Wesleyan University
Anecdote and History
Author(s): Lionel Gossman
Source: History and Theory, Vol. 42, No. 2 (May, 2003), pp. 143-168
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History and Theory42 (May 2003), 143-168
C Wesleyan University 2003 ISSN: 0018-2656
ANECDOTE AND HISTORY
LIONELGOSSMAN
Eine Anekdote ist ein historischesElement-ein historisches Molecule oder Epigramm.
-Novalis'
ABSTRACT
Althoughthe term"anecdote"enteredthe modem Europeanlanguagesfairly recently and
remainsto this day ill-defined,the short,freestandingaccountsof particularevents, trueor
invented,that are usually referredto as anecdoteshave been aroundfrom time immemorial. They have also always stood in a close relationto the longer,more elaboratenarratives
of history,sometimes in a supportiverole, as examples and illustrations,sometimes in a
challenging role, as the repressedof history-"la petite histoire."Historians'relationto
them, in turn,varied from appreciativeto dismissive in accordancewith their own objectives in writing history. It appearsthat highly structuredanecdotes of the kind that are
rememberedand find theirway into anecdote collections depend on and tend to confirm
establishedviews of history,the world, and humannature.In contrast,loosely structured
anecdotes akin to the modemfait divers have usually worked to undermineestablished
views and stimulatenew ones, either by presentingmaterial known to few and excluded
from officially authorizedhistories,or by reporting"odd"occurrencesfor which the established views of history,the world, and humannaturedo not easily account.
I. WITTGENSTEIN'S
POKER
How are anecdotes related to history and to the writing of history? The question
was raised in an unusually vivid way by David Edmonds and John Eidinow's
recent, highly successful book Wittgenstein'sPoker: The Story of a Ten-Minute
Argument Between Two Great Philosophers. The kernel of the book is a fairly
well-known anecdote about the encounter of two celebrated Viennese philosophers, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper, at a meeting of the Moral Science
Club of Cambridge University on October 25, 1946. Before the end of Popper's
talk, according to some, Wittgenstein became so incensed by the visitor's deliberately provocative rejection of his own view that there are no philosophical
problems, only language puzzles, that he rose to his feet, brandishing a red-hot
poker in Popper's face before storming angrily out of the room; according to others, Wittgenstein, having used the poker "in a philosophical example" before
dropping it on the tiles around the fireplace, then "quietly (left) the meeting and
andRichardSamuel,vol. 2: "Dasphilosophische
ed.PaulKluckhohn
1. Novalis,Schriften,
Werk,"
andGerhard
ed. RichardSamuel,Hans-Joachim
Schulz(Stuttgart:
Kohlhammer,
1960),567.
Mdihl,
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144
LIONELGOSSMAN
(shut) the door behind him."2The competing versions of the anecdote told by
those who witnessed the scene raise one of the oldest and most fundamentalof
all historiographicalproblems:how to determinewhat actually happenedwhen
eyewitness reportsare at variance.The problemis aggravatedin this instance by
the fact that all the eyewitnesses in question were philosopherspresumablydedicated to the disinterestedsearchfor truth.
Intriguingas this aspect of Wittgenstein'sPoker might be, it is hard not to be
disappointedby the basic strategy the authors adopted for the writing of their
book. This consisted in expandingthe dramaticanecdoterecountedat the beginning into a complex, circumstantial,novel-like story. Edmonds and Eidinow
draw on standardintellectualbiographiesof Wittgensteinand Popper,as well as
publishedhistorical testimonies by persons close to them, histories of Viennese
society and culture,and accountsof modem philosophy,to paint a broadtableau
of the two principalcharactersand their world and to explain their intense rivalry. We learnaboutthe competingphilosophicalpositions of the two protagonists
and the largerbackgroundof early twentieth-centuryViennese philosophy from
which they both emerged;we learn about the families in which they grew upboth highly assimilatedJewish families, one fabulously wealthy and almost aristocratic, the other solidly bourgeois; we learn about the different layers of the
Viennese society they belonged to and in particularabout their differentexperiences, as Austrians of Jewish descent, in a pervasively anti-Semitic culture;
about how each was affected by and responded to National Socialism and the
incorporationof Austria into the Third Reich; about their differentconnections
with English philosophers and English society; and so on. The anecdote thus
unfolds into somethingclose to a culturaland intellectualhistoryof an important
partof Europein the first half of the twentiethcentury."The storyof the poker,"
in Edmonds'sandEidinow's own words, "goes beyond the charactersand beliefs
of the antagonists.It is inseparablefrom the story of their times, opening a window on the tumultuous and tragic history that shaped their lives and brought
them togetherin Cambridge."3
As the representationof a dramaticencounterof two rival philosophers,the
original anecdote had a stripped-down, almost abstract character which left
room-a typical feature of many oral forms-for variationsof detail. Its focus,
besides the competitionbetween two particularways of looking on the world"the schism in twentieth-centuryphilosophy over the significance of language,"
as Edmondsand Eidinow put it4-was perhapsthe more general,comic contrast
between the ostensible natureof philosophy, as the disinterestedand disembodied pursuitof truth,and the intensepersonalconflict of the two philosophers,culminating in an apparent threat of physical violence; between the tranquil,
unworldlylocus of the event-a shabbyroom in a quiet Cambridgecollege-and
2. David Edmondsand John Eidinow, Wittgenstein'sPoker: The Story of a Ten-MinuteArgument
Between TwoGreatPhilosophers (London:Faber and Faber,2001), 16-17.
3. Ibid., 5.
4. Ibid.
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ANECDOTEAND HISTORY
145
the passions that were unleashedin it.5The particularphilosophicalviews of the
rival protagonistswere barely alluded to in the anecdote, which-fairly typically as it turnsout- supposes thatthe audiencealreadyhas certainnotions of them.
Edmondsand Eidinow, in contrast,fill out the anecdote's elementary,essentially
dramaticstructure,put flesh on its bones, and deck it out in colorful clothing.The
300-page history to which it gives rise is an intelligently conductedamplificatio,
but it contains no surprises.The antithesis at the core of the anecdote continues
to structurethe history, providing the frameworkon which the authors arrange
and display their rich but familiarborrowings.
II. DRAMATICAND NOVELISTICCONSTRUCTIONSOF REALITY
The relation of the epic and dramaticgenres, and the implications, in terms of
ideology or Weltanschauung,of narrativeversus dramaticrepresentationsof the
world, have been a major topic of reflection on literaturesince Antiquity.As
anecdotes,I now believe, may favor either--they may reducecomplex situations
to simple, sharplydefined dramaticstructures,but they may also, if more rarely,
prise closed dramaticstructuresopen by perforatingthem with holes of novelistic contingency-a brief discussion of this topic is in order.
The development of narrativein the eighteenth century seems to have been
partof the general critical approachof the Enlightenmentand its questioningof
the normsand beliefs aboutthe natureof humanbeings and the world enshrined
in the contentand the form of Frenchclassical literature.These norms and beliefs
had the undeniablemerit of facilitating a common recognition and understanding of particularactions, situations, and personalities and thus of reinforcing
social cohesion. The novels of Marivaux,Sterne, and Diderot, in contrast,carried-again both formally and thematically-a deliberately disorienting message: that if we examine particularactions, situations, and personalitiesclosely
and in individual detail, we will find that they are not neatly ordered and predictablein the mannersuggestedby the limited repertoryof actions and the welldefined,often antitheticalsets of characters(old man/youngman, master/servant,
and so on) to which they are reduced in classical drama,or by the equally general antitheticalcategories (appearance/reality,substance/accident,mind/matter,
and so on) to which they are reducedin classical philosophy.6What Marivaux's
La Vie de Marianne and Diderot's Jacques le fataliste imply is that reality is a
process of unpredictableand continuous mutations,not something already pre5. In his essay on the structureof thefait divers, Roland Barthes considers "disproportion"and a
"slightly aberrantcausality" to be a feature of the "genre"--if the fait divers can be designated a
genre. ("Structuredu fait divers," in Essais critiques [Paris: Seuil, 1964], 188-197) Most of what
Bartheshas to say aboutthefait divers holds equallyfor certaintypes of anecdote.In the presentcase,
the disproportionmight be said to arise from the spectacle of philosophers,who are meant to argue,
to use words,resortingto physical violence, and from upsettingthe "normal"relation,amongphilosophers, of body and mind.
6. The repertoryof gestures and expressions codified for paintersby CharlesLe Brun, Directorof
Louis XIV's Acad6mieRoyale de Peinture,is anotherexample, alongside the "emplois"or stock characters of the theater,of a view of the world in which the general was deemed more real and fundamental than the particular.
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146
LIONELGOSSMAN
formed and simply waiting to be elaboratedand unfolded (literally divelopped,
with local variations, as in classical comedy, the classical nouvelle or, for that
matter,Cartesianmechanistbiology).7In the greateighteenth-centurynarratives,
life is an adventure,not the acting out of a dramaticpart. It is probablynot fortuitous thatthe hero of Rousseau's groundbreakingautobiographicalnarrativeis
a thoroughlyuprootedbeing, or thatthe centralcharactersof key eighteenth-century novels, such as La Vie de Marianne and Fielding's Tom Jones, are
foundlings or persons of unknownorigin. To such individuals the world has no
obvious markersbut is an enigma whose workingsthey have to explore. They in
turndo not presentthemselves to the world with obvious markers,but must constantly invent and reinvent themselves in a complex negotiation with the world
and its expectations.Appearanceand reality, truthand fiction, virtue and vice,
body and soul, masculine and feminine turnout, in much of the literatureof the
eighteenthcentury,to be not nearly as clearly distinguishableas readersof classical literatureand philosophy might have been encouragedto suppose. Human
behavior and the human psyche no longer appearreducible to the clearly balanced designs and categories of the maxims of La Rochefoucauld.
Writingin the second half of the eighteenthcentury,Chamfort,for one, did not
believe matterswere so simple. "Thingsare miscellanies,"he declared;"menare
patchworks.Ethics and physics are concernedwith mixtures.Nothing is simple,
nothing is pure."8To the authorof Maximes et Pensees, Caract&reset Anecdotes,
the anecdote itself, by situatingmorality in a narrativecontext, however slight,
represented a much-needed correction to the abstract formal structureof the
maxim as practiceda centuryearlierby La Rochefoucauldand a challenge to its
seemingly incontrovertibletruths."Moralists,like those philosopherswho have
constructedsystems of physics or metaphysics, have overgeneralized,and laid
down too many maxims,"he wrote.
What,for instance,becomesof the sayingof Tacitus,"Awomanwho has lost hermodwhenconfronted
withtheexamplesof
estywill notbe ableto refuseanythingafterward,"
so manywomenwhoma momentof weaknesshasnotpreventedfrompracticinga numberof virtues.I haveseenMadamede L_, aftera youthwhichdifferedlittlefromthatof
ManonLescaut,conceivein herriperyearsa passionworthyof Heloise.9
7. A weakening of classical models of composition is also visible in historiography.In one of my
first attemptsto study the structureof a historical text ("Voltaire'sCharles XII: History into Art,"
Studies on Voltaireand the Eighteenth Century25 [1963], 691-720), I tried to show that Voltaire's
early Histoire de Charles XII could be seen as the filling out of an essentially dramaticstructureor,
in rhetoricalterms,as the elaborationof an antithesis(Peterof Russia versus Charlesof Sweden, modem calculationand ruthlessnessversus old-fashionedchivalryand honor,etc.) or a chiasmus(the victor is vanquished,the vanquishedvictorious).The informingantitheticalstructureof the work, I held,
is reinforcedby the pervasiveness of parallelsand antithesesat the textual level and epitomizedin the
proleptic embedded anecdote of the CzarafisArtfchelou in Book 2. I contrastedthis early historical
work of Voltaire'swith the laterSihcle de Louis XIVand the Essai sur les moeurs,both of which I saw
as less dramatic,more truly narrative,more open-ended,tending away from the paradigmatictoward
the syntagmatic(despite the recurrentantitheticalstructureof enlightenmentversus superstition).
