In the Middle Ages the diverse peoples of Europe could have imagined themselves drawn together, both theologically and politically, by their shared Christian faith and the vestiges of an imperial polity marked by the absence of internal frontiers. While their multiple allegiances were often in conflict, at least the appearance of an overarching framework that united them could be articulated in the common language of their diplomats, priests and professors. But with the Reformation and its attendant wars of religion, together with the dynasties whose authority was consolidated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, that European community, defined by Western Christendom, collapsed and was throughout this period progressively replaced by institutions heralding the advent of the modern nation-state and its philosophies of ragione di stato. The Treaty of Westphalia of 1648 which ended the Thirty Years’ War consecrated the territorial sovereignty and independence of the states and empires of which fragmented Europe had come to be comprised, putting paid to papal claims of transnational supremacy. The Treaty of Utrecht of 1713 likewise brought to an end the ambitions of universal empire that might have been entertained by Louis XIV of France. Thereafter Europe seemed destined, politically, to be no more than a confederation of states, wherein peace might be negotiated only through alliances formed by its separate members, such as were envisaged in the Age of Enlightenment by the abbé de Saint-Pierre, Rousseau and Kant and which, after the Second World War, came to be enshrined in the European Community.1
In the course of the eighteenth century these political developments were nevertheless accompanied by economic and cultural changes which helped to foster an image of European integration such as had been unknown in its early modern history connected with the establishment and evolution of separate states, religions and languages. With the advent and triumph of commercial society in Western and Northern Europe, the infrastructure of traffic within the continent, including the network of roads, rivers and canals that lubricated both internal and external trade, was improved on a scale not witnessed since the age of the Antonine emperors. Relative peace and prosperity and the absence of epidemic disease spurred substantial growth of the populations of European cities, where vastly improved rates of literacy nurtured scientific and humanistic academies and through a burgeoning book trade extended the influence as never before of Europe’s international republic of letters. In the mid-eighteenth century the term civilization came for the first time to acquire its modern meaning as a progressive force in opposition to barbarism, which in the Age of Enlightenment was also associated with Christendom’s legacy—the Crusades, the Inquisition, the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes—whose fundamentalist spirit of fanaticism could now be regarded as Europe’s middle-aged immaturity or retrogression from its Greek and Roman ideals.2
In opposing the Augustinian doctrine of original sin and the mysteries of revealed religions, writers and philosophers of the eighteenth century joined a conception of mankind’s reason and perfectibility to a veneration of Europe’s ancient cultures, whose fresh efflorescence in the Renaissance was deemed to have marked a new dawn of human history after a thousand benighted years of obscurantist priestcraft and feudal oppression. That dawn had proved short-lived, however, largely because its achievements in recovering the arts and philosophy of ancient Rome, and in paying tribute to and attempting to revitalize the political institutions and values of the Roman Republic in particular, had been obscured by forces generated quite independently of the Renaissance and in a different part of Europe but which came to be felt at the same time and were marked by an attachment to an altogether different Rome, that is, of Pauline and Augustinian Christianity. The Reformation and the Counter-Reformation together turned the culture of Europe away from classicism and instead towards the theology of an otherworldly pilgrimage unsuited, in both the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, to recover the tangible treasures of ancient Rome before they had been tarnished by Christianity.
