Charles-Olivier Carbonell

Charles-Olivier Carbonell (20 June 1930 – 8 July 2013) was a French historian and historiographer who worked to put history as a profession on a sound scientific footing. He wrote numerous history books geared to secondary education, and devoted much of his work to establishing a field of European history.^[1]

Career

Carbonell was an important figure in writing about the development of French historiography by pioneering historians of the 19th century. He broke out of narrow constraints of domestic narratives, and expanded his research to look at comparative history among different countries in Europe over a period of millennia, and inspired a group of young historians.^[2]

The generally accepted date for the development of French historiography is the 1870s (at the latest), but at the point, there was only one professional school for historians in France (Chartres) and it was turning out archivists, not historians. Only 10% of histories produced in the 1870s were by historians, and the majority were about antiquity; lawyers and journalists contributed. Carbonell did content analysis, showing the subjective views of writers of the period, for example referring to German soldiers as "barbarians", "butchers", "brigands". Ernst Lavisse described them as "voracious", "animal-like", "sweaty"; and similarly in books about the Paris Commune of 1871. In 1876, Gabriel Monod and established the Revue historique, supposedly the equivalent of the Historische Zeitschrift, a milestone in the establishment of the scientific tradition in French historiography, but in reality, it represented the views of a small, Protestant clique.^[3]

In the 1970s there was a reassessment by the nouvelle histoire group of historians including Carbonell leading to the Third Republic historians' work becoming an object of study. It was Carbonell's work Histoire est historiens, published in 1976, which saw the Third Republic as a period in which a new type of history writing in France arose, and so it is a response by the Protestant historians of the Third Republic who wrote history in a different way than Catholics did previously.^[4]

Recognition

A book about Carbonell contributions to the profession appeared in 2002, entitled, "History(s), memory(s) and Europe: a passion for history: a tribute to Professor Charles-Olivier Carbonell".^[2]

Personal life

Carbonell was born in Pézenas, France on 20 June 1930, and died in Montpellier, on 2 January 2013.^[1]

Works

• Carbonell, Charles-Ollivier (April 1976). "La naissance de la Revue historique. Une revue de combat (1876-1885)" [The birth of the Revue historique. A journal of combat (1876–1885)]. Revue Historique (in French). 255 (518). PUF: 331–351. JSTOR 40953091.

See also

• List of French historians
• Nouvelle histoire

References

Works cited

• "Charles-Olivier Carbonell (1930-2013) Hommage". Association des Professeurs d’Histoire et de Géographie (in French). 29 April 2013.
• Amalvi, Christian; Biloghi, Dominique, eds. (2002). Histoire(s), mémoire(s) et Europe: une passion de l'histoire : hommage au professeur Charles-Olivier Carbonell [History(s), memory(s) and Europe: a passion for history: a tribute to Professor Charles-Olivier Carbonell] (in French). Privat. ISBN 978-2-7089-5802-9. OCLC 216856615.
• Lukacs, John (1977). "Professional History As Myth [Review of Histoire et historiens. Une mutation idéologique des historiens français 1865-1885, by C.-O. Carbonell]". Salmagundi. 37: 155–160. JSTOR 40547080.
• Noronha-DiVanna, Isabel (19 February 2010). Writing History in the Third Republic. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. ISBN 978-1-4438-2010-3. OCLC 1162437900. prefacce is great for general historiog

Further reading

• Almavi, Christian (11 May 2022). Entre histoire, souvenirs et memoire - Charles-Olivier Carbonell (1930-2013) un historien européene [Between History, Recollections, and Memory - Charles-Olivier Carbonell (1930-2013) a European historian] (in French). Presses Universitaires de la Mediterranee. ISBN 9782367814308. OCLC 1366285781.
• Bentley, Michael, ed. (27 February 2006). Companion to Historiography. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-134-97023-0.
• Keylor, William R. (1975). Academy and Community: The Foundation of the French Historical Profession. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-00255-5. OCLC 1000751715. UCB has it
• Robert Leroux (31 August 2017). History and Sociology in France: From Scientific History to the Durkheimian School. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-351-59529-2.
• Levine, P. J. A. (13 February 2003). The Amateur and the Professional: Antiquarians, Historians and Archaeologists in Victorian England 1838-1886. Cambridge University Press. pp. 11–. ISBN 978-0-521-53050-7. OCLC 12418783.
• McCrank, Lawrence J; Barros, Carlos (2012) [2004 Haworth Press Binghamton NY]. History Under Debate: International Reflection on the Discipline (Conference proceedings). New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-1-135-79840-6. OCLC 847628399.