This is a tale of two archives, each with its own draw on the emotions. One, in cartons I first opened in 1987, are hundreds of letters written by Inès and Joseph Fortoul in the 1880s, and are held by the Archives Nationales de France. These are love letters, written by the couple to sustain their connection while Joseph fought as part of an expeditionary force in what is now northern Vietnam. The letters celebrate their romantic love, unusual in the arranged marriages of their Parisian world, and in their correspondence the couple reflect at length on their own marriage, as well as on the matches and marriages of their elite circle. Their feelings and self-conscious descriptions of “modern” love draw me in first as a historian, excited to have a rich source. In the late 1980s, I also found them compelling as a young woman who asked many of the same questions about marriage, even as I inhabited a very different emotional community. I have returned to these letters with an interest less in romantic love, and more in the lost emotions in happy arranged marriages that romantic love has replaced. The Fortouls had many opportunities to observe these emotions, but they, like us, rejected them as a truly satisfactory emotional basis for marriage. 

The second archive is, in fact, my computer, and everything that good Wi-fi has brought into my house in this pandemic. Historical dramas are my primary sources, and like all TV, emotion is their stock in trade. What draws the historian in, as much as any other viewer? Television makes us feel – but historical drama must also decide, how much will it emphasize the strangeness and difference of the past, and how much to make its characters feel and behave like us? Romantic love is perhaps the emotion most frequently portrayed with historical inaccuracy – sometimes wild inaccuracy. For this paper I draw on the television film, The Scapegoat (2012), first aired on Britain’s ITV network, in thinking about how television and film work to keep viewers emotionally engaged in historical drama.

Michèle Plott is a historian living in the Boston (Massachusetts) area. Faculty in History at Suffolk University until 2022, where she was the director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program, she received her Ph.D. from Yale University and is the author of “The Rules of the Game: Respectability, Sexuality, and the Femme Mondaine in Late-Nineteenth-Century Paris” French Historical Studies 25:3(Summer, 2002), 531-556. Her current project examines recent British and American period drama and how these series rely for their success on viewers’ emotional attachment to character and narrative, far more than historical accuracy.