Europe’s religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries seemed to cosmopolitan tourists of the eighteenth century to be sectarian reversions to the dark ages of medievalism which the Renaissance had confronted but not overcome. Worse still for such tourists, the principal universities of Europe had, in the course of the previous two centuries, by and large abandoned many of their earlier functions as progressive seats of learning in order, rather, to consolidate the strictures of the orthodox theologies of their day. By the mid-eighteenth century their role as institutions for the ordination and instruction of clerics, especially in Italy, France and England, made them appear conservative bastions within closed ideological borders, in need of lifting in an age of grand tourism that provided an alternative map of the more expansive and engaging mind of Europe as a whole, designed to complete the education of young gentlemen once released from the clutches of their university tutors. In many respects, the itinerary of the Grand Tour offered a programme of postgraduate studies which aimed to lift the veil of ignorance of an undergraduate curriculum that embraced classical languages but not the civilizations that had produced them. To the benighted theologies of the universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Paris, it provided both liberation and the promise of a countercultural experience, substituting travel, a comparative anthropology of modern Europe’s inhabitants and curiosity in the relics of Europe’s achievements before the advent of Christianity in its most sectarian forms, to the interpretation of Scripture and doctrines. Already in the seventeenth century the scholar James Howell had portrayed foreign travel as ‘a moving Academy, or the true Perpatetic Schoole’,3 and by the eighteenth century tourism formed a central part of the education of inquisitive thinkers and writers, for which ‘a restless curiosity’ in pursuit of even ‘the most doubtful promise of entertainment or instruction’, was essential to a traveller, remarked Edward Gibbon, adding that ‘the arts of common life are not studied in the closet’.4 In cultivating their minds, freed from the trappings of both ignorance and barbarism, tourists of the Age of Enlightenment sought to retrace what they took to be European civilization’s roots, sources and tributaries. In inspecting the monuments of both classical architecture and Renaissance art, they were not only modernity’s amateur archaeologists determined to preserve Europe’s ancient relics and treasures. They were also modernity’s secular pilgrims, embarked on journeys to civilization’s holy land to pay it their devotion at its most genuinely as opposed to obscurantist sacred sites.5
Tourists of one denomination or another had been in great abundance in European history before the eighteenth century, and many of the motives that had inspired travellers in medieval and early modern Europe—diplomacy, commerce, adventure and, especially outside Europe, missionary zeal and anthropological curiosity—remained widely prevalent. If the practice of inviting predominantly French philosophers to grace the court or tutor the children of enlightened monarchs in Europe’s hinterland became almost commonplace in the late eighteenth century, this convergence of philosophy with kingship along lines promoted in Plato’s Republic was not unprecedented. However much we might associate that practice with enlightened despotism—a term employed by Diderot himself in his Mémoires pour Catherine II6—his own presence at the court of Catherine, or Voltaire’s at Frederick’s, or Condillac’s in Parma, had been prefigured in the seventeenth century by Descartes’ and Pufendorf’s invitations to Stockholm. In the Age of Enlightenment, travellers’ tales, either of real or imaginary journeys, became an established literary form, not only of exoticism but above all as a means of self-inspection, whereby fictitious foreigners drawn from beyond Europe’s borders might be granted insights into the character of Europeans themselves, as in Marana’s Espion turc or Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes.7 But perhaps the most striking differences between grand tourism in the eighteenth century and journeys undertaken by earlier travellers revolve around the conceptions of civilization which inspired eighteenth-century voyagers to retrace Europe’s origins and partake of its most glorious antiquity.8
Most if not all of them came from the Protestant north and west of Europe, already identified in the eighteenth century, not least by Montesquieu himself, with the spirit of both modern liberty and enterprise. The great majority journeyed south to Catholic France and Italy, occasionally embracing Switzerland as well. In embarking on the Grand Tour they sought to complete their education by retracing the lineage of their own world, whose ancient and Renaissance ideals and standards of taste inspired what they regarded as the best of contemporary culture. ‘The noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees’, Dr Johnson famously remarked, ‘is the high road that leads him to London’, but he supposed London and England more generally to be just the modern executors of civilization’s literary and philosophical inheritance. ‘A man who has not been in Italy, is always conscious of an inferiority’, Johnson added, for ‘the grand object of travelling is to see the shores of the Mediterranean’.9 Although other tourists, like the splenetic Tobias Smollett, might prefer to report on the nature of France’s and Italy’s contemporary inhabitants than to savour their monuments,10 most shared Johnson’s awe as firsthand witnesses of Continental Europe’s achievements. For much of the mid- to late seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth century, the Grand Tour was largely conceived, by those who embarked on it, as a peripatetic cours de civilisation européenne. While in some instances French, the pre-eminent grand tourists were above all Englishmen, Germans and Scandinavians, and their principal urban destinations were, in the north of France, Paris, and in the south, Nice, Montpellier, Aix and Arles, followed by, in Italy, Genoa, Turin, Venice, Florence, Naples and Rome. If they travelled eastwards from England or south from Scandinavia, for the most part on separate journeys often though not always undertaken by different tourists, they were drawn as well as to the imperial capitals of Berlin and Vienna, perhaps even more to the splendours of Prague, Leipzig and Dresden, or to the smaller and architecturally more compact university towns of Göttingen or Jena. From all directions they were drawn as well to Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague in the United Provinces and to Antwerp, Brussels and Louvain in the Austrian Netherlands. In Central Europe grand tourists frequently journeyed by pleasure boats down both the Rhine and the Danube, whose attractions included not only the fashionable spas sprinkled on the shores of the region’s two most illustrious rivers but also, particularly along the Rhine, some of Europe’s most visually agreeable landscapes. Tourists for whom the rugged delights of nature surpassed those of culture at its best, occasionally travelled by way of Lyon and Grenoble across the Alps into Switzerland on expeditions to the glaciers of Chamonix, but even the hardiest among them, if they had the right connections, were characteristically pleased still more by the domestic charms, comforts and conversation they might be invited to enjoy at Voltaire’s house at Ferney near Geneva.
