Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
Border Patrol
Author(s): Joan W. Scott
Source: French Historical Studies, Vol. 21, No. 3 (Summer, 1998), pp. 383-397
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/286938
Accessed: 27-06-2016 02:31 UTC
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Society for French Historical Studies, Duke University Press are collaborating with JSTOR to
digitize, preserve and extend access to French Historical Studies
This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Mon, 27 Jun 2016 02:31:46 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
FORUM
Border Patrol
Joan W Scott
Gerard Noiriel is perhaps best known for his important study of im-
migration, Le Creuset francais: Histoire de l'immigration, XlXe-XXe sieles,
which was published in English as The French Melting Pot: Immigration,
Citizenship, and National Identity.' In that book, Noiriel sought to ac-
count for and correct the "denial of memory" that led generations of
French historians to overlook or repress the fact that at least from the
end of the nineteenth century on, immigration has been an important
factor in the political, economic, and social history of France. Histori-
cal amnesia about immigration served the myth of a cohesive French
nation rooted not only in the land but in the "postulated filiation" of
an enduring and continuous population, a family whose "genetic trace
we carry within us" (in the words of historian Pierre Chaunu).2 In fact,
Noiriel shows clearly, various practical measures, from identity cards
to passports to union membership to the educational system, either
promoted the assimilation of foreign-born residents to French national
culture or cordoned them off as strangers. In both cases the process
effectively obscured the fact that immigration was long a significant
factor in France's history and not, as certain politicians have suggested
in the past year, an entirely new phenomenon. But if state bureaucrats
had reason to represent France as a unified culture and to establish
institutions to realize that representation, why were historians so will-
ing to go along with them? How can we account, Noiriel asks, for their
failure to make immigration the object of historical inquiry?
The answers he offers are varied and complex. A primary one has
Joan W. Scott is professor of social science at the Institute for Advanced Study. She is au-
thor, most recently, of Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (1996). She
would like to thank Paul Friedland for his helpful suggestions.
1 Gerard Noiriel, Le Creusetfranfais: Histoire de l'immigration, XJXe-XXe sicles (Paris, 1988);
idem, The French Melting Pot: Immigration, Citizenship, and National Identity, trans. Geoffroy de
Lafourcade (Minneapolis, Minn., 1996).
2 Pierre Chaunu, LaFrance (Paris, 1982), quoted in Noiriel, French Melting Pot, 41.
This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Mon, 27 Jun 2016 02:31:46 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
384 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES
to do with the influence of the Annales school, which has until recently
dominated the field of history and whose preeminence is roughly con-
temporary with the beginnings of sustained immigrations. Fernand
Braudel represents the strengths and the limits of the Annales school
for Noiriel. Indeed, Noiriel's introduction at once pays tribute to the
master and repudiates him: "The painful thing about this book ... is
that. . . I had to gradually renounce the Braudelian enchantments of
my student years and criticize the very foundations of the theoretical
edifice he left, because the direction in which it took me was, I real-
ized, misleading."3 Although Braudel pointed, correctly in Noiriel's
view, to the need to reconcile sociological analysis with history, his pre-
occupation with the longue durge tended to obliterate discontinuity as
a factor in history and to deprive historians of a (genuinely sociologi-
cal) methodology by which they could study the specificities of social
interactions. The tenacity with which the Annales historians held to
the idea of the longue durge, with its exaggerated insistence on history
as continuity, resulted, Noiriel suggests, less from deep philosophical
commitment than from the strategic need to counter the "expansionist
designs" of sociology. This interest in maintaining disciplinary bound-
aries blocked the kinds of investigations that might have illuminated
the complexities of France's national history (among them the his-
tory of immigration). That sociologists such as Emile Durkheim and
Maurice Halbwachs were suggesting new approaches to these com-
plexities only demonstrates the debilitating effects of disciplinary rival-
ries. For it was "competitive games" between the disciplines of history
and sociology that finally deprived the Annales historians of the tools
that would have made possible a genuine "sociohistory" of national as-
similation of the kind Noiriel now sought to write.4
The arguments set forth in The French Melting Pot- that theoreti-
cal commitments can be inimical to history, that sociology provides a
suitable methodology, and that antagonisms between history and soci-
ology are unfortunate and unnecessary- are again evident in Sur la
"crise" de l'histoire. While these themes were in a sense incidental to the
major purpose of The French Melting Pot (the point there is the empiri-
cal demonstration that immigration was a fact of French history), they
are at the very heart of the new book. Here Noiriel seeks to stage the
reconciliation that Braudel suggested but did not realize between soci-
ology and history, a reconciliation that is a way of both analyzing and
solving what has been deemed the "crisis" of history.
