Edward Gibbon’s Europe and Germany’s new Stalinist

Reading The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire with Sahra Wagenknecht on the news

Aug 25, 2024

I am reading one of those books on people’s ‘list of great books to read’ Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I am an atrocious historian, so this tome used to be read to me at bedtime along with Garrett Mattingly’s The Defeat Of The Spanish Armada because they are long stories. Why these two books together and not say Livy’s History? Because Gibbon’s book is an eighteenth century one and my mind had to be in England from Elizabeth I through to a bit after the Augustan Age. And so I read Gibbon with J. G. A. Pocock’s magisterial Barbarism and Religion, six volumes that situate Gibbon and his six volumes in a series of contexts in the history of eighteenth-century Europe.

This is how a scholar should read Gibbon, but it got me thinking, how do others read Gibbon? We know that Iggy Pop read him “with pleasure around 4 am, with my drugs and whisky in cheap motels”. This is from a hoot of a paper the Classical Association of Ireland published in their journal Classics Ireland in 1995, written by Pop and titled ‘Caesar Lives’. He begins:

In 1982, horrified by the meanness, tedium and depravity of my existence as I toured the American South playing rock and roll music and going crazy in public, I purchased an abridged copy of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Dero Saunders, Penguin). The grandeur of the subject appealed to me, as did the cameo illustration of Edward Gibbon, the author, on the front cover. He looked like a heavy dude.

He was a ‘heavy dude’ and while the ‘cameo’ Pop refers to would have been Henry Walton’s portrait, he no doubt had in mind Joshua Reynold’s done in the grand style and above. Pop is actually an astute reader and very fun writer, although he does say “America is Rome…why shouldn’t it be?” but he is writing as an artist, and explaining how the book seemingly inspired his ‘extemporaneous soliloquy’ ‘Caesar’. So, we read for different reasons, and in different contexts, but always, as Pop would have it, to find out ‘how little we know’.

And ‘how little we know’, or rather just how limited Gibbon’s Europe was is what struck me when I returned to Pocock. It shouldn’t have, because I know all of this backwards, but that was precisely what struck me. Gibbon’s Europe is limited and so is mine. My Europe, from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century, is like Gibbon’s, Anglo-French. It is not entirely, of course, and it makes perfect sense, but it is interesting to remember, particularly as I am smack-bang in the centre of Europe and at the moment writing on Germany.

I am writing on the Stalinist Sahra Wagenknecht, whose new party BSW (Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht) looks like it will score big in the coming state elections in Brandenburg, Saxony and Thuringia. The AfD is dominating the polls, leading in Brandenburg and Thuringia, however the other major player is the BSW. In Thuringia polling shows almost half of the votes going to the AfD (30%) and BSW (19%). In Brandenburg and Saxony AfD and BSW are expected to win a combined 41% of the vote. What I make of this, and whether the polls are correct, is to come.

At the moment I am thinking of Gavin Mortimer’s observation that, despite holding views that mirror Marine Le Pen’s, ‘foreign media’, namely the BCC and Politico, describe her as a ‘cultural conservative’. ‘Why aren’t left-wing anti-immigration parties called fascists?’, he asks. Indeed. The explanation usually given is that that of left wing bias and Mortimer writes that “Wagenknecht is proof that much of the mainstream media go easy on a politician if they are perceived to be left-wing”. This is true, however your Anglosphere commentariat seems to have a blind spot when it comes to the East on the whole.

Anything East of Vienna, and Wagenknecht’s head is very east of Vienna indeed, is largely a mystery to your minimally English-educated hack, and if you put a BBC journalist on a train from Prague to Vienna with a compass and asked them to tell you which direction they were going in I think they would be surprised. This is, however, somewhat understandable. While the ‘mainstream’ left have a disturbing tendency to gloss over Stalin and fixate on Hitler, I think the blind spot goes back further than this, as disturbing as the more recent blind spot is.

If we put EU and UN ideology to the side, the Europe your non-Catholic English-speaking layperson likely thinks of is Gibbon’s. That is, Enlightenment Europe Latin and largely Protestant and with the Holy Roman Empire sort of forgotten. While in the Anglosphere everyone with an arts degree is forced to read Kant (although probably only that ‘perpetual peace’ essay these days) Hume is not only read but understood. Common law no doubt has a lot to do with this.

