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De Achttiende Eeuw. Jaargang 46 (2014)

De Achttiende Eeuw. Jaargang 46

(2014)– [tijdschrift] Documentatieblad werkgroep Achttiende eeuw–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

Vorige Volgende

Introduction: The Enlightenment and the past
Old controversies and new perspectives
Wyger R.E. Velema

This introduction starts with a sketch of the most salient features of the historiography of the Enlightenment and demonstrates that the enlightened approach to the past was hugely influential and rapidly set new standards for historical writing all over Europe. It proceeds to explain how, from the late eighteenth century on, the prestige of Enlightenment historiography was undermined by a number of developments, including an unprecedented series of political revolutions, the emergence of a methodologically sophisticated academic history, and the rise of a romantic historical sensibility. It was not until the twentieth century that the historiography of the Enlightenment was rehabilitated. The introduction ends with an overview of the most recent developments in the study of Enlightenment historiography and, against that background, a discussion of the various contributions to this issue of De Achttiende Eeuw.

The historical thought of the Enlightenment

Enlightenment historians were, on the whole, rather pleased with their own achievement. They had every reason for this self-assured estimate of their contribution to the civilization of their time. History was more popular than ever before. The great works of Enlightenment historiography, from Voltaire's Siècle de Louis XIV and Essai sur les moeurs et l'esprit des nations to David Hume's History of England and Edward Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, had found their way to the polite reading public of the eighteenth century.1 Against this background, Hume's frequently cited remark that he was living in ‘the historical Age’ seems fully understandable and appropriate.2 Yet it was not just popular success which underpinned the self-confidence of the Enlightenment historians. They could also and with considerable plausibility claim to have reshaped the entire field of historical studies beyond recognition.

At the dawn of the Enlightenment, historiography clearly was in deep trouble. The great tradition of classical narrative and political history was still alive, but it had taken a merciless pounding from the adherents of the new

historical Pyrrhonism. This powerful seventeenth-century current of skeptical thought, running from Descartes through La Mothe le Vayer to Pierre Bayle, had exposed the inevitably biased nature of the historian's enterprise and had cast grave doubt on the reliability of both ancient and modern historical knowledge.3 The challenge of Pyrrhonism could to some extent be effectively met by a further refinement of the techniques of erudite antiquarianism, but antiquarian studies did not result in polished historical narratives and were therefore unable to reach an audience larger than that of specialists.4 Finally, as far as the grand scheme of history was concerned, it had become clear that the kind of providential history as still recounted in Bossuet's Discours sur l'histoire universelle (1681) was no longer credible or acceptable after the crise de la conscience européenne, but an alternative comprehensive account of history had yet to emerge.5 Confronted with these predicaments, the men (and some women) of the Enlightenment energetically set to work and, with their ingenious blend of narrative, erudition and philosophie, succeeded in breathing new life into historiography. It cannot be doubted that a prominent role in the initial phase of this collective endeavor was played by Voltaire. He was the one who not only squarely took on providential history as represented by the likes of Bossuet, but also succeeded in replacing it with his own enlightened ‘philosophie de l'histoire’. In Voltaire's new philosophical history it was no longer God who determined the course of events, but the progress of the human mind, the ‘progrès de l'esprit humain’. History therefore became the story of secular development. Momentous as this breakthrough was, it was by no means the only significant contribution Voltaire made to the historiography of the Enlightenment. For not only did he insist that history was the story of the secular progress of the human mind, he also pointed out and demonstrated that this story could not be told in terms of European history alone. Nor could it be reconstructed through the deeds of kings, statesmen and soldiers, the protagonists of classical narrative history. An enlightened historiography worthy of its name needed both a broad geographical scope and an emphasis on society and culture rather than on politics.6

Important and indispensable as both Voltaire's suggestions for an enlightened ‘philosophie de l'histoire’ and his actual historical writings were, they were neither entirely original, nor did they solve all the problems eighteenth-

