The Modern Mind

by Peter Watson

  Bloch (a resistance hero in World War II) wrote two books for which he is remembered today, The Royal Touch and Feudal Society. The Royal Touch was concerned with the belief, prevalent in both England and France from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, that kings – by the mere act of touching – could cure scrofula, a skin disease known as ‘the king’s evil.16 But Bloch’s study ranged much further than this curious belief; it drew on contemporaneous ideas in sociology, psychology, and anthropology in search of a context for what Bloch called the mentalité of the period. In Feudal Society, published on the eve of World War II, he attempted to re-create the historical psychology of feudal times, something that was completely novel.17 For example, he explored the mediaeval sense of time, better described perhaps as an ‘indifference’ to time, or as a lack of interest in the exact measurement of time. In the same way, Febvre’s Rabelais explored the mentalité of the sixteenth-century world. By an analysis of letters and other writings, the author was able to show, for example, that when Rabelais was denounced as an atheist, his critics didn’t mean what we would mean today.18 In the early sixteenth century, atheist had no precise meaning, simply because it was inconceivable for anyone to be an atheist as we would recognise the term. It was, instead, as Peter Burke confirms in his history of the Annales school, a general smear word. Febvre also explored time, showing for example that someone like Rabelais would not have known the year in which he was born, and that time was experienced not in a precise way, as measured by clocks, but rather by ‘the length of an Ave Maria’ or ‘the flight of the woodcocks.”19 It was the ability of Bloch and Febvre to get ‘inside the heads’ of individuals remotely removed in time that readers found exciting. This felt much more like history than the mere train of events that many historians wrote about. And it applied even more to Braudel, for he took the Annales approach much further with his first book, The Mediterranean, which appeared in 1949 and created a bigger stir.20

  This book was conceived and written in extremely unusual circumstances. It had begun as a diplomatic history in the early 1920s. Then in 1935–7 Braudel accepted an appointment to teach at the University of São Paolo, and on the voyage back he met Febvre, who ‘adopted him as un enfant de la maison.’21 But Braudel didn’t get round to writing the book until he was a prisoner of war in a camp near Lübeck. He lacked notes, but he had a near-photographic memory, and he drafted The Mediterranean in longhand in exercise books, which he posted to Febvre.

  The Mediterranean is 1,200 pages long and divided into three very different sections. In the first part, Braudel treats his readers to 300 pages on the geography of the Mediterranean – the mountains and rivers, the weather, the islands and the seas, the coastlines and the routes that traders and travellers would have taken in the past. This leads to a discussion of the various cultures in different geographical circumstances – mountain peoples, coastal dwellers, islanders.22 Braudel’s aim here is to show the importance of what he called la longue durée — that the history of anywhere is, first and foremost, determined by where it is and how it is laid out. The second part of the book he called ‘Collective Destinies and General Trends,’ and here the focus of his attention was on states, economic systems, entire civilisations – less permanent than the physical geography, but still more durable than the lives and careers of individuals.23 His gaze now centres on change that occurs over generations or centuries, shifts that individuals are barely aware of. Exploring the rise of both the Spanish and the Turkish Empires, for example, he shows how their growth was related to the size and shape of the Mediterranean (long from west to east, narrow from north to south); he also showed why they gradually came to resemble each other – because communications were long and arduous, because the land and the available technology supported similar population densities.24 And finally, there is the level of events and characters on the historical stage. While Braudel acknowledges that people differ in character, he thinks those differences account for less than traditional historians claim. Instead, he argues that an understanding of how people in the past viewed their world can help explain a lot of their behaviour. One example he makes much of is Philip II’s notorious slowness in reacting to events. This was not just due to his personality, says Braudel. During Philip’s reign Spain was financially exhausted (thanks again to geographical factors), and communications were slow – it could take two months to travel from one end of the Mediterranean to the other. Philip’s deliberation was born as much of Spain’s economic and geographic situation as anything.25

  Whereas Bloch’s books, and Febvre’s, had created a sensation among historians, The Mediterranean broke out of its academic fold and became known well beyond France. He himself was very ambitious for this to happen.26 People found the new type of information it contained every bit as fascinating as the doings of monarchs and prime ministers. For his part, Febvre invited his enfant de la maison (now turned fifty) to join him in an even more massive collaborative venture. This was a complete history of Europe, stretching over four hundred years, from 1400 to 1800, exploring how the mediaeval world became the modern world, and using the new techniques. Febvre said he would tackle ‘thought and belief,’ and Braudel could write about material life. The project hadn’t gone very far when Febvre died in 1956, but Braudel carried on, with the book eventually taking almost as long to complete as did his earlier work. The first volume of Civilisation et capitalisme, known in English as The Structures of Everyday Life, appeared in 1967; the last in 1979.27

