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Anecdote and History Author(s): Lionel Gossman Source: History and Theory, Vol. 42, No. 2 (May, 2003), pp. 143-168 Published by: Blackwell Publishing for Wesleyan University Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3590879 Accessed: 21/12/2009 08:36
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History and Theory 42 (May 2003), 143-168

? Wesleyan University 2003 ISSN: 0018-2656

ANECDOTE AND HISTORY

LIONELGOSSMAN

Eine Anekdote ist ein historischesElement-ein historischesMolecule oder Epigramm. -Novalis1

ABSTRACT

enteredthe modem Europeanlanguagesfairly recently and Althoughthe term"anecdote" remainsto this day ill-defined,the short,freestandingaccountsof particular events, trueor invented,that are usually referredto as anecdoteshave been aroundfrom time immemorial. They have also always stood in a close relationto the longer,more elaboratenarratives of history,sometimes in a supportiverole, as examples and illustrations,sometimes in a challenging role, as the repressedof history-"la petite histoire."Historians'relation to them, in turn,varied from appreciativeto dismissive in accordancewith their own objectives in writing history. It appearsthat highly structuredanecdotes of the kind that are rememberedand find their way into anecdote collections depend on and tend to confirm establishedviews of history,the world, and humannature.In contrast,loosely structured anecdotes akin to the modemfait divers have usually worked to undermineestablished views and stimulatenew ones, either by presentingmaterialknown to few and excluded from officially authorizedhistories,or by reporting"odd"occurrencesfor which the established views of history,the world, and humannaturedo not easily account.
I. WITTGENSTEIN'SPOKER

How are anecdotes related to history and to the writing of history? The question was raised in an unusually vivid way by David Edmonds and John Eidinow's

Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute recent, highly successful book Wittgenstein's

Argument Between Two Great Philosophers. The kernel of the book is a fairly well-known anecdote about the encounter of two celebrated Viennese philosophers, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper, at a meeting of the Moral Science Club of Cambridge University on October 25, 1946. Before the end of Popper's talk, according to some, Wittgenstein became so incensed by the visitor's deliberately provocative rejection of his own view that there are no philosophical problems, only language puzzles, that he rose to his feet, brandishing a red-hot poker in Popper's face before storming angrily out of the room; according to others, Wittgenstein, having used the poker "in a philosophical example" before dropping it on the tiles around the fireplace, then "quietly (left) the meeting and
1. Novalis, Schriften,ed. Paul Kluckhohnand RichardSamuel, vol. 2: "DasphilosophischeWerk," ed. RichardSamuel, Hans-JoachimMahl, and GerhardSchulz (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer,1960), 567.

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(shut) the door behind him."2The competing versions of the anecdote told by those who witnessed the scene raise one of the oldest and most fundamentalof all historiographical problems:how to determinewhat actually happenedwhen are eyewitness reports at variance.The problemis aggravatedin this instanceby the fact that all the eyewitnesses in question were philosopherspresumablydedicated to the disinterestedsearchfor truth. Poker might be, it is hard not to be Intriguingas this aspect of Wittgenstein's authors basic the the strategy adopted for the writing of their disappointedby book. This consisted in expandingthe dramaticanecdoterecountedat the beginning into a complex, circumstantial,novel-like story. Edmonds and Eidinow intellectualbiographiesof Wittgensteinand Popper,as well as draw on standard testimonies by persons close to them, histories of Viennese historical published and accountsof modem philosophy,to paint a broadtableau and culture, society of the two principalcharactersand their world and to explain their intense rivalry. We learnaboutthe competingphilosophicalpositions of the two protagonists Viennese philosophy from and the largerbackgroundof early twentieth-century which they both emerged;we learn about the families in which they grew upboth highly assimilatedJewish families, one fabulously wealthy and almost aristocratic, the other solidly bourgeois; we learn about the different layers of the Viennese society they belonged to and in particularabout their differentexperiences, as Austrians of Jewish descent, in a pervasively anti-Semitic culture; about how each was affected by and responded to National Socialism and the of Austria into the Third Reich; about their differentconnections incorporation with English philosophers and English society; and so on. The anecdote thus unfolds into somethingclose to a culturaland intellectualhistoryof an important partof Europein the first half of the twentiethcentury."The storyof the poker," and beliefs in Edmonds'sandEidinow's own words, "goes beyond the characters of the antagonists.It is inseparablefrom the story of their times, opening a window on the tumultuous and tragic history that shaped their lives and brought them togetherin Cambridge."3 As the representationof a dramaticencounterof two rival philosophers,the original anecdote had a stripped-down, almost abstract character which left room-a typical feature of many oral forms-for variationsof detail. Its focus, besides the competitionbetween two particularways of looking on the world"the schism in twentieth-century philosophy over the significance of language," as Edmondsand Eidinow put it4-was perhapsthe more general,comic contrast between the ostensible natureof philosophy, as the disinterestedand disembodied pursuitof truth,and the intensepersonalconflict of the two philosophers,culminating in an apparent threat of physical violence; between the tranquil, unworldlylocus of the event-a shabbyroom in a quiet Cambridgecollege-and
Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute 2. David Edmondsand John Eidinow, Wittgenstein's Argument Between TwoGreatPhilosophers (London:Faber and Faber,2001), 16-17. 3. Ibid., 5. 4. Ibid.

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the passions that were unleashedin it.5The particular philosophicalviews of the rival protagonistswere barely alluded to in the anecdote, which-fairly typically as it turnsout- supposes thatthe audiencealreadyhas certainnotions of them. Edmondsand Eidinow, in contrast,fill out the anecdote's elementary,essentially dramaticstructure, put flesh on its bones, and deck it out in colorful clothing.The 300-page history to which it gives rise is an intelligently conductedamplificatio, but it contains no surprises.The antithesis at the core of the anecdote continues to structurethe history, providing the frameworkon which the authors arrange and display their rich but familiarborrowings.
II. DRAMATICAND NOVELISTICCONSTRUCTIONSOF REALITY

The relation of the epic and dramaticgenres, and the implications, in terms of of narrativeversus dramaticrepresentations of the ideology or Weltanschauung, world, have been a major topic of reflection on literaturesince Antiquity.As anecdotes,I now believe, may favor either-they may reducecomplex situations to simple, sharplydefined dramaticstructures, but they may also, if more rarely, prise closed dramaticstructuresopen by perforatingthem with holes of novelistic contingency-a brief discussion of this topic is in order. The development of narrativein the eighteenth century seems to have been partof the general critical approachof the Enlightenmentand its questioningof the normsand beliefs aboutthe natureof humanbeings and the world enshrined in the contentand the form of Frenchclassical literature. These norms and beliefs had the undeniablemerit of facilitating a common recognition and understanding of particularactions, situations, and personalities and thus of reinforcing social cohesion. The novels of Marivaux,Sterne, and Diderot, in contrast,carried-again both formally and thematically-a deliberately disorienting message: that if we examine particularactions, situations, and personalitiesclosely and in individual detail, we will find that they are not neatly ordered and predictablein the mannersuggestedby the limited repertoryof actions and the welldefined,often antitheticalsets of characters(old man/youngman, master/servant, and so on) to which they are reduced in classical drama,or by the equally general antitheticalcategories (appearance/reality, mind/matter, substance/accident, and so on) to which they are reducedin classical philosophy.6 What Marivaux's La Vie de Marianne and Diderot's Jacques le fataliste imply is that reality is a process of unpredictableand continuous mutations,not something already pre5. In his essay on the structureof the fait divers, Roland Barthes considers "disproportion" and a "slightly aberrantcausality" to be a feature of the "genre"-if the fait divers can be designated a du fait divers," in Essais critiques [Paris: Seuil, 1964], 188-197) Most of what genre. ("Structure Bartheshas to say aboutthefait divers holds equallyfor certaintypes of anecdote.In the presentcase, the disproportion might be said to arise from the spectacle of philosophers,who are meant to argue, to use words,resortingto physical violence, and from upsettingthe "normal" relation,amongphilosophers, of body and mind. 6. The repertoryof gestures and expressions codified for paintersby CharlesLe Brun, Directorof Louis XIV's Acad6mieRoyale de Peinture,is anotherexample, alongside the "emplois"or stock characters of the theater,of a view of the world in which the general was deemed more real and fundamental than the particular.

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formed and simply waiting to be elaboratedand unfolded (literally developpe, with local variations, as in classical comedy, the classical nouvelle or, for that narratives, matter,Cartesianmechanistbiology).7In the greateighteenth-century life is an adventure,not the acting out of a dramaticpart. It is probablynot fortuitous thatthe hero of Rousseau's groundbreaking narrativeis autobiographical a thoroughlyuprootedbeing, or that the centralcharacters of key eighteenth-century novels, such as La Vie de Marianne and Fielding's Tom Jones, are foundlings or persons of unknownorigin. To such individuals the world has no obvious markersbut is an enigma whose workingsthey have to explore. They in turndo not presentthemselves to the world with obvious markers,but must constantly invent and reinvent themselves in a complex negotiation with the world and its expectations.Appearanceand reality, truthand fiction, virtue and vice, body and soul, masculine and feminine turnout, in much of the literatureof the eighteenthcentury,to be not nearly as clearly distinguishableas readersof classical literatureand philosophy might have been encouragedto suppose. Human behavior and the human psyche no longer appearreducible to the clearly balanced designs and categories of the maxims of La Rochefoucauld. Writingin the second half of the eighteenthcentury,Chamfort,for one, did not believe matterswere so simple. "Thingsare miscellanies,"he declared;"menare patchworks.Ethics and physics are concernedwith mixtures.Nothing is simple, To the authorof Maximes et Pensees, Caractereset Anecdotes, nothingis pure."8 the anecdote itself, by situatingmorality in a narrativecontext, however slight, represented a much-needed correction to the abstract formal structureof the maxim as practiceda centuryearlierby La Rochefoucauldand a challenge to its seemingly incontrovertibletruths."Moralists,like those philosopherswho have constructedsystems of physics or metaphysics, have overgeneralized,and laid down too many maxims,"he wrote.
What, for instance, becomes of the saying of Tacitus,"A woman who has lost her modwhen confrontedwith the examples of esty will not be able to refuse anythingafterward," so many women whom a moment of weakness has not preventedfrom practicinga number of virtues.I have seen Madamede L_, aftera youth which differedlittle from that of Manon Lescaut, conceive in her riperyears a passion worthy of Heloise.9
7. A weakening of classical models of composition is also visible in historiography. In one of my first attemptsto study the structureof a historical text ("Voltaire'sCharles XII: History into Art," Studies on Voltaireand the Eighteenth Century25 [1963], 691-720), I tried to show that Voltaire's early Histoire de Charles XII could be seen as the filling out of an essentially dramaticstructureor, in rhetoricalterms,as the elaborationof an antithesis(Peterof Russia versus Charlesof Sweden, modem calculationand ruthlessnessversus old-fashionedchivalryand honor,etc.) or a chiasmus (the victor is vanquished,the vanquishedvictorious).The informingantitheticalstructure of the work, I held, is reinforcedby the pervasiveness of parallelsand antithesesat the textual level and epitomizedin the proleptic embedded anecdote of the CzarafisArtfchelou in Book 2. I contrastedthis early historical work of Voltaire'swith the laterSiecle de Louis XIVand the Essai sur les moeurs,both of which I saw as less dramatic,more truly narrative,more open-ended,tending away from the paradigmatic toward the syntagmatic(despite the recurrent of enlightenmentversus superstition). antitheticalstructure 8. "Dansles choses, tout est affairesmelees; dans les hommes, tout estpieces de rapport.Au moral et au physique, tout est mixte. Rien n'est un, rien n'est pur." 9. "Les Moralistes, ainsi que les Philosophes qui ont fait des systemes en Physique ou en Metaphysiqueont trop generalise, ont trop multiplidles maximes. Que devient, par exemple, le mot