century historians were struggling with. Voltaire's philosophy of history heavily leaned on the historical genealogy of the Enlightenment which had emerged from the querelle des anciens et des modernes.7 Soon, however, other practitioners of the new historiography began to point out that writing history in terms of the progress of the ‘esprit humain’ was not entirely satisfactory. That story, they observed, needed a firm and systematic grounding in the material aspects of the past. Attempting to develop a general law of historical development, they formulated the immensely influential four stages theory of history.8 But there was an even more fundamental area in which Voltaire's approach to history was deemed to be seriously flawed. Writing history for overtly polemical purposes, Voltaire had demonstrated a deep contempt for the exact details of history. ‘Woe to details! Posterity neglects them all; they are a kind of vermin that undermines large works’, he confidently wrote to the abbé Dubos in 1738.9 Yet it had precisely been the refusal of historians working in the tradition of classical and humanist historiography to base their work on the detailed and trustworthy findings of erudite antiquarianism which had made them so vulnerable to the biting criticism of the historical Pyrrhonists. In a process that reached its culmination in Gibbon's learned tomes, many enlightened historians after Voltaire therefore strove to integrate antiquarian findings into their narrative histories and thereby may be said to have laid the foundations for the modern practice of history.10

By the time Gibbon's Decline and Fall started appearing in 1776, a new and enlightened historiography had thus firmly established itself. It had effectively fought off the threat of historical Pyrrhonism by integrating erudition and narrative. Replacing providential history with the secular vistas of philosophie, it offered new master narratives conceived in terms of the progress of the human mind or the progress of society through the stages of hunting, pasturage, agriculture, and commerce. It had freed itself from the limiting classical and humanist focus on politics and war and had expanded the field of historical inquiry to include the economy, society, and culture. The geographical scope of this new history, moreover, was considerable. Indeed, when Edmund Burke in 1777 wrote a letter to congratulate William Robertson with the appearance of his History of America, he emphasized the fact that historians were now writing about the history of the entire world: ‘The Great

Map of Mankind is unrolld at once; and there is no state or Gradation of barbarism, and no mode of refinement which we have not at the same instant under view’.11

Aspects of this new enlightened historiography were rapidly appropriated all over Europe. In the Dutch Republic, where humanist traditions remained strong, historians began to experiment with enlightened history rather late. But they too did in the end embrace key aspects of the new approach to history, as various contributions in this issue of De Achttiende Eeuw make clear.12 Where the main themes of enlightened historiography were still relatively absent from Jan Wagenaar's enormously successful Vaderlandsche Historie, published in 21 volumes between 1749 and 1759, during the following decades historians such as Simon Stijl and Cornelis Zillesen quickly made up for this deficiency.13 By 1780 Elie Luzac, an ardent admirer of the historical writings of David Hume and William Robertson, could approvingly observe:

In recent years, people have started to write a different kind of history. It is no longer considered beneath the dignity of the human mind to know how countries became populated, how civil societies arose and developed. This new history has established that civil society owes more to industry and diligence in the arts, commerce, and navigation, than to the devastating art of war; and that, where the latter is needed for the protection of country and people, it is only the former that can assure a happy and pleasant life.14

An even more glowing Dutch tribute to the accomplishments of the Enlightenment in the field of historiography was delivered by the last Grand Pensionary of the Dutch Republic, Laurens Pieter van de Spiegel, himself a historian of considerable merit. Deposed from his functions and incarcerated in 1795, Van de Spiegel spent his time in prison trying to come to grips with the meaning of the Enlightenment. It was an intellectual movement he regarded with a great measure of ambivalence. It had in his eyes replaced intellectual depth with a superficial breadth of knowledge in many areas, had led to the profound misunderstanding that informed and uninformed judgments were of equal worth, and had suffered from a completely unfounded overestimation of its own achievements. For whereas it was certainly undeniable that the

age of Enlightenment had in many ways removed the ‘rust of Barbarism’ from European civilization, it was also true that it had remained inferior to the civilization of the ancients.15 Yet despite all such objections it had to be admitted that the Enlightenment had brought some fields of human endeavor to previously unknown heights. Prominent among these was the writing of history. Classical and humanist historiography had systematically failed to address the most important topics:

History, as it used to be practiced before our century, told the story of the acts of the Great, rather than those of the Peoples; it was about Kings, not about human beings; it consisted of little more than a dry chronological sequence, an endless cycle of wars, battles, conquests, revolutions, oppression and violence: such topics were certainly not altogether useless to know about, but History has the potential to teach us about far more useful matters.16

And it was this potential, Van de Spiegel maintained, that the historiography of the Enlightenment had unleashed, thereby raising itself far above the level of even the greatest of the Greek and Roman historians:

The Historians of our Time have tried to explain the origin of Civil Societies, their good and bad aspects, and the natural consequences thereof; they have made clear to us the progress of Civilization, and the fruits of the Arts and Sciences; the bonds between Peoples both of the old and the new World constituted by Traffic and Commerce. In a word, they have written the History of Human Beings for Human Beings and in their hands history has developed into a veritable school for this and the next Centuries.17

Whatever else might according to Van de Spiegel have been wrong with the Enlightenment, it had clearly been a great and unambiguous blessing for the study of the past.

