The March 2024 issue of French History is a Special Issue celebrating the work of Colin Jones, edited by Charles Walton and Cathy McClive. In this post, we spoke to Cathy, Charles and Colin about France, the Age of Revolutions, 1968, and the joys and humour of writing history.

Hi all, thanks for joining us to talk about the new special issue of French History celebrating the work of Colin Jones. Cathy and Charles, as the editors, could you start by telling us a little about the background to this special issue?

Charles Walton: Good question. Back in January of 2020, Tom Stammers put Cathy and me in touch with each other. Cathy wanted to organise panels for the SSFH annual meeting in honour of Colin that summer to mark his upcoming retirement from Queen Mary.

Cathy McClive: When Colin told me he planned to retire, I emailed his wife Professor Josephine McDonagh and we put together a list of names and possible plans. The SSFH annual meeting in London in 2020 seemed an obvious choice for a series of honorary panels given Colin’s extensive career in the UK and the fact that London is his home city. It was funny because at first the organizers rejected the panels because they didn’t believe that Colin was retiring, and I had to ask Jo to email them and confirm that I wasn’t making it up! I don’t think that they could contemplate the idea that he was actually retiring! When that didn’t work out Tom put me in touch with Charles and we pivoted to the online workshop.

Charles Walton: How innocent we all were in January 2020! When the pandemic threw a wrench in those plans, Cathy and I organised an online event for the following summer (2021): ‘Colin Jones and Eighteenth-century France: Art, Revolution, Science and Medicine’. The two-day workshop involved short papers interspersed with reminiscences, including some of Colin’s. It was hosted by the Early Modern and Eighteenth-Century Centre at the University of Warwick, where Colin spent a portion of his career and was head of department. It is still available to view online. We had 19 speakers from 5 countries.

Cathy McClive and Charles Walton: The special issue grew out of some of the papers from the workshop.

Other colleagues and friends of Colin joined us later in the process. We aimed for a mix of contributors at different stages of their careers, from Colin’s peers to those he mentored and postgraduates he advised. We also tried to capture the breadth of Colin’s research as reflected in the workshop themes: ‘Art, Revolution, and Medicine’.

Colin Jones: For my part, I would like to register my warmest thanks to Charles and Cathy for organising the special issue. They had kindly put together an online conference in my honour a few years ago, and indeed following that we talked briefly about plans to take it further. But I had no idea of the scale or exact nature of the operation, until they approached me for a final comment for the special issue. When I saw the text as a whole, I was dumbfounded with gratitude and felt very humble to be the honoured in this way by so many I am lucky to count as friends.  

Colin, could we ask about how you got started as a historian? What do you wish you knew then that you know now?

Colin Jones: I would isolate three early career moments, each quite vivid in my mind.

The first when I was an undergraduate at Oxford. The great thing about Oxford then was the freedom it gave to work on your own. I found myself reading C.E. Labrousse’ work on prices before the French Revolution. Most colleagues would not find this the most exciting read, but I felt thrilled to seem to be  getting beneath the car bonnet (American: hood) to look at the workings of the motor of change. 

Second, after having to write an essay on the impact of Roman imperium on Anglo-Saxon England I bitterly complained to some friends that I just hated the Middle Ages for its ‘irrelevance’. (This was 1968, it should be said in my defence!)  They informed me that Oxford had just set up a joint degree in History and French: the syllabus allowed me to drop medieval history, concentrate on France and Europe, work with the great French Revolutionist, Richard Cobb, read many French novels and have a year out in France. It seemed a no-brainer. It was to determine the shape of my whole life.

Third, I spent 1969-70 in Paris and besides all the political excitement of the times – I was arrested twice and put in gaol for nothing more radical than walking in the Latin Quarter with long hair – I started going to the Archives Nationales, then located in the Salle Soubise of the Hôtel Soubise and working on primary sources for an undergraduate dissertation. I remember thinking: I love this; I hope I can go on and do more of it.

If I knew then what I know now I would have deprived myself of all the fun (and some pains too) of learning along the way. If I have one shamefaced regret, however, it is that I was so dismissive of medieval history, which I now realise was just rank prejudice on my part and a misunderstanding of what ‘relevance’ really means.

How do you think the fields you have worked in have changed since your first work?

Colin Jones: The change that has cheered me most is the way that francophone scholars now routinely read in English. This was just not the case when I started out and when my supervisor Richard Cobb was the only anglophone scholar whose work French scholars read (and that was because he wrote at that time almost exclusively in French). The only other ‘Anglo-Saxons’ they engaged with– like R.R. Palmer and Bill Doyle – they attacked. This has changed very dramatically, and I believe that francophone colleagues are now often more likely to be versed in key works in English than the other way round. I love the rich, refreshing and respectful transnationality of exchanges within the research community these days. God bless H-France for its role in this!  In terms of approaches to the past, I started out when the ‘history from below’ style of social history seemed the cutting edge. I have tried not to stagnate but to learn from and contribute to the movement for the history of women and gender in the 1980s and early 1990s and what passes as the ‘cultural turn’ in the 1990s. Where I have not been able to adapt so far is the move towards global history since circa 2000, but I am comforted in the thought that the centrality of issues of inequality highlighted in the global turn are not so far removed from what we tended to see in terms of social class.

