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An Infinite History: The Story of a Family in France over Three Centuries
An innovative history of deep social and economic changes in France, told through the story of a single extended family across five generations
Marie Aymard was an illiterate widow who lived in the provincial town of Angoul�me in southwestern France, a place where seemingly nothing ever happened. Yet, in 1764, she made her fleeting mark on the historical record through two documents: a power of attorney in connection with the property of her late husband, a carpenter on the island of Grenada, and a prenuptial contract for her daughter, signed by eighty-three people in Angoul�me. Who was Marie Aymard? Who were all these people? And why were they together on a dark afternoon in December 1764? Beginning with these questions, An Infinite History offers a panoramic look at an extended family over five generations. Through ninety-eight connected stories about inquisitive, sociable individuals, ending with Marie Aymard's great-great granddaughter in 1906, Emma Rothschild unfurls an innovative modern history of social and family networks, emigration, immobility, the French Revolution, and the transformation of nineteenth-century economic life.
Rothschild spins a vast narrative resembling a period novel, one that looks at a large, obscure family, of whom almost no private letters survive, whose members traveled to Syria, Mexico, and Tahiti, and whose destinies were profoundly unequal, from a seamstress living in poverty in Paris to her third cousin, the cardinal of Algiers. Rothschild not only draws on discoveries in local archives but also uses new technologies, including the visualization of social networks, large-scale searches, and groundbreaking methods of genealogical research.
An Infinite History demonstrates how the ordinary lives of one family over three centuries can constitute a remarkable record of deep social and economic changes.
Marie Aymard was an illiterate widow who lived in the provincial town of Angoul�me in southwestern France, a place where seemingly nothing ever happened. Yet, in 1764, she made her fleeting mark on the historical record through two documents: a power of attorney in connection with the property of her late husband, a carpenter on the island of Grenada, and a prenuptial contract for her daughter, signed by eighty-three people in Angoul�me. Who was Marie Aymard? Who were all these people? And why were they together on a dark afternoon in December 1764? Beginning with these questions, An Infinite History offers a panoramic look at an extended family over five generations. Through ninety-eight connected stories about inquisitive, sociable individuals, ending with Marie Aymard's great-great granddaughter in 1906, Emma Rothschild unfurls an innovative modern history of social and family networks, emigration, immobility, the French Revolution, and the transformation of nineteenth-century economic life.
Rothschild spins a vast narrative resembling a period novel, one that looks at a large, obscure family, of whom almost no private letters survive, whose members traveled to Syria, Mexico, and Tahiti, and whose destinies were profoundly unequal, from a seamstress living in poverty in Paris to her third cousin, the cardinal of Algiers. Rothschild not only draws on discoveries in local archives but also uses new technologies, including the visualization of social networks, large-scale searches, and groundbreaking methods of genealogical research.
An Infinite History demonstrates how the ordinary lives of one family over three centuries can constitute a remarkable record of deep social and economic changes.
464 pages, Hardcover
First published January 26, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
June 4, 2021
My parents have long been obsessed by genealogy, tracing the stream of ancestors vertically further and further back into the murky past and also laterally branching out to third and fourth and fifth cousin lines spread out in Europe and the States. Since I became obsessed with history at a young age and subsequently became a professional historian, I think they've always been surprised by my lack of interest in my lineage - a bit disappointed that I, unlike they, do not derive satisfaction from tracing one more English coalminer's baptism into the 1830s, one more Polish peasant's death into the 1850s. But the truth is that what historians do and what genealogists do are generally very different things even if they make use of some similar skills. Even historians, like me, who have long had an interest in microhistory and "history from below" - for whom "finding people" is essential to writing good narrative - envision the past in a very different way than those legions of greying men and women scouring ancestry.com to reconstitute their family tree.
