Baar Monika. Historians and Nationalism: East-Central Europe in the Nineteenth Century
Подождите немного. Документ загружается.
x Contents
Encounters with Nikolai Karamzin 124
Contemporary resonances: the French liberal school 128
Conclusion 132
5 Language as Medium, Language as Message 136
The fecundity of inferiority complexes 136
Language as a bridge: in the service of unity 141
Language as evergreen cowberry: representing continuity 144
The unique language: antiquity and other virtues 147
Enriching the national culture through translations 152
The Lithuanian Robinson 154
Promoting academic language in Hungary 157
The birth of modern political language in Romania 160
Towards creating ‘original’ scholarship 163
Conclusion 165
6 National Antiquities 167
The interest in origins and early societies 167
The vantage point: Tacitus 172
Nordic antiquity 174
Indo-European antiquity 178
Putative Czech antiquity 181
Roman antiquity 186
Semi-Nomadic antiquity 189
Conclusion 193
7 Feudalism and the National Past 196
The study of feudalism in historical scholarship 196
Conquest and colonization 200
The late arrival of feudalism and its illegitimate nature 203
Humanitarianism, common sense and urban liberties 205
Feudal institutions as national institutions 209
Creating modern society: the emancipation of the peasantry 211
Liberalism versus democracy 215
Ways of change: reform versus revolution 219
Conclusion 221
Contents xi
8 The Golden Age 224
The evolution of master narratives 224
Virtue in the forest: pagan Lithuania 226
Poland: a true republic 231
The Czechs: a small nation’s contribution to liberty 236
The Hungarian constitution and the spirit of liberalism 242
Romania: united and independent 248
Conclusion 253
9 Perceptions of Others and Attitudes to European Civilization 256
Images of the self and others 256
External others: the neighbours 259
Internal others: the Jews 264
Internal others: the Jesuits 270
Internal others: women 273
Symbolic geography: East, West and their alternatives 275
TheCyranodeBergeraceffect 278
Negation and analogy: the nation’s mission 282
Conclusion 286
Conclusion 289
Bibliography 305
Index 335
This page intentionally left blank
Introduction
This book investigates the writings, thoughts and preoccupations of
five historians in comparative perspective and aims to ascertain their
place in the intellectual landscape of nineteenth-century historiography.
They are: Joachim Lelewel (Polish, 1786–1861), Simonas Daukan-
tas (Lithuanian, 1793–1864), Franti
ˇ
sek Palack
´
y (Czech, 1798–1876),
Mih
´
aly Horv
´
ath (Hungarian, 1804–78), Mihail Kog
˘
alniceanu (Roma-
nian, 1818–91). As historians these scholars played prominent roles
in articulating perceptions of their national past. As leading figures in
their national movements they contributed to contemporary political
debates and shaped visions of the future. Their impressive achievements
attracted generous attention from their respective national communities.
Nonetheless, their work has remained largely unknown to international
scholarship. Accordingly, it has not been accommodated in a more com-
prehensive perspective and therefore continues to occupy a marginal
place within historiographical production. The primary ambition of my
study is to counter this oversight. To this end, the comparison of these
scholars’ writings, the elucidation of similarities and differences in their
thoughts, represents only the first stage of my analysis. The second, final
stage necessitates the evaluation of my findings within the context of
the nineteenth-century historiographical canon. This calls for reflection
both on attributes that corresponded to mainstream developments and
on characteristics that were distinctive to their oeuvre. In a more general
context, the underlying question of my study addresses the extent to
which historical writing in a given era and genre is characterized by
universal attributes and the extent to which it is influenced by regional
conditions.
