Tea at Trianon: Make History Great Again!

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, December 18, 2021

Make History Great Again!

From The Spectator:

Of course every generation complains that children are ignorant of facts that we used to take for granted. Often it’s simply a question of changing priorities: where children once learned about Walpole and Gladstone, they now learn about the suffragettes and American civil rights. Even so, despite the success of Horrible Histories, you’d have to be wilfully blind to deny that history itself has rarely seemed so embattled.

In recent years, the culture around our history has been almost entirely negative. Statues are toppled, museums ‘decolonised’, heroes ‘re-contextualised’, entire generations of writers and readers dismissed as reactionaries. When Britain’s past appears in the national conversation, it’s almost always in the context of controversy, apology and blame. What explains all this? Part of it, I think, reflects an unconscious Americanisation of our public discourse

Sir Francis Drake has been transformed from swashbuckling sea captain to cold-hearted slave trader. We hear more about Nelson’s alleged support for the triangular trade — at most, a footnote in his career — than his heroism at Trafalgar. Left to his critics, Churchill is increasingly portrayed as a viciously racist opponent of Indian independence who, in a minor interlude in the 1940s, happened to lead Britain through a passing international kerfuffle.

Against this background, who’d choose to study history? For that matter, who’d be a history teacher? Even selecting a topic for your Year 4 children seems full of danger, with monomaniacal zealots poised to denounce you for reactionary deviation. And all the time you’re bombarded with ‘advice’, often in the most strident and intolerant terms. The National Education Union, for example, has advised its members that ‘British imperialism and racism’ should be woven into all history lessons from nursery upwards, so children can learn about ‘white privilege and colonialism’.

That’s the language: at once priggish, hand-wringing and hectoring, forever painting our history as a subject of shame. The past, we are told, is a place of trauma, suffering and victimhood. The National Trust’s much-criticised dossier about its country houses’ colonial connections opens by talking of the ‘sometimes uncomfortable role that Britain, and Britons, have played in global history’, and piously warns the reader that our history is ‘difficult to read and to consider’. The Trust’s Colonial Countryside Project encourages creative writing about ‘the trauma that underlies’ many country houses. In other words, drag the kids around an old property and make them feel miserable. Maybe I’m wrong, but I doubt that’ll make historians of them.

What explains all this? Part of it, I think, reflects an unconscious Americanisation of our public discourse, in which the black civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s looms as the most important — indeed, the only important — historical event. Go into Waterstones, and you’ll be hard pressed to find a children’s book on the Norman conquest or English civil war; but you can hardly move for biographies of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King.

Behind this lurks the spectre of ‘relevance’, a word history teachers ought to treat with undiluted contempt. History isn’t about you; that’s what makes it history. It’s about somebody else, living in an entirely different moral and intellectual world. It’s a drama in which you’re not present, reminding you of your own tiny, humble place in the cosmic order. It’s not relevant. That’s why it’s so important.

So how should we write history for children? The answer strikes me as blindingly obvious. As a youngster I was riveted by stories of knights and castles, gods and pirates. What got me turning the pages wasn’t the promise of an ‘uncomfortable’ conversation. It was the prospect of a good story. Alexander the Great crossing the Afghan mountains, Anne Boleyn pleading for her life on the way to the scaffold, Britain’s boys on the beaches of Dunkirk, Archduke Franz Ferdinand taking the wrong turn at the worst possible moment... that’s more like it, surely? (Read more.)