Abstract
The introduction considers the origins, development and challenges of the ego-history genre. It refers to previous ego-history projects, often situated within historical studies and a specific national context, and presents the international and multidisciplinary outlook of the current volume, as well as its thematic unity, centred on the study of the history and memories of the Second World War in France. The introduction also analyses how the ego-history genre explores the relationships between the subjective and the objective in academic writing, offering insights into individual and collective intellectual trajectories. Finally, it considers the continuing presence and significance of ‘Vichy’, its afterlife in contemporary French culture and its transnational dimensions.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
- 3.
The exclamation mark cannot and should not simply be dismissed as being ironical as Maurice Agulhon consequently devotes ten pages to his parents and grandparents.
- 4.
This short text (Nora 2003) is the foreword to a collection of ego-histories written by historians of ‘la Suisse romande’ (French-speaking Switzerland), in which Nora returns to the distinctive features of the genre and its close relationship with memory studies. It is also worth noting that, a decade later, Nora wrote a longer ego-historical text, suggesting that he too finally managed to overcome his own scruples (Nora and Arjakovsky 2013).
- 5.
See https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichTexte.do?cidTexte=LEGITEXT000028933129&dateTexte=20170102. Accessed 4 August 2017.
- 6.
See https://crheh.hypotheses.org/category/histineraires and Henry Rousso (Chapter “From a Foreign Country”). Accessed 4 August 2017.
- 7.
For a short history of the discipline of French Studies in the UK, see Diana Holmes (2011).
- 8.
E. H. Carr, What is History? (1967, 23).
- 9.
The workshop was generously supported by the British Academy/Leverhulme, the Association for the Study of Modern and Contemporary France (ASMCF), the Society for the Study of French History (SSFH), the Society for French Studies (SFS), the Institute for Collaborative Research in the Humanities in Belfast, the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Leicester and the Stanley Burton Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.
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Bragança, M., Louwagie, F. (2018). Introduction: Ego-histories, France and the Second World War. In: Bragança, M., Louwagie, F. (eds) Ego-histories of France and the Second World War. The Holocaust and its Contexts. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70860-7_1
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