Course topic

People’s history always represents some sort of attempt to broaden the basis of history, to enlarge its subject matter, make use of new raw materials and offer new maps of knowledge.
Implicitly or explicitly it is oppositional, an alternative to ‘dry-as-dust’ scholarship, and history as taught in the schools.

But the terms of that opposition are necessarily different in different epochs and for different modes of work. The subject matter of ‘people’s history’ varies, even if the effort is always that of ‘bringing the boundaries of history closer to those of people’s lives. The ‘people‘ of people’s history have as many different shades of meaning as the term has usages. They are always majoritarian.

• But the connotations vary according to the pole of comparison (government, the “elite”, the bourgeoisie, etc.).
• The term also takes on quite different meanings within particular national traditions.
  • In France, the 19th century idea of the people was indelibly marked by the rhetoric of the Revolution, the term was inescapably associated with notions of class power.
  • In England, with its long inheritance of popular constitutionalism, it was rather associated with the defence of political and social rights.
• For the folklorists ‘the people’ is fundamentally a peasantry, for sociologists it is the working classes, while in democratic or cultural nationalism, it is coextensive with an ethnic stock.

Raphael Samuel, “People’s history”, in R. Samuel (ed.), People’s History and Socialist Theory, 1981

“Master narratives”?

This course addresses a complex and far-reaching issue: the relationship between cultural background narratives (so-called master narratives) and the diverse accounts of the past produced and circulated across various fields – academic, media, intellectual, political, activist, and more.
The term “master narrative” is here used to designate those culturally shared templates that allow one to make sense of the past: “recurrent skeletal stories, belonging to cultures and individuals, that play a powerful role in questions of identity, values, and the understanding of life” (Abbott, 2008).

These templates or skeletal stories are not necessarily hegemonic; they simply need to be available within a given context.

This course assumes that any particular representation and interpretation of the past always draws upon such master narratives. Without these, no account of the past could be conceived, let alone understood and enjoyed.
However, master narratives are inherently open-ended and contested. It is thus possible for a given account of the past to reshape – at least in part – preexisting master narratives.

“People’s history”?

We will approach this issue through a specific set of cultural and intellectual forms: “people’s history“.
As Raphael Samuel suggests in the above quote, this untranslatable term always carries with it a challenge to the established boundaries of historical scholarship and history-teaching.

It therefore provides a particularly fertile ground for exploring the relationship between master narratives and the many accounts of the past that engage with them:

• not only academic history-writing,
• but also the multiple – and more or less fictionalized – representations of the past in diverse social fields.

Thus, throughout this course, we will try to reflect on the related (or opposed) meanings encapsulated in the words people and history.
To provide orientation, here are some of the meanings usually involved in the use of such terms.

• “The people” =
  • The entire population of a given territory
  • The governed, as opposed to the ruling class
  • A unified ethno-cultural entity
  • The lower classes, as opposed to the upper classes
  • The whole body of citizens

• A “people’s history” =
  • A history about the people
  • A history for the people (intended for them? serving their interests?)
  • A history made from the people’s perspective
  • A history made by the people
  • A history that enjoys a wide circulation and popularity

We will thus explore both (1) specific accounts of the past (“people’s histories“) and (2) the way these accounts draw upon – and at times reshape – master narratives within a given context.

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Session format

Each session will take place in the MLE.B110 classroom (Monod).

The course follows a flipped classroom model.

• You will engage with most of the course material autonomously before each session, through a combination of reading, listening and writing tasks. This will take up approximately 2 to 2.5 hours per week.
  • You will read the instructions & study the documents for the weeks’ session.
  • You will write a short text (~200-250 words) on your group’s Google doc. The text will be either:
    • an ANSWER to one (and only one!) of the two questions on the Google doc.
    • or a REACTION to one of your teammates’ answers on the Google doc.
• Each class session (40 minutes) will then be devoted to collective discussion in teams of 4.

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Evaluation

You must attend every session. Any absence requires 1) prior notification and 2) justification.

Your final grade will be established as follows:

• 25% homework (= your weekly writing on the Google docs).
• 25% oral participation (= your participation in weekly collective discussion).
• 50% final exam (= DST).

If you have any questions or anxieties, please come talk to me!