X

DYNAMO

Powerhouse of the World, 1815–1914

THERE is a dynamism about nineteenth-century Europe that far exceeds anything previously known. Europe vibrated with power as never before: with technical power, economic power, cultural power, intercontinental power. Its prime symbols were its engines—the locomotives, the gasworks, the electric dynamos. Raw power appeared to be made a virtue in itself, whether in popular views of evolution, which preached ‘the survival of the fittest’, in the philosophy of historical materialism, which preached the triumph of the strongest class, in the cult of the Superman, or in the theory and practice of imperialism.

Europeans, in fact, were made to feel not only powerful but superior. They were infinitely impressed by the unaccustomed ‘forces’ which surrounded them. They saw new physical forces, from the electric current to dynamite; new demographic forces which accompanied an unprecedented growth of population; new social forces which brought ‘the masses’ to the forefront of public concern; new commercial and industrial forces that thrived on the unparalleled expansion of markets and technology, new military forces that could mobilize millions of men and machines; new cultural forces which spawned ‘movements’ of mass appeal; new political forces which won unchallenged supremacy throughout the world.

Here, indeed, was Europe’s triumphant ‘power century’. Its leaders were in the first instance Great Britain, ‘the workshop of the world’, and in the later decades Germany, whose failure to find ‘a place in the sun’ helped reduce the whole edifice to ruins. Its losers and victims consisted of all the people and peoples who could not adapt, or could not compete—the peasants, the hand-weavers, the urban poor; the colonial peoples; the Irish, the Sicilians, and the Poles, who were forced to migrate in their millions; the three great empires of the East—Turkey, Austria-Hungary, Russia. The century began in the aftermath of one revolution, in France, and ended in the prelude to another revolution, in Russia. It began with one would-be master of all-Europe, Napoleon, proclaiming that Power was his mistress. It ended with another, Lenin, proclaiming: ‘Communism is Soviet Power plus the Electrification of the whole country.’

It can be argued, of course, that the nineteenth century’s experience of power was less than that of the twentieth century. After all, the potency of steam and electricity bears no comparison to that of nuclear fission. The marvellous speed of a railway train cannot compete with that of aeroplanes or intercontinental rockets. The oppressive capacity of imperialism and colonialism, great though it was, can hardly be likened to the totalitarian tyranny of fascism and communism. The point is that, for nineteenth-century man, power was the object of wonder and hope; for twentieth-century man, it became the object of suspicion. In the interval which separates the Industrial Revolution from Environmental-ism, attitudes have been transformed. The benefits of electricity, when discovered in 1805, were not doubted; the benefits of nuclear power provoke anguished debates. Industrialization or colonialism were once seen as a great step foward for all concerned. They are now seen, at best, to have brought mixed blessings.

The psychology of power and speed has been changed out of all recognition. In 1830, when the world’s first passenger train ran between Liverpool and Manchester, a senior British politician was knocked down and killed by the Rocket, which was travelling at 24 m.p.h.; despite ample warning, he had failed to comprehend the implications. In 1898, when motor vehicles were first allowed on to public roads in Britain, they were restricted to 4 m.p.h., so that a man might walk ahead with a red flag. Nowadays, no concern is shown by millions who cruise at 100 m.p.h. on the German autobahns, at 240 m.p.h. on the French TGV, or at 1,000 m.p.h. on Concorde. Since the nineteenth century power and speed have been made familiar; and familiarity has bred contempt.

Naturally, most Europeans did not realize how great was the power which had been put in their hands. The rash and the ambitious sought to exploit it to the full; the wise sought to use it with caution. The British, the early leaders, had little choice but to step warily in Continental affairs. So too did Otto von Bismarck, creator of the most powerful industrial and military unit of the age. The Iron Chancellor turned Germany into a great power, but not a universal menace. His best-known phrases about ‘iron and blood’ (1849) or ‘blood and iron’ (1886) were spoken about budgets and social affairs, not war. As the century’s greatest statesman, he even grasped the limitations of statesmanship itself, not aspiring ‘to control the current of events, only occasionally to deflect it’. ‘In der Beschränkung zeigt sich erst der Meister’, ran one of Goethe’s epigrams (The master triumphs by holding back, or Genius consists of knowing when to stop).1 Bismarck’s successors did not practise such restraint.

Contrary to some expectations, Europe’s brush with modern power revived its Christian culture. The ‘Railway Age’ was also the age of muscular Christianity. Engineers went out into the world in the company of missionaries. People who felt their own vulnerability in a fast-changing world hankered after earlier models of piety and discipline. Despite the mindless machines, and in line with the growing wave of Romanticism, they felt more need for divine reassurance, a greater readiness to accept the supernatural, an eagerness to experience ‘the depth of their being’. When they died, they were not averse to seeing their life as a journey on the ‘Spiritual Railway’:

The Line to Heaven by Christ was made
With heavenly truth the rails were laid,
From Earth to Heaven the Line extends,
To Life Eternal where it ends…
God’s Love the Fire, his Truth the Steam
Which drives the Engine and the Train.
All you who would to Glory ride
Must come to Christ, in Him abide
In First and Second, and Third Class
Repentance, Faith, and Holiness…
Come then, poor Sinners, now’s the Time
At any station on the Line,
If you’ll repent and turn from sin,
The train will stop and take you in.

The initial circumstances of nineteenth-century Europe were crucial. The forces for change could only operate within the political and international framework that came into being at the end of the revolutionary wars. And that framework was given a very particular twist by the extraordinary events of 1815.

In February of that year, at the moment when the Congress of Vienna was failing to agree on a settlement, the revolutionary genie slipped once more from the bottle. Napoleon escaped from Elba. In the subsequent ‘Hundred Days’, Europe had to face the spectre of revolutionary war all over again. The shock was tremendous. If the political mood among the victorious powers in 1814 had been cautious, in 1815 it became downright reactionary. It created a climate in the subsequent decades where any sign of changes was instantly suppressed.

The Cent Jours, therefore, electrified Europe. Within three weeks of his lonely landing at Antibes on 1 March, Napoleon had crossed the Dauphiné Alps, won over Marshal Ney, who had been sent to ‘bring him back in a cage’, and entered Paris in triumph, forcing Louis XVIII to flee. Within three months he had reformed his army and left Paris to attack the forces of the Coalition which were gathering on the northern frontier. His strategy was simple—to pick off the Allies one by one before they could coalesce against him. On 16 June, at Ligny, he defeated the Prussians, but did not prevent them from retiring in good order. On 18 June he confidently attacked the British at Waterloo near Brussels. But the ‘thin red line’ of the Duke of Wellington resisted all the furious charges of the French in a day of unrelenting slaughter; and Blücher’s Prussian cavalry, riding over the horizon in the late afternoon, swept the French from the field. Napoleon, after his sixtieth set battle, was finally swept from the field of history. On 22 June he abdicated yet again; on 15 July, a fugitive at Rochefort, he surrendered to Capt. Maitland of HMS Bellerophon. He was taken to Plymouth, and thence to the remote island of St Helena. This time he didn’t escape. Writing his memoirs, he predicted that within ten years Europe would be either ‘Cossack or republican’. When he died, ‘it was not an event’, Talleyrand said, ‘only a news item’, [ECO]

Reconvening after Waterloo, the Congress of Vienna met in chastened mood. The representatives of the victorious powers could not be accused, as in the previous year, of‘dancing instead of making progress’. They were ready to risk nothing. They were determined, above all, to restore the rights of monarchy—the sacred institution considered most threatened by the Revolution. In so doing, they paid little attention to the claims either of democracy or of nationality. They resolved their differences by compensating the disgruntled at the expense of the defeated. A German Confederation of 39 states was to take the place of the Confederation of the Rhine and the Holy Roman Empire (see Appendix III, p. 1299). Prussia, which had been pressing for Alsace, Lorraine, and Warsaw, was given half of Saxony instead. Austria, which had lost its stake in the Netherlands, was given much of northern Italy. The United Provinces, which had lost the Cape of Good Hope, was given the Austrian Netherlands. Sweden, which had lost Finland, was given Norway. Russia was confirmed in its possession of Finland, Lithuania, and eastern Poland, and was given a separate kingdom of Poland round Warsaw, where the Tsar could be king. Britain contented itself with a bag of islands from Heligoland to Ceylon. A gaggle of antiquated monarchies was restored to Naples, Madrid, and Turin—but few of the old republics were allowed to revive. As Tsar Alexander remarked, ‘Republics are not in fashion’. An exception was made for the Republic of Cracow, a city claimed by Prussia, Russia, and Austria and withheld from all of them.

The spirit of the settlement, therefore, was more than conservative: it actually put the clock back. It was designed to prevent change in a world where the forces of change had only been contained by a whisker. The Duke of Wellington’s comment on Waterloo was: ‘a damned nice thing, the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life’. Such was the feeling all over Europe. The issue between change and no change was so close that the victors felt terrified of the least concession. Even limited, gradual reform was viewed with suspicion. ‘Beginning reform’, wrote the Duke in 1830, ‘is beginning revolution.’ What is more, France, the eternal source of revolutionary disturbances, had not been tamed. Paris was to erupt repeatedly—in 1830, 1848, 1851, 1870. ‘When Paris sneezes,’ commented the Austrian Chancellor, Metternich, ‘Europe catches cold.’ French-style democracy was a menace threatening monarch, Church, and property—the pillars of everything he stood for. It was, he said, ‘the disease which must be cured, the volcano which must be extinguished, the gangrene which must be burned out with a hot iron, the hydra with jaws open to swallow up the social order’.

In its extreme form, as embodied by Metternich, the reactionary spirit of 1815 was opposed to any sort of change which did not obtain prior approval. It found expression in the first instance in the Quadruple Alliance of Russia, Prussia, Austria, and Britain, who agreed to organize future congresses whenever need arose, and then in a wider ‘Holy Alliance’ organized by the Tsar. The former produced the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle (1818), which readmitted France to the concert of respectable nations. The latter produced the proposal that the powers should guarantee existing frontiers and governments in perpetuity.

All this was too much for the British government, which in advising the Prince Regent against the Holy Alliance had put him into the company of the Sultan and the Pope. By British standards, Lord Liverpool’s government was unusually conservative: in its internal policies it was resisting reform on all fronts. But it could not allow the reactionaries of Europe to create the international equivalent of a steam-engine with no form of safety-valve. At each of the subsequent Congresses held at Troppau (1820), Laibach (1821), and Verona (1822), the British held strong reservations about the successive expeditions for crushing revolution in Naples, Greece, and Spain. On the critical issue of the revolt of Spain’s South American colonies, the British Foreign Secretary, George Canning, joined the US President, James Monroe, in forbidding any sort of European intervention in the Americas. ‘I called the New World into existence’, he told the House of Commons in 1826, ‘to redress the Balance of the Old.’ In effect, he killed the Congress System stone dead. ‘Things are getting back to a wholesome state,’ he remarked shortly before his death. ‘Every nation for itself, and God for us all.’

None the less, the short-lived ‘Congress System’ was important for setting the scene within which nineteenth-century Europe began its stormy career. Despite its failure to create any durable institutions—which had briefly promised to assume the mantle of some premature League of Nations—it set the climate of the conservative Continental order against which all subsequent reformers and revolutionaries had to contend. It delineated the international arena in which the five recognized powers—the Quadruple Alliance plus a reinstated France—were to operate against all upstarts and newcomers for the next century. Despite important modifications, it presided over a map of Europe that was not to change in its essentials until 1914–18.

From the starting-point of 1815 the century evolved through three clear stages, those of reaction (1815–48), reform (1848–71), and rivalry (1871–1914). In the first stage, the conservative fortress held out with varying success until it collapsed amidst the general revolutionary outburst of 1848. In the second stage, the powers reluctantly conceded that controlled reform was preferable to endless resistance. Important concessions were made on all fronts. Constitutions were granted, the last serfs emancipated. Two of the three leading contenders for national independence were allowed to achieve it. In the third and final stage, Europe entered a period of intense rivalry, aggravated by diplomatic realignments, military rearmament, and colonial competition. Forty years of unequalled peace could not restrain the growing tensions which in August 1914 were permitted to pass into open conflict. Europe’s modern and modernizing societies, armed with modern weapons, recklessly entered a modern war whose slaughter made Napoleon’s battles look like skirmishes.

‘Modernization’, not to be confused with Modernism,* is now the preferred sociological term to describe the complex series of transformations which communities undergo on their way from ‘backwardness’ to ‘modernity’. Its starting-point is the traditional type of agrarian, peasant-based society, where the majority of people work on the land and produce their own food; and its destination is the modern type of urbanized and industrialized society, where most people earn their living in towns and factories. It consists of a chain of some 30 or 40 related changes, each link of which forms a necessary component in the total operation. It certainly includes and subsumes industrialization and ‘the Industrial Revolution’, which is now usually taken to be just one vital part, or one stage, of the overall process. ‘No change in human life since the invention of agriculture, metallurgy, and towns in the New Stone Age has been so profound as the coming of industrialisation.’

By general consent, modernization was first experienced in Great Britain—or rather in certain regions of Great Britain such as Lancashire, Yorkshire, the Black Country, Tyneside, Clydebank, and South Wales. But it was soon felt on the Continent, especially in locations on or near the great coalfields in Belgium, in the Ruhr, and in Silesia. From these areas of industrial concentration its effects were gradually felt in ever-widening circles, first in the ports, then in the capital cities, and eventually right across the countries which received the industrial stimulus. It could never be complete; but to varying degrees its effects were felt across the face of Europe. When they were felt overseas, either through the colonial end of imperial economies or through local initiative, they were seen as aspects of ‘Europeanization’. In this way, modernization became the focal point not only of a world-wide economic system but equally of the distinction between ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ countries.

Modernization, above all, must be seen as a motor of change, not as the static sum of its component parts. This motor, or engine, needs first to ignite, then to accelerate, and finally to reach the critical point of ‘take-off’, when it passes into an entirely different mode of motion. (It can best be likened to the twentieth-century phenomenon of flying, although the example of the early nineteenth-century locomotive is perhaps more fitting.) There is the long period of preparation, when the boiler is lit and a sufficient head of steam accumulated; there is the dramatic moment of departure, when steam pressure is applied to the pistons and the wheels begin to move; there is the phase of consolidation, as the engine picks up speed amidst an array of groans and judders; and there is the glorious state of cruising, when it purrs sweetly along the track with maximum speed and efficiency.

Throughout the nineteenth century, most European governments were striving to foster the conditions that would take their countries from economic ignition to social ‘take-off’. Some succeeded; some did not; some had no chance of success in the first place. After Britain’s lonely start, most of the countries of northwestern Europe followed suit in the middle of the century—first Belgium and Holland, then Prussia, Piedmont, and France. By the end of the century Britain’s lead was being rapidly overhauled by the superior resources and dynamism of a united Germany.

Most countries showed marked contrasts between modernized metropolitan regions and their outlying provinces. Within the United Kingdom, England began to look very different from the outlying highlands and islands. Highly developed regions began to appear along the Paris-Lyons-Marseilles axis in France; along the Lille-Liège-Rotterdam axis in the Low Countries; along the Rhineland-Ruhr-Berlin-Saxony-Silesia axis in Germany; in the Bohemia-Vienna-Budapest core of Austria-Hungary; in Lombardy within the united Italy. Provinces such as Ireland, Brittany, Galicia, or Sicily were highly underdeveloped. The Russian Empire, despite regional contrasts of the most extreme degree, was accelerating rapidly towards modernization in the last years before 1914.

Owing to differential developments both between states and within states, the existing economic contrasts within Europe were greatly accentuated. Indeed, in the course of the nineteenth century, two distinct economic zones emerged: an advanced, predominantly industrialized and modernized zone in the North and West, and a backward, industrializing but largely unmodernized zone in the South and East. The former participated in the ‘worldwide maritime economy’, still dominated by Great Britain, and like Britain was able to boost its performance by the acquisition of overseas colonies. The latter could only act as a dependent source of food, raw materials, and cheap migrant labour, and as a captive market for manufactured goods.

The one major discrepancy lay with Germany, which, though it became the most dynamic country of the industrialized zone, was prevented for reasons of politics and timing from acquiring a commensurate collection of colonies. As a result, once Germany was united in 1871, it forged close economic links with the countries of Eastern Europe, thereby compensating itself for its colonial failures. Whereas in former times the divide between Western and Eastern Europe had largely been religious and political in nature, it now assumed strong economic overtones.

Industrialization in Eastern Europe was confined to localized areas which stood out like islands in a sea of rural backwardness. Such islands grew up in northern Bohemia, in the triangle of Lodz-Warsaw-Dąbrowa, in the cotton mills of Nizhny Novgorod and St Petersburg, in the Donbass, and in the oilfields of Galicia, Romania, and the Caspian. What is more, these islands were not just geographically isolated: even at the end of the century, they generated insufficient momentum for driving the economy as a whole to the point of take-off. The consequences, both social and strategic, were considerable. The mass of the peasant population suffered mounting distress; they were freed from former obligations on the land but were given no adequate opportunity for betterment in the towns. They could benefit neither from modern agriculture nor from any significant degree of industrial employment. What is more, in a poor society, the state had to tax its poverty-stricken subjects mercilessly. Here were the makings of social and political revolt. Seeing this, and fearing the dynamism of Germany, the Western Powers decided to bolster their politicalrapprochement with Russia with a campaign for massive investment. In 1890–1914 French, British, and Belgian investment in Russia mounted mightily, fuelling a massive increase in Russia’s railway mileage, industrial production, and foreign trade.

