6 eric r. dursteler
marked by well-defined, impermeable social categories. Gino Benzoni’s
summary judgment may be most accurate: the official historiography is
“a heterogenous body of disparate contributions,” which are “deformed
in their tone and content” and, as such, do not represent the most pen-
etrating or suggestive output of the ruling class. This is to be found, in his
opinion, in the relazioni of venice’s ambassadors.12
The Nineteenth CenturyWith the extinction of the venetian Republic in 1797, its fate “passed from
the hands of politicians to those of historians.”13 The result was an expan-
sion in both the quantity of treatments and the controversies surrounding
its history. The 19th century marked the birth of a new historiography of
venice, but one which also remained deeply informed by the patterns of
myth and anti-myth that had characterized the first millennium of vene-
tian historical writing.
The first substantial treatment of venice’s history following the Repub-
lic’s fall, and the point of departure for this new historiography, was
Pierre Daru’s influential and controversial L’Histoire des Républiques de
Venise, published in eight volumes in france in 1819. The work enjoyed
widespread popularity and diffusion throughout europe until the middle
of the century, was translated into German and Italian, and had a pro-
found influence on generations of scholars. Daru, who never set set foot
in venice, based his history in part on a pre-existing french anti-myth
of venice literature and in part on archival records which had been
transferred to Paris in 1797, including ambassadorial dispatches, senate
deliberations, and the records of the Inquisitors of State, in all some 4000
documents that he meticulously catalogued. Unfortunately, as scholars
quickly pointed out, a number of his sources proved to be forgeries.14
While he grew out of and responded to the french anti-myth tradition
that saw venice stereotypically as a decadent oligarchic political system,
12 Benzoni, “Introduzione,” pp. xxxiv, xlvii–xlviii.
13 Claudio Povolo, “The Creation of venetian Historiography,” in John Jeffries Martin
and Dennis Romano, eds., Venice Reconsidered: The History and Civilization of an Italian
City-State: 1297–1797 (Baltimore, 2000), p. 491.
14 filippo de vivo, “Quand le passé résiste à ses historiographies: venise et le XvIIe siècle,”
Les Cahiers du Centre de Recherches Historiques 28–30 (2002), 223–34; Xavier Tabet, “Pierre
Daru et la vision historique et politique du passé vénitien,” in Christian del vento and
Xavier Tabet, eds., Le mythe de Venise au XIX siècle: Débats historiographiques et représenta-
tions littéraires (Caen, 2006), pp. 29–30.