  Here again Braudel’s conception was threefold – production at the base, distribution, and consumption at the top. (This was Marx-like, rather than specifically Marxist.) In the realm of production, for example, Braudel explored the relationship of wheat and maize and rice to the civilisations of the world. Rice, he found, ‘brought high populations and [therefore] strict social discipline to the regions where they prospered’ in Asia.28 On the other hand, maize, ‘a crop that demands little effort,’ allowed the native Americans much free time to construct their huge pyramids for which these civilisations have become famous.29 He thought that a crucial factor in Europe’s success was its relatively small size, plus the efficiency of grain, and the climate.30 The fact that so much of life was indoors fostered the development of furniture, which brought about the development of tools; the poorer weather meant that fewer days could be worked, but mouths still had to be fed, making labour in Europe relatively expensive. This led to a greater need for labour-saving devices, which, on top of the development of tools, contributed to the scientific and industrial revolution. The second volume, The Wheels of Commerce, and the third, Perspective of the World, followed the rise of capitalism. Braudel’s central point was that geography governed raw materials, the creation of cities (the markets) and trade routes. There was in other words a certain inevitability about the way civilisations developed, which made Europe, rather than Asia, Africa, or America the cradle of both capitalism and science.31

  Braudel’s influence lay not just in his books but in the inspiration he offered to others (he died in 1985). Since World War II, the Annates school has spawned a very successful series of investigations, among them The Peasants of Languedoc; Montaillou; Centuries of Childhood; The Hour of Our Death; The Coming of the Book; The Identity of France; The Great Cat Massacre; Catholicism from Luther to Voltaire; The Birth of Purgatory; and The Triumph of the Bourgeoisie. Emmanuel le Roy Ladurie was widely regarded as Braudel’s most brilliant pupil.32 He too was interested in la longue durée, and in The Peasants of Languedoc and Montaillou he sought to recreate the méntalité of mediaeval Europe. Montaillou, situated in the Ariège region of southwest France, was in an area that had been ‘home’ to a number of nonconformists during the Cathar heresy of the fourteenth century. These heretics were captured and interrogated by the local bishop, and a written record of these interrogations has survived. This register was used by Ladurie, who interpreted it in the light of more recent advances in anthropology, sociology, and psychology.33 Amo
ng the names on the register of interrogations, twenty-five came from one village, Montaillou, and for many readers Ladurie brought these individuals back to life. The first part of his book deals with the material aspects of village life – the structure of the houses, the layout of the streets, where the church was.34 This was done with wit and imagination – Ladurie shows, for instance, that the stones were so uneven that there were always holes in the walls so that families could listen to their neighbours: privacy was unknown in Montaillou. But it is in the second part of the book, ‘An Archaeology of Montaillou: From Body Language to Myth,’ that the real excitement lies. Here we are introduced, for example, to Pierre Maury, a gentle shepherd, but also politically conscious, to Pierre Clergue, the obnoxious priest, too big for his boots and the seducer of Béatrice des Planissoles, impressionable, headstrong, and all too eager to grow up.35

  The Annales school has proved very influential. Its attraction for many people lies in the imaginative use of new kinds of evidence, science added to a humanity that provides a technique to bridge the gap across the centuries, in such a way that we can really understand what happened in the past, and how people thought. The very idea of recreating mentalités, the psychology of bygone ages, is ambitious, but for many people by far the most intriguing use of history, the closest to time travel we have ever had. A second reason why the Annales form of history has proved popular is its interest in ‘ordinary’ people and everyday life, rather than in kings and parliaments, or generals and armies. This shift of interest, very marked during the century, reflected the greater literacy achieved in Western countries at the end of the nineteenth century; poorer readers naturally wanted to read about people like themselves. It was also yet another fruit of World War I – that disaster affected the lives of ordinary people far more profoundly than it affected the generals or the leaders. Finally, the shifts in history writing formed part of a general trend: with the growth of mass society, of new media and popular forms of entertainment, the worlds of ‘ordinary’ people were a focus of interest everywhere.

  But in some quarters there was a more specific reason, and this found an outlet particularly in Britain, in the work of a small but very influential group of Marxist historians. The British Marxist historians were less original than their French counterparts but more coherent in their aim, which was essentially to rewrite British history from the end of the Middle Ages to the beginning of the twentieth century, ‘from the bottom up’ (a favoured phrase, which soon became hackneyed). Most of its seminal works were produced in or near the 1960s: Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution of the Seventeenth Century, by Christopher Hill (1958); Primitive Rebels, by Eric Hobsbawm (1959); The Age of Revolution, by Hobsbawm (1962); Studies in the Development of Capitalism (1963), by Maurice Dobb; The Making of the English Working Classes (1964) by E. P. Thompson (‘the pivotal work of British Marxists,’36 ‘probably the most important work of social history written since the Second World War’); Labouring Men, by Hobsbawm (1964); Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution, by Hill (1965); A Medieval Society: The West Midlands at the End of the Thirteenth Century, by Rodney Hilton (1966); Reformation to Industrial Revolution: A Social and Economic History of Britain, 1530–1780, by Hill (1967); The Decline of Serfdom in Medieval England, by Hilton (1969); Bandits, by Hobsbawm (1969); God’s Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution, by Hill (1970); and Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Movements and the English Rising of 1381, by Hilton (1973). Three men stand out in this history of the lower orders, Rodney Hilton, Christopher Hill, and E. P. Thompson. The issues they focus on are the way feudal society changed to capitalist society, and the struggle which produced the working class.

