Collective Memory in Europe: European Culture and Identity since Homer Volume 1 9781350058521, 9781350058514, 9781350058668

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FOREWORD

Europe is a kaleidoscope and so, suitably enough, is this book. It shows us Europe in all its endless variety: multilingual, polyphonic, protean, diverse yet full of halfhidden unities, incessantly defining itself against others yet constantly intermingling with them. In nearly 150 short, vivid and stimulating chapters, it delights in human detail, the original, the offbeat, illumination offered from an unexpected point of view. It does not lecture or prescribe; it provokes and evokes. The European Way since Homer appears in English at a time when British newspapers routinely report that Britain has ‘left Europe’. This journey through more than 2,500 years of European history and memory shows us just how ridiculous that statement is. The ‘Europe’ of the Brexit debate is to this real Europe as a child’s crude black-and-white sketch is to a Renaissance palace or a polychromatic altarpiece by Albrecht Dürer. The Europe of the EU institutions, important though it is, is just one small part of the whole. You can no more take the Europe out of Britain than you can take the Britain out of Europe. What would Charlemagne’s court have been without Alcuin of York? What European culture without Shakespeare and Walter Scott? What the story of the Second World War in Europe without Winston Churchill? As none other than Margaret Thatcher observed in her 1988 Bruges speech: ‘we British are as much heirs to the legacy of European culture as any other nation. Our links to the rest of Europe, the continent of Europe, have been the dominant factor in our history.’ True then; still true now. For English-speaking readers in the rest of the world, this book shows us how no corner of the globe is untouched by Europe, but also how influences from other continents have shaped Europe. Those European encounters with the rest of the world were for centuries colonial and often brutally exploitative. They were also complex. Take the fascinating short chapter on Tintin in the Congo for example. That book, which has sold more than 10 million copies since its first appearance in 1931, trivializes one of the most horrendous examples of European colonial exploitation – the Belgian Congo, Joseph Conrad’s ‘heart of darkness’ – and reproduces crude racist stereotypes. Yet, the authors tell us that in 1969 the Democratic Republic of the Congo itself requested that the book be reprinted. And when the Congolese president wrote to Richard Nixon to congratulate him on the moon landing, he reminded him that Tintin had got there first. One of the editors’ guiding principles comes from the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur: to understand ourselves we have to see ourselves through the eyes of others. Oneself as Another is the title of Ricoeur’s seminal work. But who are Europe’s others? Or, to use the significant capitalization of identity studies, its Others? This takes us,

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again and again, to the frontiers of Europe. Europe is to be found in its heartland cities, such as Rome; but it is only to be understood by looking also at its edges. Thomas Serrier tells us that the European Union has a 14,000-kilometre external land frontier, while the entire continent – from the Atlantic to the Urals – has some 90 interstate frontiers and a 37,000-kilometre circumference. Yet in most directions, Europe does not end; it merely fades away. Its only definite, hard (and cold) end is in the North. To the east and south-east, it fades away somewhere across Russia, between the Urals and Vladivostok, and across Turkey. To the south, we have the entire Mediterranean world, which Greeks and Romans would have thought much more part of their civilization than what is now Scotland or Finland. The water divides, but it also connects. You might think the western frontier of Europe is clear enough. Even leaving aside the matter of Iceland and Greenland, that is not the case culturally, historically and politically. Not just the United States and Canada but all the countries of all the Americas, North and South, have elements of Europeanness, of a ‘new Europe’, be it in New Orleans, New York, or London, Ontario. That includes the languages that connect us across the Atlantic, notably English, French, Spanish and Portuguese. One of the most refreshing aspects of this kaleidoscopic work is how little it dwells on the European Union, let alone getting lost in its inner workings. Here you have no comitology (the grim science of analysing the EU’s multiple committees) and, as important, no teleology. Instead of some simplistic ‘from Charlemagne to the Euro’ teleological narrative, the thread linking so many disparate subjects in these volumes is the idea of ‘places of memory’ (lieux de mémoire), originally developed by the French scholar Pierre Nora. ‘Place of memory’ is the literal translation, but what is meant is something more like ‘locus of memory’. The locus can be a city, building or statue, or also a book, a film, a myth, a historical figure or a piece of music. Thus, the EU figures most prominently in an excellent chapter on ‘Brussels’ as a place of memory. Here the Brussels of the EU’s Berlaymont building, that extraordinary late 1960s piece of technocratic modernism, coexists with other layers and vectors of memory: the Brussels of mediaeval crafts and trade, which you can still sense around the Grand Place; the Brussels of late nineteenth-century historicist grandeur, partly built on the colonial spoils of the Belgian Congo; the Belgian Brussels, with its intricate urban geography, hearty cuisine and everyday culture of French-speaking and Flemish/Dutch-speaking inhabitants; the Brussels of NATO, that bridge between old Europe and the new Europes across the Atlantic. It has been well said that the essence of the Enlightenment could be captured in Immanuel Kant’s question ‘What is Enlightenment?’ The answer is given by a perpetual process of self-questioning. So also with Europe. As this book suggests, a defining characteristic of Europe is that it never ceases to pose the question ‘What is Europe?’ The answer is in the quest. That also means that there is never simply one right answer. So this polyphonic exploration of the multiple, intersecting Europes of memory leads us finally to a question to you, the reader: What is your Europe? Timothy Garton Ash Oxford, December 2020

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would never have been able to pursue this intellectual adventure, The European Way since Homer, if it had not been for the authors from five continents who responded to our request in such large numbers. This work, the product of international energies, is also theirs, and we extend our warmest thanks to them. This three-volume set is the English translation of a multi-contributor book that was originally published under the title Europa. Notre histoire in one single volume at Les Arènes in Paris in 2017. It was later published in German as Europa. Die Gegenwart unserer Geschichte at the Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft in Darmstadt. We would like to express our gratitude to Bloomsbury for their early interest in our book, to our editor Rhodri Mogford for his huge work of supervision and to Augusta Dörr for taking up the challenge of translating 1400 pages all alone and rendering them in such a fluent, flowing and perfectly polished prose. We warmly want to thank Sophie Langlais, Hélène de Virieu and Laurent Beccaria at Les Arènes who helped to make this translation possible. And we feel deeply in debt to Timothy Garton Ash for writing his superb Foreword to the English edition in light of tremendous changes. We are also deeply grateful to the team that convinced us to embark on this project, and then advised, supported and encouraged us throughout those years of painstaking work. Our thanks are also due to our young academic coordinator, Mike Plitt of the European University Viadrina at Frankfurt (Oder), for his wholehearted commitment and creative approach to the project. We can never sufficiently emphasize the mutual trust and friendship that characterized our exchanges with our five co-editors − Pierre Monnet (Professor for Medieval History at the EHESS, Paris, and Director of the French-German Institute for History and Social Sciences at Frankfurt am Main), Akiyoshi Nishiyama (Dean and Professor of history at Kyoritsu Women’s University, Tokyo), Olaf B. Rader (Professor at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities), Valérie Rosoux (Senior Research Fellow at the Belgian National Scientific Research Fund and a Professor at the Catholic University of Louvain) and Jakob Vogel (Professor of European history at Sciences Po, Paris and Director of the Centre Marc Bloch, Berlin) – for the huge share of the workload that each of them assumed. We would also like to express our gratitude to the team of academic advisors who helped us to conceive our work. In addition to the colleagues we have already mentioned, they are: Włodzimierz Borodziej (Professor of contemporary history

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at the University of Warsaw), Catherine Gousseff (Senior researcher at the CNRS and former Director of the Centre Marc Bloch, Berlin), Luisa Passerini (Professor of history at the University of Pisa), Drago Roksandić (Professor of history at the University of Zagreb), Bénédicte Savoy (Professor of art history at the Technical University of Berlin and the Collège de France), Ibrahima Thioub (Rector of the Cheikh Anta Diop University of Dakar) and Jay Winter (Professor of history at Yale University). Our thanks are likewise due to the numerous colleagues and friends with whom we have discussed our project, particularly to the late lamented Hagen Schulze, former Director of the German Historical Institute in London, who coedited Deutsche Erinnerungsorte with Étienne François in 2001 and organized the first international conference devoted to European realms of memory, held at Cumberland Lodge in 2003; in this way, we are also indebted to Anne-Marie Autissier, Steven Englund, Kornelia Kończal, Benoît Majerus, Pierre Nora, Kiran Klaus Patel, Marie-Louise von Plessen, Krzysztof Pomian, Pierre-François Raimond, Jacques Revel, Dominic Sachsenmaier, Bernhard Schulz, Gisela Vetter-Liebenow and Annette Werberger. And a special mention goes to Nathalie Petitjean, at the time Editor-in-chief of the Photographic Archives at La Documentation française, who in 2012 commissioned us to produce a work on ‘Lieux de mémoire européens’ for their Cahiers series, an enterprise that effectively became a form of ‘dress rehearsal’ for us. As with all large-scale projects, our work is the culmination of a long journey only made possible by assistance from multiple sources. The research stay made by Étienne François at the Nantes Institute for Advanced Study in 2009 enabled him to plan the initial outline of the future book, the study days organized at Saint-Florentle-Vieil, where the spirit of Julien Gracq lingers still, proving particularly useful. And in November 2016, during the project itself, the generosity of the Volkswagen Foundation enabled us to bring together a good half of our authors, and several international specialists, at Herrenhausen Palace in Hanover. We are likewise deeply grateful to the Fondation des Treilles, which in March 2017 hosted the entire editorial team’s concluding residential seminar, an occasion as intensive as it was fruitful. Our thanks are also due to the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and to the All European Academies. In addition, we would like to thank our students at the Free University of Berlin, the Institute of European Studies at the University of Paris 8 and the European University Viadrina at Frankfurt (Oder), with whom we were able to test a large number of entries in this work and refine our analyses. We cannot conclude these acknowledgements without thanking Beate and Barbara, both of whom encouraged us to undertake this project from the outset, and who have steadfastly accompanied it throughout its journey, with all its highs and lows, unfailingly providing pertinent advice and clear-sighted opinions, and to whom we will never be able to express the fullest extent of our gratitude.