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Though only evoked and not recounted, the anecdote about Madame de L_ (its claim to reality signaled by the delivery of the first-person testimony in the perfect, not the past tense), does not provide a concrete particular instance to illustrate a general rule; rather, it bolsters a proposition challenging general rules and, along with them, the view of the world implied and communicated by classical drama, the classical maxim, the classical caractere, and some of the basic figures of classical rhetoric. As Chamfort put it, it is necessary to pay attention to people's actual behavior "afin de n'etre pas dupe de la charlatanerie des Moralistes" ("in order not to be fooled by the quackery of our theorists of human nature")-such as La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyere.
III. DEFININGTHE ANECDOTE

These preliminary observations leave the anecdote still undefined. In fact, scholars cannot even agree whether there is anything definable there, whether the anecdote can properly be considered a particular form or genre, like the novel, the maxim, or the fable. The scholarly literature on the topic, moreover, is scattered and fairly thin, as though the anecdote were thought to be too trivial a form to deserve serious consideration. While much has been written about the essen-

de Tacite: Neque mulier,amissa pudicitia, alia abnuerit apres l'exemple de tant de femmes qu'une de pratiquer faiblesse n'a pas emp&chees plusieursvertus?J'ai vu madamede L. .., apresunejeunesse peu diff6rente de celle de Manon Lescaut, avoir, dans l'age mfr, une passion digne d'Heloise." Sebastien Roch Nicolas de Chamfort,Products of the Perfected Civilization: Selected Writingsof Chamfort,transl. W. S. Merwin (New York:The Macmillian Company, 1969), 130 (chap. ii), 160 (chap. v). Original French texts in Maximes et Pensees, Caracteres et Anecdotes, ed. Claude Roy (Paris:Union Generaled'Editions, 1963), 56, 88. Cf. the first maximof chap. i: "Maximsand axioms, like summaries,are the works of persons of intelligence who have labored,as it seems, for the convenience of mediocre and lazy minds. The lazy are happy to find a maxim that spares them the necessity of making for themselves the observationsthat led the maxim's authorto the conclusion to which he invites his reader.The lazy and the mediocre imagine that they need go no further,and ascribeto the maxim a generalitythatthe author,unless he was mediocre himself, as is sometimes the case, has not claimed for it. The superiorman graspsat once the resemblances,the differences,which renderthe maxim more or less applicablein one instance or another,or not at all. It is much the same with naturalhistory,where the urge to simplify has led to the imaginationof classificationsand divisions. They could not have been framedwithout intelligence for the necessary comparisonsand the observing of relationships;but the great naturalist,the man of genius, sees that natureis prodigal in the invention of individuallydifferentcreatures,and he sees the inadequacyof divisions and classificationswhich are so commonly used by mediocre and lazy minds"(109). ("Les Maximes, les Axiomes, sont, ainsi que les Abreges, l'ouvrage des gens d'esprit, qui ont travaille, ce semble, a l'usage des esprits mediocres ou paresseux.Le paresseuxs'accommoded'une Maxime qui le dispense de faire lui-meme les observationsqui ont men6 l'Auteur de la Maxime au resultatdont il fait partie a son Lecteur.Le paresseux et l'homme mediocre se croient dispens6s d'aller au-dela, et donnent a la Maxime une generalite que l'Auteur, a moins qu'il ne soit lui-meme m6diocre ... n'a pas pretendului donner. L'hommesuperieursaisit tout d'un coup les ressemblances,les differencesqui font que la Maxime est plus ou moins applicablea tel ou tel cas, ou ne l'est pas du tout. Il en est de cela comme de l'Histoire naturelle,oi le d6sirde simplifiera imagine les classes et les divisions. I1a fallu avoir de l'esprit pour et observer des rapports.Mais le grand Naturaliste,l'homme de les faire. Car il a fallu rapprocher genie voit que la Natureprodiguedes 8tres individuellementdifferents,et voit l'insuffisancedes divisions et des classes qui sont d'un si grandusage aux esprits m6diocresou paresseux . .." (Maximeset pensees, 33).

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tial natureof tragedy,comedy, the epic, the novel, the short story, the maxim, I have been able to find only a few works, almostexclusively by Germanscholars, Valuable that attemptto define the nature,form, and function of the anecdote.10 as these studies are, they focus mainly on a particularspecies of anecdote that was elevated in the first two decades of the nineteenthcenturyto the status of a recognized and admired, if minor, literary form in Germany by the Prussian and short story writerHeinrichvon Kleist and the Basel-bornSwabian dramatist preacher and popular dialect poet Johann Peter Hebel. (The conjunction of drama,short-storyform, and anecdote in the case of Kleist does not, as we shall see, appearto be fortuitous,inasmuchas the dramaand the shortstory are, like a certain kind of anecdote, condensed forms representinga critical moment in which the "essence"of a situationor characteris supposedto be made visible.) The word "anecdote"itself was and is used to describe a wide range of narratives, the defining featureof which appearsto be less their brevity (thoughmost are quite short) than their lack of complexity.As the OED puts it, an anecdoteis the "narrative of a detachedincident, or of a single event, told as being in itself and interesting striking."1That general dictionarydefinition, which obviously aims to distinguish the anecdote from more complex narrativeforms like histo10. In particularKlaus Doderer, "Die deutsche Anekdoten-Theorie"in his Die Kurzgeschichte. Ihre Form und ihre Entwicklung[1953] (Darmstadt: WissenschaftlicheBuchgesellschaft, 1969); Hans "VomNutzen und Franck,Deutsche Erzdhlkunst (Trier:FriedrichWinter,1922); RichardFriedenthal, Wertder Anekdote,"in Sprache und Politik: Festgabefiir Dolf Sternbergerzum 60. Geburtstag,ed. Friedrichand Benno Reifenberg (Heidelberg:LambertSchneider,1968), 62-67; Heinz Carl-Joachim Grothe, Anekdote, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1984); Robert Petsch, Wesen und Formen der Erzdhlkunst(Halle/Saale: Max Niemeyer, 1934); Rudolf Schafer, Die Anekdote: Theorie, Analyse, Zum Wandel Dialektik (Munich: Oldenbourg,1982); WalterErnst Schifer, Anekdote-Antianekdote: einer literarischenForm in der Gegenwart (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta,1977). In addition,in English, are the hard-to-come-byDissertation on Anecdotes (1793) of Isaac D'Israeli (himself no mean compiler of anecdotes), and the Introductionby Clifton Fadiman to the Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes (Boston/Toronto:Little, Brown & Co., 1985). Most of these works attemptto define the essential characteristics and functions of the anecdote.The more historicalapproachadoptedby VolkerWeber, Anekdote-Die andere Geschichte (Tubingen: StauffenburgVerlag, 1993) and Sonja Hilzinger, Anekdotisches Erzdhlen im Zeitalter der Aufkldrung: Zum Struktur- und Funktionswandel der M&P (Stuttgart: GattungAnekdotein Historiographie,Publizistikund Literaturdes 18. Jahrhunderts Verlag fiir Wissenschaft und Forschung, 1997)-provide an invaluable complement to these otherwise preeminentlyformal studies of the anecdote. In French, in addition to Roland Barthes's essay (see n. 5 above), several articlesdevoted to thefait divers in Annales 38 (1983), 821-919, throwmuch light on the closely related, sometimes indistinguishableform of the anecdote, notably Marc Ferro, "Presentation" (821-826) and Michelle Perrot,"Faitdivers et histoire au XIXeme siecle" (911-919). 11. The OED definitioncorrespondsremarkably to RolandBarthes'sdefinitionof thefait divers in du fait divers":"Le fait divers ... est une informationtotale .. .; il contient en soi tout son "Structure savoir:point besoin de connaitrerien du monde pourconsommerun fait divers;il ne renvoie formellement a rien d'autre qu'a lui-meme; bien sur, son contenu n'est pas etrangerau monde: d6sastres, tout cela renvoie h l'homme, h son hismeurtres,enlevements, agressions,accidents, vols, bizarreries, toire, h son alienation, h ses fantasmes."("Thefait divers ... is a complete piece of informationin itself.. .It contains all its knowledge within itself: consumptionof afait divers requiresno knowledge of the world;it refers formallyto nothingbut itself; of course, its content is not unrelatedto the world: disasters, murders,abductions,robberies, and eccentricities all refer to human beings, their history, their conditionof alienation,their fantasies.")But it contains its own circumstances,its own causes, its own past, its own outcome. It is "sans dur6e et sans contexte" (It has "neithertemporalduration nor context")(189).

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ry and the novel, still accommodatesa wide varietyof verbalpractices,both oral and written,both popularand cultivated:the joke or the tall story;the jewel-like shortnarrative,with its witty punch line, that was developed in the salons of the elite in the eighteenth century;the short tale, usually containing a moral lesson, of the type composed (or adapted)by JohannPeter Hebel for Swiss and German popular almanacs or Kalender; the highly stylized, now classic anecdotes of Heinrichvon Kleist.'2 The later,carefully craftedworks, entitled Anekdoten,by Wilhelm Schafer, and the so-called Kalendergeschichtenof Bert Brecht-a sophisticatedkind of anti-anecdoteintended to underminethe shared assumptions that the traditionalanecdote depends on for its intelligibility and effectiveness-must also be regardedas productionsof high literary art. Moreover, the anecdote may be fairly detachedand free-standing,as in anecdote books or collections.l3Or it may be integrallyconnectedwith and embeddedin a largerargument or narrative,as in sermons and most historicalwritings. As to its form, what most people would considerthe classic anecdoteis a highly concentratedminiaturenarrativewith a strikinglydramaticthree-actstructure consisting of situationor exposition, encounteror crisis, and resolution-the last
usually marked by a "pointe" or clinching remark, often a "bon mot."'4 But rel-