The question remains whether an all-European economy existed or not. The answer is probably not. But if it did—and those massive Western investments in Russia heralded growing economic integration—then the pivotal position clearly came to be occupied by Germany. By 1900 Germany combined a major stake in the industry and commerce of the West with a dominant role in the economics of the East.

Given the contrast between Germany’s economic precocity and her political retardation, it is not surprising that modernization’s leading theorists were both Germans. Yet Friedrich List (1789–1846), whose National System of Political Economy was published in 1841, derived very different conclusions from those of Karl Marx (see pp. 837–8). For Marx, the motor of change was to be found in the class struggle; for List, it was to be found in the economic policy of the state, which could foster development by protectionist tariffs and by heavy investment in infrastructure and education. List was the most coherent advocate of what others have called the ‘Prussian road to capitalism’—an example which excited the imagination of many, especially in Eastern Europe, who longed to follow in Prussia’s steps.5

At the time few Europeans bothered to ask the fundamental question why this modernization occurred in Europe rather than elsewhere. The answer would seem to lie in a particular coincidence of ecological, economic, social, cultural, and political circumstances, which other more ancient and highly sophisticated civilizations did not possess. The emphasis lies on coincidence—in other words, on ‘the European miracle’.6

Seen in detail, the process of modernization can be broken down into an apparently endless chain of sub-processes and new developments, each interacting with the others. Apart from the dozen factors which contributed to the initial Industrial Revolution, some thirty others have to be taken into account as change fuelled change in the economic, social, cultural, psychological, political, and military spheres. (See Appendix III, p. 1293.)

Agricultural production benefited from the gradual introduction of machines, from McCormick’s horse-drawn reapers (1832) to steam-driven threshers, and eventually to petrol-driven tractors (1905). The export of agricultural machinery was a major item in the trade between industrial and non-industrial regions. More machines meant fewer hands on the farm, and more people who could migrate to town and factory.

The mobility of labour was greatly increased during the Revolutionary wars, when serfdom was abolished in France, Italy, and Spain, and when millions of soldiers left their villages never to return. In Eastern Europe the emancipation of the serfs took place over several later decades. It caused much misery in Prussia in 1811–48, where brutal rentification of services often led to forcible clearances. It happened overnight in Austria in 1848, leaving a trail of unresolved disputes. It was effected in the Russian Empire by the ukaz of 1861, in the Kingdom of Poland by the ukaz of April 1864.

New sources of power were brought in to supplement ‘King Coal’, first with gas, then with oil, and later with the commercial use of electricity. Pall Mall in London had been illuminated by gas lights in 1813; and coal-gas was generally available in Britain for domestic and urban use from the 1820s. Oil was available from the 1860s. Oilfields were opened up in Europe at Borystaw (Galicia), at Ploesti (Romania), and at Baku on the Caspian. With time, the internal combustion engine (1889) was to prove as revolutionary as the steam engine. Electricity became widely available only in the 1880s, following Gramme’s perfection of the dynamo (1869) and the construction by Deprez of high-tension transmission cables (1881). It could produce heat, light, and traction. The debut of’la Fée Élec-tricité’ took place at the Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1900. At that time, 92 per cent of the world’s energy still came from coal.

Power-driven machines and engines were applied to an ever-widening range of operations, from conveyor belts to steamboats. The critical developments, however, were those of machine tools—machines that manufactured machines—and of power tools, such as the steam-hammer or pile-driver, which eliminated the manual element from heavy operations. Henry Maudslay (1771–1831) of Woolwich, inventor of the metal lathe (1797), is sometimes seen as the father of the field.

Mining, for all the advances in pumping and safety, remained a labour-intensive industry. In 1900 as in 1800, millions of European coalminers crouched at the coalface, pick in hand, selling their health for a high wage and silicosis. Iron-mining was centred on the rich ‘Minette’ deposits in Luxemburg-Lorraine, in northern Spain, in northern Sweden, and at Krivoi Rog in Ukraine. Metallurgy made greater progress. A series of advances in blast-furnace design culminated in Sir Henry Bessemer’s Converter at Sheffield (1856) and in Martin’s open-hearth process at Sireuil (1864). The Railway Age was supplied with cheap, high-quality steel which, apart from rails, could be used for bridges, ships, building frames, munitions. In the 1880s advances in the theory and practice of allotropy brought a wide range of high-grade alloys on to the markets, with specialized uses in tool-making and artillery. Electro-metallurgy facilitated aluminium production. If the eighteenth-century ironmasters were the princes of the first Industrial Revolution, the steelmakers of the late nineteenth century, such as Schneider of Le Creusot or Krupp of Essen, were their true heirs apparent. Steel production became the key index of industrial power. (See Appendix III, pp. 1296–7).

Transport improved dramatically in speed, efficiency, and comfort. Roads entered a new era with John McAdam’s stone and tar surface (1815), only fully utilized after the arrival of the motor car. Bridging acquired fresh dimensions with Telford’s first suspension bridge at the Menai Straits (1819). Railways carried ever more passengers and freight ever more cheaply and faster. Overland travel time between Paris and St Petersburg was cut from 20 days in 1800 to 30 hours in 1900. Europeans were united by the romance and the utility of their railways. By the turn of the century, by far the densest network had been built in Belgium (42.8 km of track per 100 km2 as compared to 19 km in the UK and 17.2 km in Germany). By far the most extensive provision had been made in Sweden (27 km per 10,000 inhabitants as against 12.2 km in Belgium). By far the worst provision had been made in Serbia (2.5 km per 10,000 as compared with 5.7 km in European Russia), [BENZ]

In aviation, the Montgolfiers’ hot-air balloon, first tested on 5 June 1783 at Annonay near Lyons, made ballooning an important military skill throughout the nineteenth century. It was superseded by Count Zeppelin’s dirigible airship (1900) and shortly afterwards by aeroplanes. In the 1890s Otto Lilienthal pioneered gliding in Germany, and in 1903 at Dayton (Ohio) the Wright Brothers achieved manned, petrol-driven flight. On 25 July 1909 Louis Blériot sensationally flew a monoplane across the English Channel in 31 minutes.

Communication systems improved in parallel. The creation of unified postal services made rapid correspondence available to all. Postage stamps made their appearance with Great Britain’s ‘Penny Black’ on 1 May 1840. They were introduced in Zurich and Geneva (1843), in France and Bavaria (1849), in Prussia, Austria, and Spain (1850), in Sweden (1855), in Russia and Romania (1858), in Poland (i860), in Iceland (1873). The invention of the electric telegraph (1835), of the telephone (1877), and of radio (1896) rendered long-distance communication instantaneous. The most famous demonstration of the value of superior communication was staged on 19 June 1815, when Nathan Rothschild made a record killing on the London stock market, having used a special yacht to bring news of Waterloo many hours in advance of his rivals. Important improvements in international communications were effected by the International Postal Union (1874), the International Telegraph Union (1875), the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (1875), and the Central Bureau for Railway Traffic (1890). [PHOTO]

Capital investment multiplied in proportion to growing returns. Private firms reinvested growing profits; governments invested a growing proportion of rising taxation. A bottomless demand for capital exhausted the possibilities of private borrowing, and revived the potential for joint-stock companies (which in England and France, though not Scotland, had been curtailed since the Bubble disaster of 1720). From the 1820s the limited joint-stock company became familiar all over Europe. These sociétés anonymes (SA) or Aktiengesellschaft (AG) or ‘Company Limited’, with their shareholders and their AGMs, paid dividends to their investors whilst owing only limited liability to their creditors. Soon, through ‘horizontal’ mergers or ‘vertical’ contracts, they were combining themselves into ever-larger conglomerates—either consolidated trusts or confederated cartels. In Britain, where fears of monopoly were strong, trusts and cartels were slow to develop. Many of the largest British companies, such as the steamship lines P. & O. or Cunard, appeared in the 1840s. But in France cartels were common. In united Germany there was little opposition to enormous trusts or Konzernen on the American model, which dominated each sector of the market.

BENZ

IN 1885, Carl Benz of Mannheim (1844–1929) built a three-wheeled, self-I propelled, petrol-driven motorwagen. Often billed as ‘the first motor-car’, it marked only the mid-point in two centuries of car history. A steam-driven vehicle built by Nicholas Cugnot (1725–1804) had earned the name of automobile as long ago as 1769. Steam carriages were in widespread service by 1850. Gas-driven cars were also tried. But it was the four-stroke, internal-combustion engines of Nikolaus Otto (1876), Gottlieb Daimler (1885), and Rudolf Diesel (1897) which really gave motor transport its future.

The original Benz tricycle is exhibited in the Deutsches Museum at Munich. It has two 80-spoke, solid-rimmed driving wheels connected to differential gears, and one forward guide-wheel steered by an upright handle. The engine, underneath a raised bench seat, had electric ignition. It developed less than 1 hp, but achieved a speed of 16 kph. There was no coachwork.1

European motorization was greatly assisted by Andre Michelin’s pneumatic tyre (1888) and by American methods of mass production (1908). Motor cycles, lorries, and buses proliferated. The turn of the century welcomed major commercial firms such as Fabbrica Italiana di Automobilismo di Torino (FIAT, 1899) and Renault in Paris (1901). The Daimler-Benz ‘Mercedes’ of 1901 and the Rolls-Royce ‘Silver Ghost’ of 1906 set new standards of luxury and reliability. (Lenin owned a Rolls-Royce.) Two world wars slowed down growing car ownership, but increased the number of transport vehicles and of trained drivers. Popular motoring reached a landmark with Hitler’s inauguration of the Volkswagen ‘Beetle’ in 1938. Motoring in Scandinavia was pioneered by Volvo of Gothenburg, and in Czechoslovakia by Skoda of PIzen. A Polski Fiat was built under licence in inter-war Poland. The era of general motorization reached Western Europe after 1950, and the Soviet bloc from the late 1960s.

The history of technology is bedevilled by claims about ‘firsts’, which often distort the essentially collaborative and cumulative nature of technological advance. Yet moments of qualitative change do occur. The difficulty is to identify them. When, for example, was the first powered flight? One can take one’s choice between Launoy and Bienvenu’s model ‘bowstring’ helicopter (1784), Henry Giffard’s steam-powered airship (1852), the petrol-powered aeroplane (1890) of Clément Ader, whom it carried on a flight of 50 metres, or the experimental rockets of K. E. Tsiolkovsky. Most reference works prefer a flight at Kill Devil Hill (North Carolina) on 17 December 1903. But they refer to a different category, ‘powered and controlled flight’.2

PHOTO

AN old barnyard at Chalons-sur-Sâone had the distinction of transmitting its image onto the world’s first photograph. One day in 1826, Joseph Nicéphore Niepce succeeded in capturing the image on pewter plate after an exposure of eight hours. Thirteen years later Niepce’s partner, Louis Daguerre (1789–1851), was able to market a photographic system which required an exposure of thirty minutes onto copper plates covered by light-sensitive silver chloride. The Daguerrotype launched a long process of evolution which led to the popular box camera, colour film, movies, sound movies, X-rays, infra-red and miniature photography, and, most recently, electronic camcorders.

The impact of photography on peace and war cannot be exaggerated. It helped destroy the raison d’ótre of representational art. [IMPRESSION] It transformed people’s visual consciousness of themselves and of the world around them. It put a powerful tool at the disposal of every branch of science and communications. Pictures of the Crimean War brought the realities of military conflict to the world’s attention, just as family portraits revolutionized perceptions of social life. Photography also brought a new dimension to the historical record. Fifty years before sound could be recorded [SOUND], photographic collections began to amass real images of all aspects of the past. [AUSCHWITZ]

Yet the realism of photography was deceptive. The art of the retoucher in official Soviet photography, for example, was notorious. Stalin removed all traces of Trotsky’s presence from the record; and Gorbachev’s unsightly birthmark was removed as late as 1985. But even the honest photographer’s arbitrary selection of angle, of the momentary snapshot, of light, tone, and texture, and, above all, of subject, leaves as much hidden as revealed. The camera, like the historian, always lies.

Domestic markets were boosted by population growth, by the greater accessibility of population centres, by expanding affluence, and by the creation of entirely new sorts of demand. Among many newcomer industries the most important was the chemical industry, which grew from the separation of aniline dye stuffs (1856), the Solvay process of soda extraction (1863), and the production of artificial fertilizers. A barrage of exciting artificial materials then descended, including plastics, concrete, cellophane, celluloid, rayon, viscose, aspirin. German names were specially prominent among the chemical pioneers, notably Liebig, Hofmann, Bunsen, and Bayer, [MAUVE]

Foreign trade was boosted by the opening up of new continents, especially America and Africa, by the drive for colonies, by the hunger at home for raw materials, by the thirst abroad for an ever-greater range of manufactured goods. Foreign and domestic markets became interdependent,[JEANS]

Government policy towards modernization varied in accordance with a country’s regime, its resources, and its relative position. Few could fail to see the benefits; but governments of poor countries, like Russia or Spain, vacillated between their shame of backwardness and their fear of dependence. Autocratic regimes like Russia could isolate themselves until a decision to accept foreign investment was taken. More liberal or more indecisive regimes, like Austria-Hungary, could not.

Once the Industrial Revolution was in motion, a long series of consequences ensued. In the purely economic sphere, the growth of the money economy turned self-sufficient peasants into wage-earners, consumers, and taxpayers, each with new demands and aspirations. Paper banknotes came into general circulation. A vast range of new skills and techniques in marketing, advertisement, and distribution was nurtured. The deluge of developments in science and technology took innovations away from the private inventor and into the realm of systematic, sponsored R. & D. The need for financial services great and small led to the proliferation of credit associations, savings banks, and insurance companies. The multiplication of commercial transactions encouraged the standardization of weights, measures, and currencies.

In the social sphere, urbanization on a massive scale brought a welter of new problems, a set of new social classes, and a crop of new public services. The latter included paved streets, city transport, street lighting, fire brigades, waterworks, gasworks, sewerage works; town-planning, hospitals, parks, and police. The old rural distinction between the nobles and the peasants was overtaken by the new urban distinction between the middle classes and the working classes. Just as the middle classes were conscious of strata within their ranks, with professional lawyers and doctors feeling much superior to traders and shopkeepers, so the working classes were channelled into hierarchies of their own. Wage-labourers formed an important sector of employees both on farms and in factories, and as ‘navvies’ on the ubiquitous construction projects. Domestic service in the large number of prosperous middle-class family houses provided a vital source of employment for both men and women. Employment in the new factories was thought more prestigious than self-employment in the older crafts. Skilled, well-paid specialists and foremen could feel themselves ‘proletarian aristocrats’vis-à-vis the unskilled casuals and the urban poor. The concept of class based on flexible economic criteria was strongly opposed to the older groupings based on birth and legal privilege, and was a central feature of modern society.

The traditional European family household had always been thought to be large, complex, stable, and patriarchal. Modern research has challenged some of the preconceptions about this ‘classic family of Western nostalgia’, and has shown that the small, simple household and the nuclear family were not exclusively modern inventions. Even so, it would be hard to accept that modernization did not have a profound effect on family structures. Certainly, it was the belief that modern life was destroying the stability of the family that motivated Frederic Le Play (1806–82), the pioneer of family history and conceptualizer of la familie souche or ‘stem family’.7

MAUVE

SOMETIME in 1856 an 18-year-old student began experimenting in the back room of his home in the leafy London suburb of Harrow. The boy, later Sir William Henry Perkin (1838–1907), was trying to produce a synthetic form of the anti-malarial drug, quinine. Instead, by oxidizing aniline sulphate with potassium dichromate, he chanced on a new precipitate. When he dried it and extracted it in alcohol, he saw a brilliant colour which no one had ever seen before. It was the world’s first synthetic dye. He called it ‘Tyrian Purple’. French chemists later called it mauveine after the mallow flower or mauve:1

Two years later, when Perkin was already manufacturing mauveine commercially, another youngster from the Royal College of Chemistry, Johann Peter Griess, analysed the reaction which accounted for such startling results. He established that primary aromatic amines, like aniline, when treated with a mixture of hydrochloric acid and sodium nitrite, will give diazo compounds. These in turn react with phenolic compounds or aromatic amines to give intensely coloured products known as azo dyes. Aniline, for example, when treated with a mixture of hydrochloric acid and sodium nitrite, gives benzenediazonium chloride.2 A key feature of this ‘diazo-reaction’, as of other dyes, lies in the presence in the molecule of so-called chromophores, that is, of groups of atoms which absorb light of a very specific wavelength and give the end product a unique colour.

Where mauveine led the way, other artificial colours followed in profusion: Magenta and Violet Imperial (1860), Bleu de Lyon (1862), Aniline Yellow and Aniline Black (1863), Dahlia Pink, Perkin’s Green, and Manchester or Bismarck Brown (1864), Alizarin Red (1871), and London Orange (1875). When the British Post Office chose mauveine for printing the famous ‘1d. lilac’ stamps of 1881, it was already falling from fashion. But the aesthetics of colour would never be the same again.

For colour constitutes one of the fundamental properties of matter, and hence of human reactions to the environment. In Europe, yellow has traditionally been associated with cowardice, red with anger, black with depression. Greens and browns are supposed to soothe, blues and reds tostimulate. Northern Europeans are thought to prefer subtle, subdued shades; the Mediterranean peoples revel in bright, primary colours.

The invasion of everyday life by unrestricted colour undoubtedly triggered a profound change. Prior to mauveine, all colours and pigments had to be extracted from natural materials. The root of the madder, Rubia tine-torum, was the standard source of reds. Thousands of tons of the plant had to be carted to every textile town. Indigo, which the Romans obtained from shellfish for their ‘imperial purple’, was the main source of blues: fustic or annatto of yellow. Some shades and colours, notably green, could only be achieved by double dyeing. A semi-artificial red calledmurexide was produced in France c.1850 by treating bird-droppings with nitric acid.

