The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815–1914 (The Penguin History of Europe Book 7)

by Richard J. Evans

Alongside decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, pimps, brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ-grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars – in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call la bohème.

The German policeman Friedrich Christian Benedikt Avé-Lallemant (1809–92) wrote four volumes on the criminal classes, the final one being a dictionary of their language, known as Rotwelsch.

I'll see more about that language.

However, in Sicily the blood feud took on a new and dangerous form in the 1860s as the landowners’ private armies, disbanded by the new Italian state, were replaced by rival clans – the Mafia – who first worked to enforce the landowners’ sanctions against their tenants, then drifted into protection rackets and other forms of criminality, and finally began to fight each other over the spoils. As long as the state was too weak to penetrate mountainous or remote areas like Albania, Catania, Corsica and the Mani, the blood feud and the vendetta continued to flourish.

Rise of Sicilian mafia in view of blood vengence.

Sensational murder trials began to make headlines, whether of the American homeopath Dr Hawley Crippen (1862–1910), found guilty of the murder of his wife and arrested on board a transatlantic liner with his young mistress, or of the former miller and repeat offender August Sternickel (1866–1913), executed in Frankfurt an der Oder in 1913 for strangling a farmer in the course of a robbery after a trial that made press headlines day after day. Readers were mesmerized by stories of fictional detectives, whether Dickens’s Inspector Bucket in Bleak House (1852–3) or Dostoyevsky’s Inspector Porfiry in Crime and Punishment (1866).

Wow I didn't know that 😲 Crime and punishment came out when trial for murder was seen as something new and interesting

During the relatively liberal 1820s, Niemcewicz served in a number of official capacities in the administration of Congress Poland, only to be forced into exile again after participating in the insurrection of 1831. Driven to despair by the setbacks he had experienced, he wrote shortly before his death that ‘Everyone has a homeland; but the Pole only has a grave.’ On his own grave in a suburb of Paris was inscribed the epitaph: ‘And there, where tears are banished, he still shed Poland’s tear’.

anti-Semite scum.

The forest was, wrote the conservative critic of the urban-industrial world, Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, ‘the heartland of folk culture’ in Germany, ‘so that a village without a forest is like a town without any historical buildings, theatre or art galleries’.

Italian governments therefore began to fund land reclamation and improvement schemes on a large scale. The malarial Fucine Lake in central Italy, whose Roman outlet had been blocked many centuries before, was drained between 1862 and 1875 by the Swiss engineer Jean-François Mayor de Montricher (1810–58) on the initiative of Alessandro Torlonia, Prince of Civitella-Cesi (1800–86), son of a successful banker.

In May 1862 a series of fires broke out in St Petersburg. One entire precinct, the Soldiers’ District, was set alight, with forty buildings going up in flames, leaving only ‘heaps of metal and skeletons of houses’, while at one point fires were raging simultaneously in five different parts of the city. Arson was widely blamed, attributed variously to ‘students’, ‘radicals’ and ‘Poles’, and a number of left-wing intellectuals were arrested, though no connection was ever proven.

I'm surprised they didn't blame the Jews.

The frequency of fires, especially in towns and cities, and the losses of life and property they caused, prompted widespread efforts in the nineteenth century to prevent such disasters and deal with them promptly and effectively should preventive measures fail. In 1867 the Paris fire brigade was transformed into a military regiment commanded by a colonel; it numbered forty-eight officers and 1,800 men by 1914.

First fire brigade.

Writers made metaphorical use of these ‘London particulars’, from the elaborate opening paragraphs of Bleak House (1853) by Charles Dickens, where they stand for the obfuscation caused by the Court of Chancery, to the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) by Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94), where fog is used to denote the mystery surrounding the murderous activities of the eponymous split-personality criminal.

This was the standard adopted at the Washington conference, which divided the world into twenty-four time zones by longitude, treating the meridian as the zero line, dividing the eastern from the western hemisphere and creating an International Date Line drawn through the least inhabited part of the Pacific.

Didn't know that was the reazon they set the start day meridian there.

larger, as well as more uniform and more organized.

For radical liberals such as the German pathologist Rudolf Virchow (1821–1902), typhus was not so much a sign of ignorance and slovenliness born of a backward state of civilization, as the result of oppression and the deprivation of basic human rights. Commissioned by the Prussian government to investigate an outbreak of the disease in Upper Silesia in 1848, Virchow condemned the filth, squalor, idleness and drunkenness of the people but rejected any idea that these habits were the product of the fact that the area was largely inhabited by Poles. The people, he declared, did not bother to take care of themselves because they had lost their right to participate in cultural and political life. Virchow’s report earned him dismissal from his post, but in retrospect it can be regarded as one of the first great classics of social medicine.

It is not surprising that its author subsequently became a leading liberal and opponent of Bismarck, who was so angered by his persistent criticisms that in 1865 he challenged Virchow to a duel. As the person challenged, Virchow had the right to choose the weapons to be used, and famously he chose two sausages – one thoroughly cooked, for himself, and one raw, and stuffed with lethal trichinae larvae, for Bismarck. Sensibly on all counts, Bismarck then withdrew his challenge.

The serious study of sexuality had begun in the late 1860s, with a campaign by the Hungarian journalist Károly Kertbeny (1824–82) to stop the German Criminal Code then in preparation outlawing homosexuality, a word he himself invented in 1860.

Inventing the word "homosexuality"

Before the nineteenth century, human beings had been condemned to live with almost constant pain, alleviated at best by folk remedies of one kind or another. Major operations had to be conducted without anaesthetic, the patient’s senses dulled only by the application of copious quantities of alcohol or opiates. Even small operations, such as tooth-pulling, which had become a frequent necessity after the arrival of large amounts of sugar in the European diet during the eighteenth century, could cause almost unbearable pain.

So before 18th century people didn't have so many tooth aches as in the 18th?

Given the dangers of general anaesthesia, surgeons, especially where minor operations were involved, sought a means of dulling pain in small areas of the body as required. The Austrian ophthalmologist Karl Koller (1857–1944) was the first to use a local anaesthetic to stop patients involuntarily reacting when their eyes were touched by a surgical instrument: he employed cocaine successfully, experimenting on himself to begin with, and its use soon spread to dentistry as well.

Cocaine was first used for local anaesthesia.

Folk medicine had long been adept at applying pain-reducing natural remedies such as willow bark and spiraea, and their active ingredient, salicylic acid, was isolated in the eighteenth century. In 1859 its structure was determined, and in 1897 the chemical company Bayer produced a synthetically altered version derived from the herb meadowsweet (spiraea ulmaria), acetylsalicylic acid, to which it gave the trade name Aspirin. Two years later it was being marketed all over the world as the first effective modern painkiller.

History of Aspirin.

The consequences of Lombroso’s basic argument, popularized by his student Enrico Ferri (1856–1929) in Italy, by Gustav Aschaffenburg (1866–1944) in Germany, by Francis Galton (1822–1911) in Britain, and by Rafael Salillas (1854–1923) in Spain, were momentous. The study of crime and criminality became the province not of law and its practitioners but of medicine and of professional criminology.

Was it here that Galton's idea of regression to the mean evolved? or at least was apparent?

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 lost competency in his later years.

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.’

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

Jews in the Russian empire and the Pale of settlement.

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).

Coinage of the term "antisemitism"

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;

I knew the name Canetti was familiar. That's a common Jewish Sephardic name.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

Wow! That's a shocking story!

The feminist Helene Stöcker (1869–1943), an admirer of Nietzsche’s doctrines of personal liberation from the constraints of convention, advocated legal equality for unmarried mothers and illegitimate children, the free distribution of contraceptives, the legalizing of abortion and other measures which shocked bourgeois moral convention.

Helene Stöeker. a radical feminist in the late 19th century.

What united all the various national feminist movements, as well as the international associations to which they belonged, was the fact that they were overwhelmingly bourgeois in their composition and liberal in their politics. Even the English suffragettes fought shy of demanding the vote for women of all classes and merely campaigned for equal suffrage. Property laws everywhere still favoured men, so that if middle-class feminists sought equal voting rights for women, they were in effect only seeking them for a very small minority of propertied women.

Conscious of the threat to public safety posed by the long hours worked by railway engine drivers – in the 1860s a driver threatened with dismissal for failing to stop at three stations revealed he had been driving for thirty-eight consecutive hours and had fallen asleep in the cab – French governments repeatedly pressed the railway companies to impose limits, and were finally successful in 1891, when the companies agreed to a twelve-hour maximum working day.

How workers unions set the work day to 12 hours max

The major change in this respect was initiated by none other than Bismarck, who introduced a range of state welfare measures in the 1880s. The state, declared the Iron Chancellor, had to ‘meet the justified wishes of the working classes . . . through legislation and administration’. Linked to aristocratic paternalism in Bismarck’s own mind, this ‘state socialism’, as he himself called it, soon outgrew its political roots. In 1883 he introduced health insurance through sickness funds, to which workers themselves had to contribute two-thirds but were rewarded by the right to stand for election to the managing committees, which they came to dominate after the turn of the century. By 1885 sickness insurance schemes in Germany covered 4.3 million workers. An accident insurance scheme followed in 1884 and a pension scheme for the old and infirm in 1889, all of them backed to a considerable extent by the state.

Rose of the welfare state under Bismarck.

The Working Men’s International, founded in 1864, had collapsed at the beginning of the 1870s and was formally dissolved in 1876, destroyed by internal dissension between the followers of Marx and Bakunin, and by the massive police repression that followed the Paris Commune of 1871.

