The Bologna Process as Alpha or Omega, or, on Interpreting History and Context as Inputs to Bologna, Prague, Berlin and Beyond

Abstract

Not so long ago, in a fit of misplaced enthusiasm, a good colleague mischievously claimed that more studies had been made on Bologna than on the Great Napoleon. As a scientific observation, it was neither plausible nor credible. However, it served a more latent purpose and it served it well: it caused many somnolent experts to surface from a deep – but mercifully not terminal – torpor. Happily, our optimist was not a historian, though to offset this lacuna one has to admit the individual concerned was extraordinarily well versed in the arcana of the Bologna process and perhaps for that very reason, had never heard of Herr Friedrich Kircheisen. In the earlier part of the previous century, Herr Kircheisen was one of Germany’s leading spirits in Napoleoniana and a regular contributor to the Bibliographie napoléonienne, a semi-hagiographical ongoing work of reference, which first appeared in the France of 1902. It continued over the subsequent years right up to the start of the Great War. Through this work of incomparable erudition, Herr Kircheisen and his French colleagues set themselves the stupendous task of cataloguing all that had been written on the Corsican Ogre. And indeed, the imperial score was impressive.

All men are not patient docile Johnsons; some of them are half-mad inflammable Rousseaus. Such, in peculiar times, you may drive too far. Society in France, for example, was not destitute of cash … [T]he time has come when [Laissez-faire] must either cease or a worse thing straightaway begin – a thing of tinderboxes, vitriol-bottles, secondhand pistols, a visibly insupportable thing in the eyes of all.

Thomas Carlyle. “Chartism.”

Selected Writings. Harmondsworth: Penguin,

1971, 199–200