The Ridiculous History of France and the World

For many of us, studying history is no more than a painful memory where uncompromising teachers forced their pupils to learn endless lists of dates without ever grasping the true nature of the events that lay behind them. The best way to get over this tedious learning process is to explore the characters behind the names that have cut a swathe through history. We very quickly discover that some have a few aces up their sleeves, others are underhand and yet more are excessively ambitious. If we delve a little further, and take their machinations out of their historical context and place them under the naked spotlight of rationality, they invariably turn out to be ridiculous. We could boldly apply the same analytical method to our current leaders. And very quickly we would see some of them as incompetent, others as two-faced and yet others as megalomaniacs. And even all three at once for a few outstanding specimens. In short, they are cast in the same mould as their predecessors and happily make exactly the same mistakes. And yet, there is a recurrent theme in philosophy that asks the following question: "Does history have a stammer? Does it repeat itself?" An eminent specialist in this field has attempted to analyse this question and define history from a universal angle. To be quite honest, it went over my head and anyone who claims to have understood it must be the epitome of pretention. When we think about it, our leaders are struck by the same blindness as their predecessors. They are visited by the same ambitions and they will make the same idiotic mistakes! In reply to the question "Does history repeat itself?" the answer is a resounding "Yes". Our current presidents and prime ministers have exactly the same flaws as the kings and princes of yesteryear. To the second question "Should we study history?" the answer is "Yes" once more - but not in the scholarly manner prescribed in text books. We should study the personality of these great figures and the ridiculous decisions that they sometimes made. We should laugh at some of their judgements and acknowledge that their narrow vision can lead to tragedy. Critical awareness should be the province of the majority so that people can berate their leaders when they stray onto hazardous paths. Our current leaders have the same flaws as their predecessors. Power invariably takes them to dizzy heights, cutting them off from reality. This might lead us to conclude that studying history is per se a futile exercise. However, if our knowledge of the past keeps us from committing the same mistakes, then studying history becomes indispensable.