short narrativesof particularevents, such as the miscellaatively unstructured neous murders,trials, and naturalcatastrophesrecorded in Smollet's late eighHistory of Englandfrom the Revolutionto the Death of GeorgeII, teenth-century as a kind of addendato the principalpolitical events,'5 or thefaits divers report12. Though Kleist first publishedhis anecdotes in a newspaperwith which he was associated, the BerlinerAbendbldtter, it is fair to assume that the readershipof the paper,unlike that of almanacsor Kalender,was the educated middle and upper class of the Prussian capital. See Heinrich Aretz, Heinrich von Kleist als Journalist: Untersuchungenzum "Phibus," zur "Germania"und zu den "BerlinerAbendbldttern" Hans-DieterHeinz, 1983). (Stuttgart: 13. In the well known Percy Anecdotes,individualanecdotesare groupedin thirty-eightcategories, according to the themes they are held to illustrate, such as "Humanity,""Eloquence," "Youth," "Enterprise,""Heroism," "Justice," "Instinct," "Beneficence," "Fidelity," "Hospitality," "War," "Honor,""Fashion."(Thomas Beyerley and Joseph Clinton Robertson [pseud. Reuben and Sholto Percy], The Percy Anecdotes, revised ed., to which is added a valuable collection of American Anecdotes [New York:Harperand Brothers, 1843]). 14. There is still work to do to explore the relation of the anecdote to the joke, the Renaissance facetie or Schwank,and the apophtegm.One of the chief repositoriesof apophtegms,the De vita et moribusphilosophorumof Diogenes Laertius,a favorite work of Renaissancescholars (it was printed in Basel by Frobeniusin 1533), became the object, in the last thirdof the nineteenthcentury,of the scholarly attention of the young Nietzsche, whose own disruptive, fragmentaryphilosophical style had a good deal in common with collections of apophtegms. 15. Book III, chap. xiii (covering the year 1760) may be considered fairly typical of Tobias Smollet's practice. "Before we record the progress of the war [the Seven Years' War],"the author announces,"it may be necessaryto specify some domesticoccurrencesthatfor a little while engrossed the public attention." There follows a series of anecdotesof murders,trials,etc. only loosely connected by the generalproposition(para. 12) that "Homicideis the reproachof England:one would imagine thatthereis somethingin the climate of this country,thatnot only disposes the natives to this inhuman outrage,but even infects foreignerswho reside among them."These more or less extensive narof individualsandparticular in the "pubratives,along with the many narratives episodes interspersed lic" history, should doubtless be distinguishedfrom more general reports (reminiscentof traditional Annals), such as that (para. 42) of "the horrorsand wreck of a dreadfulearthquake,protractedin repeatedshocks,"that struckSyria and "beganon the thirteenth day of October,in the neighbourhood

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ed in the newspapers,have also often been referredto, since the eighteenthcentury,as anecdotes.16 In addition, the term "anecdote"was widely used in the late eighteenth and early nineteenthcenturiesto designate a species of historical writing that delibto borrowHaydenWhite's useful eratelyeschewed large-scale"narrativization," term. These anecdote-histories-Anecdotes des Republiques(1771), Anecdotes arabes et musulmanes(1772), Anecdotes espagnoles et portugaises depuis l'origine de la nationjusqu'd nos jours (1773), Anecdotes americaines (1776), and so on--seem to be defined by their ostensible refusal of systematization,totaland by their reportingof only particular, ization, and ideological interpretation relativelyisolated episodes, often enough in simple chronologicalorder,as in the annals and chronicles of the Middle Ages (interestin which revived, as it happens, aroundthe same time).17
of Tripoli."The reportis a list ratherthan a narrative: "A great numberof houses were overthrownin Seyde, and many people buriedunderthe ruins ... an infinite numberof villages ... were reducedto heaps of rubbish.At Acra, or Ptolemais,the sea overflowedits banks and pouredinto the streets.The city of Saphet was entirely destroyed, and the greatestpart of its inhabitantsperished.At Damascus all the minarets were overthrown, and six thousand people lost their lives." (The History of Englandfrom the Revolutionin 1688 to the Death of George the Second, 6 vols. [London:J. Walker,1811], VI, 189-216, 261). 16. "Vermischte Anekdoten"was the heading under which the writer ChristianFriedrichDaniel Schubart(1731-1791) gatheredtogether a great variety of reportsof events and personalitiesin his bi-weekly newspaper Teutsche Chronik(1774-1777; under other names until 1793). The termfait divers dates only from 1863 and appearsto have no equivalentin other languages,which simply borrow the Frenchterm. Whatis now understoodby fait divers used to be designatedin Frenchas "anecdotes,""nouvelles curieuses, singulieres,"or "canards." (See Michelle Perrot,"Faitdivers et histoire au XIXeme siecle" [as in note 9]). 17. The catalogue of Princeton'sFirestoneLibrarylists well over 200 volumes undertitles such as Anecdotesafricaines, Anecdotesamdricaines,etc. Most were publishedbetween 1750 and 1830, but the genrecontinues well into the nineteenthcentury.These texts vary in character. Some authorsinsist on the fragmentary, eyewitness character of their work. Thus the author of Anecdotes and CharacteristicTraitsrespecting the Incursion of the French Republicansinto Franconia in the Year from the German[London:J. Bell, 1798]) declaresin his Preface: 1796, by an Eye-Witness(translated "I do not here present the public with a complete history of the French incursioninto Franconia;but supply the futurehistorianof thatmemorableevent with a few facts and incidents, of which I was an eye-witness, collected within the district where I reside. Every circumstancerelatedhere is genuine. I endeavouredto be an attentiveobserver,to collect with fidelity, and to delineate withoutprejudice." George Henry Jennings, the author of An Anecdotal History of the British Parliamentfrom the Earliest Period to the Present Time (New York:Appleton, 1883), aims to "bringtogetherin anecdotal form some of the most strikingfacts in the history of our Parliaments,and the public lives of distinguished statesmen"in order to return to the "original"of certain statementsand episodes which have suffered, he says, from what Gladstone called "mythical accretion."L. A. Caraccioli's brief Anecdotespiquantes relatives aux Etats-Gne'raux (1789) retail how the news of the EstatesGeneral was received in various European capitals (Rome, Warsaw, St. Petersburg, Stockholm, Vienna, London),in Paris and at Versailles,and in many Frenchprovincialtowns. In Constantinople, contrast,Guillaume Bertoux's Anecdotes espagnoles et portugaises depuis l'origine de la Nation, jusqu'a nos jours, 2 vols. (Paris:Vincent, 1773) and his earlierAnecdotesfrancaises depuis l'etablissment de la monarchie jusqu'au regne de Louis XV (Paris: Vincent, 1767), the anonymous Anecdotes des Republiques, 2 vols, (Paris: Vincent, 1771), divided into "Anecdotes G6noises et Corses," "Anecdotes Venitiennes," "Anecdotes Helv6tiques,"etc., the Anecdotes arabes et musulmanes depuis l'an de J.-C. 614, epoque de l'etablissementdu Mahometanismeen Arabiepar le faux l'extinction du Caliphaten 1578 of J.F. de Lacroix and A. Harnot(Paris: PropheteMahometjusqu'a

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Though anecdotes have been around in one form or another for a very long time, as long, no doubt, as rumor and gossip, it was not until fairly late-around 1650 in French, a few years later in English-that the term "anecdote" itself entered the European languages. Its introduction was probably a result of the discovery and publication by the Vatican Librarian, in the year 1623, of a text referred to in the Suda, an eleventh-century Byzantine encyclopedic compilation, as Anekdota (literally "unpublished works") and attributed to Procopius, the sixth-century author of an officially sanctioned History in Eight Books of the Emperor Justinian's Persian, Vandal, and Gothic wars and of a laudatory account of Justinian's building program, De Aedificiis. At first, the term retained in the modem languages the purely technical meaning of "unpublished" that it had had both for those who used it in antiquity (Cicero, Diodorus Siculus) and for the eleventh-century compilers of the Suda. In the mid-eighteenth century, Dr. Johnson's Dictionary defines "anecdote" as "something yet unpublished." According to the Encyclopedie article (by the Abbe Mallet), "anecdote" designates "tout ecrit de quelque genre qu'il soit, qui n'a pas encore ete publie" ("any piece of writing, of whatever kind, which has not yet been published").18 From this literal meaning of "unpublished" springs, in all likelihood, the meaning of "an item of news orfait divers" (that is, something hitherto unknown or unpublished) which seems quickly to have attached itself to the term "anecdote," and which is most probably the meaning of the word in the rarely cited subtitle of Benjamin Constant's famous early nineteenth-century novella Adolphe: "Anecdote trouvee dans les papiers d'un inconnu" ("Anecdote found among the papers of an unknown"). Constant no doubt intended it to convey the impression that his tale described a "real" event. Its association with Procopius's text also provided the word "anecdote" with yet another meaning in the modem European languages. The Anekdota, now usually referred to as Procopius's Secret History or Storia arcana, turned out to consist of instances of the most brutal exercise of despotic power, as well as scurrilous tales of palace and family intrigue, that were completely at odds with the celebratory narrative of Procopius's official History. The second meaning of the word "anecdote" listed in Johnson's Dictionary-"secret history"-reflects this influence of Procopius's text. In the Encyclopddie it is already the first meaning given: "his-

Vincent, 1772), and the Anecdotes amiricaines, ou histoire abrege des principaux evenements arrives dans le Nouveau Monde depuis sa decouverte (Paris: Vincent, 1776) are all essentially chronologies, though only those years areincludedin which somethingoccurredthat,in the authors' seem closely relatview, can be told as a story.Numerous collections of "Episodes"and "Curiosities" There was a curiousrevival of "anecdotehistory"in the period following the First ed to "Anecdotes." WorldWarin Germany,in response to anothercrisis of historicalunderstanding; see the discussion of the prolific Alexander von Gleichen-Russwurm'sWeltgeschichtein Anekdoten und Querschnitten (Berlin:Max Hess, 1929) in VolkerWeber,Anekdote-Die andere Geschichte, 152-167 (as in note 10). 18. When the ItalianEnlightenmentscholar Ludovico Muratoripublished some of the Greek and Latin manuscriptsin the AmbrosianLibraryin Milan between 1697 and 1713, he entitledhis collections AnecdotaLatina and Anecdota Graeca.

