Europe: A History (175 page)
No less influential than Nietzsche was the bowdlerized version of his philosophy peddled by his sister. Elizabeth Nietzsche-Foerster (1846–1935), who led a party of ‘Aryan’ settlers to the colony of Nueva Germania in Paraguay in 1886, nursed her dying brother and appropriated his ideas. She befriended both Wagner and Mussolini, idolized the Nazis, and linked the name of Nietzsche with racism and antisemitism. A tearful Fiihrer would attend her funeral.
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From the sociological point of view, Nietzsche’s views may be seen as an intellectual’s revulsion against the rise of mass literacy, and of mass culture in general. They were espoused by an international coterie of artists and writers, which wished to strengthen the barriers between so-called ‘high culture’ and ‘low culture’, and hence to preserve the role of the self-appointed aristocracy of ideas. In this, they formed a suitable partner for modernism in the arts, one of whose chief attractions lay in the fact that it was unintelligible to the person in the street. ‘Mass culture generated Nietzsche in opposition to itself,’ writes a recent critic, ‘as its antagonist. The immense popularity of his ideas among early twentieth-century intellectuals suggests the panic that the threat of the masses aroused.’
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In retrospect, it is the virulence with which Nietzsche and his admirers poured contempt on ‘the masses’ that appears most shocking. ‘Many, too many, are born,’ spake Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, ‘and they hang on their branches much too long.’ In
The Will to Power
, Nietzsche called for ‘a declaration of war by higher men on the masses … The great majority of men have no right to existence.’ In a private letter written in 1908, D. H. Lawrence, who had just discovered Nietzsche in Croydon Public Library, actually imagined a gas chamber for the painless disposal of superfluous people:
FOLLY
N
IETZSCHE
once complained that historians never write about the things which make history really interesting—anger, passion, ignorance, and folly. He can only have been referring to the German School. In Poland, for example, there has been a long tradition of analysing the past in terms of vices and virtues. Bochenski’s classic work,
The History of Stupidity in Poland
, was published in 1842.
1
In 1985 the dissident historian Adam Michnik wrote his account of Polish resistance to Communism in terms of
The History of Honour.
2
Nowadays everyone has learned that the study of ‘Mentalities’ is central to the historian’s trade. An American historian has demonstrated that Folly has marched through European history from beginning to end. The Trojans admitted the Wooden Horse; the Renaissance popes provoked the Protestant secession; the British government drove the American colonists to rebel…
3
Yet everyone can learn from mistakes. The old Polish proverb says
Polak mądry po szkodzie
(a Pole is wise when the damage is done). Blake said something similar in his
Proverbs of Hell:
‘If every fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.’ Real folly consists of making the same mistake twice. One could write European history in those terms as well,
[ANNALES]
If I had my way, I would build a lethal chamber as big as the Crystal Palace with a military band playing softly, and a cinematograph working brightly; then I’d go out in the back streets and main streets and bring them in, all the sick, the halt, the maimed; I would lead them gently, and they would smile a weary thanks; and the band would softly bubble out the Hallelujah Chorus.
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This gem, thirty-three years before Auschwitz, came out of Edwardian England. So, too, did the deeper thoughts of H. G. Wells (1866–1946), seer, socialist, author of
The Time Machine
(1895) and
The War of the Worlds
(1898), and one of the most popular and prolific writers of the age. In his
Anticipations
(1902), he showed himself an enthusiastic advocate of eugenics, the science of improved human breeding which demanded the elimination of the weak, the inferior, and the undesirable. ‘And how will the New Republic treat the inferior races’, he asked, ‘the black… the yellow men … the alleged termite of the civilised world, the lew?’
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The important point to remember, of course, is that ‘the masses’, as reviled by their detractors, did not and do not exist. ‘Crowds can be seen; but the mass—the sum of all possible crowds, [is] the crowd in its metaphysical aspect … a metaphor … [which] turns other people into a conglomerate … [and] denies them the individuality which we ascribe to ourselves and to people we know.’
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In this same era, the challenge of Marxism spawned intellectual debates which far transgressed the narrow bounds of politics. For example, early readings in historical materialism provided the spur for the ‘Philosophy of Spirit’ developed by the Neapolitan writer Benedetto Croce (1866–1952). Croce’s work in
Aesthetics
(1902), in
Logic
(1905), and in
The Theory of Historiography
(1917) was accompanied by historical studies of Naples, of modern Europe, and of contemporary Italy. Rejecting both metaphysics and religion, he stressed the role of human intuition and the importance of history as the study of evolving spirit. His journal
Critica
, founded in 1903, gave a platform for his ideas for half a century. Later in life, Croce was to become the intellectual leader of opposition to Italian fascism.
