His work, for all its incoherence and complexity, was riveting to a younger generation who felt that they wanted to rebel but were not sure against what. Kessler, who was an ardent admirer and loyal friend, wrote in 1893: ‘There is probably no twenty-to-thirty-year-old tolerably educated man in Germany today who does not owe to Nietzsche a part of his worldview, or has been more or less influenced by him.’26 It is not surprising that a conservative newspaper in Germany called for his work to be banned. Part of Nietzsche’s appeal was that it was easy to read a great deal into his work, and people including socialists, vegetarians, feminists, conservatives and, later, the Nazis did. Sadly, Nietzsche was not available to explain himself; he went mad in 1889 and died in 1900, the year of the Paris Exposition.
The Exposition celebrated reason and progress but Nietzsche and his admirers spoke for the other forces that were stirring in Europe: a fascination with the irrational, with emotions, with the supernatural. For those, an increasing number it seemed, who felt that life at the end of the nineteenth century lacked something, there were other ways of getting in touch with the spiritual world than attending churches. Séances where the furniture moved, tables echoed to taps from unseen and presumably astral hands, strange lights suddenly appeared and the dead communicated with the living through Ouija boards or mediums were wildly popular. Even Conan Doyle, the creator of the most famous of all scientific detectives, Sherlock Holmes, developed a deep interest in what was called spiritualism. While Doyle remained a Christian, others were drawn to the more ecumenical Theosophy. Its Russian founder, Madame Helena Blavatsky, who was a cousin of the infinitely more prosaic Sergei Witte, claimed to be in communication with ancient masters somewhere in Tibet, or perhaps they were in the ether. She and her disciples wove together bits and pieces of Western mysticism and Eastern religions, including reincarnation, to talk about an unseen spiritual world which was the true reality. Races and cultures rose and fell, according to her teachings, and nothing could be done to change that cycle. General Helmuth von Moltke, the chief of the German general staff after 1905, who contemplated the prospect of a general war with gloomy resignation, was a follower.
God may have been dead and attendance at church was falling off but Europeans were intensely interested in the spiritual. The lectures of Henri Bergson, the gentle philosopher, at the Collège de France in Paris were packed with students and members of fashionable society. He challenged the positivist view that everything can be measured and explained. The inner self, its emotions, its unique memories, its unconscious, in other words its spiritual essence, existed outside time and space – and beyond the reductionist reach of science. (In one of those coincidences that cannot be made up, Bergson married a cousin of Proust’s mother.)27 Bergson’s influence showed itself in sometimes curious ways before the Great War. The French military took his ideas of an animating force in life – l’élan vital – to argue that spirit in soldiers was ultimately more important than weapons. Henri Massis, at the start of his career as a leading intellectual, said that Bergson delivered his generation ‘from the systematic negation and doctrinaire scepticism of the past’.28 In 1911 Massis and his friends led a campaign against the academic establishment, accusing them of promoting an ‘empty science’ and pedantry while neglecting the spiritual education of their students.29
In its Palais des Beaux-Arts, the Exposition of 1900 largely celebrated the arts of the past (only a small room was devoted to French contemporary artists and a single painting by Gustav Klimt hung in the exhibit devoted to art from Austria-Hungary), but outside in Paris, Berlin, Moscow, or Vienna, young artists and intellectuals were challenging traditional forms, rules and values and the very idea that there was something called reality. In Proust’s great and unfinished work In Remembrance of Times Past, memory itself is partial and fallible and what the narrator had thought to be certainties about himself and others repeatedly shift.
Modernism was both a revolt and an attempt to establish new ways of thinking and perceiving and it worried the older generation. In 1910, in an effort to hold back the tide, Pope Pius X was to make priests swear an oath against modernism. ‘I entirely reject’, said one part, ‘the heretical misrepresentation that dogmas evolve and change from one meaning to another different from the one which the Church held previously.’
