Of all the images to adorn the covers of histories of the nineteenth century, the most ubiquitous must surely be Anton von Werner's depiction of the proclamation of the German Empire on January 18, 1871, in the Hall of Mirrors of the Palace of Versailles. Surrounded by the German princes, the new Emperor William I looks down impassively from the dais at the cheering throng of gorgeously uniformed officers, headed by the two main architects of victory, Prince Otto von Bismarck and Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke. Conspicuous by his absence was the sensitive young King Ludwig II of Bavaria, for whom the thought of his detested Hohenzollern uncle desecrating the palace of the Sun King he venerated was too much to bear. His refusal to attend the celebrations is a salutary reminder that not all Germans were triumphalist in 1871. Ludwig's own prime minister, Baron von der Pfordten, wrote in his diary, “seventy-eight years ago the French killed their king; today the Bavarian deputies have placed their king and country under the military domination of Prussia. Finis Bavariae!” Well might they lament the apotheosis of the King of Prussia, for Bavaria had always flourished when French power was at its zenith. It had been Napoleon I who had turned the Wittelsbach electorate into a kingdom and had given it no fewer than eighty-three extra territories when he destroyed the Holy Roman Empire.

Until the publication of the first volume of Derek Beales's biography of Joseph II in 1976, what scholars ‘universally regarded as the best account of the emperor's work’ (in Beales's own words) was the two-volume study by the Russian Paul von Mitrofanov, published in German translation by C. W. Stern of Vienna and Leipzig in 1910. The original Russian edition had appeared three years earlier in a single volume. Although the translation was given a different title – ‘Joseph II, his political and cultural activity’, as opposed to ‘The political activity of Joseph II, his supporters and his enemies (1780–1790)’ – a comparison of the two texts shows that the translator was entirely loyal to the original version. The historiographical domination established by this remarkable work for most of this century is a tribute both to its quality and to the intractability of the problems posed by its subject. In the introduction to his own book, Beales ruefully conceded:

This collection of essays, by friends, colleagues and former students, is presented to Derek Beales to mark and to celebrate his sixty-fifth birthday. It is at least doubly appropriate that it should be called History and Biography. For not only was this the title of his inaugural lecture as Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University, which is reprinted here: it also describes his range and defines his accomplishments as a scholar. Few historians today trouble themselves with large-scale, full-dress biographies. Even fewer biographers write anything that is recognisable as serious history. Derek Beales, by contrast, may justly claim to be both a distinguished historian and a gifted biographer. He has written national history, international history, political history, constitutional history, ecclesiastical history and cultural history. For four years, he taught a Special Subject on Gladstone's First Ministry in Part Two of the Cambridge Historical Tripos. And he is still engaged on his major work: a magisterial biography of the Emperor Joseph II. As all his writing makes plain, Derek Beales is fascinated by the interplay between men and events, individuals and circumstance. He is sceptical of impersonal and structural history, and he has never favoured debunking or mocking biography. And he is as much an historiographer as he is an historian. Not for nothing was the alternative title for his inaugural lecture ‘Historians as Great Men, and Great Men as Historians’.

As Derek Beales would be the first to remind us, there are formative influences on historians no less than on statesmen or monarchs.

To the philosophes who marched under the banner of ‘écrasez l'infâme’, the notion of an Enlightenment in Catholic Germany was a contradiction in terms, a monstrous hybrid analogous to grafting a philosopher's head and torso on to the hind quarters of an old, fat and malodorous sow. Nor was this kind of opinion confined to the French, who have never shown much appreciation of the intellectual life of Baron Thunder-ten-Tronckh's fellowcountrymen. The Italian Carlantonio Pilati, who at least had first-hand experience of the German educational system, recorded in 1777 that ‘the German Protestants are infinitely more enlightened than the Catholics. [The latter teach] their children ideas which ruin their judgment and their reason: their minds are crushed and are steered towards error, futility and stupidity.’ Although local historians of Catholic Germany have always sought to do justice to the cultural achievements of their region, it was not until this century that revision on a national scale began.

Even so, the image persists of the Catholic principalities as highly ornamental baroque troughs, in which epicurean prelates happily if sleepily wallowed. In a recent monograph on the German Enlightenment, for example, it is stated confidently that