# My American Lectures/Present-day History and Historians

PRESENT-DAY HISTORY AND HISTORIANS
I have been privileged to witness many far-reaching changes in the historiography of our times, so let me ask that my long experience should serve as an explanation and, if necessary, as an excuse for the methods I myself pursue in the writing of history.
In the now remote days of my youth I was a pupil at the small Roumanian university of Jassy of a man who has left some trace on the European thought of his period, Alexander D. Xenopol. A former student in Berlin, first and foremost preoccupied by questions of Roman institutions, a man of philosophical rather than historical tendencies, an economist and seeker after definite laws in the complicated field of history, he was later attracted towards historical studies, but he studied in his early years the now unjustly despised doctrine of Buckle, and his six-volume history of the Roumanians, no mean achievement, shows this early familiarity with eading abstract ideas. It is, in spite of many errors of fact, a solid mass of work in which the chaos of the pragmatical is always dominated by superior conceptions.
Something of the Buckleian era remained in the minds of his generation and, by means of his teaching, passed into my own being too. For them history was not an immense chaos of bygone deeds culled from different sources, critically analysed and held together only by the loose ties of territorial unity and chronological sequence. ​Everything had to be explained and, in their opinion, an explanation could be found and had to be found, because unexplained things, bred as they were to studies of natural science, jurisprudence, economics and metaphysics, could not exist. The facts were ruled, for them as for Buckle, by the influence of the natural surroundings or, according to Xenopol, by laws similar to those of nature, but by ties of succession not of contemporaneity.
It was a matter of thought and large horizons continually opened before the searching mind. No seminary for preparing each student to anything in the domain of particular research existed at this time and, notwithstanding this, if the immense majority left the university without having made their universal discovery, preserved for eternity in the thesis of their doctorate, some distinguished searchers and thinkers were set loose, completely formed and trained on their own personal methods by influence of this generous mind, ever fond of new ideas and original interpolations.
All studies of history were presented in the same sense as by Xenopol. We learned that of the Romans, following the pages of Duruy, directed by the remembrance of the Gibbonian thought, and Greek history in the volumes of Grote and Curtius — a very different spirit from that of the later Belloch (Curtius I was to meet later in Berlin, accomplishing, like von Gizycki in ethics, his duties as a teacher in spite of age and infirmity, thus affording an object lesson to the new generation).
This school contributed valuable work to historiography in the first half of the 19th century. Seldom were such great and enduring works written as the History of Ferdinand and Isabella, and of Philip the Second by Prescott, those dealing with the revolt in the Tow Countries ​by Motley, the history of Charles the Bold by Foster Kirk, or of the United States by Bancroft.
Besides this succession to the historians of the 18th century, who were led by general ideas and sought literary form adequate to their conception of personalities and developments, the German philosophy of the opening years of the 19th century, the diplomatic and archivistic studies of the French Benedictines some decades earlier, the scrupules of the archaeologists gave rise to another directive in the writing of history: the methodical pursuit of truth, the attainable verities in the facts. For other schools, strong, enlightened minds were necessary, with some literary talent and notably an experience of life: their interpretation had ever the personal character of a creative spirit; for the second, good schooling, a normal intelligence and the sense of honestly accomplising their duty to the university sufficed.
The democratic directives of contemporary life, as well as the necessity of having teachers of history for the secondary schools, archivists and librarians for the public repositaries of knowledge, favoured the development, the universal expansion of this second school. A product of bureaucratic Germany, where everything could be accomplished without direct contact with the world, within the four walls of a study, and not of the organic Germany, brilliantly represented by the most open mind which ever interested itself with history (that of Leopold von Ranke), it was extended to other nations by the enhanced prestige of victorious German arms after 1870. Not however in conservative England, where such splendid works as the «Constitutional History of England» by Stubbs, who as a professor was obliged only at rare intervals to hold the lectures which were later collected in a rare volume, were written without the aid of foreign methods, ​but in contemporary France, under the influence of Gabriel Monod, educated in the German universities — for him the Franco-German war was a personal tragedy (see his « Français et Allemands »). Opposed to the spirit of the Sorbonne, which was considered antiquated, the Bcole des Hautes Etudes took the leadership of the movement. Never was a stranger discipline more impressively exercised over young minds as here: Monod himself, my own good old teacher Charles Bemont, Giry, the author of the best treatise on diplomacy ever written, that consistent doubter of martyrology, Monseigneur Duchesne (who possessed more than a touch of Voltairian irony), minor ones such as the searcher of institutions, Thevenin, the more neglected Roy, were representative of the current. Good chronology for selected proved facts, not unconnected with the imperative need of a rounded French form, but a certain mistrust of general ideas and a bitter contempt for all that bore the appearance of literature (and literature was dilettantism), that was our creed.
Against the proceedings of the Roman historian of Roman history, Ettore Pais, a new Italian school, influenced by the presence of Belloch as a teacher in Rome, gave the opposite history of republican and imperial Rome, by Monsieur de Sanctis. Here, too, everything had to be renewed and only critically elaborated facts could be presented as authenticated truths. The era of higher conceptions, which were considered dangerous, was carefully closed.
But in that same Germany which generated these methods and imposed these inviolable limits, a cry of revolt resounded, heralding, in Berlin and Leipzig, the commencement of a hard and long-contested struggle between two factions of historians. Karl Lamprecht had begun to preach. ​
He was not a revolutionary against realities not to be despised or suppressed. With him was revived not the old phraseology dealing with certain doubtful facts, chosen first and foremost to embroider the sumptuous garment of Rhodian rhetoric. The metaphysics, traces of which can be discovered in his mentality, that of an honest if crude German peasant, with something of Luther in his lineaments as well as in his manner of thought, inspired, but could not also guide him. But the man who began with patient research among the ancient miniatures of his country, without neglecting their material aspects, was strong in the belief (very different from the materialistic « naturalist» Buckle) that moral factors govern the life of mankind and that they can be identified with types. Types changing and recurring in such regular rhythm as was for the first time conceived by the genius Vico. Thus was the theory of the human race, beginning with the type and ending with the most outspoken individualism, evolved and applied to German history, before final crystallisation in his American lectures.
Lamprecht’s theory, applied to no other history, notwithstanding the polite offers of his Japanese pupils, will not endure, though much of his noble work is worthy of preservation : his broad outlook, his faith in psychological factors, his convinction that all manifestations of human life are parts of one connected whole, of one preconcerted scheme.
After the world war, a very different directive seems to have had its source of inspirations otherwise than in Lamprecht’s ideology. I refer to the recent theories of Spengler, so much discussed by the few and so naively accepted by the multitude. He seems, insofar as it is possible for a trained mind to pursue such ideas, both to accept for himself and to preach to others the doctrine that, following a rhythm of its own, humanity sets up civilisations which ​unfailingly pass through the same phases of birth, growth, decay and oblivion. According to Spengler, our own civilisation, that of the west, is at the end of its long development and we are about to become the spectators of its final death agonies. A certain number of past civilisations are presented in a convincing and impressive manner, with undeniable literary skill, in proof of this. For all this Spengler is no historian, being the mere champion of information drawn from secondary sources, choosing only those facts which favour his theories and his bias. The uninformed public can see no danger and can therefore not avoid it.
In the success of this clamorous craft of self-advertisement to which belong, in another field of literature, the historical romances from Paris and the semi-literary improvisations of Emil Ludwig, many recent books have their origin. With a sovereign contempt for the facts, presented recently in a long series of volumes, such as the English ones from Cambridge and the collection of « syntheses » directed by Mr. Berr, they destroy all that was hitherto definite and secure. A bolshevism in historiography as childish and impertinent as the other doctrine, which corresponds to the new portraiture and sculpture of human beings the like of which is yet to be born, to the architecture without profile and proportion, to the poetry whose first requirement is to be deprived of all rhyme and rhythm. The psychosis of the new generation should be manifested in history too.
It is natural that a witness of these important changes in his own speciality should try, after forty years of experience, and after having studied the histories of most countries on this globe, minutely as well as along the broad lines of material and moral currents, to prepare a synthesis of his own. It appeared at Paris, in the four volumes ​of my « Synthèse de l'histoire de l'Humanité », with many unjust criticisms of detail and, occasionally too, abuse, as in the « Revue des Questions Historiques » from the pen of a very young man who had specialised only in the local history of his native Britanny. I will explain its principal object.
For me the history of mankind is an organism having its organic necessities, its organic development, possessing a body and a mind.
In this organism, territories and nations appear for the first time at the precise moment when they possess one of two qualities: — either to represent the whole, to be « representative » in the sense that Emerson referred to personalities, or to be in advance of the rest of mankind, giving it new inspiration and becoming the leading factor in its development.
