European civilization and the “emulation of the nations”

History of European Ideas 34 (2008) 353–360

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European civilization and the ‘‘emulation of the nations’’ Histories of Europe from the Enlightenment to Guizot Marcello Verga Dipartimento di Studi sullo Stato, Facolta` di Scienze Politiche ‘‘Cesare Alfieri’’, Universita` di Firenze, via delle Pandette 21, 50127 Firenze, Italy

A R T I C L E I N F O

Available online 7 September 2008 Keywords: Voltaire William Robertson Edward Gibbon Franc¸ois Guizot

A B S T R A C T

This paper discusses the paradigms of European history and of European civilisation defined in the main histories of Europe written from the Enlightenment to Guizot. Voltaire, Robertson, Gibbon, and Guizot consolidated a model of the history of Europe which has its origins in the fall of the western Roman Empire and the invasions of the Barbarians. The other main steps of this history were the Christianisation, the creation of a vital economic centre in western and northern Europe, the development of the cities, the rediscovery of Roman law, the creation of a complex system of states, the colonial expansion and again the birth of a society of ‘‘good manners’’. A common civilisation which did not ignore the differences which existed between one country and another – the ‘‘national characters’’, discussed by David Hume in 1748. Instead the different national characters – the variety of Europe as Guizot wrote – represented an important element of the European civilisation. ß 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

‘‘A sort of great Republic divided in several states’’ In the mid-1930s Paul Hazard’s analysis of the upheavals in the European ‘‘spirit’’ in the years between 1680 and 1715 – the years of the crisis of Europe’s conscience – underlined the vital ‘‘sentiment of national differences’’.1 Europe, as it emerged transformed from the ‘‘crisis’’ of the late seventeenth century, may have become the Europe of reason, of the enlightenment, but it was still the Europe of the French, the English, the Spanish, and the Italians. ‘‘What is Europe?’’ was the question Paul Hazard frequently asked in the conclusion of his great book. He was revisiting a theme, that of national differences, which had dominated European reflection on the idea of Europe and of its civilization since the eighteenth century. The Europe under consideration was an ensemble of nations which shared a civilization, a history, a spirit, the same ‘‘good manners’’, but at the same time was divided into different nations, with their own psychological peculiarities, traditions, customs, and laws. Europe as a space of nations, each (as was stated in nineteenth century) with its own path in the context of a common civilization and history. And at the same time Europe as a distinctive ‘‘civilization’’, the highest point in the evolution of a progress. A civilization which was to serve as the model for any possible progress. In allegorical representations, Europe, from antiquity to the sixteenth/seventeenth centuries, and as late as the eighteenth, accepted the tributes of non-European lands as a woman/queen. Europe was indeed a body mysteriously able to contain many bodies/peoples, not all of them sharing the same entitlements and the same rights. In the seventeenth and the eighteenth century, the idea of European civilization, as formed in the ‘‘strong’’ centers of European society – London, Paris, Amsterdam – consolidated this complex interweaving of values and meanings which the idea of Europe was taking on. On

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E-mail address: marcello.verga@unifi.it. P. Hazard, The European Mind, 1680-1715 (London, 1953).

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M. Verga / History of European Ideas 34 (2008) 353–360