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toiressecretesde faits qui se sont passesdans l'int6rieur du cabinetou des coursde dans les de leur histories of whathas gone & Princes, mysteres politique"("secret on in the innercounsels or courtsof Princesand in the mysteriesof theirpolitics"). From its earliest usage in the modem European languages, then, the term has been closely relatedto history,and even to a kind of counter-his"anecdote" tory. Procopius's Anekdota cover exactly the same years as his History of the Wars:527-553 CE.But in the unpublishedwork, the secretaryand companionof Belisarius, Justinian'sfamous general, exposes the censored, seamy underside, the chroniquescandaleuse, of the reign he himself had presentedin noble colors in his official history. The Justinianof the Anekdota is a tyrant, the Empress Theodoraa vindictive, cruel, low-bornformer harlot.Belisarius is venal, avaricious, prone to acts of gross violence and injustice, spineless and disloyal in his personal life, and enslaved to his scheming, licentious wife Antonina. Like an ideal humanform when it is inspected close up througha microscope, the heroic and orderlypublic narrativeof the History is undercutby a ragbag of stories of depravityand abuse of power. Procopius'sAnekdotaor secrethistorywas the explicitly acknowledgedmodel of several late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century histories, the barely disguised target of which appears to have been the new absolutist European monarchies. The best known of these is probably Antoine de Varillas's Les Anecdotesde Florence, ou l'histoire secrete de la maison des Medicis, published in 1685, supposedly in The Hague. Likewise, Les Anecdotes de Suede, ou Histoire Secrete des Changemensarrives dans ce Royaumesous le regne de Charles XI, which appearedin Stockholm in 1716, took the lid off the official history of CharlesXI of Sweden, the ally and emulatorof Louis XIV.19 Not surprisingly, the friends of power, those concernedwith maintainingpublic images and decorum,have generallybeen fearful of anecdotes and have lost no opportunityto denigratethem, while at the same time enjoying them in private and, when necessary,using them against their own enemies. "L'anecdote," the Goncourtbrothersassert, "c'est la boutique a un sou de l'Histoire"20 ("The
19. Anecdotes continueto function in this way in moder use, as in the clandestinediariesin which Ulrich von Hassell, GermanAmbassadorto Rome between 1932 and 1937, recordednot only his and his friends' efforts to organize a regime-change but living conditions and popular attitudes in of the law requiringJews to GermanyunderNational Socialism. Thus, to illustratethe unpopularity wear a yellow star,he tells of a worker in North Berlin "who had sewed on a large yellow starwith the inscription:'My name is Willy'," and of another"herculean worker"who "saidto a poor and aged Jewess in the train:'Here, you little shooting star,take my seat!' and when someone grumbled,said threateningly:'With my backside I can do what I like."' Anotheranecdote, more properlydefined as a joke, "illustratesthe stupidity of the Party. 'At a crossroadthree cars, each with the right of way, Who is to blame?'Answer: 'The Jews"' (Ulrich von collide-Hitler, the SS, and the fire department. Hassell, The VonHassell Diaries: The Storyof the Forces against Hitler inside Germany1938-1944 [Boulder,CO and Oxford:Westview Press, 1994], 227, 246-247). 20. Edmond and Jules de Goncourt,Iddes et sensations (Paris:Bibliotheque Charpentier-Eugene Fasquelle, 1904), 13. See Michelle Perrot,"Faitdivers et histoireau XIXeme siecle," 912-913, on the and their attemptsto suppress or domesticate them by authorities'fear of anecdotes and "canards" removing them from the less controllablearea of oral circulationto the more controllablearea of the press. Even so, serious newspapersrelegate themto an inconspicuousposition on an inside page, and

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anecdote is the dime store of history"). But they themselves made abundant use of anecdotes in their Histoire de la societe franfaise pendant la Revolution, the aim of which, in their own words, was "not to relate once again" the grand political history of the Revolution, but to "portray France, manners, states of mind, the national physiognomy, the color of things, life, and humanity from 1788 to 1800" ("peindre la France, les moeurs, les ames, la physionomie nationale, la couleur des choses, la vie et l'humanite de 1789 a 1800"). That meant, in this instance, discrediting the heroic Republican account of the Revolution and substituting an alternative, unheroic, and often petty counter-history. To write such a history, the Goncourts said, "we had to discover new sources of the true, to look for our documents in newspapers, pamphlets, and a whole universe of lifeless paper hitherto viewed with contempt, in autograph letters, engravings, all the monuments of intimacy that an age leaves behind."21In short, they had to explore the world of the anecdote and the anecdotal. Voltaire had already expressed a similarly ambivalent view of anecdotes. In his "Discours sur l'Histoire de Charles XII" of the early 1730s, he lambasted his contemporaries for their "fureur d'ecrire" ("mania for writing"), their "demangeaison de transmettre a la posterite des details inutiles" ("itch to transmit useless details to posterity"). This passion for the allegedly trivial had gotten to the point, he alleged, that "hardly has a sovereign departed this life than the public is inundated with volumes purporting to be memoirs, the story of his life, anecdotes of his court."22 In Voltaire's own view, only great public events and events that had major consequences for the course of history deserved to be recorded and remembered.23 Two decades later, somewhat apologetically, the mature author of the Siecle de Louis XIV devoted the concluding four chapters of the political part of his history to "Particularit6s et anecdotes du regne de Louis XIV." Anecdotes may be of interest to the public, he conceded, but only "when they concern illustrious personages" ("quand ils concerent des personnages illustres"). In general, however, moder historiography has no place for anything

the most serious,like Le Monde, exclude them altogether. The conservativeBarbeyd'Aurevilly anticipated that the newspaperwould destroythe book and would in turnbe destroyedby the fait divers. "Le petit fait le rongera.Ce sera son insecte, sa vermine"(quoted by Perrot,913). 21. "il nous a fallu d6couvrirde nouvelles sourcesdu Vrai,demandernos documentsauxjournaux, aux brochures,h tout ce monde de papiermort et meprisejusqu'ici, aux autographes,aux gravures,a tous les monuments intimes qu'une epoque laisse derriere elle." Edmond et Jules de Goncourt, Histoire de la societe franfaise pendant la R6volution (Paris: Bibliotheque Charpentier-Eugene Fasquelle, 1904), v-vi. In a section of the book devoted to the passion for the gaming table duringthe le chevaRevolutionaryperiod, one reads, for instance, the story of an addictedgambler:"Mourant, lier Bouju, le terribleponte, se fit porterau trenteet un et, dans les brasde ses amis, agonisant,crispant ses mains sur le tapis vert, comme sur les drapsde son lit de mort, il se gagna, ce cadavrejoueur,de superbesfun6railles"("As he lay dying, that formidablegambler,chevalier Bouju, had himself transIn the armsof his friends, at death'sdoor, clutchingthe portedto a gaming house to play trente-et-un. gaming table like the sheet on his deathbed,this gamblingcadaverwon a superbfuneralfor himself') (26). 22. "a peine un souverain cesse de vivre que le public est inond6 de volumes sous le nom de memoires, d'histoirede sa vie, d'anecdotesde sa cour." 23. Voltaire,Histoire de CharlesXII (Paris:Garnier-Flammarion, 1968), 30-31.

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that cannot be properlyverified, and that is often the case with anecdotes.Thus Procopius'sHistoire secrete de Justinien is not, in Voltaire's view, a model for modem historians to follow. It is a satire "motivatedby vengefulness" which "contradicts the author'spublic history"and "is not always true."Seventy pages of anecdoteslater,Voltairerelentshardlyat all. Anecdotes have value only when they are at least plausible and concern prominentfigures in world history. "A philosophermight well be repelled by so many details. But curiosity,that common failing of mankind,ceases perhapsto be one, when it is directedtowardmen and times that commandthe attentionof posterity."24 In part, Voltaire'sdisdain for anecdotes was consistent with his demand that history not be about individual monarchsbut about nations and civilizations. It is the false view of history as the story of kings, he argued,that encouragesthe presumptuousbelief that every detail concerning them and those aroundthem must be of vast and enduring interest. Voltaire'smostly negative judgment of anecdotes was also determined,however, by the same classical, fundamentally conservative esthetics (and politics) that later led the editors of the Annee Litteraireto condemn Rousseau's Confessionsas an act of literaryarroganceand presumption."Wherewould we be now," they protestedin 1782, "if every one to himself the rightto write and printeverythingthatconcernshim perarrogated It is hardto read this indignantrejection sonally and thathe enjoys recalling?"25 of Rousseau's claim that the humblest anecdotes concerningthe personallife of an obscure semi-orphanchild (albeit one who became a famous writer)are worthy of interestas expressing anythingbut a classical (and conservative)desire to control the knowledge of history and to preservehierarchyin history as well as in society by dictating what should count as important and worthy of being rememberedand what should not. Admittedly,this is a complex matter.As is well known, the eighteenth century was a greatage of anecdotes.A considerablepublishingindustrywas devoted to anecdotes on every conceivable subject-medicine, literature,the theater,the arts.Voltairewas one of many writers who deploredthis developmentas a sign of the decadenceof taste andthe intrusionof the commercialspiritinto literature, with publishersrushing to please a growing readingpublic allegedly no longer willing or able to engage seriously with literatureor history.26But that was almost certainlya simplificationof the issue. The taste for particulars ratherthan extended formal narrativesor arguments,for the concrete private detail rather than the public generality,probablydid reflect a diminutionof traditionalculture
24. "Tantde d6tails pourraient rebuterun philosophe;mais la curiosit6, cette faiblesse si commune aux hommes, cesse peut-etre d'en etre une, quand elle a pour objet des temps et des hommes qui attirentles regardsde la post6rit6." Voltaire,Siecle de Louis XIV,2 vols. (Paris:Garier-Flammarion, 1966), I, 307, 379. 25. "Ou en serions-nous si chacun s'arrogeoit le droit d'6crire et de faire imprimertous les faits Annde litteraire 4 (1782), 150-151, qui l'int6ressentpersonnellementet qu'il aime h se rappeler?" quoted in Franco Orlando,"Rousseaue la nascita di una tradizioneletteraria:il ricordo d'infanzia," Belfagor 20 (1965), 12. 26. See ChristopherTodd, "Chamfortand the Anecdote," Modern Language Review 74 (1979), 297-309, especially the opening pages.

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in an expandedreadingpublic, a demandfor easy distractionand quick stimulation. But it also had a good deal to do with Enlightenmentempiricism, distrust of authorityand "authorized" explanationsof things, and suspicion of all-encompassing systems-in historiographyand ethics, as well as in politics, theology, and philosophy.
V. ANECDOTES IN HISTORICALWRITING

As it happens, the most common use of anecdotes by historians appearsnot to have been especially subversive.Anecdotes usually functionedin historicalwriting not as puzzling or unusualindividualcases throwingdoubton notions of historical order,but as particularinstances exemplifying and confirming a general rule or trendor epitomizinga largergeneralsituation.The particular in this usage was not, as Voltairefeared it might be, disruptive or destructiveof the general, but remainedsubordinateto the general. The detail or particularstory or anecdote was admittedwhen it illustratedhistoricalsituationsor personalitieswhose general characterand importancehad alreadybeen established-that is, when it illustrated,in Voltaire'sown words, "men and times that commandthe attention of posterity." As magistra vitae, early modem history was often a collection of episodes Thus the "histories"relatexemplifying general rules and lessons of behavior.27 ed in the Historische Chronica, published by the celebratedengraverMatthaus Merianin the 1620s and frequentlyreprinted,were intendedto demonstratethat vice is punishedand virtue rewardedin the same way thatexamples in grammar books offer particularillustrationsof the general rules governing noun declensions and verb conjugations.As a result, particularnarrativesare relatedto each other in the Chronica far more in terms of the virtues or vices they exemplify than in terms of an internalhistorical connection or relation among them. Only the succession of dates in the margins(calculatedfrom Creationor from the birth of Christ) establishes a loose temporal connectedness-something akin to the of annals, as distinctfrom connectednessHaydenWhite considers characteristic "narrativized" histories-while also serving,at the same time, as a signal thatthe events being narratedare not to be regarded as fables but as having truly if they were to function as exemplary,the stories had to occurred.Furthermore, be relatively short, simple, and easily intelligible in terms of traditionalvalues and a shared understandingof human beings and the world. The relation of part-individual short narrativeor anecdote-to whole in this kind of history
27. ChristophDaxelmiiller,"Narratio,Illustratio,Argumentatio:Exemplumund Bildungstechnik in der friihen Neuzeit," in Exempel und Exempelsammlungen,ed. Walter Haug and Burghart Wachinger(Tiibingen: M. Niemeyer, 1991), 79. In Plutarch-still Rousseau's favorite historian"pastevents only become history,"that is they enterthe narrativeof history,only "when theirexemtheir capacity to offer (the present)models to imitate, releases them from the sphere plary character, of the irrevocablyvanished"(EginhardHora, "ZumVerstindnis des Werkes,"in Giambattista Vico, Die neue Wissenschaft[Hamburg,1966], 232, quoted by Rudolf Schafer, Die Anekdote: Theorie, Analyse, Dialektik [Munich:Oldenbourg,1982], 12).

