Matthew Parris has narrated this article for you to listen to.
The trouble with history is that it is topiary. History is what’s left after the unwanted foliage has been clipped and cleared away. The topiary birds, pigs and pyramids are just yew bushes minus the clippings, these forms having emerged from the topiarist’s shears. Your yew-based pig is a product of selective disposal, even down to its curly tail.
Likewise with a historian’s shears. The raw material may be facts (in the words of the 19th-century German historiographer Leopold von Ranke, ‘what actually happened’) but the history book’s account, the shape and meaning we give to an era, relies as much on the happenings we choose to discard as on those we decide to notice. In like manner, Ancient Greek astronomers conjured up fantastical constellations by topiarising the stars.
Such thoughts teased me as we walked around the Centre d’histoire de la Résistance in Lyon last week. I do recommend a visit both to this chilling museum dedicated to the Free French resistance during the Vichy years, and to Lyon itself.
If your only brush with the city is (as mine had been) a complex motorway bypass to avoid it, then Lyon will come as a revelation. Situated on and to each side of the peninsula formed by the confluence of two great navigable rivers, the Rhône and the Saône, Lyon surpasses Paris (in my view) in its ambience, squares, promenades, boulevards and architecture from every era since the city was established by the Romans as one of their hubs of empire.
The climate is mild and the atmosphere warm: classy restaurants and cool bars spill out on to tree-lined pavements. In an age when something in Paris has gone rancid, Lyon remains full of flavour. On a train trip to Spain we had decided to break our journey there for a night and explore.
Museum-bashing is not my habit, but the courage of this hotbed of the French Resistance and the horror of the deportation of Lyon’s Jewish population lends the museum sharp focus. Impossible to sum up in a few paragraphs, but the huge collection of images, explanations, re-created rooms and even recorded sounds transport the visitor back into a terrifying time. Through sepia-tinted photographs and the accounts of Jews dragged off to an awful fate, something of the malign spirit of the Butcher of Lyon, Klaus Barbie, hangs in the air.
Sharp focus, as I say. But something troubled me. Something was missing. How had all this felt to that overwhelming majority of citizens who were not clandestine freedom fighters, Nazis or Vichy administrators, and who were not Jews? What access have we to their daily thoughts, hopes, fears and prayers? How much did they know, or want to know, or care, about what was arguably a terrorist campaign (though one we admire) by the Resistance? Whose side – if any – were they actually on?
The meaning we give to an era relies as much on what we choose to discard as what we decide to notice
Or is this not even a useful question, when the routine of hundreds of thousands of citizens may have been so far from what we are pleased to call the ‘news’ of the day? Perhaps for them such news was a distant thing: the daily grind and the impacts upon their own everyday interests being what was close-up, real, central; and the ‘history’ they were living through only peripheral.
These were questions that, not weeks before, had been prompted in my mind when I asked a splendidly competent Ukrainian lady managing a café in an English village how she assessed the situation in her country. I’d thought to get her views on the various impasses between Zelensky, Trump and Putin, the insolence of Vance, and her feelings on the shape of any possible peace deal. But all these were far from her thoughts. Instead she told me of her hopes that some of her family might be able to come here, and her uncertainties about the current arrangements for Ukrainian refugees already in Britain. War and politics were just the wallpaper to her life.
Yet in that very shrug, wider insights may be seen. Popular sentiment, even popular apathy, the question of what the populace will bear, may by a million small channels filter upwards, finally influencing the shape of big ‘historic’ decisions.
What access, then, will the future have to the present’s minor vexations and fixations, the present’s ignorance, the present’s unconcern? Any pollster’s biggest problem is the issue of ‘salience’: not ‘What do they think?’ but ‘How important is it to them?’ Of course AI may offer future historians access to a billion emails – but there’s much we don’t put into emails. Or a billion WhatsApps – but when do we mean it and when are we just going through the motions?
So much that matters is not discoverable through the measurement of frequency or assurances of sincerity. There’s a magnificent church on every corner in Lyon, and the city’s cathedral is a monumental masterpiece, but did those who designed, financed or built these boasts in stained glass and stone really believe the scriptural assurances to which they gave architectural expression? Or did they just like building cathedrals?
Through the lens of history we’re afforded glimpses of great events as we might view the painting of some majestic galleon, her sails puffed tight in a stiff breeze. We can see there was a wind. But we cannot see, cannot feel, cannot test the wind. From history we see when there was movement or inertia. But we cannot feel for ourselves what drove change or paralysis. How often have we nodded intelligently to scholarly accounts of the reasons for the first world war but, asked later to explain, grasped hopelessly for anything one could get a grip on? There were winds we cannot see.
Von Ranke was closer to the mark when he wrote (of the past) that most people and governments are not blind or ignorant, but ‘some impulse within them’ propels them forward: ‘Most see their ruin before their eyes; but they go on into it.’ They were blown there, yet we cannot see the wind.
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