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), an Austrian physician, was founder of the theory and practice of psychoanalysis. His work exercised a profound influence not only on the nascent medical sciences of psychology and psychiatry, but on all branches of the humanities concerned with the workings of mind and personality. Starting from hypnosis, he explored the unconscious processes whereby the human mind defends itself against external and internal pressures. In particular, he revealed the role of sexuality in the life of the unconscious and of repression in the formation of neuroses. The publication of
The Interpretation of Dreams
(1900) brought in many followers who were soon to form the International Psychoanalytical Association. Dissension ensued, however, especially when one of Freud’s early associates, Carl Jung (1875–1961), launched the concept of‘collective psychoanalysis’ in
The Psychology of the Unconscious
(1912), together with the distinction between introvert and extrovert personalities. In
Civilisation and its Discontents
(1930) Freud argued that the repression of desire required by life in developed societies made happiness virtually impossible. He was driven by the rise of the Nazis to flee to England in 1938. By that time psychoanalysis had many strands and many critics; but it had established a new, uneasy dimension in people’s perception of themselves: ‘The Ego is not the master in its own house.’
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Decadence
, as an artistic movement, can be regarded as an outgrowth of late Romanticism. It was born of the desire to explore the most extreme experiences of human sensuality. In the process, despite endless scandals, it furnished some of the most creative masterpieces of European culture. Its links with Romantic precursors can be traced through Charles Baudelaire (1821–67), who had translated both De Quincey and Poe into French. Baudelaire’s collection
Les Fleurs du Mal
(1857) was later seen as the manifesto of poetical symbolism, a style seeking to find hidden ‘correspondences’ of order and beauty beneath the ugly surface of reality:
La Nature est un temple oú de vivants piliers
Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;
L’homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles
Qui le regardent avec des regards familiers.
(Nature is a temple where living columns I now and then release confused words; I There Man passes amongst forests of symbols I which watch him with familiar glances.)
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In his ‘Invitation to the Voyage’, he sets out for an imaginary paradise, ‘where everything is order and beauty, delectation, calm and bliss’—
Là, tout n’est aurorare et beauté
, I
Luxe, calme et volupté
. Baudelaire’s successors, especially Paul Verlaine (1844–96) and Arthur Rimbaud (1854–91) achieved poetical effects which were the linguistic counterparts of the images of the Impressionist painters, whom they were among the first to admire:
Les sanglots longs
Des violons
De l’automne
Blessent mon coeur
D’une langueur
Monotone.
(The long sobbings I Of the violins I Of autumn I Wound my heart I With their languorous I Monotony.)
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A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu: voyelles
(Black A, white E, red I, Green U, blue O—vowels)
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The Decadents paid dearly for their defiance. Verlaine expressed the view that ‘decadence implies … the most sophisticated thoughts of extreme civilization’. But few of his contemporaries agreed. Baudelaire was heavily fined and humiliated for the ‘offence to public morals’ supposedly contained in his poems. Verlaine was imprisoned, having eloped with Rimbaud and shot him during a quarrel. In 1893 a German writer in Paris decried the drugs, the homosexuality, the pornography, the hysteria, and ‘the end of an established order that has satisfied logic and fettered depravity for thousands of years’. ‘The prevalent feeling’, wrote Max Nordau, ‘is that of imminent perdition and extinction.’
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In England, Oscar Fingall O’Flahertie Wills Wilde (1854–1900), author of several brilliant comic dramas, notably
The Importance of Being Earnest
(1895), spent two bitter years in Reading Gaol for homosexual offences. Much of the work of his collaborator, the erotic illustrator Aubrey Beardsley (1872–98), was unpunishable, as was that of Algernon Swinburne (1837–1909), poet, critic, and Old Etonian flagellant. The mood of these aesthetes was totally at odds with the preoccupations of most sections of society, where religious observance, social betterment, and temperance were at their height,
[BAMBINI] [TOUR]
Modern painting broke forever with the representational art which had prevailed since the Renaissance, and which photography had now rendered obsolete. The moment of departure came in 1863, when édouard Manet (1832–83) in a fit of exhibitionism exhibited
Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe
at the ‘Salon des Refuses’ in Paris. From then on a dazzling succession of labels had to be invented to keep track of the trends and groupings which were incessantly experimenting with genre, technique, colour, and form. The original Impressionists, Monet, Pissarro, Sisley, Renoir, Cezanne, and Degas, so named after Monet’s
Impression, Sunrise
(1874), were followed by the Pointillists (1884) led by Seurat, the Neo-impressionists (1885), the Nabis (1888) of Serusier and Bonnard, the Synthetists (1888) inspired by Gauguin, and the Expressionists (1905) pioneered by Ensor, Van Gogh, and the German Briicke Group. After them came the Orphists, the Fauves (1905), headed by Matisse, Dufy, and Vlaminck, the Cubists (1908) of Braque and Picasso, the Futurists, the Black Cat and the Blue Rider Group (1912). By 1910 or 1911, in the work of Vassily Kandinsky (1866–1944), a Russian settled in Germany, painting approached the stage of pure abstractionism,
[IMPRESSION]
BAMBINI
O
N
6 January 1907 a one-room nursery school opened its doors in Rome’s slum suburb of San Lorenzo. It was equipped with child-size furniture, with a cupboard full of puzzles and learning games, and with no qualified teacher. It was provided for the children of working parents who would otherwise abandon them on the streets during the daytime. It was called
La Casa dei Bambini
, ‘the Children’s House’.
