The fascination with the mysterious, the esoteric and the irrational that characterizes the entire epoch would pave the way for the revolutions of 1848. After their failure, accumulated frustration would generate intransigent movements of socialism as well as nationalism, and desire for a genuine, thoroughgoing revolution that would bring freedom and equality to all, not just a few.
Alternative Gods
‘What is exploding today was prepared before 1848 … the fire that burns today was lit then.’ The German jurist Carl Schmitt wrote these words in the mid-twentieth century; they ring even truer today. In the years before 1848, thwarted idealism went into forging new religions and ideologies, and revolts and uprisings kept young men gainfully employed as professional conspirators and insurgents. The Italian Carboneria, which became the first secret organization to lead a large-scale uprising in modern Europe, offered a model for many subsequent small revolutionary cells.
As such quasi-Christian sects and societies burgeoned, Byron spoke in 1818 of the Italian yearning for the ‘immortality of independence’. The English poet went on to become a pied piper, seducing bored men into dreams of private glory. He drummed up support for Greek independence among secularized Europeans brought up on a heavy diet of antipathy to Ottoman Turks and reverence for ancient Greece (and himself died, as Alexandre Dumas put it in the overblown style of the age, ‘for the Greeks like another Jesus’). Germans responded to the new Crusade in Greece with particular eagerness, and, like many others, were disillusioned, if not dead, soon after arriving in the land of their dreams (Hölderlin’s 1797 novel Hyperion anticipates their crushing disappointments).
There were rebellions in Spanish American colonies in which the new vocabulary of equality and liberty played a central role. Restless young men from virtually every European country travelled to South America in search of suitably chivalrous and uplifting causes (and usually ended up sacrificing their lives to such fiascos as Simón Bolívar’s attempt to unite the Continent). John Keats was among those tempted to fight in Venezuela. Even John Stuart Mill, emerging from a breakdown, found that Byron’s ‘state of mind’ was too disturbingly like his own, exposing the good life in prospering England as a ‘vapid, uninteresting thing’. Mill later projected his own fear of debility and boredom to modern society as a whole, warning against the dangers of spiritual stagnation.
Chateaubriand in The Genius of Christianity (1802) had tried to renew the appeal of Catholicism for a new generation. But a return to traditional religion was unlikely in post-Enlightenment France – Voltaire’s scoffing had taken care of that possibility. Robespierre, a priest manqué (in Condorcet’s words), with his religion of the ‘Supreme Being’ had, however, broadened the scope for pseudo-religions; and France, struggling with let-down after the adventures of the Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, produced some ambitious schemes for secular salvation in the period between 1815 and 1848.
The most influential of these figures, Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon, who in 1825 came up with a new universal religion, le Nouveau Christianisme, voiced a general suspicion that the Rights of Man had proved to be deeply inadequate. Society had now to be organized and regenerated in ways other than through the principles of ‘individualism’ – a word to which the Saint-Simonians gave wide currency through their criticism of the crisis of authority in France. The poet Alphonse de Lamartine, writing a hagiography of Joan of Arc during the bleak days of the Bourbon Restoration, hoped for a new spiritual community. Charles Fourier, a travelling salesman, claimed to be the new Messiah, who had unlocked the secret to universal harmony. Saint-Simon’s secretary, Auguste Comte, floated a religion of Positivism. Defining human progress as the transition from theological and metaphysical ways of thinking to the scientific or ‘positive’ one, and outlining a grandiose role for experts, Comte achieved widespread fame, and such unlikely disciples as Turkey’s modernizing autocrat, Atatürk.
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The scope, opened up by the Enlightenment, for social engineering by rational experts was broadened as the scientific ‘value-neutral’ approach and technocratic ideas began to enter the political realm; they were helped by breakthroughs in modern medicine, which, improving everyday life, made progress seem automatic, and such effective advocates as Saint-Simon, who blended a passion for science and technology with the existing cult of emotion.
