The Pursuit of Power: Europe, 1815-1914

by Richard J. Evans

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.

Yet cf. involvement of Royal Navy (shelling villages where missionaries had been attacked).

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.

Like Darwin himself, the vast majority of scientists and scholars believed that their discoveries were compatible in one way or another with Christianity,

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.

The Church lent its blessing to the belief in miracles, but the line between the miraculous and the magical was a fine one.

Islam in the nineteenth century was not regarded by Christians as a threat to Christian Europe. The same was not always true, however, of

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 Britain the doctor and philanthropist George Birkbeck (1776–1841) founded Mechanics’s Institutes in Glasgow and London in the 1820s.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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,

France vs England — England didn't ban until 1986 in state schools and 1990s in private schools.

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.’

Head of Rugby school

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.

Curie

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.

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,

increasingly in the second half of the century tears became a sign not of Romantic sensibility but of female frailty.

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.

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’

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,

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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’).

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.

Art, argued Wilde and the other proponents of Aestheticism in the 1890s, should be pursued for art’s sake, and for no other purpose.

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).

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.’

Marinetti. Fascist?

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.

Sibelius wrote his grim, spare and dissonant Fourth Symphony (1913) explicitly ‘as a protest against present-day music,’ he wrote, referring to Strauss

eg Der Rosenkavalier

This campaign of ‘outrages’ created severe strains within the suffragette movement. Emmeline Pankhurst tried to quell them by cancelling the annual meeting of the Women’s Social and Political Union, denying members the right to object, and concentrating all decision-making processes in a small coterie she gathered round her, which included her daughter Christabel. Democracy was beside the point, she said: the suffragettes were ‘an army in the field’.

Others were summarily expelled, including Emmeline’s other daughters Sylvia and Adele, who had in her view become too close to the socialist movement.

their violence was overwhelmingly directed against physical symbols of male society (such as golf courses); unlike the fascists, they made no serious attempt to kill or maim individual people.

Mill did not consider that women were necessarily equal to men in every sphere of life, but he thought it wrong that they should be prevented from finding out if they were; if they were inferior in any area, then free competition would prove it and legal barriers were not needed.

Liberals are exhausting

The legal and social exclusion of women from many areas of public, political, economic and cultural life, he argued, was depriving society of the use of half its members, to its great detriment.

i.e. if it did not benefit society, no need for equality? Women not inherently deserving of equality (/freedom) but only due to its benefits to others (i.e. men).

Equality was in Mill’s view, however, to be granted only to middle-class women and not the women of the proletariat.

Liberal feminism in France faced problems quite different from those encountered in England. While Republican politicians did a great deal to improve the education of women, believing it would wean them away from the Church, they were consistently opposed to giving women the vote, since they thought this would undermine the Republic by strengthening the forces of monarchism.

Nationalist associations had gained an authoritarian, masculinist, aggressive, sometimes antisemitic cast in Germany by 1914, and out of their milieu there even emerged the German League for the Prevention of Women’s Emancipation (1912), complete with accusations, entirely erroneous, that the feminist movement in Germany was dominated by Jewish women.

All Czech political parties accepted the principle of female suffrage, and put up women candidates for election to the Bohemian Diet, though with one exception for seats which they had no hope of winning

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.