I recently finished a pair of books: The French: Portrait of a People by De Gramont and Barbarian Migration and the Roman West by Halsall. Both were interesting in their own right, but I found them even more fascinating from the standpoint of historiography. Both books were good reminders that history is not the dispassionate, factual, or objective enterprise that the general public mostly seems to regard it as. All history is subjective and reflects the worldviews, objectives, and morals of the historian (and the society in which the historian lives). They also reflect the selection bias that comes from the historians themselves: sedentary, bookish people who naturally focus more on affluent “civilized” regions where records are more plentiful, buildings and archives more accessible, research less dangerous, and funding more generous. The famous historian Ferdinand Braudel commented on this process when he tried to self-consciously correct for the lack of focus put on mountainous areas in compared to plains (as quoted in The Mediterranean, p.29) :

“The historian…tends to linger over the plain…and does not seem eager to approach the high mountains nearby. More than one historian who has never left the towns and their archives would be surprised to discover their existence. And yet how can one ignore these conspicuous actors?”

But what about historical facts themselves? Yes, facts exist in terms of events actually happening, but which facts to consider, how to interpret them, and where to put them in some sort of causal narrative requires a judgment call. At its most basic level, one has to realize that there are a near infinite number of data points which one could use to make sense of reality, and the choosing of which data points to use, from what perspective, and where they fit requires deliberate choices and normative stances. And these will change over time.

I often hear complaints about “rewriting history”, but history is rewritten each generation; narratives that are useful to the contemporary generation are kept, the rest are forgotten (until resurrected by a subsequent generation). One can see this trend clearly when reading history books from different centuries. It’s not merely a case of the heroes and villains being different, but also the units of analysis, the events considered, and of course the explanations. To further illustrate my point, consider three of the narratives from history discussed in The French and Barbarian Migrations about Vercingetorix, Joan of Arc, and barbarians in general.

Vercingetorix

If you have ever read the popular comic strip Asterix, you’re undoubtedly familiar with Vercingetorix, the Gaulish chieftain who surrendered to Ceasar. He is a heroic figure studied by every French school child. More specifically, he was one of the leaders of several rebellions against Rome that happened during the Roman occupation of Gaul. Why do we remember him and not any of the others? De Gramont points out that he gained some contemporary fame because Ceasar’s account of the Gallic wars made Vercingetorix his principal adversary. Though the revolt broke out among other tribes, Ceasar exaggerated the role of Vercingetorix to cover up his own mistakes, to explain the difficulties of the campaign, and (although not mentioned by De Gramont) surely to also to give his account of the war greater stakes and more characters the general public would be interested in.

It was especially convenient to make a hero out of Vercingetorix since Ceasar brought him with as a captive to Rome; this made Ceasar appear all the more heroic. Also, presenting Vercingetorix as a particularly outstanding general helped conceal the fact that the Gaulish resistance was more broadly based, and would not be overcome with the loss of just one leader. So, Vercingetorix was briefly famous (at least in Rome) during his lifetime, his role perhaps significantly exaggerated. His role in history was largely forgotten, however, until resurrected by nineteenth-century French historians as an emblem of French unity and patriotism. As de Gramont puts it (p.67):

“At a time of dismemberment, because of the loss of Alsace and Lorraine, the Arverni chief became the first authentic French patriot…He was presented as a brilliant military leader, whereas in fact he foolishly gathered his armies on the Alesia hill, a hopeless strategic position which was soon surrounded, and threw in his elite cavalry at the start of the battle, where it was uselessly destroyed…[yet] he was officially christened"the first resistance hero of French history.”

So, of all the possible things we might know about Gaulish resistance to Rome, the one that has made the biggest impact on received history is this chieftain, one of various ones who might have been chosen, whose role was made outsized by Ceasar for various self-serving reasons, subsequently relegated to obscurity, and made famous again by later French historians. If French nationalism grows feebler, Vercingetorix’s place in history may fade again. He emerges when needed.

