Age of Anger

by Pankaj Mishra

  Thus, the concepts discovered on Herder’s trip to France, and during the larger German recoiling from metropolitan society and quest for Kultur, were adapted to different conditions and traditions. Each ‘wounded’ people defined their unmediated sense of belonging unreservedly in terms of their own ‘people’, religious community or ethnic group. Just as German writers had sought to re-create archaic Greece or the Middle Ages in modern myth, so poets and artists elsewhere rediscovered, or freshly invented, mythical heroes and events for political use. Marked and conditioned by its origins – the revolt of German intellectuals against French culture and domination with some help from Ossian – cultural nationalism crystallized the desperate ambitions, drives, fantasies and confusions of generations of educated young men everywhere, even as the Crystal Palace expanded around the world, making it more and more homogeneous.

  II. Messianic Visions

  Literary Activism

  In the autumn of 1855, as war raged in Crimea, the European poet-prophet of nationalism Adam Mickiewicz arrived in Istanbul. His life and work had already spanned five decades of one of the most turbulent periods in modern Europe. He had met everyone who mattered – Pushkin in Moscow, Hegel in Berlin, Metternich in Marienbad, Goethe in Weimar, Chopin and George Sand in Paris. His disciples were some of the most influential people in the nineteenth century, including Lamennais and Mazzini.

  Typically, Mickiewicz, born in Lithuania, had gone into exile at the age of twenty-four; the national poet of Poland, he visited the country we now know as Poland only once, and never saw Warsaw or Krakow. Mickiewicz addressed God on behalf of a hopelessly scattered Polish diaspora in 1832:

  Almighty God! The children of a warrior nation raise their disarmed hands to you from every quarter of the world. They cry to you from the bottom of Siberian mines and the snows of Kamchatka, from the plains of Algeria and the foreign soil of France.

  But God did not listen. Mickiewicz raised many armies and participated in multiple uprisings for Polish independence. He hoped that France, where he delivered a series of stirring lectures in the early 1840s, would save the world. Repeatedly disappointed, he invested his much-tested faith in 1855 in Russia’s defeat by Western Powers allied with Turkey. In Istanbul, he threw himself into efforts to strengthen the ‘Ottoman Cossacks’, a legion raised from emigrants and Polish prisoners of war. Assisting him in this task was another writer, Michał Czaykowski, who had participated in the failed Polish uprising of 1831, and had lived in Istanbul since 1851 with his wife Ludwika, an old friend of Mickiewicz from Lithuania. Czaykowski in fact had converted to Islam and, joining the Turkish army, had become General Sadyk Pasha.

  Mickiewicz, refusing all offers of finer accommodation, holed up in a small room in Tarlabası, an old immigrant neighbourhood in the heart of Istanbul. He felt at home in Turkey, which he said reminded him of his native land. Also, Polish émigrés like him were exposed to none of the hostility and suspicion they encountered among authorities in France.

  The Ottoman Empire had offered refuge to Polish exiles since Catherine and Frederick partitioned Poland in the late eighteenth century (a Polish village founded in 1842 still exists near Istanbul). During his travels through Crimea in the 1820s, Mickiewicz had developed a fraternal feeling for Muslims who had been conquered and humiliated by Catherine’s Russia at the same time as Polish Catholics. In Istanbul he insisted that Jews among the Ottoman Cossacks form a separate legion: the ‘Hussars of Israel’, as he anointed them. Jewish militancy in his view would galvanize not only Jewish masses across Russia but also the passive Christian peasantry of Poland and Lithuania: ‘We shall,’ he said, ‘spread like lava with our continually growing legion.’

  Much to Mickiewicz’s delight, a synagogue was opened in the Cossacks’ camp, and a fine military uniform designed for the Hussars of Israel by a Jewish officer. But his partner, a Muslim convert in command of both Jewish and Ukrainian soldiers, finally drew the line at such incredible and untenable alliances. His Turkish overlords, he said, would fear the prospect of the Hussars of Israel focusing their emancipatory energies on the Ottoman province of Palestine. Angrily disappointed, Mickiewicz retreated to his Istanbul home. He was still strategizing futilely about the Hussars of Israel when a few weeks later, in November 1855, he suddenly died of cholera.