8. "Dansles choses, tout est affairesmldees;dans les hommes, tout est pieces de rapport.Au moral
et au physique, tout est mixte. Rien n'est un, rien n'est pur."
9. "Les Moralistes, ainsi que les Philosophes qui ont fait des systhmes en Physique ou en
Mdtaphysiqueont trop generalise, ont trop multipli6 les maximes. Que devient, par exemple, le mot
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ANECDOTEAND HISTORY
147
Though only evoked and not recounted,the anecdote aboutMadame de L_ (its
claim to reality signaled by the delivery of the first-persontestimony in the perfect, not the past tense), does not provide a concrete particularinstance to illustratea generalrule;rather,it bolstersa propositionchallenginggeneral rules and,
along with them, the view of the world implied and communicatedby classical
drama,the classical maxim, the classical caract&re,and some of the basic figures
of classical rhetoric.As Chamfortput it, it is necessary to pay attentionto people's actualbehavior"afinde n'etre pas dupe de la charlataneriedes Moralistes"
("in ordernot to be fooled by the quackeryof our theoristsof human nature")-such as La Rochefoucauldand La Bruybre.
III. DEFININGTHE ANECDOTE
These preliminaryobservationsleave the anecdote still undefined.In fact, scholars cannot even agree whether there is anything definable there, whether the
anecdote can properlybe considered a particularform or genre, like the novel,
the maxim, or the fable. The scholarlyliteratureon the topic, moreover,is scattered and fairly thin, as though the anecdotewere thoughtto be too triviala form
to deserve serious consideration.While much has been written about the essende Tacite:Neque mulier,amissa pudicitia, alia abnuerit aprdsl'exemple de tant de femmes qu'une
faiblesse n'a pas emp&ch6esde pratiquerplusieursvertus?J'ai vu madamede L. .., apresunejeunesse
peu diff6rente de celle de Manon Lescaut, avoir, dans l'age mfr, une passion digne d'Hdloise."
Sdbastien Roch Nicolas de Chamfort,Products of the Perfected Civilization: Selected Writingsof
Chamfort,transl. W. S. Merwin (New York:The Macmillian Company, 1969), 130 (chap. ii), 160
(chap. v). Original French texts in Maximes et Pensdes, Caractureset Anecdotes, ed. Claude Roy
(Paris:Union G6ndraled'Editions, 1963), 56, 88. Cf. the first maximof chap. i: "Maximsand axioms,
like summaries,are the works of persons of intelligence who have labored,as it seems, for the convenience of mediocre and lazy minds. The lazy are happyto find a maxim that spares them the necessity of making for themselves the observationsthatled the maxim's authorto the conclusion to which
he invites his reader.The lazy and the mediocre imagine that they need go no further,and ascribeto
the maxim a generalitythatthe author,unless he was mediocre himself, as is sometimes the case, has
not claimed for it. The superiorman graspsat once the resemblances,the differences,which renderthe
maxim more or less applicablein one instance or another,or not at all. It is much the same with naturalhistory,where the urge to simplify has led to the imaginationof classificationsand divisions.They
could not have been framedwithout intelligence for the necessary comparisonsand the observing of
relationships;but the great naturalist,the man of genius, sees that natureis prodigal in the invention
of individuallydifferentcreatures,and he sees the inadequacyof divisions and classificationswhich
are so commonly used by mediocre and lazy minds"(109). ("Les Maximes, les Axiomes, sont, ainsi
que les Abrdg6s, l'ouvrage des gens d'esprit, qui ont travailld, ce semble, 'a l'usage des esprits
m6diocresou paresseux.Le paresseuxs'accommoded'une Maxime qui le dispense de fairelui-meme
les observationsqui ont mend l'Auteur de la Maxime au r6sultatdont il fait partie 'a son Lecteur.Le
paresseux et l'homme m6diocre se croient dispens6s d'aller au-deli, et donnent Ala Maxime une
g6ndralit6que l'Auteur, A moins qu'il ne soit lui-meme m6diocre .. .n'a pas pr6tendului donner.
L'hommesup6rieursaisit tout d'un coup les ressemblances,les diff6rencesqui font que la Maxime est
plus ou moins applicablea tel ou tel cas, ou ne l'est pas du tout. Il en est de cela comme de l'Histoire
naturelle,oil le d6sirde simplifiera imagindles classes et les divisions. II a fallu avoir de l'espritpour
les faire. Car il a fallu rapprocheret observer des rapports.Mais le grand Naturaliste,I'homme de
g6nie voit que la Natureprodiguedes dtresindividuellementdiff6rents,et voit l'insuffisancedes divisions et des classes qui sont d'un si grandusage aux esprits m6diocresou paresseux ..." (Maximeset
pensdes, 33).
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148
LIONELGOSSMAN
tial natureof tragedy,comedy, the epic, the novel, the short story,the maxim, I
have been able to find only a few works, almostexclusively by Germanscholars,
that attemptto define the nature,form, and function of the anecdote.10Valuable
as these studies are, they focus mainly on a particularspecies of anecdote that
was elevated in the first two decades of the nineteenthcenturyto the status of a
recognized and admired, if minor, literary form in Germany by the Prussian
dramatistand short story writerHeinrichvon Kleist and the Basel-bornSwabian
preacher and popular dialect poet Johann Peter Hebel. (The conjunction of
drama,short-storyform, and anecdote in the case of Kleist does not, as we shall
see, appearto be fortuitous,inasmuchas the dramaand the shortstory are, like a
certain kind of anecdote, condensed forms representing a critical moment in
which the "essence"of a situationor characteris supposedto be made visible.)
The word "anecdote"itself was and is used to describe a wide range of narratives, the defining featureof which appearsto be less their brevity (though most
are quite short) than their lack of complexity.As the OED puts it, an anecdoteis
the "narrativeof a detachedincident, or of a single event, told as being in itself
interestingand striking.""That general dictionarydefinition, which obviously
aims to distinguish the anecdote from more complex narrativeforms like histo10. In particularKlaus Doderer, "Die deutsche Anekdoten-Theorie"in his Die Kurzgeschichte.
IhreForm und ihre Entwicklung[1953] (Darmstadt:WissenschaftlicheBuchgesellschaft,1969); Hans
Franck,Deutsche Erzdihlkunst
(Trier:FriedrichWinter,1922); RichardFriedenthal,"VomNutzen und
Wertder Anekdote,"in Sprache und Politik: Festgabefiir Dolf Sternbergerzum 60. Geburtstag,ed.
Carl-JoachimFriedrichand Benno Reifenberg (Heidelberg:LambertSchneider,1968), 62-67; Heinz
Grothe, Anekdote, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1984); Robert Petsch, Wesen und Formen der
Erzdhlkunst(Halle/Saale: Max Niemeyer, 1934); Rudolf Schifer, Die Anekdote: Theorie, Analyse,
Dialektik (Munich: Oldenbourg,1982); WalterErnst Schhifer,Anekdote-Antianekdote:Zum Wandel
einer literarischenForm in der Gegenwart(Stuttgart:Klett-Cotta,1977). In addition,in English, are
the hard-to-come-byDissertation on Anecdotes (1793) of Isaac D'Israeli (himself no mean compiler
of anecdotes), and the Introductionby Clifton Fadiman to the Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes
(Boston/Toronto:Little, Brown & Co., 1985). Most of these works attemptto define the essential
characteristicsand functions of the anecdote.The more historicalapproachadoptedby VolkerWeber,
Anekdote-Die andere Geschichte (Tiibingen: StauffenburgVerlag, 1993) and Sonja Hilzinger,
Anekdotisches Erzdhlen im Zeitalter der Aufkldirung:Zum Struktur- und Funktionswandel der
GattungAnekdotein Historiographie,PublizistikundLiteraturdes 18. Jahrhunderts(Stuttgart:M&P
Verlagfir Wissenschaft und Forschung, 1997)-provide an invaluable complement to these otherwise preeminentlyformal studies of the anecdote. In French, in addition to Roland Barthes's essay
(see n. 5 above), several articlesdevoted to thefait divers in Annales 38 (1983), 821-919, throwmuch
light on the closely related, sometimes indistinguishableform of the anecdote, notably Marc Ferro,
(821-826) and Michelle Perrot,"Faitdivers et histoire au XIXeme sihcle" (911-919).
"Pr6sentation"
11. The OED definitioncorrespondsremarkablyto RolandBarthes'sdefinitionof thefait divers in
"Structuredu fait divers":"Le fait divers ... est une informationtotale .. .; il contient en soi tout son
savoir:point besoin de connaitrerien du monde pourconsommerun fait divers;il ne renvoie formellement a rien d'autre qu'a lui-meme; bien sur, son contenu n'est pas dtrangerau monde: ddsastres,
meurtres,enlevements, agressions,accidents,vols, bizarreries,tout cela renvoie i l'homme, a son histoire, h son alienation,tases fantasmes."("Thefait divers ... is a complete piece of informationin
itself...It contains all its knowledge within itself: consumptionof afait divers requiresno knowledge
of the world;it refers formallyto nothing but itself; of course, its content is not unrelatedto the world:
disasters, murders,abductions,robberies, and eccentricities all refer to human beings, their history,
their conditionof alienation,their fantasies.")But it contains its own circumstances,its own causes,
its own past, its own outcome. It is "sans dur6e et sans contexte" (It has "neithertemporalduration
nor context")(189).
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ANECDOTEAND HISTORY
149
ry and the novel, still accommodatesa wide varietyof verbalpractices,both oral
and written,both popularand cultivated:the joke or the tall story;the jewel-like
shortnarrative,with its witty punch line, that was developed in the salons of the
elite in the eighteenth century;the short tale, usually containinga moral lesson,
of the type composed (or adapted)by JohannPeter Hebel for Swiss and German
popular almanacs or Kalender; the highly stylized, now classic anecdotes of
Heinrichvon Kleist.12 The later,carefully craftedworks, entitled Anekdoten,by
Wilhelm Schifer, and the so-called Kalendergeschichtenof Bert Brecht-a
sophisticatedkind of anti-anecdoteintended to underminethe shared assumptions that the traditionalanecdote depends on for its intelligibility and effectiveness-must also be regardedas productionsof high literaryart. Moreover, the
anecdote may be fairly detachedand free-standing,as in anecdotebooks or collections.13 Or it may be integrallyconnectedwith and embeddedin a largerargument or narrative,as in sermonsand most historicalwritings.
As to its form, what most people would considerthe classic anecdoteis a highly concentratedminiaturenarrativewith a strikinglydramaticthree-actstructure
consisting of situationor exposition, encounteror crisis, and resolution-the last
usually markedby a "pointe"or clinching remark,often a "bon mot."l4 But relatively unstructuredshort narrativesof particularevents, such as the miscellaneous murders,trials, and naturalcatastrophesrecorded in Smollet's late eighteenth-centuryHistory of Englandfrom the Revolutionto the Death of GeorgeII,
as a kind of addendato the principalpolitical events,'5 or thefaits divers report12. Though Kleist first publishedhis anecdotes in a newspaperwith which he was associated, the
Berliner Abendbldtter,it is fair to assume that the readershipof the paper,unlike that of almanacsor
Kalender, was the educated middle and upper class of the Prussian capital. See Heinrich Aretz,
Heinrich von Kleist als Journalist: Untersuchungenzum "Phdbus," zur "Germania"und zu den
"BerlinerAbendbldttern"(Stuttgart:Hans-DieterHeinz, 1983).
