"Properly speaking, history is nothing but the crimes and misfortunes of the human race"
About this Quote
Bayle guts the comforting myth of history as a parade of progress and replaces it with a ledger: what we record, preserve, and teach is disproportionately catastrophe. The line works because it sounds like a definition, almost pedantic in its opening - "Properly speaking" - then swerves into moral indictment. He is not claiming humans only commit crimes or suffer misfortunes; he is pointing out that "history" as a genre selects for rupture. Peace is quiet. Justice is local. Disaster leaves paperwork.
Coming out of a 17th-century Europe scarred by confessional violence and state-building, Bayle had reasons to distrust triumphalist narratives. A Huguenot exile after Louis XIV's crackdown, he understood how official histories dress power up as providence. His subtext is skeptical and, in a way, proto-media-literate: the archive is biased toward harm because harm creates institutions, trials, edicts, and martyrs. Memory itself becomes an accomplice.
The intent is also quietly polemical against religious and political storytelling that uses history to justify authority. If history is mostly crimes, then appeals to tradition lose their glow; "we've always done it this way" starts sounding like "we've always gotten away with it". Bayle's cynicism is strategic: it clears space for tolerance by refusing to let any side launder itself through the past.
Read now, it lands as an x-ray of our doomscrolling era. We don't just consume bad news; we canonize it. Bayle warns that the story of humanity is shaped less by what is best in us than by what leaves scars deep enough to archive.
Coming out of a 17th-century Europe scarred by confessional violence and state-building, Bayle had reasons to distrust triumphalist narratives. A Huguenot exile after Louis XIV's crackdown, he understood how official histories dress power up as providence. His subtext is skeptical and, in a way, proto-media-literate: the archive is biased toward harm because harm creates institutions, trials, edicts, and martyrs. Memory itself becomes an accomplice.
The intent is also quietly polemical against religious and political storytelling that uses history to justify authority. If history is mostly crimes, then appeals to tradition lose their glow; "we've always done it this way" starts sounding like "we've always gotten away with it". Bayle's cynicism is strategic: it clears space for tolerance by refusing to let any side launder itself through the past.
Read now, it lands as an x-ray of our doomscrolling era. We don't just consume bad news; we canonize it. Bayle warns that the story of humanity is shaped less by what is best in us than by what leaves scars deep enough to archive.
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