Europe: A History (158 page)
Industrialization brought wave after wave of migration: first on a local or seasonal basis from village to factory; next on a regional basis from the countryside to the towns; and, from the 1850s onwards, on an international and an intercontinental basis to all the industrial cities of Europe and the USA. Unregulated migration brought in its turn urban overcrowding, vagrancy, housing shortages, homelessness, epidemics of typhus and cholera, unemployment amidst prosperity, persistent and irremediable poverty. With much delay, the worst epidemics, such as the Europe-wide outbreaks of cholera in 1830–5,1847–8,1853–6,1865–7, 1869–74,1883–7, and 1893–5, provoked a revolution in public and private hygiene
and the institution of communal health services,
[SANITAS]
Medical progress eventually resulted in a startling drop in the death rate and in infant mortality.
Rising population, however, compounded the evils of overpopulation in the villages, and of sweatshops, child labour, inhuman working hours, female exploitation, and unspeakable sorrow in the slums. Organized crime thrived on poverty and the psychopathology of urban living. It spawned a new underclass of committed criminals, the new idea of professional police forces modelled on Scotland Yard, a new profession of detectives, a new rash of prison building, and, with
The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
(1894), a new literary genre—the crime thriller.
The terrible contrast between rich and poor has never been better described than by Benjamin Disraeli (1804–81), novelist and prime minister. In
Sybil
(1845) Disraeli wrote of ‘Two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings as if they were … inhabitants of different planets’.
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The description was accurate enough; but the accusation was not altogether fair. The nineteenth century also saw a huge explosion of private charities.
[CARITAS]
In the cultural sphere, education vastly expanded its frontiers. Town dwellers could no longer function without basic literacy and numeracy: universal primary education became necessary for children of both sexes. Technical education was required for the army of fitters, technicians, and apprentices; higher scientific education for the corps of engineers and researchers. Government and business leaders called for secondary schools of a new type to train the executive cadres of the civil service, the colonial departments, and industry. Women’s education was launched. Mass literacy, however, opened the way for new forms of mass culture: popular magazines, trash novels, romances, and whodunnits, comics, self-help almanacs, family reference works. Regular incomes created the possibility of new forms of leisure and recreation: musical associations, family holidays, tourism, mountaineering, and sport, football for the workers, golf for the bosses,
[RELAX-ATIO][TOUR]
The mania for physical pursuits, which was a product of cramped urban living, combined with the mania for education to create a number of hybrid youth movements such as the widespread ‘Sokol’ associations in central Europe or
Scouting for Boys
and
Guiding for Girls
(1908). Religious culture responded in tune. Literate children could not be expected simply to learn their catechism by rote. The church halls of urban parishes became the focal point of social, charitable, and temperance activities. In the Protestant countries evangelical fundamentalism, Sunday schools, and Bible-reading classes proliferated. In the Catholic countries the Church organized the first industrial parishes, worker-priests, and private Catholic primary schools. In the universities, with scholars struggling to comprehend the changing world about them, a whole new range of social sciences made their appearance—economics, ethnography, anthropology, linguistics, sociology. Each of the new disciplines were to have a profound influence on the recognized fields of study: philosophy, science, history, and literature.
SANITAS
I
N
1829 the city of Orenburg in the Urals was hit by an unprecedented I wave of cholera. In 1830 the same cholera hit Moscow. In 1831 it marched with the Russian Army against Poland before spreading to Hungary, Austria, and Prussia. It reached London in February 1832, Paris in March, Amsterdam in June, and thence spread to Scandinavia. The Spaniards tried to protect themselves behind a decree passing the death sentence on all non-quarantined immigrants. But in January 1833 cholera reached Oporto, and entered Spain through Portugal. Though no one knew it, Europe stood in the front line of the second of six pandemics of cholera that were to sweep repeatedly round the world for the next ninety years; and Russia was Europe’s bacterial gateway.
1
[EPIDEMIA]
The effects of the pandemic were all the more deadly since its workings were not yet fully understood.
Cholera
is the old Greek word for ‘gutter’, and accurately described the violent intestinal flux that could empty out a sufferer’s substance in a couple of days. Medical opinion is unsure whether earlier forms of this dysentery-like illness, under a variety of names, had in fact been the same. But the guilty agent was eventually identified in 1883 as a bacterium,
vibrio cholerae 01
, which infected the small intestine after being imbibed with contaminated water. First observed by British Army doctors in India, the launch-pad of all the pandemics, physicians eventually realized that it could best be prevented by a clean water supply and best treated by simple rehydration techniques. The initial outbreak of 1817–23 had moved eastwards round Asia. But all subsequent pandemics—in 1829–51, 1852–9, 1863–79, 1881–96, and 1899–1923—visited Europe with a vengeance. The second pandemic, which had raged for fifteen years in the USA, came round again for a final fling in Europe in 1847–51. In Britain 53,000 died in 1848, and a similar number died in France in 1849. In 1851 a statue was erected in Paris to implore God’s mercy on cholera’s helpless victims.
