Eastern Europe in the Eighteenth Century

over the last thirty years it has seemed to me probable, or even inevitable, that the richly interesting agenda of historical issues pursued especially by historians of eighteenth-century France and England, but also of the German and Italian lands, would eventually come to the field of Eastern Europe. Not only has that not happened, but it seems to me that we may now be witnessing some recession of general interest in eighteenth-century Europe (perhaps triggered by the advent of the twenty-first century, which makes the eighteenth century seem just a little bit more remote)—and the moment for studying eighteenth-century Eastern Europe therefore seems unlikely to be imminent. Even in France, amazingly, academics are talking about a decline in young scholarly energy devoted to the Enlightenment and the Revolution—subjects that the French, for obvious reasons, have claimed to own. One exception might be eighteenth-century Russian history, which, especially in Europe (including Russia), offers the compelling reigns of Peter and Catherine (and these may seem even more compelling to Russian scholars if twentieth-century topics become increasingly fraught). I would doubt, however, whether new work in eighteenth-century Russian history is likely to have very interesting implications for the history of eighteenth-century Eastern Europe. At New York University (NYU) I am seeing lots of graduate applications in the Eastern Europe field, but I am scarcely seeing any (and none that are strong) that focus on the eighteenth century.

I myself came to the eighteenth century (when I conceived my doctoral dissertation on Poland and the Vatican, thirty years ago at Stanford) based on the somewhat simplistic principle that since the theoretical literature on nationalism (as it then existed) pointed to the eighteenth century as crucially formative for national ideas, that would be a logical place to look for meaningful national imprinting. So I approached the eighteenth century thinking backward from the nineteenth century, and it was not until some years later that I realized that I was making myself into an “early modernist”—and though it lies outside the scope of this essay, it should certainly be noted that all the early modern centuries are depressingly understudied for Eastern Europe. Furthermore, as a graduate student still in the age of Cold War, I was taken with the notion (quaint as it now appears) that it would be interesting to study Poland during the period of the Polish partitions, from 1772 to 1795, as a kind of political model for understanding the tensions between nominal national independence (under Stanisław August) and actual Russian domination (under Catherine). While I’m a little embarrassed to articulate this now, I can only say that it was not an altogether unusual way of approaching historical subjects at that time, in the context of Cold War academia.

There was, actually, a rather well-developed eighteenth-century historical field in Poland itself at that time, including such eminent scholars as Emanuel Rostworowski (1923–1989) at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, Jerzy Michalski (1924–2007) at the Institute of History in Warsaw, and the somewhat younger Jerzy Łojek (1932–1986), whose academic career was complicated by his oppositional politics. Rostworowski was writing about Stanisław August (Ostatni król Rzeczypospolitej, 1966), Michalski worked on Poland’s relation to the wider Enlightenment (Rousseau i sarmacki republikanizm, 1977) while Łojek was summing up the eighteenth century more provocatively (Wiek markiza de Sade, 1972). All of them were attentive to the Constitution of May 3, an eighteenth-century subject with contemporary political meanings in communist Poland. In fact, when I was working on my doctoral dissertation on eighteenth-century Poland in the 1980s I had more of a sense that the eighteenth century was a strong and active historical field than one might have today. It should be noted that one of the most interesting recent publications concerning the Polish partitions is, in fact, a republication: Marian Serejski’s very important study, Europa a rozbiory Polski, concerning European historiography of the partitions from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, was originally published in Warsaw in 1970 and republished there in 2009.

The end of communism in Poland in 1989 was quickly followed by two historical anniversaries that seemed very likely to push forward the agenda of eighteenth-century history: the bicentennial of the constitution in 1991 and the bicentennial of the Kościuszko insurrection in 1994. The academic conference at Bloomington in 1991 produced a weighty volume of contributions (Constitution and Reform in Eighteenth-Century Poland, edited by Samuel Fiszman, 1997) from leading scholars in the United States, Poland, Britain, and Germany. 1991 was also the year that Jerzy Łukowski published Liberty’s Folly: The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the Eighteenth-Century. The Kościuszko bicentennial conference—held in Solothurn in 1994, the Swiss city where Kościuszko died in 1817—brought together a great number of interesting scholars, produced notable academic tensions between the very different Swiss and Polish conceptions of how to run a conference according to the clock, and resulted in a thought-provoking volume on Kościuszko (Der letzte Ritter und erste Bürger Europas, eds. Heiko Haumann & Jerzy Skowronek, 1996) that might also have acted as a stimulus to eighteenth-century studies. It would of course be a pity to have to wait another hundred years for tricentennial occasions that might push the field forward. In 1998, the two hundredth anniversary of the death of Stanisław August, Richard Butterwick published his fascinating study, Poland’s Last King and English Culture.

