HEINRICH VON SYBEL

 

A GERMAN publicist of great ability—Karl Hildebrand—wrote in 1874: “History in Germany, in spite of the impartiality on which its writers pride themselves, is, above and before all, national and Protestant”. The professors may have as many illusions as they wish about their objectivity, their “scientific incorruptibility”, on the “uprightness of their conscience” and the “infallibility of their method; whether they wish or know it or not, they have served national and Protestant interests. They have made history to suit their fancy. Among its facts, they have chosen those which supported their point of view. They have soon forgotten the science learned on the benches of the University : the national and Protestant tendency alone has remained”.

These lines apply to no one better than to Heinrich von Sybel, who was, in Germany, the representative par excellence of the national and Protestant tendency. He used, moreover, no concealment about it. Historical science in its results ended for him in the same conclusions as his political and religious ideas. He defended these ideas with the utmost passion.

Up to the present the national historians we have dealt with did not interpose themselves in their histories to defend a personal point of view in politics. Niebuhr and Leopold von Ranke were satisfied to make known the historical development of the peoples they were dealing with, leaving their readers themselves to draw the political lessons which their point of view deduced. Mommsen had gone a step further than this. Finding at Rome a situation of affairs which bore some comparison with the situation in Germany after 1848, he had described it with a fervour which had never before been displayed by the historians of his country. In Sybel we shall find a historian who subordinates everything to his own ideas and for whom every circumstance of the past serves as a pretext to prove the excellence of the Hohenzollern institutions and the truth of the principles of National Liberal politics. He developed these ideas particularly in his “History of Europe during the French Revolution” and in his no less considerable work on the “Origins of the New German Empire”.

 

To describe Heinrich von Sybel’s psychology is to describe that of the National Liberals, of whose tendencies and spirit he is, perhaps, the best representative in Germany.

A National Liberal was a man for whom nationality did not consist in the characteristics of race and language. To these had to be added certain political ideas and particular religious beliefs. To be national in Germany about the year 1850, it was necessary to be Protestant, if not in faith, at least in spirit, and to be Prussian in political ideas. As for the liberalism of the men of this party, it had nothing in common with that of Canning, Cavour or Laboulaye, who loved liberty for itself, while this party could only conceive liberty surrounded by certain institutions whose model was to be found in Prussia.

Certain peculiarities of character, life, and education must have been present to create this type, which drew its numbers particularly from the enlightened middle-class, among those pursuing liberal occupations, professors, publicists, and men of letters. Heinrich von Sybel is one of the Germans who have best realized these conditions.

A positive and sturdy temperament, destitute of imagination and penetration, with dogmatic brain, rather domineering in his doctrinairism, but active and sane, Heinrich von Sybel by his ancestry belonged to both the currents which joined to form this party—the middle-class and aristocratic spirit. On his father’s side he belonged to a noble Westphalian family which had many officials, lawyers, and pastors to its credit : on the side of his mother, who descended from a family of manufacturers and merchants of Elberfeld, he was one of the middle class.

This double aristocratic and middle-class character was the basis of Sybel’s nature; externally this great broad-shouldered man, agreeable, pleasant, companionable, a great hard-worker, knowing how to enjoy life, his frankness intermingled with middle-class pompous dignity, resembled a self-made man from the United States. In his ideas and tastes, on the other hand, he belonged to the aristocratic class of Prussian officials of whom Baron Stein was an example. To this were added several peculiarities which were due to his nature and to the circumstances in the midst of which he lived.

Sybel was a Rhine Protestant. This qualification, which does not mean much to us nowadays, had, about 1840, a particular significance. The people of the Rhine, in a general way, were more Liberal than the other Germans of the North. The French domination, which had taken a firmer root there than elsewhere, had left there a desire for liberty which was found in all the politicians. I know, of course, that for many of these Germans this French liberty, which they called State liberty as opposed to municipal liberty, was not liberty at all. They attached little importance, too, to political equality, which, since the time of the French domination, had abolished class distinctions in this part of the country and put all citizens under one denomination.

Sybel was one of those people. As a Rhenish Protestant he felt, like all his fellow-Protestants, attracted towards Prussia, whose strongest support they had been from 1815, while the Catholic majority still kept its sympathy for French ideas. And this seemed natural. Overwhelmed in the midst of a Catholic population hostile to all their ideas, these Protestants regarded Prussia as the bulwark of their faith. But the strangest thing of all is that, brought up in a country where public liberty had penetrated into their customs, they made extraordinary efforts to show that Prussia, a military and feudal State, alone was able to save their liberty. Like many German Protestants, they were inclined to confuse the religious, intellectual and economic liberties which actually existed in Prussia with the political liberties of which that State had none.

The little town of Dusseldorf, where Sybel was born in 1817, was just one of those centres of Protestant culture where a mind such as his could be developed best. In this town, which had been a centre of art ever since the Palatine Elector Charles Theodore had founded a Drawing Academy there, where Cornelius, Schadow and Bendemann had been professors, one might meet there at that time musicians like Felix Mendelssohn, men of letters like Karl Immermann, who was managing director of the theatre, where were staged German and foreign plays—Shakespeare, Calderon, Goethe and Schiller. The house of Sybel’s father (a distinguished lawyer) was one of the meeting-places of this artistic society. The historian said later on in life : “I acknowledge all I owe to this admirable environment”. He might have added that this centre of Protestant art was at the same time a centre of Prussian influence, which in its mind and tendencies was totally different from the other artistic centres of the Rhine country, whose culture was exclusively Catholic.

We can understand, then, that it was among the Protestants of the Rhine country that this German liberalism had its origin—a liberalism which has been called National Liberalism and which has the triple character of being Prussian in spirit, anti-clerical, and anti-French. Its first leaders were men of the Rhine : Hansemann, von der Heydt, Sybel the elder, Kamphausen, Mevissen—who all helped to form the mind of Heinrich von Sybel, the future theorist of the party. Indeed, from 1840 on he placed at the service of their cause a talent, as publicist and historian, of the first rank. It was he who spread their ideas throughout the whole of Germany by means of his works and took the first steps in the formation of the great party of the Empire—the National Liberal party.

 

II

 

When he made his first appearance in political life, about 1840, Heinrich von Sybel was a young historian who had just finished his studies at Berlin University, where his mind had been formed by two masters : Ranke, the historian, and Savigny, the jurist.

The first of these, Ranke, had initiated him in the critical method and Savigny had taught him his philosophy of history : two sciences, two truths, in his eyes, which by their united power would serve to supply the proof in a scientific fashion of a certain number of political problems.

In the historico-political system of Sybel, which at bottom is only an exaggeration of Ranke's system, historical criticism is an element of the first rank. As political judgment, indeed, depends upon the knowledge of historical facts, it is necessary, above all, to establish the truth of these facts in an irrefutable manner.

“The National Liberal ideas”, Schmoller, the economist, said rightly, “were a combination of the old feudal ideas of the Prussian aristocracy with the ideas of the Rhenish Liberals. Sybel was the scientific champion of this moderate Rhenish constitutionalism, with a bias at once middle-class and aristocratic (Kaufmannisch-aristokratische Farbe)”. He might have added : “A most Protestant bias in opposition to the equalitarian liberalism of the Rhenish Catholics”.

Under Ranke’s direction, Sybel had become a critic of the first rank. Endowed with a clear-thinking, lucid, and vigorous mind, he had no equal, in his own country, in the art of classifying authorities, in his manner of establishing the authenticity of sources and searching out the truth in the midst of contradictory evidence. His critical essays on Jordanes, on the “History of the First Crusade”, on “The Origin of Kingship in Germany”, are masterpieces of precision, lucidity, and common sense.

But to Sybel history was not scientific through the exactitude of researches alone, but also through the number of moral, social, arid political truths it could establish. That, at least, was what the jurist Savigny had taught him when he showed him that all societies, from the beginning of the world, continually evolved in the same direction and fashion, and concluded therefrom that the number of political experiences that humanity has undergone could be collected under certain types : that as these experiences repeat themselves under analogous forms at all periods of history, it is sufficient to examine the past to have the key to all the political problems of the day.

“A true historian”, said he, “should unite in himself three conditions : he ought to be an investigator endowed with a critical sense, a man endowed with a sense of politics, and an artist capable of expression. In the matter of research, the historian’s duty is to set aside all personal feeling. In order to understand the basic meaning of events, the subjective point of view must always be the most useful. Finally, as to the artistic point of view, it will always be the artist’s personality which will set its seal on the story”.

With this theory of the historical school of law Sybel did not become, like Niebuhr and Ranke, merely a defender of the theory of nationalities, and like Mommsen a partizan of the struggle for historical life : he attempted further to explain by this means all the great events of history and contemporary politics.

Now to what results did this philosophy of history together with textual criticism lead? To prove in the first place that if the French Revolution failed it was because its political principles were wrong : because the present age could not accommodate itself to the communistic theories which were at its root nor to the Napoleonic universal empire which was its consequence : that the organization of States on a national basis is the great historical fact of the nineteenth century : that Germany would succeed in this, and that to achieve it she had to exclude from her mind everything that tended to destroy national life, viz., Catholicism and the anti-German policy of the Hapsburgs. Once the Hapsburgs were removed the Hohenzollern would be able to assume the leadership of the movement. “Thus it is”, says the critic Julian Schmidt naively, “that the author’s political opinions ended with the same conclusions as science”.

This conviction had in Sybel’s eyes great importance. It allowed him to state his opinions as indisputable truths. And he did not fail to do so. From his earliest works he openly expresses his opinions as a Protestant, a Nationalist and Liberal.

In a work on Jordanes (1837), which was his thesis for his doctor’s degree, he could see, even at that early period, in that historian the apostle of the national idea in opposition to the dream of Casarian and Catholic universal dominion. Another little work “The History of the First Crusade” (1841), gave him an opportunity of dissipating the halo of romantic legends, of waging war “against the monks and their lying fashion of writing history”, and of showing us what conception he (Sybel) had of religion. “We have seen”, he said, “what caused the Crusades to fail : not Zenki’s impetuosity, Noureddin’s firmness, or Saladin’s joyous valour. In the great streams of history, none hopelessly sink but those who destroy themselves. It was the heat of religious excitement which called the Crusades into existence and then irresistibly hurled them to perdition. We have seen how over-excitement, thirst for the miraculous, and contempt for the world rendered any regular and consecutive plan of conquest in the East impossible from the very beginning. The Crusaders despised all earthly resources of the mind, and thus their mystical transports led them into every other miserable passion. .. . Men in modern times . . . no longer see, as in the Middle Ages, an inveterate hostility between heaven and earth, or expect religious perfection from the renunciation but from the right use of earthly things. Thus it is that this age, apparently so lukewarm in religion, has succeeded in attaining an object which the zeal of Urban and the power of the Baldwin in vain strove to effect”.

“The History and Literature of the Crusades”, translated from the German by Lady Duff Gordon

In a third work, “The Origin of Kingship in Germany”, a work nevertheless of purely scientific character, Sybel endeavours to show, in contradiction of the Catholic historians, who, in their hatred of Protestant Germany, tried to sever every connection between the past and present, that kingship in Germany evolved quite spontaneously and did not undergo any influence from the Roman State in its development.

This thesis, which gratified Sybel’s national point of view and which he endeavoured to uphold by ethnological, economic and social considerations, was far from receiving the support of the scholars of the country. Even in the camp of Prussian historians the great mediaeval scholar Waitz opposed it successfully, thanks to his deeper knowledge of the subject and its sources, to his sense of judgment, and even to his historian’s eyes.

With this polemical incisive spirit Sybel would seem to be of such a kind as to succeed rather in pamphlets than in history. He was, indeed, a wonderful writer of occasional pamphlets. At all the critical moments of Prussian politics he wrote them. His first work of the kind was an anti-Catholic pamphlet, “The Holy Coat of Trèves”, published 1844.

