There is a curious moment in Tony Judt's new book of essays, Reappraisals (William Heinemann). He is writing about Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler's 1940 novel about Stalin's purges. Koestler's book, writes Judt, is "remarkably benign… there are no scenes of torture. There is hardly any violence at all." Judt's own book, by contrast, is a reflection on what he calls "the forgotten 20th century." His account of modern Europe, an important work by one of the outstanding historians of his generation, is dark and ends on a note of bleak pessimism. The words evil, violence and terror recur on almost every page.
Reappraisals, however, is a teddy bear's picnic by comparison with this summer's other outstanding work of history, Mark Mazower's Hitler's Empire (Allen Lane). Mazower's 768-page book is about Nazi rule in occupied Europe, focusing on Hitler's attempt to build an empire in the east. The east is what mattered to Hitler. It is also where the bodies are. During the liberation of Paris in 1944, about 1,500 Frenchmen lost their lives in a week; during the 1944 Warsaw uprising, more than 200,000 died. At one battle on the eastern front in the summer of 1944, Bagration, over half a million Germans were killed or wounded. As many Soviet POWs died in German captivity in one day as British and American POWs died in German camps during the whole war. But there were other perpetrators too. The Italians in Ethiopia, the Croats and Romanians, the Hungarians and Ukrainians—and the Allies. After the war, in May 1945, "thousands of Algerians died in massacres" while "bloodiest of all was the repression on Madagascar," where about 80,000 natives died in 1947-48 as French troops quashed an uprising.
Mazower and Judt, in two very different books, have written bleak accounts of the 20th century. But they are not alone. Something has changed in the way history is being written. The contrast between the postwar generation of historians, writing in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, and many of today's equivalents is striking. Whether they are writing about the Reformation or early Victorian England, the French revolution or modern Russian history, there is a new pessimism. Atrocities and massacres that were once marginal are now centre stage. A quiet confidence in stability and progress towards greater prosperity and equality has given way to a new uncertainty, a sense that all you can be sure of is the piles of corpses left by war and revolution. What has changed?
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The postwar years were a high point in British history writing. A new generation of historians became household names. AJP Taylor lectured on television. JH Plumb's England in the Eighteenth Century sold over 1m copies in paperback. EP Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class was on every left-wing student's shelf. History departments expanded and new kinds of history emerged: GR Elton's Tudor Revolution in Government, Christopher Hill's English Revolution, the 18th-century political world traced by JH Plumb and the protest movements described by young social historians, including Eric Hobsbawm and George Rudé.
None of these historians were naive or "Whiggish" in the sense of Herbert Butterfield's The Whig Interpretation of History (1931), which attacked "the tendency… to emphasise certain principles of progress in the past and to produce a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present." Yet whatever their political differences, these historians shared a mood of confidence, both about particular moments in the past and about the nature and progress of history itself.
In Elton's The Tudor Revolution in Government (1953), which transformed the study of Tudor history, the word "freedom" is used five times in the opening paragraph and the word "stability" twice. On the opening page, Elton writes of "England's exceptional constitutional history and her exceptional stability." The book begins as a hymn to English exceptionalism, to its distinctive mix of order and stability on the one hand, and freedom on the other. Christopher Hill, the best-known historian of 17th-century England, argued in The Century of Revolution, 1603-1714 (1961) that "the object of this book is to try to understand the changes which set England on the path of parliamentary government, economic advance and imperialist foreign policy, of religious toleration and scientific progress." In his popular England in the Eighteenth Century (1950), JH Plumb sounded a similar note. "The age of Walpole was rough, coarse, brutal," he writes, "…but the expanding world of commerce and the rich harvests brought both prosperity and opportunity, which bred a boundless self-confidence."
In the 1960s and 1970s, EP Thompson, George Rudé and Eric Hobsbawm presented a different view of 18th and early 19th-century England. But they too found grounds for optimism, tracing the making of a new working class and the emergence of a political culture of radicalism and dissent. Labour's return to power and the rise of the new left in the 1960s gave confidence to Marxist social history.
In 1965, AJP Taylor produced his acclaimed English History, 1914-1945. For all its cheeky 1960s iconoclasm, poking fun at first world war generals and the political establishment, there was an underlying sense of patriotism. "No other army has ever gone to war," he writes of the British army in the first world war, "proclaiming its own incompetence and reluctance to fight, and no army has fought better. The humble Englishman found his voice, and these wartime songs preserve him for posterity." He closes the book with the ending of the second world war: "The British were the only people who went through both world wars from beginning to end. Yet they remained a peaceful and civilised people, tolerant, patient and generous. Traditional values lost much of their force. Other values took their place. Imperial greatness was on the way out; the welfare state was on the way in… Few now sang 'Land of Hope and Glory.' Few even sang 'England Arise.' England had risen all the same."
