Les « silences rebelles » des bêtes : la place des animaux dans le débat historiographique en France

During the last decades, social sciences have shown a growing interest in the animal issue, and historical studies are not excluded from this process. In this article, we will show that the concern for the role of animals in historical events is not recent. Indeed, it had already been at the heart of the debate on domestication which, in the first half of the 19th century, brought together naturalists, historians, philosophers and anthropologists around the topic of the relationship between natural and civil history. It was only towards the end of the 19th century, during the process of epistemological autonomisation of human sciences, that the gap separating the latter from the natural sciences widened, leading to the exclusion of animals from the field of study of historical and social disciplines. We will therefore examine how the long French historiographical season, from the École des Annales to the history of mentalities, fits into these epistemic coordinates. While, on the one hand, we can see in it the blatant example of this animal absence, it is nonetheless possible to detect some of the conditions that made it possible to think about the “animal turn” that we are witnessing in the more recent historiographical debate. It is precisely by collecting and radicalising the legacy of Michel Vovelle, one of the last masters of this fruitful intellectual season, that Pierre Serna was able to inaugurate a research project on the “political history of animals” at the IHRF. This research proposal is part of a rich debate on the history of animals, some of the main options of which we will examine.