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    To the Finland Station: A Study in the Acting and Writing of History
    To the Finland Station: A Study in the Acting and Writing of History
    To the Finland Station: A Study in the Acting and Writing of History
    Ebook695 pages12 hours

    To the Finland Station: A Study in the Acting and Writing of History

    By Edmund Wilson

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    One of the great works of modern historical writing, the classic account of the ideas, people, and politics that led to the Bolshevik Revolution

    Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station is intellectual history on a grand scale, full of romance, idealism, intrigue, and conspiracy, that traces the revolutionary ideas that shaped the modern world from the French Revolution up through Lenin's arrival at Finland Station in St. Petersburg in 1917. Fueled by Wilson's own passionate engagement with the ideas and politics at play, it is a lively and vivid, sweeping account of a singular idea—that it is possible to construct a society based on justice, equality, and freedom—gaining the power to change history.

    Vico, Michelet, Bakunin, and especially Marx—along with scores of other anarchists, socialists, nihilists, utopians, and more—all come to life in these pages. And in Wilson's telling, their stories and their ideas remain as alive, as provocative, as relevant now as they were in their own time.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateNov 12, 2019
    ISBN9781466899667
    To the Finland Station: A Study in the Acting and Writing of History
    Author

    Edmund Wilson

    Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) was a novelist, memoirist, playwright, journalist, poet, and editor but it is as a literary critic that he is most highly regarded. His more than twenty books include Axel’s Castle, Patriotic Gore, To the Finland Station, and Memoirs of Hecate County.

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    Reviews for To the Finland Station

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    • 5/5
      A wide-ranging story of the development of the Socialist/Communist movement in 19th Century Europe, from the post French Revolution roots up to Lenin’s arrival in St. Petersburg(at the Finland Station) to lead the Bolsheviks in 1917.
    • 4/5
      I finally got to visit St. Petersburg in 1994 and walk across the bridge . . . to the Finland Station! There wasn't much going on. I'd missed the revolution by 70-80 years or so. Oh, well.
    • 4/5
      History of the rise of socialism, from the French Revolution to the dawning of the Russian Revolution. All the standard caveats apply, and by the end of his writing the work Wilson knew the reality of the Soviet Union, but this is a worthwhile effort. The earlier chapters especially stand out. A historical work, not a political one.
    • 3/5
      Clear explanation of historical thought from Michelet, Renan, to Marx, Engels, Lenin
    • 5/5
      Terrific stuff: everything intellectual history should be.
    • 4/5
      Generally, I can't stand Edmund Wilson when he's wearing his 'critics hat', but I can tolerate him enough for the sake of his scholarship, such as it is here. Worth your time to read.
    • 4/5
      1084 To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History, by Edmund Wilson (read 6 Oct 1970) This is an account of Communism up to Apr 16, 1917, when Lenin arrived at Petrograd. I don't quite know what to make of it. It is more favorable to Marxism than I am, but it is well-written and probably quite objective. It discusses a lot I am not familiar with, especially in the earlier part of the book. For instance, some time is spent on Jules Michelet, who was born in 1798 and wrote a history of France. I'd like to read it--I wonder if there is a good English translation. The account of Marx seems familiar because I had an excellent teacher in college : Father William Green. The accounts of Lasalle (born Apr 11, 1825, in Breslau, died in a duel) and Bakunin (born 18 May 1814 in Russia, died 1 July 1876) were well-written and interesting. I have long wanted to read this book and it has been time well-spent.
    • 4/5
      A heavy book loaded with the philosophical and historical under pinnings of socialsim and communism. Social conditions beget ideas, ideas beget actions which beget social conditions. . .
    • 4/5
      We almost always read fiction in what I call our 'uptown' reading group, but this time we tackled [To the Finland Station]. Very interesting discussion followed, to my surprise and pleasure. Edmund Wilson writes marvelously clear prose, even if it's in an older, more subordinate-clause style. While his section on Lenin is too much a hagiography (as he himself admitted later), the history of socialist and communist origins and philosophy in Europe really filled a hole in my education, and his concentration on the history and personalities of Marx and Engels made them very vivid to me. If you haven't read it, take a look, and forgive the first chapter or so on the French philosophers (it is rather deadly).

    Book preview

    To the Finland Station - Edmund Wilson

    TO THE FINLAND STATION

    A Study in the Writing and Acting of History

    EDMUND WILSON

    Farrar, Straus and Giroux New York

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    Introduction, 1971

    It is all too easy to idealize a social upheaval which takes place in some other country than one’s own. So Englishmen like Wordsworth and Charles James Fox may have idealized the French Revolution, and so men like La-Fayette may have idealized our American one. The remoteness of Russia from the West evidently made it even easier for American socialists and liberals to imagine that the Russian Revolution was to get rid of an oppressive past, to scrap a commercial civilization and to found, as Trotsky prophesied, the first really human society. We were very naïve about this. We did not foresee that the new Russia must contain a good deal of the old Russia: censorship, secret police, the entanglements of bureaucratic incompetence, an all-powerful and brutal autocracy. This book of mine assumes throughout that an important step in progress has been made, that a fundamental breakthrough had occurred, that nothing in our human history would ever be the same again. I had no premonition that the Soviet Union was to become one of the most hideous tyrannies that the world had ever known, and Stalin the most cruel and unscrupulous of the merciless Russian tsars. This book should therefore be read as a basically reliable account of what the revolutionists thought they were doing in the interests of a better world. Some corrections and modifications ought, however, to be made here to rectify what was on my part a too hopeful bias. What was permanently valuable—whatever that implies—in the October Revolution I cannot pretend to estimate.

