From Napoleon to Stalin: Comments on European History, by A. J. P. Taylor

Abstract

For his latest book Professor Taylor has brought together occasional articles and reviews that first appeared in a number of outstanding English journals, on the theme which has run through European history since the French revolution-the search for stability in an unstable world. Like his earlier works on German and Austrian history, the value of From Napoleon to Stalin varies unpredictably from section to section. In the incisive and interesting writing, one gets throughout the working out of a thoroughly learned and first-rate critical mind; and much of the time his judgments are shrewd. This is particularly true of the essays on Napoleon's Memoirs , the meaning of the Fashoda crisis, the Entente Cordiale, Lord Russell and Lord Salisbury, as well as of his comments on some recent autobiographical apologias. But a few of the pieces-where Taylor becomes involved with some of his preconceptions on German history -are disappointing. The most inadequate-indeed seriously misleading-pages of the book are those dealing with Bismarck and William II. There is once more the fiction about Bismarck partitioning Germany with the Hapsburgs (which leads one to wonder whether Professor Taylor himself, after all, favored a pan-German settlement). Nor do I see how one can reconcile the statement (p. 71) that in 1898 Germany already overshadowed Europe. This was not his [Bismarck's] doing. Increase of population and an unrivalled heavy industry made German greatness inevitable , with the assertion twelve pages later that 'What is wrong with Germany is that there is too much of it . ... This great Germany is a very recent appearance, created overnight by Bismarck. It happens that the former statement is much closer to the truth. Moreover, Taylor thinks that while Bismarck could not prevent the Germans from running mad, he lured them into a strait jacket which did not work loose until twenty years after his death . ... The world owes what has been good in the Germany of the last fifty years to Bismarck's policy (p. 74). And of William II he writes that he was not a ruler; he was a medium. He reflected the political mind of Germany and expressed it with genius. To this I would say that unless we are to have a wholly misleading reinterpretation of Bismarck and William II (as we have been getting of Metternich by Srbik, Viereck, Engel-Janosi,