Christian Jouhaud, the Luigi Einaudi Chair in Modern European and International Studies at Cornell University, will present the Einaudi Lecture on Tuesday, Oct. 22, at 4:30 p.m. in the A.D. White House on the Cornell campus.

The lecture, free and open to the public, is titled "Two Stories in One: Literature as a Hidden Door to 17th-Century French History."

Jouhaud, director of research at the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) in Paris, is one of only a few historians to study the relationship between history and literature in the early modern period and to attempt to bridge the gap between these disciplines, according to Steven Kaplan, the Goldwin Smith Professor of History at Cornell.

"Jouhaud is one of those historians who takes literature seriously," said Kaplan, a French historian who met him in Paris in 1982. "Most literary scholars use history to illuminate literature, while most historians reduce literature to mere illustration. Interested in explaining the aesthetics of power and the power of aesthetics, Jouhaud tries to marry history and literature on equal terms."

In his lecture, to be delivered in English, Jouhaud will read passages from a book written by a 17th-century critic, Jean Louis Guez de Balzac (no relation to novelist HonorŽ de Balzac), who was highly influential in his day but is now relatively obscure, Jouhaud said. On the basis of this text, he hopes to show how literature was practiced and how it addressed crucial questions concerning the organization of state and society.

Educated in Bordeaux and Paris, Jouhaud has taught at the Ecole des Hautes en Sciences Sociales and the Ecole Normale SupŽrieure and has been a visiting fellow at the University of California at Berkeley, Johns Hopkins University and Princeton University. He visited Cornell as an Einaudi Fellow (1988), Society for the Humanities Fellow (1990) and Mellon Fellow (1995) before coming this semester to hold the Einaudi Chair.

Like his predecessors, Jouhaud will do much more at Cornell than deliver the Einaudi Lecture. He is teaching a course, "Producing the Past: 17th-Century France, History and Literature" to undergraduate and graduate students. And, with Kaplan, he is co-convening a conference that will bring noted historians to the A.D. White House Nov. 8 and 9.

"Entering Politics From Below and From Above: The Legitimizing Process" will feature six French and six American historians, who have distributed original source materials to each other in advance of the conference. Once here, they will discuss their mutual interpretations of these documents to better understand how French citizens from the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries used social protest, literature and other tools to acquire political voices.

Kaplan predicts the discussions will reveal as much about how historians interpret original source materials as about the historical events described in the sources themselves.

"When a historian acquires a primary document, how does he or she use these documents -- whether they are police documents, literary texts or diaries?" asked Kaplan. "We want to understand the way in which a historian goes about unpacking the evidence and then assessing and reading it; we want to strip bare the process of analysis and interpretation."

The Einaudi Lecture is being sponsored by the Institute for European Studies, and the historians' conference is being co-sponsored by several Cornell departments and programs, including the Program in French Studies and Society for the Humanities.

The Einaudi Chair and Lecture are named for Luigi Einaudi, the first elected president of Italy after World War II. His eldest son, Mario, who died in May 1994, joined the Cornell faculty in 1945, served as chair of the Department of Government and founded the Center for International Studies that bears his name. At his death he was the Goldwin Smith Emeritus Professor of Government.

Jouhaud said he is honored not only to hold the Einaudi Chair, but to be surrounded by books from Mario Einaudi's library in his Uris Hall office -- many of them classic texts from 17th-century France.