the one hand, even higher barriers were raised between Europe and other civilizations and parts of the world; and on the other, the differences between the single parts of Europe were accentuated, the diversity of customs and levels of ‘‘civilization’’ amongst its peoples was more pronounced. This fostered an image of Europe fractured not only along a North– South axis but also along a West–East axis.2 This eighteenth-century image of Europe did not contradict or nullify the differences which existed inside Europe, differences which depended, as David Hume wrote in 1748 in his famous essay Of National Characters, not on the climate, but rather on ‘‘a lot on moral causes’’.3 One might question the assumption that this was the accepted idea of Europe and its civilization in the mid-eighteenth century. If these lines of Hume were those along which the social psychology of the European peoples were to develop – from Voltaire to Mably to Kant – 4; if this was indeed the Europe geographers described with ever increasing accuracy, the one perceived by theorists of international politics and diplomats as a system of states connected to each other; and if this was, finally, the Europe which the philosophers compared to Asia and the Americas. What, we ask, were its roots? What was its history? This paper will attempt to answer these questions in the light of those historiographers – from Montesquieu to Guizot – who have attempted to write a history of Europe. What is Europe? And why write its history, and how? In the mid-eighteenth century, Montesquieu and Voltaire, adopted distinct approaches to the theme. Montesquieu studied power systems and society and by looking at the ‘‘spirit of the laws’’; Voltaire, the philosophe, concentrated on political and cultural history and the ‘‘spirit of the nations’’. In the two and a half centuries since their publication much has been written on Montesquieu’s Esprit des lois of 1748 and on the Essai sur l’histoire ge´ne´rale et sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations depuis Charlemagne jusqu’a` Louis XIII, begun by Voltaire in 1745 and published in 1756. According to Montesquieu, who built his idea of European civilization by constant comparison with Asia – or rather the idea of Asia and of its civilization which held sway in European culture in the early eighteenth century – the differences between Europe and Asia lay not so much in the climate, as in their history and in a combination of ‘‘physical’’ and ‘‘moral’’ causes.5 For these reasons Montesquieu, believed that ‘‘power should always be despotic in Asia’’; while ‘‘In Europe, the natural divisions form many medium-sized states in which the government of laws is not incompatible with the maintenance of the state. This is what has formed a genius for liberty, which makes it very difficult to subjugate each part and to put it under a foreign force other than by laws.6 There is no lack in Montesquieu, in the Spirit of the Laws, and other works, of further considerations on Europe. It was left to Voltaire however to provide a complete history of Europe – whose eastern borders stopped at Berlin –: ‘‘Christian Europe, all except Russia, might for a long time has been considered as a sort of great republic, divided in several states, some monarchical and others mixt. Of the latter some were aristocratic and other populars, but all connected with one another; all professing the same system of religion, those divides into several sects; all acknowledging the same principles of public justice and policies, unknown to the other nations of the world’’.7 It was not in the Age of Louis XIV that Voltaire turned his attention to the history of Christian Europe but rather in the universal history on which he worked until the end of his life. This began with a broad view of the ‘‘globe’’ and of the great oriental civilizations, before concentrating on European history from Charlemagne to Louis XIII. In Voltaire’s Essai sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations et sur les principaux faits de l’histoire depuis Charlemagne jusqu’a` Louis XIII, despite this panoramic vision, his narration focused on European history, from the fall of the Roman Empire to France under the Bourbons. In his account, increasingly detailed as he progressed from Charlemagne to Louis XIII’s monarchy, he pauses to reflect on five occasions to consider ‘‘government customs’’, within European ‘‘traditions’’. His first pause is devoted to Charlemagne’s age; the second to the tenth and eleventh centuries; the third to the twelfth; the fourth to the thirteenth and fourteenth; and the fifth to the sixteenth century. How had we advanced from ‘‘barbarian rusticity’’ to ‘‘contemporary politesse’’?8 The question had been outlined in his Essai d’histoire ge´nerale, describing extraordinary events in European history from the fall of the Roman Empire and the barbarian invasions. These signaled the beginning of decadence, wrote Voltaire, or actually of a ‘‘discouragement in which Europe lived until the sixteenth century and from which it emerged only after terrible convulsions’’.9 And even though Charlemagne had represented ‘‘a place worthy of the attention of a citizen’’,10 European history from the fall of Rome to Charlemagne was nothing but ‘‘that of some barbarian captains who contended with the bishops for power over imbecile slaves’’.11 If a ‘‘principle’’ could and should be

2 L. Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe. The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment ( Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1994); G. Cecere, ‘‘L’ Oriente d’Euroopa. Una idea in movimento (sec. XVIII)’’, Chromos 8 (2003), 1–25. 3 D. Hume, Of National Characters, in Essays Moral, Polical and Literaty, ed. E. F. Miller (Liberty Fund. Inc., Indianapolis, 1987), 187–215. 4 Cf. D. Peabody, National Characteristics, (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1985). For Voltaire the reference is to the Essai sur les mœurs . . . (on which cf. the main text); for Mably the reference is to the Esprit of 1758; for Kant the reference is to his not systematic notes on the national characters on which cf. G. Tonelli, ‘‘Kant e i caratteri della nazione’’ Quaderni della Biblioteca Filosofica di Torino, 51 (1974), 129–38. 5 On these themes of the Esprit des lois and of the whole work of Montesquieu see the essays collected in the volume L’Europe de Montesquieu, ed. A. Postigliola, M. G. Bottari (Liguori, Naples, 1995). 6 Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws, ed. A. M. Colher, B. C Miller, H. S. Stone (Cambridge Uniervsity Press, 1989), 283. 7 Voltaire, The Age of Louis XIV (London, 1779), 7. 8 Voltaire, Essai sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations et sur les principaux faits de l’histoire depuis Charlemagne jusqu’a` Louis XIII, (Paris, 1990, vols. 2), vol. I: 904. 9 Voltaire, Essai sur les moeurs . . . vol. I, 309–19. 10 Voltaire, Essai sur les moeurs . . . vol. I, 336. 11 Voltaire, Essai sur les moeurs . . . vol. I, 384.