13. In the well known PercyAnecdotes,individualanecdotesare groupedin thirty-eightcategories,
according to the themes they are held to illustrate, such as "Humanity,""Eloquence," "Youth,"
"Enterprise,""Heroism," "Justice," "Instinct," "Beneficence," "Fidelity," "Hospitality," "War,"
"Honor,""Fashion."(Thomas Beyerley and Joseph Clinton Robertson [pseud. Reuben and Sholto
Percy], The Percy Anecdotes, revised ed., to which is added a valuable collection of American
Anecdotes [New York:Harperand Brothers, 1843]).
14. There is still work to do to explore the relation of the anecdote to the joke, the Renaissance
facitie or Schwank,and the apophtegm.One of the chief repositoriesof apophtegms,the De vita et
moribusphilosophorumof Diogenes Laertius,a favorite work of Renaissancescholars (it was printed in Basel by Frobeniusin 1533), became the object, in the last thirdof the nineteenthcentury,of the
scholarly attention of the young Nietzsche, whose own disruptive, fragmentaryphilosophical style
had a good deal in common with collections of apophtegms.
15. Book III, chap. xiii (covering the year 1760) may be considered fairly typical of Tobias
Smollet's practice. "Before we record the progress of the war [the Seven Years'War],"the author
announces,"it may be necessaryto specify some domesticoccurrencesthatfor a little while engrossed
the public attention."There follows a series of anecdotesof murders,trials,etc. only loosely connected by the generalproposition(para. 12) that "Homicideis the reproachof England:one would imagine thatthereis somethingin the climate of this country,thatnot only disposes the natives to this inhuman outrage,but even infects foreignerswho reside among them."These more or less extensive narratives,along with the many narrativesof individualsand particularepisodes interspersedin the "public" history, should doubtless be distinguishedfrom more general reports (reminiscentof traditional
Annals), such as that (para. 42) of "the horrorsand wreck of a dreadfulearthquake,protractedin
repeatedshocks,"that struckSyria and "beganon the thirteenthday of October,in the neighbourhood
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LIONELGOSSMAN
ed in the newspapers,have also often been referredto, since the eighteenthcentury,as anecdotes.16
In addition, the term "anecdote"was widely used in the late eighteenth and
early nineteenthcenturiesto designate a species of historical writing that delibto borrowHaydenWhite's useful
eratelyeschewed large-scale"narrativization,"
term. These anecdote-histories--Anecdotesdes Republiques(1771), Anecdotes
arabes et musulmanes(1772), Anecdotes espagnoles et portugaises depuis l'origine de la nationjusqu' nos jours (1773), Anecdotes ameiricaines(1776), and
so on--seem to be defined by their ostensible refusal of systematization,totalization, and ideological interpretationand by their reportingof only particular,
relativelyisolated episodes, often enough in simple chronologicalorder,as in the
annals and chronicles of the Middle Ages (interestin which revived, as it happens, aroundthe same time).17
of Tripoli."The reportis a list ratherthan a narrative:"A great numberof houses were overthrownin
Seyde, and many people buriedunderthe ruins ... an infinite numberof villages ... were reducedto
heaps of rubbish.At Acra, or Ptolemais,the sea overflowedits banks and pouredinto the streets.The
city of Saphet was entirely destroyed, and the greatestpart of its inhabitantsperished.At Damascus
all the minarets were overthrown, and six
thousand people lost their
lives." (The History of Englandfrom the Revolutionin 1688 to the Death of George the Second, 6
vols. [London:J. Walker,1811], VI, 189-216, 261).
16. "VermischteAnekdoten"was the heading under which the writer ChristianFriedrichDaniel
Schubart(1731-1791) gatheredtogether a great variety of reportsof events and personalitiesin his
bi-weekly newspaper TeutscheChronik(1774-1777; under other names until 1793). The termfait
divers dates only from 1863 and appearsto have no equivalentin other languages,which simply borrow the Frenchterm. Whatis now understoodbyfait divers used to be designatedin Frenchas "anecdotes,""nouvelles curieuses, singulibres,"or "canards."(See Michelle Perrot,"Faitdivers et histoire
au XIXeme siecle" [as in note 9]).
17. The catalogue of Princeton'sFirestoneLibrarylists well over 200 volumes undertitles such as
Anecdotesafricaines, Anecdotesamdricaines,etc. Most were publishedbetween 1750 and 1830, but
the genrecontinues well into the nineteenthcentury.These texts vary in character.Some authorsinsist
on the fragmentary, eyewitness character of their work. Thus the author of Anecdotes and
CharacteristicTraitsrespecting the Incursion of the French Republicansinto Franconia in the Year
1796, by an Eye-Witness(translatedfrom the German[London:J. Bell, 1798]) declaresin his Preface:
"I do not here present the public with a complete history of the French incursioninto Franconia;but
supply the futurehistorianof thatmemorableevent with a few facts and incidents, of which I was an
eye-witness, collected within the district where I reside. Every circumstancerelatedhere is genuine.
I endeavouredto be an attentiveobserver,to collect with fidelity, and to delineate withoutprejudice."
George Henry Jennings, the author of An Anecdotal History of the British Parliamentfrom the
Earliest Period to the Present Time(New York:Appleton, 1883), aims to "bringtogetherin anecdotal form some of the most strikingfacts in the history of our Parliaments,and the public lives of distinguished statesmen"in order to return to the "original"of certain statementsand episodes which
have suffered, he says, from what Gladstone called "mythical accretion."L. A. Caraccioli's brief
Anecdotespiquantes relatives aux Etats-Gindraux(1789) retail how the news of the EstatesGeneral
was received in various European capitals (Rome, Warsaw, St. Petersburg, Stockholm,
Constantinople,Vienna, London),in Paris and at Versailles,and in many Frenchprovincialtowns. In
contrast,Guillaume Bertoux's Anecdotes espagnoles et portugaises depuis l'origine de la Nation,
jusqu ' nos jours, 2 vols. (Paris:Vincent, 1773) and his earlierAnecdotesfran!aises depuis l'dtablissment de la monarchie jusqu'au rkgne de Louis XV (Paris: Vincent, 1767), the anonymous
Anecdotes des Rdpubliques,2 vols, (Paris: Vincent, 1771), divided into "Anecdotes G6noises et
Corses," "Anecdotes V6nitiennes,""Anecdotes Helv6tiques,"etc., the Anecdotes arabes et musulmanes depuis l'an de J.-C. 614, edpoquede l'dtablissementdu Mahomitanismeen Arabiepar le faux
ProphkteMahometjusqu'd l'extinctiondu Caliphaten 1578 of J.F. de Lacroix and A. Harnot(Paris:
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151
IV. EARLYUSES OF THE TERM "ANECDOTE"
Though anecdoteshave been aroundin one form or anotherfor a very long time,
as long, no doubt, as rumorand gossip, it was not until fairly late-around 1650
in French,a few yearslaterin English-that the term"anecdote"itself enteredthe
Europeanlanguages. Its introductionwas probablya result of the discovery and
publicationby the VaticanLibrarian,in the year 1623, of a text referredto in the
Suda, an eleventh-centuryByzantineencyclopedic compilation,as Anekdota(literally "unpublishedworks")and attributedto Procopius,the sixth-centuryauthor
of an officially sanctioned History in Eight Books of the EmperorJustinian's
Persian,Vandal,and Gothic wars and of a laudatoryaccountof Justinian'sbuilding program,De Aedificiis.At first,the termretainedin the modem languagesthe
purelytechnicalmeaningof "unpublished"thatit hadhadboth for those who used
it in antiquity(Cicero, Diodorus Siculus) and for the eleventh-centurycompilers
of the Suda. In the mid-eighteenthcentury, Dr. Johnson's Dictionary defines
"anecdote"as "somethingyet unpublished."According to the Encyclopidie article (by the Abbe Mallet), "anecdote"designates"tout6critde quelquegenrequ'il
soit, qui n'a pas encore6t6publie"("anypiece of writing,of whateverkind,which
has not yet been published").18From this literal meaning of "unpublished"
springs,in all likelihood, the meaningof "an item of news orfait divers"(thatis,
something hitherto unknown or unpublished) which seems quickly to have
attacheditself to the term"anecdote,"and which is most probablythe meaningof
the word in the rarely cited subtitle of Benjamin Constant'sfamous early nineteenth-centurynovella Adolphe:"Anecdotetrouvee dans les papiersd'un inconnu" ("Anecdotefound among the papers of an unknown").Constantno doubt
intendedit to convey the impressionthathis tale describeda "real"event.
Its associationwith Procopius'stext also providedthe word "anecdote"with yet
anothermeaningin the modernEuropeanlanguages.The Anekdota,now usually
referredto as Procopius'sSecretHistoryor Storia arcana,turnedout to consist of
instancesof the most brutalexercise of despotic power, as well as scurriloustales
of palace and family intrigue,that were completely at odds with the celebratory
narrativeof Procopius'sofficial History.The second meaningof the word "anecdote" listed in Johnson'sDictionary-"secret history"--reflectsthis influenceof
Procopius'stext. In the Encyclopddieit is alreadythe first meaning given: "his-
Vincent, 1772), and the Anecdotes am6ricaines, ou histoire abrigee des principaux eve'nements
arrives dans le Nouveau Monde depuis sa dicouverte (Paris: Vincent, 1776) are all essentially
chronologies, though only those years are includedin which somethingoccurredthat, in the authors'
view, can be told as a story.Numerous collections of "Episodes"and "Curiosities"seem closely related to "Anecdotes."There was a curiousrevival of "anecdotehistory"in the period following the First
WorldWarin Germany,in response to anothercrisis of historicalunderstanding;see the discussion of
the prolific Alexander von Gleichen-Russwurm'sWeltgeschichtein Anekdoten und Querschnitten
(Berlin:Max Hess, 1929) in VolkerWeber,Anekdote--Die andere Geschichte, 152-167 (as in note 10).
18. When the ItalianEnlightenmentscholar Ludovico Muratoripublished some of the Greek and
Latin manuscriptsin the AmbrosianLibraryin Milan between 1697 and 1713, he entitledhis collections AnecdotaLatina and Anecdota Graeca.
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152
LIONELGOSSMAN
toires secretesde faits qui se sont passesdans l'int6rieurdu cabinetou des coursde
Princes,& dans les mystbresde leur politique"("secrethistoriesof whathas gone
on in the innercounsels or courtsof Princesandin the mysteriesof theirpolitics").
From its earliest usage in the modern European languages, then, the term
"anecdote"has been closely relatedto history,and even to a kind of counter-history. Procopius's Anekdota cover exactly the same years as his History of the
Wars:527-553 CE.But in the unpublishedwork, the secretaryand companionof
Belisarius, Justinian'sfamous general, exposes the censored, seamy underside,
the chroniquescandaleuse, of the reign he himself had presentedin noble colors
in his official history. The Justinianof the Anekdota is a tyrant, the Empress
Theodoraa vindictive, cruel, low-bornformer harlot.Belisarius is venal, avaricious, prone to acts of gross violence and injustice, spineless and disloyal in his
personal life, and enslaved to his scheming, licentious wife Antonina. Like an
ideal humanform when it is inspectedclose up througha microscope, the heroic and orderlypublic narrativeof the History is undercutby a ragbag of stories
of depravityand abuse of power.
