The Anxious Triumph

by Donald Sassoon

colossal ignorance, the illiterate masses, bureaucrats who behave like machines, ignorant professors, childish politicians, intolerable diplomats, incompetent generals, workers without skills, patriarchal farmers, and a rhetoric which gnaws on our bones.8

  Almost ten years later, in 1875, still lamenting the waste and the corruption, Villari complained: ‘Even if we were united, free, independent and with our finances in order, we would still be a nation without meaning in the world. What we need is to acquire a new spirit and to have a new ideal manifesting itself before us …’9 And in 1894 the social theorist Vilfredo Pareto echoed such negative views of Italians and their leaders (views that are just as prevalent now). He lambasted the state for being the servant of narrow interests, since ‘the best’ (i migliori), so far, look after only their own interests: ‘Freedom has been extinguished except the freedom of politicians to steal; everything is done to destroy any feeling of rectitude and honesty existing in popular conscience.’10

  A similar need for the ‘right’ people to construct the nation surfaced in an older country, China. Sun Yat-sen, ‘father of modern China’, leader of the 1911 revolution, revered by communists as well as their nationalist antagonists, was aware that a modern industrial country had to be democratic (Mínquán), but also that it must have national unity (Mínzú), and prosperity (Mínshēng). These three features (democracy, unity, and prosperity) constituted Sun’s famed Three Principles of the People (San-min chu-i). The problem with China, according to Sun, was that its people had lost their sense of a nation and were like scattered sand. They needed to reconstruct themselves on the basis of their own past, their own ancient morality, and not on the basis of ‘cosmopolitan’ (i.e. foreign) ideologies (as if the idea of a republic had not come from the West).11

  Sun Yat-sen thought that China needed unity and discipline more than individual freedom, which was secondary to national emancipation.12 In 1924–5, shortly before his death, in his lectures ‘The Three Principles of the People’, he explained that there are three classes of men. Firstly, there are the innovators and discoverers, ‘those who know and perceive beforehand’; then the promoters, ‘those who know and perceive afterwards’; and, finally, those who neither know nor perceive, who cannot see anything and can only do as they are told.13 The task of the enlightened minority is to guide these masses towards democracy. Their duty is to serve the less able and make them happy. This is what is meant, added Sun Yat-sen, sounding like the Plato of the myth of the cave in the Republic, by the saying that the clever must be ‘slaves’ to the imbeciles. This, he thought, was the problem of democracy; and since this is not a problem the West has resolved, there is little to imitate and China must find its own route: ‘After the Revolution of 1911, the whole country went mad and insisted on applying in China the political democracy which westerners talked about, without any study of its real meaning.’14 Once he had attributed the origin of his country’s backwardness to the stagnation caused by an unreformed and unreformable imperial court. By 1920 he had concluded that the real enemy was Western imperialism. The nationalist revolution he had led to oust the Qing Dynasty could not move forward without challenging the West.15

  Far more difficult was constructing a nation in which there was no common language, no common territory, and no common culture. This was the dilemma facing Jewish nationalism. As the Zionist leader Nahum Sokolov disarmingly observed in 1903: ‘We don’t even have a people yet.’16 The task of the Zionists was to create a people out of a deeply divided community held together by persecution, but with no common ideology, culture, or religious practices (since fewer and fewer Jews observed traditional rituals). In the creation of a Jewish people the Zionists were helped, if that is the word, by anti-Semites. Theodor Herzl, whose pessimistic views as to the fate of liberalism in Europe led him to proclaim the need for a Jewish national home, wrote: ‘anti-Semitism … will do the Jews no harm. I hold it to be a movement useful for the development of the Jewish character.’17 The requisite impetus for Jewish migration to Palestine would be voluntary but, he added in his famous pamphlet, The Jewish State, help would come from the anti-Semites: ‘They need only do what they did before, and they will create a desire to emigrate where it did not previously exist, and strengthen it where it existed before.’18

