Slightly different versions of this essay have been presented to Darwin College, Cambridge, and to the Departments of History at the Universities of Siena and Cagliari. I am grateful to Gopal Balakrishnan, Michele Battini, Pier Cesare Bori, Cesare G. De Michelis, Andrea Ginzburg, Maria Luisa Catoni, Mikhail Gronas, and Sergei Kozlov for their help.
1. Jean-François Revel, ed. (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1968). My quotations are taken from M. Joly, Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu: Humanitarian Despotism and the Conditions of Modern Tyranny, trans., ed., and with commentary by John S. Waggoner (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003).
2. For Joly’s biography, see P. Charles, Les Protocoles des sages de Sion (1938), reprinted in Les Protocoles des sages de Sion, ed. Pierre-André Taguieff, 2 vols. (Paris: Berg International, 1992), 2:9–37: 25 (henceforth cited as Taguieff). Cf. also Joly, The Dialogue in Hell, pp. xvii ff. and idem, Dialogo agli Inferi tra Machiavelli e Montesquieu, ed. R. Repetti, trans. E. Nebiolo Repetti (Genoa, 1995), p. 12n4. In 1870 Joly stated that a second, enlarged edition of the Dialogue, on which he had worked during his confinement at Sainte-Pélagie, was in press. But there is no evidence that it ever appeared (Maurice Joly: Son passé, son programme, par lui-même [Paris: Lacroix, 1870], p. 10n2).
3. Ibid., p. 9: “Un soir que je me promenais sur la terrasse au bord de l’eau, près du Pont Royal, par un temps de boue dont je me souviens encore, le nom de Montesquieu me vint tout à coup à l’esprit comme personnifiant tout un côté des mes idées, que je voulais exprimer. Mais quel serait l’interlocuteur de Montesquieu? Une idée jaillit de mon cerveau: et pardieu c’est Machiavel!
“Machiavel qui représente la politique de la force à côté de Montesquieu qui représentera la politique du droit; et Machiavel, ce sera Napoléon III, qui peindra à lui-même son abominable politique.”
4. Ferdinando Galiani, Dialogue sur le commerce des bleds, in Opere (Illuministi italiani, vol. 6), ed. Furio Diaz (Milan and Naples: Ricciardi, 1975), pp. 357–612.
5. Satyre Menippée ou la vertu du Catholicon d’Espagne, ed. C. Nodier, 2 vols. (Paris: Delangle, 1824).
6. After having finished the present essay, I discovered that this connection had already been proposed by Johannes Rentsch in Lukian-Studien (Plauen: Programm Plauen Gymnasium, 1895), p. 39 (I cite from Nicoletta Marcialis, Caronte e Caterina: Dialoghi dei morti nella letteratura russa del XVIII secolo [Rome: Bulzoni, 1989], p. 19). Rentsch mentioned the German translation of the Dialogue aux Enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu, which appeared anonymously.
7. Lucian, Dialogues of the Dead, 12.
8. Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, Nouveaux dialogues des morts (1683), new, enlarged ed. (London: Printed for Jacob Tonson, 1711), dedicated to Lucian: “J’ai suprimé Pluton, Caron, Cerbère et tout ce qui est usé dans les Enfers.” On the contrast between ancients and moderns, see, for example, the dialogue between the physicians Erasistratus and Hervé (William Harvey).
9. J. Egilsrud, Le “dialogue des morts” dans les litteratures française, allemande et anglaise (1644–1789), thesis (Paris: L’Entente Linotypiste, 1934); Frederick Keener, English Dialogues of the Dead: A Critical History, an Anthology, and a Check-List (New York: Columbia University, 1973); Marcialis, Caronte e Caterina. For a typical example, see [A.-A. Bruzen de la Martinière], Entretiens des ombres aux Champs Elysées (Amsterdam: H. Uytwerf, 1723), which includes a dialogue (the sixth) between Confucius and Machiavelli (2:111–232).
10. M. Joly, Dialogue aux Enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu, preceded by Michel Bounan’s L’Etat retors (Paris: Éditions Allia, 1987; 3rd ed., 1999). In English, see The Crafty State, preface to Joly’s Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu (Paris: Éditions Allia, 1992). The epilogue has appeared as an autonomous text: M. Joly, Le Plébiscite: Épilogue du Dialogue aux Enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu, with a postscript by F. Leclercq (Paris, 1996).
11. Joly, Dialogue in Hell, pp. 27–28; Dialogue, p. 40 (end of the fourth dialogue): “Je ne vois de salut pour ces sociétés, véritables colosses aux pieds d’argile, que dans l’institution d’une centralisation à outrance, qui mette toute la force publique à la disposition de ceux qui gouvernent; dans une administration hiérarchique semblable à celle de l’empire romain, qui règle mécaniquement tous les mouvements des individus; dans un vaste système de législation qui reprenne en détail toutes les libertés qui ont été imprudemment données; dans un despotisme gigantesque, enfin, qui puisse frapper immédiatement et à toute heure, tout ce qui résiste, tout ce qui se plaint. Le Césarisme du Bas-Empire me paraît réaliser assez bien ce que je souhaite pour le bien-être des sociétés modernes. Grâce à ces vastes appareils qui fonctionnent dejá, m’a-t-on dit, en plus d’un pays de l’Europe, elles peuvent vivre en paix, comme en Chine, comme au Japon, comme dans l’Inde. Il ne faut pas qu’un vulgaire préjugé nous fasse mépriser ces civilisations orientales, dont on apprend chaque jour à mieux apprécier les institutions. Le peuple chinois, par exemple, est très commerçant et très bien administré.”
12. I take the quotation from Arnaldo Momigliano, “Per un riesame della storia dell’idea di cesarismo,” in idem, Sui fondamenti della storia antica (Turin: Einaudi, 1984), pp. 378–388: 380n6. See also his “Contributi ad un dizionario storico: J. Burckhardt e la parola ‘cesarismo,’ ” ibid., pp. 389–392. Momigliano does not mention Joly’s Dialogue aux Enfers. The latter’s intellectual debt to Romieu’s Ere des Césars has been noted by Tami Sarfatti in “Reading Machiavelli in Mid-Nineteenth-Century France: Auguste Romieu, Maurice Joly and a Critique of Liberalism” (paper presented at a seminar which I organized at UCLA, Winter 2002). On the entire question, the fundamental treatment is Innocenzo Cervelli, “Cesarismo: Alcuni usi e significati della parola (secolo XIX),” Annali dell’Istituto Storico Italo-Germanico di Trento 22 (1996): 61–197 (esp. pp. 103ff. on Romieu; pp. 135–36n255, on Joly).
13. A. Romieu, Le spectre rouge de 1852, 2nd ed. (Paris: Ledoyen, 1851), pp. 5–6: “Je crois à des besoins sociaux, non à des droits naturels. Le mot DROIT n’a aucun sens pour mon esprit, parce que je n’en vois, nulle part, la traduction dans la nature. Il est d’invention humaine.. . .”
14. Joly, Dialogue in Hell, pp. 10–11; Dialogue, p. 12 (first dialogue): “Tous les pouvoirs souverains ont eu la force pour origine, ou, ce qui est la même chose, la négation du droit.. . . Ce mot de droit lui-même, d’ailleurs, ne voyez-vous pas qu’il est d’un vague infini?”
15. For the eighteenth-century discussions, see Franco Venturi, “Despotismo orientale,” Rivista Storica Italiana 72 (1960): 117–126.
16. A. de Tocqueville, De la Démocratie en Amérique, ed. François Furet (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1981), 2:386: “J’ai toujours cru que cette sorte de servitude, réglée, douce et paisible, dont je viens de faire le tableau, pourrait se combiner mieux qu’on ne l’imagine avec quelques-unes des formes extérieures de la liberté, et qu’il ne lui serait pas impossible de s’établir à l’ombre même de la souveraineté du peuple.” Cf. also C. Cassina, “Alexis de Tocqueville e il dispotismo ‘di nuova specie,’ ” in Domenico Felice, ed., Dispotismo: Genesi e sviluppi di un concetto politico-filosofico (Naples: Liguori, 2002), 2:515–543.
17. Tocqueville, De la Démocratie en Amérique, 2:392.
18. Joly, Dialogue in Hell, p. 90; Dialogue, pp. 153–154 (end of the fifteenth dialogue): “Un des mes grands principes est d’opposer les semblables. De même que j’use la presse par la presse, j’userai la tribune par la tribune.. . . Les dix-neuf vingtièmes de la Chambre seraient des hommes à moi qui voteraient sur une consigne, tandis que je ferais mouvoir le fils d’une opposition factice et clandestinement embauchée.”
19. Idem, Dialogue in Hell, p. 91; Dialogue, p. 155 (beginning of the sixteenth dialogue): “L’anéantissement des partis et la destruction des forces collectives.”
20. Idem, Dialogue in Hell, pp. 69–70; Dialogue, pp. 112, 114 (twelfth dialogue): “. . . j’entrevois la possibilité de neutraliser la presse par la presse elle-même. Puisque c’est une si grande force que le journalisme, savez-vous ce que ferait mon gouvernement? Il se ferait journaliste, ce serait le journalisme incarné.. . . Comme le dieu Wishnou, ma presse aura cent bras, et ces bras donneront la main à toutes les nuances d’opinion quelconque sur la surface entière du pays. On sera de mon parti sans le savoir. Ceux qui croiront parler leur langue parleront la mienne, ceux qui croiront agiter leur parti agiteront le mien, ceux qui croiront marcher sous leur drapeau marcheront sous le mien.” “Sont-ce là des conceptions réalisables ou des fantasmagories? Cela donne le vertige.”
