Henri Pirenne

Belgian historian

• Born: December 23, 1862
• Birthplace: Verviers, Belgium
• Died: October 24, 1935
• Place of death: Eccle, Belgium

Pirenne altered extant periodization of European history and altered the thinking of medievalists by reminders of the influences of Islam and Byzantium on Western history and of all historians. He diverted historians from undue emphasis on institutional (legal), political, and religious events. The so-called Pirenne thesis has been a major influence on professional historical thinking.

Early Life

Henri Pirenne (ahn-ree pee-rehn) was the first, and ultimately the most distinguished, child born into an unusual bourgeois family in Verviers, Belgium. His father, Lucien Henri, a hard-driving industrialist who operated Belgium’s technically most advanced woolen manufactory, was also bookish, polylingual, learned, and widely traveled. Young Henri’s mother, Marie Duesberg, was the accomplished daughter of his paternal grandfather’s business partner. She came from a less fervently economic, more intellectual lineage than her husband. Since the marriage, which joined Verviers’s two most respected families, was less a marriage of convenience than one based on mutual respect and affection, young Henri enjoyed a nourishing familial environment.

Romantic, bookish, but gregarious and observant, Pirenne not only came to know Verviers’s urban workers but also explored the surrounding Franchimont region, whose peasants had always been freemen. At seven, his formal education began at the local Collège Communal, pedagogically French, where he displayed a remarkable memory and prizewinning excellence in Latin, German, Greek, French, geography, and history, but notable weakness in mathematics, thus aborting his father’s hopes that he would proceed to engineering, helping to upgrade the mill’s technology. Pirenne’s father, therefore, suggested that his son study law at the University of Liège.

Matriculating in 1879, Pirenne subsequently performed brilliantly in all subjects but swiftly came under the influence of historians Godefroid Kurth and Paul Fredericq: Kurth was fervently Roman Catholic, and Fredericq was vociferously Protestant. Each taught superbly, however, and both, trained in the new critical German historical methodologies, identified with Leipzig’s great Theodor Mommsen and Berlin’s masterful Leopold von Ranke, helped further a renaissance in Belgian university life. Not less propitious was the amazing Belgian archival collection somewhat earlier assembled by Paris-born and self-taught Prosper Gachard. It was invaluable to the Liège historians later, most particularly to Pirenne.

In 1881, Pirenne qualified with greatest distinction (by examination) to proceed toward the doctorate; directed by Kurth, he published his first monograph at the age of nineteen in 1882. Completing his doctorate in 1883, he was urged by his mentors to continue medieval studies in Paris at the École Pratique des Hautes Études and the École des Chartres, which, after extensive scholarly travels, he did, again performing with excellence. Essentially his career was well launched with a scholarship to study at the very heart of the modern revolution in historical studies: in Germany at the University of Leipzig, then at the University of Berlin.

Life’s Work

Berlin meant Pirenne’s direct contact with the elite of nineteenth century historians: Ranke, Gustav von Schmoller, Georg Waitz, and a host of young rising historians. Then in 1885, through the indefatigable efforts of Kurth, Pirenne received a professorship at the University of Liège, teaching Latin paleography and diplomatic as well as historical exercises for the humanities division. Master of French, German, Dutch, Latin, and Greek, he also read Italian and English; master too of paleography, philosophy, and toponomy (the origins of regional place names and languages), he had, as they expected, excelled his mentors. However distinguished a future awaited him at Liège, he was within a year “stolen” by Fredericq for a post in the less distinguished University of Ghent, where he would remain until retirement in 1930. Advancement in academic rank was one reason for the move but was less important than Fredericq himself and the opportunity to teach his own courses on medieval history and the history of Belgium of which in time he would be applauded as the nation’s premier historian.

Two loves pinned Pirenne to Ghent: first, as a medievalist, his recognition of its immense economic importance from the twelfth into the fourteenth centuries and the economic revivification it again was enjoying while he was there and second, his marriage in 1887 to Jenny Vanderhaegen, an alert, shrewd, gracious woman who industriously protected and advanced her husband’s career. They would have four sons, one a historian of note.

Thus settled, Pirenne extended associational activities promoting collections of Belgian historical documents, added the teaching of urban economic history, and published a series of originally documented monographs, which exposed previous scholarship as myth and thereby promoted controversies of the sort that would mark his entire career. He also produced a monumental Belgian bibliography of extant documents from dozens of fields up to the year 1580 plus a history of Belgium and the Low Countries up to 1830 that instantly won international acclaim. Further, his monographic history on medieval Dinant became a model of urban history because of its concentration on social, political, legal, and economic affairs a precursor of total history, later to characterize the Annales school of historical research that has enjoyed international recognition.

Disciplined, a splendid teacher whose students’ scholarly careers confirmed this active in meliorating German and French scholars after embitterments of the Franco-Prussian War, active also in a host of professional associations, Pirenne, with the publication in the Revue historique of his “L’Origine des constitutions urbaine au moyen âge,” by 1893 ranked among the greater European historians. Already he had established the thesis that urban development was the key to understanding the history not only of Belgium and the Netherlands but also of European civilization in general. Additionally, besides scores of book reviews, lectures, and meetings, he published eighteen major articles on aspects of the Middle Ages between 1894 and 1899.

Of these articles, the most important conveyed Pirenne’s conviction that European urban life, based largely on Roman towns, was virtually extinguished between the sixth and eighth centuries and that a general economic revival in the tenth and eleventh centuries produced and centered on the town, a new institution in the Middle Ages, one that precipitated the decline of feudal institutions and social structure. The second portion of the article (1895) focused on historical forces that he regarded as responsible for the rise of the town and the emergence of the bourgeoisie.

