Chapter 9 of 16 · The great periods of history
Chapter 8. The Contemporary Era
The only period the convention leaves open: its starting boundary, its problem of length, and what the abundance of its sources changes.
A period with no end
Four of the five periods of the convention have two boundaries. The fifth has only one. The official history syllabus published in 2026 writes it itself in its landmarks: "1789/1815: end of Modern Times / beginning of the Contemporary Era (up to today)". The bracket does all the work: the period runs up to the moment it is read, and it grows by a year every year. Its French name is l'époque contemporaine, and the English name used here translates it.
This creates a difficulty the other four do not have. An open period swells without limit: it counted one century a hundred years ago, it counts two today, and nothing says what it will contain in two centuries. A filing system one of whose boxes keeps growing ends up not filing anything.
Historians have responded by dividing the inside of this box, without touching the convention. People commonly speak of the nineteenth century, then of the twentieth, then of a history of the present time, that of the decades whose witnesses are still alive. These internal divisions are not official periods: they are working conveniences, and they have to be treated as such.
The starting boundary, and what it designates
The two dates kept are 1789 and 1815. The first opens the French Revolution. The second closes the period of wars that follows it, and marks the moment when the states of Europe redraw their borders.
One of the acts of 1789 has remained in force, which is rare for a text more than two centuries old. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, adopted on 26 August 1789, is still published today by the French public service for the dissemination of law, among the texts of national law in force. Its first article states: men are born and remain free and equal in rights.
This detail is worth more than a long commentary on the choice of the boundary. A periodisation date is usually a convenient landmark and nothing more. This one designates a text that still produces legal effects, which is true of very few documents of that age.
Like every boundary in the convention, it remains open to argument, and on a precise point: it is French. A division that starts a world period at an event in a single country adopts a point of view, even when the date chosen is that of a text that became influential far beyond its borders.
| Title of the theme | Years covered | What it makes it possible to follow |
|---|---|---|
| Towards a republican France | 1848 to 1852, then 1870 to 1914 | How a political regime settles in by stages, with interruptions, rather than all at once |
| France in the First World War | 1914 to 1918 | What a conflict of that scale does to a whole society, and not only to its armies |
| France during the Second World War | 1939 to 1945 | A period documented by massive sources and by witnesses, which raises questions of method that had not arisen before |
| France since 1945 | From 1945 to today | Eighty years of transformations, which the syllabus treats as a single theme for want of enough distance to divide them |
The last theme in this table is the one that best shows the difficulty of an open period. On its own it covers more time than the three other rows of this table put together, and it carries a title that counts years rather than naming a phase. You do not name what you have not yet finished crossing: that is caution, not a gap.
What the abundance of sources brings, and what it complicates
What it brings
- Continuous runs: prices, wages, births, deaths, over whole decades.
- Images: photographs, then films, showing gestures and places that no text described.
- Voices: recordings, interviews, testimony gathered from people who did not write.
- Sources produced by ordinary people: letters, notebooks, household accounts, postcards.
- Administrative archives of an unprecedented regularity and volume.
What it complicates
- Sorting: no historian can read all the sources of a single year of the twentieth century.
- Distance: living actors contest the accounts made of what they lived through.
- Fabrication: image and sound can be faked, and are faked better and better.
- Preservation: a digital medium degrades and becomes unreadable faster than a parchment.
- The confusion between quantity and reliability: a thousand documents copying one another are not worth one independent source.
The point the official syllabus insists on
The history syllabus published in 2026 states what a pupil must have acquired at the end of the course, and the wording deserves to be read in full: the pupil has acquired the bases of historical knowledge, namely telling fictional accounts apart from historical accounts, questioning the traces of the past and putting them in context by learning to question the reliability of sources, digital ones in particular.
Three things are asked and only one concerns facts. Telling a fiction apart from a historical account. Questioning a trace and putting it back in its context. Questioning the reliability of a source. These are three moves of method, and the syllabus specifies digital ones in particular, which aims directly at the material of this period.
The reason is simple to state. For ancient periods, the scarcity of sources protects against part of the errors: you cannot invent a twelfth-century parchment without specialists noticing. For the Contemporary Era the reverse is true: anyone can produce an image, a quotation or a document that looks old, and circulate it in thousands of copies within a few hours.
The defence is the same as throughout this book, and it requires no technical skill. Ask where the document comes from. Look for who produced it, when, and to what end. Check whether another source exists, independent of the first, that says the same thing. The next chapter turns this into a complete method.
Four questions an open period leaves unanswered
When will it close?
Nobody can say, because a boundary is chosen afterwards. Those who lived through 1789 did not know that they were changing period: it was the nineteenth century that decided it for them. The closing boundary of our era will be set by people who are not born.
Are we already in something else?
Several proposals circulate for dating a break in the twentieth century: the world wars, the end of the colonial empires, nuclear weapons, computing. None of them commands agreement, and a boundary without agreement is not a boundary.
Can you write the history of what you are living?
You can document it and tell it, and historians do. The difficulty is not the absence of sources, it is their excess and the absence of distance: we still do not know which of today's facts will count in fifty years.
What will be left of our sources?
A fired clay tablet can be read after five thousand years. A file stored on a medium that is no longer made, in a format no software will open, is unreadable in thirty years. This is a real problem, and it is dealt with by institutions whose job it is.
What this period teaches about the whole convention
The case of the Contemporary Era throws light on the whole division by contrast. The four other periods look solid because they are finished: their boundaries were set afterwards, by people who knew how the sequel had gone. The comfort they give is that of a finished story.
Our own period offers no such comfort, and it never will to those who live in it. That is a reminder of something the four preceding chapters each showed in their own way: no period was lived as a period. All of them were open presents, with no visible closing boundary, exactly like ours.
That is the best reason to treat the convention for what it is: a tool made afterwards, useful for filing, false as soon as it is taken for a description of what people lived. The official syllabus writes it in one sentence, and that sentence has been quoted three times before this page because it carries everything: the division of historical time is the product of convention and is subject to debate.