SPECIAL ARTICLE
Social Responsibility of the Historian
The Annales’ Agenda in Perspective
Arundhati Virmani
Recent conflicts in India over what constitutes historical
facts or “truths” have forced historians out of their ivory
towers and into the public arena, adding urgency to
reflections on the historian’s social responsibility. Is it the
historian’s responsibility to expose manipulations of the
historical past, point to social dysfunctions, and identify
remedies? Or should the citizen historian nourish public
debate on sensitive topics without taking a clear-cut
position on them? This paper explains how the French
journal, the Annales d’Histoire Economique et Sociale,
established in 1929, has interpreted these questions,
attempting to deal with problems of contemporary
concern, but without making the shift from debate to
polemics. Annales has been in favour of a non-emotional
history, inviting historians to work with data, and
reminding them that their primary role is to strengthen
the citizen’s understanding of the social mechanisms of
change, not to take ideological positions themselves.
Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the conference titled
“The Politics of History and the History of Politics,” at Jawaharlal
Nehru University, Delhi, in November 2014, and at the Indian Institute
of Advanced Study, Shimla, in July 2016. My thanks to Bhagwan Josh,
Chetan Singh and the IIAS fellows, to Sunil Kumar and to the EPW
referee for their remarks and suggestions.
Arundhati Virmani (arundhati.virmani@ehess.fr) is a historian who
teaches at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Norbert
Elias Centre, Marseille.
46
T
he recent publication of What the Nation Really Needs to
Know (2017), a set of open lectures on nationalism or-
ganised by the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU)
Teachers’ Association in response to the charges of sedition
and anti-nationalism against three of its students, reopens a
set of questions that have been recurrent in India since inde-
pendence. On what grounds does a historian intervene? As a
concerned citizen, or as an expert possessing specialised
knowledge on a given subject? When the object of his/her
knowledge is discussed in public, can the historian remain in
the wings and let the debate unfold without intervening? The
questions are not totally new. However, the increasing politi-
cal use, misuse or manipulation of the historical past in India
and in the world, which encroaches on citizens’ rights and
weakens the rule of law, has added urgency to reflections on
the historian’s social responsibility.
The notion of social responsibility is today more easily
associated with the corporate world. Since 2014, big firms in
India have been expected to engage in projects for the
improvement of society and vulnerable groups, through social
or community investment actions. No such external mandato-
ry rules apply to historians, who must decide when to speak
out according to their own subjective criteria. Yet, recent
conflicts in India over what constitutes historical facts or
“truths” have forced historians into the public arena.
On the one hand, the historian is trained in the notion of
responsibility inherent in the historian’s craft: professional
values determine his approach to the objects and tools of
research. These involve describing the past wie es gewesen ist
(as and how it happened), leaving fantasy and imagination to
the realm of science fiction or storytelling, denouncing false
notions or refuting fictive accounts of the past, and not least,
providing convincing explanations based on evidence. Today,
his responsibility extends to a larger duty towards society and
citizens. In 1967, the linguist Noam Chomsky (1969: 227–64)
had insisted on the need for social scientists and technocrats to
exercise their critical function in influencing United States
(US) policy, particularly towards the Vietnam war. This critical
mission is inherent in the historian’s work, giving them the au-
thority to denounce errors and deformations of the historical
past, or speak up against the manipulations of this past by the
state, political leaders or parties. More than that, the historian
builds a positive knowledge about the past that he then makes
available to citizens. Historians today take account of the long
tradition of seminal works on nationalism by specialists like
september 9, 2017 vol liI no 36 EPW Economic & Political Weekly

Ernest Renan (Thapar et al 2016), Anthony D Smith, Eric
Hobsbawm and others, to reflect on the processes of
production and dynamics of Indian nationalism. A historian’s
work is therefore not simply an expression of his/her private
opinions but a result of investigations that follow a set of
professional rules.
‘Speaking Truth to Power’
The History Manifesto, a recent reflection on the role of history
in contemporary society, added another element to the specific
contribution of historians to debates in the public arena: the
tools and approaches specific to history can provide the bigger,
longue durée (long-term) picture so urgently required in this ep-
och of short-termism, thus widening the options to think about
the future (Guldi and Armitage 2014). A symposium organised
by the City University, London, in 2016 debated the idea of re-
sponsibility as “speaking truth to power,” drawing attention to
some further aspects of the historian’s responsibility. Is it
about the historian’s role in the creation and analysis of ideology?
Or about situating events in their historical perspective? Or is
it about the historian’s duty to diffuse the knowledge they have
produced using proper historical methods with the aim of
empowering citizens and the cause of human values? In quite
another perspective, as Hobsbawm urged, can we consider the
historian’s social responsibility to consist of avoiding jargon,
polemics or provocation in the style of presentation of one’s
results? Is it the historian’s responsibility to remain compre-
hensible, yet not hardening opposition between camps, thus
preventing a breakdown of dialogue?
The challenge is particularly difficult in the contemporary
Indian situation where public, even violent, controversies have
become banal reactions to positions or statements by Indian
historians on sensitive issues such as communitarian identi-
ties, beef eating, tribal rights or nationalism. Or in a more
positive light, does responsibility mean paying attention in
his/her research and approach to understanding how society
holds together, and more generally how a social phenomenon
takes shape and is transformed in practice?
