Europe: A History (159 page)

Finally, in the military sphere, both generals and politicians had to contemplate conflicts where civilians and women would be recruited to the war effort, where conscript armies of unheard-of size would be mobilized, and where staff officers armed with railway timetables would marshal men armed with machine-guns onto ground that could be subjected to 20 tons of high-explosive shell-fire per square foot per hour. Of all the challenges, this was the one which by 1914 they were least equipped to face. Reflections on the implications of warfare did not lead Europeans to reduce their military establishments. Kant, in 1797, had issued the definitive moral condemnation. ‘War’, he wrote at the end of his
Metaphysics of Manners
, ‘ought to have no place there.’ But much more common was the assumption of De Maistre that war was ‘the habitual state of the human species’. The treatise
On War
(1832), written by the Prussian general Karl von Clausewitz (1780–1831), was one of the most lucid and influential books of the century. ‘War’, he wrote, ‘is the continuation of politics by other means.’

Recounting the onward march of modernization, it is easy to give the impression that the road was smooth and the direction obvious. But such an impression would be false. The territory was often hostile, the obstacles enormous, the accidents unremitting. For every entrepreneur there was an aristocrat who did not want the railway to cross his land; for every machine there was a dispossessed craftsman who wanted to smash it; for every fresh factory, abandoned villages: for every shining city hall, slums. Of every ten children born into that Europe of pride and progress, three or four died. Economic growth did not mount on a steady upward curve: the new capitalism was capricious. Violent booms alternated with sudden slumps; the first decade of peace after 1815 witnessed a prolonged recession throughout Europe. Later periods of recession occurred after 1848, and after 1871. All periods contained shorter cycles of advance and retreat. Wages and prices moved by fits and starts. In the past, economic crises had been caused by visible things like plague or famine. Now they were said to be caused by inexplicable things like over-production, market conditions, or monetary failure. Average material conditions were definitely improving; but for individual
families they often spelt unfamiliar wealth or desperate penury. Materially, European society was better off; psychologically, Europeans were seriously disturbed.

None the less, the world created by European modernization was incredibly rich for its chief, middle-class beneficiaries—rich in material possessions, rich in variety, rich in culture and style, rich in new experiences. A university professor in Scotland in the 1880s might earn £600 annually, ten times the upper reaches of the working class and equivalent to the price of a six-bedroomed house. In 1890–1 the seventeen official nationalities of Austria-Hungary shared 215 registered spas and 1,801 newspapers and periodicals. ‘La Belle Époque’ was the time when people went waltzing, dined at the Café Royale, bought pictures by the Impressionists, lived in the luxury of Art Nouveau. ‘A French politician like Édouard Herriot, mayor of Lyons, could speak excellent German, and hold his own on Wagner and Kant.’ In 1895 Henry James, the American novelist living in Europe, acquired electric lighting; in 1896 he rode a bicycle; in 1897 he wrote on a typewriter. And that was in a period which a British Royal Commission had called ‘the Great Depression’. Money was increasing in real value as prices gently fell. The poor, at least, could eat cheap food. Only the landowning aristocracy squeaked, appalled at their shrinking fortunes. There was no major war for more than forty years. ‘It looked as if this world would go on for ever.’
⁹

Demographic growth was one of the surest indicators of Europe’s dynamism. In brute terms, the population rose from c.150 million in 1800 to over 400 million by 1914. The accelerating rate of increase was more than twice as great as in the previous three centuries (see Appendix III, p. 1294). Europeans were reminded of the implications from the start. In 1816 the English economist Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) published the final edition of his depressing
Essay on the Principle of Population
. He predicted that, while the production of food might rise arithmetically, the growth of population would proceed geometrically. If he had been correct, Europeans would have begun to starve to death within a few decades. Indeed, some thought that the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s was a premonition of the general disaster,
[FAMINE]

The British Isles, with a limited supply of arable land and a rocketing population, looked specially vulnerable. In the event, the general disaster never occurred. Such famines as did occur, as in Ireland, struck in the most backward rural districts of Europe, in Galicia and on the Volga, not in Europe’s over-crowded cities. The point came in the 1870s when large amounts of grain began to be imported from North America. But several European countries, such as Ukraine and France, showed a healthy surplus, and food prices in 1870–1900 were falling everywhere. At no time did the overall situation become critical.

The dynamics of European demography came to be much better understood in the course of the century. Sweden had been exceptional in carrying out a general census as early as 1686; but every European government now began a regular series: France and Great Britain from 1801, the German Customs Union from 1818, Austria-Hungary from 1857, Italy from 1861, Russia from 1897. By the turn of the
century sophisticated statistics were available for all countries. (In Eastern Europe they were far superior to much that the twentieth century produced.)

