While in France
commemoration of 14 July and such republican symbols as Marianne were banned, the
forces of ultramontane conservative Catholicism seemed to be conniving in the
diffusion of new Catholic cults, whose mass appeal had been greatly facilitated
by the advent of cheap rail transport. The lines between politics and religion
were being blurred, although clericalists hardly disguised their belief that
the authority of the Church should count in temporal as well as spiritual
affairs, determining standards of public and private life. Fifty deputies took
part in an expiatory festival at Paray-le-Monial,
where in the late seventeenth century Christ had reappeared, to a Visatandine nun, revealing His bleeding heart crowned with
thorns.
Born in French-ruled
Genoa, Giuseppe Mazzini was far from being theologically literate, but rarely
can someone have so thoroughly confused religion with politics, to the point
where his political writings were like (idiosyncratic) religious utterances.
After graduating in
law, Mazzini combined legal practice with the literary journalism that was his
true metier. In 1827 he joined a Genoese cell of the
Carbonari, travelling the following year to Tuscany to establish affiliated
societies that Mazzini compared with the Greek Etairia.
Mazzini based himself in Marseilles, whence sailors could smuggle subversive
materials into Genoa.
It did not take long
to decide to remain aloof from that ancient mariner of the Revolution, Filippo
Buonarroti, whose Paris-focused communist insurrectionism did not appeal to the
younger Mazzini. The latter thought it was not up to France to give other
revolutions the red or green signal. He also decided to break with the format
of secret societies, which he claimed bore the marks of the original sin of
dependency upon (anti-Napoleonic) Italian monarchs.
In the summer of 1831
Mazzini and thirty others founded Young Italy, the name reflecting the desire
to restrict membership to the under forties, even though the rules were bent in
favour of the `young in spirit'. There were
initiation rites and recognition procedures that owed much to the heritage of
the secret societies. When two `Cousins' met they must have seemed like
windmills. As one crossed his arms with palms flat on his chest, the other
tried the trickier manoeuvre of crossing the arms
with the palms upwards to signify an open heart. The question `what is the
time?' was meant to elicit the response `time for the struggle'.
Young Italy's programme was a declaration of faith:
The one thing wanting
to twenty millions of Italians, desirous of emancipating themselves, is not
power, but faith. Young Italy will endeavour to
inspire this faith - first by its teachings, and afterwards by an energetic
initiative.
Breaking with the
French Revolution's insistence upon abstract rights, Young Italy stressed both
a national `mission' and the moral duty incumbent upon Italians to fulfil it:
Right is the faith of
the individual; duty is a collective faith. Right can only organize resistance,
it can destroy but not lay foundations. Duty builds and creates collaboration
... Right undermines sacrifice and eliminates martyrdom from the world. In any
theory of individual rights interests alone predominate and martyrdom becomes
an absurdity. No interests could survive one's death. Nevertheless, it is
martyrdom which frequently serves as the baptism of a new world and the
initiation of progress. (Mazzini, `Foi et
avenir',1835, in his Scritti editi
e inediti (Imola 1906-40)
6, pp. 263ff.)
Young Italy was
republican, for this was Italy's `historic' form of government and monarchs had
always betrayed the national cause. It was 'unitarian' because federalism would
only promote the autonomy sought by such places as Sicily with its separate
culture, history and institutions. It was self-reliant in the sense that
dependence upon external events or sympathetic foreign powers would mean that
these alone determined the tempo of events. Above all, Young Italy combined a
political programme with a regenerative moral
mission, something it had in common with most national liberation movements:
Both initiators and
initiated must never forget that the moral application of every principle is
the first and the most essential; that without morality there is no true
citizen; that the first step towards the achievement of a holy enterprise is
the purification of the soul by virtue; that, where the daily life of the
individual is not in harmony with the principles he preaches, the inculcation
of those principles is an infamous profanation and hypocrisy; that it is only
by virtue that the members of Young Italy can win over others to their belief;
that if we do not show ourselves far superior to those who deny our principles,
we are but miserable sectarians; and that Young Italy must be neither a sect
nor a party, but a faith and an apostolate. As the precursors of Italian
regeneration, it is our duty to lay the first stone of its religion.'(Mazzini,
Life and Writings (London 1864) 1, pp. 105-6)
At least in theory,
Young Italy was characterised by high moral tone;
criminals, drunks and womanisers were unwelcome. The
mission of its `apostles' was to convert into a `popolo'
(people) the unregenerate`genre' (mob) who populated
the intensely fissiparous and provincial regions of Italy. In other words, the
revolution was moral before it was political, and it had to be for the people
rather than by the people, who were as yet unformed.