How did the participants and editors work together to assemble the special issue?

Charles Walton and Cathy McClive: It was a delight to work with French History’schief editor Joe Clarke. He was enthusiastic about the project from the outset. We stewarded the articles in the first instance. Joe kept the peer-review process on track. He and Claire Eldridge offered very helpful editorial advice. They were meticulous with copy-editing and saved us the embarrassment of silly errors. It is not every journal that provides such robust assistance, and we’re very grateful for it! Once Joe stepped down Tom Hamilton took over and he was incredibly helpful too in the final stages of production.

The special issue is such an interesting snapshot of how other historians have been influenced by Colin’s work and taken forward the questions he asks. What do you want readers to take away from the issue?

Charles Walton: The most obvious take away is the sheer breadth and depth of Colin’s work. His forays into the worlds of art, medicine, consumption, gender, urban history, court culture and revolution are evident in the range of articles gathered in the issue. By framing his scholarship as oscillating between ‘the fox’ and ‘the hedgehog’, we hoped to tease out what we see as two aspects: his desire to understand the past with all its specificity and uniqueness (historicism) but also the desire to identify underlying processes of historical transformation (commerce, consumption the bourgeoisie) running through various domains of social life. In addition to conveying the breadth and influence of his work, we wanted to provide a sense of his collegiality and generosity.

Cathy McClive: We also felt it important to highlight Colin’s methodological range. His oeuvre draws on social and demographic quantitative approaches to the history of charity and hospitals, then shifts into redefinitions of cultural history and the role of texts and print culture, all the while engaging seriously with gender history, the history of the body and emotions, before moving into a highly original take on micro historical analysis of 9 Thermidor, which frankly is astonishing! As Charles says we also really wanted to emphasize Colin’s extraordinary mentoring of so many French historians across the generations at all career stages. It really is exceptional for an academic of his seniority.  

The introduction to the special issue highlights not only Colin’s intellectual contribution but his lively writing. Do you have any tips on writing for budding historians?

Charles Walton: ‘Good writing can take you a long way’, an undergraduate advisor once told me. Although it is no substitute for good historical analysis, it helps persuade. Sadly, the UK education system no longer prioritises writing skills in primary and secondary education, so there is a lot of catching up to do at the university level. I am often surprised that students have never heard of the classics on writing, such as Strunck and White’s Elements of Style and Willian Zinsser’s On Writing Well. Every writer should have these on their shelves! Taking the time with students to analyse ‘what makes this text pleasant to read’ can sensitise them to the artistic aspects of our craft.

Cathy McClive: I’ve been teaching a class on writing history at Florida State called ‘The Historian’s Craft’ for a number of years now and the main thing I try to convey to the students is the importance of practice. Writing well is something that comes with repeated practice, reflection, re-reading, re-drafting, and editing. I encourage them to schedule writing time each week for their projects, rather than leaving it to the last minute, and to take time to think about feedback and hone their papers. I agree with Octavia Butler that to write well we need to make writing a habit, instead of waiting for inspiration to strike or the urgency of the night before a deadline to instil fear!

Colin Jones: My own writing style is based on two practices: shameless theft and endless tinkering. I read widely in and beyond the discipline and am always on the qui vive for expressions, turns of phrase or ways of putting a point across that I might be able to use in my own writing. I love wit and humour and so pillage remorselessly anything that makes me smile. I then take pleasure in mashing up styles and genres, sometimes juxtaposing semi-demotic phrasing with what may appear to be high-falutin. I realise this does drive some readers of my work round the bend and may not always cross the Channel very well, lat alone the Atlantic. I was accused in the New Yorker quite a few years ago of writing like an eighteenth-century bishop! (Who knew?!) Anyway, it is too late to change. While I don’t at all see myself as a perfectionist, I do spend a lot of time going over what I have written, changing things around and trying to get things right in terms of tone, mood, content –  and readability. I always try to put myself in readers’ shoes: that’s my best tip in fact.

What do you think the next few years hold for work on the Age of Revolutions?

Charles Walton: Predicting future trends is perilous, and it is all too easy to project one’s own interests onto coming waves. But the sudden reversal of globalisation, the rise of national retrenchments and the outbreak of war in Europe may prompt historians to turn back to nationalism and the nation state. This turn might link up in fruitful ways with the growing interest in political economy and capitalism. Rebecca Spang’s work points in this direction. For my part, I would like to see the nation state approached as an economic actor in its own right and not just as a shaper of an ‘economy’ anchored in civil society. There is much interesting work coming out of economics these days, especially by women, that might inspire historians to look at the relationship between states, money and markets with fresh lenses. The recent books of Kate Raworth, Ann Pettifor, Marianna Mazzucato and Stephanie Kelton spring to mind. Not all are historical, but they disrupt a good many neoliberal assumptions that we historians often don’t even realise we hold.