PREFACE

According to Greek mythology, Europa was a ravishing nymph who was abducted by Zeus. Having assumed the form of a bull, he carried her from the East to Crete, and her name has been used to denote our continent since the days of Antiquity. One thousand years later, the anonymous author of the Mozarabic Chronicle devised the noun ‘Europeans’ in order to define the soldiers under the command of Charles Martel, who defeated Abd al-Rahman, Emir of Córdoba, and his Arab-Berber forces near Poitiers in 732 or 733. In this way, Europe became a geographical area whose inhabitants developed a sense of identity through the conviction that they were under attack. The term re-emerged in similar circumstances several centuries later, in 1454, when it was used by Enea Silvio Piccolomini, the future Pope Pius II, who was concerned by the Ottoman expansion across the Adriatic. However, the concept of Europe did not fully materialize until the mid-seventeenth century, with the treaties collectively known as the Peace of Westphalia. These put an end to the Thirty Years’ War, which had torn the continent apart and ravaged most of its territories. Almost every European monarch was represented at the signings in Münster and Osnabrück in 1648, with the exception of the tsar of Russia, the king of England and the sultan of the Ottoman Empire. Together, the treaties established the foundations of a political system that was to last over two centuries and transformed Christianity in Europe. Aside from its partial political union, which dates from the middle of the previous century, Europe in the twenty-first century has become both a tangible reality and an idealized aspiration, an elusive entity and the subject of impassioned controversy. When we reflect on our history today, we inevitably do so within a European context, viewing it both from a long-term perspective and as a collective whole – from a long-term perspective because, although our memories are dominated and all but obfuscated by current questions and recent conflicts, European heritage itself dates back to ancient times, to Homer and Athens, to Jerusalem and Rome, and as a collective whole because the clashes over Nazism and Stalinism, the Holocaust and the Gulags that have shaken European societies reveal the profound significance of spaces fashioned by the eras of European empires, the Cold War and divisions between East and West, North and South. We have sought to look beyond this geography of memories and its fault lines in order to view the tectonic structure in its entirety. Our far-reaching investigation is unprecedented in its breadth. Pierre Monnet (Paris/Frankfurt am Main), Akiyoshi Nishiyama (Tokyo), Valérie Rosoux (Louvain), Olaf B. Rader (Berlin) and Jakob Vogel (Paris/Berlin) were responsible for editing the

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three sections that comprise this publication, a collaborative enterprise involving a continuous exchange of knowledge. Around 100 authors − 109, to be precise – have contributed to this work. They come from all over Europe and the world: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, the Czech Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, India, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Senegal, Serbia, Spain, Sweden, the Ukraine and the United States, not to mention the global trajectories that so many of them have followed. Indeed, it would have been almost absurd to assign a single nationality to each of our authors, while investigations of their family roots would reveal connections with Bulgaria, Croatia, Iran, the Baltic States, Turkey and Tunisia. In order to respond to the intellectual challenge issued by the Indian postcolonial thinker Dipesh Chakrabarty, who suggested ‘provincializing’ Europe, we had to be sure to cast our net wide. In this way, all the generations, each with their own sensibilities, are represented here; over fifty years separate our oldest and youngest contributor. This polyphonic approach stems from our own convictions; we share Paul Ricœur’s certainty that ‘the work of recollection’ is actually ‘the work of recollections’. We can only unravel the tangled mass of interlocking histories and proclaimed identities by approaching them from multiple perspectives, thereby recognizing that our neighbour’s memory is equal in importance and dignity to our own. In essence, we must ensure that our memories are ‘sharable’, as Luisa Passerini so eloquently puts it. Marc Bloch made the case as early as 1928, in his article ‘Toward a Comparative History of European Societies’, when he pleads for an end to constant discussions over national histories unaccompanied by mutual understanding. And why not state from the outset that throughout its development, this project was chiefly characterized by the pleasure we gained from discovery and exchange? The entire process remained profoundly international in nature and, indeed, the ongoing dialogue it has generated continues in this vein. The European Way since Homer: History, Memory, Identity is the fruit of that adventure. This title was selected in preference to the traditional option, ‘A History of Europe’. The call to a broader collective imaginary is intended to indicate from the outset that our own investigation takes a very different approach from a history of international relations, a comparative history of European societies or a history of European civilization. These inevitably call for a linear narrative and are based on the illusion of pre-established unity, involving one history, one heritage and one European memory, in the singular form. In referring to a ‘European way’ with particular reference to memory and identity, we do not intend to suggest the existence of a sharply defined imaginary community, which would run counter our purpose. Our starting point was indeed a simple, guiding question, which subsequently developed into a series of related questions: Are European memories more than the sum of national memories? Can we speak of a European memory in the singular, or is the plural form more appropriate? Does Europe, like the nations that compose it, possess what Pierre Nora was the first to define as ‘realms of memory’? In other words, ‘any significant entity, whether material or non-material in nature, which by dint of human will or the work of time has become a symbolic element of the memorial heritage of any community.’

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The European Way since Homer presents a living, expansive history that is still under debate. It comprises 149 individual texts of varying length, in the form of farreaching essays, insights, clarifications and contrasts. This palette, which is almost playful in nature, is intended as an invitation to an intellectual voyage of discovery. We shall now briefly explain our guiding principles. By focusing on memories, we are not placing history ‘as it actually happened’ at the heart of our analysis. Instead, our emphasis is on its ‘underlying’ aspects. This is a history of Europe that has been debated, asserted, reinterpreted and, in short, updated from one generation to the next. It is a history encompassing everything that our predecessors found sufficiently important to record and preserve, to transform, transmit, discuss and dispute. Moreover, it also includes everything we felt to be a vital part of our shared and contentious heritage. The issues covered in this history are divided into three major themes, which likewise form the three volumes of this work. The first of these, Collective Memory in Europe, concerns what Saint Augustine in his Confessions termed the ‘presence of the past’. Despite the political necessity to move beyond the twentieth century’s painful legacy, an extremely varied range of sensibilities, narratives and counternarratives unquestionably present a formidable obstacle. These considerations invite us to revisit a long-term approach, spanning several centuries and extending over many lands, and to re-immerse ourselves in the depths of time, returning to the very origins of our story. Our second volume, entitled United and Divided Europes, takes the form of a quest for a geography of memories, perceived through their many and varied incarnations: figures, places and spaces, myths and representations. Our mobile camera was set up in a variety of locations; different focal lengths were used and long, static shots were avoided. This kaleidoscopic effect reflects the fact that our memories are diverse by their very nature, although this does not exclude a dialectic based on unity. Finally, if European memories are living entities, it is also due to the connection that has always existed between Europe and a constantly evolving world. We turn once more to that great historian and French Resistance leader Marc Bloch, who liked to reiterate: ‘There is no history of France, there is only a history of Europe.’ Fernand Braudel, for his part, completed this assertion with the declaration: ‘There is no history of Europe, there is only a history of the world.’ We have taken that all-important global perspective and made it our own. Our third and final volume is entitled Europe and the World in History, and relates to the theme of ‘world memories’. This echoes the term ‘world-economy’, as used by Fernand Braudel in his day, and geographers’ references to ‘world cities’. The aim here is to question, through memories, the permeable nature of the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’. At this point, we should like to add a more personal note. We were born one generation apart and our European consciousness arose, in both our cases, through our Franco-German family histories. These are composed of narratives and silences, of joys and losses. As Berliners by adoption, our shared interest in the intellectual enterprise you see before you was greatly influenced by the events of 1989 and the experience of the capital of a reunified Germany as a vast site of memories.

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All the issues of previous times that emerged after 1989 are concentrated in Berlin. The first question concerns the commemoration of the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November, a date that carries a remarkable weight of historical significance. It also marks the anniversary of the opposing proclamations of a parliamentary and a socialist republic, which took place in 1918, Hitler’s putsch in Munich in 1923 and Kristallnacht in 1938. A more general question concerns the encounter between the legacies of Nazism and those of the two Germanys. All this is set against the background of the transfer of the nation’s capital from Bonn to Berlin, of a new East–West dialogue and of the need to reinvent Europe. Berlin has now established itself as an international metropolis. Following the demolition of the GDR’s Palace of the Republic, a replica of the former Prussian royal palace, which had been destroyed in 1950, is under construction on the same site. This will house an art museum exhibiting nonEuropean collections and an international meeting centre. What is true in the case of Berlin is surely applicable to almost every other European city; in this way, one may easily imagine the rich nature of the material presented in the 148 other chapters in this publication. We have sought to create a pioneering work, stimulated by the prescient intuition of Tony Judt. In the light of the upheavals that took place between 1989 and 1990, his book Postwar (2005) invited us to consider the history of Europe from a different perspective, through the prism of memories. As is the case with all new proposals, this work has its limitations. We knew from the outset that we would inevitably be giving prominence to concrete aspects of discourse and visible traces, rather than the ‘hollows’ represented by silences, by taboos, and by groups which have either been marginalized or have no successors. A history of memory is not in the best position to re-establish an evenly distributed historical narrative. Although we are well aware of our particular standpoints, The European Way since Homer offers a fresh perspective; less than one-third of our authors are French, and a good 50 per cent of the texts were originally written in a foreign language before being translated into French. In this way, the work stands out as much for its scope as for its ambition and its kaleidoscope of different nationalities. In order to avoid the pitfall of simply reproducing a series of juxtaposed monologues, we have focused closely on flows of movement and points of convergence with a view to presenting a type of ‘general grammar’ of European memories. Any list will inevitably be selective. If our choices stimulate debate and discussion, we will already have achieved our aim. From Vancouver to Tokyo, from Helsinki to Melbourne and from Vienna to Kinshasa, our contributors could be mobilized swiftly, as the plans we had set out addressed the 109 authors in a common language. This had been developed over thirty years in the wake of the ‘memory boom’ and memory studies. The concept of ‘collective memory’ proposed nearly a century ago by Maurice Halbwachs and the worldwide circulation of the notion of ‘realms of memory’ launched by Pierre Nora in France between 1984 and 1992 certainly offered rich possibilities. Nevertheless, apart from an academic publication produced under the aegis of the Leibniz Institute of European History in Mainz and of its Director Heinz Duchhardt, the full breadth

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of European memories had remained uncharted territory. Perhaps, like the north face of the Eiger, they were too intimidating. Identities undergo constant developments, from one generation, area or social group to another; these lie at the heart of our journey through the Europe of memories. We have deliberately avoided those arguments over the definition of Europe that recur incessantly as they can never be resolved. Instead, our enquiry helps to provide a clearer idea of how Europeans and non-Europeans – in both former and present times – perceived and understood the term. For ‘us other Europeans, who are ultimately responsible for our future, although we can do nothing about our past’ as Ferenc Fejtő acknowledged, there is nothing regressive in making a detour through memories. With its 149 contributions, which serve both as starting points and as landmarks, the primary purpose of The European Way since Homer is to awaken curiosity and kindle debate. Linked as they are by a multitude of mirror effects, European memories cannot exist independently of each other. As they live purely through those who bear them, they are far from being set in stone; in a permanent state of recomposition, they will be what we make them.

