5 Histories of 4 important countries- France, Italy, Germany, USA
That's a bit about Europe in general and Britain. Other countries? France?
France. We have to talk about the Revolution. Hundreds of books. I recently read
The Terror by
Graeme Fife 2004. It could cure you of wanting to read books on the Revolution - the effect is like reading Solzhenitsyn. Particular strengths probably compared to other books is that is this less Paris-centred, and fuller about the country-wide civil war (sometimes not against Royalists, but between different factions of revolutionaries) in Lyons, the South, the West (Nantes, Vendée), more than usual about the modest and obscure, many by chance victims as opposed to the famous distinguished ones. The latter are mentioned but the balance is different from general accounts like that of Cobban (below, vol. 2) or the partisan, Hobsbawm.
I believe standard is
A History of Modern France by
Alfred Cobban of which I have 3-volume paperback Pelican edition covering from 1715 to 1962. Parts of it I have read several times, which with my retentiveness is needed. Its impact on me was such that I don't exclude there could be also other equally good books. And indeed for the third period there now is such a better book (though its author pays tribute to Cobban). I have long felt the need for this book because of this period the first part (Orleanist monarchy etc.) is confusing and like Churchills pudding, seems to have no theme, and the Second (or Third, depending who's counting) Empire is more spectacular but you wonder if it was ever real (Cobban's IMHO best chapter is about it). But then, ah, the ( best part of) the
Third Republic, La Belle Epoche,
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belle_Époque that shines as France's brilliant Golden Age of flourishing culture, every art, the sciences and technology, and progressive politics (from a bad start, and not without hard struggle). In short much of what has created an admired image of France.
But not just to recount, rather to explain as well , that is a difficult and huge job. That is the job achieved by
France 1814-1914 by
Robert Tombs. Without a guide like this you can easily fail to understand, get it wrong in fact. Example, we read the political parties form governments which last averagely less than a year, from changing coalitions of parties. The average British or American reader sees 'party' and assumes that these are like a Liberal or Conservative, the Republican or Democratic parties, just more of them, making it more complicated to form a government from. But for real historical understanding you have to look into what actually is a political party in France of that time. What relation with electors, with local power, with central Authority, what even does a Ministry amount to and how does it all work. Or a more obvious theme: we think of France as an essentially left-wing country, at least in its soul, and certainly in its intellectuals. Tombs points out it has a far from negligible right wing soul and set of intellectuals (OK maybe less brilliant) too. That the two split in the Revolution, and have been locked in a secular struggle, in a sort of stalemate society, ever since, only ending perhaps in the 1970s. And so on, Tombs puts all these things, everything, the classes, parties, institutions, the army, the colonial Empire (mostly created in this period, most of the earlier one having been lost) etc. under the microscope. This is somehow the deepest, the most scientific in the sense of newness and closeness to primary research rather than general review, of the books I have reviewed here. It's not so much for relaxation reading, more like for study.
Italy?
Mussolini, (1981) and
Mussolini's Roman Empire(Le guerre del Duce), 1976. by
Dennis Mack Smith. Two oddities there? - only 20 years of history and a British author. But actually Italians are not very interested in history, not even their own, and what interest there is is concentrated mainly on
il ventennio, which is also the case internationally since it was then that Italy and its leader most mattered to the rest of the world. And Mack Smith is the best-selling historian in Italy! So that backs up my recommendations. As did a nephew of mine studying History at University I gave the book to who said it was the best book on the subject ever written - then he said no, it was just the best book ever written.
In my recent £1 haul I netted
Mussolini: a new life by
Nicholas Farrel.2003. Have yet read only two chapters and it's clearly a 'revisionist' work. One chapter is on how the Duce met his end, where Farrel cuts his way through a lot of mythologising. He rubbishes the partisans (Resistance) in general, or let's the evidence do it, which will have earned him enemies. The other chapter I read is an exceptionally clear account of the
Abyssinian crisis, a crucial event since it turned Mussolini from Anglo-French ally into the arms of Hitler, with incalculable consequences. Farell criticises the fumblings of the British and French politicians and diplomats. The appeasers should have appeased the minor threat, enabling them take a strong line against the major one, instead of the other way round, he thinks. But that even this bunch of people might have got it right enough if it had not been for the pressure of a moralistic British public opinion fixated in a faith in the
League of Nations. This is not far from a thesis of
AJP Taylor in his 1961 book
The Origins of the Second World War, which back then unleashed a storm of controversy, due to its contradiction in this and other questions with conventional thinking of the time. Farrel draws on much new documentation (and Taylor lamented the paucity of that available to him). For instance it is news to me that Mussolini was extremely well informed of the considerations determining British policy by a spy in the British Embassy.
