Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/104

 but in contemporary France, under the influence of Gabriel Monod, educated in the German universities — for him the Franco-German war was a personal tragedy (see his « Français et Allemands »). Opposed to the spirit of the Sorbonne, which was considered antiquated, the Bcole des Hautes Etudes took the leadership of the movement. Never was a stranger discipline more impressively exercised over young minds as here: Monod himself, my own good old teacher Charles Bemont, Giry, the author of the best treatise on diplomacy ever written, that consistent doubter of martyrology, Monseigneur Duchesne (who possessed more than a touch of Voltairian irony), minor ones such as the searcher of institutions, Thevenin, the more neglected Roy, were representative of the current. Good chronology for selected proved facts, not unconnected with the imperative need of a rounded French form, but a certain mistrust of general ideas and a bitter contempt for all that bore the appearance of literature (and literature was dilettantism), that was our creed.

Against the proceedings of the Roman historian of Roman history, Ettore Pais, a new Italian school, influenced by the presence of Belloch as a teacher in Rome, gave the opposite history of republican and imperial Rome, by Monsieur de Sanctis. Here, too, everything had to be renewed and only critically elaborated facts could be presented as authenticated truths. The era of higher conceptions, which were considered dangerous, was carefully closed.

But in that same Germany which generated these methods and imposed these inviolable limits, a cry of revolt resounded, heralding, in Berlin and Leipzig, the commencement of a hard and long-contested struggle between two factions of historians. Karl Lamprecht had begun to preach.