University of Virginia Library

4. The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. In the
long previous history of the subject, nothing had
equalled the surge of historiography in the nineteenth
century, and the accompanying leap of Western
Europe into historical consciousness. This has some-
times been attributed to the reaction against the
French Revolution, which had represented an un-
usually defiant break with the past. In the period after
1800 the world was in a position to remember chiefly
the atrocities and failures of the Revolution, and its
culmination in dictatorship and war. It was as though
the human race had gone through a tremendous new
experience, and even in the political realm one had
learned the danger of flying in the face of history.
Edmund Burke had been the chief representative of
this point of view. It is clear that his particular fusion
of politics and history and his views about tradition—
about maintaining the continuity between past and
present—had existed before 1789, but it was through
his opposition to the French Revolution that he became
an important European influence.

But, visible also before 1789, the romantic movement
in general literature had its part in the story—particu-
larly that side of the movement which hankered after
the past and ran something of man's emotional life into
the sympathetic appreciation of bygone ages, now
studied for their own sake. Furthermore, if the philoso-
phe movement had been unhistorical, particularly in
its way of judging early periods by the standards of
the present and seeing them only as the stepping-stones
to the present, it had made a great contribution to the
understanding and analysis of the whole course of
general history, including man's cultural development.
In spite of a certain reaction against the thought of
Enlightenment, which was regarded as responsible for
the evils of the French Revolution, it proved possible
for students to combine the best of the romantic move
ment with the best of the philosophes; and, as the
nineteenth century proceeded, more of the thought of
these latter re-entered historiography. It was as though
the philosophes had been right in many of their
hunches, but had been deficient in the researches nec-
essary for working them out.

Amongst the factors which came together and gave
a tremendous impetus to historiography, was that
course of technical development in scholarship which
had led to the emergence of “academic history” in
Göttingen. In the 1820's this achieves more definite
self-consciousness as Ranke emerges, and the Monu-
menta Germaniae historica is inaugurated. Great im-
portance must be attached also to the fact that, in a
number of countries, a wide range of population had
come to be concerned with politics, and therefore with
issues of a historical nature.

It might almost be said that, if the present day is
under the dominion of science and technology, it was
really history that held the presidency in the nineteenth
century. This was a period of remarkable progress in
the subject itself; the world has still to learn whether
the tendencies of the twentieth century will turn out
to have been equally beneficial to history, regarded
as a sheer study of the past—a study very much at
the mercy of the winds that play upon it. In the early
decades of the nineteenth century, Hegel is a demon-
stration of the way in which philosophy itself had come
to crown its endeavor with a survey of the universe
in its historical dimension. The theologians now be-
came engrossed in history, and a great feature of their
work was to be “the quest for the historical Jesus.”

Already in the eighteenth century the natural scien-
tists had become interested in the history of animal
species, of the earth itself and of the solar system. Now,
however, the interest in the time-process is heightened
—the great scientific idea of the nineteenth century is
that of evolution; and even before Charles Darwin had
produced the Origin of Species, the notion of develop-
ment was coming to be important in various fields of
thought and scholarship. It may have seemed natural
that history should provide an intellectual basis for a
new kind of conservatism in politics after the French
Revolutionary period, but in the 1830's a new kind
of liberalism emerged in Mazzini against a background
of schematized general history. In the 1840's, Karl
Marx was developing a doctrine of revolution and a
general outlook on life which were based on a study
and interpretation of history. Henceforward, we meet
the paradoxical truth that, in the world of politics, it
was the revolutionaries who most had the mania for
history, and the determination to make use of history.

The development in historiography, and the wider
emergence of the historical consciousness, were most

remarkable of all in Germany, which led the technical
advance in scholarship, as well as the development in
the theory of the subject. Largely through its historical
achievements, that country marched forward to a gen-
eral cultural leadership. In the early decades of the
century Göttingen enjoyed international distinction as
a school for historians, where George Bancroft and
John L. Motley, for example, went for training. Initially
through the work of Protestant writers, the German
Middle Ages were rediscovered and the epic of the
Holy Roman Empire—the reminder that the country
had had its glories in the past—assisted that awakening
of national feeling which had been produced in the
War of Liberation against Napoleon. But a better un-
derstanding of the work of the medieval Church stim-
ulated the German Catholics in their turn, and helped
to produce an intellectual Renaissance amongst them.
In Europe as a whole, from this time, the interest in
history played an important part in the development
of the idea of nationality. Countries acquired a pride
in the past, an affection for the primitive stages of their
own culture, a veneration for their traditional lan-
guages, and a better awareness of the territory which
had once been theirs but had been lost at one time
or another. Perhaps to an unreasonable degree, history—
now more closely connected with the life of men and
states—was used to provide the basis for political
claims.

