Michal Jan Rozbicki on "The Rise of Learned Hagiography"

Randall Stephens

The following excerpt is from Michal Jan Rozbicki's review essay in the June 2013 issue of Historically Speaking.  Rozbicki uses Jon Meacham's Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power
(Random House, 2012) to delve into "the cult of great individuals," which even in the present, does not lack enthusiasts.  Rozbicki is professor of history and director of the Center for Intercultural Studies at Saint Louis University. He is the author of Culture and Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution (University of Virginia Press, 2011).

One would be hard pressed to find a dull period in Thomas Jefferson’s life. Mindful of that, I began devouring Jon Meacham’s 800-page Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power anticipating a gourmet biographical feast. It started off as an enjoyable and well-paced story but it was not long before the taste of syrup began to take over. By the time I reached page eight I had already been informed that “Jefferson was the

most successful political figure of the first half century of the American Republic,” “had a remarkable capacity to marshal ideas and to move on, to balance the inspirational and the pragmatic,” and was “a transformative leader.” He was a “formidable man” and his “genius” was that he “dreamed big but understood that dreams become reality only when their champions are strong enough and wily enough to bend history to their purposes.” A case of “the rare leader who stood out from the crowd without intimidating it,” his “bearing gave him unusual opportunities to make the thoughts in his head the work of his hands, transforming the world around him.” Not only “a man of Enlightenment, always looking forward, consumed by the quest for knowledge” but also “an inveterate walker,” “fit and virile,” “never tired of invention and inquiry,” “delighted in archeology paleontology, astronomy, botany, and meteorology,” “drew sustenance from music and found joy in gardening,” “bought and built beautiful things,”“was an enthusiastic patron of pasta,” and “enjoyed the search for a perfect dressing for his salads.” Moreover, he “knew Latin, Greek, French, Italian, and Spanish,” was “a student of human nature, a keen observer of what drove other men,” “perfectly acquainted” with “subject after subject,” an “extraordinary man.” Politically, he was “the father of the ideal of individual liberty, of the Louisiana Purchase, of the Lewis and Clark expedition, of the American West,” “the author and designer of America, a figure who articulated a vision of what the country could be.” A “builder and a fighter,” he “gave the nation the idea of American progress.” He was able to operate “on two levels, cultivating the hope of a brighter future while preserving the political flexibility and skill to bring the ideal as close as possible to reality.” The world “found him charming, brilliant, and gracious,” friends thought “he was among the greatest men who had ever lived, a Renaissance figure who was formidable without seeming overbearing, sparkling without being showy, winning without appearing cloying,” and “women in particular loved him.” Oh, and “he had great teeth” (xvii-xxiv).

Avast! Pirates in History

Heather Cox Richardson

One of my favorite graduate students was an expert on pirates. Trying to supervise his research meant that I had an opportunity to learn from him enough about historical piracy to have a working knowledge of it. From Roger, I learned that we actually have very few primary sources directly discussing pirates, and that much of what popular histories say of piracy is fantasy. I also learned that piracy was an economic and political enterprise that was vital to countries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and that early governments largely accepted it.

Finally, I learned that piracy is every bit as active today as it was in the Golden Age of Piracy, as men at sea make a living by stealing the wealth of others. There are even, my student pointed out, websites for the reporting of pirate attacks, although he explained that the legal tangles such accusations launch means that piracy remains seriously under-reported. There are also companies that promise protection against pirates, selling technology that makes the days when sailors rounding Cape Horn scattered carpet tacks on their decks to thwart robbers seem quaint indeed.

It is in honor of this student that I carry my keys on a fob of pirate flags.

Roger also inspired me to start reading about pirates on my own. Some of the scholarly books out there, notably Robert C. Ritchie’s Captain Kidd and the War Against the Pirates, are smart and worth reading.

But Roger’s tutorial taught me enough to know that the best book on pirates I’ve come across is William Gilkerson’s Pirate’s Passage. It purports to be a children’s story, although the themes it addresses are relevant to everyone. It is the story of the relationship between a young boy in Nova Scotia in the 1950s and an old sailor who brings a 35-foot yawl into the family dock on a treacherously stormy winter night. While the actual age and status of the old sailor is deliberately obscure, there is little doubt that he is—or was—a pirate.

As the weeks pass, the boy endures bullying from the local rich family that is trying to get control of his mother’s valuable real estate and develop it. In the evenings, the mariner tells the boy stories of pirates. Eventually, the child’s quest to defend himself from the local thugs and save his mother’s property becomes a personal exploration of wealth, ownership, and piracy, in the past and the present, forcing the boy to make decisions about what is truly just.