Despite my own lack of interest in my own family tree, however, I've always thought there was something fundamentally honest about the genealogical approach and something fundamentally alienating about the disciplinary norms that takes as its subject categories and communities and reads individual lives as examples of these. That is what make Emma Rothschild's An Infinite History so compelling and yet so ultimately frustrating. Starting with Marie Aymard, an unexceptional, illiterate woman born in the unexceptional provincial town of Angoulême in 1713, Emma Rothschild, through unimaginably meticulous archival work that I can only presume took an entire army of research assistants in additional to all the help of genealogical websites on the internet, charts the stories of the lives of nearly 100 of her descendants, as well as the people they knew (as attested by various records) through to the early 20th century. By examining the anecdotes of these lives, and the social networks and networks of information of which they are part, through the generation, somehow this family history becomes the history of all the big narratives of French history from the political and economic revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth-century to the loss of Saint-Domingue and the colonization of Algeria. We are presented with the irony of some of Aymard's descendants living in squalor a few neighborhoods away from where others lived in opulence. Most lived completely obscure lives - but one became archbishop of Algiers.
The result of years and years of archival research, this book is simply stunning. It reads like one of the great panoramic novels of the 19th century - like Balzac's Comedie humaine or Zola's Rougon-Macquart series, also stories of networks and families that were simultaneously stories of entire historical epochs. Yet, in turning to these novels in the final chapter of the book, Rothschild also provides a meditation on the difference - and probably one reason why opinions are so divided on this book. Sure, Rothschild has reconstructed an incredibly glimpse of the interconnected lives of. generally average people in eighteenth and nineteenth century France - but in the end, as opposed to the meaning granted by the very enclosed nature of the narrative of a Balzac or Zola novel, we are left wondering all the more - what does history mean? Is this what history is, generation after generation, people just making do, having kids and then dying? Where does that leave us in terms of the great mechanisms of change over time? There is, despite all that is known, and despite, as Rothschild stresses, so much more that could be known if we branched out farther and farther, if we had access to documents that have been lost or destroyed or were never kept t all, there is still, at the heart of it all, an immense unknowability.
Despite my own lack of interest in my own family tree, however, I've always thought there was something fundamentally honest about the genealogical approach and something fundamentally alienating about the disciplinary norms that takes as its subject categories and communities and reads individual lives as examples of these. That is what make Emma Rothschild's An Infinite History so compelling and yet so ultimately frustrating. Starting with Marie Aymard, an unexceptional, illiterate woman born in the unexceptional provincial town of Angoulême in 1713, Emma Rothschild, through unimaginably meticulous archival work that I can only presume took an entire army of research assistants in additional to all the help of genealogical websites on the internet, charts the stories of the lives of nearly 100 of her descendants, as well as the people they knew (as attested by various records) through to the early 20th century. By examining the anecdotes of these lives, and the social networks and networks of information of which they are part, through the generation, somehow this family history becomes the history of all the big narratives of French history from the political and economic revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth-century to the loss of Saint-Domingue and the colonization of Algeria. We are presented with the irony of some of Aymard's descendants living in squalor a few neighborhoods away from where others lived in opulence. Most lived completely obscure lives - but one became archbishop of Algiers.
The result of years and years of archival research, this book is simply stunning. It reads like one of the great panoramic novels of the 19th century - like Balzac's Comedie humaine or Zola's Rougon-Macquart series, also stories of networks and families that were simultaneously stories of entire historical epochs. Yet, in turning to these novels in the final chapter of the book, Rothschild also provides a meditation on the difference - and probably one reason why opinions are so divided on this book. Sure, Rothschild has reconstructed an incredibly glimpse of the interconnected lives of. generally average people in eighteenth and nineteenth century France - but in the end, as opposed to the meaning granted by the very enclosed nature of the narrative of a Balzac or Zola novel, we are left wondering all the more - what does history mean? Is this what history is, generation after generation, people just making do, having kids and then dying? Where does that leave us in terms of the great mechanisms of change over time? There is, despite all that is known, and despite, as Rothschild stresses, so much more that could be known if we branched out farther and farther, if we had access to documents that have been lost or destroyed or were never kept t all, there is still, at the heart of it all, an immense unknowability.
April 17, 2022
The rating is more accurate to 1.5 stars.
I was very excited for the concept of this book and very disappointed by the execution. This doesn't read like a novel, it reads like a really long research paper. The author throws out names willy-nilly to the point where it's hard to figure out if she's mentioned them before and you should remember something about them or if she's just mentioning them to tell you their death dates. I would only recommend this book to people who have researched heavily into the French Revolution and also know French.
