HISTORIESKRIVNING SOM POLITISKT VERKTYG I UPPLYSNINGENS EUROPA En jämförande analys av Abbé Millot och Catherine Macaulays historiska verk

Abstract

The writing of history in Europe went through large changes during the enlightenment. Historians from this epoch could be distinguished by their tendency to try to influence their readers philosophically, morally and politically. The aim of this study is to explore how the historians of the enlightenment could use history writing as a political tool, through a deeper study of the quite forgotten historians Abbé Millot and Catherine Macaulay. Millot was a French historian working at the court of Parma while Macaulay was an English standalone historian. These backgrounds form the aim of this study to fill in a research-gap which still holds the question of how independent a traditional author compared to a standalone author could be in their work. To explore this, this bachelor thesis builds itself upon a comparative text analysis between the historic writings of Millot and Macaulay to explore how they described and discussed historical events, to influence their readers. The result of this analysis shows that Millot and Macaulay portrayed historical events very differently, caused evidently by their own political ideas and goals. It also shows that the larger audience of readers became more relevant to a standalone historian than a historian at court.