In Germany the police did not require specific legislation to harass and molest the political activities of a party regarded as hostile to the very existence of the state. The police exploited to the full their right to attend and ‘maintain order’ at public meetings, and used even the most trivial excuse to dissolve Social Democratic assemblies, while extending a wide tolerance to those held by parties of the right. By 1914 the great majority of SPD newspaper and magazine editors had spent months if not years in jail for offences ranging from defaming the police to lèse-majesté. Social Democratic party members or supporters were excluded from all forms of government service. There were no SPD army officers, judges, or civil servants. When the physicist Leo Arons (1860–1919), inventor of the mercury vapour lamp, became an active member of the SPD, Kaiser Wilhelm II declared: ‘I will not tolerate socialists . . . as the teachers of our youth at the Royal universities’. A law was passed in 1898 specifically in order to sack Arons from the University of Berlin, where he taught. More generally, heavy industrialists like Krupp monitored the activities of their workers, employing a private police force to do so, and fired any who were found to be socialists.

History of German Social Democratic Party. How it was treated by the govt.

By this point a new figure was emerging who would unite and eventually dominate French socialism: Jean Jaurès (1859–1914). Jaurès called himself a ‘cultured peasant’. He wore bourgeois clothes including a black frock coat, but dressed so untidily, with his trousers too short, and his pockets stuffed with books and papers, that he did not really seem to belong to any social class.

Socialism transformed the lives of millions of ordinary workers in this way, but it also constituted a growing threat to social stability and order in the minds of the elites who dominated the political establishment of the day. Repeatedly, conservative and, in the end too, liberal governments tried to defuse working-class discontent by passing welfare reforms that gave the working class a stake in society and removed from its life the insecurity and poverty that generated resentment and disillusion with the dominant institutions of the state. By 1900 in almost every European country the age of the masses had begun, as political parties and groupings of every hue vied for their allegiance and competed for their support.

This was followed by the introduction of the secret ballot in 1872, which reduced the power of the landlords and brought bribery and intimidation of the electorate to an end.

In the US didn't they have a secret ballot?

What were the reasons for the chronic political instability of the two Latin nations? To begin with Italy, it was clear that governments suffered from an extreme lack of cohesion. There was no doctrine of collective responsibility and individual ministers felt no qualms about resigning over policies they disagreed with, often bringing down the entire government with them.

American economic methods such as ‘Taylorism’, making the most efficient use of working time, were much admired,

International expositions, a tradition inaugurated by Britain’s Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in 1851, began to include ‘colonial pavilions’ – eighteen of them at the Paris exposition of 1889, clustering around the Eiffel Tower, which was built for the occasion. Colonial museums opened in most European countries to display looted artefacts. Zoos began to include ‘native villages’ among their exhibits.

There were some parts of the world that never came under direct European rule at any time in history, including Abyssinia, Anatolia, Arabia, Japan, Korea, Mongolia, Morocco, Siam and Tibet. The largest and most significant of them was China. The Chinese Empire was rich, populous, and promising in terms of economic exploitation and investment. From 1850 to 1864 it had been convulsed by the Taiping Rebellion, which caused the deaths of up to 20 million people, the largest armed conflict anywhere in the world in the nineteenth century.

In 1884–5 the Berlin Conference that set off the scramble for colonies in Africa and other parts of the world laid down the basic principle that in order to establish the formal right of rule over a colony, a European power had to establish ‘effective occupation’. The primary of trading interests meant that only coastal areas were occupied to begin with, though explores soon began to penetrate inland.

His view – that the Herero should be recruited as labourers instead of being exterminated – won sufficient adherents to bring about the arrest of the remainder of the tribe – mostly women and children – along with the members of the Nama tribe, and their incarceration in ‘concentration camps’ (the first official German use of this term). Here, however, their fate was no better. At the worst of the camps, on the rocky terrain of Shark Island, off the Namibian coast, the prisoners were used as forced labourers, fed on minimal rations, exposed to bitter winds without adequate clothing, and beaten with leather whips if they failed to work hard enough.

Concentration camps in today's Namibia. Original use of concentration camps.

Some 25,000 Boer soldiers were deported overseas as prisoners of war. Both sides used large numbers of black soldiers, and the British established sixty-four concentration camps for black families as well. About 28,000 Boers, mainly children, died of disease, exposure and malnutrition in the tented camps, a death rate of around one in four. Of the 107,000 black Africans held in the camps, at least 14,000 perished. Conditions in these concentration camps were not part of a deliberate policy of genocide, as their counterparts were to be in German South-West Africa a short while afterwards, but they were murderous enough nonetheless. When, in 1909–10, the Union of South Africa was created as a self-governing Dominion, neither black Africans nor immigrant Indian workers had equal rights with the whites.

This is for all the idiots who use the term 'concentration camps' and refer to British concentration camps in South Africa without the slightest knowledge of what they were.

The outbreak of the First World War brought to an end a century of European hegemony over the rest of the world. Of course, this was not a sudden or unheralded development. Already before 1914, America had been starting to outstrip Britain and Germany in economic terms. In the colonial empires, above all in India, the first stirrings were visible of the movements for freedom and independence that would reach fruition within a few decades.