During that year the Rhenish Catholics, as if to work their revenge on the Kulturkampf, had exhibited at Treves “the seamless Holy Coat of Our Lord”, as they called it, which was kept in the Chapter House of the Cathedral. “For seven weeks”, says Treitschke in his History, “thousands of pilgrims came to Treves : in all the towns and villages in the beautiful Moselle country the church bells rang when a company of pilgrims passed with banners displayed : the innkeepers and the sellers of religious relics in the episcopal town made fortunes. Ardent prayers resounded throughout the Cathedral : Holy Coat, pray for us”.

When Sybel heard this “he danced with rage at this insult offered to the common sense and honesty of the German people”, and in a satirical pamphlet, written in Voltaire’s style, he determined to kill once for all “the Holy Coat of Treves and all the Holy Coats in the world”

Sybel played an important part in his country’s confessional struggles. Ultramontanism had no enemy more vigilant than he. In 1847 he published a pamphlet, “The Political Parties in the Rhine Provinces”, in which he wrote : “To be Ultramontane and a German patriot are two things which preclude each other: we cannot serve two masters at once, the Pope and the King : we must make our choice between them”

When he wrote this pamphlet in 1847 Sybel was already a man well in the public eye in Germany. A professor at the University of Marburg, he had taken an active part in the political life of the nation. Prussian and Liberal, he sat, in the first place, in the Hessian Chamber while waiting to become a member of the Prussian Chamber. Sybel was not one of those Liberals who believed that liberty was enough to constitute German unity. He knew that, without Prussia, this unity could never be brought about, but he also believed that, in order to make its mission in Germany popular and efficacious, Prussia should take its place at the head of the Liberal movement. “The position of Prussia in Germany”, he wrote, “and in regard to the rest of Europe is such that she needs in an equal measure two things which unfortunately often preclude each other : strong unity and strong liberty. To live and eventually to become greater she needs a powerful sovereign and a public opinion : she must possess military power and at the same time parliamentary institutions. To elaborate such a problem fifteen years are few, and if the task still awaits, today, a complete and lasting solution, we may yet say that the notion of liberty has not for one moment left the attention of the Prussian Government. It is indestructible : it is in our blood : it belongs irrevocably to the air which we breathe”.

Stating this opinion still more exactly, Sybel added : “One thing is certain, and that is that those who place obstacles in the way of the Pan-German efforts of Prussia render a service not to the cause of liberty and parliamentary constitutionalism, but to the feudal parties and legitimists in Germany and Europe. Offer up your prayers for liberty, ask the Prussian Government not to falter in the German cause”.

What Sybel meant by liberty is not exactly what is commonly signified by that word in France or in England. He said this, later, at the beginning of his History of the Formation of the German Empire  : “I do not desire liberty in the ordinary sense of the word, liberty which is nothing but a weakening of the central power to the advantage of individual rights : my liberty is a strengthening of the power of the State by the patriotic cooperation of the people in all the duties of the State”. At bottom the fundamental principle of his politics was not liberty but national individuality, which is often quite opposed to political liberty. “They will recover”, said Tocqueville, “from that mania for nationalities which eclipses for the moment their passion for political liberty”. And Tocqueville was right. Sybel, who, later, was to set at such little account the essential liberties, while he had a strong government, undertook, from 1850, to demonstrate the truth of Tocqueville's statement in the struggle which he made against the ideas of the French Revolution.

From the year 1848, his attention attracted by the power of these ideas in Germany, Sybel determined to oppose them by showing what, “in practice, the theories of radical democracy and the dogma of popular sovereignty, which was the result of the French Revolution, brought them to”.

His first intention was only to write a short essay, a pamphlet I in a lively style. But, as often happens, the pamphlet grew to a volume, and then volumes followed one after the other. For twenty years, with an indefatigable patience which no research wearied, Sybel buried himself in his subject; he read everything that had been published : general works, memoirs, and correspondence. When the printed sources were exhausted, he had recourse to unpublished sources—State papers and archival documents. At a time when, in Paris, Frenchmen had difficulty in obtaining permission to examine the archives, he was allowed access, by a special favour of Napoleon III, to the most precious documents of the Ministries of War, Home, and Foreign Affairs. When all this information had been collected in Paris, he completed it by further research in London, Brussels, the Hague, and Berlin.

In writing this history, Sybel had but one idea—but one passion : to dissipate for ever the halo of heroism which was attached to the French Revolution.

“As the Revolution”, he said, “began with the struggle of a feudal monarchy and under the cry of liberty and equality, we have become accustomed for a long time to consider revolutionary and liberal movements of an equal importance : and while blaming all revolutionary excesses, we have become used to describe the tendencies of the parties of that time as more or less liberal according to how much or little they advanced along revolutionary paths”.

Sybel thought that by placing the performances of the actors in this great drama, so transfigured by the French historians of the Restoration, in their proper light; by displaying the secret intentions of these men as they are to be found in the State papers, and by showing the real motives which led them to act, he would reduce them to their true proportions. The pity is that Sybel had his own ideas on this subject. They had been made to seem giants, he wished to make them pigmies : and both pretensions were equally absurd.

Sybel was pursuing another object side by side with this one. The Liberal middle class in Germany did not like Prussia. They had many prejudices against that State, which they called the land of militarism and bureaucracy. Sybel wished to overcome these prejudices. And his work was also intended to serve this object. The first thing was to show by history that Prussia had a mission to fulfil in Germany, one which, moreover, she had never lost sight of even in the most troubled periods of her history, as, for example, the period of the Revolution. It was also necessary to prove that this liberty, which the Liberals were seeking so far away in France, could be given to them by Prussia, for her institutions were the most Liberal in Germany. And thereupon Sybel, drawing a parallel between Prussia and England and the United States, said :

“In these three States it was the party most animated by ideas of national unity, of independence and devotion, which took command of affairs. In Prussia this command fell to the King and his servants, while the higher classes remained aside through unfriendliness or indifference, and the mass of the people were completely ignorant of politics”.

But this is not all. Sybel, by his history, wished to prove a third thing to the German people : viz. that Austria should be kept out of the future German Confederation because she had nothing German in her. “The Jesuitic spirit of the House of Hapsburg”, he said, “has completely destroyed in her the principle of true German life “ : this he endeavoured to show during the whole of the revolutionary period.

Thus it was that he set up in Germany, in 1853, that enormous instrument of war in five compact volumes, which was assuredly a scientific work of the highest standard by reason of the large number of new facts which it brought to light, but which was a long historical pamphlet, intended to adjust the judgment of those German people who did not yet believe in the Hohenzollern mission.

Sybel was bound to succeed. Science always overawes the German people, and his science was enormous. Benjamin Constant said : “I have forty thousand facts and they change at will”. Sybel had found more than forty thousand in the bundles of paper which he had taken from the archives. His good faith, it is true, cannot be doubted : but he was an impassioned man pursuing a theory, and involuntarily he went straight to the testimonies which sided with his bias. “Untruth”, says a German proverb”, “is often not in what one says but in what one keeps back”. Sybel once again will show this to us.

 

III

 

Let us recognize at once, before we criticize this work, that it is one of the masterpieces of historiography of the nineteenth century. Sybel in the first place brought to light again many points of this period of history by publishing new revelations. We may even say that he was the first to go to actual sources.

Before his time, the history of the Revolution had been written, so to speak, a priori. Mignet in his large sketch had related it according to the testimony of eye-witnesses who were still alive at the time of the Restoration. Thiers, too, was satisfied to question survivors of that time. Edgar Quinet, who came a little later (1846), had a written basis to work upon : the memoirs of Baudot, a member of the National Convention : but that was all. The only one to draw upon the archives at Paris was Michelet, who wrote the first part of his history in the Central DepOt, where he was the chief of the historical section. After December 2, 1853, when he retired to the provinces, he also examined the archives at Nantes and the valuable archives of La Vendée. And in spite of his bias, the enthusiasm with which he grasped at facts to brandish them like conquering darts, we must recognize that these facts exist and that he gave them to us. “That I should be attacked as to the meaning of these facts”, he says in the Preface to his French Revolution, “is well enough. But it should be acknowledged in the first place that he owes to me those facts with which he wishes to attack me”.

Sybel has increased to marvellous extent the knowledge of these new facts of the Revolution, and he has subjected to a most vigorous examination all those facts which we already knew. He had perhaps an advantage over French historians in that he was the dupe of nothing. He knew nothing of the respect attached to certain legends. No consideration whatever would stop him in his examination. And we must acknowledge, too, that his keen-eyed hatred has at times served him an excellent turn. After his examination everything seems to leave him renovated : events, men, and institutions. His affectation is more than is really necessary in order to show how much he disagrees with most historians who have preceded him. But after making all reserve as to his opinions, which most often are questionable and to which we will return later, we must acknowledge that this history is the completest picture existing of European life at the end of the eighteenth century, for he did not deal alone with the history of the French Revolution, but with that of all Europe of the period : for Sybel is one of those historians who believe that an event cannot reveal to us all its secrets unless light be thrown upon it by the other contemporary events.

Sybel’s history is purely political : but at the same time it is an economic and social study. And as he makes no distinction, unlike all the historians of that tendency whom we have studied, between politics and national life, he is consequently led to attach great importance to all the manifestations of that life : to rural government, to finance, industry, commerce, taxation, and the army. These chapters, which are perhaps the best in the book, give us the completest picture of the Ancien Regime (it must not be forgotten that Taine came more than twenty years after Sybel) and of private individual life at the time of the Revolution, in all its phases.

“A stranger”, he said in his Preface, “is on that account all the less exposed to the danger of adhering through attachment to some darling error, to incorrect or even now sometimes dangerous views”.

The importance he attached to the economic life of ancient France had for its first result the modification of the very idea that one had of the Revolution. Before Sybel this event had been studied almost only politically : the parliamentary struggles filled almost entirely the works of historians who, explaining the progress of the Revolution by means of these struggles, were led, when excusing the excesses of which it became guilty, to distinguish between 1789 and 1793, between that fine enterprise—the taking of the Bastille—and the bloody horrors of the Reign of Terror. Sybel shows that in reality this distinction could not exist.

“These first years”, he said, “have often been called the finest period of the French Revolution : but in truth they were to the year 1793 what the seed is to the harvest”. And he gave a proof of this, or rather, by setting out the history of the economic life of the nation, he proved that this Revolution had above all a social character, that it was in reality a transference of property, a new division of riches. He expresses it in this way : “The greatest omission in all the previous histories of the Revolution is to have maintained a profound silence in the matter of the economic facts concerning it, so that the common­place has long obtained currency that the last century aimed at a political revolution, while this one aimed at a social one, and that the first instigator of this revolution in France was Babceuf. Today it is no longer so : our sight is keener, and we recognize that the most extreme communists had their model in the Jacobin chapter of the Revolution. . . . But this history is still a long way from being explained according to that theory.”

But once in possession of this idea, instead of proceeding calmly to its demonstration, Sybel, when studying the details of the Revolution, shows a peculiarly partial mind. He is just neither to events nor to men : as to the former, in that he continually attempts to diminish their importance, and as to the latter, in that he invariably portrays them in the most unfavourable light.

Sybel exhibits this partiality in the first place by diminishing the range of influence of the French Revolution. Now, without wishing to regard that event as being absolutely unique, as certain historians still wish to do, we are forced to recognize that it is the most important fact of modern history and that its character was never local and accidental, but universal. Even Sybel cannot but agree to this to a certain extent. “What happened at Versailles”, he said, “had the merit of giving peoples and rulers a great lesson as to the directing of their policy”. Later, when the Revolution spread its influence throughout Europe, he admits that the effects of this propaganda were far from being all evil.

“It is true, no doubt, that in this case, as in every other, a good cause is furthered by every occurrence, and that in this sense freedom was furthered by the French Revolution. A century would probably have passed over half Europe before the mouldering rubbish of feudalism could have been removed by peaceful means”.