    I have been charged, not without justice, of understating the vigorous persistence of the socialist tradition in France. Where are Jaurès and Zola? I am asked. I must answer, they are not where they ought to be. And I confess that Anatole France receives something less than his deserts. I do not approve of le Petit Pierre and the tiresome Abbé Coignard any more than I did when I wrote this book. But when I reread Histoire Contemporaine in its collected one-volume edition, I liked it even better than the first time, and found it still a surprisingly accurate picture of French politics and society in our own day. As for Les Dieux Ont Soif, the dangers it warns against in the person of its intransigent fanatic, Evariste Gamelin, have been horribly demonstrated since in the intolerance of the Russian massacres. In general, I have not been quite fair to these French post-revolutionary writers, from whom I had previously learned so much.

    As for Marx and Engels, I have nothing to add. Mr. David McLellan, a British Marxist scholar, has recently published in English translation selections from what he calls Marx’s Grundrisse, a manuscript of a thousand pages, written between October 1857 and March 1858 and hitherto available only in a Russian edition of 1939 and a German edition of 1953. Mr. McLellan insists on the importance of this manuscript, describing it as the centerpiece of Marx’s thought and asserting that "any discussion of the continuity of Marx’s thought that does not take account of the Grundrisse would be doomed from the start. This manuscript was a sort of attempt by Marx to outline his designs for his whole system, and, according to Mr. McLellan, it has led some scholars to conclude that Marx was really a humanist, an existentialist, even a ‘spiritual existentialist’ [whatever that is]." But, after all, the Grundrisse were never published, and it remains as only another example of Marx’s reluctance to finish his works. The problems they raised, I believe, were always too much for him to grapple with. (The Grundrisse seem to have been mainly economic and, though it stumbles as he was always to do over the excellence of the Homeric poems—as the product of a culture which ought to have been primitive—to leave psychological problems quite unsettled.) This is why the first volume of Das Kapital, the only part that Marx published, now stands as a kind of swindle. He leaves the proletarian confronting the capitalist on the verge of a ruthless class war over the issue of labor value. The question of the value created by the many middle men is left at the point at which the manuscript breaks off. But the contagious indignation of this first volume of Das Kapital is what has aroused revolutionaries ever since the book was published. To trace Marx’s intellectual development on the basis of earlier unpublished material seems rather futile and arid, an exercise in academic one-upmanship. What Marx wanted people to read they have read and have experienced the intended emotions.

    I have also been charged with having given a much too amiable picture of Lenin, and I believe that this criticism has been made not without some justification. But at the time that I wrote I had almost nothing to go on except the accounts which had been authorized by the Soviet government and had been stage-managed in the sense it approved. Trotsky, in his fragment of his life of Lenin, says that he believes that this supervision has made even the family memoirs unreliable. Yet Trotsky himself in My Life writes of Lenin in a vein of eulogy almost equal, as I have said, to that of Plato on Socrates. It is only more recently that the impressions have been published, uncensored by the Soviet government, of persons who were in a position to see the more disagreeable side of Lenin: Pyotr Struve and N. Valentínov. It would appear that Vladímir Ilyích showed special consideration and kindness only to people who did not disagree with him, but was quite harsh and rude with others. Both Struve and Valentínov were first cultivated and encouraged by him but then abruptly dropped and denounced. Struve—I quote his statements from Richard Pipes’s book Struve: Liberal on the Left, 1870–1905—writes about Lenin as follows:

    "The impression which Lenin at once made on me—and which remained with me all my life—was an unpleasant one. It was not his brusqueness that was unpleasant. There was something more than an ordinary brusqueness, a kind of mockery, partly deliberate and partly irresistibly organic, breaking through from the inmost depths of his being, in Lenin’s way of dealing with those on whom he looked as his adversaries. And in myself he sensed at once an adversary, even though then I stood still fairly near to him. In this he was guided not by reason, but by intuition, by what hunting people call ‘flair,’ Later on I had much to do with Plekhánov. He, too, had a brusqueness verging on mockery in dealing with people whom he wanted to strike or to humble. Yet, compared with Lenin, Plekhánov was an aristocrat. The way in which they both treated other people could be described by the untranslatable French expression ‘cassant.’ But in Lenin’s ‘cassant’ there was something intolerably plebeian and at the same time something lifeless and repulsively cold.

    "A great number of people shared with me that impression of Lenin. I shall mention only two of them, and very different they were: Vera Zasúlich and Michael Tugán-Baranóvsky. Vera Zasúlich, the cleverest and subtlest of all the women I have ever met in my life, felt an antipathy toward Lenin verging on physical aversion—their subsequent political quarrel was due not only to theoretical or tactical differences, but to the profound dissimilarity of their natures.

    "Michael Tugán-Baranóvsky, with whom for many years I was on very close terms, used to tell me with his wonted naïveté, for which many people unjustly thought he was simply stupid, about his irresistible antipathy to Lenin. Having known, and even been on close terms with Lenin’s brother, Alexander Ulyánov … he used to point out, with an amazement which verged on horror, what a different man Alexander Ulyánov had been from his brother Vladímir. The former, with all his moral purity and firmness, was an extremely gentle and tactful man, even when dealing with strangers and enemies, while the latter’s brusqueness really amounted to cruelty.

    Truly, in his attitude to his fellow-men Lenin breathed coldness, contempt and cruelty. To me it was clear even then that in those unpleasant, even repulsive, qualities of Lenin, lay also the pledge of his power as a politician: he always had in view nothing but his objective towards which he marched, firm and unflinching. Or rather, there always was, before his mental eyes, not one objective, more or less distant, but a whole system, a whole chain of them. The first link in that chain was power in the narrow circle of his political friends. Lenin’s brusqueness and cruelty—this became clear to me almost from the outset, from our first meeting—was psychologically indissolubly bound up, both instinctively and deliberately, with his indomitable love of power. In such cases, it is, as a rule, difficult to determine which is at the service of which, whether the love of power is at the service of an objective task or a higher ideal that a man has set up for himself, or on the contrary, that task or that ideal is a mere means of quenching the insatiable thirst for power.