This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Mon, 27 Jun 2016 02:31:46 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
BORDER PATROL 385
5 Noiriel's book focuses on France, although it includes material on the United States and
especially on the so-called linguistic turn and its implications for social history.
6 Gerard Noiriel, Sur la "crise" de l'histoire (Paris, 1996), 46.
This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Mon, 27 Jun 2016 02:31:46 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
386 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES
This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Mon, 27 Jun 2016 02:31:46 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
BORDER PATROL 387
9 Ibid., 158.
10 Ibid., 5.
This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Mon, 27 Jun 2016 02:31:46 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
388 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES
11 Ibid., 148.
This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Mon, 27 Jun 2016 02:31:46 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
BORDER PATROL 389
It is far more important, I think, to use Noiriel's insights about how the
myth of a singular French nation was constructed - and at what costs
to assess his vision of "history." Noiriel's insistence on history as an en-
during professional community of shared competency (or method or
practice) is remarkably static, more Braudelian in conception than he
would perhaps like to admit. His reading of major historiographical
debates emphasizes their commonality, not their differences; conflict
is made secondary to a foundational methodological continuity. The
result is that "history" acquires a certain timeless existence (at least
since the emergence of the discipline in the late nineteenth century);
that conceptual change (change in the very notions of history, "savoir,
memoire, pouvoir") is eliminated from our line of vision (whether
we look backward or forward); and that some of the most innovative
writers in the field of history (Michel Foucault, Paul Veyne, Michel de
Certeau) are dismissed as passing fads whose work "n'est pas parvenue
a exercer une influence durable et etendue sur la discipline."'12 The
contributions of Jacques Ranciere and the Rivoltes logiques collective,
which I will return to later, are not mentioned at all. Noiriel's work of
boundary maintenance -extirpating all influence of philosophy from
history -so preoccupies him that he neglects to employ either the soci-
ologist's analyses of power (how did hegemonic forces within the disci-
pline conserve their influence against the pressure of the radicals?)
or the traditional historian's reading of events in their larger contexts
(how did the ideas and practices of history change in relation to the
end of imperialism, the emergence of new diplomatic constellations,
the end of the cold war, and the declared "end of history"?).
Sur la 'crise" de l'histoire is not so much a work of history (although
it has many interesting historical moments) as of moral advocacy: His-
torians are enjoined to avoid controversy and to pursue Noiriel's "prag-
matic" agenda (which, though it has much in common with the "prac-
tical realism" advanced by Joyce Appleby and her coauthors in Telling
the Truth about History, is far more totalizing in its definition of "his-
tory" than they are).'3 The idea is to refrain from anything that inhibits
easy communication among historians, whether that means avoiding
jargon borrowed from another discipline or refraining from making
too much of admittedly difficult issues. Are interpretations relative to
the standpoint of the historian? Is it fair to criticize a work from a van-
tage different from the one the author intended? Are one's presuppo-
12 Ibid., 111.
13Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth about History (New
York, 1994).
This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Mon, 27 Jun 2016 02:31:46 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
390 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES
This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Mon, 27 Jun 2016 02:31:46 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
BORDER PATROL 391
15 Ibid., 169-71.
This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Mon, 27 Jun 2016 02:31:46 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
392 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES
If the crisis is, moreover, a crisis of belief, then we need ways to ana-
lyze belief, in its expressed manifestations and as a cognitive structure.
Here is the relevance of linguistic theory and of "epistemology." By
turning attention to the belief structures of history, historians are not
16 I have written about this in 'After History?" Common Knowledge 5 (winter 1996): 9-26.
17 Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, NJ., 1995),
54.
This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Mon, 27 Jun 2016 02:31:46 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
BORDER PATROL 393
This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Mon, 27 Jun 2016 02:31:46 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
394 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES
This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Mon, 27 Jun 2016 02:31:46 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
BORDER PATROL 395
21 Ibid., 143.
22 Ibid., 110-11.
This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Mon, 27 Jun 2016 02:31:46 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
396 FRENCH HISTORICAL STUDIES
23Jacques Ranciere, La Nuit des proMtaires: Archives du reve ouvrier (Paris, 1981).
24Jacques Ranciere, "Good Times or Pleasures at the Barriers," in Voices of the People, ed.
Adrian Rifkin and Roger Thomas (London, 1988), 50. For a useful discussion of the work of Ran-
ciere, see Donald Reid, introduction to The Nights of Labor: The Workers'Dream in Nineteenth-Century
France, trans. John Drury (Philadelphia, 1989).
This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Mon, 27 Jun 2016 02:31:46 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
BORDER PATROL 397
This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Mon, 27 Jun 2016 02:31:46 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms