Anecdote And History

ANECDOTE AND HISTORY
LIONEL GOSSMAN
Eine Anekdote ist ein historisches Element—ein historisches Molecule oder Epigramm.
—Novalis1
ABSTRACT
Although the term “anecdote” entered the modern European languages fairly recently and
remains to this day ill-defined, the short, freestanding accounts of particular events, true or
invented, that are usually referred to as anecdotes have been around from time immemor-
ial. They have also always stood in a close relation to the longer, more elaborate narratives
of history, sometimes in a supportive role, as examples and illustrations, sometimes in a
challenging role, as the repressed of history—“la petite histoire.” Historians’ relation to
them, in turn, varied from appreciative to dismissive in accordance with their own objec-
tives in writing history. It appears that highly structured anecdotes of the kind that are
remembered and find their way into anecdote collections depend on and tend to confirm
established views of history, the world, and human nature. In contrast, loosely structured
anecdotes akin to the modern fait divers have usually worked to undermine established
views and stimulate new ones, either by presenting material known to few and excluded
from officially authorized histories, or by reporting “odd” occurrences for which the estab-
lished views of history, the world, and human nature do 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’s Poker: 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 philoso-
phers, 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 delib-
erately 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 oth-
ers, Wittgenstein, having used the poker “in a philosophical example” before
dropping it on the tiles around the fireplace, then “quietly (left) the meeting and
History and Theory 42 (May 2003), 143-168 © Wesleyan University 2003 ISSN: 0018-2656
1. Novalis, Schriften, ed. Paul Kluckhohn and Richard Samuel, vol. 2: “Das philosophische Werk,”
ed. Richard Samuel, Hans-Joachim Mähl, and Gerhard Schulz (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1960), 567.

(shut) the door behind him.”2 The competing versions of the anecdote told by
those who witnessed the scene raise one of the oldest and most fundamental of
all historiographical problems: how to determine what actually happened when
eyewitness reports are at variance. The problem is aggravated in this instance by
the fact that all the eyewitnesses in question were philosophers presumably ded-
icated to the disinterested search for truth.
Intriguing as this aspect of Wittgenstein’s Poker might be, it is hard not to be
disappointed by the basic strategy the authors adopted for the writing of their
book. This consisted in expanding the dramatic anecdote recounted at the begin-
ning into a complex, circumstantial, novel-like story. Edmonds and Eidinow
draw on standard intellectual biographies of Wittgenstein and Popper, as well as
published historical testimonies by persons close to them, histories of Viennese
society and culture, and accounts of modern philosophy, to paint a broad tableau
of the two principal characters and their world and to explain their intense rival-
ry. We learn about the competing philosophical positions of the two protagonists
and the larger background of early twentieth-century Viennese philosophy from
which they both emerged; we learn about the families in which they grew up—
both highly assimilated Jewish families, one fabulously wealthy and almost aris-
tocratic, the other solidly bourgeois; we learn about the different layers of the
Viennese society they belonged to and in particular about their different experi-
ences, as Austrians of Jewish descent, in a pervasively anti-Semitic culture;
about how each was affected by and responded to National Socialism and the
incorporation of Austria into the Third Reich; about their different connections
with English philosophers and English society; and so on. The anecdote thus
unfolds into something close to a cultural and intellectual history of an important
part of Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. “The story of the poker,”
in Edmonds’s and Eidinow’s own words, “goes beyond the characters and beliefs
of the antagonists. It is inseparable from the story of their times, opening a win-
dow on the tumultuous and tragic history that shaped their lives and brought
them together in Cambridge.”3
As the representation of a dramatic encounter of two rival philosophers, the
original anecdote had a stripped-down, almost abstract character which left
room—a typical feature of many oral forms—for variations of detail. Its focus,
besides the competition between two particular ways of looking on the world—
“the schism in twentieth-century philosophy over the significance of language,”
as Edmonds and Eidinow put it4
—was perhaps the more general, comic contrast
between the ostensible nature of philosophy, as the disinterested and disembod-
ied pursuit of truth, and the intense personal conflict of the two philosophers, cul-
minating in an apparent threat of physical violence; between the tranquil,
unworldly locus of the event—a shabby room in a quiet Cambridge college—and
LIONEL GOSSMAN
144
2. David Edmonds and John Eidinow, Wittgenstein’s Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument
Between Two Great Philosophers (London: Faber and Faber, 2001), 16-17.
3. Ibid., 5.
4. Ibid.

the passions that were unleashed in it.5 The particular philosophical views of the
rival protagonists were barely alluded to in the anecdote, which—fairly typical-
ly as it turns out—supposes that the audience already has certain notions of them.
Edmonds and Eidinow, in contrast, fill out the anecdote’s elementary, essentially
dramatic structure, put flesh on its bones, and deck it out in colorful clothing. The
300-page history to which it gives rise is an intelligently conducted amplificatio,
but it contains no surprises. The antithesis at the core of the anecdote continues
to structure the history, providing the framework on which the authors arrange
and display their rich but familiar borrowings.
II. DRAMATIC AND NOVELISTIC CONSTRUCTIONS OF REALITY
The relation of the epic and dramatic genres, and the implications, in terms of
ideology or Weltanschauung, of narrative versus dramatic representations of the
world, have been a major topic of reflection on literature since Antiquity. As
anecdotes, I now believe, may favor either—they may reduce complex situations
to simple, sharply defined dramatic structures, but they may also, if more rarely,
prise closed dramatic structures open by perforating them with holes of novelis-
tic contingency—a brief discussion of this topic is in order.
The development of narrative in the eighteenth century seems to have been
part of the general critical approach of the Enlightenment and its questioning of
the norms and beliefs about the nature of human beings and the world enshrined
in the content and the form of French classical literature. These norms and beliefs
had the undeniable merit of facilitating a common recognition and understand-
ing of particular actions, situations, and personalities and thus of reinforcing
social cohesion. The novels of Marivaux, Sterne, and Diderot, in contrast, car-
ried—again both formally and thematically—a deliberately disorienting mes-
sage: that if we examine particular actions, situations, and personalities closely
and in individual detail, we will find that they are not neatly ordered and pre-
dictable in the manner suggested by the limited repertory of actions and the well-
defined, often antithetical sets of characters (old man/young man, master/servant,
and so on) to which they are reduced in classical drama, or by the equally gen-
eral antithetical categories (appearance/reality, substance/accident, mind/matter,
and so on) to which they are reduced in classical philosophy.6 What Marivaux’s
La Vie de Marianne and Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste imply is that reality is a
process of unpredictable and continuous mutations, not something already pre-
ANECDOTE AND HISTORY 145
5. In his essay on the structure of the fait divers, Roland Barthes considers “disproportion” and a
“slightly aberrant causality” to be a feature of the “genre”—if the fait divers can be designated a
genre. (“Structure du fait divers,” in Essais critiques [Paris: Seuil, 1964], 188-197) Most of what
Barthes has to say about the fait divers holds equally for certain types of anecdote. In the present case,
the disproportion might be said to arise from the spectacle of philosophers, who are meant to argue,
to use words, resorting to physical violence, and from upsetting the “normal” relation, among philoso-
phers, of body and mind.
6. The repertory of gestures and expressions codified for painters by Charles Le Brun, Director of
Louis XIV’s Académie Royale de Peinture, is another example, alongside the “emplois” or stock char-
acters of the theater, of a view of the world in which the general was deemed more real and funda-
mental than the particular.

formed and simply waiting to be elaborated and unfolded (literally développé,
with local variations, as in classical comedy, the classical nouvelle or, for that
matter, Cartesian mechanist biology).7
In the great eighteenth-century narratives,
life is an adventure, not the acting out of a dramatic part. It is probably not for-
tuitous that the hero of Rousseau’s groundbreaking autobiographical narrative is
a thoroughly uprooted being, or that the central characters of key eighteenth-cen-
tury novels, such as La Vie de Marianne and Fielding’s Tom Jones, are
foundlings or persons of unknown origin. To such individuals the world has no
obvious markers but is an enigma whose workings they have to explore. They in
turn do not present themselves to the world with obvious markers, but must con-
stantly invent and reinvent themselves in a complex negotiation with the world
and its expectations. Appearance and reality, truth and fiction, virtue and vice,
body and soul, masculine and feminine turn out, in much of the literature of the
eighteenth century, to be not nearly as clearly distinguishable as readers of clas-
sical literature and philosophy might have been encouraged to suppose. Human
behavior and the human psyche no longer appear reducible to the clearly bal-
anced designs and categories of the maxims of La Rochefoucauld.
Writing in the second half of the eighteenth century, Chamfort, for one, did not
believe matters were so simple. “Things are miscellanies,” he declared; “men are
patchworks. Ethics and physics are concerned with mixtures. Nothing is simple,
nothing is pure.”8 To the author of Maximes et Pensées, Caractères et Anecdotes,
the anecdote itself, by situating morality in a narrative context, however slight,
represented a much-needed correction to the abstract formal structure of the
maxim as practiced a century earlier by La Rochefoucauld and a challenge to its
seemingly incontrovertible truths. “Moralists, like those philosophers who have
constructed systems of physics or metaphysics, have overgeneralized, and laid
down too many maxims,” he wrote.
What, for instance, becomes of the saying of Tacitus, “A woman who has lost her mod-
esty will not be able to refuse anything afterward,” when confronted with the examples of
so many women whom a moment of weakness has not prevented from practicing a num-
ber of virtues. I have seen Madame de L__, after a youth which differed little from that of
Manon Lescaut, conceive in her riper years a passion worthy of Heloise.9
LIONEL GOSSMAN
146
7. A weakening of classical models of composition is also visible in historiography. In one of my
first attempts to study the structure of a historical text (“Voltaire’s Charles XII: History into Art,”
Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 25 [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 dramatic structure or,
in rhetorical terms, as the elaboration of an antithesis (Peter of Russia versus Charles of Sweden, mod-
ern calculation and ruthlessness versus old-fashioned chivalry and honor, etc.) or a chiasmus (the vic-
tor is vanquished, the vanquished victorious). The informing antithetical structure of the work, I held,
is reinforced by the pervasiveness of parallels and antitheses at the textual level and epitomized in the
proleptic embedded anecdote of the Czarafis Artfchelou in Book 2. I contrasted this early historical
work of Voltaire’s with the later Siècle de Louis XIV and the Essai sur les moeurs, both of which I saw
as less dramatic, more truly narrative, more open-ended, tending away from the paradigmatic toward
the syntagmatic (despite the recurrent antithetical structure of enlightenment versus superstition).
8. “Dans les choses, tout est affaires mêlées; dans les hommes, tout est pièces 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 systèmes en Physique ou en
Métaphysique ont trop généralisé, ont trop multiplié les maximes. Que devient, par exemple, le mot