Procopius'sAnekdotaor secrethistorywas the explicitly acknowledgedmodel
of several late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-centuryhistories, the barely
disguised target of which appears to have been the new absolutist European
monarchies. The best known of these is probably Antoine de Varillas's Les
Anecdotesde Florence, ou l'histoire secrete de la maison des Mddicis,published
in 1685, supposedly in The Hague. Likewise, Les Anecdotes de Suede, ou Histoire Secrete des Changemensarrivdsdans ce Royaumesous le regne de Charles
XI, which appearedin Stockholm in 1716, took the lid off the official history of
CharlesXI of Sweden, the ally and emulatorof Louis XIV.19
Not surprisingly,the friends of power, those concernedwith maintainingpublic images and decorum,have generallybeen fearful of anecdotes and have lost
no opportunityto denigratethem, while at the same time enjoying them in private and, when necessary,using them against their own enemies. "L'anecdote,"
the Goncourtbrothersassert, "c'est la boutique a un sou de l'Histoire"20("The
19. Anecdotes continueto function in this way in modernuse, as in the clandestinediariesin which
Ulrich von Hassell, GermanAmbassadorto Rome between 1932 and 1937, recordednot only his and
his friends' efforts to organize a regime-change but living conditions and popular attitudes in
GermanyunderNational Socialism. Thus, to illustratethe unpopularityof the law requiringJews to
wear a yellow star,he tells of a worker in North Berlin "who had sewed on a large yellow star with
the inscription:'My name is Willy'," and of another"herculeanworker"who "saidto a poor and aged
Jewess in the train:'Here, you little shooting star,take my seat!' and when someone grumbled,said
threateningly:'With my backside I can do what I like."' Anotheranecdote,more properlydefined as
a joke, "illustratesthe stupidity of the Party. 'At a crossroadthree cars, each with the right of way,
collide-Hitler, the SS, and the fire department.Who is to blame?'Answer: 'The Jews'" (Ulrich von
Hassell, The VonHassell Diaries: The Storyof the Forces against Hitler inside Germany1938-1944
[Boulder,CO and Oxford:Westview Press, 1994], 227, 246-247).
20. Edmond and Jules de Goncourt,Iddes et sensations (Paris:Bibliotheque Charpentier-Eugene
Fasquelle, 1904), 13. See Michelle Perrot,"Faitdivers et histoireau XIXeme siecle," 912-913, on the
authorities'fear of anecdotes and "canards"and their attemptsto suppress or domesticate them by
removing them from the less controllablearea of oral circulationto the more controllablearea of the
press. Even so, serious newspapersrelegatethem to an inconspicuousposition on an inside page, and
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ANECDOTEAND HISTORY
153
anecdote is the dime store of history"). But they themselves made abundantuse
of anecdotes in their Histoire de la socijtj frangaise pendant la Revolution,the
aim of which, in their own words, was "not to relate once again"the grandpolitical history of the Revolution, but to "portrayFrance, manners,states of mind,
the national physiognomy, the color of things, life, and humanityfrom 1788 to
1800" ("peindrela France, les moeurs, les ames, la physionomie nationale, la
couleur des choses, la vie et l'humanitdde 1789 't 1800"). That meant, in this
instance, discreditingthe heroic Republicanaccount of the Revolution and substituting an alternative,unheroic, and often petty counter-history.To write such
a history,the Goncourtssaid, "we had to discovernew sourcesof the true,to look
for our documents in newspapers, pamphlets, and a whole universe of lifeless
paper hitherto viewed with contempt, in autographletters, engravings, all the
monumentsof intimacythatan age leaves behind."21In short,they had to explore
the world of the anecdote and the anecdotal.
Voltairehad already expressed a similarly ambivalent view of anecdotes. In
his "Discourssur l'Histoire de CharlesXII" of the early 1730s, he lambastedhis
contemporaries for their "fureur d'6crire" ("mania for writing"), their
"ddmangeaisonde transmettrea la postdritddes details inutiles" ("itch to transmit useless details to posterity").This passion for the allegedly trivialhad gotten
to the point, he alleged, that "hardlyhas a sovereign departedthis life than the
public is inundatedwith volumes purportingto be memoirs, the story of his life,
anecdotes of his court."22 In Voltaire's own view, only great public events and
events that had major consequences for the course of history deserved to be
recorded and remembered.23Two decades later, somewhat apologetically, the
matureauthorof the Siecle de Louis XIV devotedthe concluding four chaptersof
the political partof his history to "Particularit6set anecdotes du regne de Louis
XIV."Anecdotes may be of interestto the public, he conceded, but only "when
they concern illustrious personages" ("quandils concernent des personnages
illustres").In general,however,modem historiographyhas no place for anything
the most serious,like Le Monde, exclude them altogether.The conservativeBarbeyd'Aurevilly anticipated that the newspaperwould destroythe book and would in turnbe destroyedby thefait divers.
"Le petit fait le rongera.Ce sera son insecte, sa vermine"(quotedby Perrot,913).
21. "il nous a fallu decouvrirde nouvelles sourcesdu Vrai,demandernos documentsauxjournaux,
'
aux brochures,atout ce monde de papiermort et mrnpris6
jusqu'ici, aux autographes,aux gravures,
tous les monuments intimes qu'une 6poque laisse derribreelle." Edmond et Jules de Goncourt,
Histoire de la socijtj frangaise pendant la Revolution (Paris: Bibliotheque Charpentier-Eugene
Fasquelle, 1904), v-vi. In a section of the book devoted to the passion for the gaming table duringthe
Revolutionaryperiod, one reads, for instance, the story of an addictedgambler:"Mourant,le chevalier Bouju, le terribleponte, se fit porterau trenteet unet, dansles brasde ses amis, agonisant,crispant
ses mains sur le tapis vert, comme sur les drapsde son lit de mort, il se gagna, ce cadavrejoueur, de
superbesfundrailles"("As he lay dying, that formidablegambler,chevalier Bouju, had himself transportedto a gaming house to play trente-et-un.In the arms of his friends, at death'sdoor, clutchingthe
gaming table like the sheet on his deathbed,this gambling cadaverwon a superbfuneralfor himself")
(26).
22. "a peine un souverain cesse de vivre que le public est inond6 de volumes sous le nom de
memoires, d'histoirede sa vie, d'anecdotesde sa cour."
23. Voltaire,Histoire de CharlesXII (Paris:Garnier-Flammarion,1968), 30-31.
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LIONELGOSSMAN
that cannot be properlyverified, and that is often the case with anecdotes.Thus
Procopius'sHistoire secrete de Justinien is not, in Voltaire's view, a model for
modem historians to follow. It is a satire "motivatedby vengefulness" which
"contradictsthe author'spublic history"and "is not always true."Seventy pages
of anecdoteslater,Voltairerelentshardlyat all. Anecdotes have value only when
they are at least plausible and concern prominentfigures in world history. "A
philosophermight well be repelled by so many details. But curiosity,that common failing of mankind,ceases perhapsto be one, when it is directedtowardmen
and times that commandthe attentionof posterity."24
In part, Voltaire'sdisdain for anecdotes was consistent with his demand that
history not be about individual monarchsbut about nations and civilizations. It
is the false view of history as the story of kings, he argued,that encouragesthe
presumptuousbelief that every detail concerning them and those aroundthem
must be of vast and enduring interest. Voltaire'smostly negative judgment of
anecdotes was also determined,however, by the same classical, fundamentally
conservative esthetics (and politics) that later led the editors of the Annie
Litteraireto condemn Rousseau's Confessionsas an act of literaryarroganceand
presumption."Wherewould we be now," they protestedin 1782, "if every one
arrogatedto himself the rightto write and printeverythingthatconcernshim personally and thathe enjoys recalling?"25 It is hardto read this indignantrejection
of Rousseau's claim that the humblest anecdotes concerningthe personallife of
an obscure semi-orphanchild (albeit one who became a famous writer)are worthy of interestas expressing anythingbut a classical (and conservative)desire to
control the knowledge of history and to preservehierarchyin history as well as
in society by dictating what should count as importantand worthy of being
rememberedand what should not.
Admittedly,this is a complex matter.As is well known, the eighteenth century was a greatage of anecdotes.A considerablepublishingindustrywas devoted
to anecdotes on every conceivable subject--medicine, literature,the theater,the
arts.Voltairewas one of many writers who deploredthis developmentas a sign
of the decadenceof taste andthe intrusionof the commercialspiritinto literature,
with publishersrushing to please a growing readingpublic allegedly no longer
willing or able to engage seriously with literatureor history.26But that was
almost certainlya simplificationof the issue. The taste for particularsratherthan
extended formal narrativesor arguments,for the concrete private detail rather
than the public generality,probablydid reflect a diminutionof traditionalculture
24. "Tantde details pourraientrebuterun philosophe;mais la curiositd,cette faiblesse si commune
aux hommes, cesse peut-&tred'en &treune, quand elle a pour objet des temps et des hommes qui
attirentles regardsde la post6ritd."Voltaire,Siecle de Louis XIV,2 vols. (Paris:Garnier-Flammarion,
1966), I, 307, 379.
25. "Oti en serions-nous si chacun s'arrogeoitle droit d'dcrireet de faire imprimertous les faits
qui l'int6ressentpersonnellementet qu'il aime a se rappeler?"Annde littiraire 4 (1782), 150-151,
quoted in Franco Orlando,"Rousseaue la nascith di una tradizioneletteraria:il ricordo d'infanzia,"
Belfagor 20 (1965), 12.
26. See ChristopherTodd, "Chamfortand the Anecdote," Modern Language Review 74 (1979),
297-309, especially the opening pages.
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ANECDOTEAND HISTORY
155
in an expandedreadingpublic, a demandfor easy distractionand quick stimulation. But it also had a good deal to do with Enlightenmentempiricism, distrust
of authorityand "authorized"explanationsof things, and suspicion of all-encompassing systems-in historiographyand ethics, as well as in politics, theology,
and philosophy.
V. ANECDOTES IN HISTORICALWRITING
As it happens, the most common use of anecdotes by historians appearsnot to
have been especially subversive.Anecdotes usually functionedin historicalwriting not as puzzling or unusualindividualcases throwingdoubton notions of historical order,but as particularinstances exemplifying and confirminga general
rule or trendor epitomizinga largergeneralsituation.The particularin this usage
was not, as Voltairefeared it might be, disruptive or destructiveof the general,
but remainedsubordinateto the general. The detail or particularstory or anecdote was admittedwhen it illustratedhistoricalsituationsor personalitieswhose
general characterand importancehad alreadybeen established--that is, when it
illustrated,in Voltaire'sown words, "men and times that commandthe attention
of posterity."