Pirate’s Passage is an engaging romp that tells good history. The author clearly knows his primary sources on piracy, and he often includes passages from them as the elderly man reads to the boy. Gilkerson situates Sir Francis Drake, Mainwaring, Morgan, the buccaneers, and all their peers in their proper times and places; he also brings to life what it meant to be a sailor tied to the pirate life: hunting pigs on Hispaniola, raiding passing vessels, and getting a share of the take—a rough life, to be sure, but one that compared favorably to life on a Royal Navy ship, where lice, scabies, whipping, injuries, and endless work were the norm.

But Gilkerson does more than provide a good account of historical pirates. His book is a profound reflection on the meaning of history. The mariner refuses to let his young friend imagine the pirates as fun swashbucklers. They are human beings, trying to negotiate the shifting spheres of politics and power in order to survive and, whenever possible, make their fortunes. The first conversation the old man has with the boy about pirates begins with an observation that speaks directly to what historians do: “Rules are a given,” he says. “What could be more important than seeing who makes ‘em, and who breaks ‘em, and who makes their own, and how it’s worked through time?”

As the old man tells his stories and advises the young man’s exploits, he insists the boy look deeply into cause, effect, and, critically, responsibility. When his young friend dismisses Drake as a criminal, the mariner asks him to reconsider. Was it Drake who was the criminal, he asks, or Queen Elizabeth, who encouraged the famous pirate to go strike a blow for England? Who, exactly, is a pirate, when governments as well as individuals engaged in piracy? What justification for theft of property is acceptable? Are the rules the same for the rich as for the poor? These questions are not just academic in Pirate’s Passage, either. The local family persecuting the boy’s mother represents the local government, forcing the boy to cross a number of legal lines (in extraordinarily interesting ways) in order to protect her property. He becomes, the mariner tells him, a member of the Brotherhood.

In the end, the boy must sift through not only the past but also the present for his understanding of justice. He does so with the guidance of a wily old mariner, who refuses to let him accept easy answers.

It turns out the old salt is not just a pirate, he is a historian.

Singing the News in 18th-Century Paris: An Interview with Robert Darnton

Randall Stephens

Over a month ago I interviewed Robert Darnton at this blog on the ongoing discussions about a Digital Public Library of America. Of course, in addition to being a spokesperson for a national digital library and director of Harvard libraries, he is also an accomplished historian. He's written or edited a variety of books, including The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1979); The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (Basic Books, 1984); Berlin Journal, 1989-1990 (W. W. Norton, 1991); The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Prerevolutionary France (W. W. Norton, 1995); and The Devil in the Holy Water, or the Art of Slander from Louis XIV to Napoleon (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). His most recent book, Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), examines how songs sung on 18th-century Paris streets "provided a running commentary on public affairs . . . during a period of rising discontent. He uncovers a complex communication network, illuminating the way information circulated in a semi-literate society."*

I spoke with Darnton back in April about his research for the book, the surprising story he found, and the importance of oral sources for the study of history. (Thanks to Carissa Schutz, my admin assistant for transcribing the interview.)

Stephens: In Poetry and the Police you write about the transfer of information and the spread of news and gossip in the 18th century. What do historians know about literacy in France during this age?

Robert Dartnon: Yes, of course, it’s very difficult to know exactly what the literacy rates were 250 years ago, we have dubious sources, notarial archives, registers of people signing baptisms and marriage, that sort of thing. On the whole we have rough estimates. Urban France was more literate than rural France. It turns out that northern France was more literate than southern France, and so on. But the fact is that this was a society where people were largely illiterate, and those who could read often had only a primitive capacity to do so.

So, think of Paris around 1750. How did people know the news? How do they get information about current events? Well, they did so through oral means. There are certain places where they’d go to gossip about what was actually happening. And there were no newspapers in the modern sense of the word. The Gazette de France was heavily censored. All periodical literature actually was censored. So you could say for printed versions of the news, it hardly existed.

What I argue in this book is that they found out about current events through oral exchanges and in particular through songs. Paris was full of street singers, many were beggars, they had fiddles. They would set up shops, so to speak, at a street corner, fiddle away and ball out a song. The songs that they sung were news essentially. That is to say Parisians were improvising new words to old tunes every day. It’s astonishing what the production was. And it wasn’t terribly difficult to compose these songs. They were very simple ballads mostly. There’s some intrigue in the government, or the king has a new mistress, or the price of bread is shooting up, or it might just be the weather. People were discussing this in music through new verses to old tunes. And I came upon a wonderful run in the archives of manuscript, little sheets of paper, on which people jotted down the new verses and then carried them around in their pockets, traded them for other bits of paper, on which there were other verses.

