« From step by step », remarkable story of a banal family – Liberation

Emma Rothschild, a recognized historian of Harvard, engages in this work with a historical experience. She reconstructs, at the cost of a colossal archive work, the destiny of the descendants of Marie Aymard, born in Angoulême in 1713, over five generations, between 18th and 19th centuries. The principle is to follow the 4089 people appearing in the city's parish registers in 1764, with a particular interest in the 83 people who signed his daughter's marriage contract the same year. Marie Aymard, any more than the city of Angoulême, have singular or original characteristics, quite the contrary. It is for Emma Rothschild to carry out a « flat » story, written about ordinary characters, mostly neither very poor, nor very rich. It is a story seen from below, focused on family without being a family story, a story of individual lives and not well identified social groups. Hence the particular character of the work, fragmented in multiple stories which are not reduced to any determinism. A remarkable phenomenon underlined by Emma Rothschild is that if these family accounts are quite widely revolved around women, these female generations « Remain invisible, so to speak »the cause being that there are very few traces emanating directly from them.

The trajectories reconstituted by this original research stand out above all, according to the expression of the historian, « Histo