Young Italy's
manifesto was saturated with words like apostolate, belief, creed, crusade,
enthusiasm, faith, incarnation, martyrs, mission, purification, regeneration,
religion, sacred, sacrifice, salvation, and punctuated with sentences such as
`Our religion of today is still that of martyrdom; tomorrow it will be the
religion of victory.' The password members used to identify one another was
`Martyrdom' to which the correct reply was `Resurrection'. Mazzini once said of
himself: `I am not a Christian, or rather I am a Christian plus something more.
(Denis Mack Smith, Mazzini, 1994, p. 17)
It is difficult to
extrapolate a coherent set of religious beliefs from Mazzini's writings. By
fostering internal and external fraternity, the nation was a divinely inspired
Church, through which humanity would appreciate the essential truths within
each major religion. The nation was the ideal intermediary between man and God,
for it was there that individuals invested with rights could realise their higher selves through association,
brotherhood and patriotic duty.
Each nation had a
God-given mission and it was the duty of each and every Italian to contribute
to its fulfilment. Nationalism was a more spiritual alternative to communism or
utilitarian liberalism, which Mazzini rightly regarded as excessively
materialistic and overly focused on either the collective or the individual.
While he was no anticlerical or freethinker, he thought that because it had
supported absolutism the papacy should be replaced by a general council which
could then deliberate the merits of all major religions. This Third Rome would
then inspire humanity as the Rome of the Caesars and popes had done in the
past.
Mazzini was important
less for anything he achieved, although he sometimes upset others' plans in a
decisive way, than for the iron commitment to the national cause that his life
represented, a life of promiscuous wordage (his collected outpourings comprise
over a hundred volumes) spewed forth from the modest rented rooms that were his
lot in exile. He was belief incarnate. His unshakeable faith in divine
Providence and that `national forces' were the `ruling principle of the future'
suggests how belief in God, History and Progress enabled him and his followers
to account for, and surmount, any temporary obstacles. That may have been one
of the chief functional effects of treating politics as a religion. Portentous
talk about seeing the finger of God in the pages of a nation's history enabled
Mazzini, who has been described as an `autocratic democrat', to ignore those
occasions when the will of the People was manifestly not with him. (Roland Sarti, 'Giuseppe Mazzini and his Opponents' in John Davis
(ed.), Italy in the Nineteenth Century, Oxford 2000), p. 76, 77 Sarti, Mazzini p. 8o)
Mazzini was often the
long hand behind various abortive coups and revolts in various parts of Italy;
in the wake of one such failure - to topple king Charles Albert of
Piedmont-Sardinia - a close friend committed suicide in prison. After being
expelled from France in 1833, Mazzini spent the ensuing three years in
Switzerland. From there he organised and participated
in an attempt by a polyglot volunteer army of revolutionaries to seize power in
Savoy, whose inhabitants would then be presented with the choice of remaining
within Piedmont-Sardinia or joining the Swiss Confederation. The military
operation was an ill-coordinated fiasco. Mazzini had to go into hiding as the
French and Piedmontese lobbied for his expulsion from
Switzerland. While in Berne, he formed Young Europe in 1834 as a `holy alliance
of Peoples who are constituted as great single aggregates according to the
dominant moral and material attributes that determine their particular national
mission'.
Just as Young Italy
had sought to co-ordinate general Italian support for local revolutionary
episodes on the peninsula, so Young Europe was designed to give wider European
aid to any nation involved in insurrection. Mazzini outlined the heady
synthesis of politics and religion that guided the new foundation:
We fell as a
political party; we must rise again as a religious party.
When, at Young
Europe's dawn, all the altars of the old world have fallen, two altars shall be
raised upon this soil that the divine Word has made fruitful: and the finger of
the herald people shall inscribe upon one Fatherland, and upon the other
Humanity.
Like sons of the same
mother, like brothers who will not be parted, the people shall gather around
these two altars and offer sacrifice in peace and love. And the incense of the
sacrifice shall ascend to heaven in two columns that shall draw near each other
as they mount, until they are confounded in one point, which is God. (E. E. Y.
