This paper deals with the history of French social history. Social history was not created once and for all; it is an historical construction; it had a beginning and may come to an end. Hence, its history may be written. However, two preliminary qualifications are needed. I shall not comment on ancient or medieval social history, but on the only social history which I know a little, that of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Secondly, for the same reason, I shall only discuss French social history written by French historians.

The Ministry of All the Talents was essentially a coalition of three parties: the followers of Fox, of Grenville, and of Sidmouth. Yet in retrospect it was looked upon as principally a Whig ministry. This was partly because office consolidated what had hitherto been the rather uneasy alliance of Foxites and Grenvillites; partly also because for adherents of the main Foxite tradition of Whiggism the ministry of 1806 provided the only experience of government between 1783 and 1827.

This article is a study of Archbishop Abbot's attitude to puritan nonconformity. It contends that the accusations of laxness levelled against him by Laudian apologists such as Heylin and Clarendon can be discounted as the inevitable consequence of the very different standpoint from which they judged him. It was not laziness that led the primate to turn a blind eye to certain types of nonconformity, but rather a detached attitude – not shared by his anti-Calvinist opponents – which allowed him to differentiate between mild cases of conscience-induced ceremonial nonconformity which posed no danger to the status quo, and the factious high-profile stance of those who undermined the authority of the established church. By taking a very hard line against separatists and their ilk, Abbot felt he could justify the degree of tolerance he granted to those peaceable and orthodox preaching pastors with scruples over certain adiaphora, whose role was so crucial in the unremitting battle against popery to which he dedicated his life.

On Gibbon's death his papers contained an incomplete and unpublished essay on the genealogy of the European dynasty of which the British royal family was a branch, entitled The antiquities of the house of Brunswick. This article explains why Gibbon began this work, and why he laid it aside. Beginning by describing the nature and purpose of literature on Hanoverian genealogy in the earlier eighteenth century, and proceeding to relate the content of the Antiquities to the politics of Blackstone and Hume, the article identifies the Antiquities as a distinctively ancien régime defence of British political life and institutions which was elicited from Gibbon by the early months of the French revolution. The abandonment of the Antiquities is then explained as part of Gibbon's shocked response to the deepening gravity of events in France after the September massacres. In the polarized political atmosphere which ensued, the literary finesse of the Antiquities ran the risk of being confused with disaffection. That risk was increased when Gibbon and The decline and fall began to be used by radicals as auxiliaries in their attack on England's ancien régime. The textual history of the Antiquities allows us to perceive the rapidity with which the connotations and ownership of certain political vocabularies in England changed during the early 1790s.

On 24 April 1547 the forces of the leading protestant princes in Germany were annihilated at Miihlberg by Charles V, and the political wing of protestantism received a blow from which it never entirely recovered. Events during the preceding year had moved with a startling rapidity. Diplomats had widely expected a drawn contest in the summer of 1546, while John Frederick of Saxony and Philip of Hesse had sent a series of missions to France and England to request the military aid and intervention which might tip the balance decisively against the emperor. The diplomatic experts of the Schmalkaldic League had expected France to take advantage of the emperor's difficulties in Germany. The outbreak of war there might seem to have brought to fruition decades of French efforts to cripple the emperor by embroiling him with his German subjects, and 1546 certainly saw a culmination of French diplomatic activity across the Rhine. Yet the outcome of the frenetic negotiations which accompanied the war showed, on the part of the French, a lack of decisiveness at this critical time which is not easy to explain. Four years before, a grand anti-Habsburg coalition had been the pivotal point of French foreign policy. Now, in 1546, any chances of such a coalition were frittered away in petty negotiations with the English and a marked lack of faith between the French and the Germans.

The Action Française dates from 1898—the year when the agitation for the revision of the trial of Dreyfus was at its height—and was an offshoot of the Ligue de la Patrie Française, one of the many anti-Dreyfusard organisations. The leaders of the Patrie Française having announced that in their agitation against Dreyfus they would do nothing illegal, the more extreme members, led by Henri Vaugeois, seceded and founded the Action Française, declaring that where the salvation of the country was at stake they would stick at nothing.

The following notes were put together in response to a suggestion that workers in other fields might be interested to hear something of our problems and the solutions we are finding for them. I have addressed myself to such readers and have tried to avoid both the minute and the technical. I have confined myself to four topics largely from considerations of space. An article that covered the whole ground could have been little more than a select bibliography, and what I thought was wanted in this case was an indication of what the books contained. The selected topics have been chosen partly with reference to the amount and importance of the work that has recently been devoted to them, and partly because of their special relevance to the subject in hand. Thus much could have been said of the very interesting development of views as to origins and the pre-conquest period in general or of the important advances that have been made in the understanding of revenue, taxation and finance, but it will probably be agreed that these had to make way for such subjects as constitutional theory and parliament. Reasons for certain other obvious omissions will be given later.

