1 - Historical representation and discursive context
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 December 2009
Summary
[History] is the only articulate communication … which the Past can have with the Present, the Distant with what is Here.
Thomas Carlyle, ‘On History Again’ (1833)Historical representation in context
Vergniaud's nephew
In Book 47 of his history of the Girondins (1847), Lamartine recounts how Vergniaud's brother-in-law, a certain M. Alluaud, came to Paris from Limoges in order to bring money to the imprisoned Girondin leader, who had already been stripped of his worldly possessions and was soon afterwards to die on the scaffold; how he was accompanied by his tenyear-old son who, terrified, hid from the sight of the famished, pale face of his uncle, with his torn and dirty clothes, his unkempt hair and his long beard; how the child clung to his father, but how Vergniaud took him up in his arms:
‘Mon enfant, lui dit le prisonnier en le prenant dans ses bras, rassuretoi et regarde-moi bien; quand tu seras homme, tu diras que tu as vu Vergniaud, le fondateur de la République, dans le plus beau temps et dans le plus glorieux costume de sa vie: celui oú il souffrait la persécution des scélérats, et où il se préparait á mourir pour les hommes libres’.
L'enfant s'en souvint en effet, et le redit cinquante ans aprés á celui qui écrit ces lignes. (II:517)Information
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- The Rhetoric of Historical RepresentationThree Narrative Histories of the French Revolution, pp. 19 - 62Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1991
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