The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815–1914 (The Penguin History of Europe Book 7)

by Richard J. Evans

Not coincidentally, this concept provided the underpinning for that most universal of nineteenth-century ideas, the idea of progress. The concept of a uniform time proceeding everywhere in a linear fashion enhanced people’s ability to imagine a distant past beyond their own experience, in which things had been different. The French Revolution had already created a sense of the pre-revolutionary past as different, renumbering the years from its outbreak as Year I, Year II, Year III and so on. This practice itself did not survive. But the idea of the past as different became widespread in European culture, in contrast to the eighteenth century, which had depicted the people and societies of the past as largely similar to those of its own age. The past also began to stretch back further in the imagination.