En route to Paris, if they embarked from the south of England and travelled across the Channel by way of Dover and Calais, they might pause to visit the castle of the Prince de Condé at Chantilly, not so much to admire its Gothic splendour as to inspect its elegant formal gardens, festooned with fountains and waterfalls and decorated with aviaries filled with ornamental birds. At the Benedictine abbey of Saint-Denis, they could behold the crown of Charlemagne, Virgil’s mirror, the shoulder bone of St. John the Baptist, a box containing some of the Blessed Virgin’s hair and ‘other sacred toys’, including a crucifix carved by Pope Clement III from Christ’s original cross and a reliquary which the friar who conducted them would have tourists ‘believe was stained by the natural blood of our Saviour’, remarked a sceptical John Evelyn in his diary.11 At the great Palais de Versailles, they might be disappointed at the small rooms which hardly failed to conceal its overall ‘pompous appearance’ as reported by Horace Walpole, who initially travelled there in 1739 in the company of the poet Thomas Gray, an assessment echoed by Arthur Young not long before the outbreak of the Revolution.12 If they judged some of its waterworks childish they could still admire the grandeur of Versailles’ formal gardens designed by André Le Nôtre, however, and if they travelled down the Seine to Saint-Cloud or up to Fontainebleau they were almost invariably dazzled by graceful buildings and cultivated landscapes of a quality and character that Versailles lacked.
Perhaps their favourite among the royal chateaux in the vicinity of Paris, however, was that of Marly-le-roi (figure 2.1), where Louis XIV and Madame de Maintenon had built a palatial retreat called l’Ermitage and there entertained King James II of England after his enforced abdication. As reported by the Duc de Saint-Simon in his Mémoires, Marly’s lakes had once been stocked with pedigree carp, and for much of the eighteenth century classics of the French theatre like Molière’s Le Bourgeois gentilhomme were staged in its gardens in the presence of the king’s courtiers and foreign tourists alike. Marly was destroyed in the course of the French Revolution, although some of its treasures, and particularly its sculptures, survived and are still on display in the Louvre and elsewhere in Paris.
In Paris, once ensconced at the Hôtel Anjou in the Faubourg St Germain or perhaps in a furnished room or apartment nearby such as Edward Gibbon rented in 1763, the tourist would relish the glorious gardens of the Luxembourg, the Palais Royal and the Tuileries. He or indeed she would delight in the air among the windmills of Montmartre and, above all, bask in wonder at the spires, domes, turrets and friezes of that city’s grandest monuments—Notre Dame, the Invalides, the Sorbonne and the Louvre. Already in the eighteenth century the Seine wended its sinuous path through Paris between banks which displayed its architectural glories to greater dramatic effect than the Thames flowing through London, and to visitors also acquainted with the rivers of Central Europe its bridges seemed as elegant as those that crossed Prague. It was also in Paris, above all other destinations on the Grand Tour, that European travellers endeavoured to perfect their command of the French language, which in the Age of Enlightenment serviced the interests of diplomacy and even successfully competed with Latin as the international republic of letters’ principal medium of exchange, and it was in Paris as well that they cultivated the standards of taste—in dress, dining, comportment and conversation—that had come to be deemed most appropriate to polite society. Nowhere else in Europe were civilization’s refinements more conspicuously displayed in bonnes manières. Not every tourist, however, was captivated by the sights or fragrance of France’s capital, and virtually none were impressed by the integrity of the tailors, hatters and tradesmen who fitted them with the silk, velvet and stockings required to make the right impression within fashionable society, so sharply contrasted with the ragged bustle outside. ‘The charms of Paris have not the least attraction for me’, remarked Walpole on a much later visit to France. ‘It is the ugliest, beastly town in the universe,’ he added,13 forever complaining of its filthy river, devilish inhabitants, narrow streets with virtually identical houses and barbarous cold worse than London’s. On no other matter apart from their shared contempt for Paris would Walpole and Rousseau ever agree, but at least Walpole was spared Rousseau’s ignominious fate in being buried there.
