6

The Age of Emotion

FROM THE PRESENT TO THE PAST

Fredrika Bremer (1801–65), a writer now largely forgotten outside her native Scandinavia, had become by the middle of the nineteenth century one of Europe’s most celebrated novelists. She was born near Åbo, Swedish Finland (Turku in Finland today), into what eventually became a family of five girls and two boys. Her father Carl Fredrik Bremer (1770–1830), a wealthy merchant, moved with his family to Stockholm in 1804 when Fredrika was three, and purchased a country house at Årsta ten miles to the south, as well as an apartment in the city centre. She learned the conventional accomplishments of the upper middle-class girl: English, French and German conversation, playing the piano and dancing, sewing, embroidery, drawing and painting, with the help of a French governess and a variety of private teachers. But Fredrika suffered under a handicap in the marriage market: she was not considered as good-looking as her older sister, a fact of which she was only too well aware: ‘I wish I were more beautiful,’ she would reply to admirers even at the relatively late age of fifty. She took increasing refuge in the world of the imagination. The family would read aloud in the evening, mostly serious history books chosen by their father; the girls preferred the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78). Later the family turned to the historical novels of Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832), with their noble rebels such as Rob Roy or Robin Hood, their romantic entanglements, and their picturesque representations of old Scotland and medieval England.

Fredrika’s frustration at the restrictive regime imposed on the girls by her father drove her to depression, until in 1826 she was left at Årsta one winter to look after the two most sickly of her four sisters while their parents were in Stockholm. She began treating the young women with herbs and soon acquired a local reputation as a healer. Unable to meet the growing demands of her philanthropic work, Fredrika turned to writing in order to make some money. Her stories dealt with the bourgeois family world in which she had grown up and continued to live, but she also combined domestic realism with poetic descriptions of the sublime, with picaresque incidents and with sentimental idylls. One of the main characters in her first novel, The H— Family (1831), the beautiful blind girl Elizabeth, goes out onto a cliff-top in the middle of a violent thunderstorm, raises her arms and delivers a confession of unrequited love: ‘The lightning crossed the whole country with its glowing streaks; the storm raged around; and the thunder, now rolling, now crashing, increased above our heads. The blind girl stood upon the cliff, as though the spirit of the storm, with a wild, terrible countenance.’ She sings a song, her voice rising above the tempest: ‘Hail to the day of freedom . . . I am free . . . My hour is come.’ She tells her guardian: ‘You have fettered my body, you have bound my tongue, and now I stand before you, powerful and strong.’ Unexpectedly, however, Elizabeth does not throw herself over the precipice but returns, exhausted, to die in her bed. Indeed, elevating, romantic deathbed scenes are so common in Bremer’s novels that in one of them she pauses to address her audience with a direct question: ‘Will not my friendly readers be astonished that the pen, which ought only to be dedicated to pleasure, passes on from one deathbed to another, just as if everyday life were a continual procession of corpses?’

Full of depictions of Gothic dreams, wild-looking young men, weeping girls, endless pine forests and woodland fountains, Bremer’s novel was an instant success, winning a medal from the Swedish Academy. Dissatisfied with her ‘chaotic’ education she engaged a tutor, Per Böklin (1796–1867), a local headmaster, author of a learned dissertation on Ancient Greek accents, part-time publisher and translator from German. Böklin took her through a course on German philosophy and its relation to Christian faith. Her second full-length story, The President’s Daughters (1834), drew on Bremer’s experiences with her tutor and indeed quoted directly from his letters to her as well as reproducing the reading list he had supplied. It focuses on the four daughters of a wealthy man and their governess, whose liberal views of female education clash with the more conventional vision of her employer. The governess describes with savage irony women as men would like them to be: ‘We fill the room, and yet deprive nobody of a place; we neutralize the warring elements of life, which without us would destroy one another . . . We put our houses in order, salt our meat according to the book; gossip moderately about our neighbour, think only as much as necessary.’ By the end of the novel, however, after many vicissitudes, the women of the family have won their father round to the idea of allowing them to develop their own individuality and creativity, and the story, unusually for Bremer, ends happily.

The relationship between Bremer and Böklin, a bachelor, developed with such intensity that he eventually asked her to marry him. But she refused him, claiming that she needed to be alone and free from wifely burdens in order to write. To get over the relationship she escaped to Norway, where she stayed with friends and wrote her most popular novel, The Neighbours: A Story of Everyday Life (1836), in which an overly strict parent ends by being struck blind, one of many such instances in Bremer’s work. By this time her depiction of the tragic situation of women who were prevented from gaining their independence had acquired a grim parallel in her own life. Since she was unmarried, and thus legally still a minor whatever her age, her brother Claes Bremer (1804–39) had full legal control over her increasingly substantial income as an author after their father’s death in 1830. This was exactly at the point when she began her successful career as a novelist, and in the course of less than a decade Claes gambled a large portion of her earnings away. It was only when he died a wastrel’s death in 1839, following the demise a few years earlier of her only other brother, that Fredrika Bremer was free to manage her own affairs.

In her novels of the 1840s and early 1850s, such as Midnight Sun: A Pilgrimage (1849), the theme of religious conversion and Divine revelation entered her work. Continuing her reading, unsystematic though it might have been, she came across the phenomenon of Utopian communities, described in a novel she published in 1848, where two characters return from a visit to the phalanstery at Lowell, Massachusetts, and try to set up an imitation of it in Sweden. The following year Bremer travelled to America and visited Lowell. She met Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82), ‘a quiet nobly serious figure with a pale complexion, starkly marked features and dark hair’, conversed with leading politicians and literary figures, and was too busy being lionized to find time to read ‘the thick volumes of Hegelian philosophy’ she had brought with her in her continuing quest to educate herself. More significantly, however, Bremer was appalled by her discovery of the evils and brutalities of slavery, a ‘heathen institution that is leading to acts so incomprehensible, so inhuman in this country, the Christian and free-minded America, that it is hard for me at times to believe, to grasp that it is reality and not a dream’.

Back in Sweden, she wrote her most impassioned plea for women’s emancipation from legal and social slavery so far, in her novel Hertha (1856). In a situation that recurs in many of her stories the father of the eponymous Hertha is bad-tempered and overbearing and tells her ‘that she possessed no right at all over her own property, over herself, or her future, otherwise than in as far as her father would consider it’. The father mismanages the family estate, but is seriously injured in one of the many fires that occur in Bremer’s novels, and for a time allows Hertha to earn money as a schoolmistress. Finally, Hertha marries her sweetheart Yngve over her father’s protests (‘Will you defy me?’ he shouts) – if only, inevitably, at the young man’s deathbed, after he has been mortally injured while rescuing passengers from a blazing steamboat. With her income assured by this novel, Bremer embarked on an extensive tour first of Europe, searching for religious inspiration, then of Palestine, returning to Sweden to write a six-volume account of her travels, and finally moving back to Årsta, where she died of pneumonia on New Year’s Eve 1865.

Fredrika Bremer’s stories brought together two of the main cultural currents of the age. They combined emotionalism, love of nature and Gothic imagery with a setting that was usually family-oriented and domestic. Other writers of the period, often known as Biedermeier (1815–48), in central Europe under the impact of Metternich’s repression of open political discourse turned inwards towards the home, or to depoliticized stories about country life. Annette von Droste-Hülshoff (1797–1848), a well-educated aristocratic poet and composer of Lieder, was characteristic of these tendencies in writing mainly religious and nature poetry; in Austria the Bohemian-born writer Adalbert Stifter (1805–68) became celebrated for his depictions of nature. For a poet such as William Wordsworth (1770–1850) inspiration and emotion were rooted in the beauties of nature, above all in the mountains and streams of the English Lake District where he lived. Similarly, Biedermeier artists depicted with painstaking accuracy scenes of domestic and country life, telling a simple story in an often pious or sentimental manner. The style spread to Scandinavia, as did the simple, natural style of furniture for which the term Biedermeier is best known. Just as the English Romantic poets eschewed Classical allusion and, for the most part, elaborate metaphor in favour of the directness of ordinary speech, so Biedermeier furniture expressed a reaction against the ornate mahogany chairs, tables and other pieces produced under the French Empire; it appealed to the new middle classes with its clean lines and utilitarian designs, and was brought within their financial range by the usage of European woods such as cherry or oak rather than expensive imported hardwoods. In Sweden it was known as Karl Johan furniture, after Karl XIV Johan (1763–1844), the reigning monarch of the period, who had finished his military career as Marshal Bernadotte, a leading figure in Napoleon’s armies.

In music, too, there was a turn towards the domestic. The aristocratic and clerical patronage that had sustained the composers of the eighteenth century was no longer available, at least not on such a scale as before. Although the music of Ludvig van Beethoven (1770–1827), Carl Maria von Weber (1786–1826), Gioachino Rossini, Hector Berlioz (1803–69) and Ferenc (Franz) Liszt (1811–86) was celebrated in public performance, musical life in some respects retreated into the private sphere, into the family or the salon. The music of Franz Schubert (1797–1828) provides one of the best examples: much of it was written for musical evenings or weekends within the home or a circle of friends. Even so, Metternich’s police regarded all gatherings even in private with suspicion, especially if those who took part in them were young. In 1820, Schubert and four of his friends were arrested for subversion; the composer himself was severely reprimanded and one of his friends was imprisoned. His comic opera The Conspirators (1823) – one of a number of attempts at making money from public performances, almost all of which came to nothing – was banned by the official censors because of its title. In fact, Schubert managed to hold only one public concert of his own music and focused on chamber works and songs for solo voice and piano, all of which could be performed by competent amateurs within the home. He ushered in the private world of the narrative song-cycle with Die schöne Müllerin (1823), Die Winterreise (1828) and Schwanengesang (1828), works that are most evocative when performed in a small venue.

Similarly, Robert Schumann wrote only piano music early in his career, combining composition with music journalism in order to make a living. His piano cycles such as Carnaval (1834–5) and Davidsbündlertänze (Dances of the League of David, 1837) celebrated friendship among lovers of the arts, their pieces referring to individuals within Schumann’s circle and identified by musical cryptograms. The deceptively simple Kinderszenen (Childhood Scenes, 1838) are perhaps the best known of all musical depictions of a child’s life, with its toys (‘Ritter vom Steckenpferd’, or ‘Knight of the Hobbyhorse’), games (‘Hasche-Mann’, or ‘Blind Man’s Buff’) and imaginings (‘Träumerei’, or ‘Dreaming’, perhaps his most famous composition of all). Only later in his career did he turn to writing Lieder, building on Schubert’s pioneering production of song-cycles to produce vocal works that told a story, usually of unrequited love. In the final phase of his life, Schumann wrote chamber music along with several powerful orchestral works, notably the Piano Concerto (1845) and Cello Concerto (1850); by this time public concert performances were bringing in a more reliable stream of income.

The rhythmic ambiguities even of these late works by Schumann are combined with an inwardness that takes them a long way from the showy virtuosity favoured by some other composers of the time such as Liszt, whose public performances during the 1840s aroused hysterical audience reactions dubbed ‘Lisztomania’ by Heinrich Heine: a ‘veritable insanity’ in which women fought over his handkerchiefs and gloves after a performance and attempted to cut off locks of his hair. Liszt’s career pointed to the obverse of Biedermeier domesticity, the cult of the genius. While almost all of the instrumental and chamber works of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century composers can be performed by competent amateurs – even the final fugue of the Hammerklavier Sonata (1818) by Beethoven, if the retrospectively inserted metronome marks are disregarded – the 1820s also saw the arrival of the virtuoso, whose speciality was performing music that ordinary people found far beyond their capacities. The pioneer in this respect was not so much Liszt as the violinist Niccolò Paganini (1782–1840), whose fingers were so long that he could play three octaves across four strings simultaneously. Such was his virtuosity that he was said to have sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for it, a legend he did little to counter. To show off his talents, Paganini, like Liszt, wrote his own music, most notably the Caprices (1802–17), but he also commissioned works from professional composers such as Berlioz, who described him in his memoirs as ‘a man with long hair and piercing eyes and a strange, ravaged countenance, a creature haunted by genius’.

Berlioz’s own compositions breathed the unmistakable spirit of Romanticism, the new artistic movement that reacted to the rationalism of the Enlightenment by emphasizing the emotions, the exotic and the wild. Their themes encompassed not only a Byronic hero’s encounter with brigands and his experiences wandering alone in the mountains (Harold in Italy, 1834), but also, in another Byronic piece, The Corsair (1844), the world of the Mediterranean pirate; and in the Symphonie Fantastique (1830) the drug-induced dreams of an artist, including a ‘March to the Scaffold’ and ‘Witches’ Sabbath’. A number of early Romantic works were written under the influence of opium, including, famously, the poem Kubla Khan (1816) by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), who became a serious addict, consuming up to four quarts of laudanum (tincture of opium) a week. The drug’s impact was recorded in detail by Thomas de Quincey (1785–1859) in his Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821). Opium distorted perceptions of time and space and heightened emotional experience, something that strengthened its appeal to the Romantics. Whereas the Enlightenment had stressed the need to subordinate the emotions to the intellect, Romanticism instead stressed feeling as the fundamental source of truth and authenticity and their expression in art.

The characteristic Romantic figure was a lone individual such as the Wanderer above a Sea of Fog (1818) by the German painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840), standing on a mountain top above a sublime landscape after conquering its peaks, and, with his back turned to the viewer, contemplating an unknown and uncertain future, perhaps in the next life. The idea of the tortured genius was central to this ideal of art: art and suffering were intertwined in the Romantic agony in the figure of Beethoven, who was afflicted by increasing deafness from his mid-twenties until he had lost all his hearing by 1814. His deeply personal late string quartets met with general incomprehension – his fellow composer Louis Spohr (1784–1859), whose agreeable music is seldom heard today, described them as ‘indecipherable, uncorrected horrors’ – but all his symphonies, including the Ninth (1824) with its choral finale, were performed in a concert series in 1825 in Leipzig and again the following year, and he managed to stay financially afloat in his last years with income from commissions, chamber music and piano works, including the great Opus 111 Sonata (1822), with its ethereal, ecstatic second (and final) movement, and the endlessly inventive Diabelli Variations (1819–23). Beethoven was a transitional figure, beginning firmly in the Classical tradition and breaking free of it in his late works, whose inspiration followed Romantic principles by eschewing rule-bound forms (for example, in the number and length of different movements) and expressing emotion in seemingly spontaneous and unfettered fashion.

The Romantic hero as emotional being was expressed most dramatically perhaps in the character of Heathcliff, the protagonist of Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë (1818–48): a ‘dark-skinned gypsy’, as she described him, who is adopted as a child by a Yorkshire gentleman farmer, is spurned in love by his daughter, and, consumed by rage and despair, spends the rest of his life in pursuit of revenge upon the family. Critics preferred the novels of Emily’s more famous sister Charlotte. In her best-known work, Jane Eyre (1847), she described the eponymous heroine’s growing independence and her rejection of the constricting conditions of governessing and teaching. Romantic themes continually recur in the novel, above all the ghostly and mysterious noises which, it is eventually revealed, are caused by a madwoman kept hidden in the attic of the remote Yorkshire house where Jane is employed by Mr Rochester. The two fall in love, but the madwoman in the attic is revealed as Rochester’s wife, whom he had married unwisely in his passionate youth, and so Jane and Rochester are prevented by law from marrying. The novel ends with the madwoman setting fire to the house, which burns down, blinding its owner. Jane, who narrates the story, returns to rescue him, and opens the concluding chapter with the famous words: ‘Reader, I married him.’

Jane Eyre contains many tropes familiar from Fredrika Bremer’s work – blindness, injury and death caused by fire, women’s thirst for emancipation, the law’s restriction on women’s freedom. Jane herself, like Bremer’s heroines, is a committed Christian with a desire for self-improvement. Set in the wild moorlands of Yorkshire, the novels of the Brontë sisters depicted raw nature as something not to be ordered and controlled, but to be admired as sublime. Romantic art aimed at arousing strong emotions, not just happiness and sadness, but particularly in its choice of subjects, awe, terror, even revulsion, as in Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Shelley (1797–1851), which depicts a scientist’s disastrous creation of an artificial human being made from the parts of various bodies. Romantic painting rejected the Classicizing traditions of the Academies in favour of depictions of wild natural scenes, such as Horse Frightened by a Storm (1824) by Eugène Delacroix, in which the animal, rearing on its hind legs, expresses nothing but pure emotion; or in the seascapes and atmospheric studies of J. M. W. Turner, rendered in the free style he developed in his late thirties. In pictures such as The Slave Ship (1840) or Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth (1842) the human figures are subordinated to the effects of light, so that they are often barely discernible within the wash of colours: nature is all. To conservative reviewers who disapproved of Turner’s departure from strict Classical proportions, the influential critic John Ruskin responded that his painting fulfilled the central obligation of the artist – to be true to nature.

In showing slavers throwing overboard their dead and dying captives as a typhoon loomed, The Slave Ship struck a political note that could be found in many works of Romanticism. Byron’s influence, evident in so many of them, was political as well as aesthetic: Delacroix painted not only a scene from one of his plays in The Death of Sardanapalus (1827) but also The Massacre at Chios (1824), and Liberty Leading the People (1830), produced on the occasion of the overthrow of Charles X. Similarly, the Russian poet and dramatist Alexander Pushkin was closely engaged with the war of Greek independence and published poems that inspired the Decembrists. Polish nationalism was expressed in the national epic written by the poet and dramatist Adam Mickiewicz, Pan Tadeusz (Sir Thaddeus, 1834), with its appeal to the memory of the formerly independent Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: ‘My fatherland! You are like good health; I never knew how precious you were till I lost you!’ Polish identity was musically expressed in the martial Polonaises and more gentle Mazurkas of Fryderyk Chopin. Like many other works of early Romanticism, Chopin’s Preludes and Ballades abandoned Classical forms (in this case, the Sonata) for a more free-flowing, improvisatory structure, embodying the spontaneous expression of emotion (Schubert’s Impromptus for piano even embodied this principle in their title). The emotions that early Romanticism expressed were predominantly inward and private rather than public: poets, novelists, Lieder composers and painters dealt with love and despair, hope and belief, the wild and the sublime, but on a very personal level of experience.

In pursuit of emotional authenticity, artists and writers reached back beyond the Enlightenment to remoter periods for inspiration. Sir Walter Scott’s historical writings inspired Berlioz to write overtures on Waverley (1828) and Rob Roy (1831). Their Romantic depiction of Scotland lay behind the Scottish Symphony (1842) by Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (1809–47), with its imitations of bagpipes and its Scottish dance rhythms; the opera Lucia di Lammermoor (1835) by Gaetano Donizetti (1797–1848) was based on a novel by Scott. The French writer Alexandre Dumas declared he had experienced a ‘coup de foudre’ on reading Ivanhoe (1820) and settled down to write a series of historical romances including The Three Musketeers (1844), The Count of Monte Cristo (1844–5) and Robin Hood (1863). The Hungarian Jósika Miklós (1794–1865) even included direct quotations from Scott in his Abafi (1854), set in Transylvania, the first historical novel in the Magyar language. Pushkin called Scott ‘the Scottish sorcerer’. Germany’s most famous writer, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), who championed the principles of Classicism while exercising a substantial influence on the Romantics through his most celebrated work, the poetic drama Faust (1808, part I, and 1832, part II), said of Scott: ‘I discover in him a wholly new art with laws of its own.’

Victor Hugo took Scott’s technique of elaborate descriptions of landscape and pageantry as an inspiration for his massive novel Notre-Dame de Paris (1831). Here he provided a fifteenth-century setting for a Gothic love story centring on the disabled and impoverished bell-ringer Quasimodo and the gypsy girl Esmeralda (Scott’s Ivanhoe also featured a sympathetic portrait of an outcast girl, in his case Rebecca, daughter of a Jewish moneylender). Much later, responding in a similar way to the influence of Scott, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, regarded his medieval novels The White Company (1891) and its sequel Sir Nigel (1906), along with other historical works, as his real contribution to literature. He even killed off his fictional detective at one point because he was eclipsing what he thought of as his more serious work, only to be compelled to resurrect him in response to popular pressure. A reading of Scott’s work prompted the German historian Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886) to declare, famously, that every epoch was equal in the sight of God. The task of the historian, he thought, was to penetrate empathetically to its inner essence, to discover ‘how it essentially was’ (wie es eigentlich gewesen), not to dismiss it as backward or barbarous, as the historians of the eighteenth century had done.

Music also began to look to the past, most obviously in Mendelssohn-Bartholdy’s rediscovery of the great works of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750), previously thought of as hopelessly old-fashioned. On 11 March 1829, Mendelssohn staged a public performance of the St Matthew Passion (1727) before an audience that included the King of Prussia, the poet Heine and the philosopher Hegel. The work had not seen the light of day since Bach’s death, and the performance was a triumph. ‘It is as if I heard the roaring of the sea from afar,’ commented Goethe, when he heard of the performance’s success. The age saw the beginnings of the now almost universal practice of playing old as well as, or even rather than, contemporary music. Yet to make Bach’s work palatable to audiences in the age of Romanticism, Mendelssohn cut half the numbers in the Passion, changed the orchestration, altered the harmonies, and modified the lines the soloists had to sing. The oratorio Messiah (1741) by George Friedrich Handel (1685–1759) was far more popular than any work by Bach, and inspired composers such as Mendelssohn himself to compose their own counterparts. However, in nineteenth-century performances there was little resemblance to the original, as the orchestration was strengthened and solidified and the choral forces grew ever larger: at the ‘Great Handel Festival’ held at the Crystal Palace in London in 1857 the work was sung by a choir of 200 and an orchestra of 500 players. Gargantuan performances of this kind became the staple of the many amateur choral societies that emerged during this period.

The discovery of the past indeed frequently involved its ‘improvement’ to suit contemporary tastes. In the 1820s architecture was still dominated by the neo-Classical style expressed in official buildings in many European capitals, from the Royal Museum (1823–30, now the Altes Museum) in Berlin, designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, to the Royal Palace in Oslo (1824–48) built by Hans Listow (1787–1851). But in the Romantic era it was challenged and eventually eclipsed by the neo-Gothic style introduced in Britain by Augustus Pugin (1812–52). Pugin began his career by designing sets for an operatic version of Scott’s Kenilworth in 1829, and in 1833 he published his influential treatise, Examples of Gothic Architecture. This led to his commission, with Charles Barry (1795–1860), to build the new Houses of Parliament in Westminster following the destruction of the old ones by fire in 1834. The vast neo-Gothic building took thirty years to complete, and was rivalled in scale and grandeur only by the huge Parliament Building in the same style constructed in Budapest between 1895 and 1904 by the Hungarian architect Imre Steindl (1839–1902). Neo-Gothicism had already triumphed by the 1840s, by which time architects and designers were busy ‘improving’ buildings of all kinds to make them conform more closely to what they thought of as the spirit of the Middle Ages. Pugin insisted on putting rood-screens into the many churches he restored, despite the lack of contemporary justification for them. Eugène Viollet-le-Duc (1814–79) ‘improved’ the great Parisian Cathedral of Notre-Dame, adding gargoyles, which had not been part of the original building at all, and replacing some of the medieval statues with modern ones he thought looked more authentic. In 1849, when the French government decreed that the tumbledown walls of the southern French citadel of Carcassonne should be pulled down, an energetic campaign by the mayor resulted in a commission to Viollet-le-Duc to restore them, which he did partly by importing inappropriate northern French components such as slate roofs.

But the improving activities of Pugin and Viollet-le-Duc gave way later in the century to the movement to preserve the national heritage, fostered not only by pressure groups within each country but also by international journals, conferences and societies. Governments were gradually persuaded that leaving old buildings intact rather than adding to them was a better way to connect the present to the past. Growing national cultural pride aided the preservationists in their campaigns. International agreements, notably at The Hague in 1899 and 1907, enjoined the victors in wars to act as the guardians of the conquered nations’ cultural possessions, rather than looting them, as had been the custom of war up to and including the time of Napoleon. By the end of the century scholarly editions of Handel’s work were starting to appear, and were used as the basis for more authentic public performances than had become customary since Mendelssohn’s time. And from 1851 onwards the Bach Society in Germany began its monumental project of publishing all of the great composer’s works without editorial emendations, dissolving itself in 1900 when the task was finally completed. The ideas of national heritage and historical authenticity had finally come together.

ROMANTICISM AND RELIGION

By emphasizing the primacy of the emotions in the human spirit, Romanticism opened the way for religion to escape the scorn of Enlightenment rationalists and to come back into the cultural mainstream. The process was assisted by the drastic reduction in the secular power of the Church during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Ordinary Catholic parish clergy, liberated from dependence on aristocratic patrons, now looked above all to Rome for leadership. In northern and central Europe this meant fixing their gaze to the south, across the Alps, and so they were known as ‘Ultramontanes’. Their militant Catholicism, strongly encouraged by the Vatican, was fuelled by fear and loathing of the French Revolution and its consequences, and they turned to new forms of religious devotion as sources of emotional mobilization, including the cults of the Immaculate Conception, promulgated by Pope Pius IX in 1854, and the Sacred Heart, celebrating the corporeality of Christ. Mass pilgrimages got under way once more, the most remarkable perhaps taking place in the western German town of Trier, where the lifting of state restrictions on Catholic assemblies by the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm IV prompted Bishop Wilhelm Arnoldi (1798–1864) to stage a demonstration against Enlightenment scepticism by inviting the pious to venerate the Holy Robe supposedly worn by Jesus before his crucifixion and displayed in the cathedral. Half a million predominantly poor people streamed past the relics in a disciplined procession, demonstrating the strength and popularity of the new Catholic piety.

