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At the end of the new movie, The Report, Adam Driver’s Dan Jones argues with his would-be defense attorney about who really said, “History is written by the victors.” The lawyer (played by Corey Stoll) attributes the quote to Winston Churchill, but Jones counters by pointing to an earlier iteration of sentiment from Hermann Göring, Churchill’s World War II foe. so: who said it first, the victorious churchill or the vanquished göring?
none of them. At the very least, Driver’s Jones is right to point out that Göring is in fact recorded as expressing this sentiment at the Nuremberg trials. In the original German, Göring is reported to have said, “der sieger wird immer der richter und der besiegte stets der angeklagte sein,” which roughly translates to the quote the driver utters in the film, “the victor will always be the judge”. , and the vanquished are the accused.”
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as for churchill, while he is strongly associated with the aphorism, as seen in inspiring pinterest macros, clever quotes, and derisive tweets from wwe wrestlers, there is actually no concrete documented case where is known to have pronounced “history”. it is written by the victors.” There’s a good chance that some of the confusion here stems from a joke Churchill actually told, in a speech to the House of Commons in January. 23, 1948: “for my part, I consider it much better for all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.” Churchill apparently liked the line, as he had been trotting out versions of it since the 1930s. He even tried another version of the wit on Joseph Stalin.
So, who really coined the phrase? It was in use long before Churchill or Göring pronounced its variations. “I think the adage evolved over time,” says Garson O’Toole, owner of the must-see quote research website. “There are versions of the saying in English, French, Italian and German. but most of the early cases … do not contain the adagio in general form. these instances are precursors.”
For example, on the American Dialect Society mailing list, citation researcher ken hirsch has noted instances in French from 1842 (“[l]’histoire est juste peut-être, mais qu’on ne l’ oublie pas, elle a été écrite par les vainqueurs” or “[t]history may be right, but let us not forget that it was written by the victors”) and Italian from 1852 (“la storia di questi avvenimenti fu scritta dai vincitori” —o , as hirsch translates it, “the history of these events was written by the winners”). And by 1844, as hirsch noted, at least one of these narrower statements had become English, a description of the defeated maximilien robespierre, the Jacobin hero during the French Revolution, describes the state of his reputation thus: “defeated—his history written by the victors—robespierre has left a cursed memory.”
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but in each case these were not broad pronouncements about the nature of history itself. those who arrived towards the end of the nineteenth century. for example, in 1889, as o’toole told me, a biographer’s description of the 1746 battle of culloden in scotland laments that we will never know how many of his subject’s clan died on the battlefield, because “he is the victor who writes history and counts the dead.”
two years later, the saying was in use in the united states. in 1891, Missouri Sen. george graham vest, a former congressman from the confederacy who was still at that late date an advocate for the rights of states to secede, used the phrase in a speech, reprinted by the kansas city gazette and other daily newspapers next, August 2. 21, 1891. “In all revolutions, it is the vanquished who are guilty of treason, even by historians,” Vest said, “because history is written by the victors and framed according to the biases and prejudices that They exist on your side.” In other words, the world has rewritten history to credit the saying to one of the biggest winners of the 20th century, but it has always been wildly popular with the biggest losers in history.
thanks to yale citation book editor fred shapiro and citation researcher garson o’toole for their critical research on the central question of this article.
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