Between 1975 and the first half of 1978, it has been estimated that the Argentinian dictatorship under Jorge Rafael Videla killed and ‘disappeared’ 22,000 people. As far back as 1984, the National Commission of the Disappeared People (CONADEP) estimated that between 10,000 and 30,000 people were disappeared by the dictatorship from 1975 to 1983.
The rationale that “If they were taken, there must be a reason,” employed by Argentinians during the dictatorship in a bid for personal safety is immediately imparted in Haley Cohen Gilliland’s book, A Flower Travelled in my Blood: The Incredible Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children (Avid Reader Press, 2025). The book tells the story of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo – a group of grandmothers whose sons and daughters were disappeared by the dictatorship, and whose grandchildren were kidnapped and illegally adopted by members of the dictatorship’s state institutions.
The book opens with the kidnappings of Jose Manuel Perez Rojo and his wife Patricia Roisinblit, who were both involved in left-wing activism and resistance with the Montoneros against the right-wing turbulence in Argentina that culminated in General Jorge Rafael Videla’s dictatorship. Jose and Patricia’s toddler Mariana was taken to her grandparents by the parents’ kidnappers. In her late stages of pregnancy, Patricia gave birth to a boy while detained at the School of Naval Mechanics, known as ESMA.
The book focuses on the Roisinblit family as it traces both Argentina’s dictatorship history and that of the Abuelas. Rosa Roisinblit, who passed away in September this year at the age of 106, was one of the Abuelas’ founding members. For Rosa, the disappearance of her daughter and abduction of her grandson altered her existence from a person who completely avoided mention of politics to a driving force behind the organisation that openly challenged the dictatorship. At first through persistent presence and silent protest at Plaza de Mayo, the Abuelas would find themselves at the helm of exposing the systematic disappearances of dictatorship opponents and their stolen children.
Lieutenant General Jorge Rafael Videla swearing the Oath as President of Argentina, 29 March 1976.
Videla’s dictatorship attempted to avoid the scrutiny which the Chilean dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet ignited. Argentina obscured its description of opponents, and by doing so widened its net to encompass not only those involved in resistance but also anyone remotely linked to the disappeared detainees. The author notes, “For the junta, these covert abductions were the perfect tool: brazen enough to incite fear, but subtle enough that Argentines could pretend they weren’t happening.” As the “disappeared” started making its way into conversations and rhetoric, Videla himself utilised the word in a press conference to bolster dictatorship impunity: “The desaparecido is an unknown … they are an unknown entity, neither dead nor alive, they are disappeared.”
Of Jewish descent but born in Argentina, Rosa at first turned to Jewish organisations and even the Israeli embassy for help, but none was forthcoming, despite the fact that many Jewish people had been detained and disappeared by the military dictatorship. Videla’s manipulation of Christian values to justify atrocities was also either tolerated or supported by the Catholic clergy in Argentina, leaving the mothers and grandmothers of the disappeared with little recourse. It was during one such futile meeting that Azucena Villalfor, the mother of a disappeared detainee, determined to stage a protest at Plaza de Mayo – a gathering for relatives of the disappeared to recognise and know each other.
Fourteen women gathered for the first meeting and the group later called themselves the Madres de Plaza de Mayo. It was from this group – the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo – that the Abuelas formed their own distinct group, as they were looking for both their disappeared children and grandchildren.
The Plaza De Mayo in Buenos Aires, where the grandmothers have consistently protested since 1977.
When Rosa joined the group of women, she realised that some stories of the disappeared children held some commonality – some women were also looking for their grandchildren. As support for their mission grew, some people came forward to report that their neighbours suddenly were raising babies, despite no earlier signs of pregnancy. The first inklings that the junta in Argentina had systematically abducted their grandchildren came when two Uruguayan children were located in Valparaiso after being abducted from Buenos Aires in 1976. The transnational operation was linked to Operation Condor – a US-backed plan that sought to eliminate all Communist and socialist influence in South America, and in which Argentina also participated.
Alfredo Astiz, a naval officer who worked as ESMA, was tasked with infiltrating the group, posing as the brother of a disappeared detainee. The bodies of two mothers and a nun, supportive of their cause, were discovered decades later in a mass grave as a result of this operation.
The Abuelas followed up on clues to piece together the broken narratives that could shed light on the disappearances and illegal abductions, since it was clear that no help from the state would be forthcoming. The military would not divulge information about the disappeared and it was through contacting other human rights organisations and a breakthrough in genetic testing that the Abuelas were able to prove the identity of the stolen children they eventually tracked down, and those of the children who came forward after the fall of the dictatorship in 1981.
Cohen Gilliland gives a detailed account of the forensic anthropology that was employed to identify the remains of the disappeared buried in mass graves, as well as the setting up of Argentina’s National Genetic Data Bank in 1987. American geneticist Mary King devised a grandpaternity test that would allow the analysis of DNA samples from the grandparents and grandchildren to prove their family lineage. Cohen Gilliland writes: “In many cases, such as Rosa’s, the Abuelas were looking for grandchildren who had disappeared while still in their mothers’ wombs.” Following the return to democracy, the grandpaternity test became accepted as evidence in court cases relating to the abducted and illegally adopted children of the disappeared.
Argentina’s truth commission report noted the abduction of the disappeared’s children, stating: “When a child is torn from their legitimate family to be placed in another family environment chosen according to an ideological notion of ‘what is best for their salvation,’ a vile usurpation of roles is being committed.” The report also lauded the Abuelas’ work and determination to establish not only the identities of the stolen children, but also the contribution of their efforts towards seeking justice for crimes against humanity committed by the dictatorship.
“When a child is torn from their legitimate family to be placed in another family environment chosen according to an ideological notion of ‘what is best for their salvation,’ a vile usurpation of roles is being committed.”
Despite the scientific success of genetic testing, several of the abducted grandchildren who came forth, as well as the Abuelas, did not anticipate the ramifications that disappearances and abductions would have on the affected families. Amid campaigns to discredit the Abuelas, and lawsuits contesting custody, the book illustrates how the dictatorships tore families apart and created new ones founded on torture, disappearances, abductions and lies. Reconciliation with biological family at times came at a cost, where justice was achieved at the expense of psychological trauma. Justice did not necessarily ease the endured past.
This trauma is highlighted in the book through Rosa’s story and her search for her abducted grandson, Rodolfo, who was given the name Guillermo by the couple who raised him. While Guillermo – as he is referred to in the book – swiftly seeks out the truth about his identity, he is also faced with the repercussions of the decision. The psychological and emotional toll is evident as he navigates through two distinct realities: one in which the dysfunctional and abusive family he grew up with disintegrated, and the other in which he sought to reconcile himself with the history of his biological family, which should have belonged to him.
