The Undivided Past (20 page)

All these scholars concurred that the collective identities driving the historical process forward were those neither of religion nor of nation, but of class. Although they focused on England rather than Britain or the British Isles, they also stressed the transnational connections and the transcontinental reach of the class identities they believed they had discerned. Rodney Hilton insisted that the English peasant rising of 1381 was part of a broader European class upheaval, including the revolt in maritime Flanders, the Tuchin movement in central
France, and the wars of the
remensas
in Catalonia.
⁸⁸
In the same way, the English Civil War was merely one aspect of a more pervasive European “crisis” of the mid-seventeenth century, one that extended from Sweden and the Ukraine, via Naples and Bohemia, and the Netherlands and France, to Catalonia and
Portugal, which registered a decisive shift from feudal toward capitalist organization, as the landowning and bourgeois classes battled it out across much of the continent.
⁸⁹
According to George
Rude, it was this long-running conflict between the
aristocracy and the
bourgeoisie across the whole of eighteenth-century Europe that culminated in the
French Revolution of 1789.
⁹⁰
And Eric Hobsbawm
argued that the near-miss proletarian uprisings in England during the 1830s and 1840s were also part of a wider European pattern of dissent, alienation, and insurgency, which could be traced back to the political revolution in France and the
Industrial Revolution in Britain, and which reached its climax in the continent-wide
revolutions of 1848.
⁹¹

These Marxist reworkings of the English past were paralleled in France by interpretations of the Revolution of 1789 that were also based on class solidarities and antagonisms. In
The Communist Manifesto
,
Marx and Engels had followed such recent writers as
Thierry and
Guizot in depicting the French Revolution as a bourgeois revolution, and although at the time highly tendentious, this view of 1789 subsequently carried all before it in the French academy, as the primacy of the struggle between a declining aristocracy and a rising middle class became enshrined in successive generations of French history books and accorded the status of self-evident truth. From
Jean Jaurès’s multivolume
Socialist History of the French Revolution
, published in the 1900s, to the works of
Georges Lefebvre and
Albert Soboul, which appeared from the 1940s to the 1970s, the prevailing interpretation of the French Revolution remained essentially unchanged: it was the outcome of predetermined conflict between two very different collective identities, and it not only changed France forever but also the world for the better.
⁹²
Jaurès, Lefebvre, and Soboul all held the chair of the history of the French Revolution at the Sorbonne, all of them were members of the French Communist Party, and their views were summarized at the beginning of a book by one of Soboul’s students: “1789: The
bourgeoisie brought about the revolution,” followed by a footnote dismissing all alternative interpretations with contempt.
⁹³

The work of these English and French Marxist historians seemed especially resonant during the 1960s. With many people viewing “revolution” as the mood and the mantra of the times, there was now an added incentive to discover how classes had come into being in earlier eras, and how they had struggled and fought to change the world. This interconnected model of historical change—which assumed that economic transformation led to social transformation, and eventually to political revolution—was
extremely appealing, even to non-
Marxists: it could be traced back to
James Harrington and also to
Aristotle; it underlay the work of
Fernand Braudel and the
Annales
school in
France (with whom the Marxist historians enjoyed a close and mutually admiring relationship); and it was also taken up by many social scientists during the 1960s.
⁹⁴
In such a febrile
political and scholarly environment, the interpretation of the past built around
class formation, class consciousness, and class conflict was eagerly espoused by a new generation—indeed, a “New Left”—of radical historians inspired by the older cohort of Hilton,
Hill,
Thompson, and
Hobsbawm. They were involved in the student politics of the time, they regarded 1968 as the most exciting year of their lives, when revolution did seem possible, they would obtain university appointments in England and across western Europe and North America, and they would create their own journals, of which the
History Workshop Journal
(United Kingdom, 1976) and the
Radical History Review
(United States, 1978) were the most important.
⁹⁵