    Valentínov’s testimony (in his book Meetings with Lenin) agrees on the whole with this: No one was able as he was so to infect with enthusiasm for his projects, so to impose his will, so to make people docile to his personality, as this man who at first sight seemed so blunt and rather rude, who apparently had no gift to charm. Neither Plekhánov nor Mártov nor anybody else had mastered the secret of the direct hypnotic influence on people that emanated from Lenin; I should even say his mastery over them. Only after Lenin did they indisputably follow as after a unique unquestioned leader, since it was only Lenin who presented himself—especially in Russia—as that very rare phenomenon, a man of iron will, of indomitable energy, uniting a fanatical belief in action, in practical activity, with an unchanging faith in himself … When the break with Valentínov came, the following conversation took place. I cannot forget, said Valentínov, how quickly you relegated me to the category of your most malignant enemies and with what a torrent of scolding you rewarded me as soon as you knew that in the realm of philosophy I did not hold your views. You are quite right, replied Lenin, —on that score you are absolutely right. All those who part from Marxism are my enemies. I do not give my hand to Philistines. I do not sit at the same table … Without shaking hands, Lenin turned away and left, and I left the Bolshevik organization.

    Says Ignazio Silone, who talked with Lenin in his own Communist days: Whenever he came into the hall, the atmosphere changed, became electric. It was a physical, almost a palpable phenomenon. He generated contagious enthusiasm, the way the faithful in St. Peter’s, when they crowd around the Sedia, emanate a fervor that spreads like a wave throughout the basilica. But to see him, to speak with him face-to-face—to observe his cutting, disdainful judgments, his ability to synthesize, the peremptory tone of his decisions—created impressions of a very different kind that overrode any suggestion of mysticism. I remember how some of his terse remarks which I happened to hear during that 1921 Moscow visit struck me with the force of a physical blow.

    Bertram D. Wolfe has been able to show, by looking up Gorky’s relevant articles, that the Communist-sponsored Days with Lenin gives a much distorted and even rewritten account of the relations between Lenin and Gorky. The basic difference between them seems to have been that Lenin thought in terms of classes but Gorky in terms of men. Gorky always took religion seriously—though he did not subscribe to Christianity—and talked about bogoiskatelstvo, God-seeking, something which made Lenin furious: Every religious idea, every idea of any little god, even every bit of coquettishness with a little god is unutterable vileness. Gorky made it his duty to defend the intelligentsia—the artists and writers and scientists—and had Lenin appoint him to a post which made him responsible for them: he assailed Lenin with petitions, of which the latter became impatient and told Gorky that these matters were trivialities compared with the magnitude of the Revolution. Yet, unlike Stalin, it was possible with Lenin to appeal to an impulse of kindness and to get many accused persons let off. Gorky, in the early twenties, attempted to intercede against the execution of the Social Revolutionaries and threatened to break off personal relations. Lenin yielded to pressure to the extent of keeping them in prison without executing the sentences; but Stalin soon liquidated them. When Gorky founded a magazine, Beséda, Conversation, intended to promote good relations between the Soviet Union and the outside world, it was not allowed to be sold in Russia and no Russian writer was allowed to contribute. When Gorky warned Lenin against repeating the tyrannical measures which the Revolution was supposed to have abolished, his advice was not well received. Finally, it seems that Gorky wrote at different dates three characterizations of Lenin, not always entirely uncritical. The last and best-known of these, Days with Lenin, was considerably modified under Stalin. It originally concluded as follows: In the end, what wins out all the same is that which is honest and right that a man does, that without which he would not be a man. This was altered to read Vladímir Lenin is dead. But the heirs of his thought and his will are alive. They live and are carrying on his work, which is more victorious than anything else in the history of mankind. All Gorky’s utterances on the Jews have been suppressed from the Soviet edition, as has the following passage from one of his earlier pieces on Lenin:

    "It often happened that I spoke with Lenin of the cruelty of revolutionary tactics and ways of life.

    " ‘What do you expect?’—he asked in wonder and anger. ‘Is regard for humanity possible in such an unheard-of ferocious struggle? …’

    " ‘By what measure do you measure the quantity of necessary and unnecessary blows in a fight?’—he asked me once after a hot exchange of words. To this simple question I could only answer poetically. ‘I think there is no other answer’ [What does this mean?] …

    "Once I asked him: ‘Does it only seem so to me, or do you really feel sorry for people?’

    ‘For the clever ones I feel sorry. There are few clever people among us. We as a people are for the most part of a talented but lazy intelligence. The intelligent Russian is almost always a Jew or a person with a touch of Jewish blood in him.’

    One can see the point of Lenin’s being short with the temporizing and arguing Russians but one cannot be surprised that he gave offense and did not show himself so benevolent as I perhaps tend to make him.