One memory Guillermo narrates is his adoptive mother asking him, at the age of eight, what would happen if another woman claimed to be his mother. As memories of his past contend with the present, and the contradictions arise, particularly the discrepancies in his upbringing, Guillermo faces a major identity crisis. “You kidnapped the grandson of the vice president of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo,” he told Francisco Gomez, his adoptive father who worked for the military.
Yet Gomez’s eventual arrest and its effects upon his adoptive mother brought a new round of implications for Guillermo, who found it difficult to distinguish emotionally between healthy and traumatic bonds. Even within his biological family, Guillermo and his sister became estranged over the rupture caused by the dictatorship’s abduction, despite the fact that Guillermo went on to become a lawyer and participate in bringing the dictatorship perpetrators to justice alongside the Abuelas.
Milei shaking hands with Donald Trump in February 2025.
Cohen Gilliand’s book is particularly important at a time when Argentina’s right-wing government is resolutely waging war against memory institutions in the country. Argentina’s quest for justice already faced hurdles during Mauricio Macri’s presidency, but current President Javier Milei has exceeded Macri’s measures since the start of his tenure, attacking not only sites of memory but also directly targeting the Abuelas. In a decree that was rejected by the Chamber of Deputies in August this year, Milei sought to remove the autonomy of the National Genetic Data Bank. This book treats the delicate subject of disappearances and abductions with dignity, yet with the clarity and sense of justice that must be employed against dictatorship oblivion.
Intriguingly, women held more or less equal power in many of the African continent’s varied societies prior to its violent colonial subjugation. Gender equality was, however, viewed as a challenge to imperial hegemony by colonial administrators – more familiar with women in Counter-Reformation Europe attired in nun’s wimples ‘in order to prepare them for a life of seclusion.’
A new work, The Heretic of Cacheu(Penguin, Random House, London, 2025) by Toby Green exhumes the records of a Portuguese Inquisitorial trial from 1665 into apparently deviant conduct of one such matriarchal figure in Cacheu – at that point ‘the most important Atlantic trading town in Senegambia.’ This was the first African region to be drawn by the Portuguese systematically into the transatlantic slave trade, the appalling legacy of which we contend with to this day.
Senegambia.
Eric Williams argues that ‘slavery was not born of racism; rather, racism was the consequence of slavery.’ The deeply troubling treatment of slaves on American plantations produced a form of dehumanisation, and hierarchical conception of human ‘races.’ Apparently ‘the curse of Ham’ assigned a lower status to dark-skinned people, an idea that perhaps allowed their overseers to sleep at night.
Walter Rodney has previously explored how slavery corrupted preexisting forms of dependence known in West Africa prior to the Portuguese arrival. The legal status of slaves in Cacheu, however, depended absolutely on the Roman concept of slavery, wherein the master held a power of life and death over his human chattel.
The forcible removal, of up to thirteen million men, for the most part – only eleven of whom survived the dreaded passage – caused profound dislocation and lasting trauma to societies on both sides of the Atlantic.
Listen to our podcast with Toby Green as he discusses the effect of Covid lockdowns on Africa, which was largely unaffected by the disease, and the intellectual failure of many on the left. https://t.co/EsbBdkq4xr@toby00green@battleforeurope @SunetraGupta @KevinBardosh
Green observes how, just as in war time Britain where women took on industrial work after men were sent to the front line to be slaughtered, ‘during the political conflicts in Africa generated by the transatlantic traffic women’s labour burden increased – as did the opportunities to capitalize on this for some women.’ One such was Crispina Peres, the most successful trader in the city of Cacheu, ‘who was such a catch that during her life she was married to not one but two captain-majors of the town.’
Both she and her husband Jorge Gonçalves Frances were of mixed heritage – Portuguese fathers and West African mothers. This gave them a competitive advantage, as they were able to inhabit both worlds, and trade effectively using an array of languages. Interestingly,Crispina was the dominant partner, due in no small part to Jorge’s persistent infirmities.
Her husband’s illnesses led Crispina to engage with the djabakós – traditional healers with knowledge of local herbs and their properties. The djabakós ‘helped with fevers, difficult childbirth, worked with the bodies of the dead and provided succour to all those hanging on to the worlds of the living.’ According to Green, ‘[t]he importance of the djabakós in Cacheu spoke to the fact that African political power remained dominant.’
At that time in Cacheu, as in Europe, ‘the health of the body and the spirit were seen as integrated’. Thus, ‘healing the body also required healing the spirit,’ which gave rise to strange – in the minds of colonial authorities – practices, including animal sacrifices. Moreover, many of these healers also practised Islam, which challenged Christian supremacy.
Green observes that disease was rife in Cacheu ‘because this was a town at the heart of a period of crisis-driven transformation;’ further opining that ‘periods of crisis and the collapse of an existing sociopolitical culture are often accompanied by disease.’
Slaves on the West Coast of Africa, c.1833 (oil on canvas) by Biard, Francois Auguste (1798-1882).
In the sixteenth century, therefore, smallpox and other infectious diseases wiped out an incredible 95% of the population native to the Americas. This was exacerbated by hunger and economic hardship, ‘alongside the psychological crisis felt by many Native Americans at the brutally violent end of everything that they had known and which had brought them security.’
Green also alludes to the plague of alcoholism afflicting the post-Soviet Union society of Russia, which is strongly connected to the decline in life expectancy there by up to five years in the early 1990s. This raises a question as to what lies behind the current stalling and in some cases decrease in life expectancy across Europe, and the U.S.. While COVID-19 has been a factor, excess deaths in many countries have actually increased since 2021. The data might imply that we are witnessing an unravelling, at least, of an existing sociopolitical culture. Green, who is also an historian of the Covid period, might attribute this to the trauma of lockdowns.
It may seem inappropriate to compare our present era with the violent convulsions of the seventeenth century, but Green’s observation about waves of disease and premature death causing ‘fear and panic, generating scapegoating, gossip and hatreds’ might reasonably also be applied to the Covid period in the West. A comparison between the colonial role of the Inquisition in the seventeenth century and the role of the WHO in Africa in more recent times might also be ventured, although Green resists making this explicit.
He does, however, connect health policy with the exercise of authority more generally: ‘historically those who diagnose the condition in the first place are generally those who then are empowered to claim the authority to heal it.’ In our time, the African continent was subjected to inappropriate guidance for a disease such as Covid, a disease which had little impact on its overwhelmingly youthful population, while drawing resources away from more beneficial programmes with lasting benefits.
Similarly, at that time in Cacheu, Senegambian healers knew how to apply local plants to reducing swellings and fevers, while European apothecaries usually relied on imported salves from Europe, which tended not to be useful in such a setting.
