came to in the confession booth

"The historian’s first responsibility is to get it right—to find out what happened in the past, think of some way to convey it which is both effective and true, and do it. But if you are a historian of, say, medieval social life, then you don’t necessarily have a civic obligation to get out there in the public square and give speeches about what is wrong with wife dunking. It happened a long time ago; it’s no longer an issue; and the historian can deal with it professionally and not have to feel moral responsibility in his other capacity as a member of the community. But I don’t think that historians of the 20th century, particularly of Europe’s 20th century, have that option. The historian’s task is not to disrupt for the sake of it, but it is to tell what is almost always an uncomfortable story and explain why the discomfort is part of the truth we need to live well and live properly. A well organized society is one in which we know the truth about ourselves collectively, not one in which we tell pleasant lies about ourselves. Historians have a special role in this, probably a more important role than moralists. The latter start from some sort of universal set of propositions that may in fact not be shared by many of their audience, whereas the historian is simply saying, “Look, this is something you all share, because it is part of your common past. You have this in common, and you have to recognize it.” So, yes, we have a disruptive duty. This is one of the reasons why I get so annoyed with those of my colleagues who only write for each other. We have a duty to the larger community. We can only perform that duty by writing good professional history, but we do have that duty. I’ll give you a practical example. When the Papon trial happened in France in 1997—the only major trial of a Vichy war criminal—the prosecution asked historians of Vichy to testify in the French courts as expert witnesses to set the context for the accused’s behavior. Most of them refused, not wanting to get involved in a tricky public arena, but also on the grounds that it was not the historian’s duty to enter a court of law. The historian writes books, and that’s it. But Robert Paxton of Columbia University, who wrote the first book on Vichy France that blew open the whole debate in 1952, agreed to serve as an expert witness and played a crucial role informing the trial not only of the real world of France in 1942, but also of what was morally and politically possible in terms of personal choices and courage for a bureaucrat in that time and place. That seems to be the role of the historian as it should be: it is truthful but inevitably therefore disruptive."