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might be describedas allegorical. Each anecdote is a singularinstance of a general rule that it exemplifies and points to.28 The late Enlightenmentand Romanticinvention of History as a process,rather than a simple diachronyor a playing out in varying successive guises of a limited repertoryof acts, implied a differentrelationof partto whole, and of anecdote to history. In conformity with the shift in literatureand art from Classicism to Romanticismand from allegory to symbol,29anecdotes ceased to be allegorical, universalsituations.In a world exemplaryof essentially extra- or transhistorical in which it was held that, in Ranke's famous words, "jede Epoche ist unmittelbar zu Gott" ("every age of history stands in an immediate relation to God"), theirrelationto a largercontext beyond them ceased to be conceptual,and came to be understoodas an internalrelationto an evolving whole, of which the particularevent recountedin the anecdotewas a relatively autonomousbut integral part,as an organ is partof a body. This change was underlinedby a new-more than merely picturesque -emphasis on couleur locale and historicalaccuracyin the representationof costume and mores, in contrastwith the free handling of these-the combining of ancient figures and moder attributes,for instance-in In the new historithe engravingswith which Merianillustratedthe Chronica.30 ography,in sum, the individual incident enshrined in the anecdote came to be more like a symptom, to borrow a term from medicine, than a sign. It had long been used in that way in biography.In his "Life of Alexander" Plutarchdeclaredfamously that "a chance remarkor a joke may reveal far more of a man's characterthan winning battles in which thousandsfall, or ... marTherein,accordingto Plutarch, shalling great armies,or laying siege to cities."31
28. On the Chronica,see AndreasUrs Sommer,"Triumph der Episode fiber die Universalhistorie? Pierre Bayles Geschichtsverfliissigungen," Saeculum 52 (2001), 1-39, at 15-23. Sommer points out that as the Chronica approachedmodem times and the historical material became overwhelmingly it became increasinglydifficultto reduce it to the simple termsrequiredby exemplaryhisabundant, by the sheer mass and extent of the materialof modem history,the historiancantory. "Confronted not control it or establish anythingbut the most imperfectconnections.As moralist,he has to capituof late before the complexity of the material"(22). According to Volker Weber the "Historchen" Wilhelm Schafer (HundertHistorchen [Munich:A. Langen, G. Miller, 1940]) are a modem case of the use of anecdotes to suggest the underlying similarity of different situations. (Volker Weber, Anekdote-Die andere Geschichte, 173-174 [as in note 10]). 29. See on the importanttransitionfrom allegory to symbol, Bengt A. Sorensen, Allegorie und am Symbol:Textezur Theoriedes dichterischenBildes im 18. undfriihen 19. Jahrhundert(Frankfurt Main:Athenaum, 1972). 30. Sommer,"Triumph der Episode iiberdie Universalhistorie," 23. 31. "Life of Alexander,"in The Age of Alexander: Nine Greek Lives, transl. Ian Scott-Kilvert (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 252. In the same vein, more recently,ArthurSchnitzler: "By drawing with on threestrikinganecdotesfrom his life, we may be able to take the measureof a man's character the sameprecisionthatwe measurethe surfaceof a triangleby calculatingthe relationamongthreefixed lasst sich durchdrei ("DasWeseneines Menschen points,whose connectinglines constitutethe triangle" Anekdotenaus seinem Leben vielleicht mit gleicher Bestimmtheitberechnen,wie der schlagkraftige Flacheinhalt dreierfixer Punktezueinander, derenVerbindungslinien eines Dreiecksaus dem Verhaltnis das Dreieck bilden"). (Arthur Schnitzler, Buch der Spruche und Bedenken, in Aphorismenund O. Weiss [Frankfurt am Main: S. FischerVerlag, 1967], 53.) Cf. Nietzsche: ed. Robert Betrachtungen, to "Threeanecdotesmay sufficeto paint a pictureof a man"(quotedby Clifton Fadiman,Introduction TheLittle,BrownBook of Anecdotes [Boston/Toronto: Little, Brown and Company,1985]).

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lay the difference between the historian or chroniclerof public events and the To the degree that, with the Romantics,history itself came to resembiographer. ble a kind of nationalbiography-Michelet, it will be recalled, boasted of having "been the first to present France as a person" ("pose le premierla France comme une personne")32-Plutarch'sdistinction between the methods of the biographerand those of the historianceased to hold. As early as the last thirdof the eighteenth century some of Chamfort'sanecdotes appearto have had such symptomatic value. A story about the Duke of Hamilton, for instance-who, being drunkone night, heedlessly killed a waiter at an inn, and when confronted with the fact by the horrifiedinnkeeper,calmly replied: "Add it to the bill"seems intended as more than an allegory of the general indifferenceof the rich and powerful to the poor and powerless; it is also symptomaticof the personage described,the Duke of Hamilton,and-beyond him perhaps-of the social relahistorical moment, that of the ancien regime.33 tions of a particular This is the kind of anecdote we are most familiarwith as modem readersof history.A couple of examples from Michelet will be enough to call many others to mind. In the Histoire de France Michelet presentsan anecdote abouta change in the relations of d'Aubigne and Henri IV as symptomatic of a fundamental change in the political and culturalclimate in general at the end ot the sixteenth century. the Calvinist tells of a sad event.TheKing,still haunted by his bogeyman, D'Aubigne whoknewhis royal was determined to puthimin the Bastille.TheHuguenot, republic,
masterwell, in orderto be left in peace, asked for the firsttime to be rewardedfor his services with money, a pension. Fromthatpoint on the king is sure of him; he summonshim, embraceshim; suddenly they are good friends. That same evening, D'Aubign6 was having supperwith two noble-heartedwomen. Suddenly,without a word, one of them began to weep and shed many tears. "For good, too good reason, "Michelet comments, giving the sense of the anecdote. "The day D'Aubigne was obliged to accept a pension and ask for money the great 16th Century came to an end and the other began."34 Likewise, in the

section on the Bastille (section IX) in the Introductionto the Histoire de la

32. "Prefacede 1869," Histoire de France, Book III, Oeuvrescompletes,ed. P. Viallaneix,21 vols. (Paris:Flammarion,1971-), VI, 11. See L. Gossman, "JulesMichelet:histoire nationale,biographie, Litterature102 (1996), 29-54. autobiographie," 33. Chamfort,"Caractereset anecdotes,"in Products of the Perfected Civilization, appendix 1, 272. A somewhatsimilarpoint is made,more benignly, by an anecdotein which Madamedu Chatelet admits a manservantinto her bathroomwhile she is naked. There was no more shame in this, to an aristocraticwoman, than being seen nakedby a dog. 34. "D'Aubign6 raconte un fait triste. Le roi, revassant toujours son 6pouvantail,la r6publique calviniste, voulait d6cid6mentle mettreBla Bastille. Le huguenot,qui le connoissait,pour avoir enfin son repos, lui demandepour la premierefois r6compensede ses longs services, de l'argent,une pension. Des lors, le roi est sfr de lui; il le fait venir, il l'embrasse;les voila bons amis. Le meme soir, d'Aubign6 soupait avec deux dames de noble coeur. Tout a coup, l'une d'elles, sans parler,se mit a pleureret versa d'abondanteslarmes. Avec trop de raison. Le jour ou d'Aubign6 avait 6et forc6 de prendrepension et de demanderde l'argent,le grandXVIe siecle 6tait fini, et l'autre6tait inaugur6." "Histoirede Franceau Dix-Septieme Siecle" (1858), in OeuvresCompletes,ed. Paul Villaneix (Paris: Flammarion,1982), IX, 153.

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Revolution Francaise the essential arbitrariness Michelet considered characteristic of the ancien regime is conveyed by means of an anecdote. One day, Louis XV's and Madamede Pompadour'sdoctor, the illustriousQuesnay,who lodged with her at Versailles, sees the King enter unexpectedly and becomes disturbed.The clever Madame de Hausset, the lady-in-waiting,who has left such curious memoirs, asked him why he was so flustered. "Madame,"he replied, "when I see the King, I say to myself: There is a man who can have my head cut off."-"Oh!" she said, "the King is too kind." Michelet again concludes the anecdote by explaining its significance. "The lady in waiting summed up in a single word here all the safeguards offered by the monarchy."35
35. "Lemedecinde Louis XV et de Madamede Pompadour, l'illustre Quesnay,qui logeait chez elle a Versailles,voit un jour le Roi entrera l'improviste et se trouble.La spirituellefemme de chambre, Madamede Hausset,qui a laissdde si curieuxMemoires,lui demandapourquoiil se d6concertait ainsi. 'Madame,'repondit-il,'quandje vois le Roi, je me dis: Voila un homme qui peut me faire couper la tete.'-'Oh!,' dit-elle, 'le Roi est trop bon.' La femme de chambre rdsumaitla d'un seul mot les garantiesde la monarchie."Histoire de la revolutionfrancaise, 2 vols. (Paris:Editions de la Pleiade, 1952), II, 67. Many other examples could be cited. Describingthe drasticallydiminishedauthorityof the monarchyin the years precedingthe Revolution, Philippe de S6gur expresses confidence in his Memoiresthat "Onpeut en juger parune anecdote."He then proceeds to tell how one day he ran into the Comte de Laureguais,whose witty and cynical sayings and writings had made him the object of countless "lettresde cachet"-referred to gaily by the Count as "ma correspondenceavec le roi." Laureguaiswas strollingabout openly in a place where there was horse-racingand to which members of the Courthad thereforebeen attracted in largenumbers.Rememberingthatthe counthadbeen exiled far from Paris by a recent "lettrede cachet,"Sdgurwent up to him and warnedhim that his brazenly showing himself therewas an imprudent provocationthatcould have seriousconsequencesfor him. In response,Laureguaissimply laughed.His escapade,Segur observes, could not have passed unnoticed, "andyet it went unpunished." (Memoires,souvenirs et anecdotespar M. le Comtede Segur, ed. M. F. Barriere [Paris: Firmin Didot, 1859], 90-91). In his pathbreakingHistoire de la Conquete de l'Angleterre par les Normandsof 1825, AugustinThierryfrequentlyprovides"anecdotal illustration(s) of the life and mannersof the natives"and of the effect of the conqueston the hapless Saxons. A typical introduction to one of those anecdotes (which tells of the persecutionand spoliation of a certain Brithstanby the Normanprovost RobertMalartais)runs:"A circumstancewhich occurredsome time before this may throw some light upon these decrees, which despoiled the unhappySaxons of everything"(Historyof the Conquestof England by the Normans,transl.W. Hazlitt [London:Bohn, 1856], I, 362-363 [Book VII]). Guizot relatesan anecdote,in his Historyof England,aboutArchbishopSharp being set upon and, despite his pleas for mercy, stabbedto deathby Scottish Covenantersas he passed in a carriagewith his daughterthroughthe environsof St. Andrews.The anecdoteis intendedto epitomize the cruelty and lawlessness of those "armedfanatics," as Guizot calls the Covenanters(A Popular History of Englandfrom the Earliest Timesto the Reign of Queen Victoria[New York:John W. Lowell, n.d.],III, 378 [chap.30]). DescribingQueenMary'spersecutionof the Protestants, the nineabout a single inditeenth-century English historian,JohnRichardGreen, insertsa one-page narrative vidual, RowlandTaylor,the Vicarof Hadleigh,on the groundsthatit "tellsus more of the work which was now begun (the persecutionandthe executions), andof the effect it was likely to produce(i.e. stiffened resistance),thanpages of historicdissertation" (A ShortHistoryof the English People [New York, Cincinnati,and Chicago:AmericanBook Co., n.d.], 365 [The Reformation.Sect. II, chap. 30]). The same basic approachto anecdoteis still evident in Eileen Power's Medieval People (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1957), a successful work of moder social and economic history, first published in 1924. Power chose to presenther accountof medieval society by means of six portraitsof "ordinary people,"in the belief, as she put it, that"thepast may be made to live again for the generalreadermore effectively by personifyingit thanby presentingit in the form of learnedtreatiseson the development of the manoror on medieval trade,essential as these are to the specialist"(Preface,7). Anecdotesplay their customaryrole in the constructionof Power's portraits; in addition,each portraitin itself might be regardedas a kind of extended anecdoteepitomizinga largergeneral situation.

