Patrick Boucheron: "The autonomy of science and the plurality of information are pillars of democracy."

This is a book that contains many books, a historical library based on known and lesser-known facts to compose a universal history, a way of approaching the future of a world always in turmoil, even when we were unaware of the events taking place. In this regard, the talented French historian Patrick Boucheron has just published an extraordinary book: Dates That Made History: Ten Ways to Create an Event (Anagrama).

Boucheron, already a protagonist of the tradition of observing the world with curiosity and erudition, a tradition that includes his friends—essential historians— José Emilio Burucúa, Roger Chartier, and Carlo Ginzburg , among others, questions what a historical event is, how key dates were inscribed, and how they became part of history. The book is based on a documentary series created by Boucheron that aired on the Arte channel (France) in 30 episodes, to which he has just added 15 new ones. It is a monumental investigation that seems endless. The choice of topics, the approach and the reworking of the point of view and the analysis of each topic make this book a unique text of its kind and an exquisite work that stands out among recent history books.

Boucheron came to Buenos Aires to present his book and participate in a preview of The Night of Ideas . He participated in a historic conversation with Burucúa at the University of Buenos Aires under the theme: "The Power of History in a Changing World." The Night... was organized by: Institut français d'Argentine - French Embassy, ​​the Alliances Françaises network in Argentina, the Medifé Foundation, the network of Franco-Argentine Centers, and local governments.

In his book and in this conversation on a Saturday morning in Buenos Aires, he drew on universal facts, from the beginning of time to the 20th century.

–Did you intend to create a universal history “my way” by choosing these particular dates?

–There are several ways of situating dates in the book. The simplest was a chronological frieze, starting from prehistory with the Lascaux Cave (-16,000?) and continuing through to contemporary history, situated with the liberation of Nelson Mandela . I also use maps and timelines. This idea attempts to delve into, to delve into this French expression: ça a eu lieu . That is, an event took place. Time folds in space, and this way of thinking about the event as an intrigue in space is also one of the specific characteristics of this project. And finally, it's about the universality of time, of the totality of space, of the world, but it doesn't attempt to exhaust all the general, thematic problems of universal history. We're not trying to circumnavigate the world, but rather to compile a collection of problems posed universally by the question of the event in history.

–“Playing with the Calendar” proposes and sheds light on everything involved in the year 1000, in which the term “magic” appears. Did the arrival of that year make you think about the possibility of the end of the world? Who experienced it as apocalyptic?

–There's a fascination, at least in European culture, with the year 1000 after the incarnation of Christ . It's a magical date, which the Apocalypse of St. John considered a moment of possible change, or even the end of the world. In history, we usually learn about the event and then look for the date. For example, the founding of Buenos Aires. We have an event and we look for the date: 1536. In the year 1000, we have a date and we're looking for the event. In other words, we'd like something to have happened in the year 1000. In fact, the 11th century of the Christian calendar is an important moment in the social history of the medieval West, because it was during this period that what we call feudal society emerged. But there's no specific event that allows us to consider that people were aware of something. It's interesting to see that these stories about calendars and chronologies are also stories about historical consciousness, how aware we are of time. And evidently, the perception of time in the Middle Ages was particular to the monks who knew the Apocalypse of St. John , who knew how to calculate Christian dates, the Easter holiday, and so on. To the question, Were they afraid of the year 1000? No, because no one knew what the year 1000 was. And even if they did, it didn't represent anything in particular. But millenarianism exists, and we know that this fear was more or less an invention of historians. The fear was rekindled with the arrival of the year 2000. But we weren't afraid of the end of the world, but of computers breaking down. And it's often like that in history: we think we're describing the fears of ancient societies when in fact we're simply projecting our own contemporary fears onto the ancient world.

–He took dates relating to the life and death of Christ, the year 1 of Islam, pilgrimages, etc. Can universal history be thought of as the history of religions?

–Of course, we must consider which religions, but also the political systems, have conveyed the idea of ​​universality. There are two main events in Christianity, which are the Nativity and the Passion, and for a long time people doubted whether the new era began with the birth of Christ or with his death. In the latter case, we would have postponed everything by 33 years. I would like to point out that Christopher Columbus was involved in this, because in 1492 we were also in a millenarian period; there were calculations that we were approaching the end of time, and Christopher Columbus was, in fact, trying to bring about the emergence of universal Christian time in the New World. But one doesn't calculate this from a birth or a death. After all, the Prophet Muhammad was born and died, but it is the passage of time that makes Islamic time universal. In Rome, we have a secular universal that is not strictly religious, but ideological. The whole question of the founding of Rome is also basically the question of, what is universal time? Will it bring different societies into line with a universal time that has also been calculated since the founding of Rome?

–When we say French Revolution, we think of July 14, 1789. Why did you choose June 20, 1789, as a key date?