Europe’s overall population gains were due to natural increase. The annual birth rate was highest early in the century, when death rates were also high; but in the 1900s it was still buoyant, up to 40 per 1,000 in many countries. With the help of medical advances, death rates were halved from c.40 to 20 per 1,000. With the curious exception of France, fertility and reproductive enthusiasm were much higher than ever before or since. The growth of cities was dramatic: by 1914 Europe had a dozen million-plus conurbations. London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, St Petersburg, and Istanbul had reached that status earlier on; Glasgow, Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool, Birmingham, the Ruhr, Hamburg, and Moscow followed later. Another score of cities, from Madrid to Odessa, had passed the half-million mark. Numbers in the rural population remained fairly static in the developed countries, although their proportion plummeted. In Great Britain in 1900 they represented only 8 per cent, in Germany they stood at 40 per cent, having dropped from 75 per cent in 30 years. In the underdeveloped countries, where they could represent up to 80 per cent, as in Russia, they were rising alarmingly. Europe lost 25 million emigrants to the USA in the last quarter of the century. One-quarter of the population of Galicia emigrated in the two decades before 1914 (see Appendix III, p. 1294).

Historians disagree whether the stunning social and economic changes of the nineteenth century should be regarded merely as ‘the background’ to cultural life or its determinant. Marx, for example, was a determinist: ‘in his view all forms of thought and consciousness are determined by the class struggle, which in turn is determined by the underlying economic relations.’ (If this is true, then Marx himself was not so much an original thinker as the product of his time.) At the other extreme, there are those who maintain that culture has a life of its own. Nowadays, most people would at least accept the midway proposition that culture cannot be properly understood without reference to its political, social, and economic context.

Romanticism
, which became a dominant intellectual trend in many European countries in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, is seen by some historians essentially as a reaction to the Enlightenment. By others it is seen as an emanation of attitudes generated by the Industrial Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. Actually it was all of these things. The circumstances of its origins in the 1770s were closely connected indeed to the fading appeal of the Enlightenment (see Chapter IX). At the same time, the reasons for its mass appeal in the 1820s and 1830s were closely bound up with the experiences of a generation which lived through the revolutionary ordeal, which felt the impact of machines and factories, and which fumed after 1815 under the dead weight of the reactionary regimes. Romanticism found expression almost everywhere, even in Russia, treating the Catholic/Protestant and the Catholic/Orthodox divide with indifference. It affected all the arts, but especially poetry, painting, and music, and all branch
es of the humanities. It grew very strong in Germany. It was well represented in Britain, though the first British Romantics like Lord Byron were better received on the Continent than at home. After some delay, it appeared in force in France and Italy, as a counterweight to the deep-rooted traditions of classicism and rationalism. In Poland and in Hungary, where it was coloured by the agonies of national defeat, it became the dominant mode of thought.

The main tenets of the Romantic movement opposed everything which the Enlightenment had stood for. Where the Enlightenment had stressed the power of Reason, the Romantics were attracted by all in human experience that is irrational: by the passions, by the supernatural and paranormal, by superstitions, pain, madness, and death. Where the Enlightenment had stressed man’s growing mastery over nature, the Romantics took delight in trembling before nature’s untamed might: in the terror of storms and waterfalls, the vastness of mountains, the emptiness of deserts, the loneliness of the seas. Where the Enlightenment had followed the classical taste for harmony and restraint, and for the rules which underlay civilized conventions, the Romantics courted everything which defied established convention: the wild, the quaint, the exotic, the alien, the deranged. Where the Enlightenment had sought to expound the order underlying the apparent chaos of the world, the Romantics appealed to the hidden inner ‘spirits’ of everything that lives and moves. Where the Enlightenment was either unreligious or anti-religious, the Romantics were profoundly religious by temperament even, where they scorned conventional Christian practice. Where the Enlightenment catered for an intellectual élite, the Romantics catered for the newly liberated and educated masses.
[PARNASSE] [RELAXATIO]

The Europe-wide appeal of Romanticism can be illustrated in many ways, but nowhere better than in its poetry. John Keats (1795–1821) languished archaically before the charms of a medieval maiden:

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

Alone and palely loitering?

The sedge is withered from the lake,

And no birds sing.
¹⁰

Alphonse de Lamartine (1790–1869) revelled simultaneously in the beauties of the Lac du Bourget and in thoughts of eternity:

ô temps, suspends ton vol! et vous, heures propices,

Suspendez votre cours!

Laissez-nous savourer les rapides délices

Des plus beaux de nos jours.

(Oh, Time, suspend your flight! And you, auspicious hours, I suspend your course! I Allow us to savour the fleeting delights I of our most beautiful days.)
¹¹

Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837) sang the ‘Night Song of a Wandering Shepherd of Asia’:

Pur tu, solinga, eterna peregrina,
che si pensosa sei, tu forse intendi,
questo viver tereno,
il patir nostro, il sospirar, che sia;
ché sia questo morir, questo supremo
scolorar del sembiante
e perir dalla terra, e venir meno
ad ogni usata, amante compagnia…

(Yet, lonely, eternal wanderer, I who are so thoughtful, perhaps you understand I what this earthly life may be, I our suffering and sighing, I and what this dying is, this ultimate I fading of the features, I and perishing from the earth, and falling away I from every familiar, loving company.)
¹²

Joseph, Freiherr von Eichendorff (1788–1857), recounted his favourite themes of
Lust
(desire),
Heimat
(homeland), and
Waldeinsamkeit
(forest loneliness) in his native Silesia: