Starting a national history after its revolution silently erases the struggle that formed it

Evidence

With respect to these two works, the questions at once arise: is it possible to write (conceive of) a history of Europe in the nineteenth century without an organic treatment of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars? And is it possible to write a history of Italy in modern times without a treatment of the struggles of the Risorgimento? … In other words: is it fortuitous, or is it for a tendentious motive, that Croce begins his narratives from 1815 and 1871? I.e. that he excludes the moment of struggle; the moment in which the conflicting forces are formed, are assembled and take up their positions; the moment in which one ethical-political system dissolves and another is formed by fire and by steel; the moment in which one system of social relations disintegrates and falls and another arises and asserts itself? — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 585

Categorization

• DEFINE: The passage is building toward a concrete sense of what ‘passive revolution’ means as an analytic category.
• XREF: The critique that choosing a narrative starting point smuggles in a political judgment parallels Edward Said’s point about Orientalism’s chosen origins. — connects to: Lacking remembered history forfeits one’s claim to the nation-state. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 136; Erasing a group’s past erases its claim on the nation-state; National belonging requires forgetting much of one’s country’s history — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 2087 (+4 more)
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Lacking remembered history forfeits one’s claim to the nation-state. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 136; Erasing a group’s past erases its claim on the nation-state; National belonging requires forgetting much of one’s country’s history — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 2087 (+4 more)