After mauveine, however, the supply of dazzling hues knew few bounds. By the late twentieth century the number of synthetic dyes produced commercially in Europe had risen to over 4.000.3 Garish posters, gaudy clothes, and glamorous wallpaper—not to mention ‘technicolor’ films, colour photographs, and colour television—delight or disgust the post-industrial age in ways that the pre-industrials could not have imagined.

England’s initial lead soon passed to Germany, where Friedrich Bayer (1825–80) founded his first aniline dyestuffs factory in a washhouse at Wuppertal-Barmen in 1863.4 Bayer, BASF (Badische Anilin und Soda Fabrik), and Hoechst quickly turned Germany into the world capital of chemicals. By 1890, Germany’s chemical industry was twenty times larger than Britain’s.5 The conglomerate of I.G. Farben, like Britain’s ICI, was set up after the First World War.5

Synthetic dyes soon led scientists into fields unknown to the early dye-masters. By producing all the many categories of synthetic and semi-synthetic materials which have since been invented, modern chemistry has shattered the assumption that Nature or God alone could design the inner structure of substances. Synthetic dyes preceded the first semi-synthetic material—Parkseine or Celluloid (1862), and the semi-artificial fibre—viscose (1891). They foreshadowed the invention of synthetic drugs such as phenacetin (1888), asprin (1899), salvarsan (1910), acriflavine (1916), and heroin; the isolation of hormones such as insulin (1921) or thy-roxin (1926), which were eventually synthesized; and the production of chloramphenicol (1950), the first synthetic antibiotic.

Chemistry became an art as well as a science. Its creations, which began to proliferate wildly after Baekeland’s Bakelite (1907), Raschig’s amino-plastics (1909), and of Ostromislensky’s polyvinyl chloride or PVC (1912), have become an essential component of material life. Yet from the day in 1864 when the Empress Eugenie of France wore a gown in tri-phenylmethane green, synthetic products were shown to have aesthetic as well as practical qualities.

JEANS

GÈNES’ is the French name for Genoa, and by extension for a traditional style of trousers worn by Genoese sailors. Serge de Nîmes was the name of a tough blue sailcloth, now corrupted to ‘denim’, traditionally woven in the French town. Levi Strauss (1829–1902) was a native of Bavaria who emigrated to New York at the age of fourteen and who joined his brothers in their business of supplying the prospectors and frontiersmen of the Californian Gold Rush. Some time in the 1860s Levi’s company had the idea of matching the clenim cloth with the Genoese trousers, and of strengthening the pockets and seams with brass horse-harness rivets. Thus was produced the most durable and universal item in the history of fashion design—a German immigrant using French materials and Italian style to invent an archetypal American product.

‘Blue jeans’ remained workaday clothing in North America for almost a century, before taking Europe (and the rest of the world) by storm in the 1960s, a prime symbol of ‘Americanization’.1

Women’s circumstances were radically transformed. Traditional rural life had assured women of an equitable division of shared labour, and the presence of an extended family which eased the pressures of child-bearing and motherhood. Modern urban life turned the man into a primary ‘breadwinner’, and left the woman either as a lonely homemaker and domestic manageress or, in the case of the working class, as a thrice-burdened outworker, housekeeper, and parent. Not surprisingly, beyond the prim parlours of polite society lay a teeming underworld of prostitution, desperation, and early death.

Industrialization brought wave after wave of migration: first on a local or seasonal basis from village to factory; next on a regional basis from the countryside to the towns; and, from the 1850s onwards, on an international and an intercontinental basis to all the industrial cities of Europe and the USA. Unregulated migration brought in its turn urban overcrowding, vagrancy, housing shortages, homelessness, epidemics of typhus and cholera, unemployment amidst prosperity, persistent and irremediable poverty. With much delay, the worst epidemics, such as the Europe-wide outbreaks of cholera in 1830–5,1847–8,1853–6,1865–7, 1869–74,1883–7, and 1893–5, provoked a revolution in public and private hygiene and the institution of communal health services, [SANITAS] Medical progress eventually resulted in a startling drop in the death rate and in infant mortality.

Rising population, however, compounded the evils of overpopulation in the villages, and of sweatshops, child labour, inhuman working hours, female exploitation, and unspeakable sorrow in the slums. Organized crime thrived on poverty and the psychopathology of urban living. It spawned a new underclass of committed criminals, the new idea of professional police forces modelled on Scotland Yard, a new profession of detectives, a new rash of prison building, and, with The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1894), a new literary genre—the crime thriller.

The terrible contrast between rich and poor has never been better described than by Benjamin Disraeli (1804–81), novelist and prime minister. In Sybil (1845) Disraeli wrote of ‘Two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings as if they were … inhabitants of different planets’.8 The description was accurate enough; but the accusation was not altogether fair. The nineteenth century also saw a huge explosion of private charities.[CARITAS]

In the cultural sphere, education vastly expanded its frontiers. Town dwellers could no longer function without basic literacy and numeracy: universal primary education became necessary for children of both sexes. Technical education was required for the army of fitters, technicians, and apprentices; higher scientific education for the corps of engineers and researchers. Government and business leaders called for secondary schools of a new type to train the executive cadres of the civil service, the colonial departments, and industry. Women’s education was launched. Mass literacy, however, opened the way for new forms of mass culture: popular magazines, trash novels, romances, and whodunnits, comics, self-help almanacs, family reference works. Regular incomes created the possibility of new forms of leisure and recreation: musical associations, family holidays, tourism, mountaineering, and sport, football for the workers, golf for the bosses, [RELAX-ATIO][TOUR] The mania for physical pursuits, which was a product of cramped urban living, combined with the mania for education to create a number of hybrid youth movements such as the widespread ‘Sokol’ associations in central Europe or Scouting for Boys and Guiding for Girls (1908). Religious culture responded in tune. Literate children could not be expected simply to learn their catechism by rote. The church halls of urban parishes became the focal point of social, charitable, and temperance activities. In the Protestant countries evangelical fundamentalism, Sunday schools, and Bible-reading classes proliferated. In the Catholic countries the Church organized the first industrial parishes, worker-priests, and private Catholic primary schools. In the universities, with scholars struggling to comprehend the changing world about them, a whole new range of social sciences made their appearance—economics, ethnography, anthropology, linguistics, sociology. Each of the new disciplines were to have a profound influence on the recognized fields of study: philosophy, science, history, and literature.

SANITAS

IN 1829 the city of Orenburg in the Urals was hit by an unprecedented I wave of cholera. In 1830 the same cholera hit Moscow. In 1831 it marched with the Russian Army against Poland before spreading to Hungary, Austria, and Prussia. It reached London in February 1832, Paris in March, Amsterdam in June, and thence spread to Scandinavia. The Spaniards tried to protect themselves behind a decree passing the death sentence on all non-quarantined immigrants. But in January 1833 cholera reached Oporto, and entered Spain through Portugal. Though no one knew it, Europe stood in the front line of the second of six pandemics of cholera that were to sweep repeatedly round the world for the next ninety years; and Russia was Europe’s bacterial gateway.1 [EPIDEMIA]

The effects of the pandemic were all the more deadly since its workings were not yet fully understood. Cholera is the old Greek word for ‘gutter’, and accurately described the violent intestinal flux that could empty out a sufferer’s substance in a couple of days. Medical opinion is unsure whether earlier forms of this dysentery-like illness, under a variety of names, had in fact been the same. But the guilty agent was eventually identified in 1883 as a bacterium, vibrio cholerae 01, which infected the small intestine after being imbibed with contaminated water. First observed by British Army doctors in India, the launch-pad of all the pandemics, physicians eventually realized that it could best be prevented by a clean water supply and best treated by simple rehydration techniques. The initial outbreak of 1817–23 had moved eastwards round Asia. But all subsequent pandemics—in 1829–51, 1852–9, 1863–79, 1881–96, and 1899–1923—visited Europe with a vengeance. The second pandemic, which had raged for fifteen years in the USA, came round again for a final fling in Europe in 1847–51. In Britain 53,000 died in 1848, and a similar number died in France in 1849. In 1851 a statue was erected in Paris to implore God’s mercy on cholera’s helpless victims.

Help, however, was to hand. Cholera had the distinction of provoking Europe’s first co-ordinated initiatives for public health, at both the national and the international level. In 1848 a General Board of Health was established in London to address the foul conditions and high death rates in Britain’s burgeoning cities. Fortified by Disraeli’s great Public Health Act (1875), which held all local authorities responsible for efficient sewage treatment, drainage, and water supply, it protected the United Kingdom most effectively. By the fourth pandemic, British losses of c.15,000 were only one-tenth of those experienced in Russia, Germany, Italy or Austria-Hungary. After the fifth pandemic, when Hamburg (1893) lost over 8,000 citizens, and Moscow and St Petersburg (1893–4) over 800,000, Britain could boast that it had already warded off its last indigenous case of cholera.

In 1851 Napoleon III took the initiative of convening the founding International Health Conference in Paris. Its purpose was to exchange information about the spread and prevention of disease, especially cholera. At the time neither Pasteur nor Lister had made the pioneering discoveries of bacteriology, but it led to a regular series of conferences on hygiene, and in 1907 to the International Health Organization in Paris, the forerunner of the WHO. By then, especially in Poland, Choléra! only remained as one of Europe’s favourite swear-words.

Ironically, no sooner had Europe tamed cholera than an aberrant strain of influenza surpassed all of cholera’s triumphs. Traced to an outbreak of swine fever in Iowa in January 1918, the influenza pandemic of 1918–19 sailed to Europe with the US army. Known as the Blitzkatarrh, the ‘Flanders Grippe’, and, through the infection of the King of Spain, as ‘the Spanish Lady’, it specialized in prime young adults, particularly women. During the terminal months of the First World War it devastated Germany, where influenza was not even a notifiable disease, paralysing the workforce of major cities, interrupting deliveries and troop movements. In three terrible peaks—July 1918, October 1918, and February 1919—it destroyed millions of Europeans, possibly 40 million world-wide. ‘[This pandemic] killed more humans in a couple of months than any scourge in history.’

In the psychological sphere, urban and industrial life fostered attitudes that were entirely foreign to country dwellers. The factory hooter, the railway timetable, the need for punctuality and sobriety were all innovations that a peasant might find strange and irksome. Consumerism and compulsory thrift were complementary reactions of the fearful spender let loose on an unfamiliar market. Class-consciousness was born of anxious people uncertain of their status in a strangely mobile society. National consciousness was bred in newly educated generations who in their rural villages had never given a moment’s thought to their identity or their language. Political consciousness was aroused in generations who were no longer helpless serfs and who could cultivate personal opinions about the rights and wrongs of political events. Indeed, national and political consciousness was often aroused most fiercely in those countries where a repressed population was deprived of free expression and a free vote. Lastly, there was the psychology of late nineteenth-century imperialism, where a whole generation of parvenu Europeans were taught to look down on other races and cultures in ways that secure and settled societies would not have embraced.

In the political sphere, governments faced new types of challenge. They were no longer addressing themselves to their own narrow élite but to a mass audience of taxpayers, holding a wide variety of views expressed with growing confidence and sophistication. They could not restrict political life indefinitely to the traditional male propertied caste; and they were increasingly faced with organized campaigns for universal male suffrage and later for women’s suffrage. The majority of Europeans were enfranchised between 1848 and 1914. As a result, political parties sprang up, each with a mass following and each devoted to the interests of liberals, conservatives, Catholics, peasants, workers, or whatever. Governments had also to institute a wide range of specialized ministries and to run a bulging bureaucracy that had a mind and will of its own. They were employers on a grand scale, and were forced to consider the welfare of their employees with National Insurance and pensions. They had to reorganize local government to suit the needs of self-important cities and of freshly populated provinces, and hence to rethink the entire relationship between capital and periphery. They had to cope with a wide range of professional, commercial, and industrial associations—and, most particularly in the second half of the century, the trade unions—who claimed the right to act as pressure-groups long before they were formally integrated into political life.

CARITAS

IN 1818 the Netherlands Maatschaapij van Weldadigheid (Benevolent I Society) opened a complex of labour colonies for the care of the unemployed. They conformed to a much older Dutch tradition for correcting the idle, [BATAVIA] One colony at Veenhuizen catered for up to 4,000 men convicted of begging. Another at Leyden catered for indigent women. Three ‘free colonies’ at Frederiksoord, Willemsoord, and Wilhelminasoord were designed to teach agricultural skills to voluntary inmates. In due course, they were funded by the state. Similar institutions came into being in Germany, Belgium, and Switzerland, often under military-style discipline.1 They are examples both of the growing provision of social care in nineteenth-century Europe and also of growing regimentation. As with the workhouses introduced by the English Poor Law Amendment Act (1834), it was assumed that able-bodied recipients of charity would have to work.

Charity in various forms had been practised since ancient times. But the fundamental Christian principles were laid down by St Thomas Aquinas, who distinguished seven ‘spiritual aids’ and seven ‘good works’. The former were listed as consule (counsel), carpe (sustain), doce(teach),solare (console), remitte (rescue), fer (pardon), and ora (pray); the latter as vestio (clothe), poto (to give water), cibo (feed), redimo (redeem from prison), tego (shelter), colligo (nurse), and condo (bury). From this, one could determine the classes of unfortunates to whom charity was to be extended. They included the bewildered, the weak, the illiterate, the bereaved, the oppressed, the criminal, the sinful, the stranger, the ragged, the hungry, the imprisoned, the homeless, the sick, the mad, and the dead. Christian teaching was emphatic: ‘Faith, Hope and Charity: these three,’ says St. Paul, ‘but the greatest of these is Charity.’ For it is Charity meaning ‘love for one’s neighbour’ that begets charity meaning ‘generous giving’.

In medieval times, the burden of care had fallen on the Church, and was funded from the tithe. St Bernard launched the charitable tradition in monasteries, St Francis the tradition of social action within the community. Both had many successors. Royal, aristocratic, and municipal patrons were moved to found a widespread network of maisons-Dieu for the sick and infirm, of hospices for pilgrims, wayfarers, and strangers, of alms-houses for the deserving poor, and of leprosaria. A large city like London possessed a number of more specialized institutions, such as St Bartholomew’s Hospital, St Mary’s of Bethlehem, or ‘Bedlam’, for the insane, and St Mary’s ‘Converts’ Inn’ for Jewish converts expelled by their own community.3 As elsewhere, prosperous merchants such as Sir Richard Whittington (d. 1423), sometime Lord Mayor, left generous endowments, [LEPER] [MERCANTE]

This medieval system began to fracture in the Reformation period, particularly in the Protestant countries. The dissolution of the English monasteries (1540) had social consequences with which the hard-pressed Elizabethan Poor Laws could not cope. Modern Europe was obliged to seek new solutions. As the population grew, charitable institutions became much larger and more specialized. Purpose-built veterans’ homes, mental asylums, houses of correction, prisons, medical ‘infirmaries’, workhouses, labour colonies, and charity schools were multiplying fast in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Liberal and humanitarian movements pressed for the abolition of slavery, torture, and of degrading conditions. The burden of funding and administration passed from the Church to parish and city councils, to private benevolent societies, and eventually to the state,[PICARO] [TORMENTA]

The expansion of charitable activities has usually been seen, in the Whig tradition, as evidence for the onward march of civilization. Some historians, however, have thought otherwise. They point out that, while the institutions of social care greatly expanded, they subjected the evergrowing army of inmates to ever-rising levels of repression. The recipients may not have feared the gross physical brutalities of times past, but rigorous regimes of psychological and moral coercion could rob them of their freedom, their dignity, and their individuality. Regimentation was on the rise across a wide spectrum of social life, on the military parade-ground, in the school classroom, in factories, in the hospital ward, in the workhouses. It was seen by its originators as the necessary price for efficiency.

But there may have been a darker side. One has to wonder whether the regimentation of the masses was not somehow connected with the drive towards more liberal political institutions. Unremitting labour was the fate of both the employed and the unemployed. And as Nietzsche remarked cynically: ‘Work is the most efficient form of policing.’ Political controls could only be relaxed when social controls were tightened.

This line of thought is implicit in the work of the French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault (1926–84). Himself a sado-masochist who died of AIDS, he was determined to explore extreme experiences, and he came to be an unsparing critic of modern social reform. His studies of the history of mental asylums, which locked the most vulnerable persons out of sight, or of sexual attitudes, which drove basic human drives into the realm of hypocrisy and taboo, caused him to pronounce modern times to be ‘the Age of Repression’.4 All social relationships are determined by power. ‘Bourgeois society’, he declared, ‘was a society of blatant and fragmented perversion.’ He raises issues to which the inmates of those nineteenth-century labour colonies may have been quite sympathetic.

Finally, in the military sphere, both generals and politicians had to contemplate conflicts where civilians and women would be recruited to the war effort, where conscript armies of unheard-of size would be mobilized, and where staff officers armed with railway timetables would marshal men armed with machine-guns onto ground that could be subjected to 20 tons of high-explosive shell-fire per square foot per hour. Of all the challenges, this was the one which by 1914 they were least equipped to face. Reflections on the implications of warfare did not lead Europeans to reduce their military establishments. Kant, in 1797, had issued the definitive moral condemnation. ‘War’, he wrote at the end of his Metaphysics of Manners, ‘ought to have no place there.’ But much more common was the assumption of De Maistre that war was ‘the habitual state of the human species’. The treatise On War (1832), written by the Prussian general Karl von Clausewitz (1780–1831), was one of the most lucid and influential books of the century. ‘War’, he wrote, ‘is the continuation of politics by other means.’