The Public Intellectual (Chari and Iyengar 2015) presented
some reflections on the role of intellectuals in debates of public
importance and their contribution to sensitising public opin-
ion about ongoing social change. Although the term “social
responsibility” was not used at all, the idea of renewing intel-
lectuals’ commitment to the creation of a moral and intellec-
tual climate favourable to the transformation of society with-
out compromising on tactical interests is at the core of the
book. The subject may have become a burning issue today, but
professional preoccupation with the question is certainly
much older. World War I undoubtedly constituted a key
moment in this awareness as a moral and intellectual
consequence of those years of barbarism.
History as Power
In 1923, the Belgian medievalist economic historian Henri
Pirenne, inaugurating the Fifth International Congress of His-
torical Sciences in Brussels,1 denounced the fact that during
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SPECIAL ARTICLE
the entire course of the war, two sciences in particular had
served the belligerent powers. These were chemistry and
history. The first provided the necessary explosives and gases;
the second furnished the pretexts, justifications or excuses to
engage in war. However, Pirenne said, chemistry in its service
to the armies, would still make some precious scientific discov-
eries. History, on the contrary, lost its very essence: mainly, of
criticism and impartiality. It had let itself be swept by passion,
abandoning an understanding of historical processes in order
to fuel nationalistic fervour instead, and subordinating itself to
the goals of the military and political establishment (Pirenne
1924). It was true that at all times, princes had sought to make
history serve their ambitions and appetites. In many ways,
history was thus doing what it had always done in the 17th or
18th centuries when it had furnished Louis XIV with sufficient
legal and historical arguments to legitimise his annexation of
neighbouring territories or Frederick II’s attack on his neigh-
bours (Austria and Silesia). Our nation states however, said
Pirenne, imposed on history a burden that was much heavier
than that of the absolutist states of the ancien régime (old
order). It no longer sufficed for history to influence some diplo-
mats, to interpret princely genealogies, or discuss and inter-
pret treaties to justify their ownership of territories. World
War I attributed to history a further, more sinister, role. It had
to convince multitudes of citizens who voted and who fought,
of the righteousness of their cause, to nourish the courage and
conviction of peoples in self-sacrifice by showing their enemies
as natural and hereditary, in short, as irrevocable opponents
from ancient times.
Pirenne put his finger on a problem that many European
intellectuals had had to face since 1914. This was the role of
science and of intellectuals (historians, in particular) in the
preparation of the intellectual climate that led to the war and
then to the mobilisation of populations in its unexpected pro-
longation. By providing scientific grounds for nationalism’s ex-
cesses or for a theory of races, they had raised men against men.
Pirenne now called upon historians to draw lessons from
the war. Not limiting himself to a simple criticism or denuncia-
tion of the war, even if he did not hide his hostility to Germany
or to German historians,2 the force of his proposal lay in his
appeal for a profound methodological change. Benefiting from
the new tools promoted by the emerging social sciences (geo-
graphy, sociology, anthropology and linguistics), he placed at
the centre of the historian’s craft the use of the comparative
method that would lead them beyond the limits of an inward-
looking national history and enable them to escape the sirens
of patriotism. This was a significant volte-face, not an impetu-
ous emotional reaction to the dreadful consequences of the
long war and his personal tragedy of losing his son. Pirenne
was, of course, deeply immersed in the traditional framework
of historical research since the 19th century. He had himself
produced the first four of the eventually seven-volume Histoire
de Belgique (History of Belgium), which had won him fame and
honours from the Belgian senate at a national ceremony in
1912, making him something of a national hero. Thus, his
move away from a nationalist national history was the result
47
SPECIAL ARTICLE
of a long reflection during his three years of imprisonment by
the Germans from 1916–18.
His address struck an important note amongst the assembly
of European and some non-European historians. It opened the
door to projects of “denationalisation” and rewriting of school
history textbooks (Verga 2007: 503–24), with a view to pro-
moting peace in Europe and international cooperation.3
Equally, it called for a break with a conception and practice of
history that placed every individual in the history of his/her
nation, thus making the history of the nation the destiny that
was difficult, indeed impossible, to escape. It invited a revision
of historiographical paradigms and an invitation to explore
other scales of doing history. This proposal was a powerful
attack on a still mainstream historiographical tradition, embod-
ied by prominent figures such as Camille Jullian, historian and
archaeologist, then professor of French national antiquities at
the Collège de France in Paris, who had just published, in 1922,
a volume entitled From Gaul to France. Our Historical Origins,
where he defended the idea that “history teaches first of all
gratitude, then justice, and finally loyalty … History, he insisted,
is a learning of duties.”
Recasting the Historian’s Responsibility
Against this background, two French historians, Marc Bloch
and Lucien Febvre, planned to launch a new historical journal.
Both, the former a medievalist, the latter a modernist, were
based in Strasbourg, a region reintegrated into France after
the war, whose university assembled some of the most brilliant
minds of the country.4 They had in fact been corresponding
with Pirenne about a joint collaboration on a new journal of
economic history (Lyon and Lyon 1991). In 1919, Febvre in his
inaugural lecture at the newly recreated University of Stras-
bourg published as “History in a World of Ruins,” had declared
that any history which is in service to power is a servile history.
