limitation of serial history emerges precisely through what should be its basic objective: “the equalization of individuals in their roles of economic or sociocultural agents.” This idea of equalization is doubly deceiving. On the one hand, it distorts an obvious element: in any society the conditions of access to the production of documentation are tied to a situation of power and thus create an inherent imbalance. On the other hand, it cancels out many particulars in the existing documentation for the benefit of what is homogeneous and comparable. With a trace of scholarly pride, Furet affirmed: “the document, ‘facts,’ no longer exist for themselves, but in relationship to the series that precedes them and follows them; it is their relative value that becomes objective, and not their relationship to an ungraspable ‘real’ substance.”44 It is therefore not surprising if the twice-filtered data in the series become “incomprehensible” in their relation to reality.
Historical knowledge, obviously, involves the construction of documentary series. Less obvious is the attitude that the historian must assume with regard to the anomalies that crop up in the documentation.45 Furet proposed ignoring them, observing that the hapax (that which is unique documentation) is not usable in the perspective of serial history. But the hapax, strictly speaking, does not exist. Any document, even the most anomalous, can be inserted into a series; but not only that: it can, if properly analyzed, shed light on a still-broader documentary series.
10. In the early 1960s I began to study inquisitorial trials, hoping to reconstruct, in addition to the attitudes of the judges, those of the men and women accused of witchcraft. I quickly realized that this nonethnocentric approach would require comparison with the work of anthropologists, first among whom was Claude Lévi-Strauss. But the historiographical, conceptual, and narrative implications of such a choice became clarified for me only gradually, in the course of the years that separated I benandanti (1966) from Storia notturna (1989).46 Along the way I wrote a book in which I attempted to reconstruct the ideas and attitudes of a sixteenth-century Friulian miller who was tried and condemned to death by the Inquisition, Il formaggio e i vermi (1976). The rejection of ethnocentrism had brought me not to serial history but to its opposite: the minute analysis of a circumscribed documentation, tied to a person who was otherwise unknown. In the introduction I took issue with an essay by Furet in the Annales in which he asserted that the history of the subaltern classes in preindustrial societies can be studied only from a statistical point of view.47
Recently, Michel Vovelle rejected as fictitious the alternative between individual biography and serial research.48 In principle, I agree. But in practice the choice does assert itself: it is a question of evaluating risks and advantages on a practical and, even more, on an intellectual plane. Roger Chartier wrote about The Cheese and the Worms that “it is on this reduced scale, and certainly only on this scale, that we can understand, without deterministic reduction, the relationship between systems of belief, of values and representations on one side, and social affiliations on another.”49 Even someone not disposed to accept such an uncompromising conclusion has to admit that the experiment was not only legitimate but useful, if only for analyzing the results.
By reducing the scale of observation, that for which another scholar could have been a simple footnote in a hypothetical monograph on the Protestant Reformation in the Friuli was transformed into a book. The motives that impelled me at that time to make this choice are not totally clear to me. I am suspicious of those that come to mind today (and naturally there are many) because I would not like to project into the past intentions that have been maturing over the years. Gradually I came to realize that many events and connections of which I was totally unaware influenced the decisions that I thought I had made independently—a banal fact in itself, but always surprising, because it contradicts our narcissistic fantasies. How much does my book owe (to take an obvious example) to the political climate in Italy during the early 1970s? Something, perhaps a lot; but I suspect that the motives for my choices should be searched for elsewhere.
To discover them, at least in part, I shall begin by stating what may not be totally obvious. The Cheese and the Worms does not restrict itself to the reconstruction of an individual event; it narrates it. Furet had rejected narrative—and, more specifically, literary narrative—as an expression, typically teleological, of the “history of events,” whose time “is made up of a series of discontinuities described in the mode of the continuous: the classic subject matter of the narrative [récit].”50 Against this type of “literary” narration Furet contrasted the examination of serial ethnographic history, problem by problem. He thus appropriated that widely accepted commonplace that still today tacitly identifies a specific form of narration, based on late-nineteenth-century realist novels, with historical narrative tout court.51 Granted, the figure of the omniscient historian-narrator, who unravels the slightest details of an event or the hidden motivations that inspire the behavior of individuals, social groups, or states, has gradually established itself. But it is only one of the many possibilities, as the readers of Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Robert Musil should well know.52
Before beginning The Cheese and the Worms I had at length mulled over the relationship between research hypotheses and narrative strategies. Reading Queneau’s Exercices de style had powerfully whetted my desire to experiment.53 I had set out to reconstruct the intellectual, moral, and fantastic world of the miller Menocchio on the basis of sources produced by persons who had sent him to the stake. This in some way paradoxical project could evolve into an account that transforms the gaps in the documentation into a smooth surface.54 It could, but it seemed to me it should not, for reasons that were of a cognitive, ethical, and aesthetic order. The obstacles interfering with the research were integral elements in the documentation and thus had to become part of the account; the same for the hesitations and silences of the protagonist in the face of his persecutors’ questions—or mine.55 Thus the hypotheses, the doubts, the uncertainties became part of the narration; the search for truth became part of the exposition of the necessarily incomplete truth attained. Could the result still be defined as “narrative history”? For a reader with the slightest familiarity with twentieth-century fiction, the reply is obviously yes.