When doing sightseeing tourism it adds to have knowledge of the history of where you visit beyond the guide books and pamphlets, which is why I mention
A History of Sicily in two volumes, Medieval Sicily 800-1713and Modern Sicily after 1713, also by
Dennis Mack Smith. I've read it twice and been there twice. Not saying this is required reading for anyone, but just in case you think of it as a out-of-the-way place, well for about two millennia Sicily was situated pretty much about the centre of our civilization, though seldom master in its own house. So there is much more to be seen there than you may imagine. Its history often parallels that of the rest of Europe, just going in the opposite direction. Checking up through wiki I had a strange confirmation of a thought that struck me on first reading 40 years ago. I thought, ah, historian is dependent on his documentary sources. Like tax accounts - this book (exaggerating) could almost be called 'History of tax avoidance in Sicily'. Wiki now tells me "
He belonged to the post-World War II generation of Cambridge historians, many based at Peterhouse (a Cambridge College),
who learned to appreciate the primacy of documentary evidence." And that his father was a tax inspector!
As for the rest of the 150-year history of united Italy, I see I have on my bookshelves
Italy and Its Monarchy, 1989 which I have never got around to reading. I see that it is by one
Dennis Mack Smith. Some more about pre-united Italy in another section below.
Germany As for Italy most readership interest is concentrated on one period 1914-1945. I have read a lot of WW1, WW2, Hitler and the Nazis, but am not going to single out anything in particular other than what I have already put under Europe.The unified German state is already crystallised, as it were, before 1914 where all these histories start. I would like to read more about how it got that way, say from Napoleon to then or at least to 1871. Before Napoleon one doesn't have to worry about it for some centuries, as a stable and self-perpetuating system had been created where no one but Germans had to worry about it. A good time ago I read "
The Course of German History" by
AJP Taylor, but unusually for him it left little impression. So I thought maybe I needed a potted history and
The Shortest History of Germany by
James Hawes 2017. But I wonder if these two authors aren't a bit eccentric. Taylor's book was published in 1945, when feelings were different, and he has bluntly stated he did not like Germans. He starts one essay with the words
"What is wrong with Germany is that there is too much of it." Hawes seems of similar opinion. He seems to have a good and ideal heartland Germany that is the West and South, which of everything had stopped there might have been ideal, a normal, progressive, indeed brilliant country. Not incidentally, and quite emphasised by him, a lot of this area is Catholic. But his ideal Germany was spoilt by the influence of firstly Austria, which is outlying and also the centre of a multinational empire, so could not be good for the formation of Germany, and then especially by another periphery, Prussia, which also started as Imperial conquest enterprise which brought Germany militarism and contributed backwardness. I guess a lot of people have a vague picture of something like that. If you want a brief rundown and of how Germany got from the Middle Ages to the military-dominated setup of 1914 maybe chapter 1 and 11 of
The Germans by
Gordon A Craig (1982).
USA
Maybe this site doesn't need me to comment US history. But since I'm here…
A very long time ago I read the Pelican Paperback
History of the United States by
J E Nye & R B Morpurgo (2 vols). From which I learned basic iterminology like
Gilded Age,
New Deal,
normalcy, and even that America once had Whigs and Tories, Then I never felt the need for anything else. It's now been replaced in the Pelican series by
History of the United States of America by
Hugh Brogan, first edition in 1984 I think it has gone through a number of editions.I have not read it, but it is said to be brilliant, at least by the publishers. In British schools (white} American history is treated as British history until Independence, see also Schama above
I was amused to read that in the in the US historiography stratosphere has become impossible to work because there is too much history
http://archive.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2006/12/24/the_rejection_bin_of_history/ . Perhaps they will put it into a giant database like that at CERN and a supercomputer could extract from it at high confidence level a standard model that accounts for, if not necessarily explains, all the facts. What happened could become a minor subfield as the programme should give different results each time you run it and there could be more interest in investigating the effects of changing the historic election results etc.
Whilst on the subject of America, I stumbled across the other day this rather deep analysis, even meditation, mainly on Puritanism and its input into the formation and later history of the USA. I don't know immediately what to make, and, nor perhaps nor will many of you.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/to...il&utm_term=0_717bc5d86d-5c29292e97-407368851To be continued...
.
