SubStance

L’histoire est anecdotique: elle intéresse en racontant, comme le roman.

—Paul Veyne, Comment on écrit l’histoire (1971)¹

Les anecdotes sont un champ resserré oú l’on glane après la vaste moisson de l’histoire; ce sont de petits détails longtemps cachés, et de là vient le nom d’anecdotes; ils intéressent le public quand ils concernent des personnages illustres.

—Voltaire, Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751)²

Although coming from different perspectives and periods, the two quotations above speak of the ambivalence that modern historiography has systematically displayed toward the anecdote since Voltaire. An anecdote—defined here as a short, and sometimes humorous account of a true, interesting, if minor, event³—is the matrix of any (hi)story telling and the very substance of historiography. Yet, this fertile soil was also often seen as the threatening substratum from which historiography had to extract itself. After all, anecdotes are associated with rumor, legend, lack of rigor or evidence, a fascination with singularity and with aesthetic form, lawlessness, contamination with fiction, and subjectivity. As unpopular among historians, who tend to endow the phrase “anecdotal history” with condescending overtones, as it is among literary scholars who regard it as part of popular culture, this short narrative genre ranks low, surviving in the grey area of sensationalistic journalism and “faitdivers.” At a juncture when historians in the postmodern context⁴ are cautiously willing to grant it legitimacy, it may be worth exploring some origins of this ambivalence.

In early modern written culture, anecdotes, often interchangeably referred to as “historiettes,” “bagatelles,” or “curiosités,” were particularly widespread. In historical narratives, including memoirs and the increasingly popular genre of the historical novella, they provided a detailed picture of social practices, revealed the back stage of official [End Page 16] historiography, fostered character development, and successfully illustrated the relationship of cause to effect. They were, however, also to be found in other popular genres such as dialogues, conversations, literary portraits, and the lives of illustrious figures inspired by Plutarch.⁵ In some texts, they were even more prominent. Thus, the extremely popular “–ana” consisted of compiled anecdotes, scholarly observations, and witticisms published under the name of the man of letters who uttered them (for example, Thuana after Thuau, Naudéana after Naudé, or Segraisiana after Segrais).⁶ Tallemant des Réaux’s Historiettes is a complete anecdotal “who’s who” of the French court, based on rumors and oral gossip. In Les Caractères, La Bruyère systematically uses them to illustrate his moral observations. Disseminating witty or striking anecdotes was not only a textual practice. It equally permeated courtly sociability, and salon practices, making them a crucial product of “the age of conversation”⁷ and aptly illustrated its core values, such as the ephemeral art of giving broader significance to a small occurrence, a cultivated capacity for oral story telling and bantering, a gift for uttering pleasant gallantries and for drawing moral conclusions lightly, and the admiration for brevity and perfect shape. Telling anecdotes also served as a means of tightening the community and drawing its boundaries through the exchange of rumors and news. Their oral circulation, which undoubtedly preceded any written versions, delineated groups of shared interests, channels of communication, and elective affinities. Their popularity testified to circles that discussed and spread court secrets, a first manifestation of public opinion and of satire.⁸ It also signaled a widespread practice of exchanging curiosities, a feature which, ironically, contributed in the eighteenth century to the marginalization of anecdotes, which were increasingly taken out of their context (court life, historical narrative, etc.) and compiled into autonomous collections of curiosities. Over time, such collections, having declined in status and popularity among cultured elites, stopped being published. Stories once deemed valuable because they had never been published before, anecdotes have nowadays become insignificant, as noted by scholars of modernity (Huglo). Yet, when heavily amplified and elaborated, they are still at the root of the literary short story and the novel.

Voltaire’s Le Siècle de Louis XIV, first published in 1751, reflects history’s ambivalence towards this...