As magistra vitae, early modern history was often a collection of episodes
exemplifying general rules and lessons of behavior.27Thus the "histories"related in the Historische Chronica, publishedby the celebratedengraverMatthaius
Merianin the 1620s and frequentlyreprinted,were intendedto demonstratethat
vice is punishedand virtue rewardedin the same way thatexamples in grammar
books offer particularillustrationsof the general rules governing noun declensions and verb conjugations.As a result, particularnarrativesare relatedto each
other in the Chronica far more in terms of the virtues or vices they exemplify
than in terms of an internalhistorical connection or relation among them. Only
the succession of dates in the margins(calculatedfrom Creationor from the birth
of Christ) establishes a loose temporal connectedness- something akin to the
connectednessHaydenWhite considers characteristicof annals, as distinctfrom
histories-while also serving,at the same time, as a signal thatthe
"narrativized"
events being narratedare not to be regarded as fables but as having truly
occurred.Furthermore,if they were to function as exemplary,the stories had to
be relatively short, simple, and easily intelligible in terms of traditionalvalues
and a shared understandingof human beings and the world. The relation of
part-individual short narrativeor anecdote-to whole in this kind of history
27. ChristophDaxelmiiller,"Narratio,Illustratio,Argumentatio:Exemplumund Bildungstechnik
in der frtihen Neuzeit," in Exempel und Exempelsammlungen,ed. Walter Haug and Burghart
Wachinger(Tiibingen: M. Niemeyer, 1991), 79. In Plutarch--still Rousseau's favorite historian"pastevents only become history,"that is they enterthe narrativeof history,only "when theirexemplary character,their capacity to offer (the present)models to imitate, releases them from the sphere
of the irrevocablyvanished"(EginhardHora, "ZumVerstdindnisdes Werkes,"in GiambattistaVico,
Die neue Wissenschaft[Hamburg,1966], 232, quoted by Rudolf Schhifer,Die Anekdote: Theorie,
Analyse, Dialektik [Munich:Oldenbourg,1982], 12).
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LIONELGOSSMAN
might be describedas allegorical. Each anecdote is a singularinstance of a general rule that it exemplifies and points to.28
The late Enlightenmentand Romanticinvention of History as a process,rather
than a simple diachronyor a playing out in varying successive guises of a limited repertoryof acts, implied a differentrelationof partto whole, and of anecdote
to history. In conformity with the shift in literatureand art from Classicism to
Romanticismand from allegory to symbol,29anecdotes ceased to be allegorical,
exemplaryof essentially extra- or transhistoricaluniversalsituations.In a world
in which it was held that, in Ranke's famous words, "jede Epoche ist unmittelbar zu Gott" ("every age of history stands in an immediate relation to God"),
theirrelationto a largercontext beyond them ceased to be conceptual,and came
to be understoodas an internalrelationto an evolving whole, of which the particularevent recountedin the anecdotewas a relatively autonomousbut integral
part,as an organ is partof a body. This change was underlinedby a new-more
than merely picturesque--emphasison couleur locale and historicalaccuracyin
the representationof costume and mores, in contrastwith the free handling of
these-the combining of ancient figures and modernattributes,for instance-in
the engravingswith which Merianillustratedthe Chronica.30In the new historiography,in sum, the individual incident enshrined in the anecdote came to be
more like a symptom, to borrow a term from medicine, than a sign.
It had long been used in that way in biography.In his "Life of Alexander"
Plutarchdeclaredfamously that "a chance remarkor a joke may reveal far more
of a man's characterthan winning battles in which thousandsfall, or ... marshalling great armies,or laying siege to cities."31 Therein,accordingto Plutarch,
28. On the Chronica,see AndreasUrs Sommer,"Triumphder Episodefiber die Universalhistorie?
Pierre Bayles Geschichtsverfliissigungen,"Saeculum 52 (2001), 1-39, at 15-23. Sommer points out
that as the Chronica approachedmodem times and the historical material became overwhelmingly
abundant,it became increasinglydifficultto reduce it to the simple termsrequiredby exemplaryhistory. "Confrontedby the sheer mass and extent of the materialof modem history,the historiancannot control it or establish anythingbut the most imperfectconnections.As moralist,he has to capitulate before the complexity of the material"(22). According to Volker Weber the "Histirchen"of
Wilhelm Schifer (HundertHistbirchen[Munich:A. Langen, G. Muiller,1940]) are a modem case of
the use of anecdotes to suggest the underlying similarity of different situations. (Volker Weber,
Anekdote-Die andere Geschichte, 173-174 [as in note 10]).
29. See on the importanttransitionfrom allegory to symbol, Bengt A. Sorensen, Allegorie und
Symbol:Textezur Theoriedes dichterischenBildes im 18. undfriihen 19. Jahrhundert(Frankfurtam
Main:Athenium, 1972).
30. Sommer,"Triumphder Episode fiberdie Universalhistorie,"23.
31. "Life of Alexander,"in The Age of Alexander: Nine Greek Lives, transl. Ian Scott-Kilvert
(Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1973), 252. In the same vein, more recently,ArthurSchnitzler:"By drawing
on threestrikinganecdotesfrom his life, we may be able to take the measureof a man's characterwith
the sameprecisionthatwe measurethe surfaceof a triangleby calculatingthe relationamongthreefixed
points,whose connectinglines constitutethe triangle"("DasWeseneines Menschenlisst sich durchdrei
Anekdotenaus seinem Leben vielleicht mit gleicher Bestimmtheitberechnen,wie der
schlagkrdiftige
Flicheinhalteines Dreiecksaus dem Verhiltnisdreierfixer Punktezueinander,derenVerbindungslinien
das Dreieck bilden"). (Arthur Schnitzler, Buch der Spriiche und Bedenken, in Aphorismen und
Betrachtungen,ed. RobertO. Weiss [Frankfurtam Main: S. FischerVerlag, 1967], 53.) Cf. Nietzsche:
"Threeanecdotesmay sufficeto paint a pictureof a man"(quotedby Clifton Fadiman,Introductionto
TheLittle,BrownBook of Anecdotes [Boston/Toronto:Little, Brown and Company,1985]).
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lay the difference between the historian or chroniclerof public events and the
biographer.To the degree that, with the Romantics,history itself came to resemble a kind of nationalbiography-Michelet, it will be recalled, boasted of having "been the first to present France as a person" ("pos6 le premierla France
comme une personne")32-Plutarch's distinction between the methods of the
biographerand those of the historianceased to hold. As early as the last thirdof
the eighteenth century some of Chamfort'sanecdotes appearto have had such
symptomatic value. A story about the Duke of Hamilton, for instance-who,
being drunkone night, heedlessly killed a waiter at an inn, and when confronted
with the fact by the horrifiedinnkeeper,calmly replied: "Add it to the bill"seems intended as more than an allegory of the general indifferenceof the rich
and powerful to the poor and powerless; it is also symptomaticof the personage
described,the Duke of Hamilton,and--beyond him perhaps-of the social relations of a particularhistorical moment, that of the ancien r6gime.33
This is the kind of anecdote we are most familiarwith as modernreadersof
history.A couple of examples from Michelet will be enough to call many others
to mind. In the Histoire de France Michelet presentsan anecdote abouta change
in the relations of d'Aubign6 and Henri IV as symptomatic of a fundamental
change in the political and culturalclimate in general at the end ot the sixteenth
century.
D'Aubign6tells of a sad event.TheKing,still hauntedby his bogeyman,the Calvinist
to puthimin the Bastille.TheHuguenot,whoknewhis royal
republic,was determined
forhis sermasterwell,in orderto be left in peace,askedforthefirsttimeto be rewarded
viceswithmoney,a pension.Fromthatpointon thekingis sureof him;he summonshim,
embraceshim;suddenlythey aregoodfriends.Thatsameevening,D'Aubign6was havwomen.Suddenly,withouta word,one of thembegan
ing supperwithtwo noble-hearted
to weepandshedmanytears.
"Forgood, too good reason, "Micheletcomments, giving the sense of the anecdote. "The day D'Aubign6 was obliged to accept a pension and ask for money
the great 16thCenturycame to an end and the other began."34Likewise, in the
section on the Bastille (section IX) in the Introductionto the Histoire de la
32. "Pr6facede 1869,"Histoire de France, Book III, Oeuvrescompletes,ed. P. Viallaneix,21 vols.
(Paris:Flammarion,1971-), VI, 11. See L. Gossman, "JulesMichelet:histoire nationale,biographie,
autobiographie,"Littirature 102 (1996), 29-54.
33. Chamfort,"Caractereset anecdotes,"in Products of the Perfected Civilization, appendix 1,
272. A somewhatsimilarpoint is made,more benignly, by an anecdotein which Madamedu Chatelet
admits a manservantinto her bathroomwhile she is naked. There was no more shame in this, to an
aristocraticwoman, than being seen nakedby a dog.
34. "D'Aubign6 raconte un fait triste. Le roi, revassant toujours son 6pouvantail,la r6publique
calviniste, voulait d6cid6mentle mettre Bla Bastille. Le huguenot,qui le connoissait,pour avoir enfin
son repos, lui demandepour la premierefois r6compensede ses longs services, de l'argent,une pension. Des lors, le roi est stir de lui; il le fait venir, il l'embrasse;les voila bons amis. Le meme soir,
d'Aubign6 soupait avec deux dames de noble coeur. Tout a coup, l'une d'elles, sans parler,se mit 'a
pleureret versa d'abondanteslarmes. Avec trop de raison. Le jour oii d'Aubign6 avait 6t6 forc6 de
prendrepension et de demanderde l'argent,le grandXVIe siecle 6tait fini, et l'autre6tait inaugur6."
"Histoirede Franceau Dix-Septibme Siecle" (1858), in OeuvresCompletes,ed. Paul Villaneix (Paris:
Flammarion,1982), IX, 153.
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RdevolutionFrangaise the essential arbitrariness Michelet considered characteristic of the ancien regime is conveyed by means of an anecdote.
One day, Louis XV's and Madamede Pompadour'sdoctor, the illustriousQuesnay,who
lodged with her at Versailles, sees the King enter unexpectedly and becomes
disturbed.Theclever Madame de Hausset, the lady-in-waiting,who has left such curious
memoirs, asked him why he was so flustered. "Madame,"he replied, "when I see the
King, I say to myself: There is a man who can have my head cut off."-"Oh!" she said,
"the King is too kind."
Michelet again concludes the anecdote by explaining its significance. "The lady
in waiting summed up in a single word here all the safeguards offered by the
monarchy."35
35. "Lemddecinde Louis XV et de Madamede Pompadour,l'illustreQuesnay,qui logeait chez elle
i Versailles,voit un jour le Roi entreri l'improviste et se trouble.La spirituellefemme de chambre,
Madamede Hausset,qui a laiss6 de si curieuxMemoires,lui demandapourquoiil se d6concertaitainsi.
'Madame,'repondit-il,'quandje vois le Roi, je me dis: Voila un homme qui peut me faire couper la
t -te.'- 'Oh!,' dit-elle, 'le Roi est trop bon.' La femme de chambre rdsumaitla1d'un seul mot les
garantiesde la monarchie."Histoire de la revolutionfrangaise, 2 vols. (Paris:Editions de la Pl6iade,
1952), II, 67. Many other examples could be cited. Describingthe drasticallydiminishedauthorityof
the monarchyin the years precedingthe Revolution, Philippe de S6gur expresses confidence in his
Mimoires that "Onpeut en juger parune anecdote."He then proceeds to tell how one day he ran into
the Comte de Laureguais,whose witty and cynical sayings and writings had made him the object of
countless "lettresde cachet"-referred to gaily by the Count as "ma correspondenceavec le roi."
Laureguaiswas strollingabout openly in a place where there was horse-racingand to which members
of the Courthad thereforebeen attractedin largenumbers.Rememberingthatthe counthadbeen exiled
far from Paris by a recent "lettrede cachet,"Sdgurwent up to him and warnedhim that his brazenly
showing himself therewas an imprudentprovocationthatcould have seriousconsequencesfor him. In
response,Laureguaissimply laughed.His escapade,Segur observes, could not have passed unnoticed,
"andyet it went unpunished."(Mimoires,souvenirs et anecdotespar M. le Comtede Sigur, ed. M. F.