Recounting the onward march of modernization, it is easy to give the impression that the road was smooth and the direction obvious. But such an impression would be false. The territory was often hostile, the obstacles enormous, the accidents unremitting. For every entrepreneur there was an aristocrat who did not want the railway to cross his land; for every machine there was a dispossessed craftsman who wanted to smash it; for every fresh factory, abandoned villages: for every shining city hall, slums. Of every ten children born into that Europe of pride and progress, three or four died. Economic growth did not mount on a steady upward curve: the new capitalism was capricious. Violent booms alternated with sudden slumps; the first decade of peace after 1815 witnessed a prolonged recession throughout Europe. Later periods of recession occurred after 1848, and after 1871. All periods contained shorter cycles of advance and retreat. Wages and prices moved by fits and starts. In the past, economic crises had been caused by visible things like plague or famine. Now they were said to be caused by inexplicable things like over-production, market conditions, or monetary failure. Average material conditions were definitely improving; but for individual families they often spelt unfamiliar wealth or desperate penury. Materially, European society was better off; psychologically, Europeans were seriously disturbed.

None the less, the world created by European modernization was incredibly rich for its chief, middle-class beneficiaries—rich in material possessions, rich in variety, rich in culture and style, rich in new experiences. A university professor in Scotland in the 1880s might earn £600 annually, ten times the upper reaches of the working class and equivalent to the price of a six-bedroomed house. In 1890–1 the seventeen official nationalities of Austria-Hungary shared 215 registered spas and 1,801 newspapers and periodicals. ‘La Belle Époque’ was the time when people went waltzing, dined at the Café Royale, bought pictures by the Impressionists, lived in the luxury of Art Nouveau. ‘A French politician like Édouard Herriot, mayor of Lyons, could speak excellent German, and hold his own on Wagner and Kant.’ In 1895 Henry James, the American novelist living in Europe, acquired electric lighting; in 1896 he rode a bicycle; in 1897 he wrote on a typewriter. And that was in a period which a British Royal Commission had called ‘the Great Depression’. Money was increasing in real value as prices gently fell. The poor, at least, could eat cheap food. Only the landowning aristocracy squeaked, appalled at their shrinking fortunes. There was no major war for more than forty years. ‘It looked as if this world would go on for ever.’

Demographic growth was one of the surest indicators of Europe’s dynamism. In brute terms, the population rose from c.150 million in 1800 to over 400 million by 1914. The accelerating rate of increase was more than twice as great as in the previous three centuries (see Appendix III, p. 1294). Europeans were reminded of the implications from the start. In 1816 the English economist Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) published the final edition of his depressing Essay on the Principle of Population. He predicted that, while the production of food might rise arithmetically, the growth of population would proceed geometrically. If he had been correct, Europeans would have begun to starve to death within a few decades. Indeed, some thought that the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s was a premonition of the general disaster, [FAMINE]

The British Isles, with a limited supply of arable land and a rocketing population, looked specially vulnerable. In the event, the general disaster never occurred. Such famines as did occur, as in Ireland, struck in the most backward rural districts of Europe, in Galicia and on the Volga, not in Europe’s over-crowded cities. The point came in the 1870s when large amounts of grain began to be imported from North America. But several European countries, such as Ukraine and France, showed a healthy surplus, and food prices in 1870–1900 were falling everywhere. At no time did the overall situation become critical.

The dynamics of European demography came to be much better understood in the course of the century. Sweden had been exceptional in carrying out a general census as early as 1686; but every European government now began a regular series: France and Great Britain from 1801, the German Customs Union from 1818, Austria-Hungary from 1857, Italy from 1861, Russia from 1897. By the turn of the century sophisticated statistics were available for all countries. (In Eastern Europe they were far superior to much that the twentieth century produced.)

Europe’s overall population gains were due to natural increase. The annual birth rate was highest early in the century, when death rates were also high; but in the 1900s it was still buoyant, up to 40 per 1,000 in many countries. With the help of medical advances, death rates were halved from c.40 to 20 per 1,000. With the curious exception of France, fertility and reproductive enthusiasm were much higher than ever before or since. The growth of cities was dramatic: by 1914 Europe had a dozen million-plus conurbations. London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, St Petersburg, and Istanbul had reached that status earlier on; Glasgow, Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool, Birmingham, the Ruhr, Hamburg, and Moscow followed later. Another score of cities, from Madrid to Odessa, had passed the half-million mark. Numbers in the rural population remained fairly static in the developed countries, although their proportion plummeted. In Great Britain in 1900 they represented only 8 per cent, in Germany they stood at 40 per cent, having dropped from 75 per cent in 30 years. In the underdeveloped countries, where they could represent up to 80 per cent, as in Russia, they were rising alarmingly. Europe lost 25 million emigrants to the USA in the last quarter of the century. One-quarter of the population of Galicia emigrated in the two decades before 1914 (see Appendix III, p. 1294).

Historians disagree whether the stunning social and economic changes of the nineteenth century should be regarded merely as ‘the background’ to cultural life or its determinant. Marx, for example, was a determinist: ‘in his view all forms of thought and consciousness are determined by the class struggle, which in turn is determined by the underlying economic relations.’ (If this is true, then Marx himself was not so much an original thinker as the product of his time.) At the other extreme, there are those who maintain that culture has a life of its own. Nowadays, most people would at least accept the midway proposition that culture cannot be properly understood without reference to its political, social, and economic context.

Romanticism, which became a dominant intellectual trend in many European countries in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, is seen by some historians essentially as a reaction to the Enlightenment. By others it is seen as an emanation of attitudes generated by the Industrial Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. Actually it was all of these things. The circumstances of its origins in the 1770s were closely connected indeed to the fading appeal of the Enlightenment (see Chapter IX). At the same time, the reasons for its mass appeal in the 1820s and 1830s were closely bound up with the experiences of a generation which lived through the revolutionary ordeal, which felt the impact of machines and factories, and which fumed after 1815 under the dead weight of the reactionary regimes. Romanticism found expression almost everywhere, even in Russia, treating the Catholic/Protestant and the Catholic/Orthodox divide with indifference. It affected all the arts, but especially poetry, painting, and music, and all branches of the humanities. It grew very strong in Germany. It was well represented in Britain, though the first British Romantics like Lord Byron were better received on the Continent than at home. After some delay, it appeared in force in France and Italy, as a counterweight to the deep-rooted traditions of classicism and rationalism. In Poland and in Hungary, where it was coloured by the agonies of national defeat, it became the dominant mode of thought.

The main tenets of the Romantic movement opposed everything which the Enlightenment had stood for. Where the Enlightenment had stressed the power of Reason, the Romantics were attracted by all in human experience that is irrational: by the passions, by the supernatural and paranormal, by superstitions, pain, madness, and death. Where the Enlightenment had stressed man’s growing mastery over nature, the Romantics took delight in trembling before nature’s untamed might: in the terror of storms and waterfalls, the vastness of mountains, the emptiness of deserts, the loneliness of the seas. Where the Enlightenment had followed the classical taste for harmony and restraint, and for the rules which underlay civilized conventions, the Romantics courted everything which defied established convention: the wild, the quaint, the exotic, the alien, the deranged. Where the Enlightenment had sought to expound the order underlying the apparent chaos of the world, the Romantics appealed to the hidden inner ‘spirits’ of everything that lives and moves. Where the Enlightenment was either unreligious or anti-religious, the Romantics were profoundly religious by temperament even, where they scorned conventional Christian practice. Where the Enlightenment catered for an intellectual élite, the Romantics catered for the newly liberated and educated masses. [PARNASSE] [RELAXATIO]

The Europe-wide appeal of Romanticism can be illustrated in many ways, but nowhere better than in its poetry. John Keats (1795–1821) languished archaically before the charms of a medieval maiden:

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

Alone and palely loitering?

The sedge is withered from the lake,

And no birds sing.

Alphonse de Lamartine (1790–1869) revelled simultaneously in the beauties of the Lac du Bourget and in thoughts of eternity:

ô temps, suspends ton vol! et vous, heures propices,

Suspendez votre cours!

Laissez-nous savourer les rapides délices

Des plus beaux de nos jours.

(Oh, Time, suspend your flight! And you, auspicious hours, I suspend your course! I Allow us to savour the fleeting delights I of our most beautiful days.)

Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837) sang the ‘Night Song of a Wandering Shepherd of Asia’:

PARNASSE

ON the summer of 1835, a walking-party which included the Hungarian pianist Franz Liszt and the French writer Georges Sand checked into the Hotel de I’Union in Geneva. Their comments in the hotel register said much about their good humour and about the outlook of their Romantic generation:

	Liszt	Sand
Place of birth	Parnassus	Europe
Residence	-	Nature
Occupation	Musician-Philosopher	-
Provenance	Doubt	God
Destination	Truth	Heaven
Date of passport	-	Infinity
Issued by	-	Public Opinion1

In 1835 the idea of ‘Europe’ was hardly less fantastic than that of ‘Parnassus’.

Pur tu, solinga, eterna peregrina,
che si pensosa sei, tu forse intendi,
questo viver tereno,
il patir nostro, il sospirar, che sia;
ché sia questo morir, questo supremo
scolorar del sembiante
e perir dalla terra, e venir meno
ad ogni usata, amante compagnia…

(Yet, lonely, eternal wanderer, I who are so thoughtful, perhaps you understand I what this earthly life may be, I our suffering and sighing, I and what this dying is, this ultimate I fading of the features, I and perishing from the earth, and falling away I from every familiar, loving company.)

Joseph, Freiherr von Eichendorff (1788–1857), recounted his favourite themes of Lust (desire), Heimat (homeland), and Waldeinsamkeit (forest loneliness) in his native Silesia:

In einem kühlen Grunde, Da geht ein Mühlenrad, Mein’ Liebste ist verschwunden, Die dort gewohnet hat…	(In a cool and shady hollow The old mill wheel is turning. But my loved one has departed From where she once was dwelling.
Sie hat mir Treu’ versprochen, Gab mir ein’n Ring dabei, Sie hat die Treu gebrochen, Mein Ringlein sprang entzwei.	She promised to be my true love, And sealed it with a ring. Now all her vows are broken, And shattered is the ring.

RELAXATIO

ON 14 July 1865 a young English illustrator and mountaineer, Edward Whymper, climbed the Matterhorn, or Monte Cervino, at the seventh attempt. On the way down from the 4,440 m (14,566 ft) pyramid of rock, which towers over Zermatt, four of Whymper’s party fell to their deaths.1

This was by no means the first major alpine ascent. Mont Blanc had been climbed by Ferdinand de Saussure in 1799. But Whymper’s tragic feat publicized the new sport of alpinism, and underlined changing attitudes to recreation. No more was sport to be the preserve of a leisured elite. Nor was it to be confined to the traditional pursuits of hunting, shooting, fishing, riding, ‘taking the waters’, and the Grand Tour. Europeans of all sorts were looking for new sports, new challenges, and new sources of physical fitness.

Less than two years earlier, the Football Association had been founded at a meeting in the Freemasons’ Tavern in London on 26 October 1863. The aim was to standardize the rules of football, and to provide the framework for organized competition. (Representatives with other ideas about the game went off to found the Rugby Union.) Professional clubs soon followed; and the English Football League was created in 1888.2

Football of the FA’s ‘soccer’ variety spread rapidly to the Continent. By the end of the century it had established itself as Europe’s most popular sport and most frequented spectator entertainment. The International Federation of Association Football (FIFA) was founded in Paris in May 1904 by representatives from Austria, Belgium, Denmark, England, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, The Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland. It was the most egalitarian of games. As the ancient proverb went: ‘All are fellows at football.’

Hör’ ich das Mühlrad gehen: Ich weiss nicht, was ich will— Ich mocht’ am liebsten sterben, Da war’s auf einmal still!

When I listen to the mill wheel, I lack all thought and will. The best course is to perish For then would all be still.)

And Juliusz Slowacki (1809–49), intense and eloquent, celebrated the exalted inner life:

Kto mogac wybrad, wybrat zamiast domu,
Gniazdo na skalach orla, niechaj umie
Spac” gdy irenice czerwone od gromu
I stychác jçk szatanów w sosen szumie.

(Whoever, having the choice, in place of a home, would choose I an eagle’s nest on the cliffs, may he know how I to sleep though his eyes be reddened from the lightning I and to listen to the moaning of the spirits in the murmur of the pines.)

In due course Romanticism elicited a reaction against its own heady success. The reaction took the form of a revival of the ideals of Classicism: in short, of Neo-classicism. Thereafter, the rival trends remained major influences throughout the century. Their rivalry was specially evident in architecture. Rival railway companies would build their terminal stations in contrasting styles: the London and North Western built Euston Station in elegant classic; the Midland Railway built the adjoining St Paneras Station in flamboyant Neo-gothic.

The Classical-Romantic mix was particularly fruitful in literature. The three giants of the age, Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837), Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855), and J. W. Goethe, defy easy classification, exactly because their works fuse Classical and Romantic elements into an indivisible whole. Their masterworks— Eugene Onegin (1832), Pan Tadeusz (1834), and Faust (1808–32) were all verse-novels or verse-dramas, completed at almost the same moment. Their supreme mastery of language at a juncture when literacy was spreading rapidly gave their authors the status of national bards, making their lines and phrases an integral part of everyday communication. There is not a Pole who cannot recite ‘Oh, Litwo, my homeland, you are like health …’; not a German who has not been bewitched by ‘the land where the lemon-trees bloom’; no Russian schoolchild who has not been taught the lines of ‘The Bronze Horseman’ from St Petersburg:

(Here we are destined by nature | To cut a window into Europe; | And to gain a foothold by the sea … I love you, Peter’s creation, | I love your severe, graceful appearance, | The Neva’s majestic current, | the granite of her banks… | City of Peter, stand in all your splendour, | Stand unshakeable as Russia! | May the conquered elements, too, make their peace.)

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), however, was not merely a national bard. He was an Olympian who bestrode almost all intellectual domains. The variety of genres in which he excelled, his awareness of a rapidly changing world, and the numerous evolutions through which his creativity passed gave him a claim to be the last ‘universal man’. Born in Frankfurt-am-Main, educated in Leipzig and Strasburg, and resident for half a century in Weimar, he was poet, dramatist, novelist, philosopher, scientist, traveller, lawyer, administrator. His initial Romantic proclivities faded in the 1780s; his classical phase, strengthened by his friend Schiller, continued until c.1820. The vast psychological panorama of Faust embraced a lifetime’s reflections on the human condition. When he died, he was the greatest personality of Europe’s greatest cultural era, endlessly reaching for the unreachable:

Alies Vergängliche
1st nur ein Gleichnis;
Das Unzulängliche
Hier wird’s Ereignis;
Das Unbeschreibliche,
Hier ist’s getan;
Das Ewig-Weibliche
Zieht uns hinan.

(All transient things I Are only a parable; I The inaccessible I Here becomes reality; I Here the ineffable is achieved; I The Eternal Feminine I Draws us on.)

The later phase of Romanticism acquired a specially morbid flavour. It has been related to the tuberculosis from which many artists suffered, and to the opium which was routinely prescribed to cure it. A seminal figure was Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859), who ran away from Manchester Grammar School and who lived as a homeless stray before becoming an Oxford drug addict. His Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1822) exercised a formative influence on the American writer of the grotesque, Edgar Allan Poe, and on Baudelaire. The strange, mystical outpourings of Slowacki’s last years belong to this same story,17 as do the verses of Gerard Labrunie or de Nerval (1808–55), a schizophrenic, the ‘super-Romantic’, ‘the most Romantic of them all’:

Oú sont nos amoureuses?
Elles sont au tombeau.

(Where are our lovers, our girls? They are in their tomb.)

In the apparent derangement, and the interest in visions and hallucinations, it is not difficult to see the early seeds of the Symbolism, Freudianism, and Decadence which were to form such important elements of Modernism (see below).

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded in 1848 in a house on Gower Street, London, by a circle of poets and painters who congregated round Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–82), the son of a Neapolitan exile. Despite Continental sources of inspiration, it remained an exclusively English movement, but archetypal of the age. Apart from the Rossetti brothers, its leading members included J. E. Millais (1829–96), W. Holman Hunt (1827–1910), Ford Madox Brown (1821–93), and Edward Burne-Jones (1833–98); and it found a champion in the critic John Ruskin (1819–1900). The group took its name from its members’ common enthusiasm for the art of the Italian quattrocento, which fuelled their rebellion against contemporary academic painting. They were strongly exercised by the links between art and literature—D. G. Rossetti being the translator of both Dante and Villon—and applied their principles to everything from architecture and furniture to mosaics, tapestry, stained glass, and interior design. They cultivated what they took to be both the techniques and, above all, the spirit of late medieval art. They imitated the clarity of form and brightness of colour of icono-graphic painting; and they exuded a moral seriousness, often expressed in mystical religiosity. Among their most celebrated images would be Millais’s Ophelia (1851) and Hunt’s The Light of the World (1854). One of their later recruits was William Morris (1834–96), poet, primitive socialist, craftsman, printer, and designer. At Kelmscott Manor Morris hosted some of the Brotherhood’s most inspired activities, long after the group as a whole had broken up.