But this is all he grants, and with what bad grace Moreover, what he offers with one hand he takes back with the other one. Scarcely has he granted this than he seeks to lessen its significance.

The Revolution, in the first place, is to him nothing more than one of the forms of the end of the old regime, and as such it should be placed on the same footing as the other manifestations of the same thing, which are the fall of Poland and the destruction of the Holy Roman Empire.

“These three events”, he said, “hang together : their accidental externals may be various, but their basis is common. Everywhere in Paris, Warsaw and the German Empire, it is the crumbling of the Middle Ages : everywhere a new policy triumphs —the modern military monarchy— which levels and centralizes”.

But if Sybel shows prejudice in wishing that these events should not result expressly one from the other, and that France should not be the originator of the great movement which transformed modern history, he shows still more in the efforts he puts forward to set these events on the same level, by giving them an equal importance.

Next to the significance of the Revolution it is the incidents which he disparages. We must evidently not ask Sybel for an enthusiastic account of the “great revolutionary days”. He has given them but little space, excusing himself on the ground that he wished to write a history particularly of the institutions. But in the few words which he gives them he does not conceal his disdain. He speaks sarcastically of the infatuation of an entire people who “think that liberty is founded by enthusiasm”. Clearly Sybel is not one of those men who, like Michelet, vibrate to all the outbursts of a people's magnanimity. Having a methodical and practical disposition, he is rather inclined to mistrust popular enthusiasm. On the other hand, when he comes to the history of the Republic he lends a willing ear to all its horrors : he emphasizes with evident satisfaction all the dark and tragic aspects of that period. He very soon comes to see nothing but these aspects of the Revolution. Everything that could increase one’s impression of crime and scoundrelism he readily takes hold of. It has been said that if Taine saw in the Revolution I nothing but scoundrels, it was because he sought his information principally in the police reports. Sybel must have done the same, for he mentions scarcely anything but the excesses and acts of violence.

Indeed, a strange thing happens, and that is that he, who pretended to be nothing more than a historian of institutions, who in the Preface of his work announced his intention to study the society of the revolutionary period, what it was and what it had done, by determining its influence over modern society, he, I say, through his detestation of this event, ends by attaching value only to what is accidental. When he is speaking of crime, the smallest incidents accumulate beneath his pen, but when the time comes to demonstrate the permanent and solid results of the Convention, the historian passes them by.

This bias plays bad turns on Sybel too. It causes him frequently to contradict himself. When describing the old regime, he shows eloquently by the unhappy condition of France that the Revolution was necessary. But when he comes to the Revolution itself, he expresses regret for the old regime and finds that “it was not so bad, and that it would have been sufficient to improve the institutions by making some reforms in details”, so that all would have been for the best in the best of worlds.

This hatred of the Revolution has many causes with Sybel, but the first and strongest of them is in his turn of mind.

With respect to the French Revolution it has always been possible to divide people into two classes : the first of which is as excessive in its admiration as the second is in its hatred

These two classes of people are really two classes of minds, and we might say that they share the world between them : the idealists and the realists. The idealists are not all poets, as were the first admirers of the Revolution—Klopstock, Schiller, and Wordsworth—but also philosophers and politicians who, with Fox, Fichte, Kant and Herder, repeated to the next generation the noble words of Herder : “The seed falls into the earth : for a long while it seems dead, when suddenly it pushes up its tiny shoot, thrusts aside the hard earth which covers it, struggles with the hostile clay, and at last becomes a plant bearing flowers and fruit”.

We can readily acknowledge that all the great hopes dreamed by these noble minds have not been realized, that the Revolution fell short of its promise, that it did not reconcile all classes of society in a brotherly love, that it did not put an end to injustice nor to dogmatism nor to wars on this earth. This is true, but are the aspirations of the Revolution less noble on that account? Might they not elsewhere, in other circumstances, transform society? Who can set humanity’s course? They speak of the bankruptcy of the French Revolution as if it were over. It still continues. The leaven which it put into society is still active. From this point of view it is not an exaggeration to say that it resembles Christianity, which after eighteen centuries is far from having realized on earth its ideal of humanity. Yet who can say that it has not moulded our race and introduced more justice and love into the world? Progress is achieved but slowly. It is only little by little that society will be imbued with the ideal of the Revolution. We are at present only at the dawn of this movement. “Modern Europe”, said Frederic Harrison rightly, “regards 1789 as a date which marks in humanity the greatest evolution which the world has known since Christianity”.

But in opposition to the idealists who dream as above, the pessimistic realists form a compact battalion. We know their leaders : they are Burke, Mallet-Dupan and Taine. Sybel, by the tendencies of his genius, belongs altogether to this group. Burke was one of his first admirations, and remained, I think, the strongest. He said of Burke’s Letter on the French Revolution : “It is my political gospel”. He praised the depth of thought and penetration of the man who, from October, 1790, foretold that “this Revolution would end in military absolute power”. After this, how could one doubt the truth of the political principles of such a prophet? Then, outdoing the English critic, Sybel utters a sharper criticism than Burke’s of the rights of man—he calls them “trivialities unworthy of an intelligent man”, concerning which he writes seven pages of bitter and prejudiced argument addressed to “those simpletons who imagine that a State is founded or a revolution accomplished by means of hopes and enthusiasm”.

“Nothing”, says he, “is more painful, more tiresome, or more humiliating to read than these discussions in which they tried to decree by a majority of votes what the words right and liberty meant. . . . They destroyed with untiring zeal the last traces of tradition in order to build up the State according to the laws of nature”.

But when we go to the bottom of things we see that such deep passion was not aroused only to refute political ideas which displeased him. There was a more intimate and secret reason : fear. It was possible to say with justice of Burke’s pamphlet : “Never was a work more arrogantly and passionately national than the attack he made on the French Revolution : all the pride, jealousy, and animosity of England found their expression therein : the bitterness about the American War, the pride of being alone worthy of a free government, the antipathy of Protestant strictness against Gallic licence, turn this powerful invective into a sort of manifesto of British patriotism”. Now a similar criticism might be written of Sybel’s History of the French Revolution. Under cover of putting the French Revolution on its trial, he really does it to the French mind and French history.

Sybel did not like France. It is true he acknowledges in the French people great qualities—the solid virtues of the middle class, the sthetic sense, the intelligence and hard-working spirit of the people, who succeed wonderfully in all arts—but he did not think that in politics the nation had done anything lasting or at least worthy of imitation by the Germans. The reason he gives for it is that the average Frenchman is incapable of managing his affairs himself and that he has great need of the assistance of the State. “While the nature of the Anglo-Saxon race is expressed in the word self-government, the Frenchman’s nature finds its expression in a continual effort towards centralization”. The failure of the French Revolution, in his mind, has no other cause. “To explain the Revolution”, he said, “we must always return to this question : How is it possible that the enthusiasm of 1789, which aspired so strongly after liberty, ended, after six years, in such a murderous result? No doubt the incapacity of the leaders in the first half of the Revolution, the mob's lack of experience in the management of political affairs, and the raising of public passion for the foreign war, contributed to it. But the principal fault was the complete absence of any understanding of the two fundamental ideas of the revolution : liberty and equality”.

When defining liberty to us, Sybel shows us that the French people are not capable of it. “True liberty”, said he, “is the right of man to develop all the moral dispositions of his nature according to his free will. True equality consists in acknowledging that this liberty exists for all men who have a right to equal protection and to an equal position in the sight of the law. Hence is derived the true and eternal democratic idea which claims to fix the political right of individuals, not in the old feudal manner according to the blind chance of birth, but according to what he has done, giving preference to the capable and well-informed patriot, though he should come from the humblest cottage, over the selfish or ignorant descendant of nobility. An open career for talent arid merit, that is the meaning of liberty and equality”.

You will stop in surprise and say : “How can you say that the French Revolution did not establish that principle! It was precisely the French Revolution that introduced it into Europe”. Sybel would answer this objection by a distinction. “The French”, he says, “have completely failed in the first of the tasks they set themselves, which was to set up liberty in their country, and they have only half succeeded in the second, which was to establish equality among the citizens”.

Thereupon he exposes to us what he calls the false notion of equality among the French. “The French”, he says, “assert that men are born equal in rights, and that it is the State’s task to realize that equality by exacting for every one a right of equal suffrage, a right of eligibility to, and an equal share in, political power. This assertion should lead them speedily to the claim which is its logical consequence : the right of equal possession, of equal enjoyment, and also of equal work. And we know how near Robespierre and Hebert came to the realization of this idea. Therein is the cause of the check sustained by the Revolution, the reason for all the coups de force, the origin of the instability of all its works, whether in the nineteenth or eighteenth century”.

What strikes one most in this extract is the assurance with which he sets these facts out. It is clear that to Sybel these are irrefutable truths. He does not satisfy himself with stating them, he must also explain them, and naturally he does so through “the psychology of the Frenchman”.

In examining the Gallic type, Sybel cannot find in it any of the characteristics which make up the true democrat ; “not the desire to obey the established law nor respect for the State nor for individuals”.

“Every one”, he says, “speaks of his rights, and no one asks himself what are his duties towards himself and towards his fellow-citizens, or what efforts he should put forward to enable the State to satisfy the wishes of all”

What, then, is the remedy for this evil? Sybel has no hesitation. They need a man. If the nation had been capable of choosing one freely who would have been acceptable to all, it would have been all well, but as she was not capable, it was the man who imposed himself on the nation—Napoleon, who thus became the necessary saviour.

Sybel belonged to that class of historians who believe in the necessity for great men. The example of countries like England, America, or Switzerland, where admirable political tasks have been performed by collective assemblies in which there were no men of genius, but only upright, honest, and well-intentioned minds, is not very convincing in his eyes. “I maintain with Treitschke”, he wrote in one of his letters, “that it is the strong men who make history. The mass do nothing : they feel very pressing needs. Educated men catch a glimpse of the ideal of the future, but only confusedly. To realize it a man is needed—a strong man, who not only, like the others, recognizes the ideal of the times, but who finds in himself true means of attaining his object. Thus it was with Bismarck and German unity. When and where will social reform find its Bismarck? It seems to me to be now at the point at which the German movement for unity was in 1844: a praiseworthy effort, obscure exaggerations, and false experiences”.

For the French Revolution Bonaparte was the man. Through the failure of the nation he became the “savior”, that is, the man “powerful enough to unify by controlling them the positive acquisitions of this revolution, in order to assure for the people the prevalence and enjoyment (Behagen) of civil existence and to throw open at once to the active forces of the country careers of glory”.

“There is no occasion to look for the origin of the coup d'Etat in the rascality or duplicity of the military chief”, he says elsewhere. " . . It was the consequence of the state of affairs. . . . In September 1797 the fate of the Republic was in all respects sealed. The attempt of the 18th Fructidor had shown once more that on the basis of radical ideas a true State was not possible, equally so under the form of the Constitution of 1795 as with the prescriptions of the Constitution of 1791. It could be foreseen that with such theories the condition of all sound political life, a respect for law, would never be attained. Politics degenerated into a continuous oscillation between anarchy and the coup d'Etat, until at last a superman arose strong enough to silence the others, and, by destroying all liberty, capable of putting a stop to the misuse made of it”.

Sybel thinks that, if the Revolution at its beginning had found this man, Bonaparte would not have been necessary; but there was no such man. The only one who rose above the ordinary level, Mirabeau, had but “a tainted glory”. The dissolute life he had led had destroyed in him all moral strength. He had, it is true, some preeminent statesmanlike qualities : a sovereign intelligence which rules events and can direct them : will united with the enthusiasm of conviction. But, a slave of his past and his life, he could not take up the place which was his by right, and by the fate that weighed him down he was " reduced to the intrigues of a Court in difficulties which still hoped to save itself by expedients."

After the death of Mirabeau, in Sybel’s opinion, the reign of mediocrity began : the Assembly was subjected to all the fluctuations of the popular will. The mob ruled. The Commune, with its fanatics who were supported by the mob, was mistress of the Assembly and controlled a whole nation according to its own will.