Enlightenment historiography attacked and vindicated

At the very moment the precepts of enlightened historiography were increasingly finding acceptance all over Europe, however, a massive attack on this approach to the past was already in the making. This should of course not unduly surprise us, since it is quite usual for intellectual fashions to pass, and for styles of thought to replace each other. Yet the forces - political, institutional,

and cultural - undermining the historical worldview of the Enlightenment were experienced as particularly powerful by contemporaries, and they succeeded in utterly ruining its reputation for a very long time to come. In the political arena, it was the impact of the French revolution (an expression here used as shorthand for all the political upheavals of the time) which wiped away the relatively serene historical universe of the enlightened historians. This had been a universe of slow historical development, in which the improvement of the human mind or the progress of society through different stages had played a central role, but in which it had also remained possible to see a measure of continuity between the past and the present and to acknowledge, for instance, that the moderns firmly stood on the shoulders of the ancients. Despite all the changes the Enlightenment had brought to the theory and practice of history, the past had retained its role as magister vitae. The shock of the cataclysmic political events of the late eighteenth century suddenly brought this sense of continuity to an end, convinced many contemporary observers that a deep and permanent rupture between the past on the one hand and the present and the future on the other had opened up, and thus inaugurated a new régime d'historicité. It was a régime in which the past was no longer seen as capable in any direct way of providing lessons for human action in the present, but was increasingly regarded as different and distant, perhaps even as an object of passive nostalgia.18

The second development which brought the historiography of the Enlightenment into disrepute might be termed institutional: it was the rise of academic history and its attendant methodology. The historians of the Enlightenment had, as we have seen, been highly aware of the threat posed by historical Pyrrhonism. In order to fend it off, they had increasingly distanced themselves from the rhetorical nature and techniques of classical and humanist historiography. Instead, they turned to the findings of erudite antiquarianism to give their historical narratives a solid base in ascertainable and dependable fact. Even though their frequently somewhat casual practice often fell short of their own prescripts, the marriage between history and antiquarianism the historians of the Enlightenment brought off may be said to have constituted a highly significant breakthrough. Their immediate successors, however, regarded it as entirely inadequate. The austere German professional scholars who, from the second half of the eighteenth century on, were turning history into a methodologically stringent academic discipline insisted that it was not

enough to simply use the findings of erudite antiquarians. Historians themselves had to become rigorous and consummate practitioners of the ‘philologisch-kritische Methode’. Pioneered by Göttingen historians such as Gatterer and Schlözer, further refined by Niebuhr, this demanding type of source criticism was brought to perfection by the man who came to embody the new academic history: Leopold von Ranke.19 Ranke even went one step further and argued that applying the critical method to source material was not enough. In addition, the historian had permanently to immerse himself in the archives. Indeed, as Anthony Grafton has observed, ‘collections of primary sources and folders of archival acts acted on Ranke like clover on a pig’.20 In the light of this rapid professionalization of academic history, the rise of the critical method, and the ‘archival turn’ in history, the historiography of the Enlightenment could in nineteenth-century retrospect appear as at best amateurish and naive, at worst entirely devoid of worth.

Neither the sudden break in historical continuity brought about by the French revolution nor the methodological refinements of the new academic history, however, were as harmful to the reputation of enlightened historiography as was the rise of a new romantic historical sensibility. Romanticism, it has justly been remarked by Tim Blanning, by its very nature ‘does not lend itself to precise definition, exegesis and analysis’ and no attempt to provide any of these will be made here.21 Yet in order to understand the profound aversion many nineteenth-century commentators came to feel for the historiography of the previous century, a brief look at the impact of the elusive ‘romantic revolution’ on the theory and practice of history is indispensable. Historians have long struggled to capture the precise nature of the changes romanticism brought to the perception of the past. One of the more intriguing, and certainly one of the more elegant attempts was made by the Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga. For Huizinga, the roots of the romantic perception of the past were to be sought in a changing conception of nature. Whereas the eighteenth century had regarded nature as a mechanical phenomenon that could be rationally studied, Huizinga argued, the end of the eighteenth century saw the rise of an esthetic appreciation of the natural world, a world that now came to be regarded as better approached through the creative imagination than through rational analysis. This shift in turn deeply influenced the perception of