FIGURE 2.1. Pierre-Denis Martin, painting of Marly, air view of the château and gardens, 1722. Oil on canvas. Museum (château) at Versailles (Giraudon / The Bridgeman Art Library, London)
From Paris they would journey south along the Rhône, either by carriage or boat on the lengthiest and most arduous stage of their journey only pausing briefly to rest or shop in Lyon, until they reached the elegant and flourishing resort of Nice or the more vulgar attractions of the port of Marseilles. The Côte d’Azur, however, was not yet the haven for rich foreigners which it would become in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and tourists who travelled to the Mediterranean coast to escape the cold winters of England or Germany preferred the Provençal air of Aix, with its fountains around which they could stroll in greater comfort than those of Paris, and even more of Arles, whose ruins and antiquities offered them a French foretaste of Rome. The climate and waters of Montpellier, too, were deemed salubrious, and tourists who sought other distractions might be drawn there even more by the conviviality of students who flocked to the most progressive university in eighteenth-century France, where they could engage in wider pursuits less circumscribed by theologians than was so often the case in Paris. From Nice tourists would proceed to Genoa in Italy, either by boat from Marseilles hugging a shoreline often foraged by pirates, or along the still sometimes treacherous coastal road where they might instead be at the mercy of bandits.
In Genoa eighteenth-century tourists could, together with the Président Charles de Brosses or Mrs. Piozzi, the former Hester Thrale, admire that city’s glorious harbour and the fine palaces surrounding it, among them the Palazzo Ducale designed in the late eighteenth century by Simone Cantone (figure 2.2). Some, however, who had learnt a refined Italian described by Howell as a lingua Toscana in boca Romana,14 found the native Genoese less receptive to their skills than they hoped or might even, like the diminutive Mrs. Piozzi herself, be agitated by street urchins who would clasp her knees and rummage for her purse even while she was carried aloft in a chair. That mode of transport, as well as coaches and carriages, seemed in abundance in the principal Italian cities of the north, unlike the south where even the rich perambulated on foot. In Turin, in particular, a distinguished citizen’s reputation might be ruined if he were seen strolling without a chair through its elegant public squares, and the etiquette which there required that even sightseers’ feet be firmly planted in the air led tourists like the botanist James Edward Smith to lament the haughtiness and ceremonious dress of the inhabitants of this capital of Piedmont who would not make social visits to their superiors without wearing a sword or clutching a chapeau de bras.15 However precious and dull its natives, Turin’s wide avenues and grand buildings, many built in the early eighteenth century after the French siege of 1706, were regarded by most tourists as impressive, none more perhaps than the Palazzo Reale (figure 2.3) whose rococo interiors seemed even more extravagant than the splendours of the palace of Marly.
