Session Abstract

This roundtable panel explores how historical research and narration of individual life stories can shed light on wider processes of colonization, specifically within the French empire from the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries. Each panelist is working on a project that reconstructs the lives of individuals who transited multiple sites within France’s imperial networks, between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The microhistorical method suggests that we use these stories, especially of marginalized people, to shed light on wider historical contexts and processes. In this case, we seek to understand the production of status, identity (religious, racial, gendered, subject/citizenship), and ideology, thus contributing to recent historiographical inquiry into “Frenchness.” At the same time, each of these social and cultural categories are integral in the production of the historical archive – shaping the evidence that survives for historical interpretation of these lives. We want to be mindful of the ways in which accessible evidence is shaped by many of the historical processes that we seek to recover.

Format: Each panelist will very briefly describe the subject of their study and the moderator will facilitate a discussion of the use of biographical narratives as a means to shed light on wider processes of colonialism in the French context, using such questions as: 

• What kinds of sources can the historian turn to in generating “life history” approaches?
• What are some of the insights that arise through tracing a single life through multiple imperial spaces?
• What are some of the pitfalls (pragmatically, but especially theoretically) of this biographical approach?
• What are some of the specifically French aspects of colonial/imperial history that benefit from the biographical approach?
• How do instances of scandal or cause célèbre (intimated in several of the life stories discussed by panelists) help or hinder our understanding of colonization?