ACROSS MEXICO, ITALY AND BRITAIN: CLAVIJERO VERSUS ROBERTSON

This essay focuses on the plural practices of history writing which took shape in a broad space between Europe and America, ranging from Edinburgh to Mexico City, and back to the Pontifical States in Italy. The European intellectual context was profoundly altered during the 1770s and 1780s by a combination of political, social and cultural changes. The principal events of the period include the suppression of the Society of Jesus (1773), one of the main intellectual agents of Catholic faith and culture, which entailed a deep reorganization of the relationships between Rome and the Catholic monarchies; the beginning of the American Revolution (1776), which constituted the first defeat of European imperialism on a world scale; and the start of the French Revolution (1789), which soon came to be interpreted as a direct result of the spirit of the Enlightenment. This produced a profound reconfiguration of the intellectual poles of the Enlightenment: whereas Scotland had to rethink its own position within the British Empire, both at the margins of Britishness and at the gates of America, the disappearance of the Society of Jesus, following its expulsion from the Bourbon States, substantially modified the contours of scholarly life in the Catholic world, not least with the arrival in the Papal States of nearly four thousand Jesuits, mostly coming from Spanish America. All these events were crucial for conceptualizations of Europe, its history and its relationship with the rest of the world. The changes provoked by these shifts contributed to shape, for the next two centuries, the cultural self-image of Europe vis-à-vis the world and constituted the field in which criticism of Eurocentrism could take root—from the late eighteenth century to contemporary postmodern accounts of history.

The debate between William Robertson and Francisco Javier Clavijero on American history took place in the broad and polemical context that Antonello Gerbi has labelled, in his classical work of 1955, as the “dispute of the New World”.Footnote ¹ It is not my intention to retrace here this well-known story, but my goal is to connect it to the historiographical debate then at stake in Enlightenment Europe: by reflecting on what constituted the historical evidence of the New World, I want to shift attention to two concurrent régimes historiographiques at work at the very moment in which history starts to become a discipline.Footnote ²

Clavijero, one among the new Creole voices of the period, changed the rules of the game, entering a stage which, since the Renaissance, had been the prerogative of European scholars. As a Jesuit and a Creole, he also raised questions about the ways of writing history, its method, scope, evidence and proofs: what is history? Is it a collection of chronicles? Has it to be natural and/or moral? Or rather a philosophical history? When does history start? What are the instruments—the reliable sources—on which it might found its legitimacy? Central to these questions is the problematic relationship between the author, the person who writes, and the subject of writing: “who has the right to speak for whom?”—asks Marshall Sahlins in his inquiry about the encounter between Captain Cook and the Australian “natives”.Footnote ³ And what does it mean to be a Creole and missionary in the field/out in the New World, in relation and in opposition to a European philosopher in his study? By directly or indirectly raising questions of these kinds, Clavijero engendered an engrainage polémique,Footnote ⁴ full of political as well as epistemological consequences, which opened up a different historical approach. His work invites us to reflect on the role played by “witnesses” and “men in the field” in the fabrication of history and in the historiographical debate.

Clavijero's Storia antica del Messico, originally written in Spanish but published in Italian in 1780–81, was one of the first and major contributions from ex-Jesuit Creoles to historiography.Footnote ⁵ It was translated into English by Charles Cullen, one of the sons of the well-known Edinburgh physician William Cullen, and published in London in 1787.Footnote ⁶ While endorsing the two-century-long historical tradition of Jesuits writing about America that began with José de Acosta's Historia natural y moral de las Indias (1590), Clavijero challenged the views of the New World diffused by Enlightenment philosophes such as Buffon, de Pauw, Raynal and Robertson, whose History of America first appeared in 1777. What is particularly interesting in the dialogue with Robertson is that the Scottish historian, who generally refused to address his critics so as to claim a position of impartiality, replied to the Mexican Jesuit in 1788, the year following Cullen's translation, in the fifth and last revised edition of his History.Footnote ⁷ Central to his reaction was—I would argue—a defense of his own historical method. The English translation of Clavijero's history became part of this dialogue, as Cullen's brief introduction drew an explicit comparison between the two historians. The same was true for the numerous reviews published in the main British journals of the period and in such great works of organization of knowledge as the Encyclopaedia Britannica—whose article on “America”, published in the third edition, was based on the authority of Clavijero, in contrast to the same entry published in the second edition ten years earlier, that was clearly under Robertson's influence.Footnote ⁸

An analysis of the historiographical confrontation between Clavijero and Robertson needs to emphasize the different geopolitical and geocultural spaces in which they were placed. Robertson wrote his History of America from an intellectual centre, the Scottish laboratory which gave shape to modern historiography,Footnote ⁹ and from the dominant geopolitical position of the British Empire, at that time the strongest and richest empire in the European world. When he published his History of America the Presbyterian minister was already a central figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, principal of the University of Edinburgh and king's historiographer for Scotland, as well as a very well-known historian everywhere in Europe, for his History of Scotland (1759) and especially for his History of Charles V (1769), identified by Richard Sher as “a monumental event in Enlightenment print culture”.Footnote ¹⁰

The peripheral position of Clavijero should also be reassessed. Clavijero wrote from a double exile, from a double position of being “dominated”: as a Jesuit, he was first expelled from Mexico, by the decree of Charles III in 1767, and then banished from the Society of Jesus itself, after its suppression by Clemente XIV's bull Dominus ac Redemptor.Footnote ¹¹ However, this double marginality locates Clavijero at the heart of another intellectual world, the antiquarian and erudite one, which provided him with the epistemological tools for rethinking “how to write the history of the New World”.Footnote ¹² The collections of printed material (including Mexican codices) in Rome or Bologna, among the richest in the world, attracted erudite scholars from all over Europe—among whom the names of Johann Joachim Winkelmann and Alexander von Humboldt are just the best known. This made the Pontifical States a lively intellectual hub for the writing of history, and a crucial lieu des savoirs antiquaires.Footnote ¹³ Moreover, from Bologna, Clavijero could talk with other erudite ex-Jesuits in exile, who had also landed in the Pontifical States and were engaged in writing the histories of various parts of America, from Chile to Guatemala, Argentina, Ecuador, Philippines, et cetera.Footnote ¹⁴

With a proper relocation of Robertson and Clavijero within these European intellectual dynamics, it is then possible to question the traditional opposition between a Protestant and progressive anglophone world and a Catholic and obscurantist Mediterranean one, such as the leyenda negra had construed it.Footnote ¹⁵ It is also a way to consider Europe as part of an enlarged world, rich in different historiographical styles.Footnote ¹⁶ Finally, the geographic, social, religious and cultural positions of Clavijero and Robertson invite us to reflect on the conditions for establishing intellectual authority and recognition: what does it mean, in the late eighteenth century, to write history either from Edinburgh or from Bologna? To publish in London or in Cesena? How is their specific status construed? On what instruments does each author build the veracity of his statements and legitimacy of his discourse? What are the epistemological implications in the political arena of their specific discourses?

A TELESCOPE FROM THE MOON

When Robertson published his History of America in 1777, in the middle of the war between Britain and its American colonies, he stood at the crossroad of two debates. On the one hand, he helped shape a new conception of the history of humankind, one that outlined the universal progress of societies from an original condition of savagery, through the successive stages of hunting, herding, agriculture and commerce. This stage theory, delineated by Adam Smith in his Glasgow Lectures to chart the historical evolution of legal, social, and political systems, can be regarded as a specific form of philosophical history, and a distinctive feature of the Scottish Enlightenment. By comparing societies, it focused on subjects that until then had remained the preserve of the erudite—such as commerce, law, manners, arts and religion—giving them a central position in a history that posed a contemporary question: how to understand the process of civilization. Provided with these new tools, Robertson took part in another, and already well-nourished, European debate about the American continent, its nature, its past and its future. In this he sided with Buffon in considering the inhabitants of the New World as “savages” living in the first hunter stage: a characterization from which even the empires of Mexico and Peru, which had no knowledge of metalworking or of cattle-rearing, did not escape.Footnote ¹⁷