He insisted that historians were not missionaries marching to
the orders of some national Bible (Febvre 1920: 4). In the
1920s, the two historians had many occasions to share their
frustration about the kind of history being written in France
and exchange their ideas and plans for opening the discipline
to the study of the past through new historical objects, meth-
odologies and questions. These ideas became the foundation
of their new scientific historical journal.
In the prospectus announcing the appearance of the first
issue of Annales d’Histoire Economique et Sociale on 1 January
1929, their vision of the utility of history was spelt out in a
“Note to Our Readers” (Bloch and Febvre 1929: 1–2). Refusing
all theoretical discourse, they implemented their new vision of
history from the very first issue. First, they upheld the historian’s
autonomy from the imperatives of state programmes or agen-
das, criticising those historians who had placed themselves “in
the service of the country” through their discourse or their
teaching. As Lucien Febvre put it, “History that serves a
purpose (someone or something) is a history that obeys.” The
theme would resonate amongst intellectuals as different as
Ernest Gellner who would uphold the importance of irrever-
ence and dissidence (1990: 17–28), or Tony Judt celebrating the
48
courageous non-conformism in Léon Blum, Albert Camus or
Raymond Aron (Judt 1998). All agreed on an essential point:
the historian must not be an adviser to the prince. The Annales
rejected the pseudo-prophetic function of the historian popu-
larised in the 19th century and the ideological use of history,
which was invading political debates. The journal positioned
itself to leave behind the political idols that had obsessed his-
torians for most of the 19th century and had led them to asso-
ciate history solely with the effects of political debates, gov-
ernmental decisions or the functioning of public institutions.
In opposition to the extreme right-wing position of Charles
Maurras of “politics first,”5 the word “politics” was not even
mentioned in the tract. This was a radical departure in a coun-
try where long-standing political divisions of the past, be-
tween left and right, were echoed in the ideological positions
taken by public intellectuals.
Second, they espoused Pirenne’s invitation to undertake
comparative history, which Bloch had already practised in his
famous book Les Rois Thaumaturges or The Royal Touch, com-
paring the diverging evolution of monarchical power in France
and Britain (Bloch 1924). In fact, the comparative method that
held out an escape from the tradition of nationality served in
their eyes to discover the fabrication of differences between
neighbouring societies and to clarify problems for historical
research. In the following years, Bloch would produce a com-
parative history of rural Europe as well as a history of feudal
societies on a European scale. Comparison thus helped discov-
er uniqueness but at the same time also invalidated “local
pseudo-causes.” Here, the emphasis was on the contribution of
comparison as perspective or method to the renewal of big
historical questions (Verhulst 2001: 507–10).
Third, the tract advocated bringing an informed under-
standing of the past to contemporary decision-makers. The
past was not to be a field where the historian indulged his
taste for erudite knowledge or obscure details that made
sense mainly to other specialists of the period. On the
contrary, the historian’s choice of questions to be studied,
approaches and analysis, could have an enriching and con-
structive impact on the present. History helped understand
and act in the social world. The historian’s craft allowed them
to identify patterns in the ways societies functioned and
construct possible models of development. The historian, in
their eyes therefore, had to engage themselves with the ques-
tions and issues of their time that stretched beyond their own
national boundaries.
Bloch and Febvre had noted the absence of scientific jour-
nals that refused to separate the present from the past and the
past from the present. This was being done in its own way at
the London School of Economics, for example. With Annales
they intended to eliminate the gap between the ancient and
medieval world and a modern world, supposedly autonomous,
drunk on its material power and convinced that it was the
unique product of its own actions. As André Burguière (2009)
notes in his recent book on the Annales school, they wished to
shatter the positivist or philosophical illusion of a present that
was self-understandable.
september 9, 2017 vol liI no 36 EPW Economic & Political Weekly

By bringing these two worlds closer, Annales set itself the
goal of raising new questions about the past from contempo-
rary situations, shedding light on the present by analysing the
transformations of societies over long periods. In doing so,
Bloch and Febvre were convinced that they could interest
today’s decision-makers to know better the world in which
they lived. In the context of the post-World War I period, ob-
sessed by the question of peace and collaboration between
peoples, they attempted to come close to the new international
organisations that were created at this time: the International
Labour Organization (ILO) founded in 1919, and the Interna-
tional Committee of Intellectual Cooperation set up in Paris in
1922, which would eventually give way to UNESCO.6 Relations
with the ILO were facilitated by the fact that its director, the
socialist Albert Thomas, had been a fellow student of Febvre’s
in Paris at the Ecole Normale Supérieure.
For Bloch and Febvre, close links with the ILO offered access
to inquiries and data on contemporary economic and social
conditions of the world, which they hoped to use for their jour-
nal. Thus, an entente-cordiale between the ILO and Annales
held great promise for both parties.
This new conception of history logically led to their convic-
tion of the utility of history. This usefulness was not what it had
been in 19th century history when the new nations constructed
themselves on claims to a historical past. Bloch scorned the
idea of inserting “Clovis or Charlemagne in the quarrels of
contemporary Europe,” or of joining ranks with “those who
use their manuscripts to decide the destiny of entire peoples.”
Their target was not the world of politicians but the world of
businessmen or decision-makers. This rationale led Bloch in
1937 to address the students of the Ecole Polytechnique, the
most important French school of engineers, on the use of eco-
nomic history. For Bloch and Febvre, henceforth, the ambition
of the journal was to convey the benefits of the rigours of
academic research to those who were building a new world.
They felt that a more scientific approach to social problems
would help enlighten these decision-makers. In that sense,
they were perhaps not entirely outside a certain mainly right-
wing technocratism of the 1930s, which would be party to the
Vichy government, with the difference that they were, as
Burguière (2009) categorically maintains, profoundly demo-
cratic Republicans of the left.
More than 50% of the articles published in the 1930s dealt
with major contemporary issues such as the problems of devel-
opment, colonisation, agrarian structures, credit and banking,
African labour, Asian emigration, prices and monetary crisis,
which in the context of the recent depression, had a particular
relevance.7 An interesting, courageous attempt to propose a
broad understanding of Nazism was made in 1937. Taking its
distance from the political movement of the anti-fascist intel-
lectuals grouped in the Watchfullness Committee of anti-fas-
cist intellectuals,8 an intentionally non-polemical approach
was advanced. This special issue focused on Nazism as a socio-
cultural phenomenon,9 proposing keys of interpretation that
extended from an examination of the medieval nobility or the
Reformation up to the finances of the Nazi party and covering
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SPECIAL ARTICLE
the age of Goethe and the world of the working class under
Bismarck.10
Such were the new impulsions of Annales regarding the utility
of history, that is, the social concerns of the historian; in other
words, his responsibility. This word comes up frequently in
Bloch’s correspondence. It most certainly carried a more
ethical connotation than that of a direct, outright social
involvement. However, this ethic was not only personal. It had
a more general, professional dimension and one can think that
it would have been more explicitly presented in what is Bloch’s
testament, The Historian’s Craft, which remained incomplete
when the Nazis murdered him in June 1944.
This question of responsibility took a new turn with the
German occupation of France in 1940. The situation of the two
directors was totally different, and quite opposed. Febvre
could and did remain in Paris, and continued to edit the journal,
which changed its title.11 Bloch, on the other hand, as a Jew,
lost his position at the Sorbonne, in addition to his personal
library, and moved to the Free Southern Zone. He eventually
joined the Resistance.12 For both of them, the question of social
responsibility thus arose more sharply. Febvre saw his respon-
sibility as maintaining a free intellectual space in an occupied
country. Bloch, as an intellectual, felt it his responsibility to
engage in an analysis of the causes of the French defeat, which
he did in The Strange Defeat. This was an uncompromising
analysis of the French failure to resist invasion, a failure that
finally lay on the shoulders of the entire French society.
Burden of Responsibility
What have successive generations of Annales done with this
new conception of history, this vision of responsibility of the
historian and of the profession? I will address this question
through a series of recent interviews with six of the nine editors
of Annales since 1970.13 The question I discussed with them
was, as editor of Annales, did you have a clear vision of the
historian’s responsibility in questions touching the public
domain, public debates or society? Their responses were sur-
prisingly divergent. Their ideas of what remains of the initial
project of Annales reflect the varied understandings of the his-
torian’s social responsibility today.
It must be recalled that after a long period in which the jour-
nal was edited by senior, internationally recognised histori-
ans—Bloch and Febvre and then Braudel—it became in 1970 a
collective enterprise, with a group of young historians like
Jacques Le Goff, Le Roy Ladurie and Marc Ferro, around a
younger editor who managed the journal for four to five years.
It is surprising that in the aftermath of May 1968, which wit-
nessed strong waves of civil unrest with massive general
strikes and occupation of universities and factories across
France and the intense politicisation of French society, which
continued during several years, the journal, according to
Burguière, editor of the Annales at this very moment of the
1970s, maintained a cautious distance from political
engagements in its themes and orientation. Special issues
featured reflections on alimentation, family and kinship. This,
despite the fact that Ladurie, one of the editors, was a former
49
SPECIAL ARTICLE
communist activist, that Le Goff, also one of the editors, was
personally deeply involved in the defence of Solidarnocz in the
1980s and had very close ties, amongst others, with the great
Polish medievalist and politician Bronislaw Geremek. Personal
commitments do not seem to have ever directly weighed upon
the scientific orientations of the journal. For Jacques Revel who
expressed the position shared by others in the 1970s and 1980s,
the responsibility of the historian was a personal matter, rath-
er than a collective policy of the journal, a question of personal
ethics, not a professional one. In a more critical humoristic
vein, Lucette Valensi (1980–85), specialist of Mediterranean
Islam, colonial Maghreb and the relations between the Orient
and the West, notes that in not talking openly about politics
the journal’s editors were only following the fashion of Parisi-
an bourgeois dinners.
