I’ve just finished a most interesting and thought-provoking book about European history: Vanished Kingdoms, The History of Half-Forgotten Europe by Norman Davies.
Davies is a proper historian with all sorts of professorships and fellowships to his name. While his academic background is conventionally English, he has specialised in Eastern Europe and holds an academic post in Poland.
The book is – not surprisingly – about states that no longer exist, starting with Gothic and Celtic kingdoms in the post-Roman period, and ending with the Soviet Union. Davies spends a lot of the book in Eastern Europe, not just because it is his area of expertise, I suspect, but because there are so many candidate states to talk about in the region.
That notwithstanding, of his fifteen case studies, three are of interest in varying degrees to the Italophile. The first is about Burgundy in its various forms from 411 to 1795. Although centred in modern-day south-eastern France and western Switzerland, it did at times extend into the Valle d’Aosta and western Piedmont. It contains an interesting discussion of the Franco-Provençal or Arpitan language, which I mentioned in my post on the Valle d’Aosta.
The second is about the House of Savoy, from their origins in the 10th Century as counts of an Alpine fiefdom of the Holy Roman Empire, all the way through to their becoming the ruling house of united Italy in 1860 and the eventual extinction of the monarchy after the referendum of 1946. Davies offers quite a neat summary of the diplomatic skullduggery that saw chunks of the kingdom of Piedmont handed over to France in return for Napoleon III’s support against Austria, justified by some very dubious “plebiscites”. All this was under the auspices of the Piedmontese prime minister, the extremely slippery Count Cavour. Now celebrated in every Italian town as an Italian patriot, Cavour was nothing of the sort. He was not terribly interested in the Risorgimento and saw it only as a vehicle for the expansion of Piedmont and the interests of the House of Savoy.
The third is about the period during the Napoleonic Wars when France occupied several Italian states and handed them out to new kings, queens, dukes and duchesses, mostly Napoleon’s brothers and sisters. As Corsicans, the Buonapartes were of course more Italian than French. This was the period in which a significant amount of Italian art was stolen and taken to The Louvre, where most of it remains. Not surprisingly, this is a period that tends to be glossed over a bit by post-Risorgimento Italian historians, despite the fact that some aspects of French rule, particularly the legal code, did find their way into the modern Italian system in some form or another.
Despite the fascinating subject matter, there is an air of melancholy about much of the book, especially the Eastern European parts. One is accompanied by the ghosts of glittering aristocrats and vibrant folk cultures – Jewish, Catholic and Orthodox – now all gone.
But when it gets to the 20th Century, the mood is positively sombre. The Germans – and even more so the Russians – didn’t just redraw borders. In the name of liberation, they exterminated and expelled populations, and then re-wrote history as if they had never existed. Davies relates visiting the modern Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, formerly Königsberg in East Prussia, a place of high culture and learning and the home of Immanuel Kant. Almost all the original population is gone, replaced by ethnic Russians. Davies writes of one such, a journalist, who says that at school her teachers told the students that Stalin liberated the city from the Nazis in 1945, but said nothing whatsoever of what might have gone before.
It was that gloomy anecdote which got me thinking. Even dabblers such as myself are fully aware of the old trope that “history is written by the victors”, and to an extent part of the fun is teasing apart the myth-making accretions of, for example, post-Risorgimento Italian historians, to reveal the truth underneath. But there is a truth underneath. An historical narrative coloured by the filter of a particular culture is not at all the same as a deliberate, systematic set of lies intended to keep people in servitude.
Davies makes a powerful point in the introduction. He studied under historians in Poland, who had spent their careers resisting such industrial-scale deceit purporting to be history, and as a result they had “a passionate belief in the existence of historical truth”. In other words, the more threatened truth becomes, the more you value it, and the less likely you are to play silly semantic games with it. I wish some post-modernist academics in the Anglosphere would take a bit more notice of that.
The next post will be more Italian, and more cheerful.