Visions and revelations, including those of the French domestic servant Estelle Faguette (1843–1929) and the French teenager Thérèse Martin of Lisieux (1873–97), also gained a strong following. Most popular of all was the cult of the visionary Bernadette Soubirous (1844–79) in the Pyrenean mountain village of Lourdes, who saw the Virgin Mary in a local grotto. ‘I am the Immaculate Conception,’ the Virgin announced. Sick people began to make their way to the grotto and, later, the chapel she had instructed Bernadette to build on the site, seeking cures. Many of them claimed to have recovered from their illness following their visit. In 1862, after a thorough investigation in which Bernadette, a simple, illiterate and obviously pious girl, stuck to her story, the Church declared the visions genuine. In 1876, 100,000 Catholics, including thirty-five bishops, gathered in the village to crown a new statue of the Virgin. Other, similar apparitions were less widely accepted. When three girls living in the Saarland mining village of Marpingen claimed in July 1876 to have seen a woman in white describing herself as ‘the Immaculately Conceived’, 20,000 pilgrims appeared at the scene within a week, many of them claiming miraculous cures at the spring which the Virgin, according to the children, had indicated as a source of healing. Part of the reason for the visions’ popularity lay in a widespread feeling among German Catholics that the Virgin, having revealed herself to the French, would surely show herself to the Germans as well. The Prussian police intervened, sending a detective to the village under the pseudonym of ‘Marlow’, who manufactured evidence that was thoroughly discredited when he appeared in the witness box at the trial of a number of villagers for fraud. A company of Prussian infantrymen arrived in the village, fixed bayonets, and dispersed several thousand pilgrims by force. The Church, cowed by the Prussian state’s firm reaction to the events, refused to confirm or support the authenticity of the visions. Popular religious emotion was proving a difficult nut for the formal institutions of Church and State to crack. The girls eventually admitted they had made their story up as a prank, but had been too afraid to retract it when the story quickly became so widely accepted.

In Britain, driven on by the Evangelical revival of the early nineteenth century, voluntary associations such as the Society for the Suppression of Vice (1802) sprang up across the country, and in many of them, middle-class women played leading roles. Moral entrepreneurs from William Wilberforce (1759–1833) onwards campaigned and brought prosecutions against what they regarded as immoral art and literature. Bourgeois respectability was triumphing over aristocratic licentiousness and plebeian immorality. Good causes were not to be doubted or made fun of; and what censorship could not suppress, fashion consigned to oblivion. Part of the process of reform that transformed religion in Britain in the late 1820s and 1830s was the partial dismantling of the privileged position of the Anglican Church. Ever since the sixteenth-century Reformation, Catholicism had been regarded as a form of national treachery. Catholics like Protestant dissenters had long been barred not only from the universities of Oxford and Cambridge but also from public office, which was reserved for fully paid-up members of the Church of England. In 1828 and 1829 these restrictions were removed by Act of Parliament, not least in the Catholic case to defuse mounting tension in Ireland. A growing number of Anglican clerics saw these developments as threatening, especially when the government reduced the number of Irish bishops and proposed to secularize some of their revenues, following this with the commutation of church tithes, the legalization of civil marriage and marriages carried out in Dissenting chapels, and the establishment of a permanent Ecclesiastical Commission to reform diocesan administration, all in 1836.

A group of Anglican clerics centred round the University of Oxford and led by John Henry Newman (1801–90), John Keble (1792–1866) and Edward Pusey (1800–82) began publishing a series of tracts in which they accused the reforming Whig government of ‘national apostasy’ and Parliament of a ‘direct disavowal of the sovereignty of God’ by interfering with the Church and extending rights to Dissenters. The Tractarians, as they were known, believed that the Church of England’s possession of Apostolic continuity demanded the greater use of ritual, vestments and Catholic observances in services: Pusey was banned from preaching for two years and eventually, following his own logic, Newman joined the Roman Catholic Church in 1845, later becoming a cardinal. In 1851 another prominent Anglican, Henry Edward Manning (1808–92), also converted, later becoming Cardinal-Archbishop of Westminster and heading the Catholic hierarchy in England, which was re-established in 1850. This step was taken not least in response to the arrival of large numbers of Irish Catholic immigrants following the famine of the previous few years. It did not, however, prevent the continued identification of Catholicism and Irish nationalism, which by the 1880s had constituted itself in large part as a movement of opposition to the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland. An even more intense level of identification had developed across the other side of Europe, in Poland, where the oppressive rule of Protestant Prussia and Orthodox Russia placed Roman Catholicism at the centre of the nationalist movement. Even the Church’s condemnation of the uprisings of 1831 and 1863 failed to dent this symbiosis, which was cemented by the development of a Marian devotion more powerful in Poland than almost anywhere else in Europe.

At the other end of the Christian spectrum, the Methodist movement, founded in England by John Wesley (1703–91) in 1739, grew strongly in the early nineteenth century, numbering 489,000 members by 1850. There were Evangelical revivals in Wales and Scotland, and sects such as the Baptists and Unitarians won mass adherence in mining and industrial districts across Britain. Among agricultural labourers too, the turn to Nonconformity was unmistakable, as the proliferation of Primitive Methodist chapels across Norfolk testified. However much they differed in points of doctrine, all these sects emphasized a simple form of religion, reliant on the Bible, shorn of ritual, and using open-air sermons to attract support. These were generally followed by the lower classes, often presenting the spectacle of mass hysteria in the revivalist meetings that led to conversion. Here the rationalism of eighteenth-century religion was replaced by an emotionalism similar in degree though diametrically opposed in doctrine to that of the Anglo-Catholic movement. Nonconformity emphasized above all the need for a sober and orderly lifestyle, opening the way to self-improvement for the working classes. From one point of view, all this could be a means of inculcating the habits of hard work, regularity and sobriety that capitalism required of the new industrial workforce, combined with a predestinarian submission to the grim realities of everyday life. From another, however, it was a spur to democratic reform in the political world. Nonconformity encouraged reading and education, and it engendered a sense of self-respect among workers when employer paternalism was being replaced by the ruthless exploitation of industrial capitalism.

These developments were ultimately a reaction to the influence of the Enlightenment, and of French revolutionary anticlericalism. In Prussia, King Friedrich Wilhelm III decreed the merger of the Calvinist and Lutheran Churches in 1817 in order to foster a religious revival. He placed them under a new government department, the Ministry of Spiritual, Educational and Medical Affairs, or Kultusministerium. The merger was followed in a series of other German states (for example, in Baden in 1821). The Prussian king introduced a new, standard liturgy, complete with altar cloths, crucifixes, candles, silk cassocks for bishops and other accoutrements of Catholicism. This ran into strong criticism from many pastors, though 5,343 out of 7,782 Protestant congregations were using the liturgy by 1825. The resistance of many pastors was fortified by the fact that the General Prussian Law Code of 1794 had declared freedom of conscience in religion, but nonetheless a lengthy struggle ensued, with Friedrich Wilhelm III eventually being forced to concede defeat in 1834, marking the effective recognition of parochial autonomy and liturgical diversity. After this, it was easier for individual pastors to retain an identity that leaned either one way or the other, towards the Lutheran or the Calvinist tradition. Similar developments occurred elsewhere in northern Europe, with for example a Department of State in the Norwegian administration running the Church from 1818 onwards.

In a reaction to both the Enlightenment and the state sponsorship of quasi-Catholic ritual, a movement based on the idea of ‘awakening’ spread across Protestant Germany, spearheaded by itinerant preachers such as Hans Nielsen Hauge (1771–1824), a farmer’s son who preached strict Sabbatarianism and Puritanism to his flock. At his meetings converts abjured pleasure and frivolity and demonstrated their commitment by destroying instruments of pleasure – ‘fiddlers burned their fiddles’, as one shocked observer reported. The Moravian Church, which practised Bible reading, private prayer and the confession of sins, and advocated a life of simplicity and piety, won many new adherents in the Baltic littoral, boosting its membership in Courland from 9,800 in 1818 to 26,300 in 1839, and in Estonia from 21,900 in 1818 to 75,000 in 1839. Elsewhere in Europe, Protestantism underwent a similar ‘awakening’ in the quest to rescue religion from the rationalism of the Enlightenment. In Lutheran Finland the Karelian Revival found expression in prayer meetings and hymn-singing festivals; the Russian administration of the country saw in these a potential source of nationalist unrest and attempted to suppress them, which of course only strengthened the identification of Lutheranism with the cause of Finnish independence. In Hungary the proportion of Protestants, most of them Calvinists, rose to around 22 per cent of the population by mid-century. The fact that liberal revolutionaries like Lajos Kossuth were mostly Protestants led to the promulgation by the government in Vienna in 1859 of a decree placing the Protestant congregations under state control. But pressure from Britain forced its withdrawal the following year, and with the gaining of national autonomy under the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 the legal rights the Protestants had won in 1848 were fully regained. The Protestant ‘awakening’ of the early nineteenth century was even more marked in Switzerland, where men like François Gaussen (1790–1863) campaigned for the employment of ‘sound doctrine’ and the use of the Bible as the infallible guide to faith and practice. Some congregations declared their independence, leading eventually to the disestablishment of the Swiss Reformed Church between 1907 and 1909.

In Russia, the reaction against Enlightenment rationalism was led by Alexander I. The tsar was personally inclined to mysticism after he fell under the influence of the prophetess Juliane von Krüdener (1764–1824), who told him that he would be the instrument of the downfall of Napoleon, the Antichrist. So convinced was Alexander that his crusade against the French Emperor was sanctified by God that he once invited Juliane to an intimate dinner with Metternich at which a fourth place was laid for the absent Christ. Alexander’s genuine belief in the Divine inspiration of the Holy Alliance, which he founded under Juliane’s influence in 1815, was turned into pragmatic policy by his more down-to-earth successor. Nicholas I regarded the Orthodox Church as an arm of his autocracy and inaugurated a long tradition of subordinating other religions and denominations in the Russian Empire to the state’s control. Nicholas was particularly hostile to the so-called Old Believers, schismatics who had faced the disapproval of the tsars ever since they had rejected ecclesiastical reforms introduced two hundred years before. Some groups of Old Believers thought that the world was ruled by the Antichrist, and refused to have priests or pray for the tsar. Many wanted to simplify the act of worship and condemned the use of polyphony in Church services. Most insisted on the sacrality of the ancient Church Slavonic text of the Bible. A few even repudiated marriage and refused to use money. One group rejected icons and prayed to the East through a hole in a wall: they were known as the Dymiki, or hole-worshippers. The Nyetovtsy, as their name implied, said ‘no’ to churches, priests and sacraments. The Skoptsy practised self-castration as a mark of sanctity. Not surprisingly, the Filippovtsy, who had practised self-immolation as a form of sacrifice to strengthen the faith, had died out in the eighteenth century.

Map 12. The Religious Divisions of Europe, 1914

The Old Believers caused a good deal of anxiety for Metropolitan Philaret (Vasily Mikhailovich Drozdov, 1782–1867), who served as head of the Orthodox Church in Moscow from 1821 until his death more than forty years later. Under his influence the Jesuits were banned from the empire in 1820 and the Freemasons two years later. Increasingly aggressive Christian proselytizing led to the baptism of half the 50,000 Jewish youths under the age of eighteen recruited into the army between 1843 and 1855, and the conversion between 1845 and 1847 of 74,000 Courlanders and Estonians to Orthodoxy in the diocese of Riga, established in 1836. However, such conversions were often in name only. The formal reunion of the Uniate Church in Poland and Ukraine with Orthodoxy was announced more than once, without any noticeable effect on the parishioners’ adherence to Papal authority. Following Tsar Alexander II’s revocation of the requirement for Lutherans in mixed marriages to bring up their children in the Orthodox faith, some 40,000 Estonians and Courlanders brought up in this way reverted to Lutheranism between 1865 and 1874.

The status of the Orthodox Church as an officially sanctioned state institution was severely shaken by the 1905 Revolution in Russia, when Tsar Nicholas II was forced to proclaim freedom of religion. ‘Everyone – secular and clerical,’ complained the former Procurator of the Holy Synod, Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostsev (1827–1907), ‘has gone out of his mind.’ The lapsed hieromonk Iliodor (Sergei Mikhailovich Trufanov, 1880–1952) countered the liberal tendencies among some priests by congratulating the forces of reaction after the 1905 Revolution on their ‘great and holy work of emancipating the dear Motherland from atheists, robbers, blasphemers, bomb-throwers, firebrands, lying journalists and slanderers – all of them cursed by God and condemned by men’. He began a popular movement against the government, but in 1911 Tsar Nicholas II summoned him to a meeting and told him to attack the Jews instead; shortly afterwards, Iliodor was promoted to the rank of archimandrite. He remained, however, a disruptive influence. Undermined from within and without, the Orthodox Church in Russia was becoming increasingly fragile as the spiritual arm of a crumbling state.

The Greek Orthodox Church, which strongly backed the independence movement of the 1820s, was declared autocephalous – independent of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople – by the Greek Parliament in 1833, but immediately following this, King Otto confiscated church lands and closed down 600 monasteries, implementing in Greece the secularizing legislation that had been put into place in his native Bavaria during the Napoleonic era. However, the Patriarchate of Constantinople carried on being dominated by Greeks, and the Greek Orthodox Church continued to function throughout the Balkans in other areas outside Greece itself. The various branches of the Orthodox Church were keen to collaborate in the face of a resurgent Roman Catholicism. In 1848 a synod of the four main Orthodox Patriarchates formally declared the Roman Catholic Church to be heretical and schismatic. Later on, the new doctrine of Papal Infallibility was condemned as blasphemous, and the dogma of the Immaculate Conception was stigmatized as false. The Church also faced problems within its own ranks, however: in 1901 there were riots in Athens over a new translation of the New Testament into demotic Greek, carried out in London and published in Athens by the daily newspaper Acropolis. After it was condemned as blasphemous by the Patriarchate, students took to the streets, trashed the paper’s offices, and on 8 November held a mass demonstration outside the Temple of Zeus to demand the excommunication of the translators. The Prime Minister called in the army, who shot eight demonstrators dead and wounded another seventy. In the ensuing furore he was forced to resign, along with the Metropolitan, who had approved the translation. Although most Greeks could not understand it, the sacred Ancient Greek text was given a monopoly of usage in the Constitution of 1911.

In Bulgaria, as in other parts of the Ottoman Empire, Christians formed a separate community on their own, under the suzerainty of the Greek Orthodox Patriarch. With the rise of Bulgarian nationalism, Greek ecclesiastical and especially episcopal appointees were gradually replaced by Bulgarian ones. In 1870 the Ottoman authorities, ever ready to encourage divisions among their Christian subjects, granted permission for the establishment of an autonomour Bulgarian Exarchate, vital to Bulgarian nationalists because the school system was run by the ecclesiastical authorities. The Christian populations of the bishoprics of Skopje and Obrid voted in 1874 to join by 91 per cent and 97 per cent respectively, bringing a substantial part of Macedonia under the control of the Bulgarian Church. In 1872, Atanas Mihaylov Chalakov (1816–88) was elected Exarch; his links with the nationalist movement were made clear by his appointment as President of the Constituent and then the National Assembly in 1879. His declaration in 1872 of the autocephaly of the Exarchate prompted the Patriarchal Synod in Constantinople to defrock him, excommunicate him along with his leading followers, and convict them all of the heresy of ethnophyletism. Nevertheless, the Exarchate flourished, founding or taking over thousands of schools and other educational institutions. Church and state were moving closer together in emerging nations such as Serbia and Bulgaria, leading to the severing of ties with supranational ecclesiastical institutions. A similar process was also taking place further west.

DISSENT, DOUBT AND DISBELIEF

The revival of piety was intimately connected with a deepening crisis in the relations between Church and State, above all in Catholic Europe. In the process of Italian unification, Pope Pius IX faced the incorporation of the Papal States into the Kingdom of Italy – sealed by a plebiscite that delivered 133,000 votes in favour and only 1,500 against. The new Italian legislature passed a law recognizing Pius as a head of state, providing diplomatic immunity for foreign ministers attached to the Vatican, and assigning him a generous annual income. But Pius and his successors rejected this settlement and turned down the subsidy. In the ensuing stand-off, which lasted all the way up to 1929, the Pope issued a futile ban on Catholics taking part in Italian politics, declaring that it was ‘inexpedient’ for them even to vote. Describing himself as ‘the prisoner in the Vatican’, he did not leave the city until his death in 1878. He issued protests against the actions of the Italian state with tireless regularity. This was not surprising. In its efforts to establish control over the peninsula, the united Italian state dissolved 38,000 separate ecclesiastical bodies and corporations and sequestrated their assets. Seminarists were made liable to compulsory military service. Civil marriage was made a legal obligation. Scores of bishops and cardinals were arrested. In practice Church schools continued in existence, as did some religious orders, and, on the other hand those Catholics who were qualified continued in their great majority to vote in elections. But the alienation of Catholic institutions from those of the Kingdom of Italy remained deep.

In response to his loss of secular power Pius IX issued a Syllabus of Errors in 1864. The Syllabus proclaimed that it was an error to believe that human reason contradicted Christian faith, or to hold that Protestantism was merely another form of Christianity, or to claim that the Catholic religion should not be the sole religion of the state, to the exclusion of all other forms of worship. Article 80 proclaimed that it was an error to believe that ‘the Roman Pontiff can and ought to reconcile himself to, and agree with, progress, liberalism, and civilization as lately introduced’. Civil marriages were to be regarded as null and void, and matrimonial causes should only be dealt with by the Church (Articles 73–4). Education had to be carried out by the Church not the state (Articles 45–7). Pius strengthened his position by summoning a Council, which met in 1870 and issued a Declaration of Papal Infallibility. From this point onwards the Pope could issue decrees and encyclicals with the force of God, brooking no dissent. Liberal Catholics were appalled. Some, like the theologian and historian Alfred Loissy (1843–1922), who tried to apply modern critical methods to the study of the Bible, were sacked from their professorships, to be condemned in 1893 by the Papal Encyclical Providentissimus Deus, which reaffirmed the literal truth of the Old and New Testaments. Perhaps the most famous reaction came from the historian and sometime editor of a liberal Catholic periodical, Lord Acton (1834–1902), who declared, referring to the Pope: ‘Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.’

A similar clash between Church and State took place during the 1870s in France. While the monarchists dominated the legislature, which was for most of the 1870s, the Third Republic was powerless to act. But as their electoral influence waned, Jules Ferry (1832–93), who controlled French education policy in the late 1870s and early 1880s, pushed through a series of fiercely anticlerical measures. ‘My aim,’ he said, ‘is to establish humanity without God and without King.’ He expelled the clerical teaching orders from France and worked hard to laicize the educational system. During Ferry’s time as Education Minister or Prime Minister, or under his general influence on government, the Sunday observance laws were repealed (1879), the cemeteries were made non-denominational (1881), and divorce was legalized (1884). Anticlerical politics did not end with Ferry’s departure from the scene. In the early 1900s all monastic orders were dissolved (except the Trappists, whom Republicans considered harmless because they never said anything). Some 10,000 religious schools were closed. Finally in 1905 the Church was formally disestablished and separated from the state, which ended its financial support altogether but took over the ownership of most church buildings. The appointment of bishops was made subject to state approval. Pope Leo XIII (1810–1903), elected in 1878, launched a diplomatic campaign to try and bring the conflict to an end, and issued a famous encyclical, Rerum Novarum, calling on Catholics to take action to deal with the many social problems thrown up by industrialization and urbanization. He urged the priesthood not to involve itself in politics. In France this led to the so-called ralliement, in which Catholics were urged to come to terms with the Third Republic. This dismayed many parish priests, who continued to attack the Republic from the pulpit, while nothing was done on the state’s part to repeal the many anticlerical laws in force; rather, if anything, the opposite.

The Church-State struggles of the late nineteenth century were equally fierce in Germany, though they came to an end sooner than in France. Here again a newly created political system sought to cement the loyalty of its Catholic subjects by extending its powers over them just as Pius IX was trying to make them subordinate to the papacy. Bismarck in particular regarded the large Catholic minority in the German Empire as ‘enemies of the Reich’, since most of them had been citizens of the southern German states that had fought alongside Austria against Prussia in 1866. In addition the substantial Polish minority in the provinces of Posen and Silesia derived a great deal of its nationalist commitment from its passionate allegiance to Catholicism. In 1871, Bismarck began by legislating against clergy who used their pulpits for political purposes, before going on, in 1872, to subject Church schools to government inspection, banning the Jesuits, who seem to have been a particular object of suspicion to almost all European governments at least since the mid-eighteenth century, and breaking off diplomatic relations with the Vatican. In 1873 the so-called May Laws passed over the training of clergy to the state, while clerical appointments were subjected to government confirmation.

Half the seminaries in Prussia were closed in the following five years. In 1875 the Prussian state ended subsidies to the Catholic Church; all religious orders were dissolved, and civil marriage was made compulsory. The flames of conflict were fanned by the German liberals, who cheered Bismarck on in what they came to call the ‘struggle of civilizations’, or Kulturkampf, pitting enlightened progressivism against reactionary obscurantism. The Catholic clergy would not bow to the new laws. They boycotted state training institutions, and refused to submit clerical appointments for government approval. The police moved in and by the mid-1870s some 989 Catholic parishes were without incumbents, 225 priests were in prison, two archbishops and three bishops had been removed from office, and the Bishop of Trier had died shortly after ending a nine-month jail sentence: the furore over the alleged apparitions at Marpingen occurred at the centre of this conflict. German Catholics flocked to the colours of the new Catholic Centre Party, founded in 1871, which forcefully articulated their grievances on the political stage. Here again the election of Pope Leo XIII in 1878 opened the way to a reconciliation, especially since Bismarck was now gunning for a new ‘enemy of the Reich’ in the form of the Social Democratic Party. In 1880 he introduced a law renouncing the government’s right to remove clergy from their posts. In 1882, Prussia reopened diplomatic relations with the Holy See, and the following year the most oppressive features of the Kulturkampf legislation were softened. But this did not halt the continued rise of the Catholic Centre Party, which soon provided the largest single group of deputies in the Reichstag.

Italy, France and Germany were not the only states in which there were clashes of this kind. The liberal Ministry in power in Austria during the 1870s made appointments to the priesthood dependent on government approval. It revoked the Concordat concluded with the papacy signed in 1855, secularized marriage and subordinated Church schools to the state. However, Emperor Franz Joseph vetoed proposals to make civil marriage compulsory, and a powerful Catholic political movement emerged in the form of the Christian Social Party, founded in 1891. Similarly, from 1879 to 1884, Belgium was convulsed by a ‘school war’ in which a liberal attempt to secularize education met with fierce resistance from Catholics, who mobilized in demonstrations and riots; two protesters were killed by police in the town of Kortrijk, and when a Catholic national government was elected in 1884, 200 liberal-dominated municipalities staged massive demonstrations that called forth equally impressive Catholic counter-demonstrations. The king finally was forced to intervene, dismissing the two most radical Ultramontane ministers and forcing the Catholic government to moderate its stance. In the Netherlands, where a substantial Catholic minority inhabited the southernmost provinces, the Pope’s appointment of a number of bishops in 1853 led to protests from the Protestant clergy. A law restricting religious processions led to violent clashes with the police in 1872, and in 1878, when columns of pilgrims attacked a police cordon near Roermond in the Limburg province. In Spain the century was peppered with anticlerical legislation, and from 1900 onwards there were numerous clashes and demonstrations as secularists went on the march, following the example of France. They staged banquets on Good Friday, normally a day of fasting, and scheduled an ‘anticlerical week’ to coincide with Holy Week.

The hostility of new or restructured European states and reforming liberal governments was not the only challenge with which the Churches had to contend. Potentially more serious in the long run was the secularization of the masses. The religious sections of the 1851 national census in Britain revealed that in most large towns fewer than 10 per cent of the inhabitants had attended a place of worship on census Sunday. As one English bishop put it in 1852: ‘It is easy to see how the artisan and labourer fresh from the country villages, where, at least, they might find room, and often sought it, in the House of God, should generally lose the habit of worship and devotion, where there was neither place for them to worship nor pastor to lead them in the ways of God.’ Similar developments were taking place in Russia. In the diocese of St Petersburg only eighty-five new churches were built between 1876 and 1887. Money for building churches had to be raised locally, a difficult task in working-class districts, not least because so many of their inhabitants were new arrivals or soon moved on to other places of employment. In 1891 a statistical survey of the churches in Germany found that in Hamburg the ratio of pastors to inhabitants was one to 8,000 and in the capital city Berlin it was one to 10,000, a sharp fall from the ratio of one to 3,000 at the beginning of the century. While the overall annual communion rate in Prussia in 1891–5 was forty-three per hundred members of the Church, it stood at only sixteen in Berlin. In Stockholm only 10 per cent of adult males were communicants in 1880, in Paris 15 per cent attended mass around the turn of the century, and in London church attendance stood at 22 per cent around this time. Legislation also made it easier for people to abandon their religious duties: the Dissenter Law passed in Norway in 1845 freed citizens from the legal obligation to belong to a church, an example followed by Denmark in 1849.

