Almacenamiento de las mediciones

Two works of historia literaria in particular give an impression of the size and variety of 18th-century historical production: Charles-Marie Fevret de Fontette’s Bibliothèque histori- que de la France (1768-78) and Ludwig Wachler’s Geschichte der Historischen Forschung und Kunst (1812-20). The Bibliothèque historique was a continuation of an earlier work with the same title by Jacques Le Long (1712); originally in one folio, Fevret and his fellow Benedic- tines of St. Maur (who finished it after his death in 1772) expanded it to five folios with nearly 1000 double-columned pages each. To distinguish his own contributions from Le Long’s, Fevret marks new articles with a pointed finger icon and additions to the text with [ ]. Thus, while marking the progress that was made in historical production since Le Long, Fevret also maintains a sense of continuity.

The Bibliothèque Historique de la France is divided up in five categories: I. Prélimi- naires (géographie, histoire naturelle, histoire des Gaules); II. Histoire ecclésiastistique; III. Histoire politique; IV. Histoire civile; V. Histoire littéraire. This division was retained from Jacques Le Long’s earlier version, apart from the self-referential fifth category, Histoire littéraire, which was added to the extended version. Of these categories, Histoire politique was by far the largest, dealing with kings, laws, and treaties; Histoire civile deals with re- gions, noble houses, and cities. Fevret does not make a distinction between histories and sources, and thus the pages are filled with treaties, letters, journals, and annals, especially in the political and civil sections. Thanks to better cataloguing in the Bibliothèque du Roy, Fevret is able to add a lot of manuscript sources, which Le Long could only treat in an hap- hazard manner. At the end of Volume IV (the fifth is filled with various indexes) he adds a catalogue of his own immense collection of prints and portraits, which he sold off to the

12 For recent hypotheses on what happened to the Republic of Letters, see Laurence Brockliss, “Start- ing-out, getting-on and becoming famous in the eighteenth-century Republic of Letters”, in A. Ho- lenstein, H. Steinke & M. Stuber (eds.), Scholars in Action. The Practice of Knowledge and the Figure

of the Savant in the 18th Century (Leiden: Brill 2013), Vol. I, 71-100: 99-100; Olaf Simons, “Von der

Respublica Literaria zum Literaturstaat? Überlegungen zur Konstitution des Literarischen”, in M. Füssel & M. Mulsow (eds.), Gelehrtenrepublik (Aufklärung Vol. 26; Hamburg: Meiner 2014), 292-330: 302ff

royal library two years before his death, and which became the basis of its collection d’étamp- es; thus the updated Bibliothèque is also a repertory for non-printed and visual sources.

Wachler’s Geschichte der Historischen Forschung und Kunst was the last part to be com- pleted of the Göttingen mega-project Geschichte der Künste und Wissenschaften seit dem Wiederherstellung derselben bis zur Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts (1796-1820), which further included histories of art, classical studies, literature, philosophy, mathematics, Kriegskunde, physics, chemistry, technology, theology, and culture and learning at large, each in several (up to a dozen) volumes. As a collective enterprise, the Göttingen Geschichte was larger, more systematically divided, and more up-to-date than any other historia literaria pub- lished previously. Some of its parts remained unfinished or unwritten; the initiator of the project, theologian Johann Gottfried Eichhorn, and its most prestigious author, historian Arnold Heeren, abandoned the project after a few years, leaving the general introduction and the history of philology half-written, and volumes on law and medicine are lacking. Still the project should not be written off as a colossal failure: three quarters of the sched- uled parts indeed were finished, and the volumes on physics, art, and literature could even count as pioneer works. Several authors, including Wachler, are ambiguous between a con- ventional bibliographic format and a more narrative style. The Göttingen Geschichte, then, though not wholly the end of historia literaria, is a document of how the genre bursts out of its limits.

Wachler is more selective than the Bibliothèque historique. He aims to give a complete overview of historiography in Europe since the Renaissance, but he does not attempt to include every author or every document. The amount of different categories varies with regard to the amount and relevance of historical production in a certain time and nation. Thus Portugal in the Fünfte Periode (1750-present) fills three pages without further subdi- visions. Germany in the same period divides into Historiomathie, Chronologie, Münzkunde, Genealogie und Heraldik, Diplomatik, Schriftstellerkunde, Universalgeschichte, Geschichte ein- zelner Staaten, Litteraturgeschichte, Kirchengeschichte, Teutschland’s Geschichte, Diplomatische Spezialgeschichte, Geschichte einzelner teutschen Staaten, Allgemeine Geschichte Teutschlands. France and England, which Wachler regards as the other two great historical nations, have equally long but different lists. Also, where Fevret puts titles in a numbered list, Wachler fits them into a running narrative.