    Two personal episodes which, because I did not know about them, I did not mention in this book, should perhaps, though of no importance in connection with the revolutionary movement, be given a place here. Karl Marx—I learn from Eleanor Marx: A Socialist Tragedy by Chushichi Tsuzuki—had an illegitimate son by Lenchen, the faithful maid who was given to the Marxes by Mrs. Marx’s mother and who served sometimes without being paid. He was registered under his mother’s name as Henry Frederick Demuth, and, having been born, in June, 1851, at a low ebb of the Marxes’ fortunes, when they were living rather miserably in two rooms in Soho, he was probably consigned to a working-class family, and he did not reappear till the eighties. At one time his son drove a taxi, then he emigrated to Australia. He left his wife and four children, who were looked after by his father. Eleanor Marx always felt about Frederick an uncomfortable sense of injustice. She extravagantly idealized her father, and tried to believe that Engels was the father of Frederick; she was shocked to learn that he was not. But she maintained with him friendly relations and to some extent depended on him as a confidant. It would appear that the picture of Lenin may be made to seem less inhuman by the fact that he had a favorite woman friend with whom he may almost be said to have been in love. Inessa Fédorovna Armand was the daughter of a Scottish mother and a French music hall singer. She had been taken by a grandmother to Russia, where she acted as governess to the children of a rich Franco-Russian industrialist, whose son when she was eighteen she married. She eventually became a Bolshevik, a devoted disciple of Lenin. She left her husband but took with her her two youngest children and continued to accept his financial help till his business was liquidated by the Bolshevik revolution. She became indispensable to Lenin, played him Beethoven and attended party meetings, where her fluency in five languages made her particularly useful to her mentor, who knew nothing but some imperfect German. Lenin, says a French socialist who observed them in a café, avec ses petits yeux mongols épiait toujours cette petite française. Krúpskaya sometimes mentions her and at one point is said to have offered to resign completely from her mariage blanc with Lenin and leave the field to Inessa Armand. Inessa was one of the very few people whom Lenin addressed as ty instead of vy, and he wrote her frequent letters. She was one of the small band of Bolsheviks who accompanied him in the sealed train to Petrograd in 1917. She had three times been in prison and once been deported to Archangel Province, and, though naturally, from most accounts, an attractive woman, is described in her later years as ill-fed, often cold and hungry; … her face had begun to show the ravages of over-work and neglect of self. She traveled uncomfortably on freight cars to the Caucasus and there died of typhus in 1920. Bertram D. Wolfe, whose account I have quoted (from Encounter of February, 1964), says he talked about her with Angélica Balabánova, who told him that Lenin was utterly broken by Inessa Armand’s death. I never saw him look like that before. It was something more than the loss of a ‘good Bolshevik’ or a good friend. He had lost someone very dear and very close to him and made no effort to conceal it. Balabánova and others asserted that Inessa had had a daughter by Lenin. The girl married a German Communist, who was eventually purged by Stalin, and she was then adopted by the Ulyánovs. Balabánova, who had worked with Inessa at Socialist political conferences, told Wolfe, I did not warm to Inessa. She was pedantic, a one hundred per cent Bolshevik in the way she dressed (always in the same severe style), in the way she thought and spoke. She spoke a number of languages, and in all of them repeated Lenin verbatim. It was characteristic of Lenin that he should only have felt devotion to someone who fitted his plans without any suggestion of disagreement.

    Isaac Deutscher, in Lenin’s Childhood, the first chapter of an unfinished life of Lenin, has thrown a good deal of light on the origins of his subject. Nothing is known of the Ulyánov family further back than Lenin’s grandfather’s generation. They must actually, Deutscher thinks, have been peasants. They were probably of Mongol stock, Tartar or Kalmuck. The grandfather came to Astrakhan, a refuge for runaway serfs. I do not, said Lenin himself, know anything about my grandfather. This Ulyánov, a tailor, always very poor, was registered late in life as a meshchánin—that is, a member of a kind of lower middle class. He had hitherto, apparently on account of his low status, not had a family name and was not allowed the rights of citizenship. Lenin’s father, by his services to education, which earned him a title as an honorary noble, had risen into the middle-class intelligentsia. Lenin himself, although his mother came from a somewhat superior stratum and though Lenin distinguished himself as a scholar, had always rude and rather vulgar traits.

    In Deutscher’s three-volume biography of Trotsky, so much more detailed in its political history than my much telescoped account, I have not found anything which obliges me to make any rectifications. For the most part, for Trotsky’s early years which I cover, Deutscher is largely dependent on the same authorities as I: Trotsky’s own autobiography and Max Eastman’s Leon Trotsky: The Portrait of a Youth. From Trotsky’s Diary in Exile, 1935, however, I have found that it was not true, as I had been led to suppose—this matter was hushed up in the Soviet Union—that Lenin knew nothing about and had not approved the execution of the royal family. Trotsky—and, one imagines, also Lenin—were both extremely cold-blooded about this:

    "Talking to Sverdlóv, I asked in passing: ‘Oh yes, and where is the Tsar?’ ‘It’s all over,’ he answered, ‘he has been shot.’ ‘And where is the family?’ ‘And the family along with him.’ ‘All of them?’ I asked, apparently with a touch of surprise. ‘All of them!’ replied Sverdlóv. ‘What about it?’ He was waiting to see my reaction. I made no reply. ‘And who made the decision?’ I asked. ‘We decided it here. Ilyích believed that we shouldn’t leave the Whites a live banner to rally around, especially under the present difficult circumstances …’ I did not ask any further questions, and considered the matter closed. Actually, the decision was not only expedient but necessary. The severity of this summary justice showed the world that we should continue to fight on mercilessly, stopping at nothing. The execution of the Tsar’s family was needed not only in order to frighten, horrify and dishearten the enemy, but also in order to shake up our own ranks, to show them that there was no turning back, that ahead lay either complete victory or complete ruin. In the intellectual circles of the Party there probably were misgivings and shakings of heads. But the masses of workers and soldiers had not a minute’s doubt. They would not have understood and would not have accepted any other decision. This Lenin sensed well. The ability to think and feel for and with the masses was characteristic of him to the highest degree, especially at the great political turning points …

    "When I was abroad, I read in Poslédnie Nóvosti a description of the shooting, the burning of the bodies, etc. How much of all this is true and how much is invented, I have not the least idea, since I was never curious about how the sentence was carried out [the Tsar and Tsarina and all their children were first shot, then bayoneted and thrown into an old mineshaft] and, frankly, do not understand such curiosity."

    In this new edition, I have corrected my original text very little, but have restored the original appendices and omitted a Summary as of 1940 which appears in all the paperback editions as Marxism at the End of the Thirties, but is chronologically more in place in my collection The Shores of Light, in which it has been also included.

    I

    1

    Michelet Discovers Vico

    One day in the January of 1824, a young French professor named Jules Michelet, who was teaching philosophy and history, found the name of Giovanni Vico in a translator’s note to a book he was reading. The reference to Vico interested him so much that he immediately set out to learn Italian.