The revivalist movement did its best to counteract the effects of secularization in big cities and industrial areas, most notably, in Germany, through the ‘Inner Mission’, established in 1848 by a leading Evangelical philanthropist, Johann Hinrich Wichern (1808–81), with the aim of using charitable work among the poor to bring a conservative social message to them, based on Lutheran principles. Founded as an imitation of and reaction to the growth of missionary societies that aimed to convert the heathen and the indifferent outside Europe, Wichern’s movement spread to other northern European countries, including Denmark, where it was founded in 1861. The Danish movement offered communal activities in rural areas, bringing different social classes together on a religious basis and perhaps preventing the exodus of congregations from the state Church to the kind of radical Protestant sects that were emerging in Sweden at the time. The Catholic Church was not slow to pick up the idea. In Spain socially concerned priests organized Workers’ Circles in Valencia, Madrid and other cities from the 1890s onwards, establishing 258 of these institutions with a total of 180,000 members by 1912. In Orthodox Russia itinerant preachers organized themselves in the Society for the Propagation of Religious and Moral Enlightenment in the Spirit of the Orthodox Church. Founded in 1881, the Society held meetings in factories in St Petersburg and won many adherents. A comparable organization, the Alexander Nevsky Temperance Society, had 75,000 members in 1905, a year in which it printed 10,000 copies of a pamphlet on the workers’ question. Such efforts easily led to political activism by committed priests. Not surprisingly, they were suppressed by the authorities after Father Georgiy Apollonovich Gapon (1870–1906) had led the demonstration of workers that sparked the 1905 revolution.

For all the anxiety expressed in such movements, the contrast between supposedly devout country folk and secularized, non-believing town-dwellers could easily be overdrawn. Eighty-seven per cent of male and 91 per cent of female believers were recorded as attending confession and communion in urban and rural Russian Orthodox churches in 1900. The parish certainly remained the centre of rural community life in many parts of Europe. But religious observance in the countryside often fell far short of clerical ideals. In France enquiries in the diocese of Orléans revealed that by 1850 only 10.6 per cent of the population took Easter communion; regular attenders at church were even fewer in number. Behaviour in rural churches was frequently rowdy: a French curé complained in the 1850s that his flock never listened to his sermons but instead made a deafening noise while he was preaching, spitting, slamming doors, coughing, shuffling and chatting. Urban industrial workers and their families may not have attended church with any regularity, but they still valued religion when it came to marking the great rites of passage in life. In Berlin, 89 per cent of babies born to Protestant parents in 1910 were baptized, and 72 per cent of babies born to Catholic parents. In ‘red’ Saxony in the years 1896–1900, 90 per cent of couples were married in church and 99 per cent of the dead were given religious funerals. In baptizing their children, Social Democratic workers sometimes signalled their political allegiance by giving them demonstratively socialist names – ‘Lassaline’, a girl’s name after the early German socialist leader Ferdinand Lassalle, was a particularly popular one – but they had them baptized nonetheless.

The process of secularization affected men and women unevenly. In the diocese of Orléans around the middle of the century, 11.6 per cent of women took Easter communion but only 2 per cent of men. Within the area covered from 1830 by the state of Belgium, the ratio of nuns to monks changed from 40:60 in 1780 to 60:40 eighty years later. Most of the women were in teaching, nursing or philanthropic orders. Similarly, in Russia between 1850 and 1912, while the number of monks doubled to just over 21,000, the number of nuns increased from 8,533 to 70,453. Critics of the Church saw this as evidence of the emotionalism of the female sex. The French historian Jules Michelet (1798–1874), an ardently anticlerical Republican, talked of confessors ‘seducing’ wives or ‘flagellating’ them with ‘spiritual rods’, spreading a reactionary influence throughout society by exercising a malign influence over women. Perhaps Michelet was upset by the fact that his mistress, on her deathbed, turned to her confessor rather than to him. But his views were widely shared. Such anticlerical gender stereotyping was a major influence behind the French Republicans’ refusal to endorse the enfranchisement of women up to the end of the century and far beyond.

For all the concern of religious people in the nineteenth century about the declining power of the Church, the encroachments of the state, and the growing tendency of ordinary men, and to a lesser extent women, in the industrializing centres of population to cease religious practice except in social rites of passage such as baptisms, marriages and funerals, Europe remained an overwhelmingly religious culture right up to the First World War. Indeed, the nineteenth century was the age above all others when Christians in Europe sought to carry their message to the rest of the world through a vast array of missionary societies. These took advantage of Europe’s global hegemony, backed by greatly improved communications, to embark on Christianizing efforts across the continents. Overseas missionary societies, already active in Britain since the late eighteenth century, were founded in Basel in 1815, Denmark in 1821, France in 1822, Berlin in 1824 and Sweden in 1835. They set up schools and colleges, ran newspapers, built churches, and did their best to keep the missionaries of rival Christian denominations at bay. Although the new missionary effort was pioneered by Protestants, the Catholic Church followed suit in 1868 with the ‘White Fathers’, secular priests who wore a uniform of white cassocks and mantles, and of course the Jesuits had been undertaking missionary activities long before this. Many missionaries met a violent end at the hands of the unconverted, but an armed ‘militia of Christ’ founded by Cardinal Charles Lavigerie (1825–92) to protect them did not meet with widespread approval: it made the missionary effort look too much like the return of the Crusades.

While missionaries were setting out to evangelize the world, Christianity was coming under intense and growing sceptical scrutiny within Europe itself. The sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920) identified as a central feature of the age what he called the ‘disenchantment of the world’, a process in which the common view held by rural society that the natural world was a kind of magical creation governed by supernatural power was replaced by goal-oriented, rational systems of belief based on scientific understanding. Initially, this change in belief was confined above all to parts of the urban working class, especially in central Europe, and to the liberal bourgeoisie. Here, however, it fed on the increasingly explicit challenge to religion mounted by modern scientific discoveries and their champions. One of the most profound influences on Fredrika Bremer, evident in particular in her book Morning Watches (1842), was exercised by the writings of David Friedrich Strauss (1808–74). His book The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined, published in 1835–6, when he was twenty-seven, used modern philological methods of textual criticism to dismiss the miraculous elements in the Gospels as mythical and demonstrated how little hard evidence there actually was for the existence of the historical Jesus. Such ideas horrified Christian apologists. The English translation of his work by George Eliot, which appeared in 1846, was described by the Evangelical social reformer Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury, as ‘the most pestilential book ever vomited out of the jaws of Hell’.

Strauss’s work convinced the young classical philologist and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) that Christianity had been utterly discredited by historical research. Writing in his customary aphoristic style, Nietzsche declared ‘God is dead’; the universal value system propagated by Christianity could no longer possess any validity in a modern world in which there were so many value systems that the individual had in effect to make up his own in an act of will. Those who created a new set of values beyond conventional notions of good and evil were, accordingly, superhuman beings, whose effective use of the will to power Nietzsche contrasted with the mediocrity of the masses and the triviality of popular culture. Much of Nietzsche’s work was unread or unpublished in his own lifetime, which ended in silent dementia brought on by the onset of tertiary syphilis; but he had a considerable impact on the Danish writer Georg Brandes (1842–1927), whose 1873 lectures attacking Christianity as a dead ideology were said to have inspired the introduction in Denmark of civil confirmation (though the church rite continued to be used by the vast majority of families).

Philosophical scepticism could sometimes be rivalled in its corrosive effects on faith by Christian despondency, most notably in the work of the Danish philosopher-theologian Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55), who attacked the atheistic determinism of the Young Hegelians by emphasizing the absolute autonomy of the individual conscience. Organized religion, especially if it was state-controlled, infantilized people, he thought, and subverted their faith by compromising with the world. ‘The Christian view,’ he wrote, ‘ . . . is one of suffering, of enthusiasm for death, belonging to another world.’ By the time of his own death, Kierkegaard’s ideas were beginning to have a significant impact on the Danish Church, as his official obituary noted in 1855: ‘The fatal fruits which Dr. Kierkegaard showed to arise from the union of Church and State, have strengthened the scruples of many of the believing laity, who now feel that they can remain no longer in the Church.’ In the same year the Danish Church freed its members from the obligation only to attend services in their own parish, permitting them to choose any pastor they wished; and two years later it abolished compulsory infant baptism, following the view that religious faith should be a matter of adult choice.

But of all the intellectual challenges to Christianity in the nineteenth century the most serious was the rise of scientific materialism. A good deal of damage was done by the demonstration in the three-volume Principles of Geology by Sir Charles Lyell (1797–1875), published in 1830–3, that there was no evidence for Noah’s Flood and the world had not been created on the eve of 23 October 4004 BC as claimed many years earlier by the cleric James Ussher (1581–1656), but was far older. Christian writers and thinkers initially reacted to the work of men like Lyell or Strauss by taking refuge in a naturalistic theology that posited the existence of a grand divine plan of nature, putting human beings, the only creatures endowed with a soul, at the centre of God’s design. But it became increasingly difficult to uphold this view. An anonymously authored book, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, published in 1844, actually written by the Scottish publisher and geologist Robert Chambers (1802–71), laid out a description of the natural world that began with the solar system and ended with the emergence of humanity. It asserted that man was simply one kind of animal, ‘considered zoologically, and without regard to the distinct character assigned to him by theology’. The naturalist Charles Darwin issued an even more profound challenge to Christian belief. Darwin had collected fossils and observed the variety of species on the Galapagos Islands during his voyage on the Beagle from 1831 to 1836. Another naturalist, Alfred Russel Wallace, had independently come to similar conclusions, and in 1859, to forestall him, Darwin published his celebrated book On the Origin of Species. It opened with the boldest possible statement, that ‘the view, which most naturalists until recently entertained, and which I formerly entertained – that each species has been independently created – is erroneous’. Species had not been made in their final form by God, he declared, but had changed and evolved over time.

Darwin’s linkage of evolution to mid-Victorian optimism, along with his manifestly Christian interpretation of the natural order and the preparatory work done by Chambers and Lyell, softened the blow to religion struck by the publication of his book. But in the biologist Thomas Huxley (1825–95) the modest and retiring Darwin acquired an aggressive proponent of his ideas that quickly brought them widespread publicity. In 1860, Huxley debated Darwin’s theories with Samuel Wilberforce (1805–73), the Bishop of Oxford, at the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Wilberforce was a noted public speaker, generally known as ‘Soapy Sam’ after Disraeli had described his rhetorical style as ‘unctuous, oleaginous, saponaceous’. According to Isabella Sidgwick (1825–1908):

The Bishop rose, and in a light scoffing tone, florid and fluent, he assured us there was nothing in the idea of evolution; rock-pigeons were what rock-pigeons had always been. Then, turning to his antagonist with a smiling insolence, he begged to know, was it through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed his descent from a monkey? On this Mr Huxley slowly and deliberately arose. A slight tall figure stern and pale, very quiet and very grave, he stood before us, and spoke those tremendous words – words which no one seems sure of now, nor I think, could remember just after they were spoken, for their meaning took away our breath, though it left us in no doubt as to what it was. He was not ashamed to have a monkey for his ancestor; but he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used great gifts to obscure the truth. No one doubted his meaning and the effect was tremendous. One lady fainted and had to be carried out: I, for one, jumped out of my seat.

The debate made Darwin and his theories famous. Whether he liked it or not, evolutionism was pitched against creationism, facts against faith.

CHRISTIANITY AND BEYOND

Like Darwin himself, the vast majority of scientists and scholars believed that their discoveries were compatible in one way or another with Christianity, though some writers, like Brandes, and many rank-and-file socialists, believed that the authority of the Bible had been fatally undermined by the discoveries of science. At the other extreme of the scale of belief, magical and superstitious practices still ran in parallel to Christianity across the rural world, many of them deriving ultimately from the pre-Christian era. In the Outer Hebrides one observer reported in 1899 a continuing belief in the existence ‘of all forms of evil influence’. In Germany the practice of obtaining the blood of executed criminals for magical healing was only one of a vast number of superstitious habits designed to ward off or cure disease. Country folk prescribed ingesting herbs picked at a particular time, singing incantations or anointing an injury with a magical potion made, as in Portugal, of the ground remains of a dead lizard steeped in the victim’s urine. Gifts could be laid beneath a juniper or hawthorn or some other tree by a sufferer from fever. In Pomerania on the Baltic coast peasants reacted to the arrival of cholera by digging up the corpse of the first victim and ritually decapitating it. For scrofula the people of the Bourbonnais in central France sought the aid of the eldest of seven sons to touch the victim before sunrise on the night of St John, in ceremonies that attracted crowds hundreds strong. Sacred places, fountains, groves, wells, fairy rings, all had their various powers. Cases of witchcraft still came to light from time to time: in 1863 a bricklayer in the Ardennes was convicted of commissioning the murder of a supposed sorcerer for casting an evil spell on his kilns; in 1887 a young couple in Sologne in north-central France were condemned to death and executed for murdering the wife’s mother on the advice of a sorcerer. Books of spells were on sale at country fairs, particularly popular versions of the works of the medieval alchemist Albertus Magnus (c. 1200–80), the Grand Albert and the Petit Albert; if a man experienced an unusual run of good luck, people would say ‘He has the Petit Albert in his pocket!’

Country clergymen often continued to engage in magical practices despite the disapproval of the hierarchy. Church bells in French villages customarily rang the tocsin to dispel storms despite repeated ecclesiastical decrees against the practice. People placed phials of holy water obtained from the church to protect their crops and buildings, or put them on top of their chimneys. From here it was only a small step to go to sites of Christian pilgrimage such as Lourdes in search of cures, or to place votive tablets or handwritten prayers in churches to pray for success in examinations. The Church lent its blessing to the belief in miracles, but the line between the miraculous and the magical was a fine one. Fortune-tellers remained popular at fairs and festivals; it was a particular speciality of gypsy women, who also earned money by selling charms to ward off illness. However, the spread of secular education and the disapproval of the law increasingly undermined the belief systems that underpinned such actions. Parents might continue with the old superstitions, but children learned very different ideas at school. Law courts grew more sceptical in cases involving accusations of magical practices, the use of love-potions, and allegations of witchcraft. Magistrates in Norwich in 1843 dismissed a case in which a woman accused her sister of paralyzing her husband with a potion made of dragon’s blood mixed with water in an oyster shell and enriched by the man’s nail-parings. In 1894 an English traveller in France observed bottles of holy water placed on chimneys as protection against lightning, but already the Church and the state were pressing for the installation of lightning conductors. Magical practices underwent an even more marked decline in urban society, where in any case the need to regulate relations with the natural world was much less imperative than it was in the countryside.

Even more uneasy than the relationship between Christianity on the one hand and superstition on the other was the relationship between the majority religion and minorities who followed other faiths. Islam was the established religion of the Ottoman Empire, though the numerous Christians who lived in its European territories enjoyed extensive toleration. Islamic scholars differed over how far to adapt to the growing challenge of European science and culture. On the whole, while trying to introduce modern secular institutions to the empire, Sultan Abdülhamid II did his best to keep to a traditional interpretation of the Islamic faith, banning the importation of copies of the Qur’an printed outside the Ottoman territories, attempting to convert Shia schismatics, and insisting on the validity of his claim to the caliphate. There were substantial Muslim communities in the empire’s Balkan territories. In Bosnia around two-thirds of the population followed the Sunni branch of Islam. Some 120,000 Muslims were recorded as living in western Thrace in 1912, some of them descended from Greek converts, some from Turks, some from Bulgarian Muslims. Almost 60 per cent of Albanians were Muslims, most of them Sunnis, though a minority were followers of the Bektashi sect, an order of Sufi dervishes regarded as heretics by mainstream Sunni Muslims. Albanian Muslims like the notorious Tepenedeli Ali Pasha in the early 1820s played a significant part in the administration of the Ottoman Empire, and were noted traders and entrepreneurs. In the Russian Empire the conquest of the Caucasus led to the mass southward migration of hundreds of thousands of Muslims, leading to an increasing emphasis on the Islamic character of the Ottoman state. Partly as a consequence of this, towards the end of the century tensions rose between Christians and Muslims in the Balkans, finding violent expression during the Balkan Wars of 1912–14.

In contrast to previous centuries, Islam in the nineteenth century was not regarded by Christians as a threat to Christian Europe. The same was not always true, however, of Europe’s various Jewish communities. At the end of the nineteenth century there were about nine million adherents of the Jewish faith in Europe, the largest number by far of non-Christians in the Continent. Some 5.2 million lived under the rule of the tsar, or just under 5 per cent of the Russian population. They were required to live within the Pale of Settlement, whose boundaries roughly coincided with those of the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and included parts of modern-day Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova and western Russia. Created in 1791, the Pale amended its boundaries several times, and certain categories of Jews were sometimes permitted to live outside it, though in 1891 thousands of Jews were expelled from Moscow and St Petersburg and forced to return to it. There were legally prescribed limits on the numbers of Jewish students in universities (10 per cent within the Pale, 3 per cent in Moscow, St Petersburg and Kiev). Living mostly in poverty in settlements known as shtetls, the Jews of the Pale mainly spoke Yiddish and developed a variety of strict religious practices reinforced by identifying forms of dress. Persecution and discrimination by the Orthodox Christian population, encouraged by the state, were common, and there were major pogroms launched by Christian mobs following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, in which over forty Jews were killed and more than 200 Jewish women raped. There were further anti-Jewish riots between 1903 and 1906, in which some 2,000 Jews died in more than 200 towns, above all in Ukraine. Encouraged by the authorities and often led by Christian priests, these violent outbreaks destroyed whole villages and did incalculable damage to Jewish property. Not surprisingly, in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth, more than two million Jews left the Russian Empire for a new life in England or, above all, America. Often they were assisted by Jewish philanthropists, such as Baron Maurice de Hirsch (1831–96), a German-Jewish banker who lived in Paris and spent a fortune made in railway speculation on founding a charity, the largest in the world at the time, to help thousands of Russian Jews emigrate to Argentina, where they rode across the pampas as ‘Jewish gauchos’.

There were also two million Jews in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1900, or 4.6 per cent of the total population. They included more than 800,000 living in Galicia, part of the former Poland; they shared most of the cultural characteristics of the Jewish inhabitants of the Pale. Growing numbers of them left Galicia and took up residence in Budapest in the late nineteenth century, until they formed almost a quarter of the city’s population. In Romania there were a further 250,000 Jews according to contemporary estimates; in the Bukovina they made up 13 per cent of the population by 1914. The Jewish community in Germany grew in the same period from half a million to more than 600,000, particularly with an influx of emigrants from Russia. Around 1900 there were perhaps a quarter of a million Jews in Great Britain, 100,000 in the Netherlands, 86,000 in France, 35,000 in Italy and much smaller numbers in other countries. Everywhere Jews were the object of heavy discrimination in the early years of the nineteenth century. The restrictions that Napoleon had swept away were in many cases reimposed after his defeat in 1815, as in Frankfurt, although here as in almost every other European city the requirement to live in the old ghetto was not renewed. The exception was Rome, where Jews were still forced to live within a walled ghetto established in 1555; opened by the 1848 revolutionaries, it was closed again by Pius IX when he was restored to power, though in 1850 he abolished the poll tax levied on its inhabitants. The last remaining ghetto in Europe, it ceased to operate when Rome was incorporated into the Kingdom of Italy in 1870; its walls were torn down eighteen years later. The Pale of Settlement in the tsarist empire was a similar attempt to restrict the movement of Jews, though on a much larger scale.

Even where they were free to live where they wished, Jews were still denied basic civil rights in many European states at the time of the Restoration. The French Revolution had swept away discrimination in 1791, and Napoleon had brought equality to Jews in the lands he had conquered, even though in some of them it was later rescinded. Belgium and Greece accorded Jews full equality from the outset. But emancipation came more slowly to other European states: Württemberg in 1828, the Netherlands in 1834, Sweden and Norway in 1835, Hanover in 1842, Denmark and Hamburg in 1849. Often a major political upheaval such as the 1848 Revolution was required; the Jews of Austria-Hungary were emancipated in 1867 and the North German Confederation and then the German Empire included full rights for Jews in its constitution. By contrast, Jews had to wait until 1878 to become full citizens in Bulgaria and Serbia, 1910 in Spain and 1911 in Portugal. It was not until near the Revolution of 1917 that they gained civil emancipation in Russia, and they only obtained equal civil rights in Romania in 1923. In Great Britain the struggle for equality lasted for decades. The Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 did not include Jews; proposals to extend its provisions to them were defeated by the conservative House of Lords, led by the Duke of Wellington, until the Religious Opinions Relief Act was passed in 1846. Jews were still debarred from Parliament, however, by the requirement to swear a Christian oath, until the Jews’ Relief Act (1858) allowed them to drop the words ‘on the true faith of a Christian’ when sworn in as an MP.

By this time Jewish communities in Europe and indeed in the United States were beginning to split between Orthodox and Reform Judaism, between those congregations who wanted to retain traditional beliefs and practices and those who sought to modernize the faith. The first reform synagogue was established in Britain in 1841 and was immediately excommunicated by the German chief rabbi, whose remit still extended to the British Isles. In 1858 a United Synagogue was formed, but the division continued to hamper the campaign for full emancipation. Nevertheless, religious equality was a major achievement, brought about not least by continuing pressure from new and already established voluntary associations representing the Jewish community, and paralleling the emancipation of Christian minorities across Europe. One consequence was the conversion of increasing numbers of Jews to Christianity. Some 11,000 German Jews converted in the first seventy years of the nineteenth century, and then the rate increased dramatically, with 11,500 converting in the remaining three decades. Intermarriage with Christians reached a total of 18 per cent of marriages involving Jews in Berlin in 1900, and nearly a third in Düsseldorf by 1914. In Hamburg there were seventy-three intermarriages for every hundred purely Jewish marriages on the eve of the First World War. In Hungary, by contrast, though most Jews were highly acculturated, there were only 5,000 religious conversions to Christianity between 1895 and 1907 in a population of 830,000 Jews. The Jewish religious communities in central and western Europe attempted to counter this process of gradual dissolution by founding their own cultural organizations, newspapers, clubs and youth groups, but this did little to stem the tide of conversion in most countries.

Thanks to centuries of legal prohibitions on landowning and their long-established exclusion from the feudal system, Jews, traditionally exempted from the Christian prohibition of usury, were overwhelmingly concentrated in banking, finance and the professions, or, among the poorer sections of the population, the garment industry (brought to the East End of London by Russian Jewish emigrants in the 1890s). In Budapest, according to the census of 1910, Jews made up 85 per cent of self-employed people in the banking and financial services sector, and 42 per cent of their employees; 54 per cent of self-employed traders and 62 per cent of their employees; and 13 per cent of industrialists and 22 per cent of their employees. Some 45 per cent of the lawyers and 49 per cent of the doctors in Hungary were Jewish. There were less dramatic, but still disproportionately high figures in Berlin, Frankfurt and Vienna. The wealthiest Jewish bankers attained international fame, notably the Rothschilds, originally court bankers in Frankfurt, whose members were influential enough to be ennobled in a number of countries, including Austria in 1818 and England in 1847. There were many other prominent Jewish banking concerns, though none matched the Rothschilds for sheer wealth and influence. Gerson von Bleichröder (1822–93), only the second Prussian Jew to be ennobled, became Bismarck’s personal banker and enabled him to finance the wars of German unification in 1864 and 1866 without having to go to the German Confederation for approval.

Most Jewish bankers were actively engaged in philanthropy, but none outdid the Italian-born Sir Moses Montefiore (1784–1885). Six feet three inches tall, and very long-lived, Montefiore built the Jewish almshouses of Mishkenot Sha’ananim overlooking the walls of Jerusalem, a city he visited several times. He intervened with the Ottoman sultan on behalf of Jews in trouble, and visited Romania in 1867 to help the beleaguered Jewish community there. Montefiore’s charitable work for the small Jewish community in Palestine laid some of the first foundations of Zionism, but the real movement to end the diaspora was begun by the German-speaking Hungarian Theodor Herzl (1860–1904), whose book The Jewish State (1896) urged the return of all Jews to Palestine. A skilled lobbyist, he timed his first trip to Jerusalem to coincide with a much-publicized visit by Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, whom he met personally to put forward his views. Herzl’s World Zionist Organization held a number of conferences to promote the cause, but after his death the character of the movement changed, gravitating away from Orthodoxy and towards the socialist left. It remained a marginal force until the First World War.

The Christian Churches had been hostile to the Jewish religion for centuries, and provided a tradition from which a new and more virulent form of prejudice emerged, based on the supposedly scientific doctrines of racial difference. The change was signalled in the spread of a new term, ‘antisemitism’, first coined by the Austrian Moravian, later Prussian Jewish Orientalist Moritz Steinschneider (1816–1907). It was the German journalist Wilhelm Marr (1819–1904) who popularized the concept in his book The Way to Victory of Jewdom over Germandom (1879). Although he renounced these beliefs at the end of his life, Marr reflected a wider current in right-wing German politics, already begun by the Prussian court preacher Adolf Stöcker (1835–1909), who demanded legal restrictions on the number of practising Jews in the professions as well as reductions of their supposed influence in the world of business. Stöcker’s main concern in founding the Christian Social Party in Germany in 1878 was, however, to wean the workers away from socialism, and in this he met with only very limited success. As the leader of the Social Democrats, August Bebel (1840–1913), remarked, antisemitism was ‘the socialism of fools’. The few activists in the party who blamed the Jews and not the capitalists for the sufferings of the workers were marginal figures, while socialists of Jewish origin such as Paul Singer (1844–1911) were popular not least because the rank-and-file members of the party saw parallels between the discrimination practised by state and society against Jews and against workers. Antisemitic politics found some resonance among Protestant peasants trying to understand why they were in economic difficulties, particularly in the 1870s, but they did not gain wide support. Theodor Fritsch (1852–1933) did much to propagate the ideas and policies at the centre of the antisemitic movement, and the circle that gathered in Bayreuth around the widow of Richard Wagner, Cosima (1837–1930), gave them a certain respectability in intellectual circles – notably her son-in-law, the Englishman Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855–1927), and his book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899). But beyond small groups of extreme nationalists, antisemitism only had a limited, though discernible effect on German politics before 1914.