Stephens: It was like an underground press in a way?

Darnton: It was like an underground press, but the fascinating thing is that they were then sung. Not just by the beggar and then street singers, but by ordinary people in market places, sometimes in cafes, often in public gardens. I mean, Paris was full of song. And of course historians haven’t paid much attention to this because oral information doesn’t get recorded by and large. What I did was to try and figure out what the messages were so I went through vast collections, hundreds and hundreds of these songs and I have statistical estimates of how many there were. I could prove, for example, that there were at least three new songs composed every week around 1750, but that’s just from the evidence that has survived in the archives. I would say that we’ve got a dozen new songs almost every day being composed.

The question then is, what did they sound like? Because the music, the tunes, could’ve actually reflected the meaning of these songs and when you see the references to them in the archives, there are scrapbooks called Chansonnier that you can go through. This notes “sung to the tune of” and name of a tune that I, at least, had never heard of such as “La Béquille du père Barnabas,” or, in English, “The Crutch of Father Barnabas.” Well no one has ever heard of that tune I think today. And then I found that in the music department of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, they have keys to the tunes. So I can look up “The Crutch of Father Barnabas” and there I get the musical annotation.

A friend of mine Hélène Delavault is a cabaret singer in Paris and she agreed to record the songs. Therefore, the book I wrote has the texts of a dozen of these songs as examples of what was actually flowing through the streets of Paris around 1750. The reader can read the original French and then my translation of it and at the same time tune in to Hélène Delavault recording online which is available free of charge. (Listen to them here.)

Stephens: That’s available on the Harvard University Press website?

Darnton: That’s right. There’s a Harvard Univ. Press website but it’s open access, it’s free, and it’s a way of , so to speak, hearing the past. I mean, recovering sounds from the past. Not perfectly because this cabaret performer Hélène Delavault has quite a beautiful voice actually and the street singers were pretty coarse, but still you can get at the way tunes carried meanings, which were largely political.

In fact in April in 1749 the government fell. There was a big political crisis and all the contemporaries agreed about the cause of the crisis. In one word: songs. It sounds strange, and that’s a little too simple, but in fact there’s lots of evidence that the government fell because of a particular intrigue that took the form of a nasty song about the king and Madame Pompadour. So there’s no question that songs could actually be a factor in political crisis.

Stephens: Could royal authorities do anything about that? Could they squelch the singers? Was there an official attempt to do so?

Darnton: There was, yes, because this was such a powerful political force that the royal authorities paid attention to it. And actually I begin the book with a sort of detective story because the head of the Parisian police received an order from the top person in the government: Find me the author of the song that begins with, and they just had the first line: “Monstre dont la noire furie” (Monster whose black fury). That’s all they knew. The monster was Louis XV. They had to somehow find the author to this song. So they had spies in cafes and they fanned out and eventually one of the spies actually found a student who had recited this song/poem and he is arrested through a kind of ambush. It’s very amusing to see how they staged the arrest, because they didn’t want the word to spread that they were cracking down. They wanted to find accomplices, other people who were connected. So his name was François Bonis. He was interrogated in the Bastille. He said where he got the song. That person was arrested; so A got it from B, B got it from C, C got it from D, then D says “yup, I got it from E,” but meanwhile I got three other songs or poems from X, Y, and Z. And they’re all arrested. And they got poems and songs from other people so soon the police were trailing six poems and songs through overall networks of diffusion in Paris. And you can map the way the songs work into Parisian society with tremendous precision. So it’s possible, thanks to this police force, to actually do a very serious sociological study of oral diffusion.

Stephens: It sounds like one of the lessons of this is that even if a state pursues censorship, there will be ways that people will communicate, gossip with one another.

Darnton: Yes that’s one of the things I find fascinating because the state around 1750 could definitely control the printed word. If gossip escapes from their control, they crack down on it. They understand that it’s important, but they can’t stop it. So they really do have spies in all of the major cafes. In a separate run of documents I found reports of police spies that are written in dialogue. Now whether the dialogue is perfectly accurate, I don’t know. In the document X says to Y and Y responds to X, and you can reproduce the dialogue that occurred there according to the police spies. Now I don’t know if the spies touched up things in order to ingratiate themselves to their superiors. Police archives have to be read with a lot of skepticism, but still you can find the subjects that are being discussed and it’s clear that the state is very concerned about oral means of diffusion, even though this is in principle an absolute monarchy.