That same era also saw the efflorescence of the novel across the Continent. Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) and Charles Dickens (1812–70), born en face at Rouen and Portsmouth, were among the first to capture the popular imagination. But in time all the major novels were translated into all major European languages. Critics differ in their estimations; but the parade of the premier division should certainly include I promessi sposi (The Betrothed, 1825) by Alessandro Manzoni, Balzac’s Le Père Goriot (1834), Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1838), Mikhail Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time(1840), Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847), W. M. Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848), Madame Bovary (1857) by Gustave Flaubert, Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables (1862), Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1877), Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866) and The Brothers Karamazov(1880), and Lalka (The Doll, 1890) by Boleslaw Prus. Through the analysis of social and psychological problems fiction had become a central feature of Europe’s common culture. Authors adopted the convention of projecting their own most intimate observations into their fictional creations: Flaubert was reported to have said: ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi.’

In the realm of music, as in literature, the nineteenth century assembled a vast and varied corpus of works which greatly extended the repertoire founded by the classical and early Romantic masters. Johannes Brahms (1833–97), born in Hamburg, must surely be rated the central figure. He combined an intellectual concern for Classical form with a Romantic passion for lyricism and emotional intensity, thereby earning the title of ‘true heir to Bach and Beethoven’. The succession of more obviously Romantic orchestral composers began with Hector Berlioz (1803–69), whose ‘Symphonie Fantastique’ (1831) broke all the existing rules. Berlioz relied heavily on Romantic literature for inspiration. It was said: ‘Victor Hugo is a Romantic, but Berlioz is Romanticism itself.’ The Romantic list continued with the languid Polish exile Frederic Chopin (1810–49), the supreme master of the piano; with the indefatigable Hungarian virtuoso Franz Liszt (1811–86); with Robert Schumann (1810–56) and Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (1809–47). It contained most of the names who are often classed as leaders of national schools (see pp. 819–20); and it continued later in the century with the magnificent Russians Anton Rubinstein (1830–94), Peter Tchaikovsky (1840–93), and Sergei Rachmaninov (1873–1943); with the German Protestant, Max Bruch (1838–1920) and the Swiss Jewish Ernest Bloch (1880–1959); and with a strong contingent of Austro-German neo-Romantics led by Anton Bruckner (1824–96), Gustav Mahler (1860–1911), Richard Strauss (1864–1949), and the song-writer Hugo Wolf (1860–1903). Throughout the century, the French School produced a series of brilliant talents marked by great delicacy and originality, from César Franck (1822–90) and Camille Saint-Saèns (1835–1921) to Gabriel Fauré (1845–1924), Claude Debussy (1862–1918), and Maurice Ravel (1875–1937).

Grand opera, which married music to historical and literary drama, was a medium well suited to the Romantic style. Its success was driven by the rivalry of its three leading centres: the French opera, led by Charles Gounod (1818–93), Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791–1864), Georges Bizet (1838–75), and Jules Massenet (1842–1912); the German opera, launched by Mozart and Weber and culminating in the stupendous figure of Richard Wagner (1813–83); and the Italian opera, whose unequalled melodic traditions were promoted by Gioachino Rossini (1792–1868), Gaetano Donizetti (1797–1848), Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901), and Giacomo Puccini (1855–1924). The genre variously known as opéra comique, operetta, or musical comedy also thrived, especially in the Paris of Jacques Offenbach (1819–80), the Vienna of Johann Strauss II (1825–99) and Franz Lehar (1870–1948), and the London of Gilbert and Sullivan. (See Appendix III, p. 1278).

The nineteenth century saw the rise of all the institutions which would turn the art of music into a major public enterprise—the conservatoires, the orchestral and choral societies, the purpose-built concert halls, the musical publishers, and the departments of musicology.

Philosophy in the Romantic era came to be dominated by the powerful speculations of G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831), Fichte’s successor at Berlin. Hegel was particularly un-Romantic in many of his attitudes, and as a professional philosopher saw himself in the line of the rationalists. On a tour of the Bernese Oberland he was moved to remark: ‘The spectacle of these eternally dead masses gave me nothing but the tedious idea, £5 ist so [That’s what it’s like].’ On the other hand, the originality of many of his ideas attracted tremendous attention in a period of intellectual ferment; and he provided many distinguished pupils and critics, more rebellious than he, with a store of ammunition. Having brushed close to Napoleon in Jena in October 1806, on the day he finished his Phenomenology of Mind he wrote admiringly of the Emperor’s ‘World Soul’.

Two of Hegel’s favourite ideas were to prove specially fertile. One of these was the Dialectic, the productive clash of opposites. The other was the Geist or ‘Spirit’, the essence of pure identity, which in his Philosophy of History he assigns to every political state and to each stage of developing civilization. The Dialectic, which Hegel confined to the realm of pure ideas, turned out to have many further applications which endowed the whole concept of progress with a dynamic and universal explanation. It seemed to make sense out of turmoil, to promise that good could emerge from conflict. The historical Spirit, on the other hand, which Hegel used for the glorification of the state, turned out to be a weapon in the hands of national movements struggling against the powers of the day. Hegel’s views were intensely Germanocentric, and would seem to rationalize the Protestant and Prussian supremacy that was coming to the fore in his own lifetime. He praised war and military heroes, and gave the leading role in modern civilization to the Germans. ‘The German spirit is the spirit of the new world. Its aim is the realization of absolute Truth as the unlimited self-determination of freedom.’ Americans may or may not be flattered to learn that this po-faced purveyor of mystical metaphysics awarded America ‘the final embodiment of the Absolute Idea, beyond which no further development would be possible’.19 This may help explain the deep-seated Germanophile traditions in American academia.

Scientific thought provided one of the strands which furthered the traditions of the Enlightenment rather than of Romanticism. Pushed to extremes in the work of Auguste Comte (1798–1857), however, it led not just to the branch of philosophy called ‘positivism’ but to a new pseudo-religion replete with its own rites, dogmas, and priesthood. Comte held that all knowledge passed through three successive stages of development, where it is systematized according to (respectively) theological, metaphysical, and ‘positive’ or scientific principles. This ‘Law of the Three States’, first expounded in the Système de politique positive (1842), provides the key to his elaborate classification of the sciences and to his outline of a new ‘science of society’ which he presented in the Philosophie positive (1850–4). The discipline of ‘social physics’ would permit the reordering of human society along scientific lines. The corps of ‘social engineers’ was armed with the slogan: ‘Savoir pour prévoir, prévoir pour prevenir’ (To know in order to foresee, to foresee in order to prevent). Comte must be regarded as one of the fathers of modern sociology, which he placed at the top of the hierarchy of sciences. At the same time, by insisting on the necessity of institutionalized spiritual power and by launching what was in effect a scientific Church, he ended up in the paradoxical position of turning science into the object of a mystical cult. In the eyes of one of his critics, T. H. Huxley, Comte’s positivism was equivalent to ‘Catholicism minus Christianity’.

In this same period, science and technology forged ahead as never before. Although the nature of scientific discovery was perhaps less fundamental than that of Copernicus, Newton, or Einstein, whole new continents of knowledge were mapped out. Science moved into the forefront of public concern. The most distinguished names belong to the fields of physics, chemistry, medicine, and biology—above all, Faraday, Mendeleev, Pasteur, Mendel, Hertz, and Darwin. The list of major discoveries and inventions began to be counted not in the scores or hundreds but in thousands (see Appendix III, pp. 1272–3). With the exception of one or two Americans of genius, it was entirely dominated by Europeans. The Great Exhibition of 1851, which took place in London under the patronage of Prince Albert and whose profits were given over to the Science Museums and to the Imperial College of Science and Technology, attracted millions of visitors from all over the world, [ELEMENTA] [GENES]

The growing scientific challenge to traditional religious assumptions culminated in a major dispute over Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) and the associated Theory of Evolution. Christian fundamentalists, schooled in the literal truth of the Book of Genesis, where God created the world in six days and six nights, saw no way to reconcile a theory that mankind had slowly evolved over millions of generations. It was odd that this particular row between science and religion did not break out much earlier. After all, the pioneering treatise of palaeontology, on the antiquity of fossils, had been written by the Dane, Nils Steno, as long ago as 1669. The first scientific computation of the age of the earth—G. Buffon’s époques de la Nature, which arrived at the figure of c.75,000 years—had been published in 1778; and the Nebular Hypothesis of Laplace, ascribing the origin of the universe to an expanding cloud of gas, had been in circulation since 1796. The French naturalist J.-B. Lamarck (1744–1829) had presented a theory of evolution based on the inheritance of acquired characteristics in 1809. Ever since Steno’s time, scientific geologists had been locked in battle with the so-called ‘diluvians’, who ascribed all physical land forms to the effects of the Great Flood, [MONKEY]

ELEMENTA

ON 1 March 1869 the Professor of Chemistry at St Petersburg University, Dmitri I. Mendeleev (1834–1907) was preparing to make a journey to Tver. Though preoccupied with the preparation of his textbook, Osnovy Khimii (Principles of Chemistry), he was also deeply involved in liberal schemes to apply science to everyday life in Russia, and he had accepted a commission to study peasant cheese-making methods. He had reached the point in his textbook where he was looking for a system to classify the chemical elements; and that day, he suddenly saw the benefit of ordering them in a table which listed them according both to their atomic weights and to common properties.

Nine years earlier, Mendeleev had attended the first International Chemistry Congress at Karlsruhe, where the Italian, Stanislao Canizzaro, had drawn his attention to a list of elements arranged by atomic weight. Since then he had been playing a kind of mental patience, laying out the elements both by atomic values and by suits of properties. He now combined Canizzaro’s list with his own typological grouping. The result was a primitive version of the Periodic Table, and a provisional formulation of the Periodic Law: ‘Elements placed in accordance with the value of their atomic weights present a clear periodicity of properties.’ That month he read a paper at the Russian Chemical Society on ‘An Attempt at a System of Elements Based on Their Atomic Weight and Chemical Affinity’. It appeared in a German journal in March 1871.

Prior to Mendeleev, the elements were only understood in piecemeal fashion. The ancients recognized ten real elements, but their thinking was confused by their parallel belief in the ‘elemental forces’ of earth, fire, air and water. Lavoisier knew 23 elements. Humphry Davy isolated sodium and potassium by electrolysis. By 1860, at Karlsruhe, Canizzaro had 60 elements on his list—exactly two-thirds of the 90 which occur in nature.

Mendeleev’s findings did not gain much immediate support. They were rejected by leading British and German chemists, including Bunsen, with whom he had once worked at Heidelberg. The break came in 1875, when a Frenchman identified a new element called ‘gallium’. Mendeleev was able to show that this was one of the six undiscovered elements whose existence, atomic weights, and properties he had been able to predict. To the surprise of the profession, the Russian theoretician had proved himself in advance of the empirical research. International fame and fortune followed. In Russia, however, Mendeleev’s liberal opinions caused friction. In 1880 he failed to gain full membership of the Imperial Academy; and in 1890 he was forced to resign from the university. In his later years he served as a consultant on everything from gunpowder and icebreakers to weights and measures, aeronautics, and the petroleum industry.

Surprisingly, when Mendeleev learned of atomic structure, he felt the theory of radioactivity to be incompatible with his Periodic Law. In fact, it provided the ultimate confirmation of his great discovery. The electron count in the atom of each element is strictly related to its weight and properties, [ELEKTRON]

When Mendeleev died, his students carried a copy of the Periodic Table over his coffin. By then, it had become the accepted basis for the chemical classification of matter, the meeting-point of modern chemistry and physics. In 1955, one of nineteen artificial radioactive elements, created by bombarding einsteinium-253 with helium ions, was named in his memory. It is Mendelevium (Me101).

Darwin’s impact must be explained partly by the fact that scientific debates appealed by his time to a much wider audience, but mainly by the human aspect—the sensational news that all people were descended not from Adam but from the apes: from ‘a hairy quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in its habits’. Darwin had been collecting data on the formation of species ever since his voyage on HMS Beagle to South America and the Galapagos Islands in 1831–6; and his original flash of inspiration came after reading Malthus in 1838. More than twenty years passed before he was pushed into publishing his arguments in the Origin of Species, and more than thirty before he fully wrote them up in The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871). Many particulars of Darwin’s account of natural selection, otherwise known as ‘the survival of the fittest’, have been overtaken by later criticisms; but the main contention of evolutionism, that all living species of the plant and animal world have progressed through constant interchange with their environment and competition among themselves—quickly gained almost universal acceptance. With time, mainstream Christianity did not find difficulty in accepting human evolution as part of God’s purpose. Social scientists adapted the evolutionary idea to numerous disciplines; and ‘social Darwinism’—the notion that human affairs are a jungle in which only the fittest of nations, classes, or individuals will survive— was due to have a long career.

MONKEY

ON Saturday, 30 June 1860, seven hundred people crammed into an Oxford lecture room for a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. In theory, they had come to hear a paper by an American scholar, Dr Draper, on The Intellectual Development of Europe considered with reference to the views of Mr Darwin’. In fact they had come to watch a contest between the paper’s two main discussants. On one side sat Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, a fierce adversary of the Evolution Theory, known as ‘Soapy Sam’. On the other side, in Darwin’s absence, sat Professor T. H. Huxley, palaeontologist, about to gain the label of ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’.

No one remembered Dr Draper’s paper. But Bishop Wilberforce, who took the stand in jovial mood, ended his remarks by asking whether Mr Huxley ‘claimed his descent from a monkey through his grandfather or his grandmother?’ Huxley kept cool, and explained that Darwin’s theory was much more than a hypothesis. ‘I would not be ashamed to have a monkey as an ancestor,’ he concluded, ‘but I would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used great gifts to obscure the truth.’ A woman fainted amidst the uproar.

The meeting was a critical moment in the popular reception of modern science. It took place only one year after the publication of the Origin of Species, and two years after Darwin had read a joint paper ‘On the Tendency of Species to Form Varieties: and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection’. Four years later, at a return match in the Sheldonian Theatre, Benjamin Disraeli could not resist a jibe in the style of ‘Soapy Sam’. ‘The question is this;’ he said, ‘Is Man an ape or an angel? My Lord, I am on the side of the angels!’

The subsequent career of Evolutionism is well-trodden history. One line of development fostered by Darwin himself came to be known as ‘Social Darwinism’. It preached the ominous proposition not just that the fittest had survived but also that the fittest alone had a right to survive. Another line was concerned with the practical science of ‘improving racial standards’, i.e. of human breeding. This was pioneered by a series of English scholars headed by Sir Francis Galton (1822–1911), Professor at University College London, and came to be known as eugenics. Its later advocates included Galton’s student and biographer, Karl Pearson (1857–1936), a statistician and Marxist, who founded a theory of ‘social imperialism’, and H. S. Chamberlain who publicized their ideas in Germany.

Francis Galton was responsible for some of the most influential research and pseudo-research of the age. His Art of Travel (1855) followed a pioneering expedition into the interior of South-West Africa, setting the fashion for African exploration. His Meteorographica (1863) launched themodern science of meteorology. As an early psychologist, he conducted the first studies on the behaviour of twins, and set up the world’s first mental test centre. As an enthusiast for eugenics, he wrote a series of volumes on Gregariousness in Cattle and Men (1871), on Inquiries into Human Faculty (1883), and on Natural Inheritance (1889). Before that, he completed an extremely popular study of Hereditary Genius: its Laws and Consequences (1869). Applying statistical methods to the genealogies of a wide range of achievers from judges to wrestlers, he tried to show that ‘talent and genius, and an inclination to moral traits, tend to run in families’. In a final section, he analysed ‘The Comparative Worth of Different Races’. He graded the races on a scale from A to I, concluding that the ancient Greeks were ‘the ablest race of which history bears record’: that African negroes, despite outstanding individuals, could never attain the average grade of Anglo-Saxons: and that Australian aborigines were one grade beneath the negroes.2 Darwin said that he had never read anything ‘more original or interesting’; but he rejected eugenic science as ‘Utopian’. At Darwin’s funeral in Westminster Abbey, Galton publicly called for the Abbey’s Creation Window to be replaced by something more suited to Evolution.3 The point is: Galton, the advocate of ‘hereditary genius’, was Darwin’s cousin.4

Indeed, the general conviction that scientific methods could and should be applied to the study of human as well as natural phenomena represented one of the characteristic changes of the age. Hence, in addition to economics and ethnography there appeared sociology, anthropology, human geography, political science, and eventually psychology and psychiatry. As the scope of the physical and social sciences expanded, the preserve of pure philosophy contracted until it was left with a handful of traditional fields—epistemology, logic, ethics, aesthetics, and political theory.

Religion was resurgent. It found expression in a rich corpus of theological writing, in the fervour of the masses, in the strengthening of Church dogma and organization. The new climate was formed partly in revulsion against the excesses of the revolutionary era and partly through the termination of many earlier forms of religious discrimination. The Enlightenment was reaching its term, but not before the principle of religious toleration was accepted. Discriminatory laws against Catholics dating from the seventeenth century were removed in most Protestant states. Protestants gained equivalent rights in most Catholic states. Judaism was readmitted in many places whence it had been excluded since medieval times. In Prussia, for example, a new national Church was created in 1817 through a merger of Lutheran and Calvinist elements; the Catholic Church was fully established by the Constitution of 1850. In Austria-Hungary, full religious toleration was guaranteed as part of the Ausgleich of 1867. In Great Britain, Roman Catholics were largely emancipated by Act of Parliament in 1829, and the Jews in 1888; though both continued to be excluded from the monarchy. In the Netherlands, similar measures were completed in 1853. In France, the Napoleonic Concordat remained in force until 1905, despite tension between Catholics and Republicans. Extreme French rationalists professed a zealotry of their own: at Limoges they staged a festival of mathematics to compete with the Feast of the Assumption.

