Abstract
The concluding remarks in this final chapter build on individual singularities as well as collective patterns that emerge from the ego-histories presented here. First, this text reflects on how scholars in the current volume have engaged with what can be seen as certain passages obligés, essential and perhaps unavoidable steps of the ego-history genre, namely the questioning of the origins of one’s research (‘why?’, but also ‘how?’ and ‘when?’) and of the links between personal identities and intellectual trajectories. Second, it focuses on the research shifts and developments observed in the wake of the ‘Paxtonian turn’. A third section looks at interdisciplinary and collaborative openings along with the social and public role played by scholars working on this period. A fourth and final section considers ego-histories of France and the Second World War from an intergenerational perspective.
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Notes
- 1.
Glimpses of the contributors’ personal lives nonetheless transpire in several chapters, most notably in Robert Gildea’s. In addition, a number of ego-historians—including Colin Nettelbeck , Henry Rousso and Robert Gildea—mention occasional intellectual input from their partners, thus acknowledging crossovers between the private and the professional spheres. It should also be noted here that if teaching is rarely mentioned, this may simply be because discussions focused primarily on research during this project. Teaching is nonetheless mentioned in passing in several chapters, and generally positively, by Marc Dambre , Laurent Douzou , Richard Golsan, Bertram M. Gordon, Colin Nettelbeck and Susan Suleiman. Two contributors, however, Hilary Footitt and Colin Nettelbeck , also note how the teaching load and administrative duties had acted as barriers to their research.
- 2.
Marc Dambre, for example, chose to work on Roger Nimier in part because the field of ‘the other Roger’ (Vailland ) seemed already occupied; Renée Poznanski started working on French history when she moved from France to Israel because her background in Russian was of little use there; Bertram M. Gordon opted to work on fascism in France rather than in Romania when he realised that it would have been difficult for him to access Romanian archives at the time; at one point, Hilary Footitt resigned her busy academic position because she wanted to focus on research; and it is because Robert Gildea had a young family at the time that he researched Marianne in Chains (2002) in three contiguous départements; and so on.
- 3.
Created in 1978 and inaugurated in 1980 by historian François Bédarida , its first director, the IHTP is the direct successor of the Comité d’Histoire de la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale (CHDGM, Committee for the History of the Second World War ), created in 1951. Although the scope of the IHTP is wider than the scope of its predecessor, the Second World War remains central to the interests of its researchers.
- 4.
- 5.
On the history and family memories of these ‘colony children’, see Anne Provoost, Kinderen van de Ijzer. De Parijse jaren van de zusjes Vandewalle (Children of the Yser. The Parisian Years of the Vandewalle Sisters), forthcoming.
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Bragança, M., Louwagie, F. (2018). Conclusion: Cross-Perspectives on Ego-history. In: Bragança, M., Louwagie, F. (eds) Ego-histories of France and the Second World War. The Holocaust and its Contexts. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70860-7_17
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