Fevret’s bibliography is sorted according to subject matter, that is, particular regions, noble houses, congregations et al. Wachler’s categories, on the other hand, rather identify groups of texts that have a family resemblance, either from treating the same subject mat- ter (coins, maps, learned men) or from belonging to the same genre (Litteraturgeschichte, Universalgeschichte). This results in a less fully consistent, but more coherent overview than Fevret’s; the consequence of Fevret’s approach is that rather disparate works are being put together in the same category. It is not a random heap: the most important reference works are listed at the beginning of each section, and Fevret singles out particularly important works by a lengthier description and comment. Wachler, on the other hand, does not sim- ply list books but discusses the state of a certain field with mention of the leading authors and their main works; several thousand authors overall, and approximately a thousand

for the period after 1750. His overview is more uniform in the type of works listed: for instance, his paragraphs on Litteraturgeschichte in different countries are mainly filled with compendia, while Fevret’s 200 pages on Histoire littéraire also include dissertations on the state of learning, university decrees, pro- and anti-Jesuit tracts, éloges, and lives of great artists and scholars. Also, given the half-century that separates Wachler and Fevret, and the fact that Fevret follows the grid of an even earlier work, it is not surprising that the emphasis is different: Wachler’s chapter on France after 1750 begins with long sections on Voltaire and Montesquieu, while the books that receive the lengthiest comments in Fevret are reference works like the Histoire littéraire de la France, De Re Diplomatica and the Nouveau Traité de Diplomatique, the Recueil des Historiens de France, or the Histoire de l’Église gallicane.

What both have in common is an emphasis on compendia. These are indeed more representative of 18th century historical scholarship than the now-classical works of the leading philosophical historians, or other independent historical works that preceded or sometimes competed with Voltaire, Raynal, Hume, Robertson, and Gibbon.13 _{The com-}

pendia are more representative not because there are so many of them – they were, after all, often labour-intensive enterprises, the work of a scholar’s lifetime or a team of learned men – but because they summed up, with increasing accuracy, the state of knowledge. Fevret’s Bibliographie and Wachler’s Geschichte are themselves compendia, the one a continuation (over which Fevret died halfway), the other part of a larger team project. They are typical for the difference between French and German compendia in that Fevret comes in folios (ca 40x30 cm) and Wachler in octavos (ca 20x15), and that Fevret gives a numbered list where Wachler gives a summary.

There is an apparent discrepancy in the 18th century between the ways in which his- torical information was gathered and ordered, and how tracts on the uses, methods and study of history presented ‘history’. Fevret unwittingly points out this discrepancy when he asks, rhetorically, “Pourquoi donc, au milieu de cette abondance, avons-nous si peu de bons historiens?” Good history, for Fevret, is first of all the history of one’s own country:

L’Histoire moderne est donc aujourd’hui celle qui doit avoir pour nous le plus d’attraits. Et quelle partie de cette histoire est plus utile & plus nécessaire à un François, que l’His- toire de son pays? Aussi curieuse, aussi variée, aussi riche que puisse l’être aucune Histoire ancienne ou moderne, elle a de quoi nous attacher encore davantage, soit par les exemples domestiques d’héroïsme & de vertu qu’elle nous présente ; soit par le tableau de nos cou- tumes & de nos loix particulières, dont elle nous apprend l’origine & les progrès ; soit par la peinture de nos mœurs dans les différens âges de la Monarchie ; soit enfin par la com- paraison que nous pouvons faire des mœurs anciennes, avec le génie actuel des François, ç’est-à-dire, de nous avec nous-mêmes.14

13 Cf. Chantal Grell, L’Histoire entre Érudition et Philosophie. Étude sur la Connaissance historique à l’âge

des Lumières (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France 1993), chs. 1-3, 8; Martin Gierl, “Kompilation und

die Produktion von Wissen im 18. Jahrhundert” in H. Zedelmaier & M. Mulsow (eds.), Die Praktiken

der Gelehrsamkeit in der frühen Neuzeit (Frühe Neuzeit 61; Tübingen: Niemeyer 2001), 63-94