It’s a fascinating moment in which you see an old form of absolutism going back to Louis XIV and the 17th century confronted with a growing sense of participation in public affairs, if only by discussion. So you could say this is an example of Jürgen Habermas’s work on the public sphere. I’m not totally convinced by Habermas’ thesis, although I think it’s an important one. Certainly it is possible to reconstruct the way political acts and ideas, public affairs are being discussed and disseminated throughout a very large public.

Stephens: And this happens at a specific point in western history when this was possible? It sounds like it was almost a transitional point before the press has more freedom and influence.

Dartnon: That’s right I think this does indeed represent an intermediate phase. It’s quite a long phase. How can you precisely date it? But certainly around 1750 in big cities, even smaller cities, but especially Paris, there’s a huge interest in public affairs. It often accompanies war so from 1740 - 48 you’ve got the War of the Austrian Succession and then 1756 - 63 the Seven Years War. People follow the war and they want information. But you could get it somewhat from the official newspaper, especially when there were victories. But when things go badly you get it by going to certain benches in the Luxembourg Gardens where gossips gather. There’s a tree in the garden of the Palais-Royal called the Tree of Cracow and everyone who was interested in what was really happening would go to this tree where people were just gossiping about politics nonstop. It reached such a level that some foreign ambassadors actually sent servants to plant gossip or to pick it up because people wanted to know what was happening. And you couldn’t do this through the printed word.

Stephens: It seems too that there’d be other examples of this in other cities. I don’t know how far back the Speakers’ Corner in London’s Hyde Park dates.

Darnton: It is fascinating to compare London and Paris. It’s not just Hyde Park but the London coffee houses and the Parisian cafés were doing very similar things. But of course working class people didn’t go to cafes so much. They went to drinking establishments, guinguettes some of them are called, which are different in character but that didn’t stop them from gossiping.

An Interview with Jacqueline Riding on Mid-Georgian Britain

Randall Stephens

Jacqueline Riding is a historian and consultant who is completing her PhD in 18th-century British art and culture. She served as the curator at the Theatre Museum, the Guards Museum, the Tate, the Palace of Westminster, and was founding Director of the Handel House Museum in London. Her Mid-Georgian Britain, “the latest addition to the growing Living Histories series, charts the growth of the empire and looks at the growing importance of London as a capital city where the rich and poor rubbed shoulders. Jacqueline Riding creates a vivid portrait of the daily reality of life for a middle-class family in this age of growing affluence.”* Ever wonder what life was like in an 18th-century city? How did people eat, work, and play? What did they think about the world around them? Riding's concise, immensely entertaining book gives a snapshot of an amazing, vanished world.

Randall Stephens: Your book, Mid-Georgian Britain is a readable, fascinating account of life in the 18th century. Did your own work as a curator and scholar of art and culture influence how you composed the book?

Jacqueline Riding: Thank you very much. The basic chapter structure and length were set out by the publishers, although I did change a few of the headings. For example I think “Charity and Citizenship” is a key theme of the period and I have done a lot of work on the Foundling Hospital (my PhD is on an artist, Joseph Highmore, who donated a history painting to the charity). So I changed the chapter heading accordingly. The tight word length meant I had to be disciplined and the text feels pithy and quite fast-paced, which I like. It was important to stop worrying that so much inevitably gets left out. Even so, some of the themes were out of my comfort zone (dental pelicans anyone?!). So I learned something new too. Word length permitting, I was keen to show contrasts and find unusual facts or opinions rather than trot out the usual Georgian suspects. Having said that I could not resist Dr. Johnson. I think my background in curatorship means I think of an historical period in 3D—a case in point was recreating Handel’s house in Mayfair. I believe it is important not to be confined by a particular academic discipline, to study an historical period in the round. One of the benefits of being an art historian is that you know your way around a picture library, so I was very eager to get really good quality images. Ultimately, if I gave an interesting snap shot of the period, which encourages people to look further and even visit some of the locations mentioned, then I've done my job.

Stephens: Could you say something about how the London of the early 21st century differs from the London of, say, the 1750s?

Riding: Well, if they thought it was big in the mid-eighteenth century, they should see it now . . .

Stephens: Throughout Mid-Georgian Britain you quote a host of contemporary authors. Do you have a favorite character/author from that period?

Riding: It would have to be William Hogarth. He’s quite simply a hero, a real London bruiser with a heart made of putty.

