I just purchased the first volume of the series entitled "Twilight of the New Order." However, looking at what the other volumes are, it seems to end right before the French Revolution. Also, I have read the first three chapters already and it seems to be written in an unusual concept. If anyone knows this series, can you give your insight on any thoughts?
Claude Manceron was a very popular writer of popular history books in France, from the 1950s to his death in 1999. He died before he could finish his Revolution series, which is why it stops before the Revolution. Manceron was not an academic historian, but he was serious in his work and his books were very successful. A prominent left-winger with a big bushy beard, he was also a well-known figure on TV and involved in politics with socialist president François Mitterrand.
Like other popular historians, Manceron tended to focus on "big" stuff loved by the public (in his case Napoléon, the Revolution etc.), though his mini-biographical approach in the Revolution series (which did not deal only with the big names) was certainly original. His books are written in a "novelistic" style, with imagined conversations, internal thoughts, and actions that make the scenes movie-like. I'm not familiar with his work, but from the little I can read, it seems that there's a lot of padding. This is not a bad thing per se (it makes the books read like fiction and perfectly enjoyable) but it's not easy to tell were the document-derived "truth" stops and the novelist's imagination begins.
We can have a glimpse of how Manceron was received by the French historical community: in March 1980, the magazine L'Histoire, a pop history magazine run by academic historians, published a series of interviews under the provocative title "Should we burn Claude Manceron?". Manceron was interviewed, and four prominent academic historians were asked to give their opinion of his work. Here's how it went:
Fernand Braudel
Though Braudel was the leader of the Annales School at the time, and thus normally unreceptive to the sort of character- and anecdote-driven history written by Manceron, he was absolutely enthusiastic about him. He admired Manceron's erudition, the way he managed to capture the "movement" of history using the lives of known but also less known or even obscure characters, and his "television" and cinematic style (not a negative comparison here).
Choosing the heroes that the Revolution will promote to the forefront of its spectacular events and presenting them before fate brought them out of the shadows, is a way of getting lost in the obscure history of the whole world, the history towards which, by different paths, all current historiography tends.
Braudel, an historian of the long trends, only criticized the short-term approach ("the little spoons of time") of the books. Still, he thought that Manceron's public success was well deserved. To some, Braudel's praise of Manceron meant that the "individual" was allowed to make a come back in historiography (Dosse et al., 2005).
Jean-Paul Bertaud
Bertaud, a historian specialist of the Revolution of of the Napoleonic Empire, also appreciated Manceron's epic writing style that took the reader, like a "tourist in awe", from the King's apartments in Versailles to the battlefields in America and the open markets of the French countryside. He agreed to consider Manceron as a "great historical painter". However, he criticized a certain lack of problematization for such a disputed topic - the causes of the French Revolution. Bertaud was less happy than Braudel about Manceron's choice of characters, that he found too focused on "big men", on their writings and personal (amusing) stories, ignoring the recent advances of historiography concerning socio-economic groups (Bertaud cited for instance studies on merchant assemblies). For Bertaud, Manceron was also a little oblivious of the rural dimension of the Revolution. He still thought that his books were valuable at at time when the Revolution was little taught in French schools.
Jeffry Kaplow
Kaplow, a France-based American historian specialist of the Revolution, recognized that the books were easy to read and factually accurate, but he basically hated them. He did not approve of Manceron's biographical approach, and, in short, he was very unhappy with the writer's lack of global, society-wide perspective. Too many stories about some great man's mom or sickness, not enough critical examination of the social conditions in France (and elsewhere) at the time of Revolution. He also pointed out serious mistakes, inaccuracies, and oversimplifications. Kaplow did not mince words:
His books seem to me to contribute to the dumbing down of the general public.
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie
Another tutelar figure of the Annales School, Le Roy Ladurie was, like Braudel, laudative of the "captivating" cinematic flow of the books. He also appreciated the psychological, even "ethnographical" aspects of the work. Like Kaplow and Bertaud, however, he was a little taken aback by the global lack of problematization, and by Manceron's apparent ignorance of recent historiography, notably that based on the qualitative and quantitative exploitation of archives. For the next book, would it be too difficult, asked Le Roy Ladurie, for Manceron to consult the latest "five or six dissertations and some important books"? He also questioned the fundamentally teleological dimension of the project, with Manceron building a narrative "marching towards an inevitable end point" (to quote an old AH answer by u/k1990 on that topic) and thus ignoring whatever did not fit into his story. The Revolution happened because it happened. Duh.
This was written 40 years ago, but I guess that these judgements are still valid. Manceron was a great writer of popular history who did his homework well (his bibliography is large and impressive) and got the dates, facts, and events right. He was in the business of writing exciting, correct, character-based narratives, and his books are still appreciated for that. He got a little defensive in his own interview, explaining that he tried to enlarge his focus to disadvantaged groups (peasants, workers, etc.) - he was a left-winger after all! - but that his research was hampered by the lack of (memoir-type) sources ("most of the people of actually made the Revolution were illiterate"), but in doing so he recognized implicitly that he was not aware of recent historiography, and this is certainly even more true today.
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