Resumo de Historically Correct

Translation by: femme/600/7 February 2006
Historically Correct, by Jean Sevillia, France Loisirs, Paris, 2003, 570 pages.

Journalist and literary critic Jean Sevillia is the author of two other successful books, Zita: Courageous Empress (1997), and Intellectual Terrorism (2000). This third book, Historically Correct, is not an original work but rather a synthesis of nonorthodox considerations and analyses about several important events and periods of history.

The point of departure is polemical: Jean Sevillia states that the way we evaluate the past is wrongly determined by the values and misleading perspective of the present. Therein lies what is considered "historically correct." For example, people will pursue racism and intolerance during the Middle Ages, sexism and capitalism under the Old Regime, fascism during the nineteenth century, etc. The tendency to carry today's norms back into the past, this tendency that is spread throughout history books and the pages of encyclopedias, impels us, according to the author, to demonize entire historical periods and societies.

With these preliminary points, Jean Sevillia examines, basing his observations on works to which renowed historians have put their names, several negative cliches and comes to analize them with finesse and a great deal of aplomb. In this way, the Middle Ages is not at all considered a dark period of European history, but on the contrary, a period of great creativity. The Crusades were not simply war-like adventures brought about by economic reasons but rather a reaction to the expansion of Islam. The Inquisition would not have been an instrument of cruel oppresion, but on the contrary, a necessary institution for social stability that used to administer justice in accordance with rigorous procedures and that was to a great degree sustained by popular opinion. The "Reyes Catolicos," Ferdinand and Isabella, were not racist or anti-semitic as historians nowadays consider them to have been but rather capable politicos concerned about the religious unity of their Spanish state as enunciated in the universal slogan of the time, "One faith, one law, one king." The destruction of pre-Colombian civilizations would not have been the consequence of the invaders' cruelty and barbarity but a result of the collision between two cultures founded on opposing values-the European Christian world of mercy and faith within divine love and the Inca and Aztec world which was under the sign of merciless deities who demanded thousands of human sacrifices every year.

Several chapters of the book are devoted to the history of France-the Old Regime before the Revolution of 1789, the Resistance at the time of the Second World War, the Algerian war, etc. Each time, the author scrupulously describes the historical contexts, the diversity of the players involved, and the complexity of the facts that are never lined up in accordance with a Manicheistic tendency: everything is bad from one point of view and good from another. For example, the Old Regime of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that was in existence before the Revolution was not the world of absolutism that was so very much censured by the deep gulf that would have existed between the king who was surrounded by a privileged class and the rest of society which was thrown into servitude. The monarchy of this period initiated several political and economic reforms directed against those privileged individuals which were later usurped by the Revolution of 1789 that afterwards instituted a decennary of violence and initiated a plan for a totalitarian society. In each one of his chapters, Jean Sevillia warns against convenient simplification that favors a false depiction of history. Historically Correct is a book that is jam-packed with information and makes one stop and think. Written in a lively and hard-hitting style, people will read it with the enthusiasm usually reserved for a good detective novel.

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