Previous convictions

History of the moment
December 20, 2000

history began with a song. Long before Homer composed his Iliad, poet-seers chanted ballads about folk heroes before excited crowds. In the 19th century there were still historians inspired by Clio's music. "If the Past Time cannot become melodious," exclaimed Thomas Carlyle, "it must be forgotten, as good as annihilated!" His French contemporary, Jules Michelet, said that anybody who really wanted to understand the peasant uprising which erupted in the Vend?e during the revolution, should go to one of the region's many lonely crossroads, put his ear to the ground and listen to the music.

I started thinking of these musical origins after receiving, not long ago, a copy of a sober-looking tome about economic growth in 16th-century France. The book is described as a "fine example of the cliometric revolution in economic history" with its statistics "subjected to historical, sociological and ethnological theory." More than half of the book is taken up with footnotes and tables of mathematical correlations and algebraic regressions.

This is the kind of history I used to practise. I was inspired by the French historians of the longue dur?e. Fernand Braudel became so attached to this kind of history that, in his work on the 16th-century Mediterranean, he only begins to discuss King Philip II of Spain towards the end of a long second volume. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, in his famous Les Paysans de Languedoc, spoke of the "respiration of the centuries."

There is only one way to construct the harmonies and rhythms which characterise the best of such histories, and that is through the collection of statistics: price series, crop yields, tithe returns, birth rates, death rates, and estimates of total population. Braudel and Le Roy Ladurie wore both capable of creating music with these numbers. But they are rare gems. In the 1970s this type of history descended into dogma, the writing was touched by "holy earnest." Its enchantment disappeared.

So I had for a while been seeking another way of practising history when, some 15 years ago, I had dinner with an old American friend. He had been a pilot in the second world war and had already told me many funny and terrifying tales. "Read Joseph Heller's Catch 22," he said. "That's what it was like."

But that night it wasn't the war he wanted to talk about: it was the peace. On 8th May 1945, when the news of the German surrender came through, he was based in Venice. It was, he said, the most extraordinary day of his life. The city of the doges seemed more golden than ever. To celebrate, he and his friends flew in formation down the east coast of Italy "to gaze across Europe at peace."

It took several years before I realised the message he had passed on to me that night at dinner: there is something magical about that moment of transition from war to peace, a transition that people live intensely, passionately. It is often accompanied by an explosion in cultural activity and new political hope.

I had found my historical song. From a historian of the longue dur?e I transformed myself into a historian of the moment; my last two books hinge on a moment of peace. Every capital in Europe-including Paris-celebrated the defeat of Napoleon in the spring of 1814. There was another emotional explosion with the Armistice of 1918. Neither moment proved the perfect peace-Napoleon came back in 1815, and half of Europe remained at war after 11th November 1918-but that is just a part of the musical recital.

As I moved from one kind of history to the other, my old theoretical props collapsed. I was no longer designing trends; I was no more seeking out causes. It was less the "respiration of the centuries" which fascinated me than that sharp second when you hold your breath: at the vow of marriage, at the birth of a child, when a parent dies, when a lifeline is thrown from the side of a vessel. No longer was I guided by Macaulay's sweep of time; I now looked to Carlyle and his great "explosions" interrupting drawn-out, stodgy periods of "constipation." I no longer wanted to describe every note of a Beethoven symphony, but to focus on the instant he changed key, the moment of enchantment which defines his whole work.

There is a strange-and unintended-parallel between my own work and the natural sciences. I have left the slow "uniformitarian" legend of Charles Lyell and the Chevalier de Lamarck for the dramatic "catastrophism" of William Buckland and Georges Cuvier. Isn't that the shift in vision which has so radicalised biology and geology in the last 20 years? No longer do we hear, as we still did in the 1960s, scientists describing evolution in forms of the calm, sedate process of the longue dur?es.

And as I start work on a history of the end of the second world war I have rediscovered Jean-Paul Sartre: the young Sartre in the giddy days of Paris's liberation. At that time, he distinguished between a "serial history" of obscure "facts" and the history of rare, singular "events": events made in brilliant light which "irrupt, interrupt and explode."

But is this new history of the moment really so antithetical to history of the longue dur?e? Put them together: you'll find they sing in perfect harmony. Those Greeks weren't such fools. n