The framework of the stages, developed by Adam Smith as a rational hypothesis,Footnote ¹⁸ was connected to a conscious distancing technique, which Reinhalt Koselleck has identified as characteristic of Enlightenment historiography. The new conception of progress produced, according to the German historian, an acceleration in “time-sense”, which separated the “space of experience” of the past from the “horizon of expectation” for the future: history could no more be magistra vitae, because in the very logic of progress the exemplary gives way to the unique, so that, in François Hartog's concise formulation, “le passé devient dépassé”.Footnote ¹⁹

The experience and organization of distance was a common foundation of the Enlightenment histories, used to observe, at the same time, the unity and difference in humankind, thus tracing a path from physical anthropology to the study of social and historical man. In a perspective of absolute distancing, Voltaire's Traité de métaphysique introduced the fictio of an extraterrestrial, capable, precisely because he was a non-human figure, of observing humankind with an objective, detached and all-encompassing gaze.Footnote ²⁰ In his notes about political geography, Turgot employed the idea of a telescopic view from the Moon, in order to articulate the relationship between “natural men” and “man” in general, as a being capable of progress and civilization.Footnote ²¹ The telescope allowed different scales, from faraway to proximity: from the distant view of the globe, it progressively reduced its scope, focusing on different peoples in their various stages of historical development.Footnote ²²

The Scottish stadial history was a specific form of long-distance perspective, which had much in common with Turgot's telescope, because it adopted a view that encompassed all lands and all ages in order to examine the historical relationships between cultures. Here, the extra-human fiction was discarded. What remained was the hypothetical construction illustrated by Smith, which shifted the focus from man's origins to his historical process.Footnote ²³ Through the technique of distancing, the European traveller could also become a philosopher and a historian of the species, as illustrated by Rousseau's Second Discourse, in a passage that Claude Lévy-Strauss has identified as the foundation of modern anthropology.Footnote ²⁴ In a 1755 manuscript on the origins of languages, which developed a stadial theory similar in some respects to that of the Scots, Rousseau summarized the point incisively: “Quand on veut étudier les hommes, il faut regarder près de soi; mais pour étudier l’homme, il faut apprendre à porter sa vue au loin: il faut d’abord observer les différences, pour découvrir les propriétés”.Footnote ²⁵

Rousseau's central point here is about how best to articulate the unity of humankind and the differentiation of human cultures, which was also the crucial question from Robertson's historical perspective. The idea of stadial progress that Robertson developed in his work explained the differences between societies in historical terms, as a result of environmental and sociopolitical factors; but it also emphasized the contrast between the stagnancy of savage Americans and the dynamism of civil Europeans. This approach created a significant tension. The comparative perspective, on which it was based, made it possible to consider the savage and the civilized man on the same line of development, as the former could become civil through the process of history. However, it also underscored the persistent and strong differences that existed among peoples in the eighteenth century.Footnote ²⁶

In such a picture, Amerindians represented—as Locke had suggested—the mirror of the Europeans in their beginnings, thus providing the evidence of a primitive stage no records of which were to be found in European history. In this sense, they were the living archives of an otherwise lost past, which completed the “great map of mankind” in its full development and gradation.Footnote ²⁷ However, their failure to progress appeared an unresolved problem, a lacuna in history. American savages were, thus, at the starting point of progress made by Europe, while their negative images reinforced the great divide separating Europeans from the rest of the world. The perspective from a distance, encompassing the whole history of humankind at a glance, reinforced the underlying gap between American and European societies, which were therefore called upon to play a decisive part in the civilizing process of America. By emphasizing the part played by European expansion in Atlantic history, Robertson gave a historical justification to the providential role of European colonization in America.Footnote ²⁸

The structure of the History of America, which starts with the European discovery and conquest, mirrors Robertson's historical project and the place covered by the New World in it. Robertson's account of the destruction of the American tribes in the third book was followed by an analysis of their culture and society in the fourth, while the campaigns of Cortés and Pizarro, described in the fifth and sixth books, were followed by an examination of Inca and Aztec societies in the seventh book. The negative description of the savages, on the one hand, and that of Mexican and Peruvian barbarism, on the other, placed immediately after the account of their destruction, significantly mitigated the consequences of the conquest. This order essentially deprived all the Americans of any active role in their own history. Static America only began to progress in Book VIII, which closed the History,Footnote ²⁹ focusing on the consequences of Spanish colonialism, from the destruction of the Atzec and Inca empires to the improvement of the whole of American society in almost every field of knowledge, economics and morals that occurred especially during the last century of Bourbon rule.

