In the Age of Enlightenment scholars had created, discussed, and disseminated new ideas about the order in nature, society, and history. Beginning with the 1770s, some of these ideas had inspired actions to change the social and political order of various countries. During the subsequent one hundred and fifty years, historians were called on to mediate between the demands for change and the equally strong desire to see the continuity of the past, present, and future preserved. The task proved more or less difficult depending on the national contexts. In England historiography followed a nearly serene course, disturbed more by the arrival soon after mid-century of the new critical historical science in the German manner than by large-scale shifts in society or politics. In her former North American colonies historiography, at first shaped by the momentous creation of a new nation through a revolution, told the story of the grand adventure of stretching a small nation across a vast continent. In that story the assertion of Divine Providence and progress joined with ease a commonsense empiricism about the world. Presented by careful scholars with great eloquence, these histories became popular possessions rather than scholarly curiosa.
French historiography shared the agony of French history. The radical revolutionaries, with their ardent belief in progress and with their hopes that a libertarian, rational, and perhaps even egalitarian society could be built here and now, rejected much of the French past. Only a glorified picture of the Roman republican past seemed fitting for the new society that would be constructed according to “pure” rational concepts, would know social and political equality, and would erase all traces of the Old Regime. In 1815, after the failure of both the Jacobin radical experiment and the Napoleonic Empire, the French embarked on a quest for the proper political structure for French society. Since that search clearly aimed at finding not the best political structure in the abstract but rather the one proper for French society, the answer could only be found in the French past, and historians became the guides in the search. On the other hand the French Revolution had unsettled much of Europe’s social and political order, and Napoleon’s ambitions and armies had done their part in the unsettling. In many areas, particularly the German, the experiences with revolutionary and Napoleonic France lessened the influence of the notion that a society need not be shaped by age-old traditions because human reason was now sufficiently developed to design a society of complete justice and happiness. In the German area, the struggle for national identity was at first aimed at reestablishing the Empire. The conservative, gradualist view which went with such nationalist aspirations offered a favorable climate of opinion for historians, who in that context created the influential German historical science.
It was not only the significant public role historians played in their societies that gave historiography great influence in the 1800s. Firmly based on a philosophy—whether that of the progress of reason or a Vichian cultural interpretation of human destiny—historiography triumphed over its old rival. Throughout the century the concept of development made the once static and eternal essences of philosophy subject to change. But there was even a greater and longer-lasting triumph. Early in the century a few German professors succeeded in synthesizing what had been separated for centuries but had been close to convergence in the decades before 1800: the tradition of text criticism of classical philology; the work with sources by the erudites and legal historians; and the concept of the nation as a unique whole in which spiritual forces bind things together and each element influences the others. Used with these elements was a methodology taken from the diverse currents that helped maintain the autonony of the historical inquiry in relation to all other scholarly inquiries.
The acceptance of the German historical science, although often enthusiastic, was always partial because woven into the German synthesis was also a great number of contemporary metaphysical views. While these views made the new historical science of history congenial to Western societies, they also explain the controversies which engulfed it in the late 1800s when social and political changes challenged its link to the existing order and new concepts of reality eroded its philosophical buttresses.
World History
