Europe: A History (157 page)
PHOTO
A
N
old barnyard at Chalons-sur-Sâone had the distinction of transmitting its image onto the world’s first photograph. One day in 1826, Joseph Nicéphore Niepce succeeded in capturing the image on pewter plate after an exposure of eight hours. Thirteen years later Niepce’s partner, Louis Daguerre (1789–1851), was able to market a photographic system which required an exposure of thirty minutes onto copper plates covered by light-sensitive silver chloride. The Daguerrotype launched a long process of evolution which led to the popular box camera, colour film, movies, sound movies, X-rays, infra-red and miniature photography, and, most recently, electronic camcorders.
1
The impact of photography on peace and war cannot be exaggerated. It helped destroy the
raison d’ótre
of representational art.
[IMPRESSION]
It transformed people’s visual consciousness of themselves and of the world around them. It put a powerful tool at the disposal of every branch of science and communications. Pictures of the Crimean War brought the realities of military conflict to the world’s attention, just as family portraits revolutionized perceptions of social life. Photography also brought a new dimension to the historical record. Fifty years before sound could be recorded
[SOUND]
,
photographic collections began to amass real images of all aspects of the past.
[AUSCHWITZ]
Yet the realism of photography was deceptive. The art of the retoucher in official Soviet photography, for example, was notorious. Stalin removed all traces of Trotsky’s presence from the record; and Gorbachev’s unsightly birthmark was removed as late as 1985. But even the honest photographer’s arbitrary selection of angle, of the momentary snapshot, of light, tone, and texture, and, above all, of subject, leaves as much hidden as revealed. The camera, like the historian, always lies.
Domestic markets were boosted by population growth, by the greater accessibility of population centres, by expanding affluence, and by the creation of entirely new sorts of demand. Among many newcomer industries the most important was the chemical industry, which grew from the separation of aniline dye stuffs (1856), the Solvay process of soda extraction (1863), and the production of artificial fertilizers. A barrage of exciting artificial materials then descended, including plastics, concrete, cellophane, celluloid, rayon, viscose, aspirin. German
names were specially prominent among the chemical pioneers, notably Liebig, Hofmann, Bunsen, and Bayer,
[MAUVE]
Foreign trade was boosted by the opening up of new continents, especially America and Africa, by the drive for colonies, by the hunger at home for raw materials, by the thirst abroad for an ever-greater range of manufactured goods. Foreign and domestic markets became interdependent,
[JEANS]
Government policy towards modernization varied in accordance with a country’s regime, its resources, and its relative position. Few could fail to see the benefits; but governments of poor countries, like Russia or Spain, vacillated between their shame of backwardness and their fear of dependence. Autocratic regimes like Russia could isolate themselves until a decision to accept foreign investment was taken. More liberal or more indecisive regimes, like Austria-Hungary, could not.
Once the Industrial Revolution was in motion, a long series of consequences ensued. In the purely economic sphere, the growth of the money economy turned self-sufficient peasants into wage-earners, consumers, and taxpayers, each with new demands and aspirations. Paper banknotes came into general circulation. A vast range of new skills and techniques in marketing, advertisement, and distribution was nurtured. The deluge of developments in science and technology took innovations away from the private inventor and into the realm of systematic, sponsored R. & D. The need for financial services great and small led to the proliferation of credit associations, savings banks, and insurance companies. The multiplication of commercial transactions encouraged the standardization of weights, measures, and currencies.
In the social sphere, urbanization on a massive scale brought a welter of new problems, a set of new social classes, and a crop of new public services. The latter included paved streets, city transport, street lighting, fire brigades, waterworks, gasworks, sewerage works; town-planning, hospitals, parks, and police. The old rural distinction between the nobles and the peasants was overtaken by the new urban distinction between the middle classes and the working classes. Just as the middle classes were conscious of strata within their ranks, with professional lawyers and doctors feeling much superior to traders and shopkeepers, so the working classes were channelled into hierarchies of their own. Wage-labourers formed an important sector of employees both on farms and in factories, and as ‘navvies’ on the ubiquitous construction projects. Domestic service in the large number of prosperous middle-class family houses provided a vital source of employment for both men and women. Employment in the new factories was thought more prestigious than self-employment in the older crafts. Skilled, well-paid specialists and foremen could feel themselves ‘proletarian aristocrats’
vis-à-vis
the unskilled casuals and the urban poor. The concept of class based on flexible economic criteria was strongly opposed to the older groupings based on birth and legal privilege, and was a central feature of modern society.
The traditional European family household had always been thought to be large, complex, stable, and patriarchal. Modern research has challenged some of the preconceptions about this ‘classic family of Western nostalgia’, and has shown that the small, simple household and the nuclear family were not exclusively modern inventions. Even so, it would be hard to accept that modernization did not have a profound effect on family structures. Certainly, it was the belief that modern life was destroying the stability of the family that motivated Frederic Le Play (1806–82), the pioneer of family history and conceptualizer of
la familie souche
or ‘stem family’.
7
MAUVE
S
OMETIME
in 1856 an 18-year-old student began experimenting in the back room of his home in the leafy London suburb of Harrow. The boy, later Sir William Henry Perkin (1838–1907), was trying to produce a synthetic form of the anti-malarial drug, quinine. Instead, by oxidizing aniline sulphate with potassium dichromate, he chanced on a new precipitate. When he dried it and extracted it in alcohol, he saw a brilliant colour which no one had ever seen before. It was the world’s first synthetic dye. He called it ‘Tyrian Purple’. French chemists later called it
mauveine
after the mallow flower or
mauve:
1
Two years later, when Perkin was already manufacturing mauveine commercially, another youngster from the Royal College of Chemistry, Johann Peter Griess, analysed the reaction which accounted for such startling results. He established that primary aromatic amines, like aniline, when treated with a mixture of hydrochloric acid and sodium nitrite, will give diazo compounds. These in turn react with phenolic compounds or aromatic amines to give intensely coloured products known as azo dyes. Aniline, for example, when treated with a mixture of hydrochloric acid and sodium nitrite, gives benzenediazonium chloride.