CONTRIBUTORS TO VOLUME 1

Włodzimierz Borodziej Born in Warsaw (Poland) in 1956. Professor of contemporary history at the University of Warsaw, President of the Research Council of the House of European History (Brussels) and a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. His research interests focus on the contemporary history of Poland and its relationship with Germany. Rémi Brague Born in Paris (France) in 1947. Professor Emeritus of the history of philosophy at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, and a member of the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences. His research interests focus on the history of Classical and Medieval philosophy in the Christian and Muslim worlds. Horst Bredekamp Born in Kiel (Germany) in 1947. Professor of art history at the Humboldt University of Berlin and a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. His research interests focus on the history of art from the Middle Ages to the present day and on the theory of art and the image. Thomas Brose Born in Berlin (Germany, formerly the GDR) in 1962. Professor of religious philosophy at the Berlin affiliation of the Pontifical Gregorian University and a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts. His research interests focus chiefly on Hamann, Kant and Hume, and on the philosophy of religion of the Age of Enlightenment. Johann Chapoutot Born in Martigues (France) in 1978. Professor of contemporary history at the Paris-Sorbonne University (Paris 4) and an honorary member of the Institut Universitaire de France. His research interests focus on the history of Germany and Nazism, and more broadly on contemporary European political and cultural history. György Dalos Born in Budapest (Hungary) in 1943. Historian and a writer. Director of the Institute for Hungarian Culture in Berlin from 1995 to 1999. His research interests focus on the history of Central and Eastern Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Arnold Esch Born in Altenbögge (Germany) in 1936. Professor Emeritus of history at the University of Bern, former director of the German Historical Institute in Rome and a member of the Accademia dei Lincei. His research interests focus chiefly on Italian history during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

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Étienne François Born in Rouen (France) in 1943. Professor Emeritus of history at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and the Free University of Berlin, former Director of the Centre Marc Bloch and a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. His research interests focus on early modern, and contemporary German history and the history of European memory cultures. Emmanuel Fureix Born in Limoges (France) in 1971. Professor of contemporary history at the University of Paris-Est. His research interests focus on the political and cultural history of nineteenth-century France. Robert Gildea Born in Egham (the UK) in 1952. Professor of modern history at the University of Oxford. His research interests focus on European history in the twentieth century, particularly the Second World War, collective memory and oral history. Carol Gluck Born in Newark (the USA) in 1941. Professor of contemporary history at Columbia University (New York). A specialist in East Asia, particularly modernday Japan and its relations with the West. Catherine Gousseff Born in Paris (France) in 1961. Director of research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (the CNRS), Director of studies at the Institute for Russian, East-European and Asian Studies at the School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (the EHESS, Paris) and former Director of the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin. Her research interests focus on the history of migrations within the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe during the twentieth century. Jonas Grethlein Born in Munich (Germany, formerly the FRG) in 1978. Professor of Classical philology at the University of Heidelberg. His research interests focus on the history and literature of ancient Greece. Ulrike Guérot Born in Grevenbroich (Germany, formerly the FRG) in 1964. Founder of the think tank The European Democracy Lab and Professor for European Politics and the Study of Democracy at the Danube University Krems. Her research interests focus on democracy in Europe. François Hartog Born in Albertville (France) in 1946. Historian and Director of studies at the School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (the EHESS), Paris. His research interests focus on ancient and modern historiography. Heinz-Gerhard Haupt Born in Göttingen (Germany) in 1943. Professor Emeritus of social history at the University of Bielefeld. His research interests focus particularly on the history of political violence in Europe from the early nineteenth century onwards. Marie-Claire Hoock-Demarle Born in Argentan (France) in 1937. Professor Emerita of Germanic studies at the University of Paris 7 – Denis Diderot. Her research interests focus on the history of women in Europe, forms of feminine sociability and the new forms of power.

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Hartmut Kaelble Born in Göppingen (Germany) in 1940. Professor Emeritus of history at the Humboldt University of Berlin. His research interests focus on the social history of twentieth-century Europe. Sandrine Kott Born in Paris (France) in 1960, she is Professor of contemporary European history at the University of Geneva. Her research interests focus on social and cultural history, philanthropic practices and the history of the Welfare State. Todor Kuljić Born in Zrenjanin (former Yugoslavia, now Serbia) in 1949. Professor of political science at the University of Belgrade. His research interests focus on the ideology and structure of contemporary political systems and movements. Marie-Claire Lavabre Born in Reims (France) in 1954. A specialist in political sociology and Director of Research Emerita at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (the CNRS). Her research interests focus on the sociology and history of communism, and on the sociology of memory. Manuel Loff Born in Porto (Portugal) in 1965. Professor of contemporary history at the University of Porto. His research interests focus on the Franco dictatorship and the fascist regime in Portugal. Christof Mandry Born in Stuttgart (Germany, formerly the FRG) in 1968. Professor of moral theology at the University of Frankfurt am Main. His research interests focus on political ethics, particularly Christian social ethics. Jean-Clément Martin Born in Thouars (France) in 1948. Professor Emeritus of the history of the French Revolution at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. A specialist in the French Revolution, particularly Robespierre, the CounterRevolution and the war in the Vendée. Akiyoshi Nishiyama Born in Odawara (Japan) in 1969. Professor of history and Dean of the Faculty at Kyoritsu University, Tokyo. A specialist in the history of Germany and of its links with Japan. His work focuses primarily on the history of education. Mike Plitt Born in Bremen (Germany, formerly the FRG) in 1984. Doctor of contemporary history at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder). His research interests focus on the cultural history of the Weimar Triangle, and the history of European intellectuals during the Cold War. Olaf B. Rader Born in Bad Freienwalde (Germany, formerly the GDR) in 1961. Professor of medieval history at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. His research interests focus primarily on the history of the Holy Roman Empire.

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Valérie Rosoux Born in Dinant (Belgium) in 1972. A specialist in politics and philosophy, Senior Research Fellow at the Belgian National Scientific Research Fund (the FNRS) and Professor at the Catholic University of Louvain and Member of the Belgian Royal Academy. Her research interests focus on the uses of memory in international relations. Régis Schlagdenhauffen Born in Strasbourg (France) in 1979. Sociologist and Senior Lecturer at the School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (the EHESS), Paris. His research interests focus on the memory of the homosexual victims of Nazism. Gesine Schwan Born in Berlin (Germany) in 1943. A political science specialist. Former President of the European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder) and President of the Humboldt-Viadrina Governance Platform in Berlin. Her research interests focus on the history of theories of democracy. Thomas Serrier Born in Le Mans (France) in 1971. Professor of German history at the University of Lille. His research interests focus on German–Polish history, the history of the Central and Eastern European border regions and collective European memories. Michael Stolleis Born in Ludwigshafen (Germany) in 1941. Jurist and Professor Emeritus of legal history at the University of Frankfurt am Main. His research interests focused on public law and legal history. He sadly passed away in 2021. Bo Stråth Born in Jönköping (Sweden) in 1943. Professor Emeritus of history at the University of Helsinki. His research interests focus on the philosophy of history, political theory, modern economic theory and contemporary European history. Fabien Théofilakis Born in Paris (France) in 1976. Assistant Professor in contemporary history at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, currently affiliated to the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin. His research interests focus on the history of prisoners of war and historic European trials. John Tolan Born in Milwaukee (the USA) in 1959. Professor of history at the University of Nantes and a member of the Academia Europæa. His research interests focus on the history of cultural and religious relations between the Latin and Arab worlds in the Middle Ages. Claudia Weber Born in Guben (Germany, formerly the GDR) in 1969. Professor of contemporary history at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder) and a specialist in the history of violence in Eastern and Southern Europe. Jay Winter Born in New York (the USA) in 1945. Professor Emeritus of contemporary history at Yale University. He is a specialist in the First World War and its impacts on the twentieth century.

Introduction Resolving the past VALÉRIE ROSOUX AND AKIYOSHI NISHIYAMA

‘Les morts sont les invisibles. Ils ne sont pas les absents.’ (‘The dead are invisible, but they are not absent.’)1 Victor Hugo’s words are a powerful affirmation of the presence of the past in our lives − a presence that takes multiple forms. The past can be a guide or a burden, depending on one’s locality or interlocutors, and it remains significant everywhere. The common thread running through the first volume of this work forms a multi-layered structure (rather in the manner of a millefeuille pastry), whose most deeply concealed layers are far from being the least important. Interstices composed of silences − stifled recollections, unacknowledged suffering, lapses of memory – lie between the successive strata that connect the days of Antiquity to our own era. Those ‘reverse sides’ of our lives are all contained within these multiple layers. The first volume of this publication may be compared to a paperchase; while some pathways have already been marked out, others appear unexpectedly. The reader will encounter a multitude of faces and voices in the course of this journey. Our endeavour here is to lighten the burden of the past, to confront its harshness. The authors’ challenge involves evaluating emotions from a long-term perspective. This entails identifying not only the founding moments but also the tensions and disruptions that are woven into the fabric of our history. All the reflections here raise the question of transmission, either directly or indirectly. It is not only narratives that are passed down from generation to generation but also emotions. We experience gratitude when the past brings us prestige, bitterness when it brings humiliation, fear when it oppresses, hope when it liberates, nostalgia when it is missed, shame when it incriminates, tender sentiments when it mollifies, hatred when it brings degradation, grief when it brings pain, guilt when it compromises us or serenity when it bespeaks respect. Far from being mutually exclusive, these emotions function as combinations. Nostalgia and anger operate together. Feelings of bitterness, shame and guilt are closely interlocked in regions that are mired in conflict. Fear and obligation converge in order to create a future. European history is rooted in these movements, each of which has its own tempo. In what way does this trajectory of memories continue to shape us? In order to answer this question, the contributions presented in the first volume are based on four major themes: scars, narratives, foundations and confrontations.