This allows us to articulate better two different but connected aspects of distance that we have previously seen at work: one corresponding to the scale of analysis, the other representing distance as difference. The conceptual framework of a philosophical history aims at validating the theory of stages, and that requires a specific scope and scale: the history of humankind cannot be anything else than a global history. Like the other Enlightenment philosophes, Robertson also “se voit en peintre d’histoire”, presenting himself as an impartial and detached observer, out of time and history, who “saisit dans une vision synoptique la vérité de son objet”.Footnote ³⁰

IN SEARCH OF HISTORICAL EVIDENCE

A perspective from distance allowed, in Robertson's view, an account of the general course of history, and showed that human advancement was not determined by the plans of individuals but by the force of “unintended consequences”.Footnote ³¹ It is precisely this broad scale of analysis that determines Robertson's lack of interest in “unpleasant and uninstructive” details, when he speaks of America, where the lack of division of labour renders its people uniform and undifferentiated. Robertson considered it “highly improper” for a historian to illustrate the precise condition of each little community and “to investigate every minute circumstance which contributes to form the character of its members”. These “details of immeasurable and tiresome extent” are to be avoided. The historian, instead, is called upon to paint larger pictures, embracing in one broad gaze all the Americans, from Canada to Cape Horn, which have “such a near resemblance, that they may be painted with the same features”.Footnote ³²

However, when the object of study is the history of Europe, the gaze of the historian has to be closer and much more attentive to the differences and specificities deemed to characterize advanced “nations”.Footnote ³³ It has to tackle not the static condition of savagery, but the dynamism and singularity of civil society, which, like Hume, Robertson considered to “compose the most instructive and most interesting part” of history.Footnote ³⁴ It is here, I think, that there emerges the other side of the concept of distance of which Mark Salber Phillips writes, one based on “the dynamics of sympathy and reason”, where the philosophical abstraction meets “representational immediacy”.Footnote ³⁵ The gap between Europe and America has the most radical epistemological consequences for Robertson's historical method. At the core of A View of the Progress of Society in Europe, which introduces The History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V, are the main steps through which European societies progress after the fall of the Roman Empire, and create the present “great political system”:

The historian–philosopher, who has to disclose those “causes and events” that are responsible for the refinement of Europe, faced a crucial asymmetry with the past. Robertson's careful use of rhetoric indicates the significance of this: whereas “order” is opposed to “confusion”, and “refinement” counters “barbarism”, a third factor emerges, which does not find any correspondence in ancient times: “singularity”. Singularity comes out of history; it is the specific characteristic of modernity, a dynamic element that is set against the uniformity of savagery. The point here is, first, to individuate which societies could distinguish themselves, and, then, to show how they became civil. The historical concept of nation emerges within the context of the search for individuality. That is why the historian of Europe (in contrast with the historian of America), while contemplating the general course of things, has to be acquainted with specificities. The universal influence of the same causes and events explained the “surprising resemblance among nations of Europe in their interior police, and foreign operations”. However, “without a distinct knowledge of the peculiar form and genius of their civil government, a great part of their transactions must appear altogether mysterious and inexplicable”.Footnote ³⁷

This gap between European and American histories raises the question of the relevant sources for historical evidence, an aspect central to Robertson's preoccupations, which he approached in various parts of his History of America. In his Preface on the historical method Robertson states that the attention to sources is a “duty” the historian “owes the Public”, a point that he reinforces in the following “Catalogue of Spanish Books and Manuscripts” and in the “Notes and Illustrations”, where documents are closely discussed and compared.

It is in the elaboration of his philosophical history that Robertson legitimates his sources, by binding together the writing of history and the existence of written documents. For him, the arrival of Europeans coincided with the introduction of writing in the New World, and therefore with the very possibility for the American continent to have a history. In Enlightenment culture, writing and print assumed a progressive and universal value, as fully illustrated by Condorcet, who identified them as emancipatory agents of change.Footnote ³⁸ This means that writing and print create history: there is no history without and before literary documents, or, better, history starts with them. Like David Hume with English history, and Edward Gibbon with the history of ancient Rome, Robertson took great care to distinguish between documented history and history “before writing”, which belonged to the field of legend and fable. He first tested this method in his History of Scotland, then in his history of Europe, which he intended to base on “facts”; finally he reasserted the point in his history of ancient India.Footnote ³⁹ But once applied to the New World, and within the framework of an imperial power relationship, the Enlightened idea of print could become a cultural means of imperial expansion towards spaces and peoples “without history”.Footnote ⁴⁰ Because the Americans had not known a “proper” form of writing, American history could then be written by Europeans on a blank board, on “a blank savage page”. According to Michel de Certeau, the absence of the “writing among the others” created the condition of/for the “writing of the others”: a writing, a history, that conquers.Footnote ⁴¹

The relationship between the lack of writing and the inability to express abstract ideas was central to Robertson's analysis. Mexican paintings were nothing else than a form of “picture-writing”, more refined than the one developed by the north American Indians, but still extremely rough, and for this reason defective: “they represent things, not words. They exhibit images to the eye, not ideas to the understanding”. As Robertson further explained, “the conceptions of the mind had no corporal form, and as long as picture-writing could not convey an idea of these, it must have been a very imperfect art”. If Mexican painters had started to employ “few signs of conventions”, “they had not proceeded far beyond the first stage in the progress which must be completed before any people can be ranked among polished nations”.Footnote ⁴² With all their limitations, the first sources of American history were provided by the Spaniards.

Following a similar reasoning, Robertson could also explain the failure of the Spanish clergy to communicate “the knowledge of true religion to the Indians”. The ignorance and over-zealousness of the first missionaries was partially responsible for this failure, but it is the “limited understanding” of the Amerindians that made them unable to comprehend Christian articles of faith, too complex and abstract for them.Footnote ⁴³ In a conception of history such as that of the four stages, Christianity, as well as writing, could only appear when the progress of civilization was well advanced. Christian religion and the art of writing went hand in hand in Robertson's narrative, and marked together the history of civilization.

CLOSENESS AND EXPERIENCE

The different evaluation of the role of missionaries and of the capabilities of Amerindians in understanding Christian religion is central to Clavijero's polemics with Robertson. The Jesuit Creole opposed to the armchair historian his own experience and direct observation and knowledge: he had taught the Indians and had met not only many good Christians among them, but also priests who had received the sacraments, despite Robertson's assertions to the contrary. The Scot's opinions were contradicted by the facts.

It is important to emphasize that Clavijero differs from Robertson in three major respects: first, he does not pretend to be a historian of humankind, but presents himself as a specialist and an expert on America. Opposing the “philosophical histories” of the Enlightenment, his work is encapsulated within an antiquarian definition of the métier d’historien. Second, the epistemological framework of his work remains that of a conception of human history understood as an illustration/application of sacred history to God's creatures. The fact that he sees Americans as belonging to the human species is not a problem for him, in line with the long tradition inaugurated by Acosta. Finally, it is as a Creole that he speaks. Thus, to Robertson's “distanciation”, he replied by using closeness in a threefold way: closeness rooted in experience and direct testimony; closeness derived from the fact that he can speak on the behalf of all the Americans; and closeness in providing evidence, as he is the one who knows and brings the sources from America to Europe. In the categories recently proposed by Phillips for analysing historical distance—the formal, the affective, the ideological and the conceptualFootnote ⁴⁴—what seems to be shaping Clavijero's historical account is first of all his emotional approach, which is also a political and a personal commitment.