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found in the ‘‘revolutions’’ of European history from Charlemagne onwards, it had to be looked for in the strengthening of Catholic Europe, which represented – he explained in the Supple´ment – ‘‘the thread which brings us into modern history’s labyrinth’’. Voltaire’s universal history was, therefore, the history of ‘‘the extinction, the rebirth and the progress of the human spirit’’.12 His history started with the rebirth of the sciences and the arts, the revival of commerce, the expansion of cities and their new customs. These centuries were the prelude to one of the four happy ages which Voltaire had described in the Age of Louis XIV: the century of Leo X, of Charles V and of Francis I, a century in which the Churches – the Christian ones, but also Islam – had lived a ‘‘revolution’’, and in which ‘‘the old world’’ had ebranle´ and the new world was in the hands of the emperor Charles V. It was also a century in which ‘‘in almost all sectors’’, and especially in Italy, ‘‘nature had produced extraordinary men’’. From this quite positive picture of European history, Voltaire’s began the second part of his Essai, devoted to a minute reconstruction of ‘‘modern history’’, in great part centered on the events of the main European states. Of course, for Voltaire, ‘‘this history – from Charlemagne to Louis XIII – is a confused ensemble of crimes, follies and tragedies’’ with ‘‘some virtues, some happy times’’.13 It still remains to be understood why and how this history, tracing a thread, took place ‘‘in our part of Europe’’ –and certainly not in Eastern Europe. And why ‘‘traditions’’ and a genie, ‘‘a character which cannot be found’’ in the other regions of Europe and of the world existed in Christian Europe. Climate, government, religion – and here Voltaire seems to want to go back to Montesquieu – can explain ‘‘this world’s enigma’’. ‘‘Customs’’ had transformed the Europe of Voltaire – which extended only as far as Berlin and Vienna – into a socially, culturally, and politically developed region: a ‘‘part of the world’’ incomparably more populated, more civilized, richer, more enlightened than any other part of the globe had ever been.29 And Europe, Voltaire wrote in the final chapter of his Essai, could flourish even more if it decided not to waste its energy in continuous wars; not to spend so much on armaments; if the arts and agriculture were more developed; and if a surprisingly consistent number of men and women did not chose to shut themselves away in cloisters! Of course, it is easy to note how far his is a French Europe, completely built on the identification of the idea of French civilization and European civilization; and how far it is sustained by faith in an idea of Europe which did not extend far beyond Paris, London, Amsterdam and, perhaps, Berlin. It was essentially ‘‘a notion typical of rich, cultured, literate, civilized people’’, as Lucien Febvre pointed out at the end of 1944.14 Montesquieu and Voltaire were not alone in discussing the concept of Europe and of civilization in those years. The debate on the idea of Europe, its borders, its traits, its civilization and on European civil society was very much alive. An altogether different approach was taken by Jean Jacques Rousseau and the debate was neither resolved not clearly defined into separate camps with ‘‘cosmopolitism’’ on one side, with its overtly French tones, and the value and sentiment of belonging to a nation and a homeland on the other. In the second half of the eighteenth century the debate on the idea and the value of nation, on the sense of belonging to national communities animated a large part of the reflections of the German theorists: from Johann G. Zimmermann15 to Johann W. Archenholz16 to Friedrich L. Jahn, the author of the Deutsches Volkstum (Leipzig 1808).17 But even in Rousseau’s controversial statements there was no sense of contradiction between belonging to the Europe described by Voltaire and Montesquieu while also feeling part of the history of those nations which were constitutive elements of Europe and its civilization. Not only for those who, like Voltaire, or later Guizot, believed that the European civilization found its maximum expression in France; but also for those (such as David Hume, Adam Ferguson, William Robertson, Adam Smith) who never had any doubts that this Europe, understood as a precise ‘‘space’’ of civilization, was not opposed to an idea of Europe as a ‘‘space’’ of nations and states. It was indeed the Scottish philosopher Adam Ferguson who demonstrated this very well in his Essay on the History of Civil Society of 1767.18 ‘‘The genius of political wisdom and civil arts – insisted Ferguson – appears to have chosen his feats in particular tracts of the earth and to have selected his favorites in particular races of men’’ and the favored location referred to was clearly Europe.19 The history of civil society in Europe – from the instauration of the property principle, ‘‘which is the element of progress’’, to the development of arts and commerce, to the ‘‘decline’’ of the nations, and this is one of the main points of the Ferguson’s reflection – is always taken and inserted in a narrative context which has, as actors or natural fields of development, the various European states and nations. The same fracturing of Europe into a large number of nations is, in many respects, a constitutive element in the development of the history of European society. ‘‘The emulation of the nations – writes Ferguson in part I of the Essay devoted to ‘‘National Felicity’’, – proceeds from their division. A cluster of states, like a company of men, find the exercise of their reason and the test of their virtues in the affairs they transact, upon a foot of equality and of separate interests’’.20

12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Voltaire, Essai sur les moeurs . . . vol. II, Supple´ment 906. Voltaire, Essai sur les moeurs . . . vol. II, Supple´ment 804. L. Febvre, L’Europe: gene´se d’une civilisation (Paris, 1999). Essay on National Pride, (1771); orginal german edition: Von dem Nationalstolze, Zuerich, 1758). England und Italien (Leipzig, 1784). See H. E. Boedeker, «‘‘Europe’’ in the Discourse of the Sciences of State in 18th Century Germany» Chromos 8 (2003), 1–14. An Essay on the History of Civil Society, by Adam Ferguson, LL.DD:, professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh (1767). An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Part III, sect. I, 165. An Essay on the History of Civil Society, 89.