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Part I relates to the recollections seared into European consciousness. How can we ignore the burden of the past as it bears down upon a continent struggling to heal the wounds left by its wars? The Czech philosopher Jan Patočka, a spokesperson for the Charter 77 movement, fought all his life against the oppression of human dignity; he identified Europe as a community bound by ‘the solidarity of the shaken’. In order to address this effect, born of the upheavals that have disfigured the continent, it is important to detect the traces and imprints that continue to influence our perceptions and our behaviour. The deportations, dictatorships and massacres that ravaged Europe were not confined to the twentieth century. Tragic events experienced in ancient Greece and Rome, in the Middle Ages and in the modern or contemporary era, reverberate as echoes of the same drama. The pages devoted to such episodes in this work demonstrate that although some wounds have healed, others remain open. Part II explores grand narratives. Voices have been raised offering universally applicable discourses with a view to confronting challenges and broadening horizons. The principles of democracy, reason, humanism and the Enlightenment have all served to anchor thoughts and deeds. The fundamental rights of the individual were gradually recognized through the fight for a welfare state and equal rights for the ‘second sex’ and the gay community. Although they appear as a cohesive whole, each of the grand narratives evoked here is the fruit of intense negotiations. These will have been conducted at the national (the issue being the fabric of the collective identity), international (such combats transcend borders), local (narratives always take root somewhere) and individual levels (a great many negotiations with oneself must take place before definitive acts are accomplished). Part III investigates the question of origins in greater depth. Europe’s foundational pillars are numerous and varied: Jerusalem, Athens and Rome, Homer and Averroes, Roman law and Islam. From the nymphs of Classical mythology to the monotheistic religions, no aspect of the continent is homogeneous and none would exist without interaction – for the most part violent – with the Other. Portrayed in turn as barbaric or uncivilized, but always as those who are not Us, the definition of that Other varies according to each territory. The dread of decline, the building of bridges or the raising of walls − each key moment in history marks another roll of the dice. Part IV studies the confrontations that inhabit our collective imaginaries. From counter-revolutions to the class struggle, Europe is both fractured and structured through battles for emancipation or against segregation. Far from being over, the era of confrontation is still evolving. The pages that follow offer readers an overview, an opportunity to stimulate their curiosity, to enrich their knowledge on all fronts and to connect different − sometimes antagonistic − pasts. Bach, the Master of counterpoint, was our inspiration in this endeavour. There is no single, dominant voice here, with others reduced to the role of accompanists, or merely serving as metronomes. Instead, a multitude of voices rise in concert, forming a continual dialogue based on evenly matched negotiation. How can we ‘resolve the past’ and ‘unlock the future’2? How can we create clarity from obscurity? By returning to the scene of the crime to pay our tribute ‘with open eyes’, as advocated by Marguerite Yourcenar.

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NOTES 1. Victor Hugo, 19 January 1865, Actes et paroles. Pendant l’exil (1865) in Œuvres complètes (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1985), p. 65. 2. Nicole Lapierre, Sauve qui peut la vie (Paris: Le Seuil, 2015), p. 131.

CHAPTER 1

The shadow of the Second World War ÉTIENNE FRANÇOIS AND THOMAS SERRIER

Emerging from the devastation wrought by the Second World War, Europe established its new status as a continent at peace. Following centuries of internal conflict, it was obliged to reinvent itself in order to survive. The shadowy, towering presence of war, that matrix of European history, now hovers once more over a political and legal structure struggling to maintain its position above the fray. ‘Where have all the soldiers gone?’ asked American historian James J. Sheehan in his recent book. The peaceful way of life prevailing from Lisbon to Tallinn and from Dublin to Bucharest at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries appears to confirm that consumerism and a carefree outlook now hold sway, a far cry from cultures of war and from the traditional ‘cult of the nation in arms’ (Jakob Vogel). This had mobilized European societies for so long, causing nation to march against nation. Nowadays, mass demonstrations are prompted by anti-war sentiment. The largest trans-European gathering to date took place on 15 February 2003 to protest against the impending American intervention in Iraq and the participation of certain European states that had joined the coalition. A million demonstrators took to the streets of London, Rome and Barcelona; 500,000 marched in Madrid, Berlin and Paris, and protests took place in all the capitals of Europe: Vienna, Budapest, Prague, Warsaw, even Minsk and Moscow. Like the lead soldiers and card games of bygone days, the wars of yesteryear are preserved in the collective memory; they live through video games, the vogue for ‘historytainment’ and historical re-enactments, those entertaining reproductions of the major battles of Roman times, the Middle Ages or the Napoleonic era, performed in period clothing. The grand narrative today, however, is that of the continent’s democratization and pacification. This was expressed by Jacques Derrida and Jürgen Habermas in their joint ‘Manifesto for a European Renaissance’, calling for ‘the Renaissance of Europe’, following the major protests of 2003. The Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the European Union in 2012 confirmed that dominant vision.

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SIXTY MILLION DEAD The contrast is particularly striking as today’s Europeans share the feeling that there is a dividing line marking a time ‘before’ and a time ‘after’. This line separates the first half of the twentieth century – ‘this most terrible century in Western history’ (Isaiah Berlin) – from the latter half, a period of peace restored. For the experience of two world wars continues to weigh heavily on collective memories. The first may be regarded as the Great War by certain nations (France and Great Britain) and its centenary in 2014 brought its memory powerfully back to life throughout Europe; however, it is the Second World War, with its estimated 60 million deaths worldwide − approximately two-thirds of which occurred in Europe − that forms the main break. The theory of Year Zero and of a new beginning unsullied by any form of compromise with the past has certainly been revised more or less everywhere in Europe. This is due to the continuities, some more visible than others, some concealed, linking the interwar period, the war years and the post-1945 era. Yet 1945 will always remain the point at which all previous grand narratives recede, whether they are national or European in scope. For several generations now, all pathways have led European societies back to that ‘Latest Catastrophe’ (Henry Rousso), although this could become less evident as its final witnesses leave us. A force of destruction, it was also the instigator of a shared resurgence. The Second World War was the first conflict since the Thirty Years’ War to have resulted in more civilian casualties than military, through mass slaughter, genocide, bombings, acts of violence inflicted on populations under occupation, exoduses and forced migrations. Besides traditional modes of recollection relating to military life (accounts of battles, militaria, etc.), there are multitudes of traumatic memories which, for the first time, have affected both those fighting on the front line and those behind the scenes of conflict, blurring the boundaries between these two categories. As with each war, certain battles stand out as iconic, unifying episodes: the Battles of Britain and Stalingrad, the Normandy Landings and the Fall of Berlin in May 1945 constitute realms of memory in their own right, on both a European and a worldwide scale. They have provided collective cultural imaginaries with a constant source of material for decades. Yet the fate of civilian populations has come to claim an increasingly important place among memories of the war. The passing of time and, to a greater extent, the key part played by civilians and the ideological character of the conflict have contributed to a profound change in the distribution of roles. This was instigated in 1945 and proceeded to develop gradually over the years. A division of roles based on moral grounds, between resistance fighters and collaborators, victims and executioners was added to – or even replaced – the traditional division between conquering and conquered nations. Although that emphatic binary interpretation came up against complex realities − notably in Central Europe, caught in a vice between Hitler and Stalin − it eventually enabled reversals and convergences to occur within Europe. This was the case with Germany. As Richard von Weizsäcker, its president from 1984 to 1994, stated in his speech of 8 May 1985, the nation gradually came to see itself as having been liberated from Nazism rather than vanquished by the Allies.

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THE CONTINENT OF WAR The concept of the ‘European Civil War’ is unquestionably rooted in these characteristics, recognizable as typical of the Second World War. Charles de Gaulle favoured the phrase ‘the Second Thirty Years’ War’ when describing the period between 1914 and 1945, a comparison which reminds us that studies of these wars evolve within the context of a much older history of conflict. Rather than being the ‘continent of peace’ – from a contemporary perspective based partly on mythologizing – Europe has appeared throughout its history as the continent of war. Far from resulting in an entangled configuration, the intricate network of wars that constitute European history has contributed to unifying the antagonistic nations of Europe. This has been achieved through the effects of imitation, as the same memorial practices have spread more or less throughout the continent. The theme of war, omnipresent in European literature since the works of Homer, is doubtless the best example of a unifying force. Great authors and great works could be translated, in the fullest sense of the word, from one language and one culture to another thanks to the development of a shared grammar. Examples of this include the Germanic Legend of the Nibelungen, an account of the destruction of the Burgundian domains of Late Antiquity, which extended along the Rhine, the Song of Roland, an epic poem that tells the tale of Charlemagne’s crusade against the Saracens, Shakespeare’s history plays set in the Hundred Years’ War or the Wars of the Roses, Grimmelshausen’s The Adventures of Simplicius Simplicissimus, which takes place during the Thirty Years’ War, Sir Thaddeus (Pan Tadeusz) by Adam Mickiewicz and Tolstoy’s War and Peace, set in the Napoleonic Wars. Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front and The Bridge on the Drina, by Ivo Andrić, take place during the First World War and the Balkan Wars, respectively; Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate and Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones are both set in the Second World War. The visual arts likewise lend themselves easily to this type of dissemination, from the Bayeux Tapestry to Guernica and including Jacques Callot’s The Miseries and Misfortunes of War and Goya’s series of prints The Disasters of War, one of which was chosen by Primo Levi as a cover illustration for the first edition of If This Is a Man. Yet this past characterized by armed conflict is above all deeply embedded in localities, with certain battlefields having served as scenes of combat on two, three or even four occasions. This is the case with Fleurus in the Belgian province of Hainaut (1622, 1690, 1794 and 1815) and Lützen in Saxony-Anhalt (1632 and 1813). Certain belligerent powers were quick to use this fact for propaganda purposes, emphasizing revenge for a past humiliation. In this way, Field Marshal Hindenburg named his victory over the Russians in 1914 after the Battle of Tannenberg as reparation for the Teutonic Knights’ defeat at the hands of the Polish and Lithuanian forces in 1410. In 1945, the poster artist Tadeusz Trepkowski lost no time in drawing a striking parallel between the three dates 1410, 1914 and 1945, presenting the fall of the Third Reich as another landmark in the continuous, age-old combat pitting Poles and Slavs against the German invader. Analogies of this type have been facilitated through an entire culture based on the Classical, heroic tradition. Up until the mid-