Society First
A significant inflexion occurred in the 1990s. Jean-Yves Greni-
er, an economic historian of early modern Europe, became editor
at a time when the journal changed its subtitle from Econo-
mies, Societies, Civilisations to History and Social Sciences. For
him, this change had both an epistemological and a political
significance. He considered that the most interesting question
from the heuristic point of view was to understand how socie-
ty held together and more generally how a social phenome-
non, whatever it may be, takes shape and is transformed. “In
this sense, we felt that we were giving meaning to the social
responsibility of the historian, far more significantly than oth-
er French or foreign journals, more anchored in the uniquely
disciplinary, even scholarly dimension.”14 Grenier thus reaf-
firms the validity of Bloch and Febvre’s position: society first, de-
spite a changed epistemological context summed up by the so-
called linguistic or pragmatic turns. Furthermore, he reiterat-
ed the concern with the present whose understanding is in-
separable without the long term. Annales in Grenier’s view re-
mains loyal to the founding fathers’ programme: the historian
can only begin from the present and his questionnaire neces-
sarily results from his relationship to the world he inhabits.
This original feature of the journal was particularly important
in the 1990s. With Grenier, Annales renewed their interest in
the contemporary moment by publishing articles dealing with
the problem of unemployment, the construction of minorities,
or in 1994, Yugoslavia’s post-socialist disintegration.
This was also the moment when in France the historian
stepped forth both as a public figure and a judicial expert.
Unlike Britain where the maverick historian (like A J P Taylor)
had sometimes stepped into the public limelight through a
spectacularly popular television series, the historian in France
had remained largely a serious academic professional. This
was so despite the commercial success of some specialised his-
torical studies such as Le Roy Ladurie’s book on Montaillou or
Georges Duby’s works on medieval France. The historian’s
status and public role now shifted from a writer of history, a
knowledgeable specialist of a specific period or domain, and a
researcher, to an expert, competent and equipped to interpret
the past and hence pronounce judgments on national events.
50
This led to the emergence of a new posture of the historian
and the changing social function of history as a vector of
construction of the civic space in response to new social
demands (Dumoulin 2003).
History from the 1970s onwards, particularly the history of
the present, was called upon both by the state and by social de-
mand, to provide concrete, reliable expertise on a range of
questions coming up for organisations, institutions, ministries,
communities and civil society. Historians moved out from the
university, archives and libraries, from writing in scientific
books and journals for a specialised group of readers, to making
public pronouncements as experts in official reports, or even at
court trials, with the mediatised trials in the 1990s of Klaus Bar-
bie, Paul Touvier and Maurice Papon, who were held respo-
nsible (1981–89) for illegal, arbitrary arrests and murders of
persons of Jewish origin during World War II and accused of
crimes against humanity.15 These trials raised the question of
the relationship between history and justice on issues of consid-
erable national importance, such as fixing the responsibility of
government officials and actors in national events or in public
policies under German occupation, or more recently in analysing
the Tutsi genocide in Rwanda in 1994 as a phenomenon in the
long term rather than a spontaneous, immediate reaction of the
state or its functionaries (Audoin-Rouzeau 2016: 175–81, 2017).
The high stakes involved in these historical questions for
national communities and specific groups have given the
historian a more public role. On the one hand, the idea of the
historian’s social responsibility has expanded with a greater
official role in celebrations, national anniversaries or com-
memorations, and with more frequent interventions on the
radio, television or open universities today. At the same time,
it has opened up new horizons for the profession as historian
citizens and as expert witnesses. These developments have
placed the historian at the centre of public debates, and
extended the scope of the historian’s voice.
In 1995, confronted with the question of Jewish genocide,
François Bédarida, the founder of the Institute of Current His-
tory in Paris, declared, “The historian finds himself stunned by
the task of disentangling the complex issues and of providing a
guideline, combining critical and civic functions—to which
social demand adds an ethical function.” Thus, Bédarida
defined the responsibility of the historian by these three
modes of intervention—critical, civic and ethical—that add to
the ordinary requirements of the historian’s craft. Even so, the
Annales’ former editor Grenier is more sceptical of the possible
impact of the journal on a larger, non-academic audience, “for
the chasm between scholarly preoccupations and the political
decision-makers is enormous” (Bédarida 1995: 136).
The positions of the different editors show that the discus-
sions within the journal do not seem to have lost sight of the
founders’ intentions. Yet, they clearly reflect an awareness of
the difficulties of applying them and of their limits. They are
trying to voluntarily keep the journal on a middle ground
between two imperatives: one, of dealing with problems of
contemporary concern, and two, of avoiding the elaboration of
a clear political and ideological position that would transform
september 9, 2017 vol liI no 36 EPW Economic & Political Weekly

the academic journal into a militant platform. This position
has been clearly recognised and reaffirmed for the last two
decades. As Antoine Lilti, another former editor, put it:
The journal seeks to propose tools that are likely to nourish public de-
bates on sensitive problems, without adopting a clear-cut position on
them, for example, on the question of GMOs in the 2008 issue or in the
2011 issue on environment: an entire number was devoted to the construc-
tion of what could be a broad frame for a history of the environment,
on the crossroads of questions arising from society, states and science.16
This is voluntary, because whilst nourishing a public debate,
they are concerned about the liberty of researchers and there-
fore leave the researcher to define his/her own position. The
journal therefore presents views that are not necessarily uni-
form. Consequently, it becomes a site of confrontation limited
to the scientific field and never spills over into the political
space. An excellent example of this approach was the particu-
larly sensitive issue on the crisis of the French suburbs in 2005,
published immediately after the events in 2006. A long edito-
rial explained the journal’s specific approach to this recent
“unorganised” urban violence in the suburbs of Paris and in
several provinces, which lasted three weeks from 27 October
to 17 November. As opposed to media accounts concentrating
on descriptive, spectacular reports of clashes with the police
or personal stories, Annales situated the problem in a longer
term of suburban violence in France since the late 1970s. The
approaches of historians and sociologists raised specific issues
of French postcolonial society, such as high rates of unemploy-
ment, migration and integration, the place of Islam in a laic
society, the effectiveness of the educational system, and the
sociology of the younger generations of immigrant parents,
born, raised and educated in France. The editorial concluded
with a clear emphasis that the “social sciences cannot turn
their back on their responsibilities.” The word “responsibility”
is explicitly used and clarified as a professional ethic, which is
defined at the end of the editorial as “to submit the event and
discourses to the test of criticism, offer contextualised analy-
ses that endure, entangle perspectives, shift spatial and
temporal unities. These requirements and confidence which
are those of our discipline are also valid for the study of
contemporary facts.”
This issue of Annales is both exemplary and exceptional.
The run-of-the-mill numbers are entirely academic. Their
central preoccupation is to develop scientific innovation in an
international academic context. The lengthy, detailed and
precise response the current editor, Etienne Anheim, special-
ist of medieval European history, made to the question raised
by the author of this paper, presented a rich synthesis of the
set of problems confronted by a big international scientific
journal today. These include, first, a need to intervene more
regularly on questions more immediately concerning the poli-
tics of research: the ranking and evaluation of reviews or
through the publication of researches linked to these ques-
tions as well as on research policies such as open access or
financing of research.17 Second, the imperative that leads
every scientific journal to try and reach out to a broader audi-
ence outside the university world through public debates or
Economic & Political Weekly EPW september 9, 2017 vol liI no 36
SPECIAL ARTICLE
literary festivals. Finally, to propose studies that nourish
public debate on burning questions like the functioning of
credit on the morrow of the subprime crisis or the economic
basis of inequalities. A recent example of this is the debate in
the journal’s 2015 issue around the economist Thomas
Piketty’s book, Capital in the 21st Century, without taking a
partisan stand. More precisely, Anheim pinpointed their
awareness of the responsibility of history and the social
sciences in keeping with the initial preoccupations of the
founders, concerns that remain very topical.
Nourishing a public debate with innovative research rather
than affirming a collective militant position, which would
locate the journal in a politico-intellectual spectrum, the review
today identifies its aim as strengthening the citizen’s capacity
to emancipate herself by acquiring a better understanding of
the social mechanisms of change.
Historian as Committed Citizen
Such a position could suggest that the historian pursuing their
research according to the rigorous standards of the discipline,
would by nature also be acting as a citizen historian. They
would have to dedicate themselves entirely to being histori-
ans, adhering faithfully to the task of declaring sources, ascer-
taining historical facts, and presenting verifiable results. This
is still the foremost duty of the historian, in spite of doubts cast
by cultural theorists and literary criticism on the existence of
an historical truth. The historian is not like the lawyer arguing
a case as persuasively as possible, whether or not he/she be-
lieves in its veracity (Maclean et al 1990: 10). The responsibility
to their craft, their professional ethics, as evoked by the cau-
tious responses of the Annales’ editors, and the abundant liter-
ature produced on the subject of the practice of history, point
to this. However, is being a socially responsible historian lim-
ited to being professionally ethical?
Writing in 1996, S N Mukherjee distinguished academic his-
torians who can be absolutely ethical from the citizen histori-
ans who find a connection between their studies and life, with
their knowledge of history and their ability to use the tools of his
science (Mukherjee 1996: 8–9). His proposal seems to be a
very general statement that would have a quasi-universal
value. The historian is here not defending a militant position
but empowering the citizen. It also presupposes a democratic,
open space for research, discussion and diffusion. However, as
Edward Shils points out, there is a conflict between the perfor-
mance of intellectual actions and responsibility in public aff-
airs, for both are distinctive activities with their own institu-
tions, patterns of life and judgment. Under the best of circum-
stances, there is bound to be some tension between them
(Shils 1990: 257–306).
Hence, the question arises as to how the historian can exer-
cise her/his responsibility. What are the conditions in which
citizen historians can practice their kind of history? In a demo-
cratic society that in principle allows free public debate, what
can they do? Criticise, undertake new investigations, present
data that shatter political myths, expose false accounts of his-
tory popularised for narrow political interests, point to social
51
SPECIAL ARTICLE
dysfunctionings and identify remedies? In doing so, however,
will she not be drawn into situations that shift from pure de-
bate to polemics and from there be forced to take and even
harden her positions?
In 2003, the journal History and Theory issued a call for papers
on the question, “Do historians as historians have an ethical
responsibility, and if so to whom and to what?” The number
came out in December 2004 as “Historians and Ethics.” The ap-
proach advanced suggested a distinction between the indis-
pensable personal ethics and a more collective, social respon-
sibility, which the historian can opt for as an additional choice,
from the moment they consider that their professional work is
inseparable from the world or society in which they live.