FIGURE 2.2. Genoa, Palazzo Ducale, facade (Alinari / Art Resource, NY)
Turin was definitely worth a visit for the grand tourist, but a long stay there was thought ill-advised. After Genoa it was a detour and comfortable stopover on the leisurely route to Italy’s jewel in the crown on the Adriatic coast, that is, Venice—the most admired and most often painted of all European cities in the eighteenth century, as it remains the most frequently visited in the world today. In Venice, tourists could luxuriate in appreciation of the Ponte di Rialto and the Palladian fronts to the churches of Santa Lucia, San Giorgio Maggiore and San Francesco della Vigna, all the while in awe at the sight not only of the Grand Canal and the Doge’s Palace but also the glories of Veronese, Titian and Tintoretto lodged within the great monuments of a modern republic whose constitution had already survived longer than that of ancient Rome. Few paintings better display the political pageantry that this republic could still mount in the mid-eighteenth century after three hundred years of decay than the portrayal, by Canaletto, of the reception of the French Ambassador in 1742, later acquired by Catherine II of Russia and now lodged at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg (figure 2.4). Absent from this picture, because he would only be appointed a year later, is the Ambassador’s secretary, one Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
FIGURE 2.3. Turin, Palazzo Reale, Chinese Room (The Bridgeman Art Library, London)
In Florence, which enchanted Walpole as much as Paris had disgusted him, visitors could appreciate the treasures of the Pitti Palace and the Uffizi Gallery, including pictures or sculptures of Raphael, Rubens or Michelangelo such as are depicted by Zoffany, himself an eighteenth-century grand tourist, in his painting of the Tribuna of the Uffizi (figure 2.5). If they wished to admire the marbles of Florence they could choose between Donatello’s David in the Bargello and Michelangelo’s now in the Accademia, not forgetting Michelangelo’s equally celebrated Pietà Palestrina nearby. If they felt disinclined to linger too long in the mausoleum of the Medici they could behold the glistening villas, vineyards and olive groves on the surrounding hills or steal a glimpse of the Duomo round a bend of the via Boccaccio as students attending the European University Institute in San Domenico di Fiesole may still do today if they stroll to the city after their classes. With the other major towns of Tuscany so much relished by visitors today—Pistoia, Sienna, even Pisa—grand tourists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were relatively unimpressed. Such towns were considered too conspicuously medieval, their narrow streets, broken pavements and grated windows cramped by a gloomy insularity that contrasted with the lush expansiveness of the hills outside. Of my own favourite small Italian city, Lucca, they might well have thought the same as Hobbes, who in the twenty-first chapter of his Leviathan had remarked that from ‘the word LIBERTAS’ inscribed on that republic’s turrets no man can infer that there is more liberty there than in Constantinople.16
FIGURE 2.4. Canaletto, Reception of the French Ambassador in Venice. Hermitage, St. Petersburg (The Bridgeman Art Library, London)
Naples, in the eighteenth century the largest town in Italy and by common consent the most beguiling, dazzled tourists not only on account of its vast monuments, castles, colonnades and magnificent outlook on the sea, but perhaps above all because of the exuberance and vitality of its people, then and now forever in the streets, engaged in virtually endless dramas even more captivating than those on the stage of the San Carlo and other Neapolitan theatres. While Florentine Italians often portrayed Naples as a paradise inhabited by devils, visitors from abroad, like Goethe as he recounts in his Italienische Reise, were besotted and intoxicated by its charms, of an openness such as to make the capital of the world at the base of the Tiber, which he had visited earlier, seem instead like a cloister built on a poor site.17 To these delights, for those who did not wish to forget the history of civilization that had drawn them there, a certain gravitas was added in the Age of Enlightenment by the excavations begun at Pompeii and Herculaneum or by Virgil’s tomb.
FIGURE 2.5. Johann Zoffany, The Tribuna of the Uffizi. (The Royal Collection © 2009, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II)
As distinct from Naples but more like Paris, Rome was often judged a mixed blessing by tourists, struck as they were by the contrast between the magnificence of St. Peter’s or the Vatican Museum on the one hand, and on the other the narrow streets of crowded houses, suffused with the smell of garlic, which gave eighteenth-century Rome the appearance of an unworthy offspring of its imperial past. To foreign observers its natives were not remotely so entrancing as the Neapolitans, and as de Brosses records, uncharitably, a quarter of the figures one might see in its streets were statues, another quarter were priests and yet another did virtually nothing at all.18 But if modern Rome lacked civilization’s delights, its antiquities—even in the eighteenth century when the Coliseum had come to be filled by warrens and sheds for domestic animals and the Forum was divided into stalls for a twice-weekly market—surpassed in splendour those which survived anywhere else in the world. There could have been no more enthusiastic or better-informed guide to Rome’s ancient treasures than Winckelmann, who in 1763 was appointed superintendent of Roman antiquities and for the next five years until his untimely death in Trieste guided Wilkes, Boswell and other notable visitors to Rome on their tours. Chief among the men inspired by his learning and the awe he felt himself for the civilization that had been Rome’s was Gibbon, who after a sleepless night in 1764, as he reports, hastened to the ruins of the Forum and, noting every spot where Romulus had stood, Cicero had spoken or Caesar fell, embarked on his history of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.19 With Winckelmann and Gibbon together in Rome, the Grand Tour—conceived as bearing witness, through its ancient monuments, to the history of Western civilization itself—achieved its eighteenth-century apotheosis.