The achievement of Timoleon in the field of reconstructive statesmanship received far less attention from ancient writers than the exploits of his crusade which liberated Greek Sicily from tyranny and from Carthage. Timaeus, who was largely responsible for the literary tradition, had no experience of practical politics and was therefore considered by Polybius to be unqualified to deal with political issues. The Timoleon of Plutarch is a brilliant work, in which some aspects of his career receive detailed treatment, but except in two digressions it is wholly dependent on the tradition established by Timaeus. Moreover, to a biographer who was primarily a moralist constitutional and social reform could scarcely be an attractive theme, and it is not surprising that he sketches the reconstructive accomplishments of his hero in terms of vague eulogy without fully appreciating their significance. Diodorus, on the other hand, was profoundly interested in the political and economic development of Syracuse. The parts of Book xvi devoted to the career of Timoleon reproduce his customary faults: the narrative is ill-arranged and highly compressed, degenerating here and there into a string of disconnected notes, and in its later chapters it depends upon the tradition of Timaeus. Yet it constitutes the chief source of information on the reforms of Timoleon. The contribution of a third-rate historian is in this sphere more valuable than that of a first-rate biographer.

Mid-nineteenth century Imperial trade policy has been discussed mainly from the standpoint of the constitutional historian. It is probably for this reason that the economic events with which the policy is connected have received very little critical analysis, and are usually expounded on lines laid down by contemporary partisans. The orthodox view that the Canadian corn-exporting trade was encouraged by the English grant of increased preference in 1843, and in the midst of consequent expansion was injured by the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, and later revived in some measure by the compensating repeal of the Navigation Laws in 1849, was the view normally held by Canadian writers in 1850. Having its origin in past politics, it characteristically exalts the influence of legislation. It is hoped to show in this article that when disturbing factors besides English tariff policy are taken into account—speculation, harvest fluctuation, and the policies of foreign states, to name no others—the interpretation which has proved so seductive is in the main a legend. A legend, it is true, whose acceptance in the late “forties” is not difficult to understand.

The authorship of the Vindidae has been a vexed question for 350 years, and perhaps it is not likely to be solved. The book belongs, in the main, to a body of Huguenot literature which appeared after 1572 and was concerned with the dangerous question of the right of resistance. A good deal of this literature was sedulously and obstinately anonymous. There was a reason. If a writer advocated resistance, and, still more, if he advocated or even condoned “tyrannicide,” he would be committing himself to something as abhorrent to the general opinion of his age as “Bolshevism”is to the general opinion of ours. If in addition he backed his opinions by his name, and his name were that of a known adherent of the Calvinist cause, he would be committing that cause to certain obloquy and possible danger. He would be trespassing beyond the bounds of cautious and guarded discretion which Calvin had imposed upon himself in this matter: he would be giving to the enemies of Calvinism the very handle which they desired. In these conditions anonymity flourished: pseudonyms were rife; and calculated puzzles were set to baffle future ages. Not only are we confronted by problems of authorship: we have also to face other and lesser problems. Sometimes, for example, the place and the date of publication are falsified. There was indeed a particular reason for such falsification. Printers as well as authors—perhaps even more than authors—had to be wary; and a genuine place and date of publication afforded too easy a clue.

In April 1884 Prince Bismarck, chancellor of Germany, suddenly broke away from his long maintained anti-colonial policy, and inaugurated the German colonial empire by placing Angra Pequena under German protection. Angra Pequena was a small harbour in the middle of the unoccupied territory that later became the first German colony, South-West Africa, a long coastal stretch which England did not particularly desire and had several times refused to annex. It had only one really good harbour, Walfisch Bay, which England already possessed. Furthermore, the senior members of the second Gladstone ministry, which was in power in 1884, were generally opposed to new colonial adventures. In such circumstances, it was to be expected that Bismarck's new departure would meet with little or no opposition from the British Government, and that the formation of the comparatively modest German colonial empire would not cause a ripple in the cordial diplomatic relations existing between the two countries at that time.

Less than a month before Bismarck's dismissal as German chancellor, the Reichstag elections of February 1890 destroyed the parliamentary majority of the Kartell parties - National Liberals and Conservatives - with whose support he had governed. The number of Reichstag seats held by diese parties fell from 221 to 140, out of the total of 397; they never again achieved more than 169. To the multitude of problems left by Bismarck to his successors was therefore added one of parliamentary arithmetic: how was the chancellor to organize a Reichstag majority when the traditional governmental parties by themselves were no longer large enough, and the intransigently anti-governmental SPD was constantly increasing its representation? It was in this situation that the role of the Centre party in Wilhelmine politics became decisive, for between 1890 and 1914 the party possessed a quarter of the seats in the Reichstag, and thus held the balance of power between Left and Right.

It is an irony that so much of the major historiography of the revolutionary era outside France has succeeded – often unintentionally – in reducing the role of the patriots to a marginal one, peripheral to the impact of the French revolution on western Europe and devoid of importance for the policies of successive French regimes. There have been two main reasons for this, although many recent works have begun to dispel this image. The first has been an exaggerated concentration on the ideology of the ‘Jacobins’, which inevitably reduces the study of patriotism to that of a handful of powerless intellectual cliques, most of whose adherents were, indeed, swept away by the advent of the Consulate in 1799 and were seldom taken seriously by the French before then. These men were far from central to the history of the period, and the undue attention they have received from ideologically motivated historians has been properly criticized. However, the critics themselves have often compounded the misconception surrounding the phenomenon of patriotism, exactly because they have adopted the narrow conception of patriotism inherited from their opponents, the shared acceptance of a definition of the patriots as an intellectual clique. By concentrating on the ideas of a minority, this approach simply leaves out too many people, and fails to encompass the phenomenon of practical, political collaboration with the French, something quite different from an ideological commitment to the French revolution.