So while the Aufklärung and the Holy Roman Empire have nothing to do with Wagenknecht’s Stalinism (although she apparently spent her 18th birthday reading Kant’s Critique of Reason, make of that what you will) a limited knowledge of Germany, a ‘Western European’ country, is part and parcel for your average Anglo Joe. And with that in mind, I will continue my work on my maternal country, which my German family will be happy to hear involves me attempting to read in German, and leave you with Pocock’s sketch on Gibbon’s space and time, from his more accessible Tanner lectures:

Gibbon was born at Putney, and his life is divided into periods of residence in England and in Switzerland. The volumes composing the Decline and Fall were written partly in Bentinck Street, Westminster, and partly at the Villa de La Grotte in Lausanne. He was Anglo-Swiss by culture and bilingual in French and English; several of his writings are in French and at one time he nearly forgot his English. These facts seem to emphasize that Gibbon was a cosmopolitan; and he was one, both in the sense that he was at home in two cultures and two languages and in the sense that a vision of Europe as a plurality of interacting states and cultures was at the heart of his understanding of history. But the multicultural space in which he lived was not very extensive. He moved between London and various places in southern and south-western England, both as a private gentleman and during his service as a militia officer and member of Parliament; but he was never in northern England, or in Edinburgh during its age of genius. He visited Ferney, Bern, and St. Gallen, and in the dawn of Swiss tourism was transported across the Alpine passes into Piedmont; but he never learned to speak German or visited lands where it was a language of culture. Apart from journeys to Paris, Turin, Florence, and on one crucial excursion to Rome, his travels from Lausanne, which were frequent and often quite intrepid, followed the Rhine valley to the North Sea and England; east of that path he never went.
Gibbon, then, was from western Europe—there are several Europes and it is important to keep this in mind—a Europe heir to the Latin-speaking provinces of the Roman Empire, and he was very much from the Anglo-French provinces of that Europe. There is a sharp distinction—I think there is a tension—between the relatively constricted Europe in which he lived and the almost global scale on which he came to write history; and to understand the tension we have to consider what vision of history it was that his Europe needed, used, and encouraged. This was the Europe of Enlightenment, brought into being by the Treaties of Westphalia in 1648 and Utrecht in 1713, and when it looked back to the decline of Rome it was to recount the following processes. German-speaking, or “Gothic,” peoples had settled in Roman provinces, changing Britain into England, Gaul into France, northern Italy into Lombardy; their social and political systems had become what was known as feudal. In the absence of imperial rule, there had developed alliances between their kingdoms and an ecclesiastical potentate, the bishop of Rome, who had been enabled to establish a species of monarchy over the Latin church and press demands upon the western kingdoms. He had frustrated any revival of imperial unity in the Latin world; and in this relatively decentralized Europe, barbaric societies had in due course become civilized, by a combination of ancient and modern cultural resources and by arevival of trade. Religious dissent from the primacy of the popes liad helped certain kingdoms to assert control over their ecclesiastical structures and challenge the papal monarchy itself; and on two occasions, attempts by Habsburg and Bourbon kings to establish European hegemonies so extensive as to incur the epithet of “universal monarchy” had been defeated by various combinations of secular and Protestant authority. The Treaties of Westphalia and Utrecht had confirmed the existence of a Europe of independent states, which might be termed a confederacy in the sense that it was held together by treaties, and even a republic in the sense that its member states, being sovereign, were independent of and equal with one another. The Swiss confederacy, in which Gibbon lived, and in its way the Holy Roman Empire, were smaller models of this system.
Gibbon’s Europe, then, was doubly or trebly the heir of the overthrow of empire: of the disruption of Rome, or the failure of the Hohenstaufen, and of the defeat of the Spanish Habsburgs and Louis XIV. It was overwhelmingly Latin and largely Protestant, though the Austrian emperors and other German princes had taken part in frustrating the hegemony of Louis XIV, and the “Germanic body” of the Holy Roman Empire could be seen as part of that Europe. But on its Bohemian, Hungarian, and Croatian eastern faces the Habsburg monarchy was a powerful military state with pretensions to imperial rule. Gibbon never visited Vienna or had contact with baroque and Counter-Reformation central Europe, in which it would have been useless to expound the causes of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, since the ruling ideology denied that any such event had occurred. Caesar was still kaiser. Gibbon was a provincial in respect of this Europe; he could see the Habsburg monarchy only on its western side, and even there was largely unconscious of what was going on in contemporary German culture. At Lausanne he shared his villa with Georges Deyverdun, who translated Der Junge Werther into French ; but he was untouched by Aufklärung as well as by Sturm and Drang, and knew little about the innovative historical scholarship of Göttingen. He was a highly advanced historical thinker, but the paths along which he was advancing were Scottish.