In Austria, antisemitism was instrumentalized for political purposes by Karl Lueger (1844–1910). As well as being a successful Mayor of Vienna, Lueger was also an unscrupulous political agitator who curried favour with the Viennese lower middle class and the rural peasantry by publicly blaming the Jews for their economic problems. It was Lueger, for example, who coined the term ‘Judapest’ to refer to the Hungarian capital, where there was a high proportion of Jews among the professional classes (the word Pest also means ‘plague’ in German). Lueger’s antisemitic rhetoric did much to make such ideas respectable in Vienna. How sincere his views were is debatable; when a follower upbraided him in a Vienna café for sitting at a table with some Jews, Lueger famously replied: ‘I decide who’s a Jew.’ None of this seemed to put voters off: in 1902 he increased his majority on the council. Lueger was outdone as an antisemite by another Austrian, Georg Ritter von Schönerer (1842–1921), son of a railway magnate. In the early 1880s, Schönerer formed a German nationalist association to campaign for the incorporation of Austria into the German Empire, along with Bohemia. Later he renamed his party ‘Pan-German’, and said in the national Parliament that he ‘longed for the day when a German army would march into Austria and destroy it’. It was Schönerer who invented the greeting Heil! in imitation of the supposed Germanic heroes of medieval times. His acolytes also used the title Führer when addressing him. In 1888 with some followers he trashed the offices of a newspaper that had prematurely reported the death of the German Emperor. As a result of these antics Franz Joseph stripped him of his noble title (which had in any case only been granted in 1880). In 1898, undeterred, Schönerer led the movement Los von Rom (‘Free from Rome’) to convert Austrians to Lutheranism, which annoyed the Church and the emperor still further. Never more than a fringe politician, Schönerer lost his seat in the Reichsrat in 1907. The antisemitism of both Schönerer and Lueger was to bear fruit in the later ideology of Adolf Hitler (1889–1945), who lived in Vienna as a young man during these years.

Politicians such as these built on antisemitic theories that propounded the idea that the Jewish spirit, indelibly stamped on the Jewish racial character, was imbued with an unalterable purpose – to undermine social institutions such as the family, subvert the economy, and shatter the patriotic foundations of the nation in the interests of a ‘cosmopolitan’ spirit. Pogroms in Russia were based on a conspiracy theory that blamed Jews for the political misfortunes of the tsar. It was in Russia that the most influential of all antisemitic tracts, the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, which purported to be the record of secret plans for world domination by a small group of Jews in Paris, was put together in 1897 from sources including, bizarrely, a French political satire dating from 1864 and a German popular novel translated into Russian in 1872. Its actual contents were rather anodyne; but in its antisemitic packaging it was to have a widespread impact after the First World War. Antisemitism entered European culture well before 1914 and can be seen in a whole range of literary stereotypes, most notably perhaps the figure of Svengali, the greasy, unkempt, dirty and underhand criminal who exercises a hypnotic fascination over the naive young heroine of the novel Trilby (1894) by George du Maurier (1834–96). In Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens the villainous Fagin, who is explicitly portrayed as Jewish, controls and exploits a gang of young pickpockets, boys taken off the streets, only to meet his death at the end of the hangman’s rope.

There were, however, many who attacked antisemitic stereotypes, myths and conspiracy theories: Dickens himself was so mortified by accusations of antisemitism that he created the character of the noble Jew Riah in his last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend (1864–5), in an unsuccessful attempt to balance out the far more vivid figure of Fagin, while Daniel Deronda (1876) by George Eliot portrayed Jewish culture in a sympathetic light. The outburst of antisemitic hatred in France during the Dreyfus affair, as we shall see in Chapter 7, ran into massive and very vocal opposition, and not just on the left. As long as antisemitic prejudice existed in the continued exclusion of Jews from institutions such as the Prussian Army officer corps, or many clubs and societies in Great Britain, or, more obviously and comprehensively, from the entire Russian political and social establishment, Jewish emancipation remained incomplete, and the emergence of racial antisemitism struck a warning note; but from the vantage point of 1900, the achievement of civil equality by Jews in most parts of Europe was a triumph of social emancipation.

CLIMBING THE TOWER OF BABEL

The spread of political ideologies such as antisemitism reflected in part the rise of nationalism in a more exclusive and aggressive form than it had taken in the early decades of the century. This development depended in the first place on the establishment of national identities based on written language. At the time of the Restoration, levels of literacy, measured by the ability to sign a marriage register or an army recruitment form with one’s name rather than with a cross, were patchy at best. Around 90 per cent of men in Prussia could read and write, and over 80 per cent in Scotland, and a small majority of adult males in France and England. Elsewhere, the written word found few able to understand it; between 60 and 80 per cent of grown men in Austria, Russia, Italy, Spain and Ireland were still illiterate at mid-century. Even the gentry in the Hungarian province of Vas were unable to raise their literacy rates above 40 per cent by the early nineteenth century. And the ability of women to read and write was far lower, reflecting the almost complete absence of schooling for them in most parts of Europe: two-thirds of women in France and Belgium were still illiterate in the 1840s, more than half in England, and more than nine in every ten in Italy and Spain. Country-dwellers were far less likely to be able to read and write than townsfolk. While 99 per cent of adults in Berlin could already read in the 1860s, the comparable figure for the rural backwater of West Prussia was only 67 per cent. Within Italy illiteracy was almost universal in the south, much less common in the north. Three-quarters of adult Serbs and Croats, Romanians and Ruthenes were unable to read and write even at the end of the nineteenth century, as opposed to only 1 per cent of the Austrian population of the Alpine province of the Vorarlberg. Artisans and craftsmen, professionals and the middle classes, and the inhabitants of towns and cities, were far more likely to be able to read and write than were rural labourers or the urban underclass. In Russia only 7 per cent of rank-and-file army recruits in the 1860s were able to read and write, and even by 1890 the figure was still under a third.

Lacking a basis in a written national language, identity was firmly rooted not in nationality but in locality. ‘Every valley,’ commented an economist writing about the Pyrenees in 1837, ‘is still a little world that differs from the neighbouring world as Mercury does from Uranus. Every village is a clan, a sort of state with its own patriotism.’ When a state inspector of education visited a village school in the mountainous department of the Lozère in south-east France in 1864, he asked the pupils what country they lived in. None of them could answer him. ‘Are you English or Russian?’ he asked. They did not know. The lack of any popular national consciousness was even more pronounced in countries like Germany or Italy that had yet to achieve political unity. To be sure, language and pronunciation helped advertise social class, so that Sam Weller, in Charles Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers (1836), is instantly identifiable as a lower-class London Cockney by his pronunciation of v as w; but they were far more important in most countries as an indicator of region. One knew that someone came from Marseille as soon as they opened their mouth, because they pronounced r in a guttural way instead of rolling it, as most Frenchmen did in the nineteenth century. Words often varied from one part of a country to another: in German, for example, if you wanted to buy a potato you would ask for a Kartoffel in north-central Germany, an Erdapfel in the south, a Grumbeer in the west, a Schucke in the north-east, or a Knulle in parts of Saxony and Brandenburg. In Danish, people put the definite article before a noun if they lived west of a line running vertically down the middle of Jutland, after it if they lived to the east. A majority of Italians spoke local dialects, some so distinctive that they were barely comprehensible outside the region where they were spoken. Travelling in the French provinces, Flora Tristan complained that ‘nobody speaks French’, not even in towns like Nîmes or St Étienne. In such places, ‘one could believe one was in a savage land in the depths of America’.

Entirely different languages existed side by side as the principal medium of communication in many parts of Europe. Minority languages were present in particular regions everywhere – Welsh, for example, or Scottish Gaelic, or Basque in north-west Spain, or Sami among the nomadic Lapps of northern Scandinavia. In Brittany it was reported in 1873 that the people ‘do not speak French, and do not want to speak French’. Some dialects were extremely localized. ‘Change village, change language’, went one proverb in the French province of the Limousin. The smallest of the Slavic linguistic communities, the Lusatian Sorbs, continued to defy the influence of the surrounding majority of Germans well into the twentieth century. In Calabria, in southern Italy, people still spoke a version of Ancient Greek, probably deriving from the years of Byzantine occupation. Especially in central and eastern Europe, centuries of trade and settlement had created a multilayered linguistic palimpsest, so that different languages were often spoken in the same town. Growing up in the small trading town of Rustschuk, on the lower Danube, the writer Elias Canetti (1905–94) remembered hearing ‘seven or eight languages’ spoken as he walked around the streets: ‘There were Greeks, Albanians, Armenians, Gypsies,’ he wrote, there were Turks, who lived in their own quarter, while Romanians frequently came to the town from the northern side of the river, and Russian traders came and went from the Black Sea region. Canetti himself belonged to the local Jewish community, who spoke Ladino, an antique dialect of Spanish; the Sephardic Jews, expelled in 1492, had carried it to many parts of Europe and were still speaking it centuries later. They looked down on the Ashkenazi community, who spoke Yiddish, the common, largely Germanic tongue spoken by Jews all over eastern Europe.

Rustschuk was far from unique. German and Jewish traders and settlers turned many towns along the southern coast of the Baltic and across large parts of eastern Europe into mainly German-speaking communities, while rural migration created a large and populous area of German-speakers in Transylvania. In many towns and cities, people spoke more than one language, switching from the one to the other as required: up to the middle of the century, for example, the inhabitants of Prague mostly spoke both Czech and German and regarded themselves as Bohemian; their identity was communal and regional but not national. The lack of any firm national identity for most Europeans was underlined by the absence of passport requirements for travellers crossing state borders: in some countries formal requirements existed, but with the coming of the railways they fell into disuse and were abolished – in Norway in 1850, France and Sweden in 1860, and Portugal in 1863. In Greece a passport requirement was introduced in 1835 but was more or less never put into effect, like so many other government regulations. Only Bulgaria, Romania, Russia and Turkey continued to require identity documents and visas from incoming travellers. Cross-border travel was made easier by the fact that French remained the common European language of the upper and middle classes. Latin could be used to get by when talking to priests in a foreign land where one did not speak the local language.

What changed this fragmented situation was not only the spread of communications but also the expansion of elementary education, especially in the second half of the century. Many states attempted during this period to make primary schooling compulsory. In Britain a law passed in 1880 required all children up to the age of ten – extended to twelve in 1899 – to attend school; from 1910 elementary education was made entirely free, and Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Schools, first appointed in 1840, extended their remit of ensuring adequate standards to the whole country. The new industrial working class was held by the political elite to be badly in need of education – ‘we must educate our masters,’ said the English journalist and politician Robert Lowe (1811–92) after introducing an educational reform measure in 1862: otherwise workers would not be able to understand instructions for operating machinery, let alone grasp the issues involved in the parliamentary political system after the extension of the franchise. Indeed, the 1867 Reform Act was followed shortly by an act establishing School Boards across England and Wales to fund local elementary schools, in a move that significantly reduced the role of the established Anglican Church. By 1883 there were already 3,692 board schools, and the Church schools, of which there were still some 14,000 at the turn of the century, were running into serious financial and other difficulties. A new Education Act passed in 1902 unified the administration of all state-run schools in Britain under Local Education Authorities, allowing the creation of over a thousand new state secondary schools by 1914.

A belief that education and literacy would make the masses less savage also inspired liberal-conservative politicians in France. Guizot passed a law in 1833 requiring every village to have a primary school, declaring: ‘Ignorance renders the masses turbulent and ferocious . . . We have tried to create in every commune a moral force which the government can use at need.’ ‘France,’ declared Zola, ‘will be what the primary teacher makes it’, and there was a widespread belief that the nation’s defeat in 1870 was the result of superior standards of primary education in Germany. A further impetus for the extension of elementary education in France came from anticlerical politicians such as Jules Ferry, whose reforms passed between 1879 and 1881 extended compulsory, free and secular education to all children aged from three to thirteen. In place of Catholic indoctrination the new schools were required to teach moral precepts based on secular principles, inculcated through an appeal to the emotions: ‘The teacher,’ as Ferry declared, ‘is not required to fill the child’s memory, but to teach his heart, to make him feel, by an immediate experience, the majesty of the moral law.’ The encouragement of patriotism was a principal aim of the secular school system: apart from the ‘three Rs’ – reading, writing and ’rithmetic – teaching focused on the history and geography of France, to the exclusion of other parts of Europe and the world.

Liberal governments were particularly keen to foster primary education, literacy and numeracy. In Spain the liberal Constitution of 1812, already proclaimed the need for every village to possess a primary school, an ambition furthered by a series of education laws passed in 1821, 1836 and 1845. The Moyano Law, promulgated in 1857, made education compulsory up to the age of nine, and free for those unable to pay. Though state funding was minimal, the creation for the first time of a national Ministry of Education in 1900 did result in some increase, and provision gradually improved thereafter. As in other European countries, a principal aim of the liberals was to reduce the influence of the Church over education, and to create a national sense of identity by enforcing unity through the exclusive use of the national language – in this case Castilian. Yet underfunding meant that state schools were unable to implement these policies; schools not subject to them because they were run by the religious orders still outnumbered state schools in Madrid by 411 to 135 in 1908, for example, a situation that could also be observed in Catalonia. Minority languages and regional patois could be more easily combated in France, where they predominated in rural areas, than in Spain, where they were concentrated in advanced industrial centres in Barcelona and the Basque country.

In Russia too, primary education was dominated by Church schools until the end of the century. What changed the situation was the activism of the local authorities, the zemstva, which devoted time, energy and, crucially, funds to establishing schools for the peasantry. By the time of the First World War there were 34,000 primary schools under the Holy Synod, but 81,000 under the Ministry of Education and the local authorities. However, they were subject to a range of crippling restrictions. Primary schools mostly consisted of one class and taught religion, Russian, arithmetic, writing and singing, though in the larger schools, mostly in towns, there was room for geography and history too. Schools were often inadequately housed: the writer Alexander Sergeyevich Neverov (1886–1923) remembered his village school in the 1890s as ‘a low dark building with long desks, a filthy ceiling, partitioned off from a room used by the church caretaker’. Things were little better in the towns and cities: one school in St Petersburg at the same time consisted of two rooms in a three-room family flat, with little more than a blackboard and some desks and chairs. Nevertheless, Russian schools had a discernible effect in raising basic standards of literacy and numeracy.

Deficiencies in popular education were also being made good by the movement to improve standards of knowledge and learning in the adult population. Particularly important here were the ‘folk high schools’, pioneered by Nikolaj Frederik Severin Grundtvig (1783–1872), a Danish pastor and liberal nationalist. Originally inspired by the Protestant awakening, Grundtvig, a prolific author who published more than 1,500 hymns and innumerable books and pamphlets over the course of a very long life, believed that the common people needed to be trained in practical skills as well as being inculcated with a strong national consciousness and the inspiration to develop their own creativity. His ideas struck a chord in Danish society after the country’s defeat in the Schleswig-Holstein War of 1864, and three years later some twenty-one folk high schools had come into being. Different manifestations of the movement spread to Norway and Sweden, and found imitators in many other countries, especially Germany. In Britain the doctor and philanthropist George Birkbeck (1776–1841) founded Mechanics’s Institutes in Glasgow and London in the 1820s. By mid-century there were no fewer than 700 such institutions in Britain, aiming to provide a broad education for adults, with a special focus on engineering and science. Mostly they taught through putting on lecture courses and providing libraries from which ‘mechanics’, or in other words members of the working classes (in many instances including women), could borrow improving literature. By all these various means elementary education had a cumulative effect on literacy and the standardization of languages across Europe.

Map 13. Languages and Peoples of East-Central Europe, 1914

Nationalists tried to develop a standard written and spoken language in order to justify their claim to a national identity and national statehood. Usually they chose some particular dialect. West Bulgarian dialect was used as the basis for the literary language in Bulgaria; in Italy it was the Tuscan dialect, commonly employed in princely courts but in 1860 still only used for everyday communication by 2.5 per cent of the population. Its influence was spread among the educated classes by the 1827 historical novel The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni (1785–1873). Its anti-Spanish thrust was taken by some nationalists to apply to the Austrian rulers of northern Italy as well (Metternich reciprocated the hostility, referring to Italy as merely a ‘geographical expression’). Manzoni later extended his influence by playing a key role on the commission that established Tuscan as the official language of a unified Italy. Sometimes the choice of dialect was made for deliberately political reasons; thus the Croatian writer Ljudevit Gaj (1809–72) changed from the Kajkavian Croatian dialect to the Slovak in 1838 because the latter was also spoken by many Serbs, thus underpinning his campaign for South Slav unity and eventually creating the language known for many decades as Serbo-Croat (written in Roman lettering in Croatia, Cyrillic in Serbia). On occasion, indeed, a nationalist could actually construct a language, as with the Norwegian poet and playwright Henrik Wergeland (1808–45), who developed Nynorsk as an alternative to the existing written tongue, which he considered had been corrupted by the influence of Danish (it never found favour with more than a small minority of the population). Linguistic unity was also furthered by the attempts of nationalists to construct an ancient heritage for the national culture. In Finland this task was undertaken by the nationalist poet Elias Lönnrot (1802–84), a regional health officer who collected folk tales and songs in villages and rural communities and shaped them into a national epic, the Kalevala (1835, enlarged 1849), choosing the variants that fitted best into an overall structure and adding a few linking passages of his own (amounting, it is now thought, only to around 3 per cent of the total). As Finnish slowly established itself as a literate language (most literate Finns spoke Swedish at the time), the epic became a central focus for the development of national identity and the struggle for autonomous statehood within the Russian Empire.

Not just language, but also history, real and imagined, provided a basis for national identity. In Ireland the nationalist movement began by attempting to recover the autonomous institutions, including the Irish Parliament, abolished in the Act of Union of 1800. The cultural memory of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, a powerful state in early modern Europe until its dismemberment by Prussia, Austria and Russia in the eighteenth century, played a key role in Poland. A historical grounding for a national culture could not always be easy to create. For the supporters of Greek independence it seemed natural to call the civilization of Ancient Greece in evidence for the claim to statehood in the nineteenth century. The humanist scholar Adamantios Coraïs (1748–1833), who was educated at the University of Montpellier in south-eastern France, corresponded with Thomas Jefferson, and lived in Paris throughout the Revolution of 1789–94, attempted to revive this connection not only by publishing new editions of the Ancient Greek classics but also by propagating a new version of Demotic Greek, called Katharevousa. He aimed to purge the common spoken language of its foreign and particularly its Byzantine accretions and bring it as close as was practicable to the ancient form of the language. But the great mass of ordinary Greeks could not fully understand it and it never became common currency. In any case, language was not always the basis for statehood. In Switzerland speakers of German, Italian, French and Romansch had coexisted in a single confederal state since the era of the Reformation, and the disputes with which the state was riven in the nineteenth century were sparked by issues other than linguistic ones. In the eastern part of Upper Silesia, the so-called Wasserpolacken, ‘Water Poles’ whose Polish speech had been ‘watered down’ by German influences, resisted being co-opted into the Polish national cause. Similarly, the linguistically hybrid state of Belgium, divided between Flemings and Walloons, persisted in adhering to the statehood acquired in 1830 and did not break asunder, though its unity sometimes seemed precarious.

In the first half of the century nationalists everywhere tended to regard all European nations as moving towards a common state of advanced civilization, though from different starting points and at varying speeds. Germany appeared in British literature in the early nineteenth century as a Gothic land full of wild and untamed nature; its people could be brave and good-natured but also rough and unpredictable. Sarah Austin (1793–1867), who admired German intellectual life and translated German literature into English, thought in 1854 that in the German countryside ‘we find a state of civilization which we have been accustomed to regard as past for ever . . . The more we go back to the recollections of what we heard in our childhood from our fathers, the nearer do we approach to the manners of Germany.’ Henry Mayhew, author of London Labour and the London Poor (1851), a classic investigation of poverty and destitution in the 1840s, found Germany extremely backward. ‘Travelling southward from England,’ he wrote, ‘is like going backward in time . . . In Germany we find the people, at the very least, a century behind us in all the refinements of civilization and the social and domestic improvements of progress.’ Closer acquaintance with other countries did little to overcome prejudice. Following the demise of the aristocratic ‘Grand Tour’ in the chaos and violence of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the new English middle class began to travel to the Continent on commercial tours. Pre-eminent in this business was the company founded by Thomas Cook (1808–92), a Baptist minister who began by organizing trips for temperance campaigners, obtaining discounted tickets from railway companies in return for guaranteed bulk purchases.

By the 1860s, Cook’s tours were taking English clients to a variety of continental destinations, and what they saw merely confirmed their feelings of superiority. Their disdain for continentals was widely reciprocated. In 1890 the Romanian writer Nicolae Iorga (1871–1940) complained bitterly about the British in Venice:

You meet them everywhere, at the hotel, on the narrow streets, on the black gondolas, at the foot of statues, on the platforms atop the towers: correct, with clipped moustaches, Baedeker in hand, holding by the arm (always by the arm) their beloved other half, a doll with glass eyes, rosy cheeks and horse’s teeth. Cold and measured, muttering unintelligible explanations in their jumpy language, occasionally in French.

Many French men and women, like Flora Tristan, were not sure whether they wanted a British-style future when it brought with it the misery and oppression of industrialism. ‘London may become Rome,’ remarked the French writer Théophile Gautier (1811–72) in 1853, ‘but it will certainly never be Athens: that destiny is reserved for Paris.’ Arguments about the direction to take raged with particular intensity in Russia, where ‘Slavophiles’ like Konstantin Sergeyevich Aksakov (1817–60) saw the future as based on Russian peasant values and Orthodox traditions, whereas ‘Westernizers’ like Alexander Herzen, who spent some years in exile in England, wanted to import western European cultural norms. To writers like the Marquis de Custine (1790–1857), Russia, which he visited in 1839, seemed more than half Asiatic. Russia’s aristocracy in his view had ‘just enough of the gloss of European civilization to be spoiled as savages but not enough to become cultivated men’.

What united all these disparate views was the concept of progress, whether it was welcomed or resisted. English travellers on the Continent complained repeatedly about the filth and dirt of the towns, yet they expected them in due course to undergo the hygienic revolution already experienced in Britain. But in the later decades of the nineteenth century, cultural stereotypes began to give way to racial ones, and the notion of the road to a future along which all nations were travelling was increasingly replaced by the idea of peoples imbued with innate and therefore unalterable characteristics. After the Polish uprising of 1863–4, for example, voices were raised in Russia proclaiming the need to suppress Polish nationality rather than leading it along the path of freedom and progress. The newspaper editor Mikhail Nikiforovich Katkov (1818–87) declared that Poles and Russians were both Slavs, and that Polish identity had to be merged into the greater Russian culture. The Poles were a ‘tribe’ who with others in ‘the Great Russian world, constitute its living parts and feel their oneness with it, in the union of state and supreme power in the person of the Tsar’. Russian reactions to the first stirrings of Ukrainian national identity were even more negative: the Minister of the Interior Pyotr Alexandrovich Valuev (1815–90) warned the tsar in 1876 that ‘permitting the creation of a special literature for the common people in the Ukrainian dialect would signify collaborating in the alienation of Ukraine from the rest of Russia’. Other states began to adopt a policy of assimilating national minorities too, most notably Prussia, which introduced under Bismarck and his successors a policy of restricting the use of Polish in the eastern provinces and encouraging German-speaking immigrants to settle there.

Smaller nations and their cultures were widely thought by the apostles of nationalism in larger countries as unlikely to achieve statehood. Not only the English, for example, but also many among the educated classes in Wales, assumed that the Welsh language would ‘die fairly, peacefully and reputably’, as a Welsh clergyman told a parliamentary inquiry into education in the Principality in 1847: ‘Attached to it as we are, few would wish to postpone its euthanasy.’ In the event, however, the language survived.

The spread of education, the increasing intensity of cross-border communications, the greater ease with which people could migrate from one country to another, the rise of tourism, and the growing trend for books to be translated from one language into others, did not, as some hoped, lead to greater international understanding. In his book Unua Libro (1887) the Polish writer and opthalmologist Ludwik Lazard Zamenhof (1859–1917), author of the first Yiddish grammar (1879), made the most notable attempt to overcome linguistic barriers by inventing ‘Esperanto’, the ‘language of hope’. It attracted enough support for a World Congress of Esperantists to be held in Paris in 1905. But the language never entered the cultural mainstream anywhere.