In 1927, the French essayist Julien Benda in his influential
book La Trahison des Clercs, in French translated as “The Treason
of the Intellectuals,” despaired of the intellectuals’ abandoning
of their traditional world of reason for a political world that
mobilised emotions and passion, without the control of reason.18
He was targeting those committed to nationalist causes, in par-
ticular the extreme right-wing writers and publicists associated
with Charles Maurras’s Action Française. In the context of
rising fascism, he appealed for a return to the long-term intel-
lectual tradition of independent reasoning and critique based
on good faith, which Benda understood as a participation in
the building of an international world of peace, based on some
fundamental Christian values. However, it is true, as Ernest
Gellner pointed out more than 70 years later, that in a world
where universal values despite their affirmation are continu-
ously being challenged by ground realities, the identification
of what constitutes “good faith” has become more problematic.
In the deeply interlocking world of today, says Gellner, where
it is “appallingly difficult” to assess consequences, no pure
principle (such as Benda’s good faith) can function (Gellner
1990: 17–28). A point of view that the philosopher Tzvetan
Todorov corroborates: “One cannot demand of intellectuals
that they conform to true values for these do not exist” (Todorov
1995: 201). The position advanced in the issue of History and The-
ory, which carried a critique of a purely militant, partisan his-
tory concerned with only proving a thesis, stressed that the
historian has first to be ethical in order then to be responsible.
Can the option exercised by the Annales today serve as a
point of departure for a reflection on the responsibility of the
historian in other contexts? The separation between political
commitment and civic responsibility is not foreign to the prac-
tices of social scientists. All his life, E P Thompson, known for
his strong commitments to political causes, maintained that
he always had two different activities, which he consciously
kept quite separate: that of the historian, and that of the activist.
He had different modes of intervention and production that
were quite specific and distinct for these two activities. This
did not signify that there was no link between them. However,
Thompson (1987) affirmed that they both required very
different modes of intervention and production, different
manners of argumentation and modes of convincing. More
recently, the economist Thomas Piketty has on the one hand
developed an analysis of the mechanisms of production of
52
economic inequalities in several of his academic publications,
and simultaneously, considered it his civic responsibility to
offer a larger audience the capacity to understand the central
social dynamics of contemporary capitalism. On the other
hand, he also intervenes as a more political reformer who
elaborates plans of fiscal reform. The two activities are both,
linked and separated. The Annales always refused to move
from one position to the other. Is their defence of a non-activist
citizen historian really possible today?
Strangely enough, the debate recalls, though in different
terms, the analysis and well-known proposals of the sociolo-
gist Max Weber in his two famous lectures, “Science as
Vocation” and “Politics as Vocation” (1917 and 1919). In these
lectures, he clearly distinguished between the worlds of
science and politics, which implied different forms of responsi-
bility that a scholar—here the historian, as distinct from the
politician—can exercise. Interventions in the political world
are based on the mobilisation of values which, because of their
emotional charge, can create a powerful collective sentiment
around a cause and thus acquire a social effectiveness. That is
neither the goal desired nor the means mobilised by the schol-
ar, whose demonstrations are based both on explicitly stating
his chosen viewpoint (the processes of objectivisation, which
is one of the modern forms of objectivity) and his empirical
evidence, which he submits to open, critical discussion.
Annales was pleading for a non-emotional history, inviting
historians to work with data, and reminding them that their
primary role was not to take ideological positions.
In doing so, the citizen historian chooses the difficult path of
playing a civic role by empowering fellow citizens whilst keep-
ing social and political emotions at bay, and avoiding
sensationalism or sentimentalism. Nevertheless, their objects
of enquiry and viewpoints are very much in tune with the
questions strongly relevant for the society in which they live.
As soon as they intervene in public debates, however, this
choice puts them in a position of weakness in comparison to
the politician. This is so, even when they are writing histori-
cally about events that they may experience personally. We are
all aware, for instance, that the archaeological stratigraphy of
the Ayodhya site never rationally convinced militant Hindu be-
lievers to move beyond their own emotional systems of mythi-
cal belief, though confronted with evidence. It did not succeed
in rallying them to a secular position by the force of reasoning
based on evidence. Recent political reactions to historians’ at-
tempts to nuance the multiple strains and complex trajectories
of the nationalist idea (2017) render us sceptical about the ca-
pacity of the historian to effectively intervene on equal
grounds with politicians or ideologues.
Out of the Ivory Tower
Finally, the current epoch has propelled the historian out of
the ivory tower into a public, social space. Nevertheless, his
interventions cannot be on the classic lines of the committed
intellectual, the French intellectuel engagé epitomised by the
philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre or Simone de Beauvoir in the
1950s or 1960s, taken up in a certain way by the sociologist
september 9, 2017 vol liI no 36 EPW Economic & Political Weekly

Pierre Bourdieu at the end of his life in the 1990s. Their
defence of causes implied their total, passionate, engagement,
with no option of exit. The ethic of the historian as a profes-
sional scholar demands another approach, no doubt less spec-
tacular, but not less demanding. The contemporary claims on
what constitutes nationalism, patriotism and anti-nationalism
in India show the importance of an emotional mobilisation
built on exclusion of the other. In these very heated, violent
notes
1 The first to be held after World War I, it gath-
ered historians from all the countries admitted
to the League of Nations, including some
Indians.
