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Impartiality, Objectivity, and Political Engagement in Nineteenth-Century French Historiography: Monod and the Dreyfus Affair

At the end of 1897, the French historian Gabriel Monod was one of the first intellectuals and the first academic to publicly engage in the case of Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish army officer condemned for high treason. Using his technical skills in paleography, Monod had concluded that Dreyfus could not be the author of the single exhibit and therefore had to be innocent. This article traces the connections between Monod’s public engagement and his ideas about the purpose, methods, and epistemology of history, and historical impartiality in particular. It will be shown that in late nineteenth-century French historiography, the virtue of impartiality, which traditionally is conceived of as taking a stance “above the parties,” was strongly connected with methodological procedures, technical skills, and source criticism—features associated with the newer epistemic virtue of objectivity. Furthermore, the article argues that historians’ epistemic virtues were embedded in a broader ethos that informed their behavior both inside the professional context and in the world outside academia. This entanglement between the epistemic and the ethical will provide the basis for explaining Monod’s conduct during the Dreyfus affair and the ways his engagement caused him, in turn, to rethink his epistemics. In so doing, the article contributes to recent debates among historians of historiography on scholarly practices and epistemic virtues by introducing the dimension of ethical and sociopolitical situatedness.