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

by Richard J. Evans

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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).

But beyond small groups of extreme nationalists, antisemitism only had a limited, though discernible effect on German politics before 1914.

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!’

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.

Humboldt intended that universities should research and teach subjects for their own intrinsic intellectual value, rather than specifically preparing students for careers.

while nearly half the Nobel Prizes for Chemistry in the same period were awarded to Germans.

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.

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.

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.

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,

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

A number of countries already had universal male suffrage well before the end of the century. Greece was founded on the principle of votes for all adult men from its beginnings in 1829 (though it excluded the unemployed until 1877). In France universal male suffrage was introduced in 1848 and remained in place thereafter, while the German Empire brought it in for national elections on its foundation in 1871. Austria enfranchised all adult males in 1907 and Italy in 1912 following earlier, more limited extensions in 1882 and 1887. In Spain the Constitution of 1869 accorded voting rights to all adult men.

However, there were two states in particular where the extension of the franchise and the ‘nationalization of the masses’ gave rise to serious political conflicts. These were the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary. In both countries the intransigence of significant national minorities battened onto the decay of liberal hegemony that was the most obvious consequence of the extension of the franchise and began to threaten the very existence of the state by the outbreak of the First World War.

When Salisbury, his health failing, resigned office in July 1902, he was succeeded as Prime Minster by Arthur Balfour, who was his nephew (the succession reputedly gave rise to the phrase ‘Bob’s your uncle’ for a done deal).

Unlike Queen Victoria, neither Edward VII nor George V played any notable part in politics, which, together with the decline of the Conservatives, allowed the democratizing tendencies of the Liberal Party full rein – or almost, since the Conservatives still possessed a crushing majority among the hereditary peers of the House of Lords.

The leading and most powerful state in Europe up to the mid-1850s, Austria began a long and uneven process of decline after its defeat by Italy and France in the War of Italian Unification in 1859.

The term ‘Americanization’ was invented by the English journalist William Thomas Stead in his book The Americanization of the World (1901), in which his main aim was to advocate a renewal of the British Constitution through some form of union with the United States, to achieve the global dominance of the Anglo-Saxon race. (His quest to fulfill this aim led him to sail to America in April 1912 on the Titanic; he did not survive the journey.)

More than 80 per cent of the world’s goods were carried in British ships. The British dominated trade with independent Latin America, so there was no obvious reason why they should seek to convert economic power there, or indeed in any other part of the world, into the annexation of territory. They relied on free trade instead.

Eighty-four French ships conveyed 37,000 troops across the Mediterranean and set up a well-defended base camp. Some 35,000 Ottoman troops arrived on 19 June 1830, but the French possessed better guns and routed them. On 5 July the Dey surrendered on the condition that people’s religion was respected, and the French occupied Algiers. Napoleon had triumphed again – this time from beyond the grave. The

A local Muslim leader, Mohamed el-Mokhrani (1815–71), declared a jihad against the French, outraged that Jews had been placed above Muslims and convinced that the German defeat of the French was a sign of divine justice. In 1868, French rule had been a major factor in a famine in which perhaps a third of a million Algerians died; French propaganda made great play with the famine relief operation mounted by the Church in Algeria, but this too was a bitter cause of resentment. Some 150,000 Muslims rose in support of Mokhrani and began besieging the towns where the French and other settlers had retreated for safety. Within a short time the revolt was defeated. Together with the 1868 famine, the conflict had led to the death of around a million people, a third of the population. The French revenge was harsh. The leaders of the uprising were killed or sent to the Pacific island of New Caledonia. Up to 1,200,000 acres of Arab land were confiscated. Pilgrimages to Mecca were severely restricted in order to cut off Algeria from the rest of the Muslim world. Arabic was even classified as a foreign language. Muslim social and educational institutions thought to encourage resistance to French rule were destroyed.

Algeria was something of an exception to the general nature of European colonialism before 1880. More traditional patterns obtained in the rest of Africa, where three different interests intersected. The first of these was trading. As the slave trade declined then came to an end, European trading bases began to deal in vegetable oils instead of slaves, processing African-grown groundnuts and palms. But this only created an intensified demand for slaves within Africa itself, so that the slave trade in sub-Saharan Africa continued well into the second half of the nineteenth century.

In 1850 the British government acquired the remaining Danish forts on the coast, in 1861 Lagos and in 1872 the Dutch base of Elmina. The French acquired new trading posts on the coast of Senegal. The possibility of these trading bases getting into trouble with African rulers and requiring military protection increased as their numbers and influence grew. For the time being, however, trading interests were paramount and the likelihood of formal colonization seemed remote.

