By Hilary J. Bernstein. Leiden: Brill, 2021. ISBN 9789004426467 (hardback); ISBN 9789004426474 (e-book).

Reviewed by Alexandra Zukas [PDF Full Text]

How have archival sources been scrutinized, consciously constructed, and deployed to intentionally build narrative in the past? To what degree is archival content shaped by civic, personal, or even national pressures? Of course, all archivists negotiate these questions when curating historical sources, and the constant consideration of their impact is central to the daily grist of archival work. What Hilary J. Bernstein’s masterful Historical Communities demonstrates is that these questions have always underpinned the project of making history, even when the concept of a professionalized historical methodology was in its infancy. Bernstein has twin aims in this monograph, both of which I feel are of worth for archivist readers (particularly those specializing in early modern records): first, to assert that the fields of recordkeeping and urban history proceeded apace with concepts of provincial and national identity in early modern France; and second, that the tensions produced by municipal and ecclesiastical demands for glowing histories gave rise to questions about archival retention, access, and bias that may have propelled the field forward. In nine chapters, Bernstein progressively builds a robust scaffolding for these assertions. While chapters proceed roughly chronologically, I will address them with a primarily thematic emphasis in this review, citing cases of particular interest.

Bernstein first prepares the reader by introducing the geopolitical context in which “erudite scholars” (an umbrella term covering urban, local, and genealogical historians) conducted research (2–3). Sixteenth-century France was highly regional and decentralized, host to townships that derived their jurisdictional privileges from the Crown and clung tightly to their municipal agency. Ecclesiastical bodies operated within these townships and regions as well, attempting to expand their own routes to municipal power. Within this transactional milieu, urban historians traded on their connections with elites and fellow historians to gain access to the town council archives, ecclesiastical histories, and noble genealogies kept under lock-and-key by their creating entities. The historians engaged in this work were often nobles themselves, affording them the education and leisure time required to pursue an interest in the proto-archaeological excavations of Roman ruins then taking place as well as gain some knowledge of pre-Roman Gaul. Bernstein’s research confirms the local flavor of this interest at this stage; for example, while Pierre de Saint-Julien’s De l’origine des Bourgongnons sought to establish a distinctly Gallic ancestry, his primary aim was in establishing it specifically for the region of Burgundy rather than all regions consolidated under the crown.

In the chapters following, Bernstein expands on erudite historians’ leveraging of a vaunted if heavily mythologized Gallic past as a token of legitimacy for the provincial present. As Bernstein notes throughout, no written record of Gaul existed outside of classical Roman sources; therefore, erudite historians generally consulted these when establishing Gallic roots for their towns and provinces, blended with a healthy complement of supposition regarding the continuity of Roman place names and current landmarks. While Bernstein does state that many urban historians capitulated to the urge to imbue their localities with fantastical lineages (many claimed a Trojan founder), others sought to apply increasingly sophisticated approaches to historical inquiry, situating them firmly in a humanist movement that valued objective and systematic methodologies.

These urban histories were not constructed in isolation as purely hobbyist endeavors but were often both the product of and tools used by parties with a vested interest in burnishing their prestige. The tethering of a town’s history to antiquity was for municipal officials more than just an empty gesture; it was part of a corpus of comparative documentation intended to secure privileges from the Crown, usually at the expense of neighboring towns.

In Auvergne, the towns of Riom and Clermont vied for regional supremacy between 1588 and 1626, each asserting the hierarchical superiority of its own judiciary. In these debates, presided over by the Crown, each town wielded a chronology of precedents for the establishment of its own court, including the ancient stature of each town as perceived by imperial Rome (the urban historian and lieutenant general working on behalf of Clermont, Jean Savaron, pointed out that the Romans had deemed Riom a “vicus,” or village, as opposed to a city). Riom, meanwhile, argued for primacy based on establishment and royal reconfirmation of its judicial court in 1345 and 1575. While Riom ultimately prevailed and remained the capital of Auvergne, the decades-long litigation is demonstrative of several developments in the practices of history and archival research: first, civic administration, politics, and local history were heavily enmeshed in this era in a web of mutually-reinforcing credence; second and subsequently, much of the history conducted took on a legalistic disposition; and third, these factors gradually placed greater emphasis on standards of both recordkeeping and historical narrative as France moved from a provincial to a nationalistic discourse.

