Contenu du sommaire : Dossier : Afriques romaines

During three decades, as a professor in Ancient History at
Saint-Cloud and Fontenay Ecole Normale Supérieure, Yvon Thébert used to take
students to a field journey to North Africa, most often Tunisia and Morocco.
This short text is an evocation of Thebert ability to pass on a taste for field
research.

This article by Yvon Thébert was originally published in the
catalogue of an exhibition on Carthage held in Paris in 1995 (Carthage,
Paris-Musées, 1995 : 192-199). It offers a glimpse of Thébert's own approach on
history.

Going back to the 1978
Annales' debate is not an easy thing in today's histographical
context where the notions defended by M. Bénabou, advocate of African history
and culture, still dominate. Y. Thébert shows however that this attempt to
reconstruct the Africans' history is not without ideological presuppositions
already present in colonialist historiography. Y. Thébert reflection has opened
rich research fields in the study of Antique African pagan religion, as well as
in the frame work of contemporary semantics. In fact, the use of notions or
concepts such as African Resistance, the Berber, the Africans' religious soul,
reflect this inversion of concepts framed by the traditional colonial
historiography, criticised, but nonetheless taken up as a model by M. Bénabou.
Y. Thébert's injunction to replace Africa in its Mediterranean context, allows
to return its identity to this territory.

Although Thébert's work only concerns ancient history, it
participates in a wider debate concerning the nature of imperialism and the
links between a political centre and its periphery. By its method first, since
the study of romanisation, leads him to think anew the historical categories
necessary to analyse Roman penetration in Africa, by opposing the influence of
the recent colonial ideological heritage. He achieves this mostly by its
substance, by making class alliances the strongest drive in the roman
expansion. This approach goes beyond ancient history's frame work and questions
the understanding of colonial relations practised by some historical schools of
thought like in that of ‘Subaltern Studies'. However these attempts to
“de-colonise” history have had little impact on French contemporary historical
thought.

The contribution of Yvon Thébert to the
Histoire de la vie privée edited by
Philippe Ariès, Georges Duby and Paul Veyne in 1985 was a factor in renewing
historiography. It has offered to the elite's domestic architecture an
analysis, motivated by archaeological remains from North Africa and nourished
by a theoretical and global reflection on the societies of the Ancient
Mediterranean world, from which are outlined the methodological basis and
essential thesis.

This contribution concerns a central theme in Yvon Thébert's
work, that of a “vertical” and a “horizontal” reading of the Ancient
Mediterranean world. This theme is first of all explored through four major
articles written by Yvon Thébert and in his monograph on Roman baths in North
Africa. The Ptolemaic Egypt example aims at illustrating what his work can
bring to historians of Ancient Societies.

The work of Yvon Thébert break with past understanding of the
“barbarian” character, by privileging an socio-political approach of Hellenism
and by refusing any culturalist presupposition. The opposition between Greek
and barbarian must be conceived in an system of fluid oppositions, that varies
according to debates that agitated the political elites in Greek cities and
whose mode depends closely to the political conjunction and its
evolution.

Yvon Thébert's essay “À propos du ‘triomphe' du christianisme”
has not been received as it deserved. This work came out as a result of his own
archaeological excavations at Bulla Regia and of reflections on the
caracteristics of the first Christian communities in Roman Africa. This
academic silence over Thébert's essay reveals what is at stake in terms of
historiography : Why was the debate over the critical issue of the so-called
“conversion” of Late Antiquity society to the “new” religion, so carefully
avoided ? This articles suggests ways of re-assessing this essential academic
debate.

A clash took place in Bougie on September 4
th 1872. It erupted among a
handful of Europeans. It opposed French soldiers to civilians who were loudly
demonstrating their attachment to the Republic. The wording chosen in this
colonial setting sound out of place and such internal strife is amazing in a
barely submitted area where solidarity between the overlords should have been
essential. In fact, their speech was in sharp contrast with the silence imposed
on the Algerian people after the revolt in 1871. It reveals the settlers
insular perception of space, cut off from a hostile hinterland, more connected
by the sea to other centres and their home country. The echo of these events
was extraordinary. Enjoying powerful institutional and technical help, a
paradoxical support from central power and the lack of contradictors, the
civilian overlords alone were able to open for settlement a valley inhabited by
100 000 Algerians. In a context of political uncertainty in France and in
Algeria, they appropriated the Republic in a special way to make their land
seizure more legitimate. A premeditated act, their speech constituted a
conquest of local power.