Zoom-Link:
https://univienna.zoom.us/j/64147884198?pwd=i3H6mmou1zg5hdSddyM3WqGCuKKbdP.1
Meeting-ID: 641 4788 4198 | Kenncode: 896354
Johannes Sartou Jørgensen (Aarhus University):
From the Political Margins to the Sorbonne: George Lefebvre and the Institutionalisation of History 'from Below'
This presentation is an excerpt from the fourth chapter of my dissertation, "Staging the Subaltern: The Making and Remaking of the Past from Below", in which I trace the emergence of a historiographical thought-figure foregrounding “forgotten voices” and popular agency from 1846 to 1964.
The chapter examines the French historian Georges Lefebvre's role in institutionalising histoire d'en bas - “history from below” - within 20th-century French historiography. I situate Lefebvre between two formative traditions: the Annales School, with its attention to long-term social structures, collective mentalities, and the rhythms of everyday life, and the class-centred, politically engaged histories of Jean Jaurès and Albert Mathiez. While concerns with popular agency had circulated in earlier historical writing, often articulated from leftist or politically marginal perspectives, Lefebvre was the first to systematise them into a coherent, methodologically rigorous approach integrating peasants and urban crowds within a structure of multiple layers of social, political, and psychological agency.
The presentation focuses on readings of The Great Fear (1932) and The Coming of the French Revolution (1939) to extract Lefebvre's understanding and method of histoire d'en bas, showing how he transforms longstanding historiographical concerns about popular agency into a scholarly approach.
Johannes Sartou Jørgensen is a PhD candidate in Intellectual History at Aarhus University (Denmark) and a visiting researcher at the Department of Economic and Social History, University of Vienna, in winter term 2025/26. His dissertation, "Staging the Subaltern: The Making and Remaking of the Past from Below", explores the emergence and development of a historiographical thought-figure that foregrounds 'forgotten voices' and popular agency, focusing on the period from 1846 to 1964.