  Rodney Hilton, professor of history at Birmingham University, was like the others a member of the British Communist Party until the events in Hungary in 1956. His main interest was in the precursors of the working class – the peasants – and besides his own books on the subject, he was instrumental in the founding of two journals in the 1960s, the Journal of Peasant Studies in Britain and Peasant Studies in the United States.37 Hilton’s aim was to show that peasants were not a passive class in Britain in the Middle Ages; they did not just accept their status but were continually trying to improve it. There was, Hilton argued, constant struggle, as the peasants tried to gain more land for themselves or have their rents reduced or abolished.38 This was no ‘golden time,’ to use Harvey Kaye’s words, in his survey of the British group, when everyone was in his place and satisfied with it; instead there was always a form of peasant ‘class-consciousness’ that contributed to the eventual decline of the feudal-seigneurial regime in England.39 This was a form of social evolution, Hilton’s point being that this struggle gave rise to agrarian capitalism, out of which industrial capitalism would emerge.40

  The next stage in the evolution was examined by Christopher Hill, fellow and Tutor of Balliol from 1938, who devoted himself to the study of the English revolution. His argument was that just as the peasants had struggled to obtain greater power in mediaeval times, so the English revolution, traditionally presented as a constitutional, religious, and political revolution, was in fact the culmination of a class struggle in which capitalist merchants and farmers sought to seize power from the feudal aristocracy and monarchy. In other words, the motivation for the revolution was primarily economic.41 He put it this way: ‘The English revolution of 1640–60 was a great social movement like the French Revolution of 1789. The state power protecting an old order that was essentially feudal was violently overthrown, power passed into the hands of a new class [the bourgeoisie], and so the freer development of capitalism was made possible…. Furthermore, the Civil War was a class war, in which the despotism of Charles I was defended by the reactionary forces of the established Church and conservative landlords. Parliament beat the king because it could appeal to the enthusiastic support of the trading and industrial classes in town and countryside, to the yeomen and progressive gentry, and to wider masses of the population whenever they were able by free discussion to understand what the struggle was really about.’42 He added that the revolution also took some of its colour from recent developments in science and technology, very practical concerns that could in time be converted into new commercial outlets.

  Like Hilton and Hill, E. P. Thompson also left the British Communist Party in 1956. Like them he remained convinced that English history was determined mainly by class struggle. In a long book, The Making of the English Working Class, one of his aims was to ‘rescue’ the working classes from ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’ and render visible such neglected people as weavers and artisans. In the process, he redefined the working classes as essentially a matter of experience. It was the experience – between 1790 and 1830 – of a declining and weakening position in the world. This, he said, was the essence of the industrial revolution for the working class in England – the loss of common rights by the landless, the increasing poverty of many trades brought about by the deliberate manipulation of employment to make it more precarious.43 Part of the attraction in Thompson’s book lies in the fact that it is so vividly written and humane, but it was original in a social Darwinian sense too. Before 1790 the English working classes existed in many disparate forms; the experience of oppression and the progressive loss of rights, far from resulting in their extinction, proved to be a major unifying (and therefore strengthening) force.44

  The final element in this ‘Great Leap Forward’ of historical studies came in 1973 from the archaeologist Colin Renfrew, in Britain. Like the Annales school and the Marxists, and like archaeologists everywhere, he had an interest in la longue durée. But, again like the French and British historians, his main aim was less an obsession with dating as such as with a new understanding of history. Then professor at Southampton University, and now at Cambridge, his book was entitled Before Civilisation: The Radiocarbon Revolution and Prehistoric Europe.45 The title sold the book short, however, for
Renfrew gave an admirably clear, albeit brief history of the development of dating in archaeology in the twentieth century and how – and this was his main point – it has changed our grasp of the past, not just in terms of chronology but in the way we conceive of man’s early development.

  He began with a crisp statement of the problem, so far as archaeology was concerned. Various early-twentieth-century studies by geologists in Switzerland and Sweden had confirmed that the last ice age endured for 600,000 years and ended 10,000 years ago. The problem with ancient human history therefore stemmed from the fact that the written records stretched back no further than about 3,000 BC. What had happened between the end of the ice age and the birth of writing? Renfrew’s main aim was to take a look at archaeology in the wake of the various new dating mechanisms – dendrochronology, radiocarbon dating, and potassium-argon dating. Radiocarbon dating was first devised by Willard F. Libby in New York in 1949 (he won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1960 for his innovation), but his insight was added to significantly by the American Journal of Science, which in 1959 started an annual radiocarbon supplement, which quickly became an independent publication, Radiocarbon. This provided an easily accessible forum for all the revised dates that were then being obtained from across the world. It was perhaps the biggest intrusion of science into a subject that had hitherto been regarded as an art or a humanity.