    Though Vico had lived and written a hundred years before, he had never been translated into French and was in fact little known outside Italy. He had been a poor scholar, born at Naples, the backward tail-end of Italy, at the time when the Italian Renaissance, obstructed by the Inquisition, had run pretty completely into the sands. Vico, by reason of his humble origin and his reputation of being a crank, had missed his academic career; but, finding his path of advancement blocked and driven back upon his own resources, he pushed further his unpopular ideas. He composed, and published in 1725, a work called Principles of a New Science Dealing with the Nature of Nations, Through Which Are Shown Also New Principles of the Natural Law of Peoples. Vico had read Francis Bacon, and had decided that it ought to be possible to apply to the study of human history methods similar to those proposed by Bacon for the study of the natural world. Later he had read Grotius, who had advocated an historical study of philosophy and theology in terms of the languages and actions of men, with a view to constructing a system of law which should embrace all the different moral systems and thus be universally acceptable.

    The young Michelet had also been groping for the principles of a new science of history. Among his projects had been a history of the race considered as an individual, a series of philosophical studies of the poets and a work on the character of peoples as revealed by their vocabularies. He had desired, he wrote, to mingle history with philosophy because they completed each other. By July, he had gotten to Vico, and he read the first volume through without stopping. From the collision of Michelet’s mind with Vico’s, it is hardly too much to say that a whole new philosophical-artistic world was born: the world of re-created social history. Of this moment in Michelet’s life he was afterwards to note: 1824. Vico. Effort, infernal shades, grandeur, the Golden Bough. From 1824 on, he wrote, I was seized by a frenzy caught from Vico, an incredible intoxication with his great historical principle.

    And even reading Vico today, we can feel some of Michelet’s excitement. It is strange and stirring to find in the Scienza Nuova the modern sociological and anthropological mind waking amid the dusts of a provincial school of jurisprudence of the end of the seventeenth century and speaking through the antiquated machinery of a half-scholastic treatise. Here, before the steady rays of Vico’s insight—almost as if we were looking out on the landscape of the Mediterranean itself—we see the fogs that obscure the horizons of the remote reaches of time recede, the cloud-shapes of legend lift. In the shadows there are fewer monsters; the heroes and the gods float away. What we see now are men as we know them alone on the earth we know. The myths that have made us wonder are projections of a human imagination like our own and, if we look for the key inside ourselves and learn how to read them correctly, they will supply us with a record, inaccessible up to now, of the adventures of men like ourselves.

    And a record of something more than mere adventures. Human history had hitherto always been written as a series of biographies of great men or as a chronicle of remarkable happenings or as a pageant directed by God. But now we can see that the developments of societies have been affected by their sources, their environments; and that like individual human beings they have passed through regular phases of growth. The facts of known history, Vico writes (I quote from the translation of La Scienza Nuova made at that time by Michelet, which sometimes departs from Vico’s text), are to be referred to their primitive origins, divorced from which they have seemed hitherto to possess neither a common basis, nor continuity nor coherence. And: The nature of things is nothing other than that they come into being at certain times and in certain ways. Wherever the same circumstances are present, the same phenomena arise and no others. And: "In that dark night which shrouds from our eyes the most remote antiquity, a light appears which cannot lead us astray; I speak of this incontestable truth: the social world is certainly the work of men; and it follows that one can and should find its principles in the modifications of the human intelligence itself. And: Governments must be conformable to the nature of the governed; governments are even a result of that nature."

    All of these ideas which Michelet found in Vico were, though Vico had been their first exponent, not of course new to Michelet. The Enlightenment of the eighteenth century had occurred between Vico’s time and his. Voltaire, before Michelet was born, had already cleared the gods and the heroes away; Montesquieu had shown how human institutions were related to racial habit and climate. And Michelet, furthermore, was soon afterwards to find in Herder an evolutionary theory of culture and in Hegel an exposition of the chemistry of social change. How was it then that the Scienza Nuova could come to a man of 1820 as an intoxicating revelation? Because Vico, by force of an imaginative genius of remarkable power and scope, had enabled him to grasp fully for the first time the organic character of human society and the importance of reintegrating through history the various forces and factors which actually compose human life. I had no other master but Vico, he wrote. His principle of living force, of humanity creating itself, made both my book and my teaching. Vico had described his achievement as an explanation of the formation of human law and an indication of the specific phases and the regular process by which the customs which gave rise to law originally came into being: religions, languages, dominations, commerce, orders, empires, laws, arms, judgments, punishments, wars, peace, alliances. Of all these social elements, he has shown, he says, in terms of these phases and this process of growth, the eternal propriety by virtue of which the phase and the process must be thus and not otherwise. In August, we find Michelet preaching as follows on the occasion of the awarding of school prizes: Woe be to him who tries to isolate one department of knowledge from the rest… . All science is one: language, literature and history, physics, mathematics and philosophy; subjects which seem the most remote from one another are in reality connected, or rather they all form a single system. And he was to begin in a few years his great application of the general principles of Vico to the actual presentation of history.

    2

    Michelet and the Middle Ages

    There had become dominant with the eighteenth century Enlightenment and the French Revolution an idea which is not to be found in Vico, though it already existed in germ in his master Bacon: the idea of human progress, of the capacity of mankind for self-improvement. Vico, for all his originality, had never thoroughly emancipated himself from the theological point of view, which put the goal of improvement in Heaven, making salvation an individual matter dependent on the grace of God. He had been able to see that human societies pass through successive phases of development, but he seems to have imagined history as a series of repetitive cycles.

