Chapter 8 of 16 · The great periods of history
Chapter 7. Modern Times
Three centuries in which writing multiplies, States grow stronger and Europe sets out on the oceans: what the word modern means here.
A word that does not mean what you think
Modern, in the name of this period, means neither recent nor close to us. The French name is Temps modernes, literally modern times, and this book keeps that translation rather than replacing it with a name used in English-speaking countries, because what it is describing is the French filing system and not another one. The word was used by the learned men of these centuries to set themselves apart from those who came before them: they called themselves modern as opposed to the ancients. The name of the period has kept their point of view, frozen at the moment they expressed it.
The period covers about three centuries. Only one is shorter, the Contemporary Era, and that one grows by a year every year since it is not closed. It opens at 1453 or 1492 and closes at 1789 or 1815, depending on the boundary chosen. These four dates are the ones the official history syllabus published in 2026 writes in its landmarks, two by two and separated by a slash.
Three transformations run through it, and they support one another. States acquire permanent administrations, regular armies and continuous taxes. Printing multiplies texts on a scale unknown until then. And European ships reach continents with which Europe had no direct contact, which leads to conquests.
| Title of the theme | Centuries covered | The question worked on |
|---|---|---|
| The monarchy in France | Sixteenth and seventeenth centuries | How a State acquires a permanent administration, army and tax |
| Explorations and conquests by Europeans | From the fifteenth to the seventeenth century | What European ships go looking for, what they find, and what their arrival does to the societies already there |
| 1789, a revolutionary year in France | Eighteenth century | How a year becomes a periodisation boundary, and what that year produces that lasts |
Four words not to confuse
These four words come back constantly about this period, and three of them are often used one for another.
- An exploration
- A voyage undertaken to survey a space that those who set out do not know. The word describes the intention of those who set out, never the state of the space reached.
- A conquest
- The taking of control of a territory by force. The official syllabus uses this word alongside exploration in the very title of its theme, which avoids telling one without the other.
- A discovery
- The fact of finding what you did not know. The word only has meaning from the point of view of whoever arrives: an inhabited territory is not discovered by those who land on it.
- Printing
- The set of techniques that make it possible to reproduce a text in many copies from a form set only once. It does not create reading, it multiplies the occasions for it.
What printing changes for the historian
Every period in this book is marked out by the nature of its sources more than by the nature of its events. Modern Times is no exception, and its dominant feature is abundance. From the sixteenth century onwards, the quantity of texts preserved changes order of magnitude.
The main cause is technical. A manuscript exists in a few copies, sometimes in one; a printed text exists in hundreds. A text in hundreds of copies survives the loss of most of them, which is not the case for a single manuscript. The likelihood that a text from this period reaches us is therefore beyond comparison with that of a medieval text.
An administrative cause is added to it. A State that raises tax continuously, keeps a permanent army and runs courts produces paper all the time, and it keeps that paper because it needs it. State archives become bulky and regular, which makes possible research that was impossible for earlier centuries: following prices year after year, counting births, measuring harvests.
Abundance brings its own problem, and it has to be named. When sources are scarce, the difficulty is finding; when they are abundant, the difficulty is choosing, and the choice commits the result. A historian who read only the printed texts of a period would be telling the history of those who printed.
The word discoveries, and why it raises a problem
What the word says correctly
- That Europeans reach spaces they did not know.
- That European maps change radically within a few decades.
- That new sea routes open, and that they turn trade upside down.
- That plants, animals and diseases now travel between continents that were separate until then.
- That a geographical knowledge takes shape, of which the globes and maps of the time bear the trace.
What it conceals
- That these spaces were inhabited, often densely, by organised societies.
- That these societies had their own history, their own States and their own long-distance exchanges.
- That the arrival comes with conquests, which the official syllabus in fact names explicitly.
- That the diseases brought cause a demographic collapse in populations that did not know them.
- That the point of view adopted is that of those who arrive, and that it is presented as if it belonged to nobody.
This is not a question of morality, it is a question of method. A word that adopts the point of view of a single actor produces an incomplete account even when every one of its sentences is accurate. The simplest way out is the one the official syllabus itself uses: name both faces in the same title, explorations and conquests, and let the reader see that this is a single movement described from two sides.
| Date | The fact | The document that attests it |
|---|---|---|
| 1492 | The first voyage of Christopher Columbus towards America | The logbook of the voyage, extracts from which the Bibliothèque nationale de France publishes in its online resources |
| 1492 | The making of the oldest known terrestrial globe, by Martin Behaim | The object itself, a copy of which is presented by the Bibliothèque nationale de France |
| 1582 | The Gregorian reform of the calendar: ten days suppressed in October | The explanations published by the Institut de mécanique céleste et de calcul des éphémérides, at the Observatoire de Paris |
| 1752 | Great Britain at last applies the reform of the calendar | The same source, which dates the adoption country by country |
A period whose calendar was corrected
The first chapter of this book tells of the Gregorian reform of 1582 as an example of a convention corrected. It is worth noticing where it falls: right in the middle of Modern Times. This period is therefore the one in which Europe decided that its way of counting days was wrong, and changed it.
This has a direct consequence for anyone reading a document from these centuries, and it regularly catches people out. Between 1582 and 1752, one and the same day carries two different dates depending on the country where the document was drawn up, since the reform was applied at different moments. Before 1700 the gap is ten days: a letter dated 1 March in London and a letter dated 11 March in Rome may have been written on the same day. The gap then grows by one day at each secular year that the Gregorian rule makes a common year, that is in 1700, in 1800 and in 1900.
Historians of this period know this and signal it, by stating which style is being used. A reader who does not know it compares dates that are not comparable. It is the kind of detail that appears in no narrative and yet decides whether a chronology is right.
Four things this period installs that last
States that write continuously
Permanent tax, permanent army, permanent courts: each of them produces dated papers, kept and classified. It is from this age that the runs of archives long enough to follow a change over a century date.
A world space of circulation
Sea routes now link continents that had no direct contact. Plants, animals, metals, diseases and people travel along them, willingly or by force, and this circulation will never stop again.
A knowledge that gets published
Printing allows an observation made in one town to be read in another within a few months. A published result can be contradicted by another, which is the material condition of any organised scholarly discussion.
A shared measure of time
The calendar corrected in 1582 ends up imposing itself everywhere, which gives the world a single system of dates. Without it, none of the timelines in this book could line up facts from different regions.