THE PASSION FOR KNOWLEDGE

While the inculcation of a national language became a principal purpose of primary education, secondary education focused for most of the century on the teaching of the Ancient Greek and Roman classics. In the curriculum laid down for the Gymnasium, or academic secondary school, by the Prussian state in 1837, for example, almost a third of the lessons were devoted to Latin, and not much less to Greek. In 1856, in the course of the post-revolutionary turn to conservative values, religious teaching was introduced to the curriculum for the first time. None of this satisfied Kaiser Wilhelm II, who was concerned that an emphasis on authors such as Cicero (106–43 BC), with their doctrines of republican freedom, was nurturing a generation of educated men critical of the monarchical institutions of Imperial Germany. Stressing the need for physical training and character-building, he declared in 1890: ‘We must take what is German as the basis of the Gymnasium; we want to educate young Germans and not young Greeks and Romans.’ A new Prussian national curriculum put into effect in 1892 reduced the hours devoted to Latin by 20 per cent and Ancient Greek by 10 per cent. Similar changes in the parallel system of the less academically oriented Realschulen were even more dramatic. In both kinds of school, new requirements were brought in for German literature and history, with an emphasis on the need for teachers to be ‘filled with the patriotic spirit’.

With the growth of the middle classes in Germany came an increase in the numbers of students attending academic secondary schools – from just short of 50,000 in Prussia in 1850, for instance, to 108,000 in 1911. There were complaints about overcrowding, only partially met by an increase in the number of academic secondary schools from 261 to 372 between 1875 and 1911. In Russia there were 191 academic high schools by the end of the century, augmented by 115 technical schools. Their social exclusivity was underlined by a notorious decree issued under the reactionary Tsar Alexander III requiring academic secondary schools to be ‘freed from the attendance of children of drivers, footmen, cooks, laundrymen, small traders and other persons similarly situated, whose children, with the exception perhaps of exceptionally gifted ones, should not be encouraged to abandon the social environment to which they belong’. Here too the Classics declined as the foundation of secondary education, as the curriculum made room for more practical subjects after the turn of the century. In the academic French secondary school, the lycée, where pupils were prepared for the baccalauréat, or university qualifying examinations, teaching of the Classics fell sharply and there was a growing focus on modern subjects, especially French language, literature and history, and the sciences. This was a popular measure. Many former students remembered the Classical education to which they had been subjected with retrospective revulsion. ‘Merchants of Greek!’ exclaimed Victor Hugo in 1856, ‘Merchants of Latin! Hacks! Bulldogs! Philistines! Magisters! I hate you, pedagogues!’ The secondary-school system expanded, with 30,000 students in 1850, 53,000 in 1881, and 62,000 in 1910. Some 51 per cent of secondary pupils attended state institutions in 1899, as compared to 43 per cent Church schools and 6 per cent lay private schools, but the proportion of boys between the ages of eleven and seventeen who attended any kind of secondary school at all remained consistently below 3 per cent.

Conditions in the French lycées were far from ideal. Most were located in former church buildings, hospitals, barracks or convents. One inspector asked in 1877 on visiting one: ‘Is this a school, a farm, or an inn, this vast ramshackle hut with rotting shutters and a bare courtyard?’ But at least corporal punishment had been abolished in an edict passed in 1769 and reinforced by a Napoleonic decree forty years later. This was emphatically not the case in the leading secondary schools on the other side of the English Channel, where the sons of the elite were educated in fee-paying ‘public schools’. In the early decades of the century flogging, carried out before the assembled pupils with a birch on the naked back, was universal and meted out for the tiniest of derelictions, such as making mistakes in the parsing of Latin or Greek. Mr Creakle, the headmaster portrayed in Charles Dickens’s novel David Copperfield (1850), ‘laid about him, right and left, every day of his life, charging in among the boys like a trooper, and slashing away, unmercifully’. Acts of rebellion were just as routine as schoolmasterly violence. One Etonian paid for an artist to paint a portrait of the headmaster on his own back, expecting as all boys did to be flogged: the head was said to have used two birches to obliterate it, breaking the first one in the ferocity of his onslaught. At Winchester in 1818 the boys occupied the towers and sealed up the warden’s doors. Eventually twenty-seven were expelled, but the headmaster was forced to resign. At Eton pupils used sledgehammers to break up the headmaster’s desk of office, which was raised on a podium and enclosed in a panelled stall. Seven were expelled. Cheaper boarding schools, satirized mercilessly by Charles Dickens in Nicholas Nickleby (1839) in the shape of ‘Dotheboys Hall’, presided over by the ignorant and brutal headmaster Wackford Squeers, could sometimes be used as dumping-grounds for the unwanted, often illegitimate children of the wealthy elite. It was only gradually that this situation began to be reformed.

The main influence here was Thomas Arnold (1795–1842), appointed headmaster of Rugby School in 1828. Arnold described his mission as the cure of souls first: the inculcation of moral principles came second, and the education of minds a distant third. He would rather the boys thought that the Sun revolved around the Earth, he once declared, than that they should neglect the fundamental principles of a moral life: ‘Surely the one thing needful for a Christian and an Englishman to study is Christian and moral and political philosophy.’ Arnold brought order to school life, enforced by a system in which discipline, including corporal punishment, was applied by senior boys appointed prefects or monitors and kept closely under his control. His reforms were widely copied in other British secondary schools, and became more generally known through the popular novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857), written by Thomas Hughes (1822–96), a former pupil, who recounted how the bullying, sadism, sexual exploitation, gambling, drinking and whoring common among the senior pupils before Dr Arnold’s appointment, and encapsulated in Harry Flashman, the villain of the story, were overcome by the headmaster’s firm imposition of the basic principles of Christian conduct.

The purpose of secondary schools everywhere was above all to prepare students for university entrance. Overall numbers of students in higher education were small. There were just over 7,000 university students in Spain in the 1850s, a number that had increased to 12,000 by 1868 and continued to grow slowly into the twentieth century. Spread across ten universities, this was not very impressive. As elsewhere in Europe, the primary function of universities was to train young men for the professions, law and medicine in particular. Students were overwhelmingly the children of prosperous middle-class parents who could afford to pay the steep fee required for the licenciatura, the degree certificate that gave them the right to practise. Spanish universities were often of considerable antiquity (the oldest, the University of Salamanca, was founded in 1218, though it was outdone in Italy by the University of Bologna, Europe’s oldest, dating back to 1088). The situation was very different in France, where all twenty-two universities had been abolished by the Revolution in 1789 as bastions of privilege, corruption and idleness, and replaced by specialized faculties and colleges that offered training to lawyers, doctors and teachers. Some of these became in due course serious centres of learning and research, such as the École Normale Supérieure, founded in 1795 and re-founded in 1826, where the medical scientist Louis Pasteur pushed through a series of major reforms. (These were not always popular: when he threatened to expel any students caught smoking, seventy-three out of the eighty students in the grande école promptly resigned.) There were in general very few students at these institutions – the Faculty of Letters at Caen had only twenty under the Restoration, for example, while the Faculty of Letters at Clermont-Ferrand had only seven in 1876. Rather than being supported by the state, these institutions were funded by examination fees, which meant that they were often in a parlous state of repair.

France’s defeat in the war of 1870–1 was ascribed by some to the fact that Germany possessed advanced universities where all the disciplines could be studied independently and in a connected way rather than, as in France, a series of isolated, single-subject, professional training institutions. The amalgamation of the faculties and colleges into proper universities thus became one of the many causes taken up by French Republicans. It took until 1896, however, until the faculties in the provinces were formed into universities along German lines. Still, many subjects, including even French philology, were so much more advanced in Germany that to gain an adequate grasp of them students had to be able to read German. The grandes écoles were far more important, especially in the fields of engineering, mining and commerce; the political elite was trained in particular by Sciences Po, Paris, which opened in 1872, while the humanities were catered for by the École Pratique des Hautes Études, founded in 1868. Some of these institutions were highly specialized: the École Nationale des Chartes, founded in 1821, gained a European reputation for training in reading medieval texts, for example, while the École Polytechnique, established in 1794 and run by the Ministry of Defence, focused on military engineering and construction; Napoleon had turned it into a military academy in 1804.

As the move to create universities in France in the late nineteenth century suggested, the strongest and most developed system of higher education in Europe was to be found in Germany. It followed the ideas of Wilhelm von Humboldt, whose work in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior focused on the integration of teaching and research, the freedom of teachers to teach and students to learn what they wanted to, and the adoption of Classical ideals and the unifying intellectual principles of rationalist philosophy. ‘To inquire and to create,’ he declared: ‘these are the grand centres around which all human pursuits revolve.’ The University of Berlin, founded under Humboldt’s inspiration in 1810, explicitly embodied an alternative ideal to that of the French grandes écoles, whose prescriptive curricula and drive to uniformity and discipline he considered damaging to the spirit of innovation and renewal that German intellectual life so badly needed after the humiliations of the Napoleonic Wars. Humboldt intended that universities should research and teach subjects for their own intrinsic intellectual value, rather than specifically preparing students for careers. But this did not happen in the first half of the century. Between 1830 and 1860, for example, 30 per cent of students enrolled at German universities studied theology, to go into the ministry, 30 per cent law, to go into the civil service or the legal profession, 15 per cent medicine, 15 per cent humanistic subjects, to go into teaching, and 5 per cent the natural sciences.

The state kept a firm grip: one third of all full professors of law in German universities appointed between 1817 and 1840 were imposed on faculties by the government Ministry responsible for them without the faculties themselves agreeing or in many instances being consulted. Freedom of teaching was thus in practice restricted by the intervention of the state. Universities were still small, but between 1871 and 1914 the number of students at the twenty-two German universities, including Strasbourg, acquired from France in the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, and Frankfurt, founded in 1914, grew from 13,000 to 61,000. Berlin University’s student numbers increased from 2,200 to 8,000, making it the largest in Germany, but Munich could count more than 6,600 students by the eve of the First World War, and Leipzig over 5,300. New technical universities were founded, accounting for a further 11,500 students by 1914. The proportion of students whose fathers had degrees had already fallen during the period 1850–70 from around half to just over a third; in Leipzig it had declined to under 30 per cent by 1909. The students who were sons of industrialists, merchants and financiers were growing in number.

The German model of higher education was widely imitated. In Greece, for example, King Otto founded the Othonian University on German lines in 1837 (it was renamed the National University when he was ousted in 1862), equipped with a range of faculties; the sciences were also taught, though they were hived off into a separate institution, the Kapodistrian University, in 1911. The Royal Frederick University in Oslo was explicitly established in 1811 on the model of the newly founded University of Berlin. Older universities followed suit, including the University of Copenhagen, founded in 1479, destroyed when Admiral Nelson bombarded the city in 1801, rebuilt in the 1830s, and restructured with German-style faculties in the following decade. The founding of a university was a requirement of any self-respecting state: Bulgaria created a three-faculty higher education institute in 1888 that became a university in 1904. State control here remained close, however: King Ferdinand closed it down for six months and dismissed all the professors after he was booed by students at the opening of the National Theatre in 1907. The fate of the Jagiellonian University earlier in the century was even more dramatic: founded in 1364 in Cracow, it was a centre of Polish intellectual life until the Austrians formally annexed Cracow in 1846, when they removed the furnishings from the Auditorium Maximum in order to turn it into a grain store; the university was only rescued when the Emperor Franz Joseph intervened to save it. Polish universities and especially their students continued to be regarded with suspicion in Congress Poland, where the Russian authorities closed the University of Warsaw, founded in 1816, following the 1863 uprising, and replaced it with a higher education institution that aimed to provide education for the military occupation forces and taught only in Russian.

Tight state controls were similarly exercised over universities in Russia itself, where students formed part of the intelligentsia and were the subject of considerable suspicion on the part of the government. The tsarist authorities were caught in a dilemma, however, since if the controls were too tight and teaching was too circumscribed, young Russians would go abroad to learn, above all to German universities, described already by Alexander I as places ‘where young people acquire notions that are most opposed to religion and morality’. Later on in the century, they gravitated towards Zurich and other liberal Swiss universities. As part of Alexander II’s reforms a University Statute was passed in 1863 ceding the power of self-government to universities, including professorial appointments, and allowing the freedom of teaching and learning that were the ideals of the Humboldtian system. Following student riots at the universities of St Petersburg and Kazan in the autumn of 1882 over demands for improved representation, a new University Statute was passed in 1884 requiring rectors, deans and professors to be appointed by the government. This did not quell student unrest, which broke out again in 1887 following an incident when a student slapped a government inspector of universities in the face at a concert. But it was not until 1905 that university autonomy was restored, following a student strike lasting several months.

In Britain, as in Russia, the primacy of Classical learning was gradually reduced, with Latin and Ancient Greek outflanked by other, modern subjects, although the latter was still required as a condition for entry in all subjects up to 1920 and the former even longer. The links of the ancient universities of Oxford and Cambridge with the established Church were weakened, and new universities, starting with London University (now University College London), founded in 1826, were decidedly secular. In the provinces other colleges initially focused on degree examinations set by London, before amalgamating into new universities themselves, as with, for example, Owens College, founded in 1851, and merged into the Victoria University of Manchester in 1880. Indeed, the expansion of higher education went everywhere together with the professionalization of science and scholarship. German universities, well organized and well funded, took the lead in scientific research. The prizes endowed by Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite and owner of the Bofors arms company, were awarded to a number of scientists from Germany before 1914. In 1901, for example, the first Nobel Prize for Physics went to Wilhelm Röntgen (1845–1923), who had discovered electromagnetic radiation, or X-rays, in 1895, while nearly half the Nobel Prizes for Chemistry in the same period were awarded to Germans. Although science was still overwhelmingly the province of men, some women did break through science’s glass ceiling, most notably the Polish-born French physicist Marie Curie (1867–1934), whose research led her to coin the term ‘radioactivity’. With her husband Pierre Curie (1859–1906), in 1898 she discovered two new elements, which they named ‘radium’ and ‘polonium’ (she was a passionate Polish nationalist). On her husband’s death in a road accident, she was appointed to his chair at the University of Paris, the first woman to become a professor there. She was awarded two Nobel Prizes, one for physics, the other for chemistry, the only woman to achieve this distinction. The status of women scientists, however, was indicated by the fact that when she and her husband were invited to present their research in London, the Royal Institution only allowed Pierre to address the audience; Marie was required to remain silent.

Marie Curie had emigrated to France in 1891 to carry out her research, but Russian and Polish universities, despite political repression, were far from backward in this respect. Kazan Imperial University in Russia, founded in 1804, built a chemical laboratory and astronomical observatory in 1830 and established medical, chemical, mathematical and geological schools. Its Professor of Mathematics, Nicholas Ivanovich Lobachevsky (1792–1856), was one of the founders of modern, non-Euclidean geometry, which indeed is sometimes known as Lobachevskian geometry; its Professor of Chemistry, Alexander Mikhaylovich Butlerov (1828–86), discovered the naturally occurring organic compound formaldehyde in 1859, putting generations of embalmers in his debt; and another chemist, the Baltic German Karl Klaus (1796–1864), discovered the element ruthenium in 1844. Similarly, in Austrian-ruled Galicia in the 1870s, mindful of the rising tide of Polish nationalism, the authorities allowed the Jagiellonian University in Cracow more autonomy and provided funds for new buildings and equipment, especially in the sciences. These enabled the physicist Zygmunt Wróblewski (1845–88), who had studied in Germany, to pioneer the liquefaction of oxygen and nitrogen with his colleague Karol Olszewski (1846–1915) before dying of burns sustained while carrying out experiments. However, elsewhere university-based scientific research took longer to get under way.

The term ‘scientist’ was only coined in English in 1833, by William Whewell (1794–1866), while the Cambridge Natural Sciences Tripos was founded as late as 1851. Laboratories earlier in the century existed only in establishments like the Royal Institution. The Irish mathematical physicist William Thomson, later ennobled as Lord Kelvin, had to set up his laboratory at Glasgow University in mid-century in a disused wine cellar and the adjoining coal cellar where, as one of his students later complained:

there was no special apparatus for students’ use in the laboratory . . . no special hours for students to attend, no assistants to advise or explain, no marks given for laboratory work, no workshop, and even no fee to be paid . . . students experimented . . . in spite of the atmosphere of coal dust, which settled on everything, produced by a boy coming periodically to shovel up coal for the fires.

Only in 1874 did Cambridge establish a purpose-built physics laboratory, named after the chancellor of the university, William Cavendish, 7th Duke of Devonshire (1808–91), who helped fund it. As time went on, standard procedures were developed in teaching and research – dissection in biology, for example – replacing the old system whereby students had set up whatever experiments they fancied, often with disastrous results. Technical assistants were appointed and standardized equipment manufactured, taking advantage of the opportunities offered by industrial production. Microscopes and telescopes became more sophisticated, chemical dyes made it easier to observe microbes and bacilli, and by the end of the century scientific research and education had become fully professional. By this time, British research in physics had reached an advanced stage: James Clerk Maxwell (1831–79), Joseph Thomson (1856–1940), and the New Zealander Ernest Rutherford (1871–1937) were responsible respectively for the theory of electromagnetism (1861), the discovery of the electron (1897), and the concept of the radioactive half-life (1899). Overall, the number of university teaching posts in science and technology in Britain, excluding medicine, rose from sixty in 1850 to 400 half a century later.

By the turn of the century there was widespread optimism about the future of science, a concept that had been expanded to cover all forms of organized knowledge. Positivism, the doctrine developed by Auguste Comte in the 1840s, and made available in English in his major work A General View of Positivism, (1865), held that scientific observation was the only legitimate basis for action. A priori beliefs had to be jettisoned; only what could be seen and verified was true. If the scientific method was applied to every discipline, then all the facts would be known about everything. History, for example, should, in the view of Lord Acton, Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University from 1895 to 1902, satisfy ‘the scientific demand for completeness and certainty’. It was widely thought that history had been established as a science by Leopold von Ranke, and history professors everywhere emphasized the application of standard methods of source criticism in order to establish the authenticity of the documents on which historians now began to base their work. Ranke found imitators in universities all over Europe, who dismissed earlier historians, including even the extremely popular author and Whig politician Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–59), as mere amateurs, historically inaccurate and politically biased. Macaulay’s work was too emotional: a dispassionate approach was what was needed, and Ranke was thought to supply it.

Yet this was an illusion: the rhetoric of objectivity based on source criticism and original research was itself little more than a cloak for commitment. In putting forward the proposition that the historian’s task lay primarily in identifying the leading currents in every age, Ranke opened the way for the next generation of German historians to identify the rise of Prussia and the unification of Germany as the leading currents of the nineteenth century. Any opposition to German unification was vilified as a struggle against historical inevitability, and the Bismarckian solution to the question of German unity was inserted into the narrative as the only one possible or, indeed, desirable. The chief exponent of this view, Heinrich von Treitschke (1834–96), author of a multi-volume history of Germany in the nineteenth century (which, however, had only reached the year 1847 by the time of his death), was an unabashed German nationalist, not to mention a virulent antisemite. His influence was exercised well into the twentieth century through his many pupils, who included Otto Hintze (1861–1940), Friedrich Meinecke (1862–1954) and the Pan-German politician Heinrich Class (1868–1953). Perhaps, therefore, Rankean history was not so unemotional after all; its exponents claimed to be scientifically objective but their work served a clear political purpose.

THE GENDERING OF EMOTION

In 1848 the entry on ‘specific characteristics of the sexes’ in a popular German encyclopedia explained that as well as physical differences, men and women could also be distinguished by mental and spiritual features: ‘The female is a more feeling creature . . . The man . . . is a more thinking creature . . . Everything that mainly lays a claim on the emotions affects the woman more.’ Similar statements can be found in many other encyclopedias of the age. Emotion in the nineteenth century was a gendered phenomenon. ‘Intelligence and thought’ were the sphere of men, another lexicon declared in 1904: women by contrast were ‘removed from the common bustle of life’, because they were creatures of imagination, sensibility and love. The encyclopedias of the previous age remained silent on the issue, or treated it only very briefly. By 1887, when the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies (1855–1936) wrote his famous tract Community and Society, the difference between the sexes had been elevated by some into a universal principle. Tönnies himself regarded the organic community of pre-industrial times as held together by feminine emotion, whereas the industrial society that was (to his regret) replacing it was dominated by masculine reason. Women were being alienated from their true nature: a factory girl who, inevitably, fell under the influence of ‘society’ in this sense, according to Tönnies, ‘becomes enlightened, cold, knowing. Nothing is more alien to her original character, nothing more harmful.’

In the age of Romanticism it was common for men to weep openly at the slightest prompting. Charles Dickens cried over the death scenes in his novels as he wrote them, while the reaction of some of his readers was even more extreme. When the Irish nationalist leader Daniel O’Connell, for example, reading The Old Curiosity Shop (1841) on a train journey, came to the passage that described the death of the pure young heroine Little Nell, he found it unbearable: his eyes ‘filled with tears’, and, sobbing, he shouted ‘He should not have killed her!’ and threw the book out of the carriage window. Like many others, Lord Byron wept copious tears while watching tragic scenes in the theatre; he described succumbing during a performance in Italy to a kind of ‘choking shudder’. The judge James Shaw Willes (1814–72), when pronouncing the death sentence on a woman found guilty of murder, ‘bent forward and wept for some few seconds’, even though he knew that extenuating circumstances made it overwhelmingly likely that the sentence would be commuted. On this occasion, according to the contemporary report, not only the judge but also ‘the jury were in tears’, along with ‘the greater part of the public’.

Yet increasingly in the second half of the century tears became a sign not of Romantic sensibility but of female frailty. In his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), Charles Darwin put forward the view that crying was a sign of weakness. ‘Englishmen,’ he wrote, ‘rarely cry, except under the pressure of the acutest grief; whereas in some parts of the Continent the men shed tears much more readily and freely.’ But similar views could be found on the Continent too. A man who ‘weeps copiously without adequate occasion,’ declared the Hungarian writer Max Nordau in 1892, was clearly ‘degenerate’, suffering from a hereditary taint of emotional weakness. In the second half of the nineteenth century, ‘manliness’ became a key term of approval in public discourse, at least among men. The growth of a public sphere and in particular the gradual emergence and extension of parliamentary systems was predicated on the assumption that only men possessed the rationality and sense of responsibility to engage in political and legislative activity. The female-dominated salons of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century were replaced by men’s clubs, many of which, as in the Frankfurt Parliament of 1848, or in the Carlton Club (1832) and the Reform Club (1836) in London, performed a vital political function. The emphasis on the manly culminated in the cult of the hero as championed by Thomas Carlyle in On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841), in which he wrote ‘History is nothing but the biography of the Great Man’ – the titanic superhuman who swept all his enemies aside and dominated history with his power and aggression. In a very different version the idea of the great man reappeared in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. One consequence of this concept was drawn by the Austrian writer Otto Weininger (1880–1903) in his huge tract Sex and Character, published posthumously in 1903 after his suicide at the age of twenty-three. Weininger thought that only masculine women such as lesbians could be truly emancipated; the rest were passive, unproductive and uncreative. Weininger was also profoundly antisemitic: he declared that Jews were feminine by nature, and so incapable of fulfilling men’s true destiny of becoming geniuses. Since he himself was Jewish, his suicide, carried out in the house in Vienna where Beethoven, the greatest of all geniuses, had died, could be regarded as a logical final step in his life: perhaps the most extreme of all examples of Jewish self-hatred.

Manliness for Victorian Englishmen and their continental counterparts was expressed physically in the form of beards and moustaches. The fashion began around the middle of the century. By the 1870s half of the men whose pictures appeared in the Illustrated London News were wearing a full beard. Some justified their decision to become more hirsute on medical grounds, as the miasmatic theory of disease, dominant in mid-century, prompted the idea that the beard could be a filter against dangerous and unhealthy vapours (Bismarck called his moustache ‘my respirator’). More importantly, a beard made it easier for a man to present an impassive face to the world, avoiding the expressions of emotion that were felt to be the characteristic of the female sex. On the European Continent full beards were less common among the educated classes than they were in Britain. In Greece, for example, moustaches were ubiquitous among men of all classes, but a beard was mostly only chosen by politicians like Eleftherios Venizelos (1864–1936) who wanted to make a good impression on the international stage, and even here he kept it well groomed and relatively short, like that of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia (1868–1918) or his near-identical cousin King George V of Britain (1865–1936). International fashion may have prompted Tsar Alexander III of Russia to wear a full beard, but in general the association of a full beard with the muzhik, the peasant, deterred upper- and middle-class Russian men from sporting it – though this was precisely why the novelist Leo Tolstoy wore a particularly large and unkempt specimen.

In Germany moustaches were more common, but could also be very luxuriant. Friedrich Nietzsche took particular trouble, as his contemporary the Swiss philologist Jacob Mähly (1828–1902) remarked, with the cultivation of ‘his huge moustache, which protected him from any charge of having feminine characteristics about him’. German men were particularly notable for the variety of exotic growths on their faces, from Kaiser Wilhelm I’s bristling mutton-chop side-whiskers to the long forked beard sported by Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz (1849–1930) and the famous moustache worn by Kaiser Wilhelm II (1859–1941), with its carefully tended upturned ends. Before the 1840s beards had been a sign of cultural or political unconventionality, the property of artists and Chartists. Following the collapse of the Chartist movement and the defeat of the European revolutions in 1848, beards became respectable, their allure increased though not caused by the heroic reputation of the soldiers who returned unshaven from the Crimean War in 1856. This trend had little to do with shaving technology, or its absence; in fact it defied it as more and more men spurned the advantages that came in 1847 with the invention of the safety razor by William Henson (1812–88). Henson himself seems to have made little use of his own invention and sported a fine set of whiskers. The chronology of the British beard was followed roughly by men – many of them artists – on the Continent; almost all the French Impressionists, for example, sported beards. The Russian composer Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka (1804–57) was clean-shaven in the 1840s but had acquired a neatly trimmed full beard by 1856, and was followed by his fellow composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–93). Johannes Brahms stopped shaving in the 1860s. An accepted alternative was provided by the kind of mutton-chop whiskers worn by the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen from the mid-1860s onwards. But Ibsen abandoned his whiskers when they were no longer fashionable, and by the eve of the First World War the mutton-chops which the Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Joseph continued to wear had become a sign of his survival from a world that had long since passed into history.