The reason that Fevret gives for the lack of such ‘good histories’ is that historians either did not know about the available source material, or could not get access to it. That explana- tion, of course, is self-promotion. But the complaint is familiar. There are indeed few grand national histories: Père Daniel and Abbé Velly are the only ones from the 18th century in Fevret’s list, although the many new editions and derivatives of both fill several pages. Nor was there, in the entire 18th century, a history of Germany that would have satisfied his demands: Reichsgeschichte is invariably dry as dust. There were, of course, individual histories of great men and great events, but these too are relatively few in Fevret compared to the number of histories of cities and regions, genealogies of noble houses, and recueils of biographies; and still less lived up to classical standards of style or offered cross-temporal comparisons of laws, customs, and moeurs. In short, Fevret formulates an ideal rather than a definition. The problem is not that if national history in the grand style is the ideal type, everything else is bad; the problem is that much of what is listed in Fevret, according to his own standards, is not history proper. With Wachler, one would say that there is no lack of Historische Forschung catalogued in Fevret’s records but very little Historische Kunst.15

Three things are telling about Fevret’s idea of ‘good history’. The first is his preference for national history, which ‘has more to offer us than any other ancient or modern history’. Although he grants that “l’étude des monumens de la Réligion” comes first, the history that his compendium gives access to is fully independent from historia sacra; there is no supervenient theological frame, and histoire ecclésiastique is a civil history of the church. The second is his mix of historiographical models: historia magistra vitae, legal history, and an Enlightenment concern with mœurs and progrès. This is not a radical proposal; bibliogra- phies are seldom radical, especially not if they update another one from half a century ago. It is, rather, a mix of ideals between which Fevret apparently perceives no conflict, as long as they make history teach us something. As can be seen below, other authors did perceive such a conflict; Fevret’s position is not noteworthy for its sophistication but because it indicates that such divergent models had already become conventional.

The third is Fevret’s insistence on original sources. Again, this is no radical proposal: earlier compendia by Mabillon, Tillemont, and Muratori, and the fact that Fevret is setting forth the work of Le Long, sufficiently show how widespread ‘archive research’ already was before the 19th century. Most of it, however, was for making compendia, or for legal and feudal purposes: in this regard, there was a division of labour between ‘antiquarians’ and ‘historians’ proper. The Bibliothèque historique is more inclusive than other compendia in that it lists not just charters but also unpublished correspondence and memoirs. The inte- gration of such material into historical narrative was not unproblematic, since history, as Blair, Batteux, Mably, and other mid-18th century arbiters of style would have it, was not

15 One can see this in Wachler’s judgement of 18th-century French historiography: “Was für die Forschung geleistet ist, gehört den Männern von alter tüchtiger Art an; unter den Werken der Kunst sind nur äußerst wenige, auf welche der leichtfertige Geist dieser Zeit minder nachtheilig einge- wirkt hat.” (Geschichte der Historischen Forschung und Kunst, Vol. II.ii (Göttingen: Röwer 1818), 463) Wachler intends this as a critique of “die sogenannte philosophische Schule” (p. 454), but he and Fevret point to the same lack: of well-documented histories in the grand style.

to be interrupted with too much detail; but here too standards were shifting. Le Long, in the first version of the Bibliothèque historique, takes Mézeray’s hugely popular history of France (1643-51, with many reprints and derivatives) to task for omitting important original sources. In the expanded edition of Gabriel Daniel’s Histoire de France (1713/1755- 59), the editors proudly point back to this quip by Le Long to push Daniel forward at the expense of Mézeray. Indeed, Daniel’s volumes on the Middle Ages are peppered with notes “Ex. MS.” – but without further indication of which manuscripts precisely. Henri Griffet, Daniel’s annotator and continuator, grants that Daniel, on account of his meticulousness, does not have the same florid and lively style as the great ancient models, and that Daniel too did not make full use of all the source material that was available then, or had been uncovered since, if only because ‘life is too short’.16 _{Fevret agrees with Daniel and Griffet on}

the requirements of documentation, impartiality, and necessary dullness, but he adds an acerbic comment when he calls Daniel’s statement of principles “bonne & judicieuse, & il seroit à souhaiter que nous eussions une Histoire selon les règles qu’elle proscrit.”17