Ultimately, the Portuguese officials could not tolerate a high profile figure in Cacheu such as Crispina Peres routinely turning to the djabakós for assistance. Green argues that ‘the imperial assault on West African ways of healing both inaugurated a form of medical colonialism and was a key factor in the shifting balance of power between European empires and West Africans at this time’
Finally, it would be mistaken to see Crispina Peres as either a saintly or even heroic figure. During her trial, which lasted three years and resulted in her having to perform penance, she openly acknowledged the cruelty she visited on her own slaves. Thus, she admitted to imprisoning a household slaves named Eiria, saying she would die without confessing. This poor woman was indeed kept in shackles until she died. It goes to show perhaps that simply empowering women won’t necessarily lead to perfect conditions on Planet Earth.
Many of those featuring in this series wrote top class journalism, including Albert Camus, Noam Chomsky, Voltaire and George Orwell. None of them, however, are pre-eminently or exclusively associated with their journalism. There is one intellectual who is however. That of course is Christopher Hitchens – the non pareil journalist of our recent age, and perhaps the last of the just.
The purpose of this essay is not to deal with types of journalism or codes of ethics, or to deal with the complex relationship between editors and proprietors, and indeed now social media exerts control over journalism. Instead, I seek to identify which hacks, from Fleet Street or otherwise, have singularly, through the restrictions and obsession with news and sensation, stood out to become true Public Intellectuals.
There has never been a greater need for a mass circulation public intellectual. I open this debate by suggesting five choices, at least two of whom displayed superiority in this arena to Hitchens.
The Criteria
A Journalist-Public Intellectual must seek the truth, understand the nature of fact-gathering and vocationally support speech rights even at the outer limits. He or she must also form a bulwark against the degradation of language. In this respect the Promethean storm of social media opens the door to ever more unregulated and unfiltered opinions, often deliberately orchestrated by far right-wing or absurd woke viewpoints to enforce wrecking ball compliance and control.
It begs the question: compromised by corporate control how can a journalist in the mainstream press now become a Public Intellectual?
Recently I visited my friend Patrick Healyéminence grise of Irish Public Intellectualism in Amsterdam. He is a retired professor of architecture, painter, writer and a global authority on Karl Kraus. So let us get to the first of my five choices. The first greater than Hitchens and Swift greater than all.
Karl Kraus
In my piece The Austrian Mind I omitted Kraus given the challenge of writing on him, as Jonathan Frantzen in effect suggested in his interpretation of certain of his texts in The Kraus Project (2013). How do you grapple with so protean or unclassifiable an intellect? He seems almost incomprehensible in the present age.
Kraus acted as editor from 1899-1936 of the leading Viennese magazine Die Fackel (The Torch) which he used as his own personal soapbox. He was the exclusive writer from 1911 onwards. People feared his intemperate pen. A satirist, polemicist, aphorist and playwright, writing in the Golden Age of literary Vienna, which ended very abruptly. All shortly emigrated and dead. The fate of Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth.
His targets, not unlike the later Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, was the mediocrity of the Austrian Bourgeoisie and above all their distortion and abuse of language, particularly his fellow journalists. He could often be seen for half an hour trying to work out the insertion of a comma in Café Mozart!
In his book on Kraus Frantzen primarily deals with an essay on the German national poet Heine, where with very effective pastiche Kraus crucifies Heine and by implication those like him, saying: ‘Heinrich Heine so loosened the corsets of the German language that today every little salesman can fondle her breasts.’
He was a scathing aphorist and two of my favourites are applicable to our own age. First, is the idea that ‘corruption is worse than prostitution. The latter might endanger the morals of an individual, the former invariably endangers the morals of the entire country.’ The second is also quite relevant: ‘Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.’
Reading the entirety of Die Fackel is an experience not unlike an extended viewing of Peter Cooke’s four great impersonations of English archetypes, judge, football manager, naturalist and rock star for the Clive Anderson show shortly before his death. Peter Cook was also Lord Gnome, the proprietor of Private Eye. He employed Ian Hislop and was by indirection a journalist and public intellectual. In fact, his impersonations, his support of and informal and sometimes formal contributions to Private Eye make him an intrinsic if not central choice.
Krauss epic play The Last Days of Mankind (2015), which Patrick Healy has translated, is an attack on press barons, hacks facilitating, through mass orchestration, Populist bellicose hysteria, and the First World War. Its uneven tone demonstrates his evolution from aristocratic condescension to social democrat. The play is a mammoth fifteen hours long for voices or rather a voice best read by Kraus, or as a substitute Patrick, attacking stupidity in all directions.
Die Fackel also attacks psychoanalysis as a quack science; antisemitism, though his own antisemitism as a self-loathing Jew is also evident; corruption, not least the police chief of Vienna who he forced out of office; the pan-German Populist movement; laissez-faire economic policies; and numerous other subjects.
He dies at the very precipice of collapse, of natural causes, after a self-enforced interregnum when he suspended publication with the rise of Hitler, only for one last push of part of an extended essay The Third Walspurgers Night (1936). Its essential argument is that through their devotion to the pastime of palaver and tactics, the social democrats had facilitated Hitler’s rise and had lost all material gains. He despaired at their belief ‘they could break [the] magic circle [of Nazism] by means of the Constitutional Court.’ Consequently, the essay supports the Austrian Christian-Democratic Chancellor Dollfuss, as anything other than Hitler was needed. Historic desperation.
The opening paragraph of the essay is devastating in its implications for today I interpose.
As to Hitler, [read Trump or any other contemporary ‘strongman’ leader] I have nothing to say. I am aware that as the upshot of extended reflection, of repeated efforts to grasp the phenomenon and the forces driving it, this falls far short of expectations. They were, after all, pitched higher than ever before at a polemicist who is popularly – but mistakenly – expected to take a stand; and who, when confronted by any evil that appeals to his temperament, has indeed been prepared to “stick his neck out”. But there are evils which not only make the neck cease to be a metaphor but may also prevent the associated, ….?
The rest of the essay deals with the propogandists and the facilitators primarily Goebbels [read Musk, The Daily Mail, and indeed other legacy media].
The best reading of Walpurgis Nacht as Patrick Healy suggests is that satire is as the Roman genre par excellence satura tota nostra est – and should point not only in the direction of rhetorical agility, but also use mockery, insult, indignation etc, fusing the voice of the moralist and the skill of a standup comic. Indeed, the word also a meaning of stew bringing all ingredients together.
Jonathan Swift
The only equal of Kraus as a Journalist-Public Intellectual, and thus also greater than Hitchens in the pantheon is, in my view, Swift. Incontestably, the greatest satirical essay in the English language is A Modest Proposal ((1729). Kraus was in fact pleased to be compared to Swift on the basis that false modesty was the most arch kind of hypocrisy.