  As often happens, nationalists, but not only nationalists, have a certain aversion to the people they seek to lead, blaming them for not being sufficiently willing to be led. Zionists needed to ‘make the Jews’ the way D’Azeglio wanted to ‘make the Italians’. The closeness between Zionists and anti-Semites led Carl Schorske to point out Herzl’s ideological kinship with the leading Viennese anti-Semites, such as Georg Schönerer and Karl Lueger.19 An anti-Semitic discourse was quite common, at the time, even among the intellectual elites. Theodore Herzl himself, when describing an elegant soirée at the Berlin home of a wealthy businessman in 1885, lamented the presence of ‘Some thirty or forty ugly little Jews and Jewesses. No consoling sight.’ And, writing to his parents from Ostend, ‘although there are many Viennese and Budapest Jews here, the rest of the vacationing population is very pleasant …’20

  Constructing a nation remained a difficult yet essential task for the development of an industrial capitalist society. The multiplication of identities (national, religious, gender, regional, class, ethnic, professional, ideological, sporting affiliation, age, etc.) is not a recent phenomenon, but it is exacerbated by the greater dynamism of capitalist societies compared to those of the past. National identities, being relatively new, needed to be connected to older ones, such as linguistic or religious identities.

  Language could be a complicating factor in nation-building. Within Italy there were major cultural differences and an enormous linguistic diversity (those who habitually spoke Italian were a small minority). In 1910 in the Austro-Hungarian Empire the various Slavs (Serbs, Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Slovenes, and Ruthenians/Ukrainians) made up almost half of the population (46 per cent) whereas the German speakers made up only 23.9 per cent, the Hungarians (Magyar) 20.2 per cent, the Romanians 6.4 per cent, the Italians 2 per cent, and the Bosnian Muslims 1.2 per cent.21 Belgium and Switzerland were and have remained linguistically divided. And, throughout Europe there are still plenty of minority languages within nation states, some regarded as ‘proper’ languages, others regarded as dialects (there is no way of distinguishing between the two), such as Welsh in the United Kingdom, German in the Italian South Tyrol (or Alto Adige as the Italians call it), Catalan and Basque in Spain, Swedish in Finland, etc.

  In Germany, Hochdeutsch (High German) in 1800 was spoken by only one-third of the population. By 1900 it was understood by virtually everyone, though dialects continued to prevail, especially in the countryside. Polish was the most significant minority language in Germany, spoken by 3.4 million people.22 Poles were an obvious target of cultural contempt and prejudice: they were Catholics in a largely Protestant region (what was then Prussia); they were mostly peasants or workers; and they felt Polish.23 Other linguistic minorities in Germany were of less importance, though Germany’s national minorities accounted for almost 8 per cent of the entire population.24 There were other divisions: a widespread distrust of Prussia, the largest state, among the other German states; a growing class antagonism; and a strong urban–rural cleavage.25 In France, as in most other countries, many did not habitually speak the national language, but rather a host of other languages relegated to the rank of ‘primitive’ dialects (however ancient they might be and, in some cases, such as Provençal and Breton, as solidly implanted as French).

  Religion too could bring numerous problems to the task of nation-building. Of the independent states that existed in 1900, those where the elites and the overwhelming majority of the population shared the same religion were relatively few. They included Japan, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Greece, Romania, Italy, Spain, and Portugal. They did not include the United Kingdom since there were plenty of Catholics (including the majority of the Irish) and Nonconformists in a fo
rmally Anglican country. The Tsarist Empire had numerous religious and ethnic minorities. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was three-quarters Catholic but no single ‘nation’ dominated demographically. Switzerland was divided by both language and religion.

  In Germany religion was potentially a destabilizing factor. From a Prussian Protestant point of view the most important potential antagonism was that between the two-thirds of the inhabitants who were Protestant and the rest, who were mainly Catholic. However, this division never erupted into a serious violent conflict (as it did, on and off, in Ireland). Although Catholics were persecuted by Bismarck during the so-called Kulturkampf, Protestants did not storm Catholic holy sites; Catholics did not desecrate Protestant churches.26 Catholics and Protestant conservatives did not like each other but they shared a mutual antipathy towards liberals and socialists. Pro-capitalist anti-clerical liberals and Marxist socialists were in antagonism on most issues except on the need to keep religion at bay. Socialist and socially aware Christians had not dissimilar views on social welfare. National unity seldom means conformity and total integration.

