"Properly speaking, history is nothing but the crimes and misfortunes of the human race"
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Pierre Bayle, the 17th-century Huguenot skeptic, compresses a stark historiography into a single sentence. He insists that the story we call history is, when honestly named, a ledger of wrongdoing and suffering. Wars, persecutions, tyrannies, plagues, famines, and accidents fill the chronicles because they disrupt ordinary life and demand to be recorded. Contentment leaves fewer traces in archives. The very sources historians inherit are often produced by states, churches, and courts, institutions that document conflict and transgression far more diligently than they record the quiet routines of peace.
Bayle wrote as a refugee from religious violence, and his Historical and Critical Dictionary makes a method out of deflation. He dismantles triumphal narratives and challenges the idea that the past reveals a visible providential plan. The problem of evil looms in his work: if history is the stage on which providence vindicates justice, why does the stage brim with innocent suffering and successful crimes? By forcing readers to face this disproportion, he undercuts the moral complacency that justifies zealotry. A sober view of the past becomes an argument for toleration and modesty. If human affairs trend toward harm when inflamed by certainty, then the wisest politics seek to lessen cruelty rather than perfect the world.
The line also anticipates a modern insight about selection and memory. News prefers disaster, courts preserve indictments, and monuments often commemorate battles. We know the past through what survives, and what survives skews dark. That does not mean kindness and cooperation never mattered, only that they are less legible. Bayle’s formulation invites two responses: a moral minimalism that prizes the prevention of harm above grand designs, and a historiographical correction that recovers everyday life to balance the record. To read history without illusion is not to despair, but to align ambition with the human materials at hand, wary of the grand narratives that so often end in the very crimes and misfortunes they promised to end.
Bayle wrote as a refugee from religious violence, and his Historical and Critical Dictionary makes a method out of deflation. He dismantles triumphal narratives and challenges the idea that the past reveals a visible providential plan. The problem of evil looms in his work: if history is the stage on which providence vindicates justice, why does the stage brim with innocent suffering and successful crimes? By forcing readers to face this disproportion, he undercuts the moral complacency that justifies zealotry. A sober view of the past becomes an argument for toleration and modesty. If human affairs trend toward harm when inflamed by certainty, then the wisest politics seek to lessen cruelty rather than perfect the world.
The line also anticipates a modern insight about selection and memory. News prefers disaster, courts preserve indictments, and monuments often commemorate battles. We know the past through what survives, and what survives skews dark. That does not mean kindness and cooperation never mattered, only that they are less legible. Bayle’s formulation invites two responses: a moral minimalism that prizes the prevention of harm above grand designs, and a historiographical correction that recovers everyday life to balance the record. To read history without illusion is not to despair, but to align ambition with the human materials at hand, wary of the grand narratives that so often end in the very crimes and misfortunes they promised to end.
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