French Literature Reviews - 2026
A. Farge, What Noise Will We Make? Interviews
History, Politics and Society
[Arlette Farge has just published An Essay on the History of Voices in the 18th Century]
Arlette Farge, What Noise Will We Make? Interviews with Jean-Christophe Marti
Les Prairies ordinaires, 2005, 224 pp.
- ISBN: 2-350-96000-5
- ISBN 13: 9782350960005
- 15 €
An excerpt can be read online on the Les Prairies ordinaires website.
Review (online) by Capucine Baudoin in the journal Clio, No. 24 (2006), pp. 319-348
Publisher's description:
In What Noise Will We Make?, a dense and accessible introduction to the highly singular work and approach of Arlette Farge, questions are addressed that weave a fascinating link between the study of 18th-century lifestyles and the transformations currently reshaping the world. Arlette Farge evokes her quest for an engaged historical writing, in order to better transmit history and make it a tool for a deeper understanding and appropriation of our present. She explains how her work is grounded in the feeling of having to make noise with the voices of those—marginalized people, the insane, the poor, female rioters, ordinary men and women—who, until now, have gone unheard. By testifying to the power of a dominant discourse that crushes all other forms of expression, she identifies the new faces of domination and invites us to recognize the marginalization of popular speech, to understand how, even today, it remains excluded from any political visibility. In line with these inquiries, Arlette Farge discusses the articulation of history and politics as the locus of a necessary reflection on new approaches to collective engagement.
Arlette Farge is a historian and Director of Studies at the EHESS. She has developed a universe that blends a rigorous, scholarly study of 18th-century police archives with a genuine creative work where literature, cinema, and photography meet.
Jean-Christophe Marti is a composer. He works with several contemporary music ensembles and for the theater, focusing in particular on the intersections between artistic disciplines and the social sciences.
Philippe-Jean Catinchi, Le Monde, April 1, 2005:
"Arlette Farge's Memoirs of Revolt"
"What Noise Will We Make? Originally, Arlette Farge's phrase expressed a muted rebellion against that smoothed-over knowledge which, in order to make a faded voice more telling, erases its inconsistencies and privileges a linear path at the peril of an intimate truth too opaque to serve the historian... Tormented by this real violence of the past that the historian does not disclose, Arlette Farge explains the meaning of her work, the universe that inhabits her, and her vision of the margins she has echoed—a visitor to those prisons of oblivion promised to crowds of anonymous people with fragile lives... Advancing along a perilous ridgeline that demands both audacity and vigilance, Arlette Farge embraces her share of utopia, listening to the vibrations that, blurring past and present, speak only of the subject's humanity. Combating the cliché of emotions as "historical invariants"—"they are culturally and socially constructed"—and a feminist also in her "constant search for how to react to other, less favored societies to fight against fundamentalism and the real, violent domination of men," Arlette Farge does not disarm, hearing in the drama of temporary entertainment workers "an experience of microhistory." Since any path is worth taking to articulate history and politics in this school of human solidarity."
Arlette Farge is widely recognized for her pioneering work in microhistory and her meticulous exploration of eighteenth-century judicial and police archives. As a Director of Studies at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, she has consistently focused on the lives of ordinary people, women, and marginalized groups whose voices were traditionally erased by official documentation. Her scholarly approach bridges historical rigor with a profound literary sensibility, drawing inspiration from literature, cinema, and photography to illuminate the textures of past everyday life and popular resistance.
This volume serves as an accessible introduction to her intellectual trajectory, linking historical research on eighteenth-century lifestyles directly to contemporary political and social concerns. Through her dialogue with composer Jean-Christophe Marti, Farge reflects on the ethics of historical writing and the persistent silencing of popular speech in modern societies. The book will particularly interest students and researchers in history, sociology, and cultural studies who seek to understand how the marginalized past continues to inform current struggles for political visibility and human solidarity.