21. Joly, Dialogue in Hell, p. [5], “No one should ask whose hand wrote these pages. In a certain sense, a work like this is anonymous. It answers a call to conscience. Everyone hears this call. The ideas take form. The author withdraws to the background . . .”; Dialogue, p. 4: “On ne demandera pas quelle est la main qui a tracé ces pages: une œuvre comme celle-ci est en quelque sorte impersonnelle. Elle répond à un appel de la conscience; tout le monde l’a conçue, elle est exécutée, l’auteur s’efface.. . .”
22. Maurice Joly: Son passé, son programme, p. 9.
23. On universal suffrage as a new form of legitimacy, see Domenico Losurdo, Democrazia o bonapartismo: Trionfo e decadenza del suffragio universale (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1993); and Albert O. Hirschman, Shifting Involvements: Private Interest and Public Action (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), esp. pp. 112–120 (brought to my attention by Andrea Ginzburg).
24. Joly, Dialogue in Hell, p. 51; Dialogue, p. 80 (ninth dialogue): “Jamais les choses ne se sont passés autrement, j’en atteste l’histoire de tous les fondateurs d’empire, l’exemple des Sésostris, des Solon, des Lycurgue, des Charlemagne, des Frédéric II, des Pierre Ier.’ ‘C’est un chapitre d’un des vos disciples que vous allez me développer là.’ ‘Et de qui donc?’ ‘De Joseph de Maistre. Il y’a là des considérations générales qui ne sont pas sans vérité, mai que je trouve sans application.’ ”
25. Joseph de Maistre, Considerations on France, trans. Richard A. Lebrun (Montreal and London: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1974), p. 95 (J. de Maistre, Considérations sur la France, ed. J. Toulard [Paris: Éditions Bernard Grasset, 1980], p. 63: “Une assemblée quelconque d’hommes ne peut constituer une nation; et même cette entreprise excède en folie ce que tous les Bedlams de l’univers peuvent enfanter de plus absurde et de plus extravagant”).
26. Niccolò Machiavelli, “Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius,” in The Prince and the Discourses, with an introd. by Max Lerner (New York: Modern Library, 1940), p. 138.
27. J. de Maistre, Essai sur le principe générateur des constitutions politiques et des autres institutions humaines (Paris: Société Typographique, 1814), p. vi.
28. Joly, Dialogue, pp. 142–143: “Un machiavélisme infernal s’emparant des préjugés et des passions populaires a propagé partout une confusion de principes qui rend toute entente impossible entre ceux qui parlent la même langue et qui ont les mêmes intérêts.” The passage is quoted also in Henri Rollin, L’Apocalypse de notre temps: Les dessous de la propagande allemande d’après des documents inédits (Paris: Gallimard, 1939) [1991], p. 235.
29. Joly, Dialogue in Hell, p. 34; Dialogue, p. 49 (sixth dialogue): “Un de plus vos illustres partisans.”
30. H. Speier, “La verité aux enfers: Maurice Joly et le despotisme moderne,” Commentaires 56 (1991–1992): 671–680: 673. See also F. Leclercq, “Maurice Joly, un suicidé de la démocratie,” postscript to M. Joly, Le Plébiscite: Epilogue du Dialogue aux Enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu, pp. 107–108.
31. Peter Saurisse, “Portraits composites: La photographie des types physionomiques à la fin du XIXe siècle,” Histoire de l’Art 37–38 (May 1997): 69–78; and C. Ginzburg, “Somiglianze di famiglia e alberi genealogici: Due metafore cognitive,” in C.-C. Härle, ed., Ai limiti dell’immagine (Macerata, Italy: Quodlibet, 2005 ), pp. 227–250. Galton began working on the composite portraits in 1878, the year of Joly’s death.
32. C. Ginzburg, No Island Is an Island: Four Glances at English Literature in a World Perspective (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), p. 33.
33. For a listing of the French editions and translations, see M. Joly, Dialogue aux Enfers (Paris: Éditions Allia, 1999).
34. H. Barth, “Maurice Joly, der plebiszitäre Cäsarismus und die ‘Protokolle der Weisen von Zion,’ ” Neue Zürcher Zeitung 31 March 1962; Werner Kaegi, “Burckhardt e gli inizi del cesarismo moderno,” Rivista Storica Italiana 76 (1964): 150–171: 150–152.
35. “Un classique de la politique qui, avec un siècle d’avance, a mis a nu les procédés du despotisme moderne.”
36. I shall cite only Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1967); Les Protocoles des Sages de Sion, ed. P.-A. Taguieff; and Cesare G. De Michelis, The Non-Existent Manuscript: A Study of the Protocols of the Sages of Zion, trans. Richard Newhouse (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2004).
37. P. Charles, Les Protocoles; J. F. Moisan, “Les Protocoles des sages de Sion en Grande-Bretagne et aux USA,” in Taguieff 2:163–216. See now Maurice Olender, La chasse aux évidences: Sur quelques formes de racisme entre mythe et histoire (Paris: Galaade, 2005): “La chasse aux ‘évidences’: Pierre Charles (S.J.) face aux Protocoles des Sages de Sion.”
38. Pierre Pierrard, L’entre-deux-guerres: Les “Protocoles des sages de Sion” et la dénonciation du péril judéo-maçonnique (taken from Juifs et catholiques français: De Drumont à Jules Isaac [1886–1945] [Paris: Fayard, 1970; enlarged ed., 1997]), in Taguieff 2:241; see also P.-A. Taguieff, in Taguieff 1:94.
39. P. Charles, “Les Protocoles,” in Taguieff 2:11–37.
40. Joly, Dialogue in Hell, p. 70; Dialogue, p. 114 (twelfth dialogue); De Michelis, Il manoscritto inesistente, p. 264.
41. In the Italian translation of the Protocols published by De Michelis and appended to Il manoscritto inesistente (pp. 227–289), the passages taken from Joly’s Dialogue aux Enfers are in italics.
42. De Michelis, Il manoscritto inesistente, p. 276.
43. According to Norman Cohn (cited from De Michelis, Il manoscritto inesistente, p. 17).
44. Ibid., pp. 58–60.
45. According to De Michelis (Il manoscritto inesistente, p. 40), “Discussing the ‘rarity’ of Joly’s text is an empty exercise which ends up interesting especially the zealots”—namely, those who believe in the authenticity of the Protocols. But the instrumental use of a fact does not demonstrate its nonexistence.
46. Ibid., p. 53. The last French edition is dated 1868.
47. Ibid., p. 230 (and for the hypothesis of the excerpts, p. 56).
48. Ibid., p. 50 (Tarde); p. 52 (Chabry).
49. (Paris: Gallimard, 1939; new ed. Paris: Éditions Allia, 1991). See also De Michelis, Il manoscritto inesistente, p. 11.
50. R. Repetti, introduction to M. Joly, Dialogo agli Inferi, p. 19.
51. Édouard Drumont, La France juive (Paris: Marpon & Flammarion, 1885; 1886), 2:410–411; idem, Le testament d’un antisémite (Paris: E. Dentu, 1891), p. 285.
52. For examples of the Catholic anti-Semitic current, see l’abbé Emmanuel-Augustin Chabauty, honorary canon of Angoulême and Poitiers, Les Juifs, nos Maîtres!, Documents et devellopements nouveaux de la question juive (Paris, 1882); idem, Lettre sur les prophéties modernes et concordance de toutes les prédictions jusqu’au règne d’Henri V inclusivement, 2nd. corrected and expanded ed. (Poitiers, 1872); Les prophéties modernes vengées, ou Défense de la concordance de toutes les prophéties (Poitiers, 1874). On Chabauty, see Pierre Pierrard, Juifs et catholiques français: d’Édouard Drumont à Jakob Kaplan [1886–1994] (Paris: Cerf, 1997); C. C. de Saint-André [i.e., “l’abbé Chabotet” (!)]: manuscript addition in the catalogue of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Francs-Maçons et Juifs: Sixième âge de l’Eglise d’après l’Apocalypse (Paris, 1880); Jean Brisecou, La grande conjuration organisée pour la ruine de la France, preface by É. Drumont (Autun, France: Impr. de J. Coqueugniol, 1887). As an example of the Socialist anti-Semitic current, see Alphonse Toussenel, Les juifs, rois de l’époque: Histoire de la féodalité financière, 2 vols. (Paris: Librairie de l’École Sociétaire, 1845); reprinted in 1886 and praised in Drumont, La France juive, 1:341–342. By the same author, see also Travail et fainéantise: Programme démocratique (Paris: Au Bureau de Travail Affranchi, 1849).
53. Rollin, L’Apocalypse de notre temps, p. 260.
54. Auguste Rogeard, Les propos de Labiénus, 4th ed. (New York: H. De Mareil, 1865).
55. Rollin, L’Apocalypse de notre temps, p. 283 (the chapter is entitled “Drumont, professeur de plagiat”).
56. É. Drumont, “La fin d’un soldat,” La libre parole (3 September 1898): “Ce qu’il a fait n’est pas bien, mai c’est un enfantillage à côté de tous les moyens infâmes que les Juifs ont employés pour s’enrichir et devenir nos maîtres.” Drumont compared Henry, who died in infamy, to Bismarck, author of the Ems telegram, who died in glory.