11. But the impetus toward this type of narration (and more generally toward occupying myself with history) came to me from further off: from War and Peace, from Tolstoy’s conviction that a historical phenomenon can become comprehensible only by reconstructing the activities of all the persons who participated in it.56 This notion, and the sentiments that had spawned it (popu lism, fierce disdain for the vacuous and conventional history of historians), left an indelible impression on me from the moment I first read it. The Cheese and the Worms, the story of a miller whose death is decreed from afar, by a man (a pope) who one minute earlier had never heard his name, can be considered a small, distorted product of Tolstoy’s grand and intrinsically unrealizable project: the reconstruction of the numerous associations linking Napoleon’s head cold before the battle of Borodino, the disposition of the troops, and the lives of all the participants in the battle, down to the most humble soldier.
In Tolstoy’s novel the private world (peace) and the public world (war) now run along parallel lines, now intersect; Prince André participates in the battle of Austerlitz, Pierre at Borodino. Thus Tolstoy proceeds along a path that had been opened up to him splendidly by Stendhal in his description of the battle of Waterloo seen through the eyes of Fabrizio del Dongo.57 The romanticized personages were bringing to light the painful inadequacy with which historians had dealt with a historical event par excellence (or presumed such). It was a formidable intellectual challenge that seemed to pertain to a past now vanished, just as are Vhistoire-bataille and the polemic against it.58 But reflecting on the battle as a historiographical theme can still be useful. From it emerges indirectly a fundamental problem in the historian’s trade.
12. In The Battle between Alexander and Darius at the River Issus, the artist Albrecht Altdorfer, to represent the battle, selected a towering and distant vantage point, like that of an eagle in flight. As if with the bird’s keen sight he painted the light resplendent on armor, trappings, and harnesses, the banners’ brilliant colors and white plumes swaying on warriors’ helmets, the hordes of knights with their lances raised, resembling an immense porcupine, and then, gradually receding toward the background, the mountains behind the battlefield, the encampments, the waters and mists, the horizon arching to suggest the shape of the terrestrial sphere, the immense sky in which burn the setting sun and waxing moon. No human eye will ever succeed in catching at once, as did Altdorfer, the historical specificity (real or presumed) of a battle and its cosmic irrelevance (figure 10).59
A battle, strictly speaking, is invisible, as we have been reminded (and not only thanks to military censorship) by the images televised during the first Gulf War. Only an abstract diagram or a visionary imagination such as Altdorfer’s can convey a global image of it. It seems proper to extend this conclusion to any event and with greater reason to whatever historical process. A close-up look permits us to grasp what eludes a comprehensive viewing, and vice versa.
FIGURE.10 Albrecht Altdorfer, The Battle between Alexander and Darius at the River Issus (Munich, Alte Pinakothek, 1929).
This contradiction is at the heart of a chapter (“The Structure of the Historical Universe”) in Siegfried Kracauer’s final book, published posthumously with a foreword by Paul Oskar Kristeller: History: The Last Things before the Last. Although avowing himself to be more optimistic on this point than his friend Kracauer, Kristeller had to admit that “the discrepancy between general and special history, or as he calls it, macro and micro history, represents a serious dilemma.”60 Queneau’s Les fleurs bleues dates from 1967; Kracauer’s death, from a year before. We probably find ourselves in this instance facing an independent invention. But what is important is not the term microhistory; it is the significance that it gradually comes to assume in Kracauer’s mind.