–The interesting thing about the oath of the Jeu de Paume (similar to Basque pelota) on June 20th, to elect it instead of July 14th, 1789, is that it allowed us to understand what a revolutionary day is. In other words, in the morning you don't know you're a revolutionary, and in the afternoon you let yourself be carried away by events. The Estates General of the kingdom met at Versailles on May 5th, 1789: the nobility, the clergy, and the Third Estate were there. And at the time of the oath, the deputies of the Third Estate—that is, from the cities, the bourgeoisie, and the countryside—met separately in the Jeu de Paume hall at Versailles and swore that they would not separate until they had given France a constitution. Thus, the National Assembly was born. It's a date that commemorates in advance what it will bring; it's a spoken event. They were the deputies of the Third Estate, from the provinces. Most are monarchists; they're not there to make a revolution. But the revolutionary day is what makes you one. They're driven by something they don't understand, and it can scare them. They don't know what they're doing, but they do it. And at night, they write and say, "Well, we've done something incredible, brave maybe." We chose June 20th to ask ourselves what a revolutionary day really is.

–You wrote two powerful chapters about the catastrophes of Hiroshima and Pompeii, which were very far apart in time and somewhat in geography. Do you think there's any connection between these two events?

–Hiroshima is the name of a place, but also the name of a disaster. The day after the bomb, the newspaper Le Monde headlined “A Scientific Revolution.” They emphasized that, for the first time, humanity had equipped itself with extraordinary means of destruction due to a scientific revolution, which is nuclear physics. Atomic death is instantaneous and slow. It is irradiation and the slow agony of irradiated Japanese who can die long afterward. The Americans immediately said: “It was a decision to hasten the end of the war.” In other words, if there hadn't been Hiroshima , the war would have continued and there would have been more deaths. This is what we call a counterfactual history. All this makes Hiroshima an event for me. What is time, what is the world, what is the universal? We play with the comparison—it may seem strange—with the Lascaux nuclei, discovered during the Second World War. Georges Bataille went there in 1945 and said: “I saw the flash of Hiroshima.” Why? Because atomic terror is the idea that perhaps, since man now has the means to destroy all of humanity, there could be an earth after man. And what Bataille believed he saw at Lascaux was the origin of man. So prehistory was a bridge to the afterlife.

–And crossing time, it crosses Pompeii...

We've made this connection, but we could make the same one with Pompeii because it's absolutely fascinating. It's comparable because we're talking about a city destroyed by a deluge of fire and ash, of black rain. In both cases, people died instantly or within a few days. In Hiroshima and Pompeii, in fact, there was a huge fire that lasted for days and days, and people didn't understand what was happening. The black rain froze Pompeii and stored it in a kind of ash sarcophagus, and in a way, what we're seeing is a revelation. A revelation in the photographic sense, a negative. In Hiroshima, the nuclear fire irradiated bodies, and so the bodies were imprinted on the walls. There's a reverse effect in Pompeii, which means the city was destroyed, but it's now available to historians of the future. The history of Pompeii is that of the rediscovery of its remains since the end of the 18th century and the birth of archaeology. Just as the clocks in Hiroshima froze at 8:16, the world stopped in Pompeii on a date that is not easy to define, in the year 79 BC, only the year is certain.

–What does the conquest of the poles mean for the entire world? Today, Trump is obsessed with Greenland and the North Pole.

–What interested us was to see the moment when the world of explorers and adventurers seemed finished, over. The goal of 19th-century geographical societies was to penetrate the continental masses, and Africa in particular, of course, to subdue it, but the continents had not yet been penetrated. But in 1900, geographical societies were an alliance between curiosity and domination. They justified their desire for domination with a desire for knowledge. There was a competition to conquer the North and South Poles. It coincided with the birth of competitive sport. And so the conquest of the poles was a sporting competition for the great European colonial powers. The interesting thing about the conquest of the poles is that it's the same as Greenland for Trump; it has a geopolitical aspect, of course, since by definition the poles are the places on the globe that most challenge our planispheric representation. And they are places of journalistic fiction and friction between empires and powers. At the Pole, whether north or south, and we know this even more than 100 years ago with the conquest of the South Pole. The Pole is the universal archive of humanity, of our climate, for example. And therein lies the origin of international scientific cooperation. In other words, since the beginning of the 20th century, we have created international scientific observation bases at the poles. And so, this question, both of virility and of sporting competition, is now being raised again in Greenland, because these are places of both international cooperation for scientists and political competition for the powers that be.

–He gave prominence to a date that is an iconic image: Mandela's release...

We all saw Nelson Mandela, the world's longest-held political prisoner, who had spent 27 years in prison, unsteadily emerge from prison on February 11, 1990, with his wife, his friends, his jailers, in front of the world's cameras. The last photos we had of him were of a young man. The years between Nelson Mandela's release and his election as president of South Africa in 1994 were very violent years, and even today, the question of the legacy of apartheid remains unresolved. But I think it's important from the perspective of universal history. It's a story of colonization and decolonization, crimes, concentration camps, liberation, and denial. Well, this whole story can be told from the southern tip of the African continent. From South Africa, you see the whole story. Liberation, the fall of apartheid, can also be considered the last of the decolonizations and is a story of emancipation. It is a story of universal consciousness, of collective mobilization, without naivety.