57. Gyp, “L’affaire chez les morts,” La libre parole (26 February 1899): “On a beaucoup crié contre moi dans l’Histoire! . . . et pourtant il y’aurait une Sainte-Barthélemy Juive que j’en ne serais pas autrement surprise.. . .”
58. Mention in the Protocols of the election of a president who had “some sort of Panama” in his past must refer to Émile Loubet, elected on 18 February 1899, and the scandal connected with the bankruptcy of the French company intending to build the Panama canal (De Michelis, Il manoscritto inesistente, p. 58); this should be taken as the earliest possible date for the compilation of the Protocols.
59. Joly, Dialogue in Hell, p. 27 (“Their mercantile morals rival those of the Jews whom they have taken for models”); Dialogue, p. 39 (fourth dialogue): “De la lassitude des idées et du choc des révolutions sont sorties des sociétés froides et désabusées qui sont arrivées à l’indifférence en politique comme en religion, qui n’ont plus d’autre stimulant que les jouissances matérielles, qui ne vivent plus que par l’intérêt, qui n’ont d’autre culte que l’or, dont les mœurs mercantiles le disputent à celles des juifs qu’ils ont pris pour modèles.” See C. G. de Michelis, Il manoscritto inesistente, p. 251. Joly’s passage is noted in Rollin, L’Apocalypse de notre temps, pp. 290–291.
60. C. G. De Michelis, “La definizione di regime,” La Repubblica (2 February 2004), emphasizes the “structural similarities” between the “machiavellianbonapartist model” described by Joly and the “regime” of Silvio Berlusconi.
61. M. Bounan, “L’État retors,” introduction to M. Joly, Dialogue aux Enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu (Paris: Éditions Allia, 1991), pp. xvii–xviii.
62. Ibid., p. xii.
63. C. Ginzburg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Pantheon, 1991), pp. 12, 49–50.
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the conference “The Extermination of the Jews and the Limits of Representation,” held at the University of California, Los Angeles, 25–29 April 1990. See now Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the Final Solution, ed. Saul Friedlander (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
1. J. Schatzmiller, “Les Juifs de Provence pendant la Peste Noire,” Revue des Études Juives 133 (1974): 457–480: 469–472.
2. Storia notturna: Una decifrazione del sabba (Torino: Einaudi, 1989), chap. 1; Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Pantheon, 1991), chap. 1.
3. Martin Bouquet, Recueil des historiens des Gaules et de la France, 24 vols. (Paris: Aux dépens des libraires associés, 1840), 20:629–630.
4. See Josephus, The Jewish War, trans. G. A. Williamson (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985). Cf. P. Vidal-Naquet, “Flavius Josèphe et Masada,” in Les Juifs, la mémoire, le présent (Paris: Maspero, 1981), pp. 43ff, which perceptively analyzes the parallelism between the two passages.
5. Vidal-Naquet, “Flavius Josèphe,” pp. 53ff.
6. See The Latin Josephus, ed. Franz Blatt (Aarhus: Universitetsforlaget, 1958), 1:15–16. Cf. also Guy N. Deutsch, Iconographie et illustration de Flavius Josèphe au temps de Jean Fouquet (Leiden: Brill, 1986), p. xi (map).
7. P. Schmitz, “Les lectures de table à l’abbaye de Saint-Denis à la fin du Moyen Age,” Revue Bénédictine 42 (1930): 163–167; André Wilmart, “Le couvent et la bibliothèque de Cluny vers le milieu du XIe siècle,” Revue Mabillon 11 (1921): 89–124: 93, 113.
8. D. Nebbiai-Dalla Guarda, La bibliothèque de l’abbaye de Saint-Denis en France du IXe au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Editions du CNRS, 1985), regarding a request sent by Reichenau to Saint-Denis for a copy of Josephus’s Antiquitates Judaicae (p. 61; see also p. 294).
9. B.N. Lat. 12511; cf. The Latin Josephus, p. 50.
10. Hegesippi qui dicuntur historiarum libri V, ed. Vincentius Ussani (Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, vol. 66) (Vindobonae [Vienna]: Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1932, 1960), preface by K. Mras (on the siege of Masada, cf. 5: 52–53, 407–417). The Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris possesses twelve manuscripts of “Hegesippus” written between the tenth and fifteenth centuries: cf. Deutsch, Iconographie, p. 15.
11. See the English translation: Pierre Vidal-Naquet, “A Paper Eichmann?” Democracy (April 1981): 67–95. Note the question mark, which is absent in the original French title.
12. Maria Daraki’s proposal, mentioned in Vidal-Naquet, Les Juifs, p. 59n48, that in the first case the parallel should refer to the woman who denounced Flavius Josephus and his companions appears less persuasive to me.
13. Hendrik Van Vliet, No Single Testimony. Studia Theologica Rheno-Traiectina 4 (Utrecht: Rijkuniversiteit, 1958). The advantage of having more than one witness is underlined from a general (or logical) point of view in Vidal-Naquet, Les Juifs, p. 51.
14. Van Vliet, No Single Testimony, p. 11.
15. See, for example, Anne Libois, “À propos des modes de preuves et plus spécialement de la preuve par témoins dans la juridiction de Léau au XVe siècle,” in Hommage au Professeur Paul Bonenfant (1899–1965) (Brussels: Universa, 1965), pp. 532–546: 539–542.
16. On this topic, see the rather hasty remarks in Paul Peeters, “Les aphorismes du droit dans la critique historique,” Académie Royale du Belgique, Bulletin de la Classe des Lettres 32 (1946): 82ff. (see pp. 95–96 apropos the testis unus, testis nullus).
17. François Baudouin, De institutione historiae universae et ejus cum jurisprudentia conjunctione, prolegomenon libri II, cited in Donald R. Kelley, Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1970), p. 116 (but the entire book is important).
18. I have used the 2nd, Liège 1770 edition. The importance of this brief treatise was perceptively underlined in Allen Johnson, The Historian and Historical Evidence (New York: Scribner’s, 1926). I cite from the New York 1934 edition, p. 114. Johnson dubbed it “the most significant book on method after Mabillon’s De re diplomatica.” Cf. Arnaldo Momigliano, Ancient History and the Antiquarian, in Contributo alla storia degli studi classici (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e letteratura, 1979), p. 81.
19. See R. Faurisson, Mémoire en défense. Contre ceux qui m’accusent de falsifier l’histoire. La question des chambres à gaz, preface by Noam Chomsky (Paris: La Vieille Taupe, 1980).
20. Michel de Certeau, ed. Luce Giard (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1987), pp. 71–72. From reading Vidal-Naquet, we learn that the participation of the two correspondents in the public discussion of the thèse by François Hartog, later published with the title Le miroir d’Hérodote (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), occasioned this exchange of letters. On some of the book’s implications, see chap. 4.
21. What follows is based on Hayden White’s published writings. His paper “Historical Employment and the Problem of Truth,” appearing in the proceedings of the UCLA conference Probing the Limits of Representation, ed. Saul Friedlander (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 37–53, is marked by a less rigid (but not a little contradictory) skepticism.
22. Carlo Antoni, From Historicism to Sociology, trans. Hayden White (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1959), with a preface by White, “On History and Historicism” (pp. xxv–xxvi). Cf. the review by Bruce Mazlish in History and Theory 1 (1960): 219–227.
23. Benedetto Croce, Contributo alla critica di me stesso (Bari: Laterza, 1926), pp. 32–33; R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), pp. 91ff. (rev. ed., 1993).
24. Hayden V. White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), pp. 281–288; Benedetto Croce, Primi saggi (Bari: Laterza, 1927), pp. 3–41.
25. White, Metahistory, p. 385.
26. Ibid., pp. 378, 434.
27. Ibid., p. 407.
28. Eugenio Colorni, L’estetica di Benedetto Croce: Studio critico (Milan: La Cultura, 1932).
29. The Croce-Gentile correspondence is highly revealing from this point of view: see Benedetto Croce, Lettere a Giovanni Gentile, 1896–1924, ed. Alda Croce, introd. by Gennaro Sasso (Milan: Mondadori, 1981).
30. See Benedetto Croce, Logica come scienza del concetto puro (Bari: Laterza, 1971), pp. 193–195. Cf. also Giovanni Gentile, Frammenti di critica letteraria (Lanciano: Carabba, 1921), pp. 379ff. (a review of Croce’s Il concetto della storia nelle sue relazioni col concetto dell’arte [1897]). Gentile’s influence on Croce’s development during the crucial years 1897–1900 can be judged from Gentile’s Lettere a Benedetto Croce, ed. Simona Giannantoni (Florence: Sansoni, 1972), vol. 1. Cf. also Giuseppe Galasso in the appendix to his edition of Croce’s Teoria e storia della storiografia (Milan: Adelphi, 1989), pp. 409ff.
31. Here I am developing a number of astute observations by Piero Gobetti (see “Cattaneo” in Gobetti’s Scritti storici, letterari e filosofici [Turin: Einaudi, 1969], p. 199 [originally published in L’Ordine nuovo, 1922]).