Among those men who from that time governed the policy of France, Sybel only distinguishes two categories : the pedants and the rascals.

The pedants, well-intentioned simpletons, votaries of the pure idea, narrow-minded men, were in his eyes very dangerous, for they had faith and could be carried by fanaticism to the worst extremities. The others, the rascals, only saw in the Revolution a position of affairs which they could turn to their own advantage. These were the majority. Indeed, it would not be necessary to give Sybel much encouragement to make him declare that all the revolutionary leaders were more or less of this quality, for to him a simple revolutionist most often had a criminal within him. But what is certain is that he was not afraid of bold generalizations. He would say, for example : “For the French, fraternity was nothing but a pretext for attacking, out of a taste for plunder, the neighbouring peoples”. Elsewhere : “The cry of liberty everywhere was nothing more than the signal for despotism and war”. And again this : “No one felt the least attachment for the existing state of things. While dreaming of most wonderful Utopias, they were accustomed to exploit the present state of affairs to their private advantage”. And finally this : “Liberty to the men of the Revolution was the licence to do what seemed best to them, the absence of any hindering government, and the possibility of satisfying their own covetousness”.

With all this, what becomes of the spirit or devotion to the native land which sent the volunteers away to the frontiers? Sybel did not believe in any such spirit. Soldiers and officers to him were nothing but common looters. The generals were “unable to bridle the greediness of their officers and their commissaries or the gross lack of discipline among the soldiers (die Soldatesca)”.

When reading things like this you ask yourself whether you dream. What, then, are all the officers adventurers and the revolutionary armies “undisciplined gangs that had no taste for anything but rapine and plunder”? Then you will think of other testimonies—of that of Stendhal, who went through the first Italian campaign and who was unceasing in his praise of the disinterestedness of the soldiers and their leaders. You will recall, too, the fine words of Tocqueville : “I have long studied history, and yet I have never seen a revolution in which men were found of such sincere patriotism, such self-sacrifice, and such magnanimity”.

Which of the two was right, Sybel or Tocqueville? By piercing a little beneath the surface of his work you will not be long in making up your mind : you will perceive at last that this impeccable historian, who has read everything, seen everything, checked everything, has peculiar likings for witnesses who support his point of view. He who is so hard when dealing not with Terrorists, but with Liberals like Lafayette, Duport, Barnave and Lameth, is full of condescension for the absolute monarchs of Europe, “who”, he said, “while the revolutionists destroyed every obstacle that stood in their way, were solicitous of the prosperity and wishes of their people”. Where did he see that ?

Elsewhere Sybel undertakes to vouch for the sincerity of Marie-Antoinette. He states that she was ready to make a “reasonable trial of constitutional monarchy on condition that the King’s safety should be guaranteed and that he should have the necessary power to restore order” : he says again that if she wished to fly, it was because she wished “to place herself at the head of the Catholic movement in La Vendée or Provence” (Varennes, however, is riot in the south or west of France) : he knows, moreover, that in the event of victory, the new constitution “would have established the fall of the feudal system and of the privileges of birth, the unity of government and freedom in trade and industry”."What evidence does he bring forward to support this? None. He believes it, and that is sufficient.

Of the captivity and death of the little Dauphin in the Temple he makes a tragical history, of which the principal features and details are taken from Beauchesne, whose pathetic romance he accepts in full. A witness for the prosecution always has a chance with him of being heard, especially if his testimony demonstrates the natural ferocity of the revolutionists. Thus in the case of the Reign of Terror—the least certain part of his history—he follows literatim the more than suspicious evidence of Mortimer Ternaux. Elsewhere he invokes the authority of M. Ponjoulat.

We might let this partiality of Sybel pass were it not emphasized by the tone in which his account is written. Facts do not suffice him to show his sympathies or antipathies; these malevolent opinions must also be expressed in acrimonious terms. He cannot, for example, mention Lafayette’s name without such epithets as “intolerable coxcomb, conceited and incapable fellow, humbug and poltroon”, running to his pen. If he mentions any inherent weakness of the French temperament, he never fails to add as an antithesis “la grande nation”. There are in his work several little ironical pictures which are an ornament to it. This, for example, is the way in which he describes the famous scene of the Convention which preceded the expulsion of the twenty-seven Girondins:—

“Barère then made a last attempt and suddenly proposed that the Convention should break up in a body with the president at their head in order to test their freedom. A unanimous shout of assent was raised at the proposal, and the deputies began to move, with the exception of about a hundred Montagnards, who remained in their seats with irresolute curiosity. The others got as far as the main entrance of the palace, where Henriot, slightly intoxicated, was stationed in front of a battery of democratic gunners. He answered the address of the president with brutal ribaldry, and after the exchange of a few words drove the crowd of men, who called themselves the representatives of France, back into the palace, by the word of command Aux canons! Wherever the Convention tried their fortune in the garden they fared no better : and they soon allowed themselves to be led back into the hall by Marat, who, surrounded by a troop of gamins, marched triumphantly along”.

There is another thing in the History of the French Revolution which reveals even better perhaps the partiality of Sybel, and that is the constant efforts he puts forward to demonstrate that his country owes nothing to France.

One of the common characteristics of all historians of Prussian tendency is the belief that Prussia, long before the Revolution, had brought about for herself and by herself all the good resulting from that Revolution in the realization of the principles of social justice and equality and in the evolution of modern society. Sybel is not wanting in this : he points out the solid bulwark of German liberty in the Prussian institutions.

In another place, he will not have it that Germans in other parts of the country were indebted to France for anything. We know, for example, that the French were received with enthusiasm by the people in the Rhenish provinces. Sybel will hear nothing of this : “There”, he said, “the people trembled with a powerless rage. There it was that were scattered in Germany the first seeds of the national spirit : then, in thousands of irritated minds, there grew the conviction that no German citizen could enjoy his life in safety at his own fireside if the whole nation were not united in a powerful German State”.

Sybel confuses quite plainly two dates : 1793 and 1807.

But it is particularly in the account of the origin of the wars of the Revolution that this national self-love bursts out. Sybel’s patriotism could not suffer that the Allies, of which Prussia was one, should be responsible for the war. He must, at all costs, throw the fault upon the Girondins. He recognized well enough that after March 12th Frederick William II desired the war “to punish the Jacobins, to save chivalrously Louis XVI and the émigrés, and finally to add to his dominions a huge Polish province”; but it is no less true in his eyes that it was the Gironde “which began this war to overthrow the constitutional monarchy of 1791, Louis XVI and the Feuillants”. As for the Emperor Leopold II, he is assured that he “only sought to defend that constitution—the last bulwark which still protected them from the establishment of the Republic—from the attacks of the Jacobins”.

Not for a single moment did Sybel ask himself by what right did the Emperor Leopold and the King of Prussia arrogate to themselves the claim to interfere in French affairs.

He finds it quite natural that these monarchs should make demonstrations on the frontiers of this country, which, he says, they had no intention to violate, in order to create fear in the minds of the people. He approves of their desire “that France should become a monarchy wisely controlled and not the battlefield of savage disturbances” : he justifies them finally for wishing “to give the French Government the necessary power to wipe out the revolutionary propaganda which threatened Europe”.

And if the Girondins took offence at all this, if their rather jealous patriotism revolted against such pretensions and was alarmed at the intrigues of Marie-Antoinette with the émigrés, Sybel finds in that another reason for attacking them :

“In this state of affairs it was ridiculous in the Parisian patriots to affect anxiety about the machinations of the émigrés. The latter numbered about 4,000 men, living partly in Coblenz, partly in Worms and Ettenheim. What could this handful of men undertake without the help of Austria, against a people who, in spite of their differences, could bring against them, as was proved in June, no less than 4,000,000 armed citizens?”

But the point was not that. The question simply was whether it was possible that a people who had just shown their spirit of independence and their desire to manage their own affairs would tolerate that strangers should interfere in their politics. Sybel takes good care not to answer this question, and yet no one was better qualified than he to do so, since, in his own country, he was one of the men who asserted with the greatest vigour the principle of national independence. But when dealing with the affairs of France, Sybel is no longer of that opinion.

But it is not only towards France in regard to Prussia that Sybel shows he has two sets of weights and measures, but also towards the other parts of Germany in regard to the Hohenzollern and particularly towards Austria. Sybel was one of the bitterest opponents in his own country of Austrian policy. From 1848 he preached the formation of Little Germany under Prussian hegemony with the exclusion of Austria. In his Prefaces and pamphlets he uniformly treated the Austrians as “idiots and uncultured people” who did not deserve to be attached to the great German fatherland. In his history the expressions are not so coarse, but he does not express this idea the less for that, and he tries to justify it. He does this in two ways : first in sketching the philosophy of the history of each State : and then in showing the part which each of them played during the revolutionary period.

Sybel begins by stating that in every modern State “the advances in civilization had for their basis the principle of independence in art and science”.

He had no difficulty in showing us that Prussia, in Germany, has best realized these conditions, while Austria is farthest removed from doing so. It all comes back, in his opinion, to the question of religion. “By embracing Protestantism”, he said, “the Elector of Brandenburg became by that very fact the defender of independent Germany : Austria, on the other hand, by destroying the work of the Reformation in her territory, and by entrusting the education of the people to the Jesuits, definitely alienated herself from the true German spirit”.

“The Jesuit's education”, said Sybel, “incomparable when directed to training all men for a specific purpose, begins precisely with the negation of all individuality and all free disposal of oneself. The most certain sign by which one could recognize Austrian nationality at that time was its failure to participate in the progress which was made in the rest of Germany”.

Therein Sybel sees the origin of the struggle between Prussia—the truly free German State, “which was able during the last century to defend, with good conscience and devotion, the true interests of the Empire within and without—and Austria—the State which, knowing that the constitution had lost all influence, turned aside without scruple from her duty of submission to the laws of the Empire whenever the interests of her reigning House demanded it”.

Sybel does not attribute this superiority of the Prussian State to Protestant thought alone, but to the work of the Prussian kings as well. “It is thanks to these kings”, he said, “that the State has become great, energetic, resisting, powerfully formed, governed by one will alone, but by one which is able, under all circumstances, to consider the good of the whole nation and that of individuals too. On this solid basis the greatest and most glorious of these kings proclaimed by his own authority as king the two elementary rights of liberty (a rare thing then in Europe)—liberty of conscience and independence of justice”.

Sybel does not carry this monarchist sentiment so far as to hold that a King of Prussia, merely because he was King of Prussia, was of necessity a great king : he grants that there were ordinary ones : but there is one thing at least which he would discover in all of them, and that is a regard for the greatness of their House, together with a feeling of their mission in Germany.

In his work he shows this in a most unexpected manner with regard to Frederick William II. If this monarch abandoned the Coalition and concluded peace separately at Bale, in Sybel’s eyes he did not betray thereby German interests. On the contrary, German interests demanded it. “If at this moment”, he said, “his intentions were wrongly interpreted in Germany, it was because the people did not know the secret motives of Viennese politics and its absolute indifference to German interests”.

A few years later it was Austria’s turn to conclude the peace of Campo Formio with France. This time Sybel shows less magnanimity. There is scarcely enough water in the Danube to wash away the Austrians' crime of disloyalty. By giving up German territory to France in return for the cession to Austria of Venetia, he considers the Austrians to have given “a new proof of their selfish policy, marked by complete indifference to German interests”.

Arguments are never wanting to Sybel when it is necessary to wash Prussian policy clean from all suspicion of duplicity. He shows this particularly with regard to the second Partition of Poland.

Shutting his eyes and affecting to deplore “this catastrophe, greater than anything the world had ever seen since the destruction of Jerusalem”, he finds authoritative reasons for proving that the determination to annex a Polish province was certainly, for the King of Prussia, the only one which “would not lead to a public calamity and which was compatible with the duty of the Prussian Government”.

