Europe: A History (150 page)
But the Napoleonic experience, by destroying so many older particularisms, prepared the ground for Germany’s unified national identity. Napoleon had commented cynically that Germany was always in the process of ‘becoming, not being’. But he did much to change matters. The University of Berlin, founded in 1810 during the French occupation, nourished the new thinking. Its first rector was the philosopher J. G. Fichte (1762–1814), author of the patriotic
Reden an die deutsche Nation
(1808). The ‘War of Liberation’ of 1813–14 proved specially exhilarating. The words of a song, ‘Was ist das deutsche Vaterland?’, written by the poet and historian Ernst Moritz Arndt (1769–1860), were on everyone’s lips. Arndt, whose
Geist der Zeit
(1806) had first called for resistance, supposedly answered his own question: ‘Germany is there wherever the German language resounds and sings hymns to God in Heaven.’ In those same years the exiled Prussian Baron von Stein, who had visited St Petersburg and denounced Napoleon as ‘the enemy of mankind’, was inventing a precocious scheme for the federal union of the German peoples. ‘Germany must assert itself’, he wrote, ‘in its strategic position between France and Russia.’ Here was the kernel of the concepts both of
Gross Deutschland
and of
Mitteleuropa
.
[CAUCASIA]
Napoleonic Spain descended into a quagmire of disorder. The original French expedition of 1807 merely aimed to punish Portugal for its British ties. But anger was aroused in Spain by the presence of French garrisons and by the imposition of Napoleon’s brother Joseph on the Spanish throne. From then, the tribulations of the French party multiplied. With the Portuguese entrenched behind the lines of Torres Vedras and the British sallying forth from their base at Corunna, with Madrid and many provincial centres in the hands of the opposition and much of the countryside in the grip of guerrilla warfare, the French found the costs of holding Spain steadily mounting. In 1808–9 flagging French fortunes were temporarily restored by Napoleon’s personal intervention. But he had to leave; and every victory of his deputies, Soult and Masséna, only served to increase the complications. In 1812 the anti-French liberals, besieged in Cadiz, succeeded in passing a liberal Constitution for the restoration of a limited monarchy. In 1813 the pro-French party succeeded in restoring the original monarch, Ferdinand VII. But it was all rather superfluous: by then Wellington was well on his way to the conquest of the whole Peninsula,
[GUERRILLA]
CAUCASIA
T
HE
notion that all the peoples of Europe belonged to one white race which originated in the Caucasus can be traced to a learned professor at Göttingen, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840). Though patently false, it was destined to have a long career.
Europeans brought up on the Bible and the classics had long been conditioned to look to the Caucasus for stories of their origins. The account of the Flood in the Book of Genesis states that ‘the ark rested … upon the mountains of Ararat’ (Genesis 8: 4)—Ararat being a biblical name for Armenia. The legends of the Golden Fleece and of Prometheus were both Caucasian. But the ethnic and racial composition of the peoples of the Caucasus is complicated in the extreme (see Appendix III, p. 1298). There is no reason whatsoever to look to them as a source of racial purity. None of the more prominent sub-types from the Caucasus, such as the so-called Armenoid group, are well represented elsewhere in Europe.
Blumenbach, a pioneer of comparative anatomy, and especially of craniometry or ‘skull analysis’, is generally credited with the invention of the ‘five-race scheme’. It emerged from his study of an extensive skull collection that was published over a thirty-year period starting in 1798;
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and it has passed into the realm of conventional wisdom. According to Blumen-bach’s system, Caucasians represent the European and the highest racial type within the human species. Whilst the professor was studying ethnology, he was supplied with a skull from the Caucasus region, and considered it the finest standard of the human type.
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Given this background, it is extraordinary to find that some governments still use the Caucasian category in their formulation of social policy and statistics. In South Africa, the spurious concept of a white race informed the oppressive and discriminatory legislation of
apartheid
until 1991.
Apart from the white ‘Caucasian race’, Blumenbach identified a brown ‘Malayan race’, a yellow ‘Mongolian race’, a black ‘Negro race’, and a red ‘American race’. His fivefold classification gained wider acceptance than the simpler white, brown, and yellow scheme of Baron G. L. Cuvier (1769–1852), another comparative anatomist working at the College de France.
Somewhat later, the colour-coded classification of races was augmented by the notion of a complete racial hierarchy, within which white-skinned peoples of European origin occupied the top position. This development was first promoted in the work of Victor Courtet (1813–67), although the most influential exposition was made in the
Essai sur l’iné-galité des races humaines
(1855) by Joseph-Arthur, Comte de Gobineau (1816–82). ‘History shows’, he wrote, ‘that all civilisation derives from the white race, and that a society is great and brilliant only so far as it preserves the blood of the noble race that created it.’ Interracial intercourse was equivalent to degeneracy. ‘Peoples degenerate only in consequence of the various admixtures of blood which they undergo.’
