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Chapter 9: The Romantic Idea of History
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c h a p t e r 9 The Romantic Idea of History Europe has always been “a civilization extremely attentive to its past,” wrote the French historian Marc Bloch. Their entire heritage has moved Europeans in a historical direction: “Our first masters, the Greeks and the Romans, were history-writing peoples. Christianity is a religion of historians.”1 In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this Western characteristic manifested itself in the widespread belief that, at least now in the modern age, European civilization was following a progressive course. Yet even these modern believers seldom agreed on the nature of “progress.” Does it consist in economic improvement? If so, the optimists might be right, if one extends the comparison with the past over a sufficiently long period. Or is it cultural? The ground for this belief remained shaky, as shown by the disputes, discussed in earlier chapters , about the superiority of the moderns versus the ancients. Or are we perhaps making moral progress? Kant and Voltaire firmly denied it. Still, at least most Europeans believed that the trend of civilization was generally moving upward. As the nineteenth-century French historian François Guizot declared in his lectures at the Sorbonne, the very term civilization implies that its members attempt to improve their position with respect to self-chosen goals. Paradoxically, it was the very idea of progress, with its connotation of gradual development, that led to the Revolution, which very abruptly changed the history of Europe and the European concept of history. The French Revolution was neither gradual nor continuous. Whereas the idea of progress treated the future as the natural outcome of history, the Revolution abruptly broke into history as if it were its eschatological 247 end.2 The present, formerly viewed as the conclusion of the past, came to be regarded as the beginning of a different future. Europeans who lived through the Revolution experienced a growing sense of discontinuity between past and future, as a rapid succession of new social structures , scientific theories, and technical inventions made it evident that their descendants would live in a very different world. With the impact of a sudden revelation, this sense of a secular eschatology raised unprecedently high, although undefined, expectations, as if humanity was finally about to reach its destiny. The Romantic assumes that history is moving toward a future that exceeds the limits of any previous finite goals. During the intense later phases of the French Revolution, few of those actively involved in it would have been able to mention any specific aim that they hoped to attain . All reports suggest that the Revolution itself had become the objective of their struggles and desires. Whatever particular reforms the revolutionaries may have had in mind at the beginning had become absorbed by a desire raised to an absolute level. We might say, with Paul Ricoeur, that the desire is no longer of beings, but of absolute Being. “From the very roots of my [finite] situation I aspire to be bound by [infinite ] Being. The search is itself torn between the ‘finitude’ of my questioning and the [infinite] ‘openness’ of Being.”3 The imagination thereby seeks for symbolic images of the absolute.4 To many in France and initially also in Germany, Napoleon’s victorious campaigns intimated the beginning of a world empire of justice and peace. The entire period revived the apocalyptic hopes and fears of earlier ages. Of course, soon came the sobering reversal of the Restoration and, with it, a return to the rational and the predictable. Historians again cautioned that expectations of the future had to be measured by historical precedents. History had not come to an end. By the time the revolution of 1848 ended, the older, gradual idea of progress had once again become the dominant ideology . Still, the transcendent aura of the term revolution had not entirely vanished. The socialist movements of the 1840s and 1850s often packed their programs in apocalyptic wrappings. Not everyone was happy with the constant changes and upheavals that began with the French Revolution. Jacob Burckhardt, the Swiss historian, denounced this “age of evolution,” as he called the nineteenth 248 | syntheses of roman tic thought century, for rupturing our spiritual continuity with the past. Early in the twentieth century, Paul Valéry wrote: “There have been too many surprises, too many things created and destroyed, and too many great and sudden developments have brutally interrupted the intellectual tradition .”5 Nonetheless, after Napoleon’s empire had fallen, many continued...