Laudator Temporis Acti

Régine Pernoud, Those Terrible Middle Ages: Debunking the Myths, tr. Anne Englund Nash (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000), pp. 140-141:

It is probably one of the major errors of our time: this belief that history is created in our little brains, that one can construct it "at will". The attitude of that writer (the director of a "history series"—what a shame!) who, in a discussion about the origins of Christopher Colombus, said to the historian Marianne Mahn-Lot: "Your thesis is perhaps true, but leave people free to think as they wish!" is perfectly typical. It would undoubtedly have embarrassed this gentleman to be asked the time. If he had responded "8:30 p.m.", one could have retorted: "Leave me free to think as l wish: I think it's three in the morning."

It would be impossible to deny history more ingenuously or more brazenly. The freedom of thought that history, like all scientific research, implies and necessitates can in no way be confused with the intellectual fantasies of an individual, dictated by his political options, his personal opinions, or his impulses of the moment, or more simply by the desire to write a big book with a large edition. History has its proper domain. It ceases to exist if it is no longer a search for the true, founded on authentic documents; it literally evaporates; at best it is only fraud and mystification. This is the place to cite the very fine definition by Henri-lrénée Marrou: "A man of science, the historian is, as it were, delegated by his fellow men to the conquest of truth.”<sup>1

1</sup> De la connaissance historique (Paris: Éd. du Seuil, 1954), 219.

Id., p. 168:

History is an ascesis; I would unquestioningly say a heroic ascesis. Those who have excavated this summer, according to the expression of Archéologia, will freely recognize this with me—for they are closer to history than the gatherers of anecdotes and forgers of fantasies calculated to flatter opinion. Arduous science demands bending at length over shards and unintelligible scribbles—those scribbles that the Marxist historians find easy to treat with scorn because they call into question their own existence as historians. To weigh and feel the weight of the historical value of each source of documentation, from the pottery shard to the ancient deed or notarial act, slowly to disengage the living substance from a juxtaposition of controlled facts, that which permits one to reconstitute piece by piece the itinerary of a person, his work, and at times, if one has sufficiently abundant and expressive a documentation, his mentality—that demands many years of work, and in our era of facility, it is, once again, nearly heroic, but this too merely belongs to the price of doing history.

Id., p. 170:

By familiarizing oneself with other times, other eras, other civilizations, one acquires the habit of distrusting criteria of one's own time: they will evolve like others have evolved. It is the occasion for personally revising one's own thought mechanism, one's own motives for action or reflection by comparison with those of others. There is in that an enlargement of the familiar horizon that can be extremely beneficial, on condition, of course, that it is a matter of true history and not simply of the prefabricated judgments distributed so generously in teaching.