Tíživé dědictví školy Annales aneb Francouzská „oral history" ve službách státního aparátu
The Onerous Legacy of the Annales School: French Oral History in the Service of the State Bureaucracy

Summary/Abstract: Descamps, Florence. L'Historien, l’archiviste et le magnétophone: De la constitution de la source orale à son exploitation. Paris: Comité pour l'histoire économique et financière de la France, 2001, 864 pp. By international standards this monumental work, written by a French historian, belongs among the basic works on oral history. In terms of methodological thorough¬ness it surpasses American reference books and it contains a useful interpretation of the history of the field. Nevertheless it ignores several important conceptual questions. The reviewer judges the book against the background of the complicated process of establishing oral history in French historiography in the twentieth century. What was decisive in this sense was its relationship with the Annales School, which in its research 'appropriated' the special topics which oral history usually distinguishes itself by (for example, the history of the 'ordinary man' and of social minorities), and which occupied key positions in the institutions of French historiography. Histoire orale had to define itself in this small space and this led to its orientation towards research of institutional memory, its affinity with the political rightwing, and defining itself in contrast to American oral history.

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