32. Giovanni Gentile, “The Transcending of Time in History,” in Raymond Klibansky and H. J. Paton, eds., Philosophy and History: Essays Presented to Ernst Cassirer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), pp. 91–105: 95, 100. Thirty years earlier Antonio Labriola, in a letter to Croce, had described the Croce–Gentile relationship in curiously similar terms: see A. Labriola, Lettere a Benedetto Croce, 1885–1904 (Naples: Nella sede dell’istituto, 1975), p. 376 (2 January 1904): “I do not understand why Gentile, who inveighs in hieratic style against the wicked world, does not dedicate himself to the good deed (since he has the devil at home) of converting especially you.” For Gentile’s allusion to Croce, see the following note.
33. G. Gentile, “Il superamento del tempo nella storia,” in Memorie italiane e problemi della filosofia e della vita (Rome, 1936), p. 308: “La metafisica storica (o storicismo) . . .”; the essay had appeared previously in Rendiconti della R. Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, classe di scienze morali, ser. 6, vol. 11 (1935): 752–769. The words in parentheses (“that is, historicism”) were omitted in the English translation which had appeared a few months earlier (“The Transcending of Time in History”) (the editors’ preface is dated “February 1936”). The missing words were added presumably after the publication of Croce’s essay “Antistoricismo” (an Oxford lecture of 1930, but only published later in Ultimi saggi [Bari: Laterza, 1935], pp. 246–258). Gentile delivered his lecture at the Accademia dei Lincei on 17 November 1935 and returned the corrected proofs on 2 April 1936 (see Rendiconti, pp. 752, 769). For Croce’s reaction to the essays collected in Philosophy and History, see La storia come pensiero e come azione (1938) (Bari: Laterza, 1943), pp. 319–327 (this section is lacking in the English translation by Sylvia Sprigge, History as the Story of Liberty [New York: Norton, 1941]); on p. 322 we find a hostile reference to Gentile (“a murky tendency to mystification . . .”). In the same volume, see also the pages on “Historiography as Liberation from History . . .” (“History,” pp. 43–45; La storia, pp. 30–32: “We are products of the past and live immersed in the past, which all around presses upon us.. . .” Gentile, whose idealism was much more radical and consistent, had stated that the past (and time as well) are purely abstract notions, overcome in concrete spiritual life (“The Transcending of Time,” pp. 95–97). The importance of this essay was noted in Cesare Garboli, Scritti servili (Turin: Einaudi, 1989), p. 205.
34. See G. Gentile, Teoria generale dello spirito come atto puro (1916), 2nd rev. and enlarged ed. (Pisa: Mariotti, 1918), pp. 50–52; The Theory of the Mind as Pure Act (London: Macmillan, 1922).
35. I do not mean to be suggesting the existence of a simple and unilinear causal connection. Undoubtedly, White’s reaction to Italian neo-idealism passed through a specifically American filter. But even White’s pragmatism, to which Perry Anderson alludes at the end of his contribution to the UCLA symposium (Probing the Limits of Representation, p. 65), had undoubtedly been reinforced by the pragmatist current (mediated by Giovanni Vailati) which is discernible in Croce’s work, particularly in his Logica.
36. See H. White, “Interpretation in History” (1972–1973), in Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), p. 75.
37. Ibid., p. 2.
38. “Foucault Decoded” (1973), in ibid., p. 254.
39. Barthes appears only once in the index of names; but see also p. 24n2, where he is mentioned with other scholars working in the field of rhetoric, such as Kenneth Burke, Gérard Genette, Umberto Eco, and Tzvetan Todorov.
40. G. Gentile, “La filosofia della praxis,” in La filosofia di Marx: Studi critici (Pisa: Spoerri, 1899), pp. 51–157; the book was dedicated to Croce. See now the ample introduction by Eugenio Garin to his edition of Gentile’s Scritti filosofici, 2 vols. (Milan: Garzanti, 1991).
41. Gentile, “La filosofia della praxis,” pp. 62–63.
42. For the first thesis, see Giancarlo Bergami, Il giovane Gramsci e il marxismo (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1977); for the second, Augusto Del Noce, Il suicidio della rivoluzione (Milan: Rusconi, 1978), pp. 121–198 (“Gentile e Gramsci”).
43. See Salvatore Natoli, Giovanni Gentile filosofo europeo (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1989), pp. 94ff. (somewhat superficial); a propos A. Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, ed. Valentino Gerratana (Turin: Einaudi, 1975), 3:2038. On Gramsci’s opinion on Futurism, see Socialismo e fascismo: L’Ordine Nuovo, 1919–1922 (Turin: Einaudi, 1966), pp. 20–22.
44. B. Croce, “Antistoricismo,” in Ultimi saggi, pp. 246–258.
45. White, Tropics, pp. 27–80.
46. Idem, The Content of the Form (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 63.
47. Ibid., p. 227n12.
48. Gentile, “The Transcending of Time,” p. 99.
49. See, for example, G. Gentile, “Caratteri religiosi della presente lotta politica,” in Che cosa è il fascismo: Discorsi e polemiche (Florence: Vallecchi, 1924 [actually 1925]), pp. 143–151.
50. See, for example, the section entitled “La violenza fascista,” in Che cosa è il fascismo (a lecture delivered in Florence, 8 March 1925), pp. 29–32.
51. “State and individual . . . are one and the same; and the art of governing is the art of reconciling and identifying these two terms so that the maximum of liberty agrees with the maximum of public order.. . . For always the maximum liberty agrees with the maximum of public force of the state. Which force? Distinctions in this field are dear to those who do not welcome this concept of force, which is nevertheless essential to the State, and hence to liberty. And they distinguish moral from material force: the force of law freely voted and accepted from the force of violence which is rigidly opposed to the will of the citizen. Ingenuous distinctions, if made in good faith! Every force is a moral force, for it is always an expression of will; and whatever be the argument used—preaching or black-jacking—its efficacy can be none other than its ability finally to receive the inner support of a man and to persuade him to agree” (quoted from G. Gentile, Making the Fascist State, trans. H. W. Schneider [New York: Oxford University Press, 1928], p. 347). The speech, delivered in Palermo on 31 March 1924, first appeared in such journals as La Nuova Politica Liberale 2 (2 April 1924). When he reprinted it a year later, after the Matteotti crisis and its violent conclusion, Gentile, who had earned for himself the title of “the philosopher of the truncheon,” inserted an embarrassed and arrogant note. In it he clarified that the force for which he had intended to recognize a moral significance was one alone, that belonging to the State, for which the truncheon of the Fascist squads had been the necessary instrument in a time of crisis: see Gentile, Che cosa è il fascismo, pp. 50–51. Gentile’s reasoning was not especially original: see, for example, B. Mussolini, “Forza e consenso,” Gerarchia (1923) (in Opera omnia, ed. Edoardo and Duilio Susmel [Florence: La Fenice, 1956], 19:195–196).
52. “The Politics of Historical Interpretation” (1982), in The Content of the Form, pp. 74–75.
53. Ibid., p. 77. The italics do not appear in the French text.
54. Ibid., p. 80. My italics.
55. Ibid., p. 227n12.
56. I should like to thank Stefano Levi Della Torre for some enlightening thoughts on this last point.
57. White, Content of the Form, p. 74.
58. See R. Serra, Scritti letterari, morali e politici, ed. Mario Isnenghi (Turin: Einaudi, 1974), pp. 278–288. Cesare Garboli (Falbalas [Milan: Garzanti, 1990], p. 150) has proposed a similar interpretation of Serra’s essay.
59. See, for example (but not only), the celebrated Triptych (Those who depart, etc.), housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
60. See R. Serra, Epistolario, ed. Luigi Ambrosini, Giuseppe De Robertis, and Alfredo Grilli (Florence: Le Monnier, 1953), pp. 454ff.
61. B. Croce, Teoria e storia della storiografia (Bari: Laterza, 1927), pp. 44–45.
62. Serra, Epistolario, p. 459 (11 November 1912).
63. Serra, Scritti letterari, p. 286.
64. Ibid., p. 287.
65. See Hayden White’s passage quoted above (pp. 540–541), as well as “Historical Emplotment,” in Probing the Limits of Representation.
66. J.-F. Lyotard, The Différend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. G. Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), pp. 55–57.
67. P. Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Collier Books, 1961), pp. 5–6.
68. E. Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society (London: Faber, 1973 [1969], pp. 522ff. (The difference between testis and superstes is examined on p. 526.)
1. S. Kracauer, History: The Last Things before the Last, “completed after the Death of the Author by Paul Oskar Kristeller” (Princeton, NJ: Wiener, 1995), pp. viii–ix (henceforth cited in the notes as History).
2. I. Mülder-Bach, “History as Autobiography: The Last Things before the Last,” New German Critique 54 (1991): 139–157: 139. Against this, see P. O. Kristeller, introduction to Kracauer, History, pp. v–x.
3. Kracauer, History, pp. 3–4.
4. Now in English as The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans., ed., and with an introd. by Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 47–63.
5. Kracauer, Mass Ornament, pp. 49–50.
6. Ibid., p. 59.
7. On this point I disagree with Mülder-Bach, “History as Autobiography,” p. 141.
8. S. Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 14–17, 20, 54ff.; History, pp. 82–84.
9. M. Proust, Remembrance of Things Past. I. The Guermantes Way, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff, 2 vols. (New York: Random House, 1934), pp. 814–815.
10. Erich Auerbach comments on the passage (but without mentioning Proust): Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), p. 430; Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur (Tübingen and Basel, 1994), p. 399.