Swift’s essay argues, in light of a policy of Malthusian liquidation, that rather than allowing children starve to death a profit could be made that would contribute to the common weal. Apparently informed by an American friend, the author says that children make a very fine dish. A passage towards the end of the essay perfectly encapsulates much of the awfulness of that time, and our own:
I desire those politicians who dislike my overture, and may perhaps be so bold as to attempt an answer, that they will first ask the parents of these mortals, whether they would not at this day think it a great happiness to have been sold for food, at a year old in the manner I prescribe, and thereby have avoided such a perpetual scene of misfortunes as they have since gone through by the oppression of landlords, the impossibility of paying rent without money or trade, the want of common sustenance, with neither house nor clothes to cover them from the inclemencies of the weather, and the most inevitable prospect of entailing the like or greater miseries upon their breed for ever.
Swift wrote other great journalistic tracts such as The Tale of The Tub (1704) and in a golden age of satire his skills were venerated. His exact contemporary Alexander Pope, particularly in his epic poem The Rape of the Lock (1717) stirring up the upper classes, was more lyrical than trenchant. In fairness Pope’s wonderful Dunciad (1728-43) castigates stupidity in all its manifest forms and is dedicated to Swift. Indeed it was possibly partly written by him. It is also apposite to our time. Two quotes suffice.
How with less reading than makes felons scape, less human genius than God gives an ape
And out of context but an elaboration of the above.
To hatch a new Saturnian age of lead.
Consider also the final book of Gulliver’s Travels, where ‘Yahoos’ – a term that has entered the lexicon as a pejorative description of humans – describes lawyers and judges in the following unflattering terms:
Judges… are picked out from the most dextrous lawyers, who are grown old or lazy, and having been biased all their lives against truth or equity, are under such a fatal necessity of favoring fraud, perjury and oppression, that I have known several of them to refuse a large bribe from the side where justice lay, rather than injure the faculty by doing any thing unbecoming their nature in office.
Or
It is a maxim among these lawyers, that whatever hath been done before may legally be done again: and therefore they take special care to record all the decisions formerly made against common justice and the general reason of mankind. These, under the name of precedents, they produce as authorities, to justify the most iniquitous opinions; and the judges never fail of decreeing accordingly.
H.L. Mencken
In Kraus’ own time only the legendary muckraking American journalist H.L. Mencken is comparable. He wrote a fantastic treatise on The American Language (1919 and revised) and was the bugbear of the American bourgeoisie of his time. In colourful terms Mencken referred to the religious right in his day as ‘gaping primates, anthropoid rabble’, and the ‘boobiesie’. Famously through the Baltimore Sun he briefed Clarence Darrow to defend the teacher accused of the criminal offence of teaching Darwinism in the Scopes Trial (1925).
Darrow’s opponent as prosecutor was three-time Presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan. Bryan won, but Darrow won the moral victory not least in his devastating cross examination of Bryan on expert lessons from the Bible. The verdict was reversed on appeal. One week later Bryan died and Mencken penned his infamous obituary of William Jennings Bryan to a chorus of disapproval. Here is a flavour of it:
Bryan was a vulgar and common man, a cad undiluted. He was ignorant, bigoted, self-seeking, blatant and dishonest. … He seemed only a poor clod like those around him, deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, all fine and noble things. He was a peasant come home to the dung-pile. Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not.”
The thread that unites Kraus, Swift, and Mencken is fearless satire and rhetoric and opinion of the most audacious type, built on the defence of rationality against institutional, governmental and fundamentalist abuse.
Christopher Hitchens
Hitchens could not write a bad sentence, a line Edmund Wilson used about Scott Fitzgerald. The towering achievement of his gifted polemics is in my view The Trial of Henry Kissinger (2001), which he argues that he ought to be arrested for war crimes. There was an equally famous and blasphemous text about the ostensibly good Mother Therese of Calcutta The Missionary Position (1995). Irreverent journalism of this type is now sorely lacking!
Ryszard Kapuscinski
The book on the Islamic Revolution in Iran Shah of Shahs (1982) or his equally famous book on the fraud that was Haille Selassie The Emperor (1978) are eye-witness accounts, and rightly lauded. He had no fear, like Hitchens, of wading into dangerous territories, but his wisdom is contained in other more reflective books.
Whereas learning about the world is labour, and a great all consuming one at that. Most people develop quite antithetical talents, in fact-to look without seeing, topreserve oneself within oneself. Travels with Herodotus (2004)
Or best of all in Imperium (1993), his best book and a summation, he writes:
Three plagues, three contagions threaten the world. The first is the plague of nationalism. The second is the plague of racism. The third is the plague of religious fundamentalism.
All three share one trait a common denominator an aggressive all powerful total irrationality. Anyone stricken with one of these plagues is beyond reason. In his head burns a sacred pyre that waits its sacrificial victims.
The final word is left to Karl Kraus, who I regard as the second greatest journalist of all time, after Swift:
Those who now have nothing to say because actions are speaking continue to talk. Let him who has something to say come forward and be silent.
History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. James Joyce, in ‘Nestor’, from Ulysses (1922)
If there is any substitute for love, it is memory. To memorize, then, is to restore intimacy.’
Joseph Brodsky, in ‘Nadezhda Mandelstam (1899-1980) An Obituary’, from Less Than One: Selected Essays (1986)
One of the more contentious trends in contemporary historiography, and philosophy of history, is the weird juxtaposing of memory and history, with the latter being privileged (perhaps unsurprisingly, by professional historians) as somehow superior, or more objective. This is evident, for example, in the work of Roy Foster (e.g. ‘Sorry is not enough’, London Independent, 17/07/1999), and of David Reiff (‘The cult of memory: when history does more harm than good’, The Guardian, 02/03/2016). This tendency may have partly originated in a reaction against the work of French historian Pierre Nora, who, in his efforts to define what constitutes a ‘true’ history, instigated this opposition between history and memory. Because outright political agitation and national imperatives dominate readings of history, he argued (see Realms of Memory (1996/1998), therefore there is no objective truth to be found there. However, he went further, adopting the nihilistic perspective that because memory, although preferable, is also selective, there is, effectively, no such thing as a recoverable past. In his somewhat opaque attempt to reconcile Marxist dialectics with an underpinning theology, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (1940), Walter Benjamin took a more measured, if equally audacious approach. In Thesis VI he wrote:
To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it the way it really was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger.
But how exactly has memory come to be viewed as the poor relation of history? For what else is history, ultimately, but the product of memory? Or, at the very least, a consequence of the urge to memorialise? If only because Memory (Mnemosyne) is the mother of History (Clio), as she is of all the muses.
This shift in status is compounded by the current fearmongering panic and paranoia about the threat to humanity and the humanities by the dreaded Artificial Intelligence. While AI is NOT nothing to worry about, it should be remembered that narratives of conflict in contested spaces have always been distorted by misinformation: it is known as ‘the fog of war’ or, more commonly, ‘propaganda’. All that has improved (or disimproved, because of the uses to which it is put) is the technology. As the great Irish essayist Hubert Butler wrote in ‘The Sub-Prefect Should Have Held His Tongue’:
Speed of communication has increased, and we are expected to have strong feelings about an infinite series of remote events. But our powers of understanding and sympathy have not correspondingly increased. In an atmosphere of artificially heated emotionalism truth simply dissolves into expediency.
