Charles Seignobos

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Seignobos, Charles

Born Sept. 10, 1854, in Lamastre; died Apr. 24, 1942, in Ploubazlanec. French historian.

Beginning in 1890, Seignobos taught at the Sorbonne. He dealt with ancient and medieval history in his early works but later concentrated primarily on modern history. His works, written from a positivist point of view, are filled with concrete historical material; they deal chiefly with political history, especially parliamentary history. Seignobos also wrote works on the methodology of historical research, including Introduction to the Study of History, written in collaboration with C. V. Langlois (Russian translation, 1899).

WORKS

Le Régime féodal en Bourgogne jusqu’en 1360. Paris, 1882.
Histoire de la civilisation. Paris, 1885.
Le Déclin de l’Empire et l’établissement de la III-e République. (Histoire dela France, vol. 7. Edited by E. Lavisse.) Paris [1921].
Histoire sincere de la nation française, 29th ed. Paris, 1933.
In Russian translation:
Politicheskaia istoriia sovremennoi Evropy. St. Petersburg, 1898.

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References in periodicals archive ?

An additional consideration, perhaps, is an old observation by the French historian Charles Seignobos. "It is useful to ask oneself questions," he declared, "but very dangerous to answer them."

Suggesting risky answers to Top 5 cosmic questions

at the same time that Darwin and Lyell were making their remarkable insights about the vast age that preceded our own, the great German historian Leopold yon Ranke and French scholars Charles Langlois and Charles Seignobos were establishing the modern discipline of history.

From the editor

En contra de lo que se suele afirmar, opina que ni Charles Seignobos ni Leopoldo von Ranke fueron defensores explicitos del objetivismo.

Barros, Carlos y McCrank, Lawrence (eds.), History under debate. International Reflection on the Discipline

Second, and more importantly, he resuscitates the reputations of nineteenth-century historians such as Charles Seignobos and Charles-Victor Langlois, whose writings and teachings found such disfavor with twentieth-century Annales historian Lucien Febvre and others.

Pim den Boer, History as a Profession: The Study of History in France, 1818-1914

In part two of the book, Charle examines the efforts of Hippolyte Tame, Charles Seignobos and L[acute{e}]eon Blum to move independently within the increasing ly differentiated and mediated literary field.

Paris Fin De Si[grave{e}]cle. Culture et politique

There is commonality between this testimony and the ideas of Charles Seignobos and Emile Durkheim, isolated in chapter 5.

Fields of Knowledge: French Academic Culture in Comparative Perspective, 1890-1920

Note, for example, Lucien Febvre's zeal to specify what was historically proper of Rabelais' own "religion" (FEBVRE 1968), since, according to the historian, documents were not enough to identify the character as an atheist; thus the historical account of the context in which Rabelais lived contrasts significantly with the ahistorical treatment Febvre gives to Charles-Victor Langlois and Charles Seignobos, authors of Introduction aux etudes historiques (1898) (LANGLOIS; SEIGNOBOS 1992).

The history of historiography and the challenge of the linguistic turn

In 1898 the French historians Charles Langlois and Charles Seignobos took a logic of exclusion common to many authors and boiled it down to this lapidary expression: 'No documents, no history.' And that, it seems, was that.

Beyond the great divide: why do we have history and archaeology? In the light of our understanding of 'deep time' Daniel Lord Smail argues that it is high time that the two disciplines were reunited