The journey south from Protestant England and Germany to Catholic France and then Italy and thereby to Europe’s pagan and pre-Christian roots was not, however, conceived as embracing European civilization in all its rich diversity; seldom did grand tourists for whom a first-hand grasp of at least the remnants of that history could be described as their chief objective stray far in their pilgrimage from the paths pursued by Evelyn, Gibbon, Johnson or Goethe. Although agents of Lord Arundel, the Duke of Buckingham and, later, William Petty scavenged Greek antiquities in the seventeenth century, and while the classicists Jacob Spon and George Wheler journeyed there to investigate ancient inscriptions, until the end of the eighteenth century travellers to Greece rarely included tourists, who would instead arrive in great numbers only after they had been stirred by the imagery of poets such as Byron in Don Juan and, following Byron’s death, of romantic enthusiasts of Greek nationalism in the nineteenth century. Ancient Athens might have been the school of Hellas and, thus, when it was absorbed by the Roman Republic in the course of the Macedonian Wars, the fount that inspired Rome as well and, through Rome, gave birth to Western civilization’s literature, philosophy and some of its civic ideals. By way of Pope’s translations of both the Iliad and Odyssey tourists of the Age of Enlightenment could draw inspiration from not only classical but even pre-classical Greece, and through the Society of Dilettanti which a number of aristocratic tourists had formed in London in 1734 and which would eventually inspire the foundation of the Royal Academy, their interest in ancient art and antiquities eventually turned from Italian to Greek culture.20 A two-year archaeological and architectural expedition to Greece came to be launched in 1751 by the Society, which thereby established itself as the principal sponsor of Stuart’s and Revett’s (ultimately) five-volume Antiquities of Athens of 1762–1830,21 and from 1764 to 1766 the Oxford don and historian of Troy, Richard Chandler, set out to tour both Greece and Asia Minor under the aegis of the Society.22
But while perhaps moved by the same ambitions as had stirred so many travellers to Italy throughout the Age of Enlightenment, this venture in the domain of scholarship and erudition provided no spur to grand tourism in Greece. Unless they also happened to be professional archaeologists, architects or historians, eighteenth-century enthusiasts of Homer, Thucydides, Plato and democracy by and large sought only to recover that Greek legacy in their imagination and did not set out to cross the Balkans or discover, in the Levant, the remains of a world that had for centuries belonged to the Ottoman Turks. In the early nineteenth century, when the British ambassador to Constantinople took it upon himself to rescue fragments of the Parthenon frieze, he forsook the example of Winckelmann, Gibbon and other tourists of the Age of Enlightenment, looting it instead and transporting it to Scotland in the manner of Napoleon’s imperialist theft from Egypt of the Rosetta Stone. That relic of an even more ancient civilization than the Parthenon frieze, in turn, was surrendered to the British for whom it became a trophy and, together with the Elgin Marbles plundered from Athens, is now lodged in the British Museum.
Nor did grand tourists of the eighteenth century cross the Pyrenees to Spain. The frontiers of European civilization which they breached had already drawn Western European travellers to Russia by the 1720s and would by the 1770s prompt them to travel to Scandinavia, still later inspiring the great project of Edward Daniel Clarke, beginning in 1799 when he was initially accompanied by Robert Malthus and others, to open the vista of civilization to Nordic and Oriental no less than to mainstream Occidental readings.23 The history of late eighteenth-century anthropology (when the term first acquired its modern meaning as the science of human nature) owes perhaps as much to such literature as, in a somewhat earlier period, to Jesuit and other commentaries on the peoples of China and New World Amerindians. But comparative and synchronic studies of the diverse populations and races which comprise our species did not, and perhaps could not, take the same form as diachronic accounts of the roots of Western civilization, from which point of view it might have been thoughtlessly supposed, by northern Europe’s grand tourists, that the glories of Spanish culture, at their height in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, had come to be superseded by the achievements of other European peoples. For the same reason that eighteenth-century (and indeed later) philosophers judged that there was no Spanish Enlightenment, travellers of the period setting out on the Grand Tour displayed hardly any enthusiasm for the attractions of Spain or for Spanish thinkers or writers apart from Cervantes, even though their precursors in the seventeenth century, sometimes guided by Howell,24 had been drawn there when it was still one of the jewels in the firmament of European Christendom.
