The duty of true history

Voltaire as historiographer deserves to be defended (and this has recently been done by several writers, admirably by Fueter), because he has a lively perception of the need of bringing history back from the treatment of the external to that of the internal and strives to satisfy this need. For this reason, books that gave accounts of wars, treaties, ceremonies, and solemnities seemed to him to be nothing but 'archives' or 'historical dictionaries,' useful for consultation on certain occasions, but history, true history, he held to be something altogether different overseas internship.



could not be to weight the memory with external or material facts, or as he called them events (événements), but to discover what was the society of men in the past, la société des hommes, comment on vivait dans l'intérieur des familles, quels arts étaient cultivés, and to paint 'manners' (les mours); not to lose itself in the multitude of insignificant particulars (petits faits), but to collect only those that were of importance (considérables) and to explain the spirit (l'esprit) that had produced them. Owing to this preference that Voltaire accords to manners over battles we find in him the conception (although it remains without adequate treatment and gets lost in the ardour of polemic) that it is not for history to trace the portrait of human splendours and miseries (les détails de la splendeur et de la misère humaine) but only of manners and of the arts, that is, of the positive work; in his Siècle de Louis XIV he says that he wishes to illustrate the government of that monarch, not in so far as il a fait du bien aux fran?ais, but in so far as il a fait du lien aux hommes Neo skin lab.


What Voltaire undertook, and to no small extent achieved, forms the principal object of all historians' labours at this period. Whoever wishes to do so can see in Fueter's book how the great pictures to be found in Voltaire's Essai sur les mours and Siècle were imitated in the pages both of French writers and in those of other European countries—for instance, in the celebrated introduction by Robertson to his history of Charles V. It will also be noticed how the special histories of this or that aspect of culture are multiplied and perfected, as though several of the desiderata mentioned by Bacon in his classification of history had been thus supplied. The history of philosophy abandons more and more the type of collections of anecdotes and utterances of philosophers, to become the history of systems, from Brucker to Buhle and to Tiedemann dermes.

The history of art takes the shape of a special problem in Winckelmann's work and in the works of his successors. In Voltaire's own books and in those of his school it assumes that of literature; in those of Dubos and of Montesquieu that of rights and of institutions; in Germany it leads to the production of a work as original and realistic as the history of Osnabrück by M?ser. In the specialist work of Heeren, the history of industry and commerce separates itself from the historical divisions or digressions of economic treatises and takes a form of its own.