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Being passed aroundby word of mouth or borrowedby one writerfrom another, most often associated with the private sphere, and almost always unverifiable, anecdotes were generally regardedas of doubtfulveracity by "modem"historians determinedto apply to their work the critical methods elaborated at the In parallelsof Herodotusand Thucydides, beginning of the eighteenthcentury.36 the Fatherof History did not usually come out well. But if the meaning of an anecdote were to be sought less in its factual accuracythan in what it conveyed about states of mind and general trends,then even when its factual veracity was in doubt it might still be thoughtof as in some way illuminatinghistoricalreality. Prosperde Barante,for instance,justified his method of closely following the chronicle accounts,on which he based his immensely popularHistoire des Ducs de Bourgogne de la Maison de Valois in the third decade of the nineteenthcentury, by claiming that the "naive"vision of the chroniclerswas in itself as historically significantas any fact, since it told a great deal abouthow the men and women of an earlier age thoughtand felt. ProsperMerimee'sjustificationof the anecdote in the Preface to his Chroniquedu Regne de Charles IX was similar. "Anecdotes are the only thing I like in history,"he declared ("Je n'aime dans l'histoire que les anecdotes").Traditionalhistorians,to whom the only history is political, military,and dynastic, would doubtlessconsider this "not a very dignified taste,"but he himself "would willingly give Thucydidesfor some authentic memoirs by Aspasia or by a slave of Pericles."37 later ascribed to myth in his Cultural Something of the characterBurckhardt to the anecdote:that is to say, it was seen History of Greece was thus attributed as an essentially popularor communalcreation,the validity of which resides not so much in the accuracy with which it reportsparticularpositive facts as in its ability to reflect the generalreality underlyingthose facts or the general view of thatreality.It was thus the trueraw materialof the culturalhistorian.Burckhardt himself made the connection between anecdote and myth. "The oral tradition does not cleave to literal exactness," he declaredin a lecture on "The Scholarly Contribution of the Greeks,""butbecomes typical; that is to say that it does not
36. On hearing a string of anecdotes about a famous figure of the day, Kant is said to have "It seems to me I recall similaranecdotesaboutother greatfigures.But thatis to be expectremarked: ed. Greatmen are like high churchtowers: aroundboth there is apt to be a greatdeal of wind" (quoted by Fadiman,Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes). Investigatinganecdotes about local charactersin relatively small communities, SandraK. D. Stahl reportsthat such anecdotes, "presumedto be true by the local populace ... are often made up of motifs found in other regions as well" ("The Local Character Anecdote," Genre 8 [1975], 283-302). 37. ProsperMerim6e, Chroniquedu Regne de Charles IX (Paris:Nelson, n.d.), 6; A Chronicleof the Reign of Charles IX in The Writingsof Prosper Merimee, introductionby George Saintsbury,6 vols. (New York:Croscup& Holby, 1905), VI, v-vi. In the middle of the eighteenthcentury a similar La Curnede Sainte-Palayeas a justificationfor scholargumenthad been proposedby the antiquarian arly study of the Old Frenchromances.According to Sainte-Palaye,the very anachronismsand errors of the old romances were historicallyrevealing (L. Gossman,Medievalismand the Ideologies of the Enlightenment:The World and Workof La Curne de Sainte-Palaye [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968], 247-253).

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cleave to a factually exact grounding of the events narrated, but brings out their inner significance, what is characteristic about them, what has a general human or popular content. Often an anecdote is all that remains of a long chain of events, circumstances, and personalities."38 In fact, historians do not shrink, on occasion, from invoking anecdotes, for the truth of which they freely admit they cannot vouch. Voltaire relates an anecdote about a priest who dared to take the King to task in a sermon he preached at Versailles. The anecdote culminates in a "pointe," the memorably pointed remark characteristic of the classic eighteenth-century anecdote: "We are assured that Louis XIV was satisfied to address him thus: 'Father ... I am happy to accept my share of a sermon, but I do not like being the target of one."'39 Whether the King actually spoke those words or not, Voltaire concedes, they are instructive and revealing. In Burckhardt's work, as one might expect, the "fictional" anecdote serves an unequivocally historical function. In Part I, Section 3 of The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy "an old story, one of those which are true and not true, everywhere and nowhere," is recounted to illustrate "the thoroughly immoral relation" between city governments and powerful condottieri in fifteenth-century Italy. In the following section Burckhardt cites another "legendary history," which, he says, "is simply the reflection of the atrocities" perpetrated by
38. "Uberdas wissenschaftlicheVerdienstder Griechen"(lecturegiven in Basel on 10 November Votrtge, ed. E. Diirr,3rd ed. (Basel: Schwabe, 1919), 188-89. Burckhardt 1881), in JacobBurckhardt, goes on to describethe process of creationof an anecdote in termsreminiscentof his defense of myth in the GriechischeKulturgeschichte: "Inthe meantime,of course, the narrators have also filled out the story as it passed from mouth to mouth, not only by drawingon other informationbut by drawingon the generalnatureof the situationin question;they have addedcolor to it and recreatedit; they have in short attributedto the most celebratedrepresentativesof certain human situations and relations what happenedin them at one or anothertime. Thus the lives of most of the well-known Greeks are full of traitsthathave been observed in otherslike them and are then transferred to them-on ne prete qu'aux riches-and moder critics have an easy time of it exposing such fictions ... Yet this typical, anecdotalmaterialis also history in its way-only not in the sense of the singularevent, but ratherin the sense of what might have happenedat any time ("des Irgendwannvorgekommenen"), and often it is so beautifully expressive that we would on no account want to do without it." During the First WorldWara similarjustificationof the anecdotewas offered by the editor of a Germancollection of anecdotesdevoted to the Warand doubtless designed to raise morale. (It was one of a series of fourteen immensely popularanecdote books put out in the early twentieth century by Lutz of Stuttgart, each one devoted to a particular subject, such as Bismarck, the Hohenzollerns, the Habsburgs, the editor claimed not that Bluecher,Frederickthe Great,Napoleon, Schiller, etc.) Like Burckhardt, the stories were true (in fact these "Anekdoten" are a mixed bag of anti-Englishpoems and songs, newspaperreports, supposed letters from or to the front, as well as classic anecdotes), but that they gave an authenticpictureof the spirit of the Germanpeople at the time, its gritty energy in adversity, its pride, its humor, its capacity for laughter and for tears, its ability to celebrate triumphsand to mourn losses: "ein getreues Seelengemilde des deutschen Volkes" (Der grosse Krieg. Ein ed. Erwin Rosen, 9th ed. [Stuttgart:Robert Lutz, n.d.]). After the War,in the late Anekdotenbuch, 1920s, the anecdote was again justified as "the only valid artistic form of cultural history" in the Introduction to Egon Friedell's Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit: Die Krisis der europdischenSeele von der schwarzenPest bis zum ersten Weltkrieg, 3 vols. (Munich:C. H. Beck, 1927-1931), I, 18: "Pars pro toto: this is not the least effective or vivid of figures. Often a single hand movement can characterize an individual, a single detail an entire event, more sharply,more essentially, and with greater force than the most detailed description." 39. "On assureque Louis XIV se contentade lui dire: 'Mon pere ... j'aime bien a prendrema part d'un sermon, mais je n'aime pas qu'on me la fasse."' Voltaire,Siecle de Louis XIV, I, 367.

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the petty tyrantsof the fifteenthcentury.40 Implicitin such use of anecdotesis the idea that,even if they arenot factuallytrue,theirvery fabricationand success are in themselves a kind of evidence.
VII.CRITICAL USESOFANECDOTES IN PAST HISTORIOGRAPHY

Alongside the predominantlyconfirmatoryuses of anecdote by historians,there is also, but more rarely,a negative use. In additionto the histoire secrete tradiand alluded to earlier,what one might call the tion, stemming from Procopius41 anecdote"aims to debunkgrandgeneral argumentsabouthis"Cleopatra's-nose tory by finding the cause of major historical transformationsin some minor "anecdote" or "particularite historique,petit fait curieux dont le recit peut eclairer le dessous des choses" ("a historicalparticularity, a small curious fact whose can reveal the undersideof things"), to borrow one of the Dictionnaire telling Robert's definitions of the word "anecdote."Several examples of this use of anecdote are to be found in John Buchan's 1929 Rede lecture at Cambridge University on "The Causal and the Casual in History."The defeat of the Greeks in the Warof 1922, for instance, and the resultingconsolidationof the revolution of Kemal Ataturkin Turkey,are traced via a chain of causally connected incidents to the death,in the autumnof 1920, of the young King Alexanderof Greece from the bite of a pet monkey in the palace gardens. "I cannot,"Buchan concludes, "betterMr. Churchill'scomment: 'A quarterof a million persons died of that monkey's bite."'42 The Cleopatra's-noseanecdote does not produce a richer and more complex history than the grand narratives-of which the Marxist was probably the grandest-that it purportsto undercut;on the contrary,it presents a drastically simplified one. The opposite effect may be produced, however, by anecdotes that offer themselves neither as links in a simple causal chain nor-in the style of the Romantics-as parts of a whole, from which they derive their meaning and which they in turn epitomize. Anecdotes as fragments of some undecifar from consolidating pheredwhole, as instances thatresist neat interpretation, what we think we know, may cause us to question it and provoke inquiry into it. Such anecdotes will have to be different, however, from the classic, welldesigned anecdote, with its triadic structure of exposition, confrontation or encounter,and "pointe"or punch line, since that form of anecdote works precisely to the degree that it can count, like traditional theater, on commonly shared assumptionsto drive home its meaning despite, or even because of, its brevity. If an anecdote is to be truly disruptiveand disorienting,it cannot have
40. Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilizationof the Renaissance in Italy, ed B. Nelson and C. Trinkaus, 2 vols. (New York:Harperand Row, Colophon Books, 1958), 1,40, 49. 41. Now largely neutralized,if one can judge by a series of so-called "histoiressecretes"of the Frenchprovinces currentlybeing put out by the publishinghouse of Albin Michel in Paris. 42. John Buchan, The Causal and the Casual in History (Cambridge,Eng.: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1929), 19-20.