That was in 1956. It was ever thus. Whatever the contemporary concerns about manipulation by A.I., data harvesting, algorithms and bots, it seems to me that digitally native under-30s are more than capable of dealing with the vagaries of the media with which they have grown up and are therefore adept at handling because of easy familiarity. When it comes to being duped online, the kids are savvy enough. It is the supposed adults in the room you have to fear for and keep an eye on.
Perplexity as to the status of historiography as a somehow tainted literary representation or a scientific unbiased recounting is nothing new, with E. H. Carr’s What Is History? (1961) provoking fierce responses like that of Geoffrey Elton’s The Practice of History (1967), because of Carr’s relativism and his rejection of contingency as an important factor in historical analysis; that is, his almost proto-Baudrillardian notion of history as a partisan pursuit, a simulacrum written by the winners, or at least by those whose relative perspectives are skewed by vested interests or their own agendas. Elton, on the other hand, was a strong defender of traditional modi operandi and was appalled by postmodernism and multi-narrative histories, seeing the duty of historians as empirically gathering evidence and objectively analysing it.
Thucydides Mosaic from Jerash, Jordan, Roman, 3rd century AD at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin.
Herodotus vis-à-vis Thucydides
The Carr/Elton debate can be seen as a more recent reenactment of a controversy which has reoccurred throughout (as it were) history, for example in relation to perceptions surrounding the virtues and drawbacks of Herodotus vis-à-vis Thucydides as historians of Ancient Greece, or of Suetonius in contrast to Tacitus of Ancient Rome, the methodology espoused by each echoing the practice of their predecessors. Thucydides and Tacitus may be more analytical and less anecdotal than Herodotus and Suetonius, but their histories are still based on interviews with participants and eye witnesses, and then drawing their own conclusions. How do we know if these interviewees were telling the truth, or if their memories were accurate or faulty? They could be deliberately lying, or accidentally misremembering. Plus, these informants are rarely named. Then there is the question of how much bias effects the reliability of Herodotus’ Histories and Tacitus’ Annals of Imperial Rome, given their respective Athenian and Roman sympathies, which they freely admit. Herodotus may have been accorded the accolade the ‘Father of History’ by Cicero, but at least as early as Plutarch’s pamphlet On The Malignity of Herodotus, he has also been known as the ‘Father of Lies’. When introducing his English translation of the Annals, Michael Grant even refers to Tacitus’ ‘mask of austere impartiality’. Meanwhile, much of Plutarch is pure entertaining hearsay. Furthermore, it is worth remembering that the Greek word Ιστορία (historia), from which our own specialised meaning is derived, meant ‘research’ or ‘inquiry’, rather than the definitive account, and is how Herodotus’ titled his work.
So, while from an early twenty-first century perspective, Herodotus may seem more like a chronicler rather than an analyser, it is important to remember history’s origins in storytelling, and the influence of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey – the stories from both of which were recited orally long before they were ever written down – on Herodotus’ mindset and methodology. Indeed, in an echo of those tales told around a campfire, which rhymed to facilitate ease of memorisation, it is believed that Herodotus would have given public readings from his Histories in Athens. For this reason, we may find it more understandable that he is nebulous about the differences between tradition and history, and that he did not always realise that eye witness accounts of the same event can vary. If literature is what is written, and Herodotus was writing history, we should not forget the debt both literature and history owe to the oral tradition.
Of course, professional historians will argue that historiography has come a long way since antiquity, especially through the use of documentary evidence – inscriptions, manuscripts, treaties, newspaper and (latterly) television and radio reports, court records, archival material and archaeological discoveries, etc. But all of these (un)reliable sources are, finally, human products and personal artifacts, and thus subject to the fallibility of the species – certainly in their interpretation if not equally so in their inception. Just because something is written down does not make it true, or even representative. What pressures were being exerted on those doing the writing and signing, and what did they stand to lose or gain by their acts of scrivening – their Oaths of Allegiance and their Declarations of War? How far can we even rely on those who observed them, or who claim to have done so? Indeed, overreliance on these constituent parts privileges literacy over the oral tradition, one which Herodotus (influenced as he was by the Homeric epics) came out of and which historians have always relied upon – however unreliable it, in turn, may be, based as it is on folk memory. To favour the written over the spoken word does a great disservice to so-called ‘ordinary’ people, and smacks of a ‘made by great men’ approach to historiography. In this prejudice originates the elevation of History over Memory.
History Faculty building on the Sidgewick Site of the University of Cambridge.
Worthwhile Academic Pursuit
None of the foregoing is intended to denigrate the study of History as a worthwhile academic pursuit. But one has only to trace the history of nationalist, revisionist and counter-revisionist narratives of past events on our own island over the preceding century or so to glean an inkling of the fluctuations of fashion in how history is done and disseminated, and to be aware that all readings of history, whatever the original sources or new evidence which come to light, are necessarily provisional. Plays by Brian Friel like Translations and Making History engage with how this history has been made, and remade. The presentation of the past, whether in memory or history (or historical memory), and the relation of both forms of presentation to the ideal of an unmediated past – that is, to an account of the past not distorted by the medium in which it is presented – is illusory. In this regard, every form of (re)presenting the past is a construction and an attempt to pass on something that is already forever lost.
The concept of historiography as representation, which can easily shade into fiction, while being presented as factual truth, has correlatives in our own time. Herodotus’ treatment of the Persian invasions under Darius and Xerxes implies an underlying conflict between the absolutism of the East and the allegedly free institutions of the West, between Persian monarchy and Athenian democracy. The fact that we have no Persian record of the Persian Wars is down to the fact that Persia was an oral culture, and their version has been lost in the mists of time. In this case, written words would have proven useful. Herodotus’ contention that democracy was the cornerstone of Athenian superiority, and his praise of it as responsible for Athens’ pre-eminent position, might make us mindful of the justifications invoked for the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the United States and Britain. While bringing the benefits of democracy and freedom to a former dictatorship was the general goal of the invasion, the proximate goad was the supposed presence of weapons of mass destruction within the jurisdiction of that regime, a piece of ‘intelligence’ which was subsequently exposed as a faulty, if enabling, fiction. However, that the reason for going to war ultimately proved to be another instance of imaginative invention, every bit as much a representation (or spin) as elements of Herodotus’ Histories, did not bother the advocates of that invasion unduly after it was discovered, evidence that people are still as enthralled by mythic embroidery masquerading as objective fact as they ever were.
