Microhistory Today: On Thomas Dodman’s “Ordinary Radicalization.”
It has been forty years or more since the heyday of microhistory. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s brilliant Montaillou came out in 1975, followed the next year by Carlo Ginzburg’s classic The Cheese and the Worms. Natalie Davis’s The Return of Martin Guerre saw the light in 1982, and Robert Darnton’s The Great Cat Massacre two years after that. These books all took as their subjects what the authors explicitly considered “extraordinary” historical moments: arrests and trials for heresy; the apparent return of a long-vanished soldier; a feline killing spree by Parisian apprentices. In 1985, Giovanni Levi took a different approach with Inheriting Power, which sought to pick apart the tangled tissue of ordinary, banal, interpersonal relations.
The genre came in for considerable criticism. It had come into being in part as a reaction to the limitations of the “total history” imagined by Fernand Braudel and his colleagues in the Annales school, which sought to integrate different time scales and different historical “levels”: geological, economic, social, political, and even “mentalities.” In their search to grasp this “totality” as precisely as possible, successive generations of Annalistes had steadily restricted their objects of inquiries: from seas and oceans over centuries to single French provinces, to cities and towns. Ultimately, it seemed, totality could only be glimpsed in microcosm, as in William Blake’s famous line: “To see a world in a grain of sand.” But by the turn of the century, problems with the approach were becoming apparent. In a synthetic essay for the Blackwell’s Companion to Western Historical Thought, published in 2001, I wrote the following: “The vividness of ‘extraordinary’ microhistory has often come at the expense of satisfactory engagement with stubbornly problematic source material. The meticulous engagement with the sources on the part of ‘ordinary’ microhistory has often come at the expense not only of vividness, but of clarity and coherence. And the genre as a whole has as yet proven frustratingly incapable of integrating its microscopic scale of analysis with the larger ones through which we organize our overall sense of the past.”
Yet microhistory has refused to go gently into the good night, and for good reason. The best examples of the genre, often written with a novelist’s flair, remain some of the best teaching books available for history professors. There is nothing better for opening students’ eyes to the strangeness and wonder of the past, and to prompt engaged discussions. More recently, books like Linda Colley’s The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh and Emma Rothschild’s The Inner Life of Empires have proven extraordinarily successful in demonstrating what the tumultuous expansion of the British empire meant on an individual level, and how early modern globalization could affect ordinary people. And the Italian historian Haim Burstin’s concept of “protagonism” has offered a new way of understanding the participation of ordinary individuals in the great, churning moments of European revolution.
All of this is by way of calling attention to a terrific new article by Thomas Dodman in The Journal of Modern History that offers one of the most successful applications of microhistory that I have seen in recent years. It is entitled “Ordinary Radicalization: Becoming a Citizen-Soldier during the French Revolution.” Dodman takes as his subject a single soldier from Lorraine named Gabriel Noël. Born a peasant but adopted at age three by a noblewoman and femme de lettres named Louise-Élisabeth Durival, he volunteered for military service in 1791 and sent home a series of wonderfully vivid letters describing his experiences. His grandson published many of them in 1912, and generations of historians of the revolutionary wars (including me, in The First Total War) made very happy use of these. But Dodman, through some remarkable archival sleuthing, found many more letters, and used them as the basis for a brilliant, probing analysis of how ordinary French people were politically radicalized during the Revolution of 1789. It draws on everything from Burstin’s notion of “protagonism” to the recent history of the emotions (to which Dodman himself made a signal contribution in his recent What Nostalgia Was: War, Empire, and the Time of a Deadly Emotion) to the concept of racial “passing” in the United States. It concludes as following: “Gabriel allows us to see the revolutionary army as an open-air laboratory for a kind of accelerated social kneading of citizens, in which the egalitarian ethos of 1789 was poured into noble privilege and mixed with new forms of professional meritocracy and impersonal heteronomy for good measure… there was a social content to the forms of revolutionary transformation, a sticky substance with which people were laden and which they had to work through in order to fit into a new society and political culture. Doing so was far from easy, and if Gabriel’s experience is anything to go by, it was the anxieties and frustrations caused by this constant reflexive work on one’s overlapping selves—present, past, and future—that paved the way to radicalization, less as a coherent ideological commitment than as a quick fix, a readily available and equally ephemeral solution to a complicated predicament.”
Gabriel Noël was certainly not an “ordinary” French soldier in many respects. His eccentric stepmother raised him with Rousseau’s Émile as a guide. After the war, he returned home to Lorraine, married his stepsister (!), and settled down to a long and apparently quite dull career as mayor of the village of Sommerviller, where he died in 1850. But he didn’t need to be typical in order to experience the powerful pressures that Dodman describes, or to react to them in the ways that so many of his contemporaries also clearly did. For this reason, the article offers a way of getting past some of the criticisms leveled at earlier versions of microhistory, as well an exciting model for new work.