Though only evoked and not recounted, the anecdote about Madame de L__ (its
claim to reality signaled by the delivery of the first-person testimony in the per-
fect, not the past tense), does not provide a concrete particular instance to illus-
trate a general rule; rather, it bolsters a proposition challenging general rules and,
along with them, the view of the world implied and communicated by classical
drama, the classical maxim, the classical caractère, and some of the basic figures
of classical rhetoric. As Chamfort put it, it is necessary to pay attention to peo-
ple’s actual behavior “afin de n’être pas dupe de la charlatanerie des Moralistes”
(“in order not to be fooled by the quackery of our theorists of human nature”)—
such as La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyère.
III. DEFINING THE ANECDOTE
These preliminary observations leave the anecdote still undefined. In fact, schol-
ars cannot even agree whether there is anything definable there, whether the
anecdote can properly be considered a particular form or genre, like the novel,
the maxim, or the fable. The scholarly literature on the topic, moreover, is scat-
tered and fairly thin, as though the anecdote were thought to be too trivial a form
to deserve serious consideration. While much has been written about the essen-
de Tacite: Neque mulier, amissa pudicitia, alia abnuerit après l’exemple de tant de femmes qu’une
faiblesse n’a pas empêchées de pratiquer plusieurs vertus? J’ai vu madame de L. . ., après une jeunesse
peu différente de celle de Manon Lescaut, avoir, dans l’âge mûr, une passion digne d’Héloïse.”
Sébastien Roch Nicolas de Chamfort, Products of the Perfected Civilization: Selected Writings of
Chamfort, transl. W. S. Merwin (New York: The Macmillian Company, 1969), 130 (chap. ii), 160
(chap. v). Original French texts in Maximes et Pensées, Caractères et Anecdotes, ed. Claude Roy
(Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, 1963), 56, 88. Cf. the first maxim of chap. i: “Maxims and axioms,
like summaries, are the works of persons of intelligence who have labored, as it seems, for the conve-
nience of mediocre and lazy minds. The lazy are happy to find a maxim that spares them the necessi-
ty of making for themselves the observations that led the maxim’s author to the conclusion to which
he invites his reader. The lazy and the mediocre imagine that they need go no further, and ascribe to
the maxim a generality that the author, unless he was mediocre himself, as is sometimes the case, has
not claimed for it. The superior man grasps at once the resemblances, the differences, which render the
maxim more or less applicable in one instance or another, or not at all. It is much the same with nat-
ural history, where the urge to simplify has led to the imagination of classifications and divisions. They
could not have been framed without intelligence for the necessary comparisons and the observing of
relationships; but the great naturalist, the man of genius, sees that nature is prodigal in the invention
of individually different creatures, and he sees the inadequacy of divisions and classifications which
are so commonly used by mediocre and lazy minds” (109). (“Les Maximes, les Axiomes, sont, ainsi
que les Abrégés, l’ouvrage des gens d’esprit, qui ont travaillé, ce semble, à l’usage des esprits
médiocres ou paresseux. Le paresseux s’accommode d’une Maxime qui le dispense de faire lui-même
les observations qui ont mené l’Auteur de la Maxime au résultat dont il fait partie à son Lecteur. Le
paresseux et l’homme médiocre se croient dispensés d’aller au-delà, et donnent à la Maxime une
généralité que l’Auteur, à moins qu’il ne soit lui-même médiocre . . . n’a pas prétendu lui donner.
L’homme supérieur saisit tout d’un coup les ressemblances, les différences qui font que la Maxime est
plus ou moins applicable à tel ou tel cas, ou ne l’est pas du tout. Il en est de cela comme de l’Histoire
naturelle, où le désir de simplifier a imaginé les classes et les divisions. Il a fallu avoir de l’esprit pour
les faire. Car il a fallu rapprocher et observer des rapports. Mais le grand Naturaliste, l’homme de
génie voit que la Nature prodigue des êtres individuellement différents, et voit l’insuffisance des divi-
sions et des classes qui sont d’un si grand usage aux esprits médiocres ou paresseux . . .” (Maximes et
pensées, 33).

tial nature of tragedy, comedy, the epic, the novel, the short story, the maxim, I
have been able to find only a few works, almost exclusively by German scholars,
that attempt to define the nature, form, and function of the anecdote.10
Valuable
as these studies are, they focus mainly on a particular species of anecdote that
was elevated in the first two decades of the nineteenth century to the status of a
recognized and admired, if minor, literary form in Germany by the Prussian
dramatist and short story writer Heinrich von Kleist and the Basel-born Swabian
preacher and popular dialect poet Johann Peter Hebel. (The conjunction of
drama, short-story form, and anecdote in the case of Kleist does not, as we shall
see, appear to be fortuitous, inasmuch as the drama and the short story are, like a
certain kind of anecdote, condensed forms representing a critical moment in
which the “essence” of a situation or character is supposed to be made visible.)
The word “anecdote” itself was and is used to describe a wide range of narra-
tives, the defining feature of which appears to be less their brevity (though most
are quite short) than their lack of complexity. As the OED puts it, an anecdote is
the “narrative of a detached incident, or of a single event, told as being in itself
interesting and striking.”11 That general dictionary definition, which obviously
aims to distinguish the anecdote from more complex narrative forms like histo-
LIONEL GOSSMAN
148
10. In particular Klaus Doderer, “Die deutsche Anekdoten-Theorie” in his Die Kurzgeschichte.
Ihre Form und ihre Entwicklung [1953] (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1969); Hans
Franck, Deutsche Erzählkunst (Trier: Friedrich Winter, 1922); Richard Friedenthal, “Vom Nutzen und
Wert der Anekdote,” in Sprache und Politik: Festgabe für Dolf Sternberger zum 60. Geburtstag, ed.
Carl-Joachim Friedrich and Benno Reifenberg (Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, 1968), 62-67; Heinz
Grothe, Anekdote, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1984); Robert Petsch, Wesen und Formen der
Erzählkunst (Halle/Saale: Max Niemeyer, 1934); Rudolf Schäfer, Die Anekdote: Theorie, Analyse,
Dialektik (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1982); Walter Ernst Schäfer, Anekdote–Antianekdote: Zum Wandel
einer literarischen Form in der Gegenwart (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1977). In addition, in English, are
the hard-to-come-by Dissertation on Anecdotes (1793) of Isaac D’Israeli (himself no mean compiler
of anecdotes), and the Introduction by Clifton Fadiman to the Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes
(Boston/Toronto: Little, Brown & Co., 1985). Most of these works attempt to define the essential
characteristics and functions of the anecdote. The more historical approach adopted by Volker Weber,
Anekdote—Die andere Geschichte (Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag, 1993) and Sonja Hilzinger,
Anekdotisches Erzählen im Zeitalter der Aufklärung: Zum Struktur- und Funktionswandel der
Gattung Anekdote in Historiographie, Publizistik und Literatur des 18. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: M&P
Verlag für Wissenschaft und Forschung, 1997)—provide an invaluable complement to these other-
wise preeminently formal studies of the anecdote. In French, in addition to Roland Barthes’s essay
(see n. 5 above), several articles devoted to the fait divers in Annales 38 (1983), 821-919, throw much
light on the closely related, sometimes indistinguishable form of the anecdote, notably Marc Ferro,
“Présentation” (821-826) and Michelle Perrot, “Fait divers et histoire au XIXème siècle” (911-919).
11. The OED definition corresponds remarkably to Roland Barthes’s definition of the fait divers in
“Structure du fait divers”: “Le fait divers . . . est une information totale . . .; il contient en soi tout son
savoir: point besoin de connaître rien du monde pour consommer un fait divers; il ne renvoie formelle-
ment à rien d’autre qu’à lui-même; bien sûr, son contenu n’est pas étranger au monde: désastres,
meurtres, enlèvements, agressions, accidents, vols, bizarreries, tout cela renvoie à l’homme, à son his-
toire, à son alienation, à ses fantasmes.” (“The fait divers . . . is a complete piece of information in
itself…It contains all its knowledge within itself: consumption of a fait divers requires no knowledge
of the world; it refers formally to nothing but itself; of course, its content is not unrelated to the world:
disasters, murders, abductions, robberies, and eccentricities all refer to human beings, their history,
their condition of alienation, their fantasies.”) But it contains its own circumstances, its own causes,
its own past, its own outcome. It is “sans durée et sans contexte” (It has “neither temporal duration
nor context”) (189).