While this so-called mercantile-settlement theory gained some adherents, it initially was rebuffed by most French historians, while those in Great Britain clung to earlier Germanic explanations of town origins. Nevertheless, it commenced another of Pirenne’s shifts of historians’ emphases. This theory was also incorporated into the first of what eventually became seven volumes of his Histoire de Belgique (1900-1932; history of Belgium); the initial volume alone made him Belgium’s national historian and a figure of international professional renown, with accompanying honors and awards. His writing continued, of which the most significant was his Les Anciennes Démocraties des Pays-Bas (1910; Belgian Democracy: Its Early History , 1915). He continued in these works to reject traditional history as mere chronologizing, as a lexicon of biographies, or tales of politics and wars, rather emphasizing that events were best depicted as a complex interweaving of a people’s collective activities.

Congenitally optimistic, a meliorist through his professional contacts of Franco-German-Belgian relations, he naïvely dismissed possibilities of war in 1914, let alone the invasion of Belgium, or the instant obedience that German historians lent their government. For passive resistance, both Pirenne and Fredericq were arrested in 1916 and confined in German camps. There, over the next thirty-two months, Pirenne learned Russian, expanded his perspectives beyond Western Europe, and became intrigued with comparative interactions of Eastern and Western cultures.

Free in 1918, Pirenne continued to ask when historically the break came between the Roman world and “the First Europe,” a query he answered in his Les Villes du moyen age: Éssai d’histoire économique et sociale (1927; Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade , 1925). His next major study, partially completed after his retirement in 1930, Mahomet et Charlemagne (1937; Mohammed and Charlemagne , 1939), demonstrated that the Roman world lasted longer than traditional histories indicated and that it was Islam, not the Germanic invasions, that finally destroyed it. He was unable to revise the work, for, stricken with pneumonia, this distinguished, indomitable, unassuming man died of heart failure on October 24, 1935, in Eccle, Belgium.

Significance

In an era of great historians, Pirenne ranks among the greatest for his dramatic and provocative thesis that the accepted periodization of European history was erroneous; that the Roman world lasted centuries longer than had been believed; that its disruption was the work of militantly spreading Islam, not a consequence of the Germanic invaders who, in his view, assimilated quite readily into Roman civilization; and that the revival of Europe from rather backward agrarianism was the result of a revival of trade, responsibility for which should be assigned to the emergence of new European urban life and the activities of its commercial (or bourgeois) citizenry. Although controversy still continues over his thesis and there have been factual revisions of some of its elements, most of its main features are widely viewed as basically sound.

Few historical perspectives have so dramatically changed historical thinking and research or so massively shifted the focus of professional attention to economic and social history away from literal chronologies and literal political and institutional history. Historians accept superannuation of their research and syntheses; undoubtedly, Pirenne would have agreed that on very minimal available evidence on the Merovingian and Carolingian periods, he at times both overstated and understated his basic thesis. However, he unquestionably raised and substantially answered fresh questions on medieval history and decisive changes within the Mediterranean-European world and altered perspectives in the profession to which he so committed his life.

Bibliography

Boyce, Gray C. “The Legacy of Henri Pirenne.” Byzantion 15 (1940-1941): 449-464. An early, scholarly, well-written, appreciative but by no means uncritical analysis of Pirenne’s studies on medieval studies as well as on the historical profession in general.

Clark, Stuart, ed. The Annales School. 4 vols. New York: Routledge, 1999. A good introduction to the Annales school of history and historical research, of which Pirenne was a forerunner. Includes a bibliography and illustrations.

Delogu, Paolo. An Introduction to Medieval History. Translated by Matthew Moran. London: Duckworth, 2002. Delogu includes a few pages about Pirenne’s work in his book tracing the origin of the idea of the Middle Ages.

Havighurst, Alfred F., ed. The Pirenne Thesis: Analysis, Criticism, and Revision. Boston: D. C. Heath, 1958. With excellent introductory materials, fine footnoting throughout, and excellent bibliographical references, this brief volume not only includes excerpts from Pirenne’s work but also compacts a distinguished range of fine, very readable scholarly reactions to it.

Lyon, Bryce. Henri Pirenne: A Biographical and Intellectual Study. Ghent, Belgium: E. Story-Scientia, 1974. A major work and as fine a study as exists on any major modern historian. Contains a superb summation of the strengths, weaknesses, and legacies of Pirenne’s work in chapters 11 and 12. Includes photographs, citation footnotes, an excellent select bibliography, and an index.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Origins of the Middle Ages: Pirenne’s Challenge to Gibbon. New York: W. W. Norton, 1972. Well written by an authoritative Pirenne expert and medievalist in his own right, this work provides excellent perspective on problems of reinterpreting or delineating the origins of the Middle Ages. Contains a good bibliography and an index.

Pirenne, Henri. Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade. Translated by Frank D. Halsey. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1925. For all of his immense scholarship, Pirenne wrote to be read by an intelligent public. It is essential for serious readers to read Lyon’s biography, but there is no substitute for reading Pirenne himself. As was usual in his writing, the text itself generally suffices for documentation; there are few notes, only a modest select bibliography and index.

Riising, Anne. “The Fate of Henri Pirenne’s Thesis on the Consequence of Islamic Expansion.” Classica et Mediaevalia 13 (1952): 87-130. Riising, a Danish journalist, here examines in greater detail than anyone the arguments pro and con respecting this critical aspect of Pirenne’s major thesis about the severance of Europe from the Roman Mediterranean world in the Merovingian and Carolingian periods. Her purpose, since she agrees that the last word has not been said, is to review the extant evidence, which she manages with great skill and clarity.

Wickham, Chris. Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400-800. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. This history of the Middle Ages includes examination of Pirenne’s work.