In this episode of "I’m Not Sure?", produced at Building 21 at McGill University, literary historian Frédéric Charbonneau reflects on a life shaped by curiosity and doubt.
From science to Chinese studies to French literature, Charbonneau explores how uncertainty guides research, how ideas of progress reshape our understanding of the past, and why history can never be fully known. Rather than seeking definitive answers, he argues for working with provisional certainty—embracing uncertainty as the condition that keeps thought alive.
Presenting Literary Historian Frédéric Charbonneau's "I'm Not Sure?"
First of all, I want to thank you for inviting me to this podcast series—on such a fascinating subject.
I am indeed a professor in the Department of French Literature. But before becoming a specialist in French literature, I was first and foremost the son—and even the grandson—of teachers: a family of intellectuals and artists who spent their lives asking questions and questioning themselves.
Both of my parents were philosophers, and among philosophers, questions matter far more than answers. Questions endure; answers change. I think that shaped my intellectual path more than anything.
I came to literature through writing, which is nothing particularly original. But even before studying literature, I studied out of sheer curiosity—because I wanted to understand everything I didn’t yet know. I studied science first—hard sciences and natural sciences—then Chinese and East-Asian studies for four years, first here at McGill, and then at the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales in Paris.
After that I returned to Montréal to study seventeenth-century French literature.
Why Chinese?
Honestly, because it was the furthest thing imaginable. It was a way of responding to the anxiety I felt about studying literature—I was afraid it might “lead nowhere.” In the 1980s, Chinese seemed like a path toward the future. It also allowed me to engage with one of the great world cultures and a major literary tradition.
When I arrived at McGill, I discovered that East-Asian Studies was very small at the time and that it wasn’t even possible to complete a full undergraduate degree. So I requested—and received—a tailor-made program combining French literature and East-Asian Studies.
Later, I spent a year in Paris completing a licence at what was called L’ENSCO. And I quickly realized that to pursue what I originally wanted to do, I would have had to dedicate ten years of my life to classical Chinese. I decided to be more modest and return fully to French literature.
Back in Montréal, I worked with my mentor, Bernard Beugnot, at the Université de Montréal. He trained me first at the master’s level and then at the doctoral level in seventeenth-century literature.
When I completed my PhD, I learned that there were no academic positions open in seventeenth-century studies—but there were in eighteenth-century literature. So I did a postdoc in eighteenth-century studies and was then hired at McGill.
Over time, I’ve worked on a wide range of topics, often as a way of circling back to interests I had once had to leave aside—like Chinese culture or science. My goal has been to turn this diversity of concerns into a single intellectual trajectory.
Memory, Progress, and the Past
My first major research focus—something that remains very important to me—was historical memoirs, autobiography, and how history was written in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I have always been deeply preoccupied with memory and the past. This is also something personal.
I tell my students this constantly: when you choose a research topic—especially something you may devote your career to—it should be something deeply rooted inside you.
Soon enough, my interest in science resurfaced, and I developed a second research direction: the history of ideas—scientific ideas, medical ideas, and particularly dietetics and food, as well as the concept of progress itself.
Thinking about scientific and medical progress in the eighteenth century—anatomical discoveries, for instance—allowed me to reconnect with my older concerns about how people conceived of the past. Progress is like a slider moving forward along the timeline; as it advances, it pushes more and more things into the category of the obsolete. In truth, progress produces far more “outdated” knowledge than it produces what is current.
I spent about a decade working on these questions. Then, around 2014–2015, I shifted to a third line of inquiry: the very idea of the past itself—and particularly what we call the “remote past.”
This “remote past” is a kind of distant time set apart from us, as if history had recoiled across a fault line or rupture. I studied how eighteenth-century French scholars—members of the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres—grappled with this problem. That academy had originally been founded to study ancient inscriptions on monuments. But to understand those inscriptions, they had to investigate the broader past of ancient civilizations—not only Greece and Rome, but Egypt and the entire Mediterranean world.
Very quickly, they also became interested in East Asia—especially China—thanks to the reports sent back by Jesuit missionaries. They turned as well toward archaeology and the emerging field of paleontology. Archaeological excavations throughout the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—Pompeii and Herculaneum among them—brought to light artifacts of uncertain age: fragments, tools, shells, fossils.
All of this forced historians to rethink radically the nature of our knowledge of the very ancient past. The biblical chronological framework could no longer contain what they were discovering. The consequences were immense: the idea of prehistory was born.
At the same time, the relationship between history and literature changed. For centuries—since the Greeks—history had essentially been a literary genre, the primary form of prose narrative. But starting in the eighteenth century, history began to separate itself from literature, because literary testimony alone could not explain these discoveries. Scholars turned toward geology, astronomy, stratigraphy—scientific methods capable of grappling with vast stretches of time.