Hales, Mazzini and the Secret Societies. The Making of a Myth, London 1956,
p.141)
Mazzini's involvement
in Young Europe underscores the fact that his nationalism lacked xenophobic
tendencies, indeed, he tended to use the word `nationalism' in a rather
negative manner, preferring to describe himself as a `patriot'. Nationhood
would enable individuals to achieve a higher collective version of themselves,
with the plurality of liberated nations realising
this on behalf of humanity as a whole:
We believe in the
people, one and indivisible; recognising neither
castes nor privileges, save those of genius and virtue; neither proletariat nor
aristocracy; whether landed or financial; but simply an aggregate of faculties
and forces consecrated to the well-being of all, to the administration of the
common substance and possession - the territorial globe. We believe in the
people, one and independent; so organized as to harmonize the individual
faculties within the social idea; living by the fruits of its own labour. We believe in the people bound together in brotherhood
by a common faith, tradition, the idea of love; striving towards the
progressive fulfilment of its special mission; consecrated to the apostolate of
duties; never forgetful of a truth once attained, but never sinking into
inertia in consequence of its attainment.
In mid-1836 the Swiss
authorities bowed to international pressure by insisting that Mazzini leave a
country he regarded with some affection. Early in 1837 he arrived in London,
where he remained for much of the rest of his life. His modest income as a
journalist and writer did not prove an obstacle to his being lionised by some of the great Englishmen and women of the
day such as the Carlyles. In London, he wrote and
thought, while refounding Young Italy with a younger
generation of democratic revolutionaries.
In Italy itself,
Mazzini's democratic insurrectionary nationalism faced competition from more
moderate figures. There were those like the Piedmontese
nobleman Cesare Balbo who argued that a solution to the Italian Question would
come only from the interaction of the relatively powerful Piedmontese
state within the international system. This proved prescient. In contrast to
the rest of Italy, Piedmont had a constitution, a dynamic and liberalised economy and effective armed forces. Piedmont
was not just the sole Italian state with an indigenous ruling dynasty, but also
one whose existence was regarded as an indispensable check to the extension of
French power. This meant it might undertake adventures for whose failure it
would not have to pay a territorial price. These adventures were invariably
conceived in terms of an extension of Pied- to do so.'"' While the pope
refused to declare war on faithful Austria, papal troops defected to the Piedmontese cause. When the latter suffered catastrophic
defeat at Custoza, a vengeful mood spread in Rome
towards all those who were less than wholeheartedly for the Revolution. The
victims included Pellegrino Rossi whom Pius IX had chosen as prime minister
with a view to stablising the Papal States at a time
of general revolution. Rossi was killed in November 1848, by an assassin who
plunged a knife into his carotid artery as he mounted the steps of the
parliament. Rome was given over to mob rule. One of the pope's secretaries was
killed by a stray shot as he stood next to the pontiff at a window in the
Quirinal. In late November the pope slipped out of the city, disguised in a
simple cassock, dark glasses and a muffler, taking up residence in Gaeta in the
Bourbon kingdom of Naples, and leaving the French ambassador who was complicit
in his escape talking to himself in an empty room.
The new Roman
Republic declared that the temporal powers of the papacy were at an end,
together with Catholicism as the religion of state. Both Mazzini and the roving
revolutionary Garibaldi descended upon this oasis of anarchy and freedom, while
to the north the revolutionaries were being systematically routed by Radetsky's Habsburg troops. A French army under General Oudinot was despatched by Louis
Napoleon, both to ingratiate his regime with domestic Catholic opinion and to
forestall the prospect of the pope being restored solely by Austrian arms. From
April 1850 when he returned to Rome - choosing to reside in the Vatican rather
than the Quirinal to be safer from the urban mob - the pope's temporal power
ultimately rested upon the presence of two alien armies: the Austrians and the
French.
During the 1850s,
prime minister Cavour sought to enhance the progressive reputation of
Piedmont-Sardinia by reforming the Church in line with his dictum `a free
Church in a free State'. Since he thought the key to the wealth of Protestant
states was based on their suppression of contemplative idlers, he suppressed
all those monasteries that were not dedicated to socially useful activities.
When in 1857 his government lost its majority, he blamed the increased vote for
the right upon malign clerical influence. Charges of corruption involving
clerics were used simply to unseat opposition candidates who had probably been
fairly elected. It was at this time that a Catholic newspaper editor coined the
phrase `Ne eletti ne elettori'
(Neither elected nor electors) to indicate Catholic suspicion of the
representative character of the democratic process. The following year it was
the turn of liberals to be legitimately outraged over the squalid saga of the
kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, a Jewish boy who had
been secretly baptised by a family servant and who
was then literally snatched away to be brought up as a Catholic, thereby scandalising much of European opinion.