It is difficult to tell how many Europeans were affected by this plethora of new ideas. Certainly the more daring in the younger generation were increasingly contemptuous of and bored with the values and rules of their elders. Some among the young were fascinated by the pagan world which seemed freer and more in tune with nature than their own. Nudism, the cult of the sun, clothes that mimicked the smocks and clogs of peasants, free love, vegetarianism, communes, even the garden suburbs were all part of the revolt against modern industrial civilisation. In Germany thousands of young men and women became, if only briefly, Wandervogel (the wandering birds), setting off hiking or bicycling into the countryside.30 While many in the older generation, especially among the traditional elites, also had doubts about the modern world, the young made them uneasy, as did the working classes and often for the same reason. Would they fight if called upon? Or, worse still, would they revolt against their own rulers? Although such fears haunted military planners across Europe, this particular one turned out to be groundless; when the Great War came the young like the working classes flocked to join up.
It is striking just how many fears rippled through European society in the period before 1914. In an unsettling parallel with our own times, there was considerable anxiety about terrorists who were implacable enemies of Western society yet who lived anonymously in its midst. As with Al Qaeda in 2001 after the September 11 atrocities, no one knew how many terrorists there were or how strong or widespread their networks. All that was known was that they seemed to strike at will and that the police had only limited success in catching them. The last part of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth saw an upsurge in terrorism across Europe, especially in France, Russia and Spain, and in the United States. Often inspired by anarchism which saw all forms of social and political organisation as tools of oppression, or simply by nihilism, terrorists set off explosions, hurled bombs, stabbed and shot, frequently with spectacular success. Between 1890 and 1914 they murdered, among others, Sadi Carnot, the President of France, two Prime Ministers of Spain, Antonio Cánovas in 1897 and José Canalejas in 1912, King Umberto of Italy, President McKinley in the United States (whose assassin was inspired by Umberto’s murder), Empress Elisabeth of Austria, the Russian statesman Stolypin and the Grand Duke Sergei, an uncle of the tsar. Their victims were not only the powerful and the prominent: bombs dropped into audience at a performance of William Tell in Barcelona killed twenty-nine and a bomb thrown at King Alfonso of Spain on his wedding day missed him but killed thirty-six onlookers. Terrorist acts led to repression, often severe, by the authorities which for a time merely stirred up more violence.
Paris endured two years of terrorist attacks in the early 1890s. When anarchists were sentenced for their part in a demonstration which ended in a riot, bombs blew up the homes of the judge and prosecutor in the trial. The perpetrator was turned in by a suspicious waiter; another bomb then blew up the café where the latter worked. Six policemen were killed when they tried to defuse a bomb placed at the offices of a mining company involved in a bitter strike. An anarchist threw a bomb into the Café Terminus – to get, he said, at ‘good little bourgeois’ who were satisfied with things the way they were – and another threw a bomb onto the floor of the French parliament in protest against an unjust world which left his family starving. For a time people did not dare to go out to public places for fear of where the terrorists would strike next.31
What added to the fear was that the terrorists were so sweeping in their condemnation of society that there seemed no way to reach them. Often, when they were caught, they refused to give reasons. McKinley’s assassin would say only ‘I done my duty’.32 Or their choi
ce of target was frighteningly random. ‘I am an anarchist by conviction,’ said Luigi Lucheni, the unemployed Italian workman who killed Elisabeth of Austria. ‘I came to Geneva to kill a sovereign, with the object of giving an example to those who suffer and those who do nothing to improve their social position; it did not matter to me who the sovereign was whom I should kill.’33 The anarchist who finished his meal in a Paris café and then calmly murdered a fellow diner said merely, ‘I shall not be striking an innocent if I strike the first bourgeois that I meet.’34 Terrorism, again like Al Qaeda, lost much of its support before the war even in sympathetic left-wing and revolutionary circles as a result of increasing disgust with its methods. The fear, though, that European society was under attack, did not go away so easily.