Saint-Simon’s disciples, who inherited and expanded a lexicon of pseudo-religious high-mindedness (‘creed’, ‘mission’, ‘universal association’, ‘humanity’), turned out to be a diverse and prominent lot; they ranged from people hailing Jews for creating ‘industrial and political links among peoples’ and India’s sensuous goddesses and androgynous gods to Pierre Leroux, who inaugurated modern ideological journalism with his newspaper, The Globe. Another Saint-Simonian, Suzanne Voilquin, a working-class woman, travelled in the 1830s to Egypt (where she assumed Arab male dress), America and Russia with her message of female empowerment.
The French revolutionaries had done little for women; their general attitude was summed up by the leading radical newspaper Les Revolutions de Paris, which advised women to stay home and ‘knit trousers for our brave sans-culottes’. But revolutionary feminists were well represented among the followers of Fourier and Saint-Simon; the sheer novelty and audacity of their claims made them seem ultra-radical. George Sand, probably the most influential European woman of her age, offered a romantic version of female emancipation, basing it on the rights of the heart. But this was also the time when even the most modulated demands for female liberty were met with furious sexual epithets from men in public life, attesting to a profound anxiety about their own muddy self-definition.
Napoleon’s martial ethos and brazen misogyny were largely responsible for this (unsurprisingly, France did not give women the vote until after the Second World War). Asked by Madame de Staël, his most tenacious and influential critic, who he thought was the greatest woman in history, Napoleon replied, ‘The one, Madame, who has the most children.’ On another occasion he examined her décolletage and asked her whether she breast-fed her children; he also pulped Madame de Staël’s book on Germany, declaring it to be anti-French.
Even the sophisticated Tocqueville couldn’t hide his condescension for George Sand. ‘She pleased me,’ he declared after a meeting with the writer. Hoping to revitalize hopelessly bourgeois French males through imperial expansion in Africa, he couldn’t help adding, ‘I loathe women who write, especially those who systematically disguise the weaknesses of their sex.’ Unsurprisingly, Sand was depicted in popular caricature as a virago, holding a whip. The cult of passion and sexuality she promoted did have some takers; and her idealized images of workers and peasants turned the nineteenth-century’s serialized novel into effective socialist agitprop. A visit to Sand in 1847 turned Margaret Fuller, a cautious feminist in New England, into a revolutionary in Italy. Dostoyevsky and Herzen both credited Sand with stimulating their social conscience.
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The cult of the nation, however, grew faster in France and elsewhere among insecure men who dominated the public sphere. Its leading exponent was a Catholic priest, the Abbé Félicité de Lamennais, who believed that God, working through the people, had caused the French Revolution. His 1834 book Words of a Believer, one of the most widely read books of the nineteenth century, offered an apocalyptic vision of oppressed humanity, and its global salvation. It was Lamennais who tried to establish a precise relationship, subsequently insisted upon by nationalists in India as well as Italy, between the ‘motherland’ and the isolated individuals who voluntarily ‘penetrate and become enmeshed’ with it.
The historian Michelet, a keen reader of Herder, thought that his ‘noble country’ should ‘fill within us the immeasurable abyss which extinct Christianity has left there’. Reinterpreting history as the spiritual development of France, he presented Joan of Arc as the lover of France rather than God. France, he declared, was the ‘pilot of the vessel of humanity’ a
nd its revolution the Second Coming.
Eventually, Napoleon, dead since 1821, made a second coming as a demigod. His sacred memory thrilled the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz as well as Stendhal and Balzac, in whose novel The Country Doctor (1833) the emperor is considered divine (it helped that his birthday was also the Feast of the Assumption). This resurrection was the prelude to a bizarre worldwide deification of a ruthless imperialist. For those who abhorred it, like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, the general European adoration of Napoleon signified the triumph of godless amoralism. Raskolnikov, the former law student in Crime and Punishment (1866), derives philosophical validation from the cult of the Corsican after murdering an old woman:
A true master, to whom everything is permitted, sacks Toulon, unleashes slaughter in Paris, forgets an army in Egypt, expends half a million lives marching on Moscow, then laughs it all off with a quip in Vilno; and he even has idols erected to him after his death – so everything really is permitted.
