Yahoo Finance William Watson: We should learn to see history as Europeans do, warts and all
Every time I’m in Paris, as I was recently, I’m intrigued by the names of the subway stations. And there are lots of them to be intrigued about. The city has 16 subway lines with more than 300 stations.
One is named Robespierre, after the head of the euphemistically named “Committee on Public Safety.” It oversaw the revolutionary Reign of Terror in 1793-4 in which a total of 17,000 people were guillotined — including, eventually, Robespierre himself. Robespierre argued that logic dictated Louis XVI not get a trial before being executed: to try him would be to place the revolution itself “in litigation.” The revolution was his trial. Louis must die, Robespierre argued, “so that the nation may live.” The transgressions of Egerton Ryerson and Henry Dundas, recent reconsideration of which has led to their banishment from Toronto toponymy, seem tame by comparison.
The metro station George V got its name in 1920 to express gratitude to the British king for his country’s contribution to victory in the First World War, even though at the time he was also emperor of India, which is as imperialist, colonialist and unwoke as you can be.
Napoleon doesn’t have his own metro station but stations are named after his generals and marshals (Kléber, Duroc, Molitor and others), as well as some of his most notable victories — Austerlitz (in 1805 over the Russians and Austrians), Iéna or Jena (in 1806 over the Prussians), Rivoli (in 1797 over the Austrians in Italy), Pyramides (in 1798 over the Mamluks in Egypt) and others. By today’s standards, conquering Europe, even temporarily and even in the name of liberty, is not a very correct thing to do, yet the French have no compunctions about commemorating their man’s effort to do it.
There’s also a metro station named Stalingrad, in honour of the historically pivotal Soviet victory in 1943 over another would-be conqueror of Europe. It got its name in 1946, the same year the station on the Champs-Élysée was re-named for Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose armies helped liberate Paris in 1944 — even though, The New York Times would remind us, he had signed off on their being segregated by race at the time. In that decade and after, Pablo Picasso was behaving despicably toward the women in his life. Maybe that’s why he has only a half-station: Bobigny-Pablo Picasso.
The French do sometimes change stations’ names for political reasons. Two named Berlin and Allemagne got new names after Germany declared war in 1914. On the other hand, Bismarck’s victorious troops had marched into Paris in 1871, having besieged the city for four months during the Franco-Prussian War, and yet that hadn’t prevented the two stations from having Germanic names right up until the Great War began.
Feelings of animosity do still run deep, especially for older people, among what in many ways remain the tribes of Europe. Plaques all across France remind you of the outrages committed against resistance fighters in 1940-44. Plaques in Germany inform you that this or that church or castle was partly destroyed by bombing in 1943 or 1944 or 1945 and was extensively rebuilt in the 1950s and 1960s. In one German castle we visited on a recent trip, the guide explained it had been partly destroyed by the French army in 1689, which had used 11 mines to do the job. She explained that her spoken English had a distinct British accent because her teacher had been a prisoner of war in England. She said this with utter equanimity, as the matter of fact it was and is.
The Europeans have been doing history for a long time now. They seem to have developed an understanding that history happens, warts and all, to cite Oliver Cromwell’s instructions to his portraitist. What’s important is to know what, how and why, not to condemn from the high pulpit of modern morality.
Among Europe’s greatest historical treasures are its Roman ruins — and indeed its Roman structures that are not yet ruins. (“What built now will last 2000 years?” everyone seeing them wonders.) While constructing these future artifacts, and also giving us language, law, literature and much else that has made our world, the Romans did many terrible things: conquest, pillage, rape, massacre, enslavement and so on. Yet we seem able to take them as they were and to appreciate the good they did while also not ignoring the bad. As far as the Romans are concerned, history is settled, becalmed.
It isn’t really, of course. Specialist historians are discovering new things about Rome and its empire all the time, as well as more or less constantly re-evaluating many old things. But we seem able to be dispassionate about the Romans. They were creatures of their times, we understand, even as they helped create our times.
At what distance from the past do we acquire such perspective? And could we not shorten that distance so as to more fairly judge our more recent forebears, who were creatures of their times, as we hope future generations will understand we were of ours?