  * * *

  Poland, the country effaced from the map of Europe with the help of Enlightenment philosophes, remained a dream until the end of the First World War. But Mickiewicz left a lasting legacy in the form of a nationalist cult of sacrifice and martyrdom, a vogue of ceremonies and ritual, and an aesthetic longing, articulated by several writers after him, for action and danger.

  Writing of the literary influences over the French Revolution, Tocqueville marvelled at ‘the most unusual historical situation – in which the entire political education of a great nation was carried out by men of letters’:

  Under their lengthy discipline, in the absence of other leaders, and given the profound ignorance of practice from which all suffered, the nation read their works and acquired the instincts, the cast of mind, the tastes, and even the peculiarities of those who wrote. So that when the nation finally had to act, it carried over into politics all the habits of literature.

  This was also true for stateless and nation-free writers like Mickiewicz, who suffered from a ‘profound ignorance of practice’. They flourished at a time when literary exiles created peoples and nations in an atmosphere of heady freedom – in flagrant disregard of geographical facts and territorial boundaries – and entrusted them with holy missions.

  Herder’s historicism had posited a world culture developing from lower to higher stages, with the torch of progress passed on from one country to another. It enabled the bookish latecomers to modern history to promise their imagined ‘people’ a ‘tryst with destiny’: a phrase Jawaharlal Nehru used on the eve of India’s independence in 1947, and which could have been deployed by anyone in the preceding century – from the Italian novelist Alessandro Manzoni, Hungarian poet-nationalists Sándor Petőfi and Ferenc Kölcsey, the Russian anti-Western writers Konstantin Sergeyevich Aksakov and Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev to the Zionist novelists and poets Theodor Herzl and Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky.

  Mickiewicz went much further than all the poet-prophets in believing that Poland, crucified by Frederick and Catherine, was nothing less than the ‘Christ’ of nations, which ‘will rise from the dead and will liberate all the peoples of Europe from slavery’. (It was this identification of nation with God that attracted the Catholic Lamennais to the Polish writer in Paris.) The messianic fervour he brought to his quest for a nation lived through his many disciples. It manifests itself today among settler-Zionists, whose secular hero Jabotinsky proclaimed that nationalism was the holy Torah, as much as it does among the Hussars of Hinduism.

  Failing Better at Supremacism

  Mickiewicz was rarely parted from his copy of the Bible; and he was vulnerable to the cult of Napoleon and such charlatans as Andrzej Towianski, who claimed that the Slavs, the Jews and the French had appointed roles to play in the coming Apocalypse. But there was nothing uniquely Polish or even Christian about Mickiewicz’s overt religiosity of nationalist sentiment, the belief in resurrection and salvation. All those who felt left behind by the Atlantic West’s economic and political progress could imagine themselves to be the chosen people.

  Failure made the messianic fantasy of redemption and glory grow particularly fast. Such was the case in Italy, where notions of cultural exceptionalism – built on myths of ancient Rome’s unique and universal significance, and played up by a series of poet-prophets – made even national self-determination seem a mean achievement to the self-chosen people. Few countries were as poorly equipped for nationhood as this overwhelmingly peasant, illiterate and linguistically diverse country. Since the Renaissance, Italy had been divided into city states that were continually threatened by invasion and occupation from neighbouring powers. Marx compared it to India
, arguing for:

  the same dismemberment in the political configuration. Just as Italy has, from time to time, been compressed by the conqueror’s sword into different national masses, so do we find Hindustan, when now under the pressure of the Mohammedan, or the Mogul, or the Briton, dissolved into as many independent and conflicting States as it numbered towns, or even villages.

  Risorgimento (literally, ‘resurrection’), the movement for the political unification of Italy, began after the French Revolution, and lurched in the following eighty years through three wars of independence and several diplomatic and military battles. But for many young Italians the political and social work required to overcome Italy’s fragmentation and achieve unity always seemed paltry compared to the new spiritual community that could be built for universal purification and revival.

