Historiography reading for presentation and essay

The New Philosophical History

- Voltaire rightly thought of himself as a pioneer of a new from of history proposing a departure from the
supernatural, the narrow-political and uncritical ancient histories in favour of secular and naturalistic history.
- Both the Age of Louis XIV (1752) and Essays on the Manners and Customs of Nations (1757) are written in a
philosophical and interpretative manner.
Voltaire on Fact and Evidence
- Must sift fact from fable and interrogate historical evidence. This meant critiquing older historians.
- Voltaire exposed both the gullibility and deliberate misuse of information in prior histories
- Voltaire viewed the study of history, especially modern history as vital instrument in the enlightenment of
man.
On the uses of modern history
- Voltaire claims that ancient history is studied out of idleness and an unwillingness to labour in order to find
the facts of nature.
His example is that if there was a machine that could provide water to Paris which man could study and
learn how to replicate, they would opt to learn about the old wives as it simply requires picking up a book
and regurgitating a tale.
- Those who write history praising the Great men of history would have bored the ruler.
E.g. calling Alexander a Great Conqueror and praising him is less valuable then calling him a mad king
and interrogating his character critically.
As an impartial philosopher, historians can relate the past back to today i.e. Alexander is the lawgiver who
established the trade routes currently at the centre of commerce.
- Inculcate in the young a liking for recent times something valuable and not just something to satisfy
curiosity.
- Voltaire study of Louis XIV and splendid century is part stadial progress from Charles V, Leo Tenth
Aim to show progress of human mind use of history is to further movement towards rationality
Even if you greatly admire someone in history to talk only of praise and success is to imply that they do
not have enough virtues to afford some faults negative
- Also writes of the importance of challenging other history i.e. competing accounts on the same event this
would lift the curse of past history being unquestionable
- Ancient history only have respect because they are old and considered unquestionable
- From a more universal perspective interpretation is of upmost importance
E.g. Revocation of Edict of Nantes for a Dutchman is ill-informed and for a Frenchman is wise
Truth never dies
On his piece The age of Louis XIV
- Classifies that his history is of the human mind and progress in the glorious reign rather than the reign itself
20 chapters devoted to general history.
- Whatever characterises the century, what caused its demise and why it matters in a hundred years take up bulk
of book
- Blends a mix of well known sources with less used sources not exactly interrogating them but letting them
speak for themselves not painted by historian
This is not just a history of Louis but also how Louis interacted with those around him and serving him
from their perspective.
- The progression of the human mind in philosophy, oratory, poetry and criticism shown through progress o
painting, sculpting, weaving etc. is the focus
- Moral importance truly disentangling the chaos of the origins of French will be able to shed light on present
and in future
All history is equal for anyone who simply wants to load themselves with facts
- 4 periods deserve to be characterised as the whole history of the world the most important in that they
show progress of human mind
 1) Philip and Alexander of Plato, Apelles the glories of Greece while barbarism plagued the rest.
2) Caesar and Augustus, of Cicero
3) Followed the taking of Constantinople by Mohammed II a emphasis on perfectionism on virtue
begin to bare fruits of arts in France, England and Germany spread of human progression BUT not like
in Italy where the finest of art was taking place
4) Louis XIV most nearly approaches perfection enriched by the discoveries of the other 3. Human
reason in general has progressed revolution in our arts, minds, manners and government
French influence spread to England, Russia and Germany whilst reviving Italy
- The 4 great ages were not alien to misfortune and crime perfection does not entail peace the wickedness of
man cannot be forgotten
- The glory days of France still involved a condition of weakness, a lack of good government, a lack of
commerce, a lack of great discoveries but it was the progress of regular people that categorised this a great
age.
Modern Historiography: An Introduction Michael Bentley
Eric Voegelin
- 1700 = a dominant sense of epoch in the new century
- History becomes a comprehensive interpretation of man in society this is what history of modernity truly
means
Enlightenment
- The intellectual ferment of 1750 to 1790 gave rise to historical enquiry of a marked character. It promoted a
singular sense of the present at a moment of true importance.
Voltaire among others seemed pleased to live in the 18th century unlike many others still obsessed with
ancient times of Greeks and Romans.
Quarrel between ancients and moderns in France at end of Louis XIV centred on notion that classical
culture was not past but present notice what was going on around you now
Enlightened history discovered grounds for satisfaction with the present.
- French enlightenment historians in general attacked organised religion
Condorcet - Humanitys history falls into 3 stages
1) Darkness of an unknowable primitivism to development of language
2) The coming o language to the introduction of alphabetic writing completed by time of Greeks
3) Simply everything else tools of above two provide historian with access to rest of history
A further triad is made most important being
- Revival of science and the development of printing the throwing off the yoke of authority present
- Science will guide the future despite own misfortune use of present is optimistic
Enlightenment
- Paved way for critical history and intellectual self confidence
- Rejection of metaphysical authority of ancient
Did it however limit historical ideas?
- Through generalising perceptions of a particular time, the enlightenment lost contact with specifics
- By reducing the world to natural laws history truncated the past as a domain for enquiry i.e. as soon as event
occurred it became outdated
- Differences in histories became the focus not commonality i.e. urging one to look at their own present = lost
touch with interactions of histories.
Lecture Notes
- Old View
History was important in the Renaissance (15th and 16th c) and Romantic period (19th)
The enlightenment
o emphasised the moderns over the ancients
o Experimental methods
o Eternal natural laws are more important than pastness
o Emphasis on Progress, not the Past
Politicisation of this view: the French Revolution
Romantic Reaction to Jacobinism
- New View
History was central to Enlightenment writing and philosophy
- Crisis of European Consciousness
Thesis of Paul Hazard intellectual historian
Epistemological shift between 1680 and 1715
- What did enlightenment Historian take form the past
Reliance on written sources
History as source for political and moral lessons
- Whats new?
From cyclical to unilinear history (progress)
Moral lessons (as before) but through sympathy
Natural Laws as discoverable through history
- Why study history according to Hume
1) Entertainment
2) Leads to erudition and improvement of the mind
3) History has the power to direct readers wills and to become
more virtuous; because historians do not possess the vice of self-love
or self-interest.
Montesquieu Spirit of the Laws (1748)
- Contemporary of Voltaire
- Placed on the Vaticans Index (banned books)
- Erudite but sociological in scope, using historical examples to discover natural laws governing societies.
- Forms of government and their guiding principle:
Monarchy, republican (aristo and demo), despotism
Climate matters
Checks-and-balances
- Implicit message: European exceptionalism
Climate drove Europe from classical world of virtuous republics to commercial monarchies. Implicit
rejection of cyclical history. Implied linear progress.