Barribre [Paris: Firmin Didot, 1859], 90-91). In his pathbreakingHistoire de la Conquete de
l'Angleterrepar les Normandsof 1825, AugustinThierryfrequentlyprovides"anecdotalillustration(s)
of the life and mannersof the natives"and of the effect of the conqueston the hapless Saxons. A typical introductionto one of those anecdotes (which tells of the persecutionand spoliation of a certain
Brithstanby the Normanprovost RobertMalartais)runs:"A circumstancewhich occurredsome time
before this may throw some light upon these decrees, which despoiled the unhappySaxons of everything"(Historyof the Conquestof England by the Normans,transl.W. Hazlitt [London:Bohn, 1856],
I, 362-363 [Book VII]). Guizot relatesan anecdote,in his Historyof England,aboutArchbishopSharp
being set upon and, despite his pleas for mercy, stabbedto deathby Scottish Covenantersas he passed
in a carriagewith his daughterthroughthe environsof St. Andrews.The anecdoteis intendedto epitomize the cruelty and lawlessness of those "armedfanatics," as Guizot calls the Covenanters(A
Popular History of Englandfrom the Earliest Timesto the Reign of Queen Victoria[New York:John
W. Lowell, n.d.], III, 378 [chap.30]). DescribingQueenMary'spersecutionof the Protestants,the nineteenth-centuryEnglish historian,JohnRichardGreen, insertsa one-page narrativeabout a single individual, RowlandTaylor,the Vicarof Hadleigh,on the groundsthatit "tellsus more of the work which
was now begun (the persecutionandthe executions), andof the effect it was likely to produce(i.e. stiffened resistance),thanpages of historicdissertation"(A ShortHistoryof the English People [New York,
Cincinnati,and Chicago:AmericanBook Co., n.d.], 365 [The Reformation.Sect. II, chap. 30]). The
same basic approachto anecdoteis still evident in Eileen Power's Medieval People (Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books, 1957), a successful work of modem social and economic history, first published in
1924. Power chose to presenther accountof medieval society by means of six portraitsof "ordinary
people,"in the belief, as she put it, that"thepast may be made to live again for the generalreadermore
effectively by personifyingit thanby presentingit in the form of learnedtreatiseson the development
of the manoror on medieval trade,essential as these are to the specialist"(Preface,7). Anecdotesplay
their customaryrole in the constructionof Power's portraits;in addition,each portraitin itself might
be regardedas a kind of extended anecdoteepitomizinga largergeneral situation.
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VI. THE TRUTH OF HISTORICALANECDOTES
Being passed aroundby word of mouth or borrowedby one writerfrom another,
most often associated with the private sphere, and almost always unverifiable,
anecdotes were generally regardedas of doubtfulveracity by "modem"historians determinedto apply to their work the critical methods elaborated at the
beginning of the eighteenthcentury.36In parallelsof Herodotusand Thucydides,
the Fatherof History did not usually come out well. But if the meaning of an
anecdote were to be sought less in its factual accuracythan in what it conveyed
about states of mind and general trends,then even when its factual veracity was
in doubt it might still be thoughtof as in some way illuminatinghistoricalreality. Prosperde Barante,for instance,justified his method of closely following the
chronicle accounts,on which he based his immensely popularHistoire des Ducs
de Bourgogne de la Maison de Valoisin the third decade of the nineteenthcentury, by claiming that the "naive"vision of the chroniclerswas in itself as historically significantas any fact, since it told a great deal abouthow the men and
women of an earlier age thoughtand felt. ProsperM6rim6e'sjustificationof the
anecdote in the Preface to his Chroniquedu Regne de Charles IX was similar.
"Anecdotes are the only thing I like in history,"he declared ("Je n'aime dans
l'histoire que les anecdotes").Traditionalhistorians,to whom the only history is
political, military,and dynastic, would doubtlessconsider this "not a very dignified taste,"but he himself "would willingly give Thucydidesfor some authentic
memoirs by Aspasia or by a slave of Pericles."37
Something of the characterBurckhardtlater ascribed to myth in his Cultural
History of Greece was thus attributedto the anecdote:that is to say, it was seen
as an essentially popularor communalcreation,the validity of which resides not
so much in the accuracy with which it reportsparticularpositive facts as in its
ability to reflect the generalreality underlyingthose facts or the general view of
thatreality.It was thus the trueraw materialof the culturalhistorian.Burckhardt
himself made the connection between anecdote and myth. "The oral tradition
does not cleave to literal exactness," he declaredin a lecture on "The Scholarly
Contributionof the Greeks,""butbecomes typical; that is to say that it does not
36. On hearing a string of anecdotes about a famous figure of the day, Kant is said to have
remarked:"It seems to me I recall similaranecdotesaboutother greatfigures.But thatis to be expected. Greatmen are like high churchtowers: aroundboth there is apt to be a greatdeal of wind" (quoted by Fadiman,Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes). Investigatinganecdotes about local charactersin
relatively small communities, SandraK. D. Stahl reportsthat such anecdotes, "presumedto be true
by the local populace . . . are often made up of motifs found in other regions as well" ("The Local
CharacterAnecdote," Genre 8 [1975], 283-302).
37. ProsperM6rim6e,Chroniquedu Rhgne de Charles IX (Paris:Nelson, n.d.), 6; A Chronicleof
the Reign of Charles IX in The Writingsof Prosper Mdrimde,introductionby George Saintsbury,6
vols. (New York:Croscup& Holby, 1905), VI, v-vi. In the middle of the eighteenthcentury a similar
argumenthad been proposedby the antiquarianLa Curnede Sainte-Palayeas a justificationfor scholarly study of the Old Frenchromances.Accordingto Sainte-Palaye,the very anachronismsand errors
of the old romances were historicallyrevealing (L. Gossman,Medievalismand the Ideologies of the
Enlightenment:The World and Workof La Curne de Sainte-Palaye [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1968], 247-253).
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cleave to a factually exact groundingof the events narrated,but bringsout their
inner significance, what is characteristicabout them, what has a general human
or popular content. Often an anecdote is all that remains of a long chain of
events, circumstances,and personalities."38
In fact, historiansdo not shrink,on occasion, from invoking anecdotes,for the
truthof which they freely admit they cannot vouch. Voltairerelates an anecdote
about a priest who dared to take the King to task in a sermon he preached at
Versailles.The anecdoteculminatesin a "pointe,"the memorablypointedremark
characteristicof the classic eighteenth-centuryanecdote: "We are assured that
Louis XIV was satisfied to addresshim thus: 'Father . . . I am happy to accept
my share of a sermon, but I do not like being the targetof one.'"39Whetherthe
King actually spoke those words or not, Voltaireconcedes, they are instructive
and revealing. In Burckhardt'swork, as one might expect, the "fictional"anecdote serves an unequivocally historical function. In Part I, Section 3 of The
Civilizationof the Renaissance in Italy "an old story,one of those which are true
and not true, everywhereand nowhere,"is recountedto illustrate"the thoroughly immoralrelation"between city governmentsand powerful condottieriin fifteenth-centuryItaly.In the following section Burckhardtcites another"legendary
history,"which, he says, "is simply the reflectionof the atrocities"perpetratedby
38. "Uberdas wissenschaftlicheVerdienstder Griechen"(lecturegiven in Basel on 10 November
1881), in JacobBurckhardt,Votriige,ed. E. Diirr,3rd ed. (Basel: Schwabe, 1919), 188-89. Burckhardt
goes on to describethe process of creationof an anecdote in termsreminiscentof his defense of myth
in the GriechischeKulturgeschichte:"Inthe meantime,of course, the narratorshave also filled out the
story as it passed from mouth to mouth, not only by drawingon otherinformationbut by drawingon
the generalnatureof the situationin question;they have added color to it and recreatedit; they have
in short attributedto the most celebratedrepresentativesof certain human situations and relations
what happenedin them at one or anothertime. Thus the lives of most of the well-known Greeks are
full of traitsthathave been observedin otherslike them and arethen transferredto them--on ne prete
qu'aux riches-and modem critics have an easy time of it exposing such fictions. ... Yet this typical,
anecdotalmaterialis also history in its way--only not in the sense of the singularevent, but ratherin
the sense of what might have happenedat any time ("des Irgendwannvorgekommenen"),
and often it
is so beautifully expressive that we would on no account want to do without it." During the First
WorldWara similarjustificationof the anecdotewas offered by the editor of a Germancollection of
anecdotesdevoted to the Warand doubtless designed to raise morale. (It was one of a series of fourteen immensely popularanecdote books put out in the early twentieth centuryby Lutz of Stuttgart,
each one devoted to a particular subject, such as Bismarck, the Hohenzollerns, the Habsburgs,
Bluecher, Frederickthe Great,Napoleon, Schiller, etc.) Like Burckhardt,the editor claimed not that
the stories were true (in fact these "Anekdoten"are a mixed bag of anti-Englishpoems and songs,
newspaperreports, supposed letters from or to the front, as well as classic anecdotes), but that they
gave an authenticpictureof the spirit of the Germanpeople at the time, its gritty energy in adversity,
its pride, its humor, its capacity for laughter and for tears, its ability to celebrate triumphsand to
mourn losses: "ein getreues Seelengemdilde des deutschen Volkes" (Der grosse Krieg. Ein
Anekdotenbuch,ed. Erwin Rosen, 9th ed. [Stuttgart:Robert Lutz, n.d.]). After the War,in the late
1920s, the anecdote was again justified as "the only valid artistic form of cultural history" in the
Introductionto Egon Friedell's Kulturgeschichteder Neuzeit: Die Krisis der europdiischenSeele von
der schwarzenPest bis zum ersten Weltkrieg,3 vols. (Munich:C. H. Beck, 1927-1931), I, 18: "Pars
pro toto: this is not the least effective or vivid of figures. Often a single hand movement can characterize an individual, a single detail an entire event, more sharply,more essentially, and with greater
force than the most detailed description."
39. "On assureque Louis XIV se contentade lui dire: 'Mon pere ... j'aime bien a prendrema part
d'un sermon, mais je n'aime pas qu'on me la fasse."' Voltaire,Sihcle de Louis XIV, I, 367.
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161
the petty tyrantsof the fifteenthcentury.40Implicitin such use of anecdotesis the
idea that,even if they arenot factuallytrue,theirvery fabricationand success are
in themselves a kind of evidence.
VII. CRITICALUSES OF ANECDOTES IN PAST HISTORIOGRAPHY
Alongside the predominantlyconfirmatoryuses of anecdote by historians,there
is also, but more rarely,a negative use. In additionto the histoire secrete tradition, stemming from Procopius41 and alludedto earlier,what one might call the
"Cleopatra's-noseanecdote"aims to debunkgrandgeneral argumentsabouthistory by finding the cause of major historical transformationsin some minor
"anecdote"or "particularit6historique,petit fait curieux dont le recit peut 6clairer le dessous des choses" ("a historicalparticularity,a small curious fact whose
telling can reveal the undersideof things"), to borrow one of the Dictionnaire
Robert's definitions of the word "anecdote."Several examples of this use of
anecdote are to be found in John Buchan's 1929 Rede lecture at Cambridge
University on "The Causal and the Casual in History."The defeat of the Greeks
in the Warof 1922, for instance, andthe resultingconsolidationof the revolution
of Kemal Ataturkin Turkey,are traced via a chain of causally connected incidents to the death,in the autumnof 1920, of the young King Alexanderof Greece
from the bite of a pet monkey in the palace gardens. "I cannot,"Buchan concludes, "betterMr. Churchill'scomment: 'A quarterof a million persons died of
that monkey's bite."'42
The Cleopatra's-noseanecdote does not produce a richer and more complex
history than the grand narratives-of which the Marxist was probably the
grandest-that it purportsto undercut;on the contrary,it presents a drastically
simplified one. The opposite effect may be produced, however, by anecdotes
that offer themselves neither as links in a simple causal chain nor-in the style
of the Romantics-as parts of a whole, from which they derive their meaning
and which they in turn epitomize. Anecdotes as fragments of some undecipheredwhole, as instances thatresist neat interpretation,far from consolidating
what we think we know, may cause us to question it and provoke inquiry into
it. Such anecdotes will have to be different, however, from the classic, welldesigned anecdote, with its triadic structure of exposition, confrontation or
encounter,and "pointe"or punch line, since that form of anecdote works precisely to the degree that it can count, like traditional theater, on commonly
shared assumptionsto drive home its meaning despite, or even because of, its
brevity. If an anecdote is to be truly disruptiveand disorienting,it cannot have
40. Jacob Burckhardt,The Civilizationof the Renaissance in Italy, ed B. Nelson and C. Trinkaus,
2 vols. (New York:Harperand Row, Colophon Books, 1958), 1,40, 49.