    But Michelet, born in 1798, had the tradition of the Revolution. He had grown up under Napoleon and the Bourbon Restoration, and in his teens he had had himself baptized a Catholic; he had accepted the post of tutor to the young Princess de Parme at the Tuileries. But he had been poor: his family on both sides had belonged to the cultivated small bourgeoisie—one of his grandfathers had been organist in the Cathedral at Laon—and his father, a printer, had been ruined by Napoleon’s suppression of the press. Two years before Jules was born, the printing shop had been raided for Jacobin literature: an incriminating manifesto, which would have cost Furcy Michelet his head, was lying in plain sight on the table and the inspector never thought to examine it; but Mme. Michelet, who was pregnant at the time, always believed that the stillbirth of her baby had been due to the shock of the raid. When Jules Michelet was ten, his father was arrested for debt, and he went along with his mother while she accompanied her husband to jail. Later, Napoleon’s police put the seals on the Michelets’ press; and the incident caused Jules such anguish that he afterwards made a stipulation in his will that his wife should not be obliged to seal his coffin. The principles of the Revolution were never far below the surface in Michelet, even in those years of his early manhood when they appeared somewhat varnished over by what had come to be the conventional bourgeois opinions.

    In the July of 1830, the reaction against Charles X resulted in an uprising of workers and students which held Paris for three days and drove the white flag back into exile. Michelet, still full of Vico, became possessed by a vision of his own, in which the reawakening idealism of the tradition of the great Revolution gave purpose to Vico’s cycles. In a burst of emotion, he wrote at top speed an Introduction to Universal History. It had been dashed off, he said, on the burning pavements of Paris; and it opened with the following declaration: With the world began a war which will end only with the world: the war of man against nature, of spirit against matter, of liberty against fatality. History is nothing other than the record of this interminable struggle. Christianity has given the world the moral gospel; now France must preach the social gospel. The solutions to social and intellectual problems are always ineffective in Europe until they have been interpreted, translated, popularized, by France.

    But the victory of the workers was premature; the provinces failed to support Paris; and the liberal bourgeoisie, instead of restoring the republic, sold out to the Orleanist party, who set up the constitutional monarch, Louis-Philippe. Michelet went back to the Tuileries, where he now had a new princess to tutor, Louis-Philippe’s daughter. But he got also an appointment more important to him: he was made Conservateur des Archives, head of the Record Office. And with the charters, the statutes and the official correspondence of ancient France at his disposal, he embarked on his History of the Middle Ages.

    When Michelet went into the Records, with Vico and the echoes of July in his head, a new past, for the first time the real past of France, seemed to revive for the imagination. The first volume or two of Michelet’s history, dealing with the early races of Gaul, a period where documents are few and as to which, even in the light of later scholarship, we still remain considerably in the dark, were not particularly successful as resurrection of the past, the phrase Michelet applied to his method. It is only with the chapter called Map of France and devoted to the description of the country, that the characteristic Michelet appears. But as we get on into the ages where the materials are more plentiful, the miracle begins to take place.

    Michelet’s letters during this period supply a remarkable picture of his conception of his historian’s task and the passion with which he attacked it.

    I believe I have found, he writes, "through concentration and reverberation, a flame sufficiently intense to melt down all the apparent diversities, to restore to them in history the unity they had in life… . I have not been able to interpret the least social fact without calling all the departments of human activity to my aid, and coming more and more to realize that our classifications do not hold… . To undertake to combine so many elements alien to one another is to harbor within oneself a great disturbing force. To reproduce so many passions is not to calm one’s own. A lamp which is hot enough to fuse whole peoples is hot enough to consume its very hearth… . I have never yet [he is writing of the Renaissance now] lifted so great a mass, combined in a living unity so many apparently discordant elements… . I am trying to twist those threads which have never been woven together in science: law, art, etc., to show how a certain statue, a certain picture, is an event in the history of law, to follow the social movement from the stocky serf who upholds the niches of the feudal saints to the fantasy of the court (Goujon’s Diana), even to Béranger. This double thread is twisted of industry and religion. It is easy for the imagination to catch a glimpse of this interaction, but to determine with any certitude the manner, the quantity, of the action, to found so new a theory scientifically, requires no small effort."

    Behind the chronicles and legends of the Middle Ages, which that flame had rendered transparent, there now narrowed down into focus a new and distinct panorama. No one had really explored the French archives before; the histories had mostly been written from other histories. Michelet tells how in those solitary galleries, where I wandered twenty years, in that deep silence, there had come to me the whispers of the souls who had suffered so long ago and who were smothered now in the past—all the soldiers fallen in all the wars, reminding him of the hard reality and demanding of him bitterly whether he had come there to write romances in the manner of Walter Scott, prompting him to put into the record what had been left out by Monstrelet and Froissart, the hired chroniclers of the age of chivalry. One has heard Michelet called a romantic; and his history has plenty of movement and color and, in its early phases, passages of wordy rhetoric. But Michelet’s fundamental attitude is certainly, as he insists, realistic and not romantic. He worked by himself, he says—the romantic movement passed him by. We are all more or less romantics, he had written in his journal at twenty-two. It is a disease in the air we breathe. He is lucky who has equipped himself early with enough good sense and natural feeling to react against it.

    The great mediaeval stories are in Michelet, and they are made vivid with a peculiar intensity; but the effect of the historian’s treatment is to clear up the haze of myth about them. And they are presented in relation to a background of economic and social processes quite unknown to the school of romantic fiction of which Michelet disapproved. It was characteristic of the romantics to be interested in remarkable individuals for their own sake; Michelet was interested in remarkable individuals as representatives of movements and groups. The stately language of the old chronicles no longer gave its tapestry remoteness to the Crusades and the Hundred Years’ War. Michelet made them take place on the same stage and pitched them at the same level of dignity as the wars of drilled regiments and artillery. What interests the historian more than the feats of individual prowess is the developing technique of warfare.