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Gobineau, who wrote a history of Persia, was also responsible for propagating the mistaken coincidence between the ‘white race’, which he saw as the progeny of the ancient Aryans or ‘Iranians’, and the Indo-European linguistic family. In this way he turned the spurious Aryan label into a partner and a rival for the older but equally spurious Caucasian one.
‘White’, ‘Caucasian’, ‘Aryan’, and ‘Europoid’ all reflect the protracted search for an exclusive, and therefore non-existent, common denominator in the racial make-up of Europe’s population. They form part of a wider vocabulary of doubtful terms including ‘Black’, ‘Asian’, ‘Semitic’, and ‘Hispanic’, where physical, geographical, and cultural criteria are hopelessly confused.
The great variety of physical types which exist within Europe’s population has inspired many attempts to fix the boundaries of its constituent or regional subgroups. The flaxen-haired ‘Nordic’
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(adopted by Nazi ideology), the ‘Ibero-Celtic’, the ‘Atlanto-Baltic’ (which lumps the English with the Dutch and the north Germans), the ‘Central European’ (which includes both the majority of Germans and the majority of Russians), and the swarthy ‘Indo-Mediterranean’ can all be encountered in current reference works. These are only slightly less fanciful than the once fashionable practice of putting each modern nationality into its own racial group (see p. 817). Even so, phrases such as ‘the Island Race’, ‘German genes’, or ‘Polish Blood’ have not yet passed from popular parlance, not to mention the ‘Daneskin’ and the ‘red-haired Irish’, or the ‘black dogs’ and ‘white ladies’ with which European folklore abounds.
Modern genetic science has progressed far beyond the methods and conclusions of the nineteenth-century pioneers. In this, the crucial step came with the demonstration of the workings of DNA in 1953. Generally speaking, the advances have emphasized the overwhelming mass of genetic material which all members of the human race hold in common and the immense number of characteristics that are encoded in the genes.
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In a series of declarations between 1956 and 1964, UNESCO condemned the principal racial myths that had prevailed since the days of Blumenbach and Gobineau.
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Racial and kinship differences have not been discounted. But the field has been cleared for a greater emphasis on cultural, religious, and socio-economic factors, for sophisticated genetic analysis based on proven scientific principles, and for the final dismissal of the old obsession with skins and skulls.
Napoleonic Poland was a land of fervent enthusiasms and deep disillusionment. Napoleon’s arrival in December 1806, and the creation of the self-governing Grand Duchy of Warsaw, aroused great excitement; but the changes fell very short of the expected restoration of the late Republic. In 1809 the second defeat of the Austrians delivered Cracow to the Duchy; but no help was forthcoming for the recovery either of Danzig or of Lithuania and the provinces absorbed by Russia. Polish volunteers served in every stage of the Revolutionary wars, from the legions of Italy in 1796. But vicious financial exactions symbolized by the so-called Bayonne Sums, and the constant toll of conscripts, dead, and
mutiles
swelled popular resentments. Napoleon never revealed his ultimate intentions for Poland, even in 1812, when he briefly controlled almost the whole of historic Polish territory. His legend fared better in the Romantic times after his death than during his lifetime. When his most faithful lieutenant, Marshal Poniatowski, spurred his charger into the waters of the Eister at the end of the ‘Battle of the Nations’, he was expressing the despair of an exceedingly deceived and weary people.
GUERRILLA
I
N
June 1808, laden with spoils after sacking Cordoba, the French General Dupont retreated towards Andujar and the passes of the Sierra Morena. He then found himself surrounded not only by the regular Army of Andalusia but also by armed bands of Andalusian peasants harrying his retreat from the rear. His surrender with 22,000 men gave notice that holding Spain would prove much more difficult than invading it.
Throughout the Peninsular War, the French Army faced two sorts of conflict—one, the main military campaigns against Spanish, Portuguese, and British formations, and the other, the
guerrilla
or ‘little war’ against roaming bands of peasants. The second form of warfare proved specially vicious. The guerrilla bands avoided open battle, specializing instead in ambushes, night raids, and surprise attacks on isolated outposts. They provoked the French into murderous, collective reprisals on civilians. And they bequeathed their name to all who have emulated their methods. They showed how small bands of determined fighters could contest the overwhelming force of a professional army.
The guerrillas of Napoleonic Spain have had many heirs, not least in the popular heroes of colonial wars and the backwood revolutionaries of Latin America. But they have had their disciples in Europe as well—in the Russian anarchists, in the partisans and
maquisards
of the Anti-Nazi Resistance Movement, and, with the IRA or ETA, in the ‘urban guerrillas’ of modern political terrorism.