ry and the novel, still accommodates a wide variety of verbal practices, both oral
and written, both popular and cultivated: the joke or the tall story; the jewel-like
short narrative, with its witty punch line, that was developed in the salons of the
elite in the eighteenth century; the short tale, usually containing a moral lesson,
of the type composed (or adapted) by Johann Peter Hebel for Swiss and German
popular almanacs or Kalender; the highly stylized, now classic anecdotes of
Heinrich von Kleist.12
The later, carefully crafted works, entitled Anekdoten, by
Wilhelm Schäfer, and the so-called Kalendergeschichten of Bert Brecht—a
sophisticated kind of anti-anecdote intended to undermine the shared assump-
tions that the traditional anecdote depends on for its intelligibility and effective-
ness—must also be regarded as productions of high literary art. Moreover, the
anecdote may be fairly detached and free-standing, as in anecdote books or col-
lections.13 Or it may be integrally connected with and embedded in a larger argu-
ment or narrative, as in sermons and most historical writings.
As to its form, what most people would consider the classic anecdote is a high-
ly concentrated miniature narrative with a strikingly dramatic three-act structure
consisting of situation or exposition, encounter or crisis, and resolution—the last
usually marked by a “pointe” or clinching remark, often a “bon mot.”14 But rel-
atively unstructured short narratives of particular events, such as the miscella-
neous murders, trials, and natural catastrophes recorded in Smollet’s late eigh-
teenth-century History of England from the Revolution to the Death of George II,
as a kind of addenda to the principal political events,15 or the faits divers report-
12. Though Kleist first published his anecdotes in a newspaper with which he was associated, the
Berliner Abendblätter, it is fair to assume that the readership of the paper, unlike that of almanacs or
Kalender, was the educated middle and upper class of the Prussian capital. See Heinrich Aretz,
Heinrich von Kleist als Journalist: Untersuchungen zum “Phöbus,” zur “Germania” und zu den
“Berliner Abendblättern” (Stuttgart: Hans-Dieter Heinz, 1983).
13. In the well known Percy Anecdotes, individual anecdotes are grouped in thirty-eight categories,
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: Harper and Brothers, 1843]).
14. There is still work to do to explore the relation of the anecdote to the joke, the Renaissance
facétie or Schwank, and the apophtegm. One of the chief repositories of apophtegms, the De vita et
moribus philosophorum of Diogenes Laertius, a favorite work of Renaissance scholars (it was print-
ed in Basel by Frobenius in 1533), became the object, in the last third of the nineteenth century, of the
scholarly attention of the young Nietzsche, whose own disruptive, fragmentary philosophical 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 necessary to specify some domestic occurrences that for a little while engrossed
the public attention.” There follows a series of anecdotes of murders, trials, etc. only loosely connect-
ed by the general proposition (para. 12) that “Homicide is the reproach of England: one would imag-
ine that there is something in the climate of this country, that not only disposes the natives to this inhu-
man outrage, but even infects foreigners who reside among them.” These more or less extensive nar-
ratives, along with the many narratives of individuals and particular episodes interspersed in the “pub-
lic” history, should doubtless be distinguished from more general reports (reminiscent of traditional
Annals), such as that (para. 42) of “the horrors and wreck of a dreadful earthquake, protracted in
repeated shocks,” that struck Syria and “began on the thirteenth day of October, in the neighbourhood

ed in the newspapers, have also often been referred to, since the eighteenth cen-
tury, as anecdotes.16
In addition, the term “anecdote” was widely used in the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries to designate a species of historical writing that delib-
erately eschewed large-scale “narrativization,” to borrow Hayden White’s useful
term. These anecdote-histories—Anecdotes des Républiques (1771), Anecdotes
arabes et musulmanes (1772), Anecdotes espagnoles et portugaises depuis l’o-
rigine de la nation jusqu’à nos jours (1773), Anecdotes américaines (1776), and
so on—seem to be defined by their ostensible refusal of systematization, total-
ization, and ideological interpretation and by their reporting of only particular,
relatively isolated episodes, often enough in simple chronological order, as in the
annals and chronicles of the Middle Ages (interest in which revived, as it hap-
pens, around the same time).17
LIONEL GOSSMAN
150
of Tripoli.” The report is a list rather than a narrative: “A great number of houses were overthrown in
Seyde, and many people buried under the ruins . . . an infinite number of villages . . . were reduced to
heaps of rubbish. At Acra, or Ptolemais, the sea overflowed its banks and poured into the streets. The
city of Saphet was entirely destroyed, and the greatest part of its inhabitants perished. At Damascus
all the minarets were overthrown, and six thousand people lost their
lives.” (The History of England from the Revolution in 1688 to the Death of George the Second, 6
vols. [London: J. Walker, 1811], VI, 189-216, 261).
16. “Vermischte Anekdoten” was the heading under which the writer Christian Friedrich Daniel
Schubart (1731–1791) gathered together a great variety of reports of events and personalities in his
bi-weekly newspaper Teutsche Chronik (1774–1777; under other names until 1793). The term fait
divers dates only from 1863 and appears to have no equivalent in other languages, which simply bor-
row the French term. What is now understood by fait divers used to be designated in French as “anec-
dotes,” “nouvelles curieuses, singulières,” or “canards.” (See Michelle Perrot, “Fait divers et histoire
au XIXème siècle” [as in note 9]).
17. The catalogue of Princeton’s Firestone Library lists well over 200 volumes under titles such as
Anecdotes africaines, Anecdotes américaines, etc. Most were published between 1750 and 1830, but
the genre continues well into the nineteenth century. These texts vary in character. Some authors insist
on the fragmentary, eyewitness character of their work. Thus the author of Anecdotes and
Characteristic Traits respecting the Incursion of the French Republicans into Franconia in the Year
1796, by an Eye-Witness (translated from the German [London: J. Bell, 1798]) declares in his Preface:
“I do not here present the public with a complete history of the French incursion into Franconia; but
supply the future historian of that memorable event with a few facts and incidents, of which I was an
eye-witness, collected within the district where I reside. Every circumstance related here is genuine.
I endeavoured to be an attentive observer, to collect with fidelity, and to delineate without prejudice.”
George Henry Jennings, the author of An Anecdotal History of the British Parliament from the
Earliest Period to the Present Time (New York: Appleton, 1883), aims to “bring together in anecdo-
tal form some of the most striking facts in the history of our Parliaments, and the public lives of dis-
tinguished statesmen” in order to return to the “original” of certain statements and episodes which
have suffered, he says, from what Gladstone called “mythical accretion.” L. A. Caraccioli’s brief
Anecdotes piquantes relatives aux Etats-Généraux (1789) retail how the news of the Estates General
was received in various European capitals (Rome, Warsaw, St. Petersburg, Stockholm,
Constantinople, Vienna, London), in Paris and at Versailles, and in many French provincial towns. In
contrast, Guillaume Bertoux’s Anecdotes espagnoles et portugaises depuis l’origine de la Nation,
jusqu’à nos jours, 2 vols. (Paris: Vincent, 1773) and his earlier Anecdotes françaises depuis l’étab-
lissment de la monarchie jusqu’au règne de Louis XV (Paris: Vincent, 1767), the anonymous
Anecdotes des Républiques, 2 vols, (Paris: Vincent, 1771), divided into “Anecdotes Génoises et
Corses,” “Anecdotes Vénitiennes,” “Anecdotes Helvétiques,” etc., the Anecdotes arabes et musul-
manes depuis l’an de J.-C. 614, époque de l’établissement du Mahométanisme en Arabie par le faux
Prophète Mahomet jusqu’à l’extinction du Caliphat en 1578 of J.F. de Lacroix and A. Harnot (Paris:

IV. EARLY USES OF THE TERM “ANECDOTE”
Though anecdotes have been around in one form or another for a very long time,
as long, no doubt, as rumor and gossip, it was not until fairly late—around 1650
in French, a few years later in English—that the term “anecdote” itself entered the
European languages. Its introduction was probably a result of the discovery and
publication by the Vatican Librarian, in the year 1623, of a text referred to in the
Suda, an eleventh-century Byzantine encyclopedic compilation, as Anekdota (lit-
erally “unpublished works”) and attributed to Procopius, the sixth-century author
of an officially sanctioned History in Eight Books of the Emperor Justinian’s
Persian, Vandal, and Gothic wars and of a laudatory account of Justinian’s build-
ing program, De Aedificiis. At first, the term retained in the modern languages the
purely technical meaning of “unpublished” that it had had both for those who used
it in antiquity (Cicero, Diodorus Siculus) and for the eleventh-century compilers
of the Suda. In the mid-eighteenth century, Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary defines
“anecdote” as “something yet unpublished.” According to the Encyclopédie arti-
cle (by the Abbé Mallet), “anecdote” designates “tout écrit de quelque genre qu’il
soit, qui n’a pas encore été publié” (“any piece of writing, of whatever kind, which
has not yet been published”).18
From this literal meaning of “unpublished”
springs, in all likelihood, the meaning of “an item of news or fait divers” (that is,
something hitherto unknown or unpublished) which seems quickly to have
attached itself to the term “anecdote,” and which is most probably the meaning of
the word in the rarely cited subtitle of Benjamin Constant’s famous early nine-
teenth-century novella Adolphe: “Anecdote trouvée dans les papiers d’un incon-
nu” (“Anecdote found among the papers of an unknown”). Constant no doubt
intended it to convey the impression that his tale described a “real” event.
Its association with Procopius’s text also provided the word “anecdote” with yet
another meaning in the modern European languages. The Anekdota, now usually
referred to as Procopius’s Secret History or Storia arcana, turned out to consist of
instances of the most brutal exercise of despotic power, as well as scurrilous tales
of palace and family intrigue, that were completely at odds with the celebratory
narrative of Procopius’s official History. The second meaning of the word “anec-
dote” listed in Johnson’s Dictionary—“secret history”—reflects this influence of
Procopius’s text. In the Encyclopédie it is already the first meaning given: “his-
Vincent, 1772), and the Anecdotes américaines, ou histoire abrégée des principaux événements
arrivés dans le Nouveau Monde depuis sa découverte (Paris: Vincent, 1776) are all essentially
chronologies, though only those years are included in which something occurred that, in the authors’
view, can be told as a story. Numerous collections of “Episodes” and “Curiosities” seem closely relat-
ed to “Anecdotes.” There was a curious revival of “anecdote history” in the period following the First
World War in Germany, in response to another crisis of historical understanding; see the discussion of
the prolific Alexander von Gleichen-Russwurm’s Weltgeschichte in Anekdoten und Querschnitten
(Berlin: Max Hess, 1929) in Volker Weber, Anekdote—Die andere Geschichte, 152-167 (as in note 10).
18. When the Italian Enlightenment scholar Ludovico Muratori published some of the Greek and
Latin manuscripts in the Ambrosian Library in Milan between 1697 and 1713, he entitled his collec-
tions Anecdota Latina and Anecdota Graeca.

toires secrètes de faits qui se sont passés dans l’intérieur du cabinet ou des cours de
Princes, & dans les mystères de leur politique” (“secret histories of what has gone
on in the inner counsels or courts of Princes and in the mysteries of their politics”).
From its earliest usage in the modern European languages, then, the term
“anecdote” has been closely related to history, and even to a kind of counter-his-
tory. Procopius’s Anekdota cover exactly the same years as his History of the
Wars: 527–553 CE. But in the unpublished work, the secretary and companion of
Belisarius, Justinian’s famous general, exposes the censored, seamy underside,
the chronique scandaleuse, of the reign he himself had presented in noble colors
in his official history. The Justinian of the Anekdota is a tyrant, the Empress
Theodora a vindictive, cruel, low-born former harlot. Belisarius is venal, avari-
cious, 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 human form when it is inspected close up through a microscope, the hero-
ic and orderly public narrative of the History is undercut by a ragbag of stories
of depravity and abuse of power.
Procopius’s Anekdota or secret history was the explicitly acknowledged model
of several late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century histories, 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
Anecdotes de Florence, ou l’histoire secrète de la maison des Médicis, published
in 1685, supposedly in The Hague. Likewise, Les Anecdotes de Suède, ou His-
toire Secrète des Changemens arrivés dans ce Royaume sous le règne de Charles
XI, which appeared in Stockholm in 1716, took the lid off the official history of
Charles XI of Sweden, the ally and emulator of Louis XIV.19
Not surprisingly, the friends of power, those concerned with maintaining pub-
lic images and decorum, have generally been fearful of anecdotes and have lost
no opportunity to denigrate them, while at the same time enjoying them in pri-
vate and, when necessary, using them against their own enemies. “L’anecdote,”
the Goncourt brothers assert, “c’est la boutique à un sou de l’Histoire”20
(“The
LIONEL GOSSMAN
152
19. Anecdotes continue to function in this way in modern use, as in the clandestine diaries in which
Ulrich von Hassell, German Ambassador to Rome between 1932 and 1937, recorded not only his and
his friends’ efforts to organize a regime-change but living conditions and popular attitudes in
Germany under National Socialism. Thus, to illustrate the unpopularity of the law requiring Jews 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 “herculean worker” who “said to 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.’” Another anecdote, more properly defined as
a joke, “illustrates the stupidity of the Party. ‘At a crossroad three 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 Von Hassell Diaries: The Story of the Forces against Hitler inside Germany 1938–1944
[Boulder, CO and Oxford: Westview Press, 1994], 227, 246-247).
20. Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Idées et sensations (Paris: Bibliothèque Charpentier-Eugène
Fasquelle, 1904), 13. See Michelle Perrot, “Fait divers et histoire au XIXème siècle,” 912-913, on the
authorities’ fear of anecdotes and “canards” and their attempts to suppress or domesticate them by
removing them from the less controllable area of oral circulation to the more controllable area of the
press. Even so, serious newspapers relegate them to an inconspicuous position on an inside page, and

anecdote is the dime store of history”). But they themselves made abundant use
of anecdotes in their Histoire de la société française pendant la Révolution, the
aim of which, in their own words, was “not to relate once again” the grand polit-
ical history of the Revolution, but to “portray France, manners, states of mind,
the national physiognomy, the color of things, life, and humanity from 1788 to
1800” (“peindre la France, les moeurs, les âmes, la physionomie nationale, la
couleur des choses, la vie et l’humanité de 1789 à 1800”). That meant, in this
instance, discrediting the heroic Republican account of the Revolution and sub-
stituting an alternative, unheroic, and often petty counter-history. To write such
a history, the Goncourts said, “we had to discover new sources of the true, to look
for our documents in newspapers, pamphlets, and a whole universe of lifeless
paper hitherto viewed with contempt, in autograph letters, engravings, all the
monuments of intimacy that an age leaves behind.”21 In short, they had to explore
the world of the anecdote and the anecdotal.
Voltaire had already expressed a similarly ambivalent view of anecdotes. In
his “Discours sur l’Histoire de Charles XII” of the early 1730s, he lambasted his
contemporaries for their “fureur d’écrire” (“mania for writing”), their
“démangeaison de transmettre à la postérité des détails inutiles” (“itch to trans-
mit useless details to posterity”). This passion for the allegedly trivial had gotten
to the point, he alleged, that “hardly has a sovereign departed this life than the
public is inundated with volumes purporting to 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.23 Two decades later, somewhat apologetically, the
mature author of the Siècle de Louis XIV devoted the concluding four chapters of
the political part of his history to “Particularités et anecdotes du règne de Louis
XIV.” Anecdotes may be of interest to the public, he conceded, but only “when
they concern illustrious personages” (“quand ils concernent des personnages
illustres”). In general, however, modern historiography has no place for anything
the most serious, like Le Monde, exclude them altogether. The conservative Barbey d’Aurevilly antic-
ipated that the newspaper would destroy the book and would in turn be destroyed by the fait divers.
“Le petit fait le rongera. Ce sera son insecte, sa vermine” (quoted by Perrot, 913).
21. “il nous a fallu découvrir de nouvelles sources du Vrai, demander nos documents aux journaux,
aux brochures, à tout ce monde de papier mort et méprisé jusqu’ici, aux autographes, aux gravures, à
tous les monuments intimes qu’une époque laisse derrière elle.” Edmond et Jules de Goncourt,
Histoire de la société française pendant la Révolution (Paris: Bibliothèque Charpentier-Eugène
Fasquelle, 1904), v-vi. In a section of the book devoted to the passion for the gaming table during the
Revolutionary period, one reads, for instance, the story of an addicted gambler: “Mourant, le cheva-
lier Bouju, le terrible ponte, se fit porter au trente et un et, dans les bras de ses amis, agonisant, crispant
ses mains sur le tapis vert, comme sur les draps de son lit de mort, il se gagna, ce cadavre joueur, de
superbes funérailles” (“As he lay dying, that formidable gambler, chevalier Bouju, had himself trans-
ported to a gaming house to play trente-et-un. In the arms of his friends, at death’s door, clutching the
gaming table like the sheet on his deathbed, this gambling cadaver won a superb funeral for himself”)
(26).
22. “à peine un souverain cesse de vivre que le public est inondé de volumes sous le nom de
mémoires, d’histoire de sa vie, d’anecdotes de sa cour.”
23. Voltaire, Histoire de Charles XII (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1968), 30-31.

that cannot be properly verified, and that is often the case with anecdotes. Thus
Procopius’s Histoire secrète de Justinien is not, in Voltaire’s view, a model for
modern historians to follow. It is a satire “motivated by vengefulness” which
“contradicts the author’s public history” and “is not always true.” Seventy pages
of anecdotes later, Voltaire relents hardly at all. Anecdotes have value only when
they are at least plausible and concern prominent figures in world history. “A
philosopher might well be repelled by so many details. But curiosity, that com-
mon failing of mankind, ceases perhaps to be one, when it is directed toward men
and times that command the attention of posterity.”24
In part, Voltaire’s disdain for anecdotes was consistent with his demand that
history not be about individual monarchs but about nations and civilizations. It
is the false view of history as the story of kings, he argued, that encourages the
presumptuous belief that every detail concerning them and those around them
must be of vast and enduring interest. Voltaire’s mostly negative judgment of
anecdotes was also determined, however, by the same classical, fundamentally
conservative esthetics (and politics) that later led the editors of the Année
Littéraire to condemn Rousseau’s Confessions as an act of literary arrogance and
presumption. “Where would we be now,” they protested in 1782, “if every one
arrogated to himself the right to write and print everything that concerns him per-
sonally and that he enjoys recalling?”25 It is hard to read this indignant rejection
of Rousseau’s claim that the humblest anecdotes concerning the personal life of
an obscure semi-orphan child (albeit one who became a famous writer) are wor-
thy of interest as expressing anything but a classical (and conservative) desire to
control the knowledge of history and to preserve hierarchy in history as well as
in society by dictating what should count as important and worthy of being
remembered and what should not.
Admittedly, this is a complex matter. As is well known, the eighteenth centu-
ry was a great age of anecdotes. A considerable publishing industry was devoted
to anecdotes on every conceivable subject—medicine, literature, the theater, the
arts. Voltaire was one of many writers who deplored this development as a sign
of the decadence of taste and the intrusion of the commercial spirit into literature,
with publishers rushing to please a growing reading public allegedly no longer
willing or able to engage seriously with literature or history.26
But that was
almost certainly a simplification of the issue. The taste for particulars rather than
extended formal narratives or arguments, for the concrete private detail rather
than the public generality, probably did reflect a diminution of traditional culture
LIONEL GOSSMAN
154
24. “Tant de détails pourraient rebuter un philosophe; mais la curiosité, cette faiblesse si commune
aux hommes, cesse peut-être d’en être une, quand elle a pour objet des temps et des hommes qui
attirent les regards de la postérité.” Voltaire, Siècle de Louis XIV, 2 vols. (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion,
1966), I, 307, 379.
25. “Où en serions-nous si chacun s’arrogeoit le droit d’écrire et de faire imprimer tous les faits
qui l’intéressent personnellement et qu’il aime à se rappeler?” Année littéraire 4 (1782), 150-151,
quoted in Franco Orlando, “Rousseau e la nascità di una tradizione letteraria: il ricordo d’infanzia,”
Belfagor 20 (1965), 12.
26. See Christopher Todd, “Chamfort and the Anecdote,” Modern Language Review 74 (1979),
297-309, especially the opening pages.

in an expanded reading public, a demand for easy distraction and quick stimula-
tion. But it also had a good deal to do with Enlightenment empiricism, distrust
of authority and “authorized” explanations of things, and suspicion of all-encom-
passing systems—in historiography and ethics, as well as in politics, theology,
and philosophy.
V. ANECDOTES IN HISTORICAL WRITING
As it happens, the most common use of anecdotes by historians appears not to
have been especially subversive. Anecdotes usually functioned in historical writ-
ing not as puzzling or unusual individual cases throwing doubt on notions of his-
torical order, but as particular instances exemplifying and confirming a general
rule or trend or epitomizing a larger general situation. The particular in this usage
was not, as Voltaire feared it might be, disruptive or destructive of the general,
but remained subordinate to the general. The detail or particular story or anec-
dote was admitted when it illustrated historical situations or personalities whose
general character and importance had already been established—that is, when it
illustrated, in Voltaire’s own words, “men and times that command the attention
of posterity.”
As magistra vitae, early modern history was often a collection of episodes
exemplifying general rules and lessons of behavior.27
Thus the “histories” relat-
ed in the Historische Chronica, published by the celebrated engraver Matthäus
Merian in the 1620s and frequently reprinted, were intended to demonstrate that
vice is punished and virtue rewarded in the same way that examples in grammar
books offer particular illustrations of the general rules governing noun declen-
sions and verb conjugations. As a result, particular narratives are related to each
other in the Chronica far more in terms of the virtues or vices they exemplify
than in terms of an internal historical connection or relation among them. Only
the succession of dates in the margins (calculated from Creation or from the birth
of Christ) establishes a loose temporal connectedness—something akin to the
connectedness Hayden White considers characteristic of annals, as distinct from
“narrativized” histories—while also serving, at the same time, as a signal that the
events being narrated are 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 traditional values
and a shared understanding of human beings and the world. The relation of
part—individual short narrative or anecdote—to whole in this kind of history
27. Christoph Daxelmüller, “Narratio, Illustratio, Argumentatio: Exemplum und Bildungstechnik
in der frühen Neuzeit,” in Exempel und Exempelsammlungen, ed. Walter Haug and Burghart
Wachinger (Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 1991), 79. In Plutarch—still Rousseau’s favorite historian—
“past events only become history,” that is they enter the narrative of history, only “when their exem-
plary character, their capacity to offer (the present) models to imitate, releases them from the sphere
of the irrevocably vanished” (Eginhard Hora, “Zum Verständnis des Werkes,” in Giambattista Vico,
Die neue Wissenschaft [Hamburg, 1966], 232, quoted by Rudolf Schäfer, Die Anekdote: Theorie,
Analyse, Dialektik [Munich: Oldenbourg, 1982], 12).

might be described as allegorical. Each anecdote is a singular instance of a gen-
eral rule that it exemplifies and points to.28
The late Enlightenment and Romantic invention of History as a process, rather
than a simple diachrony or a playing out in varying successive guises of a limit-
ed repertory of acts, implied a different relation of part to whole, and of anecdote
to history. In conformity with the shift in literature and art from Classicism to
Romanticism and from allegory to symbol,29
anecdotes ceased to be allegorical,
exemplary of essentially extra- or transhistorical universal situations. In a world
in which it was held that, in Ranke’s famous words, “jede Epoche ist unmittel-
bar zu Gott” (“every age of history stands in an immediate relation to God”),
their relation to a larger context beyond them ceased to be conceptual, and came
to be understood as an internal relation to an evolving whole, of which the par-
ticular event recounted in the anecdote was a relatively autonomous but integral
part, as an organ is part of a body. This change was underlined by a new—more
than merely picturesque—emphasis on couleur locale and historical accuracy in
the representation of costume and mores, in contrast with the free handling of
these—the combining of ancient figures and modern attributes, for instance—in
the engravings with which Merian illustrated the Chronica.30 In the new histori-
ography, 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”
Plutarch declared famously that “a chance remark or a joke may reveal far more
of a man’s character than winning battles in which thousands fall, or . . . mar-
shalling great armies, or laying siege to cities.”31 Therein, according to Plutarch,
LIONEL GOSSMAN
156
28. On the Chronica, see Andreas Urs Sommer, “Triumph der Episode über die Universalhistorie?
Pierre Bayles Geschichtsverflüssigungen,” Saeculum 52 (2001), 1-39, at 15-23. Sommer points out
that as the Chronica approached modern times and the historical material became overwhelmingly
abundant, it became increasingly difficult to reduce it to the simple terms required by exemplary his-
tory. “Confronted by the sheer mass and extent of the material of modern history, the historian can-
not control it or establish anything but the most imperfect connections. As moralist, he has to capitu-
late before the complexity of the material” (22). According to Volker Weber the “Histörchen” of
Wilhelm Schäfer (Hundert Histörchen [Munich: A. Langen, G. Müller, 1940]) are a modern 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 important transition from allegory to symbol, Bengt A. Sorensen, Allegorie und
Symbol: Texte zur Theorie des dichterischen Bildes im 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am
Main: Athenäum, 1972).
30. Sommer, “Triumph der Episode über die 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, Arthur Schnitzler: “By drawing
on three striking anecdotes from his life, we may be able to take the measure of a man’s character with
the same precision that we measure the surface of a triangle by calculating the relation among three fixed
points, whose connecting lines constitute the triangle” (“Das Wesen eines Menschen lässt sich durch drei
schlagkräftige Anekdoten aus seinem Leben vielleicht mit gleicher Bestimmtheit berechnen, wie der
Flächeinhalt eines Dreiecks aus dem Verhältnis dreier fixer Punkte zueinander, deren Verbindungslinien
das Dreieck bilden”). (Arthur Schnitzler, Buch der Sprüche und Bedenken, in Aphorismen und
Betrachtungen, ed. Robert O. Weiss [Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1967], 53.) Cf. Nietzsche:
“Three anecdotes may suffice to paint a picture of a man” (quoted by Clifton Fadiman, Introduction to
The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes [Boston/Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1985]).

lay the difference between the historian or chronicler of public events and the
biographer. To the degree that, with the Romantics, history itself came to resem-
ble a kind of national biography—Michelet, it will be recalled, boasted of hav-
ing “been the first to present France as a person” (“posé le premier la France
comme une personne”)32
—Plutarch’s distinction between the methods of the
biographer and those of the historian ceased to hold. As early as the last third of
the eighteenth century some of Chamfort’s anecdotes appear to have had such
symptomatic value. A story about the Duke of Hamilton, for instance—who,
being drunk one night, heedlessly killed a waiter at an inn, and when confronted
with the fact by the horrified innkeeper, calmly replied: “Add it to the bill”—
seems intended as more than an allegory of the general indifference of the rich
and powerful to the poor and powerless; it is also symptomatic of the personage
described, the Duke of Hamilton, and—beyond him perhaps—of the social rela-
tions of a particular historical moment, that of the ancien régime.33
This is the kind of anecdote we are most familiar with as modern readers of
history. A couple of examples from Michelet will be enough to call many others
to mind. In the Histoire de France Michelet presents an anecdote about a change
in the relations of d’Aubigné and Henri IV as symptomatic of a fundamental
change in the political and cultural climate in general at the end ot the sixteenth
century.
D’Aubigné tells of a sad event. The King, still haunted by his bogeyman, the Calvinist
republic, was determined to put him in the Bastille. The Huguenot, who knew his royal
master well, in order to be left in peace, asked for the first time to be rewarded for his ser-
vices with money, a pension. From that point on the king is sure of him; he summons him,
embraces him; suddenly they are good friends. That same evening, D’Aubigné was hav-
ing supper with two noble-hearted women. Suddenly, without a word, one of them began
to weep and shed many tears.
“For good, too good reason, ”Michelet comments, giving the sense of the anec-
dote. “The day D’Aubigné was obliged to accept a pension and ask for money
the great 16th Century came to an end and the other began.”34 Likewise, in the
section on the Bastille (section IX) in the Introduction to the Histoire de la
32. “Préface de 1869,” Histoire de France, Book III, Oeuvres complètes, ed. P. Viallaneix, 21 vols.
(Paris: Flammarion, 1971–), VI, 11. See L. Gossman, “Jules Michelet: histoire nationale, biographie,
autobiographie,” Littérature 102 (1996), 29-54.
33. Chamfort, “Caractères et anecdotes,” in Products of the Perfected Civilization, appendix 1,
272. A somewhat similar point is made, more benignly, by an anecdote in which Madame du Châtelet
admits a manservant into her bathroom while she is naked. There was no more shame in this, to an
aristocratic woman, than being seen naked by a dog.
34. “D’Aubigné raconte un fait triste. Le roi, rêvassant toujours son épouvantail, la république
calviniste, voulait décidément le mettre à la Bastille. Le huguenot, qui le connoissait, pour avoir enfin
son repos, lui demande pour la première fois récompense de ses longs services, de l’argent, une pen-
sion. Dès lors, le roi est sûr de lui; il le fait venir, il l’embrasse; les voilà bons amis. Le même soir,
d’Aubigné soupait avec deux dames de noble coeur. Tout à coup, l’une d’elles, sans parler, se mit à
pleurer et versa d’abondantes larmes. Avec trop de raison. Le jour où d’Aubigné avait été forcé de
prendre pension et de demander de l’argent, le grand XVIe siècle était fini, et l’autre était inauguré.”
“Histoire de France au Dix-Septième Siècle” (1858), in Oeuvres Complètes, ed. Paul Villaneix (Paris:
Flammarion, 1982), IX, 153.

Révolution Française the essential arbitrariness Michelet considered characteris-
tic of the ancien régime is conveyed by means of an anecdote.
One day, Louis XV’s and Madame de Pompadour’s doctor, the illustrious Quesnay, who
lodged with her at Versailles, sees the King enter unexpectedly and becomes
disturbed.The clever 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
LIONEL GOSSMAN
158
35. “Le médecin de Louis XV et de Madame de Pompadour, l’illustre Quesnay, qui logeait chez elle
à Versailles, voit un jour le Roi entrer à l’improviste et se trouble. La spirituelle femme de chambre,
Madame de Hausset, qui a laissé de si curieux Mémoires, lui demanda pourquoi il se déconcertait ainsi.
‘Madame,’ répondit-il, ‘quand je vois le Roi, je me dis: Voilà un homme qui peut me faire couper la
tête.’—‘Oh!,’ dit-elle, ‘le Roi est trop bon.’ La femme de chambre résumait là d’un seul mot les
garanties de la monarchie.” Histoire de la révolution française, 2 vols. (Paris: Editions de la Pléiade,
1952), II, 67. Many other examples could be cited. Describing the drastically diminished authority of
the monarchy in the years preceding the Revolution, Philippe de Ségur expresses confidence in his
Mémoires that “On peut en juger par une 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 “lettres de cachet”—referred to gaily by the Count as “ma correspondence avec le roi.”
Laureguais was strolling about openly in a place where there was horse-racing and to which members
of the Court had therefore been attracted in large numbers. Remembering that the count had been exiled
far from Paris by a recent “lettre de cachet,” Ségur went up to him and warned him that his brazenly
showing himself there was an imprudent provocation that could have serious consequences for him. In
response, Laureguais simply laughed. His escapade, Ségur observes, could not have passed unnoticed,
“and yet it went unpunished.” (Mémoires, souvenirs et anecdotes par M. le Comte de Ségur, ed. M. F.
Barrière [Paris: Firmin Didot, 1859], 90-91). In his pathbreaking Histoire de la Conquête de
l’Angleterre par les Normands of 1825, Augustin Thierry frequently provides “anecdotal illustration(s)
of the life and manners of the natives” and of the effect of the conquest on the hapless Saxons. A typ-
ical introduction to one of those anecdotes (which tells of the persecution and spoliation of a certain
Brithstan by the Norman provost Robert Malartais) runs: “A circumstance which occurred some time
before this may throw some light upon these decrees, which despoiled the unhappy Saxons of every-
thing” (History of the Conquest of England by the Normans, transl. W. Hazlitt [London: Bohn, 1856],
I, 362-363 [Book VII]). Guizot relates an anecdote, in his History of England, about Archbishop Sharp
being set upon and, despite his pleas for mercy, stabbed to death by Scottish Covenanters as he passed
in a carriage with his daughter through the environs of St. Andrews. The anecdote is intended to epit-
omize the cruelty and lawlessness of those “armed fanatics,” as Guizot calls the Covenanters (A
Popular History of England from the Earliest Times to the Reign of Queen Victoria [New York: John
W. Lowell, n.d.], III, 378 [chap. 30]). Describing Queen Mary’s persecution of the Protestants, the nine-
teenth-century English historian, John Richard Green, inserts a one-page narrative about a single indi-
vidual, Rowland Taylor, the Vicar of Hadleigh, on the grounds that it “tells us more of the work which
was now begun (the persecution and the executions), and of the effect it was likely to produce (i.e. stiff-
ened resistance), than pages of historic dissertation” (A Short History of the English People [New York,
Cincinnati, and Chicago: American Book Co., n.d.], 365 [The Reformation. Sect. II, chap. 30]). The
same basic approach to anecdote is still evident in Eileen Power’s Medieval People (Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books, 1957), a successful work of modern social and economic history, first published in
1924. Power chose to present her account of medieval society by means of six portraits of “ordinary
people,” in the belief, as she put it, that “the past may be made to live again for the general reader more
effectively by personifying it than by presenting it in the form of learned treatises on the development
of the manor or on medieval trade, essential as these are to the specialist” (Preface, 7). Anecdotes play
their customary role in the construction of Power’s portraits; in addition, each portrait in itself might
be regarded as a kind of extended anecdote epitomizing a larger general situation.

VI. THE TRUTH OF HISTORICAL ANECDOTES
Being passed around by word of mouth or borrowed by one writer from another,
most often associated with the private sphere, and almost always unverifiable,
anecdotes were generally regarded as of doubtful veracity by “modern” histori-
ans determined to apply to their work the critical methods elaborated at the
beginning of the eighteenth century.36
In parallels of Herodotus and Thucydides,
the Father of History did not usually come out well. But if the meaning of an
anecdote were to be sought less in its factual accuracy than in what it conveyed
about states of mind and general trends, then even when its factual veracity was
in doubt it might still be thought of as in some way illuminating historical reali-
ty. Prosper de Barante, for instance, justified his method of closely following the
chronicle accounts, on which he based his immensely popular Histoire des Ducs
de Bourgogne de la Maison de Valois in the third decade of the nineteenth cen-
tury, by claiming that the “naïve” vision of the chroniclers was in itself as his-
torically significant as any fact, since it told a great deal about how the men and
women of an earlier age thought and felt. Prosper Mérimée’s justification of the
anecdote in the Preface to his Chronique du Règne 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”). Traditional historians, to whom the only history is
political, military, and dynastic, would doubtless consider this “not a very digni-
fied taste,” but he himself “would willingly give Thucydides for some authentic
memoirs by Aspasia or by a slave of Pericles.”37
Something of the character Burckhardt later ascribed to myth in his Cultural
History of Greece was thus attributed to the anecdote: that is to say, it was seen
as an essentially popular or communal creation, the validity of which resides not
so much in the accuracy with which it reports particular positive facts as in its
ability to reflect the general reality underlying those facts or the general view of
that reality. It was thus the true raw material of the cultural historian. Burckhardt
himself made the connection between anecdote and myth. “The oral tradition
does not cleave to literal exactness,” he declared in a lecture on “The Scholarly
Contribution of the Greeks,” “but becomes 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 similar anecdotes about other great figures. But that is to be expect-
ed. Great men are like high church towers: around both there is apt to be a great deal of wind” (quot-
ed by Fadiman, Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes). Investigating anecdotes about local characters in
relatively small communities, Sandra K. D. Stahl reports that such anecdotes, “presumed to be true
by the local populace . . . are often made up of motifs found in other regions as well” (“The Local
Character Anecdote,” Genre 8 [1975], 283-302).
37. Prosper Mérimée, Chronique du Règne de Charles IX (Paris: Nelson, n.d.), 6; A Chronicle of
the Reign of Charles IX in The Writings of Prosper Mérimée, introduction by George Saintsbury, 6
vols. (New York: Croscup & Holby, 1905), VI, v-vi. In the middle of the eighteenth century a similar
argument had been proposed by the antiquarian La Curne de Sainte-Palaye as a justification for schol-
arly study of the Old French romances. According to Sainte-Palaye, the very anachronisms and errors
of the old romances were historically revealing (L. Gossman, Medievalism and the Ideologies of the
Enlightenment: The World and Work of La Curne de Sainte-Palaye [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1968], 247-253).

cleave to a factually exact grounding of the events narrated, but brings out their
inner significance, what is characteristic about 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, historians do not shrink, on occasion, from invoking anecdotes, for the
truth of which they freely admit they cannot vouch. Voltaire relates an anecdote
about a priest who dared to take the King to task in a sermon he preached at
Versailles. The anecdote culminates in a “pointe,” the memorably pointed remark
characteristic of the classic eighteenth-century anecdote: “We are assured that
Louis XIV was satisfied to address him thus: ‘Father . . . I am happy to accept
my share of a sermon, but I do not like being the target of one.’”39 Whether the
King actually spoke those words or not, Voltaire concedes, they are instructive
and revealing. In Burckhardt’s work, as one might expect, the “fictional” anec-
dote serves an unequivocally historical function. In Part I, Section 3 of The
Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy “an old story, one of those which are true
and not true, everywhere and nowhere,” is recounted to illustrate “the thorough-
ly immoral relation” between city governments and powerful condottieri in fif-
teenth-century Italy. In the following section Burckhardt cites another “legendary
history,” which, he says, “is simply the reflection of the atrocities” perpetrated by
LIONEL GOSSMAN
160
38. “Über das wissenschaftliche Verdienst der Griechen” (lecture given in Basel on 10 November
1881), in Jacob Burckhardt, Voträge, ed. E. Dürr, 3rd ed. (Basel: Schwabe, 1919), 188-89. Burckhardt
goes on to describe the process of creation of an anecdote in terms reminiscent of his defense of myth
in the Griechische Kulturgeschichte: “In the meantime, of course, the narrators have also filled out the
story as it passed from mouth to mouth, not only by drawing on other information but by drawing on
the general nature of the situation in question; they have added color to it and recreated it; they have
in short attributed to the most celebrated representatives of certain human situations and relations
what happened in them at one or another time. Thus the lives of most of the well-known Greeks are
full of traits that have been observed in others like them and are then transferred to them—on ne prête
qu’aux riches—and modern critics have an easy time of it exposing such fictions. . . . Yet this typical,
anecdotal material is also history in its way—only not in the sense of the singular event, but rather in
the sense of what might have happened at 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
World War a similar justification of the anecdote was offered by the editor of a German collection of
anecdotes devoted to the War and doubtless designed to raise morale. (It was one of a series of four-
teen immensely popular anecdote books put out in the early twentieth century by Lutz of Stuttgart,
each one devoted to a particular subject, such as Bismarck, the Hohenzollerns, the Habsburgs,
Bluecher, Frederick the 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-English poems and songs,
newspaper reports, supposed letters from or to the front, as well as classic anecdotes), but that they
gave an authentic picture of the spirit of the German people at the time, its gritty energy in adversity,
its pride, its humor, its capacity for laughter and for tears, its ability to celebrate triumphs and to
mourn losses: “ein getreues Seelengemälde 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
Introduction to Egon Friedell’s Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit: Die Krisis der europäischen Seele von
der schwarzen Pest 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 charac-
terize an individual, a single detail an entire event, more sharply, more essentially, and with greater
force than the most detailed description.”
39. “On assure que Louis XIV se contenta de lui dire: ‘Mon père . . . j’aime bien à prendre ma part
d’un sermon, mais je n’aime pas qu’on me la fasse.’” Voltaire, Siècle de Louis XIV, I, 367.

the petty tyrants of the fifteenth century.40 Implicit in such use of anecdotes is the
idea that, even if they are not factually true, their very fabrication and success are
in themselves a kind of evidence.
VII. CRITICAL USES OF ANECDOTES IN PAST HISTORIOGRAPHY
Alongside the predominantly confirmatory uses of anecdote by historians, there
is also, but more rarely, a negative use. In addition to the histoire secrète tradi-
tion, stemming from Procopius41
and alluded to earlier, what one might call the
“Cleopatra’s-nose anecdote” aims to debunk grand general arguments about his-
tory by finding the cause of major historical transformations in some minor
“anecdote” or “particularité historique, petit fait curieux dont le récit peut éclair-
er le dessous des choses” (“a historical particularity, a small curious fact whose
telling can reveal the underside of 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 War of 1922, for instance, and the resulting consolidation of the revolution
of Kemal Ataturk in Turkey, are traced via a chain of causally connected inci-
dents to the death, in the autumn of 1920, of the young King Alexander of Greece
from the bite of a pet monkey in the palace gardens. “I cannot,” Buchan con-
cludes, “better Mr. Churchill’s comment: ‘A quarter of a million persons died of
that monkey’s bite.’”42
The Cleopatra’s-nose anecdote does not produce a richer and more complex
history than the grand narratives—of which the Marxist was probably the
grandest—that it purports to 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 undeci-
phered whole, as instances that resist 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, well-
designed anecdote, with its triadic structure of exposition, confrontation or
encounter, and “pointe” or punch line, since that form of anecdote works pre-
cisely to the degree that it can count, like traditional theater, on commonly
shared assumptions to drive home its meaning despite, or even because of, its
brevity. If an anecdote is to be truly disruptive and disorienting, it cannot have
40. Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, ed B. Nelson and C. Trinkaus,
2 vols. (New York: Harper and Row, Colophon Books, 1958), 1, 40, 49.
41. Now largely neutralized, if one can judge by a series of so-called “histoires secrètes” of the
French provinces currently being put out by the publishing house of Albin Michel in Paris.
42. John Buchan, The Causal and the Casual in History (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University
Press, 1929), 19-20.

the structural coherence that the classic anecdote possesses in far higher degree
than history itself.43
The disruptive or negative anecdote can already be found in Pierre Bayle, and
a little later Diderot took delight in demonstrating how undecipherable the real-
ity behind a seemingly transparent story may be. The most ardent champion of
the anecdote as a disruptive element may in fact be a novelist rather than a his-
torian. “Just think,” wrote the author of Le Rouge et le Noir, itself developed
from a fait divers reported in the newspapers, “Just think that what fools despise
as gossip is, on the contrary, the only history that in this affected age gives a true
picture of a country. . . . We need to see everything, experience everything, make
a collection of anecdotes.”44 Not the contrived narrative of history, in short, but
only the anecdote, understood as a naïve, unreflected, and unvarnished report of
a fragment of reality, offers reliable clues to the way things are (or were), unal-
tered by either ideological or formal-esthetic elaboration. As the only window
onto reality as it is, rather than as we have pre-shaped it, the anecdote valued by
Stendhal could not, obviously, be the polished product of salon wits that finds its
way into the anecdote books. Its chief merit being that it is “exactement vraie”
(“exactly true”), it could not, in Stendhal’s own view, be “fort piquante” (“very
snappy”). It could not, in other words, be literature.45 It 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 narrative telling, however naive, involves a minimum measure of shap-
ing according to a priori moral, psychological, epistemological, literary, and lin-
guistic categories, there was something inherently paradoxical about Stendhal’s
LIONEL GOSSMAN
162
43. See, for instance, Richard N. Coe, “The Anecdote and the Novel: A Brief Inquiry into the
Origins of Stendhal’s Narrative Technique,” Australian Journal of French Studies 22 (1985), 3-23:
“In the remoter origins of all narrative literature there may be discerned two fundamental elements:
history, which creates out of ‘real life’ a model of quasi-arbitrary, but strictly chronological develop-
ment, retailing facticity from day to day; and the anecdote which, starting from a factual-historical
‘happening,’ proceeds to refashion it in terms of structural coherence, endowing it with a beginning,
middle and end, and imbuing it with significance and point. History may well be haphazard and shape-
less, and yet command attention nonetheless because ‘that’s how it was’; the anecdote depends, for
its viability, entirely on its formal structure—a fact which in no way contradicts its necessary depen-
dence upon a profound substructure of historically, socially or psychologically verifiable truth” (3). In
his study of Brecht’s “anti-anecdotes,” Walter-Ernst Schäfer highlights the structured dramatic form
of the anecdote and its dependence, like the drama, on stereotypes and shared assumptions.These are
what Brecht set out to deconstruct. “Eine ‘epische Anekdote’ muss diese Gattung überhaupt sprengen
und Erzählung oder Roman an ihre Stelle treten lassen” (“An ‘epic anecdote’ should explode the very
genre of anecdote and replace it with an extended narrative or a novel”) (Schäfer, Anekdote–Anti-
anekdote, 29).
44. “Songez que ce que les sots méprisent sous le nom de commérage, est au contraire la seule his-
toire qui dans ce siècle d’affectation peigne bien un pays . . . il faut tout voir, tout éprouver, faire un
recueil d’anecdotes.” Stendhal, Mémoires d’un touriste, I, in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Victor Del Litto
and Ernest Abravenel (Paris/Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1986), XV, 174 (dated Lyon, 24 May, 1837);
Journal littéraire, 25 frimaire, an XI (16 December 1802), in Oeuvres complètes, XXXIII, 31.
45. “Le premier mérite du petit nombre d’anecdotes qui peuvent faire le saut du manuscript dans
l’imprimé sera d’être exactement vraies, c’est annoncer qu’elles ne seront pas fort piquantes” (Mémoires
d’un touriste, in Oeuvres complètes, XV, 189, cited in Coe, “The Anecdote and the Novel,” 9.

requirement. It is fascinating to follow his desperate attempts to protect the anec-
dotes he valued from such shaping—to the extent that he sometimes refrained
altogether from giving them verbal form and confined himself to a simple refer-
ence, such as “Mlle Camp’s reply to her lover” (“Réponse de Mlle Camp . . . à
son amant”) or “heartbreaking anecdote this morning” (“anecdote déchirante ce
matin”).46
The preservation of authenticity at the expense of communicability
inevitably leaves the reader with an undecipherable notation.47
It has taken
Stendhal scholars over a century to track down and identify some of these enig-
matic references.
From our point of view, the most important difference between the unliterary,
radically realist anecdote that seems to have been Stendhal’s preference and the
anecdote as it appears in most historical texts lies in the fact that, in traditional
historical usage, the anecdote is mainly borrowed, not found. It has already been
worked over and made into literature. It does not lie at the beginning of a histor-
ical investigation or prompt one, but is imported from a repertory of 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 appears to have imagined it is not found after the historical argument
has already been drawn up, but, precisely because it cannot be easily understood
in terms of existing notions of past or present reality, becomes the starting point
of a longer story (fictional or historical) that explores that reality and seeks a new
understanding of it. The Stendhalian anecdote, in short, disturbs intellectual rou-
tines and stimulates new explorations of history.
VIII. MODERN HISTORIANS, MICRO-HISTORY, AND THE ANECDOTE
In an essay outlining a proposed “History of the Anecdote,” a scholar of English
literature observes that, “as the narration of a singular event,” the anecdote is “the
literary form or genre that uniquely refers to the real.” By the very fact that it
does not refer to the real through direct desciription or ostention, it inevitably has
a literary character; 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 formal if not its actual brevity, as a
historeme, i.e. as the smallest minimal unit of the historiographic fact.” The func-
tion of the anecdote is thus essentially disruptive, according to Fineman. His the-
sis, he declares, is “that the anecdote is the literary form that uniquely lets histo-
46. Mémoires d’un touriste, in Oeuvres complètes, XV, 224, cited in Coe, “The Anecdote and the
Novel,” 9.
47. See Coe, “The Anecdote and the Novel,” 8-10, 12, 13 [as in note 43]. Stendhal did not, of
course, succeed in his endeavor to deconstruct the literary anecdote. Indeed, he pursued the goal only
intermittently and 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 anecdote about Haydn in Carpani’s biography, which Stendhal knew inside out, since
he made abundant use of it for his own Vie de Haydn, reappears in Stendhal’s Vie de Rossini applied
to the Italian composer (Coe, 10-11).

ry happen [italics in text] by virtue of the way it introduces an opening into the
teleological, and therefore timeless, narration of beginning, middle, and end. The
anecdote produces the effect of the real, the occurrence of contingency, by estab-
lishing an event within and yet without the framing context of historical succes-
sivity.” To Fineman, the Hegelian type of historical narrative is the “purest
model” of the kind of “timeless” historical design or grand récit that the anec-
dote 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
functioned or must, by its very nature, function, it is, I believe, a fair description
of how Stendhal may have wanted it to function and how it functions for a num-
ber of modern or, more accurately perhaps, “postmodern” historians.48
The collapse of confidence in the widely accepted grands récits or “metahis-
tories” (Jean-François Lyotard) of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is
also the context in which the Italian historian Giovanni Levi49 situates the suc-
cess of “microhistory,” a modern, or perhaps one should again say postmodern,
form of history that often seems to start from an anecdote or a narrative ground-
ed in a non-literary source, such as a court or other archival record. One thinks
of Natalie Davis’s Return of Martin Guerre (1983), Robert Darnton’s The Great
Cat Massacre of the Rue Saint-Séverin (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 Fernand Braudel, “microhistoire” was a pejorative term—a char-
acter in Raymond Queneau’s Les Fleurs Bleues of 1965 applied it humorously to
the lowest, pettiest kind of history, “à peine de l’histoire événementielle”50—by
the 1980s, it marked, for many historians, the discovery of a new method, as well
as new objects and topics, of historical investigation and analysis. It did indeed
reject the hierarchy of historical objects still adhered to in some measure even by
Voltaire, but it was defined less by the small-scale and humble character of its
objects than by its way of looking at all historical objects—through a micro-
scopic lens.
LIONEL GOSSMAN
164
48. Joel Fineman, “The History of the Anecdote,” in The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser
(New York and London: Routledge, 1989), 49-76: “Governed by an absolute, inevitable, inexorable
teleological unfolding, so that in principle, nothing can happen by chance, every moment that partic-
ipates within such Hegelian history, as the Spirit materially unfolds itself into and unto itself, is there-
by rendered timeless; such moments exist . . . outside of time, or in a timeless present, and this because
their momentary durative appearance is already but the guaranteed foreshadow, the already all but
realized promise of the concluding end of history toward which, as but the passing moments in a story
whose conclusion is already written, they tend” (57). Other quotations from page 61. One is remind-
ed of Karl-Heinz Stierle’s comment that “Die Problematik der Konstitution von Geschichten ist ein
Beispiel jener Problematik der Relation von Allgemeinem und Besonderem, die in der Perspektive
Montaignes die eigentliche Erkenntnisproblematik darstellt” (“The problem of how history is consti-
tuted is an instance of the wider problem of the relation of the general and the particular, which in
Montaigne’s perspective, is the essential problem of all knowledge”) (“Geschichte als Exemplum—
Exemplum als Geschichte,” in Geschichte—Ereignis und Erzählung, ed. Reinhart Koselleck and
Wolf-Dieter Stempel [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. Raymond Queneau, Les Fleurs Bleues (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), 85.