Sybel recognizes plainly enough that Poland was guilty of no offence against Prussia, that Prussia was aggressive towards that country “in the completest sense of the word and without the shadow of a right”. But he excuses this by saying “that in the midst of the crisis caused by the French Revolution, which suddenly brought into question all existing rights, the sentiment of self-protection was paramount” : that, moreover, Poland deserved her fate, “the justice of history demanding that we should not be silent concerning the faults by which a nation has herself brought about her ruin”, and that finally everything should give way to this consideration, that “a million of Germans were thus released from a foreign yoke which was hateful to them, and that thereby the first of all the truly German States won a considerable extension of territory”.

This last reason, at bottom, is the real one for Sybel. Why, then, call up others? He who wishes to prove too much ends by proving nothing. By wishing on every occasion to prove his fellow-country­men innocent, to show them as white as snow, Sybel shakes his credit as a historian. It is with him as with Taine. When we see the author of the Origins de la France contemporaine borrow from a menagerie of wild animals the most vituperative epithets to bestow on the Revolutionists, we say involuntarily, with the common sense of the popular saying, “You are getting angry, so you must be wrong”. The expressions with Sybel are less coarse than with Taine, but calmness is equally absent from his work. We must pay our respect to his knowledge, and are ready to profit by all that is good and even excellent in it, but we must take his work with a great deal of caution : we only accept it, so to speak, as part of the assets.

 

IV

 

With the qualities with which he was endowed, it would seem that Sybel should have been called to fulfil some important political part in his country. He was indeed to take up militant politics, but it was not till later, in 1861, at the time when he was elected to the Prussian Chamber. At the time when he was writing the first part of his History of the French Revolution, political life in Germany was completely dead. No great question filled every one’s mind. There was not even a place from which a man might give out his ideas. The rare Parliaments of individual States were only concerned with questions of local interest. The Press, on the other hand, was not, as in France and England, a powerful instrument : a journalist’s career in Germany led to nothing : it did not even give him influence or honour. In view of this dearth of public platforms, it is quite natural that University chairs should become the means of certain professors to express their ideas.

After 1848 there were a certain number, the remnants of the Parliaments of Frankfort, Erfurth and Gotha, who taught in the German Universities. Bismarck always laughed a good deal at these parliamentary professors, who thought by their speeches to bring about German unity. In default of anything else, they brought back from their experience of public affairs a taste for present-day problems and the power of dealing with them in a practical way. When they returned to private life and resumed their University chairs, they turned these into parliamentary platforms. This was true particularly in regard to the teaching of history. While preserving their sound learning, they paid more attention to form and began more rhetorical lectures, which indeed were not unlike those of the French historians of the Restoration, Michelet and Guizot. It is true that it was not love of humanity or liberty which inspired them. They preached to the Germans the excellence of the Hohenzollern institutions. They took their seats in the most diverse Universities. Between 1850 and 1870 they were by turn, or at the same time, at Berlin, Kiel, Jena, Bonn, Heidelberg, and even at Munich I and at Freiburg in Brisgau.2 Among all these men three particularly distinguished themselves : Musser, Droysen, and Sybel.

Hausser was, in the opinion of those who had heard him, the most eloquent professor in Germany during the nineteenth century. His lectures at Heidelberg University attracted an immense crowd of students; these came from all parts to hear him, as much for what he said as for the manner in which he said it. He was a Liberal, and, a strange thing for a southern Liberal, a decided partisan of Prussia. It is true he was attached less to what Prussia was at that moment in politics than to the spirit which she represented and to the mission which he saw she had in Germany. He also said that this mission was essentially Liberal. An ardent patriot, filled with the part which Germany united and strong would play in the world, he placed all his eloquence at the service of that idea. By stimulating, moreover, the patriotic feeling of his audience, he prepared them for accepting Prussian hegemony, which, in his eyes, alone could realize that unity. Thanks to him, Heidelberg became in the South an advanced stronghold of the Prussian idea.

Musser realized all the qualities of the national historians. Like them, he was, above all, a man of action, filled with the notion that it is through history that the political problems of the age are solved. He said that the historians' place in Germany was to become “the educators and leaders of the nation”. He said also that the historical value of a work depends less upon its wealth of information or beauty of form than upon the advantage the nation can derive from it. “We must cultivate the historical sense of the nation and by initiating her into our method enable her to solve the problems of the moment”. He made an attempt at this himself by writing a History of Germany from the Death of Frederick the Great until the Treaties of 1815, which is the first pleading in favour of Prussia coming from a South German and a Liberal.

Yet Musser is not a true historian of the New Germany. Or rather, something further was wanted in him to have truly been one : form. His work is truly a remarkable one. It is lucid, well arranged, but it lacks genius, or even originality. It had influence through the ideas it spread, but it has not remained a real enrichment of German literature of the nineteenth century. Today it is almost forgotten.

Droysen underwent the same disfavour as Musser. His influence was greater as a professor than as a historian. As a historian, he is the author of a huge History of Prussian Politics, I a work typical of the German scholar, a true Benedictine’s work, stuffed with knowledge, meticulous and exact ad nauseam, but, on that very account, untractable and unsuitable for general reading. Add to this a most involved diction, trained by Blockh, the philologist, and Hegel, the philosopher, who gave him—one his method of research, and the other his ideas. Droysen has at once the heavy style of the philologist who desires to express everything and the elusive style, bristling with abstractions, of the metaphysician. Those who wish to see what point of abstruseness German prose can reach, I would advise to read a little work by Droysen, “The Science of History”, a veritable Chinese head-racker written in German gibberish.

But this strange writer was, as often happens, an incomparable professor. From this point of view he resembled his master Bockh, the philologist, who wrote thorny works but delivered clear lectures. When he was once asked the reason for this, he replied, “It is because I set down my knowledge in my books, but in my lectures I express my ideas.” Droysen, similarly, was a poor writer but an eloquent speaker. “He would begin in an undertone”, said Professor Fredericq, “like the great preachers, in order to get the completest silence. You might have heard a pin drop. Bending over his little blue note-book and darting at his audience penetrating glances which seemed to pierce the glasses of his spectacles, he spoke of falsifications of history. It was in his lecture on historical instruction and method that he had the appearance of being deeply vexed at the falsities published under the name of history, and his habitual expression of nervous displeasure added still more to the energy and pitiless passion with which he unfolded his subject, speaking with closely pressed lips and frequently uttering sighs of anger and contempt. Each moment a successful joke, always biting and keen, would send a quiet smile across the benches. Now he would fix some characteristic of a historical personage, now he would laugh at the expense of some contemporary scholar—of Schliemann, for example—or of one of his colleagues of higher education whom he would mention by name. The subject would be treated with the greatest originality, with an abundance of characteristic examples, a mischievous sprightliness which seemed only to be cot icealed beneath a manner of speaking that was frigidly comic. The lecture would be ended with a Homeric outburst of laughter, raised by some anecdote related by Droysen with irresistible humour. Never was I so diverted at a University lecture. . . . But rarely too have I heard things so serious and full of matter”.

As a propagator of Prussian ideas, which he set forth by turn at the Universities of Kiel, Jena, and Berlin, Droysen, according to the words of his biographer, Max Duncker, was “able to inspire the middle class with a love for the Hohenzollern army and institutions, created by the Kings of Prussia for the welfare of all Germans”.

Droysen was, in fact, a good and true Prussian, who had faith in Prussia alone, and who never became enthusiastic, like his colleagues, about liberty alone.

He had been trained quite young according to these ideas by his father, the chaplain of a Prussian regiment during the War of Independence, who did not cease to repeat to his son as a memento mori : “Remember the evil which the Gauls did us”. Droysen, who had all the qualities of a true Prussian —obstinacy, a practical and vigilant mind without a shadow of superficiality, never leaving go of an idea whose usefulness he once recognized—attached himself indissolubly to the fortunes of the State which best represented these qualities. He remained narrowly Prussian, and nothing but Prussian, like Gustav Freytag. With Treitschke, he became the truest apostle of Imperialism.

Quite different from this was Sybel’s part as a professor. In his teaching, the author of the History of the French Revolution did not distinguish between Liberalism and Prussian politics. A political writer of the first order, an indefatigable debater and dialectician, he tried to convince rather by the close network of his arguments than by the pathos or brilliance of his eloquence. Above all, he was a powerful opposition speaker, whose best opportunity occurred at the time of the struggle of 1861 and 1862 between the Liberals and the Prussian Government.

He made his first appearance in the little Hessian University of Marburg, but, fully occupied at that time with his scientific works, he gave no signs whatever of the orator that was within him. At Munich, where he became a professor in 1856, he had a more numerous public, but there he found, as he said, that the soil was harder to work. From the moment he wished to begin his teaching in the National Liberal sense he was attacked with the utmost violence by the old Bavarians and by the Catholic party. Each day saw some new pamphlet issued against him. The Almanach de Munich, very widely read among the Bavarian population, ended its wishes for 1860 with the words : “You will soon see that the true light is not the light of the North, and with me you will offer up this prayer to God : Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from Sybel. Amen”.

For four years these attacks were renewed with the same violence, so much so that Sybel, who had never felt himself at Munich but as “a missionary in a foreign country”, left that town at the first opportunity. In 1861 Professor Dahlmann’s chair had fallen vacant at Bonn, and Sybel took it up next.

At Bonn, Sybel’s real political career began. “When coming back to Bonn”, wrote Gustav Freytag to him, “you doubtless did not count upon a peaceful, smoothly flowing life : the struggles at Munich will scarcely be more disheartening than those which await you here. But we are not placed on this earth for rest. To see you on the first battlefield of Germany is to me, as to a number of brave people, the essential thing”.

Freytag was right. A period of fierce struggles was now beginning for Sybel. The State on which he had based all his hopes and of which he had said a short while before : “The position of Prussia in Germany, and even in Europe, is such that she needs two things to an equal extent—two things which seem to exclude each other—a powerful unity and a powerful liberty : . . . liberty above all, for it has ineradicably penetrated the flesh and blood of our State : it belongs to the air we breathe : it has given life, strength, and prosperity to the State of Prussia”—this State, I say, betrayed the trust he had placed in it by declaring war on the representatives of the nation with regard to the military credits which they had refused to vote.

Sybel took an active part in this struggle. He had just been made member for a district of Elberfeld and sat in the Prussian Chamber. With professors Gneist and Virchow he was one of the most ardent opponents of the Government’s obstinacy. In a violent speech he went so far as to foretell a great revolution and cast all the responsibility for it on those “blind rulers who remain deaf to the just complaints of their subjects”.

Sybel, like all the Liberal professors, had not foreseen Sadowa. Even on the eve of that battle he could only see in Bismarck a sort of Polignac, who only sought to make war to rid himself of internal difficulties, and who already discounted the victories in order to put down public liberties. But when the victory came about his eyes were opened. Filled with admiration, he understood that this country squire whom he had taken for a reckless fellow was a most discreet politician whose calculated hardihood was full of prudence, a player sure of his power, bold and successful. From that time on he no longer persisted in his error. He made his mea culpa. He trifled no longer with the military credits. “To keep what she has taken”, he said, “Prussia needs a strong army. She needs it also to assure the peace of Europe. Germany should be invincible in the world”.

From that moment onwards we may say that Sybel’s liberalism was very ragged. The historian still protests his attachment to liberty. Some years afterwards, at the unveiling of a statue of Baron Stein at Nassau (end of 1872), he said :

“Yes, the Prussian people deserved to be called to liberty, for they learned in a school of unexampled misfortune that liberty, far from being the subversion of egotism, signifies work useful to all, political duty, and patriotic efforts. May these ideas remain alive in every one’s heart, for the greatest good of the people's rights and the power of the State”.

Yes, Sybel still said that, but the time was not long in coining when, completely won over to Bismarck’s policy, he would say exactly the opposite.

After all, this strange, sudden change could only surprise those who knew Sybel superficially. In reality he had always been more Prussian than Liberal. He had displayed more eloquence in demanding the rights of the Hohenzollern than those of liberty. To be assured of this it is only necessary to glance at the " Historical and Political Essays " which he published from 1847 to 1871.