Meanwhile, the exiled
Mazzini persisted in a conspiratorial insurrectionism that was designed to show
the world that Italians could liberate themselves. One such expedition in 1856,
led by the Neapolitan nobleman Carlo Pisacane, resulted
in the liberators being killed as `brigands' by troops and peasants in upper
Calabria. Such madcap adventures were fitfully relevant to how the big players
handled events, for, as a later Italian patriot remarked, it was Cavour's
achievement to make the Italian Revolution the subject of European diplomacy.
In 1858 dissident
associates of Mazzini's tried to assassinate Napoleon III by hurling grenades into
his carriage. So great was the latter's fear of the lethality of Italian
republicanism that six months later he was prepared to enter into the secret Plombieres agreement with Cavour. France and Piedmont
agreed to expel Austria from northern Italy, a move made possible by the
weakening of Austria's diplomatic hand because of its equivocations during the
Crimean War, the major cause of diplomatic instability in the mid-nineteenth
century. The result would be four kingdoms within an Italian confederation
under the honorary presidency of the pope. France would be rewarded with Savoy
and Nice. When, following the bloody battles of Magenta and Solferino, Napoleon
III unexpectedly concluded an armistice at Villafranca with Austria, the idea
of a federal Italy was dropped. On 26 March 186o Pius IX excommunicated those
who had usurped his lands in the papal legations, the start of his implacable
hostility to the emergent Italian state.
Mazzini then made a
further providential intervention in events. Cavour had little interest in the
Italian south, for many northerners thought `Africa' began among the kasbah
alleyways of Naples, a view succinctly expressed in a letter from Carlo Farini, who was its first chief administrator: 'But, my
friend, what lands are these, Molise and the South! What barbarism! Some Italy!
This is Africa; compared to these peasants the Bedouins are the pinnacle of civilisation. And what misdeeds!
The involvement of
Mazzini in persuading Garibaldi (who in disgust at the surrender of his homeland
Nizza to the French had joined the service of the new Tuscan regime) to extend
the war southwards by landing in support of a minor rising in Sicily was
sufficient for Cavour to take up the goal of national unification while
substituting monarchism for Mazzinian republicanism. Whereas Garibaldi thought
that a negotiated union between north and south would concede Sicily a large
degree of autonomy in recognition of its distinct traditions, Cavour decided
upon outright annexation and enforced assimilation. Endemic divisions and
different goals within the southern opposition to the Bourbons enabled him to
win the peace after others had won the war.
Garibaldi's
`Thousand' rapidly defeated superior numbers of Bourbon troops, partly thanks
to the local knowledge of Francesco Crispi, the Sicilian nationalist given the
task of stabilising the island in the wake of
Garibaldi's conquests." The Bourbon monarch Francis circled the wagons at
Gaeta to fight another day. Garibaldi crossed over to Reggio Calabria, racing
up the peninsula, in such a hurry that for his triumphal entry into Naples he
took a train. Mazzini arrived in the great southern city, his agenda being not
just rapidly to unify Italy, but to increase the likelihood of it becoming a
republic. Mazzini urged Garibaldi to make a further dash to take Rome and then
Venice, a strategy that would have ensured the intervention of Austria and
France. But after defeating the Bourbons at Volturno
on 1 October 1860, Garibaldi handed the former Kingdom of the Two Sicilies to Victor Emmanuel and retired to the island of Caprera. Victor Emmanuel became Italy's first king after a
series of plebiscites had resulted in the annexation of Garibaldi's conquests.
The encounter between liberal Piedmontese
administrators (including the denatured southerners who accompanied them) and
the Mezzogiorno was a rude one. Many of them reported
that the south was figuratively or literally sick: `in every way fusion with
the Neapolitans frightens me; it's like going to bed with someone who has
smallpox', Instead of being welcomed as liberators, northern and southern
liberals found themselves fighting a grim war against remnants of Garibaldian
democrats, diehard adherents of the Bourbons and what they called `bandits'.