    And we remember the terrible description of the peasants in the chapter on the peasant revolts when we have forgotten Philippe de Valois and Philippe le Bel: Today, Michelet writes, there are few châteaux left. The decrees of Richelieu and the Revolution have seen to that. Yet when we find ourselves even now in our travels under the walls of Taillebourg or Tancarville, when in the depths of the Ardennes forest, in the Montcornet gorge, we catch sight above our heads, of the squinting oblique eye watching us pass, our heart contracts and we feel something of the sufferings of those who for so many centuries wasted at the foot of those towers. To know it we do not even need to have read the old histories. The souls of our fathers still throb in us for pains that have been forgotten, almost as the man who has been wounded feels an ache in the hand he has lost.

    Michelet has done a good deal, it is true, to make Jeanne d’Arc popular and famous; but it was as the spokesman for the national sense of the people, not as a mystic or a saint, that she interested him. What legend is more beautiful, he writes, than this incontestable story? But one must be careful not to make it into a legend. One must piously preserve all its circumstances, even the most human; one must respect its touching and terrible humanity… . However deeply the historian may have been moved in writing this gospel, he has kept a firm hold on the real and never yielded to the temptation of idealism. And he insisted that Jeanne d’Arc had established the modern type of hero of action, contrary to passive Christianity. His approach was thus entirely rational, based squarely on the philosophy of the eighteenth century—anti-clerical, democratic. And for this reason, the History of the Middle Ages, important as it is, and for all its acute insight and its passages of marvelous eloquence, seems to me less satisfactory than the other parts of Michelet’s history. What Michelet really admires are not the virtues which the chivalrous and Christian centuries cultivated, but the heroisms of the scientist and the artist, the Protestant in religion and politics, the efforts of man to understand his situation and rationally to control his development. Throughout the Middle Ages, Michelet is impatient for the Renaissance.

    The reign of Louis XI, letting him down after Jeanne d’Arc, is too much for Michelet: though he is never precisely dull, he makes us feel during the periods which do not interest him his fatigue and his lack of sympathy. In the middle of Louis XI, he heaves a great sigh of oppression: The history of the fifteenth century is a long history, he writes, "—long are its years and long its hours. They were so for those who lived them, and they are so for him who has to begin them again and relive them. I mean, for the historian, who, taking history as something more than a game, makes the effort in good faith to enter into the life of the past… . For where is the life here? Who can say here which are the living and which are the dead? In what party am I to take an interest? Is there one among these various figures who is not either dubious or false? Is there one on whom the eye may rest and find expressed in him clearly the ideas, the principles, on which the heart of man lives? We have descended low indeed into indifference and moral death. And we must descend lower still."

    In the meantime, in Michelet’s own century, the struggle between the reaction and the republic is pressing to an issue again. The clergy are denouncing Michelet’s history; and the child of the Revolution is called again to vindicate its principles. The Princess Clémentine gets married, and Michelet resigns his post as tutor; and in his course at the Collège de France, where he is now a popular figure, he begins a series of lectures against the Jesuits. Among his colleagues were the militant Quinet and the exiled Polish patriot Mickiewicz. Action, action! Michelet wrote in July, 1842, action alone can console us! We owe it not only to man, but to all that lower nature which struggles up toward man, which contains the potentiality of his thought—to carry on vigorously thought and action. From 1843 on, Michelet follows a definite and uncompromising line. He turns his back on the Middle Ages, having given them, as he believes, all the sympathetic attention they deserve. It has become dangerous now to idealize them; the cult of that past only leads to reaction; the old tyrannies come back with the romance. And Michelet, although he did not engage in political action, jumped his history forward from the fifteenth century to the French Revolution, whose purposes and achievements he felt had been obscured by the confusion of events which had followed it. He was now at the height of his power; and, under pressure of the mounting passion which was to burst forth in 1848, he threw himself into the epic of three centuries which was to occupy him all the rest of his life and to which the History of the Middle Ages was to serve as scarcely more than an introduction.

    3

    Michelet and the Revolution

    The mature Michelet is a strange phenomenon. He is in many ways more comparable to a novelist like Balzac than to the ordinary historian. He had the novelists social interest and grasp of character, the poet’s imagination and passion. All this, by some unique combination of chances, instead of exercising itself freely on contemporary life, had been turned backward upon history and was united with a scientific appetite for facts which drove him into arduous researches.

    He had grown up in isolation from his fellows and much thrown in on his own resources. Michelet’s early life had been sad, poor and hard. Born in a dark and damp old church which had been deserted for many years and let in the wind and rain through broken windows, but which his father had got cheap for a printing office, he spent his youth and a good deal of his young manhood amidst surroundings peculiarly depressing. I grew up, he wrote, like a weed without sun between two paving stones of Paris. Up to the time that Jules Michelet was fifteen, the family had no meat and no wine; they lived on boiled vegetables and bread. And in the basement in which they were lodging during the years when Jules was going to school, they spent winter after winter without heat. Jules’s hands got so badly chapped that he kept the scars all the rest of his life. Living at close quarters, the father and mother quarreled constantly, and the boy had to witness these quarrels. When he was seventeen, his mother died of cancer. At school, he was weakly, queer and shy, and a butt for the other boys. He could not make friends among them; he came to them out of a different world. When the other boys left school, it was to go home to bourgeois comfort and leisure; when Jules went home, it was to work on the press. He had learned to set type at twelve.

