Europe: A History (176 page)
In architecture and design, the Continent-wide wave of Art Nouveau ‘seceded’ from prevailing standards and practices. The earliest example was Victor Horta’s Tassel House (1893) in Brussels. But its monuments could be found at every point between the Glasgow School of Art (1898) of C. R. Mackintosh, the factories of Peter Behrens in Germany, and a string of Austro-Hungarian railway stations from Carlsbad to Czernowitz. The Secessionshaus (1898) in Vienna was built by J. Olbrich in what was called the
Jugendstil
for exhibiting the works of breakaway artists. It bears the inscription:
‘DER ZEIT IHRE KUNST:
I
DER KUNST IHRE FREIHEIT’
(Art for its time; freedom for Art).
In music, Debussy and Ravel explored musical impressionism. Then, with Schoenberg, Hindemith, and Webern, the avant-garde abandoned the basic harmonies and rhythms which had reigned since the Middle Ages,
[TONE]
In literature, the Decadents’ defiance of social and sexual mores was overtaken by intellectual radicalism of a still more profound order. First the Frenchman Marcel Proust (1871–1922) and the Irishman James Joyce (1882–1941), then Franz Kafka (1883–1924), a German Jew from Prague, overturned accepted views concerning the reality of the world, and the means whereby human beings perceive it. They were the literary partners of Freud and Einstein,
[COMBRAY]
The year 1913 saw the appearance of the first volume of Proust’s
à la recherche du temps perdu
and of Kafka’s first stories. The première of Stravinsky’s
Sacre du Printemps
caused a riot in Paris. One publisher in Dublin tore up Joyce’s manuscripts for fear of libel, whilst others took their courage in their hands with D. H. Lawrence’s
Sons and Lovers
and Apollinaire’s
Alcools
. The first light of day fell on Max Ernst’s
Landscape (Town and Animals)
and on Kokoshka’s
Self-portrait
. Most European artistic ventures, like most of European society, still clung to tried and traditional forms; but in the world of Modernism, the fashion was to tear apart the very foundations of conventional culture.
International relations
had remained remarkably stable throughout the nineteenth century. Europe continued to be dominated by the five Great Powers that had organized the Congress of Vienna; and no general conflict had occurred between them since 1815. The wars which did break out were limited both in time and scope. There were international police actions, where one of the Powers could intervene to suppress revolutionary outbreaks that could not be controlled locally. Such were repeated French interventions in Spain and in Italy, or Russian interventions in Poland and Hungary. There were regional conflicts, notably in Italy, in Germany, and in the Balkans. There were various colonial wars overseas. But there was nothing to match the scale of the Napoleonic Wars before 1815 or the Great War which began in 1914. Europe’s energies were for long directed either inwards, to the tasks of internal change, or outwards to fresh imperialist conquests across the globe. Only two intractable problems possessed the capacity to upset the international order. One of them was the accelerating rivalry between France and Germany. The other was the so-called ‘Eastern Question’.
IMPRESSION
I
N
the 1860s, Claude Monet and Auguste Renoir liked to paint together. I They wanted to see how each would capture a different effect from the same scene, and to compare their results. One of their favourite haunts was the suburban riverside of Bougival, beyond St Cloud, near Paris.
Monet’s
La Seine à Bougival
dates from 1869 (see Plate 67). He appears at first to have chosen the mundane, not to say banal, scene of people strolling over a bridge in the evening sunlight. Yet he was trying to achieve an entirely novel effect: he was not painting the world as he thought it was or ought to be, i.e. realistically or idealistically; he was painting the impression which the world made on him. Another canvas of his,
Impression: Lever du soleil
(1874), was to lend its name to a movement which was deliberately and unashamedly subjective. Monet paid a high price for pursuing his own stubborn course. For years he sold no pictures. To his contemporaries his work seemed either worthless or outrageous. Once, when he left Paris to visit his new-born son, creditors seized the contents of his studio and sold them off for a pittance. He attempted suicide.
1
The Impressionists were interested in three matters. First, they sought to explore the foibles of the human eye which contrives to see certain things and not to see others. For this reason, they were intent on constructing an imprecise or selective image. Monet’s deliberately blurred brush strokes at Bougival produced blotchy waves, lop-sided windows, fuzzy leaves, and messy clouds.