41. Now largely neutralized,if one can judge by a series of so-called "histoiressecretes"of the
Frenchprovinces currentlybeing put out by the publishinghouse of Albin Michel in Paris.
42. John Buchan, The Causal and the Casual in History (Cambridge,Eng.: CambridgeUniversity
Press, 1929), 19-20.
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LIONELGOSSMAN
the structuralcoherence that the classic anecdote possesses in far higher degree
than history itself.43
The disruptiveor negative anecdote can alreadybe found in PierreBayle, and
a little later Diderot took delight in demonstratinghow undecipherablethe reality behind a seemingly transparentstory may be. The most ardentchampion of
the anecdote as a disruptiveelement may in fact be a novelist ratherthan a historian. "Just think," wrote the author of Le Rouge et le Noir, itself developed
from afait divers reportedin the newspapers,"Justthink that what fools despise
as gossip is, on the contrary,the only history thatin this affected age gives a true
pictureof a country..... We need to see everything,experience everything,make
a collection of anecdotes."44Not the contrivednarrativeof history,in short,but
only the anecdote, understoodas a naive, unreflected,and unvarnishedreportof
a fragmentof reality, offers reliable clues to the way things are (or were), unaltered by either ideological or formal-estheticelaboration.As the only window
onto reality as it is, ratherthan as we have pre-shapedit, the anecdote valued by
Stendhalcould not, obviously, be the polished productof salon wits that finds its
way into the anecdote books. Its chief merit being that it is "exactementvraie"
("exactly true"),it could not, in Stendhal's own view, be "fortpiquante"("very
snappy").It could not, in other words, be literature.45It is because this kind of
anecdote is raw, unpolished, not "piquante,"that it is more easily found in the
provinces, according to Stendhal,or in legal documents or newspapers,than in
the spoiled and cultivated circles of the capital.
As any narrativetelling, however naive, involves a minimummeasureof shaping accordingto a priori moral,psychological, epistemological, literary,and linguistic categories, there was something inherentlyparadoxicalabout Stendhal's
43. See, for instance, Richard N. Coe, "The Anecdote and the Novel: A Brief Inquiry into the
Origins of Stendhal'sNarrativeTechnique,"Australian Journal of French Studies 22 (1985), 3-23:
"In the remoterorigins of all narrativeliteraturethere may be discerned two fundamentalelements:
but strictly chronologicaldevelophistory,which creates out of 'real life' a model of quasi-arbitrary,
ment, retailing facticity from day to day; and the anecdote which, startingfrom a factual-historical
'happening,'proceeds to refashionit in terms of structuralcoherence, endowing it with a beginning,
middle andend, andimbuing it with significanceandpoint. Historymay well be haphazardand shapeless, and yet command attentionnonetheless because 'that's how it was'; the anecdote depends, for
its viability,entirely on its formal structure--a fact which in no way contradictsits necessarydependence upon a profoundsubstructureof historically,socially or psychologically verifiabletruth"(3). In
his study of Brecht's "anti-anecdotes,"Walter-ErnstSchifer highlights the structureddramaticform
of the anecdoteand its dependence,like the drama,on stereotypesand sharedassumptions.Theseare
what Brecht set out to deconstruct."Eine 'epische Anekdote'muss diese Gattungtiberhauptsprengen
und Erzihlung oder Roman an ihre Stelle tretenlassen" ("An 'epic anecdote' should explode the very
genre of anecdote and replace it with an extended narrativeor a novel") (Schhfer,Anekdote-Antianekdote, 29).
44. "Songez que ce que les sots meprisentsous le nom de commerage,est au contrairela seule histoire qui dans ce siecle d'affectationpeigne bien un pays ... il faut tout voir, tout 6prouver,faire un
recueil d'anecdotes."Stendhal,Mdmoiresd'un touriste, I, in Oeuvrescompletes, ed. Victor Del Litto
and ErnestAbravenel(Paris/Geneva:Slatkine Reprints, 1986), XV, 174 (datedLyon, 24 May, 1837);
Journal littiraire, 25 frimaire,an XI (16 December 1802), in Oeuvrescompletes,XXXIII, 31.
45. "Le premiermrrite du petit nombred'anecdotes qui peuvent faire le saut du manuscriptdans
l'imprim6serad'8treexactementvraies,c'est annoncerqu'elles ne serontpas fortpiquantes"(Mdmoires
d'un touriste,in Oeuvrescompletes,XV, 189, cited in Coe, "TheAnecdote and the Novel," 9.
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ANECDOTEAND HISTORY
163
requirement.It is fascinatingto follow his desperateattemptsto protectthe anecdotes he valued from such shaping-to the extent that he sometimes refrained
altogetherfrom giving them verbalform and confinedhimself to a simple reference, such as "Mlle Camp's reply to her lover" ("Rdponsede Mlle Camp ... .
son amant")or "heartbreakinganecdote this morning"("anecdoteddchirantece
matin").46 The preservationof authenticityat the expense of communicability
inevitably leaves the reader with an undecipherablenotation.47 It has taken
Stendhalscholars over a centuryto trackdown and identify some of these enigmatic references.
From our point of view, the most importantdifferencebetween the unliterary,
radicallyrealist anecdote that seems to have been Stendhal'spreferenceand the
anecdote as it appearsin most historical texts lies in the fact that, in traditional
historicalusage, the anecdote is mainly borrowed,not found. It has alreadybeen
worked over and made into literature.It does not lie at the beginning of a historical investigationor promptone, but is importedfrom a repertoryof anecdotes,
after the historical argument is already in place, as an illustrative rhetorical
device. In that respect, the Romantic symbolical anecdote does not differ
markedly from the Humanist allegorical anecdote. In contrast, the anecdote as
Stendhal appearsto have imagined it is not found after the historical argument
has alreadybeen drawnup, but, precisely because it cannotbe easily understood
in terms of existing notions of past or presentreality,becomes the startingpoint
of a longer story (fictionalor historical)thatexplores thatreality and seeks a new
understandingof it. The Stendhaliananecdote, in short,disturbsintellectualroutines and stimulatesnew explorationsof history.
VIII. MODERN HISTORIANS,MICRO-HISTORY,AND THE ANECDOTE
In an essay outlining a proposed"Historyof the Anecdote,"a scholarof English
literatureobserves that,"as the narrationof a singularevent,"the anecdoteis "the
literaryform or genre that uniquely refers to the real." By the very fact that it
does not referto the real throughdirectdesciriptionor ostention, it inevitablyhas
a literarycharacter;nonetheless, Joel Fineman insists, "however literary,[it] is
nevertheless directly pointed towards or rooted in the real," and it is this that
"allows us to think of the anecdote,given its formalif not its actualbrevity,as a
historeme,i.e. as the smallest minimalunit of the historiographicfact."The function of the anecdoteis thus essentially disruptive,accordingto Fineman.His thesis, he declares, is "thatthe anecdoteis the literaryform that uniquely lets histo46. Mimoires d'un touriste,in Oeuvrescompletes, XV, 224, cited in Coe, "TheAnecdote and the
Novel," 9.
47. See Coe, "The Anecdote and the Novel," 8-10, 12, 13 [as in note 43]. Stendhaldid not, of
course, succeed in his endeavorto deconstructthe literaryanecdote.Indeed, he pursuedthe goal only
intermittentlyand also made use of familiar anecdote forms. In fact, he was not above the kind of
transposition of anecdotal material from one subject to another to which Kant and Burckhardt
referred:thus an anecdoteaboutHaydn in Carpani'sbiography,which Stendhalknew inside out, since
he made abundantuse of it for his own Viede Haydn, reappearsin Stendhal's Viede Rossini applied
to the Italiancomposer (Coe, 10-11).
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ry happen [italics in text] by virtue of the way it introducesan opening into the
teleological, and thereforetimeless, narrationof beginning,middle, and end. The
anecdoteproducesthe effect of the real, the occurrenceof contingency,by establishing an event within and yet without the framingcontext of historical successivity." To Fineman, the Hegelian type of historical narrative is the "purest
model" of the kind of "timeless"historical design or grand recit that the anecdote disrupts by injecting contingency and thus real, open-ended time into it.
Though I cannot agree with Fineman that this is how the anecdote has always
functionedor must, by its very nature,function,it is, I believe, a fair description
of how Stendhalmay have wanted it to function and how it functionsfor a number of modem or, more accuratelyperhaps,"postmodem"historians.48
The collapse of confidence in the widely accepted grands rdcits or "metahistories"(Jean-FranqoisLyotard)of the nineteenthand early twentiethcenturiesis
also the context in which the Italian historianGiovanni Levi49 situates the success of "microhistory,"a modem, or perhapsone should again say postmodem,
form of history that often seems to startfrom an anecdote or a narrativegrounded in a non-literarysource, such as a court or other archivalrecord. One thinks
of Natalie Davis's Returnof Martin Guerre(1983), RobertDarnton'sThe Great
Cat Massacre of the Rue Saint-Severin (1984), Alain Corbin's Le Village des
cannibales (1990) or, albeit the action takes place in a more elevated social
milieu, Edward Berenson's The Trial of Madame Caillaux (1992). Whereas in
the heyday of Femand Braudel, "microhistoire"was a pejorativeterm-a characterin RaymondQueneau'sLes Fleurs Bleues of 1965 appliedit humorouslyto
the lowest, pettiest kind of history, "a peine de l'histoire 6vdnementielle"50-by
the 1980s, it marked,for many historians,the discovery of a new method,as well
as new objects and topics, of historicalinvestigation and analysis. It did indeed
rejectthe hierarchyof historicalobjects still adheredto in some measureeven by
Voltaire,but it was defined less by the small-scale and humble characterof its
objects than by its way of looking at all historical objects-through a microscopic lens.
48. Joel Fineman, "The History of the Anecdote," in The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser
(New Yorkand London: Routledge, 1989), 49-76: "Governedby an absolute,inevitable, inexorable
teleological unfolding, so thatin principle,nothingcan happenby chance, every moment that participates within such Hegelian history,as the Spiritmateriallyunfolds itself into and unto itself, is thereby renderedtimeless; such momentsexist ... outsideof time, or in a timeless present,and this because
their momentarydurative appearanceis alreadybut the guaranteedforeshadow,the already all but
realizedpromise of the concludingend of historytowardwhich, as but the passing momentsin a story
whose conclusion is alreadywritten,they tend" (57). Otherquotationsfrom page 61. One is reminded of Karl-HeinzStierle's comment that "Die Problematikder Konstitutionvon Geschichten ist ein
Beispiel jener Problematikder Relation von Allgemeinem und Besonderem, die in der Perspektive
darstellt"("The problemof how history is constiMontaignesdie eigentliche Erkenntnisproblematik
tuted is an instance of the wider problem of the relation of the general and the particular,which in
Montaigne'sperspective, is the essential problem of all knowledge") ("Geschichteals ExemplumExemplum als Geschichte," in Geschichte-Ereignis und Erzdihlung,ed. Reinhart Koselleck and
Wolf-DieterStempel [Munich:Wilhelm Fink, 1973], 375).
