The book under review presents various aspects of the relationship of the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga (1872-1945), author of such classic works as Herfsttij der middeleeuwen [“Autumntide of the Middle Ages”] and Homo ludens, to both the history of France and the tradition of French historiography. To a certain extent it therefore forms a French counterpart to Christian Krumm’s Johan Huizinga, Deutschland und die Deutschen (Münster, 2010).
Contrary to the German case, however, De Voogd makes clear that the reception of Huizinga’s work in France has turned out to be relatively marginal, despite his frequent dealings with aspects of French history. This is all the more surprising considering his admiration for French historians such as Jules Michelet, his personal contacts with French intellectuals like Julien Benda, and especially with his contemporary French academic colleagues, in particular with the founders of the Annales-school, Marc Bloch (1886-1944) and Lucien Febvre (1878-1956). In this book, which was much reworked and enlarged from an original doctoral thesis, De Voogd has addressed these issues at length, but also used these same issues as a mirror to reflect Huizinga’s own changing methodological and ideological deliberations, notably on the issues of nation, patriotism, and nationalism. In a way, this book therefore consists of three separate, albeit interrelated studies: Huizinga and French history, Huizinga and French historiography, and Huizinga’s own epistemological thoughts about history.
It is clear throughout that De Voogd’s primarily intended audience is linguistically, culturally, and academically French, which is why he allows considerable space for explaining aspects of the particularly Dutch background to Huizinga’s work in comparison to France. As such, he reviews the evolving government legislation on university education in the Netherlands from the early nineteenth century onward—including, for example, details on the remuneration of the growing number of professorial chairs in history—as well as the allegedly late and slow adoption of a strictly national[istic] historical narrative among Dutch scholars. As opposed to Germany and France, only the increasingly threatening international developments of the interbellum and occupation years appear to have led to a belated political mobilisation of this national narrative in the Netherlands by the likes of Pieter Geyl, Jan Romein, and Huizinga himself.
After describing Huizinga’s international reputation, his biography, and general intellectual (“devoir et liberté”) (54) and aesthetic (“deuils et mélancolie fin de siècle”) (50) outlook, De Voogd proceeds to extensively map his networks and travels in France, highlighting their increased frequency during the troubled ‘thirties of the twentieth century. Notably, Huizinga was invited to join the rather high-brow Commission Internationale de Coopération Intellectuelle which included such French luminaries as Julien Benda and Paul Valéry as well as the likes of Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, and Béla Bartók. Importantly, De Voogd opines that Huizinga’s early reception in France, which he labels, “une réception précoce mais discrète et ambivalente,” was partly hampered by faulty translations of low quality (143).
Two chapters in total are dedicated to Huizinga’s take on developments in French history. De Voogd nicely illustrates both those aspects which Huizinga disapproved of, always from a pronouncedly Dutch perspective (especially the figures of Louis XIV and Napoleon, with their expansionist ambitions), and those with which he was in sympathy (especially the case of Jeanne d’Arc and mediaeval French courtly culture in general). Interestingly, the French Revolution, otherwise a rather divisive issue in Dutch nineteenth-century historiography, is regarded by Huizinga in a surprisingly dispassionate, albeit critical manner. Despite Huizinga’s thoroughly German-influenced historical epistemology, De Voogd underscores the inspiration of nineteenth-century French scholars and intellectuals, especially Jules Michelet and Ernest Renan, for his thinking about national history and the concept of nationhood.
The various chapters dealing with the development of Huizinga’s own views on historiography, generally in comparison and contrast to that of his French colleagues, are similarly instructive. On the one hand Huizinga shared with Febvre and Bloch a predilection for an international, interdisciplinary approach as opposed to one narrowly political and nationalistic, as well as an aversion to the historical vie romancée still current at the time. Furthermore, all three disliked the contemporary kind of philosophical historiography on a grand scale produced by the likes of Oswald Spengler, H. G. Wells, and Arnold Toynbee.
Even so, De Voogd also shows that there were quite as many essential differences between the French historians and their Dutch colleague. For example, Huizinga’s resistance to the determinist take on national history then common in both France and Germany, countering the “double illusion rétrospective et déterministe...dans le mythe de la nation éternelle” (197) in favour of a “possibilism” with an emphasis on history as a narrative of lived experience, can, to some extent, even be seen as a precursor to the kind of “histoire-mémoire” latterly associated with Pierre Nora. Even so, this approach, itself rooted in an historical epistemology of “understanding” owing much to German thought (e.g., Wilhelm Dilthey, Heinrich Rickert, Wilhelm Windelband, and Georg Simmel), contrasted sharply with an epistemology of “explaining,” common to the natural and social sciences—and favoured by his Annales-colleagues. According to De Voogd, Huizinga’s ideas about the forms and representations of cultural history similarly owed a lot to the kind of “cultural morphology” of his friend André Jolles (1874-1946), whose work was entirely unknown in France at the time.
The final chapter provides, as is traditional in doctoral dissertations submitted in the Netherlands, a collection of commented theses. However, their inclusion in this monograph study seems to this reviewer a bit “nailed on” at the end, thus adding to the already mildly disjointed structure of the whole book. Moreover, the style of writing is, again according to this reviewer, somewhat verbose and at times rather meandering. The author’s endeavours to provide exhaustive supporting information both in the extensive footnotes and frequently also in the main text at times further undermine the clarity and flow of the argument. Particularly striking in this regard are the many, often excessively long, citations where paraphrase surely would have sufficed. Similarly, consecutive pages consisting of summaries, such as the letters on p. 151 sqq., may have been better placed in an appendix.
The appendices that De Voogd does provide, finally, consist of an helpful biographical and chronological table of Huizinga’s relations with France; the first French announcement ofHerfsttij from 1919, the year in which it was published; a French translation of Huizinga’s critical but benevolent review of Bloch’s classic Les rois thaumaturges from 1924, and Bloch's 1928 lukewarm review of the German translation of Herfsttij. The remaining pages (405-417) are taken up by a number of black-and-white and full-colour illustrations of high quality.