the past: ‘The entire way the past is viewed changes: it is no longer a model, an example, a rhetorical arsenal or a cabinet of curiosities, but fills the mind with longing for the faraway and the strange, with the desire to intimately experience that which once existed’.22 Later commentators have generally followed Huizinga's emphasis on the importance of the abandonment of the mechanical view of nature and its consequences for the ways in which history was perceived. They have in addition, among other things, explored the romantic fascination with the lost world of medieval religiosity, the romantic aversion to historical generalizations and the obsession with historical particularity, and the romantic desire to evoke rather than to analyze the past.23 Taken together, these shifts clearly meant that for the nineteenth century the historical universe of the Enlightenment had completely lost its relevance. Summarizing matters in his habitual extreme way, Thomas Carlyle in 1830 concluded that the analytical Enlightenment ‘cause-and-effect speculators, with whom no wonder would remain wonderful, but all things in Heaven and Earth must be computed and ‘accounted for’ [...] have now wellnigh played their part in European culture; and may be considered [...] verging towards extinction’.24

Looking back from a much later perspective at the political, institutional and cultural developments which at the end of the eighteenth century and in the early decades of the nineteenth century were held to have definitively undermined the premises of the historiography of the Enlightenment, we may well somewhat relativize their decisive importance. The French revolution, we may now conclude, was indeed a rupture which deeply changed the way the past was perceived, but so were the crise de la conscience européenne and the querelle des anciens et des modernes of the decades around 1700.25 The new academic historians may have poured scorn on their Enlightenment predecessors, but we are now in a position to recognize that in their attempts to combine research and narrative they were in fact deeply indebted to the historical achievement of the eighteenth-century. And in some areas, for instance in its renewed narrowing down of the subject matter of history to politics, we have come to regard their work as an impoverishment of the grand

historical vision of the Enlightenment.26 Even the profound change in historical sensibility brought about by romanticism, the enduring importance of which is beyond dispute, in retrospect turns out to have left ample room for the survival of themes first broached in Enlightenment historiography.27 Yet the fact remains that the nineteenth century came to regard the historical achievement of the Enlightenment as entirely inadequate and that its verdict has continued to resonate in scholarship for a remarkably long time. Even the eminent and subtle historian Friedrich Meinecke, who had come to regard the historical thought of the Enlightenment with a certain measure of sympathy, nonetheless persisted in discussing it as hardly more than a necessary preliminary stage for the development of Historismus.28 Many other and less gifted historians until deep into the twentieth century simply continued uncritically to echo the polemical pronouncements of their nineteenth-century predecessors.29

It was also in the course of the twentieth century, however, that ever stronger signs of a rehabilitation of the historical thought of the Enlightenment began to emerge. Ironically, this process started in Germany, the very country which had played such a prominent role in vilifying the ‘superficial’ historical worldview of the Enlightenment. As early as 1901, Wilhelm Dilthey vigorously attacked the romantic cliché of an ahistorical Enlightenment in his essay ‘Das achtzehnte Jahrhundert und die geschichtliche Welt’.30 Some thirty years later the influential philosopher Ernst Cassirer followed in Dilthey's footsteps. In his Die Philosophie der Aufklärung, originally published in 1932 and translated into English in 1951, he devoted an entire chapter to the Enlightenment's ‘conquest of the historical world’ and began it with the provocative observation that ‘the common opinion that the eighteenth century was an ‘unhistorical century’, is not and cannot be justified’.31 It took a while for these historiographical clarion calls to reach the Anglophone world of scholarship, but at the 1963 First International Congress on the Enlightenment Hugh Trevor-Roper, perhaps the most brilliant British historian of his generation, lectured the audience on ‘The Historical Philosophy of the Enlightenment’. Although Trevor-Roper's speech was in many ways rather bizarre, for instance in anachronistically crediting the philosophes with the invention of ‘the concept of the organic nature of