Clavijero aimed, first of all, to provide evidence of a history in America before the conquest, which meant that he closed his narrative where Robertson began his own. The Storia antica del Messico was published in Cesena—an important centre in the Pontifical States for the publication of erudite works—and dedicated “by a Mexican” (as it is emphasized from the very outset) to a Mexican institution, the “reale e pontificia università degli Studi di Messico”, considered to be the only place that had the tools and the authority for judging Mexican history. However, such a dedication also included a denunciation: the absence of a chair of antiquities meant, Clavijero pointed out, the loss of comprehension of the characters and figures of Mexican paintings, even in Mexico itself. This, in turn, had made the task of the historian very difficult, if not impossible. Clavijero urged, then, the Mexican university to constitute a museum, in which to preserve and study the ancient statues and the ancient documents, gathered by former missionaries and Indians, as well as any other antiquity discovered in subsequent excavations: such was, according to him, the only solid basis for history.Footnote ⁴⁵

The Storia antica del Messico consists of four volumes (in the Italian edition, and two in the English), prefaced by a discussion on historical method, which parallels and challenges Robertson's own Preface, precisely through its emphasis on direct knowledge and the access of locals to original documents, and through its “Account of the writers on the Ancient History of Mexico”, in which Clavijero reversed the authorities of the Scottish Principal, putting Mexican paintings and codices at the top of his list of original, and therefore most reliable, sources. He then opposed their consistency to the European “false images and figures”, “such as those of the famous Theodore Bry”, which encouraged “fictions” belonging to “romance not history”.Footnote ⁴⁶ Clavijero's main text consists of ten books, chronologically ordered, from the late sixth century to the capture of the last Mexican monarch in 1521, and closed by nine “Dissertations”, dedicated to Count Gian Rinaldo Carli—author of the Lettere Americane (1780), which compared pre-Columbian history to Italian antiquities.Footnote ⁴⁷ These repeated, in polemical and oratorical form, the topic previously expounded as “historical truth”. Each dissertation took as an argument one of the themes of the Enlightenment “thesis” about America, rejecting the “philosophical chimeras, invented by the restless intellects of our century”. Clavijero challenged the supposed strangeness and malignant nature of the American continent, the assumption that American animals were small, paying much attention to the question of how America was peopled—an aspect dismissed by Robertson, who did not want to enter into those “regions of conjectures” not belonging to the realm of a historian. He insisted in particular on the physical and moral constitution of the Americans, their culture and religion, not forgetting to remind his readers of the “true” origin of syphilis.Footnote ⁴⁸

Clavijero used the instruments of criticism as elaborated by European Enlightenment against Enlightenment itself. From a rhetorical point of view, he followed a twofold strategy, both ironical and provocative, by denouncing the whimsical theories of Robertson, and the other European philosophers, who never left their countries but who claimed the right to write the history of others. Whereas Robertson made the Jesuits Acosta or Lafitau his sarcastic targets, arguing that, given their aim to convert people, they did not benefit from the necessary philosophical distance for the study of man, it was both as a missionary and as an American voice “in the field” that Clavijero undertook to ridicule and to “provincialize” histories produced by an armchair scholar in, and from, Enlightened Europe. Clavijero created an imaginary and sarcastic dialogue with, on the one hand, the European philosophers and, on the other hand, his potential reader. This rhetoric, which continually resorted to pathos, to exclamation and moral judgement, led to the condemnation of the opposing party in an imaginary court.

In order to strengthen a régime d’historicité alternative to that of the European Enlightenment, Clavijero had to shape his authority differently. One of his literary strategies was to found his legitimacy on his status as a Creole—like other authors from the Americas, from Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin to Samuel Stanhope Smith and Benjamin Smith Barton, who all published in the 1780s: his own experience allows him to argue about his direct and close knowledge of the “native” inhabitants of the New World. He could understand and speak the Náhuatl, and, as a missionary, had taught Indian pupils in the college of San Gregorio in Mexico City between 1758 and 1762, and in the college of St Francis Xavier in Puebla in 1762–3.

