the historian of customs and ideas vs. the historian of events.
The historian of customs and ideas has no less austere a mission than the historian of events. The latter has the surface of civilization, the struggles for crowns, the births of princes, the marriages of kings, the battles, the assemblies, the great public men, the revolutions in broad daylight, all the externals; the other historian has the internals, the background, the common people who work, suffer, and wait, the downtrodden woman, the child in its death throes, the muted one-on-one wars, obscure ferocities, the prejudices, the accepted iniquities, the hidden repercussions of the law, the secret revolutions of souls, the indistinct quiverings of the multitudes, those ding of hunger, the barefoot, the barearmed, the disinherited, the orphans, the wretched, and the vile, all the spineless worms that wander in the dark. He has to descend, his heart full of charity and severity at the same time, like a brother and like a judge, right down to those impenetrable blockhouses where those who are bleeding and those who strike, those who are crying and those who curse, those who go without food and those who devour, those who endure wrong and those who do it, crawl and slither willy-nilly. Are the duties of these historians of hearts and souls lesser than those of the historians of external events? Do you think Dante has less to say than Machiavelli? Is the bottom of civilization, being deeper and darker, any less important than the top? Can you really know the mountain well if you don’t know anything about the cave?
We must say, however, in passing that from some of the above you might infer that there is a clear-cut division between the two classes of historian that does not, to our mind, exist. Nobody can be a good historian of the patent, visible, dazzling, and public life of peoples if he is not at the same time, to a certain extent, a historian of their deep and hidden life; and nobody can be a good historian of the inner life if he can’t manage to be, whenever necessary, a historian of events, and the other way round. They are two different orders of fact that match each other, that always follow on from one another and often generate each other. All the lines of Providence draws on a nation’s surface have their somber but distinct parallels down below, and all the convulsions down below produce upheavals on the surface. True history involving everything, the true historian gets involved with everything.
Man is not a circle with a single center; he is an ellipse with two focal points. Deeds are one, ideas the other.
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, trans. Julie Rose