society’, he made it abundantly clear that the Enlightenment had produced a ‘positive historiographical revolution’, a revolution richly deserving of further and more detailed study.32 This challenge was taken up in the second volume of Peter Gay's The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, which appeared in 1969. In his chapter ‘History: Science, Art, and Propaganda’, Gay lambasted the nineteenth-century critique of Enlightenment historiography as ‘partisan and time-bound’. He proceeded to claim that the philosophes had revolutionized the study of history and that the new map of the past they had drawn was still ‘recognizable and usable - in many respects our map’. To demonstrate the truth of this rather bold claim, he pointed to the way the Enlightenment had definitively secularized history, had dramatically expanded the range of its topics, and had vastly extended its reach in both space and time.33 Gay's was in many ways a bravura performance and certainly still had its uses, but it also made clear that the debate on the historical thought of the Enlightenment had now become stuck in a series of rather facile and less than fruitful binary oppositions. Indeed, the endless attempts to determine whether the historical thought of the Enlightenment was modern or not now slowly began to appear as distractions from what was still sadly lacking at the time Peter Gay wrote his chapter: a history of Enlightenment historical thought with a genuine historical character.34

New perspectives

Over the past few decades, steps towards such a more genuinely historical history of Enlightenment historiography have indeed been taken. Developments, however, have been rather slow and the history of historiography has certainly not undergone a methodological transformation comparable to that of the history of political thought.35 Yet even a brief look at recent general discussions of Enlightenment historiography demonstrates that questions regarding its ‘modernity’ are fortunately no longer as prominent as they used to be and that, instead, serious attempts are now being made to understand it in its various early modern and eighteenth-century contexts.36 One of the

areas in which this new emphasis has produced fruitful results is that of the analysis of the grand themes of Enlightenment historiography. As we have seen, Enlightenment historians, having swept aside the master narrative of providential history, in their attempts to provide secular explanations for the course of history introduced new overarching themes such as the progress of the human mind and the succession of various economic stages. Yet precisely how these themes were reflected in the way these historians wrote their works until recently remained largely unexplored. Through the work of Karen O'Brien and, above all, J.G.A. Pocock, however, we are now able to discern how the historians of the Enlightenment slowly forged an ‘enlightened narrative’ which revolved around the gradual emergence of a system of sovereign European states, sharing a commercial and polite culture, from the long darkness of medieval ‘barbarism and religion’.37 At the same time, it has become increasingly clear that, despite the progressive nature of the ‘enlightened narrative’, the work of many enlightened historians remained more deeply entangled with the heritage of the classical and the humanist historians than had previously been supposed. This is, for instance, quite evident in the explanations the Enlightenment offered for a historical occurrence with which it was almost obsessively preoccupied, the decline and fall of the Roman Empire: these remained largely classical and humanist.38 But the continued relevance and importance of the ancients also emerges in other contexts. The outcome of the querelle can no longer be regarded as an unambiguous victory for the modernes; classical historical examples turn out to have lost very little if any of their power in the eighteenth century, and enlightened historians freely kept combining linear and cyclical historical perspectives.39

This move towards a less anachronistic and more nuanced understanding of the main features of Enlightenment historical thought has been further reinforced by the fact that the lesser figures in Enlightenment historiography are now starting to receive the attention they deserve. It has long been one of the main tenets of the Cambridge school that the writings of the creative geniuses of political thought can only be properly understood against the background of the more conventional works of their contemporaries. The same may be said to hold true for the great works of historiography. It is

therefore a substantial gain that the study of Enlightenment historical thought is now in the process of considerably broadening its scope. This more inclusive approach has already produced significant new insights. It has, for instance, led to an entirely novel appreciation of the great importance the Enlightenment attached to the production of narrative histories of ancient Greece and Rome and has revived the reputation of previously ignored authors such as the abbé Vertot, Louis de Beaufort, and Nathaniel Hooke.40 As a result, general surveys of Enlightenment historical thought can now no longer be written without paying ample attention to the eighteenth-century study of the ancient world.41 Important as such detailed and meticulous reconstructions of the historiographical landscape of the eighteenth century are, they are only part of a more encompassing modification of our interpretation of the historical thought of the Enlightenment. Of equal significance to this enterprise has been the recent emphasis on the fact that the historical interest of the Enlightenment manifested itself in a multiplicity of genres not ordinarily included in the study of historiography. The querelle of the decades around 1700, for instance, has traditionally been regarded as primarily a literary quarrel. As Larry Norman has convincingly shown, however, it ultimately revolved around different conceptions of the uses of the past and should therefore be included in any account of the historical thought of the eighteenth century.42 Similarly, Mark Phillips has drawn our attention to the fact that in eighteenth-century Britain historical thought manifested itself in many different genres and that there was a much ‘greater diversity in historiographical practice than we generally acknowledge’.43 Over the past decades, in short, it has become increasingly clear that a proper study of the historical thought of the Enlightenment can no longer limit itself to a few canonical authors. Their accomplishments can only be understood against the background of the historical writing of a host of nowadays lesser known historians and can only be properly appreciated in the context of a broader world of historical thought traceable through a great variety of genres.

Many of the themes adumbrated in this introduction are taken up in the various articles published in this issue of De Achttiende Eeuw, which is largely devoted to the study of eighteenth-century historical thought. The first contribution, by Jacques Bos, offers the reader a broad survey of the ways in

which the entire early modern period conceived of its relationship to the past. Following what by now has become a familiar line of argument, Bos insists that the anachronistic search for the historical origins of nineteenth-century historicism has marred much previous scholarship on the historical thought of the early modern period. Instead, he contends, we should focus our attention on the specific nature of the early modern interest in the past. Starting in the Renaissance, early modern historical thought could no longer conceive of the past as entirely similar to and continuous with the present. Yet neither did it regard the past as in all respects fundamentally different from the present, as historicism would later do. It was precisely this highly ambivalent attitude, most clearly manifested in the endless debates about the respective merits of the ancients and the moderns, which constituted the most salient characteristic of early modern historical thought, to which Bos sees the historical thought of the Enlightenment as still emphatically belonging.

The remaining four articles all focus on aspects of historical thought in the eighteenth-century Dutch Republic. This emphasis is a most welcome one, since despite the fact that scholarly interest in the Dutch Enlightenment has blossomed over the past decades, the varieties of eighteenth-century Dutch historiography have hitherto remained curiously underexplored. It has already been pointed out in the above that the Dutch approach to the past remained largely traditional and humanist until deep into the eighteenth century. Eventually, however, many Dutch historians came to embrace the changed orientation and the new themes of international Enlightenment historiography. They did so in contexts that were specific to the eighteenth-century Dutch Republic, such as the existence of a strongly republican political culture, the synthesis of protestantism and Enlightenment that had emerged in the course of the century, and the steadily growing public perception of economic, moral and political decline.44 These particular features of the Dutch intellectual and cultural scene could and did in many cases lead to a marked historiographical preoccupation with the history of the Dutch Republic itself. Yet, as Eleá de la Porte convincingly demonstrates in her contribution, Dutch eighteenth-century historians also invested considerable energy in studying more comprehensive themes. Indeed, they produced no fewer than three histories of the entire world. In keeping with recent scholarly trends, De la Porte's article analyzes a lesser known historiographical genre and demonstrates its importance for our understanding of Enlightenment historical thought. Writing world histories

was, of course, a form of historiography with a long tradition behind it.45 What makes De la Porte's story so fascinating is that she is able to show how this age-old genre was gradually yet completely transformed by the incorporation of the themes, methods and techniques that we have come to associate with Enlightenment historical thought. While she carefully avoids the temptation to present this development in terms of the rise of historiographical modernity, De la Porte nonetheless makes it abundantly clear that the late eighteenth-century historical universe of Martinus Stuart, with its highly developed interest in the secular progress of society, was fundamentally different from the early eighteenth-century one of Geerlof Suikers and Isaak Verburg.

Where Eleá de la Porte rescues a hitherto largely neglected genre of Dutch eighteenth-century historical writing from undeserved oblivion, Jan Rotmans focuses on the historical interests of a widely known but seldom studied Dutch enlightened historian: Cornelis Zillesen. This turns out to be a fruitful choice, since Zillesen's approach to the past reveals a great deal about the tensions and ambivalences to be found in enlightened historical thought. Zillesen was a tax collector, a land measurer, an inventor, an enthusiastic participant in enlightened sociability, and a passionate although rather inconsistent contributor to the political debates of the last two decades of eighteenth century. Above all, however, he was a prolific publicist, who authored, among many other works, two multi-volume histories largely devoted to the Dutch past. Zillesen's historical thought, Rotmans argues, was the result of a complicated and never entirely resolved balancing act between two seemingly incompatible approaches to history. On the one hand, he clearly adopted the main tenets of the ‘enlightened narrative’. He was in no doubt whatsoever that history could be told as a story of human progress, in which eighteenth-century Europe could be held to have surpassed not only the barbarous middle ages, but also the civilizations of the ancient world. On the other hand, his historical outlook remained profoundly shaped by the classical republican view of history, in which the everlasting cycle of virtue and corruption implied the everlasting rise and decline of states. To Zillesen, it was entirely certain ‘that every people reaches a certain level of development, and, having reached that point, naturally declines again’. This was a view he even held on to after both the French and the Batavian revolution. His historical thought therefore evidently casts doubt on the well-known thesis that the late eighteenth-century revolutions constituted such a dramatic rupture that