At first for Kracauer, “microhistory” seems to be synonymous with monographic research. But the comparison between “microhistory” and cinematographic close-up (an obvious thing for the author of From Caligari to Hitler and Theory of Film) introduces new elements. Kracauer observes that some research of a specific character, such as Hubert Jedin’s on the Councils of Constance and Basel, is capable of modifying the comprehensive visions delineated by macrohistory. Are we compelled to conclude, then, with Aby Warburg, that “God is in the detail”? It is the thesis sustained by “two great historians,” the Tolstoy of War and Peace and Sir Lewis Namier (the pairing suggested by Kracauer is significant). But despite Kracauer’s sympathy for these positions, he recognizes that certain phenomena can be grasped only by means of a macroscopic perspective. This suggests that the reconciliation between macroand microhistory is not at all taken for granted (as Toynbee wrongly believed). And yet it needs to be pursued. According to Kracauer, Marc Bloch offered the best solution in his Feudal Society: a constant backand-forth between microand macrohistory, between close-ups and extreme long shots, so as to continually thrust back into discussion the comprehensive vision of the historical process through apparent exceptions and cases of brief duration. This methodological prescription led to an affirmation of a decisively ontological nature: reality is fundamentally discontinuous and heterogeneous. Consequently, no conclusion attained apropos a determinate sphere can be transferred automatically to a more general sphere (what Kracauer calls the “law of levels”).61
These posthumous pages of Kracauer’s, who was not a professional historian, still constitute today, in my opinion, the best introduction to microhistory. As far as I know, they have had no influence on the emergence of this historiographical current.62 Certainly not on me, since I learned about them with deplorable delay only a few years ago. But when I read them they seemed strangely familiar for two reasons. First, an indirect echo of them had reached me long before by way of my decisive encounter with Minima moralia, the masterpiece in which Theodor Adorno, despite his belief in the idea of totality, and one he never renounced, implicitly demonstrated his own indebtedness to the micrological tradition inaugurated by Georg Simmel, a tradition carried on by Adorno’s friend (and, in a sense, master) Siegfried Kracauer.63 Second, the latter’s ideas on history, beginning with the crucial one of the discontinuity of reality, are an explicit and conscious development of key phenomena in the culture of this century, from Proust to the cinema. The fact that certain ideas are in the air signifies, after all, that even when starting from the same premises, it is possible to arrive at similar conclusions independently.
13. It is often difficult to demonstrate the existence of intellectual convergence and, at the same time, the lack of direct contact. So, if I am not mistaken, the interest (going well beyond the relevance of the object) in the intellectual genealogy that I have attempted to reconstruct thus far is in part true, in part fictional; in part conscious, and in part unconscious. Looking at things from a distance, I realize that the researches of our original Einaudi “microstorie group” were a fragment of a more general tendency, the parameters of which almost totally escaped me at the time. It may not be pure chance that the word microhistory was used first in the title of a work that, in almost maniacal detail, describes a battle (although the conclusion of Stewart’s book on Gettysburg seems to evoke Conrad rather than Tolstoy). Even less casual is the fact that some years later, undoubtedly independently, Kracauer identified microhistory with Tolstoy; I read this, I must confess, with pleasure mingled with some disappointment (my approach had not been so unusual after all).
I am aware of a difficulty. Tolstoy’s extraordinary capacity to communicate to the reader the physical, palpable certainty of reality seems incompatible with the wholly twentieth-century idea that I have placed at the core of microhistory—namely, that the obstacles interfering with research in the form of lacunae or misrepresentations in the sources must become part of the account. In War and Peace just the opposite happens. Everything that precedes the act of narration (from personal reminiscences to the memorials of the Napoleonic age) is assimilated and fused to permit the reader to enter into a relationship of special intimacy with the characters and participate directly in their lives.64 Tolstoy leaps over the inevitable gap between the fragmentary and distorted traces of an event (a battle, for instance) and the event itself. But this leap, this direct contact with reality, can take place only on the terrain of invention. It is precluded by definition from the historian, who has at his disposal only fragments of things and documents. The historiographical frescoes that seek to communicate to the reader, through frequently mediocre expedients, the illusion of a vanished reality tacitly remove this constituent limitation of the historical vocation. Microhistory chooses the opposite approach. It accepts the limitations while exploring their gnoseological implications and transforming them into a narrative element.
This approach had been anticipated in some respects by the Italian critic Renato Serra, in a brief but important essay written in 1912 and published posthumously: “Partenza di un gruppo di soldati per la Libia.”65 In a letter to Benedetto Croce, Serra explained that he had started from Tolstoy’s ideas on history as expressed in War and Peace.66 In an article later included in the volume History: Its Theory and Practice, Croce had repudiated Tolstoy’s position, calling it absurd and skeptical: “we know at every moment all the history that we need to know”; consequently, the history that we do not know is identical to “the eternal phantom of the ‘thing itself.’ ”67 Serra, in calling himself “a slave to the thing itself,” confessed to Croce that he felt much closer to Tolstoy, “only that,” he added, “my difficulties are, or seem to be, more complex.”68
In effect, “Partenza” harks back to ideas of Tolstoy (without naming him) but takes them in a completely different direction. Gruff letters from soldiers to their families, newspaper articles written for the pleasure of a distant public, accounts of military actions hurriedly scribbled by a harried captain, the reworking by historians full of superstitious veneration for each of these documents—all these narratives, independently of their more or less direct character, have (Serra explains) a highly problematic relationship with reality. In phrases that become little by little more hurried and almost feverish, Serra registers the rhythm of a thought that revolves around the unresolved contradiction between the certainty of the existence of the “thing itself” and distrust in the possibility of encompassing it by means of the evidence:
There are people who imagine in good faith that a document can be the expression of reality.. . . As if a document could express something different from itself.. . . A document is a fact. The battle is another fact (an infinity of other facts). The two cannot make one.. . . The man who acts is a fact. And the man who narrates is another fact. . . . Every piece of evidence provides testimony only of itself; of its proper moment, of its proper origin, of its proper end, and of nothing else.. . . All the critical judgments to which we subject history involve the concept of true history, of absolute reality. It is necessary to face up to the question of memory; not insofar as it is forgetfulness, but insofar as it is memory. Existence of things in themselves.69
14. I read Serra’s work only at the beginning of the 1980s. But the gist of it had reached me more than two decades earlier through Arsenio Frugoni’s teaching in Pisa. In his book Arnaldo da Brescia nelle fonti del secolo XII (1954) he had shown how the specific perspective of each narrative source contributes to present the same personage in an alternating, different light.70 Today I feel that Frugoni’s sarcasm over the naive efforts by positivist erudites to make the pieces fit together had as its point of departure Serra’s antipositivist polemic (“Every piece of evidence provides testimony only of itself; of its proper moment, of its proper origin, of its proper end, and of nothing else”), which it sought to surpass in its skeptical implications.
I am not certain that Frugoni knew Serra’s “Partenza di un gruppo di soldati per la Libia.” But that it had been read or reread recently by Italo Calvino seems obvious from his “Memories of a Battle” (“Ricordo di una battaglia”) (1974), a writing of a completely different kind.71 “It is necessary to face up to the question of memory,” Serra had written. Calvino takes up the question, even if his battle is an episode of partisan warfare that he is recalling at a distance of almost thirty years. At first everything seems clear to him, easily within reach: “It is not true that I no longer remember anything, my memories are still there, hidden in the gray matter of the brain.” But the negative statement “It is not true” shows that he is already assailed by doubt, that recollections crumble as memory brings them to light: “And my fear now is that as soon as some remembrance forms, it will immediately appear in a faulty light, contrived, sentimental, as war and youth always are, and become a segment in the story with the style of that time, which cannot tell us how things really were but only how we thought we saw them and said them.” Can memory abolish the mediation of the illusions and distortions of the self of a bygone time in order to attain “things” (“the things themselves”)? The conclusion echoes, with a bitter ironic twist, the false confidence of the beginning: “Everything that I have written thus far serves to make me understand that I remember almost nothing of that morning.”
The closing words of “Memories of a Battle” (“The sense of everything that appears and disappears”) insist on the precariousness of our relationship with the past. And yet that “almost nothing” suggests that the past, in spite of everything, is not unattainable. This conclusion is important subjectively for me, having learned much from Calvino, but also objectively, since it explodes the current image of him (of the later Calvino) as a postmodernist writer. The laborious and painful autobiographical reflection that emerges from “Memories of a Battle” provides a different image than the one now in fashion of the euphoric skeptic.
15. In a recent essay, F. R. Ankersmit, a Dutch student of historiographical theory, argued that the tendency to focus attention on scraps rather than on larger entities is the most typical expression of “postmodernist historiography.”72 To elucidate this point Ankersmit used a vegetal metaphor (one that actually goes back to Lewis Namier, and perhaps to Tolstoy).73 In the past historians were preoccupied with the trunk of a tree or its branches; their postmodernist successors busy themselves only with the leaves—namely, with minute fragments of the past that they investigate in an isolated manner, independently of the more or less larger context (branches, trunk) of which they were a part. Ankersmit, who accepts the skeptical notions formulated by Hayden White in the early 1970s, looks with great favor on this shift toward the fragmentary. In his opinion it expresses an antiessentialist or antifoundationalist attitude that brings to light (Ankersmit is not frightened by formal contradictions) the “fundamentally postmodernist nature” of historiography: activity of an artistic type that produces narratives incommensurable among themselves. The ambition to know the past has waned: the significance of the fragments is sought in the present, the way “in which their pattern can be adapted to other forms of civilization existing today.” As examples of this historiographical tendency Ankersmit cites two French books (Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou and Georges Duby’s Sunday of Bouvines), an American work (Natalie Zemon Davis’s The Return of Martin Guerre), and a nonex is tent book (Microhistories, by the undersigned).
