The Age of Revolution, volume 28 of the critical edition of the works of Jacob Burckhardt, is a remarkable document. Comprising 1,100 pages of text and 400 pages of editorial annotations, the book brings together the transcribed sum of Burckhardt's notes for the immensely popular public lectures he held in Basel between 1859 and 1881. The notes consist of basic text from Burckhardt, plus excerpts and paraphrases from historians and contemporaries.

The Revolutionszeitalter is unabashedly a political and military history of the period of war and revolution. It starts with the Seven Years' War, thickens with a very detailed account of the French Revolution, provides a close narrative of Napoleon's rise to power and his conquest of Europe, and ends with the “Wars of Liberation.” Burckhardt, as is well known, resisted the teleological views of the small-Prussian school and chose to stay in Basel rather than go to the University of Berlin as the successor to Leopold von Ranke (Treitschke went in his place). In these lecture notes, we see the full, transnational avante la lettre purview of Burckhardt; his history moves effortlessly among the politics of Germany, France, England, Italy, Spain, and Russia, though it is especially detailed on the first three of these. Prussia plays a role in this story, but France is the main mover and actor, and England the center of resistance. Russia is perhaps underplayed. Prussia is one country among a number (for which, however, the historical sources are especially complete), and Austria is second to England. As regards sources, Burckhardt hardly follows an explicitly ideological line—he draws as easily from Sybel on Prussia as from Taine with regard to the social dimension of the French Revolution. Our categories notwithstanding, nineteenth-century history writing was the work of a European coterie of scholars, who, differences of opinion notwithstanding, read each other's books and trusted each other's evaluations of the evidence.

This was true even when writing contentious contemporary history. The French Revolution was barely seventy years old when Burckhardt gave these lectures, the “Wars of Liberation” not quite fifty. Europe, he thought, was still in the midst of a revolutionary age, and, as he noted, “we want to know on which wave of the great storm we are riding” (p. 11). To Burckhardt, the period 1815 to 1848 seemed but an intermezzo in the great revolutionary drama. Equality was part of what the French Revolution brought, but so, too, was an immense centralization of the state, an intensification of its power, inwardly and outwardly, and the division of Europe into nations capable of genuine and dangerous emotions. Not without reason, he believed the period in which he wrote was marked by a dramatic increase in wealth and speed, and a corresponding sense that everything could be changed. This, he thought, was perhaps the French Revolution's most dangerous heritage, giving it a “volcanic” (p. 352) quality. In previous centuries, contemporaries had to endure only war. But the last three generations had witnessed the making of states and nations, the dramatic change of customs and morals, and the creation of new literatures. Two issues, the national and the social, especially imprinted the current age. And another one, militarism, caused Burckhardt to look back. From his vanishing point, the decisive world-changing moment in Paris was not one of the constitutions, or even the beheading of the king, but the decree for a levée en masse.

One learns, too, that previous generations of historians knew more about some things than we generally do. This is not just a matter of the details of military and political history. It is also a matter of emphasis. Burckhardt pays considerable attention to the partitions of Poland and communicates a sense for how pernicious they then seemed; he brings Spain and Portugal into the story; and, without being pro-Prussia, he does not desist from writing that Austria remained “untouched by German patriotism” (p. 1,103). Unlike some current-day historians, Burckhardt has little positive to say about the Holy Roman Empire in its last decades and essentially pronounces it dead in the 1790s. Not having a peaceful pre-1989 West Germany before him, he also sees little in the Confederation of the Rhine except Napoleon's attempt to “de-organize Germany” (p. 926). He slyly points out that many of the students who joined volunteer units in 1813 were precisely from these middle German states.

It is impossible to do justice to this remarkable book. To read it is to walk into the study of one of the world's greatest historians and have all his excerpts opened, typed up, neatly ordered, interspersed with his insights, and all of this well indexed and commented upon by a team of scholars. There is also a bibliography of works cited by Burckhardt, and in the editorial afterword, we are told that this mass of material was used as a quarry for lectures that were given from memory. One feels humbled. We may, in any case, be grateful to the editors for their careful transcriptions and annotations. They have given us a historical treasure.