Instead of setting out with a set of established macrohistorical categories—
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 order to investigate, con-
cretely and without prior parti pris, networks of relations in the small Lebens-
welten in which people actually live, with the aim of discovering unsuspected
patterns of action and interaction, motivation, and behavior. By opening up orig-
inal fields and modes of inquiry, it was hoped, the unusual or statistically excep-
tional case might make it possible to look behind the well-mapped surface of his-
tory to those “silences de l’histoire” to which Michelet famously referred in a
journal entry for January 30, 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
attempting to break through categories that may once have led to better under-
standing, but had become conventions facilitating the production of a particular
kind of institutionalized discourse. Where that discourse often ended up acting as
a screen rather than a lamp, the new history hoped to serve as a kind of recon-
noissance flare illuminating a darkened landscape.51
Nothing could be further from the polished miniature mostly used by histori-
ans in the past, or closer perhaps to the petit fait social of Stendhal’s ideally un-
literary anecdote, than the deliberately raw eight-line recounting of a strange
incident, followed by an equally brief, puzzlingly contradictory contemporary
judgment of it, with which, in a section with—in the original French—the musi-
cal title “Prelude,” Alain Corbin opens Le Village des cannibales (1990; pub-
lished in English as The Village of Cannibals, 1992).
The date is August 16, 1870. The place is Hautefaye, a commune in the Nontron district
(arrondissement) of the Dordogne département. On the fairground, a young noble is tor-
tured for two hours, then burned alive (if indeed still alive) before a mob of three hundred
to eight hundred people who have accused him of shouting “Vive la République!” When
night falls, the frenzied crowd disperses, but not without boasting of having “roasted” a
“Prussian.” Some express regret at not having inflicted the same punishment on the parish
priest.
The scene now shifts forward in time to February 1871. The republican journalist
Charles Ponsac supplies details that turn tragedy into historical object: “Never in the
annals of crime has there been so dreadful a murder. Imagine! It happened in broad day-
light, in the midst of merrymaking, before a crowd of thousands [sic]! Think of it! This
revolting crime lacked even the cover of darkness for an excuse! Dante is right to say that
man sometimes exhibits a lust more hideous than concupiscence: the lust for blood.” Later
in the article we are told that “the crime of Hautefaye is in a sense a wholly political act.”
The enigma of Hautefaye . . . lies in this tension between horror and political rational-
ity. We must therefore turn to history, to what it was that first brought horror and politics
51. Inquiring into neglect and even disdain of the fait divers among historians until quite recently,
Michelle Perrot observes that “le choix du long terme, l’ambition macrostructurelle, les obsessions du
sériel . . . ne pouvaient qu’en détourner, comme aussi le peu d’inérêt porté à l’histoire de la sphère
privée” (“the focus on the long term, the interest in macrostructures, the obsession with quantitative
series, along with the lack of interest in the private sphere, could only distract from the fait divers”)
(“Fait divers et histoire au XIXème siècle,” 917).

together and then prized them apart, in order to clarify our understanding of what proved
to be, in France, the last outburst of peasant rage to result in a murder.52
The point of departure of Corbin’s Les Cloches de la terre (1994; published in
English as Village Bells, 1998) is again anecdotal—in this case a series of three
anecdotes about the ringing of bells. The first relates an incident in which a group
of girls and unmarried women repeatedly rang the bells of the commune of
Brienne in the department of Aube on the 4th
Frimaire of the year VIII (25
November, 1799), in flagrant violation of laws passed in 1795 and 1796 restrict-
ing the use of bells to national festivals, and in uncomprehending defiance of the
attempts of the “authorities” to get them to desist. The second anecdote tells 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 order to satisfy a request of the sub-prefect
of Bar-sur-Aube that the commune pay for the arming of the local national guard.
Finally, in the third anecdote we learn of the uproar caused in 1958 in the solid-
ly religious commune of Lonlay-l’Abbaye in Normandy by a decision of the
municipal council to have the restored bell of the local church resume the ancient
tradition of marking the noon hour, in place of the siren on the roof of the town
hall to which that function—important in a rural community—had been entrust-
ed after the destruction of the church tower by the Germans in 1944.53
This text
is further punctuated by innumerable stories of disputes over bells. “Many will
be astonished at the idea of treating bell-ringing as a subject of historical inves-
tigation,” Corbin concedes in a foreword to the English translation, “and yet 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
retrouvé de Louis-François Pinagot: sur les traces d’un inconnu 1798–1876,
1998; published in English as the life of an unknown: The Rediscovered World of
a Clog-Maker in Nineteenth Century France, 2001), Corbin seems to have want-
ed to distance himself even further from basing his own text on a previously
existing structured narrative. His “hero” is chosen at random, the only condition
of selection being that not a single pre-shaped biographical or autobiographical
account of him, not even a criminal record, was to be found.55
According to Corbin himself, his story of Louis-François Pinagot is “not real-
ly an exercise in micro-history.” Whether it is or is not is of less interest than the
lengths to which Corbin went in order to make sure that the starting point of his
investigation would be as undetermined as possible. Pinagot himself was select-
ed not simply by excluding any figure who “left an unusual record of any kind”
LIONEL GOSSMAN
166
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 culture sensible dans les campagnes
au XIXe siècle (Paris: Albin Michel, 1994), 9-13.
54. Corbin, Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the 19th Century French Countryside, transl.
Martin Thom (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), ix.
55. Corbin, the life of an unknown: The Rediscovered World of a Clog-Maker in Nineteenth Century
France, transl. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), viii, ix, x.

or about whom any personal or family recollections remained, but by the histo-
rian’s picking out, eyes closed, “a volume from the inventory of the municipal
archives . . . on which (his) hand happen(ed) to fall”—which turned out to be that
for the commune of Origny-le-Butin, “a nondescript locality, a tiny cell in the
vast tissue of French communes,” 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 statistics for the late eighteenth century. Only here did the histori-
an intervene: one of the two was eliminated because he died young and thus
would have been of limited heuristic value.
It is hard to imagine a starting point 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 elaborate an existing story, as Edmonds and Eidinow do. There was
no such structure. His starting point was a cipher, a mystery about which every-
thing had to be learned. Moreover, the aim was not to make Pinagot himself an
object in his world, but to use him “like a filmmaker who shoots a scene through
the eyes of a character who (himself) remains off screen,” in order to “paint a
portrait of his world as he might have seen it, to reconstitute his spatial and tem-
poral horizon, his family environment, his circle of friends, his community, as
well as his probable values and beliefs.”56 Between the historian and his charac-
ter the distance remains unbridged and unbridgeable. Unlike Edmonds and
Eidinow, Corbin does not present himself as an omniscient narrator describing a
world of readily identifiable and intelligible objects, relations, and personalities,
but as a historically limited subject engaging with other historically limited and
deeply unfamiliar subjects. Conjuring away the strangeness of the other is not
part of Corbin’s historiographical project.
Compared with the experimental and exploratory work of Davis, Darnton,
Corbin, and others, Wittgenstein’s Poker must strike one, in the end, as “potted”
history, skillfully cobbled together from other books by a couple of intelligent
and well-read journalists. Like a large class of traditional anecdotes—anecdotes
of Napoleon, Bismarck, Churchill, De Gaulle, and so on—the opening anecdote
of Wittgenstein’s Poker is a well-structured narrative involving a famous indi-
vidual about whom the reader can be expected to have the usual common
notions. Characteristically also, it has been borrowed from the public domain and
is not itself the product of historical research or discovery. Not surprisingly, it
produces fairly predictable results and does not contribute to the opening up of
new historical questions or lead to new areas of historical exploration.
As a structured form, written or oral, that is passed from hand to hand or mouth
to mouth and, transcending the particular circumstances it 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 illustrate a problem or even a paradox, but it will not usu-
57. Ibid., 12.

ally lead to a rethinking of the terms of the problem or paradox. In contrast, as
an unpublished, often secret record of events excluded from the official record,
anecdotes may challenge the historian to expand and revise established or autho-
rized views of a historical situation, event, or personality or of human behavior
generally. In the modern guise of the fait divers, that is, as a raw journalistic or
archival report of a striking, disturbing, or perplexing event or behavior, anec-
dotes may likewise provoke a reconsideration of what we believe we know about
history and society and lead us to consider previously unobserved aspects of the
past. As Marc Ferro notes, the “fortuitous incident”—dismissed as a non-event
by churches, governments, political parties, and similar established institu-
tions—is in fact a “necessity of (the writing of) history . . . a privileged histori-
cal object” in that it serves as an “indicateur de santé,” a signal of trouble in the
texture of society, politics, the economy, or the prevailing value system.57
Princeton University
LIONEL GOSSMAN
168
57. Marc Ferro, “Présentation,” Annales 38 (1983), 824-825.

Anecdote And History

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