While erudite historians were not solely motivated by political aims when researching and composing historical narrative, their historical pursuits often still had an indirect impact on the project of nation-building. Bernstein discusses the field of genealogy as an aspect of the evolving view of France as a cohesive nation. Genealogy was intimately tied to a provincial substructure that relied on meticulous documentation of aristocratic succession; thus, mapping the pedigrees of France’s ruling families led to prolific output for some erudites. Here Bernstein cites the extensive work of André Duchesne, a royal geographer and prominent historian whose manuscripts are now preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale. Duchesne is identified as solidifying the craft of genealogy in France, adopting citation of documentary evidence, directly naming authors with whom he was in conversation, and eventually prefacing his works with an “Avertissement,” a note on his sources, which included charters, royal and ecclesiastical treasuries, cartularies, and family repositories.

Notably, Duchesne also cited other foundational erudite scholars, such as Jacques-Auguste de Thou, a magistrate and president of the Parlement of Paris, historian, and general promoter of Gallican ideology. Duchesne and de Thou shared an interest in using their respective avenues of research to produce national histories of France, de Thou publishing his Histoire universelle…depuis 1543 jusqu’en 1607 (posthumously consolidated and translated to vernacular French in 1734) and Duchesne undertaking an unrealized topographical history of France, the preparatory work for which relied heavily on Duchesne’s noble genealogies. We see here a suggestion of the genres of history that persisted prior to the advent of microhistory and people’s history: elite biographies, royal chronicles, and the deposition of archives that subsisted on the conferral of relevance by family name.

Finally, Bernstein addresses the contested ground of public memory after the French Wars of Religion, a topic she has brilliantly addressed elsewhere.[1] The Wars of Religion, a series of eight civil wars between Protestant and Catholic constituencies in the latter half of the sixteenth century, inflicted expansive and deleterious effects on the French population. For urban historians, their craft was fraught by recency, but also, as Bernstein states, by royal decree: any public commentary risked disturbing the fragile amnesty between Protestants and Catholics, and as a result skirted the criminally culpable. Furthermore, localities that had thrown in their lot with the Catholic League labored under the necessity to ameliorate their disloyalty to the Crown, making them liable to sanitize their roles in the conflict.

Bernstein highlights conspicuous silences in the historical record in this period and compares them with more forthcoming contemporaries not intended for publication, as with a terse account of Bordeaux’s history written by a jurist versus the detailed journal entries penned by the town’s Catholic canon, who bemoaned his perception of Bordeaux’s leniency toward Protestants. More compelling than the silences is what was committed to paper by urban historians as they negotiated the destruction of cultural and sacred sites, regarded as communal touchpoints of a shared history. A touching account by Bourgueville expressed a sense of powerlessness while witnessing the conflicts, writing that “one can no longer see anything but ruins.”[2] Bernstein provides several case studies to this effect, testifying to the individualized manner in which witnesses responded to cataclysmic events, leaving accounts that were humanized but often hobbled—from a modern standpoint—by the omission of opposing Protestant sources of information.

There is much value in Historical Communities for both intellectual historians and archivists specializing in early modern manuscripts, family archives, and ephemera. Any Robert Darnton work would make a fine reading companion for this volume, providing a bookend for the ways in which print material alternately bound together and finally frayed the ties of the Ancien Régime.[3] The thematic concerns of Bernstein’s work should prove philosophically provocative for those in the public history sphere, as her body of evidence reminds us that no repository is without conscious manufacture.

But while reading Historical Communities, I found myself pondering broader implications: that even propagandized archives can bear a silent but greater truth about their creators’ motives and the world that forged them, and the litigation of historical memory is both malleable but also subject to collective acceptance. Bernstein cites a common habit of sixteenth-century urban historians: the attribution of Roman ruins to a dreamed-of prelapsarian Gaul, a mirage from the past they hoped would promise an as-yet undefined but illustrious future. In other words, the history that was done and the archives that were deposited reflected the prevailing lean into nation and an attendant need to mythologize—behaviors we today developed methodological guardrails to prevent. But as the saying goes, the past is never past. What paradigms will inspire new guardrails in the future?

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[1] Hilary J. Bernstein, “The Reformed Terreur Panique of 1562: Debating Miracles and Memory in Seventeenth-century Le Mans,” French History 34, no. 4 (June 12, 2020): 475–92, https://doi.org/10.1093/fh/craa039.  

[2] Bourgueville, Les recherches et antiquitez, book 2, 169–71, quoted in Hilary Bernstein, Historical Communities: Cities, Erudition, and National Identity in Early Modern France (Brill, 2021), 325.

[3] Robert Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Harvard University Press, 1982); Robert Darnton, The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748–1789 (W. W. Norton, 2023). Darnton’s intellectual histories use literary and political ephemera to chronicle the waning power of the Ancien Régime throughout the eighteenth century. In particular, his works cite the lingering tension between provincial power and the centralized power of the state.