At Lausanne, some two years after the night of the 27th June, 1787, on which he had written the closing words of the “Decline and Fall” in his quiet garden in that peaceful Swiss city, an historian whose unsuspecting ear had failed to catch the undertones of a new ideological enthusiasm in the music of a temperate contest played in A.D. 1775-1783 [American Revolutionary War] was suddenly shaken out of his complacency by the outbreak of the French Revolution, and he never recovered from the shock. He had flattered himself that a once rolling stream of Time had been frozen into a perpetual immobility, and now the rebellious waters had burst out again in an unprecedentedly boisterous flood. The horrifying cataclysm had swept away the sandy foundations of the hapless historian’s confidence long before it became a menace to the independence and integrity of the Swiss Confederation, and the glimpse of Time’s angry sea-horses tossing their white manes above the sky-line of the Jura was something more than Gibbon’s nerves could stand. “Altogether there was too much history going on for a historian to feel quite safe.” [Footnote: Young, G. M.: Gibbon, 2nd ed. (London 1948, Hart-Davis), p. 172.] In May 1793 Gibbon fled from Lausanne for the insular asylum of which he was a native. Racing breathlessly round the wide arc described by the east bank of the Rhine while revolutionary French armies were battering the fortresses guarding the western approaches to the river, the historian-refugee managed to make his way to England via Holland; but his Muse had been silenced and his spirit broken; and he added nothing to his laurels before his death on the 16th January, 1794.
I arrived in Lausanne from London on the evening after 9/11, the day which had ended the brief era under whose spell Francis Fukuyama had written about the end of history. I stayed at the Hôtel de Ville et du Rivage in Lutry and looked from my balcony across the peaceful lake towards Haute-Savoie in the evening. London might have been a refuge for Gibbon. For me, a Londoner believing that London would be next, Lausanne felt like one.
A Study of History, Vol IX, OUP, 1939
July 7, 2009 at 10:15 pm
Lance Knobel wrote by email: “Did you really think London would be next? Or that there would be a next, whatever that means?
“It’s commonplace here [US], even eight years after the event, for people to talk about how shattered they were by 9/11. They no longer felt secure, they were sleepless, they worried (even more) about their children. I was, of course, dumbfounded on the day, and deeply involved in trying to understand what happened. But I felt no less secure than I had the day before. Oh, perhaps a tiny bit less secure. Am I the outlier?”
I replied: “I certainly did have that feeling, but for a short time. And it didn’t make me lose sleep. There is a chance I didn’t get to Lausanne until the Sunday – but I don’t think it was that late or I wouldn’t have had the feeling in quite the same way looking at the lake. It was the Wednesday for meetings at the end of the week.” Only transatlantic flights were comprehensively cancelled.