  In France, where the majority of the population espoused a conventional form of Catholicism, the religious issue was resolved by creating a secular French nationality. The so-called laïcité, enshrined in French law only in 1905 after lengthy disputes akin to a non-violent civil war, became part of a national narrative that endures in France to this day. Of course, laïcité is constantly reinterpreted and means different things to different people. The way to examine it is not to decide how near or far from the idealized French model other countries are (the French version of a myth of exceptionalism that is common to other nationalisms), but to compare it to how the question of the relation between Church and State was resolved elsewhere.

  Well before the French espousal of laïcité, the United States had disentangled ‘the American nation’ from any specific religion and, for obvious reasons, unlike most European countries, no single Church dominated. It was thus in the interest of the numerous Christian Churches and sects (non-Christian religions were of little importance in nineteenth-century America) to have a state that did not intervene in religious matters. God was not mentioned. It is said that when Alexander Hamilton was asked why the Constitution did not mention God, he answered ‘We forgot.’ More likely it was quite deliberate since religion and the divinity are never invoked in the Federalist Papers, of which Hamilton wrote fifty-one out of eighty-five, whereas in the previous century no political argument could be conducted without some reference to the Bible.

  The original oath of allegiance to the American flag (1892), ‘I pledge allegiance to the Flag … one Nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all’, was formally adopted by Congress only in 1942, to be read in all schools. The words ‘under God’ inserted after ‘one Nation’ were added only in 1954. And only in 1956 a new national motto, ‘In God We Trust’, was deployed on all dollar banknotes, adding weight to the feeling that God had blessed American capitalism. By and large it was still a Protestant God. Even though the country became less and less Protestant as emigration from Catholic Europe (Ireland, Poland, and Italy) accelerated in the last decades of the nineteenth century and from Catholic Latin America over the past fifty years, political control has remained in the hands of Protestants. Only in 1960 was a non-Protestant, the Catholic John F. Kennedy, elected President. Religion remains very important to a majority of Americans. According to a Gallup poll the percentage of Americans who said that religion was important to them oscillated between 58 and 53 per cent between 1982 and 2016, with a peak of 61 per cent in 2003, though secularization may be on the increase.27 Other countries had resolved the Church– State problem as early as the sixteenth century by ‘nationalizing’ the Church, that is to say, by establishing a Church under state control. In England the sovereign became the head of the Church of England. Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, and Finland followed with an established national state religion. Nations could be built ‘against’ religion (the French case) or by having a national religion. Mexico and Turkey established a secularism similar to the French laïcité, enforced by law in, respectively, 1917 and 1924.

  The key instrument of French nation-building turned out to be the establishment of a state educational system that sought to ‘make’ the French by forcing the adoption of a common language and even inventing a common ancestry to be traced back to a mythical Gaul. The legislators and the architects of the French educational system restructured the identity of the nation in terms of an antagonism towards Germany and the Germans, being against monarchists and for la République, and against Catholics and for laïcité. This led to a constant rise in spending on education throughout the nineteenth century not just in France but in many other countries, though there were significant differences in the numbers of children enrolled in primary school in 1900: the United States had the highest number (939 per 1,000 children), followed by France (820), the United Kingdom (720), Japan (507), Italy (362), and Russia (149).28

  Ernest Lavisse’s Histoire de France depuis les origines jusqu’à la Révolution (1901) became a mandatory history textbook in French schools, instructing generations of children that the great duty of their lives would be to avenge the defeat of Sedan in 1870 by Prussia and defend the values of the French Revolution against all those who sought a return to the Ancien Régime.29 The motherland, patriotism, and the honour of France were in evidence everywhere, from books aimed at a young readership to the newly inaugurated 14th of July, the day which since then has been taken as the day the Revolution started (there were other possible contenders). By contrast, a pacifist textbook written by Gustave Hervé, when he was a socialist (later he became a supporter of Mussolini), Histoire de France pour les grands (1910), was banned in all the schools of the Republic.

  Italy could have been united by religion, but national unity had been achieved against the will of the Pope. Secular nationalism was politically dominant, though the majority of the population remained loyal to the Church. As in France, unity was constructed through education, propaganda, and centralization. In much of Latin America, overwhelmingly Catholic, anticlericalism was also a major force in building the nation, particularly in Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile.

