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.”1
1 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.