49. "On Microhistory,"in New Perspectives on Historical Writing,ed. Peter Burke (Cambridge,
Eng.: Polity Press, 1991), 93-113.
50. RaymondQueneau,Les Fleurs Bleues (Paris:Gallimard,1965), 85.
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ANECDOTE
ANDHISTORY
165
Instead of setting out with a set of established macrohistoricalcategories-such as the individual, the family, the state, industrialization,urbanization,and
so on-the new history stayed close to the ground.Typically,it worked out from
some limited, often perplexing, incident or person, in orderto investigate, concretely and without priorparti pris, networks of relations in the small Lebenswelten in which people actually live, with the aim of discovering unsuspected
patternsof action and interaction,motivation,and behavior.By opening up original fields and modes of inquiry,it was hoped, the unusualor statisticallyexceptional case might make it possible to look behind the well-mappedsurfaceof history to those "silences de l'histoire" to which Michelet famously referredin a
journalentryfor January30, 1842. One could say that the new history was doing
what innovative writers of fiction, including Marivaux, Diderot, and Stendhal,
have repeatedly done, almost always in the name of "realism":that is, it was
attemptingto break throughcategories that may once have led to better understanding,but had become conventions facilitatingthe productionof a particular
kind of institutionalizeddiscourse.Wherethatdiscourse often ended up actingas
a screen ratherthan a lamp, the new history hoped to serve as a kind of reconnoissance flare illuminatinga darkenedlandscape.5'
Nothing could be furtherfrom the polished miniaturemostly used by historians in the past, or closer perhapsto thepetitfait social of Stendhal'sideally unliterary anecdote, than the deliberately raw eight-line recounting of a strange
incident, followed by an equally brief, puzzlingly contradictorycontemporary
judgmentof it, with which, in a section with-in the originalFrench-the musical title "Prelude,"Alain Corbin opens Le Village des cannibales (1990; published in English as The Villageof Cannibals, 1992).
Thedateis August16, 1870.Theplaceis Hautefaye,a communein theNontrondistrict
(arrondissement)of the Dordogne dipartement.On the fairground,a young noble is torturedfor two hours, then burnedalive (if indeed still alive) before a mob of three hundred
to eighthundredpeoplewhohaveaccusedhimof shouting"Vivela Republique!"
When
night falls, the frenzied crowd disperses, but not without boasting of having "roasted"a
"Prussian."
Someexpressregretatnothavinginflictedthesamepunishment
on theparish
priest.
The scene now shifts forwardin time to February1871. The republicanjournalist
CharlesPonsacsuppliesdetailsthatturntragedyinto historicalobject:"Neverin the
annalsof crimehas therebeenso dreadfula murder.Imagine!It happenedin broaddaybeforea crowdof thousands[sic]!Thinkof it! This
light,in the midstof merrymaking,
revoltingcrime lacked even the cover of darknessfor an excuse! Dante is right to say that
man sometimesexhibits a lust more hideous thanconcupiscence:the lust for blood."Later
in the articlewe are told that "thecrime of Hautefayeis in a sense a wholly political act."
The enigma of Hautefaye ... lies in this tension between horrorand political rationality. We must thereforeturnto history,to what it was that first broughthorrorand politics
51. Inquiring
intoneglectandevendisdainof thefait diversamonghistorians
untilquiterecently,
MichellePerrotobservesthat"lechoixdulongterme,l'ambitionmacrostructurelle,
les obsessionsdu
sdriel... ne pouvaientqu'end6tourner,
commeaussile peu d'indretport6'al'histoirede la sphere
theobsessionwithquantitative
priv6e"("thefocuson thelongterm,theinterestin macrostructures,
series,alongwiththe lackof interestin theprivatesphere,couldonlydistractfromthefait divers")
("Faitdiverset histoireauXIXemesiecle,"917).
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166
LIONELGOSSMAN
of whatproved
togetherandthenprizedthemapart,in orderto clarifyourunderstanding
to be, in France,thelastoutburstof peasantrageto resultin a murder.52
The point of departureof Corbin'sLes Cloches de la terre (1994; publishedin
English as VillageBells, 1998) is again anecdotal-in this case a series of three
anecdotesaboutthe ringing of bells. The firstrelatesan incidentin which a group
of girls and unmarriedwomen repeatedly rang the bells of the commune of
Brienne in the departmentof Aube on the 4th Frimaire of the year VIII (25
November, 1799), in flagrantviolation of laws passed in 1795 and 1796 restricting the use of bells to nationalfestivals, and in uncomprehendingdefianceof the
attemptsof the "authorities"to get them to desist. The second anecdotetells of a
riot that broke out in the same place in December 1832 following a decision by
the municipal council to sell one of the village bells-the oldest, known as the
"great"bell-which was cracked, in orderto satisfy a request of the sub-prefect
of Bar-sur-Aubethatthe communepay for the armingof the local nationalguard.
Finally, in the thirdanecdote we learnof the uproarcaused in 1958 in the solidly religious commune of Lonlay-l'Abbaye in Normandy by a decision of the
municipalcouncil to have the restoredbell of the local churchresumethe ancient
traditionof markingthe noon hour,in place of the siren on the roof of the town
hall to which that function--importantin a ruralcommunity--had been entrusted after the destructionof the churchtower by the Germansin 1944.53This text
is furtherpunctuatedby innumerablestories of disputes over bells. "Manywill
be astonishedat the idea of treatingbell-ringing as a subject of historicalinvestigation,"Corbinconcedes in a foreword to the English translation,"andyet it
offers us privileged access to the world we have lost."54
A few years later, in writing the life of an unknown clog-maker (Le Monde
retrouvi de Louis-Frangois Pinagot: sur les traces d'un inconnu 1798-1876,
1998; publishedin English as the life of an unknown:TheRediscoveredWorldof
a Clog-Makerin NineteenthCenturyFrance, 2001), Corbinseems to have wanted to distance himself even furtherfrom basing his own text on a previously
existing structurednarrative.His "hero"is chosen at random,the only condition
of selection being that not a single pre-shapedbiographicalor autobiographical
accountof him, not even a criminalrecord,was to be found.55
According to Corbinhimself, his story of Louis-FranqoisPinagot is "notreally an exercise in micro-history."Whetherit is or is not is of less interestthanthe
lengths to which Corbinwent in orderto make sure that the startingpoint of his
investigationwould be as undeterminedas possible. Pinagot himself was selected not simply by excluding any figurewho "left an unusualrecordof any kind"
52. Alain Corbin, The Village of Cannibals: Rage and Murder in France, 1870, transl. Arthur
Goldhammer(Cambridge,Eng.: Polity Press, 1992), 1.
53. Alain Corbin,Les Cloches de la terre:paysage sonore et culturesensible dans les campagnes
au XIXesibcle (Paris:Albin Michel, 1994), 9-13.
54. Corbin, Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the 19th CenturyFrench Countryside,transl.
MartinThom (New York:Columbia University Press, 1998), ix.
55. Corbin,the life of an unknown:TheRediscoveredWorldof a Clog-Makerin NineteenthCentury
France, transl.ArthurGoldhammer(New York:ColumbiaUniversityPress, 2001), viii, ix, x.
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ANECDOTEAND HISTORY
167
or about whom any personal or family recollections remained,but by the historian's picking out, eyes closed, "a volume from the inventory of the municipal
archives ... on which (his) handhappen(ed)to fall"- which turnedout to be that
for the commune of Origny-le-Butin,"a nondescriptlocality, a tiny cell in the
vast tissue of Frenchcommunes,"one, moreover, that "like so many other tiny
communes . . . has vanished from memory in the same way as its individual
inhabitants."Two names were finally chosen "at random"from the decennial
tables of vital statisticsfor the late eighteenthcentury.Only here did the historian intervene: one of the two was eliminated because he died young and thus
would have been of limited heuristicvalue.
It is hard to imagine a startingpoint more at odds with that of Wittgenstein's
Poker, with which I began this paper.Corbin's task was not to fill in an existing
structure,to elaboratean existing story,as Edmondsand Eidinow do. There was
no such structure.His startingpoint was a cipher, a mystery about which everything had to be learned.Moreover,the aim was not to make Pinagot himself an
object in his world, but to use him "like a filmmakerwho shoots a scene through
the eyes of a characterwho (himself) remains off screen," in order to "painta
portraitof his world as he might have seen it, to reconstitutehis spatialand temporal horizon, his family environment,his circle of friends, his community,as
well as his probablevalues and beliefs."56Between the historianand his character the distance remains unbridged and unbridgeable. Unlike Edmonds and
Eidinow, Corbindoes not presenthimself as an omniscientnarratordescribinga
world of readily identifiableand intelligible objects, relations, and personalities,
but as a historicallylimited subjectengaging with other historically limited and
deeply unfamiliarsubjects. Conjuringaway the strangenessof the other is not
partof Corbin'shistoriographicalproject.
Compared with the experimental and exploratory work of Davis, Darnton,
Corbin,and others, Wittgenstein'sPoker must strikeone, in the end, as "potted"
history, skillfully cobbled together from other books by a couple of intelligent
and well-readjournalists.Like a large class of traditionalanecdotes-anecdotes
of Napoleon, Bismarck,Churchill,De Gaulle, and so on-the opening anecdote
of Wittgenstein'sPoker is a well-structurednarrativeinvolving a famous individual about whom the reader can be expected to have the usual common
notions. Characteristicallyalso, it has been borrowedfrom the public domainand
is not itself the product of historical research or discovery. Not surprisingly,it
produces fairly predictableresults and does not contributeto the opening up of
new historicalquestions or lead to new areas of historicalexploration.
As a structuredform, written or oral, that is passed from hand to hand or mouth
to mouth and, transcendingthe particularcircumstancesit relates, that pretends
to a broader significance, the anecdote depends on, epitomizes, and confirms
generally accepted views of the world, human nature,and the human condition.
It may be invoked to illustratea problemor even a paradox,but it will not usu57. Ibid., 12.
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LIONELGOSSMAN
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ally lead to a rethinkingof the terms of the problem or paradox.In contrast,as
an unpublished,often secret record of events excluded from the official record,
anecdotesmay challenge the historianto expand and revise establishedor authorized views of a historical situation,event, or personalityor of humanbehavior
generally.In the modernguise of thefait divers, that is, as a raw journalisticor
archivalreport of a striking, disturbing,or perplexing event or behavior, anecdotes may likewise provokea reconsiderationof what we believe we know about
history and society and lead us to considerpreviously unobservedaspects of the
past. As Marc Ferro notes, the "fortuitousincident"-dismissed as a non-event
by churches, governments, political parties, and similar established institutions-is in fact a "necessity of (the writing of) history ... a privileged historical object"in that it serves as an "indicateurde sant6,"a signal of troublein the
textureof society, politics, the economy, or the prevailingvalue system.57
Princeton University
57. Marc Ferro, "Presentation,"Annales 38 (1983), 824-825.
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