By the second half of the 18th century there was a substantial split in historical practice between France and the German lands. In this split, English and Scottish historians were on the French side, although they were in general more mercifully received by German reviewers. French historians, for their part, simply didn’t bother much to read German books. Partly the split was institutional: German historians, already then, were working and teaching at universities whereas their French and British counterparts were not.18 _Part-

ly it was a matter of publishing formats: German books were more often printed on small- er pages, with less prints, and mainly in Fraktur. Although the German lands had a sub- stantial book market – as evidenced by the Frankfurt and Leipzig book fairs – it was less centralized: Brockhaus in Leipzig and Gebauer in Halle were not publishing powerhouses like Le Breton and Panckoucke in Paris and Strahan in London. State support went di- rectly to the universities rather than to large publication projects. This goes a long way to explain why German scholars wrote few monumental folio compendia and historical mon- ographs, and rather filled handbooks and learned journals. The situation was not new – it had largely been that way since the Thirty Years’ War.19 _{What was new was that German}

scholars were articulating and emphasizing the difference in their handbooks and reviews. And so it also became a matter of style, or rather of the importance attached to style.

On both sides of the Rhine and both sides of the Channel, history was treated as a literary genre – not just in the inclusive sense of literature as Lettres, but also in the

16 Gabriel (Père) Daniel, Histoire de France, Vol. I (ed. Henri Griffet) (Paris: Le Mercier et al. 1755 [1713]), vii

17 Fevret, Bibliothèque historique Vol. II (1769), 55

18 Cf. Horst-Walter Blanke & Dirk Fleischer (eds.), Theoretiker der deutschen Aufklärungshistorie (Stutt- gart: fromann-holzboog 1990), Vol. I, 103-123 for a list of chairs of history and their holders at Ger- man universities in the 18th and early 19th century.

19 There had been a German industry of antiquarian compendia before the Thirty Years War, centered in Frankfurt and Heidelberg. See Mulsow, “Netzwerke gegen Netzwerke. Polemik und Wissenspro- duktion im politischen Antiquarianismus um 1600”, in id., Die unanständige Gelehrtenrepublik, specif- ically pp. 172-173

more restricted (still fairly wide) sense of rhetoric and belles-lettres. One finds it under that denominator in Fénélon’s Réflexions sur la Grammaire, la Rhétorique, la Poésie & l’His- toire (1712) and in the Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres of Adam Smith (delivered 1762-63, published 1963) as well as those of Hugh Blair (first delivered 1762, published 1783). Christoph Meiners included history without reservations in his Grundriß und The- orie der schönen Wissenschaften (1787) – where Schöne Wissenschaften is cognate with ‘rhet- oric and belles-lettres’, but specifically means (for Meiners) those branches of knowledge which involve aesthetics.20 _{Bouterwek’s Geschichte der Poesie und Beredsamkeit (1801-1820),}

like Wachler’s work a part of the Göttingen Geschichte, is more half-hearted in including historical works, just as his overview is ambiguous between an early modern historia liter- aria and a history of literature in the modern sense.

Equally, everyone agreed that history should be true, or at least achieve the highest degree of probability. ‘Literature’, in the 18th-century sense, did not imply ‘fiction’. The dif- ference is in the relative weight attached to style and truth. For Blair, the “proper object and end of history” is “to record truth for the instruction of mankind”; but this ‘instruction’ in turn requires unity, gravity, dignity, a worthy subject, “no flippancy of style, no quaintness of wit”.21 _{The greatest part of the two lectures Blair devotes to history is about the proper}

tone of narration to reflect “the four prime qualities required in a historian, impartiality, fidelity, gravity, and dignity”,22 _{and about the relative merits of the ancients and moderns}

in this regard. When Blair rules that “the Author should trace to their springs the actions and events which he records”,23 _{he means not that historians should treat history as a me-}

chanical science, but that they should be acquainted with statecraft. In his requirements, there is no serious divergence from what Lenglet du Fresnoy had laid down half a century before in Méthode pour Étudier l’Histoire (1713/29);24 _{all the same, Blair was no voice from}

the past, but a central figure in Enlightenment Edinburgh whose Lectures were republished continuously over a hundred times in the next hundred years.