This was popular history for its time. It was written by historians born in the last years of Edwardian England (AJP Taylor 1906, Plumb 1911, Hill 1912) or just after the first world war (Elton 1921, Thompson 1924) and formed by the 1930s and the second world war. And it was written for a generation who had been through the war, who experienced it as a victory for civilised values, and who saw Britain and its past as exceptional. British stability and democracy stood out clearly against the European dictatorships of left and right. The welfare state offered a new equality and the 1950s a new prosperity. For the left, there was hope of radical change; for the right, liberal democracy thrived and capitalism boomed. An optimistic consensus—a sort of intellectual Butskellism—underlies the surface left-right divisions.
What is striking is not so much what was said as what was not said. Elton's Reformation is about administrative progress from medieval government to a recognisably early modern kind of state. There is none of the sense of violent change and rupture which characterises Eamon Duffy's The Stripping of the Altars (1992). "The Reformation," Duffy writes, was "an essentially destructive force," "a relentless torrent carrying away the landmarks of a thousand years." Where Elton, in the 1950s, saw progress and order, Duffy, 40 years later, sees terrible loss.
Plumb's England in the Eighteenth Century (1950) finds little room for Scotland (12 references), Wales or even Ireland (just six pages and a few scattered references). The slave trade is another omission: four references in the whole book, all about abolition (one more than in his The First Four Georges).
It is not that historians were looking through rose-tinted spectacles. After all, these years produced some of the most compelling accounts of the poverty and social distress of the industrial revolution and the suffering of artisans unable to compete with cheaper labour and new technology. Plumb and EP Thompson both write in light and dark. Yet their gaze was selective. Particular groups were excluded. Some forms of loss and suffering slipped to the margins: slaves, starving Irish peasants, women, the mad. Radical reformers and artisans were acceptable social actors, many others were not. This criticism has become a commonplace—thanks in part to the rise of the new social and cultural history in the 1970s and 1980s, to feminism, to postcolonialism and so on. But it's not just about putting victims back into history. It is about changing the optimistic assumptions which left them out in the first place.
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Or compare Cobban's tone with Simon Schama's breakthrough book about the French revolution, Citizens (1989), in particular the famous chapter on 1793, "Terror is the Order of the Day." Schama writes: "an entire microcosm of Lyon society had been annihilated. The trauma left scars that took several generations to heal." Elsewhere, he writes, "women were routinely raped, children killed, both mutilated… 30 children and two women were buried alive [in one incident]…" It is not that Cobban denies the violence, but that the language used by Davies and Schama, the assumptions they share, is different.
These differences grow exponentially once we move east. In A Short History of Germany, 1815-1945 (1959) by Passant, Henderson, Child and Watt, the first 200 pages take us from Waterloo to Hitler's rise to power. The years 1933-45 are covered in 30 pages. "The Elimination of European Jewry" takes two pages. Similarly, in a major essay of almost 120 pages on German history, "From Bismarck to the Present" (1972), the Jewish refugee historian Peter Pulzer gives one paragraph of 11 lines to the final solution. In AJ Ryder's Twentieth Century Germany: From Bismarck to Brandt (1973), almost 700 pages long, there are just a few pages about the final solution. Today, in Waterstone's in Piccadilly, there are almost eight shelves of books on the third reich and the Holocaust.
The same applies further east. There has been a kind of paradigm shift in Soviet historiography. Before 1991, much Soviet history in the west was dominated by two schools of thought: left-wing historians who tended to minimise the scale of slaughter under Lenin and Stalin, and some non-communist historians who nevertheless saw Soviet industrialisation as a form of modernisation, the "you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs" school. Think of the last scene of David Lean's Doctor Zhivago (1965). We have just sat through more than three hours of suffering, loss and death. And then the camera pulls away to show the thundering dam, symbol of the Soviet Union's industrial might and achievement.
But in Orlando Figes's A People's Tragedy (1996) or The Whisperers (2007), there is no consolation, just suffering on every page. The last words of The Whisperers belong to a survivor, Antonina Golovina, whose parents were kulaks: "I was on my own on a deserted road… I went down to the river bank and washed myself in the river. And then I said a prayer for my parents." Compare that with the last words of EH Carr's 14-volume A History of Soviet Russia (1950-78): "The revolution fell far short of the aims which it set for itself, and of the hopes which it generated. Its record was flawed and ambiguous. But it has been the source of more profound and more lasting repercussions throughout the world than any other historical event of modern times."
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This isn't just a question of tone. There are several features of the new pessimism. First, certainly, a greater awareness of violence and cruelty: drowning counter-revolutionaries in Nantes, the slaughter at Stalingrad or the suppression of the Paris commune. But other things are going on too. There is a new sense that, as academics steeped in postmodern and postcolonial studies have pointed out, what to the victors seemed part of a story of progress felt like a violent loss to the losers. The Reformation was a central part of a traditional story of English progress, part of what Duffy scathingly calls the "patriotic Protestant foundation-myth." But today that looks very different seen from the view of English Catholics, and if the United Kingdom starts to come loose, the story of Protestantism and its relation to British history will be looked at differently.
There has also been a loss of confidence in the building blocks of the national narrative. Questions about England and Britain started to look very different after Linda Colley's Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 (1992), which questioned the way we represent basic assumptions about Britain as a nation. Since the 1990s, Scotland, Wales and especially Ireland have started to move in from the margins. In postwar writing, there was an unmistakable sense of national feeling. The end of empire has changed how we think about England and English exceptionalism.
The same has happened with European history. Norman Davies's Europe: A History challenged many people's sense of Europe by shifting its perspective to give due prominence to central and east Europe. Similarly, Mark Mazower found that European history looks very different from Warsaw or Salonica. Liberal democracy looks more fragile. The violent relationship between nationalism and minorities looms large. Continuity—at the heart of British and French ideas of the nation state—gives way to constant change and upheaval. Britain and France, in other words, become less the norm.
"Revolution" was a key term, and a benign one, in postwar history—from the Tudor revolution in government to Hill's English revolution, from the French and American revolutions to the agricultural and industrial revolutions. Today's historians emphasise complex and uneven changes rather than grand revolutions. But they also see revolution as a terrible, almost mad, upheaval and count the casualties. The classic example is Schama's Citizens. It begins with a plaster elephant which stood for over 30 years on the site of the Bastille, "a sorry spectacle." And it ends with a naked woman in a madhouse, "alone in her cell, shouting out half-intelligible revolutionary phrases…" The progress of British or European history is no longer a civilising procession. Reading the new historians, it is as if Davies and Figes, Schama's Citizens or Mazower's Hitler's Empire, are writing on the other side of some great historical divide. Instead of marginalising revolutionary terror, the Holocaust or Stalinist violence they put them at the centre of their narratives.
What is going on here? One explanation is the political defeat of the left. The left's apparent victory in the academy—the rise of victim history, the denigration of "progress"—has concealed a larger defeat for the utopias of the left and of militant humanitarianism: the genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia, the bombing of Sarajevo and then 9/11 and the Iraq war. And it is no coincidence that Schama's Citizens, with its stress on the terrible costs of revolution, appeared in 1989, the year the Berlin wall came down. The events of 1989-91 haven't just changed the way we think about communism. They have changed the way we think about revolutionary violence and its costs. A younger generation, educated in the 1970s, has no illusions about revolutionary utopias.
A second clue comes from Davies's account of the drowning at Nantes. The reference to "reusable death chambers" tells the story. Since the late 1980s, the way we think about the Holocaust has changed our historical imagination. It has deepened our sense of violence and evil. It is no coincidence that a number of these new historians—Figes, Mazower, Judt, Schama—are Jews, sons and grandsons of refugees and immigrants. The experience of central and east Europe in the mid-20th century matters to them.
This has coincided with a larger cultural shift. Images of sadism are widespread in our culture, from torturing witches in JK Rowling and Philip Pullman to cruel Daleks in Dr Who. There is a desire among readers for history as a horror movie, along with an almost pornographic fascination with terrible figures (Hitler, Stalin, Henry VIII) and appalling violence. Instead of the age of reform or the growth of political stability, we want to read about the eastern front and the death camps.
If the optimists were writing at a time of growing prosperity and stability at home, so are today's pessimists. But the answer is not about economics. It is surely about culture, a larger sense of pessimism and decline. "England had risen all the same." Who could write that line now about any moment in the recent past? EH Carr's Bolsheviks, the great Soviet dam in Doctor Zhivago and AJP Taylor's Tommys seem like something out of a museum. Today we have replaced them with Antonina Golovina, weeping on a deserted road, Schama's madwoman, Duffy's Catholics, slaves and Jews.
Perhaps that is why the recent fiction of Ian McEwan and Philip Roth seems to speak to us. The central image in McEwan's fiction or in American Pastoral is that all is fine, and then one day something will come out of the blue—a balloon, a group of thugs in a car, an accusation by a young girl—and everything will be ruined. The world is not a safe place. Life is fragile. There are no values out there—religious, nationalistic, political ideologies—to save us. We are on our own. Judt, Mazower, Figes, Schama and Davies would add: it was always so.