Secondly, they were fascinated by the wonderful workings of light. Monet had served for a couple of years with the Chasseurs d’Afrique, and had seen the extreme effects of desert light in the Sahara. He would later conduct a series of systematic experiments with light by painting the same subjects over and over again. His twelve studies of the façade of Rouen Cathedral, each one bathed in the different light of a different time of day, did much to convince the public of the method in his madness.
Thirdly, they were delving into the complex variations in the sensibility and receptivity of the artist’s own mind. This was the key to the epoch-making impetus which they gave to modern art.
It is sometimes considered that modern art, and Impressionism in particular, was reacting against the realistic imagery made possible by photography,
[PHOTO]
In fact, nothing could be more selective and transitory than the image registered by light entering a camera lens for a fraction of a second at a specific exposure and a specific angle. The Impressionists were intensely interested in photography. They often used it in their preparatory studies. Cezanne, for instance, used snapshots both for his landscapes and his self-portraits.
2
However, the camera, though selective like the human eye and very responsive to the play of light, has no mind. And it is in the realm of the human mind that modern artists really came into their own. For that reason, they ultimately reached their goal, which, in Cezanne’s words, was to make themselves ‘more famous than the old masters’.
COMBRAY
E
UROPE
is full of locations redolent of time past. But there is none to equal the village of llliers, near Chartres. For llliers was the place which provided Marcel Proust with his boyhood vacations, and which he was to recreate in his mind as ‘Combray’.
Of all the literary masters, Proust was the supreme timesmith—and hence a writer of special interest to historians. He was convinced that the past never dies, and that it can be recaptured by art from the deepest levels of subconscious memory. Hence, a banal incident such as the crumbling of cake into a cup of tea could trigger the recall of places and events thought lost for ever. More exactly, it could trigger the recall not just of similar banalities in the past but of worlds of emotion and experience with which they were inextricably connected.
For this reason, Proust spent the nineteen years from 1903 to 1922 immured in a fumigated, cork-lined room in Paris, isolated from the world in an attempt to bring the past back to life. And much which he resurrected, together with the myriad thoughts and anxieties of his youth, was to be found at llliers—’la maison de Tante Léonie’, ‘la rue de l’Oiseau-Flèche’, ‘le Pare de Tansonville’, ‘le côté de chez Swann’:
These are not at all the sort of places where a great man was born, or where he died, and which one visits to pay him homage. These are the places which he admired, which he asked to provide him with thought, and which still stand guard over that thought…
1
Generally speaking, the spirit of the past is best preserved in small intimate museums. One can still feel the shade of Charles Dickens in his house on Doughty St, London WC1; one can visit the life of the young Karl in the Marxhaus, preserved by the SPD in face of much adversity at Trier; and one can still imagine oneself stretched out on Freud’s red velvet couch in his house at Bergstrasse 19 in Vienna. But the ultimate pilgrimage in search of lost time can only be directed to that very ordinary village in the Eure-et-Loir, now suitably renamed in Proust’s honour ‘llliers-Combray’.
Franco-German rivalry could be traced to the division of Charlemagne’s Empire; but its modern emanations were rooted in the Revolutionary Wars. Frenchmen remembered the two German powers, Prussia and Austria, as the invaders of 1793 and 1814–15. Prussians and Austrians remembered France as the occupier of 1805–13, against whom their modern existence had been won and defined. For several decades after 1815 a defeated France and a divided Germany were indisposed to brawl. Yet the old animosities seethed under the surface. By 1840 France was once again demanding the frontier of the Rhine, and raising a storm of German protest reflected in the patriotic songs of the day, ‘Die Wacht am Rhein’ and the ‘Deutschlandlied’. In 1848 France was seen, once again, as the source of Germany’s internal unrest. By the 1860s, when France was launched into the self-confident adventures of the Second Empire and Prussia was asserting itself in Germany, both powers were frightened by the other’s aggressive posture. Bismarck engineered the perfect pretext through the Ems Telegram. As it proved, he engineered the event whose consequences would destroy the balance.