But Germany also had Ranke, whose stature and
influence would in any case have given her the primacy
in the historical field. He developed along with the
nineteenth century itself, but at the same time he was
the pioneer who planned and led much of the develop-
ment. An important stage in the evolution of his man-
uscript work was his use of the famous relazioni—the
long descriptive accounts produced by Venetian am-
bassadors after their period of residence abroad. This
procedure still had its limitations, and it was still a
case of using the finished pieces produced by what were
almost “contemporary historians.” Also it involved the
employment of diplomatic documents for the recovery
of the internal history of various countries. Soon Ranke
came to the conclusion that the whole of modern
history needed to be torn to pieces and reassembled
with the help of all available manuscript sources. He
held a privileged position and was able to secure early
access to archival sources at a time when the scholar
who had the first glimpse of the official documents
could be certain of rich returns. His famous seminar
helped the development of research on the new
methods and the establishment of recognized standards
and techniques.

The opening of government archives to scholars, first
partially in the 1830's, and then on a more generous
scale in the 1860's, came as the crown of the whole
development, providing it with its most essential in-
strument, and enabling men to feel that history had
now come into its own. Its importance lay not merely
in the fact that things were now revealed which gov-
ernments had hitherto kept hidden, or even the fact
that vast ranges of documents now available had been
produced by men who could not have dreamed that
their productions would ever be exposed to the outside
world. Most significant of all was the fact that, now,
more than ever before, the historian could base himself
on something that was not mere “reporting,” whether
on the part of contemporary historians or memoir-
writers, or Venetian ambassadors in their relazioni.
Henceforward he could study the papers in which (and
by means of which) the business of government had
actually been transacted. To a great degree he could
study official papers in their continuity and, following
events day by day, could reconstruct the framework
of an entire narrative.

The new history, arising from the archives in various
European capitals, concentrated itself largely on the
work of government and tended to see events from
the point of view of government. Political history was
now triumphant, and, possibly because diplomatic
documents were so accessible, so nicely arranged and
so easy to use—so capable moreover of presenting the
reader with their own story, in all its continuity—there
was an emphasis on the external relations of states, and
on that states-system which had already been a great
subject of study at Göttingen. Ranke himself has some-
times been held to have been responsible for this, but,
insofar as a certain bias of the mind was involved,
something is due to his predecessors; his own outlook
was so broad that the “cultural historians” were nearer
the truth when, later in the century, they claimed his
support in their criticism of the prevailing system. For
a very short period in his younger days Ranke had a
connection with a conservative political journal, but
quickly found the situation unsatisfactory. For the rest,
he held that the historian should be primarily a scholar,
aloof from the movements of his time. He received
moral reprobation for this, and even his pupils (who
tended to grasp only parts of his teaching) proved
unwilling to follow his austere example.

The historical movement of the nineteenth century
came into alliance therefore with the powerful German
national movement that culminated in 1870-71; the
result was shown in what came to be the classical
school of German historiography, which from 1861 was
dominated by supporters of Prussia and entrenched
itself in the universities, putting history at the service
of the national cause, and even insisting on this as a
point of ethics. As the work of Frederick the Great

and Bismarck acquired such a central place in the story
of modern Germany, it became easy for any student
to draw conclusions about the nature of history and
politics very different from those which would be
drawn by Germans taking their bearings at the present
day. Even in 1870 Gervinus vainly tried to point out
that a wider view of Germany's past would have pro-
duced a better understanding of the real tradition of
the country, enabling historiography to do greater
service in its role as the discoverer or creator of a
nation's tradition about itself.

In the middle of the century the great works were
appearing which showed that, over a wide area, his-
toriography had been carried to a new stage. Ranke
himself had completed between 1839 and 1847 his
massive treatise on German History in the Age of the
Reformation: and, after dealing with Prussia, he moved
in the 1850's to large-scale work first on French history
in the early modern period, and then on England in
the seventeenth century. The most formidable scholar
amongst his pupils, Georg Waitz (1813-86), was pub-
lishing from 1844 a tremendous work on deutsche
Verfassungsgeschichte, which went back to the customs
and institutions of the early tribes and showed his
mastery of medieval sources. After Waitz moved to
Göttingen in 1849 he made that University the most
distinguished school of medieval history in Europe.
Macaulay published the four completed volumes of his
History of England between 1848 and 1856; and,
though limited by the excessive positivism of his judg-
ments, by the smallness of the area of history that he
really mastered, and by the extraordinary insularity of
his whole outlook, he took some pains in the collection
of his materials; nor was his Whiggism more preju-
diced—more detrimental to his work—than the parti-
sanship of some of the Prussian giants of the period.