They did, however, travel to Switzerland, often on the same journeys as they made to France and Italy, but not for the same reasons. Most tourists to Switzerland had scant interest in tracing civilization’s trajectory, still less in uncovering its classical roots. Switzerland appealed to them instead because it was, by and large, civilization’s opposite, the uncouth state of nature most accessible to Europeans, such as Rousseau—cultivated society’s fiercest enemy in the Age of Enlightenment—had so romantically portrayed. It was from Chamonix in 1760 that the philosopher Horace Bénédict de Saussure resolved to scale Mont Blanc, while from the inns soon afterwards established not only at Chamonix but also Grindelwald and Lauterbrunnen leisurely tourists were enabled to study alpine plants, and more adventurous hikers, like Wordsworth, could manage to negotiate mountain passes without having to camp overnight in the snow. Since it had come to be widely supposed by persons who reflected on such matters that mankind had not sinfully stumbled in his original state but had on the contrary risen from it, scaling mountainous heights might indeed be deemed compatible with human progress, requiring as it did so many of civilization’s artefacts, including barometers, quadrants, compasses, ropes and heavy shoes, none of which, however, managed to save Walpole’s spaniel, which he had ill-advisedly brought to the Alps for company, when it was consumed by a wolf.
The Low Countries and the Hapsburg and Prussian territories of Central Europe attracted tourists’ interest as well, offering, by contrast with the antiquities of the south and the wilderness of the Alps, glimpses of the efflorescence of European culture in its most golden age of modernity before the rise of both England and France. They were filled with awe at the sight not only of Amsterdam’s magnificent Guildhall, the mansions of the Keizersgracht, the Noorderkerk and other Protestant churches and the Sephardic Synagogue, but also at the bustle of traffic along and beside its glorious canals. Here they found a city, luxuriating in its commerce, still virtually in its prime, relishing a period of ascendancy of far closer historical proximity than Rome’s, seeming more even than the port of London in the eighteenth century to form the gateway to the world. In Rotterdam they were enchanted not only by buildings scarcely less opulent but by the splendid panorama of its waterfront, the Boompjes, and by the humanist spirit of the northern Renaissance which Erasmus had bequeathed to it, destined in each case to be ground into dust by the Luftwaffe in May 1940. In The Hague they could relish the Mauritshuis and especially the Ridderzaal, one of the glories of medieval European architecture, as well as gawk at the cabinet of curiosities in the collection of the Prince of Orange. If they sought further evidence of Holland’s contribution to the civilization of modern Europe, they would not fail to visit the sumptuous royal palace and baroque gardens of Het Loo, the charming harbour of Dordrecht or the university towns of Utrecht and especially Leiden, in the eighteenth century perhaps the most progressive seat of higher education anywhere in the world, to which scholars and students from all corners of Europe flocked. Nor would they forget to inspect the collections of the Holbeins, van Dyck, Rubens, Rembrandt and Vermeer which formed the supreme treasures of Dutch art. Proceeding south to the Austrian Netherlands they would be drawn to the quieter civility of Antwerp, the exquisite Grand’Place and Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie of Brussels and the Gothic Hôtel de Ville of Louvain, in the eighteenth century also a vibrant and flourishing centre of learning.