There's an essential phrase in Mandela's memoirs about emancipation, which in my opinion is the key phrase of the 20th century and applies to all liberation movements: that our liberation is not complete until we have liberated our oppressors. This at a time when so many authoritarian powers in the world, starting with Trump, are driven by a single passion: revenge. Mandela spent 27 years in prison, and when he gets out, he doesn't seek revenge, he seeks reconciliation. Because he knows he won't be free, fully free, until the last of his oppressors, his executioners, his jailers, is freed from their prejudices. That may sound very lyrical, very optimistic, but it is an optimism of method. I write history because I believe in the emancipatory power of history. Because I believe that, indeed, it is an art of emancipation through knowledge. We liberate ourselves by learning from the past, and that's why this is a hope of our working method, and it remains ours.

–I wanted to ask you for an exercise in imagination... What place would characters like Trump, Putin, Orbán, Milei... have in the book in the future?

–All these experiences of populist authoritarian nationalism have a different agenda, but today we understand that everything is coordinated, that it's coherent, and that there's a program. We've been disappointed, we've wasted our time. We've been fooled by the clowning, the buffoonery. Trump, but also Berlusconi before him, or Boris Johnson in England. It's what Michel Foucault called the spring of the grotesque: politicians who become their own caricatures. And from the moment they become their own caricatures, it's very difficult to caricature them. In other words, we have at least one of the most common means of political subversion—through mockery or caricature—snatched away from us, confiscated from us because these leaders go out of their way to be outrageous, violent, and caricature-like, and thus paralyze everyone. The first effect is to say, "Really, this isn't serious." Today we live in a world where there's only one grand mobilizing narrative for developed societies, so to speak: they claim to be tired of democracy. It's quite complicated because the populist nationalism of Trump or Orbán claims to act in the name of the people, and therefore in the name of a democracy that has been confiscated. They are clearly saying that democracy is their enemy. We know that democracy is also the enemy of the entire Trump International. But they say something else: "Democracy has been confiscated by the elites, and we, in the name of the people, are going to take it back." And to do so, they develop a policy of segregation and separation and a break with the entire movement for the emancipation of public rights and freedoms.

Today, this is the only coherent and attractive narrative, the only one firmly supported by powerful economic interests. And why? We have now understood that those who oppose democracy and those who oppose the energy transition are the same people; that is, they are financed by the same interests. This attack is against democracy in the sense that democracy should help raise awareness about the consequences of climate change. So, that is something absolutely essential and complicated. But the global ecological discourse is not a grand mobilizing narrative. The proof is that there is not a single country where political ecology has taken power.

It's quite complicated because the populist nationalism of Trump or Orbán claims to act in the name of the people, and therefore in the name of a democracy that has been confiscated. They are clearly saying that democracy is their enemy. We know that democracy is also the enemy of the entire Trump International. But they say something else: "Democracy has been confiscated by the elites, and we, in the name of the people, are going to take it back." And to do so, they develop a policy of segregation and separation and of rupture with the entire movement for the emancipation of public rights and freedoms. Today, this is the only coherent and attractive narrative, the only one firmly supported by powerful economic interests. And why? We have now understood that those who oppose democracy and those who oppose the energy transition are the same people; that is, they are financed by the same interests. This attack is against democracy in the sense that democracy should help raise awareness about the consequences of climate change. So, that is something absolutely essential and complicated. But the global ecological discourse is not a grand mobilizing narrative . The proof is that there isn't a single country where political ecology has taken over.

–Why do they attack universities, journalism, for example?

–And therein lies the problem, a problem that should concern us all, and that is if the current grand narrative is that of a populist, authoritarian, and anti-democratic national narrative against science, against civil liberties, equal rights, and the fight against injustice and discrimination. We don't have an alternative discourse that is as powerful, coordinated, or coherent. Let us never forget that the Russian invasion of Ukraine began with an aggression against Ukraine's history. For years, history was rewritten, convincing Russians that Ukraine was part of Russia. And Putin attacked Memorial, the great association that defends Russia's memory of the crimes of Stalinism . So wars always begin with wars against history, against science. All these people have an anti-intellectualist attitude, and they went on the attack after they had already won the battle of ideas. For the moment, those of us who don't allow ourselves to be seduced by this discourse are losing every battle, both political and ideological. I have always wanted to defend the autonomy of my discipline, of History. I'm not a militant historian who would consider his knowledge to be at the service of a struggle. I fight for history. And simply put, we cannot be autonomous in a political world that rejects the autonomy of knowledge. So I have to get involved, if only to defend my autonomy. I'm worried, mobilized, but decidedly optimistic. By defending journalists or university students, we're not just defending ourselves; we're defending the common good. We're convinced that the autonomy of science and the plurality of information are two pillars of democracy.

He is one of the leading exponents of the European historiographical renewal. A professor at the Collège de France, he directed the bestseller Histoire mondiale de la France (2017). In his works, he analyzes the medieval roots of political phenomena, such as the authoritarian drift of democratic governments ( Conjurar el miedo (2018)) and the use of fear as a political tool ( El miedo (2019). He has increased his public presence with texts that warn against the rise of the far right and populisms, such as El tiempo que nos queda (The Time We Have Left ). He participated in the documentary series Quand l'histoire fait dates (Quand l'histoire fait dates) , of which Dates that Made History is a part.