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twentieth century, this was sustained with stories of national exploits or recurring Classical themes. Leonidas’s resistance against the Persians at Thermopylae provided an archetype that may even be found in contemporary action films. Whatever the outcomes of any given wars may be, they have resulted in a general uniformity that strikes any visitor travelling through the continent. No city is without its triumphal arch, its victory column and its prestigious avenues resounding with the names of foundational conquests or battles. Leipziger Platz in Berlin, which commemorates the Battle of the Nations in 1813, echoes the Gare d’Austerlitz in Paris and London’s Waterloo Station. Statues of generals and national heroes stand on the main public squares, while museums display frescoes glorifying the conquests and military virtues of the Ancients. Likewise, every European city without exception presents its own history of devastation and reconstruction, from Magdeburg, which was destroyed during the Thirty Years’ War, to Sarajevo and Vukovar, ravaged during the Balkan conflicts. Further examples include Heidelberg, torched by the Sun King’s armies in 1689, and Verdun and Reims, destroyed in the First World War. Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, Leningrad, Königsberg and Dresden were all bombed in the Second World War. In the context of that staggering list, Paris, Prague, Rome and Krakow almost appear to have survived through a miracle. New commemorative practices were introduced and these likewise spread very rapidly. They include the erection of monuments to the dead, cenotaphs and (after 1918) tombs for Unknown Soldiers, not forgetting the countless military cemeteries. Throughout the entire continent of Europe, those ‘great cemeteries under the moon’, as Bernanos described them, preserve the memory of the wars and massacres that have drenched it in blood. European cities are distinguished by their architecture, be it Gothic, Baroque or Classical, or by their materials, whether stones or bricks, rather than through these interchangeable expressions of convention. It is a mistake to regard these as memorials, since nothing is condemned to become invisible as quickly as a monument that has merged into the everyday landscape, as the Austrian writer Robert Musil ironically observed. While the remembrance of war is chiefly guided by the logic of patriotism and the national community, it also provides an opportunity to learn of traditional alliances as it forms the basis of a map of Europe indicating a legacy of coalitions and rivalries. This collective memory is embedded in national stereotypes − the Poles, for instance, have been waiting for the French since the Napoleonic era − and is vividly expressed through the transcontinental fashion for those humorous latenineteenth-century postcards depicting a French Zouave or a Spahi being assailed by a German soldier in a pointed helmet, who is in turn being attacked from the rear by a Russian muzhik built like a bear.

THE POST-WAR PERIOD: PAX EUROPEANA ‘Polemos’ (war, strife) ‘is the father of all things’, declared Heraclitus. War is clearly a matrix of European history. It has shaped individual nations (the Hundred Years’ War, in the case of France and England) and also established the basis of a balance

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of power within Europe (the Thirty Years’ War gave rise to the Westphalian System, while the Napoleonic Wars, which ended with the treaties signed at the Vienna Congress, paved the way for the Concert of Nations). Moreover, it led to the construction of a new Europe, which arose from the ashes of the Second World War and from the powerless position of a ravaged continent subject to American and Soviet dominance. Europeans readily recall that shift to a state of harmony, which fits into a venerable tradition of a quest for an eternal peace. From the works of Erasmus to the ‘founding fathers’ of the European Union, including the famous proposals expounded by the Abbé de Saint-Pierre in 1713 and by Immanuel Kant in 1795, this narrative has run parallel to the reality of war. Does this reflect the predictable, complacent attitude behind a certain, endlessly repeated pro-European discourse that no longer impresses those lucky generations born after 1945, who have only ever known the security of living in a united Europe? Perhaps. Convinced that war had been permanently banished, the outrage and dismay of Europeans today on witnessing its resurgence within their continent (in former Yugoslavia in 1991 and now in Ukraine) are felt particularly keenly. This has not stopped them, however, from continuing to carry out armed interventions beyond Europe’s borders, from the post-war colonial conflicts to today’s military campaigns in Africa and Asia. Bellicose rhetoric was denounced a decade ago when used by George W. Bush on launching his offensive in Iraq; it has notably resurfaced in the context of contemporary Islamic terrorism, with significant differences. While President Hollande adopted that martial tone in reaction to the attacks in Paris on 13 November 2015, Chancellor Merkel took care to avoid it after the attack on the Christmas Market in Berlin in December 2016. Having been accustomed to peace for several decades, Europe may well have rediscovered the pertinence of Carl von Clausewitz’s aphorism, ‘war is merely the continuation of politics by other means,’ or the truth of Carl Schmitt’s assertion that all politics are based on the distinction between friend and enemy. Without directly asking the price to be paid for the construction of a political and cultural entity freed from the inevitability of war, Europeans are becoming aware of the potential difficulties involved in remaining for much longer ‘above the fray’, as exhorted by Romain Rolland in 1915.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Forrest, Alan, Étienne François and Karen Hagemann (Eds.), War Memories: The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in Modern European Culture, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. François, Étienne, Hannes Siegrist and Jakob Vogel (Eds.), Nation und Emotion. Deutschland und Frankreich im Vergleich, 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1995. Judt, Tony, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945, New York, The Penguin Press, 2005. Koselleck, Reinhart and Michael Jeismann (Eds.), Der politische Totenkult. Kriegerdenkmäler in der Moderne, Munich, Wilhelm Fink, 1994.

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Mazower, Mark, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century, London, Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1998. Plessen, Marie-Louise von, Idee Europa. Entwürfe zum ‘Ewigen Frieden’, Berlin, Deutsches Historisches Museum, 2003. Rousso, Henry, La Dernière Catastrophe, Paris, Gallimard, 2012. Sheehan, James J., Where Have All The Soldiers Gone? The Transformation of Modern Europe, Boston, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008. Snyder, Timothy, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, New York, Basic Books, 2010. Vogel, Jakob, Nationen im Gleichschritt. Der Kult der ‘Nation in Waffen’ in Deutschland und Frankreich 1871−1914, Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1997.

CHAPTER 2

Commemorating catastrophe The First World War, Europe’s suicide? JAY WINTER

The First World War put an end to Europe’s dominance and opened wounds that have never fully closed. However, it is now widely commemorated at both the national and individual level, thereby filling a void left by a decline in religious belief and satisfying a growing need to seek out origins and roots in societies whose institutions are crumbling. Between 2014 and 2018, an avalanche of commemorative events descended both on the nations which fought the war and on the successor states created by it. Other states only indirectly touched by the carnage of the war joined in public assessments of its causes, character and consequences. This global wave of commemoration is hardly surprising, since the Great War radically transformed the international order, both opening a new era we now term the Cold War between communism and its adversaries and closing an era of European dominance of world affairs. As Alexis de Tocqueville had anticipated, the United States and Russia, reconfigured as the core of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), flanked a European continent whose war-inflicted wounds have never fully closed. A decentralized world economy replaced a Eurocentric one, no longer able to sustain indefinitely the costs of holding its colonies and dependencies. The Allies had won the war in part because of their imperial power, but the war was at one and the same time the apogee and the beginning of the end of empire.

CURRENT CENTENARY COMMEMORATIONS (2014–18) Centenary commemorations took many forms, but they can be divided roughly into two camps. First, there were commemorations organized by the central state, providing forums for current leaders to speak to and for the nation, and to link current military service and expenditure to the honourable record of the 70 million

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men all over the world who joined the ranks during the war. Second, there were commemorations organized by the institutions of civil society – local groups, families, civic associations, tour groups, re-enactors, students and scholars, churches and synagogues – to highlight the ubiquitous reach of the first total war and the deep marks left on virtually every facet of the social life of combatant nations. There were, to be sure, overlaps between the two. When museums or memorials were refurbished or redesigned, state money – alongside local contributions – paid for it. In France a ‘Grand Collecte’, or appeal to the nation, brought to state archives a vast array of privately held documents, artefacts and photographs henceforth part of the collections of the Bibliothèque nationale, the Archives nationales, and other libraries and archives. Where the state stops and civil society begins is always a vexed question, but from 2014 on, the divide between the two at times took on a political character. The rough rule of thumb was that when the state took the commemorative microphone, and spoke to the nation, it did so with a mixed message of sadness for the bloodbath and respect for the men who put on a uniform to fight for their country. The direct link to current military expenditure and the need to defend the nation today was highlighted time and again by the presence of today’s serving men and women in commemorative ceremonies, the great grandchildren, as it were, of the soldiers of 1914–18. In contrast, civil society commemoration mostly highlighted the upheaval of war and its staggering human costs for the nation as a whole, and not solely for the army. Many commemorative events highlighted women’s role in waging total war – war between fully industrialized powers. The market is the backbone of civil society, and from 1914 on it provided millions of consumers with objects big and small which served as miniature war memorials for all age groups and for both sexes. Tour and travel companies did a massive business in Great War pilgrimage, leading tour groups to sites of memory all over the world, where they purchased souvenirs of varying degrees of authenticity, poignancy or vulgarity. Here is a snowy glass item purchased in 2015 from the shop in the ossuary of Fort Douaumont in Eastern France. The film industry, television and the internet brought digitized images of a commemorative kind to hundreds of millions of people, who could, for a small fee or for no fee at all, partake in a global memory boom centred on the 1914–18 war. Part of the appeal of this shift to the right in the demand curve for First World War commemorative products arose primarily (but not solely) from two sociological trends. The first is the decline of church attendance in many parts of the world. Remembering the Great War required a focus on sacred themes – of sacrifice, of death, of love, of the meaning of suffering, of redemption – in earlier generations posed primarily in the traditional churches. With the spread of secular as opposed to transcendental attitudes, men and women asked those sacred questions no longer in churches, but in other sites and spaces. War museums, war memorials, battlefield sites are prominent among them. The second source of the memory boom as a time when traces or imitation objects about war are sold as light consumer durable goods is the growing industry of family history or genealogy. At a time when family forms are changing, and when

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divorce is commonplace, the ‘meaning’ of family ties is not at all clear. How my great grandfather, or the town in which I live, survived the war raises issues about small-group loyalties and identities. Thus to purchase a First World War doily or ashtray brings the memory of war into the domestic arena. Commemoration in this as well as in many other ways domesticates war. By doing so, the commemorative cycle surrounding the 1914–18 conflict enables many people to claim an identity – as part of a nation which went through the upheaval of war. And yet, this kind of identity formation has a hidden trap in it. For many, having won or lost the war matters less than having survived it. Witness the transnational memorial at Notre-Dame-de-Lorette in Northern France displaying alphabetically the names of all soldiers killed in Artois and Flanders regardless of nationality. But for others, French, Australian and British commemorators among them, victory matters. Thus the identity of ‘victor’ can bear traces of a kind of nationalism with political consequences today. In contrast, when commemoration highlights not national identity but multiple identities – wife, mother, father, child, orphan, caretaker of the disabled, worker, peasant, teacher – then the memory of the staggering losses of the war becomes less national than both local and transnational. In this case, war commemoration has a pacifist character, extending the community in mourning not only to families on both sides of the line but to us today. In many parts of the world, commemoration has not the slightest trace of celebration. In these lieux de mémoire, celebrating war is like celebrating bubonic plague.