The outcome was a widespread proliferation of history written in a Marxist mode around the collective identities and antagonisms of class. Following the lead given in
The Communist Manifesto
, some scholars rewrote the histories of ancient
Greece and Rome as a succession of class
struggles between those who owned property (including
slaves) and those who did not (especially slaves), all these divisions and confrontations supposedly arising out of the “slave mode of production.”
⁹⁶
A new cohort of Marxist medieval historians, often inspired by
Rodney Hilton, elaborated and extended his argument that there was a deep chasm separating feudal
landowners and peasants, and that their relations were so vexed and antagonistic as to lead to class war.
⁹⁷
Meanwhile, the earlier debates concerning the transition from
feudalism to capitalism, and on the general European “crisis” that took place during the mid-seventeenth century, were revived by the American historian
Robert Brenner, who insisted that “the issue of class exploitation and class struggle” was “essential” in understanding how the medieval economy and society had developed into the early modern economy and society.
⁹⁸
The result was that the collective identities of class across many centuries of European history were declared to be much more important than
those of religion or nation, and in the early 1970s
Perry Anderson put all these newly fashioned pieces of the past puzzle together in a “Marxist grand narrative of world history” tracing social classes and social conflicts from the ancient world to
feudalism, and then on to the early modern era of absolute
monarchy.
⁹⁹

This new prioritizing of class made an even greater impact on interpretations of the relatively recent past, as historians sought and discovered bourgeois
revolutions in America’s
Revolutionary and
Civil Wars, in the Italian
Risorgimento, in the unification of Germany by
Bismarck, and in the Meiji Restoration in
Japan; in each case they insisted that the old feudal order of landowners had been overthrown by a new, modernizing regime of
capitalists.
¹⁰⁰
And although proletarian revolutions had not yet followed these bourgeois upheavals, in the way that
Marx and Engels had predicted they would and must, many historians were eager to follow
E. P. Thompson and
Eric Hobsbawm in discerning and describing the working-class identities that they were convinced had come into being. In the United States, the new generation of radical
labor historians explored how the workers, in their heroic struggles against brutal managers and rapacious capitalists, had forged their own collective identity and class
consciousness.
¹⁰¹
In
Mexico, the political upheaval of 1910–11 was depicted in similarly Marxist terms, as
Emiliano Zapata was credited with successfully mobilizing a popular, progressive, anticlerical, class-based revolution against the repressive regime of
Porfirio Díaz.
¹⁰²
In
Russia the events of 1917 were still celebrated as the first ever triumph of a self-consciously revolutionary proletariat—albeit one under the decidedly nonproletarian leadership of
Lenin and
Trotsky.
¹⁰³
And from
China to Egypt, historians traced the making of the twentieth-century working classes coming to full collective self-awareness.
¹⁰⁴

This was a very different way to understand the past, to apprehend the present, and to predict the future than those underlying earlier histories centered mostly on the identities of religion or nation: whereas
G. M. Trevelyan had written
Garibaldi and the Making of Italy
, E. P. Thompson wrote
The Making of the English Working Class.
Whereas Trevelyan had celebrated the creation of the Italian nation as the embodiment of liberty and
freedom, Thompson exalted the formation of the English proletariat as the superior and preferred embodiment of very much the same things. While Whig history had been insular, patriotic, and constitutional, Marxist history was
cosmopolitan, subversive, and class-based: “concentrated charges of intellectual explosive,” according to
Eric Hobsbawm, “designed to blow up crucial parts of the fortifications of traditional history.” Indeed, by the end of the 1960s that seemed to be exactly the incendiary effect Marxist history was having. “In recent years,” Hobsbawm explained, “the most direct approach to the history of society has come through the study of
classes.” It was an exhilarating prospect:

And this was not only of academic importance, for many of those scholars writing about class were also offering historical validation and support for the “human collective projects of the twentieth century” that were now being advanced in the name of
Communism.
¹⁰⁵