A powerful pupil of Ranke who came to diverge
from his master because he so strongly believed that
history should be put at the service of what was re-
garded as a great public cause, was Heinrich von Sybel.
From 1853 he was producing his most imposing work,
his History of the Revolutionary Period, which, in its
use of sources, represented a significant advance in its
own field. It had been intended from the start to show
up the evils of political radicalism, though in the course
of execution it came to be still more dominated by
the idea of demonstrating the effect of external rela-
tions on internal development, the primacy of foreign
policy, and the influence of the French Revolution on
other countries. Johann Gustav Droysen was not a
pupil of Ranke and was influenced rather by Hegel,
but must be regarded as perhaps the chief of the foun-
ders of the Prussian school. In the thirty years or so
from 1855 there appeared the successive volumes of
his History of Prussian Policy, a work based to an
almost unprecedented degree on manuscript sources,
and packed with new material. It has been described
as one of the most important of the achievements of
the new historiography and, by G. P. Gooch, as “the
most exhaustive study of the foreign policy of a great
power ever written”; yet, by the constant anachronistic
attribution to Prussia of a national German policy, it
showed how tremendous learning can be piloted to
produce a false result. The work was dominated by
Droysen's view of the state as a vast power-organiza-
tion.

One of the most distinguished of the pupils of Ranke
was Wilhelm von Giesebrecht, and his great work, the
History of the Period of the Empire began to appear
in 1855. It was inspired by the idea of awakening the
Germans to the glory of their medieval history—the
romanticism and the achievements of their famous
emperors—and Giesebrecht proved to be a wonderful
narrator, the evidence of his immense scholarship being
relegated to the footnotes. Giesebrecht had the dis-
tinction of reconstructing an old chronicler from later
writers who had made use of him, and then having
his scholarship confirmed when the work itself came
to light a generation later. It was his history of the
Kaiserzeit which provoked the great controversy over
the effects of medieval imperialism on the cause of
German nationalism.

In 1856 Alexis de Tocqueville published L'ancien
régime et la révolution, a treatise based on the study
of provincial and other local archives, and devoted to
an examination of the roots of the Revolution—the
effective opening of analytical work on the character
and structure of ancient France.

Other forms of history were developing, however,
principally in Germany itself; their challenge to the
prevailing system built up the pressures which in the
1890's produced controversies on the very nature of
a history—controversies that mark another stage in the
story, since the position and state of the whole subject
could never be quite the same again (though the classi-
cal school maintained its hold through the universities).

In various countries there had long been antecedents
of what we should call economic history; in the eight-
eenth century these are to be found in Adam Smith's
Wealth of Nations and in histories of commerce, some
of which covered a considerable area of economic life.
Descriptive works—regional studies and accounts of
particular industries, for example—went on appearing
in the nineteenth century; and, partly perhaps through
the influence of Montesquieu, possibly also as a result
of influences from the Scottish Enlightenment, exam-
ples were to be found in Göttingen at the very be-
ginning of the century, particularly in the work of

A. H. L. Heeren. The main nineteenth-century move-
ment owes its rise, however, to Wilhelm Roscher, who
had been influenced by Heeren; and, for some decades,
the real purpose of the movement—a purpose already
made clear in Roscher's famous “manifesto” of
1843—was to establish a new kind of economics, which
should attain a wider kind of generalization based on
the study of the past as well as the present, and partic-
ularly a comparative study of the development of the
various nations. William Ashley, who held at Harvard
the first chair of economic history ever created, took
his start from this position, and it was only in his
Inaugural Lecture in 1893 that he began to depart from
it. By the late 1870's books had begun to appear in
Germany which claimed to be “economic histories,”
and some were proposing to cover the whole economic
history of the country, for, here as elsewhere, what
was particularly required was the full-length account
of a nation's development. By the late 1870's, however,
Gustav Schmoller, who became the dominating figure
in Germany (and greatly influenced Ashley, for exam-
ple) was concentrating on the economic policy of
Frederick the Great; and, whether because of the
analogy with political history or because of the exist-
ence of etatist views, or because the sources were
governmental, or because economists hoped that they
might be advisers on policy, economic history at this
stage in its development tended to be preoccupied with
the work of government, or to see events from the
point of view of government. It was in the nature of
the subject to envisage, however, a life and activity
that sprang from society in all its length and breadth,
and the transition to this wider survey of a nation's
material development was continually assisted by the
appearance of regional studies and descriptive accounts
of particular industries. The depiction of an economic
life which rises autonomously out of the whole land-
scape would seem to have depended somewhat, also,
on the availability of a larger range of nongovern-
mental sources.