To be sure, in Herodotus’ day it was the Persian Empire which was the aggressor, looking to colonise Greece, and the united city-states, including Athens, were merely defending themselves. The notable difference in our day is that it is the democrats who are doing the invading, with the sanctioning intention of toppling an absolute ruler, or eradicating terrorism. Again, how often today do we hear the sound bite, employed not only in defence of Israel’s right to defend itself, but also in support of its continued existence, that it is ‘the only democracy in the region’? Without too much of a stretch, it could be argued that Herodotus was indulging in an early version of what Edward Said subsequently termed, in the title of his masterly book which almost single-handedly founded postcolonial studies, Orientalism (1978). Having initiated the debate, Said developed it further in Culture and Imperialism (1993), sensitising the average western reader to this strange and sinister colonialism of culture. Sadly, these tropes will not cease, for obscurantism is not the sole prerogative of any epoch, or political grouping.
Said’s originality was evident in the way he defined the subject of his book. Orientalism is, first, an academic specialisation: a topic studied by archaeologists, historians, theologians and others in the West who are concerned with Middle Eastern and North African cultures. But Said added two further meanings to the term. Orientalism is also something more general, something that has shaped Western thought since the Greeks: namely, a way of dividing up the world between the West and the East. What appears to be a simple geographical fact is, says Said, actually an idea. The division of the world into these two parts is not a natural state of affairs, but an intellectual choice made by the West in order to define itself. The third meaning for Orientalism is more historically specific. Since the latter part of the eighteenth century, when European colonialism in the Middle East developed most fully, Orientalism has been a means of domination, a part of the colonial enterprise. Said argues that colonialism is not only about the physical acts of taking land, or of subjugating people, but is also about intellectual acts. The academic study of the Orient is unthinkable outside its colonial context and vice versa. So, rather than just an innocent scholarly topic, Orientalism is a general way of imagining the world’s divisions and a specific mechanism for furthering the colonial quest.
Following Foucault, Said describes the Orient as a product of discourse; that is, not as something in the world that is discovered and analysed, but as something created by Western institutions and ideas. The definition of the Orient is a means of regulating it; the apparent truths discovered are in fact ideas circulated and accepted as part of Western colonial activity in the Middle East. The sense of the Orient as a discursive construct, in turn, enables Said to make one of his most important and striking arguments: what the West believed it had discovered about the East tells us little about the colonised cultures, but much about the coloniser’s. The texts and disciplines that comprise Orientalism – historical narratives like that of Herodotus, analyses of religion, travel writing, etc – reveal the values and preconceptions of the West, of the way people in Washington or Paris or London, or indeed fifth century Athens, wanted to see themselves, their fears and ambitions and prejudices. In particular, the image created of the East is used as a means of constructing one’s own identity. The picture of the East functions as a distorting mirror image, enabling the West to say that whatever they are, we are not. This emphasises the way in which a duality, often referred to as a dyad, is set up: West and East, us and them.
In spite of the growing influence of Asian nations and the recent ‘Easternisation’ of international politics and trade, such exclusively Western- or Euro-centric readings still predominate our understanding of global history. This is a mindset which has been challenged, in what can be seen as a continuation of the Orientalism project, by Peter Frankopan, in his The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (2015), and The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World (2018). One would do well also to have a look at Palestinian-American Rashid Khalidi’s books Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (1997) and The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (2017), in which he depicts Israel as a settler-colonial state, and argues that the modern history of Palestine can best be understood as ‘a colonial war against the indigenous population’.
Bakhmut_during_the_battle_(2023-04-05).
Proxy Wars
Both of the ongoing international conflicts which dominate the news cycle in these times, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the Israeli-Hamas hostilities, are in truth complex proxy wars. Appeasement, or its more recent first cousin, conflict management, does not work. As Professor Yossi Mekelberg, of the venerable Chatham House Think Tank, has written:
One conclusion from the collapse of the status quo between Israel and the Palestinians is that conflict management is a fallacy that has failed time and again. As a long-term instrument it at best buys time until the next round of violence begins. More than 75 years of conflict between Israel and the Palestinians have seen periodic outbreaks of hostilities and periodic efforts to bring peace based on a two-state solution. For most of this time the focus has been on managing the conflict. This exposes a lack of belief that a peace agreement laying to rest the differences between the two peoples can be reached. It also shows that the international collective security mechanism set up after the Second World War has failed in its mission to peacefully settle conflicts.This conflict does not need management, it needs its root causes to be addressed.
The Northern Ireland Peace Process, which culminated in the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 (‘Sunningdale for slow learners’), provides some hope that reconciliation is possible in ‘lost cause’ situations, even if underlying tensions still persist. At least it put an end to what were euphemistically termed ‘The Troubles’, with their violence and loss of life. A United Ireland will happen sooner or later, and it will be an economic problem, much as the reunification of Germany was: Britain does not want to continue footing the bill for the statelet, and the Republic of Ireland is charry of taking it on. Meanwhile, most of those resident in the territory – from whatever side of the Unionist/Nationalist sectarian divide – are more preoccupied about having to pay for G.P. visits and prescriptions, should they find themselves in a New Republic.
The Russian/Ukrainian stalemate might be resolved if Putinistas were to be purged of their nostalgia for the Russian Empire and the former reach of the U.S.S.R., and had their fears over N.A.T.O. encroachment addressed; and if Zelenskyyites were not so ardent in their pursuit of N.A.T.O. membership. The Russian invasion was not, as is routinely heard in Western governmental and media discourse, entirely ‘unprovoked’. As Professor Jeffrey D. Sachs of Colombia University has written:
A far better approach for Russia might have been to step up diplomacy with Europe and with the non-Western world to explain and oppose U.S. militarism and unilateralism. In fact, the relentless U.S. push to expand NATO is widely opposed throughout the world, so Russian diplomacy rather than war would likely have been effective. […] The key to peace in Ukraine is through negotiations based on Ukraine’s neutrality and NATO non-enlargement.
As for the seemingly intractable Israeli/Palestinian conflict, with its attendant apartheid, ethnic-cleansing and genocide on the part of the more powerful and well-resourced combatant: if Israel were suddenly left to fend for itself, without being massively underwritten by the U.S. and the E.U., it would soon have to start behaving itself, and acting in a civilised manner with its neighbours – just as a reduction in Iranian (bankrolled by Russia), Qatari and Yemeni support for Hamas would greatly alleviate tensions in the zone. Alas, this is not going to happen, given the North American imperative for a strategic foothold in the region and Zionist funding of their politicians through AIPAC, coupled with German Holocaust guilt, and the onus on oppositional sympathisers to provide some sort of counterforce. The only difference between the I.D.F.’s war crimes and those of Hamas is that the latter lacks the technology to do as much extensive damage, because the former enjoys such disproportionately huge investment, and impunity.
History makes no mistakes because it has no purpose – that much Hubert Butler must have known by that time (1930s and 40s) if only because at Oxford he read the Greek and Roman classics. In any case, the dishonesty, self-deception and self-aggrandizement of those evoking history to pull the trigger didn’t escape him, not did their utter humanness. His knowledge of Russian…and of Serbo-Croatian,not to mention his French and his German, helped him along the line, no doubt, enormously. The detection of humanness in those whose words and deeds obscure it is, however, his own feat. On the other hand, this must have been easier for him, an Irishman, since schizophrenic uncertainty is humanness’ integral part.