As a publicist Sybel would deserve a separate study, so great was his output during the Empire’s years of preparation. No week passed without his publishing a pamphlet, without his writing a newspaper article or a notice in a review. He even founded a historical journal for the needs of his cause, the Historische Zeitschrift, “with the purpose”, as he said, “of spreading throughout the nation the true historical method and of inculcating in the Germans sound political principles”. “The more false knowledge”, he said, “can do us harm in the present state of our affairs, the more desirable is it to give true knowledge an organ and to lead the crowd to a proper recognition of the value historical science has for our national life. I do not think that within our sphere of influence there is a task more urgent than this”.

 

The Historische Zeitschrift, which is still today the first scientific historical review in Germany, has played a very great part in the development of national life. Founded at Munich in 1857, it was addressed not to specialists, but to the general public. “Our arguments”, wrote Sybel to the historian Waitz, to whom he was stating his ideas, “are not for our learned confrères who are in agreement with us on this question. Still less are they for the triflers in literature, for neither you nor I can hope to improve them. What we desire is to awaken among our educated people the knowledge of the true technique of history. . . . When we speak of the Ultramontane historians, is it not our duty to explain their lack of scientific spirit. . . . Our object is to serve not the Church, but science”.

In what way he expected to serve science is thus explained by Sybel in the Preface of his new review : The observer endowed with a historical sense notices that the life of peoples is manifested, under the dominion of moral laws, as a natural and individual development, which spontaneously produces from within itself forms of State and of civilization which cannot arbitrarily be obliterated or hastened, nor can they be submitted to regulation from without. This conception therefore excludes :—

Feudality, which would wish to introduce dead elements into the forward march of progress in order to attempt to revive them.

Radicalism, which puts subjective arbitration in the place of organic evolution.

Ultramontanism, which places national and spiritual development under the authority of an external Church.

That was what Sybel called founding “an independent organ of purely scientific character which would not be the mouthpiece of any party”.

In reality it was the organ of a purely Protestant and national conception of history. I know, of course, that Sybel held that this conception would end with the same results as science. He said so, but he was scarcely in a condition to prove it. Has it been proved? His collaborators, it is true, were the first historians in Germany : Mommsen, Strauss, Zeller, Musser, Droysen, Dahlmann, Bernhardi, Waltz, Giesebrecht and Loebell. We might even concede, too, that, in the matter of the rigour of their critical method and their science, these men were superior to the Catholic historians of Great Germany, but they do not represent the less, on that account, a tendency equally narrow as the others. To enter this house it was necessary to show a clean slate, and that did not always involve a diploma of scientific honesty, as, for example, in the case of Palacky, a Tcheck Protestant historian, whose great merit in Sybel’s eyes was his enmity towards Catholic and feudal Austria, who published an article the texts of which he was convicted of altering. When the Austrian historian Holler, who caught him red-handed, offered to prove this in the review, Sybel refused.

By saying that he did not found a review for a few dozen specialists, but “to swell the current of the national movement”, Sybel showed by that very fact in what spirit he was going to direct the enterprise.

Until that time Germany had no literary reviews similar to those of England and France. It was perhaps this gap that Sybel wished to fill. His intention was to place the great questions of history within the public reach. To do this it was necessary to avoid too much technicality in the discussion, but to limit oneself to the great facts, results, and ideas. No one has done more than Sybel to turn historical study in this direction. He gave the first examples. As a disputant, Sybel is admirable : he has a quick, nervous style of discussion, a sharp, acrid manner, a biting wit and the gift of sarcasm. The tone of his articles is always lively and keen. VVith all this he is a skilful dialectician and fertile in resources. No one understands better than he how to find his opponent’s weak spot. To defend his causes he often displays the ability of a most artful lawyer. His marvellous learning stands him in good stead. History to him is a huge arsenal from which he may help himself to arms wherewith to defend all causes, whether it be to show that since the thirteenth century “the small Danish nation, powerful, cautious and warlike, continually attempted to attain a position disproportionate to its means . . . until the day when Germany, collecting her forces, drove her back to her just and natural conditions”, or to prove with new arguments the theory he had developed in his History of the French Revolution, namely, that Austria was not fit to aspire to govern the German people because, during the Revolutionary Wars, she had betrayed German interests by signing the Treaty of Campo-Formio.

And it must be acknowledged that Sybel wrote this sort of article with undoubted superiority. Those who wish to see the richness of resource he has, I recommend to read that most interesting study he devoted to the historian Vivenot.

The Viennese historian Vivenot had attacked Sybel with great vigour respecting the part he makes Austria play during the revolutionary period. Some years afterwards he published a monograph on Duke Albert of Saxe-Teschen—a Field-Marshal of the Empire, who commanded the Upper Rhine Army from April 1794 till March 1795. Now in this work, the author, although an officer of the Austrian Army, gives a most confused account of the military operations of that time. You should see how Sybel dresses him down. “When a layman”, he says, “examines the detailed history of an army and its leader, he takes care in the first place to find exact and precise information about the strength and composition of that army, since to him, as a layman, the complete understanding of the actions of leaders and of their mistakes would seem to depend particularly on those circumstances : and the more so when the author of the book is an officer, an Imperial and Royal Captain (K.K. Hauptmann), and when, moreover, he is in possession of all the documents on the war in the Imperial and Royal Archives. But whether the military flight of Herr von Vivenot rises too high or his style of writing falls too low, the fact remains that it is a particularly difficult task to find anything among the information he gives us, and I confess, for my part, that, after having studied to a certain extent the military history of all the nations of Europe during the revolutionary period, I never found anything to be compared with this”.

Thereupon follow several sarcastic pieces of advice on the way to write history, on the art of choosing and classifying documents and the manner of making use of them. “Now”, he said, “if he has any regard for his literary reputation he will do another thing : he will give up writing history, himself, until he has acquired, by a study extending over many years, the rudimentary information necessary to a historian : he will limit himself . . . to collecting documents. But even for the elaboration of such a work he will not trust his own intelligence : if he is wise, in the future he will send nothing to press without first having submitted the proofs to some one who really understands history. There is no lack of them at Vienna, even among those who are least suspected of sympathy with Prussia. When dealing with so unskilful an enemy, the least one can do, to fight him fairly, is to furnish him with the means of finding efficacious weapons and to show him the way in which his feeble hands may use them”.

All Sybel’s critical articles are written in this lively, clear, and cutting style. They are on all subjects, from the Political and Social State of the Early Christians to Napoleon III, from Socialism, Communism, and the Emancipation of Women to Clerical Policy in the Nineteenth Century. In all these Sybel proves himself to be the same alert and vigorous disputant.

It can readily be understood that he had great success in Germany. Since Lessing, that lively and brilliant manner of approaching and discussing questions had not been known. But the question may also be asked whether these articles were in place in a historical review which claimed to be purely scientific.

After 1870 Sybel’s passion slackened down a little. Not that his talent as a historian was on the decrease, but, having won the game, he could rest after his struggles. Never were victories greeted with such enthusiasm as were those of Prussia by Sybel. “How happy am I”, he wrote at the beginning of the war, “to see these great days in which the nation has risen at a single bound to the height of her destiny.”  On the news of the surrender of Paris his joy knew no bounds : “When I read this news, the tears ran down my cheeks. What have we done, 0 Lord, I cried, to see such great and powerful things? How can we live henceforward? What has been for twenty years the object of all our desires and efforts has been accomplished in a most magnificent way. How can one at my age take up a new cause for the short space left for one to live?”

There could now be no question of any opposition to the Government. For several years Sybel had been converted to Bismarck’s policy, together with the most of the National Liberal party chiefs. Of the old Liberals of note there were only four left faithful to the ideal of their youth : Mommsen, Hoenel, Rickert, and Virchow. Sybel, moreover, now grown old, was clearly tired of the struggle. The last time he took part in the political passages of arms was in 1874, at the time of the Kulturkampf, of which he was one of the most ardent supporters in the Reichstag. He was at that time completely won over to Bismarck, who had just vanquished Germany for the second time by giving the death-blow to the Liberal party (1881). Sybel did not raise a protest. Appointed five years before to the charge of the Archives at Berlin, he took no more part in politics, but devoted his remaining strength to the writing of the History of the Foundation of the New German Empire, a great work which was only to be interrupted by his death.

This is the way he explains the origin of this work : “Having described in my History of the French Revolution (1789-1800) the disintegration of the Holy German Empire, no desire took such a hold on my heart, after the great events of 1806 and 1870, as the desire to describe the resurrection of the German Empire”.

The writing of that work was in Sybel’s mind the accomplishment of a national act, for he thought thus to work towards securing the great results of the war of 1870. Indeed, he saw a close connection between the events of 1789 and those of this war. In the first of his works—the History of the French Revolution—he had stated the negative side of the vital political problem of the nineteenth century. By writing now the history of Prussia’s work in Germany, he thought he was going to state the positive side. Having criticized, it was now necessary to construct. The question was whether Sybel would succeed in his second task as well as he did in his first. An inquiry into his History of the Foundation of the German Empire will now show us that.

 

V

 

As a historian, Sybel had revealed, in his History of the French Revolution, qualities of the highest order. Tireless in research, active in discussion, his mind always alert, he was unequalled as a critic. And he did not show his superiority alone in collecting State papers and in classifying and analysing them, in determining which were authentic sources of information, and in throwing light on points where there was contradictory evidence, but also in his criticism of the ideas and great political events, in the analysis of negotiations and in the discussion of affairs.

But his talents ended at that. He had not the art of bringing historical characters to life again : he gives us an idea of what they did, but not of what they were, and in spite of his knowledge of the undercurrents of politics, of the secrets of diplomacy, he never succeeded in giving us a living picture of the great movement he wished to describe.

We have seen already that this defect was due to a certain gap in Sybel’s mind : his lack of psychological feeling. Interested particularly in the play of diplomatic contrivances and giving his attention to the solution of the great political problems which are comprised in the actions of these statesmen, he is rather inclined to forget that it is these men with their passions and interests who make history. In no part of his History of the French Revolution has he succeeded in giving us an idea of the complexity of human nature. To him, one might say, man is nothing but a brain. Events seem to follow from the pure logic of situations. The characters are conceived as if they were unconditioned.

Sybel, who reproaches the revolutionists in so vehement a manner for having founded their arguments on abstractions, at bottom does this very thing himself. When entering upon the history, he has his ideas on each type of character, and consequently his mind made up, as is usually done, but instead of regarding these ideas as provisional and being ready to modify them according to what he finds out, he looks for nothing among the facts but what will confirm his point of view. Now the characters, with very rare exceptions—and this is also true about the logicians of the Revolution—are never constant to themselves. They depend upon a thousand circumstances which modify them. And to describe them with truthfulness they must be taken by surprise at all times of their lives. A man may assert a thing very sincerely today and yet tomorrow act in a sense diametrically opposed to it. Through the lack of an intellect supple enough to enter the recesses of the minds of men, Sybel is never able to penetrate those characters which have many shades. And this is particularly true when he describes women. We have seen it already with regard to Marie-Antoinette. To understand a nature as variable and fantastic as hers, he would have needed the penetration and suppleness of Sainte-Beuve, accustomed to all variations of that delicate perception capable of seizing the most elusive changes of the heart. Sybel, who forms logical opinions according to conditions, fails entirely. In all the Queen’s falsehoods, in her double-dealing and subterfuges, he sees further proofs of the purity of her intentions. Even in the case of the notorious letter to Count Mercy, which he quotes : “I must throw them off their guard in order to deceive them the better later on”, he finds explanations which lessen the guilt. “She was persuaded”, said he, “that all that Barnave and his followers offered her did not guarantee her safety forthe future”. How does he know? What proof does he offer that this is what Marie-Antoinette really thought? None but his personal conviction, or rather his bias.

