TO TELL OR NOT TO TELL; THE NEW HISTORY AND THE REBIRTH OF NARRATIVE

The question of narrative has been extensively debated in current historical theory, from both descriptive and normative perspectives. From a descriptive standpoint, critics have asked whether historians do use narrative and, if so, which kinds of narrative. Hayden White, for example, in his celebrated Metahistory, has examined how some important texts in nineteenth-century historiography could be characterized by certain modes of emplotment, that is, by the way they organize their material according to different kinds of story-line: comedy, tragedy, romance and satire. Taking a normative angle, other critics have asked whether historians should use narrative and whether that mode of discourse provides an adequate type of knowledge. Thus, epistemologists such as Karl Popper and Carl Hempel have described historiography as an imperfect science which can at best propose "explanation sketches." Responding to these charges, philosophers like Arthur C. Danto, Walter B. Gallie and Louis O. Mink have attacked the notion of the "unity" of science, chiefly the idea that the only valid model of explanation operates by "laws" от "theories." They have contended that storytelling is a perfectly legitimate way of making sense of things, one which can provide a certain type of knowledge as powerful as (if different from) the knowledge derived from laws in the natural sciences. 1 My purpose is to investigate some aspects of this debate in French historiography, more precisely in what is known as the New History (La Nouvelle Histoire): the movement which started in the 1930s as the Annales School and has now attained a dominant position in French universities, professional journals and even the popular media. My discussion will unfold in two stages. First I will analyze the anti-narrative stance which typified the New History from the 1930s to the 1960s. Then I will consider the trend which some critics have labeled the "return" or the "revival" of narrative in that same New History in the 1970s. Focusing on a few works published during this period, I will argue that such a "return" must be carefully characterized and that it involves neither giving up recent advances in historical research nor regressing to earlier types of historiography. From its inception in the 1930s, the Annales School defined itself as radically opposed to what it called "narrative history" ( histoire narrative ) and