In the past decade Giovanni Levi and I have unceasingly argued against the relativist positions, including the one warmly espoused by Ankersmit, that reduce historiography to a textual dimension, depriving it of any cognitive value.74 There is no contradiction between this polemic and the debt I have acknowledged in these pages toward Calvino and more generally toward the nineteenth- and twentieth-century novel. The experimental attitude that brought together, at the end of the 1970s, the group of Italian students of microhistory (“a history with additives,” as Franco Venturi ironically dubbed it) was based on a definite awareness that all the phases through which research unfolds are constructed and not given: the identification of the object and its importance; the elaboration of the categories through which it is analyzed; the criteria of proof; the stylistic and narrative forms by which the results are transmitted to the reader. But this accentuation of the constructive moment inherent in the research was combined with an explicit rejection of the skeptical implications (postmodernist, if you will) so largely present in European and American historiography of the 1980s and 1990s. In my opinion the distinctive quality of Italian microhistory must be looked for in this cognitive wager.75 I should like to add that my own work during these years, even if in large part absorbed by a book decisively macrohistoric in approach (Ecstasies), proceeded, at least in my intentions, along this twofold track.
16. Piero della Francesca, Galileo, a community of nineteenth-century Piedmontese weavers, a Ligurian valley in the sixteenth century: these examples selected at random show that Italian research in microhistory has looked at subjects of acknowledged importance as well as themes that had been previously ignored or relegated to spheres considered inferior, such as local history.76 What all these investigations have in common programmatically is the insistence on context—exactly the opposite of the isolated contemplation of the fragmentary advocated by Ankersmit. But although the choice of Galileo does not require any prior justification, we have to ask ourselves: why precisely that community, why precisely that valley? In these cases, the reference, explicit or implicit, to a comparative dimension is inevitable. Franco Ramella (Terra e telai, 1984) and Osvaldo Raggio (Faide e parentele, 1990) have shown us that the in-depth study of the Val di Mosso and of the Fontanabuona compel us to look differently at such problems as protoindustry and the birth of the modern state. But to recognize the richness of the results is still not enough. An object, as we saw, may be chosen because it is typical (González y González) or because it is repetitive and therefore capable of being serialized (Braudel, apropos the fait divers). Italian microhistory has confronted the question of comparison with a different and, in a certain sense, opposite approach: through the anomalous, not the analogous. First of all, it hypothesizes the more improbable sort of documentation as being potentially richer: the “exceptional normal” of Edoardo Grendi’s justly famous quip.77 Second, it demonstrates, as was done, for example, by Giovanni Levi (L’eredità immateriale) and by Simona Cerutti (La Ville et les métiers), that any social structure is the result of interaction and of numerous individual strategies, a fabric that can be reconstituted only from close observation.78 Significantly, the relationship between this microscopic dimension and the larger contextual dimension became in both cases, though so diverse, the organizing principle in the narration.79 As Kracauer had already foreseen, results obtained in a microscopic sphere cannot be automatically transferred to a macroscopic sphere (and vice versa). This heterogeneity—we are just beginning to perceive the implications—constitutes both the greatest difficulty and the greatest potential benefit of microhistory.80
17. Giovanni Levi, speaking recently of microhistory, concluded: “this is a self-portrait, not a group portrait.”81 I had proposed doing the same, but did not succeed. Both the boundaries of the group to which I belonged and my own boundaries of self seemed retrospectively shifting and uncertain. To my surprise I discovered how important to me, unknowingly, were books I had never read, events and persons I did not know existed. If this is a selfportrait, then its model are the paintings of Umberto Boccioni in which the street enters into the house, the landscape into the face, the exterior invades the interior, the I is porous.
Domenico Scarpa, whom I thank with pleasure, brought to my attention that the word microhistory appears in writings by Andrea Zanzotto that date back to the 1960s, specifically:
In these passages, as we see, Zanzotto used the word microhistory in a very different sense from that which Italian historians would give to it subsequently. But Scarpa notes that as far back as 1962, in his critical review of the anthology I novissimi, Zanzotto contraposed to Sanguinetti’s “archhistory” a history that “actually tended to take the form of tales, nugae, dynamics (moto) of depressed areas” (Lepoesie eprose scelte, p. 1110). I wonder if Zanzotto, who obviously for quite some time had been contemplating the idea of the transformation of greater history into fables, might not have obtained the word microhistory from Queneau (Les fleurs bleues, 1965), a hypothesis that cannot be verified at the moment, as Gian Mario Villalta kindly informs me.