WAR AS A DISAPPEARING ACT: INNOVATIONS IN REMEMBRANCE Of the 10 million men who died in uniform during the Great War, half have no known graves. In 1914, war became more than a killing machine. It became a vanishing act. The primary cause was the exponential growth of artillery and the overwhelming force of firepower the Industrial Revolution had let loose on the world. Perhaps two-thirds of the men who died in the war were killed at long distance by guns they never saw. Big guns fired long distances on cities; Paris was hit on Good Friday 1918, when eighty-eight worshippers were killed during Mass at the Church of St Gervais, near the Paris city hall. It was on the battlefields, though, especially on the Western front, that artillery wreaked its greatest carnage. Ernst Jünger, wounded six times in the war, said going through an artillery barrage was like watching a gigantic hammer come thudding down and missing your head by a few inches. Courage was simply staying where you were. By 1918 about one in every four shells fired on the Western front was a gas shell, adding to the terror and the suffering. Less frequently used, but devastating, were underground tunnels leading kilometres through no-man’s land, and then detonated under enemy positions, frequently at the outset of offensive operations. Artillery both killed and ground up the terrain such that few makeshift graveyards at the front survived intact. The dead

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of 1914 were subject to artillery fire throughout the war; it is hardly surprising that the initial graveyards turned into devastated ruins. The Battle of Verdun in 1916 created another version of the pulverizing destructive power of modern artillery. There was no way to separate the remains of German and French soldiers who fought over the same ground again and again for ten months – the longest continuous battle in history. In 1927, the Bishop of Verdun, Monseigneur Ginisty, consecrated an ossuary for these remains. They can be seen to this day. This transformation of farming land to what resembled the dark side of the moon was, in many sectors, more dust to mud, than dust to dust, in the biblical language so many soldiers knew. It was also a kind of war which made the identification of bodies either difficult or impossible. What airpower did to urban populations in the Second World War, artillery did to the soldiers of the Great War. That is why the army of the dead very rapidly became an army of the missing. And missing initially meant just that – not present anywhere. Given the chaos of communications and the confusion of war on the grand scale, a report of a soldier going missing could mean many things: a man could have been captured; he could have been wounded and unable even to give his name; he could have gone mad; or he could have been killed. For the army, ‘missing’ meant that he did not show up for roll call the next day and could not be counted in calculations of regimental strength. The Red Cross sent men and women all over the world to gather information that might make it possible to find out what had happened to the missing. Some were discovered in hospitals and prisoner-of-war camps; most simply vanished. Those who had confirmation of the death of a loved one were the lucky ones. Consider the fate of families who simply had no idea what had happened to their loved ones from 1914 on. That was what happened to millions of people. Both during and at times long after the war, they had to deal with a void, an unknown, an absence without an answer. It is hardly surprising that practices of spiritualism, or communication with the dead, were widespread in this period. This revolution in industrialized warfare led to three commemorative innovations. The first was the emergence of a cult of names surrounding all those men who died in the war, and the proliferation of war memorials with names on them in all combatant countries. The second was the erection of cenotaphs, empty tombs, to embody symbolically the millions of men who never came home from the battlefield, or of memorials to the missing of particular battles, like the Somme and Ypres. These were sites dominated by the names of the dead or presumed dead. The third was the creation of tombs of an ‘unknown’ warrior or soldier of combatant nations, a single tomb which stood for the archipelago of graves scattered all over the world. The cult of names arose out of the democratization of death in the war. In Britain, the armies were raised through volunteering from 1914 to 1916, but on the continent, conscription was the rule from the beginning of hostilities. The death toll in 1914 was staggeringly high, and popular awareness that military losses passed the 1-million mark by Christmas 1914 made it impossible to privilege the slaughter of the officer corps in commemorative practices. And given the fact that so many men’s bodies had vanished completely, it made sense to preserve and honour exactly

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what remained of each of these dead soldiers – their names. When the Imperial War Graves Commission decided to place a rectangular stone altar in its war cemeteries, the English poet Rudyard Kipling, who had lost his son in the war, chose for its inscription the words from Ecclesiasticus, ‘Their names liveth forever more.’ In these cemeteries, wooden crosses were replaced by Devonshire stone stelae, on which were carved a man’s name, his regiment, a cross or a Star of David, and a phrase chosen by his parents. On war memorials at home, names were listed mostly alphabetically or in the order of the date of their deaths, rather than by military or naval rank. Each name had the same value as every other name. Cenotaphs are empty tombs. The Greek word appealed in Britain to those who wanted to acknowledge their Imperial dead – Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, atheist as well as Christian. They appeared in many places, but probably the best known is the Cenotaph in Whitehall, designed for the Victory Parade in London on 19 July 1919. It was designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, and rapidly built out of paper mache as a temporary statue. Its appeal to the British people, more than 2 million of whom walked past it on that day and subsequent days, persuaded the British Cabinet to ask Lutyens to rebuild it out of stone. It stands in Whitehall to this day. Of similar inspiration are tombs of the Unknown Warrior, which were erected in many capital cities in the post-war decade. The Cenotaph as an empty tomb could be the tomb for any of the 10 million men who had died in the war. The Tomb of the Unknown Warrior (a nod to the sailors as well as the soldiers who had been killed or had died during the conflict) held the remains of a man who could be the son of any of the millions of parents and widows in mourning after the war. Honouring the Unknown Warrior was honouring the vast army of the bereaved created by the war. In 1932, Edwyn Lutyens’s monument to the missing French and British soldiers who died during the 1916 Battle of the Somme was completed and inaugurated. Have a look at the simplicity of the design and the profundity of its message. Lutyens started with four arches of triumph, each perched on two square and two rectangular bases. Lutyens then rotated each of these bases by ninety degrees and produced two bigger arches, each two and a half times bigger than the base, with an empty space in the arch also two and a half times bigger than the empty space in the base. He then rotated that second arch of triumph by another ninety degrees, and multiplied its dimensions and the void at its centre by a factor of two and a half. This produced the very larger arch with a very large empty space at its core. Finally, Lutyens took that enormous arch and rotated it again, but this time, the result is not grandiose. The result is nothingness. The final element of the monument is the pedestal, on which rests two flag poles pointing up. The Roman arch of triumph Lutyens himself had used in the construction of New Delhi before the war was thus reduced to absolutely nothing. Lutyens’s genius left us another message, which is something of a visual miracle. At a certain point in approaching the monument, the white slabs at its base suddenly reveal the 73,000 names of those who are honoured here, though they have no known graves. That moment of recognition is a shock to visitors, who suddenly see all the names – those which are all that remain of the men who died in this one battle on one front of the Great War. They are listed alphabetically by regiment, not

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to indicate rank but to enable visitors and pilgrims to find the men in their families who died here. And so they do by the millions to this day. The missing of the Great War were the first in a long line of those who have vanished in war and violence, domestic or international, over the past century. After the Great War came the search of the survivors of the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, for the missing loved ones, who might have, could have come through the upheaval alive. The Holocaust added millions to the armies of those who vanished in wartime. Here is a cylindrical space, pointing to the sky, in which the names and faces of Jews murdered in the Shoah are recorded in Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. Again, the cult of names emerged out of the ashes of disappearance. The commemorative practices for the dead and the missing of the Great War inspired similar gestures for those who either disappeared or, in a new grammatical form of state criminality, ‘were disappeared’ in their own countries from the 1970s on. Anyone who witnessed the aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001 saw another outbreak of violence on a scale which made bodies simply vanish. Just as in the case of the dead of the Great War, half of those who died in Manhattan on 9/11 have disappeared without a trace. And just as in London or Berlin in 1918, and in displaced persons’ camps in 1946 or in Buenos Aires in 1985, there were those who long harboured the hope, kept alive the possibility, refused to listen to probability and wondered. They put notices and photos on buildings all over Manhattan in the immediate aftermath of the attack: Have you seen my son? My husband? My daughter? The faces of the innocent demanded our attention, but rarely yielded answers. Half of those killed on 9/11 vanished without trace; the same proportion disappeared nearly a century before in the Great War. These images of the missing bind together the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In 1914, state violence moved into a higher gear than ever before, threatening us all not only with mutilation or death but with disappearance, with dying in an unknown place, inaccessible and indeterminate. Since 1918, millions have entered this no-man’s land, never to be seen again. They are the successors of the vanished dead of the Great War.

