Understanding History through Uchronie: A Historical Analysis

Extract

[...] Would we have had the same borders, the same political systems and if not, what would we have become? Thus, it is noted that the motivations of historians go beyond the simple framework of history to embrace notions that are rather oriented towards philosophy: what makes a humanity, a culture: how is it constructed and can it be malleable? The historical events used by the authors become quasi-pretexts - it is understood that these events are chosen but others could very well have been used to understand the more fundamental notions raised by the authors' problem and this work. [...]

[...] This historical school brings together a variety of historians quite diverse in the image of Michel de Pure or Louis Napoléon Geoffroy-Château whose novel Napoleon and the conquest of the world (1836) reconsiders the idea that Napoleon would have fled to Moscow. How do the authors treat the announced problem? In order to nourish their reflections, the authors rely essentially on works. Indeed, within the indicative bibliography proposed at the end of the work, in which we note that the authors rely on cliometric studies. [...]

[...] In proposing refaire history, the authors lead their readers into a parallel reading of history. Indeed, the idea of taking back the scientific codes (history word) and associating it with the fantasy of an imagination of what it could have been. From then on, we witness a uchronie. ? On : This is a collective approach, beyond the authors themselves, we are as readers invited to analyze the history and take a step back. This word has a crucial importance in the sense that it questions the notion of the reader facing history: should he be passive and read the history or have a critical spirit facing the history that the author proposes to him? [...]

[...] Yes : This word undertakes to interpret the subject of study through a grammatical means: it is the subjunctive. The authors, from the title, propose another reading that in no case confronts the official version of History. From then on, this book, and the research related to it, cannot intervene in a desire to contradict propose an alternative History as can be found in certain works such as those proposing a re-reading of World War II. The period and space used by the authors are very vague and cannot be defined in a fixed manner. [...]

[...] The challenge of this title is situated around three concepts: ? Refaire and history : The concept of uchronie lies within the entanglement of these two words. Indeed, the idea is to take back the term History: a scientific term residing in the will of scientists - in this case, historians - to understand historical events in our society and provide answers to the imbrications of events with each other, particularly through a specific subject: for example: how did we arrive at the Second World War? [...]