11. “Das Gesicht gilt dem Film nichts, wenn nicht der Totenkopf dahinter einbezogen ist. ‘Danse macabre.’ Zu welchem Ende? Das wird man sehen.” See M. Hansen, “ ‘With Skin and Hair’: Kracauer’s Theory of Film, Marseille 1940,” Critical Inquiry 20 (1993): 437–469: 447. In Hansen’s introduction (signed M. Bratu Hansen) to the new edition of Kracauer’s Theory of Film, p. xxiv, the quoted passage is linked to the allegorical impulse derived from Benjamin’s book on Trauerspiel.
12. S. Kracauer and Erwin Panofsky, Briefwechsel, 1941–1966, ed. Volker Breidecker (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1996), pp. 83–92: 83 (“Tentative Outline of a Book on Film Aesthetics”).
13. In addition to Hansen, “ ‘With Skin and Hair,’ “ see the evidence adduced by K. Michael, “Vor dem Café: Walter Benjamin und Siegfried Kracauer in Marseille,” in Michael Opitz and Erdmut Wizisla, eds., “Aber ein Sturm weht vom Paradiese her”: Texte zu Walter Benjamin (Leipzig: Reclam, 1992), pp. 203–221.
14. M. Proust, Die Herzogin von Guermantes, trans. Walter Benjamin and Franz Hessel (Munich: Piper, 1930).
15. W. Benjamin, “Piccola storia della fotografia,” in L’opera d’arte nell’epoca della sua riproducibilità tecnica, trans. E. Filippini (Turin: Einaudi, 1966), pp. 59–77: 63. The same expression recurs in the essay “L’opera d’arte nell’epoca della sua riproducibilità tecnica” (1936), ibid., pp. 41–42. See also Béla Balázs, “Physiognomie” (1923), in Helmut H. Diedrichs et al., eds., Schriften zum Film (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1982), pp. 205–208 (cited in M. Hansen, “Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: ‘The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology,’ “ New German Critique 40 [1987]: 179–224: 208n48).
16. “Ahasuerus, or the riddle of time,” in Kracauer, History, pp. 139–163.
17. V. Breidecker, “ ‘Ferne Nähe’: Kracauer, Panofsky and ‘the Warburg Tradition,’ “ in Kracauer and Panofsky, Briefwechsel, pp. 129–226, esp. the section “Interpretation als Entfremdung” (pp. 165–176); but the entire paper is very important. See also my “Straniamento: Preistoria di un procedimento letterario,” in Occhiacci di legno: Nove riflessioni sulla distanza (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1998), pp. 15–39.
18. Kracauer, History, p. 84. See the astute observations in Breidecker, “ ‘Ferne Nähe,’ “ pp. 176ff. (section “Das Exil als Text”). Arnaldo Momigliano alludes to the great Greek historians as exiles in “La traduzione e lo storico classico,” in La storiografia greca (Turin: Einaudi, 1982), pp. 42–63: 60 (originally published in History and Theory [1972]).
19. S. Kracauer, Theory of Film, pp. 16–17, where he comments on B. Newhall, “Photography and the Development of Kinetic Visualization,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes (1944): 40–45. Cf., in general, D. N. Rodowick, “The Last Things before the Last: Kracauer and History,” New German Critique 41 (1987): 109–139: 123; Breidecker, “ ‘Ferne Nähe,’ “ pp. 178–179.
20. Hansen, “ ‘With Skin and Hair,’ “ p. 447.
21. T. W. Adorno, “Der wunderliche Realist,” in idem, Noten zu Literatur (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1985). I have used the Italian version: “Uno strano realista: Su Siegfried Kracauer,” in Note per la letteratura 1961–1968 (Turin: Einaudi, 1979), pp. 68–88: 68.
22. E. Panofsky, “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures,” in Three Essays on Style, ed. Irving Lavin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 93–125: 108 (revised version of an essay first appearing in 1936).
23. T. Y. Levin, “Iconology at the Movies: Panofsky’s Film Theory,” in Irving Lavin, ed., Meaning in the Visual Arts: Views from the Outside. A Centennial Commemoration of Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968) (Princeton, NJ: Institute for Advanced Study, 1995), pp. 313–333: 319ff.
24. E. Panofsky, “Die Perspektive als ‘symbolische Form,’ “ Bibliothek Warburg. Vorträge 1924–1925 (1927): 258–330.
25. W. Benjamin, Briefe an Siegfried Kracauer, ed. Theodor W. Adorno Archiv (Marbach am Neckar: [Deutsche Schillergesellschaft], 1987), pp. 65–66 (cited in Breidecker, “Ferne Nähe,” pp. 186-187).
26. E. Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell, 1960), pp. 82ff. See also Breidecker, “ ‘Ferne Nähe,’ “ p. 175.
27. S. Kracauer, History, pp. 56–57, 105, 123.
28. On the first, see the astute observations in Breidecker, “ ‘Ferne Nähe,’ “ pp. 176–191.
29. S. Kracauer, History, p. 122.
30. C. Ginzburg, “Distanza e prospettiva: Due metafore,” in Occhiacci di legno, pp. 171–193.
31. Sergei M. Eisenstein, “Dickens, Griffith and the Film Today,” in idem, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory and the Film Sense, ed. and trans. Jay Leyda (Cleveland and New York: Meridian Books, 1963), pp. 195–255.
32. Idem, “Through Theater to Cinema,” ibid., pp. 3–17: 12–13.
33. C. Ginzburg, Rapporti di forza: Storia, retorica, prova (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2000), pp. 109–126.
34. Revue des Deux Mondes (15 December 1869): 987–1004.
35. Saint-René Taillandier, Histoire et philosophie religieuse: Etudes et fragments (Paris, 1859); Études littéraires (Paris: Plon, 1881).
36. Revue des Deux Mondes (15 February 1863): 840–860. See also, by the same author, the article “La tentation de Saint-Antoine (Une sotie au dix-neuvième siècle),” ibid. (1 May 1874): 205–223.
37. Revue des Deux Mondes (15 February 1863): 860 (the italics are in the original text).
38. K. Witte, “ ‘Light Sorrow’: Siegfried Kracauer as Literary Critic,” New German Critique 54 (1991): 77–94: 93–94 (apropos Hemingway’s In Our Time); Kracauer to Panofsky, 8 November 1944 (Kracauer and Panofsky, Briefwechsel, p. 38).
39. M. Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972).
40. Jules Michelet, Histoire de France, 19 vols. (Paris: C. Marpon & E. Flammarion, 1879), 19: 360–361 (the preface is dated 1 October 1855). For a preliminary overview, see Jean Sgard, Les trente récits de la Journée des Tuiles (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1988), esp. p. 93.
41. I have quoted and discussed it in Rapporti di forza, pp. 113–114.
42. S. Kracauer, History, p. 122.
43. On this point, see my Rapporti di forza. According to Peter Burke, Kracauer was the first to argue that the novels of Joyce, Proust, and Virginia Woolf offer to the historical narrative “a challenge and an opportunity.” See Burke’s “Aby Warburg as Historical Anthropologist,” in Horst Bredekamp, Michael Diers, and Charlotte Schoell-Glass, eds., Aby Warburg: Akten des internationalen Symposions, Hamburg 1990 (Weinheim: VCH, 1991), p. 237, quoted in Kracauer and Panofsky, Briefwechsel, p. 147n80. But Kracauer (Theory of Film, p. 219) was referring to Auerbach.
44. Kracauer, Theory of Film, p. 301.
45. S. Kracauer, “The Hotel Lobby,” in The Mass Ornament, p. 178 (a chapter from Kracauer’s Der Detektiv-Roman: Ein philosophischer Traktat, in idem, Schriften [Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1971], 1:103–204). According to T. Clark, the expression “disenchanted world” came from Schiller (Farewell to an Idea [New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1999], p. 7). But Schiller probably knew the book by Balthasar Bekker with the same title.
46. Hansen, “With Skin and Hair.”
47. Breidecker, “ ‘Ferne Nähe,’ “ pp. 178–179.
48. W. Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in idem, Selected Writings. IV. 1938–1940, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al., ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA, and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996–2003), p. 391 (slightly modified).
49. Kracauer and Panofsky, Briefwechsel, p. 91. Cf. also the epilogue of Kracauer, History, p. 219.
50. Ibid., p. 202.
51. See the conclusion of Theory of Film, pp. 300–311 (where much attention is paid to the closing pages of Auerbach’s Mimesis).
I should like to thank Patrick Fridenson, with whom I discussed this article while I was writing it. Perry Anderson read it and critiqued it before it assumed a definitive form: my debt to him is once again very great.
1. Levi remembers the first discussions about the series that he had with Giulio Einaudi and me to have been in 1974, 1975, or 1976 (see “Il piccolo, il grande, il piccolo: Intervista a Giovanni Levi,” Meridiana, September 1990, p. 229); but this is a lapse in memory.
2. Made possible by ORION, the program on which the UCLA Library computer catalogue is based (now YRL).
3. Kantorowicz, who is not named but is easily recognizable, makes a fleeting appearance in Stewart’s account: see The Year of the Oath: The Fight for Academic Freedom at the University of California (Garden City: Doubleday, 1950), p. 90. See also E. H. Kantorowicz, The Fundamental Issue: Documents and Marginal Notes on the University of California Loyalty Oath (San Francisco: Parker Print Co., 1950), p. 1: “This is not intended to be the history of ‘The Year of the Oath.’ This subject has been admirably dealt with by Professor George R. Stewart.”