    But near the press in that bleak and unhealthy basement, he was building up for himself his own empire. In proportion as he was hungry and cold, so was he forced in for food and heat on his own mind and imagination. After all, he was an only child of whom his parents expected much and for whom they procured such advantages as they could. Later in life, he was to write to his son-in-law on the question of his grandson’s schooling: "The most important matter is Etienne. I must hand on to him what my parents did for me in providing me by unexampled sacrifices with freedom, freedom to have time for my work. Let us not indulge in false democratic attitudes. The worker is a slave either of the will of others or of fate. I escaped that, thanks to my father and mother. And, after all, although, as we shall see, the damp and chill winters of Paris put their blight on all Michelet’s youth, he was a Parisian, and that was to mean to him all his life to have been born to a great intellectual inheritance. He speaks in one of his letters of his eagerness to get back to our Paris, that great keyboard with its hundred thousand keys that one can play on every day—I mean by that its innumerable intellectual resources,"

    And finally—what provided Michelet with a special kind of outlook and training—the Michelets were a family of printers, who had their printing press to give them a common interest and a sort of esprit de corps. The press was to become for Michelet the great symbol of the advance of modern thought, and printing a veritable religion. There was something in the Michelets still of the spirit of the great Renaissance printers such as the Etiennes and the Alduses, of whom Michelet gives so stirring an account—those extraordinary learned families who, transported by the discovery of antiquity and hardly stopping to sleep at night, managed not merely to set up the classics but to edit and elucidate them, too. So, up to the time of his death, Michelet’s father worked with him over his history. And Michelet’s interest in the freedom of the press and the progress of human science is that of a man to whom printing is still an adventure and a conquest. It is an essential part of Michelet’s strength and charm that he should seem less like a nineteenth-century scholar than like the last great man of letters of the Renaissance. In his early years he mastered Latin and Greek with a thoroughness which was at that time already rare; and he later acquired English, Italian and German and devoured the literature and learning of those languages. With small means, he succeeded in traveling pretty much all over Western Europe, and those regions, such as the Slavic East, to which his actual travels did not penetrate, his insatiable mind invaded. The impression he makes on us is quite different from that of the ordinary modern scholar who has specialized in some narrowly delimited subject and gotten it up in a graduate school: we feel that Michelet has read all the books, been to look at all the monuments and pictures, interviewed personally all the authorities, and explored all the libraries and archives of Europe; and that he has it all under his hat. The Goncourts said that Michelet’s attractiveness lay in the fact that his works seem to be written by hand. They are free from the banality and impersonality which the printed thing has; they are like the autograph of a thought. But what Michelet really goes back to is an earlier stage of printing before either the journalistic or the academic formulas had come between first-hand knowledge and us. He is simply a man going to the sources and trying to get down on record what can be learned from them; and this role, which claims for itself, on the one hand, no academic sanctions, involves, on the other hand, a more direct responsibility to the reader.

    Michelet thus learned from the beginning to fortify himself inside an intellectual citadel impregnable to hardship or disaster. The external circumstances of his life continued to be somber and distressing. After the death of Mme. Michelet, Jules’s father was given an odd kind of employment presiding over an institution which was half boarding-house, half insane asylum. There Michelet spent some eight years of his youth in the company of cracked and impoverished persons left over from the old regime, and of the doctors and attendants who took care of them. Jules married the young companion of an old and feebleminded marquise. She had little in common with Michelet and after fifteen years died of consumption, leaving him with two children. During these years, as a young professor, Michelet would get up at four in the morning and read, write and teach all day: he even took a book on his afternoon walk. He had made one close friend, a medical student, with whom he shared the intellectual passions which, as he said, devoured his youth; but this young man, to Michelet’s anguish, had also come down with consumption, had sickened and wasted and died.

    There is perhaps no more amazing example in literature of the expansion of a limited individual experience into a great work of the imagination. When the frail and solitary printer’s son came to turn himself inside out in his books, he gave the world, not, as his romantic contemporaries did, personal exaltations and despairs swollen to heroic volume, but the agonizing drama of the emergence of the modern world out of feudalism. His history of France, immense though it is and with all its complexity, variation and detail, displays a bold emotional design which is easily referable to Michelet’s own experience. The centuries which lead up to the Revolution are like a long and solitary youth waiting year after year for self-expression, release, the assertion of unacknowledged rights, the free association with others. The climax of the story is the moment of the founding of the Federations in the year after the taking of the Bastille, when communities all over France met together to swear fraternity and devotion to the Revolution. Michelet had been the first historian to investigate and emphasize this phenomenon. At no other time, I believe, he wrote, has the heart of man been wider and more spacious—at no other time have distinctions of class, of fortune and of party been more completely forgotten. But it was a moment only; after that, the back-flow of old instincts and interests among the purposes and hopes of the new was to bring years of confusion and disorder. The leaders were to find themselves undone by their own internal contradictions between the new and the old—as Michelet, before making his stand, had found himself between his royal patrons and his revolutionary tradition. Michelet was himself the child of that period of paradoxes; and he was to become par excellence the historian of the perplexed personalities and political anomalies peculiar to an age of social change. This idea of contradictions inside a social system, which is to play, as we shall see, such a prominent role in later social-economic thought, already pervades Michelet to such an extent that we may trace to it the habit of verbal paradox which grew on him in the later-written volumes of his history, where he is dealing with the impasses of the old regime. With Michelet, the typical internal antithesis —which splits up and prevents from functioning the individual or the political body—is between class solidarity on the one hand and patriotic duty on the other; and beyond it, one is always aware of the two opposite emotional poles which magnetize Michelet’s world and give it its moral system: a cold and anti-social egoism and the impulse toward human solidarity.

    To return again to Michelet’s own century, the Revolution of 1848 had come and gone before Michelet had finished his history of the Revolution of 1789. In 1848, on the eve of the February revolution, Michelet’s lectures had been considered so inflammatory that his course had been suspended; but after the revolution, he had been reinstated in his chair. When Louis Bonaparte made himself Emperor in 1851, Michelet was dismissed without a pension, and when he refused to take the oath of allegiance, was deprived of his post at the Archives. He was a poor man again now after a period of relative prosperity; and from a position of direct public influence, he found himself alone with his history. He who knows how to be poor knows everything, he wrote. He had ended the History of the Revolution with the fall of Robespierre, and now he set himself to fill up the gap between the death of Louis XI and the taking of the Bastille. When he had done that, he picked up the story again at the fall of Robespierre and brought it down through Waterloo.

    And as the years went on and volume after volume made the long continuity of

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