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The origins of Europe’s history. ‘‘The proud Giants of the North’’, Christianity, the cities Two years after the publication of Adam Ferguson’s Essay, William Robertson wrote a history of ‘‘Society in Europe’’ and a history of its main states, from the fall of the Roman Empire to the Empire of Charles V. But the History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V, as it was entitled, was preceded by a long foreword: A View of the Progress of Society in Europe from the Subversion of the Roman Empire to the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century. The View was divided into three parts. The first two recounted ‘‘the progresses of society in Europe with respect to interior government, laws and manners’’ and ‘‘the command of national force requisite in foreign operations’’ while the third delineated ‘‘the political constitution of the principal states in Europe, at the commencement of the sixteenth century’’. It was a history of Europe tracing the reconstruction of the affirmation of European civilization and ‘‘society’’ from the fall of the Western Roman Empire to the sixteenth century, to ‘‘the modern age’’. ‘‘Europe’’ – Robertson’s vision was limited to the north-western regions and the western Mediterranean – ‘‘began to breathe and to recover strength’’ with the formation of the great Roman Empire. It was only after its fall, however, with the barbarian invasions, ‘‘in the obscurity of the chaos, caused by this general wreck of the nations, we must search for the seeds of order and endeavor to discover the first rudiments of the policy and laws now established in Europe’’. ‘‘To this source – continued Robertson – the historians of its different Kingdoms have attempted, though with less attention and industry than the importance of the inquiry merits, to trace back the institutions and customs peculiar to their countrymen’’ (p. 12). Histories of the single European countries had long ‘‘discovered’’ the Middle Ages: from the histories of France and Germany to Muratori’s Antiquitates, the great history of Italy. Neither Montesquieu’s Esprit des lois nor Voltaire’s Essai had failed to give ample space to the Europe of the barbarians. Robertson’s history of Europe also started with the northern invasions, with their incursion into the Empire and with the division of the territories between the conquerors. These events determined a complete revolution in the history of these regions: the ‘‘new division of property, together with the maxims and manners to which it gave rise, gradually introduced a species of government previously unknown. This singular institution – explained Robertson – is now distinguished by the name of feudal system’’ [the emphasis is the Scottish historian’s] (p. 13). And there quite long and detailed proofs and illustrations – almost another complete dissertation, parallel to the View – which Robertson devoted to the origins and the development of the feudal system, discussed with reference to Montesquieu (Esprit des lois, l. XXXX, chapters 3 and 16) and Mably (Observations sur l’histoire de la France, Paris 1765, vol. I, p. 356). And while in his Proofs Robertson insisted on the transformation of the property regime, in the text he also underlined the evolution of the political system. ‘‘There is an ultimate point of depression [. . .] from which human affairs naturally return in a contrary point’’ (p. 17): according to a cyclical scheme of history and a narrative invention which Robertson could have admired in David Hume’s History of England. The causes for this rebirth of European Society – and there were no fewer than ten – were attentively investigated by our author. The crusades were ‘‘the first event that roused Europe from the lethargy’’. An ‘‘extraordinary phenomenon of fanaticism’’ – according to Voltaire in his Essai: ‘‘but from these expeditions, extravagant as they were, beneficial consequences followed’’ (p. 20). Following the crusades, the second cause of the shake-up in Europe had been ‘‘the forming of cities into communities, corporations, or bodies politic, and granting them the privilege of Municipal Jurisdiction,’’. This, ‘‘contributed more, perhaps, than any other cause, to introduce regular government, police and arts, and to diffuse them over Europe’’ (p. 22). In the city, continues Robertson, ‘‘the spirit of industry revived. Commerce became an object of attention and began to flourish’’ (p. 25). and it was in the cities that ‘‘laws and subordination, as well as polished manners’’ took ‘‘their rise’’ (p. 25). In few pages Robertson outlined the third reason for the recovery of European society: the political power acquired by the cities. The fourth cause was related to the acquisition of civic liberty: the enfranchisement of serfs in the countryside and the decline of the aristocratic regime. Robertson paused longer on the fifth cause: the contribution ‘‘of a more regular administration of justice [. . .] to the improvement of society’’ (pp. 28–39). The establishment of such as justice system was the result and the sign – insisted Robertson – of an overall growth of the civil level of society, testified among other things by the abolishment ‘‘of private war’’ and by the ‘‘prohibition of the judgment of God’’. And not far from the fifth was the sixth cause for the progress of society: ‘‘the regulation of the canon law’’. And next to canon law Robertson put – as the seventh cause – the ‘‘revival of the Roman law’’. The next cause was said to be the introduction of the spirit of chivalry. The last two were ‘‘the progress of the sciences’’ and ‘‘the progress of commerce’’ and the latter especially ‘‘had a considerable influence in polishing the manners of the European nations and in establishing among them order, equal laws and humanity’’ (p. 46). This broad picture, traced by Robertson, served as an introduction to a summary of the foreign and internal policies of the main European states (including the Ottoman empire) in the first decades of the sixteenth century and led into an account of the main events of Charles V’s reign. Robertson’s History when compared to the model of ‘‘general’’ history provided by Voltaire and to David Hume’s national history (History of Great Britain of 1754–1756), still shared in a certain method of recounting history. It also covered the span of the centuries, put strong emphasis on the barbarian origins of European civilization, and wove the plot between Europe’s general history and the history of the single countries. Not very different was the chronological span in that other, extraordinary, European history, Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The first part of the History, published in 1776, dwells on a description of the empire in the age of the Antonines. His opening and generous account of both Persia and Germany, together with the chapter devoted to ‘‘progresses of Christian religion’’, made clear to his many readers the way Gibbon intended to recount his history.