There was a more insidious fear too, that perhaps the terrorists were right, that Western society was thoroughly corrupt and decadent and ought to be thrown into the dustbin of history. Or, and this led to a glorification of military virtues and of war itself, the time had come to reinvigorate the nation and make it ready to fight for its existence. François Coppée, an ardent French nationalist who was often known as the poet of the humble, complained to an Englishman in Paris that ‘Frenchmen were degenerating, that they were becoming too materialist, too absorbed in the race for enjoyment and luxury, to retain that grand subordination of self to great causes which had been the historic glory of the French character’.35 In Britain, where a classical education had always been stressed, the analogy with the fall of Rome – including the predilection of the ancient world for ‘unmanly vices’ – came easily. In 1905 a young Conservative published a highly successful pamphlet, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, whose topics included ‘The Prevalence of Town over Country Life, and its disastrous effect upon the faith and health of the British people’, ‘Excessive Taxation and Municipal Extravagance’ and ‘Inability of the British to defend themselves and their Empire’.36 General Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy Scouts, made frequent reference in his manual Scouting for Boys to the need for the British to avoid the fate of that great earlier empire. ‘One cause which contributed to the downfall of Rome’, he told his young readers, ‘was the fact that the soldiers fell away from the standard of their forefathers in bodily strength.’37 The enthusiasm for sport of various kinds which was growing at the turn of the century was in part a reflection of greater leisure as working hours got less but its advocates often also saw it as a way of reversing national decline and preparing the young to fight. The Almanach des sports approved of soccer – le football– when the new sport made its way into France from Britain around 1900, describing it as ‘a veritable little war, with its necessary discipline and its way of getting participants accustomed to danger and to blows’.38
Prosperity and progress were, it was feared, inflicting damage on the human species and making young men less fit for war. The speed of change – and more literally speed itself, whether cars, bicycles, trains or the new aeroplanes – was, so some medical experts thought, unsettling the human nervous system. ‘Neurosis lies in wait for us,’ wrote a French doctor in 1910. ‘Never has the monster made more victims, either because ancestral defects accumulate or because the stimulants of our civilization, deadly for the majority, precipitate us into an idle and frightened debilitation.’39 In 1892 Max Nordau, the doctor son of an Orthodox rabbi from Budapest, published a highly successful attack on degenerate modern art and on the modern world in general which voiced the same concerns. Degeneration, which was translated into several languages and sold widely across Europe, charged further that materialism, greed, a restless search for pleasure, and the loosening of the bonds of traditional morality which led in turn to ‘unbridled lewdness’ were destroying civilisation. European society, Nordau said, was ‘marching to its certain ruin because it is too worn out and flaccid to perform great tasks’.40 The sexual imagery is interesting and not at all unusual for a period when commentators often lamented the lack of virility of their own nation.