The renewed attention paid to the most ancient history of Aztecs led Clavijero to adopt an alternative historiographical perspective, which began to question the alleged direct relationship between writing—one form of writing—and history. While denouncing the distorted vision through which the written culture of Europe failed to recognize the worth of other cultures, he upheld the use of different sources and the interpretative value of material culture. In this sense, his approach marked a break from the methods of Enlightenment. If, as Jorge Cañizares suggests, the definition of history as offered by the Enlightenment could be interpreted as a rejection not only of the validity of Indian sources, but, even more radically still, of the validity of any other system of knowledge based on classifications which differ from the European system, then Clavijero broke with this model.Footnote ⁴⁹ He introduced types of source that differed from those considered legitimate by Robertson, such as iconographical, archaeological and pictographical ones. In this way, he challenged the writing of a world history from a distance, and adopted a close view, concentrating on what Robertson considered to be boring and useless details of savages. Clavijero presented himself as a kind of expert in communication, a role the recent historiography of the Society has identified as characteristic of the Jesuits’ position as agents of acculturation.Footnote ⁵⁰ He thus paved the way for a decentralized history of European expansion, in opposition to that of the Enlightenment.

However, by justifying the evangelizing mission and by maintaining a constant parallel with European classical antiquity, Clavijero remained within a Eurocentric perspective. So my interpretation differs from that of Cañizares, in what I perceive as the epistemological limits of Clavijero's Christian universalism.

“THIS NICE CONTROVERSY”

In his response to Clavijero in 1788, Robertson basically reasserted his point of view and his historiographical method, while correcting only factual aspects in the notes. If the question of the computation of time in Mexico was the only concession to Clavijero,Footnote ⁵¹ Robertson added a long footnote on historical paintings, in answer to the Jesuit's “great asperity”: not only was it a matter of fact that the preserved Mexican paintings were very few in number—and yet he pointed up his discovery of two unknown original collections—but the crucial point was that the codex remained a “questionable authority”: “the annals of a nation conveyed in this manner” were so “meager and imperfect” that it was impossible to rely on them.Footnote ⁵² Clavijero appeared to Robertson “a weak credulous Bigot”, as he characterized the Mexican Jesuit in a private letter.Footnote ⁵³ In the paragraph inserted at the end of his 1788 Preface, he publicly expressed his disappointment about Clavijero's work, which he viewed as partial and full of “zeal” for the honour of his native country—in opposition to Robertson's own effort of impartiality. Despite his expertise as a local (he “seemed to possess the means of obtaining accurate information”—Robertson emphasizes the mere appearance of the act), Clavijero did not add anything new to Acosta's and Herrera's ancient histories of the Mexican empire, except fanciful conjectures derived from Torquemada and Botourini, and Indian paintings and symbols of the most doubtful origin.Footnote ⁵⁴

To substantiate this, Robertson appealed to the authority of Edward Gibbon, defined as one of “the most eminent historians of the age”.Footnote ⁵⁵ This reference allowed him to reassert that “objective” history did not take its sources from direct observation, but rather through the critical analysis of the texts that were necessary to the historian to produce evidence in proof of his assertions. Without this, it would be possible to write an amusing tale, but one could not be said to have composed an “authentic” history. One and half centuries later, Arnaldo Momigliano, in his mostly influential historiographical reflections, would legitimize Robertson's view, by recognizing Gibbon, Hume and Robertson himself as the fathers of modern historiography.Footnote ⁵⁶

In taking such a stance, Robertson reacted not merely against the prise de parole of a Creole, but also against those who, at the very heart of the British world, endorsed the view of the value of experience. It was in the name of experience that Charles Cullen justified his English translation of Clavijero's history, his criticism focusing on the question of the historical perspective. The “translator's preface” made the point that it was impossible to put order in the chaos of history “from a distance”, without consulting those “essential documents”, which were solely preserved in Mexican archives. Such was the main reason for Robertson's failure, despite the elegance of his style, and his attempts to maintain a balanced attitude.Footnote ⁵⁷ Diligence, fidelity and record of truth, characterizing Clavijero's work, were opposed to the beauty of Robertson's narrative and to philosophical history.