Ferguson Stadial history

1) Hunting no property, no wealth to accumulate, stage of savagery
2) Pasturage less mobile but still nomadic, wealth can be accumulated
3) Agriculture - even less mobile, farmer live on land in own houses, more wealth and greater inequality
4) Commerce property ownership, laws governing property, complex societies

Conjectural History Rational reconstruction, or speculation, of what must have happened to mankind in the past,
even if it cant be empirically shown
- Rousseau: Humans were born free and moral (or at least morally neutral) but civilisation eventually corrupted
them
Why was Voltaire obsessed with modern history?

Voltaire and the necessity of modern history - Pierre Force

Voltaires historical writings make up a significant part of his catalogue
These histories were highly regarded in his lifetime, and Voltaire was a powerful influence on the other
great historians of the age, Hume, Gibbon and Robertson.
Many find Voltaire polemical and tendentious in his histories e.g. Karen OBrien Voltaires histories
have not recovered today from the low reputation to which they sank after the French Revolution.
His use of modernism i.e. viewing everything resolutely modern point of view can make him seem nave,
Often neglected is his determination to write modern history. Much of his historical writing, especially in the earlier
years, is devoted to the modern world.
He explores the defining characteristics of modern world (trade science tolerance) first in England then
looks at the clourishing culture of France.
study of recent history was, Voltaire declared bluntly, a matter of necessity.
The study of modern times was more precise than the study of ancient history, because sources were more
numerous and more reliable.
Voltaire seems influenced by the English writer Bolingbroke modern history is best placed to offer us
instructive examples.
Traditionally, it had always been ancient history that was thought to be significant as a source of morally
improving examples of conduct.
Voltaire turns that idea on its head. As an Enlightenment philosopher, he wants to teach the lessons of free
thought and religious tolerance, and he turns to modern history for telling examples to prove his point.
The spirit of criticism that characterises the Enlightenment begins when we scrutinise our own age, and we cannot
fully understand Voltaire the philosopher without appreciating his commitment to the study of modern history.
Voltaire's neoclassical poetics of history Karen OBrien
Voltaire was known to French, British and American readers, perhaps primarily, as a historian of France and the world
Voltaire's histories were perused by appreciative and unperturbed readers throughout the continent and its
colonies.
Louis XV, who appointed him historiographer royal in 1745
Together, these works represent a sustained and wideranging exploration of the literary, cognitive and thematic
potential of historical narrative.
As literary works, they make new commitments to form and style which exceed and displace older
rhetorical theories of purpose and expression.
As meta-historical investigations of the cognitive problems of retelling the past, they contribute something
to contemporary French philosophical debate
It was the thematic concerns of Voltaire's histories, which centred upon the evolution and existence of a unique,
common European civilisation, that particularly attracted an international readership.
Voltaire was the first historian to articulate in detail an Enlightenment narrative of the rise of Europe as it
was hastened by the growing wealth and independence of the middle orders of society.
He was the first to explain the political utility of this common sense of European identity
first to show how this sense of identity had a more solidly political basis than the older Renaissance notion
of a shared classical heritage.
cosmopolitan historian of France is never entirely at ease with the narrative enterprise of history
Reconstruction
- Pierre Bayle's celebrated Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697)
did a great deal to re-establish history as a discrete field of knowledge capable of delivering truths whose
status could not be determined by Cartesian methodology.
Voltaire grew up intellectually during a period of reconstructive historical thinking
- Nicholas Freret - history as a separate cognitive field, and laid down the principles for an empirical method in
historical inquiry
- Voltaire came to write the 'Histoire' entry for the Encyclopidie,
devoted most of the piece to refuting the notion that history is an unreliable form of human knowledge
Two of the most significant histories of France to precede Voltaire's Siicle de Louis XIV, Mezeray's Histoire de
France (1643-51), and Daniel's Histoire de France (
lambasted by Voltaire Mezeray's work rarely rises above the annalistic, in spite of its stylishness. Daniel's