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It was not concluded until 1788, with the publication of the last volume devoted to fourteenth century Rome – the Rome of Petrarch and of the rebirth of literature. With the ‘‘sober and precise language’’ which suited – wrote Gibbon – the ‘‘character’’ and ‘‘conditions of a modern historian’’, the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire mused over the reasons for the empire’s decline and looked to the origins of modern Europe according to a narrative scheme so complex as to provoke Mably’s anger.21 Gibbon’s work was quite different from that of Voltaire or Robertson: it was distinguished by a rigorous attention to facts, to sources, and to meticulous narration. It reflected quite a different conception of the task in hand. Gibbon’s judgment of the Middle Ages, of the crusades, of the idea of the progress of European civilization, also set him apart. He intended his work to be primarily a history of Rome, rather than one of the Roman world. It became, on account of its great length and complexity, not only a history of Rome but also a history of Europe. For Gibbon also, as for Voltaire, Hume and Robertson, the origins of modern Europe, of its society and civilization, were to be found in the Northern peoples and their customs. Most significant was the outcome of the barbarian encounters with the Roman world and with Christianity. The reference is obviously and quite explicitly to Tacitus, ‘‘rediscovered’’ since the seventeenth century,22 and whose arguments, wrote Gibbon, were familiar to the ‘‘philosophers–historians of our time’’ (chapter IX). In the other volumes of the History the many pages devoted to Christianity and the ample digressions on the Arabs, made Byzantium and the western peoples, rather than Rome, the focus of a great part of his work. These diversions interrupt the linearity of his account: the history of Rome is only taken up again in the sixth and final volume. But beyond the complex interpretative questions provoked by the History’s composition and internal order; beyond the debate, sometimes of purely academic interest, on what distinguishes Gibbon from Hume and from Robertson,23 it is important to recall the references – present in many of the volumes – to Europe’s modern history, to its civilization, to its ‘‘civil society’’. ‘‘[. . .]’’ (ch. III). In this page, as in many others in the History, the lively and detailed narration of the Empire of the East, the learned, cultured digressions devoted to the Arabs, the long discussions on Christianity, left space – true, not that much – to quite general considerations on the ‘‘state’’ of Europe. These concerned the roots of that civilization which seemed to insure richness, to ease commerce and guarantee a more solid asset of powers and a more balanced system of states. This was the Europe which Gibbon was familiar with:‘‘Europe is now divided into twelve powerful, though unequal kingdoms, three respectable commonwealths and a variety of smaller, tough independent, states: the chances of royal and ministerial talents are multiplied, at least, with the number of its rulers; and a Julian or Semiraminis may reign in the North, while Arcadius and Honorius again slumber on the thrones of the South. The abuses of tyranny are restrained by the mutual influence of fear and shame; republics have acquired order and stability; monarchies have imbibed the principles of freedom or, at least, of moderation; and a some sense of honor and justice is introduced into the most defective constitutions by the general manners of the times. In peace, the progress of knowledge and industry is accelerated by the emulation of so many active rivals; in war, the European forces are exercised by temperate and undecisive contests’’.24 Europe’s history thus opened the way for contemplation, more complacent on Voltaire’s part, more critical and cautious on Gibbon’s, of their civilization. It was defined with immediate reference to the Scottish school although Gibbon refused any such allegiance, but the Scots has provided elements necessary for understanding European civilization and, therefore, for tracing its history. The definition and the analysis of European civilization, of ‘‘civil society’’ which Ferguson had outlined and of which he had traced the history, could not now avoid – not only in the Scottish ‘‘school’’, but also in all the other European cultures of those last decades of the eighteenth century – passing for a general history of Europe. ‘‘How did Europe arrive to its civilization and its rank of pre-eminence over the other peoples?’’ it was Johann Gottfried Herder who asked this in the Concluding observations of the twentieth – and last – book of the fourth part of his Ideas for the philosophy of the history of humanity (1784–1791). His history of Europe opened with a panoramic view of the European populations: from the Gaels, to the Cimurs, to the Finns, to the Latvians, to the Prussians, to the Germans, Slavs, Albanians, Arabs, Gypsies, to encompass all those who made up European civilization. Precisely this extraordinary mix of peoples, the migrations of strong and rough peoples, who were soon converted to Christianity, and, finally, the clash between these ‘‘European’’ peoples and Islam, had first shaped European society. Many decisive factors had contributed to the high level of civilization in the European regions: the spirit of commerce – but not the crusades – the philosophical culture, law and a full list of ‘‘institutions and discoveries’’. On each of these Herder pauses with particular attention: the cities, the citizens’ corporations; the universities; and among the inventions: the magnetic needle; glass; gunpowder; paper; print; Arab numerals; musical notes; clocks; oil paint . . .. Only when concluding these pages did Herder ask the question from which we started: ‘‘how did this Europe arrive to civilization?’’. ‘‘The place, the time, the need, the circumstances, the flow of events – argued Herder – have brought her to it; but most of all she reached this rank as a result of many communal efforts, her own hard work and genius’’. And again: ‘‘the pressure of the Roman hierarchy’’ on the ‘‘uneducated peoples of the Middle Ages’’. ‘‘Without it perhaps Europe would have been prey of despots, theatre of eternal contrasts or even a Mongolic desert’’. The Ideas stop here. Herder never wrote those

