INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF HISTORY

[132] Fustel de Coulanges explains very clearly the danger of this method: "Some students begin by forming an opinion ... and it is not till afterwards that they begin to read the texts. They run a great risk of not understanding them at all, or of understanding them wrongly. What happens is that a kind of tacit contest goes on between the text and the preconceived opinions of the reader; the mind refuses to grasp what is contrary to its idea, and the issue of the contest commonly is, not that the mind surrenders to the evidence of the text, but that the text yields, bends, and accommodates itself to the preconceived opinion.... To bring one's personal ideas into the study of texts is the subjective method. A man thinks he is contemplating an object, and it is his own idea that he is contemplating. He thinks he is observing a fact, and the fact at once assumes the colour, and the significance his mind wishes it to have. He thinks he is reading a text, and the words of the text take a particular meaning to suit a ready-made opinion. It is this subjective method which has done most harm to the history of the Merovingian epoch.... To read the texts was not enough; what was required was to read them before forming any convictions...." (Monarchie franque, p. 31). For the same reason Fustel de Coulanges deprecated the reading of one document in the light of another; he protested against the custom of explaining the Germania of Tacitus by the barbaric laws. In the Revue des questions historiques, 1897, vol. i, a lesson on method, De l'analyse des textes historiques, is given apropos of a commentary by M. Monod on Gregory of Tours: "The historian ought to begin his work with an exact analysis of each document.... The analysis of a text ... consists in determining the sense of each word and eliciting the true meaning of the writer.... Instead of searching for the sense of each of the historian's words, and for the thought he has expressed in them, he [M. Monod] comments on each sentence in the light of what is found in Tacitus or the Salic law.... We should understand what analysis really is. Many talk about it, few use it.... The use of analysis is, by an attentive study of every detail, to elicit from a text all that is in it; not to introduce into the text what is not there." After reading this excellent advice it will be instructive to read M. Monod's reply (in the Revue historique); it will be seen that Fustel de Coulanges himself did not always practise the method he recommended.

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