4. See Madison S. Beeler, “George R. Stewart, Toponomyst,” Names 24 (June 1976): 77–85 (the fascicle is entitled Festschrift in Honor of Professor George R. Stewart). Cf. also the interview “George R. Stewart on Names and Characters,” ibid. 9 (1961): 51–57; and John Caldwell, George R. Stewart (Boise, ID: Boise State University, 1981).
5. See Stewart, “The Regional Approach to Literature,” College English 9 (1948):370–375.
6. Stewart, Pickett’s Charge: A Microhistory of the Final Attack on Gettysburg, July 3, 1863 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959; reprinted Dayton, 1983), pp. ix, 211–212.
7. Ibid., p. ix.
8. See Luis González y González, Pueblo en vilo: Microhistoria de San José de Gracia (Mexico: El Colegio de Mexico, 1968), p. 2: “La pequeñez, pero la pequeñez tipica” (the reference to Leuilliot is on p. 16); trans. John Upton as San José de Gracia: Mexican Village in Transition (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1974).
9. See Luis Aboites, La revolución mexicana en Espita, 1910–1940: Microhistoria de la formación del Estado de la revolución (Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropologia Social. Cuadernos de la Casa Chata 62) (Mexico, 1982).
10. L. González y González, “El arte de la microhistoria,” in Invitación a la microhistoria (Mexico: Sepsetentas, 1973), pp. 12, 14.
11. Ibid., p. 13. The introduction has been reprinted, in part, under the title “Histoire et sociologie” in Braudel’s Écrits sur l’Histoire (Paris: Flammarion, 1969), pp. 97–122 (now in English: F. Braudel, On History, trans. Sarah Matthews [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980]).
12. See Braudel, On History, pp. 74–75; Écrits sur l’Histoire, pp. 112ff.: “Le fait divers (sinon l’événement, ce socio-drame) est répétition, régularité, multitude et rien ne dit, de façon absolue, que son niveau soit sans fertilité, ou valeur, scientifique. Il faudrait y regarder de près.”
13. See the section entitled “Fait divers, fait d’histoire,” with contributions by Maria Pia Di Bella, Michel Bée, Raffaella Comaschi, Lucette Valensi, and Michelle Perrot, in Annales: E.S.C., 38 (1983): 821–919. In his introduction to these essays, Marc Ferro juxtaposes the analysis of the fait divers to works in microhistory as similar and inverse but complementary operations (p. 825). In the same issue Perrot, in “Fait divers et histoire au XIXe siècle” (see p. 917), referred to the passage by Braudel quoted above.
14. Still today the term cannot free itself from ironic connotations, as emerges, for example, from an allusion in Georges Charachidzé, La Mémoire indo-européenne du Caucase (Paris: Hachette, 1987), pp. 131–132 (“ce que j’avais voulu appeler, par jeu, micro-histoire . . .”).
15. Although an excellent English version exists (R. Queneau, The Blue Flowers, trans. Barbara Wright [New York: Atheneum, 1967]), the present rendering is based directly on the French original: Les fleurs bleues (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), pp. 84–85:
“Que voulez-vous savoir au juste?”
“Ce que tu penses de l’histoire universelle en général et de l’histoire générale en particulier. J’écoute.”
“Je suis bien fatigué, dit le chapelain.”
“Tu te reposeras plus tard. Dis-mois, ce Concile de Bâle, est-ce de l’histoire universelle?”
“Oui-da. De l’histoire universelle en général.”
“Et mes petits canons?”
“De l’histoire générale en particulier.”
“Et le mariage des mes filles?”
“A peine de l’histoire événementielle. De la microhistoire, tout au plus.”
“De la quoi? hurle le duc d’Auge. Quel diable de langage est-ce là? Serait-ce aujourd’hui ta
Pentecôte ?”
“Veuillez m’excuser, messire. C’est, voyez-vous, la fatigue.”
If I am not mistaken, the Braudelian texts cited apropos this passage in Ruggiero Romano, “Un modèle pour l’histoire,” in Andrée Bergens, ed., Raymond Queneau (Paris: Éditions de l’Herne, 1975), p. 288, are relevant for histoire événementielle, not for microhistoire.
16. See L. Gonzales [sic], Les barrières de la solitude: Histoire universelle de San José de Gracia, village mexicain, trans. Anny Meyer (Paris: Plon, 1977).
17. The Grande dizionario della lingua italiana, ed. Salvatore Battaglia, 10 vols. (Turin: UTET, 1961–1978), 10:365, refers to this passage apropos the entry for “microstoria” (defined as “voce dotta”—that is, “learned entry”). The definition that follows—“particularly brief and succinct history, summary and essential account”—is definitely unsatisfactory (but see the postscriptum below).
18. Primo Levi, The Periodic Table, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Schocken Books, 1984), p. 224.
19. See Italo Calvino, Il barone rampante (Turin: Einaudi, 1957), now available in English as The Baron in the Trees, trans. Archibald Colquhoun (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1959). Cesare Cases did not miss the similarity in his introduction to Levi, Opere, 3 vols. (Turin: Einaudi, 1987–1990), 1: xvii. For his concern in regard to Levi, apprentice-writer, see Calvino, I libri degli altri: Lettere, 1947–1981, ed. Giovanni Tesio (Turin: Einaudi, 1991), pp. 382–383, as well as the letter (in a very different tone) on the revision of Il sistema periodico (p. 606). See also Severino Cesari, Colloquio con Giulio Einaudi (Rome: Theoria, 1991), p. 173.
20. See Queneau, Piccola cosmogonia portatile, trans. Sergio Solmi (Turin: Einaudi, 1982), followed by Calvino’s “Piccola guida alla Piccola cosmogonia,” p. 162. See also Levi, L’altrui mestiere (Turin: Einaudi, 1985), pp. 150–154 (trans. R. Rosenthal as Other People’s Trades [New York: Summit Books, 1989]), and the declaration by Carlo Carena in Cesari, Colloquio con Giulio Einaudi, p. 172.
21. At any rate it was an unconscious echo: to the question “from what does the term ‘microhistory’ derive?” Giovanni Levi stated (29 December 1991) that he knew only that the term had been used by Queneau. The last part of Queneau’s passage quoted above was used as the epigraph for Raul Merzario’s Il paese stretto: Strategie matrimoniali nella diocesi di Como nei secoli XVI–XVIII (Turin: Einaudi, 1981), one of the first books published in the series Microstorie.
22. See Edoardo Grendi, “Micro-analisi e storia sociale,” Quaderni storici 35 (1977): 506–520.
23. Richard Cobb, Raymond Queneau (“The Zaharoff Lecture for 1976”) (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976).
24. R. Queneau, Une histoire modèle (Paris: Gallimard, 1966) (but written in 1942); idem, Bâtons, chiffres et lettres, enlarged ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), pp. 170–172, an article that had appeared in the Front National, 5 January 1945.
25. See, instead, the fine introduction by Italo Calvino to Queneau’s Segni, cifre e lettere e altri saggi (Turin: Einaudi, 1981), especially pp. xix–xx (a different and larger collection than the French edition of the same title).
26. See Cobb, A Sense of Place (London: Duckworth, 1975), about which see Grendi, “Lo storico e la didattica incosciente (Replica a una discussione),” Quaderni Storici 46 (1981): 338–346: 339–340.
27. Impatience with the pretenses of scientific historiography is more evident in a study by González y González which in its very title closely echoes Nietzsche’s second Untimely Meditation. See González y González, “De la múltiple utilización de la historia,” in Carlos Pereyra, ed., Historia? para qué? (Mexico: Siglo XXI Editores, 1990), pp. 55–74.
28. See Traian Stoianovich, French Historical Method: The “Annales” Paradigm (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976), with an introduction by F. Braudel, who calls the two preceding paradigms, respectively, “exemplar” and “developmental” (p. 25). On microhistory as a response to the crisis of the “great Marxist and functionalist systems,” see G. Levi, “On Microhistory,” in Peter Burke, ed., New Perspectives on Historical Writing (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), pp. 93–113: 93–94. See also Levi’s Inheriting Power: The Story of an Exorcist, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
29. See Mélanges en l’honneur de Fernand Braudel. II. Méthodologie de l’histoire et des sciences humaines (Toulouse: Privat, 1973), pp. 105–125, 227–243. The text by Furet and Le Goff is divided in two parts that develop two communications “préparées en collaboration,” entitled, respectively, “L’histoire et ‘l’homme sauvage’ “ and “L’historien et l’homme quotidien.” In the first piece Furet outlines a general picture; in the second Le Goff proposes a program of research with examples drawn from the sphere of medieval studies. Even if I distinguish between the two texts in my discussion, I am assuming basic agreement between their authors, as they have stated, except in cases where the opposite is indicated. On both Chaunu and Le Goff, one can read their self-portraits included in Pierre Nora, ed., Essais d’ego-histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1987).
30. Chaunu, “Un nouveau champ pour l’histoire sérielle,” p. 109. In French, the term ethnologue is more widely used than its synonym anthropologue.