Histoire announces its ambition to avoid scepticism, in practice, it does not keep either of these promises.
Voltaire's solution to the poverty of national history and to the philosophical depreciation of history was
to effect a closer rapprochement between history and literature.
He executed and interpreted his plays and poems according to the neoclassical principles of criticism
elaborated in the late seventeenth century, and soon conceptualised his histories in similar ways.
Histories were conceptualised in similar fashion to a play
By arranging his histories within identifiable literary structures (not excluding the Essai sur les maurs), Voltaire hoped
to annex similar prestige to history.
Voltaire also imported from neoclassical theory the notion of 'vraisemblance' which encapsulated the
moral and aesthetic requirement that literature should treat only of the natural and probable, and never of
the fantastic.
Voltaire also embraced the ethical function performed by neoclassical literature; like poetry, history must
assert civilised standards, and harmonise moral, social and aesthetic values.
Voltaire constantly struggled to sustain history as a serious genre, and to resist the satirical treatment
which much of his material appeared to require.
Many features of Voltaire's historical method were worked out in this transition from poetry to prose.
 Voltaire argues that epic poetry, as well as having universal appeal, must mirror the peculiarities and meet
the specific needs of its country of origin.
Voltaire's critique of Charles is thrown into relief by his admiring presentation of the reforming and patriot Czar Peter
I of Russia.
Voltaire's first major history also incorporates, in an innovative way, the idea of a distinct critical voice, engendered
by this separately periodised modernity, which speaks from the cultural realm to the political sphere of history,
tradition and law.
Notion of the emancipation of art from tradition was a paradoxical and persistent feature of French
neoclassicism.
moderns tried to accelerate the detachment of French classicism from the classics, in the name of a
cultural nationalism which the ancients found both presumptuous and historically ignorant.
Voltaire thought of himself as a middle ground
- Voltaire found liberating this post-classical neoclassicism with its exuberant periodisation of modern
civilisation.
In the Siecle de Louis XIV, he would also try to situate himself as a writer in this normative modernity
from which to scrutinise history, politics and tradition.
- By avoiding both sustained irony and nostalgia, Voltaire can generate a secondary critical account of
eighteenth-century French modernity and nationality.
The Siicle is directly engaged with eighteenth-century political controversy, and is partly intended to
provide a critique of the legal theoretical foundations of these contemporary debates.
more than a mere annalistic or military history
Economic, military and legal reforms under Louis XIV, as well as improvements in technology and
communications, are described as modernisations
Voltaire showed increasing signs of the cosmopolitan historical sensibility
image of Europe as an increasingly civilised, culturally interdependent system of states.
- Voltaire's approach both reflects and accelerates the general desacralisation of the iconography of the French
monarchy during the eighteenth century.
The monarchy had not altogether lost its sacred and mystic aura by this time, but naturalistic images of
the king had started to prevail over eucharistic models
Voltaire derived energy for his historical writing from his urge to refute what he saw as Montesquieu's hopelessly
abstract sociology of laws by putting it to the test of history
The modernity of the age of Louis XIV is more seriously called into question by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes
Voltaire is fascinated and appalled by the disastrously inflexible character both of the French Protestants
and of the Jesuit-inspired repressive action of the state.
Voltaire finds on both sides a failure of Enlightenment, and a perverse unwillingness to subordinate
religious to civil interests
Progression/ cyclical
The era of Louis XV is one of relative artistic decline. Voltaire expresses the conventionally neoclassical
fear that, once the nation's language and the arts have been perfected in one epoch, they will inevitably be
corrupted in the next
Global History?
Voltaire's concept of world history is quite generous, embracing the Middle and Far East, though rarely
Africa.
Although Voltaire describes other civilisations as they develop in ways wholly independent of Europe, his
narrative shifts of perspective are usually strategic manoeuvres in which Europe remains his main subject.
The Decline and Fall, identifies Christianity as a major cause of the weakening and collapse of the Roman
Empire.
Enlightenment, Passion, Modernity - Mark S. Micale, Robert L. Dietle, Peter Gay