The author really could have benefited from cutting out the fat (like stories of random people that last for less than a sentence). I enjoyed the parts where she fleshed out some of the people more and explained the significance of certain things (there was one guy who made divorce legal and a woman who was executed for supporting the king), but those parts were few and far between. The writing style appeared to be more interested in seeming fancy than actually being well written/understandable (I understood what she was trying to say, but also I speak French. That shouldn't be a requirement for a book in English). The author assumes the reader has a significant amount of knowledge about the French Revolution and thus loses so many opportunities to elaborate on more interesting topics as opposed to cramming in more single sentence lines about random people (frankly, when you only give me a sentence about someone's life - I don't care about them). I tried hard to muscle my way through the book but eventually had to follow Marie Kondo's advice and I gave up about 2/3rds of the way through.
It was clear that the author did a *lot* of research, which is why I gave the extra 0.5-1 stars. It's really a shame.
I was very excited for the concept of this book and very disappointed by the execution. This doesn't read like a novel, it reads like a really long research paper. The author throws out names willy-nilly to the point where it's hard to figure out if she's mentioned them before and you should remember something about them or if she's just mentioning them to tell you their death dates. I would only recommend this book to people who have researched heavily into the French Revolution and also know French.
The author really could have benefited from cutting out the fat (like stories of random people that last for less than a sentence). I enjoyed the parts where she fleshed out some of the people more and explained the significance of certain things (there was one guy who made divorce legal and a woman who was executed for supporting the king), but those parts were few and far between. The writing style appeared to be more interested in seeming fancy than actually being well written/understandable (I understood what she was trying to say, but also I speak French. That shouldn't be a requirement for a book in English). The author assumes the reader has a significant amount of knowledge about the French Revolution and thus loses so many opportunities to elaborate on more interesting topics as opposed to cramming in more single sentence lines about random people (frankly, when you only give me a sentence about someone's life - I don't care about them). I tried hard to muscle my way through the book but eventually had to follow Marie Kondo's advice and I gave up about 2/3rds of the way through.
It was clear that the author did a *lot* of research, which is why I gave the extra 0.5-1 stars. It's really a shame.
July 28, 2021
This was an early and mostly unread donation to the library.
I bought this after reading a review, and didn't pick up that book is essentially a genealogy tale -- I'm less interested in family names and family trees and more interested in how life changed in France during this period.
I bought this after reading a review, and didn't pick up that book is essentially a genealogy tale -- I'm less interested in family names and family trees and more interested in how life changed in France during this period.
February 3, 2023
From my discussion post on the book:
An Infinite History, to its benefit and detriment, often feels as if it is actually infinite in length. The sheer abundance of information—names, places, events, relationships, etc—is overwhelming. Rothschild can have no reasonable expectation that her reader is absorbing most of the things she says. In a single page, she may tell the story of three different people in three different professions and of completely differing natures. Yet, the sheer density of information appears to be the very point that Rothschild wants us to grasp about the history of Angoulême. In her own words, the book is “a story that is without a sense of destiny, or of the development of character over time.” The lack of a narrative arc—both throughout the book and within each individual story—subverts a conventional understanding of how history plays out, especially in times of revolution. History, even the micro, tends to strive for strong plots and compelling stories both because they are more interesting and because they are easier to tell. Each character appears as an agent and as a subject. An Infinite History in contrast seems to be asking us to think of the people of Angoulême as objects, as observers of history, as “individuals glimpsed out of the corner of the eye.”
The story of Léonard Robin is one of the few extended narratives in the entirety of the book. However, Robin’s story is far from conventional. During the revolution he served on a committee on the rights of the Jews; he acted as a commissioner for the National Assembly in the Department of the Lot and at Tuileries palace after the flight to Varennes; he served as a member of the National Assembly and authored France’s first divorce law. Yet Robin appears nothing like the figures of the revolution that we are used to reading about. He has little alike with either Brissot or Condorcet, the other two members of the committee. Robin appears like nothing more than an observer of history. A lawyer who was at the right place at the right time. His narrative is indicative of the whole of Angoulême’s relation to the revolution. Rothschild's point is not that nothing happened in Angoulême—plenty did happen—but that the town is simply moving through history without any sense of destiny. In Rothschild’s words, “It is a history, above all, of what it is like to live amidst events that are beyond one’s control.”