Joan of Arc

Even more emblematic of this trend is the famous Joan of Arc. Her trial is one of the most famous in received history, and yet at the time her “three-month heresy trial and her death at the stake caused little public reaction. There was no rioting. She did not become an object of worship…To contemporaries, the judges were not English puppets but prelates with impressive reputations” (p.75). Rather than wanting to convict her, the judges were accused of dragging it out too long to try and spare her; one contemporary note read: “We are particularly surprised…that the cause of this woman commonly called the Maid is taking so long” (p.75).

This is not to say that she was not an important figure, but the sacredness of her character and the great outrage over her death came later. In 1450, King Charles directed an inquest into her death since it was obviously not politic for the Valois dynasty to be saved by someone burned as a heretic and a witch. The inquest, not surprisingly, found “a whole new batch of miracles…[and] in the end the dead Joan was so thoroughly rehabilitated that there could never in the future be the slightest danger of confusing her with the living Joan” (p.76).

If Joan of Arc’s legend was only due to the Valois dynasty, she would not have lasted. Every subsequent generation, however, has managed to reinvent Joan to suit its own times and purposes. John Calvin found her a symbol of idolatry, the French Philosophers scorned her for her rusticity, Voltaire hated her Catholicism, but Napolean cemented her importance. He erected a monument in her honour and restored an annual feast celebrating her life. Obviously, a French military hero dedicated to defeating the English was just the sort of person he was looking for. “But the cult of Joan”, writes de Gramont, “did not reach full ripeness until the defeat of 1870, when she became a symbol of vengeance…A new national holiday in her honour was decreed. Statues were inaugurated…The process of canonization was pressed. Children’s textbooks showed Joan on the cover…Her militant image saturated France.” (p.77). Later, during the First World War, Joan was also hailed as a model to reunite the French in the face of foreign opposition on their soil. And in modern times, feminists have found a hero in a Joan of Arc defying the patriarchy and assuming masculine gender roles. This follows a long tradition of appropriating Joan’s life: as a nationalist, a religious hero and martyr, a Charlatan, a lunatic, and even the first communist.

My point here is that both the facts and their interpretations are up for question. Joan of Arc represents many different things for different times and peoples. Nor has her fame been constant; her importance as a historical figure has been very different at different times.

Barbarians and Rome

Everyone knows the basic story of Rome: a hardy republic, transformed into a powerful empire, until eventually felled by the Barbarian hordes waiting just outside the borders. This is usually regarded as a major setback for civilization until Europe gets its act together in the Renaissance, essentially a return to Roman values. This is obviously a narrative that reflects the values of a post-Renaissance society, and one which they adopted, in part, because they were able to read the Roman sources that chronicled the invasion.

This interpretation of European history, however, has varied by nationality. For French and Italian historians, the “Barbarian Hordes = Dark Ages” narrative was a way to connect back to their own glorious, Romanized past. For German historians, however, the Barbarian (itself a loaded word) invasion was regarded as a good thing; a replacement of a decadent and despotic autocracy with a new virile, martial society, one which was regarded to have political norms based on a proto-democracy of free peasants (Halsell, p.11). Spanish historians, too, were often inclined to give a more heroic aspect to the invasions given that the later medieval Reconquista depended on the notion that they (the Spaniards) were the heirs of an earlier Visigoth kingdom (p.12). In England, the appeal of the narrative depended on the success of democracy. In later years, the ideals of British constitutional monarchy were held to derive from the Anglo-Saxons rather than from the Romans (p.13). It was also a reaction to French ideas that the progress of England was due to the Frankish invasion of William the Conqueror.

The identity of the Barbarians in question, too, was hotly contested. The rise of Germany in the 19th century coincided with a need to ground Germany in a mythical past, and to assume that the Germanic peoples who invaded Rome were indeed the same as the Germans of the 19th century. Indeed, German historians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries liked to imagine that modern Germany’s antipathy to the French was just a continuation of the ancient struggle between the noble, free Barbarians and the decadent, slavish Romans (see Lewis & Wigan, the Myth of Continents, 1998, p.58).

Of course, many other examples are possible, but these three are fresh in my mind having just finished these books. We might think of Vercingetorix, Jone of Arc, and “the Barbarian hordes” as indispensable, fairly uncontroversial parts of history, but their inclusion clearly reflects the values and objectives of contemporary historians and the social contexts in which they are embedded.