An Infinite History

Shortlisted for the American Library in Paris Book Award

Shortlisted for the Cundill History Prize, McGill University

Winner of the PROSE Award in European History, Association of American Publishers

An innovative history of deep social and economic changes in France, told through the story of a single extended family across five generations.

Marie Aymard was an illiterate widow who lived in the provincial town of Angoulême in southwestern France, a place where seemingly nothing ever happened. Yet, in 1764, she made her fleeting mark on the historical record through two documents: a power of attorney in connection with the property of her late husband, a carpenter on the island of Grenada, and a prenuptial contract for her daughter, signed by eighty-three people in Angoulême. Who was Marie Aymard? Who were all these people? And why were they together on a dark afternoon in December 1764? Beginning with these questions, An Infinite History offers a panoramic look at an extended family over five generations. Through ninety-eight connected stories about inquisitive, sociable individuals, ending with Marie Aymard's great-great-granddaughter in 1906, Emma Rothschild unfurls an innovative modern history of social and family networks, emigration, immobility, the French Revolution, and the transformation of nineteenth-century economic life.

Rothschild spins a vast narrative resembling a period novel, one that looks at a large, obscure family, of whom almost no private letters survive, whose members travelled to Syria, Mexico, and Tahiti, and whose destinies were profoundly unequal—from a seamstress living in poverty in Paris to her third cousin, the cardinal of Algiers. Rothschild not only draws on discoveries in local archives but also uses new technologies, including the visualisation of social networks, large-scale searches, and groundbreaking methods of genealogical research.

'Rothschild rightly rejects what she describes as an 'ideological' division of the dead by historians between 'important'—the people with substantial records—and 'the unimportant...who can be counted, but cannot be understood.' Rather, as this book demonstrates, a focus on the 'ordinary' can offer new perspectives on periods of extraordinary change.' Laura O'Brien, Times Literary Supplement