In Russia, in contrast, the Orthodox establishment enforced severe restrictions on religious diversity. Although the Protestants of the ex-Swedish provinces of the Baltic, the native Christians of the Caucasus, and the Muslims of Central Asia enjoyed a large measure of autonomy, the Jews, Roman Catholics, and Uniates of the ex-Polish provinces were subject to state control, harassment, and discrimination. The Jews were legally required to reside in the so-called Pale of Settlement (see Appendix III, p. 1311), beyond which they could only live by special licence. The Roman Catholic Church was run via the so-called Holy Synod, and was deprived of all direct contact with the Vatican. St Petersburg refused all official ties with Rome until it succeeded in arranging the Concordat of 1849 on its own terms. The Uniates were forcibly converted to Orthodoxy, in the Empire in 1839 and in the ex-Congress Kingdom of Poland in 1875.

Theological debate was stimulated across Europe by three separate developments^—by the interchange of Protestant and Catholic viewpoints that were now emerging from their isolation cages, by the profound interest of the Romantic period in exotic religions, especially Buddhism and Hinduism, and by the growth of scientific attitudes. In the course of the century, many theologians acquired an interdenominational and an international reputation. These included the Silesian Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), a Calvinist and professor at Berlin, the radical Breton abbé Hugues Lamennais (1782–1854), the Bavarian Catholic J. J. Ignaz von Dollinger (1799–1890), Rector at Munich, the Anglican convert to Roman Catholicism, John Henry-Newman (1801–90), and the gloomy Dane Soren Kierkegaard (1813–55), whose works were not understood till decades after his death.

Schleiermacher, who was influential in the Prussian Union of Churches, brought theological rigour to an integrated view of human art and culture. His Über die Religion (1799) taught the Romantic generation that their outward contempt belied profound sympathies; his major work, Der Christliche Glaube (1821–2), is the standard summary of Protestant dogmatics. His Kurze Darstellung (1811) or ‘Brief Outline of Theology’ was still being cited in 1989 as the best introduction to the subject.20

The Abbé Lamennais set out to reconcile the Church to those parts of the revolutionary tradition which he judged to be compatible with Christianity. Under the device of ‘Dieu et Liberté’, he gradually pushed Rome to disown him. Scandalized by the outcome of the Revolution of 1830, by the Vatican’s betrayal of Catholic Poland, and by the Church’s disinterest in social justice, he became a scourge of the Establishment. Faith was not to be confused with loyalty to the Church, nor patriotism with loyalty to the state. The titles of his books speak for themselves—Paroles d’un croyant(1833), Les Affaires de Rome (1836), Le Livre du peuple (1837), UEsclavage moderne (1840). Lamennais’s work has had a profound impact on the dissident tendency within European Catholicism, where a critical mind was no obstacle to profound belief.

Döllinger led the resistance to the doctrine of papal infallibility (see below). His Der Papst und die Konzil (1869) was described as ‘the severest attack on the Holy See in a thousand years’. Newman, sometime Vicar of the University Church of St Mary the Virgin in Oxford, is particularly interesting, since his career illustrates the interaction between Protestants and Catholics. He came to prominence in the 1830s as a leader of the Tractarian or Oxford Movement within the Anglican Church. The polemical series of ‘Tracts for the Times’, which he prepared in the company of Edward Pusey (1800–82) and John Keble (1792–1866), sought to reconcile the Anglican and the Roman Catholic traditions. But attacks on his Tract 90 (1841), which linked the Thirty-Nine Articles with the views of the early Church Fathers, destroyed his faith in Anglicanism and provoked his resignation. His Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864) examines his spiritual struggle with great candour. As he records, his entry into the Catholic fold occasioned much bleating. He later clashed with his fellow convert and cardinal, H. E. Manning (1808–92), on the issue of papal infallibility; but he did not push his dissent to the point of disobedience.

Kierkegaard’s writings were aimed first at the philosophy of Hegel and secondly at the cosy practices of the Church of Denmark; but they penetrated far beyond, into intellectual regions otherwise unexplored. His Fear and Trembling (1843), The Concept of Dread (1844) and Sickness unto Death (1849) enter and explore the psychology of the unconscious. His Unscientific Postscript (1846) is often taken as the lead text of existentialism. All his works constitute a devastating offensive against rationalism. Subjectivity, according to Kierkegaard, is truth. ‘The history of Christendom’, he wrote, ‘is the history of the subtle disregarding of Christianity.’ In a passage strangely prescient of the tragedy of the Titanic, he once likened Europeans to the passengers of a great ship, passing the night in revels as they sailed towards the iceberg of doom.

In the course of these debates, theology and biblical scholarship began to adopt many of the methods and values of literary and historical criticism. The most daring foray in this direction, The Life of Jesus (1863) by Ernest Renan (1823–92), led to its author’s suspension from the College de France. Even so, ‘modernism’ continued to make headway, especially when solemnly denounced by the hierarchy.

Religious fervour is not easily measured; but there is no doubt that the Christian faith now aroused greater passions among greater numbers of people than in the previous century. The general trend towards literacy strengthened religious as well as secular education; and missionary campaigns were targeted as much on the poor and lapsed souls of the new industrial towns as the pagans of distant continents. Especially in the Protestant countries, the Churches provided a measure of social leadership and social discipline that was previously unknown. The revivalist movements such as German Pietism or English Methodism now gripped whole districts, whole sections of society. In other countries, as in Ireland or parts of Poland, popular piety became associated with national resistance. Everywhere there occurred a great outpouring of religious art, often inspired and infused by medieval models. It found expression in the wave of Gothic church-building, in hymn-writing, in religious-minded art movements such as the Pre-Raphaelites in England or the Nazarenes in Germany, and in a great body of Church music. According to C. F. Schinkel (1781–1841), the Neo-Gothic architect, ‘Art itself is Religion’. Composers from Berlioz to Franck worked to meet the demands for ever new settings of the Mass, [MISSA]

The Roman Catholic Church was by no means immune from the changes, though its reluctance to move with the times was manifest. The Catholic heartlands in Spain, Italy, Austria, Poland, and southern Germany were less immediately affected by industrialization and modernization. What is more, the higher echelons of the Catholic hierarchy had been shocked to the roots by the events of the revolutionary era, and were frozen into an ultra-conservative stance from which they did not begin to emerge until the 1960s. The Vatican was further frightened by the long rearguard action that was fought in Italy over the Papal States, which were suppressed in 1870. Ultramontanism returned to fashion, not least under pressure from the embattled French bishops and from the Jesuit Order, restored in 1814. [BERNADETTE]

Under Pius IX (r. 1846–78), whom Metternich had initially mistaken for a liberal, dogmas were adopted that exceeded the claims of the most assertive medieval Popes. In 1854 the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin was promulgated. In 1864 the Encyclical Quanta Curaasserted the Church’s supremacy over all forms of civil authority, whilst the Syllabus expounded an extraordinary list of ‘modern errors’ including everything from civil marriage to religious toleration. In 1870, by the doctrinal constitution Pastor Aeternus passed by the General Vatican Council, the dogma of papal infallibility was introduced in matters of faith and morals. These positions were so extreme that the Papacy lost much respect both within and without the Church. A major conflict, the Kulturkampf, was provoked in Germany, and a number of Swiss, German, and Dutch clerics broke away to form the Old Catholic Church. Pius IX died in the Vatican Palace, stripped of all temporal powers, protesting he was ‘a moral prisoner’. His loyal servants the Jesuits were expelled from Germany in 1872, from France in 1880. [SYLLABUS]

Under Leo XIII (r. 1878–1903), the ‘Pope of Peace’, the Church moved much closer to modern thinking on political and especially social issues. The Encyclical Libertas (1888) sought to affirm the positive aspects of liberalism, democracy, and freedom of conscience. Another, Rerum Novarum (1891), put the Church on the side of social justice, condemning the excesses of unrestrained capitalism and exhorting all states to promote the welfare of all their citizens. Under Pius X (r. 1903–14), however, the Encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907) flatly denounced modernism as ‘the résumé of all heresies’, and seemed to raise the reactionary banner once again.

BERNADETTE

BETWEEN 11 February and 16 July 1858, in a grotto near the town of Lourdes in Bigorre, a malnourished, asthmatic waif, Marie-Bernarde Soubirous, saw a series of eighteen remarkable apparitions. She heard a rushing wind, then saw a beautiful young girl in a white dress and a blue sash, with golden roses at her feet. The apparition told Bernadette to pray, to be penitent, to build a chapel, and to drink of the fountain. On one occasion, it announced, in patois, that it was immaculada concepciou, ‘the Immaculate Conception.’ It let itself be sprinkled with holy water as proof against the Devil; and it showed itself capable of punishment and reward. Townspeople who blasphemed about it fell sick. Others who trampled the roses near the grotto found their property damaged. The water from the fountain proved to have healing powers.

At first, neither the civil nor the ecclesiastical authorities were impressed. They interrogated Bernadette at length, creating a large corpus of evidence; and they placed a barrier round the grotto. When they could restrain neither the locals nor the stream of visitors, they removed Bernadette to a convent at Nevers. In due course, they decided to join what they could not beat, building a huge basilica to receive the pilgrims, and a Catholic medical centre to test the claims of miraculous cures. Lourdes was to become the largest centre of Christian faith-healing in Europe.1

In Church History, St Bernadette (1844–79) belongs to the large company of Marian visionaries and Catholic devotionalists who upheld traditional religion against advancing secularism. Together with the consumptive St Thérèse Martin (1873–97), ‘the Little Flower of Lisieux’, whose autobiographical History of a Soul became a sensational best-seller, she helped to demonstrate the sanctity of the suffering believer. As such she was recruited for the French Church’s struggle against its foes. She was canonized in 1933, eight years after St Thérèse.

In another respect, the case of Bernadette Soubirous suggests that the age of social modernization in which she lived was not quite so simple as conventionally portrayed. Historians have described the process whereby peasants were being steadily changed by state schooling and military service into uniform Frenchmen.2 But the events of 1858 show other factors at work. Everyone in Lourdes, even the bishop, spoke patois. No one suggested that Bernadette was mad, or a devil-worshipper. She described no ordinary Madonna, and no Christ-child. She belonged to a timeless community, where water was venerated and where the rituals of washing, whether of clothes or of the dead and the newborn, was strictly woman’s work. She lived in a region, where, though the bishop had been repairing Marian shrines, the caves and grottos of the Pyrenean wilderness werestill held to be the haunt of fairies. She even called the apparition petito demoisella—a phrase sometimes used for ‘fairy’. Her barefoot, lice-ridden body, her stubborn consistency, and, above all, the long hours on her knees in positions of ecstasy, proved very convincing. It has been suggested that her body language was acting as ‘a non-verbal vehicle for social memory’.3 Bemadette was conveying something which her neighbours took to be authentic.

The Orthodox world saw changes principally in the sphere of national politics. As Ottoman power receded in the Balkans, separate autocephalous Churches were established in Greece, Serbia, Romania, Montenegro, and Bulgaria, each subject to its own synod or Patriarch. They provided an important focus for the developing identity of the Balkan nations. The Ecumenical Patriarchs of Constantinople correspondingly lost much of their previous prestige and influence. Repeatedly deposed by the Porte, they were particularly threatened by the pretensions of the Russian Orthodox Church, which increasingly claimed to exercise protection and patronage over all the Sultan’s Orthodox subjects. The divisions between Christians proved hard to heal: there was no general wish for unity or intercommunion. The Russian Orthodox showed a certain interest in the Old Catholics; and at the Tsar’s coronation in 1895 the first of a series of contacts were made with the Church of England. Yet the early stirrings of ecumenism were necessarily confined to the Protestant world. The Church Union of 1817 in Prussia brought Calvinists and Lutherans together. The British and Foreign Bible Society (1804), the YMCA (1844), and the YWCA (1855) were pioneering examples of interdenominational and international co-operation. Generally speaking, the Roman Catholic hierarchy stood aloof, until the scandal of competing missionary organizations in Africa and Asia eventually prompted action. The World Missionary Conference held in Edinburgh in 1910 gave rise to the International Missionary Council, one of two acknowledged sources of the subsequent ecumenical movement.

Politics in the nineteenth century centred on the fate of the monarchies whose supremacy was restored but then gradually undermined by the three great movements of the age—Liberalism, Nationalism, and Socialism. Generally speaking, despite some notable casualties, the monarchies survived intact. There were more ruling heads on sacred thrones in 1914 than a hundred years earlier. But they only survived by profoundly modifying the nature of the bond between rulers and ruled.

SYLLABUS

ON 8 December 1864 Pope Pius IX published the encyclical Quanta cura together with a ‘Syllabus of the Most Important Errors of our Time’. The documents had been in the Vatican pipeline for more than fifteen years, and had been revised several times. They had already sparked a furore in 1862 when an anticlerical journal in Turin, // Mediatore, had published a selection of their leaked contents.

The Syllabus is divided into ten thematic sections, each containing several clauses. Since the purpose is to expose errors, the Roman Church’s position on any particular issue can be reached by prefacing the relevant clause with the words ‘It is not true that’:

Atheism and Absolute Rationalism

1. God does not exist.

2. Divine revelation can be used to oppose all science or philosophical speculation.

On Moderate Rationalism

Indifferentism

15. All religions and religious denominations are equal.

On Political Societies

18. All socialist, communist, secret, bible-reading, and clerico-liberal societies are permitted.

The Rights of the Church

24. The Church has no temporal power.

26. The Church can be denied the right to hold property.

28. Bishops may only promulgate apostolic letters by governmental consent.

30. The Church’s rights derive from Civil Law alone.

32. The clergy’s exemption from military service may be rescinded.

33. The Church may be denied the right to teach sacred doctrine.

37. National churches may be established free of papal control.

The Rights of the State

39. The State is the sole fount of social authority.

43. The State may rescind concordats unilaterally.

44. Civil Law is superior to Canon Law.

45. The State’s right to determine educational policy is absolute.

46. The State may exercise ultimate control over seminaries.

49. The State may deny the Hierarchy free communication with Rome.

50. Lay bodies have the sole right to appoint or to depose bishops.

54. Kings and princes may be exempted from the laws of the Church.

55. The separation of Church and State is necessary.

Ethics

56. Human laws need not conform to natural or to divine law.

58. Only powers rooted in matter are to be acknowledged.

63. It is permissible to rebel against legitimate princes.

Christian Matrimony

66. Matrimony is not sacramental in nature.

67. The matrimonial bond is dissoluble, and hence divorce sensu stricto can be permitted by the State.

68. The State alone may define the impediments to matrimony.

The Pontiff’s Temporal Powers

75. Faithful Catholics may dispute the Pontiff’s temporal or spiritual powers.

76. The Church would benefit by relinquishing its temporal powers.

Liberalism

77. It is no longer expedient that Catholicism be the sole denomination.

78. Immigrants to Catholic countries should be entitled to the public exercise of all religions.

80. The Roman Pontiff can and should reconcile himself and harmonize with ‘progress’, ‘liberalism’, and ‘modern civilization’.1

The origins of the Syllabus lay in the demands of Italian bishops for guidance in the maelstrom of debate surrounding the creation of the Kingdom of Italy. The Papacy was an active participant in the political struggle, and many of the clauses, though presented in universal terms, were dictated by very specific local conditions. This grave failing led to many misunderstandings. For example, the apparently blanket condemnation of all ‘clerico-liberal’ societies in Clause 18 was taken to be an attack on all enlightened clerics from Montalembert onwards. Its intention had merely been to curb that part of the clergy in Piedmont which was supporting government plans to dissolve the monasteries.

Reading the text carefully, it is clear that on the majority of issues the Vatican was simply reserving its position. By saying ‘It is not true that the Pontiff should harmonize with modern civilization’, the Syllabus was only stating the obvious: that the Church was guided by the timeless principles of its religion, and would not bow to fashionable slogans.

But the impression created was rather different. Several of the key clauses were lamentably drafted, and should not have been included. Once the double negatives had been bandied around in a hostile press, many people were convinced that the Roman Catholic Church was implacably opposed to all toleration, to all rational thought, to all forms of matrimonial separation, to all national self-determination, and to all forms of social charity.

On the political front, it is extraordinary in retrospect that the Vatican’s lawyers could have lumped all socialists, communists, secret societies, independent bible-readers, and liberal clerics into the same ring of Hell. But that was a sign of the times. Other highly intelligent conservatives elsewhere in Europe thought in the same way. Fyodor Dostoevsky, arguably the greatest mind of the age, might have approved of Clause 18 as far as it went. Except, from his peculiarly Russian standpoint, he would have been tempted to add ‘and all Roman Catholics’.2

Liberalism developed along two parallel tracks, the political and the economic. Political liberalism focused on the essential concept of government by consent. It took its name from the liberales of Spain, who drew up their Constitution of 1812 in opposition to the arbitrary powers of the Spanish monarchy, but it had its roots much further back, in the political theories of the Enlightenment and beyond. Indeed, for much of its early history it was indistinguishable from the growth of limited government. Its first lasting success may be seen in the American Revolution, though it drew heavily on the experiences of British parliamentarian-ism and on the first, constitutional phase of the Revolution in France. In its most thoroughgoing form it embraced republicanism, though most liberals welcomed a popular, limited, and fair-minded monarch as a factor encouraging stability. Its advocates stressed above all the rule of law, individual liberty, constitutional procedures, religious toleration and the universal rights of man. They opposed the inbuilt prerogatives, wherever they survived, of Crown, Church, or aristocracy. Nineteenth-century liberals also gave great weight to property, which they saw as the principal source of responsible judgement and solid citizenship. As a result, whilst taking the lead in clipping the wings of absolutism and in laying the foundations of modern democracy, they were not prepared to envisage radical schemes for universal suffrage or for egalitarianism.