21

Mably, De la manie`re d’e´crire l’histoire (Paris, 1784). A. M. Battista, La Germania di Tacito nella Francia illuministica (Urbino, 1999). 23 Ragione e immaginazione. Edward Gibbon e la storiografia europea del Settecento, ed. G. Imbruglia (Napoli, 1996). 24 E. Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. III, General Observations on the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West (I quoted from edition in six volumes, Philadelphia 1878, 639). 22

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other five volumes, in which he would have talked about the formation and character of modern nations; about the Reform and its consequences; about the spirit of the sciences; about the rights of the people; about the political equilibrium; about the ‘‘spirit of commerce’’; about Russia; about the West and East Indies; about Africa; and, finally, about humanity. It was now quite clear that the history of Europe could only be an account of the forces and circumstances which had created its civilization. These had to be seen in complex relationship with the events of the single nations and states which were constitutive elements of this history. If one wanted to write such a history it was essential to ask whether it should be, first of all, a general history of Europe, of its civilization, or a history of the nations and states. The question was posed openly by Mably in De la manie`re d’e´crire l’histoire.25 ‘‘Mr Robertson’s example – wrote Mably – must make us circumspect’’. The Scottish historian, Mably acknowledged, was a man ‘‘of great merits’’; but the ‘‘picture of the revolutions which Europe’s states themselves have lived after their establishment’’ did not examine ‘‘anything in depth’’. Robertson’s work was ‘‘un ouvrage croque´’’, ‘‘un parfait galinatias historique’’: but this was the same Mably who had described Voltaire’s Essai a ‘‘farce’’. In truth, neither Voltaire nor Robertson had written a real European history, even though the Essai and the View certainly aimed at an interpretation of European civilization and its ‘‘spirit’’. These histories not were a ‘‘collection of particular histories’’, as Mably himself recognized. They did not signal out some peoples and some historical periods as exclusive protagonists but they identified some general causes and some underlying motifs. But the problem remained unresolved in that extraordinary intellectual and editorial achievement – Universal History.26 Although between 1759 and 1765, it devoted no less than 44 volumes in octave and 16 tomes in folio to the Modern History – largely to the peoples and states of Europe – Gibbon labeled it a ‘‘heavy mass of things [. . .] never revived by a spark of philosophy and good taste’’. Between the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Guizot and his history of European civilization But in these same decades of the eighteenth century, when Voltaire, Ferguson and Robertson were thinking about the history of European civilization and society, many were the works of history devoted to the single nations. The works of Hume and Smollet on English history, the history of France by Mably himself, and others by Voltaire and later works in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, show that the nation, its origins, its events in the modern ages, and even its founding myths, increasingly became the main and most common ‘‘subject’’ of historical accounts, one which touched the readers’ sensibility. It is impossible even to outline here the political and cultural context of these decades of transition from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century: from the American Revolution to the division of Poland, from the French revolution and Europe under Napoleon, or alternatively, from Rousseau to Kant, and to Hegel. Perhaps it would be simpler to chart some of the changes in European political and cultural vocabulary at the time, to focus on, as has been done before, the appearance and spread in those years of new values and new ideals, capable of mobilizing the elites and public opinion in Europe. In 1808 Friedrich Ludwig Jahn devoted his famous Researches to the nationality (Volksthum) and spirit of the German peoples. Many other examples could be produced to demonstrate how consistently ‘‘nation’’, ‘‘people’’, ‘‘nationality’’ were identified with the values and concepts at the centre of European culture and political sensibility. Whether it was the nation of the French revolutionaries, the political body which seized back its sovereignty and exercised it with all its might; or the nation which instead had to take defense against the French nation – a nation often forced to express itself not with the strength of arms or the power of the state, but with art and literature. A nation which could only express the suffering of its people in a variety of artistic forms including music and painting. In these decades between the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, the ‘‘nation’’ and ‘‘nationality’’, were expressed in David’s Marianna or in the German hero Hermann, while England ‘‘rediscovered’’ the words of Rule Britannia composed by James Thomson of Scotland in 1740. The history of Europe and of European civilization no longer appeared to be the main themes of political and cultural reflection. They stirred neither enthusiasm not works of art, and were certainly not the subject of history books. In the extraordinary repertoire of historical essays published between 1800 and 1850 in the European academic and scientific journals, published by Koner, very few essays were devoted to the questions raised by Voltaire or Robertson.27 In European periodicals and essays there was no lack of histories of the political events of the continent: from the annual ‘‘reviews’’ of political and military events – continuing the eighteenth century annual histories of the year and gazettes– to the histories of the main European states after the Congress of Vienna. In 1817 the French edition of Robertson’s History also appeared, followed in 1824 by the Italian edition, in a collection including the first volumes of Sismondi’s Storia dei Francesi.28 In this context it is clear that the main interest would appear to be in History of Charles V rather than in the View of the Progress of Society in Europe. In 1828, in the political and cultural climate of the last years of the restoration of the Bourbons of France, Franc¸ois Guizot resumed teaching at the Sorbonne. The text of his course a Cours d’histoire moderne – was published in 1829–1832. Divided into two parts, the first was devoted to a history of civilization in Europe; the second to the history of civilization in France. He wanted to give a general picture of Europe’s modern history, considered as the development of a civilization, to provide a

25

Mably, before quoted. See G. Ricuperati, ‘‘Universal History: storia di un progetto europeo. Impostori, storici ed eruditi nella Ancient Part’’; e G. Abbatista, ‘‘The Literary Mill’’: per una storia editoriale della Universal History (1736–1765)’’, Studi settecenteschi I (1981), n. 2, 7–91 and 93–133. 27 Repertorium ueber die vom Jahre 1800. Bis zum Jahre 1850. in Akademischen Abhandlungen, Gesellschaftsschriften und Wissenschaftslichen Journalen auf dem Gebiete der Geschichte und ihre huelfswissenschaften, von Dr. W. Koner (Berlin, 1852). 28 W. Robertson, Storia del regno dell’imperatore Carlo V (Nicola Bettoni, Milano, 1824); S. de Simondi, Storia dei Francesi ( Nicolo Bettoni, Milano, vol. 5). 26

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panoramic view of its origin, progress, purpose, and character. ‘‘It is evident’’, Guizot began in his first lecture, ‘‘that a European civilization exists’’. He underlined the unity manifest in the civilizations of the various European states, its derivation from similar events, despite remarkable differences of time, place, and circumstance. He saw it connected to the same principles and aims and leading almost everywhere to similar results. But, continued Guizot, ‘‘if it has a certain unity, no less prodigious is its variety’’. Only a French liberal, and only one of Guizot’s temperament, could have reopened, at the end of the 1820s, the theme of the history of Europe as a history of a civilization largely shared by the European nations while the same time conceived essentially as a history of a single country, France. ‘‘There is not a single great idea, not a single great principle of civilization, which, in order to become universally spread has not first passed through France. There is, indeed, the genius of the French, something of sociableness, of sympathy – something which spreads itself with more facility and energy, than in the genius of any other people’’. ‘‘In studying, then, the history of this great fact, it is neither an arbitrary choice, nor convention, that leads us to make France the central point from which we shall study it’’.29 But beyond, or, actually, together with this exaltation of France’s primacy, the impassioned substance of the first two lectures, the underlying message of the whole course at the Sorbonne was the elaboration and affirmation of the idea of European civilization. Guizot distinguished the element which better than any other characterizes the history of civilization in Europe, when he compared it to those civilizations which preceded it: in Asia and in Europe itself. ‘‘These – explained Guizot – seem to be generated by only one fact, only one idea’’. In modern Europe’s civilization, on the other hand, ‘‘all the principles of social organization are found existing together [. . .]; all the social situations are jumbled together and visible within it; as well as infinite gradations of liberty, of wealth and of influence. These various powers, too, are found in a state of continual struggle among themselves, without any one having sufficient force to master the others and take sole possession of society’’.30 For these reasons, then, civilization in modern Europe ‘‘reveals itself to be incomparably richer than any other and such as to have provoked the greatest number of different developments. And, in fact, it has lasted for one thousand five hundred years and its state is that of continuous progress, [. . .] since freedom always accompanies all its movements’’. Civilization and freedom were, then, the key words identifying the idea of European civilization itself, and in this idea resided the political message of Guizot’s Cours d’Histoire moderne. Freedom, which ‘‘has resulted from the variety of the elements of the civilization and from the state of war in which they have constantly lived’’ is a European value, intrinsically and universally European; in it could be recognized the civilization and history of Europe. The account, quite detailed, of the history of civilization in Europe, developed, then, from this assumption and Guizot divided this history into three periods. The period of the origins and the formation of civilization in Europe: from the fall of the Roman Empire to the twelfth century. A period of ‘‘trials’’ and ‘‘uncertainty’’: from the twelfth to the sixteenth century. ‘‘Then comes the period of development, in which human society in Europe takes a definitive form, follows a determinate direction, proceeds rapidly and with a general accord towards a clear and precise object’’ (lecture VIII, pp. 176–177). A division into periods, by now ‘‘classic’’, if we bear in mind Voltaire’s historical episodes or the chronology of Robertson’s View. And just as ‘‘classic’’ were the themes which Guizot developed in the second lecture on fifth century Europe, stressing the elements the ancient world had transmitted to the modern world. Two are the ‘‘elements which passed from the Roman civilization into ours were: first, the system of municipal corporations, its habits, its regulations, its principle of liberty [. . .], secondly, the idea of absolute power; – the principle of order and the principle of servitude’’ (p. 48). And also from the Roman world came the Christian Church. Not Christianity, but – Guizot explains insistently – the Church, with its organization and capacity for affirmation, with its law, its clergy – ‘‘a body of priests; a settled ecclesiastical polity for the regulation of their different functions, revenues, independent means of influence’’ (pp. 48–49). In this fifth century Europe another element erupts onto the scene, also destined to leave a strong impression on modern European civilization: the barbarians. From the barbarians Europe learned the ‘‘sentiment of personal independence, this love of individual liberty’’ (p. 57): the pleasure of using your own force and your own freedom and the exercise of ‘‘personal freedom’’ which was something different from the ‘‘political liberty’’ of the classical polis. These elements allowed, anyway, the survival of civilization until, from the beginning of the tenth century, the invasions halted and, ‘‘the populations became fixed; estates and landed possessions became settled; the relations between man and man no longer varied from day to day under the influence of force or chance’’; and ‘‘the feudal system oozing at last out of the bosom of barbarism’’ (lecture III, 80–81). The General history of civilization in Europe: this was the title of the first part of Guizot’s course – was, then, first of all a history of events; but it was a history which, while judging every single event, elevated as its own interpretative criterion a ‘‘twofold question: what has this done for or against the development of man; for or against the development of society?’’ (lecture IV, p. 82). A history, then, which had a lot to do with ‘‘the great questions of moral philosophy’’; a history which fed itself on the ‘‘inevitable alliances of philosophy and history’’ (lecture IV). Europe’s history was, then, the instrument to comprehend the complex formation of the constitutive ‘‘elements’’ of its ‘‘civilization’’; to verify their different interweaving; to follow their action in the formation of modern Europe. Obviously also in Guizot’s Histoire a ‘‘first great event’’ was the crusades. ‘‘Before the crusades [. . .] in fact Europe did no exist. The crusades manifested the existence of Christian Europe’’ (lecture VIII, p. 177). Europe had moved towards the

