Extract
[...] What we find in this interview is these bridges, this plurality of thoughts and works by new authors who have made the new social science up to Ariès' recent death. The plural organism of these researches is not without recalling the critical history of Foucault's knowledge itself, its method, its forms, the porosities and polysemies it implies. Died in 1984, the historian Philippe Ariès left behind a great work whose most well-known titles are theHistory of the French Populations and their attitudes towards life (1948), The Child and Family Life under the Ancien Régime (1960), and his masterpiece Man before Death (1977). [...]
[...] A rapprochement then took place between The Child and Family Life and the analyses of the philosopher Michel Foucault around the idea of a modernity that would be the place of a 'separation', a quarantine of children. In the preface to the new edition of 1973, which constitutes an essay in itself on the 1960 version, Philippe Ariès gives credit to this thesis and therefore indirectly to the emerging model: This quarantine, it's the school, the high school. A long process of imprisonment of children (like the mad, the poor and the prostitutes) then begins, which will no longer cease to expand until today and is called schooling». [...]
[...] Finally, after the First World War, the "forbidden death", hidden, triumphs. Beyond the proposed interpretation scheme, Philippe Ariès' approach to death remains fundamentally linked to the vision of the evolution of society developed in the history of the French populations. With the transition from a traditional civilization based on instinct to a technical civilization where reason triumphs, man becomes more attentive to everything that affects his body. In 1948, he insisted on the fact that the idea of reducing death by natural techniques had not always existed in people's minds. [...]
[...] Driven by the wave of the 'new history', Philippe Ariès then became one of its 'founding fathers' with Jacques Le Goff, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Paul Veyne or Michel de Certeau. The primary interest of this interview is in any case to place Ariès' position in the context of post-quantitative new history. The posthumous legacy of the author arrives late. Born in 1914, Philippe Ariès, was not a professional historian, and did not obtain institutional recognition until the age of 64, five years before his death. Michel Foucault recognized him, however, before this period, as he maintained a relationship of esteem with him. [...]
[...] This title was considered too long by his editor at the time, René Withmann. Like the historian Pierre Chaunu, who said he was indebted to the precursor, the probable suicidal death of his brother, Lieutenant Jacques Ariès, deeply affected this young historian. In The Time of History, Philippe Ariès links this episode, which increased his resentment against the history of the event, to this famousinvasion of history ». This is no longer the death of demographers and doctors studied in the history of French populations, but the death true and brutal. [...]