An Infinite History, to its benefit and detriment, often feels as if it is actually infinite in length. The sheer abundance of information—names, places, events, relationships, etc—is overwhelming. Rothschild can have no reasonable expectation that her reader is absorbing most of the things she says. In a single page, she may tell the story of three different people in three different professions and of completely differing natures. Yet, the sheer density of information appears to be the very point that Rothschild wants us to grasp about the history of Angoulême. In her own words, the book is “a story that is without a sense of destiny, or of the development of character over time.” The lack of a narrative arc—both throughout the book and within each individual story—subverts a conventional understanding of how history plays out, especially in times of revolution. History, even the micro, tends to strive for strong plots and compelling stories both because they are more interesting and because they are easier to tell. Each character appears as an agent and as a subject. An Infinite History in contrast seems to be asking us to think of the people of Angoulême as objects, as observers of history, as “individuals glimpsed out of the corner of the eye.”
The story of Léonard Robin is one of the few extended narratives in the entirety of the book. However, Robin’s story is far from conventional. During the revolution he served on a committee on the rights of the Jews; he acted as a commissioner for the National Assembly in the Department of the Lot and at Tuileries palace after the flight to Varennes; he served as a member of the National Assembly and authored France’s first divorce law. Yet Robin appears nothing like the figures of the revolution that we are used to reading about. He has little alike with either Brissot or Condorcet, the other two members of the committee. Robin appears like nothing more than an observer of history. A lawyer who was at the right place at the right time. His narrative is indicative of the whole of Angoulême’s relation to the revolution. Rothschild's point is not that nothing happened in Angoulême—plenty did happen—but that the town is simply moving through history without any sense of destiny. In Rothschild’s words, “It is a history, above all, of what it is like to live amidst events that are beyond one’s control.”
February 12, 2022
This sounded like a neat idea. Following the story of an ordinary French family over a couple hundred years, traced through various public records. What was it like for ordinary people to live through the French Revolution and many other revolutionary changes during this time?
Turns out this was unbelievably, mind-numbingly, boring. The limited records the author had available were dull things like legal testimonies, wills, sales transactions, which represented a tiny scattering of insight across the lives of dozens of people who were hard to keep track of. There was little narrative, just stuff like "random person X who was distantly related to other person Y left her son her furniture in her will".
The only reason I "finished" this is because I put the audio on a 20-minute timer to put me to sleep every night for a couple of months. Worked a treat.
There was one guy at the end who might have been interesting but I wasn't paying much attention.
Turns out this was unbelievably, mind-numbingly, boring. The limited records the author had available were dull things like legal testimonies, wills, sales transactions, which represented a tiny scattering of insight across the lives of dozens of people who were hard to keep track of. There was little narrative, just stuff like "random person X who was distantly related to other person Y left her son her furniture in her will".
The only reason I "finished" this is because I put the audio on a 20-minute timer to put me to sleep every night for a couple of months. Worked a treat.
There was one guy at the end who might have been interesting but I wasn't paying much attention.
January 2, 2025
歐洲民間歷史記載真是豐厚，人們習慣通過立法/締結契約/打官司來解決問題，人與人的關係網也錯綜複雜，終於明白爲什麼說中國是原子化社會了。讀這本書讓我想到同時在看的《顯微鏡下的大明》，徽州人素有興訟美名，歐陽修記載「民習律令 性喜訟」，斯是寶地。
March 5, 2021
Let me preface this by saying that I am not and probably never will be an economic historian. However, I appreciated what Emma Rothschild was trying to do. The French Revolution was clearly one was affected by economic issues. In her book, Rothschild tries to look at what the economic consequences of the Revolution look like throughout a couple generations. She starts before the revolution and traces through the economic circumstances of individual family members. It is an interesting idea and it humanizes a field that is often seen as separate from human experience (economics). Rothschild is pretty explicit about that. She really is trying to talk about the way that economics was interwoven with everyday life. That being said, I really don't think she did as well as she could have. This could be a personal preference, but I feel like if she had just picked a couple of people from each generation and gone in depth with their economic circumstances and how things changed over their lives it would have been much more compelling. As such, with the amount of people that she uses, it seems that she spends most of her time talking about how people are related and stays quite surface level. Although she calls her book a micro-history, I would have liked more of a focus within the micro-history. It would have been more interesting and easier to follow.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews