"The historical thought of the French philosophes", chapter 20 of volume III of The Oxford History of Historical Writing, 5 vols., General Editor: Daniel Woolf, Editors vol. III: Jos\ue9 Rabasa, Masayuki Sato, Edoardo Tortarolo, and Daniel Woolf.

The chapter on the historical thought of the French "philosophes" authored by Guido Abbattista aims at describing the most relevant expressions of history writing in the French Enlightenment and the guiding concepts and methods that insipred them. It dwells particularly on the idea of historiography as the representation of a world historical process of development of societies, cultures and civilizations, as history of human and cultural diversities and of the evolution of successive forms of society, identifiable on the basis of different economic activities,and shaped by commerce, colonization and international competition. It also shows how French 18th century historiography was animated by more and more focussed anthropological and religious-historical inquiry supported by an ever richer and wide-ranging travel literature and by the experience of non European cultures. Its main point is that 18th century Enlightenment history writing was inspired by the need to innovate historical awareness, re-centering it on such 'modern' phenomena as commerce, colonies, empires, economic expansion, and to make it 'philosophical' and 'critical', that is to say useful, politically oriented and capable to identify and criticize the main features of the modern world. The Oxford History of Historical Writing is a five-volume, multi-authored scholarly survey of the history of historical writing across the globe. It is a chronological history of humanitys attempts to conserve, recover, and narrate its past with considerable attention paid to non-Western traditions and their points of comparison with Western historiography. Each volume covers a particular period, with care taken to avoid unduly privileging Western notions of periodization, and the volumes cover progressively shorter chronological spans, reflecting both the greater geographical range of later volumes and the steep increase in historical activity around the world since the nineteenth century. The Oxford History of Historical Writing is the first collective scholarly survey of the history of historical writing to cover the globe across such a substantial breadth of time