Help, however, was to hand. Cholera had the distinction of provoking Europe’s first co-ordinated initiatives for public health, at both the national and the international level. In 1848 a General Board of Health was established in London to address the foul conditions and high death rates in Britain’s burgeoning cities. Fortified by Disraeli’s great Public Health Act (1875), which held all local authorities responsible for efficient sewage treatment, drainage, and water supply, it protected the United Kingdom most effectively. By the fourth pandemic, British losses of c.15,000 were only one-tenth of those experienced in Russia, Germany, Italy or Austria-Hungary. After the fifth pandemic, when Hamburg (1893) lost over 8,000 citizens, and Moscow and St Petersburg (1893–4) over 800,000, Britain could boast that it had already warded off its last indigenous case of cholera.
In 1851 Napoleon III took the initiative of convening the founding International Health Conference in Paris. Its purpose was to exchange information about the spread and prevention of disease, especially cholera. At the time neither Pasteur nor Lister had made the pioneering discoveries of bacteriology, but it led to a regular series of conferences on hygiene, and in 1907 to the International Health Organization in Paris, the forerunner of the WHO. By then, especially in Poland,
Choléra!
only remained as one of Europe’s favourite swear-words.
Ironically, no sooner had Europe tamed cholera than an aberrant strain of influenza surpassed all of cholera’s triumphs. Traced to an outbreak of swine fever in Iowa in January 1918, the influenza pandemic of 1918–19 sailed to Europe with the US army. Known as the
Blitzkatarrh
, the ‘Flanders Grippe’, and, through the infection of the King of Spain, as ‘the Spanish Lady’, it specialized in prime young adults, particularly women. During the terminal months of the First World War it devastated Germany, where influenza was not even a notifiable disease, paralysing the workforce of major cities, interrupting deliveries and troop movements. In three terrible peaks—July 1918, October 1918, and February 1919—it destroyed millions of Europeans, possibly 40 million world-wide. ‘[This pandemic] killed more humans in a couple of months than any scourge in history.’
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In the psychological sphere, urban and industrial life fostered attitudes that were entirely foreign to country dwellers. The factory hooter, the railway timetable, the need for punctuality and sobriety were all innovations that a peasant might find strange and irksome. Consumerism and compulsory thrift were complementary reactions of the fearful spender let loose on an unfamiliar market. Class-consciousness was born of anxious people uncertain of their status in a strangely mobile society. National consciousness was bred in newly educated generations who in their rural villages had never given a moment’s thought to their identity or their language. Political consciousness was aroused in generations who were no longer helpless serfs and who could cultivate personal opinions about the rights and wrongs of political events. Indeed, national and political consciousness was often aroused most fiercely in those countries where a repressed population was deprived of free expression and a free vote. Lastly, there was the psychology of late nineteenth-century imperialism, where a whole generation of parvenu Europeans were taught to look down on other races and cultures in ways that secure and settled societies would not have embraced.
In the political sphere, governments faced new types of challenge. They were no longer addressing themselves to their own narrow élite but to a mass audience of taxpayers, holding a wide variety of views expressed with growing confidence and sophistication. They could not restrict political life indefinitely to the traditional male propertied caste; and they were increasingly faced with organized campaigns
for universal male suffrage and later for women’s suffrage. The majority of Europeans were enfranchised between 1848 and 1914. As a result, political parties sprang up, each with a mass following and each devoted to the interests of liberals, conservatives, Catholics, peasants, workers, or whatever. Governments had also to institute a wide range of specialized ministries and to run a bulging bureaucracy that had a mind and will of its own. They were employers on a grand scale, and were forced to consider the welfare of their employees with National Insurance and pensions. They had to reorganize local government to suit the needs of self-important cities and of freshly populated provinces, and hence to rethink the entire relationship between capital and periphery. They had to cope with a wide range of professional, commercial, and industrial associations—and, most particularly in the second half of the century, the trade unions—who claimed the right to act as pressure-groups long before they were formally integrated into political life.
CARITAS
I
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1818 the Netherlands
Maatschaapij van Weldadigheid
(Benevolent I Society) opened a complex of labour colonies for the care of the unemployed. They conformed to a much older Dutch tradition for correcting the idle,
[BATAVIA]
One colony at Veenhuizen catered for up to 4,000 men convicted of begging. Another at Leyden catered for indigent women. Three ‘free colonies’ at Frederiksoord, Willemsoord, and Wilhelminasoord were designed to teach agricultural skills to voluntary inmates. In due course, they were funded by the state. Similar institutions came into being in Germany, Belgium, and Switzerland, often under military-style discipline.