Masculinity was also signified in the nineteenth century by the top hat, which had replaced the tricorne by the 1820s, after which time it became virtually ubiquitous among the middle classes. Once Prince Albert started wearing one, in 1850, the triumph of the top hat in Britain was assured, and it was soon imitated on the Continent. As silk replaced beaver skin in their manufacture, top hats grew ever higher, extending in America into the ‘stove-pipe’. It was not surprising that collapsible top hats began to go on sale, particularly useful when attending the opera or theatre. Unlike the full-length beard, the top hat persisted until the First World War and beyond. Combined with a dark frock coat and, from the 1830s, trousers instead of knee breeches, it was a symbol of bourgeois respectability, advertising the wearer’s status and power. Its main function was not to protect the head but to be doffed when greeting others: social gradations were observed by the order in which hats were doffed. Not wearing a hat was an obvious sign of insanity or distance from civilization. A Berlin newspaper reported in 1893 that ‘a hatless man’ had been spotted wandering about the streets and bothering passers-by; clearly he was mentally disturbed. In Charles Dickens’s novel Our Mutual Friend (1865) Gaffer Hexam, who makes a living by fishing dead bodies out of the Thames and emptying their pockets into his purse, is described as ‘half savage’ because he has ‘no covering on his matted head’.

In earlier times, including the eighteenth century, aristocratic men had worn clothing that distinguished them as members of the titled nobility, but the triumph of the top hat and frock coat reflected the blurring and then the disappearance of the social boundary that separated the nobility from the upper echelons of the bourgeoisie. While masculinity was advertised through generally dull grey or black clothing, women’s dress was more colourful, with the waist coming down from the high ‘Empire line’ and then from the 1850s the crinoline, a skirt billowing outwards supported by a series of hoops, completely concealing the body’s natural shape beneath. With the growth of feminist ideas, however, the impracticality of such styles gave way to the more close-fitting ‘princess line’, while the more advanced feminists began wearing divided skirts, known as ‘bloomers’ after their American inventor, the temperance and women’s rights advocate Amelia Bloomer (1818–94), who had adopted them in imitation of Turkish pantaloons in the 1850s. Women’s fashions began to change more rapidly as paper patterns and sewing machines became more widely available, and the fashion industry began to emerge, with its advertising campaigns for new styles for every season. The ‘bustle’, attached to the back of a skirt to keep its hem from dragging, was for instance only current for a few years in the 1880s. Common throughout the century, however, were corsets, usually made of whalebone, to bring in the waist, and, as with men, hats, though for women these were often of very modest dimensions, at least until the first decade and a half of the twentieth century, when extravagant wide-brimmed hats became fashionable, often sporting an array of ostrich feathers, imported from the colonies and dyed in a variety of different colours. Fashions such as these were only available to the well off, though with the spread of the department store it became easier for women of the lower middle class to acquire stylish dresses as well.

The rise of the beard from mid-century onwards can perhaps be best understood as a reaction to the emergence in many European countries of a new feminist movement, which began to bring women into the public sphere as campaigners for the recognition of equal rights in many areas of life. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the characterization of men as rational and women as emotional was expressed in the law’s placing of women in the same category as children, their rights exercised by their husband, or by their father if they were unmarried. Women were barred from most professions in most European countries as the professionalization of medicine and the law raised further the barriers against them, while their lack of legal rights prevented them from being active in business, banking and finance. More fundamental, perhaps, was discrimination against women in education. Most professions required a university degree, but women were not admitted to universities across the greater part of Europe until the latter decades of the century. In the Code Napoléon, which governed civil law not only in France, Belgium, Spain, Portugal and Poland, but also in significant parts of western Germany, and had a strong influence over the Romanian Code of 1864, women were not legal persons but were treated as minors until they were married, after which they were represented legally by their husband. They could not sign contracts, and they required the permission of their father or husband if they wanted to engage in paid employment, change residence, or conduct a lawsuit. The law required the wife to obey her husband. He was entitled to use force to compel her to reside at a place of his own choosing. If she committed adultery, she could be imprisoned for up to two years; adultery by men, in contrast, was not a crime at all. If a husband discovered his wife committing adultery and killed her, he could not be prosecuted for murder, while a wife had no legal protection if she committed an act of violence against her husband. The Code Napoléon had originally allowed divorce, but this right was deleted in France in 1816, after the Restoration.

In Russian law the Code of 1836 required that a wife was obliged in law to go with her husband wherever he went, unless he was sent to Siberia. She was not a legal person and needed her father’s permission, or her husband’s, to work, study, travel or trade. Divorce was theoretically possible on grounds of adultery, five years’ unexplained absence, or deprivation of civil rights, but in practice it was hard to obtain. Thus in Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina (1877) the eponymous heroine, married to a government official she does not love, has an affair with Vronsky, a younger man, and bears his child. But despite her husband’s eventual consent, she is unable to divorce him because the law only allows the innocent party to sue for divorce and requires either a confession from the guilty party or evidence of infidelity, both of which would ruin her reputation. Despairing of ever resolving the situation, Anna commits suicide by throwing herself under a train. In Germany the Civil Law Code of 1900, which replaced all previous provisions and was valid throughout the German Empire, removed the few rights that women had possessed under the laws of the Prussian Enlightenment, by giving all a woman’s property to her husband on marriage, and making divorce considerably more difficult by introducing the principle of guilt.

Yet despite the persistence of many of these inequalities, one of the most striking features of the nineteenth century was the gradual improvement of women’s rights. In Sweden this was pioneered by none other than Fredrika Bremer, whose work bore political consequences in 1858, following what was called ‘the Hertha debate’. From this point onwards unmarried women in Sweden enjoyed full legal equality. In 1862, Bremer declared publicly in favour of women’s suffrage, and indeed in the same year municipal voting rights were extended to women of legal majority. Organized feminism in many countries had its origins in female philanthropy, and Bremer too engaged in educational and charitable work for the poor. Such activities brought women into the public sphere, and confronted them with many of the problems caused for poorer women by their lack of rights. One way of improving the situation of at least some women was by entering the professions. A campaign led by Sophia Jex-Blake (1840–1912) resulted in the admission of women to the entrance examination for Edinburgh University in 1869 (152 candidates sat for the exam, with four women passing among the top seven candidates). However, the medical students, egged on by some of the more conservative professors, blocked their way into the examination room at Surgeons’ Hall on 18 November 1870, pelting them with garbage and mud. Despite the fact that the rioters were fined by the university, the Court of Session, the supreme legal body in Scotland, ruled in 1873 that the women should not have been admitted and had no right to sit examinations. The women qualified abroad instead, and returned later on to take up practice. Scottish universities admitted women on equal terms from 1892.

The Englishwoman Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (1836–1917) gained a licence to practise medicine through a loophole in the statutes of the Society of Apothecaries, a loophole the Society closed immediately afterwards. She opened a private practice and dispensary in London, having obtained a medical degree from the Sorbonne in Paris, although with some difficulty, in 1870. Three years later she was admitted through another loophole to the British Medical Association, which also changed its rules immediately afterwards to stop any other women from joining. The first woman to practise medicine in Britain was not, however, either Anderson or Jex-Blake, but Dr James Barry (c. 1792–1865). Born in Ireland and brought up as Margaret Ann Bulkley, a girl, she secretly took on a masculine identity after puberty as James Barry in order to be able to enter medical school at Edinburgh University (a plan hatched by family members). Barry obtained a medical degree in 1812, lived as a man thereafter and became a successful military surgeon, travelling to postings in South Africa, Mauritius, St Helena, Canada and the Caribbean accompanied by a black manservant and a dog called Psyche. Barry’s true sex was only discovered after her death, causing considerable embarrassment to the medical authorities.

The preferred universities for women on the Continent were mostly Swiss. Zurich opened its university to women in 1847, twelve years after its foundation. Similarly, the University of Bern, established in 1834, admitted women to study for degrees in the 1870s; around half the 2,000 students were from other countries, and here too Russian and German women found the opportunities denied to them in their own universities. Just across the border, the universities of the liberal South German state of Baden admitted women in 1902, and by 1908 all German universities allowed women to study. Women were briefly admitted to Russian universities in the liberal heyday of 1860–1, but they were all expelled in 1862 and henceforth Russian women studied abroad. However, the tsarist government disapproved of this too, since it considered foreign study to be a source of political radicalism, and so it recalled all female students studying at foreign universities to Russia. A solution was eventually found in the form of special women’s study courses held in St Petersburg. Nearly though not quite of university level, they were supported by the spread of women’s secondary education in the 1870s, but in the reaction of the 1880s all of them were closed down apart from one, which was closely supervised by the secret police. A fresh wave of women departed to study abroad as a consequence. Alarmed at this development, which can hardly have been surprising in the circumstances, the government of Tsar Nicholas II re-established the women’s study courses in the 1890s. By 1904 between five and six thousand students were attending the women’s study courses, compared to a mere 150 twenty years previously. After 1905 women were finally allowed to take state university examinations. The situation was similar in many other countries. The first state-funded girls’ grammar school in Germany, for example, was opened in 1893. In France a regular system of girls’ secondary education was only established in 1880, but this still did not prepare girls to take the baccalauréat. The first women’s college, Girton, was set up in Cambridge in 1869, but its students were not allowed to take their degrees until the mid-twentieth century even if they passed their examinations. Progress was slow but it was under way.

Women’s rights in the private sphere improved as well. In 1857 the Matrimonial Causes Act allowed divorce for the first time in England without the passage of a special private Act of Parliament; it also included provisions for legal separation. A new divorce court was set up in London, and such was the scale of business that it dealt with a thousand cases during its first six years of existence. However, it still treated men and women differently, allowing men to petition for divorce on the sole ground of adultery, and requiring them to name the co-respondent, while women had to prove cruelty, bigamy or other offences in addition and were not required to name the co-respondent. In 1870 a further improvement in women’s rights took place in Britain when Parliament passed a Married Women’s Property Act, which provided that any income a wife earned through her own work remained hers, a measure extended in 1882 to the property she brought into the marriage. In 1884 divorce was finally legalized in France, and in Germany women were legally recognized as independent persons by a law passed in 1875. By the turn of the century women’s rights over their property and their children had improved in many jurisdictions, and women had made their presence felt in the public sphere as editors of magazines and writers of newspaper columns, fatally undermining the claim that they were too emotional to take part in public life.

The feminist organizations that pressed almost everywhere for legal and educational improvements in the status of women mostly emerged in the liberal atmosphere of the 1860s and 1870s. Organized feminism in Sweden began with the Association for Married Women’s Property Rights in 1873, which actively campaigned on economic issues. The Danish Women’s Association, founded in 1871 in the wake of a reorientation of liberal politics, was pulled to the left in 1883 as the ending of state-regulated prostitution became a central issue; similarly, in Norway, a series of speeches denouncing the double standard of morality by the nationalist writer Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson (1832–1910) in 1887 led to the creation of a White Ribbon Society in 1892 and campaigns for social purity, temperance and women’s suffrage. Early feminism in France was closely associated with Republicanism. The two leading figures were Léon Richer (1824–1911) and Maria Deraismes (1828–94), both Freemasons. In 1875 their organization, the Society for the Improvement of Women’s Lot, was banned by the pro-monarchist government; at the time the organization had a mere 150 members and its meetings featured an average attendance of ten or twelve. In 1882–3, Richer launched a new female emancipation society, the French League for Women’s Rights, but it was dominated by men, who made up around half its membership, and in 1883 it was outflanked by a more radical organization, the Women’s Suffrage Society, led by Hubertine Auclert (1848–1914). Both remained limited in numbers and influence. German feminism was dominated by middle-class Protestant women, one of whom, the social novelist Louise Otto-Peters (1819–95), who had already been an active feminist during the 1848 Revolution, took advantage of the revival of liberal politics to found the General German Women’s Association in 1865. For thirty years its politics were ultra-cautious. It was unable to raise the demand for the vote because women were barred by law from engaging in political activities at all in most parts of Germany, including Prussia. It petitioned the Reichstag to write married women’s property rights into the Civil Code promulgated in 1900, though without success.

Until the late nineteenth century feminism was everywhere an almost exclusively middle-class movement. It had little to say to the great mass of the peasantry who constituted the majority of Europe’s population throughout the period. In some respects the situation of women in rural society worsened during the nineteenth century. As young men left for the towns in the age of heavy industrialization, lured by the prospect of higher wages, so the women they left behind had to shoulder an increasing burden of work while still running the household, raising the children and doing the domestic chores. As a local doctor in the Zeitz district of northern Germany wrote in 1912, there had been a ‘change in the division of labour’, which ‘places heavy demands on the women’s physical resources’. This was only partly balanced out by the greater freedom women had to marry as serfdom was abolished and better communications made it easier for them to travel away from the village and so obtain a wider choice of potential spouse. Divorce, however, was still beyond the reach of most of them. In England the high cost of divorce even after it became easier to obtain meant that popular justice continued to assert itself in the practice of wife-sales, described disapprovingly at the opening of Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), as the hay-trusser Michael Henchard, drunk on furmity laced with rum, parades his wife Susan at market and auctions her off to the highest bidder. In practice, the purchaser was usually pre-arranged. In 1833 the sale of a woman for two shillings and sixpence was reported at market in the Essex town of Epping. Brought before the magistrates, the husband claimed that he had not lived with her for some time, ‘and that she had lived in open adultery with the man Bradley, by whom she had been purchased’. The authorities stamped this practice out by the First World War; but it indicated a widespread lack of sentimentality about marital relations in rural society that shocked the urban middle classes. The focus of the feminist movement on property, educational improvement and marital rights did not really apply to the great mass of working-class women either, whose lives were taken up by hard work, childbearing and the struggle to survive.

Nevertheless, what the feminists achieved paved the way for the extension of meaningful rights to all women. Even if only a handful of women entered professional life before 1914, the fact that they were able to practise as doctors or study at university in itself established a vital precedent for the future. The feminists won the argument not so much on the basis of equal rights for all individuals as on the principle that women would exercise a beneficent influence on society because they were more moral, more sympathetic, more feeling than men. Women proved their worth, many of them declared, by their engagement with charitable and philanthropic activities, through which they showed not only that they could apply their motherly instincts to society as a whole but also that they could organize and channel these instincts in a responsible manner, to the benefit of all. So women had to appear to be strong as they entered the public sphere and the industrial and administrative world, and began to present themselves in less emotional terms. ‘The woman who indulges in the luxury of a “good cry”’, declared the Daily Mirror in 1911, ‘no longer exists.’ The article was headlined: ‘Women Who Never Cry: Business Girl’s Grit Replaces Victorian Tears and Hysterics’. However much feminists might stress women’s closeness to nature and the world of feeling, the end result of their efforts was to ensure that middle- and upper-class women also developed, like men, what the Americans called ‘the stiff upper lip’.

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

People in Europe, as in other parts of the world, have generally sought happiness, among other things, through cultured activities. This search has not always been conducted separately from the world of work. In pre-industrial society, men and women sang to set the rhythm of their work during sowing and reaping, spinning or weaving, relieving the boredom and repetition of their tasks as well as setting a pace for themselves in performing them. ‘When the ploughman sings’, went one saying in France, ‘the plough goes well.’ In the Pyrenees women were hired to follow the reapers to sing out the rhythm of their scything. Musical instruments such as fiddles, bagpipes and drums were brought out for special occasions such as weddings or dances; people played them and sang songs handed down to them from their parents, bought ballads from pedlars, or listened to itinerant minstrels singing for their supper on the village green or square. German Bänkelsänger – ‘bench-singers’ – would travel around with a satchel full of songsheets or illustrated pamphlets telling rhymed stories of miraculous events, strange happenings, grisly murders and tragic love affairs; these were known as Moritaten because they frequently ended with a strong moral message. Often, especially in areas that experienced hardship and oppression, folk songs lamented the poor country people’s lot, articulating complaints about hunger, hard work, taxes, conscription and other miseries of daily life: ‘They lead us like oxen’, as one Romanian folk song had it, ‘they shear us like sheep.’ Ribald songs accompanied village weddings, just as folk songs were adapted for political purposes during upheavals such as the 1848 Revolutions.

Folk songs seldom survived the transition to the urban-industrial environment. ‘The beautiful old folk-song,’ wrote an anonymous American observer of Russian popular culture in 1893, ‘ . . . disappears at the sound of the steam whistle.’ Slow epics and ballads were being replaced by shorter and livelier songs, communal rituals by songs focusing on individual experience, traditional melodies by new ones imported from the towns. With the spread of the railways and the consequent improvement of communications, young people in the French countryside began to demand popular melodies from Paris sung in French rather than local tunes sung in local patois, while both the village priest and the village schoolteacher distributed printed songbooks with edifying patriotic and moral ditties in them, and encouraged the formation of orphéons, or choral societies, to bring village music under their control. In 1864 a school inspector in the department of the Aude in the south reported with satisfaction that ‘the lewd songs that wounded even the least modest ears have been replaced by the religious and patriotic choirs of numerous choral societies due to schools and the initiative of teachers’. Itinerant balladeers could not compete, and their trade died out. Traditional country dances, with men and women facing each other in lines or in a round, had provided opportunities for courtship regulated by the community, but by the 1870s the young had come to prefer dancing in pairs to the strains of a waltz, a polka or a quadrille – ‘the dances of city people’, as one observer called them in Lorraine in the 1880s. ‘The old dances,’ it was reported in Lauragais in the south-west in 1891, ‘are disappearing progressively, and most already survive only as memories.’ Dancing became separated from the ritual year, and became a form of organized leisure and popular entertainment.

Rural popular culture also attracted the growing hostility of the state. Officials tried to curb fairs and processions because they considered them a threat to public order. Rough and often bloody village games were suppressed in the interests of health and safety, while shooting and throwing competitions with live animals as the targets were banned in the cause of animal welfare. In Russia officials and middle-class moralists deplored the drunkenness and violence they observed in popular fairs and ceremonies. During patronal festivals, one temperance campaigner complained in 1908, the peasants ‘drink themselves into a complete frenzy, bite off one another’s fingers, often thrash each other to death . . . The same is true on religious holidays . . . Vodka flows like rivers and there is widespread immorality and disorder.’ The organized mass fistfights common on such occasions often ended in serious injury or even death. Already by the late 1890s almost fifty Russian cities and towns had outlawed or curtailed holiday markets, deterring the peasants who came to town to take part in them. In England, as elsewhere, the enclosure of common land took away many of the venues traditionally used for country recreations. By 1840, as William Howitt (1792–1879), writer and husband of Fredrika Bremer’s translator Mary Howitt, noted, ‘a mighty revolution has taken place in the sports and pastimes of the common people . . . In my own recollection, the appearance of morris-dancers, guisers, plough-bullocks, and Christmas carolers, has become more and more rare.’

The consequences, as the economist and circuit judge Joseph Kay (1821–78) observed, were particularly unfortunate as the lower classes flocked into the new industrial towns. ‘In England,’ he noted in 1850, ‘it may be said that the poor have now no relaxation but the alehouse or the gin palace.’ Alcohol was the lubricant of industrialization. Pubs and bars proliferated in the new urban world. In the industrial French department of the Nord there was already one bar for every forty-six inhabitants in 1890, catering for the thirst of the predominantly urban working-class population. By 1910 the French were drinking nearly 5 billion litres of wine every year, though very often it was watered down by both the growers and the barkeepers, so that it was not always very potent. The authorities everywhere tried to curb the taste for alcoholic beverages, but with little success: to circumvent the licensing laws in Prussia, for example, cheap and informal Schnapskasinos opened up, often in rooms rented privately by groups of workers. By 1893 there were more than 100 of these in the mining districts of the Ruhr, with over 16,000 members. As the name implied, they served not only bottled beer but also hard liquor. While Germans drank Schnaps, the French preferred absinthe, a green-coloured spirit based on the medicinal plant wormwood: they were consuming 36 million litres a year by 1910. A spectacular murder committed by an absinthe addict led to a ban on the drink being written into the Swiss Constitution after a referendum in 1908, followed by similar bans in the Netherlands in 1909 and France itself in 1914.

In Russia the government was reluctant to attempt to reduce alcohol consumption even before it established a monopoly over the distilling of vodka in the 1890s, when the alcohol revenues of the Russian state began to increase almost exponentially, from 250 million roubles a year to nearly a billion by the eve of the First World War. Taxes on vodka supplied nearly a third of government revenues for much of the century. Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866) – originally intended to be called The Drunkards – is full of scenes of inebriation in the bars and taverns of St Petersburg, opening with a drunken monologue by the hopeless alcoholic Marmeladov, who sells his daughter into prostitution to subsidise his addiction. Similar reports could be heard from social commentators all over Europe. In The Condition of the Working Class in England (1844), Friedrich Engels described how on being paid on a Saturday afternoon, ‘the whole working class pours from its own poor quarters into the main thoroughfares, [where] intemperance may be seen in all its brutality’. Early on in the industrial era, indeed before it even began, temperance organizations emerged across Europe, often inspired by religious movements, to combat drinking both through moral exhortation and through pressure for legislation and tax increases. Such organizations were particularly powerful in Scandinavia: in Sweden the government established a monopoly on the sale of liquor, which could only be obtained in carefully regulated outlets, while in Norway, where there were similar arrangements, the average annual consumption per head of akvavit fell from 32 pints in 1833 to 12 pints by 1851. Pure water and soft drinks became more widely available to quench the worker’s thirst, so that between 1899 and 1913 a 25 per cent reduction in alcohol consumption was registered across Germany. In Britain consumption of beer began to fall from the 1880s onwards, from 40 gallons per person per year in the 1870s to under 30 gallons on the eve of the First World War. For the British bourgeoisie, tea-drinking was already a central part of domestic life by 1800, but with urban growth tea trickled down into the lower middle and respectable working classes as well, with average annual per capita consumption rocketing from 1.6 pounds in the 1840s to 4.4 pounds in the 1870s and 5.7 pounds in the 1890s.

Clubs and societies offered further alternatives to drinking. In the northern industrial town of Lille under the French Second Empire, for example, there were sixty-three drinking clubs, but also thirty-seven clubs for card-playing, twenty-three for bowls, thirteen for skittles, ten for archery and eighteen for crossbow-shooting. Miners commonly kept pigeons or greyhounds for racing, symbolizing perhaps the freedom and speed of movement they were unable to achieve for themselves in the cramped conditions of the coalface. Football clubs were founded in many areas and helped cement the solidarity of new urban communities. Initially in England the Football Association, founded in 1863 in an attempt to enforce the ‘Cambridge rules’ – drawn up in 1848 by representatives of the public schools at Trinity College, Cambridge – was dominated by elite educational establishments. But in 1883 the working-class team of Blackburn Olympic inaugurated a new era when it defeated the Old Etonians in the Football Association Cup Final. The game rapidly spread to the Continent, usually taken there by the British. As early as 1863 The Scotsman newspaper reported that ‘a number of English gentlemen living in Paris have lately organized a football club . . . The football contests take place in the Bois de Boulogne, by permission of the authorities, and surprise the French amazingly.’ The Dresden English Football Club was set up by British workers in 1874 and was soon followed by others. A. C. Milan was founded by the English lacemaker Herbert Klipin (1870–1917) in 1899, under the name of the Milan Cricket and Foot-Ball Club (the cricket did not last very long). The first football match in Poland was played between Lwów and Cracow in 1894. It was won by Lwów with the first recorded goal in Polish history, scored by Włodzimierz Chomicki (1878–1953) in the sixth minute, after which the referee ended the game: an understanding of the rules was slow in coming. Football was already on the way to becoming an international sporting phenomenon by 1914, with an increasingly dominant working-class following; indeed, many teams were set up in industrial towns, like the Ruhr club of Schalke 04, the number signifying its date of foundation; its players were popularly known as ‘the miners’.

As literacy rates improved, entertainment of a different kind was provided by the rise of the popular press. In Russia the gradual relaxation of censorship from the time of Alexander II onwards encouraged the rise of the ‘penny press’, single-sheet newspapers sold on the street rather than by subscription. The best-selling of these ‘boulevard newspapers’ was the Moscow Sheet, whose editor Nicholas Pastukhov (1831–1911), a former innkeeper described by one of his own journalists as an ‘illiterate editor who in the midst of illiterate readers . . . knew how to speak their language’. A rival penny paper in St Petersburg was dismissed in 1870 as ‘a sort of junkyard of all sorts of rumours, gossip, and news’. The young writer Anton Chekhov was told by his editor that ‘we’ll grab the readers with stupidities and then instruct them with learned articles’. In practice, the latter continued to be in short supply. In France local newspapers began to be produced from the 1870s onwards, though they were read mainly by the middle classes at first; in 1896, however, the police described one such paper, L’Avenir du Cantal, as ‘much read by the peasant’. Its sales had climbed to 2,300 three times a week, more than the entire press of the south-central department of Cantal two decades before. ‘The taste for newspapers’, it was noted in the Breton commune of Guipel in 1903, ‘is creating serious competition for legends and traditional stories. It is expelling them from thought and conversation.’

Cheap newspapers in France were no more immune from sensationalism than they were in Russia. Murders, scandals, sensations of many kinds filled the pages of Le Petit Journal, founded in 1863. The proprietor, Moïse Polydore Millaud (1813–71), told the first editor that he must be ‘bold enough to appear stupid . . . Find out what the average man is thinking. Then let yourself be guided by this.’ The paper achieved sales of more than half a million by 1880. Such papers were not only sold on street corners but also in railway kiosks, whose number in France exceeded a thousand by the turn of the century. The circulation of the daily press in Paris mushroomed from one million in 1870 to five million in 1910, aided by the passage of a liberal new press law in 1881 and by the importation of rapid rotary printing presses manufactured by the Hoe Company in America. Newspaper circulation in Britain leapt as a result of the abolition of stamp duty in 1855, but long after this even the relatively popular papers like the Daily News, with a circulation of 150,000, or the Daily Telegraph, which reached 190,000 by the 1870s, were staid in appearance and respectable in content.

It was not until the 1896 that a truly popular press arrived, with the creation of the Daily Mail. By 1902 the paper was enjoying a circulation of over a million copies, the largest in the entire world. With its sensational headlines and stunts, such as the offer in 1906 of a prize of £1,000 for the first airplane flight across the English Channel, it quickly exerted an unrivalled popular appeal. If the press was becoming more sensational, it was in a new way, therefore, linked to the reporting of real-life events rather than stories of miracles and wonders. This was particularly the case in Germany, where generally high literacy rates and the effective ending of pre-censorship after the 1848 Revolution created a thriving newspaper industry. By 1862 there were thirty-two newspapers appearing in Berlin alone, six of them twice a day. In 1866 some 60,000 copies of the Cologne Newspaper were being printed daily. Illustrated weeklies like Die Gartenlaube with 400,000 subscribers by 1875 and satirical journals such as Kladderadatch and Simplicissimus were even more popular than the newspapers. The number of newspapers in Germany increased from around 1,500 in 1850 to 4,221 in 1914. However, sensationalism did not become a significant feature of German newspapers until the 1920s, when the highly respectable and well-organized Social Democratic subculture that provided newspapers and magazines for the industrial working class began to be sidelined by the rise of the commercial press.

Besides newspapers and magazines, the emerging working classes of the industrial age also read books with increasing enthusiasm, helped by the spread of public libraries. Reprints of popular novels could be bought for two shillings by the 1850s, while the publisher Richard Bentley (1794–1871) was producing one-shilling books in his ‘Railway Library’ at the same time. Such improving popular literature did not plunge into a cultural vacuum; it was largely aimed at replacing what serious-minded reformers regarded as the vulgar and corrupting influence of sensational ‘penny dreadfuls’. In Germany the equivalent of the latter was the colportage novel, sold door-to-door or on the streets as a cheap serial publication. The Executioner of Berlin, published in 130 weekly instalments in the early 1890s, was typical of the genre, and included executions, murders, kidnappings, duels, exhumations, drownings, accidents, arson and espionage, all within the first few chapters. Publishers also produced cheap editions of the classics as a kind of moral counterweight; popular biographies of heroic figures such as Garibaldi had a broad appeal; and improving literature was churned out by organizations such as the Society for the Dissemination of Useful Books, founded in Russia in 1861; but there is little doubt which genre sold the best. Concern about the quality of working-class reading led in Britain to the Public Libraries Act of 1850, which established the principle of free libraries funded by local authorities. Yet the idea was slow to spread across the Continent, with the Frenchman Eugène Morel (1869–1934) only pioneering the idea in 1910. More common were reading clubs and societies, and small libraries founded by trade unions in the social centres they built.

Cheap fiction was also used as the basis for melodramas, which reached the height of their popularity during the Victorian era. Typical was The String of Pearls (1846–7), which featured as its villain Sweeney Todd, ‘the demon barber of Fleet Street’, who murdered his customers to make fillings for meat pies. Apart from the villain, customarily hissed loudly by the audience on his every appearance onstage, there was also usually a rather dim and unsuspecting young hero and an equally innocent damsel in distress, along with an aged parent and a servant. Melodrama merged seamlessly into the music hall, which emerged as a form of popular entertainment in the 1850s. The first to be opened was the Canterbury Hall in Lambeth, in 1852; by 1878 there were seventy-eight large music halls in the capital city. Songs and dances, with comic and acrobatic or juggling acts, were introduced by a compère while the audience ate and drank their way through the evening, which often ended in riotous disorder. English music halls were described by one commentator in 1868 as ‘gleaming temples of dissipation’ where audiences were ‘debased by low songs and vulgar exhibitions’. The messages purveyed in music-hall songs were hardly revolutionary – as one song had it, ‘It’s a little bit of what yer fancies does yer good’ – but moral reformers strongly disapproved of the ribaldry of performers such as Marie Lloyd (1870–1922), whose performances were deemed unacceptably risqué by middle-class critics.

In France simple cafés chantants such as the Cabaret des Assassins in Montmartre, founded in the 1850s and under its later name the Lapin Agile the haunt of artists and writers, were eventually trumped by more elaborate venues with stand-up comics, bands, dance routines and lavishly costumed performers. The most famous of these was the Folies Bergère, founded in 1869. The Moulin Rouge, which opened for business in 1889, was the birthplace of the cancan, a dance performed by a high-kicking line of chorus girls, and the haunt of the painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901), who designed its advertising posters. Here too there were risqué performances by artistes such as Mistinguett (Jeanne Bourgeois, 1875–1956), who catered for a mixed audience of all kinds avid for entertainment. Le Chat Noir (also known briefly as the Cabaret Artistique), opened in 1881 in Montmartre – the composer Erik Satie (1866–1925) earned his living playing the piano there – but it closed in 1897 following the death of its founder and host, Rodolphe Salis (1851–97). The working-class equivalent of the music hall in Germany, the Tingeltangel, so called after the noise customers made when they jangled the cutlery against their glasses while singing the refrain of a song, was born in Berlin in the 1870s, and soon spread across northern and western Germany. By 1879 the Tingeltangel was being attacked in the Reichstag. It was to be judged immoral ‘partly’, as one speaker declared, ‘owing to the frivolous or suggestive content of what is performed, and partly because of the suggestive nature of the performances themselves’.

Outside France the fashion for literary and artistic cafés spread until they found imitators like the Zielony Balonik (Green Balloon) in Cracow, established in 1905 explicitly for writers and painters; it was forced to close in 1912 under the weight of censorship and police interference. In Germany the Überbrettl cabaret, founded in Berlin in 1901, employed the Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) as its director of music. Els Quatre Gats in Barcelona, which opened in 1897 as a beer hall, tavern and hostel, was explicitly modelled on the Parisian original and specialized in traditional Catalan puppet shows. But despite – or possibly because of – its habit of displaying modernist paintings to try and sell them to the public, it closed after a few years, in 1903. The Café Central in Vienna, which opened for business in 1876, proved more durable: in 1913 alone customers included Sigmund Freud, the later Yugoslav Communist Josip Broz Tito (1892–1980), Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. On the eve of the First World War the Austrian socialist leader Victor Adler (1852–1918) warned the Foreign Minister, Count Leopold Berchtold (1863–1942), that a European war would cause a revolution in Russia. ‘And who will lead this revolution?’ Berchtold asked sarcastically: ‘Perhaps Mr Bronstein sitting over there at the Café Central?’ Lev Davidovich Bronstein (1879–1940) was indeed a revolutionary, though in his political activities he went under the name of Leon Trotsky.

In Munich the great beer cellars of the 1880s, such as the Bürgerbräukeller (1885) or the Löwenbräukeller (1888), with their large halls and outside gardens, provided entertainment as well as food and drink for thousands, with a resident band playing background music and on Saturday evenings a series of singers, comedians and variety acts taking the stage. In Russia such institutions were less closely linked to the consumption of alcohol because factory owners and temperance organizations set up their own theatres and put on performances of short dramas, operettas, farces and vaudeville shows, and acts by clowns, magicians, comedians and other popular entertainers. In 1899 alone the Guardianships of Popular Temperance organized 1,332 theatre performances and 1,356 outdoor entertainments: by 1904 these numbers had increased to 5,139 and 4,238 respectively. Around 40 per cent of their offerings consisted of serious drama, and they were reported to have driven the popular theatrical entertainments put on at the Shrovetide Fair – celebrated in the ballet Petrushka (1911) by Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky (1882–1971) – and other folk festivals out of existence. In 1908 it was claimed that ‘the Guardianship has managed to fight the uncultivated masses’ aspiration for spectacles of a baser sort and arouse in them a love for classical art’. Nevertheless, melodrama remained the most popular form of theatre in Russia; one manager complained in 1902 that ‘no innovations, even in the guise of artistic ensemble, interested the public, who were captivated only by melodramatic acting in heartrending plays’.

An alternative to the theatre or the beer cellar, the bar or the café, was offered to the working class across Europe by the dance hall, often little more than a pub room cleared of its furniture. This was a world away from the formal waltzes at middle- and upper-class balls danced to the strains of music by Viennese composers such as Johann Strauss (1825–99) on the one hand, or the elaborate communal dancing that could be seen in villages and rural communities across Europe on the other. In the dance hall the steps were simple, the music basic, and the dancers couples. The German theologian and social investigator Paul Göhre (1864–1928), who lived as a worker for three months to observe the life of the proletariat, thoroughly disapproved of the goings-on at the Sunday-night dance halls in an industrial suburb of Chemnitz in 1895: ‘In these halls, in the nights from Sunday to Monday, our young labouring people are losing today not only their hard-earned wages but their strength, their ideals, their chastity.’ Authorities everywhere began to impose restrictions on these and similar institutions in the name of public order and morality. By the early 1900s a licence was required to open a music hall in Britain, and on the eve of the First World War alcohol was finally banned on music-hall premises. Similar measures were taken in Germany: in Düsseldorf the police moved the closing time for public dances forward to 10 p.m., a step followed in many other German industrial towns.

Before 1914 music for dances had to be played by live bands. The phonograph, invented by Thomas Edison in 1877, using wax cylinders for recording, was little more than a novelty. However, by recording the voices of Gladstone, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Tennyson and others for publicity purposes, the phonograph left a record of what they sounded like that can still be heard today. The German-born American Emile Berliner (1851–1929) improved the technology by inventing a flat disc in 1887 that could be played on what he called a ‘gramophone’. But the rotation speed was difficult to control, the record only provided two minutes of music, and full orchestras had to be replaced by bands numbering only a dozen musicians or so, because the recording equipment could only pick up sounds emitted close to it. It also took a long time to invent a method of copying discs, so that musicians had to record the same piece fifty times if they wanted to sell fifty records. All this made gramophones and records very expensive. Nevertheless, the great Italian tenor Enrico Caruso (1873–1921), whose resonant voice was ideally suited to the new medium, caused a sensation with his first recordings. By 1914 he was earning £20,000 a year from sales of his records. Tchaikovsky called the gramophone ‘the most surprising, the most beautiful, and the most interesting among all inventions that have turned up in the nineteenth century’. He made sure that his own voice was recorded for posterity by Edison as well.

At the end of the century all these activities began to be put into the shade by the rise of the entertainment medium that was soon to dominate the leisure time of the masses: the cinema. Already in 1839 the Frenchman Louis Daguerre (1787–1851) had produced the first photograph – known as the daguerreotype – and technical improvements by the 1850s enabled the British photographer Roger Fenton (1819–69) to take dramatic pictures of the Crimean War. Early photographs needed a long exposure to achieve results. Sitters had to remain still for as much as half an hour if they wanted an unblurred portrait. Often they were assisted by neck-braces, armbands and waist restrainers to stop them from moving. The photographer had to place the camera on a tripod and cover his head in black cloth to keep out unwanted light. Only towards the end of the century did gelatin plates open up the possibility of capturing a body in motion, while cheap, hand-held Kodak box cameras, first manufactured in America in 1888, brought photography within the compass of ordinary people. At the same time experimentation with multiple lenses and perforated celluloid reels led to the invention of motion pictures, the first of which was shown by the brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière in 1895. When one film showed a train coming towards the screen, members of the cinema audience panicked, threw themselves back into their seats, or jumped up and ran to the back of the auditorium. By 1897 the first studios had been built, and a rotating camera had been devised for panning shots. Far cheaper to put on than live entertainment acts, movies spread with extraordinary rapidity across Europe. Already in 1895 the Wintergarten Theatre in Berlin was showing an early one-take film. New techniques were developed that allowed for multi-shot and then multi-reel films, companies were set up to create and sell them, and dedicated cinemas began to appear, pioneered by the Nickelodeon in Pittsburgh in 1905.

The rapidity of the spread of the cinematograph – the term invented by the Lumières – can be illustrated by the example of Spain, where the first one-shot film was shown as early as 1896. Movies became hugely popular in the working-class districts of the larger towns, where initially they formed part of variety shows in basic premises like sheds and basements, known as baracas. By 1910 there were more than 100 venues in Barcelona alone, with grand purpose-built cinemas along the Ramblas providing 1,000 seats or more, segregated by ticket price so that the middle classes were not inconvenienced by the rowdiness of the working-class patrons. In such venues a pianist was often hired to provide dramatic musical accompaniment to the silent events being shown on screen; there might even be hand-tinted colour versions, though normally films were in black and white. A census carried out in 1914 counted more than 900 cinemas in Spain, including mobile shows that went from village to village. The government, worried about immorality, set up a pre-censorship system in 1912. The same happened in other countries: in Britain, for example, the Cinematograph Act of 1909 was followed in 1912 by the creation of the British Board of Film Censors. Surprisingly, perhaps, the most active country in movie production was Denmark, where the Nordisk company churned out sixty-seven films the year after its foundation in 1906. By 1914, however, imported American films were taking the largest share of movie showings in every European country. The European cinema industry had been born, but the global dominance of Hollywood, where movie companies were beginning to move from the East Coast by this time, was already on the horizon.

REALISM AND NATIONALISM

The realism of photography and moving pictures had a profound effect on the development of art. By mid-century the age of Romanticism was drawing to a close with the growing turn to Realism in the work of painters such as Gustave Courbet (1819–77), who eschewed mythical and religious themes of the past for the concerns of contemporary life. His landscapes abandoned the dramatic exaggeration and compositional artifice employed by the Romantics in favour of a naturalistic approach that suggested he had just come upon a scene and decided on the spot to paint it. In The Stone-Breakers (1849) Courbet depicted two peasants breaking rocks by the side of a road, while in A Burial at Ornans (1849) he showed the funeral of his great-uncle, depicting not richly clad models but the actual people who attended the event, participating in an orderly manner rather than indulging in the emotional gestures that would have been expected in a Romantic representation of the same subject. ‘The burial at Ornans,’ Courbet remarked, ‘was in reality the burial of Romanticism.’ Later he complained that ‘the title of Realist was thrust upon me just as the title of Romantic was imposed upon the men of 1830’. But his paintings undoubtedly inaugurated a new cultural style. Courbet was a political radical and a committed participant in the Paris Commune of 1871, and he painted scenes of poverty that were intended as social criticism rather than presentations of the picturesque. In The Gleaners (1857) Jean-François Millet (1814–75) showed poor peasant women bending over to pick up small ears of corn left on the fields after the harvest, while The Potato Eaters (1885) by Vincent van Gogh depicted a group of rough peasants sitting round a table eating their potatoes by the light of a little lamp. Van Gogh wanted, he said, to indicate by their appearance the fact that they had ‘tilled the earth themselves with these hands they are putting in the dish’.

Realist in a very different way were the English painters of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, founded in 1848. From one point of view the paintings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–82), William Holman Hunt (1827–1910), John Everett Millais (1829–96) and their colleagues reflected the concern of Romanticism, with their focus on the Middle Ages and religious subjects and their break with Classical models and techniques in the search for authenticity of expression. But they also followed the new Realism in using ordinary people, including working-class girls and prostitutes, as models. Millais’ painting Christ in the House of His Parents, exhibited in 1850, was widely condemned: instead of employing transcendental religious imagery, it was set amid the dirt and mess of a carpenter’s workshop and showed the Holy Family as ordinary, poor people. Even more controversial was the sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840–1917), whose sculptures were a far cry from the smooth Classicism of the Academies. Instead of following the Grecian tradition they made a direct appeal to the emotions through their dramatic and often unconventional poses and the roughness of their textures. In 1864 the Paris Salon rejected The Man with the Broken Nose, a bust of a Paris street-porter, because of what the judges considered its unfinished state. A life-size male nude, The Age of Bronze (1877), admitted to the Salon after a very close vote in the selection board, puzzled critics because it did not have an historical or mythological theme but was ‘just’, Rodin said, ‘a simple piece of sculpture without reference to subject’. By this time, however, he was beginning to win commissions. Rodin never completed the commission he was given to sculpt a vast doorway surround entitled The Gates of Hell, after Dante. But some of the figures he created as part of it subsequently became famous, notably The Thinker of which the first of many bronze castings was made in 1904, and The Kiss, an 1889 marble sculpture. Despite the controversy elicited by his work, Rodin achieved not only popular fame by the turn of the century but acceptance by the government, bypassing the Academies in the process.

Realism spread rapidly to other countries, reaching Russia for example in the shape of ‘the Wanderers’, fourteen young artists who abandoned the Imperial Academy of Arts in 1863 to form their own co-operative, painting scenes such as the celebrated Barge Haulers on the Volga (1873) by Ilya Yefimovich Repin (1844–1930). Similarly, the Realist novel was often, though not invariably, set in the present rather than in the Romantic past. It allowed readers to inhabit a world parallel to their own, where moral and social dramas were played out in ways that were recognizably similar to their own lives, but more eventful and exciting, and which sometimes prompted the desire to subscribe to the reforming ideas of the author. The chronology of literary Realism did not match that of its counterpart in the visual arts precisely: already in the 1830s, Balzac was turning away from writing historical fiction in the manner of Walter Scott, as in early novels such as Les Chouans (1829) and fantasy-fables like La Peau de chagrin (1831), to writing in a Realist manner his series La Condition humaine. Of course some artists continued to paint Biblical, Classical and historical scenes regardless of the Realist trend. But there is no doubt that artworks and novels addressing contemporary life and attempting to portray it in a manner that was true to life predominated after the middle years of the century.

It was above all industrialization that called forth the Realist novel as a means of portraying the collectivity of society, with its teeming mass of characters and its depiction of the shifting relations between them. The master here was Charles Dickens, many of whose works sought to lay bare in literary form the evils of the age and to advocate by showing their dramatic consequences the urgent need to tackle them: Oliver Twist (1837–9) addressed the state of crime and disorder in London, Bleak House (1853) the expense and injustice of the antiquated English system of civil law, Hard Times (1854) the cruelties inflicted by the utilitarian philosophy of the new industrialists. The ‘social novel’ carried a strong charge of social criticism: Alton Locke (1849) by Charles Kingsley (1819–75) reflected its author’s Chartist sympathies in its depiction of the exploitation of agricultural labourers and workers in the garment industry, while Mary Barton (1848) by Elizabeth Gaskell (1810–65) showed what its author called the ‘misery and hateful passions caused by the love of pursuing wealth as well as the egoism, thoughtlessness and insensitivity of manufacturers’. Les Misérables (1862) addressed the three great problems of the age, identified by Victor Hugo as ‘the degradation of man by poverty, the ruin of women by starvation, and the dwarfing of childhood by physical and spiritual night’. In L’Assommoir (1877), Émile Zola painted a drastic picture of poor housing conditions in a Parisian slum, while his Germinal (1885) brought together the political and social features of life in a coal-mining community over several decades in a dramatic narrative of a strike followed by an uprising. More drastic still was the account of impoverished Russians living in a shelter for the homeless in The Lower Depths (1902) by Maxim Gorky.

Realist novels could flourish in many European countries not least because of the emergence of a new market for books, as the middle classes grew in numbers and wealth, and merchants, industrialists, lawyers, bankers, employers and landowners were joined in the ranks of the affluent by doctors, teachers, civil servants, scientists, and white-collar workers of various kinds, numbering more than 300,000 in the 1851 census in the United Kingdom for example, the first time they were counted, and more than double that number thirty years later. Books became cheaper and more plentiful as steam-driven presses replaced hand-operated ones in the printing industry, and as mechanical production reduced the cost of paper while hugely increasing the supply. Novels, including those of Dickens and Dostoyevsky, were commonly printed in instalments and read in serial form. Alongside the ‘penny dreadful’ and the colportage serial a new type of bourgeois novel emerged, catering for an educated readership. Altogether, if 580 books were published in the United Kingdom every year between 1800 and 1825, more than 2,500 appeared annually in mid-century, and more than 6,000 by the end of the century. In 1855 some 1,020 book titles were published in Russia, and by 1894 this figure had increased tenfold, to 10,691, a figure equal to the output of new titles in Britain and the United States combined.

In all of this, despite the growing taste for non-fiction, ranging from encyclopedias and handbooks to triple-decker biographies, the proportion of works of fiction published in Britain increased from 16 per cent in the 1830s to nearly 25 per cent half a century later. Novel-reading, once the province of upper-class women, became a general habit among the middle classes of both sexes. Perhaps by necessity, in order to gain a following, Realist artists and writers focused on the comfortably off as well as on the poor and the exploited. Portraits continued to be a significant source of income for painters, while in literature the bourgeoisie featured centrally in the family sagas of the age. Fathers and Sons (1862) by Ivan Turgenev dissected the fraught relationship between a conservative older generation and young nihilistic intellectuals; Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart (1871–93), a cycle of twenty novels, attempted, as the author said, ‘to portray, at the outset of a century of liberty and truth, a family that cannot restrain itself in its rush to possess all the good things that progress is making available and is derailed by its own momentum, the fatal convulsions that accompany the birth of a new world’.

In Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1871–2), George Eliot tackled the impact of change brought by the railways, medicine and other harbingers of modernity on a deeply conservative small-town society; Madame Bovary (1856), written by Gustave Flaubert after his friends had persuaded him to abandon early efforts at historical fantasy, described in realistic detail the daily life and love affairs of the bored wife of a weak provincial doctor; both Theodor Fontane in Effi Briest (1894) and Tolstoy in Anna Karenina (1877) dealt with adultery, real or imagined, and the constrained lives of married women in the upper reaches of society; and in the six-novel sequence The Barsetshire Chronicles (1855–67), Anthony Trollope traced the fortunes of the leading inhabitants of an imaginary provincial town, while The Pallisers (1865–80) focused on the engagement of a much grander family with parliamentary politics. As the American writer Henry James (1843–1916) remarked, in a somewhat backhanded compliment, Trollope’s ‘inestimable merit was a complete appreciation of the usual’. However quotidian their concerns, Realist novels and paintings shared one thing in common with the cultural products of Romanticism: their appeal to the emotions, achieved not least by plumbing the depths of character and arousing sympathy and identification in the reader or the viewer.

Literary Realism was a broad European movement. In Portugal it was represented by José Maria de Eça de Queirós (1845–1900), who was influenced by the Realist novels of England, where he worked during the 1870s as Portuguese consul in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. He did not like England much (‘Everything about this society is disagreeable to me,’ he wrote on a visit to Bristol, ‘from its limited way of thinking to its indecent manner of cooking vegetables’). So he set his stories in Portugal, most famously The Sin of Father Amaro (1875), whose depiction of a young priest’s affair with the daughter of his landlady caused considerable scandal when it was first published. In Scandinavia the Realist movement found its most powerful expression on the stage. The Swedish playwright August Strindberg (1849–1912) followed the precepts of Zola’s essay ‘Naturalism in the Theatre’ (1881) in his plays The Father (1887) and Miss Julie (1888), which eschewed elaborate dramatic structures in favour of the exploration of character. Meanwhile his Norwegian counterpart Henrik Ibsen, writing in Danish, used carefully constructed plots to expose the sordid and oppressive realities behind the respectable facade of bourgeois life in plays such as A Doll’s House (1879) and The Master Builder (1892). Ibsen was a strong influence on the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), who conveyed a strongly social-critical message in plays such as Widowers’ Houses (1892), an attack on slum landlords, Mrs. Warren’s Profession (1893), an exposure of sexual hypocrisy, and Pygmalion (1912), a comedy of manners centred on the cultural gulf between the classes. The Weavers (1892) by Gerhart Hauptmann (1862–1946) dramatized the plight of poor and oppressed Silesian workers in the 1840s. Before the advent of Realism contemporary drama had tended to be both superficial and artificial, as for example in the farces of Georges Feydeau (1862–1921), with their convoluted plots and unlikely coincidences; afterwards, though comedies and farces continued to be produced, contemporary theatre acquired a serious cultural cachet.

Realism even entered the highly artificial world of opera, which, after the unification of Italy, came under the influence of verismo in Italian literature. This was spearheaded by Luigi Capuana (1839–1915), who had begun as a Romantic poet but began writing in the 1870s what he called ‘the poetry of the real’. With his contemporaries such as Giovanni Verga (1840–1922) he turned from history to the present, and from Romanticized subjects like the carbonari to the actual lives of the people. In 1890, Verga’s play Cavalleria Rusticana (Rustic Chivalry) was turned into a one-act opera by the Tuscan composer Pietro Mascagni (1863–1945). It told the story of the love affairs of a group of Sicilian peasants, a whole world away from the normal historical or fantastical subjects of Italian opera. Cavalleria Rusticana was often performed in the same bill as another one-act opera set in a village, I Pagliacci (The Clowns) by Ruggero Leoncavallo (1857–1919), first performed in 1892. In tune with the changing fashion, the ageing Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901) turned from Romantic subjects such as La Traviata (1853), based on Dumas’ Lady of the Camellias, to Shakespeare for his final works, Otello (1887) and Falstaff (1893). Neither of these operas used typical Realist subject matter, but both abandoned the traditional operatic alternation of recitative and aria for a flowing, through-composed musical style in which the sung parts follow conversational rhythms.

Verdi’s successor was generally agreed to be the Tuscan Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924), who began as a Romantic composer, with operas such as La Bohème (1896), based on the 1851 book by Henri Murger, but then gravitated towards verismo with Tosca (1900), a work his publisher described as ‘the opera I need, with no overblown proportions, no elaborate spectacle, nor will it call for the usual excessive amount of music’. Madam Butterfly (1904) and The Girl of the Golden West (1910) were more obviously indebted to Realism, being set in the present or very recent past, whereas the action of Tosca took place during the Napoleonic Wars. Perhaps the most extreme example of Realism in opera was provided by the Moravian composer Leoš Janáček (1854–1928), whose Jenůfa (1904), a story of infanticide and redemption set in an impoverished Moravian village, was one of the first operas to be written in prose and sung to conversational speech rhythms. Realist operas often caused a scandal when they were first performed. The everyday setting and working-class characters of Carmen (1875) by the French composer Georges Bizet, for example, shocked the audience, who received the work in stony silence. ‘All these bourgeois,’ Bizet complained, ‘have not understood a wretched word of the work I have written for them.’ Carmen ran to half-empty houses, and after a brief revival in 1876 it was not performed in Paris again until 1883. It did rather better in Vienna in October 1875, but its success reflected not least the fact that the spoken dialogue was partly replaced with recitatives, while a ballet using other music by the composer was now interpolated into the second act. Bizet himself did not live to see this dubious triumph; he had died of a sudden heart attack in June the same year, at the age of thirty-six.

In many countries the turn to Realism coincided, not fortuitously, with the rise of literary and cultural nationalism. One of the century’s greatest examples of literary nationalism, the novel The Doll (1890) by Bolesław Prus (pseudonym of Alexander Glowacki [1847–1912], a journalist by profession), set in a precisely delineated Warsaw, depicted the failure of Polish aspirations in 1848 and 1863, with the protagonists caught in a social order dominated by snobbish aristocrats and unwilling to engage in revolutionary action to free the country from foreign rule. Russian writers turned especially to the defeat of Napoleon in 1812, above all in Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1869), though this vast book – a work that the author himself said is ‘not a novel, even less is it a poem, and still less a historical chronicle’ – is of course about far more than the celebration of Russian resilience in the face of invasion, and its depiction of the Battle of Borodino is anything but heroic. French painters until the end of the century and beyond engaged in repeated representations of the Napoleonic Wars, just as Italian painters gloried in the triumphs of the Risorgimento. Zola’s novel The Débacle (1892) is an indictment of the incompetence of the French military leadership and the ruthlessness of the Prussian army during the Battle of Sedan (1870). In Realist art the Russian painters who called themselves ‘the Wanderers’ developed a genre of landscape painting designed to display the beauties of the Russian countryside as well as the hardships endured by those who lived and worked in it. In a similar way the series of tone poems entitled Má vlast (My Homeland), written by the Bohemian composer Bedřich Smetana (1824–84) between 1874 and 1879, contained musical representations of the Czech countryside, along with the nation’s heroes and legends. The German painter Anton von Werner (1843–1915) specialized in precisely observed patriotic depictions of events during the unification of Germany (such was his fame, indeed, that he was even engaged for the thankless task of trying to teach Kaiser Wilhelm II to paint).

By the middle decades of the century, opera in Italy had become a genuinely popular art form, its tunes played by village bands across the country, and patriotic songs, or songs that could be interpreted as patriotic, gaining the status of modern folk melodies. Not least for this reason it took on a significant role in the development of Italian nationalist culture. Even though the arts had been heavily censored earlier in the century, it had still been possible to get a nationalist message across, as for example in the opera The Italian Girl in Algiers (1813) by the immensely popular Gioachino Rossini, where Italian slaves are urged to ‘think of your fatherland, and boldly do your duty: Behold throughout Italy, examples of daring and valour are reborn once more.’ Norma (1831) by Vincenzo Bellini (1801–35) featured an uprising by Gauls against the occupying Romans, while Verdi’s Nabucco (1841) was full of not so subtly coded references to the Austrian occupation of northern Italy, notably in the famous ‘Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves’. A performance in Parma of The Horatii and the Curiatii (1846), a now-forgotten opera by Saverio Mercadante (1795–1870), with its depiction of Italian resistance to a German invader in the Middle Ages, even caused a riot: when the words ‘let us swear to triumph for the fatherland or to die in the attempt’ were sung, the audience burst out onto the streets and forced the Duke of Parma to flee. Richard Wagner made the triumph of ‘German art’ the central theme of his music drama The Mastersingers of Nuremberg (1868), incorporating in it a prophecy from the Middle Ages that ‘Evil deeds threaten us; once the German people and the German empire fragment under false foreign domination’. ‘I am the most German being,’ he had declared three years earlier in one of his frequent outbursts of cultural megalomania: ‘I am the German spirit.’

Nationalism permeated the work of Russian composers throughout the century. Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky (1839–81) wanted his music to be ‘an independent Russian product, free from German profundity and routine . . . grown on our country’s soil and nurtured on Russian bread’. In his songs and in the early versions of his opera Boris Godunov (1873) he sought to reproduce Russian speech rhythms and intonation. The Year 1812 by Tchaikovsky, first performed in 1880, with its bombastic concluding rendition of the national anthem to the accompaniment of cannon-fire, celebrated the Russian victory over Napoleon. The unfinished opera Prince Igor by Alexander Borodin (1833–87) provided a justification for Russian imperial conquests in Central Asia. Later in the century nationalism was expressed in the use of folk melodies, as for example in Smetana’s opera The Bartered Bride (1866), which used Czech dance forms such as the Furiant in its typically Realist setting of a peasant village community. Following Smetana’s example, Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904) also incorporated folk tunes into his work and turned them into concert pieces for his Slavonic Dances (1878–86). The Finnish composer Jean Sibelius (1865–1957) pressed his music into the service of the Finnish struggle for national identity and independence from Russia with compositions such as the Karelia Suite (1893) and above all Finlandia (1899–1900). In England, Edward Elgar (1857–1934) prefaced his first set of Pomp and Circumstance marches (1901–07) with the words ‘I hear the Nation march/Beneath her ensign as an eagle’s wing’. The concert pianist and composer Isaac Albéniz (1860–1909) used flamenco dance rhythms and Spanish folk music for virtuoso piano works such as España (1890) and Iberia (1905–9); many of his compositions were successfully transcribed for that most Spanish of musical instruments, the guitar. Edvard Grieg (1843–1907) was even granted a pension by the Norwegian government in recognition of his music’s role in the formation of Norwegian national identity. However, he came to dislike what was perhaps his most famous composition, ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’, part of his incidental music for Ibsen’s 1867 play Peer Gynt, ‘because it absolutely reeks of cow-pats [and] exaggerated Norwegian nationalism’.

RITES OF SPRING

With the decline of Romanticism, the standard forms of classical music staged a revival, though they had never entirely gone away. Demand from amateurs ensured that piano and chamber music found a ready market, and with growing middle-class prosperity and urban pride came the construction of purpose-built concert halls such as the Music Hall in Aberdeen (1859), the Gewandhaus in Leipzig (1884), the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam (1888), the Stadsgehoorzaal in Leiden (1891) and the Victoria Hall in Geneva (1894). The cult of the virtuoso led composers to collaborate with performers to produce concerti for them to perform. The relationship between Brahms and the Hungarian violinist Joseph Joachim (1831–1907) was a particularly famous example, though Brahms often ignored his technical advice, so much so that one critic described the Concerto for Violin (1878) as not so much for the violin as against it. After a period of eclipse following the death of Beethoven in 1827, the symphony moved once more to the centre of the orchestral repertoire. Robert Schumann did not begin to compose symphonies, concerti and chamber music until relatively late in life, while Brahms found the precedent of Beethoven so daunting that he took over two decades to write his First Symphony, which paid direct homage to his great predecessor’s Ninth Symphony in the main theme of the last movement. So dominant did the symphony become as the central expression of musical genius that several composers later in the period, such as Anton Bruckner (1824–96), Gustav Mahler (1860–1911) and Jean Sibelius, wrote few other large-scale compositions. As a mark of its importance, the symphony increased both in length, with Bruckner’s Eighth (1892) and Mahler’s Third (1896) each lasting around an hour and a half, and in scale, with vast orchestral forces and sometimes a chorus as well. So many performers were involved in Mahler’s Eighth Symphony (1910) that it was popularly known as the ‘Symphony of a Thousand’. ‘A symphony must be like the world,’ Mahler told Jean Sibelius in a famous exchange: ‘It must contain everything.’ The Finnish composer, whose symphonies were much shorter and more tightly organized than those of his Austrian counterpart, preferred to stress the symphony’s need for ‘profound logic and inner connection’.

Such works stood, sometimes self-consciously, as in the case of Brahms, in a tradition going all the way back to Beethoven. With string quartets, concerti, piano sonatas and trios, the choral A German Requiem and other works in classical genres, traditional musical forms were at the heart of Brahms’s output, like that of Mendelssohn-Bartholdy. They were, however, written off as conservative by the proponents of the ‘new German school’. Here, new musical forms such as the symphonic poem, invented by Liszt, or the music drama, created by Wagner, were regarded as the music of the future: free-flowing, narrative, representational. For Wagner music drama was a ‘total work of art’, whose performance was a kind of sacred rite, literally so in Parsifal, his final work, performed in 1882 at the innovatory theatre he had built in Bayreuth for his operas in 1874–6. For critics like Eduard Hanslick (1825–1904), music could awaken emotion in the listener but it could not represent it in itself. Wagner for his part condemned Hanslick and his supporters as a ‘musical temperance society’ afraid of emotional expression, and sneered at Hanslick’s ‘gracefully concealed Jewish origin’. Yet the ‘war of the Romantics’ concealed the fact that the two sides had much in common. Brahms declared privately ‘I am the best of Wagnerians’, and his music was often regarded as highly unconventional: an early performance of his First Piano Concerto in 1859 was hissed by the audience, who found its vast first movement and delayed piano entry too strange to stomach. Both sides represented different variants of late Romanticism. Wagner was thought to have pushed forward the boundaries of harmony into new realms of chromaticism, especially with Tristan and Isolde (1857–9), but as Schoenberg later pointed out, Brahms’s own handling of tonality was just as innovatory.

The search for a ‘new music’ by the Wagnerians expressed a growing dissatisfaction with conventional cultural forms that could be found in many branches of the arts in the later decades of the nineteenth century. In painting the camera was beginning to subvert Realism and representation and forced artists to rethink the nature of their business. Sharing many of the basic features of Realism, above all its focus on the ordinary and the everyday, a group of Parisian artists led by Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919), Alfred Sisley (1839–99) and Camille Pissarro (1830–1903), and influenced by Édouard Manet, broke free of the conventions of the Academy to paint not so much static, finished representations of reality as works recording its often fleeting impressions on the observer. They reacted to the rejection of their work by the Academy’s annual Salon by forming a Salon des Refusés (Exhibition of Rejects) in 1863. Eventually known as the Impressionists, a term invented by a critic of Monet’s Impression, Sunrise (1872), they used free brushstrokes and paintings created en plein air rather than in the studio to record the effects of light in bold colours. Monet even painted the same subject – haystacks, for example, or Waterloo Bridge, or Rouen Cathedral – scores of times in succession to show the impression it made on the viewer in different kinds of sunlight, mist, fog, or shade, at different times of the day or the year. The use of vivid and constantly changing colour offered the Impressionists a conscious alternative to photography, at a time when colour film had been invented only on an experimental scale without entering general circulation. Met initially with public ridicule, the Impressionists had gained widespread acceptance by the end of the nineteenth century.

Impressionism found its way into music through the compositions of Claude Debussy (1862–1918), though he himself denied that his works were what ‘imbeciles call “impressionism” a term employed with the utmost inaccuracy’. Eschewing traditional musical form, he composed piano and orchestral pieces that used unconventional harmonies and subtle timbres to evoke the moods and emotions aroused by subjects such as mists, gardens in the rain, reflections on the water, a submerged cathedral, the hills of Anacapri or, in his most extended orchestral work, La Mer (1903–5), the play of the waves and their dialogue with the wind. His compatriot Maurice Ravel (1875–1937), who also rejected the categorization of his works as Impressionist, produced more abstract music, but several of his pieces, such as the piano suite Miroirs (1905), with its evocations of a boat on the waves or church bells in a valley, could fairly be described as belonging to the genre. A major influence on Debussy in particular was the French Symbolist movement in literature, which represented a significant move away from Realism and towards spirituality and the imagination. It was futile, argued a ‘Symbolist Manifesto’ published in 1886 by the Greek-born poet Jean Moréas (1856–1910), to attempt to represent reality in a direct way: what was required was, as in the work of the Impressionists, to depict ‘not the thing, but the effect it produces’. The three poets named in the manifesto, Charles Baudelaire (1821–67), Paul Verlaine (1844–96) and Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–98), used the sounds of words as much as their meaning to convey the impression of their subject. Debussy and Ravel were inspired by the Symbolist poets to write a number of compositions, notably Debussy’s symphonic poem for orchestra Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (1894) and Ravel’s Trois Poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé (1914) for soprano and chamber ensemble.

Symbolist painters such as the German Franz von Stuck (1863–1928), whose painting Sin (1893) showed a female nude emerging seductively from the shadows, the Norwegian Edvard Munch (1863–1944), best known for The Scream (1893), and the Austrian Gustav Klimt (1862–1918), whose Judith and the Head of Holofernes (1901) surrounded an erotically charged female semi-nude with Byzantine-style gold, retained a figurative core to their work while placing it in a determinedly non-figurative context. The emphasis on surface decoration in Klimt’s paintings paralleled the emergence of Art Nouveau or Jugendstil in the decorative arts in the 1890s, with its curves and parabolas and cursive scripts. The new style was evident, for example, in the architectural decoration of the Norwegian town of Ålesund, rebuilt in three years after its complete destruction by fire in 1904, and in many buildings of the newly constructed Hungarian city of Pest. In Russia writers such as Alexander Alexandrovich Blok (1880–1921) and Andrei Bely (pen-name of Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev, 1880–1934) incorporated sound-pictures and experimental rhythms into their poetry. The Symbolists were rebelling against not only the notion of realistic representation but also the conscription of the arts into the service of nationalism, arguing instead that the arts were entirely autonomous from social or political life. The French writer Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848–1907) dealt in his novel Against Nature (1884) what Zola called a ‘terrible blow’ to Realism: the action, or rather inaction, of the novel takes place in a hallucinatory world in which the imagined becomes more real than the real. In Oscar Wilde’s novella The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) the ravages of the protagonist’s dissolute life are visited upon his portrait, while his own physical appearance remains untouched by age or the consequences of sin. Art, argued Wilde and the other proponents of Aestheticism in the 1890s, should be pursued for art’s sake, and for no other purpose.

These developments opened the way to the separation of art from representation and the severing of its ties with centuries-old conventions. The English painter and art critic Roger Fry (1866–1934) coined the term ‘Post-Impressionism’ in 1910 for an exhibition in London of the work of Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh and others, who departed from the subtleties of Impressionism by employing vivid and increasingly arbitrary colours in their paintings. Gauguin’s pictures of life among South Sea islanders, such as Spirit of the Dead Watching (1892), used colour not as a representation of the subject but as an interpretation of the subject’s emotions, as did the whorled clouds in van Gogh’s Starry Night (1889). Another of the featured artists, Paul Cézanne (1839–1906), used geometric forms that underpinned figurative representations of landscapes, departing further from the representational conventions of Impressionism. A further step was taken in the paintings of Henri Matisse (1869–1954), where the pigments bore no relation at all to the natural colours of the subject: in his Woman with a Hat (1905), for example, brushstrokes of green cover the nose and forehead of the sitter. Charing Cross Bridge (1906) by André Derain (1880–1954) was coloured in strident greens, blues, reds and yellows. A critic compared the work of Matisse and Derain to that of wild animals – Fauves – and so they became known as the Fauvists. Their work had parallels in Germany, where in Dresden in 1905 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938) and others formed the group known as Die Brücke (The Bridge), whose works sought to express the inner creative urge of the artist: hence the name ‘Expressionist’. More radical still was Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), a group formed in Munich in 1911 after a painting by Franz Marc (1880–1916) of a blue horse against a background of red, yellow, purple and blue hills.

‘We have ceased to ask: “What does this picture represent?” and ask instead: “What does it make us feel?”’ wrote the art critic Clive Bell (1881–1964) in 1912 on the occasion of a second Post-Impressionist exhibition in London, in words that equally applied to other trends in the visual art of the time. Another of the Blue Rider’s members, the Russian émigré Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky (1866–1944), set not only colour but also form adrift from its moorings in figurative representation and created the first abstract paintings, with titles such as Squares with Concentric Circles (1913). In Paris the ‘Cubists’ Georges Braque (1882–1963) and Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) dissolved the surface of pictures into a complex set of geometric patterns representing a view of the subject from a variety of different angles, replacing the bright colours of the Fauvists with a uniform pale wash of colour, usually grey or brown. The subject of the painting could still be discerned but was broken up like a kaleidoscope, as in Braque’s Violin and Candlestick (1910). But by 1912 the Cubists were using collage to eliminate the perception of depth and perspective altogether, as in Picasso’s Glass and Bottle of Suze (1912), where pieces of newspaper are stuck onto the surface of the painting seemingly disconnected from its ostensible subject. These developments quickly exerted a general European influence, leading to paintings with titles such as Amorpha: Fugue in Two Colours (1912) by the Czech artist František Kupka (1871–1957), or Abstract Speed and Sound (1913–14) by the Italian Futurist Giacomo Balla (1871–1958). Futurism was yet another of the numerous groups and movements that emerged in the last decade and a half before the outbreak of the First World War. Created by the poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944), it attempted to capture noise and movement as well as other aspects of what his 1909 Futurist Manifesto described enthusiastically as a future dominated by machines, by conflict, and by aggression. ‘We will glorify war,’ he wrote, ‘the world’s only hygiene – militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.’

The Futurists’ worship of the machine stood in sharp contrast to the revival of disappearing folk traditions that formed part of the effort to create a national culture. Hans Aall (1869–1946), founder of the Norwegian Folk Museum, declared that the purpose of his collection was to remind his fellow countrymen ‘that first and foremost we are a people . . . we are Norwegian’. Organizations like the English Folk Song Society sprang up at the end of the century, and musicians such as Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958) began recording on wax cylinders some of the now usually rather old men and women who sang the traditional songs of the countryside. All of this sounded perfectly innocuous. It conjured up images of sandal-wearing, homespun-clad, middle-class intellectuals searching for an alternative lifestyle that would get away from industrially produced goods and an urban way of life and recapture the natural, simple skills and styles of traditional folk art. The Arts and Crafts movement begun in the 1880s by William Morris (1834–96), under the influence of John Ruskin, tried to do just that. So did the Werkbund, the German group whose leading figure, the architect Hermann Muthesius (1861–1927), published in 1904 a three-volume survey of the English house written in the spirit of the Arts and Crafts movement. Similar associations were founded in Austria and Switzerland in 1912 and 1913 respectively. Their critique of industrial capitalism lent their work a distinctly left-wing tone.

But there was a more disruptive side to the recovery of ‘primitive’ folk culture. As the European empires cemented their hold on their African and Asian colonies, African artworks like Benin bronzes were imported into Europe and exerted a strong fascination on artists seeking a way forward from Realism. After Picasso first saw African art in a Paris exhibition in 1907, he began to experiment with incorporating its forms into his own work, above all in his painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), which portrayed a group of prostitutes, two of them wearing African masks, in a two-dimensional representation that marked an important stage on his road to Cubism. The term ‘primitivism’ was soon used to describe such work – and not only in the visual arts. In music, composers such as Béla Bartók (1881–1945), who, like Vaughan Williams, travelled the countryside recording folk songs, discovered that the rhythms and harmonies of folk music were often very different from those of the European classics. Previous appropriations by classical composers had smoothed them over, adjusting their rhythms and domesticating their harmonies. Instead, Bartók left them raw and unvarnished when he began incorporating them into his own work.

Other composers also started pushing up against the boundaries of tonality, already extended by Wagner, and eventually burst through them altogether. It was a personal experience that prompted Arnold Schoenberg to begin composing music without any definable key – his wife’s affair with the painter Richard Gerstl (1883–1908), who committed suicide when she returned to her husband. In the Second String Quartet (1908) and the song cycle The Book of the Hanging Gardens (1908–9), Schoenberg cut the music adrift from traditional tonality. With his atonal ‘melodrama’ Pierrot Lunaire (1912) he tried to compensate for the loss of harmony by deploying a series of elaborate formal devices in the accompaniment provided by a small chamber ensemble to the poems half-spoken, half-sung by the soprano performer. ‘Away with stylized and protracted emotion,’ he wrote: his music, he said, was ‘not built, but expressed’. Schoenberg was followed on his journey into atonality by two of his pupils, Alban Berg (1885–1935) and the meticulous Anton Webern (1883–1945). But other composers too, while retaining tonality in their work, reacted against the lush harmonies and hyper-romanticism of music such as the enormously popular Der Rosenkavalier (1911). In this opera Richard Strauss (1864–1949) turned from his earlier flirtation with dissonance in his operas Salomé (1905) and Elektra (1909) to a more conventional late-Romantic style. Sibelius wrote his grim, spare and dissonant Fourth Symphony (1913) explicitly ‘as a protest against present-day music,’ he wrote, referring to Strauss rather than to Schoenberg, adding that unlike late Romanticism, ‘It has absolutely nothing of the circus about it.’

Modernist music frequently encountered protests, sometimes very vocal, in the opera house and the concert hall. On 31 March 1913 there was a riot during a performance of works by Schoenberg, Berg and Webern in Vienna; fights broke out, the police were called, and the concert ended prematurely. At a subsequent court trial brought over a punch thrown by the concert’s organizer at a protester, one witness, the operetta composer Oscar Straus (1870–1954), commented acidly that the noise of the punch had been the most harmonious sound in the entire evening. But this event was eclipsed by the scandal caused by the first performance of the ballet by Igor Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring, on 29 May 1913, in the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris. Stravinsky had already written two very successful ballets on Russian folk themes for the enterprising impresario Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev (1872–1929) and his Ballets Russes. The first of these, The Firebird (1910), had established him as an exciting new presence on the Parisian musical scene; the second, Petrushka (1910–11), proved even more popular, though it included episodes of bitonality – music played in two keys at the same time – and ended, despite Diaghilev’s objections, on a note outside the main key. As soon as The Rite of Spring began, however, a faction of the packed audience broke out into derisive laughter; a rival faction began loudly to object, and soon the dancers onstage could not hear the music from the orchestra in the pit, into which, as the conductor Pierre Monteux (1875–1964) later remembered, ‘everything available was tossed’ by the rioters. The powerful, irregular, repeated rhythms and the dissonant phrases and chords issuing from the orchestra pit, combined with the heavy stamping of the dancers as they enacted a pagan rite that ended with a young girl dancing herself to death, drove the audience into a frenzy. One onlooker recalled that the man sitting behind him ‘began to beat rhythmically on top of my head with his fists’, though he himself was so excited that he failed to notice for a time. A countess got up from her seat, her tiara awry, and shouted, ‘I’m sixty years old and this is the first time anyone had dared to make fun of me!’ Insults were exchanged and at least one challenge to a duel was issued. Amid loud whistling and shouting, the lights were turned up and forty of the offenders were escorted from the theatre, while the performances carried on doggedly to the end amid the uproar.

Press reaction the next day was uniformly negative. The music and the dancing had been ‘barbaric’, and the Ballets Russes should go back to Russia. Stravinsky later remarked that music was merely an abstract arrangement of notes, incapable of expressing anything but itself: but the powerful, uncontrollable emotions aroused by The Rite of Spring belied this verdict. The primitivism of the music, its framing in a pagan rather than a Christian context, and its use of multiple conflicting rhythms and tonalities, all broke through the smooth surface of European culture to disturb and upset. A challenge had been issued to the mellifluous late Romanticism of composers like Camille Saint-Saëns (1835–1921), Gabriel Fauré (1845–1924), or the much younger Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninov (1873–1943). When in 1914 the English composer Gustav von Holst (1874–1934; he dropped the ‘von’ during the war) wrote Mars, the Bringer of War, its loud, repeated chords, harsh dissonances and pounding rhythms seemed to presage the end of the peaceful, complacent, cultural world of the prewar era. But that world had already been shaken to its foundations by modernist artists, writers and composers. Critics referred to the Rite’s ‘barbarity’, upset not only by the music but also by the choreography’s departure from the classical balletic traditions of costume, dance and design. Just over a year after the riot in the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, real barbarity was to spread across Europe with the outbreak of a world war.