The other side of the Republic : History and historians at the Académie française (1870-1940)

Throughout the Third Republic, the Académie française remained one of the most prominent institutions in the field of cultural production. Its forty members, however, embodied what Arno Mayer termed “the persistence of the Old Regime”, as promoters of political and cultural values opposed to the intellectual model, both republican and secular, endorsed by the regime. This un-peaceful coexistence resulted from a convergence of interests between the state and the academicians, allowing the former to benefit from the Academy’s national and international reputation as well as its contribution to nationbuilding, while academicians derived considerable social prestige and moral authority from this official patronage. Even though the French social memory canonized the Académie française as a literary institution, we argue that the case of history best exemplifies these dynamics. Drawing on a prosopography of Académie française historians and a database of the annual prizes awarded by the academicians to history books, this paper highlights the significant features of the institution, defined as a counter-society deeply embedded in Catholicism, aristocracy, nationalism, and royalism, at the forefront of a genuinely counter-hegemonic project. In doing so, this research sheds light not only on a remarkable section of the Third Republic’s cultural field but also on a political institution generally overlooked by historical scholarship despite its pivotal function in the “culture wars” of the period.