Bias is, in truth, Sybel’s greatest enemy. It is this which misleads him and deceives his judgment, which prevents him from seeing clearly and from distinguishing things. If he will not allow at any price that Marie-Antoinette should have committed any errors, it is because he wishes the responsibility for the war to fall upon the Girondins. And he does not do this intentionally, but from a sort of natural infirmity, the abundant proofs of which we are now going to see in that page of contemporary history in which he himself took a certain part.

We might think that, when writing the history, not of a period ancient already and one for which he had never felt the least enthusiasm, but of an event in which he was closely concerned and the realization of which had been the great event of his life, Sybel would give us a living piece of work. Had he not known personally the greater number of the actors of this great period? Had he not been in the confidence of highly-placed men I who had been able to inform him as to the undercurrents of Prussian politics, without which, he writes himself, such a work could not have been written? Did he not hold, also, in his capacity as Director of the Archives, the secrets with regard to all these events? Yet in spite of this he was not able to give us a living picture of the political life of Germany during that second half of the century. He remains the same critical and diplomatic historian that we already know. The finest parts of his History are the expositions of great problems : for example, the question of Schleswig-Holstein, a masterpiece of lucidity and intelligence, at least in so far as we set aside the author’s personal opinions, in which he shows his Prussian prejudice: his accounts of the campaigns in Denmark and Austria, of a clearness and simplicity worthy of all praise : his exposition of the origins of the war of 1870, in which he shows the same critical stability, the Same sagacity as ever, particularly in that part where he annihilates the lying assertions of Gramont. But all that which would give charm to the book is wanting. You would look in vain not only for a fairly vivid picture of German life of that period, but even for an interesting characteristic of Prussian politics in what is human and consequently living in it. He has not understood its true spirit nor its inner life. What he needed for such a work was a certain warmth of feeling, a little enthusiasm. Now Sybel has not that warmth of feeling, and his enthusiasm, moderate as it is, is purely intellectual. So it is that he has succeeded in creating an exact and true piece of work, if we have regard to its facts, but one destitute of that higher human truth.

“In no part of this book”, said Sybel in his Preface, “have I attempted to conceal my Prussian and National-Liberal opinions”. And this seems natural, or at least it conforms with his philosophy of history, for Sybel is one of those historians who only judge the value of a policy by its results.

Prussia having succeeded in bringing about German unity, everything in German history during the nineteenth century should be judged in relation to the Prussian policy.

We can easily see in what conclusions this idea, logically deduced, must end : the two instruments which brought about German unity were Prussian administration and the army : the first, by means of the Zollverein, had prepared that predominance of Prussia in Germany which the second had brought about on the field of battle.

German unity had not been able to be accomplished until the day when Frederick the Great had a true successor. This successor is King William, who in 1848 had described the situation : “This affair will not be decided in Gagern’s way, but by force of arms : when and how, is the secret of the future”.

This is the idea which Sybel tries to illustrate in his History. He recognizes that in order to live Prussia should progress, that to stand still was death to her, that her life was staked on the establishment of her power in Germany, and that German civilization urgently demanded this. With regard to the Schleswig-Holstein question he recognizes that, at bottom, to Prussia it is but a question of interest—the question of life or death for her commerce. In the same way he explains the origin of the Austro-Prussian War as being due less to the arbitrary result of personal passion than to the inevitable conflict between ancient rights acquired during centuries and pressing national needs growing continually stronger. “The state of discomfort which resulted from it was intolerable, and it was only a formidable crisis which could lead to a permanent cure. It was for the well-being of Germany that this cure was accomplished”."

He acknowledges, too, that the war of 1870 was inevitable (that war which, in his correspondence, he confesses he awaited for twenty years), because at bottom it was nothing but one of those necessary struggles of historical life between a young State wishing to make for itself a place in the sun and an old nation which was struggling to keep up its position.

After that, you would expect Sybel, faithful to his philosophy of history, to describe in a straightforward manner this work of conquest, justifying the Prussian wars, as Mommsen had done in his History of Rome, by Darwin’s law of the survival of the fittest.

Now this is not so. When it comes to going to the logical consequences of his theory he draws back. It is repugnant to him to have to confess that his country may have had recourse to reprehensible means to achieve her ends. And so when he approaches the causes of these three wars, he endeavours to cast the blame in turn upon the Danes, the Austrians, and the French.

When Frederick the Great entered Silesia, he said cynically : “I take in the first place : I can always find pedants enough to prove my rights”.

There has never been a lack of these pedants in Germany, especially among her historians, and Sybel now offers us a good example.

Sybel has shown himself already, in his History of the French Revolution, to be a most expert casuist in the art of passing what is white for black and vice versa. But that is nothing in comparison with the efforts he puts forward to show that Prussian policy—let us say, if you will, Bismarck's policy—was always irreproachable in the matter of correctness and loyalty.

The public in Germany, however, was of another opinion. When Sybel’s work was announced, its curiosity was aroused to a great extent. They expected sensational revelations and they were glad. The people, who have an instinct for justice and can be roused to enthusiasm for great and noble causes, is also full of indulgence for rogues when they are lucky. In its attitude towards these men it is like the child who applauds the misdoings of Guignol in thrashing the policeman.

Bismarck, the most skilful among the skilful, adding to his skilfulness a cynical boastfulness, fills them with great admiration; they are ready to excuse him all his misdeeds. But with Sybel's account their curiosity was by no means satisfied. They found themselves face to face with a prodigious being, a superman, without any of those touches which make a character real and living. True to his method, the historian, in the portrait he makes of him, leads everything back “to the incommensurable political genius of this man, who was a politician of a great stock who sacrificed everything to the interest of the State”. “Every other consideration”, he added, “was secondary to him. Free trade or protection, feudal or democratic institutions, religious liberty or hierarchy, questions which for thousands of men are the determining principles of their lives, were nothing to him but good or bad means to an end, according to circumstances : he only had in view the aggrandisement of Prussia, and his enemies have sometimes been able to accuse him of being the most unprincipled opportunist there ever was. While Frederick the Great regarded the State as an instrument of civilization, Bismarck was always a pure utilitarian—always asking himself to what extent any art or science would contribute to the prosperity of the Prussian State”.

But what we look for in vain in Sybel’s work is the means employed by this “unscrupulous utilitarian” to bring about German unity. The historian makes a point of honour in having us believe that he never on any occasion tried to deceive his opponents : he makes him a sort of paragon of virtue, whose actions were only determined by noble motives, always inspired by a feeling of duty.

Nothing is more significant in this respect than the way he explains the origin of the three wars which presided over the foundation of the New Empire.

In the first place, there is the history of the Schleswig-Holstein question.

Never before had Sybel better exhibited the resources of his genius, fertile in expedients to attempt to wash the Prussian Government clean of any reproach of double-dealing. He examines with the greatest care the two questions invoked by the Germans to justify their intervention in the affairs of the duchies : the political or constitutional question and the question of law or succession.

The second of these questions, solved according to circumstances in two senses absolutely opposed to each other and always according to the Prussian interest of the moment, seems to him decidedly a bad one, and he abandons it, not without reproving with a certain asperity his fellow-countrymen who obstinately persist in using it still, and thus compromise a good cause.

The first one remains, the political question and the sound one, and on this he brings to bear all the weight of his argument. But he recognizes that this political question is very involved, for it is complicated with dynastic questions whose roots run back to the fifteenth century, and which require the solution of the complicated rights of individuals, of princes and kings. He shows us the jurists of the Crown exerting themselves to decide whether it is the people’s right and the State which has the highest authority, or whether it is the private right of princes : whether a right established for four centuries gives each agnate member of the family an intangible personal right, or whether the legal power of the State is invested in the right of controlling a new succession to the throne : in other words, whether the right of succession should be judged according to the principles of the Feudal System or according to those principles which, after the English Revolution, directed the affairs of the political world.

In reality all this cleverly arranged, solemn preparation of rights was only intended to deceive the gallery. “The question of the duchies”, said von noon cynically, “is not a question of rights; it is a question of force, and we it is who have the force”. The whole military party in Prussia said the same thing. “Just think”, said General von Manteuffel to General Fleury, “I am the head of a division and have never yet been under fire”.

Again, a curious thing was that these feudalists supported the people’s right, which allowed Prussia to intervene in Schleswig-Holstein, while democratic Germany, by supporting Augustenburg, sided with feudal right.

What one would like to find in Sybel is that chapter of high human comedy in which Bismarck played the principal part : to see the consummate skill he displayed in encouraging resistance among the Danes by letting them be informed secretly that the English would support them in their demands the subterfuges he used to remove the scruples (Rechtsbedenken) of the King, who was a believer and was concerned as to the legality of the position : the manoeuvres he used to bring Austria into the affair : the way he set about making Augustenburg, after he had recognized his imbecility, fall into the trap : how subsequently he was able, by means of the subsidized Press and the encouragement he gave to the Liberals of the duchies, “to set loose”, as he said, all the dogs who wished to bark, against the Danish power” : the still more skilful way in which he induced legitimist Austria to propose to the Diet rigorous measures against Augustenburg : then the consummate skill he displayed in driving Austria from the duchies after having made her his accomplice : all this most dexterous policy, which was nothing but the putting into practice of a plan deliberately developed and which he had laid down as early as 1862  :

“It is certain that the whole Danish business can have no solution for us, as we could wish it, except through a war : we shall have no dculty in finding a pretext when the right time for entering upon it arrives” : all this policy, I say, we do not find in Sybel's work. It seems, according to this historian, that in these events everything followed a logical and natural course and that Prussia was only obliged to intervene to put an end to a disorder which threatened to be prolonged.

In the breaking off of diplomatic negotiations between Prussia and Austria which followed the Danish question, Sybel would have us believe, the same as ever, that the Prussian Government committed no wrong. If the Prussian fleet, in spite of the assurances she had given to do nothing without Austria, took possession of the port of Kiel, he cries : “How can you wish her to have done anything else: if Austria, by her geographical position, could not use that port, was that a reason why Prussia, otherwise situated, should not use it?”

When in the autumn of 1865 Bismarck left suddenly for Biarritz, where Napoleon III was at that time, Sybel assures us that it was less to sound the intentions of the French Emperor than “to ask of the powerful waves of the Bay of Biscay strength for his overworked nerves”.

After the war, if Prussia annexes Hanover and Electoral Hesse, you would never guess why she does it. It is to punish France for her stupid meddling in German affairs. The passage is worth quoting. This is it : “Prussia had undertaken this war only with the intention of reforming the Confederation and for the possession of Schleswig-Holstein, with no thoughts of any more extensive annexations. It was Napoleon, by his opposition to German unity, that forced Bismarck to give the King the necessary power to defend German interests by strengthening the individual power of Prussia”. When an advocate is reduced to such arguments, his cause must decidedly be a bad one.

The causes of the war of 1870 are a historical problem which Sybel wished to treat thoroughly. He knows too well that in the eyes of posterity the people who wished for it will carry a heavy burden of responsibility, and so he strives to make all the blame for it fall on France. To this question he devotes no less than half a big volume, even at the risk of destroying the balance between the various parts of his work. But in spite of his trouble and pains we may well ask ourselves whether he has carried the question any further.

At first it is very difficult to determine what might be called the remote causes of this war. Was French jealousy, as Sybel believes, of Sadowa, that “magnificent victory which eclipsed Solferino and all Napoleon III’s victories”, one of the causes? It would then remain to be determined what sort of Frenchmen desired such a revenge.

It was not the educated class—the Liberals, who all along had supported Prussia : it was not the mass of people, who were under the Second Empire profoundly indifferent as to what happened abroad : it could only have been, then, the military and clerical party. But what did they represent in the nation? I know, of course, that, once decided upon a campaign, they had thousands of ways of exciting public opinion and creating a factitious agitation. But until when did they do this?—at any rate only until the moment when the relations became suddenly strained between Prussia and France, following the question of the Hohenzollern candidature, which consequently became the real cause of the war.