Yet even in its heyday, from the early 1960s to the early 1980s, this claim that class-based solidarities were the most important collective identities failed to carry all before it.
¹⁰⁶
Many “traditional” historians disapproved of their Marxist colleagues, preferring to write about
religion or the nation rather than about class, and insisting that these remained more important forms of human solidarity; meanwhile, some social historians continued to believe that hierarchy, consensus, deference, and subordination were more important forces than class solidarity and class conflict.
¹⁰⁷
While Marxist historians had captured the commanding heights of French academe, their British and American counterparts were less successful, especially in the universities of Oxford and Cambridge,
or in the Ivy League, where class-based approaches to the past remained essentially marginal, and where Marxism was never mainstream. And despite their close friendships and their in-house journals, the Marxist historians conspicuously failed to agree among themselves as to what these class groups were doing or achieving. Had
feudalism disappeared by the mid-seventeenth century, or was the transition to
capitalism further delayed by the advent of absolutism? If the
bourgeoisie had triumphed so completely across the West, why was it that in Britain and elsewhere in Europe the traditional landed classes were still dominant during the nineteenth century? And why had the industrial working class, apparently so radical and so subversive during the 1830s and 1840s, subsequently shown such a lack of interest in the sort of
revolutionary endeavor that
Marx and
Engels had been certain they would espouse?
¹⁰⁸

With the Marxist historians unable to agree about the trajectory and accomplishments of the classes they believed had existed in the past, it was scarcely surprising that scholars who did not share their faith were strongly critical of their overall approach, and since the 1980s, the flow of criticism has swollen to a flood. Nowadays it is very rare for historians of the ancient world to call themselves Marxists, and few believe that class identity and class conflict are the most applicable concepts: the
economy and social structure were never completely divided between
slave owners and slaves; there were significant regional variations across greater
Greece and the
Roman Empire; and
political conflicts within the ruling elites were at least as important as their conflicts with other classes.
¹⁰⁹
Similarly, the depiction of the medieval world as a two-class society, riven by pan-continental revolutionary peasant movements, has also largely been abandoned. (In the opening pages of
The Communist Manifesto
, Marx and Engels had admitted that the ancient and medieval worlds had been characterized by a complex gradation of ranks, and about this, at least, it seems they were right.)
¹¹⁰
As for the “bourgeois revolutions” or the “general crisis” of the seventeenth century, this no longer seems valid for England, where there was no neat division between the decline of the
aristocracy and the rise of the
middle class, and where change was gradual rather than cataclysmic; nor
does it fit for Europe as whole, where the revolts were too localized to form a cross-continental pattern, where the vertical bonds of hierarchy were more significant than the horizontal solidarities of class, and where the explanations for unrest and rebellion were political and courtly rather than economic or social.
¹¹¹

There has been a similar overturning of Marxist categories and concepts that had been used to explain the more recent past. During the 1950s and 1960s,
Alfred Cobban assailed the view that the
French Revolution was a bourgeois revolution, insisting that the middle class and the aristocracy were not separate,
monolithic, antagonistic entities—a skeptical interpretation that subsequent research has done much to affirm. Thus
Simon Schama wrote his bicentennial account of 1789 in opposition to the “dialectical dance routine” of social classes, and insisted that “the ‘bourgeoisie’ said in the Marxist accounts to have been the author and beneficiaries of the [Revolution] have become social zombies, the product of historiographical obsessions rather than historical realities.”
¹¹²
The claim by
E. P. Thompson that he had discerned a single radical, self-conscious English working class, united by common experiences, was early on dismissed as “a myth, a construct of determined imagination and theoretical presuppositions,” and subsequent work on the varieties of working-class experience, in the context of what was an elaborately layered and interconnected social hierarchy, has borne out this hostile verdict.
¹¹³
As for the European revolutions of the 1830s and the 1840s, they were no more a class-driven, continental phenomenon than those alleged to have taken place during the 1640s and 1650s, having been set in train by various forces in many different locations, and not by a unified bourgeoisie or proletariat.
¹¹⁴