The Pursuit of Power: Europe, 1815-1914

by Richard J. Evans

the idea of the past as different became widespread in European culture, in contrast to the eighteenth century, which had depicted the people and societies of the past as largely similar to those of its own age.

Some 250 out of 696 autopsies performed in the main Paris hospital in the early nineteenth century reached a diagnosis of tuberculosis as the cause of death.

By the middle of the nineteenth century the Kingdom of Prussia had passed laws refusing to admit young people to school, apprenticeships, employment or the army without a vaccination certificate.

Smallpox

In France, the government had been far less successful; 125,000 French troops in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1 caught the disease, of whom some 28,000 died, compared with 8,500 cases and a mere 400 deaths among the Prussians and their allies.

Soon christened ‘Asiatic cholera’, the disease was widely understood as Asia’s revenge: a deadly invasion from the supposedly backward and uncivilized East, launched just as Western civilization, in the eyes of many Europeans, was reaching the height of its progress and achievements.

By the late nineteenth century it had become regarded as a blessing when someone died without knowing that they were dying; a sudden death, or death in one’s sleep, were thought of as ideals.

Death had become something to avoid talking about. Indeed people even began to seek for supposedly scientific evidence that it was only a transition to another life, as Christian certainties began to ebb away.

the average number of children per woman of childbearing age also fell – between 1800 and 1910 in England and Wales from just under six to just under three.

The vulcanization of rubber in 1844 enabled the Goodyear tyre company to produce rubber sheaths from the mid-1850s (they were apparently about the thickness of a bicycle inner tube), but they were expensive and still unreliable.

Contraceptives

The only completely safe contraceptive method was abstinence, and since it was women who bore the risk of pregnancy and all the consequent burdens, it was women who began to repress their sexual feelings. The idea that women were incapable of sexual activity, an idea that would have seemed strange in the eighteenth century, became more common, above all among the bourgeoisie.

as early as 1820 a leading periodical, the Edinburgh Review, was declaring that ‘it is better every way that what cannot be spoken, and ought not to have been written, should now cease to be printed’.

Re: Bowdler

Giving birth out of wedlock, with its consequence of social stigmatization, was frequently cited as a major reason for women being forced to engage in prostitution, which underwent a considerable expansion in the nineteenth century.

Male clients using prostitutes went unstigmatized: they were merely young men ‘sowing their wild oats’. Protecting them from disease appeared to the male authorities to be a priority.

Paris-trained gynaecologist Dr William Acton (1813–75), who believed that the women who became prostitutes were morally and physically disordered, untypical of the female sex as a whole. Acton stated baldly: ‘The majority of women (happily for them) are not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind.’ Men, on the other hand, were in his view driven by strong sexual urges that required expression.

The campaign against prostitution in Britain led among other things to an amendment to the 1885 Act, put by the ambitious Liberal politician Henry Labouchère (1831–1912), providing for up to two years’ hard labour in prison for acts of gross indecency between men.

That the outlawing of homosexuality in the United Kingdom did not extend to homosexual relations between women was not, as legend would have it, because nobody in the British government dared broach the subject with Queen Victoria, but in reality because of a belief in the absence of the sexual impulse between women that underlay the entire social purity campaign.

The risks of infection in hospitals more generally were first recognized by the Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis (1818–65), who in 1847 observed that around a third of the women who gave birth on the doctors’ wards in the Vienna General Hospital, where he worked, died of ‘puerperal fever’, whereas the death rate on the midwives’ wards was only around 10 per cent.

Medical men felt insulted by the suggestion that they might themselves be spreading disease.

Handwashing

At Newcastle Infirmary the death rate from operations of all kinds fell from 60 per cent to 1 per cent after Lister’s practices of ‘antisepsis’ were applied.

he encouraged thrift, orderliness, punctuality, hard work and cleanliness, so it is not surprising that phrenology was popular in the age of headlong industrialization. Yet its reputation declined sharply after 1850, as the arbitrariness and medical absurdity of its central tenets became steadily more apparent,

Phrenology never had much influence elsewhere, especially not in France,

Notions of appropriate behaviour for men and women were vital components of the emerging public sphere. Violation of these norms, especially by lower-class people, increasingly led to their stigmatization as insane.

By 1815 the death penalty was restricted almost exclusively to first-degree murder and high treason almost everywhere in Europe except Great Britain. Here, exceptionally, it applied to theft as well as homicide – three-quarters of those hanged in England and Wales in the 1820s had been convicted for property crimes, and only one-fifth for murder.

from 1816 through 1820 no fewer than 518 hangings took place in England and Wales. There were 364 from 1821 up to the end of 1825, and 308 from 1826 to 1830. This compared to an annual average of only four or five in Prussia, whose population at the time, at 16 million, was about the same as that of England and Wales.

capital punishment had manifestly proved useless as a deterrent. In the 1830s and 1840s reformers such as the German jurist Carl Mittermaier (1787–1867) backed this up with statistics showing that the ending of executions, wherever it had occurred, had not led to any demonstrable increase in the murder rate.

under the influence of the theory of evolution propounded by Charles Darwin (1809–82), Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909), who served with the Italian Army in 1863 fighting brigands in Calabria, came to the view that criminals were not made but born, representing throwbacks to an earlier stage of human evolution.

he modified his arguments to suggest that hereditary criminality was also the consequence of generations of alcoholism, or sexually transmitted diseases, or malnutrition; but more generally the basic idea that criminality was inherited began to exert a growing influence across Europe in the late nineteenth century.

in the 1890s and beyond, arguments began to be raised in favour of the compulsory sterilization of the ‘inferior’ who might be found work but should not be allowed to reproduce.

she was unmarried, and thus legally still a minor whatever her age,

The age saw the beginnings of the now almost universal practice of playing old as well as, or even rather than, contemporary music.

Bach "rediscovered"

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,

Thanks I hate it

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.

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.

‘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,

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 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.

Poland, where the oppressive rule of Protestant Prussia and Orthodox Russia placed Roman Catholicism at the centre of the nationalist movement.

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,

Nonconformity emphasized above all the need for a sober and orderly lifestyle, opening the way to self-improvement for the working classes.

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.

the Pope issued a futile ban on Catholics taking part in Italian politics, declaring that it was ‘inexpedient’ for them even to vote.

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’.

Lord Acton (1834–1902), who declared, referring to the Pope: ‘Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.’

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.

Versus Catholic Church

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.