TECHNOLOGY AND MEMORY: THREE MEMORY BOOMS The Great War – the greatest bloodbath in history to date – was followed by the first memory boom of the twentieth century. Like later commemorative waves, this moment was technologically driven. While both photography and film were nineteenth-century innovations, technical advances increased exponentially the exposure of mass populations to fixed and moving visual images of war. At the same time, the need to commemorate the army of the dead – 10 million strong – produced a demand for commemorative works of many kinds. As I have noted earlier, we can still see those monuments in stone built in the 1920s and 1930s as war memorials on battlefields, and in villages and towns all over Europe and in areas of white settlement elsewhere. Some repeated earlier heroic tropes; many more adopted a

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more sombre rhetoric, with horizontal axes undermining the vertical language of aesthetic redemption. Much more numerous were the books and ephemeral publications, the works of art, popular and professional, the photographs and the commercial films on war created in the interwar years. Among scientists as well as avant-garde writers and artists – for Freud, as much as for Proust and Virginia Woolf – memory became a fascination, indeed an obsession, greater than ever before. In the more popular markets, the thirst for war stories and illustrated books seemed to be limitless before the outbreak of the Second World War created additional markets for them all over the world. The second memory boom of the twentieth century – starting in the 1980s with the birth and development of the internet – was also technologically driven. The means of recording, preserving, retrieving and disseminating war stories were altered radically in these decades . Audio recorders, video recorders and then the internet made it possible to capture and circulate images of war and the voices and faces of the victims of war as never before. Memory archives and museums of the Great War proliferated in the 1980s and after. The thirty years since 1945 covered the period when the wounds of occupation and collaboration in the Second World War by and large had healed, and when the Holocaust entered centrally into the narrative of the 1939–45 war. Increasing real incomes in the 1980s liberated disposable income for expenditure on cultural products, including museums of all kinds, among a more educated population. Finally the war in Vietnam presented parallels to the Great War, emphasizing their common futility and brutality, creating a North American market for memorial projects already of popular interest in Europe. Prior to these years, the Great War was of little significance in the United States. By that time, many people throughout the world had come to the delayed recognition that the Shoah was not only a monstrous deformation of the practices of war but that it was also at the heart of the history of the Second World War. The civilian victims of the Shoah and the myriad other atrocities of post-1945 wars could not be commemorated in the same way as the soldiers of the Great War. These soldiers made a choice to fight; one constrained by law, family pressure and public opinion, but a choice nonetheless. Mutiny or desertion was an option; it was not so for the civilian victims of the Shoah. Remembering them, and other victims of war, belatedly but explicitly including soldiers too, became a matter touching on a new category of memory – traumatic memory – in which the psychological damage of war could go underground, explode long after the events which triggered it and last a lifetime. Other victims of violence – of sexual abuse in particular, but also of civilian victims of police states – joined the ranks of those deemed to be suffering from traumatic memories, now formally recognized by the medical profession as pathological in character. This set of images of victimhood in the later twentieth century affected subtly the patterns of remembrance of the Great War. Shell shock became more acceptable and comprehensible when seen as a precursor of post-traumatic stress disorder among soldiers in later wars. The price paid by families, and in particular by women, to care for those traumatized by war service in the 1970s and after enabled historians

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to rewrite the history of the aftermath of the Great War with much more attention given to the long shadow of war disability and the way that shadow darkened family life after 1918. The exponential growth of the internet and social media in the digital age since the turn of the twenty-first century precipitated the third memory boom of the early twenty-first century. Only in the age of miniaturization and globalization, of cell phones and instant video and photographic recall, could there have been the Abu Ghraib scandal, in which American soldiers in an Iraqi prison engaged both in recording and in promiscuously ‘sharing’ violent pornographic images of the tortures they inflicted on their charges and the pleasure they got in inflicting them. When these images went ‘viral’, meaning uncontainable and therefore undeniable, remembering war and its cruelties entered a new phase. Viral circulation is the hallmark of the third memory boom. It has led to the global recirculation of iconic images of Great War soldiers on battlefields and of the instruments of warfare which killed or wounded over 30 million of them. In each of these three memory booms, we can see that how people remember affected deeply what people remember. The Great War is not the only driving force behind today’s digitized memory boom, but it is an important element in the story. And the transformation of war from being a conflict on battlefields populated primarily by soldiers to conflicts populated overwhelmingly by civilians ensured that a certain kind of heroic imagery and literature of men at arms would be put in question or compromised. The Shoah was the iconic war of soldiers against civilians; other disasters have followed in its wake and have helped change how we imagine war. With the civilianization of images of war, the Armenian genocide has emerged from Turkish strategies of denial to enter the heart of the international narrative of the Great War, anticipating the Nazi murder of the Jews of Europe which followed it. To be sure, older images of men in uniform as noble warriors did not vanish; they persist in many parts of the world. And yet a second array of visual and verbal images of war as an unjustifiable abomination has grown alongside what Edmund Wilson once termed ‘patriotic gore’,1 and has also been disseminated easily and globally to become part of the digital memory boom. This set of images has created a widespread visceral revulsion at the inevitable sights accompanying armed conflict today: images of the homeless, the torn bodies of children and other broken inhabitants of war zones. In parts of Western Europe and North America, these images have tended to undermine the political legitimacy of war; in other places, they have fuelled mobilization for punitive military action. We cannot ignore the fact that Syrian children occupy the very same terrain of refugee camps near Aleppo which Armenian children, the survivors of the genocide, occupied a century ago. It is too early to tell whether the bad (visual) press that war in general and the Great War in particular has gotten in recent years will make it more difficult to ‘sell’ war to populations whose support and cash are needed to launch and sustain it. Suffice it to say that the array of social practices and media surrounding war and the victims of war today bears very little resemblance to those languages of memory which operated before 1914. That radical transformation of images of war, so evident in the 1914–18 conflict, is still in motion.

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WITNESSES AND WITNESSING From Lascaux to the present, wars have had witnesses who have tried to capture the moment of violence between and among men. One of the striking features of the last century is the extent to which new institutional frameworks have emerged to capture not only the voices and faces of the soldier but those of the witness, understood as the innocent, civilian victim of war. The first witnesses to the Great War were the soldiers who fought in it. In the early 1920s, there was an avalanche of books about the war. Most were written by the military and political leaders of the combatant countries. Soldiers read these works, and wondered where was the war they knew, the war of hardship and suffering, of mud and gas and disembodied comrades. This sparked many of these veterans to produce what we now know as the ‘war books boom’ of the period 1928–34. At that time, publishers all over the world found large markets for books based on soldiers’ memoirs of the war. The film industry exploited this renewed interest in the soldiers’ wars, making films like All Quiet on the Western Front. Here was a German war memoir turned into an international box office success by transforming it into an American film in which the Germans spoke with flat American accents, demonstrating the universality of the message that the Great War was an exercise in futility for victors and vanquished alike. Other films were more upbeat, but in all cases, they shared the view that the war the soldiers fought in 1914–18 was unlike anything that the world had seen before. In the Second World War, more civilians died than soldiers. This is hardly surprising given the effects of air power and the explicit targeting of civilians for extermination by the Nazis. Published memoirs and films appeared during and after the war in numerous forms recounting the 1939–45 war in conventional ways. Hitler’s war, though, was hardly conventional. After the restabilization of Europe in the 1945–70 period, and the fading of the myth of a vast popular resistance to Nazi rule in occupied Europe, the true features of genocide became more and more central to the narrative of the Second World War as a whole. To deal with this facet of the war, new institutions of memory emerged, which have contributed to forms of remembrance of the Great War and of the conflicts which followed it. The first was judicial. In the Paris Peace Treaty of 1919, the Kaiser was indicted for responsibility for the outbreak of war in 1914, but he never stood trial, having successfully sought sanctuary in the neutral Netherlands. The Nuremberg trials after the Second World War did not use the testimony of survivors of genocide. There was more than enough official documentation to convict the leadership of the Third Reich of a series of war crimes and crimes against humanity. By the 1960s, though, there occurred a shift in emphasis which had a bearing not only on how the victims of the Second World War – Jews, gypsies, the handicapped – were remembered but also on how the story of similar victims in the period of the First World War, especially the victims of the Armenian genocide, was remembered. We should take careful note of the timing of this cultural development in public discourse about the victims of war. As we have already seen, the judicialization of memory took place after the 1960s and 1970s, when the proportion of the

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population in developed countries who identified themselves as churchgoers reached record lows. It was then that there emerged new institutions – legal, archival and familial — in which the voices of the survivors of both world wars were heard and preserved. The sheer scale of the casualties of modern war overwhelmed the churches at the very time they were losing their central position within family and community life. Consequently, other institutions took on both the privilege and the burden of inviting those damaged in war to tell their story and to seek a kind of recognition or justice rarely reached in the aftermath of war. The 1970s saw the emergence of thousands of small groups and organizations dedicated to the promotion of human rights, and in this new environment of global ethics, the modern-day witness to war came into her own. Thus the term ‘the witness’, whose Greek origins signify the stance of the martyr, prepared to die for his or her faith, took on a new set of meanings in the later twentieth century. The first was he who testified in a court of law as to the nature of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The second was he who permitted his voice and his story to be recorded for posterity, a witness for the future, and in particular for the young. In this second sense of the term, the witness told first-person stories, family stories, either for storage in an archive or for publication. Note that the gestation of these witness narratives was frequently decades long. These stories were perhaps too hard for the children of survivors to hear; after all, this second generation was intent on living ‘normal’ lives just like other children. But grandchildren were another matter, forming an affective bond of teller and listener over the heads of the difficult second generation in the middle. In many cases, there was a palpable time gap between the end of the war and the beginning of the formal witnessing of those who survived it. After the Eichmann trial of 1961, and following other trials of the perpetrators of Nazi crimes in Europe, the voices of the survivors, like Primo Levi’s, took on exemplary moral force. To speak out, and by doing so, to show that moral thinking had indeed survived the abomination of Auschwitz, gave witnessing an existential profile. Those who bore the marks of these crimes on their bodies and in their minds retrieved a sense of dignity through standing up in court rooms or through sitting in front of a camera in an archival setting. The narrative the world would inherit was not solely that of the killers but of those who escaped their executioners. A similar time lag occurred in the case of the survivors of the Armenian genocide. In the 1980s, the grandchildren of the survivors pried out of grandparents, silent until then, the stories of their expulsion from Ottoman Turkey. With this testimony, the full history of the Armenian genocide emerged in the language of those who had lived through it. And this took on even greater political significance, in the light of ongoing official Turkish denial that anything remotely resembling genocide took place throughout Ottoman Turkey a century ago. These ‘martyrs’ bore witness to the national tragedy of Armenia, in the traditional language of their church. Thus by the turn of the twenty-first century, witnesses to war and to war crimes testified in court rooms all over the world. Both there and in museums and in archives created to store their testimony, witnesses told stories of cruelties at or beyond the limits of our imagination and of courage and (at times) of faith that take one’s breath away. Some of the survivors spoke of having had a mission – to live