In the meantime, Jakob Burckhardt's Civilisation of
the Renaissance in Italy, published in 1860, had given
a fresh stimulus to that cultural history which had been
quickened by the work of Voltaire and the interest of
the eighteenth century in the history of the arts and
sciences. In the late 1880's there was a foretaste of
the larger controversy that was due to appear shortly
afterwards. Dietrich Shäfer's insistence that the state
must be the central point in historical reconstruction
was answered by Eberhard Gothein, who held that
Kulturgeschichte was necessary for the achievement of
the essential synthesis. In various countries the kind
of history which concerned itself with the processes
of society rather than the narrative of political events
had already begun to raise important issues. The influ-
ence of Auguste Comte had encouraged a tendency
to believe that the study of the past could be regarded
as analogous to the natural sciences, aspiring to achieve
generalizations and laws. This had shown itself in
H. T. Buckle's History of Civilisation in England, which
had appeared in 1857 and was receiving renewed
attention in the 1890's; and a brilliant and imposing
illustration of it was Hippolyte Taine's Origines de la
France contemporaine, published between 1876 and
1894. By the end of the 1870's, furthermore, some
economic historians were insisting that, in any com-
prehensive history of culture and society, the economic
factor must have the determining role and in reality
provides the clue to the processes of historical change.
It is not clear that this view owed anything to the
influence of Marx in academic circles, though the first
volume of Das Kapital had been published in 1867.
At the same time the system that Marx produced—
however much it owed to antecedent writers—must
be regarded as one of the most remarkable and power-
ful contributions ever made to the interpretation of
the past, and in the period after 1917 it came to have
an important influence even on historians who were
not themselves Marxists.

It was the publication (from 1891 to 1913) of Karl
Lamprecht's large-scale German History which, by
provoking a considerable controversy, led to the dis-
cussion of some of these larger issues, and to heated
debates amongst historians themselves on the subject:
“What is history?” Lamprecht's conception of his work
as a comprehensive study of society and culture, his
views about the importance of the economic factor in
the synthesis, his insistence that history should be re-
garded as a science—and the interest which he also
had in social psychology—made him militant against
the prevailing school in Germany. And ideas which,
though not necessarily new, were thrown out in this
controversy—and so gained a general hearing—have
remained in currency during the controversies of the
twentieth century. The battle in the 1890's was a very
bitter one and Lamprecht attempted on one occasion
to gain control of the historische Zeitschrift, which was
the chief instrument of his opponents. Lamprecht was
vulnerable himself in many ways, but, though he failed
to dislodge his opponents, he could not be repressed
and he preached his doctrines in the United States. For
historiography, a new period had in fact opened.

In the meantime the development of historiography
had produced problems still more profound—problems
that were calculated to tax the mind of the philoso-
pher—and the discussion of these reached great in-
tensity in the 1890's, though its influence amongst
practicing historians tended to come later. Funda-

mental issues affecting the emergence of “historicism”
had been raised by the writings of Friedrich Karl von
Savigny from the year 1814. He had taught that law
was not to be manufactured rationalistically from a
blueprint, but grew naturally out of the Volksgeist, like
a country's language or its manners or its consti-
tution—an attitude that tended to lead to historical
relativism. Later still, what had begun as a conflict with
positivism became in Dilthey, Wilhelm Windelband,
and Heinrich Rickert an enquiry as to the basis (and
the very possibility) of historical knowledge—a discus-
sion which, this time, stressed the differences between
history and the natural sciences, probed into the prob-
lem of the historical consciousness itself, and posed the
question whether the universe has any ethical meaning.
Instead of the old “philosophy of history” there now
emerged a primary concern with methodological and
epistemological issues in the historical realm; and
(through Max Weber, Ernst Troeltsch and Friedrich
Meinecke, for example) these discussions carried
their influence into the realm of the actual historian,
particularly in the twentieth century. In the 1890's,
furthermore, there emerged some imposing criticisms
of Marx.

