In the 1950s, the Vatican employed a variety of means in a bid to influence UNESCO's scientific research. This article uncovers the actions that targeted the Cahiers d'histoire mondiale (henceforth the Cahiers), a UNESCO publication edited by the historian Lucien Febvre. Drawing upon new archival research, combining the archives of Pope Pius XII's Secretariat of State and of UNESCO, it proposes a microhistory of the resources employed and the actors who contributed to undermining the journal. Scholars from France, Italy, Belgium and the United States helped implement the Roman Curia's strategy that sought to impose a Catholic vision of history. Priests and laypersons secretly met in Paris. Intellectuals, sometimes colleagues of Lucien Febvre at the & Eacute;cole pratique des hautes & eacute;tudes (EPHE), engaged in battles backed by Pius XII's Cardinal Secretary of State Domenico Tardini. By exercising constant pressure upon and infiltrating the editorial board between 1949 and 1954, these actors steered the Cahiers in a direction that was at once conservative, Eurocentric and proselytizing. As a result, the publication was poles apart from the project that Febvre had originally conceived.
This article explores the career of Claude Pithoys-a Minim monk who became a Calvinist and professor of philosophy at the Academy of Sedan-in order to assess how an author could establish themselves within the public sphere. It demonstrates that an author's standing depended on negotiating their legitimacy to write, especially when they crossed confessional, censorial and doctrinal boundaries. In this context, Claude Pithoys crafted a fictional persona or 'paper double' as a writer within his texts, which strengthened his position in the world of publishing and of religious controversies during the seventeenth century.
Abstract The archival ledgers of the second French East India Company (1719–70) appear well suited to digital analysis, but a quantitative approach can have risks. From our experience on a multi-year digital humanities project that revisits these maritime trade records, we share pros and cons of using relational databases to analyse individuals, geography and identity. A better understanding of the biases and priorities of the original record creators allows us to recover women, children and free and enslaved racialized labourers. Rather than attempting to eliminate distortions in these ‘dirty’ primary sources and their subsequent layers of interpretation, we recommend developing flexible interpretative layers that allow for changes in historical understanding, and that can be reused by historians asking different questions. These enriched records help us revise the position of the Compagnie des Indes in French colonial history, providing new evidence of the diverse individuals who participated in trans-oceanic trade.
Abstract Poor relief in France on the eve of the Revolution was found wanting, both by contemporaries and historians. But existing economic histories of almsgiving suffer from serious flaws, of the kind common to quantification on a macro scale. They extrapolate from patchy data and ignore variation in favour of averages. Their judgements employ a highly subjective language of ‘generosity’, based on narrowly defined quantitative measures. Their calculations, by their own admission, omit all giving that cannot be readily counted, such as so-called ‘informal’ charity. This article moves away from macro estimates to a micro-level approach, using a rare set of sources: the responses to an enquiry into poverty in the Rouen area by the Commission intermédiaire de l’Assemblée provinciale in 1788, which notably includes voluntary alms. Ultimately, the article invites a wider and less negative reassessment of charitable giving that encompasses both ‘small’ and ‘big data’.
Abstract In the twenty-first century, quantitative history seems to have made a comeback. And with it, the phrase ‘cleaning data’ has become commonplace. Data seems to be considered dirty when it includes blanks or gaps (missing information), weirdness (exceptions, unusual phrasings, things written in the margins of administrative forms, etc.) and contradictions (in the same source, as in the case of traces of deletion, and especially across sources). This article advocates for keeping these features of the data and for taking them seriously, because they can be key to source criticism as well as to substantive interpretation.