  Thus, the chasm between pretence and reality yawned wider in Italy than in Germany; and the Risorgimento never managed to bridge it. The peasant masses remained indifferent to Mazzini’s plans for a ‘Third Rome’; the urban proletariat was insignificant; local loyalties and traditions were stronger than the idealism peddled by students and bourgeois intellectuals, who were nearly all drawn from the propertied classes, and, like Mazzini and Garibaldi, often lived abroad.

  Military unpreparedness brought repeated failures on the battlefield. In the end, scattered uprisings and the stirring rhetoric of republicans like Mazzini and Garibaldi failed to bring a united Italy into being. Diplomatic intrigue by the liberal-conservative Camillo Cavour and much assistance from a monarchy helped found Italy; and the new country consolidated itself largely through the ill-luck and losses of its foreign occupiers. Despite these failures and disappointments of the Risorgimento, one of its leading activists managed to turn romantic nationalism into a religion worldwide while also specifying its theological basis.

  * * *

  A true disciple of Mickiewicz and Lamennais, Mazzini hoped through sheer will and rhetoric to unite a hopelessly fragmented and geographically scattered country and raise it to a summit of cultural and political excellence. As Gandhi put it in his first eulogy to Mazzini in 1905, he was one of the ‘few instances in the world where a single man has brought about the uplift of his country by his strength of mind and his extreme devotion during his own lifetime’. Italy was like India, whose people, Gandhi wrote, ‘owed allegiance to different petty states’. Thanks to Mazzini, Italians were now ‘regarded as a distinct nation’.

  In actuality, Mazzini failed repeatedly and disastrously as a political activist. But this remained obscure to the me-too nationalists everywhere who responded to Young Italy, the organization of self-sacrificing patriots that Mazzini created in 1831, with Young China, Young Turkey and Young India. Perhaps even accurate knowledge of his failures would not have dispelled Mazzini’s aura in Asia. For this fervent reader of Ossian was the perfect prophet for an early generation of emulous nationalists – in India and China as well as Ireland and Argentina – who despaired over their own somnolent and unenlightened masses, and their inability to summon them to concerted action.

  Mazzini, closely following Lamennais, spoke of ‘Duties to Man’ rather than Rights of Man. The French Revolution had helped entrench, he argued, an arid bourgeois individualism; ‘the cold doctrine of rights, the last formula of individualism’ was now ‘degenerating into sheer materialism’. He offered a new, ostensibly more virtuous vision of the modern individual, one who can find fulfilment in surrendering his immediate interests to the well-being of the nation.

  It left ominously unclear how individual duties were to play against the seemingly legitimate pursuit of individual interests. Nevertheless, this shift in emphasis to individual duties was welcome to intellectuals in countries that were not independent and where the notion of individual rights seemed a bit moot. Duty there could be turned into an obligation to wrest liberty, as Mazzini wrote, ‘by any means from any power whatever which denies it’. These intellectuals could hearken to Mazzini’s praise of martyrs who ‘consecrate with their blood an idea of national liberty’ and ‘sacrifice all things, and needs be life also’ since ‘God provides elsewhere for them.’

  Educated men in countries with intensely religious populations could only approve when, after a botched invasion of Italy in 1834, Mazzini brought God back into the political frame, identifying Him with national sovereignty: ‘We must convince men,’ he wrote, ‘that they are all sons of one sole God, and bound to execute one sole law here on earth.’ Mazzini openly scorned the Catholic Church, but in the name of a more effective, useful and ambitious religion. ‘Ours was not a sect but a religion of patriotism,’ he clarified. ‘Sects may die under violence; religions may not.’

  The religious view of politics naturally turned into a demand for all aspects of life to be subordinated to politics, and subsumed into a militant total faith. Nationalism, as Mazzini conclusively defined it for many, was a system of beliefs that pervades collective existence, and encourages a spirit of self-sacrifice, in order to bring about a revolutionary community. Education – or indoctrination of the masses, the ‘people’ – was deemed crucial to this end. And a large popular following, he believed, could only be achieved by appropriating the vocabulary and practices of Catholicism: God, faith, duty, preaching, martyrdom and blood. It was a short step from the interpenetration of religion and politics – a competitor to the French deities of liberty, fraternity and equality – to cultural supremacism.

  * * *

  Mazzini blithely revised history: the Roman Empire, he claimed, had been the ‘most powerful nationality of the ancient world’. And he unapologetically conferred the role of world saviour on Italy: in the Third Rome, after the First and second Romes of the Caesars and the Church, Italy would give a ‘new and powerful Unity to all the nations of Europe’.

  This confederation of European states would ‘civilize Asia’, sweeping away the Ottoman ‘papacy’ along with the Roman one, and create a ‘council of mankind’. ‘There flashed upon me, as a star in my soul, an immense hope,’ Mazzini claimed, ‘Italy reborn, at one bound the missionary to Humanity of a Faith in Progress and in Fraternity more vast than that of old.’

  The liberal critic Gaetano Salvemini described Mazzini’s political system as a ‘popular theocracy’. Gramsci would dismiss his thought as ‘hazy claims’ and ‘empty chatter’. One of Mazzini’s own comrades, Luigi Carlo Farini, was accusing him of incoherence as early as 1851. But such criticisms missed the fact that Mazzini was an exponent of political style, an artist depending on the incantatory effect of words like ‘God’, ‘people’, ‘republic’, ‘thought’ and ‘action’ – terms that demanded submission rather than cogitation.

  Pushkin and Mickiewicz had first linked poetry with prophecy in the nineteenth century; Mazzini deepened the connection by repeatedly speaking of the artistic, poetical and political Genius who gives voice to the ‘people’. Combining aesthetic with religious experience, he first showed that potent symbols in politics were more important than a clear doctrine or specific project. The grand but vague style of course left a lot of ideological wriggle room. A nationalist, in Mazzini’s schema, could be a monarchist as well as colonialist, pagan and Catholic. However liberal or cosmopolitan Mazzini’s nationalism in theory, it left a large space for utopian fantasy of both the left and the right.

  Georges Sorel, the most influential thinker of fin de siècle France, insightfully noted in Reflections on Violence (1908) that Mazzini, while apparently pursuing a ‘mad chimera’, confirmed the importance of myth in revolutionary processes. ‘Contemporary myths lead men,’ Sorel affirmed, ‘to prepare themselves for a combat that will destroy the existing state of things.’ Reviewing Sorel’s book in Benedetto Croce’s Italian translation, a young socialist called Benito Mussolini was even more to the point: Mazzini had given Italians a myth that ‘impelled them to take part in conspiracies and battles’.

  The War on Bourgeois Mediocrity

  Mussolini wrote his review while Mazzini
’s messianic thinking experienced a revival across Italy in the early twentieth century. His myths were originally a product of the religious mood of the early nineteenth century, the desire for an unreachable ideal that can be sensed in the writings of Novalis, Hölderlin, Byron and Shelley. They inevitably came to feed, as did German infatuation with the Volk in the second half of the century, on widespread feelings of frustration.

  For the reality of United Italy failed to match up to the sonorous rhetoric that had heralded it. The nation achieved after manifold battles with foreign occupiers had degenerated into political corruption; the great disappointment intensified the messianic tendencies of all those who followed in Mazzini’s wake. The developmentalist ideology pioneered by the Germans, and given a pseudo-scientific gloss by Positivism, had also reached Italy. But, as one bitter failure followed another in the late nineteenth century, Mazzini’s successors in Italy, like many others, became convinced that only a war and imperial expansion by a powerful state could redeem his vision.

  The Mazzini-inspired patriots aspired to the rank of ‘sixth great power’ of Europe; but, as Bismarck tactlessly pointed out, ‘Italy has a large appetite, but poor teeth.’ The country simply lacked the economic and technical resources to achieve that status. There were vast natural differences between the north and south. Italy had no long-established government like Britain’s, or a monarchy worthy of being idealized. The democratic revolutionaries of the Risorgimento had upheld popular sovereignty against the papacy; but parliament, modelled on Westminster, turned out to be a shoddy thing, a byword for venality and unaccountability.