Large and small states, great or small groupings are, in the history of mankind, not interesting from this point of view, but only insofar as concerns the qualities already mentioned. Often a second-class nation, possessing little territory, would attract the attention of the historian because it identified itself with the current movement or prepared to become great in the future.
To look in such a book for facts regarding a country for a set number of years is to have no appreciation of the intentions of the author and the critic mentioned above could therefore speak in his own sense of a work of «less than embryonic character». It is possible to forgive the aggressive modesty of his estimate.
In this presentation of history many changes in the present mode of writing occur owing to the necessity of suitably presenting the new point of view itself. ​
The prehistoric has no legitimate claim to the predominance attributed to it by the present-day. There is no true guidance to be found in the vague language of excavated pottery and flint arrow-heads, nor in the aesthetic but doubtfully accurate interpretations of such disinterred relics, resulting oft-times in the discovery of a society of cave-dwellers worshipping a hitherto unsuspected and quite fabulous deity.
The prejudice of successive national monarchies of the past can no better withstand the judgment of the historian. He rather gains the impression that the state of the gods, the state for the « four corners of the earth » is successively helped and sustained, to the end of their power, by all oriental nations. None of them, when occupied by a dynasty foreign in our sense of the word, has the humilitating sentiments of a vanquished nation. The gods have only changed their representative, the instrument of their domination, and the newcomer, as in Egypt, be it Cambyse, Alexander or Caesar, adopts the traditional forms respected by his predecessors in entirety. With this the Hellenic role of the Macedonian, for instance, disappears : he leads his peasants in the name of vengeful Achilles to the conquest of a world which, immediately after the victory, causes the victor to be a king in its sense, a divine monarch, as Nebuchadnezzar, to whose spirit Babylon, under all rules, has remained true.
Greece is a very different matter. It is outside the pale of godly monarchy, inaugurating by its revolt the reign of man in politics as well as in thought and art. But not the visible Greece of Athens, which speaks for all others (notwithstanding that not all moral leaders whose biographies are connected with Athenian life were born in that city) so much as the Greece of Southern Italy, the monarchical state of Sicily — as opposed to the Persian ​thalassocracy ​on the one hand and the Etruscan encroachments on the other, — is of the greater importance in the development of the general scheme of history.
Rome, as it began to appear to the more recent French historians, was no more a conqueror. It sought not world domination: it was called to this destiny because of the impossibility of peace by any other solution. It accomplished as a city what Alexander compassed as a hero, what the half-Greek Hannibal strove to achieve. The Romans, at no time and in place, attempted to change the life of the aboriginal peoples over whom they assumed the mastery. They merely supervised the progress of their conquests, each of which became a Roman province, while preserving its ancient traditions.
Christianity appeared as a new power, as a menace to imperial supremacy. In its modified form, very different from its initial Palestinian pastoral form, it gave to the world, accustomed to live under a single government, its instinctive unity. This has been the greatest achievement of the religion of love tending, in its perfected organisation, to become the best means of dominating all nations.
The middle ages began with the moment that the first barbarian state, that of the Franks, adopted Christianity and served Christian ends. So the invasion of the Germans and Turanians too loses much of its recognised importance. They are no longer the founders of a new era, bringing with them, against tyranny and dissolution, their patriarchal and personal dependency, their liberty and purity of morals. No enemies and, still less, despisers of Rome, they served, revered and would have liked to resemble her. The theory of the catastrophe which heralded the mediaeval epoch has been attacked in more recent days by an Austrian, Herr Dopsch. The ancient times continued ​in the newer and, if continuity was not perfect, it was merely because perfection has ever been impossible.
To the barbarian states, Byzantium appeared as the true, indeed the only, Rome, which remained as the sole undefiled source of royalty, whence all new things sprang. Theodoric was only its viceroy in Italy. The conquest of the peninsula by Justinian, as well as his conquest of Africa and the East coast of Spain, was not an invasion in the true sense, but merely the return of the true master. Theoretically speaking, Byzantium never relinquished its rights.
Compared to the realm of Charles the Great, it was much stronger and had a degree of legitimacy to which the Frank could never successfully have aspired. The emperor in Constantinople never recognised an impossible equality with Charlemagne, the usurper in the West, whose ascendancy was prepared by a long series of Italian disturbances which aimed at giving the whole world over to western thraldom. Because Charlemagne himself did not confine this authority to the West, he became, according to his own theory only, emperor of the world. Similarly Eirene, his supposed wife, is herself not an empress but, as she appears on coins, an « emperor »!