Economic liberalism focused on the concept of free trade, and on the associated doctrine of laissez-faire, which opposed the habit of governments to regulate economic life through protectionist tariffs. It stressed the right of men of property to engage in commercial and industrial activities without undue restraint. Its energies were directed on the one hand to dismantling the economic barriers which had proliferated both within and between countries and on the other to battling against all forms of collectivist organization, from the ancient guild to the new trade unions.

Liberalism is often categorized as the ideology of the new middle classes; and it certainly appealed to that wide and expanding social constituency which lay between the old privileged nobility and the propertyless industrial masses. Yet its appeal cannot be so closely confined. It also reached to a wide variety of interests that were not essentially social or economic in their motivation—to the widespread Burschenschaften or student associations of the 1820s, to freemasonry, to cultural dissidents, to educational and prison reforms, to aristocratic British Whigs and Polish magnates, even to groups such as dissident army officers in Russia, the ‘Decembrists’, who in 1825 dared to plot against the evils of autocracy.

Given England’s precocious development, it is not surprising to find the most cogent exposes of liberalism in English writing. In economics, the Principles of Political Economy (1817) of David Ricardo (1771–1823) completed the work of the classical economists started by Adam Smith. Ricardo’s disciples took practical action in the activities of the Anti-Corn Law League and in the campaigns of the Manchester School, the advocates of free trade headed by Richard Cobden (1804–65) and John Bright (1811–89). In political philosophy, the works of John Stuart Mill (1806–73) stand as the supreme monument to a tolerant and balanced brand of liberalism, where some of the starker principles of earlier advocates were refined and modified in the light of recent debates and experience. Mill defends laissez-faire economics, for example, but only if the power of capitalist employers is matched by the rights of employees’ trade unions. He endorses the ‘greatest happiness’ principle of the Utilitarians—as proclaimed by his philosopher father, James Mill (1773–1836)—but only if happiness is not confused with pleasure. In his essay On Liberty (1859) he produced the standard manifesto of individual human rights, which should only be restricted where they impinge on the rights of others. ‘The sole end where mankind is warranted … in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number’, he wrote, ‘is self-protection.’ In The Subjection of Women (1869) he made the clearest of arguments for the feminist cause, maintaining that there is nothing in the many differences between men and women that would justify their possession of different rights.

The central political drama over liberalism, however, was bound to be played out in France, the home of the frustrated Revolution and the scene of the most developed, honed, and diametrically opposed political opinions. French politics were characterized not merely by the entrenched positions of conservative Catholic monarchists and of radical anticlerical republicans. They were complicated by a number of paradoxical figures, such as the ex-Jacobin republican and ‘Citizen-King’, Louis-Philippe (r. 1830–48), or the would-be liberal and revolutionary turned Emperor, Louis-Napoleon (Napoleon III, r. 1848–70).

The result was a see-saw history of alternating conservative and liberal regimes interspersed with a series of violent revolutionary outbreaks. The Bourbon Restoration of Louis XVIII (r. 1815–24) and Charles X (r. 1824–30) was overthrown by the July Revolution of 1830. The July Monarchy of Louis-Philippe was overthrown by the Revolution of 23 February 1848. The short-lived Second Republic was overthrown by its original beneficiary, who proceeded to proclaim himself Emperor. The Second Empire (1851–70) was overthrown amidst the humiliation of the Franco-Prussian War, and the violence of the Paris Commune. The Third Republic, inaugurated in 1870, survived for 70 years; but it was marked by the extreme instability of its governments, by the extreme liveliness and futility of its public debates, and by the extreme animosity of the opposing camps. The notorious affair of Captain Dreyfus which gripped France between 1894 and 1906 was proof that the liberal and anti-liberal passions of the French had still not found a modus vivendi.

Similar swings of violent fortune prevailed in Spain, which served as a sort of laboratory of liberalism. An unbridgeable gulf yawned between the exaltados or ‘extreme radicals’ and the apostolicos, the extreme, Church-backed monarchists. From 1829 many of the latter supported the claims of the royal pretender, Don Carlos (d. 1855) and his heirs, who commanded a loyal following among the Basques and Catalans. A succession of impoverished and debauched monarchs— Ferdinand VII (r. 1814–43), Isabella (r. 1840(3)-68), Alfonso XII (r. 1874–85)— bent to every breeze that blew. As a result, liberal constitutions were annulled as frequently as they were introduced—in 1812, 1820, 1837, 1852, 1855, 1869, 1876. Clerical intrigues, excesses, and civil war were the order of the day. After the brief reign of Amadeo, Duke of Aosta (r. 1870–3), a brief republic existed. After 1876, under Alfonso XIII (r. 1885–1931), the liberal centre was at last strong enough to maintain a constitutional monarchy until the 1920s, [PRADO]

Portugal endured an 80-year constitutional struggle that ended with the abolition of the monarchy. The constitutional Charter was granted in 1826, soon after Brazil had established its independence, and King Pedro had decided to stay on as Emperor of Brazil. But all manner of stratagems were used to obstruct the Charter’s implementation. Until 1853 the absolutist court of Maria II and her two sons held sway. Under Carlos (r. 1889–1908), the rotativos or ‘revolving ministries’ of the Progressive and Regenerator Parties dominated the Cortes, and combined to exclude the growing body of republican sentiment. The reign culminated in a brief royal dictatorship, and in the assassination of the King and Crown Prince. The last King of Portugal, Manuel II (r. 1908–10), retired to England when the armed forces backed the revolution of 5 October 1910 and declared a Republic.

Each of France’s ‘Revolutions’ had repercussions right across Europe. In 1830 the ‘July days’ in Paris sparked the August rising in Brussels, and the November rising in Warsaw (see below). In Paris, the sight of Lafayette at the head of the rebels led to the abdication of the reactionary Charles X and his parti prêtre, and the election of Louis-Philippe by the Chamber of Deputies. In Brussels, the seizure of the Hotel de Ville and the failure of the Dutch army to restore order led to the election of Louis-Philippe’s son, the Due de Nemours, as prospective King of the Belgians. The Belgian provinces of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands had resented their subordination to Dutch interests ever since 1815. Belgian independence was acceptable to the Powers, who approved the creation of a model constitutional monarchy. But it was Leopold I of Saxe-Coburg (r. 1831–65) who emerged as King, not the Due de Nemours. [GOTHA]

In February 1848 the head of revolutionary steam was much stronger than in 1830, and the rash of explosions spread to all the major states except for Britain and Russia. In this case trouble was already afoot in Switzerland from 1845, in the Republic of Cracow from 1846, and in Sicily from 1847. The overthrow of Louis-Philippe sent the signal which set almost all the major cities of Germany, Italy, Austria, and Hungary ablaze. The events of 1848–9 have been termed ‘the Revolution of the Intellectuals’, mainly on the strength of the weighty debates in the Vorparlament in Frankfurt and in the Slav Congress in Prague, and of the epoch-making publication of the Communist Manifesto (see below). In reality, it was a time when bloody actions spoke much louder than mere words. It was not only intellectuals who manned the barricades, even though poets such as Lamartine, Mickiewicz, or Sándor Petôfi plunged into the fray. Lamartine served as foreign minister in France’s initial revolutionary government. Mickiewicz raised a legion of Polish exiles to fight for the Roman Republic. Petőfi died in a battle against the Austrians. In Paris, over 10,000 people died during the ‘June days’ when General Cavaignac’s troops crushed the resistance of the workers, whose short-lived national workshops had been abolished. In Berlin and elsewhere, the monarchs tended to fire first and to discuss constitutions afterwards. In Italy, Sardinia launched a ‘Guerra Santa’ against Austrian rule in Lombardy. In Hungary, where the Habsburgs were dethroned and Kossuth proclaimed regent and dictator, two Russian armies and a year-long campaign were required to effect the restoration. In Italy, French, Austrian, and Neapolitan troops had to be called in to destroy the self-proclaimed Republics in Rome and Venice.

In the immediate reckoning, therefore, 1848 provoked a series of liberal disasters. Only one monarchy was toppled, and that in France, where President Louis-Napoleon moved swiftly to undermine the republican institutions that had brought him to power. Within three years the French, who had thrown out their King, were saddled once more with an authoritarian Emperor. Not one of Europe’s new republics survived. Metternich, the symbol of the previous era, returned to Vienna from exile in London. New repressions, under new leaders, returned with him.

Yet before long 1848 came to be seen as a watershed in Europe’s affairs. The reactionary régimes had triumphed, but only at such heavy cost that they could not bear a repeat performance. Constitutions that had been granted, imposed, and in some cases withdrawn were gradually reintroduced or widened. If the violent methods of the revolutionaries were rejected, the political and social reforms which they demanded were now given serious consideration. With some delay, monarchs realized that wise concessions to popular demands were preferable to endless repression. The basic liberal principle of government by consent steadily gained widespread acceptance. One by one over the next two decades, the victors of 1848 abandoned their frozen postures. National and constitutional aspirations came again to the fore. Even the autocratic empires of the East began to bend. In 1855, with the accession of Alexander II (r. 1855–81), the Romanovs set in motion a season of liberalization à la russe. In 1867, through the Ausgleich or ‘Equalization Agreement’, the Habsburgs finally addressed the long-standing desires of the Hungarians, setting up the dual Austro-Hungarian monarchy, Kaiserliche und Königliche, with which they had to live for the rest of their reigning days.

Economic liberalism, of course, was not necessarily tied to its political counterpart. The German Zollverein or Customs Union, for example, was initiated by Frederick-William III of Prussia in 1818, at a time when political liberalism was in sharp retreat. Originally intended for Prussian territories alone, it was steadily extended to all the states of the German confederation except Austria. By banning all internal tariffs, it created a growing zone of free trade within which Germany’s infant industries could flourish. In 1828 two rival Customs Unions came into being, one based on Bavaria and Wurttemberg, the other on Saxony; but within four years these were absorbed. In 1852 Austria tried to break out of its isolation by proposing a customs union for the whole of Central Europe and northern Italy. But the Prussians resisted. The accession of Hanover in 1854 made the Prussian victory complete, except for the recalcitrant cities of Bremen and Hamburg. The foundations of a united German economy, excluding Austria, had been laid at a juncture when prospects for political unification still seemed remote.

PRADO

SPAIN’S Royal Art Museum was opened to the public on Prado Avenue in Madrid on 19 November 1819. It owed its existence to the enthusiasm of King Ferdinand VII, recently restored to his throne, and to his second queen, Isabella de Braganza. It was managed by its first director, the Prince of Anglona, under the Council of Grandees. It was housed behind the Corinthian facades of a new building designed thirty years earlier by the architect Don Juan Villanueva as a museum of natural history. The initial exhibition displayed 311 paintings. It did not include the large number of masterpieces which had been captured by the Duke of Wellington six years earlier in the baggage of Joseph Bonaparte, but not returned.

The Museum’s first catalogue was published in 1823 in French, since the Duke of Angoulême, and the latest French army of occupation, ‘the sons of St Louis’, had recently entered Spain to rescue the King from his subjects. It was renamed the National Museum in 1838, after merger with the Trinidad Collection taken from suppressed monasteries. It assumed the name Prado Museum in 1873, following the liberal revolt. It was closed during the Spanish Civil War of 1936–9, when many of its treasures were removed and exhibited in Geneva.

Spain’s royal art collection goes back to John II of Castile (d. 1445), who is known to have bought pictures by Roger Van der Weyden. Its greatest benefactors were Charles V and Philip II, the patrons of Titian: Philip IV, who employed Velazquez: and Charles III, who in 1774 sequestered the entire property of the Jesuits. Despite severe losses through fire and the French, it grew into one of the world’s prime collections, preserved in exceptional condition by the dry air of the Castilian plateau.

The glories of the Prado range over all the great names of the Italian, Flemish, German, Dutch, and French schools. Above all, it is the home base of the Spanish School—hence of El Greco (1541–1614), the Cretan who settled in Toledo; of the Sevillians, Diego de Velazquez (1599–1660) and Bartolomé Murillo (1618–82); of the Valencian, José de Ribera (1591–1652): and of the incomparable Francisco de Goya (1746–1828), who was Spain’s most celebrated contemporary painter when the Prado was opened.

‘Art galleries preserve the essence of man’s creative genius.’ They provide perhaps the most accessible route into Europe’s past, assailing the senses and arousing the imagination as no history book can do. The Prado stands at the top of a premier league of national galleries which includes the Louvre in Paris, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, the National Gallery in London, the Hermitage in St Petersburg, the Uffizi in Florence, and the Vaticano. They are supported by a second league of ‘provincial’ galleries and museums, Munich, in Cracow or in Oxford, often of surprising magnificence; by gal in Minsk, Manchester, or Munich, in Cracow or in Oxford, often of surprising magnificence; by galleries dedicated to modern art; and by a supporting cast of obscure and devoted institutions from Cholet to JÇdrzejów or Dulwich.

In 1784, when Ferdinand VII was born and the Prado building started, another European monarch was planning another public gallery. King Stanislaw-August of Poland had commissioned a dealer in London to assemble a selection of old masters to supplement his private collection in Warsaw. Then the Russo-Polish war and the partitions of Poland intervened. The King was deported to Russia, together with 2,900 of his pictures, which were destined to adorn Russian instead of Polish galleries. He never saw the paintings in London, which could not be paid for. They remained to form the core collection of the Dulwich Picture Gallery, which is one of those many minor treasure-houses that deserve to be better known.2

Judged by Continental standards of liberalism, Great Britain was both more and less advanced than its main rivals. On the one hand, Britain could fairly claim to be the home of ‘the Mother of Parliaments’, of the rule of law, of the Bill of Rights, and of free trade. British society was for long the most modernized and industrialized in Europe, and supposedly the most open to liberal ideas. On the other hand, British institutions were exceptional in never having experienced the shock of revolution or occupation. Prevailing political attitudes remained intensely pragmatic. The monarchy continued to reign according to rules and customs agreed in the late seventeenth century, as if the French Revolution had never happened. In Queen Victoria (r. 1837–1901) and her extensive family it found the ideal foil for parliamentary government, a force for stability, and a channel for discreet influence abroad. There were republican sympathies in Britain, but no serious move to abolish the monarchy or to introduce a constitution, [GOTHA]

Britain’s ancient institutions were slow to reform. Radical reformers had to beat their heads on the gates, often for decades. The unreformed parliament, which survived till 1832, was a scandalous anachronism, like its French counterpart under the July Monarchy. The Corn Laws held out against Free Trade until 1846. Civil marriage and divorce only became possible in 1836 and 1857 respectively. The demands for universal suffrage first voiced by the Chartists in 1838–48 were never fully conceded. The Church of England was never disestablished, except in Ireland (1869) and in Wales (1914). The feudal privileges of the House of Lords were not even trimmed until 1911. Religious toleration was never quite complete. The two-party system, which saw the ancient teams of Whigs and Tories reclothed as Liberals and Conservatives, delayed the advent of a strong socialist movement and of much social legislation. Under W. E. Gladstone (1809–98) and Benjamin Disraeli (1804–81), who dominated the scene in the third quarter of the century, and who both had liberal proclivities, domestic reforms were often overshadowed by the concerns of Empire. Wales remained an administrative part of England. Scotland received its own Secretary of State, a second-rank minister, in 1885. Ireland never achieved Home Rule (see below). Though liberal policies were followed with respect to the English-speaking dominions, there was little wish to extend them to the colonies at large. The British loved to pride themselves on their tolerance and liberalism; but much of their pride became outdated. In later decades they lagged well behind France in domestic democracy, behind Germany in social legislation, behind Austria-Hungary in nationality policy,[RELAXATIO]

GOTHA

THE Thuringian Duchy of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha was established in 1826, when the Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld was obliged by divorce to exchange Saalfeld for Gotha. Together with Saxe-Altenburg, Saxe-Meiningen, and Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, its eight tiny enclaves were ultimately destined to join the German Empire.

The Duke had two sons—Ernest (1818–93) and Albert (1819–61). His brother Leopold (1790–1865) had once been married to the heiress of the House of Hanover, Charlotte Augusta. His sister Louise, also married to a Hanoverian, was the mother of Princess Victoria (1819–1901), conceived at Amorbach in Franconia. The family’s prospects greatly improved in 1830 when, like her deceased aunt before her, Victoria unexpectedly emerged as heir presumptive to the Hanoverian succession, and Leopold as King-elect of Belgium.

‘Uncle Leopold’ was the royal match-maker par excellence. Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha was his nephew, and Victoria of Hanover his niece. In May 1836, he brought them together. They were both seventeen. They were to be ‘the Father and Mother of Europe’.1 (See Appendix III, pp. 1300–1.)

The House of Hanover, which in earlier times had used the titles of ‘Luneburg-Celle’ and ‘Braunschweig-Lüneburg’, reigned simultaneously from 1714 as Electors (then Kings) of Hanover and Kings of the United Kingdom. Though resident in Britain, they had always taken German brides, whilst a staathalter or deputy ran their ancestral lands. Since the law of Hanover did not admit female monarchs, when Victoria ascended the British throne in 1837, Hanover passed to her father’s brother and after that to Prussia. Albert and Victoria were married on 10 February 1840. They were blessed with nine children. As from 1858, the three eldest were married respectively to Frederick William of Hohenzollern, the future German Emperor; to Princess Alexandra of Denmark; and to the future Grand-Duke Louis of Hesse-Darmstadt.2

The Grand Duchy of Hesse-Darmstadt had enjoyed only middling rank until the Grand Duke’s daughter Marie married Alexander II Romanov, the future Tsar of Russia, in 1841. Two of Marie’s sons took wives from the family of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Gluecksburg. Her daughter, also Marie, married Prince Alfred (1844–1900), Duke of Edinburgh, Admiral RN and the future Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. The Darmstadt-St Petersburg alliance was reinforced first by the marriage of Elizabeth of Hesse to a Russian Grand Duke and then by the marriage of Elizabeth’s younger sister Alix to Nicholas II, the last Tsar.

