French Historians in the Nineteenth Century: Providence and History
This study is a reflection on the major historians of nineteenth-century France, and shows that, near the end of the century, a major change of perspective occurred. The historians discussed in the opening sections of the book looked to the past for guidance, while modern historians from the twentieth-century onwards regard the past as a closed book which the historian has to open. Guizot is the hero of the first section of the book; in part two, Comtesse d’Agoult (Daniel Stern) is specifically mentioned, partly because she, who wrote a splendid history of the revolution of 1848, tends to be ignored as a historian while Michelet and Tocqueville are still discussed. The historians in part three are transitional figures who politically and morally still belong to the nineteenth-century, but whose histories show the new approach to the past.
F.L. van Holthoon is Professor Emeritus in Social and American History at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. His English-language publications include a study on J.S. Mill, a survey of political theories in the nineteenth-century (State and Civil Society, 2000), and A Dialogue on Hume (2007).
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