Britain’s relative lack of interest in formal colonial acquisitions was illustrated by events in south Africa. London veered between annexing areas settled by the Boers, who were after all British subjects, and allowing them autonomy;

In India, too, expansion was largely unplanned by Britain, but occurred in particular on the initiative of the Governor-General, Lord Dalhousie (1812–60), appointed in 1848. Dalhousie thought Indian-controlled states were inefficient and that income for the East India Company – the powerful British trading organization that in the previous decades had come to rule over large areas of the subcontinent with its own private armies and administrators, in order to provide a stable and secure basis for its operations – would be increased if he annexed them.

The British were driven back into their forts, where they were besieged. There were numerous massacres of British troops, most notoriously in 1857 at Kanpur, which inflamed public opinion back home and fuelled a wave of revenge as British forces regained the initiative. They began punishing the rebels, shooting and hanging them in huge numbers, or using the traditional Mughal punishment of firing them from the mouths of cannon. Blamed for the uprising, the military and administrative role of the British East India Company was removed in 1858 and replaced by direct government control.

British government control was soon extended over the Malayan peninsula, where local states were forced to accept British informal suzerainty in 1873, in an attempt to protect trade with China against piracy – also a major factor in prompting the Dutch to extend their control over Indonesia in the 1850s. Like much else in this period, such expansion was largely piecemeal and unplanned. The same can be said of the activities of the French in Indochina, where Napoleon III sent troops at the end of the 1850s after French missionaries had been persecuted and killed; local French officials argued that further expansion was necessary to protect missions and trading interests, clashes took place with local and regional powers, and by the 1890s France was in full occupation of the entire peninsula, after capturing the key fort of Hung Hóa in 1884.

it was local European officials, merchants and missionaries who put pressure on metropolitan governments, and not the other way round. Strongest of all was the pressure coming from European settlers, not only in south Africa but also in Australasia.

There were never more than seven or eight hundred Russians in Alaska, almost all of them in the two main coastal towns. In 1867, recognizing the intractability of these problems, the Russian government sold the province to the United States for two cents an acre. History might have turned out very differently had it not done so.

The cult of empire began in Britain in 1877 with the proclamation of Queen Victoria as Empress of India. Within a few years British royal ceremonies, including Victoria’s golden jubilee were featuring maharajas and colonial troops.

The celebration of empire was relatively slow to take on, but gradually it took hold, above all in the new popular press, and by the 1890s imperial propaganda could be found everywhere, on railway bookstalls, in political meetings, in novels, magazines and history books.

France’s rivalry with Britain, stimulated by the quarrels over Egypt, led its local administrators in west Africa to push forward with the idea of an empire stretching from Algeria to the Congo River, and in 1889–90 treaties were signed with the British defining the boundaries of the two empires. All of this was effectively on paper only, since the hinterland was actually controlled by a series of large and powerful Islamic states.

Yet far from being inevitable after 1500, as some historians have claimed, this global imbalance did not really take hold until the third quarter of the nineteenth century. It was the product not just of technological superiority but also of European peace. Things might have been very different had the European nations carried on fighting each other and exporting their conflicts to other parts of the globe, as they had done before 1815. Peace, underpinned by British naval hegemony, allowed the spread of communications networks, telegraph cables, sea lanes and trade routes, and intercontinental railways, leading to further economic development and a dense network of rapid imperial communications. Global trade expanded almost exponentially under these conditions, in a way that would have been impossible had the major industrializing states been fighting one another.

The main damage to the indigenous population was done, as elsewhere, by disease. From an estimated half to three-quarters of a million in 1788, the Aboriginal population of Australia had declined to 72,000 by 1921.

In major respects, however, British rule in India brought disaster for the population. The intensive land taxes levied by the Raj, and collected with considerably greater efficiency than their equivalents had been under the Mughals, caused changes in land use and turned bad harvests into famines, with two million people dying of starvation in northern India in 1860–1, six million across India in the 1870s, and another five million with a monsoon failure in 1896–7, when the situation was made worse by an outbreak of plague.

The empire was catastrophically incompetent at managing its economy. It was not until 1845 that the first bank was opened in Constantinople; the first banknotes were not numbered and they were thus extremely easy to forge. There was no state budget until the 1840s; the Ministry of Finance was only set up in 1839. Although things had improved a little by the mid-1850s, the finances of the empire were utterly unable to cope with the huge costs of the Crimean War.

For much of the nineteenth century, dominant European notions of racial and cultural superiority over the rest of the world were mostly relative rather than absolute, and they had a strong moral and religious content. British geography textbooks pointed out that the Egypt of the pharaohs had been ‘full of ancient learning when Britain was inhabited by savages’.