History is the recital of facts presented as true rather than fable which is the recital of facts presented as false

Voltaire distinguishes three kinds of content

1) History of opinions gathering together human errors
2) History of Arts combines knowledge of their invention and mechanisms
3) Natural History
Origins of history = stories told by fathers to children transmitted over the generations losing truth with each
retelling.
Therefore, most history is presented as true
The only undisputable monuments in historical interest are
1) Babylonian astronomical tables
2) Chinese calculation of solar eclipse
3) Arundel marbles
Most history is fable
There is no certitude in history
Modern historian has greater burden because of the accumulation of data and desire for accuracy in details.
Commends a style of history that is serious, pure, carried and agreeable
Voltaire recast historiography in both factual and analytical terms.
Not only did he reject traditional biographies and accounts that claim the work of supernatural forces, but
he went so far as to suggest that earlier historiography was rife with falsified evidence and required new
investigations at the source.
Such an outlook was not unique in that the scientific spirit that 18th-century intellectuals perceived
themselves as invested with.
A rationalistic approach was key to rewriting history
emphasized customs, social history and achievements in the arts and sciences. He was the first scholar to
make a serious attempt to write the history of the world, eliminating theological frameworks, and
emphasizing economics, culture and political history.
"One demands of modern historians more details, better ascertained facts, precise dates, more attention
to customs, laws, mores, commerce, finance, agriculture, population."
Already in 1739, he had written: "My chief object is not political or military history, it is the history of the
arts, of commerce, of civilization in a word, of the human mind.
He helped free historiography from antiquarianism
Peter Gay says Voltaire wrote "very good history", citing his "scrupulous concern for truths", "careful
sifting of evidence", "intelligent selection of what is important", "keen sense of drama", and "grasp of the
fact that a whole civilization is a unit of study

Voltaire and the necessity of Modern

How does one account for Voltaires presentism in a scenario that gives him a key role in the development of modern
historical thought?
However, it is not enough to say that academic history, especially in Germany, moved away from Voltaires present-
centered history, since important aspects of Voltaires approach can still be seen in eighteenth.
Whilst the Gottingen School may criticise Voltaire they still implement essential aspects of Voltaires program
regarding universal history. Like Bossuet and Voltaire, Schlozer was interested in the allgemeiner Blick132 and he
professed to study murs rather than kings and battles.
Schlosser admired Voltaire for passing judgment upon every other age, in the sober discretion of his own.
Like Voltaire, Ranke believed that universal history could not concern itself with the history of primitive peoples, and
the ancient histories of India and China could not be included because they belonged to the realm of the fabulous.
According to Meinecke, the most important thing that Voltaire and nineteenth-century historians have in common is
the sovereignty of historical judgment.
In Voltaire, this sovereignty is grounded in the values and preferences of the present. In Ranke, it is grounded in an
implausible timelessness that hides an actual grounding in the pre-judgments of the present.
Yet the rehabilitation of eighteenth-century historicism by Cassirer (and Peter Gay after him) was predicated on the
notion that Voltaire and his followers should be praised for their methodological advances but criticized for their naive
presentism
nothing naive about Voltaires presentism. Voltaire, as is apparent in his dialogue with Dubos, was deeply familiar
with the humanist artes historicae, and he deliberately moved away from this tradition because he felt that the
humanist art of distancing did not do justice to the claims of the present
Hayden White has argued, to the extent that it is a deliberate choice, Voltaires presentism is not a blind spot in his
approach.
Cassirer is quite right that modern historians have been insufficiently historical in their assessment of Voltaire.
However, we must take his reappraisal of Voltaire one step further: Voltaire is a major figure in the history of
historiography not in spite of his presentism (as Cassirer and Gay have argued), but because of it.
And faulting Voltaire for his presentism is naive, because it overlooks the presentism that underlies the entire
structure of modern historicism.
Voltaires contribution was to give voice to the claims of the present.

Cosmopolitanism and nationalism are formed at the same time

Is stadial and conjectural history
Montesquie
There is history in his work
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