So wrote the great Nobel Prize-winning Russian poet Joseph Brodsky in ‘On Hubert Butler’ (1994). In what could be read as a corrective to the notion of this blind, ahistorical history, he also gave this insight in his essay on the work of the great Greek pre-Modernist poet, Constantine Cavafy, ‘Pendulum’s Song’ (1975): ‘The only instrument that a human being has at his disposal for coping with time is memory, and it is his unique, sensual historical memory that makes Cavafy so distinctive.’ However, if the school principal in the ‘Nestor’ episode of Joyce’s Ulysses, Mr. Deasy, is blatantly antisemitic in his exchanges with Stephen Dedalus, Brodsky, in another essay, ‘Flight from Byzantium’ (1985), is patently Islamophobic, displaying a smug ignorance and revulsion of ‘the East’. Indeed, so vitriolic is his repugnance, it is tempting to speculate that he is intentionally verging into parody:
The delirium and horror of the East. The dusty catastrophe of Asia. Green only on the banner of the Prophet. Nothing grows here except moustaches. A black-eyed, overgrown-with-stubble-before-supper part of the world. Bonfire embers doused with urine. That smell! A mixture of foul tobacco and sweaty soap and the underthings wrapped around loins like another turban. Racism? But isn’t it only a form of misanthropy? And that ubiquitous grit flying in your muzzle even in the city, poking the world out of your eyes – and yet one feels grateful even for that. Ubiquitous concrete, with the texture of turd and the colour of an upturned grave. Ah, all that nearsighted scum – Corbusier, Mondrian, Gropius – who mutilated the world more effectively than any Luftwaffe! Snobbery? But it’s only a form of despair. The local population in a state of total stupor whirling its time away in squalid snack bars, tilting its heads as in a namaz in reverse toward the television screen, where somebody is permanently beating somebody else up. Or else they’re dealing out cards, whose jacks and nines are the sole accessible abstractions, the single means of concentration. Misanthropy? Despair? Yet what else could be expected from one who has outlived the apotheosis of the linear principle? From a man who has nowhere to go back to? From a great turdologist, sacrophage, and the possible author of Sadomachia?
Brodsky even goes on to argue that: ‘By divorcing Byzantium, Western Christianity consigned the East to non-existence, and thus reduced its own notion of human negative potential to a considerable, perhaps even a perilous, degree.’ He also implies that: ‘…the anti-individualistic notion that human life is essentially nothing – i.e., the absence of the idea that human life is sacred, if only because each life is unique’, originates in the East, and that Western Christianity’s neglecting the experience supplied by Byzantium is the reason why college campus killers are classed as mentally ill, and presumably suicide bombers are labelled religious fanatics, as opposed to just plain evil. If supposedly enlightened classical humanists can harbour such sentiments, what hope can there be for reconciliation and mutual understanding?
Interestingly, in ‘A Man Must Not Be Too Moslem’ (1953), Paul Bowles (while admittedly, no friend of Said – See Hisham Aidi, ‘So Why Did I Defend Paul Bowles?’, New York Review of Books, 20/12/2019) took entirely the opposite tack, and was so prescient that the ideas contained therein could have been ripped from today’s headlines. He wrote:
Rationalizing words like ‘progress’, ‘modernization’, or ‘democracy’ mean nothing because, even if they are used sincerely, the imposition of such concepts by force from above cancels whatever value they otherwise have. There is little doubt that by having been made indifferent Moslems, the younger generation in Turkey has become more like our idea of what people living in the 20th century should be. The old helplessness in the face of mektoub (it is written) is gone, and in its place is a passionate belief in man’s ability to alter his destiny. That is the greatest step of all; once it has been made, anything, unfortunately, can happen.
Mit Gewalt aus Bunkern hervorgeholt (‘Forcibly pulled out of bunkers’)
Victims of Oppression go on to Oppress
It can be argued that what Israel is doing in Gaza, and has done to the countries which surround it since its foundation, partakes of the classic pattern of abusive behaviour, on a national rather than an individual level. ‘Those to whom evil is done/Do evil in return’ as W. H. Auden had it in ‘September 1, 1939’. It is not unheard of that victims of oppression go on to oppress even more. The Jewish people, who were victims of a genocide perpetrated by the Nazis during the Second World War, are now themselves perpetrating a genocide against the Palestinian people. Perhaps Brodsky’s Jewish ancestry accounts for his self-advertised blindspot: he was merely conforming to stereotype. But the Children of Gaza by now far outnumber Butler’s ‘The Children of Drancy’ (1968/78) – with the added developmental difference that now the whole world is watching their slaughter. Yet the majority of Western leaders persist in standing staunchly by Israel and its policies, paying mere lip service to popular calls for a ceasefire while continuing to supply the weapons used for the razing of Gaza and the annihilation of its people. The last thing our planet needs in this day and age is the continued endorsement and maintenance of yet another theocratic ethno-state. We in Ireland should know this all too well. George Santayana’s famous aphorism is usually misquoted as ‘Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it’, but in its original form read, ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’ Unfortunately, no one learns any lessons from history, and remembers only what suits them, which is why it constantly repeats itself – first as tragedy and then as farce.
Bad things undoubtedly follow when any ethnic or national or religious grouping (often a toxic concoction of all three) claim to have all the answers, and so start getting notions that they are The Master Race, or The Chosen People, or undertake Crusades against the Heathen or Jihad against the Infidel, or any convenient Evil Other. Note that I include here such secular religions as Fascism and Communism, which too frequently manifest as latter-day utopian belief systems which can be used to sponsor mass murder.
All wars are, at root, economic. The geopolitical importance, the religion and the patriotism, the toppling of tyrants and establishing of democracy, are just the attendant window dressing. (Doubtless, all those anti-materialists who would prefer to forget, or only remember in an approved way, will here dismiss my arguments with the classic cheap insult of ‘vulgar Marxist’ – incidentally, a phrase Foster has appropriated from Benjamin’s Theses, although used there in an entirely different context. Apparently, there exist kosher, refined Marxists, and objectionable, vulgar Marxists. Thus, E. P. Thompson is deemed acceptable within the academy, despite the fact that he expressed sentiments such as, ‘so great has been the reaction in our time against Whig or Marxist interpretations of history, that some scholars have propagated a ridiculous reversal of historical roles: the persecuted are seen as forerunners of oppression, and the oppressors as victims of persecution’ (from The Making of the English Working Class (Penguin, 1978).) Yet all wars also end eventually, if only for longer or shorter periods, either through disengagement, conquest, de facto surrender, formal surrender or negotiated peace agreement. The means of disseminating misinformation may be more covert, efficient and persuasive, but what does not change is human nature. The apportioning of blame, who has right (or God) on their side, is in most conflicts a question of ‘How far back would you like to go?’ (which is, in turn, a slightly more grown-up rendering of the childish playground staple, ‘You started it’). Would that be the first incursion or the latest atrocity, or any point on the calendar in-between?
