Édouard Dolléans: First Modern Historian of Chartism?

Though Édouard Dolléans (1877–1954) was described by Malcolm Chase as Chartism’s first modern historian, his writings on the subject have never been translated into English and are largely unfamiliar to current historians of the movement. This paper discusses the two editions of Dolléans’s history of Chartism, published in 1912–13 and 1949, and the uses that Dolléans made of these materials in his wider labour histories and political journalism. It locates Dolléans within a first phase of Chartist historiography that was international in character and resonates with current concerns with a transnational labour history. It also situates Dolléans within distinctively French intellectual traditions as his perspectives on Chartism were shaped and reshaped in turbulent political times amidst influences that ranged from syndicalism and the Popular Front to wartime collaboration and the labour movement’s Cold War polarization. Though Dolléans was a flawed historian, he provides a notable case study in the interactions of past and present in the writing of labour history and both influenced and anticipated the concerns with activist biography of a later generation of French labour historians.