Napoleon set the template for many popular despotisms to follow, by seeking, in Madame de Staël’s words, ‘to satisfy men’s interests at the expense of their virtues, to deprave public opinion by sophisms, and to give the nation war for an object instead of liberty’. ‘The French, alas!’ she lamented, ‘seconded him only too well.’ And so did aspiring nationalists and imperialists across Europe. Napoleon’s holy ghost supervised the July Revolution of 1830 that ended the Bourbon Restoration, and liberated the repressed creed of the French Revolution. Copycat uprisings in Poland, Italy and Spain soon followed, but suffered for want of mass support.
Their zealous leaders exiled in Paris, London or Geneva remained undaunted, however. Failure or success paled before the necessity of emotional intoxication. The young German writer Heinrich Heine was typical of those who moved to Paris to be close to the action. ‘Together,’ he wrote, speaking of the reappearance in 1830 of Lafayette, the tricolour and the ‘Marseillaise’, ‘they kindled my soul into a wild glow … bold ardent hopes spring up’.
How to Develop, German-Style
In Heine’s politically conservative and stagnant country, however, the yearning for enchantment fed a massive religious revival that made the country seem medieval rather than modern. More than a million pilgrims went to Trier in 1844 to glimpse what they believed to be the Holy Robe of Christ. The sale of theological books rocketed. The spiritual unrest and longing for the infinite spilled over from political theory and art into political-philosophical speculation.
The modern world’s greatest philosophical system, implicit in all our political ideas and values today, was built during this time. The French Revolution may have announced the nineteenth century’s religion of the nation, and the cults of liberty and equality; but Germans brooding on their political inadequacy produced an Ur-philosophy of development: one to which liberal internationalists and modernization theorists as well as communist universalists and cultural nationalists could subscribe.
As the German states modernized in response to the Revolution and Napoleon’s depredations, Hegel came to see human history culminating in a new political system in Germany. Prepared by Luther’s Reformation the Germans, he maintained, were better placed spiritually and philosophically than the French for the tasks of reason and progress. Indeed, the historical trajectory of the Revolution and Germany’s development pointed to an imminent ‘end of history’, when all the major conflicts of history would be at last resolved.
Since Prussian and other German states appeared further than ever from this historical terminus in the 1830s and 1840s – an especially bleak time for German intellectuals – one of Hegel’s keen disciples readjusted his philosophical universal history. Germany’s backwardness, as he saw it, could only be eradicated by a working-class revolution – so far-reaching that it would amount eventually to the emancipation of humanity.
In the social and economic history written by Karl Marx – another form of German exceptionalism and system-building – the end of history became synonymous with a proletariat revolution and the creation of a communist society in Germany. Building brilliantly on the Romantics’ original critique of alienation, Marx came to see Germany as the catalyst of a worldwide transformation.
Marx’s collaborator, Engels, even claimed a sixteenth-century German (and devoutly Christian) peasant leader for the idea of Communism: Thomas Muenzer, he wrote, like a ‘genius’ understood that the ‘kingdom of God was nothing else than a state of society without class differences, without private property, and without superimposed state powers opposed to the members of society’.
The failure of the 1848 revolutions showed that much remained to be done before the Kingdom of God could be established on Earth. Marx and Engels posited several phases, such as class struggle, in the path towards it. Critics such as Max Stirner and Bakunin had argued that the task of securing individual freedom could not be entrusted to such ideological abstractions as class and state – ‘spooks’, as Stirner called them.
Furious with both Stirner and Bakunin, Marx underlined that the conditions must be right before man could become fully human; he should be free of economic and social constraints, and this freedom was not simply an act of individual will or assertion of ego. It had to be worked towards in progressive stages, such as bourgeois industrialization, working-class disaffection and revolution. This was all supposedly scientific. As Engels asserted in his eulogy on the occasion of Marx’s death in 1883, ‘Just as Darwin discovered the laws of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history.’