This judgment was reasserted by one of the most important British journals, the Monthly Review, which also emphasized—in a review of Cullen's English translation—that the Aztecs were a “learned”, “enlightened” and “polished people”: they were well acquainted with the useful arts of architecture and agriculture, and perfectly able to record their own past through “the fine arts of sculpture and paintings”. The review ended with a rhetorical question, borrowed from one of Clavijero's polemical dissertations (the sixth, on the “Culture of the Mexicans”): “What more is necessary to vindicate a nation from the imputation of being barbarous and savage?”Footnote ⁵⁸

An opposite point of view was adopted by an anonymous reviewer in the European Magazine, and London Review, who stated that all history prior to the conquest by Cortés was neither interesting nor reliable. The reviewer rhetorically asked, “Who would imagine, from the pomp and gravity of this account that the author was speaking of a parcel of illiterate savages?” Clavijero's work appeared to him as “an enormous structure of two solid quartos stuffed with impossible facts, absurd exaggerations, and such a barbarous jargon of uncouth names, as to be within one degree of absolute unintelligibility . . . For our part, if Robertson be wrong, we are content to be wrong with him”. Clavijero was not a historian, but a storyteller.Footnote ⁵⁹

If the English Review presented Clavijero as a historian who gave “authentic information” on Mexico past and present,Footnote ⁶⁰ the Monthly Review had taken a middle way in its 1781 review of the original Italian Storia antica del Messico. On the one hand, the reviewer stressed the advantage of Clavijero, as local expert, who was able to “observe” “with the eye of a philosopher” and gather “from the natives exact information with respect to every object of any consequence”, for which he could be considered almost as “an ocular witness of what he relates”—something that “opens some new sources of evidence” about “the state and progress of civilization and arts in Mexico”. On the other hand, Robertson's description of Mexico was considered “the most masterly discussion we remember to have met with in any history”; however, by its strong and solid criticism of “the progress and perfection of the arts” attained by the Mexicans, it “leaves the mind in a state of skepticism and suspense”. It was up to the reader, then, to measure Clavijero's “critical acumen”, “so necessary to appreciate the sources of information, to discuss dubious facts . . . and to separate truth from fable”. The review concluded that “the reader must judge” if the new “materials” provided by Clavijero “are in the decision of this nice controversy”.Footnote ⁶¹

“This nice controversy” had important echoes in the newborn United States of America, where Clavijero was mobilized against Robertson, and his example was followed to account for North American antiquities.Footnote ⁶² But it could not publicly take place in Spain, as the prompt translations of both Robertson's and Clavijero's histories never saw the light of day.Footnote ⁶³ The Spanish edition of Clavijero's history, announced in 1784 by the publisher Antonio Sancha in the year in which he started to publish Raynal's Histoire des deux Indes, envisaged revisions by José Antonio de Alzate y Ramírez, a younger colleague of Clavijero who, being a secular priest, could remain in Mexico. The notes written by Alzate, part of which are conserved in manuscript form in the Biblioteca Nacional de Antropolocía of Mexico, interest me here for one reason: they identified as Clavijero's major limitation the fact that he also wrote from his Italian exile, and was therefore far away from the Mexican sources, specimens and monuments he was speaking about.Footnote ⁶⁴ While addressing to Clavijero the same criticism the latter had raised against European writers, Alzate stressed an important contradiction lurking throughout the work of the exiled Jesuit: Clavijero had construed his own history in a language of intimacy and closeness, but he was also writing from a distant space and time, being in Bologna and dealing with the Aztec past. In his revision of natural history, Alzate pointed at what he could observe closely, as a “local”.

One may argue, at this point, that Alzate's criticism took place in a new politico-intellectual context, that of the developing of independence movements, where the question of the “uses of the past” would become one of the most central battles of the Creoles. In order to shape his own authority against the Creoles from Europe, Alzate had to recentre in America the location of knowledge, avoiding the part of Mexican antiquity which had been “stolen” by Europeans,Footnote ⁶⁵ and which has been displayed in their museums. On the opposite side of the ocean, the controversy between Robertson and Clavijero encapsulated the full elements of a large histori(ographi)cal trend, starting with the ancients and ending with the Enlightenment: the definitive loss, by Europeans, of an intellectual monopole, that of history writing. By that time, distance and closeness not only had become tools that Europeans, Creoles, and “natives” shared; they also turned into divergent ways of accounting for the past.