I am especially motivated by recent initiatives in historical research
which seek to release marginal traditions from their isolated position and
bring about a new, more encompassing vision of the European historio-
graphical heritage. This is because, undoubtedly, the above-mentioned
lacuna is not exclusive to the five historians featured in this study, but
2 Introduction
exemplifies a pattern. On the one hand, it is frequently lamented in
literature that ‘small’ or ‘peripheral’ traditions have remained neglected
fields of research. On the other, the tacit assumption that the essence of
European historiography can be uncovered by the appraisal of a handful
of ‘mainstream’ traditions seems to have survived. This limitation is
unfortunate as it sacrifices the rich and complex diversity of Euro-
pean historical writing to an arbitrarily established standard. National
historiography is typically defined as ‘a specific form of historical repre-
sentation which aims at the formation of the nation-states, accompanies
the formation of the nation-states or seeks to influence the existing self-
definitions of national consciousness’.¹ It seems justifiable, therefore,
to pay more attention to national historiographies which developed in
territories where national movements sought emancipation from within
existing empires.²
Books on comparative historiography are scarce and informed by the
predominance of the national paradigm. A notable exception to this
trend is the volume Writing National Histories, Western Europe since
1800, which promises to investigate the hitherto overlooked common
European dimension of historiographic nationalism.³ The contribu-
tions in this book, which focus on four ‘core countries’, i.e. Britain,
France, Germany and Italy, yield remarkable conclusions. However, as
the chapters are dedicated to individual national contexts, the national
paradigm cannot entirely be overcome. Studies in comparative histo-
riography with a focus on East-Central Europe are especially rare. To
my knowledge, there are only two existing accounts in this field, and
unsurprisingly both were authored by scholars from the region. The first
was written in 1946 by a Czech historian, Josef Mac
˚
urek, under the title
D˘ejepisectví evropsk´eho v´ychodu (The Historiography of Eastern Europe,
Prague, 1946). Mac
˚
urek’s work offers an unprecedented survey of both
East European history and historiography from the Byzantine era to just
before the period in which he lived. The second book, At¨ort´enetír
´
as
t¨ort´enete Kelet-Eur´op
´
aban (The History of Historical Writing in Eastern
¹ Stefan Berger, ‘Representations of the Past: The Writing of National Histories in Europe’,
Debatte 12:1 (2004), 75.
² This constitutes an important ambition of the international research project Writ-
ing National Histories in Europe (2003–8), which is sponsored by the European Science
Foundation.
³ Stefan Berger, Mark Donovan and Kevin Passmore, ‘Apologias for the Nation State in
Western Europe since 1800’, in Stefan Berger (ed.), Writing National Histories: Western Europe
since 1800 (London and New York, 1999), 3.
Introduction 3
Europe, Budapest, 1996) was produced by a Hungarian scholar, Emil
Niederhauser. This volume contains a sound outline of East Euro-
pean historiography, from its beginnings until modern times, but lacks
explicit comparison.
The names of the historians upon whom this study focuses remain
absent from general surveys, and the sporadic instances when they
receive a mention are notable for their dismissive tone. G. P. Gooch’s
somewhat dated but still often quoted book, History and Historians in
the Nineteenth Century, dedicates a few pages to what he calls ‘minor
countries’ and touches cursorily on Lelewel, Palack
´
y and Horv
´
ath in that
context. Acknowledgement is given to Horv
´
ath for having produced a
brief history from a democratic standpoint, but on the whole, criticism is
levelled at his generation for allegedly being unable to escape the shackles
of narrow patriotism.⁴ In a similar tone, the paragraph dedicated to
Lelewel argues that his analysis of medieval Polish history suffered from
a lack of access to the archives, and that he was an ardent democrat
who attributed more popular influences to early Polish history than
had ever actually existed.⁵ Another classic and monumental work on
historiography is Eduard Fueter’s Geschichte der Neueren Historiographie.
This covers a long period from the scholastic tradition to the age of
Burckhardt and has a very German focus. In the book Palack
´
y’s name
receives just one cursory mention, and that in a pejorative sense. The
author draws a comparison between the German historian Ludwig
H
¨
ausser and Palack
´
y and condemns both scholars for grounding their
judgement entirely on patriotic sentiments and disregarding historical
validity.⁶
Other overviews pay still less attention to marginal traditions, or
even none at all. Harry Elmer Barnes’s A History of Historical Writing
mentions Palack
´
y and Lelewel in passing in a chapter which is dedicated
to ‘other’ countries (i.e. other than France, Germany and England),⁷ and
Ernest Breisach’s book, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval and Modern,
focuses exclusively on the German, British, French and American
realm in the discussion of the modern period.⁸ These accounts are
also characterized by a lack of scholarly engagement, giving the overall
⁴ G. P. Gooch, History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century (London and New York,
1952), 433–4.
⁵ Ibid., 452.
⁶ Eduard Fueter, Geschichte der Neueren Historiographie (Munich and Berlin, 1936), 541.
⁷ Harry Elmer Barnes, A History of Historical Writing, 2nd edn. (New York, 1963), 220–6.
⁸ Ernst Breisach, Historiography. Ancient, Medieval and Modern, 2nd edn. (Chicago, 1983).