Berlin’s and Vienna’s architectural delights were more manifestly imperial than most of the fine buildings in the principal cities of the Low Countries, while for many tourists of the Age of Enlightenment who visited it the glistening monuments, mansions, palaces, squares and bridges of Prague made its architecture seem the most elegant and refined in the whole of Europe. Frederick the Great’s Palace of Sans Souci at Potsdam near Berlin and the Schloss Schönbrunn in Vienna were deemed to rival the Palace of Versailles in scale, grandeur or pretentiousness, but tourists who wished to spend less time indoors than was required for excursions through the rooms of these vast edifices could instead enjoy strolls through Berlin’s Tiergarten and along Unter den Linden or, in Vienna, in the gardens of the Belvedere Palace, in the already famous woods outside the city or, in winter, even across the Danube when it froze. For tourists who might also imagine themselves cultivated sportsmen, Vienna in particular, with its riding and fencing schools was unrivalled by any other city in Europe. From Vienna or Prague they might journey to Dresden, the Elector of Saxony’s official seat elegantly tucked along the banks of the Elbe, which at the hands of the Allies was to suffer a fate similar to that of Rotterdam in the Second World War but has since been more lovingly restored. From either Dresden or Berlin they would often visit Leipzig to inspect its Romanushaus or the Alte Rathaus in the Marktplatz, and while these buildings struck them as less imposing than those of Berlin or Dresden, tourists to Leipzig generally found the city’s inhabitants livelier and more companionable. Such attractions as distinct from those of urban architecture also drew them to some of Germany’s smaller university towns in other regions, such as Göttingen or Jena.
If European tourists of the eighteenth century were largely determined to bear witness to their civilization’s origins and inheritance, they relied heavily in their travels upon its modern technology—the vastly improved infrastructure of its roads and its networks of post horses and carriages which transported them, and the inns and taverns through which they passed, often assisted by such modern luxuries as an inflatable bath and modern necessities like latch keys that could ensure their safety and secure their purses in hostel rooms while they slept. Above all, to make their journeys both possible and tolerable, tourists of the eighteenth century required the facility of two essential aids which substantially defined their way of life—leisure and wealth—not widely available in any earlier periods of European history. Civilization had by the eighteenth century come to mean more than just the refinements of the arts, sciences and culture; it had come as well to mean commercial society, or capitalism as it would be called in the nineteenth century, denoting civilization’s highest stage—the German term bürgerliche Gesellschaft standing at once for commercial as well as civil society. With leisure and wealth tourists could contemplate its visceral no less than spiritual delights, conceiving rites of passage across Europe’s frontiers through images of freedom or sex, to be realized or fulfilled by valets, grooms, prostitutes and other professional servants provisioned at the staging posts of their journeys or at their destinations by a fresh market catering for their acquired tastes.
European civilization was not only uncovered and retraced in the Grand Tours of eighteenth-century travellers. It was in crucial respects invented by those who set out in search of it, no less than were contemporaneous or subsequent ideas of national identity inspired by notions of a community imagined through similarly creative leaps of faith and pilgrimages of another sort. To subscribe to the idea of Europe internally sans frontières and defined instead by its common history it was not even necessary to embark on the Grand Tour. Kant’s conception of perpetual peace within a continent politically shaped by the Treaties of Westphalia and Utrecht required the crossing of borders only in his mind, since as he recounts in his Anthropologie he became so violently sick on a short sea journey which he took as a young man25 that he never again departed from Königsberg.
Together with other cosmopolitan thinkers of his day Kant envisaged the future of Europe as populated by citizens of the world, spiritually united by ties more durable than their separate political allegiances, languages and religions. In identifying the rights of man to be exactly the same as those of the citizen, however, the French Revolutionary Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen of 1789 established both the philosophical and practical framework not for European civilization but rather the modern ethos of the nation-state, initially conceived as civilization’s instrument or vehicle, although in time, however, it would instead become its negation. For in promoting the liberation of distinct peoples by way of their acquisition of territorial sovereignty, the nation-states established in Europe in the wake of the French Revolution were in the early twentieth century to drive them towards the Treaty of Versailles, out of which was to arise the fractious disintegration of European polities along the fissures of geographical, linguistic and cultural boundaries exploded in the Second World War. A flicker of the world that had been lost with the age of the Grand Tour could be witnessed in 1989 with the fresh and overwhelmingly peaceful dissolution of some of those boundaries on account of the collapse of Europe’s communist regimes, but by then and shortly afterwards, in the Balkans and for many of its own disillusioned citizens as well as other peoples throughout the world whose history was no longer cast in its shadow, the exemplary role once ascribed to Europe as the bearer of the whole of Western civilization had come to seem grievously tarnished if not fatally flawed.26