Men, or so it was feared, were getting weaker, even effeminate, in the modern world and masculine values and strength were no longer valued. It was a bad sign, according to Field Marshal Sir Garnet Wolseley, commander-in-chief in Britain from 1895 to 1900, that ballet dancers and opera singers now were valued so highly in British society.41 The Germany military authority Wilhelm Balck, who wrote one of the leading handbooks on tactics, believed that modern man was losing his physical powers as well as his ‘fanaticism and religious and national enthusiasm of a bygone age’ and warned, ‘The steadily improving standards of living tend to increase the instinct of self-preservation and to diminish the spirit of self-sacrifice.’42 In both Germany and Britain there were concerns among the military about the poor physical condition of their recruits. An inquiry after the Boer War shocked the British public by finding that 60 per cent of the volunteers had been rejected as unfit.43
And homosexuality, it was suspected, was on the increase, particularly among the upper classes. That would surely undermine the family, one of the foundation stones of a strong state. Could homosexuals be loyal to the nation? Maximilian Harden, the journalist who destroyed the Kaiser’s close friend Philip Eulenburg, talked about how homosexuals tended to find each other out and form cliques. Like anarchists or Freemasons, their loyalties appeared to transcend borders. Such fears may help to explain why scandals involving homosexuals such as Oscar Wilde caused such widespread outrage and concern. In his newspaper, Harden used terms such as ‘unmanly’, ‘weak’, ‘sickly’ to describe Eulenburg and his circle. A leading German psychiatrist, Dr Emil Kraepelin, whom Harden quoted as an authority, added suggestibility, unreliability, lying, boastfulness, and jealousy to the list of homosexual characteristics. ‘There is not the slightest doubt’, said Kraepelin, ‘that contrary sexual tendencies develop from the foundation of a sickly, degenerate personality.’44
Women, on the other hand, appeared to be getting stronger and more assertive and were abandoning their traditional roles as wives and mothers. Surely Edvard Munch’s painting of 1894, originally entitled Love and Pain but which has always been known as Vampire, can be read as a more general fear of women sucking life out of men? The militant suffragettes in Great Britain, a powerful minority of those who wanted votes for women, fed such fears when they declared war on men. ‘What we are going to get’, said one of their leaders in 1906, ‘is a great revolt of women against their subjugation of body and mind to men.’45 It was precisely for that reason that conservatives resisted more liberal divorce laws and freely available contraception. A doctor who wrote a successful book for mothers which included advice on birth control was found guilty of ‘infamous conduct in a professional respect’ by a council of his peers.46
Another worrying indicator that virility was flagging, at least in certain countries, was a decline in fertility. In France, the birth rate fell sharply from 25.3 live births per 1,000 of population in the 1870s to 19.9 by 1910.47 Although its neighbour Germany’s birth rate declined slightly in the same period, it still remained significantly higher which meant, in practical terms, that there were more German men available every year for military service. This gap was a matter of public discussion and concern in France before 1914.48 It was too bad about French civilisation, Alfred Kerr, a leading German intellectual, told a journalist from Le Figaro just before the war, because it was over-ripe. ‘A people whose men don’t want to be soldiers, and whose women refuse to have children, is a people benumbed in their vitality; it is fated to be dominated by a younger and fresher race. Think of Greece and the Roman empire! It is a law of history that the elder societies shall cede their place to the younger, and this is the condition of the perpetual regeneration of humanity. Later our turn will come, and the ferocious rule will apply to us; then the reign of the Asiatics will begin, perhaps of the blacks, who can tell?’49
The decline in fertility also raised another concern about the future of European society: that the wrong sorts of people wer
e reproducing. The upper and middle classes feared the working classes as a political force; they also suspected that the poor were more likely to harbour vices such as drunkenness and promiscuity or physical and mental defects which they would pass on to their children, thus weakening the race. For racialists there was another worry still: that people they deemed inferior such as Jews or the Irish were increasing in numbers while the right classes or ethnic groups were shrinking. In Great Britain moral crusades to reinforce the family and its values (does it sound familiar?) picked up momentum, perhaps not by coincidence as the naval race with Germany intensified. In 1911 the National Council on Public Morals issued a call to the British public to take seriously its responsibility to educate its young to believe in marriage and to produce healthy children. The signatories, who included eight peers, several bishops, leading theologians and intellectuals, as well as the heads of two Cambridge colleges, claimed that this was the way to ‘cope with the demoralisation which is sapping the foundation of our national well-being’.50 In the years before 1914 the eugenics movement, advocating the breeding and cultivation of human beings as if they were cattle or vegetables, also found considerable support among political and intellectual elites. In 1912, the First International Eugenics Conference took place in London; its honorary patrons included Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, Alexander Graham Bell, and the emeritus president of Harvard University Charles W. Eliot.51 With such attitudes, war often seemed desirable, both as the honourable way to struggle against fate and as a way of reinvigorating society. Dangerously for Europe, war also came to be accepted by many as unavoidable.
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