The Franco-German War of 1870–1, the third of Bismarck’s lightning wars, caused an even bigger sensation than Sadová. It was actively sought by the French, who were itching to teach the Prussians a lesson. But they found themselves facing a coalition of all the German states, whose forces were better armed, better organized, and better led. France’s military supremacy, which had lasted since Rocroi in 1643, was annulled in less than two months. The first cannon-shot was ceremoniously fired on 1 August 1870 by the Emperor Napoleon’s son, to cries of ‘à Berlin’. After that, one mighty German thrust surged across the frontier, and encircled the main French army at Metz. Another French army, marching to the relief of Metz with the Emperor at its head, marched straight into a finely laid trap near Sedan. In the immortal words of General Bazaine on the eve of almost certain defeat: ‘Nous sommes dans le pot de chambre, et demain nous serons emmerdés’
69
(We are in the chamber pot, and tomorrow we shall be covered in it). Surrounded on all sides, and battered at arm’s length by an enemy that had learned to refrain from frontal assaults, the French resisted Krupp’s steel guns for some hours before capitulating. The Emperor was taken prisoner, abdicated, and eventually took refuge in England. France fought on for eight months; but with Paris besieged, starving, and crumbling from the Prussian artillery, the government of the Third Republic was forced to sue for a humiliating peace. In May 1871 it submitted, consenting to cede Alsace-Lorraine, to pay huge reparations, and to accept German occupation for two years.
Prussia’s crowning victory had several long-term consequences. It facilitated the declaration of a united German Empire, whose first Emperor, William I (r. 1871–88), King of Prussia, was acclaimed by the princes of Germany assembled at Versailles. It served notice that the new Germany would be second to none in
military prowess. In France, it provoked the desperate events of the Paris Commune, and it fuelled the passions of anti-German hatred that were to call ever more insistently for revenge.
The ‘Eastern Question’, as it came to be called, grew from two related and apparently unstoppable processes—the continuing expansion of the Russian Empire and the steady retreat of the Ottomans. It gave rise to the independence of the Balkan nations, to the Crimean War (1854–6), and to a chain of complications which eventually sparked the fatal crisis of 1914. The prospect of Ottoman collapse loomed ever more starkly throughout the century. For the Russians, this was entirely desirable. The re-establishment of Christian power on the Bosporus had formed the ultimate goal of tsarist policy ever since the myth of the Third Rome was formulated. Possession of the Straits would fulfil Russia’s dream of unrestricted access to warm water. As Dostoevsky remarked in 1871, in triumphant expectation: ‘Constantinople will be ours!’ For the other Powers, the demise of the ‘Sick Man of Europe’ held a host of dangers. Britain feared for its lines of communications to India. Austria felt threatened by the emergence of a gaggle of Russian-sponsored states on her south-eastern border. Germany felt threatened by the rise of the only land power whose military capacity might some day overtake her own.
Russia’s compulsive expansion continued at a rate which for the period 1683–1914 has been calculated on average, perhaps conservatively, at 55 square miles per day.
70
But it did not always threaten Europe directly. Following the gains of the Napoleonic period, the main thrusts were now directed against what Russians sometimes called the ‘Middle South’ in the Caucasus and Central Asia, and against China and Japan. Europe, however, was not immune from the Bear which constantly probed the limits of tolerance. Russia’s involvement in the Greek War of Independence sounded the alarm bells, and her gains at the Treaty of Adrianople (1829) were restricted to a small corner on the Danube delta. Both in 1831 and 1863, Russian violation of Poland’s nominal independence evoked vigorous protests from Britain and France. But it was not unwelcome to Berlin and Vienna, which had Polish territories of their own to hold down. So nothing was done. Russia’s advance into the Danubian principalities in 1853 provoked an immediate military response from Austria and the onset of the Crimean War (see below). After that, St Petersburg understood that direct annexations in Europe could be costly, and that parts of her empire were vulnerable to attack from adversaries with superior naval power. The decision was taken to withdraw from North America; and in 1867 Alaska was sold off to the USA for a trifling $8 million. Real estate was more easily acquired elsewhere. In 1859, after half a century of brutality and devastation, the conquest of the mountain tribes of the Caucasus was completed, and their Chechen hero, Shamil, captured. In 1860 the Amur and Maritime provinces were acquired from China, in 1864 Turkestan from Persia, in 1875 Sakhalin and the Kuriles from Japan. All these gains would later be denounced by the losers as the fruit of ‘unequal treaties’. In 1900 the Russian occupation of Manchuria provoked conflict and defeat in the Russo-Japanese
War (1904–5). In 1907 the division of Persia into British and Russian spheres of influence ended several decades of Britain’s fears over Central Asia whilst raising suspicions about Russia’s designs on the Persian Gulf.