The principal forum for eighteenth-century studies in the United States is the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS), with annual national meetings and regular regional meetings as well; many historians (including myself) are members, but if you look at the programs of the conferences you see immediately that the organization is dominated by literary studies, principally English and secondarily French. These conferences have a lot to offer on Samuel Johnson, Jonathan Swift, Henry Fielding, Voltaire, and Rousseau, sometimes with historical implications but with historical subjects in the minority—and East European subjects scarcely represented. On the other hand, societies for eighteenth-century studies exist in many other countries, and though they usually reflect a literary emphasis, there are societies in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovenia. I am aware of considerable encouragement for eighteenth-century historical studies within the Bulgarian and Hungarian societies, where Nikolai Aretov and Laszlo Kontler, respectively, have played important roles. Every four years the international society (ISECS) for eighteenth-century studies holds a world congress on the Enlightenment; this will take place in Graz in 2011, and it is encouraging to note that one of the guiding themes is to be “Central and Eastern Europe in the Age of Enlightenment.”

In the years following 1989, ISECS sponsored an East–West Seminar, under the direction of Robert Darnton, for the purpose of bringing together young scholars from America and Western and Eastern Europe to discuss issues of eighteenth-century studies; the idea was, in some sense, to reconstitute the “Republic of Letters” in the aftermath of the Cold War. Under Darnton’s direction, this project had a notable historical emphasis and could be immensely stimulating: in the year that I participated, 1994, the theme was the public sphere in the eighteenth century. More recently, under other directors, this seminar has been less focused on the former purpose of connecting Eastern and Western Europe (the urgency of 1989 has certainly receded), less focused on historical subjects, and somewhat more likely to be concerned with literature and/or cultural studies.

Habsburg history might have offered other promising ways into the eighteenth century, for the reigns of Maria Theresa and Joseph, like those of Peter and Catherine in Russia, might have been expected to draw significant scholarly attention. Yet, again, eighteenth-century studies have been less lively than one might have hoped. In British scholarship, Derek Beales has now completed the second and final volume of his comprehensive biography of Joseph, pointing to many avenues for future research on Eastern Europe, while R. J. W. Evans has published a volume of extremely thought-provoking eighteenth-century essays (Austria, Hungary and the Habsburgs: Central Europe c. 1683-1867) as a sort of sequel to his classic The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy. Penn State Press has just published a very interesting book about Maria Theresa, Michael Yonan’s Empress Maria Theresa and the Politics of Habsburg Imperial Art, but this is largely focused on Vienna. We are still waiting for monographs on eighteenth-century art and architecture to emulate the geographical breadth of Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann’s Court, Cloister, and City: The Art and Culture of Central Europe 1450-1800, published in 1995. Often, Vienna serves as an eastern endpoint for western studies, as explicitly in the recent very interesting monograph on religious history by David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna (2008). Any historian of Eastern Europe, while admiring this comprehensive and ecumenical title, would ask: what about Orthodoxy? In this regard, some of the most interesting research being done in eighteenth-century religious and cultural history is that of the Greek historian Paschalis Kitromilides, whose striking conception of an “Orthodox Enlightenment” embraces a large part of southeastern Europe.

In Habsburg and in Polish history, one might mention two recent titles as hopeful signs: Rita Krueger’s Czech, German, and Noble: Status and National Identity in Habsburg Bohemia (2008), which begins in the eighteenth century, and Magda Teter’s Jews and Heretics in Catholic Poland: A Beleaguered Church in the Post Reformation Era (2006), which concludes in the eighteenth century. Both works attempt to give the eighteenth century its due. Yet, it remains true in 2010, as it was when I wrote my dissertation in the 1980s, that the best book on the cultural and intellectual history of eighteenth-century Poland is still Jean Fabre’s Stanislas-Auguste Poniatowski et l’Europe des Lumières . . . published in 1952.