Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History

That the French Revolution triggered new, distinctively modern modes of historical consciousness across Europe and the West has become something of an historiographical cliché. Because the processes involved are so multifarious and ambiguous, however, they have tended to resist schematisation or even description, and the historians who address them most frequently resort to a very abstract or poetic register for this purpose. Despite the impression conveyed by his irritatingly uncommunicative title, Peter Fritzsche generally avoids both. His attention focuses initially on the disjunctions and dislocations that real people experienced in the backwash of revolution and Continental war. The quick succession of changes of regime gave many people a new sense, not only of being actors (or at least subjects) in a common public sphere, but of narrative sequence that begged reflection on the longer durée. Fritzsche cites (twice) Chateaubriand's observation around 1800 that one could still read inscriptions such as ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or Death’ daubed on Parisian streets underneath the whitewash that had been used to obscure at least the last two words of the formula. For émigrés like him, the period of exile gave plenty of opportunity for consideration of ‘before’ and ‘after’, as well of futurity; physical dislocation—temporary residence in England or America—also gave glimpses of hitherto unappreciated cultural diversity. Chateaubriand was even moved to think of the ‘savages’ he encountered on the Ohio River, squeezed out of their native habitats by westward-moving American settlers, as exiles much like himself. The émigrés are perhaps a special case, to whom Fritzsche devotes a whole chapter, having originally conceived his book as an investigation of their feelings of, first, alienation, and then, more enduringly, nostalgia. But Fritzsche is also concerned with ordinary people with less to lose than exiled aristocrats. He makes good use of Sulpiz Boisserée's travel diaries and other sources illuminating the reactions of peasants, soldiers and merchants to conscription, quartering, invasion, rumours of war, changes of regime—all of which induced ‘a new apprehension of eventfulness’. No-one remembered where they were when they heard of the fall of the Bastille, because this kind of ‘flash-bulb memory’ is dependent on having the concept of a popular memory of an historical event, which concept the fall of the Bastille helped to construct; thereafter, people could remember where and when they heard of Robespierre's death, or of Napoleon's victories and defeats. That said, it is not at all clear that the Revolutionary Wars really were the potentiating factor in cultivating popular historical consciousness. Only two-thirds of the way through his book does Fritzsche begin to widen out his chronological, geographical and analytical frame. Ideas of progress, after all, which gave people an historical context not so dependent on dislocation and rapid change, especially in Britain, had been brewing long before 1789, and were far from completely discredited by the ups and downs of the Napoleonic era. Fritzsche dwells excessively on the likes of the Grimm brothers, the Boisserées and the Schlegels, Chateaubriand, Wordsworth, William Cobbett and John Clare who match up with his favoured palette of emotions, regret, melancholy, alienation, wistful fascination with the ruin and the fragment. When Rahel Varnhagen dares to suggest that the ‘old days have flowed on just like the Rhine’—and to object to the rebuilding of Cologne Cathedral—she is reproved for not properly understanding ‘that new time did not always flow steadily into a progressive sea, but pooled and puddled around the wreckage of the past’. Not all of the broader social and economic changes of the eighteenth and nineteenth century were experienced as convulsive or destabilising, either. Fritzsche is wrong to suggest that ‘Industrial Revolution’ was an early nineteenth-century concept (at least in Britain, it was devised later, for retrospective ideological purposes); and wrong, too, I think, to suggest that its processes (or those of urbanisation) necessarily produced mostly feelings of alienation and loss. His last substantive chapter addresses the memorialising practices of those westward-moving Americans encountered by Chateaubriand, who gradually developed a sense of an ‘old New England home’ (with obligatory village graveyard and haunted house) as they moved further and further away from it, and who in letters and heirlooms and patchwork quilts accumulated an array of memorialising devices which conveyed a thicker sense of lineage, of family history, of purposefulness, of the transcendental significance of little domestic details. As Fritzsche acknowledges in his conclusions, this deliberate building up of histories, small and great, can be hopeful, even utopian, as much as melancholy and nostalgic. We still need a more systematic account of the range of historical consciousnesses thrown up in this fertile period. This requires consideration of a wider range of motive forces, at the cost, perhaps, of losing Fritzsche's valuable focus on the French Revolution and descending into the fog of ‘modernity’. It also requires a closer reading of the everyday sources for traces of the full range of emotions, identities and concepts embedded in them, of which Fritzsche can only supply a taste in this neat little monograph.