By the last two decades of the nineteenth century,
academic history had come to have an imposing char-
acter in books both massive in form and intricate in
texture. The intensity of research, the accumulated
results of government support in the publication of
great amounts of archival sources in various countries,
and the vast range of manuscript material to which
historians had now found their way, were transforming
the whole landscape and giving scholarship its modern
appearance. The adoption of the new methods and the
new standards by universities—the palpable effects of
all this during the last two decades of the century in
the United States and at Oxford and Cambridge—
secured that a regular progress should take place on
all sides; and the fruits of the movement were apparent
even in Russia.

The establishment of learned journals in one country
after another encouraged the natural tendency of re-
search to become more microscopic, and, in 1900, the
inauguration of the International Congress of the His-
torical Sciences turned historians into a cosmopolitan
fraternity, though it failed to eliminate the constrictive
effects of nationalism. The whole study made solid
advances irrespective of the theoretical controversies
that seemed in the 1890's to be shaking its very basis.
There were interesting developments in historical
thinking, characterized in the case of Great Britain by
the revision of anachronistic and excessively Whiggish
interpretations in the writings of William Stubbs and
in the modern history field. Still more important were
the problems raised in Germany by writers like Max
Weber and Ernst Troeltsch. As a result of many decades
of work and a long accumulation of documentary
materials, certain fields of sixteenth-century history—
particularly the Revolt of the Netherlands, the French
Wars of Religion and the period of Philip II of Spain
—were due for a considerable reshaping by the end
of the century; French Revolutionary studies had
achieved a great development, the emergence of
François V. A. Aulard marking a new era; and similarly
the intensified researches into Frederick the Great and
Napoleon now brought scholarship to a new stage.

From the time of the ancient campaign annals, his-
torical writing repeatedly had a curious relationship
with war. The historical consciousness was sometimes
awakened (or spread more widely) as the result of a
conflict that had come as a great human experience.
War would also seem to have been the point at which
men of all classes were compelled to feel the impact
of historical events. All this has been illustrated afresh
in the twentieth century, when two world wars (and
the revolutions more or less connected with them) have
greatly altered the position of history. Immediately
after 1919 the consequences came in a flood—the host
of memoirs from political and military leaders, the
controversies over the question of “war-guilt,” and the
interest of governments in the production of the record.

The flood itself went on mounting in every subse-
quent decade. Massive selections, particularly of
diplomatic documents, were published. Archives were
opened to a more recent date, especially in the case
of defeated or revolutionized governments. There
emerged avowedly “official histories” and sometimes
the most recent documents would be made available
to such scholars as were deemed reliable. The special
concern which the general public had for issues that
were still in a sense alive brought a revival of the
tremendous importance which had so often been at-
tached to the writing of “contemporary history.” In
a world in which democracies have a special claim
to information and the journalists have a special skill
in exposing the underside of events, the production of
“instant” history, and the attempt to achieve scholarly
accounts of episodes still very recent, have altered the
center of gravity in historiography.

The situation has its dangers, especially where a
wider general public can act as the arbiter, and its
voice may have an effect on scholarship itself. Men
are more completely locked within the framework of
their age than they ever realize, and history can easily
lose what Lord Acton once specified as its important
function: to release men from the tyranny of the pres-
ent. Even for the purpose of writing “contemporary
history,” it may be best that a student should have

received his training in a past sufficiently remote to
allow of a certain degree of detachment, and should
have had exercise in the mental transpositions which
are required for an understanding of more distant
ages—an understanding of men not like-minded with
himself.

The pursuit of immediately “utilitarian” objects, and
the assumption that the past is interesting only as the
preparation for the present can be unfortunate for both
students and writers, who may never learn that further
dimension which historical thinking acquires when its
roots go back to more distant times. Even the European
(and still more the global) scene is altered by the fact
that young democracies, young nationalities, find it so
difficult to combine their necessary sympathies with
the due degree of detachment in respect of their own
history. The powerful position of communism has
made it hard for men of both Left and Right to be
judicious about Marxist history, though, particularly in
the economic history field, a genuine dialogue between
the West and Russia has been more possible in recent
years. It would be unfortunate if historians, anxious to
secure special privileges (special access to documents,
for example) should compete with one another for the
favor of government.