Nor was Otto the First a German conqueror of Italy. He was in reality adopted by the Italian realm: being sought in marriage by Adelaide. Queen of Italy, she considered herself as reigning in her own right. The second Otto, destined to die for Italy in Italy, was an Italian, and the third, son of a Byzantine princess, an Oecumenic emperor preparing himself for Rome as well as for Constantinople.
Now the capital energy of the middle ages was French. They changed, through such women as Agnes the Burgundian, the character of the emperors. The French spirit ​of Cluny ruled the Church. The voice of St. Bernard called the mediaeval world to its duty. The crusades were almost exclusively French; England, for instance, still being in the early years of the Norman conquest.
The son of a Norman princess, Frederick the Second, was brought up as an Italian: this serves to explain his Roman laws and his constitution which was exclusively feudal and yet infinitely superior to the English Magna Charta, with its so-called «liberties ». The French attempt in the 14th century to Francize the empire they at one time claimed for themselves: see, after Otto of Brunswick, educated in France, Henri of Luxemburg, or the half-French Charles IV. In France began a holy realm, with the ninth Louis, then a true monarchy, stronger under Philippe le Bel (a much stronger one than the adventures of Frederick the Redbeard in Italy, which he invaded eleven times though he could never remain as master). The Hundred Years' War was not an Anglo-French conflict, but the struggles of two dynasties for the priceless possession of France: without Joan of Arc it would have been possible to complete the conquest of England, begun by the Norman dynasty, pressed on by the Aquitanian element in the dynasty, by counsellors such as Simon de Montfort, by the French bankers; in England, more than ever in France, lived the French literature of the middle ages.
As regards modern history, not so much the conception as the lines of presentation, must be changed. The 15th century was still mediaeval: what was modern in the reigns of Charles VII and Louis XI? Francis I employed mediaeval forces for the modern purpose of gaining territory, and his realm is still mediaeval. In Europe there was a single absolute monarchy, that of the Turks. The knights of the desert, the mercenaries of the Palaeologues, under ​Mahomed the Second and Solieman the Magnificent, were truly Byzantine, viz: Roman Caesars. Under their sceptres the Christian nations, who are commonly said to have lived under oppression, continued the same local existence as they had done under the rule of Christian emperors. All western activities were of secondary interest to the ruler of three continents, the master of the Mediterranean and the Euxine. Louis XIV was the first modern king of France, but modern France, unitary and centralised (the created France not the historical), was the work of the political struggles of the Revolution.
The Revolution was not the beginning of a new era. Its ideas and methods were to be found at the beginning of the 15th century in the riotous Paris of Caboche. Without the intervention of the «absolute» monarchy the outburst would have forestalled Mirabeau by four hundred years. But the former free life of the cities, the greatest thing in that greatest epoch of mankind, the middle ages, was crushed. The political importance of the bourgeoisie was recognised by Louis XIV. The destruction of the Court by the shy half-Teuton Louis XV made of the new bourgeoisie of the salons the intellectual leaders of France. The philanthropical debility of Louis XVI gave the final blow to the already tottering edifice as the Bastille, the institution of the old kings, was conquered because it was never defended. This is why I began my contemporary history with America, the first to employ the theories of French philosophy, the first to uphold a popular, and this time a true popular movement of liberty.
Nevertheless, in the middle ages, a new principle of historical life was presented: the Roman territories, practically abandoned by the Empire and unoccupied by the barbarian, developed in a free and patriarchal manner, free forces such as Venice, Genoa, peasant confederations such ​as the Swiss Cantons, the clans of Scotland and the new-wholly new-States such as Roumanian Wallachia.
Recognizing the part played by Latin-America in the revolutionary movements towards 1820, demonstrating the strict relationship between these all movements, I have been unable to pass over the often leading role of the SouthEast in the formation of contemporary Europe. After the dynastic states, I have presented the national — or, better said, ethnographical — states which have emerged triumphant from the melting-pot of the Great War. But at the same time I must indicate the economic movement, preparing, as it undoubtedly is, yet another new grouping of the nations of the world: the world-wide competition between territorial and national products, characterising the new era, the leading moral ideas of which have yet to breast the horizon.