4 Introduction
impression that the writers never came into direct contact with my
historians’ work and based their judgements exclusively on secondary
and tertiary sources. The consequence of this is an awkward situation,
whereby my protagonists are condemned for imposing pre-existing
conclusions on their material by scholars who seem to follow the
same ‘methodology’. A recent erudite addition to general surveys in
modern historiography, Donald Kelley’s Fortunes of History represents
a refreshing change from this prevailing attitude inasmuch as it refrains
from such value judgements. Kelley does not subscribe to the view that
scholars representing marginal traditions can automatically be relegated
to second- or third-rank historians. He also indicates that Iberian,
Scandinavian, East European and Balkan states or would-be states all
followed a similar trajectory of development.⁹ Nevertheless, no attempt
is made to establish those marginal traditions’ relation to the mainstream
scholarship of the age. The chapter in which East European, Iberian,
Scandinavian and Balkan developments are bracketed together carries
the telling title ‘beyond the canon’ and subtitle ‘on the margins’.
That my historians, and in more general terms, representatives of
‘marginal’ traditions have not gained more widespread recognition can
be at least in part attributed to methodological and practical difficulties,
of which the most persistent is undoubtedly the language barrier. One of
the greatest achievements of my protagonists was the replacement of the
previously used Latin, German and Greek with the vernacular language,
rendering their writings more accessible to the national community.
At the same time, paradoxically, this novelty seriously restricted their
availability to international scholarship. As Donald Kelley points out:
‘these interstitial traditions also had their literary masterpieces, though
they were hardly known outside their particular cultural spheres except
through translation into at least one of the major languages’.¹⁰
However, it is not sufficient to explain this situation purely in terms
of linguistic difficulties. Behind the linguistic barrier another obstacle
appears to be lurking, which is ideological in nature. As I have briefly
discussed above, the assessment of the historians’ work is informed
by clich
´
ed value judgements and an a priori dismissal of their views.
This is because such statements purport the existence of a ‘proper’
or ‘more proper’ historiography of the era, and it is in relation to
⁹ Donald Kelley, Fortunes of History: Historical Inquiry from Herder to Huizinga (New
Haven and London, 2002), 272.
¹⁰ Ibid.
Introduction 5
this putative, normative version that the awkwardness of Hungarian
historiography ‘in the shackles of patriotism’, Palack
´
y’s nationalistic
zeal and the idealization of the past in Lelewel’s work, represented a
distortion. This is not to question the validity of those critical remarks.
But an intimate knowledge of nineteenth-century historiography is not
necessary in order to realize that the criteria on which such criticism is
founded, i.e. strong patriotic feeling, insufficiency of archival research
and the idealization of the past, are general attributes of the era rather
than the distinctive shortcomings of a few historians.
The unqualified attribution of political partisanship and unscholarly
attitudes to historians of East-Central Europe may be connected with
another general assumption about the ‘special’ role of the historian
as a political force in nineteenth-century Central and Eastern Europe.
The most concise formulation of this thesis originated from R. W.
Seton-Watson, whose inaugural lecture, The Historian as a Political
Force in Central Europe, at the School of Slavonic Studies in 1922, was
entirely dedicated to this problem. According to Seton-Watson’s old but
still influential claim, present political miseries acted as an incentive to
the revival of historical studies, enabling the present to be unfavourably
contrasted with past glories. In Central and Eastern Europe the historical
tradition was to play an ‘absolutely decisive’ part, even rescuing whole
nations from oblivion.¹¹
Doubtless, my protagonists’ sensitivity to the acute problems within
their societies manifested itself not only in their historical writings
but also in public life: apart from Daukantas they were all highly
committed politically. As Kog
˘
alniceanu put it: ‘today we are not only
writing, but also making history’.¹² On the international scene they
sought to liberate their own nations from foreign ties and improve their
international standing. Such ambitions were intertwined with domestic
demands for the extension of individual rights to a larger part of the
population and the abolition of the remnants of feudalism, in short
for political and economic modernization. Lelewel played a crucial role
in the Polish uprising of 1830. Subsequently, he became a charismatic
leader of the exiled Poles. Palack
´
y’s political activity received extensive
scholarly treatment due to his famous letter in which he rejected the
invitation to attend the Frankfurt Parliament of 1848 (claiming that
¹¹ R. W. Seton-Watson, The Historian as a Political Force in Central Europe (London,
1922), 27.
¹² Alexandru Zub, Mihail Kog
˘
alniceanu istoric (Ias¸i, 1974), 262.
6 Introduction
he was not German but a Czech of Slavonic descent). Horv
´
ath became
a bishop and Minister of Education during the revolution and war
of independence in 1848–9, after which, like Lelewel, he was forced
into exile. Kog
˘
alniceanu served as Prime Minister, then later as Foreign
Minister and Minister of the Interior in one of the most crucial eras of
Romanian history, the period of unification and attainment of national
independence.
Nevertheless, these instances appear to provide little evidence about
the exceptionality of my historians’ political commitment. The historian
who saw writing history as a way of practising politics and therefore
deliberately set out not only to write and teach history but also to
make it, appears to be representative of an archetype in an age when
many historians both espoused political views in their writing as well as
occupying powerful political posts. In his book referred to above (again,
from which the East-Central European region is entirely absent!), Ernst
Breisach concludes with regard to the era in question that ‘one could
have thought that the ancient period had returned, as history writing
and public service once more were frequently linked’.¹³ Among the
abundant examples of historians ‘turning Clio into the preceptor of
the nation’¹⁴ are the German historians at the Frankfurt Parliament
in 1848 (the Professors’ Parliament) and subsequently the Prussian
schools’ concern for German unification. A representative of the latter,
Heinrich Sybel, famously declared that he was four-sevenths politician,
three-sevenths professor.¹⁵ The French Romantic school’s use of history
as a weapon in political struggles is also widely known, as is the fact
that many of its members held prominent political positions, including
Franc¸ois Guizot, who served as Prime Minister, and Thiers, who became
the first President of the Third Republic.¹⁶ Furthermore, one may ask
whether political experience is inevitably harmful to historical writing,
or whether, at least in some instances, it may have the potential to help
comprehend the past. This question is especially worth asking in light
of the fact that most historians of the era saw their own involvement
¹³ Breisach, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval and Modern, 262.
¹⁴ Herbert Flaig, ‘The Historian as Pedagogue of the Nation’, History 59 (1974), 18.
¹⁵ Ibid., 19.
¹⁶ See Jacques Barzun, ‘Romantic Historiography as a Political Force in France’, Journal of
the History of Ideas 2:3 (1941), 318–29; Stanley Mellon, The Political Uses of History: A Study
of Historians in the French Restoration (Stanford, 1958); Lionel Gossman, ‘Augustin Thierry
and Liberal Historiography’, in Gossman, Between History and Literature (Cambridge, MA,
and London, 1990), 83–151.
Introduction 7
in politics not as an obstacle to understanding the past, but, on the
contrary, as a catalyst for genuine historical insight.¹⁷
However, arguments about political partisanship as a distinctive
hallmark of historiography in Central and East Europe are embedded
in a more comprehensive discourse emphasizing political and cultural
inferiority.¹⁸ According to the foremost representative of this thesis,
Hans Kohn, Western nationalism can be interpreted as a product of
the Enlightenment, a rationalist ideology, centred around the notions
of political legitimacy, active citizenship and the Staatsnation,whileits
Eastern counterpart was based on a romantic collectivism organized
around the irrational, pre-civilized folk concept and the Kulturnation.¹⁹
The former is deemed individualist and universalist, and compatible with
liberal ideals, whereas the latter is regarded as collectivitist, exclusivist
and therefore dangerous. Kohn’s distinction and latent criticism, which
was originally directed against Germany, soon became transferred into
the context of Central and Eastern Europe. The shortcomings of this
theory, especially its sweeping generalizations, have themselves been
frequent targets of criticism. In addition, it has also been shown that
almost all nations displayed some feelings of inferiority towards their
competitors.²⁰
Nevertheless, this line of argument continues to occupy a strong
position in scholarly literature. Especially visible among its supporters are
theorists who associate the development of nationalism with modernity
and modernization and hence subscribe to a vanguard version of national
development, which was later imitated by latecomers in a distorted
form, resulting in dependence and underdevelopment: ‘In Central
and Eastern Europe the character of nationalism changed according
to local conditions: the farther an area was from the lands in which
nationalism developed, the less its nationalism resembled the original
model. Even basic expressions of nationalism such as constitution,
freedom, or republic acquired different meanings in more eastern areas
of Europe.’²¹ Nonetheless, the contradiction inherent in arguments
about the distorted nature of nationalism in East-Central Europe is
¹⁷ Gossman, Between History and Literature, 95.
¹⁸ Andrzej Walicki, Philosophy and Romantic Nationalism: The Case of Poland (Notre
Dame, 1944), 66.
¹⁹ Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism (New York, 1945), 329–31.
²⁰ Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads To Modernity (Cambridge, MA, 1992), 178.
²¹ Peter Sugar (ed.), Eastern European Nationalism in the Twentieth Century (Washington
DC, 1995), 8.