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the structural coherence that the classic anecdote possesses in far higher degree
than history itself.43

The disruptiveor negative anecdote can alreadybe found in PierreBayle, and a little later Diderot took delight in demonstrating the realhow undecipherable behind a be. ardent The most ity seemingly transparent story may champion of the anecdote as a disruptiveelement may in fact be a novelist ratherthan a historian. "Just think," wrote the author of Le Rouge et le Noir, itself developed from afait divers reportedin the newspapers,"Justthink that what fools despise as gossip is, on the contrary, the only history thatin this affected age gives a true of a .... We need to see everything,experience everything,make picture country a collection of anecdotes."44 Not the contrivednarrativeof history,in short,but only the anecdote, understoodas a naive, unreflected,and unvarnished reportof a fragmentof reality, offers reliable clues to the way things are (or were), unaltered by either ideological or formal-estheticelaboration.As the only window onto reality as it is, ratherthan as we have pre-shapedit, the anecdote valued by Stendhalcould not, obviously, be the polished productof salon wits that finds its way into the anecdote books. Its chief merit being that it is "exactementvraie"
("exactly true"), it could not, in Stendhal's own view, be "fort piquante" ("very snappy"). It could not, in other words, be literature.45 It is because this kind of

anecdote is raw, unpolished, not "piquante," that it is more easily found in the to in documents or newspapers,than in or provinces, according Stendhal, legal the spoiled and cultivated circles of the capital. As any narrative telling, however naive, involves a minimummeasureof shaping accordingto a priori moral,psychological, epistemological, literary,and linguistic categories, there was something inherentlyparadoxicalabout Stendhal's
43. See, for instance, Richard N. Coe, "The Anecdote and the Novel: A Brief Inquiry into the Origins of Stendhal'sNarrativeTechnique,"Australian Journal of French Studies 22 (1985), 3-23: "In the remoterorigins of all narrativeliteraturethere may be discerned two fundamentalelements: but strictly chronologicaldevelophistory,which creates out of 'real life' a model of quasi-arbitrary, ment, retailing facticity from day to day; and the anecdote which, startingfrom a factual-historical coherence, endowing it with a beginning, 'happening,'proceeds to refashionit in terms of structural middle andend, andimbuing it with significanceandpoint. Historymay well be haphazard and shapeless, and yet command attentionnonetheless because 'that's how it was'; the anecdote depends, for its viability,entirely on its formal structure-a fact which in no way contradictsits necessarydependence upon a profoundsubstructure of historically,socially or psychologically verifiabletruth"(3). In his study of Brecht's "anti-anecdotes," Walter-Erst Schaferhighlights the structured dramaticform of the anecdoteand its dependence,like the drama,on stereotypesand sharedassumptions.Theseare what Brecht set out to deconstruct."Eine 'epische Anekdote'muss diese Gattungtiberhaupt sprengen und Erzahlungoder Roman an ihre Stelle tretenlassen" ("An 'epic anecdote' should explode the very genre of anecdote and replace it with an extended narrativeor a novel") (Schafer, Anekdote-Antianekdote, 29). 44. "Songez que ce que les sots m6prisentsous le nom de commerage,est au contrairela seule histoire qui dans ce siecle d'affectationpeigne bien un pays ... il faut tout voir, tout 6prouver,faire un recueil d'anecdotes."Stendhal,Memoiresd'un touriste,I, in Oeuvrescompletes, ed. Victor Del Litto and ErnestAbravenel(Paris/Geneva:Slatkine Reprints, 1986), XV, 174 (datedLyon, 24 May, 1837); Journal litteraire, 25 frimaire,an XI (16 December 1802), in Oeuvrescompletes,XXXIII, 31. 45. "Le premiermerite du petit nombred'anecdotes qui peuvent faire le saut du manuscript dans (Mdmoires l'imprim6serad'etreexactementvraies,c'est annoncerqu'elles ne serontpas fortpiquantes" d'un touriste,in Oeuvrescompletes,XV, 189, cited in Coe, "TheAnecdote and the Novel," 9.

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It is fascinatingto follow his desperateattemptsto protectthe anecrequirement. dotes he valued from such shaping-to the extent that he sometimes refrained altogetherfrom giving them verbalform and confinedhimself to a simple reference, such as "Mlle Camp's reply to her lover" ("Reponsede Mlle Camp ... a anecdote this morning"("anecdotedechirantece son amant")or "heartbreaking The of matin").46 preservation authenticityat the expense of communicability inevitably leaves the reader with an undecipherablenotation.47It has taken Stendhalscholars over a centuryto trackdown and identify some of these enigmatic references. From our point of view, the most importantdifferencebetween the unliterary, radicallyrealist anecdote that seems to have been Stendhal'spreferenceand the anecdote as it appearsin most historical texts lies in the fact that, in traditional historicalusage, the anecdote is mainly borrowed,not found. It has alreadybeen It does not lie at the beginning of a historworked over and made into literature. ical investigationor promptone, but is importedfrom a repertoryof anecdotes, after the historical argument is already in place, as an illustrative rhetorical device. In that respect, the Romantic symbolical anecdote does not differ markedlyfrom the Humanist allegorical anecdote. In contrast, the anecdote as Stendhal appearsto have imagined it is not found after the historical argument has alreadybeen drawnup, but, precisely because it cannotbe easily understood in terms of existing notions of past or presentreality,becomes the startingpoint of a longer story (fictionalor historical)thatexplores thatreality and seeks a new of it. The Stendhaliananecdote, in short,disturbsintellectualrouunderstanding tines and stimulatesnew explorationsof history.
AND THE ANECDOTE VIII. MODERN HISTORIANS,MICRO-HISTORY,

In an essay outlining a proposed"Historyof the Anecdote,"a scholarof English of a singularevent,"the anecdoteis "the literature observes that,"as the narration that refers to the real." By the very fact that it form or genre uniquely literary does not referto the real throughdirectdesciriptionor ostention, it inevitablyhas a literarycharacter;nonetheless, Joel Fineman insists, "however literary,[it] is nevertheless directly pointed towards or rooted in the real," and it is this that "allows us to think of the anecdote,given its formalif not its actualbrevity,as a fact."The funchistoreme,i.e. as the smallest minimalunit of the historiographic tion of the anecdoteis thus essentially disruptive,accordingto Fineman.His thesis, he declares, is "thatthe anecdoteis the literaryform that uniquely lets histo46. Memoiresd'un touriste, in Oeuvrescompletes, XV, 224, cited in Coe, "TheAnecdote and the Novel," 9. 47. See Coe, "The Anecdote and the Novel," 8-10, 12, 13 [as in note 43]. Stendhaldid not, of course, succeed in his endeavorto deconstructthe literaryanecdote.Indeed, he pursuedthe goal only intermittentlyand also made use of familiar anecdote forms. In fact, he was not above the kind of transposition of anecdotal material from one subject to another to which Kant and Burckhardt referred: thus an anecdoteaboutHaydn in Carpani'sbiography,which Stendhalknew inside out, since he made abundantuse of it for his own Viede Haydn, reappearsin Stendhal's Vie de Rossini applied to the Italiancomposer (Coe, 10-11).

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ry happen [italics in text] by virtue of the way it introducesan opening into the of beginning,middle, and end. The teleological, and thereforetimeless, narration anecdoteproducesthe effect of the real, the occurrenceof contingency,by establishing an event within and yet without the framingcontext of historical successivity." To Fineman, the Hegelian type of historical narrative is the "purest model" of the kind of "timeless"historical design or grand recit that the anecdote disrupts by injecting contingency and thus real, open-ended time into it. Though I cannot agree with Fineman that this is how the anecdote has always functionedor must, by its very nature,function,it is, I believe, a fair description of how Stendhalmay have wanted it to function and how it functionsfor a number of modem or, more accuratelyperhaps,"postmoder" historians.48 The collapse of confidence in the widely accepted grands recits or "metahistories"(Jean-Francois Lyotard)of the nineteenthand early twentiethcenturiesis also the context in which the Italian historianGiovanni Levi49situates the suca modem, or perhapsone should again say postmodem, cess of "microhistory," form of history that often seems to startfrom an anecdote or a narrativegrounded in a non-literarysource, such as a court or other archivalrecord. One thinks of Natalie Davis's Returnof Martin Guerre(1983), RobertDarnton'sThe Great Cat Massacre of the Rue Saint-Severin (1984), Alain Corbin's Le Village des cannibales (1990) or, albeit the action takes place in a more elevated social milieu, Edward Berenson's The Trial of Madame Caillaux (1992). Whereas in was a pejorativeterm-a charthe heyday of Ferand Braudel, "microhistoire" acterin RaymondQueneau'sLes Fleurs Bleues of 1965 appliedit humorouslyto the lowest, pettiest kind of history, "a peine de l'histoire evenementielle"50-by the 1980s, it marked,for many historians,the discovery of a new method,as well as new objects and topics, of historicalinvestigation and analysis. It did indeed rejectthe hierarchyof historicalobjects still adheredto in some measureeven by Voltaire,but it was defined less by the small-scale and humble characterof its objects than by its way of looking at all historical objects-through a microscopic lens.
48. Joel Fineman, "The History of the Anecdote," in The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (New Yorkand London: Routledge, 1989), 49-76: "Governedby an absolute,inevitable, inexorable teleological unfolding, so thatin principle,nothingcan happenby chance, every moment that participates within such Hegelian history,as the Spiritmateriallyunfolds itself into and unto itself, is thereby renderedtimeless; such momentsexist... outsideof time, or in a timeless present,and this because their momentarydurative appearanceis alreadybut the guaranteedforeshadow,the already all but realizedpromise of the concludingend of historytowardwhich, as but the passing momentsin a story whose conclusion is alreadywritten,they tend" (57). Otherquotationsfrom page 61. One is reminded of Karl-HeinzStierle's comment that "Die Problematikder Konstitutionvon Geschichten ist ein Beispiel jener Problematikder Relation von Allgemeinem und Besonderem, die in der Perspektive darstellt"("The problemof how history is constiMontaignesdie eigentliche Erkenntnisproblematik tuted is an instance of the wider problem of the relation of the general and the particular,which in Montaigne'sperspective, is the essential problem of all knowledge") ("Geschichteals ExemplumExemplum als Geschichte," in Geschichte-Ereignis und Erzdhlung, ed. Reinhart Koselleck and Wolf-DieterStempel [Munich:Wilhelm Fink, 1973], 375). 49. "On Microhistory,"in New Perspectives on Historical Writing,ed. Peter Burke (Cambridge, Eng.: Polity Press, 1991), 93-113. 50. RaymondQueneau,Les Fleurs Bleues (Paris:Gallimard,1965), 85.

