From the 1930s to the 1960s, the problem of the relations between narrative and historiography often was posed in normative terms. The question was: Should historians use narrative? Does that form provide an adequate type of knowledge? In the United States, philosophers of science sometimes deplored what they held to be history's excessive reliance on narrative. According to them, that reliance kept history in the situation of an imperfect science. Unlike physics or biology, history was unable to bring the phenomena it was studying under a "general law"; it could at best offer "explanation sketches," which needed "filling out" in order to turn into "full-fledged explanations" (Hempel 351). Yet other philosophers challenged the idea that science was unified, the only way of accounting for a phenomenon being to identify the law that "covered" it. Making the case for alternative models, they contended that story-telling constituted a legitimate means of making sense of things, one that provided a "primary cognit ive instrument" as powerful as--if different from--the general laws of the natural and theoretical sciences (Mink 185).

In France, the debate opposed the historians of the so-called Annales School to their "positivist" predecessors. Rejecting what they called "event history" (histoire evenementielle) and "narrative history" (histoire-recit), the Annalistes advocated "problem-oriented history" (histoire-probleme): a kind of research that would move away from recounting political, military, and diplomatic events, analyzing instead "the problems that are raised by those events," and doing so on the basis of an "explicit conceptual elaboration" (Furet 56-57). Yet the Annalistes never described the new, better discursive forms that were to replace narrative, and Paul Ricoeur showed that they had not fully carried out their agenda in the domain of textual organization. Indeed, according to Ricoeur, even such a programmatically non-narrative work as Fernand Braudel's The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II actually includes an underlying plot. Moreover, that plot is neither a superficial feature of the t ext, nor a remnant from a prior, obsolete kind of research; playing a central role, it supplies a "configuration" that enables Braudel to operate a "synthesis" of the many, heterogeneous materials that comprise his study (Ricoeur 216).

These polemics and controversies now seem to be over. Scholars have shown that narrative is used in such disciplines as law (Brooks and Gewirtz), economics (McCloskey), and biology (Latour), and that it offers a perfectly valid mode of knowledge in specific situations. If--to borrow an example from the historian Hermann Lubbe--we want to explain why the German universities of Bochum and Dortmund, only 15 kilometers apart, both fund expensive departments of engineering and electronics, the search for a "general law" won't take us very far. For Lubbe, such a duplication and the resulting overcapacity can only be "explained historically" (544), that is, through a narrative that traces the origin of those departments and recounts their growths. [1] While issues concerning the relations between narrative and historiography are still raised today, it is less to assess the value of the historical endeavor than to describe its exact nature. In other words, the question is no longer: Should historians use narrative? It is rather: Do historians necessarily rely on narrative? Answers to that question have varied since the 1980s. On the one hand, following Ricoeur, several scholars have claimed that history always (and necessarily) falls under story-telling. Michelle Perrot, for example, states in a brief description of her discipline that "history is narrative" (38), thus excluding implicitly the possibility that historical discourse might take other forms. Similarly, reviewing the main features of that same discourse, Perrot's colleagues Roger Chartier and Francois Hartog have titled recent essays "L'histoire ou le recit veridique" [History or Truth-claiming Narrative] and "L'art du recit historique" [The Art of Historical Narrative], thus positing from the onset that to do history can only mean to tell stories. Other researchers have maintained, on the other hand, that Ricoeur's thesis is too totalizing and that a close examination of historiographic works reveals a whole variety of textual arrangements. Antoine Prost, f or instance, argues in Douze lecons sur l'histoire [Twelve Lessons about History] that historical discourse is not necessarily bound up with narrative; it may at times come under other forms, such as the "overview" and the "commentary" (241-42).

The question: Do historians necessarily rely on narrative? is of course among the questions that lend themselves to an empirical investigation. It is also a question that narrative theory can help to answer, since that theory offers clear definitions of narrative and sets about to distinguish the genre from other types of discourse. Using one of those definitions, I ask in this essay whether history "is" narrative by exploring a specific corpus in twentieth-century historical research: studies written about the period known in French history as the Occupation, that is, the time (June 1940-August 1944) when the country was under German control, the government had moved to Vichy, and the French Republic had given way to the French State. That period has generated an enormous number of publications that--in addition to the politics of the Vichy government--treat subjects as varied as sports, everyday life, the Resistance, the university, the fate of the Jews, and the place assigned to women by the new regime. F or the sake of homogeneity, I deal here exclusively with scholarly works, and works written by French historians. Thus, I don't consider a study as important as Robert Paxton's Vichy France (Paxton is American), nor the many memoirs that witnesses and participants have written over the years (though often interesting, those works cannot be regarded as "scholarly"). I use the English-language versions of the texts I am considering whenever such versions are available; when they are not I offer my own translations, although I do not translate the titles (e.g., Histoire de la Resistance) that involve obvious cognates. Because my corpus evidently cannot stand for "historiography" as a whole, part of my conclusion is devoted to the issue of that corpus's "representativeness" on the map of current historical production.

Narratologists usually define narrative as a text made of "at least two real or fictive events or situations in a time sequence" (Prince 4), of "one event told in the form of at least two temporally ordered propositions" (Adam 12), or of one event involving "a transformation, a transition from an earlier state to a later and resultant state" (Genette, Narrative Discourse Revisited 18). In other words, a text, to count as a narrative, must include at least two units that are temporally ordered, although the first unit can remain implicit. [2] Thus, the utterance "Most French people loved Marshal Petain" is not a narrative, because it does not refer to a progression in time; but the utterance "Most French people lost faith in Marshal Petain" is a narrative, because it describes the shift from one moment to the next and could be rewritten as "Most French people had faith in Marshal Petain and then they lost it." To be sure, real histories of Vichy France never come in the form: "Most French people lost faith in Marshal Petain." But many such histories could be outlined in this manner if we asked the question: What, according to this study, happened over the years to the Vichy regime? "Most French people lost faith in Marshal Petain "is thus one of the possible synopses of Francois-Georges Dreyfus's Histoire de Vichy (and several other studies of the Vichy regime), just as "Ulysses comes home to Ithaca" and "Marcel becomes a writer" are some of the possible synopses of The Odyssey and Remembrance of Things Past, in this instance, those (facetiously) proposed by Gerard Genette in his analysis of "minimal narrative" (Narrative Discourse 30).

If we use the above definition of narrative to ask whether the works about the Occupation I have selected fall under story-telling, the answer can only be: some of them do, but others obviously follow alternative models of textual arrangement. I have distributed those works into four categories, distinguishing between the texts that tell a story and the ones that do not, and then asking how historians organize their data when they do not order them along temporal lines.

Linear Histories

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