Although cultural anthropology is out of fashion these days in history, the late David Graeber’s work on ‘debt’ offers interesting perspectives that might help us reconceptualise the overlaps between cultures of obligation and political economy. No doubt, the study of Atlantic revolutions will continue apace. But whereas much of this scholarship has focussed on circulation and entanglements, there are signs of interest in comparative and integrative analyses, such as David Bell’s recent Men on Horseback, which examines ‘charisma’ in different revolutionary contexts, and Nathan-Perl Rosenthal’s The Age of Revolutions, which identifies patterns of mobilisation across different revolutions and how those patterns have changed between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Cathy McClive: I think that the most exciting new work in eighteenth-century and revolutionary French history puts the Occident into conversation with the global context, and in particular with race, gender, and ethnicity. Christy Pichichero, Robin Mitchell, Lorelle Semley, and Julie Duprat have all done really important work recently on what it meant to be Black and French in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I’m eagerly awaiting Mitchell’s biography of Suzanne L’Ouverture. Scholarship on gender and the revolution is increasingly nuanced in exciting ways revealing the importance of local and regional differences across France, and the impact of political differences. Colin’s new edition of the Duchesse d’Elbeuf’s journals (with Simon Macdonald and Alex Fairfax-Cholmely) for instance, demonstrates the importance of considering royalist women’s experiences when asking how the revolution impacted women.

Colin Jones: My own work on 1789 as a ‘bourgeois revolution’ looks awfully dated now, but around the time of the Bicentenary I was trying to highlight the dynamism of the French economy in the eighteenth century at a time when it was invariably locked in a revisionist loop which stressed French social torpor and economic backwardness (notably in regard to Britain). The global turn and more recently the new history of capitalism have combined to confirm French economic dynamism, albeit within the global and not merely ‘hexagonal’ framework and over the whole of the 1750-1850 period not simply up to 1789. The balance of much of the most striking recent work addresses this expanded agenda.

If you could see one change in academia in the next five years, what would it be?

Charles Walton: I suspect that the growth of artificial intelligence will radically reshape academia, challenging not only how we do our work and how our students learn but also the value of our work and our sense of purpose. Although the contours of this brave new world are hard to discern at present, we might prepare for it by putting the ‘human’ back into the ‘humanities’ – to valorise human interaction and community. Sadly, universities have for too long bought into the de-humanising language of ‘metrics’. If this language continues to constitute the measure of our worth, AI and most certainly AGI (artificial general intelligence) will render us obsolete. By shifting the focus from ‘metrics’ to ‘lived experience’, we might re-dynamize history. It is ironic that historians have written much about ‘lived experience’ but not very much about what kind of ‘lived experience’ we want to create for ourselves and our students. By reflecting more on community and human presence, we might find ways to produce meaningful experiences that AI cannot easily produce for us (and without us). I have no idea how to go about this but am persuaded that we should start reimaging what we do along these lines.

Cathy McClive: I agree, I would love to see Higher Education shift away from the concepts of market forces and back towards explorations of how disciplines like History and the Humanities can enrich our understanding and our communities in non-material ways. There’s so much historical research that could usefully inform our approaches to the current ‘pandemicene’ and climate change.

Colin Jones: I can see repeated and daunting challenges from the directions noted by Cathy and Charles. On a more general level, I do worry that recent engagement with global and micro-historical analysis risks scholars abandoning national history and leaving the genre to be taken over by amateurs and ghastly Zemmour-style populists. David Blackbourn’s recent Germany and the World: A Global History, 1500-2000 (2023) is a stirring attempt to rethink national history in the light of the global turn, and I have a stab at much the same thing in my forthcoming book, A Shortest History of France (2025). It would be great if this were the start of a trend. Finally, and I hope not too chimerically, over the next five years I would love to see, very simply, more jobs. There are so many brilliant early career scholars out there!

---

Colin Jones is Emeritus Professor of Cultural History at Queen Mary’s University London. Check out his faculty bio here for a full list.

Cathy McClive is Ben Weider Professor of History at Florida State University. Her work focuses on social and cultural history of medicine, embodiment, gender, sexualities and expertise in early modern France.

Charles Walton is a historian of France and Director of the Early Modern and Eighteenth Century Centre. Before joining the History Department at Warwick, he taught at Yale University, the University of Oklahoma (Norman) and Sciences Po (Paris). His research focuses on Ancien Régime, Enlightenment and Revolutionary France, with emphases on rights, political economy and socio-economic justice.

Title Image: Alt text: Colour print shows a game with a blindfolded man who represents the French people stumbling between three female figures, representing liberty, equality and fraternity. One holds out a red phrygian bonnet for him, the second is adjusting his blindfold and the third is playing a triangle to attract his attention. To their right stands death in a black cape, his scythe at the ready. From the trees above the figures hangs a sign in French reading ‘Liberty, equality, fraternity, DEATH’. The image is subtitled in French ‘The French people, or Robespierre’s regime.