The German family of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Gluecksburg acquired the Danish throne in 1853. But they soon advanced further. Christian IX’s eldest son, Frederick (1843–1912), was the progenitor of both the Danish and the Norwegian monarchies. His second son, William (1845–1913), was to marry a Russian Grand Duchess and, as George I, to found the Greek royal line.3 His daughter Alexandra (1844–1925), wife of Edward, Prince of Wales, became British Queen. His second daughter, Marie (1847–1928), wife of Alexander III Romanov, became Tsarina.

Into this dense nexus of Germanic cousinage there stepped the supreme arrivistes—the Battenbergs.4 The Hessian Counts of Battenberg had died out in the fourteenth century. But their title was revived in 1858 for the benefit of a morganatic union. Prince Alexander of Hesse (1823–88) had accompanied his sister Marie to Russia, and had served in the Tsarist cavalry. But eloping with an imperial maid of honour, Julia Hauke (1825–95), daughter of a murdered Polish general, he fled Russia and took a commission in Vienna. His morganatic bride, renamed Julia, Countess von Battenberg, gave her progeny their good looks and their surname. Her sister wrote children’s stories. Her brother served in 1848 as commander of the Polish Legion in Tuscany.5

Alexander and Julia had four sons. No. 2 married a princess of Montenegro. No. 3 was enthroned, and dethroned, in Bulgaria. No. 4, Count Henry, married Albert and Victoria’s youngest child, Beatrice. But it was the eldest son who scooped the kinship jackpot. Married to Queen Victoria’s favourite granddaughter, Victoria of Hesse, Count Louis Battenberg (1854–1921) was a cousin on the paternal side both to Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh and to Tsar Alexander III, and brother-in-law to Empress Alix. Having joined the Royal Navy as a cadet, he worked his way up to be Admiral, Director of Naval Intelligence, and, at the outbreak of war in 1914, Britain’s First Sea Lord. Unfortunately as a German, he was immediately forced to retire. By then, his elder daughter had become Queen of Sweden and his younger daughter, Alice, a Princess of Greece. His niece was Queen of Spain. His younger son, Louis (1900–79), known as ‘Dickie’, later Earl of Burma, was to follow him into the British Admiralty. In July 1917 the family name was changed once again, this time from Battenberg to Mountbatten. Their Romanov relatives were under arrest, and their relatives in the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha-Hanover-Teck were hurriedly renaming themselves ‘Windsor’.

In time, Admiral Louis Mountbatten revealed the same match-making talents as Queen Victoria’s Uncle Leo. His favourite nephew was a young exiled prince from Greece called Philip.6 Amongst the Windsors, the young Princess Elizabeth had unexpectedly emerged in 1937 as Britain’s heir presumptive. ‘Uncle Dickie’ brought them together. Prince Philip of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Gluecksburg (b. 1921), and Princess Elizabeth of Windsor (b. 1926) were married in 1947. Both were descended in the same degree from the lines of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Hanover, Hesse, and Denmark. Except for some relations of Elizabeth’s Scottish mother, neither had any modern English forebears. Both changed their names twice. Philip had taken his uncle’s adopted name of Mountbatten. After his wife’s Coronation as Elizabeth II in 1953, he and his family reverted by an Order in Council to the Queen’s maiden name of Windsor. Skilful genealogists showed them to be descendants of Plantagenets, Tudors, and Stuarts, even of Charlemagne, Egbert, and King Alfred.

When the House of Windsor was created by deed poll in 1917, the republican H. G. Wells had called them ‘alien and uninspiring’. But their cousin, the German Kaiser, was less critical. In a rare flash of wit, he said that he was off to the theatre to see a performance of The Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.1

The correlation between liberal politics and the growth of a powerful bourgeoisie has generated much historical comment, with special reference to the contrasts between Britain and Germany. Attention has been focused on Britain’s success and Germany’s failure in building a stable parliamentary system, and hence on the differences of structure and ethos in their middle classes. Unlike their British counterparts, the new German capitalists were seen to ‘turn to the state’, supposedly shirking their democratic duty and submitting to the guidance of enlightened but essentially illiberal ministers of the Prussian imperial service. The thesis about Germany’s Sonderweg or ‘special path’ was inspired at a much later date by concern over the rise of Hitler, and by the weakness of German liberalism as shown by the ‘collaboration of the capitalists’ in the 1930s.21 Prussia certainly set the example of a Rechtsstaat which honoured legal forms but in which constitutions were subject to the authoritarian traditions of court, army, and bureaucracy. This has given German imperial government after 1871 the label of a ‘façade democracy’. On the other hand, one has to remember that the German Empire was a federal state, where several of the kingdoms were much less authoritarian than Prussia.

In any case, a slightly wider sample of comparison might suggest that Germany’s path was not so special after all. Sweden, for example, combined an expanding parliamentary system of the British type with an enlightened bureaucracy and a none-too-liberal capitalist class of the German type. Sweden’s two-chamber parliament was organized at the instigation of liberal-minded bureaucrats in 1866. A capitalist bourgeoisie, which grew with rapid industrialization in the later decades, opposed the extension of the franchise, and did not involve itself with the Liberal Unity Party that took up the torch of liberal causes at the turn of the century. Swedish capitalists were no more interested in liberalism than their German partners. Swedish liberalism was inspired by a coalition linking state ministers, the non-capitalist Bildungsbürgertum or ‘educated middle class’, and even peasants, who together ensured the preservation of Sweden’s evolving democracy.22 [NOBEL]

Of all the major powers Russia was the most resistant to liberalism. Recurrent bouts of reform—after 1815,1855, and 1906—produced impressive results in certain circumscribed spheres. After the establishment of a Council of State and the creation of state schooling under Alexander I, and the emancipation of the serfs (1861) under Alexander II, important degrees of autonomy were granted to the mir or peasant communes, to the zemstva or district councils, to the universities, and to the criminal courts. A legislative assembly or State Duma, with consultative powers, was eventually established at the second attempt. It operated in fits and starts between 1906 and 1917, and promised to set Russia definitively on the road to constitutionalism. Yet progress proved more apparent than real. No reforming Tsar was able to sustain a liberal course for long. Both Alexander II and Nicholas II seemed to be driven on to the liberal path by military defeats—the one by defeat in the Crimea and the other by the Russo-Japanese War and the subsequent ‘Revolution’ of 1905. Both were forced to reverse direction. Each bout of reform was brought to an end byforce majeure—by the Decembrist revolt of 1825, by the Polish rising of 1863–4, and by the outbreak of the First World War. In each case periods of fierce reaction followed, when liberal forces were repressed. One hundred years after the Congress of Vienna, the Russian autocracy and its police regime remained essentially intact. Nothing had been done to dent the fundamental right of the Tsar-Autocrat to rescind any concessions made. What is more, Russia had frequently intervened to stop the march of liberalism abroad. Although Alexander III abandoned direct interventionism, the long-standing instinct had been for Russia to act as ‘Europe’s gendarme’. When Nicholas I heard during a palace ball in February 1848 that Louis-Philippe had been overthrown, he announced: ‘Gentlemen, saddle your horses! France is a Republic.’

To a greater or lesser degree, therefore, the winds of liberalization blew through all the European monarchies. But their gusts were irregular and the effects ragged. European liberalism built up its head of steam during the reactionary decades after 1815, and made its greatest impact in the aftermath of the explosion of 1848. In the later part of the century, though liberals battled on, their uncompleted agenda was having to compete with the demands of Conservatism, Nationalism, Socialism, and Imperialism.

Conservatism began to crystallize as a coherent ideology in conjunction with liberal trends. It was not opposed to democracy or to change as such, and should not be confused with simple reactionary positions. What it did was to insist that all change should be channelled and managed in such a way that the organic growth of established institutions of state and society—monarchy, Church, the social hierarchy, property, and the family—should not be threatened. Hence its name, from the Latin conservare: ‘to preserve’. Typically, its founding father, Edmund Burke (see above), had welcomed the French Revolution, before turning decisively against its excesses. Like the liberals, the conservatives valued the individual, opposed the omnipotent state, and looked for a reduction of central executive powers. Through this, they often turned out to be the most effective of would-be reformers, toning down the proposals coming from more radical points on the spectrum, and acting as the go-between with the ruling court. The leading practitioners of the conservative art in Britain were Sir Robert Peel (1788–1850) and his disciple, Disraeli. They had many admirers on the Continent. The ultimate distinction between liberal conservatives and moderate liberals was a fine one. In many democracies, the large area of agreement between them came to define the ‘middle ground’ of political life.

Nationalism, a collection of ideas regarding the nation, whose interests are taken to be the supreme good, has become one of the elemental forces of modern times. It received its greatest single boost from the French Revolution, and was crystallized by the social and political changes of nineteenth-century Europe. It has since travelled round all the continents of the globe. It came in two opposing variants. One of them, state or civic nationalism, was sponsored by the ruling establishments of existing states. The other, popular or ethnic nationalism, was driven by the demands of communities living within those states and against the policy of their governments. In this regard, some historians have contrasted the process of ‘state-building’ with that of ‘nation-building’. The essential difference lay in the source of ideas and action. State nationalism was initiated ‘at the top’, among a political élite which sought to project its values downwards into society at large. Popular nationalism started ‘at the grass roots’, at the bottom, seeking to attract mass support before trying to influence or overthrow the existing order.23 Another important distinction is made between peaceable cultural nationalism of the Herderian type, which is limited to the propagation or preservation of the culture of a national community, and aggressive political nationalism, which claims the right of self-determination to achieve the nation-state.24 The nation-state is one where the great majority of citizens are conscious of a common identity, and share the same culture.

There are as many theories on the essence of nations as there are theorists. But the essential qualities would seem to be spiritual in nature. ‘The nation is a soul,’ wrote Renan, ‘a spiritual principle. [It] consists of two things. One is the common legacy of rich memories from the past. The other is the present consensus, the will to live together…’ In order to reach that consensus, many members of the nation will have to forget the oppressions and injustices which once divided them. ‘L’oubli, the act of forgetting, and one might even say historical falsehood, are necessary factors in the creation of nations.’

State nationalism, which was driven by the interests of the ruling élite, is well illustrated in the case of Great Britain, even better in that of the USA. In 1707, when the United Kingdom came into existence, there was no British nation. The people of the British Isles thought of themselves as English, Welsh, Scots, or Irish. Over the years, however, the propagation of the dominant English culture, and the promotion of its loyal Protestant and English-speaking servants, gradually consolidated a strong sense of overlying British identity. In the nineteenth century, when the liberal establishment came to favour mass education, non-English cultures were actively suffocated. Welsh children, for example, if they dared to speak Welsh, were punished with the Welsh ‘Note’. All ‘Britons’ were expected to show loyalty to the symbols of a new British nationality—to speak standard English, to stand up and sing the royal anthem, ‘God Save Our Noble King’ (i745)> and to respect the Union Jack (1801). In this way the new British nation was successfully forged. Its older component nations, though not eradicated, were relegated to the status of junior and subordinate partners. (See Chapter VIII.)

Similarly, the US government was obliged to adopt an official national culture to replace those of its variegated immigrants. During the Civil War the US Congress allegedly voted for the compulsory adoption of English rather than German by the margin of one vote (though accounts of this disagree). Thereafter, before new citizens were allowed to swear loyalty to the ‘Stars and Stripes’, a knowledge of English was thought equal to a knowledge of the Constitution. The new, English-speaking American nation was forged under government sponsorship, especially by education. The adoption of the American version of English culture was put forward as the touchstone of success for all immigrant families.

One common characteristic of state nationalisms lies in their practice of equating the concepts of’citizenship’ and ‘nationality’. In official British usage, nationality has been made to mean citizenship, that is, something granted by British law. In American usage, ‘nations’ have been equated with countries or political states. Such terminology only confuses the issues, perhaps deliberately. It is partly responsible for persistent errors, such as that which has regarded all inhabitants of the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union as ‘Russians’; and it contrasts unfavourably with the practices of countries where citizenship has to be more precisely defined.26 State nationalism accepts that governments determine nationality, whilst abhorring the idea that nations can forge states. As Lord Acton wrote: ‘A State can sometimes create a nation, but for a nation to create a state is going against nature.’

Most European governments strove to strengthen the national cohesion of their subjects—by ceremonies, by symbolic art, by interpretations of history, above all by education and the promotion of a common culture. No nineteenth-century government planning to introduce universal primary education could avoid the crucial choice of language or languages in which the children were to be instructed. The Ottoman Empire, which had always granted autonomy to minority groups, was alone in never trying to enforce a common state culture. Austria-Hungary abandoned the attempt after 1867, overwhelmed by the contrary tides of popular nationalism.

Popular nationalism, which grew from the grass roots, was planted like so many acorns under the dynastic states and multinational empires of the era. Firmly grounded in Rousseau’s doctrine of popular sovereignty, it assumed that the proper forum for the exercise of the general will was provided by the national or ethnic community, not by the artificial frontiers of the existing states. It created an elaborate mythology where the ‘blood’ of the nation was inextricably mixed with the ‘soil’ of the national territory. Hence, if Italians lived on the territory of half a dozen states from Switzerland to Sicily, it was assumed that justice for the Italian nation involved the abolition of those states, and their replacement by one united Italian kingdom. Of course, most down-to-earth nationalists realized that the existence of a fully fledged nation, fully conscious of a uniform national culture, belonged largely to the realm of dreams. Once the Italian state was established, many Italian leaders knew that they would have to follow the example of other governments and use the power of the state to consolidate the culture and consciousness of its citizens. As Massimo d’Azeglio remarked in the opening session of the parliament of a united Italy in 1861, ‘Now that we have created Italy, we must start creating Italians.’

Much of the nineteenth-century debate on nationality was dominated by the conviction that the peoples of Europe could be divided into ‘historic’ and ‘unhistoric’ nations. The idea first appeared in Hegel. It was adopted by social Darwinists, who looked on the competition between nations as an evolutionary process, with some fitted for independent survival and others destined for extinction. With Marx, the economic factor came to the fore. Criteria and calculations naturally varied, and the list of potential nation-states differed widely. None the less, by the mid-nineteenth century a measure of consensus had been reached. It was generally assumed that the established Powers—France, Britain, Prussia, Austria, and Russia—possessed a historic destiny, as did the states whom the Powers already recognized—Spain, Portugal, Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, and Greece—and the leading national contenders—the Italians, the Germans, and the Poles. Mazzini sketched a map of the future Europe containing twelve nation-states.

In reality, the concept of historicity was entirely subjective, not to say spurious. Three of the five Powers, whose admirers assumed that they were among the most permanent fixtures of the European scene, were destined to disappear within a century. Several countries, like Denmark or Great Britain, who liked to think of themselves as cohesive nation-states, were destined to learn that they were not. Many of the nations who felt that they had an iron-clad case for self-determination were due to be disillusioned. Here, the decisive factors turned out to be neither size, nor economic viability, nor valid historical claims, but political circumstance. The German nationalists, who had little chance when opposed by the might of Prussia, were assured of success as soon as Prussia changed heart. The hopes of the Italians were dependent on the active support of France. The Poles, whose historic statehood remained within living memory until the 1860s, had no outside support, and no luck. Politics alone decided that Greeks, Belgians, Romanians, and Norwegians might succeed, where for the time being the Irish, the Czechs, or the Poles could not. At first, the crumbling Ottoman Empire offered the most obvious prospects for change. The nationalities of the Tsarist and Habsburg empires, which were to produce the largest number of nation-states, did not come to the fore until the turn of the century. [ABKHAZIA]

Nevertheless, nationalism did not only flourish where it was most likely to succeed: on the contrary, it thrived on deprivation and repression. One might almost say that the fervency of the national ideal increased in proportion to the improbability of its success. Throughout the century, committed national activists strove to arouse the consciousness of the people whom they wished to recruit. Poets, artists, scholars, politicians appealed to six main sources of information to construct the image of reality that was to inspire the faithful.

History was raked to furnish proof of the nation’s age-long struggle for its rights and its land. Prehistory was a favourite subject, since it could be used to substantiate claims to aboriginal settlement. Where facts could not be found, recourse had to be made to myth or to downright invention. National heroes and heroines, and distant national victories, were unearthed to be praised. Anything of universal interest was ignored. Anything that reflected discredit on the nation, or credit on its foes, was passed over.

Language was reformed and standardized as proof of the nation’s separate and unique identity. Dictionaries and grammars were compiled, and libraries collected, where none had existed before. Textbooks were prepared for national schools and national universities. Linguists set out to show that previously neglected vernaculars were every bit as sophisticated as Latin or Greek; that Czech or Catalan or Gaelic or Norwegian was every bit as efficient a means of communication as the existing state languages. The Norwegian case was specially interesting. A composite construct of peasant dialects called nynorsk or landsmål (New Norse or ‘country language’) was invented in order to challenge the established riksmål or bokmål (the ‘state language’/’book language’ of Denmark and Norway). The New Norse movement, which came to a head in 1899, saw itself as the necessary partner to the drive for political independence. But like Gaelic in Ireland, it achieved only limited success, [NORGE]