“Truth (for once) lies in the middle”

“Truth (for once) lies in the middle” is the narrator’s concise principle for understanding political reversals. In the discussion of Strasbourg’s fall, it redirects attention from sweeping explanations toward the competing claims that follow, making the phrase both a call for balanced judgment and a reminder that historical causes are disputed.

Context and Meaning

The phrase appears after an account of the French ambition to acquire Strasbourg. A system of universal monarchy, commissioned by Colbert and presented in manuscript to Louis XIV in 1664, included taking the city as a means of securing entry into Swabia and disturbing the peace of Germany. The narrator says that Strasbourg eventually fell into French hands as part of this design.

Against that large strategic explanation, the narrator observes that only a few discern the true springs of such revolutions: ordinary people look too high for them, while statesmen look too low. The phrase locates understanding between those extremes. It does not specify a single hidden cause; instead, it prepares the reader to weigh explanations that reduce the fall to different civic failings.

Competing Explanations

One historian attributes the city’s fate to the pride of a free city. Strasbourg’s citizens regarded accepting an imperial garrison as a diminution of their freedom, and, in this account, their refusal left them prey to a French garrison instead. The reversal makes the defense of liberty appear to have helped bring about the loss of the city’s independence.

Another historian offers a material explanation. The citizens anticipated their revenues, subjected themselves to taxes, and exhausted their strength. By the time they needed to defend the gates, this account says, the city had become too weak to keep them shut, allowing the French to push them open. Where the first explanation emphasizes a political judgment, the second traces vulnerability to financial depletion.

Rhetorical Function

The phrase does not simply endorse either historian. Its placement between the strategic account and these rival civic explanations makes it an instruction in how to read: neither lofty designs nor local conduct should be mistaken for the whole story. The two accounts also sharpen each other. A city’s effort to preserve freedom can be represented as pride, while the depletion of its resources turns that political vulnerability into a physical image of gates that cannot be secured.

The qualification “for once” lends the assertion a dry, self-conscious edge. The narrator briefly claims that truth occupies the middle, yet immediately presents competing interpretations rather than a final adjudication. The expression therefore offers a principle of moderation without pretending that historical judgment has become effortless or settled. It is a pivot from the fall of Strasbourg as a geopolitical outcome to the uncertain, layered explanations through which that outcome is understood.