But it is much rather on the German side, if we wished to weigh the imponderables, that since 1867 we could find the moral causes of the war. Their national feeling at least showed itself to be more susceptible and jealous than that of the French. The question of Luxemburg, which to Napoleon was only one of compensation which Bismarck had let him catch a glimpse of at the price of his neutrality, raised in Germany a passion of national feeling which deeply surprised France. Sybel implicitly acknowledges that after Sadowa the German people, who now knew their own strength, did not consider the situation in the same way as they had before the war. Then why does he reproach France? He also avows that if the French Emperor had been a man of penetration he would have taken advantage of Prussia’s preoccupation in Bohemia to take possession of Luxemburg. “No one in Germany”, said he, “would have made that a casus belli”. But to claim the duchy after the German victory seemed to him rather an ingenuous thing to do.

Although he admits all that, Sybel does not persist the less in saying that the national susceptibility of the French was greater than that of the Germans. He recognizes well enough, to tell the truth, that the Luxemburg question suddenly assumed in Germany “the proportions of a national event” : that Bismarck, who had not counted on it, was rather surprised at first, but that, pulling himself together at once, he decided, in order to reassure public opinion, to allow himself to be questioned on this subject by a Liberal deputy, Benningsen. Who cannot see that it was at that very moment that Bismarck saw, if he had not seen it before, how and by what means he could gather the Germans more closely around Prussia?

A national war alone was able to do that.

If war did not break out at that moment, we now know why : Bismarck reserved for himself the choice of the hour. All his skill henceforward was directed towards making France declare war.

There have been many discussions up to the present as to the origin of the Hohenzollern candidature, and there has been no enlightenment as to whether it originated in Madrid or Berlin. It would seem highly probable that Bismarck was the originator of it, but until the Spanish archives make this certain for us by giving up the secrets they still hold, we can, at any rate, state that if he did not work it out entirely himself, he used it very aptly for the needs of his policy. After the revelations of the brother of the candidate himself, King Charles of Roumania, the certainty of this matter may be regarded as complete.  In Germany today there is no doubt about it. “France’s suspicions”, says Hans Delbrück on this subject, “are fully justified today. It was the King of Rumania who, for reasons difficult to understand—they say he did not wish the responsibility for this war to rest upon his family—divulged the secret which the Minister for Foreign Affiairs guarded with such jealous care”.

After this declaration, we are forced to acknowledge that from the beginning Bismarck intrigued for the success of this candidature. He wrote a letter to Prim twelve months before the public knew anything about the affhir. What he evidently wished to do was to feel the pulse  of public opinion in France, to see whether it would fly up at the idea of a Hohenzollern mounting the Spanish throne. Once he was informed on that point there was nothing left but to let things go, satisfying himself with intriguing covertly so that the Hohenzollern Prince should not absolutely refuse the candidature.

That is a thing which Sybel does not admit. One might almost say that he makes it a point of honour that in all the incidents of that candidature Bismarck always acted in a correct and loyal manner. We see this particularly in the account he gives of what might be called the three phases of the crisis : (1) the visit of Rances to Berlin : (2) the double-faced negotiation of Bismarck with Prim and with Prince Anthony, the father of the candidate; (3) the Ems telegram.

As for Rances’ visit, we know what it was about. Two months after the publication of Salazar's pamphlet, which was the first openly to broach the Hohenzollern candidature, Rances, a former Spanish Ambassador at Berlin, now at Vienna, came to Berlin for three days in a most mysterious fashion. He had more or less secret interviews everyday with Bismarck. Is it likely that during these interviews there was no mention of the Hohenzollern candidature, as Sybel declares? What proof does he give us of this assertion? None, unless it is his personal conviction. This, at any rate, was not the opinion of the diplomatic world in Berlin. This unexpected visit, coming just after the declaration of the Hohenzollern candidature, seemed a little dubious to the diplomatic corps. Lord Loftus, who voices their opinion, said : “Clearly it was not the mere desire to offer his compliments to Bismarck that brought Rances to Berlin”. He scents “a snake in the grass”. The French Government, notified of it, is disturbed. Benedetti is required to ask an explanation of Bismarck. Explanations are made, but he is not satisfied. He seems to see in Bismarck’s words that something is being kept back : he suspects that “he has not been told the truth”.  Sybel, instead of examining impartially to see if anything in these suppositions might have some foundation, attacks “the suspicious mind of Benedetti, who concludes arbitrary results from nothing at all”.

If Sybel sees nothing abnormal in that, he would not see anything strange in the secret mole's methods practised by Bismarck at Madrid and Sigmaringen, advising Prim, on the one hand, to apply directly to the Prince, assuring him that the affair, which had not succeeded with the King, might well succeed behind his back, and exerting, on the other hand, pressure on the Prince’s father to make him accept for his son the Spanish crown. Although he relates these facts in detail, Sybel, through either his psychological inaptitude or his bias, does not look for its meaning. Not for a moment does he ask himself why Bismarck, who, in order to prevent the King of Prussia from interfering, had just declared that this affair had no political character, nevertheless concerned himself about it—he who was nothing but a politician.

What reason does he give for this sudden change ? None, unless it is that a man may alter his opinion if he likes. This reason is not good enough for us.

Yet it would have been easy for Sybel to justify the conduct of the Prussian Government by showing that if France made this Hohenzollern question a national one, Bismarck was right in secretly pushing forward that candidature in order to see how far French pretensions would go. But with his bias he did not even think of that expedient.

With regard to the Ems telegram, Sybel’s purpose is still more apparent. “An abridgment”, he says ingenuously, “is not a forgery”. It is sufficient, in order to be convinced, to compare the two copies. Everybody knows that the second had an offensive tone that was not to be found in the first. But who has any doubt about it nowadays? Has it not been known for a long time that this telegram was the direct cause of the declaration of war? “A telegram was brought to the Foreign Office”, said Marshal Lebceuf before the Commission of Inquiry. “It was read in Council : I don't remember the words, my recollection of it is not accurate enough, but the dispatch was of such a character that an immediate change of face took place in the Council : mobilization was immediately decided upon”. But what was not known until Bismarck himself cynically confessed it, was that he himself, by skilful omissions, had given the communication its offensive tone. It was, indeed, an intentional mutilation, and as the German historian Philippson rightly said, “It made the King say exactly the contrary to what he had meant to say”.

It is difficult in the case of Sybel to measure with exactness the degree to which partiality and his lack of psychological sense contributed in preventing him from setting up for us real living historical characters, and in rendering with verisimilitude the drama or comedy of history. It would seem that partiality carries it in the explanation of events, and that the lack of psychological sense makes itself felt particularly in his synthetic portraits, when he gathers together his observations and tries to make the features stand out in an expression. Nothing illustrates this better in his History of the Foundation of the German Empire than the full-length portraits he tried to make of the great actors in this drama. Who, for example, would recognize Bismarck in this description?

“Bismarck was then in his thirty-sixth year, at the time when human life is at its highest development. A tall stature, surpassing the majority of humble mortals by a head and shoulders, a countenance bright with good health, a glance full of intelligence : in his mouth and chin, the expression of indomitable will. . . . His conversation always full of telling outbursts of wit, of coloured images and picturesque turns. He took me for an egg, he said of Frederick William IV, out of which he wished to breed a minister”.

How tame, colourless, and trivial is everything in the expression of this description. What he says of Bismarck might easily refer to any one. There is no individual characteristic, no expressive and living word which would thrust you at once to the bottom of that extraordinary man’s nature!

It is the same with his other portraits. In William I he only sees the humble and submissive Christian :—

“He always walked under the eyes of the Most High. . . . His faith was the bread of his life, the consolation of his sorrows . . . the only rule for his actions. Feeling himself powerless in the hands of God, he was strong in the face of the world”.

And the portrait thus proceeds for several pages in this honeyed and unctuous tone. With what diligence, we feel, Sybel applied himself to this! He evidently said to himself that in order to celebrate suitably the merits of the founder of the German Empire, he must blow the trumpet of praises. He tries to do this, but how grossly and with what unctuousness!

In a similar way the genius in Moltke is not even indicated in Sybels work. He is satisfied to point out what were the results of the “methodical calculations of a man who saw, foresaw, calculated, and understood everything, and who left nothing to chance”, but you will look in vain for a more coloured picture of his activity.

There are in the History of the Foundation of the German Empire a few anecdotes, but how frigidly they are told. Here is a fairly amusing one which he had from the lips of the Chancellor himself:—

“In March 1848 Bismarck was walking with King Frederick William IV on the Orangery terrace at Potsdam. The King was complaining that he could not get the revolution over. The Prince replied that the absence of courage compromised everything. “Courage, again courage, and yet again courage, he cried, and your Majesty will have the victory”. At this moment the Queen came out from behind a bush :

“Herr von Bismarck”, said she, “how dare you speak to your King like that?” “Leave him alone”, answered the King, “laughing, I shall soon put him down”, and he went on stating his prudent policy."

Sybel evidently relates well, but he paints badly. Bismarck, who was the antipodes of this form of mind —Bismarck, to whom all history was contained in anecdotes—illustrated this one day in a rather striking fashion. As he was reading the volume of Sybel which contains the portrait of Radowitz, he exclaimed : “A Radowitz like the one described by the historian never existed”. Then he set about making a portrait of the real Radowitz, the Radowitz he had known himself.  “It is not with diplomatic documents that one can get to know men, but in their everyday life”.

Bismarck might have added, that to write psychological history a particularly subtle and alert intelligence is required, and in the absence of nimbleness of mind, good humour, or rather a sense of the irony of things, which is only perhaps, when all is taken into account, a certain modesty or self-effacement. This state of mind, the farthest possibly removed from any fanaticism and even bias, requires a basis of good-natured scepticism, which Sybel did not possess in any degree. He was, above all, a man of faith. He believed in the truth of certain political principles, and he also believed that these principles were always sufficient to give us the key to characters. In short, he had the bias of the doctrinaire.

But that, perhaps, was the root of his strength and contributed to his success. Such as it is, that lucid and deliberate exposition of the realistic policy which was enacted at the formation of the New Empire seems only the more striking on that account. If Sybel had not the fire which warms, he had at least the light which illuminates.

“I renounce”, he said in his Preface, “any attempt to produce romantic effects . . . a sacrifice which is only imposed upon me by the desire to present historical truth in its integrity”.

Sybel, in short, believed that there is always something arbitrary in historical pictures, that the reconstruction of wholes is always problematical, and as he endeavoured to instruct and not amuse, he rather despised imagery. In his works he only wanted to bring out the spirit and deduce lessons. Hence the abstract character of his explanatory narrative, where the expressions “It seems certain that. . . . Before examining . . . let us see. . .. The first question that should be asked is. . . . If we sum up . . . we find,” etc., are used at every end and turn.

But Sybel was not mistaken when he saw that thereby he would have a deeper influence on his contemporaries. At the time when he was writing, the most pressing task of the historian was to form the political judgment of the nation. Sybel was admirably adapted to do this. Clear-headed, lucid, and emphatic, with his rather meagre and dry, but incisive manner : with his irony rather cold, but certain in effect : vigorous and rapid intelligence, ready in retort, skilled in handling ideas and in presenting them in the most favourable light : with his special talent of placing these ideas under the authority of science, Sybel with his methodical work did more than any one else in his country to spread those National-Liberal political ideas which have become those of the New Empire. Lord Acton has admirably expressed it. He helped “to absorb and stiffen the diffused, sentimental, and strangely impolitic talent of the studious Germans : he inculcated in them a taste for reality”.

These are real services which the Germans could not forget. Sybel was truly their political educator.

But after that critical work which prepared their minds for the Imperial policy, there was yet another piece of work to be done, that of glorifying the work done by the Hohenzollern.

For this new work it was not a dialectician that was wanted, but a poet or an orator endowed with that fire of soul which was rather lacking in Sybel. Prussia’s victories had the power of bringing him to being.