"From close to close", a remarkable story of an ordinary family

Emma Rothschild, a renowned Harvard historian, engages in a historical experiment in this work. She reconstructs, at the cost of colossal archival work, the destiny of the descendants of Marie Aymard, born in Angoulême in 1713, over five generations, between the 18th and 19th centuries. The principle is to follow the 4,089 people listed in the parish registers of the city in 1764, with a particular interest in the 83 people who signed her daughter's marriage contract the same year. Marie Aymard, no more than the city of Angoulême, has no singular or original characteristics, quite the contrary. For Emma Rothschild, it is a question of proceeding with a "flat" history, written about ordinary people, most of whom are neither very poor nor very rich. It is a history seen from below, centered on the family without being a family history, a history of individual lives and not of clearly identified social groups. Hence the particular character of the work, fragmented into multiple stories that cannot be reduced to any determinism. A remarkable phenomenon highlighted by Emma Rothschild is that if these family stories largely revolve around women, these female generations "remain, so to speak, invisible" , the cause being that we find very few traces emanating directly from them.

The trajectories reconstructed by this original research emerge above all, according to the historian's expression, "from a history