The founder of the school, Dr Maria Montessori (1870–1952), was a woman well in advance of her time. She was a feminist who advocated equal pay for equal work, a qualified doctor, and director of an institute for retarded infants. Secretly, she was also the mother of an illegitimate boy, Mario Montessori, who was later to run the Association Montessori Internationale in Amsterdam.
The
Montessori Method
, published in 1910, preached the principles of child-centred education. Children want to learn. Children can teach themselves. Children have five serses and must explore them all. Children must have the freedom to choose what to learn and when. All they need is a place free from intimidation, proper equipment, and encouragement. These ideas were anathema to most of the educators of the day, who favoured ‘chalk and talk’, religious instruction, ferocious discipline, and a rigid syllabus and timetable. ‘Education is not acquired by listening to words,’ Dr Montessori told them, ‘but by experiences in the environment.’
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Some of Montessori’s ideas can still raise a frown. She believed that children hate sweets, and love silence. She insisted that writing should precede reading. But her central conviction, that the needs of the child are paramount, became the cornerstone of modern, progressive pedagogics. Hundreds of her schools were opened across Europe, and in the USA. In Fascist Italy and in Nazi Germany they were closed down.
In many ways, Montessori followed in the steps of two earlier pioneers— the Swiss J. H. Pestalozzi (1746–1827) and the Thuringian Friedrich Froebel (1782–1852). Froebel’s first
Kindergarten
or ‘Children’s Garden’, set up at Burgdorf near Berne in 1837, was the true ancestor of the
Casa dei Bambini
. Montessori’s ideas on child psychology were in turn developed by the Swiss educationalist, Jean Piaget (1896–1980).
2
TOUR
A
T
2.15 pm on 1 July 1903, some sixty cyclists set off from a starting-line near the café of Réveil-Matin in the Parisian suburb of Montgéron. They were heading for Lyons, over 467 km of ill-made roads, on the first of six designated stages of the first
Tour de France
. They were expected to ride night and day. Nineteen days later, Maurice Garin was acclaimed the winner when he entered the Pare des Princes, having covered a total of 2,430 km at an average road speed of 26.5 km per hour. He was riding a machine with dropped handlebars, and wore knee-length stockings, plus-fours, a polo-neck sweater, and a flat cap with earflaps. His prize was 6,125 Fr.F.—the equivalent of £242. With the exception of the war years, the race has been contested every July ever since.
1
Europe’s most protracted and most popular sporting event arose from the conjunction of several modern phenomena—the concept of leisure and recreation; the organization of mass (male) sport; targeted technology—in this case cable brakes, cycle gears, and rubber tyres; and the competition of mass-circulation newspapers.
The immediate origins lay in the rivalry of two Parisian weeklies,
L’Auto
(‘The Motor Car’) and
Le Velo
(‘The Bicycle’). The publisher of
L’Auto
, Henri Desgrange, who was trying to break into the cycling market, had been successfully sued for changing his paper’s name
io L’Auto-Vélo
. The Tour was his response. He never looked back. He saw the circulation of
L’Auto
multiply dramatically whilst
Le Velo
dwindled into obscurity. He remained patron and sponsor of the Tour until his retirement in 1936.
The Tour took final form over a period of years. The route, in particular, varied. For five years, from 1906, it was extended to include Alsace; but permission was withdrawn by the German government when roadside crowds began singing the
Marseillaise
. In the mountains, it was directed over the Col de Tourmalet (2,122 m) in the Pyrenees, and the terrifying Col du Galibier (3,242 m) in Savoy, where contestants had to carry their machines over unmade tracks. From a maximum length over 5,000 km, it settled down in the 1930s to a more modest length c.3,700 km, undertaken in 30 daily stages. The idea of a bright-coloured jersey to identify the race leader was adopted in July 1913, when Desgrange dashed into a wayside store and bought the first
maillot jaune
.
After the First World War, the Tour assumed international proportions. Belgian, Italian, and Spanish riders frequently gained the laurels. Champions such as Eddie Merckx or Jacques Anquetil had a following as great as any sports stars. In July 1991, watched by 22 million spectators, the 79th Tour was won by the Basque from Spain, Miguel Indurain, with an average speed of 39.504 km/h.
2
In 1994, the 82nd Tour saw Indurain winning for an unprecedented fourth time in a row over a course which took the riders across the Channel to England. And Indurain would live to ride again.
