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This article is about a new historical culture that emerged and evolved during the ‘long nineteenth century’, between the outbreak of the French Revolution and that of the First World War. In that period, societies that were amongst the first to experience modernization rediscovered the past, or rather competing pasts, with which they negotiated constantly and obsessively. The article examines these societies’ representations and uses of the past, and the circulation of those representations in a rich popular culture. By recovering alternative popular interpretations and representations, it offers a corrective to the historiography of the development of history and challenges the prevailing assumption that dominant interpretations of the past were liberal and progressionist. Rather than emphasizing continuity between past and future via a secure present, these representations showed history to be arbitrary, dangerous and destabilizing of the very notion of progress. At the centre of this recovery is the definition and history of ‘horrors’, used here as an organizing term and image. The new culture of history was part and parcel of ‘mixed modernity’, a form of modernity in which the old and the traditional coexisted with intense and unprecedented change. Examining this culture of history thus enables us to rethink and redefine modernity.
Billie Melman is Professor of History, Henri Glasberg Chair in European Studies and Director of the Graduate School of History at Tel Aviv University.