The solution was `troops, troops and more troops', with two-thirds of the
Italian army despatched southwards in the 186os. The
`nation's' liberals rapidly accustomed themselves to martial law, the
suppression of classical liberal freedoms, laying siege to villages and
shooting captives in the head or the back.See Nelson
Moe, "`This is Africa". Ruling and Representing Southern Italy,
186o-6i' in Albert Russell Ascoli and Krystyna von Henneberg
(eds), Making and Remaking Italy. The Cultivation of National Identity during
the Risorgimento (Oxford 2001) pp. r35ff.
Looking back on these
events from the vantage of 1868, Francesco Crispi reflected: Italy was born
eight years ago. It was born prematurely, and when no one was expecting it. It
is we who conspired to make it. It needs to be strengthened and brought to
manhood. Time is required to achieve this. We have destroyed the old
governments; and we have linked up the various provinces: south to centre, centre to north. But this
is no great achievement: it needs to be cemented. The stitches of our union are
still visible: they must disappear, and the whole body made seamless.'
The chasm between the
`legal' Italy that had been created between 186o and 1870 and the `real' Italy
of his own constituency in central Basilicata, in the arch between the heel and
toe, was symbolised by the fact that on Crispi's rare
visits from Turin or Florence, the seats of government until 1870, priests had
to be a staple of every reception party since they alone could speak Italian, a
language Cavour spoke haltingly. A fashionably biologistic cast of mind
encouraged the view that, although nationhood was always latent, centuries of
clericalism and despotism had resulted in a `national' enfeeblement that could
only be cured by regular doses of the `national story'. Having originally
espoused the small state and dense local government, along the lines of the
British model, Italian liberals awoke to the educative potentialities of the
state in a country utterly lacking any common history since classical antiquity.
But there was more. In order to induce that sense of latent nationhood, the new
masters of Italy turned to what they regarded as another innate human impulse:
`In man, religiosity is something innate, organic like sexuality, property, and
the family ... No system will succeed in suppressing religiosity in the myriad
forms in which this instinct manifests itself. It is the task of politicians
simply to direct it towards good, and the maximum benefit of society.
The exempliary character of the lives of great men was recognised by the ancients, a practice that Christianity
paralleled with its saints. Even while fighting continued, the leaders of the
nationalist movement were subject to secular canonisation.
When Garibaldi's red-shirted legions stormed into battle, courtesy of the
smocks worn by butchers in Uruguay, they sang a hymn that described martyrs
breaking out of their tombs to take up arms. When Garibaldi was wounded, as at Aspromonte in 1862, the wounds were depicted as stigmata on
a man whom some peasants confused with Christ. His bullet-punctured boot and
bloody sock became the relics of the age. Patriotic altars with his bust were
surrounded by fetching displays of cannon balls and bayonets, in fulfilment of
the patriotic religion envisaged by Fichte in Germany, who would doubtless have
approved of a Lord's Prayer containing the verse: 'Give us today our daily
cartridges'. There were ten patriotic commandments:
1. I am Giuseppe
Garibaldi your General.
2. Thou shalt not be a soldier of the General's in vain.
3. Thou shalt remember to keep the National feast days.
4. Thou shalt honour thy Motherland.
5. Thou shalt not kill, except those who bear arms against Italy.
6. Thou shalt not fornicate, unless it be to harm the enemies of Italy.
7. Thou shalt not steal, other than St Peter's pence in order to use it for the
redemption of Rome and Venice.
8. Thou shalt not bear false witness like the priests do in order to sustain
their temporal power.
9. Thou shalt not wish to invade the motherland of others.
10. Thou shalt not dishonour thy Motherland. (A. Zamoyski, Holy Madness. Romantics, Patriots and
Revolutionaries 1776-1871, London, 1999, p.409.)
From these ad-hoc
beginnings developed a much more knowing attempt to construct a communion of
the faithful to the Fatherland, which was both modelled on the rituals of the
Church and meant to supplant them:
We need to make this
religion of the Fatherland, which must be our principal if not only religion,
as solemn and as popular as possible. We all of us, servants of Progress, have
gradually destroyed a faith that for centuries sufficed our people, precisely
because through the ritualised forms of its displays
it appealed to the visual senses, and through the visual senses to the minds of
the masses, who are impressionable, imaginative, and artistic, eager for
shapes, colours and sounds to feed their fantasies.
