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Kyle Harper is a professor of history at the University of Oklahoma. Before focusing on the history of diseases and climate, he studied that of slavery and sexuality at the end of the Roman Empire. He showed, following Foucault, that Christianization has profoundly changed the relationship to desire. Rich in these contributions and a solid classical training, he delivers in his new work a profoundly new reading of the fall of the Roman Empire.
It is one of the essential dates for those interested in history in the West, marking the passage between ancient history and medieval history. On September 4, 476, Romulus Augustule abdicates. The Roman Empire of the West ceased to exist. That of Orient, whose capital is Constantinople, will survive for nearly 1,000 years, before collapsing in turn under the blows of the Ottomans in 1453.
Was the fall of Rome inescapable ?
For four centuries, the Empire has stretched from the Middle East to Spain, from the Red Sea to the north of present-day England, with unparalleled unity on such a scale, and for such longevity. Most historians, writers and playwrights have focused on the period of the Republic and on what French terminology has called the High Empire since the 18th century. The Lower Empire, which began between the end of the second and the end of the third century of our era, is classically associated with a reorganization of power towards an absolute regime and in the collective imagination with an idea of decomposition.
The English historian Gibbon, who at the end of the eighteenth century wrote his History of the Decadence and Fall of the Roman Empire , durably instilled in the minds the idea of a Roman people having gradually put back control from its borders in the hands of mercenaries and its power to emperors from the minorities of the Empire. It is found practically intact in a recent book and pleasant reading, The Day of the barbarians , Alessandro Barbero, telling the menu of the Battle of Adrianople, August 9, 378, when repressed within the borders of the Empire, the "refugees" goths suddenly turn into invaders.
This declineist view of history, in which the end of each Empire seems programmed as that of a living being, has scarcely any scientific value. For the Roman Empire, the essential question is less that of an end supposed inevitable than that of its exceptional duration, of which the world today, by the worldwide extension of the Latin languages, the strength of the Catholic Church or the legacy of Roman law, carries the trace everywhere. In France, Henri-Irénée Marrou chose as early as 1977 to reverse the problem with his book Décadence romaine ou Antiquité tardive ? .
The cold and the plague, as much as the barbarians
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, historians have, to rethink this period, scientifically renewed reading tools from written and archaeological sources. Thus the historian Kyle Harper undertakes to tell the story of the collapse of the Roman Empire based on fundamental discoveries about the history of diseases and climate. Of course, at a time of major global epidemics and climate change, the interest in these factors seems to be explained by our current fears, just as the "barbarian invasions" echo the fantasies of the "great replacement" .
It would, however, reverse the causes and consequences. Indeed, it is precisely the need to understand the mechanisms of environmental and epidemic phenomena that have allowed enormous progress in the knowledge of the evolution of climate and in the history of diseases, which historians of antiquity have benefited from by rebounds. That Rome has once again collapsed in 476 does not matter. It is more important to understand why she never recovered from this ultimate crisis. Less than a century later, the plague of Justinian was going to take the vast majority of the inhabitants of Constantinople, putting an end to any possible reconquest of the Empire. The planet was entering a small ice age.
Seize human history in its complexity
The strength of Kyle Harper's book is to synthesize classical and contemporary knowledge without ever giving in to determinism. It is in line with recent great books which, starting from the history of the climate, have allowed for example to connect various planetary phenomena of the year 1816 to the gigantic eruption of the Tambora volcano (Gillen d'Arcy Wood, The Summerless Year , The Discovery, 2016) or simultaneous famines on three continents at the end of the 19th century and their consequences on underdevelopment (Mike Davis, Tropical Genocides , The Discovery, 2006).
Benoît Rossignol writes in the preface to Kyle Harper's book: " In considering environmental history, it is important to recognize the narcissistic wound that is again inflicted on us. Galileo had expelled us from the center of the cosmos, Darwin from the summit of creation, and Freud had cast a shadow over our existence as subjects, but now history has escaped human monopoly. "
Yet this vision of a nature capable of shaking the most powerful civilizations goes back at least, also, to the eighteenth century, when Voltaire and others perceive that the Portuguese Empire will not recover from the earthquake of Lisbon, in 1755. Since it took more than one event, natural or human, to put an end to the domination of Rome, he is happy to read this book which restores in an elegant and limpid way the great complexity of the world.
► Kyle Harper, How the Roman Empire collapsed. The climate, diseases and the fall of Rome , The Discovery, 2019. Preface by Benoît Rossignol.