Europe against Revolution by Matthijs Lok

Author:Matthijs Lok [Lok, Matthijs]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780198872153
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2023-02-10T00:00:00+00:00

8. Principles for a European Peace

The sudden and unexpected collapse of the Empire in the spring of 1814 was experienced by Vogt as a traumatic turning point in European history as well as in his own life.118 The optimism and self-confidence that had characterized Vogt’s writings in the first decennium of the nineteenth century receded in his publications of the year 1814–15.119 Like many contemporaries in these years of regime change, he felt the need to justify himself and his past behaviour as well as the positions he had taken in his earlier writings. In his Historisches Testament (Historical Testament, 3 vol. 1814–15), Vogt looked, reflectively, back on his life as historian and publicist. Although he would live and write for more than another two decades, he gave here the impression of an old and disillusioned man. He wrote about himself as a man who had failed in his endeavours, and his ‘testament’ was meant for younger generations to complete the task Vogt had set himself but had failed in its execution as a result of the revolutionary years.120 Whereas many contemporaries immediately downplayed their allegiance to Napoleon after his fall, Vogt in his Testament, remarkably, still praised the French emperor, calling him a ‘genius’.121 He also proudly testified that he had witnessed Napoleon’s coronation in Paris. Tellingly, however, the work avoided explicit comments on contemporary politics.122 Vogt presented Napoleon primarily as an apolitical supporter of the arts and as a maecenas of European civilization, echoing Napoleon’s later self-representation in Le Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène.123

The cataclysmic political events of 1814–15 also led Vogt to reflect more in depth on the nature and meaning of the ‘history’ of humanity.124 ‘History’, according to Vogt in a more religious vein, should be regarded as a theodicy: divine will was revealed through world history. Treatises on world, and especially European, history could be compared to the holy books in the sense that they gave information about providential intentions. The historian was like a priest, whose duty was to explain the higher meaning of the world by the interpretation of history.125 Divine Providence had changed the course of human history at certain key moments. The destruction of the ancient world was such a turning point. The French Revolution should also be seen in that light. The apocalyptic destruction caused by this Revolution, also enabled, for Vogt, the regeneration of a corrupted European civilization, an argument later also made by Joseph de Maistre.126

Like Feller, Vogt provided a chronology of human history in twenty-eight epochs, starting with the biblical creation and ending with the outbreak of the French Revolution. But in contrast to Feller, Vogt still explicitly tried to fuse providential and Enlightenment narratives. He did not examine the biblical story of creation uncritically but instead emphasized, in a Pyrrhonic vein, the lack of sources and the impossibility of attaining indisputable historical knowledge on the earliest human history.127 World history for Vogt was evidently mainly European history with the addition of parts of the history of the Near East and the Arabic and Islamic worlds.

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