Thus, development came to be infused with fresh earnestness and world-historical urgency, and then exalted with the prestige of science. Mere being came to be degraded, thanks to Germany’s special experience, by becoming. As Nietzsche wrote caustically, ‘The German himself is not, he is becoming, he is “developing”. “Development” is thus the truly German discovery.’
In the long term, ‘development’ proved to be the most important discovery: it is still the word we use to assess societies. Human self-knowledge since the nineteenth century has been synonymous with all that could help the process of ‘development’: the advance of science and industry and the demystification of culture, tradition and religion. All the hopes, transmitted from Marxists to modernization theorists and free-marketeers, of ‘development’ emerge from nineteenth-century German thinkers: the first people to give a deep meaning and value to a process defined by continuous movement with a fixed direction and no terminus. All our simple dualisms – progressive and reactionary, modern and anti-modern, rational and irrational – derive their charge from the deeply internalized urge to move to the next stage of ‘development’, however nebulously defined.
Finding the Enemy Within
As Romanticism metamorphosed into grand proclamations about the spirit of history (and its fondness for Germany), Heine warned against ‘that vague, unfruitful pathos, that unprofitable vapour of enthusiasm, which plunges, scorning death, into an ocean of generalizations’. Shorn of his earlier hopes, Heine became Germany’s most acute critic as the country’s slow progress under a conservative regime incited grandiloquent daydreams of power among the intellectuals. As he then wrote, ‘The French and the Russians rule the land, / Great Britain rules the sea, / But we’re supreme in the realm of dreams, / Where there’s no rivalry.’
Heine keenly sensed Romanticism’s disturbing mutations. In ‘Atta Troll’ (1841) a bear dancing vigorously and ineptly represents the Young Germany:
Atta Troll, trend-conscious bear, respectably
Religious, ardent as a companion,
Through seduction by the Zeitgeist
A sansculotte of the primeval forest.
Dances very badly, yet with
Conviction in his shaggy bosom.
Also pretty stinky on occasion.
No talent, but a character.
The Jewish poet was an early critic of nationalism, having noticed its malign dependence on various enemies for self
-definition: ‘The French-devourers,’ he wrote, ‘like to gobble down a Jew afterwards for a tasty dessert.’ He attacked the book-burners at the Wartburg ceremony of 1817:
Dominant there was that Teutomania that shed so many tears over love and faith, but whose love was no different than hatred of the foreigner and whose faith lay only in stupidity and could, in its ignorance, find nothing better to do than to burn books!
Heine went after the solemn intellectual defenders of nationalism, the German philosophers and historians who ‘torture their brains in order to defend any despotism, no matter how silly or clumsy it may be, as sensible and authentic’. His defiant Francophilia, and contempt for German nationalists, exposed Heine to anti-Semitic attacks. The most formidable of his critics after 1871 was Heinrich von Treitschke, a kind of intellectual spokesman for unified and rising Germany with his patriotic histories. In 1807, Fichte had already floated the possibility of expelling unassimilated Jews. Treitschke made anti-Semitism respectable in Bismarck’s Second Reich with an article that began with the words, ‘The Jews are our national misfortune.’ He deplored the fact that Heine ‘never wrote a drinking song’ and ‘of carousing in the German way the oriental was incapable’. ‘Heine’s esprit,’ he concluded, ‘was by no means Geist in the German sense.’
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Treitschke was trying to name and shame un-German Orientals when Germany had become a unified nation state, and its material and political conditions had vastly improved. For a long time only some bookish Germans had been even interested in a national state, despite the best efforts of various freelance revolutionaries. The misery of peasants and factory workers had bred passive acceptance rather than political resistance, let alone revolutionary rage – a fact that continually frustrated Marx and pushed him into increasingly radical hopes. Francophobia acquired a mass base only in 1840, when France demanded the surrender of German territories on the left bank of the Rhine.
Age of Anger Page 19