2
A key feature of this ‘diazo-reaction’, as of other dyes, lies in the presence in the molecule of so-called
chromophores
, that is, of groups of atoms which absorb light of a very specific wavelength and give the end product a unique colour.
Where mauveine led the way, other artificial colours followed in profusion: Magenta and Violet Imperial (1860), Bleu de Lyon (1862), Aniline Yellow and Aniline Black (1863), Dahlia Pink, Perkin’s Green, and Manchester or Bismarck Brown (1864), Alizarin Red (1871), and London Orange (1875). When the British Post Office chose mauveine for printing the famous ‘1d. lilac’ stamps of 1881, it was already falling from fashion. But the aesthetics of colour would never be the same again.
For colour constitutes one of the fundamental properties of matter, and hence of human reactions to the environment. In Europe, yellow has traditionally been associated with cowardice, red with anger, black with depression. Greens and browns are supposed to soothe, blues and reds to
stimulate. Northern Europeans are thought to prefer subtle, subdued shades; the Mediterranean peoples revel in bright, primary colours.
The invasion of everyday life by unrestricted colour undoubtedly triggered a profound change. Prior to mauveine, all colours and pigments had to be extracted from natural materials. The root of the madder,
Rubia tine-torum
, was the standard source of reds. Thousands of tons of the plant had to be carted to every textile town. Indigo, which the Romans obtained from shellfish for their ‘imperial purple’, was the main source of blues: fustic or
annatto
of yellow. Some shades and colours, notably green, could only be achieved by double dyeing. A semi-artificial red called
murexide
was produced in France c.1850 by treating bird-droppings with nitric acid.
After mauveine, however, the supply of dazzling hues knew few bounds. By the late twentieth century the number of synthetic dyes produced commercially in Europe had risen to over 4.000.
3
Garish posters, gaudy clothes, and glamorous wallpaper—not to mention ‘technicolor’ films, colour photographs, and colour television—delight or disgust the post-industrial age in ways that the pre-industrials could not have imagined.
England’s initial lead soon passed to Germany, where Friedrich Bayer (1825–80) founded his first aniline dyestuffs factory in a washhouse at Wuppertal-Barmen in 1863.
4
Bayer, BASF (Badische Anilin und Soda Fabrik), and Hoechst quickly turned Germany into the world capital of chemicals. By 1890, Germany’s chemical industry was twenty times larger than Britain’s.
5
The conglomerate of I.G. Farben, like Britain’s ICI, was set up after the First World War.
5
Synthetic dyes soon led scientists into fields unknown to the early dye-masters. By producing all the many categories of synthetic and semi-synthetic materials which have since been invented, modern chemistry has shattered the assumption that Nature or God alone could design the inner structure of substances. Synthetic dyes preceded the first semi-synthetic material—
Parkseine
or
Celluloid
(1862), and the semi-artificial fibre—
viscose
(1891). They foreshadowed the invention of synthetic drugs such as
phenacetin
(1888),
asprin
(1899),
salvarsan
(1910),
acriflavine
(1916), and
heroin;
the isolation of hormones such as
insulin
(1921) or
thy-roxin
(1926), which were eventually synthesized; and the production of
chloramphenicol
(1950), the first synthetic antibiotic.
Chemistry became an art as well as a science. Its creations, which began to proliferate wildly after Baekeland’s
Bakelite
(1907), Raschig’s
amino-plastics
(1909), and of Ostromislensky’s
polyvinyl chloride
or
PVC
(1912), have become an essential component of material life. Yet from the day in 1864 when the Empress Eugenie of France wore a gown in tri-phenylmethane green, synthetic products were shown to have aesthetic as well as practical qualities.
JEANS
G
ÈNES’
is the French name for Genoa, and by extension for a traditional style of trousers worn by Genoese sailors.
Serge de Nîmes
was the name of a tough blue sailcloth, now corrupted to ‘denim’, traditionally woven in the French town. Levi Strauss (1829–1902) was a native of Bavaria who emigrated to New York at the age of fourteen and who joined his brothers in their business of supplying the prospectors and frontiersmen of the Californian Gold Rush. Some time in the 1860s Levi’s company had the idea of matching the clenim cloth with the Genoese trousers, and of strengthening the pockets and seams with brass horse-harness rivets. Thus was produced the most durable and universal item in the history of fashion design—a German immigrant using French materials and Italian style to invent an archetypal American product.
‘Blue jeans’ remained workaday clothing in North America for almost a century, before taking Europe (and the rest of the world) by storm in the 1960s, a prime symbol of ‘Americanization’.
1
Women’s circumstances were radically transformed. Traditional rural life had assured women of an equitable division of shared labour, and the presence of an extended family which eased the pressures of child-bearing and motherhood. Modern urban life turned the man into a primary ‘breadwinner’, and left the woman either as a lonely homemaker and domestic manageress or, in the case of the working class, as a thrice-burdened outworker, housekeeper, and parent. Not surprisingly, beyond the prim parlours of polite society lay a teeming underworld of prostitution, desperation, and early death.