Working with Uncertainty
What interests me most are these thinkers who suddenly became unsure whether the past could even be known.
Up until the early eighteenth century, the past seemed securely anchored in classical historians and biblical chronology. Creation itself had a precise date—4004 BCE, on October 23rd at noon, according to calculations by a monk.
And then, little by little, everything fell apart.
Scholars had to imagine an “eventless history”—a history of long duration rather than a chain of happenings recorded by chroniclers. This was incredibly difficult to conceptualize.
My object of study is precisely this moment of uncertainty. And I must say: I myself have no certainties—only hypotheses.
I work from archives—notes, drafts, fragments of correspondence—to see whether my hypotheses help make sense of what emerges from these materials and from debates within the academic networks of the time. In that sense, I not only study uncertainty—I practice it.
My goal is not to arrive at definitive truths—that’s impossible. Our certainties are always provisional. Instead, hypotheses give us footholds from which inquiry can continue, for ourselves or for future scholars.
History is, in many ways, about constructing connections—building narratives that bridge the gap between fragments of discovery.
Time as Spiral
Human time—historical time—was long understood as cyclical, modeled after natural or astronomical cycles. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers felt closer to ancient Romans or Greeks than to their medieval ancestors, because those ancient cultures were perceived as prior “high points” on the spiral of history.
This cyclical conception depended on a closed vision of time—beginning with Creation and destined for an end. Much as astronomy moved from a “closed world” to an “infinite universe,” our understanding of time shifted from a closed loop to a linear, endless expanse.
Studying what enabled that shift—that transformation—is part of what I seek to explain.
Seeing the Past
Someone asked whether distant events appear larger the further back they go. Eighteenth-century thinkers suggested that the past grows larger as it recedes. I take the opposite view.
Following Leonardo da Vinci’s optics: the farther something is, the less distinct it becomes. Distance blurs form; color fades into blue. Think of the background of the Mona Lisa—blue, hazy, indistinct.
I believe the same applies to historical knowledge. We can still perceive the past, but only through a kind of haze—we strain toward it, never fully grasping it as present.
Husserl compared memory to viewing something through water: it is both present and distorted, held at a distance. Historical knowledge operates much the same way.
And so I don’t think what we seek is absolute certainty. Truth resides within a certain imprecision—within uncertainty itself. To seek crisp clarity would ignore the inherent distance of the past.
Two Ways of Reading the Past
When I teach early modern literature, I always describe two approaches:
- Pull the past toward ourselves — interpret older works as mirrors of our own concerns. This is what classical exoticism often did with Persia, Turkey, or China in Enlightenment Europe: use foreign cultures to reflect on oneself.
- Move toward the past — attempt to decenter ourselves, to approach the other on its own terms. Some Jesuit missionaries exemplified this path; they became so immersed in Chinese culture that they were effectively “sinicized.” Some were even buried under Chinese steles bearing Mandarin titles.
My own work follows this second approach: I try not to pull the past closer to me, but instead to step toward it.
Provisional Certainty
Like my philosopher parents, I believe the real work lies in the questions—and answers matter mostly because they generate new ones.
We must operate with provisional certainty—otherwise we couldn’t speak or think at all. We say “the past” as if we all mean the same thing—though nothing is less certain. Still, we must proceed as if we agree.
Taken too far, skepticism leads to paralysis. We need working assumptions, what Gadamer calls “preconceptions”—not prejudices to be eliminated, but starting points to be recognized and used consciously.
Our fragile certainties are necessary conveniences.
So my work doesn’t aim to eliminate uncertainty. On the contrary: I build fragile architectures of thought—structures strong enough to think from, yet open enough to endure questioning.
That openness allows future scholars—or students—to take up abandoned or unfinished questions and pursue them along new lines, just as I returned to my scientific and Chinese studies through different avenues.
Do uncertainty and doubt need to be resolved? No. Eliminating doubt would mean the death of thought itself. Universities could close their doors.
About "I'm Not Sure"
Everyone's always talking about what we're sure of: certainties, predictions, facts.
Here at “I’m Not Sure”, we take a turn and ask: What are some things we aren’t so sure of? What do scientists, artists, practitioners, experts, and leaders wonder about? What are the questions and curiosities that guide us to explore the smallest particles, the farthest spaces, the deepest mysteries, and our closest relationships?
Co-hosted by: Ollivier Dyens & Isabella Chiaravallotti
Produced by: Alex Nicholas Chen
Music by: Christian Denis
Graphics by: Sophie Wu
Conceived, conceptualised & created in Montréal, QC 2025
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