The texts in this first class are probably the ones that best accord with the idea of historical discourse that (some) linguists and (some) literary theorists seem to have: they focus on a series of events, which they report "as they occurred, as they appeared on the horizon of history" (Benveniste 208; translation modified), that is, by moving from one item to the next along chronological lines. While historians now prefer discussing events rather than recounting them (a trend exemplified in such classics of the Annales as Georges Duby's The Legend of Bouvines and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's Carnival in Romans), several works in my corpus show that the tradition of the straight, linear narrative has not completely disappeared from scholarly historiography. Those works may first follow the model of the case study, treating an occurrence that the historian regards as representative of the period or some aspect of it. Tzvetan Todorov's A French Tragedy thus describes what happened in Saint-Amand, a small town in central France, during the summer of l944. [3] Arguing, as many historians do, that France was then the site of a civil war, Todorov sets out to recount in detail one of its episodes: the initial uprising in the town on June 6th upon the news of the Allies' landing; the ensuing fights between the Resistance and the Milice (the paramilitary force the Vichy government had set up); the taking and execution of hostages; the intervention of the German army; the arrest and killing of part of the Jewish population; and the eventual liberation of the town on September 3rd. In a brief "Epilog," Todorov justifies his use of the label "tragedy" by the fact that everything in Saint-Amand seemed to be "programmed to happen," as the actions were "linked together, beckoning each other, responding to each other" (121). The strict chronological order that Todorov adopts thus agrees with the historian's way of making sense of his data; it conveys the thesis of the "fatality" of the events, of their "connecting force" and "int erdependence" (122). Yet while Todorov holds this episode to be unique because of its tragic unfolding, he also presents it as "typical," in this instance, of the "other," lesser known Liberation that occurred "far from the front lines" and opposed the French to the French rather than the French to the Germans (xvi). In terms of narrative theory, the story in A French Tragedy is thus both "singulative" (as a "tragedy") and "iterative" ("as a case of") (Genette, Narrative Discourse 114, 116). Todorov tells once what happened once, but he also claims that what he tells one time happened several times, as occurrences similar (though not exactly identical) to the ones he is recording took place in France during the summer of 1944. Its representativeness, for that matter, is what makes the Saint-Amand episode worth telling for the historian, since that episode admittedly affected the outcome of neither the War nor even the Liberation.

Linear histories may also recount a much longer and more complex series of events, such as the events that occurred in the life of an individual. French historians, after dismissing biography as an inferior genre, recently have returned it; but they are still reluctant to report the deeds of the person they are investigating, preferring instead to explore that person's environment as well as the issues that his/her actions are raising. Jacques Le Goff thus only devotes the first part of his recent Saint Louis to a narrative of the king's feats; the second part discusses problems of evidence in a research that concerns the Middle Ages, and the third part offers an anthropological description of monarchy in the thirteenth century. Yet my corpus, possibly because of its subject matter, still includes a few biographies that consist almost exclusively of the "facts" in a life. One of them is Fred Kupferman's Laval, an account of the career of the politician who filled many posts during the 1920s and 1930s, was he ad of the Vichy government during most of the Occupation, supported the politics of "collaboration" with Germany, and was executed for treason shortly after the war. Kupferman organizes his study into fifteen chapters, going from Laval's birth in 1883 to his execution on October 15, 1945. All chapter titles and sometimes intertitles include a date (e.g., "The Apprenticeship: 1883-1914," "The Fall: November 1943-August 17, 1944," "The extremist conspiracy of July 5, 1944"), and reading the book's table of contents shows that Kupferman consistently observes chronology. Indeed, at the level of the chapter and its occasional subdivisions, the "discourse" in Laval always coincides with the "story" (Chatman 19); that is, the order of the events in the text follows the order of the events as they occurred in actuality, or, rather, as the documents the historian was able to consult attest that they occurred.

Texts, however, can only observe chronology at the level of their macro-organization--of the succession of the parts, the chapters, and the other large units that comprise them. Whether historical or fictional, they cannot consistently unfold in linear fashion at the level of their micro-organization--of the succession of the shorter temporal sequences that constitute a unit like the chapter. The only texts in which events follow one another in the narrative as they do in the diegesis are thus the pocket-size stories that narratologists fabricate to illustrate "chronological order," like Prince's "John washed, then he ate, then he slept" (49). Thus while Laval observes chronology in its overall outline, it also includes numerous "anachronies" (Genette, Narrative Discourse 35): utterances that refer to what happened earlier, or will happen later, than what the historian is recounting. Portraying General Giraud, whom the Americans had appointed "Civil and Military Commander-in-Chief for North Africa" in Decemb er 1942, Kupferman writes for instance: "When he was in charge in Metz before the war, he had under him a certain Colonel de Gaulle. He never imagined for one second that he could be his subordinate" (396). Kupferman here employs retrospection ("When he was in charge in Metz") to provide information about events that occurred before the moment he is describing, and a more detailed analysis would show that he does so on most (all?) pages in his book. It remains that the anachronies in Laval do not affect the organization of the text as a whole; Kupferman never foregrounds episodes by changing their positions along the temporal axis, as Marc Ferro--among others--does in his biography of Petain, which begins with the story of Raynaud's call to the Marshal upon the invasion of France ("On May 16, 1940, at 12:30 P.M. [...]" [7]), and ends with the narrative of Petain's most celebrated victory: the battle of Verdun. Kupferman, moreover, includes neither an introduction nor a conclusion, and he self-consciously refr ains from the commentaries and generalizations that could interrupt the flow of his narrative. Laval thus comes as close as feasible to the model of historical discourse as a text where events--to return to Benveniste's definition--are reported "as they occurred, as they appeared on the horizon of history," that is, where the representation of the past unfolds in linear fashion as the past itself supposedly did.

Stage Narratives

If some studies of Vichy France order their data in a straight, chronological narrative, most of them are organized according to different principles of textual disposition. Among the works that still arrange the information along temporal lines, several belong to the model that I propose to call "stage narrative": their authors slice up the period (or the part of the period that they consider) into a certain number of moments, which they successively characterize and piece together to constitute a story. Such a story is thus not made of a series of individual occurences; rather, it comprises sets of occurrences, forming the "phase," or the "stage," which the historian has endeavored to describe.

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