29 I quote Guizot’s History from the 3th american edition : General History of Civilization in Europe from the fall of the Roman Empire to the French Revolution, by M. Guizot ( New York, 1869), 16–8. 30 General History of Civilization in Europe, 37–8.

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crusades prompted by a strong religious sentiment and by the ‘‘social state’’, in which it found itself in the twelfth century. These two elements ‘‘hurled Europe against Asia’’, until the end of the thirteenth century, when Europe found itself in a completely different situation. The crusades, in fact, would change the ‘‘state’’ of Europe, promoting ‘‘a great progress towards more ample, more free ideas’’ and combining to change the conditions of the economy and of society. Having laid down these premises, once the passage to modern Europe had been completed, the history of Europe was nothing else but the history of its constitutive elements: ‘‘the government, on the one hand; the people, on the other’’ (lecture IX). Naturally, this process of civilization had not taken place in the same way and at the same time in all of the countries of Europe; and it had not attained the same results everywhere. However, this process of ‘‘fusion’’ of the ‘‘special societies’’ had been the main road followed by Europe: in the fifteenth century as in the sixteenth century: the century, this latter, of the Reform, of the real beginning of modern Europe, of that ‘‘period in which everything is summarized in general facts, in the age of order and unity’’ (lecture XII). The history of Europe, of its civilization was, then, a history which had taken place largely in this long span of centuries, starting with the barbaric invasions. Guizot’s statement was not, of course, a new one; neither the general scheme not the chronological divisions were new. They had been adopted by Voltaire, Robertson and Hume in the second half of the eighteenth century. Guizot followed a ‘‘codified’’ scheme in his History of civilization in Europe – the barbaric origins, Christianity; the municipalities and the crusades; commerce; the monarchies of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; the Reform; the English revolution and the reign of Louis XIV; modern philosophy – to describe the development of European civilization. His insistence on the idea of civilization and of modern society capable of responding to the expectations of an important part of the European culture of the early nineteenth century was innovatory. What is important to underline is, in fact, that Guizot’s History ‘‘was one of those key works which strongly contributed to the formation and consolidation of that spiritual climate which was common to all of liberal Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century’’31 and which ended up representing the essential point of reference, through which all the historiography of a large part of the nineteenth century would look at the history of Europe and of its civilization. Guizot’s work researched the constitutive ‘‘elements’’ of ‘‘being European’’, beyond the consolidation of national and state differences and before the affirmation of a historiography more interested in the nation state, in its origins and the roots of the its power, rather than in a shared European civilization.

31

A. Saitta, Introduzione to F. Guizot, Storia della civilta` in Europa (Milano, 1973), 59.