2 Pirenne’s explicit desire had led to the exclu-
sion of German historians from the Fifth Inter-
national Congress of Historical Sciences.
3 This enterprise was undertaken principally by
French and German historians in the 1930s.
Their concern to counter the political tendencies
of whipping up patriotic emotion for nationalis-
tic causes by serious, analytical analysis of the
past has not lost its relevance. Battles to neu-
tralise state attempts seeking to impose ideo-
logical interpretations of the past that suit po-
litical agendas continue in Russia, India.
4 Amongst them, the sociologist Maurice Halb-
wachs in 1919, the historian of the French Rev-
olution, Georges Lefebvre in 1928, the sociolo-
gist of religions and law, Gabriel Le Bras in
1923–29.
5 Charles Maurras (1868–1952), journalist, prin-
cipal philosopher of the political movement
Action Française that was monarchist and anti-
parliamentarist, placed his country above
everything. His views anticipated some of the
ideas of fascism.
6 Its dozen or so personalities included Albert
Einstein, Marie Curie and Debendra Nath
Bannerjea, the Indian economist and jurist,
professor of political economy at the University
of Calcutta, who had published extensively on
Indian constitutional law and politics. The
future president of the Indian Republic,
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, would be one of the
members in 1938.
7 The 1929 issue of Annales also examined the
teaching of economic history in some major
institutions such as the faculties of political
sciences in Italy and in the United States; a
1930 number focused on the Institute of Eco-
nomic History in Stockholm.
8 Created in March 1934, this committee boasted
more than 6,000 members by the end of the year.
9 This 1937 issue of Annales d’Histoire Econom-
ique et Sociale, opened with an article by Lucie
Varga entitled “The Birth of National-Social-
ism: A Social Analysis.” It analysed the appeal
of the Führer and the movement towards iden-
tifying a scapegoat in the form of the Jews not
from an ideological pespective of the history of
ideas and programmes, nor in socioeconomic
terms but in anthropological terms of “social
honour.”
10 The volume included pieces on “Luther, Youth
and Nazism,” pp 604–06, a review by the
Austrian historian Lucie Varga of Herbert
Schoffler’s book on the Reformation. Schoffler
drew parallels between a younger generation
concentrated in new cities without universi-
ties, who created the Reformation with its
intellectual inquiring climate, and a younger
generation free of traditions of erudition, of the
oppressive burden of ancient wisdoms and
inherited cautions that were creating in the
present moment national-socialist Germany.
Economic & Political Weekly EPW september 9, 2017
confrontations, there is no tolerance of any serious understand-
ing of nationalism. The strong polarisations between national-
ism and anti-nationalism demand clear-cut answers and lead
to clearly opposed, extreme positions, developed in the
absence of any serious knowledge of nationalism. Does this
reveal the weakness of scholars to make themselves heard in a
political climate nourished by emotional discourse? The ques-
tion merits attention.
Varga deplored the historian’s giving in to
pseudo-comparisons and a deformation of the
fundamental rules of the comparative method
as drawn up by Marc Bloch.
11 The review started appearing without the
name of its editors. After two numbers, it became
Mélanges d’Histoire Sociale. Finally, it would
appear only sporadically. Only from February
1946 would the review again mention the
names of the two directors.
12 A rather heroic description of this period of
Bloch’s life is to be found in Fink (1991); Olivier
Dumoulin (2000) proposes a more balanced
account of Bloch the intellectual and the histo-
rian in his book.
13 André Burguière (1969–75), Jacques Revel
(1975–80), Lucette Valensi (1980–1985), Bernard
Lepetit (1985–1991), Pierre-François Souiry
(1992–93), Jean-Yves Grenier (1994–2000),
Jacques Poloni-Simard (2001–06), Antoine Lilti
(2007–12), Etienne Anheim since 2012.
14 Personal communication to the author in 2014.
15 Klaus Barbie, head of the Gestapo of Lyon, was
put on trial in 1987 for his responsibility in
arresting and deporting the children of Izieu
(Ain) in 1942; Maurice Papon, secretary gener-
al of the Gironde prefecture in 1942, was tried
for crimes against humanity; Paul Touvier,
regional commander of the Rhone Militia, was
tried in 1994 for crimes against humanity. He
was held responsible for the 1944 massacre of
Jewish hostages at Rilleux-la-Pape.
16 Personal communication to the author in 2014.
17 Annales thus devoted an issue to relationships
between the teaching of history and research,
and a series of articles analysing questions
relating to research policies (such as open ac-
cess and finance agencies). This is a direct
means of intervening in research and public
policies of research.
18 Julien Benda started writing his book in 1924.
It was published in French in 1927, translated
into English in America as “The Treason of the
Intellectuals,” and in the UK in 1928 as “The
Betrayal of the Intellectuals,” and recently
reprinted in 2006.
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