What have we substituted for their faith? As far as the masses are concerned,
nothing. We have closed our new Gods of Reason and Duty within ourselves,
offering sacrifices to them, modestly in the course of our everyday lives,
heroically in times of danger, but without adorning them with the external
trappings of religion that still today, in the absence of an alternative, draw
to church people who are nostalgic for beauty at a time when beauty is tending
to disappear. We must address this, as the character of a people is not changed
from one day to the next; it is moulded not only by
education but also by the natural surroundings in which it is condemned to
live. (La Riforma 1o June 1882)
Following the deaths
of Victor Emmanuel in early 1878 and Garibaldi in 1882, both became central to
the state-sponsored national cult. Elaborate ceremonies accompanied the body of
Victor Emmanuel into Rome's Pantheon where, despite his equivocal attitude to
unification during his lifetime, he was memorialised
as the `father of the fatherland'. From the mid-i88os, plans were afoot for the
imposing, gleaming-white monument to Victor Emmanuel, which was eventually completed
in 1911, the idea of incorporating the Italian parliament into the monument
having been dropped. Garibaldi was already the subject of a cult in his own
lifetime, as reflected in the number of institutions and streets named after
him, not to speak of a profusion of hagiographical icons. That Garibaldi wanted
his ashes interred on the remote island of Caprera
was initially an obstacle to a major funerary monument in the capital.
As in united Germany,
anniversaries, festivals, historical paintings and school history textbooks
were other important ways of establishing the national canon. In 1886 a
commission on the teaching of history at secondary level discovered that no
textbook existed that met `the needs of the present' or promoted the `noble
goal of national education'. Until 1867, the history curriculum stopped in
1815, partly to avoid the problem of the Risorgimento being taught by clerics
who disapproved of its outcome for the Church. However, the recruitment of more
lay teachers meant that in 1884 the modern history curriculum was extended to
1870. Apart from being used to educate people who were `upright, peaceful,
strong and sober', the content of history classes was also adjusted according
to whether Mazzini or Cavour were `in' or `out'. Beyond the schoolroom, the
equivalent of the Church's feasts and saints' days were picked out in the
calendar, commemorating the deaths of Garibaldi, Mazzini and Victor Emmanuel,
or such events as the taking of Rome or Palermo, celebrations which were
attended by surviving veterans of these engagements. The dead were present too.
In an emotional address in Palermo's Politeama
theatre in 1885, Crispi began with a roll-call of the martyrs, anticipating the
use of such evocatively plangent strategies by the dictatorships (and some of
the democracies) of the following century, for by then public displays of
hysterical emotion had become universal:
The ranks of the honoured phalanx have been thinned by death, and more than
six hundred have not answered the call of the noble city.
The supreme captain:
absent! Giuseppe Sirtori, his learned and intrepid
lieutenant: absent! Nino Bixio, the modern Achilles:
absent! Giancinto Carini,
the brilliant captain of the Calatafimi: absent!
Francesco Nullo, the soldier of humanity: absent!
Giuseppe La Masa, the daring rebel of 12 January 1848: absent! Enrico Cairoli,
the unsullied and fearless fighter: absent!
Similar roll-calls of
the absent dead would echo in post-war Italy and Germany after 1918. The
sentiments that Fascism would develop and exploit were already gathering around
the altars of the nineteenth-century fatherlands, which for many people seemed
too hierarchical, remote and impersonal, besides the more potent symbols of
modern mass totalitarianisms. The British had things relatively easy with their
medieval Westminster and eighteenth-century anthem `God Save the King'. Other,
newer, nations experienced an orgy of national symbol-making in the nineteenth
century. Between 1870 and 1900 Germany, with which we began, was studded with
new monuments. Some were dynastic, like the Deutsches
Eck at the confluence of Rhine and Mosel in Koblenz, although Ludwig I of
Bavaria built his Valhalla at Regensburg as a national monument. Others,
notably the vast figures of Germania in the Niederwald
or Hermann in the Teutoburger Forest, were the products of nationalist
enthusiasm only ever partly satisfied by the Hohenzollern Reich, and which
abandoned the notions of freedom and humanity that originally accompanied it.
They dated terribly quickly. After the shock of the First World War
expectations were abroad that required more than beribboned worthies gathered
to celebrate anniversaries that lost their emotional force as the years
passed, around monuments that did not transcend the era in which they were
built, and which nowadays seem as if they had been put there by visitors from
Mars. Before we trace the fate of those enthusiasms, we need to look at some
powerful nineteenth-century creeds, some of which are still very much with us.
For updates
click homepage here