an entirely new and modern régime d'historicité became inevitable.46 Among practitioners of the history of political thought it has by now become a widely accepted view that the revolutionary era of the late eighteenth century cannot possibly be comprehended as the unambiguous beginning of modernity. Rotmans's contribution powerfully suggests that the same may hold true for the historical thought of those turbulent decades.

The final two historiographical contributions to this issue of De Achttiende Eeuw continue the exploration of relatively unfamiliar dimensions of eighteenth-century Dutch historical thought. Christophe Madelein's article takes the reader into the world of literature and illustrates the fact that the study of texts not habitually regarded as belonging to the province of historiography may nonetheless yield important insights into the eighteenth-century sense of the past.47 His topic is the eighteenth-century Dutch epic. Madelein's contribution is similar to that of Eleá de la Porte in that it tries to come to grips with the ways in which the enlightened eighteenth-century impinged upon a highly traditional and very old genre. It is, of course, dissimilar, because the epic was a literary genre governed by strictly classical rules of content and composition. An epic was supposed to relate the elevated deeds of elevated heroes in a highly stylized setting. Madelein, however, successfully demonstrates that the eighteenth-century Dutch epic loosened up these rather strict rules. Whereas seventeenth-century Dutch epics had predominantly dealt with biblical themes, the later eighteenth century saw the emergence of the history of the Dutch nation as one of the most desirable themes for epic treatment. This development, which may be said to have started with Onno Zwier van Haren's The Beggars (1771), was accompanied by a significant change in the subject matter of the epic. It has repeatedly been pointed out in this introduction that the Enlightenment considerably broadened the scope of history and rejected the exclusive classical and humanist focus on the exemplary deeds of mighty kings, statesmen and soldiers. Similarly, the eighteenth-century Dutch historical epic moved away from the great deeds of elevated heroes to emphasize the pious simplicity and love of the family and the fatherland evinced by common Dutchmen throughout the centuries. It thus both mirrored and contributed to a broad shift in the way the past was perceived.

In Mathijs Boom's discussion of the historical work of Adriaan Kluit we encounter yet another face of eighteenth-century Dutch historical

thought and we are reaching the outer limits of the historical world of the Enlightenment. In many ways Kluit, who undoubtedly was one of more celebrated Dutch historians of the later eighteenth century, remained a typical early modern historian. His great work, the History of the States Government of Holland, published in five volumes between 1802 and 1805, while perhaps ‘singularly prosaic and prolix’, was nonetheless a ‘stunning compendium’ of the Dutch constitutional debate as it had been conducted ever since the sixteenth-century Revolt.48 He repeatedly made it clear, moreover, that he believed history and politics to be intimately connected and he enthusiastically put this conviction into practice by frequently harnessing his historical findings to his conservative political preferences. At the same time, however, Kluit was in some respects evidently moving beyond what had by his time become the conventional practices of Enlightenment historiography in the Dutch Republic. This no doubt had something to do with the fact that, in contrast to many of his contemporary fellow historians, Kluit was an academic, who spent most of his life as a professor at Leiden University. Yet far more important, as Boom rightly stresses, was the fact that he was deeply influenced by the profound transformation German historical scholarship was undergoing at the end of the eighteenth century.49 As a result, Kluit turned against what he had come to regard as the amateurish historical methods of his Dutch contemporaries and insisted that history should be thoroughly empirical and based on the most advanced techniques of source criticism. With Adriaan Kluit, in short, we find ourselves on the threshold of the academic and professional way of doing history that would come to dominate the nineteenth century.

About the author:

Wyger R.E. Velema is Jan Romein Professor of History at the University of Amsterdam. He has widely published on the eighteenth century, including Enlightenment and Conservatism in the Dutch Republic. The Political Thought of Elie Luzac (1721-1796) (1993) and Republicans. Essays on Eighteenth-Century Dutch Political Thought (2007). He is currently working on a study of the role of the classics in Dutch Enlightenment culture. E-mail: wre.velema@uva.nl

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