Histoire, littérature et psychanalyse. Michel de Certeau et l’école des Annales (1974-1975)

Abstract

In 1974, Michel de Certeau published « L’operation historique », which was the first paper of the collective book Faire de l’histoire, now considered the “manifest” of the third generation of the Ecole des Annales. In 1975, he reproduced this text in his proper book L’Ecriture de l’histoire, with another headline, “L’operation historiographique”, in a version which was augmented of a third part. While comparing these two versions of a single text, we can understand how Michel de Certeau then considered the historian’s work, in the light of literary theory and psychoanalysis, at time when this position was rare among French historians. By the way in which Certeau undermined the distinction between archive and historical text, and between past and present, he went to characterize literary space as a democratic one, where all the speakers, dead or alive, are in an equal position.