Stephens: You include sections in the book on “Love and Sex, Marriage and Family,” “Home and Neighbourhood,” “Work,” “Food and Drink,” and more. What did you find most interesting to research and write about?

Riding: As I say, most of the headings were provided by the publisher although “Love and Sex . . .” was one of my modifications—partly so I had the excuse to illustrate the syphilitic skull and condom. When you are asked to rattle through a thirty-year period covering as many bases as possible you start to realize how little you know or at least how relatively limited your expertise is. No one is an expert on “the eighteenth century”—it’s just not possible. Humbling but true.

Stephens: Are you working on any projects now that you can tell us about?

Riding: I am indeed. For anyone interested in mid-Georgian art and charity I have an article in Art History Journal titled “The mere relation of the suffering of others’: Joseph Highmore, History Painting and Charity.” I have an article coming out in April’s History Today on Charles Edward Stuart and I am also writing a narrative history on the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 for Bloomsbury Publishing (eta 2013).

King George II & III, Colonial News, and a Royal Autopsy

Randall Stephens

On October 25, 1760 George III became King of Great Britain. News traveled slow, of course, and New Englanders didn't know about George II's (b. 1683) death or their new monarch for weeks.

Just how slow did people and information cross the Atlantic? In 1750 the school master and organist Gottlieb Mittelberger made the voyage from England to Philadelphia. He later wrote: "When the ships have for the last time weighed their anchors near the city of Kaupp [Cowes] in Old England, the real misery begins with the long voyage. For from there the ships, unless they have good wind, must often sail 8, 9, 10 to 12 weeks before they reach Philadelphia. But even with the best wind the voyage lasts 7 weeks."* Sailing technology had greatly improved in the 18th century. Still, slow transatlantic journeys and poor roads hindered the speed of information for decades. (See the map showing travel times circa. 1800.)

So, finally, in late December Bostonians read of the King's demise in the Boston Post: "Saturday arrived here Capt Partridge in about 6 weeks from London by whom we have the melancholly News of the Death of the most high, most mighty, and most excellent Monarch, GEORGE the Second, King of Great Britain . . . Defender of the Faith . . . . GEORGE the Third was proclaimed KING. . ." ("Partridge; Weeks; London; News; Death; Monarch; George," Boston Post-Boy, December 29, 1760, 2.)

The British American loyalty to King and Country sometimes gets lost in our popular view of colonials as patriots in the making. But as Brendan McConville writes in his The King's Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688-1776, "British North Americans championed their British king with emotional intensity in print, during public political rites, and in private conversation" (9).

Yet, before Americans pulled out the bunting and uncorked bottles to celebrate their new King, they had a bit of morbid curiosity to satisfy. How did George II die?

Fortunately, newspaper editors, keen to print what the people wanted, had the scoop on the Royal Autopsy. The Boston Post relayed the news from London: "In obedience to the order transmitted to us by the Right Hon. Vice-Chamberlain, We the under-signed have this day opened and examined the body of his Majesty . . ." They found "all parts contained in a natural and healthy state, except only the surface of each kidney there were some hydrides, or watery bladders, which however, we determined could not have been at this time of any material consequence." The regal heart, though, did not look so well. Among other abnormalities, they observed "a rupture in the right venticle." ("London, November 4," Boston Post-Boy, December 29, 1760, 2.) (For what passed as medicine in that day, see the amusing film The Madness of King George. The physicians in the movie are a hoot!)

Certainly, the 18th century is culturally distant from us today. This past is definitely a foreign country. Today, we travel at breakneck speeds and communicate across space and time with ease. Still, reading newspaper accounts like the above, makes the celebrity mongering of today and news as infotainment seem not entirely new.

Slavery in New England

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The Sunday Ideas section of the Boston Globe features an interesting essay on slavery in New England. Francie Latour lays bare some of the myths related to regionalism and slavery.

Francie Latour, "New England’s Hidden History," Boston Globe, September 26, 2010.

"When it comes to slavery, the story that New England has long told itself goes like this: Slavery happened in the South, and it ended thanks to the North. Maybe we had a little slavery, early on. But it wasn’t real slavery. We never had many slaves, and the ones we did have were practically family. . . .

As the nation prepares to mark the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War in 2011, with commemorations that reinforce the North/South divide, researchers are offering uncomfortable answers to that question, unearthing more and more of the hidden stories of New England slavery — its brutality, its staying power, and its silent presence in the very places that have become synonymous with freedom." >>>