31. Ibid., p. 231.
32. Ibid., p. 237.
33. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, “L’historien et l’ordinateur” (1968), in idem, Le territoire de l’historien (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), p. 14; now in English as “The Historian and the Computer,” in idem, The Territory of the Historian, trans. Ben Reynolds and Siân Reynolds (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979); and idem, Montaillou, village occitan de 1294 à 1314 (Paris: Gallimard, 1975; reprinted 1982); and in English as Montaillou, the Promised Land of Error (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).
34. See Furet, “L’histoire et ‘l’homme sauvage,’ “ p. 232.
35. On this historiographical mutation, see, in a perspective partially diverse from the one advanced here, Jacques Revel, “L’histoire au ras du sol,” introduction to G. Levi, Le pouvoir au village: Histoire d’un exorciste dans le Piémont du septième siècle, trans. Monique Aymard (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), pp. i-xxxiii, more fully developed in J. Revel, “Micro-analyse et reconstitution du social,” in Ministère de la Recherche de la Technologie: Colloque “Anthropologie contemporaine et anthropologie historique,” no. 2, pp. 24–37; text prepared for the Marseilles colloquium, 24–26 September 1992.
36. For a recapitulation, see La nouvelle histoire, ed. Jacques Le Goff, Roger Chartier, and Jacques Revel (Paris: Retz, 1978). See also the introductory essay by Peter Burke to New Perspectives on Historical Writing, pp. 1–23.
37. See Georges Duby, Le dimanche de Bouvines, 27 juillet 1214 (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), pp. 7–8 (1st ed., 1973): “L’histoire . . . qu’on devait dire, plus tard et abusivement, ‘nouvelle’ (je dis abusivement, car la plupart des interrogations que nous fûmes si fiers de forger, nos prédécesseurs, avant que ne s’appesantisse la chape du positivisme, les avaient formulées dans le second tiers du XIXe siècle).” See, in this regard, the extremely instructive book by Charles Rearick, Beyond Enlightenment: Historians and Folklore in Nineteenth-Century France (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974).
38. See J. Le Goff, Les mentalités: Une histoire ambigüe, in J. Le Goff and P. Nora, eds., Faire l’histoire, 3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), 3:76–94.
39. P. Ariès, “L’histoire des mentalités,” in Le Goff, Chartier, and Revel, La nouvelle histoire, p. 411.
40. P. Ariès and Michel Winock, Un historien du dimanche (Paris: Seuil, 1980).
41. Alf Lüdtke, ed., Alltagsgeschichte: Zur Rekonstruktion historischer Erfahrungen und Lebensweisen (Frankfurt a. M.: Campus Verlag, 1989); Geoff Eley, “Labor History, Social History, Alltagsgeschichte: Experience, Culture, and the Politics of the Everyday—A New Direction for German Social History?” Journal of Modern History, 61 (1989): 297–343.
42. Furet, “L’histoire et ‘l’homme sauvage,’ “ p. 230: ‘Il n’ya rien d’étonnant à ce que, en même temps qu’elle [la grande histoire du XIX siècle] cherche désespérément à sauver son impérialisme comme porteuse de la ‘modernisation,’ elle retourne à l’ethnologie comme consciente de ses échecs.”
43. Ibid., p. 233.
44. Ibid., p. 232.
45. I discussed this theme in my “Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm,” in Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. John Tedeschi and Anne C. Tedeschi (1979) (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), pp. 96–125.
46. Now available in English: The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. John Tedeschi and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), and Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Pantheon, 1991).
47. Now available in English: The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, trans. John Tedeschi and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), p. xx. In the introduction to The Night Battles I had already stressed, against the undifferentiated notion of “collective mentality,” the importance of the development of specific beliefs on the part of single individuals.
48. See M. Vovelle, “Histoire sérielle ou ‘case studies’: vrai ou faux dilemme en histoire des mentalités,” in Histoire sociale, sensibilités collectives et mentalités. Mélanges Robert Mandrou (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1985), pp. 39–49.
49. R. Chartier, “Intellectual History or Sociocultural History? The French Trajectories,” in Dominick La Capra and Steven L. Kaplan, eds., Modern European Intellectual History: Reappraisals and New Perspectives (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), p. 32; the emphasis is mine.
50. Furet, “L’histoire et ‘l’homme sauvage,’ “ p. 231.
51. This unstated identification is implied even in the famous essay by Lawrence Stone, “The Revival of Narrative: Reflections on a New History,” Past and Present 85 (1979): 3–24; this did not advance the subsequent discussion.
52. Here I elaborate some observations formulated in my review of J. Le Goff, Pour un autre Moyen Age, in Critique, no. 395 (1980): 345–354.
53. Richard Cobb contemporaneously had become aware of the methodological implications of the Exercices de style: “apart from its brilliance both as parody and as conversation totally recaptured, [it] might also be described as an essay on the relative value and interpretation of conflicting or overlapping historical evidence” (Raymond Queneau, p. 7).
54. I am speaking of lacunae in a relative, not absolute, sense (historical evidence is always lacunar by definition). But new research questions create new lacunae.
55. On the silences of Menocchio, see The Cheese and the Worms, pp. 110–112. These concluding words allude to my “The Inquisitor as Anthropologist” in my Clues, Myths and the Historical Method, pp. 156–164, 220–221. The connection between “échelle d’analyse” and “écriture de l’histoire,” identified as “questions majeures,” is grasped with great perspicacity in the anonymous editorial “Histoire et sciences sociales: Un tournant critique?” Annales: E.S.C. 43 (1988): 292–293.
56. See Isaiah Berlin, “The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History,” (1953), in Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly, eds., Russian Thinkers (London: Hogarth Press, 1978), pp. 22–81.
57. Tolstoy was perfectly aware of his indebtedness. See Paul Boyer (1864–1949) chez Tolstoï: Entretiens à Iasnaïa Poliana (Paris: Institut d’Études Slaves, 1950) (quoted also in Berlin, “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” p. 56). Cf. Nicola Chiaromonte, Credere o non credere (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1993). I am grateful to Claudio Fogu for the reference.
58. Duby, Le dimanche de Bouvines.
59. Otto Benesch, Der Maler Albrecht Altdorfer (Vienna: Scholl, 1939): “Makrokosmos und Mikrokosmos werden eins” (p. 31). I realize that I had already broached this theme in speaking of a Brueghel landscape (Dark Day) and of the battle with which Roberto Rossellini’s film Paisà concludes. See, respectively, my Spurensicherungen: Über verborgene Geschichte, Kunst und soziales Gedächtnis, trans. from the Italian by Karl Friedrich Hauber (Berlin: Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, 1983), pp. 14–15; and “Di tutti i doni che porto a Kaisàre . . . Leggere il film scrivere la storia,” Storie e Storia 5 (1983): 5–17. On the conclusion of Paisà, see also the anecdote reported by Federico Fellini, who had worked on the film as Rossellini’s assistant director, in Fellini, Comments on Films, trans. Joseph Henry, ed. Giovanni Grazzini (1983) (Fresno: California State University Press, 1988), p. 66. On Altdorfer’s Battle between Alexander and Darius, see also the essay, written from a point of view very different from the one sketched here, which opens Reinhart Koselleck’s Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1979).
60. Paul Oskar Kristeller, foreword, in Siegfried Kracauer, History: The Last Things before the Last (1969) (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1995), p. xiv; emphasis added. See esp. chap. 5, “The Structure of the Historical Universe,” pp. 104–138, which Kracauer left unfinished.
61. Ibid., p. 134.
62. In fact, they have not had much of an echo generally; but see the penetrating analysis by Martin Jay, who demonstrates convincingly that “in many ways, History is one of Kracauer’s most compelling and original works, which deserves to be ‘redeemed,’ if one may borrow his own word, from an unmerited oblivion” (“The Extraterritorial Life of Siegfried Kracauer,” Salmagundi, nos. 31–32 [1975–1976]: 87).
63. Jay, “The Extraterritorial Life,” p. 62, on Minima moralia; p. 63, on Kracauer’s diffidence toward the category of “totality”; and p. 50, on the connection, in Kracauer’s thought, between “wholeness and death.” See also, Jay, “Adorno and Kracauer: Notes on a Troubled Friendship,” Salmagundi, no. 40 (Winter 1978): 42–66; and Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 245–246, passim. The young Adorno read Kant under Kracauer’s guidance; see Remo Bodei, introduction, in Theodor W. Adorno, Il gergo dell’autenticità [Jargon der Eigentlichkeit: Zur deutschen Ideologie] (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1989), p. vii. I have acknowledged my debt to Minima moralia in the introduction to Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, p. ix. In the final page of Dialettica negativa (as Hans Medick has brought to my attention), Adorno ascribes a decisive function to “the micrological view.”
64. Viktor Shlovskii [Sklovskij], Materiali e leggi di trasformazione stilistica: Saggio su ‘Guerra e Pace,’ trans. Monica Guerrini (Parma: Pratiche, 1978).
65. R. Serra, Scritti letterari, morali e politici, ed. Mario Isnenghi (Turin: Einaudi, 1974), pp. 278–288. Here I am returning to ideas I expressed in “Just One Witness” (chap. 12 in this volume).
66. R. Serra, Epistolario, ed. Luigi Ambrosini, Giuseppe De Robertis, and Alfredo Grilli (Florence: Le Monnier, 1934), pp. 453–454.
67. B. Croce, History: Its Theory and Practice, trans. Douglas Ainslie (1915) (New York: Russell & Russell, 1960), p. 55.