  In the United Kingdom there were four ‘nationalities’, but, in the nineteenth century, only one, the Irish, resisted inclusion into the (British) national family, and were themselves divided between Catholics and Protestants. The Welsh and the Scots appeared content with their subordinate status. The English did not seem to require nation-building myths and national heroes on a par with Vercingetorix, though in the nineteenth century an attempt was made to establish Boudicca (who led an uprising against the Romans just like Vercingetorix and Arminius) as a somewhat idealized ancestor of Queen Victoria. It never caught on. The problem was that, in traditional ‘school’ history, the Anglo-Saxons had been subjugated by the Normans and that, as a result, to be ‘English’ meant to be descended from both conquered and conquerors. The claim that all English were descended from a single ethnic group was never seriously peddled in the way French schoolchildren for generations recited together the unlikely claim nos ancêtres les Gaulois – a claim that originated only in 1875.30 In Germany the idea of a common ancestry was also muted, though Romantic myth-making produced a national hero, Arminius (or Hermann), who fought against the Romans just like the ‘French’ Vercingetorix, but who was more successful since he defeated them in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest.

  In Poland nation-building was rendered unusually complicated by the fact that it was not clear who the Poles were and where the boundaries of Poland lay. As everywhere else, political activists were deeply divided. The socialists thought that the national question was divisive because it set workers in one nation against those belonging to another nation, thus uniting the ‘wrong’ people and putting in the same camp Polish workers and Polish aristocrats. The conservatives meanwhile tried to carve out for the more privileged cla
sses (i.e. themselves) a space within the three empires (Tsarist, German, and Austro-Hungarian) then occupying putative Polish territory. The strongest political force, however, were the nationalists of the Polish National Democratic Party, which dominated the Polish parliament and whose leader, Roman Dmowski, argued that ‘we are a nation, a unified indivisible nation, because we possess a common, collective consciousness, a shared national spirit’.31 In Polish nation-building, as in most nationalist ideologies, historical truth counted for little. History was mined for events that could form a national narrative. Dmowski’s nationalism, however, was of a new type, less connected to a Romantic myth of an ancient Polish nation, and more imbued with the modern idea of creating ‘new Poles’.32 Not every country could aspire to become a nation. Some nations were ‘real’, others were not. For Dmowski, Ukrainians, Belorussians, and Lithuanians were incapable of statehood and, consequently, should be subjected to Polish rule, while Poland’s eastern borders should extend from the Baltic to the Black Sea.33 Polish nationalism could be built around Catholic identity and stand against Orthodox Russia and Protestant Prussia.

  The French ‘solution’ was to regard all identities (religious, regional, linguistic) as a private matter. This could be achieved, if at all, after a protracted struggle between the Catholic monarchist ‘Right’ and the Republican ‘Left’. The Dreyfus Affair of 1894, in which a Jewish army captain was falsely accused of treason, was the terrain where this battle was fought. It saw the victory of the pro-Dreyfus camp, an uneasy coalition between modernist pro-capitalists and socialists of various hues. The losers had to abandon the old dream of turning the clock back to a monarchic Catholic nation and reconstitute itself as a new nationalist force of the right, virulently anti-German, despising parliament (since it divides the nation) and the Jews (guilty of not being sufficiently French). The ultra-nationalist Maurice Barrès even deployed a class rhetoric in an effort to appeal to French workers. In articles such as ‘La lutte entre capitalistes et travailleurs’ (Le Courrier de l’Est, 28 September 1890) he addressed the workers thus: ‘You are isolated workers … hold hands with all other workers, your brothers.’34 When the Dreyfus Affair erupted Barrès and his supporters branded Dreyfus a traitor because he was a Jew and because he was not really French, pointing out that even his great defender, the writer Émile Zola, was not quite French either, since his father was Italian. This new modern battleground was defined by questions of ethnicity and citizenship. The idea of ‘race’ acquired a new dimension. Barrès’s journal, L’Action Française, redefined ‘Frenchness’ to exclude Protestants, Jews, and Freemasons.35 Two-thirds of the articles it published between 1908 and 1914 attacked the Jews.36 If the Jews tried to assimilate, in the words of Henri Vaugeois, one of the initiators of the movement, it was even worse since ‘the Jew is all the more dangerous when he is cleaned up, adapted, civilized’.37 This process of redefining French nationhood in racial terms enabled those hostile to the Republic to shed their monarchism, and become patriotic supporters of the (bourgeois) Republic.