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The only major dispute is one of precedence. In French historiography, the pride of place is not given to the Spanish guerrillas but to ‘Jean Chouan’ and his followers, that is, to Frenchmen who defied the might of the Republic more than a decade before French armies entered Spain.
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Great Britain, though free from French occupation, was shaken to its roots by the revolutionary wars. Indeed, whilst the external foe was repelled, there were moments when internal revolution loomed. In 1797–8 the coincidence of naval mutinies at Spithead and the Nore with the revolt of Wolfe Tone’s United Irishmen was particularly menacing. Certainly the prosecution of almost constant war with France inhibited political reform. The Union of Great Britain with Ireland, for example, which came about in 1801 in consequence of Tone’s defeat was marred by the postponement of promised Catholic emancipation for the best part of thirty years. At the same time the sense of British solidarity was greatly enhanced by the run of naval victories, and by the threats of French invasion, which on one occasion in 1798, in the remote extremity of Ireland, actually materialized. The prestige of Parliament was strengthened by the magnificent tussle between Pitt the Younger and his eloquent rival, Charles lames Fox (1749–1806). All the while, Britain’s commercial, colonial, and economic strength continued to accrue. The tally of French, Spanish, and Dutch colonial prizes grew longer and longer. At home, the General Enclosure Act (1801) greatly accelerated the tempo of social change. The Caledonian Canal (1803–22) was constructed despite the war. And in 1811 the first of the Luddite attacks on machinery took place, in Nottingham. In that same year the old King was finally declared permanently insane, and was succeeded by his son, the Prince Regent. The Regency, 1811–20, proved to be one of the most splendid intervals in British architecture, patronage, and high society.
Scandinavia, too, escaped the Revolution, but not the associated turbulence. Sweden was twice involved with wars against Russia. In 1788–90, after the naval victory at Svenskund, she came through unscathed. In 1808–9 she lost Finland and, in the ensuing debacle, her King, Gustav IV Adolphus (r. 1792–1809). The constitution of 1809 introduced a limited monarchy, and one of Napoleon’s ex-marshals, Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte (1763–1844), was invited to accept the throne as Charles XIV. He entered the anti-French coalition, participated in the war of liberation in Germany, and hived off Norway from Denmark,
[NORGE]
Denmark, on the other hand, had desperately tried to maintain a policy of neutrality, which twice earned her ruthless retaliation from Britain. Under the great
reformer C. D. F. Reventlow (1748–1827), the Danish Enlightenment achieved many things, including the emancipation of the serfs, Jewish civil rights, free trade, and a free press. But it did not save the country from her neighbours. In April 1801 the Danish fleet was sunk at Copenhagen on the occasion when Nelson reputedly put the telescope to his blind eye and refused the signal to desist. In September 1807 Copenhagen was invested by the British and forced to capitulate. After that the Danes went over wholeheartedly to the French connection, for which they were duly punished by Bernadotte and by the Congress of Vienna.
NORGE
A
T
the end of the Napoleonic Wars, when Denmark had clearly backed the losing side, Norway’s leaders made their break from 400 years of Danish rule. On 17 May 1814 an assembly was convened at Eisvold, near Christiania, to declare Norway a sovereign, constitutional monarchy. The constitution was largely modelled on that of Spain (1812). The Danish governor of the country, Prince Christian Frederick, was unanimously acclaimed Norway’s first king since 1389.
The assembly at Eisvold, however, had not reckoned either with Sweden or with the King of Denmark. Ever since their loss of Finland in 1809, the Swedes had sought to acquire Norway in compensation; and the Danish King had unilaterally conceded their claim. Moreover, the Swedish army, under the heir to the throne, Bernadotte, was already on the march to enforce the agreement. After a fortnight’s war, the Norwegians were obliged to accept a bargain whereby they could retain their constitution, and their separate
Storthing
or parliament, but not their king, within a joint Suedo-Norwegian realm. This settlement was enshrined in an Act of Union and confirmed at the Congress of Vienna.
Henceforth, Norway’s national movement was directed in the cultural sphere against Danish domination but in the political sphere against the union with Sweden. No amount of pressure could persuade the Norwegians to forgo their constitution; and ninety years of wrangles over foreign policy, over national flags, and, above all, over the powers of the Swedish king, soured the union. At one point the entire Norwegian cabinet was arraigned before the country’s constitutional court, and the premier fined, for exceeding their rights. Finally, the Swedish government resigned itself to Norway’s second declaration of independence. The Danish Prince Charles was unanimously elected king, and entered his capital on 25 November 1905. The King took the name of Haakon VI, and the capital returned to its ancient name of Oslo. With some delay, the will of the assembly of Eisvold had finally prevailed.
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