The Debate on the Crusades, 10992010 by Christopher Tyerman;

Author:Christopher Tyerman; [Tyerman;, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780719073205
Publisher: ManchesterUP
Published: 2012-09-15T05:00:00+00:00

Crusade and nation: Michaud’s legacy

Nowhere was this tension potentially more acute than in France. Yet nowhere did popular, academic and political enthusiasm combine so productively. The influence of Michaud was hard to avoid: the crusades were essentially French enterprises, demonstrating the vigour and spirit of western Christian society as revealed in their pioneering colonialism in the eastern Mediterranean, leading to a French version of Manifest Destiny. For a society that experienced two invasions (1814–15; 1870–71) and six different political regimes in less than sixty years (Empire, Bourbon Restoration, Orleanist Monarchy, Second Republic; Second Empire; Third Republic), the medieval past adorned with French heroes strutting the international stage offered a relatively neutral focus for national pride and identity, one eagerly exploited by successive governments and the academic community alike. To this essentially passive reception of convenient historical myth was added a dynamic reimagining of medieval French colonialism as a model not just for European conquest but for the creation of distinct, new colonial societies. These were presented as active fusions between the cultures of occupiers and occupied, a demonstration at once of western superiority and the beneficial leavening effects of western culture. Not all agreed. The arguments between those called by one observer in 1844 as ‘les fils des croisés et les fils de Voltaire’ persisted.24 The great historian of France and anti-clericalist Jules Michelet (1798–1874), amongst whose voluminous output were two volumes of edited documents on the trial of the Templars (1841 and 1851), regarded the crusades as violent and driven by fanaticism. Some crusade historians, such as Riant himself, were unpersuaded by nationalist appropriation. Yet fewer voices were raised against the increasing focus on the crusaders’ activities in the east which marked French crusade studies after Michaud. Even Michelet argued that the true result of the crusade lay in the rapprochement between Europe and Asia, invisible, intangible, but no less real.25

Concentration on campaigns and conquests deflected traditional philosophical or religious controversy over the nature of the crusades. Left and right, legitimists and republicans, believers and secularists could unite in being impressed by the material actions of their ancestors in foreign fields, whether they admired their motives or saw them as religious dupes. The wide academic as well as popular acceptance of this consensus, gaining ground as the century progressed, can be explained in part by the close relationship between power and learning. Crusade studies in Germany depended on a network of separate universities; in France on individual private funds and government patronage. While German crusade studies were recruited to help create a national identity, their French counterparts were employed to confirm one. The creation of the Recueil des historiens des croisades (1844–1906) provides one prime example of this process; Louis-Philippe’s Salles des croisades at Versailles (from 1837) another.

Attempts under the First Republic and First Empire to revive the Maurist plan for a collection of crusade sources failed. A suggestion from the ministry of Justice under the Restoration for an edition of the Assises de Jérusalem bore no immediate fruit.

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