At some point, the origin of the primordial offence recedes from history into myth – found in sacred books and the stories people tell. Sometimes it is even, conveniently, the Word of God (be it Yahweh or Allah). Arguably, memory is more historically accurate than lots of competing histories. Indeed, as has been demonstrated, many of those histories, official and unofficial alike, are based on recollections after the fact. Ultimately, history is nothing more or less than memory. Yet memory fades, unless it is recorded – however rigorously or haphazardly – in history. We currently stand as helpless as we ever were when The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, as Goya had it, and Voltaire’s admonition, ‘Whoever can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities’ is still, sadly, applicable.
The anthropologist Jack Goody pours scorn on modern dining habits. Solitary consumption he says reverses the customary habit of ‘public input and private output’, making eating alone ‘the equivalent of shitting publicly.’
Dining, after all, as the great gastronome Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, put it: ‘is the common bond which unites the nations of the world in reciprocal exchanges of objects serving for daily consumption.’
The restaurant emerged as a distinctive forum for public consumption in eighteenth century France. Prior to that it was the simple table d’hôte, where a traiteur would present a large pot to the assembled diners, who arrived at the appointed hour.
This could present difficulties, however, if agreed conventions were lacking on how diners were to participate. On his travels in France, the agronomist Arthur Young bemoaned the greed of his dining companions in hostelries, saying, ‘the ducks were swept clean so quickly that I moved from the table without half a dinner’. In the wake of the French Revolution, an upwardly mobile bourgeoisie sought a more recherché experience.
Originally, restaurants (deriving from the verb restaurer ‘to restore to a former state’) sold medicinal broths. In her history, The Invention of the Restaurant (2000), Rebecca Spang recalls how the restaurants of eighteenth-century Paris differentiated themselves from other eateries by offering sustenance at any time of day. Eventually they began offering more solid fare, thereby encroaching on the traiteurs.
The strict laws regulating the division of business between the different food guilds in France at the time led to a landmark court case in which the restaurateurs carried the day. This allowed the restaurant-style of dining, ‘characterized not by commonwealth but by compartmentalization’, to emerge as the dominant form of eating out in the Western world.
Fine Dining,
Elitist Quality
Today, restaurants invariably ‘plate’ each dish before presentation to the individual customer a style known as service à la russe, which replaced the more medieval display of service à la Francaise during the mid-nineteenth century.
The elitist quality of the restaurant experience is part of its appeal. Indeed, according to Sprang, the ‘restaurant fantasy implicitly required the presence of somebody outside: some poor devil with his nose pressed to the window’.
Thus, a restaurant is more than merely an establishment where food is served. It involves the division of diners into parties and, generally, serves separate portions to individuals. It remains synonymous with French food, and the dominance of French cuisine is apparent in the early history of Dublin restaurants, although this has changed radically in recent decades.
Apart from chefs, waiting staff and often indulgent investors, the most important person for a restaurant’s survival is the food critic. A bad review can sink a restaurant, while praise can bring customers flooding into the next big thing, although in recent times food criticism is being overtaken by online reviewers that are subject to manipulation.
Grimod de La Reynière
The First Gastronome
A food critic may also be referred to as a gastronome. The first of this kind was Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimod de la Reynière who wrote his Almanach des Gourmands in the wake of the Revolution.
He issued his pronouncements in the name of tradition as a member of the departed ancien regime. The son of a rich farmer-general, in his early life he displayed liberal tendencies but became disillusioned with the new order, condemning ‘everything that is despicable and vile; there in two words you have the Revolution’.
He asserts: ‘I will never be the friend of a democrat. It is atrocious that men of letters should think as the majority do today (MacDonogh,1997).’
According to his biographer MacDonogh, he began to write about food after being told to write about something harmless, or give up writing altogether. In this medium he ‘masked his vicious attacks behind harmless idioms’. Gastronomy became a vehicle for his reactionary views.
An awareness of ‘good’ food revealed the true aristocrat. After the Revolution he founded what he referred to as a Jury des Degustateurs, and between 1803 and 1812 set about writing his Almanach des Gourmands. The aristocratic display of pre-Revolutionary France could re-emerge in the new forum of the public restaurant.
De la Reynière was also alive to the possibility that he could be labelled a glutton, asserting: ‘Let it be said that of all the Deadly Sins that mankind may commit the fifth appears to be the one that least troubles his conscience and causes him the least remorse.’ Henceforth a glutton would be one who eats too much rather than a refined individual with an interest in talking about food.
The gastronome in his or her most evolved form is not a professional cook. He or she is a man of letters. His or her real table is not the one where he eats but where he or she writes. It is with the flourish of the pen that he or she achieves success rather than through their knowledge of the arcane culinary arts, as ultimately the gastronome is not the one who knows the most, but the one who speaks, and writes, best.
Garden café of the Hôtel Ritz Paris (1904), Pierre-Georges Jeanniot.
‘Lightning Sketches on the Table Cloth’
Curnonsky, the pen name of the great French food critic Maurice Edmond Sailland who was elected Prince Elect of Gastronomy by Le Soir magazine in 1927 describes the role as follows:
There are those who stare with gluttonous resentment, and those who snap impatient fingers at every passing waiter: those who flap huge newspapers in their companions’ faces, and those who shake defiant powder-puffs in their neighbours soup; those who devour bread to repletion, and those who chat so gaily, to the restaurant at large. But there are others, a chosen few who, having developed to a fine degree the study of physiognomy and, coupling this with a skilled pen or pencil, combine their talents in lightning sketches on the tablecloth.
Pascal Ory poses the question ‘Does the chef make the gastronome or vice versa?’. Culinary evolution is largely independent of gastronomic evaluation, but without a critical audience chefs may be insensitive to diners’ tastes.
Moreover, just as when we cook for ourselves we don’t tend to perform heroics, a cook without a responsive audience might take a more functional approach. But innovation and high standards become an imperative when the food critic is there to evaluate.
Even if they may claim to have nothing but contempt for the breed, virtuoso chefs usually seek the validation of critical approval, and boundaries are only broken when gastronomes are there to describe them as such. More to the point, the imprimatur of the critic brings great rewards. Perhaps unfairly, the pen is often mightier than the kitchen knife.
Notwithstanding increasing costs in a fraught business, the back breaking labour of chefing, improved takeaways, the strains of Covid and the distortion of food criticism through sites like TripAdvisor, restaurant dining endures as a sought after experience. After all, where else would anyone refer to me as “Sir”.
