The use and misuse of the barbarian invasions, 1732-2002

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Context: Few historians working on Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages are aware of the origins of the debates in which they are now involved, and the ways in which those debates have changed over time. Equally, few people are aware of the extent to which debates about the Early Middle Ages (and especially the establishment of the barbarian kingdoms following the Fall of the Roman Empire) were drawn into social and political discourse in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries.Among books on the Early Middle Ages, even major works like Chris Wickham's Framing the Early Middle Ages, have shown little awareness of the historiographical development of the subject, and although Walter Goffart's Barbarian Tides and Patrick Geary's Myth of Nations have paid more attention to past writing, they have only dealt with specific aspects of the material. The closest parallel to the book I am writing is La fabrique d'une nation, by Claude Nicolet: but his area of expertise is Ancient History, and his discussion is limited to France.Aims and Objectives: Among writers on the Modern Period, Joep Leerssen, in National Thought in Europe, has noted how certain aspects of Early Medieval History were have been exploited in the nineteenth century, but he has not demonstrated the consistency with which it has been exploited. By looking at the changing discourse on the Early Middle Ages from the Ancien Regime to the early twenty-first century, and by considering France, Italy, Germany and (to a lesser extent) England, and by incorporating case studies of certain works of art, literature and music, I will demonstrate the value of setting historiography in context, both for an understanding of the Early Middle Ages and for an understanding of more modern social and political debate.Chapter 1 will show how the Fall of the Roman Empire was used in debates over the privileges of the nobility, and in revolutionary discourse. Chapter 2 will examine the use of the Merovingians by Napoleon, and then by writers in the 1820s, notably Augustin Thierry. Chapter 3 will consider the transfer of Thierry's arguments to Italy, where they were used as a model for the depiction of the exploitation of the country by invaders. In addition to looking at historiography, this will also look at Risorgimento drama and opera. Chapter 4 will present the use of Early Medieval History, especially by Jacob Grimm, in the context of the unification of Germany, and in debates surrounding the extent of the new state. Chapter 5 will examine the extent to which the historiography of the barbarian invasions was influenced by the Franco-Prussian War, as well as the impact of those debates on public art in France, and on literature in Germany. Chapter 6 will consider the use of interpretations of Germanic settlement in justifying German aggression in 1914, and the scholarly reaction, above all of Henri Pirenne. Chapter 7 will consider the use of early medieval archaeology and of onomastics by the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich, and how that was used to draw up ideal boundaries for the Reich. It will also show how understanding of the Germanic peoples was becoming increasingly bound up with ideas of ethnicity. Chapter 8 will examine the reactions of scholars after 1945 to the use made of history in the Nazi period, and above all the attempts to remove the issue of ethnicity from the study of the barbarian peoples. Chapter 9 will consider the way in which public debate about the barbarian invasions has moved into the sphere of museum exhibitions, and how the underlying agenda has become one of the question of the definition of the EU. Looking beyond an academic audience, the chief benefit of the study will be to show how one period of history has been used and misused by politicians, and will point to the value of presenting history to a wide audience, but at the same time to the need to monitor the presentation.