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They are examples both of the growing provision of social care in nineteenth-century Europe and also of growing regimentation. As with the workhouses introduced by the English Poor Law Amendment Act (1834), it was assumed that able-bodied recipients of charity would have to work.
Charity in various forms had been practised since ancient times. But the fundamental Christian principles were laid down by St Thomas Aquinas, who distinguished seven ‘spiritual aids’ and seven ‘good works’. The former were listed as
consule
(counsel),
carpe
(sustain),
doce
(teach),
solare
(console),
remitte
(rescue),
fer
(pardon), and
ora
(pray); the latter as
vestio
(clothe),
poto
(to give water),
cibo
(feed),
redimo
(redeem from prison),
tego
(shelter),
colligo
(nurse), and
condo
(bury). From this, one could determine the classes of unfortunates to whom charity was to be extended. They included the bewildered, the weak, the illiterate, the bereaved, the oppressed, the criminal, the sinful, the stranger, the ragged, the hungry, the imprisoned, the homeless, the sick, the mad, and the dead. Christian teaching was emphatic: ‘Faith, Hope and Charity: these three,’ says St. Paul, ‘but the greatest of these is Charity.’
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For it is Charity meaning ‘love for one’s neighbour’ that begets charity meaning ‘generous giving’.
In medieval times, the burden of care had fallen on the Church, and was funded from the tithe. St Bernard launched the charitable tradition in monasteries, St Francis the tradition of social action within the community. Both had many successors. Royal, aristocratic, and municipal patrons were moved to found a widespread network of
maisons-Dieu
for the sick and infirm, of hospices for pilgrims, wayfarers, and strangers, of alms-houses for the deserving poor, and of leprosaria. A large city like London possessed a number of more specialized institutions, such as St Bartholomew’s Hospital, St Mary’s of Bethlehem, or ‘Bedlam’, for the insane, and St Mary’s ‘Converts’ Inn’ for Jewish converts expelled by their own community.
3
As elsewhere, prosperous merchants such as Sir Richard Whittington (d. 1423), sometime Lord Mayor, left generous endowments,
[LEPER] [MERCANTE]
This medieval system began to fracture in the Reformation period, particularly in the Protestant countries. The dissolution of the English monasteries (1540) had social consequences with which the hard-pressed Elizabethan Poor Laws could not cope. Modern Europe was obliged to seek new solutions. As the population grew, charitable institutions became much larger and more specialized. Purpose-built veterans’ homes, mental asylums, houses of correction, prisons, medical ‘infirmaries’, workhouses, labour colonies, and charity schools were multiplying fast in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Liberal and humanitarian movements pressed for the abolition of slavery, torture, and of degrading conditions. The burden of funding and administration passed from the Church to parish and city councils, to private benevolent societies, and eventually to the state,
[PICARO] [TORMENTA]
The expansion of charitable activities has usually been seen, in the Whig tradition, as evidence for the onward march of civilization. Some historians, however, have thought otherwise. They point out that, while the institutions of social care greatly expanded, they subjected the evergrowing army of inmates to ever-rising levels of repression. The recipients may not have feared the gross physical brutalities of times past, but rigorous regimes of psychological and moral coercion could rob them of their freedom, their dignity, and their individuality. Regimentation was on the rise across a wide spectrum of social life, on the military parade-ground, in the school classroom, in factories, in the hospital ward, in the workhouses. It was seen by its originators as the necessary price for efficiency.
But there may have been a darker side. One has to wonder whether the regimentation of the masses was not somehow connected with the drive towards more liberal political institutions. Unremitting labour was the fate of both the employed and the unemployed. And as Nietzsche remarked cynically: ‘Work is the most efficient form of policing.’ Political controls could only be relaxed when social controls were tightened.
This line of thought is implicit in the work of the French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault (1926–84). Himself a sado-masochist who died of AIDS, he was determined to explore extreme experiences, and he came to be an unsparing critic of modern social reform. His studies of the history of mental asylums, which locked the most vulnerable persons out of sight, or of sexual attitudes, which drove basic human drives into the realm of hypocrisy and taboo, caused him to pronounce modern times to be ‘the Age of Repression’.
4
All social relationships are determined by power. ‘Bourgeois society’, he declared, ‘was a society of blatant and fragmented perversion.’
5
He raises issues to which the inmates of those nineteenth-century labour colonies may have been quite sympathetic.
