Designed to offer a “new history of Europe”, the collective book edited by Denis Crouzet disappoints. How are historians of Europe selected? Is Europe really the “metaphor of history”? How can historians be prevented from interpreting their own path?
This collective work brings together 19 contributions, preceded by a general introduction by Denis Crouzet. Each text is devoted to a different European historian in monographic form, without any links other than their themes of study (Europe understood in a broad and elastic sense) connecting them together, except for the introduction by the project manager, which we will return to later.
This company is one of the arrival points of a Labex axis EHNE“Writing a new history of Europe”, approached here through a critical return to the old historiography of the continent. The exercise proves to be salutary, as we live on this subject on partial and caricatured representations, due to the uncertain nature of such a subject and its variations according to the periods studied. However, the result of this accumulation of case studies remains unsatisfactory and inconclusive, and this, for three main reasons.
Selection of historians
The first is the choice of authors studied. Some that one would have expected, in particular Marc Bloch, the only one to have really taken the subject by the horns in a famous article on the comparative history of European societies, are missing. The project manager also acknowledges the unfortunate absence of Georges Duby, Benedetto Croce and Alphonse Dupront.
Conversely, other choices are not very convincing: George Macaulay Trevelyan has a more than dubious status as a historian of Europe. He is nevertheless the subject of detailed analyses, under a somewhat thunderous title by Jean-Pierre Poussou, while his most important books deal with England and, when they deal with Italy, defend a British-centric vision of history, the exact opposite of what one might think to be a true history of Europe.
The second dissatisfaction is due to the defined chronological span. Only deceased authors were chosen, more for reasons of academic propriety than for scientific reasons. It is clear, in fact, that the historiography analyzed here is a rather old historiography (it extends from the interwar period to the 1970s) in relation to today’s issues. This may obviously be of archaeological interest, but it does not help us much in conceiving – according to the collective’s overall project – a “new history of Europe”.
The national diversity of the cases is just as relative. France and Great Britain take the lion’s share (6 and 4 contributions respectively), followed by Germany (3 chapters), Italy (2), Belgium (1), the Netherlands (1). A Soviet historian, Aaron Gourevitch, is mentioned, but he was a specialist in medieval Northern and Western Europe. The entire historiography of Central and Eastern Europe is therefore almost absent. Less than nationality (which nevertheless induces a specific point of view on Europe), it is the period of specialization that guides the historiographical definition of the European space embraced.
The medievalists and, to a lesser degree, the modernists undoubtedly dominate the population studied. Contemporary history is limited to the names of Trevelyan, Eric Hobsbawm, and Jean-Baptiste Duroselle. However, through their generations, all these historians were involved in the great European crises of the XXe century; the oldest (Pirenne) was born in 1862, the youngest (John Bossy) in 1933. Five were victims of anti-Semitic persecution (Hobsbawm, Elias, Kantorowicz, Hauser, Lopez), another suffered the constraints of Stalinism (Aaron Gourevitch). Henri Pirenne was interned during the occupation of Belgium and a prisoner in Germany. Four were strongly marked by the wars: Febvre fought during the war of 14, Koselleck was wounded at Stalingrad and a prisoner in Russia, Chabod participated in the resistance in Northern Italy, Braudel was a prisoner in Germany.
Europe as a historical object
This dual relationship to history, as a subject of study and as a lived temporal flow, appears in each of the monographs, but is not analyzed globally in the introduction. However, it explains a lot about the visions of Europe held by these historians and their way of questioning its history. Denis Crouzet, the editor of the book, rather defends the thesis according to which the choice of historians favored here is due to their capacity to confront with a fresh perspective such a complex historical object, while the traditional histories of Europe that he reviews at a fast pace and without indulgence are limited to partial or dated simplifying models: parallel history of nations, history periodized by international politics, economic transformations, collective representations (religious or ideological), shared civilization, or even the teleological history of European construction.
Even if Denis Crouzet’s criticisms of some of these attempts can sometimes be justified, he tends to dismiss in two lines or three sentences a number of works that deserve a better fate. This preliminary clean slate ends with a somewhat despairing proposition, given the enormous bibliography condemned with a stroke of the pen: “It (Europe) suffers from the fact that its history is written as if it were any history. While it must be analyzed differentially (sic). Writing history means producing a system of multiple contingencies and intermittencies and not just fabricating a cumulative discourse of data inspiring parallels or convergences. » (p. 13)
Hence a proposition that is both attractive and ambiguous, since it does not reveal the method to follow, given its generality: “History is a succession of possibilities that are more or less realized and therefore more or less lost, and Europe is then the metaphor of history. It exists because it merges with history.” (ibid.)
This will be objected to the historian of religious wars: can we not say more or less the same thing about any historical object larger or smaller than Europe, of which no prior definition is proposed here, which is precisely the issue, since the geography itself of this space is caught up in historical flows?
Such a thesis says nothing about how to construct (or deconstruct) this singular historical object and propose criteria and a method of analysis. Crouzet then gets away with what is only a postulate just as questionable as those criticized in his bibliographical review: historians, chosen because they are “great historians”, would enjoy a kind of state grace to take hold of complex objects like Europe.
Even if their books or proposals are dated, they would have come closer to what should be done, even when their object was not explicitly Europe. These historians would have in common to have “implemented procedures decentering their writing of history – “national” or “Campanilist” or of global history” (p. 15). Crouzet then sets about demonstrating this, by summarizing the various chapters of the book.
Apologetics
Unfortunately, his demonstration is convincing only for a few figures and not for all, given the engagement of most in the political and national passions of their time, as seen above.
When we discover, for example, that Reinhart Koselleck seeks to free Nazi Germany from part of its historical guilt by integrating it into an interpretation of European history as a “civil war” that has been going on since the end of the Enlightenment, we can have some doubts (whatever Koselleck’s essential contribution to historical reflection) about his real contribution to the history of Europe and his ability to escape from a national or Germanocentric problematic that we found again during the famous Historikerstreit of 1986-1987.
The same goes for the medievalist Kantorowicz or British historians like John Bossy, a minority Catholic in a country that had left Catholicism. Denis Crouzet himself, in his otherwise very interesting contribution on Fernand Braudel, cannot hide many non-European and sometimes very Franco-French presuppositions of the history of civilizations painted in broad strokes by the author of L’Identité de la France, in relation to the declining international position of France at the time Braudel was writing.
The historians who would best correspond to the project defined by the project owner would ultimately be those who, contrary to what he otherwise claims, have a relatively more established theoretical framework than the others, whether it be the revisited Marxism of an Éric Hobsbawm, the demographism mixed with the history of religious mentalities of a Pierre Chaunu, the historical sociology inspired by Durkheim of the great absentee, Marc Bloch.
Not that these theorizations manage to exhaust an object as inexhaustible and complex as the history of Europe, but at least they offer reasoned and explanatory interpretations of certain dynamics and escape the civilizationist, religious, culturalist or national-liberal apologetics which in reality form the basis of most of the works of the other historians studied in the book.