In his book on Michelet, Brahami points to a little revolution in method that follows in the wake of Michelet’s metaphors. Michelet, who was as close to skin, bone, blood and sex as any nineteenth century bon vivant, did not like the idea of the historian looking at history through a telescope or a loupe. Brahami goes outside of his strictly historical work, and finds in such texts as “The People” and “The Bird” the key to Michelet’s method – a auscultation of history. Michelet work as a historian was contemporaneous with the instrument invented by his contemporary, Laennec. He uses the image in a rather charming way in The Bird: the woodpecker « ausculates to see how the tree sounds, what it says, what it is in itself. The procedure of auscultation, so recent in medicine, was the principle art of the woodpecker for millenia. It interrogated, sounded, saw by hearing. »
This is a rather fascinating out of the frame metaphor. The British and American historical method was a sort of junction of positivism and epic. But the French school, from Michelet to Foucault, has always been directed by another metaphoric, a combination of folksong and positivism, if such a thing is thinkable.
Brahami quotes the preface from Michelet’s The People:
“Thus, I closed my books and I placed myself in the people as much as I could ; the solitary writer plunges into the crowd, he listens to the noises, notes the voices.” The opposition between the book and the crowd, here, may be a little rough – but even in the book, the books that contain the noted voices, the popular media, there is a sort of historiographic listening that is extraneous to the spirit of the British and American schools, until recently. The failure of historians in the U.S. to use the amazing material of the slave narratives gathered after the Civil War was a failure due to both racism and a predominantly visual sense of history, as if we could “see” the past better than we could hear it.
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