68. Serra, letter to Croce, 11 Nov. 1912, Epistolario di Renato Serra, p. 459. Serra’s differences with Croce have been noted in Eugenio Garin, “Serra e Croce,” in Scritti in onore di Renato Serra: Per il cinquantenario della morte (Florence: Le Monnier, 1974), pp. 85–88.
69. Serra, Scritti letterari, pp. 286–287.
70. See chap. 4, “Proofs and Possibilities.”
71. Calvino’s piece, first published in the newspaper Corriere della Sera on 25 April 1974 (anniversary of the Liberation), can now be read in the collection La strada di San Giovanni (Milan: Mondadori, 1991), pp. 75–85 (trans. Tim Parks as The Road to San Giovanni [New York: Pantheon Books, 1993]). The printing of Isnenghi’s Einaudi edition was completed on 16 Feb. 1974.
72. F. R. Ankersmit, “Historiography and Postmodernism,” History and Theory 28 (1989): 137–153 (esp. pp. 143, 149–150). See also the response in Perez Zagorin, “Historiography and Postmodernism: Reconsiderations,” ibid. 29 (1990): 263–274; and Ankersmit’s further rejoinder, “Reply to Professor Zagorin,” pp. 275–296, where we read this characteristic statement (apropos such constructionist theoreticians of historiography as M. Oakeshott, L. Goldstein, and M. Stanford): “The past as the complex referent of the historical text as a whole has no role to play in historical debate. From the point of view of historical practice this referential past is epistemically a useless notion. . . Texts are all we have and we can only compare texts with texts” (p. 281).
73. Namier is thought to have said: “Toynbee, I study the individual leaves, you the tree. The rest of the historians study the clusters of branches, and we both think they are wrong” (quoted in Kracauer, History, p. 110). But see also the passage in Tolstoy’s diary quoted in Isaiah Berlin, “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” p. 30. For a precocious formulation of Namier’s program to study “individual leaves” (members of the House of Commons), see his “The Biography of Ordinary Men” (1928), in Skyscrapers and Other Essays (London: Macmillan, 1931), pp. 44–53.
74. By Levi, see “I pericoli del geertzismo,” Quaderni Storici 58 (1985): 269–277; and “On Microhistory.” See also, in the present volume, “Proofs and Possibilities” (chap. 4); “Description and Citation” (chap. 1); “Just One Witness” (chap. 12). See also my “Checking the Evidence: The Judge and the Historian,” Critical Inquiry 18 (1991): 79–92; as well as “The Inquisitor as Anthropologist” (cited in full at n. 55).
75. Peter Burke emphasizes the cultural relativism of the “new history” in his introduction to New Perspectives on Historical Writing, pp. 3–4.
76. See, respectively, Ginzburg, Indagini su Piero: Il Battesimo, il ciclo di Arezzo, la Flagellazione (Turin: Einaudi, 1981; new ed., 1994) (trans. Martin Ryle and Kate Soper as The Enigma of Piero della Francesca: The Baptism, the Arezzo Cycle, the Flagellation [London: Verso, 1985]); Pietro Redondi, Galileo eretico (Turin: Einaudi, 1983) (trans. Raymond Rosenthal as Galileo Heretic [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987]); Franco Ramella, Terra e telai: Sistemi di parentela e manifattura nel Biellese dell’Ottocento (Turin: Einaudi, 1984); and Osvaldo Raggio, Faide e parentele: Lo stato genovese visto dalla Fontanabuona (Turin: Einaudi, 1990). Alberto M. Banti (“Storie e microstorie: l’histoire sociale contemporaine en Italie [1972–1989],” Genèses 3 [March 1991]: 134–147: 145) emphasizes the presence in Italian microhistory of two tendencies, centered respectively on the analysis of social structure and of cultural implications. Banti assigns to my essay “Clues” some of the responsibility for the ultimate failure of the microhistorical paradigm (the true one, the first of the two just mentioned).
77. Grendi, “Micro-analisi e storia sociale,” p. 512.
78. The subtitles of the two books are, respectively, Carriera di un esorcista nel Piemonte del Seicento and Naissance d’un langage corporatif (Turin 17e–18e siècles). Some of the intellectual and political implications of this research could be clarified by a parallel reading of Riprendere tempo, the dialogue—it, too, published in 1982 in the series Microstorie, between Vittorio Foa and Pietro Marcenaro. The two are not historians, contrary to what Edward Muir states in the introduction to Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), p. xxii n7, even though Foa, politician and trade unionist, is also the author of a book of history: La Gerusalemme rimandata: Domande di oggi agli inglesi del primo Novecento (Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1985); Pietro Marcenaro, after having worked as a laborer for a time, is once again a trade unionist.
79. Cf. Revel, “L’histoire au ras du sol,” p. xxxii, and “Micro-analyse et reconstitution du social,” pp. 34–35.
80. Martin Jay has underlined this difficulty, citing Kracauer, “Of Plots, Witnesses and Judgments,” in S. Friedlander, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 103. Gwyn Prins has called the “small scale” a “trap,” observing, “It is not there that the propulsive forces of historians’ explanatory theories can be found” (“Oral History,” in P. Burke, ed., New Perspectives in Historical Writing, p. 134).
81. Levi, “On Microhistory,” p. 111. It would be useful to have the version of the other scholars involved in this enterprise, starting with Edoardo Grendi (but see now “Ripensare la microstoria?” Quaderni storici, n.s., vol. 86 [1994]: 539–549).
This is a revised version of a lecture read in Tokyo in 1992 on the occasion of the Japanese translation of a Storia Notturna: Una decifrazione del sabba (1989).
1. The source for the quip is Georges Dumézil; see Jacques Bonnet, ed., Georges Dumézil (Paris: Éditions Pandora, 1981), p. 25.
2. Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts, introd. by Jonas Salk (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986).
3. Natalia Ginzburg, “Inverno in Abruzzo” (1944), in Le piccole virtù (Turin: Einaudi, 1962), p. 18.
4. Storia notturna: Una decifrazione del sabba (Turin: Einaudi, 1989); trans. Raymond Rosenthali as Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath (New York: Pantheon, 1991).
5. Franco Venturi, Il pop u lismo russo (Turin: Einaudi, 1952), 2:1163.
6. C. Levi, “Ricordo di Leone Ginzburg,” in Le tracce della memoria, ed. Maria Pagliara (Rome: Donzelli, 2002), pp. 101–103.
7. Keith Thomas, “The Relevance of Social Anthropology to the Historical Study of Witchcraft,” in Mary Douglas, ed., Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations (London: Tavistock, 1970), p. 47.
8. The situation changed somewhat in the decades that followed.
9. The friend was Paolo Fossati.
10. Eric J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in the Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Manchester, UK: University Press, 1959); idem, “Per lo studio delle classi subalterne,” Società 16 (1960): 436–449 (I allude to this essay in The Cheese and the Worms, trans. John Tedeschi and Anne Tedeschi [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980], p. 130).
11. “Witchcraft and Popular Piety: Notes on a Modenese Trial of 1519” (1961), in my Clues, Myths and the Historical Method, trans. John Tedeschi and Anne C. Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), pp. 1–16, 165–170.
12. Morton Smith, The Secret Gospel: The Discovery and Interpretation of the Secret Gospel According to Mark (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), p. 96. Through a lapse, I failed to make the attribution for these words in C. Ginzburg and Adriano Prosperi, Giochi di pazienza: Un seminario sul “Beneficio di Cristo” (Turin: Einaudi, 1975), p. 183.
13. “Witchcraft and Popular Piety,” p. 16.
14. See Roman Jakobson, Autoritratto di un linguista, trans. G. Banti and B. Bruno (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1987), p. 138 (translation of Jakobson’s Retrospects [not seen]), who cites L. V. Scerba, although the reference should be to Nietz sche, preface to Aurora.
15. See the preface to I benandanti: Ricerche sulla stregoneria e sui culti agrari tra Cinquecento e Seicento (Turin: Einaudi, 1966). I quote from the English version, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. John Tedeschi and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), p. xvii. I presented the anomaly in these terms “. . . the voices of these peasants reach us directly, without barriers, not by way, as usually happens, of fragmentary and indirect testimony, filtered through a different and inevitably distorting mentality.” Recently, this observation was dispatched as ingenuous (Franco Nardon, Benandanti e inquisitori nel Friuli del Seicento [Trieste: Edizioni Università di Trieste; Montereale Valcellina: Centro Studi Storici Menocchio, 1999], pp. 36, 106; see also the preface by Andrea Del Col, p. 6). But the person who quoted this sentence to criticize it forgot to cite what immediately followed: “Such a statement may seem paradoxical, and this leads to the specific interest of the research.” Between “the image underlying the interrogations of the judges and the actual testimony of the accused,” there was, I explained, a “discrepancy,” a “gap” which “permits us to reach a genuinely popular stratum of beliefs which was later deformed and then expunged by the superimposition of the schema of the educated classes” (The Night Battles, p. xviii).
16. For a striking example, see Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971), pp. 163–165; and the pungent comment in E. P. Thompson, “Anthropology and the Discipline of Historical Context,” Midland History 3 (1972): 41–45.
17. Adriano Sofri, “Il segreto di Natalia,” L’Unità (16 November 1992). Cf. Storia notturna, p. xxxvii; Ecstasies, p. 22.
18. C. Ginzburg, “Momigliano e De Martino,” Rivista Storica Italiana 100 (1988):400–413.