On the other hand, the “contemporary historian” has
an advantage, for the passage of time, which in some
respects makes it possible to produce a fairer record,
is attended by losses as well as gains. So much of the
atmosphere of a period—or of a given circle, a given
episode—may disappear; and the future may fail to
recover that host of thoughts and assumptions which
never needed to be expressed because they were part
of the atmosphere—the future may even forget the
delicate connotations of words. It has become evident
that those sensitive aspects of an age which disappear
from sight once direct contact with that age has been
lost are the ones that require for their ultimate resur-
rection the most penetrating and laborious kind of
research. The “contemporary historian” may fail to
realize that, by “taking sides,” even perhaps uncon-
sciously, or by otherwise accepting a framework of a
story already current, he has made the task of mounting
and organizing the narrative too easy for himself. But
if he possesses judgment and training he may pass down
to the future a record of permanent and unique impor-
tance.

Another important feature of twentieth-century
historiography is the relationship with the social sci-
ences, which themselves had reached a new stage (and
had come into closer contact with history) in the work
of men like Émile Durkheim and Max Weber. That
work arose out of lively intellectual movements of the
1890's, and was paralleled in the United States, where
Frederick Jackson Turner's paper on “The Significance
of the Frontier in American History” appeared in 1894.
Turner's “frontier” hypothesis and his insistence on the
importance of sectionalism in American life sprang
from a more comprehensive view of the whole past
and had great influence on historical study in the
United States. After a period of intense discussion and
rapid progress, his paper on “Social Forces in American
History” appeared in 1910 and along with it, James
Harvey Robinson, writing on “The Relation of History
to the Newer Sciences of Man,” prepared the way for
his volume, The New History, which came out two
years later and launched a further controversy.

So far as historical scholarship is concerned, it is
particularly since the Second World War that the
whole landscape has been transformed as a result of
the developments in the social sciences. The appli-
cation of social science procedures to various problems
and periods of the past has tended to change the direc-
tion of historical enquiry itself, and to alter the notion
of what might be needed to achieve satisfactory forms
of historical explanation. The historian himself now has
a different view of what must be done to produce, for
example, a “reconstruction of the ordinary working
world of the politician” in a bygone period. At the
same time, he enters upon forms of analysis which
would hardly have been possible if masses of further
source material had not become available and research-
work had not been organized so as to make a coopera-
tive endeavor more feasible.

The historian, also, is now more ready to envisage
society as a whole and movements in the mass, and
to turn his mind to population problems, the sociology
of religion, and so forth. For a long time, even during
the twentieth century, the historian and the social
scientist were in conflict with one another, and seemed
unable to agree about their respective roles in the
recovery or the explanation of the human story. Today
when the historians (though so many of them continue
to work as before) are more prepared to use the results
and the methods of the social scientists, and even to
move further afield, to psychology, for example, the
controversy has not been brought to an end. The claim
has arisen that history should itself be regarded as a
social science—no more and no less—and this is con-
strued as though it meant relegating into the realm
of mere useless antiquarianism that work which his-
torians throughout the ages (and still largely even at
the present day) have been accustomed to producing:
namely, the sheer recovery of the past and the narra-
tion of what actually happened.

History is enriched by the developments that have
taken place, but those who build up their outlook only
from the social sciences will have only a sectionalized

view of the overall process of historical change, a
process in which the genius of a single leader who sees
and uses existing conditions can secure an enormous
leverage, and a handful of men who have faith can
move mountains, as the twentieth century itself has
shown. It is possible that democracy will also radically
turn its back on what was for so long a main objective
of historical writing—the communication of what the
art of statesmanship requires. When help has been
recruited from all available sciences, there is something
left for the mind of the historian who, surveying the
whole, can make the presidential contribution that is
itself something like an act of statesmanship. Some-
times the subject has been reduced almost to a study
of conditions, but Camille Ernest Labrousse and
Georges Lefebvre, students of conditions, came to
admit that the French Revolution cannot be explained
without the political narrative, and that a man like
Henri IV on the throne of France, instead of Louis
XVI, might have given a different turn to the whole
story. It is still going to be true that when a people
has been involved in a war, it will want to know how
that war came about and how its leaders behaved; and
perhaps this basic human demand for narrative will
secure the survival of what has always been regarded
as history, and will tend to keep the subject on the
rails. Indeed, there is something absolutely essential in
history and in the processes of time to which justice
cannot be done save in the form of a narrative in which
one does not know in advance what is going to happen
next.