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Instead of setting out with a set of established macrohistoricalcategoriessuch as the individual, the family, the state, industrialization, urbanization,and so on-the new history stayed close to the ground.Typically,it worked out from some limited, often perplexing, incident or person, in orderto investigate, concretely and without priorparti pris, networks of relations in the small Lebenswelten in which people actually live, with the aim of discovering unsuspected patternsof action and interaction,motivation,and behavior.By opening up original fields and modes of inquiry,it was hoped, the unusualor statisticallyexceptional case might make it possible to look behind the well-mappedsurfaceof history to those "silences de l'histoire" to which Michelet famously referredin a journalentryfor January30, 1842. One could say that the new history was doing what innovative writers of fiction, including Marivaux, Diderot, and Stendhal, have repeatedly done, almost always in the name of "realism":that is, it was attemptingto break throughcategories that may once have led to better understanding,but had become conventions facilitatingthe productionof a particular kind of institutionalized discourse.Wherethatdiscourse often ended up actingas a screen ratherthan a lamp, the new history hoped to serve as a kind of reconnoissance flare illuminatinga darkenedlandscape.5' Nothing could be furtherfrom the polished miniaturemostly used by historians in the past, or closer perhapsto the petitfait social of Stendhal'sideally unliterary anecdote, than the deliberately raw eight-line recounting of a strange incident, followed by an equally brief, puzzlingly contradictorycontemporary judgmentof it, with which, in a section with-in the originalFrench-the musical title "Prelude,"Alain Corbin opens Le Village des cannibales (1990; published in English as The Village of Cannibals, 1992). Thedateis August16, 1870.Theplaceis Hautefaye, a commune in theNontron district tured fortwohours, thenburned alive(if indeed stillalive)beforea mobof threehundred to eighthundred himof shouting "Vivela Republique!" When peoplewhohaveaccused crowddisperses, butnot without of having"roasted" a nightfalls,the frenzied boasting "Prussian." Someexpress atnothaving inflicted thesamepunishment on theparish regret priest. The scene now shifts forward in time to February 1871. The republican journalist Charles Ponsacsuppliesdetailsthatturntragedyinto historical object:"Neverin the of crimehas therebeenso dreadful annals a murder. It happened in broad Imagine! daybeforea crowdof thousands light,in the midstof merrymaking, [sic]!Thinkof it! This crimelackedeventhecoverof darkness foranexcuse!Danteis rightto saythat revolting mansometimes exhibits a lustmorehideous than thelustforblood." Later concupiscence: in thearticle we aretoldthat"thecrimeof Hautefaye is in a sensea whollypolitical act." Theenigma of Hautefaye ... lies in thistension between horror andpolitical rationalturnto history, to whatit was thatfirstbrought horror andpolitics ity.Wemusttherefore
51. Inquiringinto neglect and even disdain of thefait divers among historiansuntil quite recently, Michelle Perrotobserves that "le choix du long terme,l'ambition macrostructurelle, les obsessions du seriel ... ne pouvaient qu'en detourner,comme aussi le peu d'ineret port6e l'histoire de la sphere the obsession with quantitative priv6e"("the focus on the long term, the interest in macrostructures, series, along with the lack of interestin the private sphere, could only distractfrom the fait divers") ("Faitdivers et histoire au XIXeme siecle," 917).

of the Dordogne departement.On the fairground,a young noble is tor(arrondissement)

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of whatproved in order andthenprized themapart, to clarifyourunderstanding together in a murder.52 thelastoutburst of peasant to be, in France, rageto result The point of departure of Corbin'sLes Cloches de la terre (1994; publishedin as Bells, 1998) is again anecdotal-in this case a series of three English Village anecdotesaboutthe ringing of bells. The firstrelatesan incidentin which a group of girls and unmarriedwomen repeatedly rang the bells of the commune of Brienne in the departmentof Aube on the 4th Frimaire of the year VIII (25 November, 1799), in flagrantviolation of laws passed in 1795 and 1796 restrictdefianceof the ing the use of bells to nationalfestivals, and in uncomprehending to get them to desist. The second anecdotetells of a attemptsof the "authorities" riot that broke out in the same place in December 1832 following a decision by the municipal council to sell one of the village bells-the oldest, known as the "great"bell-which was cracked, in orderto satisfy a request of the sub-prefect thatthe communepay for the armingof the local nationalguard. of Bar-sur-Aube Finally, in the thirdanecdote we learnof the uproarcaused in 1958 in the solidly religious commune of Lonlay-l'Abbaye in Normandy by a decision of the municipalcouncil to have the restoredbell of the local churchresumethe ancient traditionof markingthe noon hour,in place of the siren on the roof of the town hall to which that function-important in a ruralcommunity-had been entrustThis text ed after the destructionof the churchtower by the Germansin 1944.53 is furtherpunctuatedby innumerablestories of disputes over bells. "Manywill be astonishedat the idea of treatingbell-ringing as a subject of historicalinvestigation,"Corbinconcedes in a foreword to the English translation,"andyet it offers us privileged access to the world we have lost."54 A few years later, in writing the life of an unknown clog-maker (Le Monde retrouve de Louis-FranFoisPinagot: sur les traces d'un inconnu 1798-1876, 1998; publishedin English as the life of an unknown:The RediscoveredWorldof a Clog-Makerin NineteenthCenturyFrance, 2001), Corbinseems to have wanted to distance himself even furtherfrom basing his own text on a previously narrative.His "hero"is chosen at random,the only condition existing structured of selection being that not a single pre-shapedbiographicalor autobiographical accountof him, not even a criminalrecord,was to be found.55 Pinagot is "notrealAccording to Corbinhimself, his story of Louis-Franqois Whetherit is or is not is of less interestthanthe ly an exercise in micro-history." lengths to which Corbinwent in orderto make sure that the startingpoint of his investigationwould be as undeterminedas possible. Pinagot himself was selected not simply by excluding any figurewho "left an unusualrecordof any kind"
52. Alain Corbin, The Village of Cannibals: Rage and Murder in France, 1870, transl. Arthur Goldhammer(Cambridge,Eng.: Polity Press, 1992), 1. 53. Alain Corbin,Les Cloches de la terre:paysage sonore et culturesensible dans les campagnes au XIXesiecle (Paris:Albin Michel, 1994), 9-13. 54. Corbin, Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the 19th CenturyFrench Countryside,transl. MartinThom (New York:Columbia University Press, 1998), ix. 55. Corbin,the life of an unknown:TheRediscoveredWorldof a Clog-Makerin NineteenthCentury France, transl.ArthurGoldhammer(New York:ColumbiaUniversityPress, 2001), viii, ix, x.

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or about whom any personal or family recollections remained,but by the historian's picking out, eyes closed, "a volume from the inventory of the municipal archives ... on which (his) handhappen(ed)to fall"--which turnedout to be that for the commune of Origny-le-Butin,"a nondescriptlocality, a tiny cell in the vast tissue of Frenchcommunes,"one, moreover, that "like so many other tiny communes . . . has vanished from memory in the same way as its individual inhabitants."Two names were finally chosen "at random"from the decennial tables of vital statisticsfor the late eighteenthcentury.Only here did the historian intervene: one of the two was eliminated because he died young and thus would have been of limited heuristicvalue. It is hard to imagine a startingpoint more at odds with that of Wittgenstein's Poker, with which I began this paper.Corbin's task was not to fill in an existing structure,to elaboratean existing story,as Edmondsand Eidinow do. There was no such structure.His startingpoint was a cipher, a mystery about which everything had to be learned.Moreover,the aim was not to make Pinagot himself an object in his world, but to use him "like a filmmakerwho shoots a scene through the eyes of a characterwho (himself) remains off screen," in order to "painta portraitof his world as he might have seen it, to reconstitutehis spatialand temporal horizon, his family environment,his circle of friends, his community,as Between the historianand his characwell as his probablevalues and beliefs."56 ter the distance remains unbridged and unbridgeable. Unlike Edmonds and Eidinow, Corbindoes not presenthimself as an omniscientnarrator describinga world of readily identifiableand intelligible objects, relations, and personalities, but as a historicallylimited subjectengaging with other historically limited and deeply unfamiliarsubjects. Conjuringaway the strangenessof the other is not project. partof Corbin'shistoriographical Compared with the experimental and exploratory work of Davis, Darnton, Poker must strikeone, in the end, as "potted" Corbin,and others, Wittgenstein's cobbled together from other books by a couple of intelligent history, skillfully and well-readjournalists.Like a large class of traditionalanecdotes-anecdotes of Napoleon, Bismarck,Churchill,De Gaulle, and so on-the opening anecdote Poker is a well-structurednarrativeinvolving a famous indiof Wittgenstein's vidual about whom the reader can be expected to have the usual common notions. Characteristically also, it has been borrowedfrom the public domainand is not itself the product of historical research or discovery. Not surprisingly,it produces fairly predictableresults and does not contributeto the opening up of new historicalquestions or lead to new areas of historicalexploration. As a structured form, written or oral, that is passed from hand to hand or mouth to mouth and, transcendingthe particularcircumstancesit relates, that pretends to a broader significance, the anecdote depends on, epitomizes, and confirms generally accepted views of the world, human nature,and the human condition. It may be invoked to illustratea problemor even a paradox,but it will not usu57. Ibid., 12.

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ally lead to a rethinkingof the terms of the problem or paradox.In contrast,as an unpublished,often secret record of events excluded from the official record, anecdotesmay challenge the historianto expand and revise establishedor authorized views of a historical situation,event, or personalityor of humanbehavior generally.In the modem guise of thefait divers, that is, as a raw journalisticor archivalreport of a striking, disturbing,or perplexing event or behavior, anecdotes may likewise provokea reconsideration of what we believe we know about history and society and lead us to considerpreviously unobservedaspects of the past. As Marc Ferro notes, the "fortuitousincident"-dismissed as a non-event by churches, governments, political parties, and similar established institutions-is in fact a "necessity of (the writing of) history ... a privileged historical object"in that it serves as an "indicateur de sante,"a signal of troublein the textureof society, politics, the economy, or the prevailingvalue system.57 Princeton University

57. Marc Ferro, "Presentation," Annales 38 (1983), 824-825.