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to tell the tale. These ‘moral witnesses’ spoke not only of what their own eyes had seen; they also spoke for the dead, who knew in their last moments that someone had to outlive the catastrophe, otherwise no one would believe what they had to say. In the late twentieth century and after, witnessing became a global phenomenon. In some instances, the original religious meaning of the term ‘witnessing’ was evident. In South Africa, the revealingly named Truth and Reconciliation Commission had a sacred aura, resting on the power of confession, and on the notion that the truth shall set you free. Those criminals confessing in public to the crimes they had committed were spared the punishment their still silent fellow-criminals suffered. In Central and South America, the murder of priests and nuns helped spark efforts to uncover the truth about the dirty war waged by right-wing governments from Chile and Argentina to Guatemala and El Salvador. In post-communist Poland and Russia, the resistance of Catholic and Orthodox men and women to communism has led to the canonization of many who did indeed die for their faith. There are two features of the outpouring of testimony in the past forty years which are controversial. The first is the extension of the traumatic experience of those who survived war and genocide to their children. There are those who believe that the children of survivors can inherit their injuries. From this standpoint, what we now term ‘traumatic memories’ can be passed on to one’s children and other loved ones. Many who doubt this proposition are prepared to adopt a more metaphoric variation of it. They claim that those youngsters who live in the presence of survivors of war and genocide feel the emotional pull of their elders’ suffering to such an extent that they, the younger people, adopt or appropriate the memories of the first generation as their own. Thus those born after 1945 have a kind of memory of the Holocaust, which Marianne Hirsch has termed ‘postmemory’.2 The same would be true of the large population of Armenians born after the genocide but whose lives were marked indelibly by it. In many cases, these offspring claim to share what they term the traumatic memory of war and genocide. The objection to the transmission theory of traumatic memory, either in its visceral or its metaphoric forms, arises from concern about promiscuous uses of the term ‘memory’ itself. The children of Holocaust survivors born in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s did not have any memories, conventionally configured, of the concentration camps or the death camps. They had memories of other people’s memories, and such memories could be pathological in character. After all, growing up with damaged parents frequently produces damaged children. The key point is that these children were not damaged by the SS, and had no memories of such events. They lived in the shadow of their parents’ experience, and had no right to claim that experience as their own, through empathy or proximity or osmosis. In essence, the sceptics argued, the problem with notions of the transmission of traumatic memories is that they either deny or dilute the reality or the truth-value of the original injury or insult suffered in any meaningful sense solely by those who were there. Given the ubiquity of the memory boom, it is hardly surprising that well-intentioned people differ over whose memory is authentic. The second highly controversial argument concerns the possible therapeutic effects of remembrance. Once again, we can see traces of the sacred returning in the

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age of the secular witness. If those unable to face their past can be persuaded to tell it to sympathetic listeners, then some of their paralysing shame and regret may vanish in part or entirely. There are psychoanalytic variants of this position that bringing memories to the surface can heal or at least reduce suffering. Sceptics in this debate raise the possibility that remembrance is just as likely to damage as it is to heal. Why should we assume that those who have buried deeply their own terrible memories will be better off by retrieving them? The notion that silence is always unjustified repression cannot withstand serious scrutiny. People turn their backs on ugly things they have endured at times for very good reasons. There is no doubt that witnessing matters because it helps to stop people – especially guilty people – from lying about the past. All governments do so, and many individuals and families do so too. In these cases, correcting deliberate falsification is an unexceptionable act. What is less certain is that remembering the cruelties of war, civil war and genocide will always or even in most cases benefit those who recall these horrors. There are too many instances of suicide among those who remember the darkness of the past for us to be unequivocal on this matter. This is as true of the survivors of the Great War is as it is of those who lived through the catastrophes which have followed it in the century since its outbreak in 1914.

DIVIDED MEMORIES: WESTERN AND EASTERN EUROPE There is no European memory of the Great War. The further east you go in Europe, the less central is the Great War to national and international narratives of the history of the past century. In part, this is a function of the creation of successor states in Central and Eastern Europe, as well as in the Middle East, where new states, emerging after 1918, treated the Great War as the antechamber to their own history. The same treatment of the war marked the international communist movement; when 1917, the year of the two Russian revolutions, was year zero, then what came before had little other than the force of a preface to more important things to come. Ireland is the only Western European country to replicate this Eastern European trend, highlighting, until recently, not 1914 nor 1918, but 1916, the year of the Easter Rising against British rule. Since the waning of armed conflict in Ireland after the Easter accords of 1998, Ireland has come to resemble Britain in its commemorative landscape. Recognizing that at least 30,000 Irishmen died for Britain’s king and country has come belatedly, but undeniably, a century after the 1916 Rising. Ireland was effectively a colony of Britain in 1914. Other dependencies and colonies went to war in 1914 to defend the motherland too. In Verdun there are monuments to Muslims who died there, including many men from Morocco, Algeria and Senegal. The colonial contribution to the war was a matter of pride in France and in her overseas possessions, incurring little of the intense bitterness which precluded Irish commemoration of the Great War until the early twenty-first century.

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SUCCESSOR STATES AND THE GREAT WAR Woodrow Wilson’s ideology of self-determination was framed in order to dismember the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the eastern parts of the German Empire as well. In this respect, he succeeded. What makes remembering the Great War difficult in these successor states is that in virtually every case, newly independent states fought a series of wars from 1917 to 1923 to fix these boundaries as permanent ones. In part, this violent phase of post-war history was due to the commitment of Trotsky and the Bolsheviks to build a ‘red bridge’ across Europe. Red armies reached Warsaw in 1920, and were only driven back after bitter fighting. There were armed conflicts between ‘Red’ and ‘White’ forces in Berlin, Munich and Budapest, as well as in a wide swathe of terrain in both the Baltic and the Balkan states. Perhaps the most devastating fighting took place between Turks and an array of enemies, including Greek, British and French forces. Under Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, these foreign troops were defeated, and a substantial part of the Greek community that had lived in Anatolia for millennia was killed or driven out of the country. At the same time, Muslim communities which had lived for centuries in Europe were forced to leave their homes and flee to newly independent Turkey. In each of these cases, as well as in Ireland, successor states created a national narrative which started either during or after the war. The men who seized the Post Office in Dublin and declared the independence of Ireland on Easter Monday 1916 were shot as traitors. This was indeed the case, since they had engaged in insurrection while the legally constituted authority, Britain, was at war, and Irishmen were fighting alongside Englishmen, Welshmen and Scots, in it. Later on, when the story of Irish independence was framed, the Great War and Irish participation in it formed a disposable antechamber to the edifice of freedom Irish patriots constructed. The Polish war of independence from 1918 to 1921 similarly occluded the participation of millions of Poles in the German, Austro-Hungarian and Russian armies. It is hardly surprising that post-communist Poland has constructed a museum of the War of Independence, fought against Bolsheviks and Ukrainians, rather than a museum of the Great War. The Turkish and Armenian states organize their commemorative practices in different and at times contradictory ways. The fact that the Ottoman army lost the war is occluded by commemoration of the victory of 18 March 1915, when Ottoman naval and land forces under the command of German General Lyman von Sanders defeated a combined French and British naval flotilla attempting to force the Dardanelles and sail on to Constantinople, thereby knocking Turkey out of the war. One month later, on 24–25 April 1915, an Allied combined amphibious operation landed troops on Gallipoli, with the intention of capturing the batteries and garrisons blocking the sea lanes north to Constantinople. This expedition failed too. On 24 April 1915, the Triumvirate ruling the Ottoman war effort set in motion the expulsion of the nearly 2-million-strong Armenian population which had lived in Anatolia for millennia. After ordering the murder of the leaders of the Armenian community, groups of soldiers and paramilitary forces, mainly Kurds, raped,

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maimed and murdered this defenseless population, and drove the survivors into the Mesopotamian desert to die of heat, thirst and hunger. The term ‘genocide’ was invented in 1943 by Polish lawyer Rafael Lemkin, to describe this crime. Until today, Turks and Armenians have competing commemorative practices of these events. To the Turks, 18 March is ‘Martyrs’ day’, to celebrate the heroic actions of all Turkish soldiers who died in the war. The date 24 April is Armenian ‘Martyrs’ Day’, honouring Armenian victims of genocide. Until recently, Turks were forbidden to use the word ‘genocide’ in public to describe the fate of the Armenian people, a politics of denial rejected by most of the world. On 23 April 2015, in the face of Turkish refusal to acknowledge and to accept responsibility for the murder of over 1 million Armenians, the Catholikos of the Armenian Apostolic Church canonized each and every victim of the genocide. Now Armenians who died in the genocide of 1915–16 are no longer victims; they are victors in Christ.

MARTYRS AND MARTYRDOM The stark difference between Turkish and Armenian remembrance practices raises another significant aspect of the divide between European narratives of the Great War and its aftermath. To the west of a line roughly linking the eastern borders of Italy and the western borders of Poland, languages of memory are no longer framed by the language of martyrs and martyrdom. During the war, the language of martyrdom was alive in France, where Roman Catholic and revolutionary rhetoric had deep roots. In Protestant countries like Britain, the word ‘martyr’ was already archaic, and had little purchase when the language of commemoration of the Great War dead was framed. Over time, this linguistic divide has deepened, and the Roman Catholic and Orthodox rhetoric of resistance first to the Nazis and then to the communists separates languages of memory in Eastern Europe from those of Western Europe in radically different ways. A secularized language of sacrifice – to one’s family, community and nation, rather than to God or to Christianity – has survived in Western Europe, but it does not have the powerful purchase of Eastern European religious practices. One hundred years ago, this distinction was not at all fixed. Spokesmen for the Society of Jesus entered into discussion with the president of the French Republic as to whether it would be right and proper for the image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus to be affixed to the French national flag. The city of Reims, on the front line, alongside the city of Louvain in occupied Belgium were called Villes Martyres during the war. Such metaphors faded away rapidly after the Second World War and are archaic today in many parts of Europe. In effect, this secular/religious divide has made it impossible for there to be a common language of commemoration of the Great War linking Poland and Portugal, Serbia and Scotland, the east of Europe and the west. The addition to the European Union of the former Warsaw Pact nations after 1992 has left a fractured European memory landscape in its wake. If the leaders of 1914 had had any idea of the scale and the irreversible nature of the damage they were about to inflict on Europe and on Europeans by their decision

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to go to war, they probably would have changed their minds. But history does not allow reruns, and the bloodbath these men set in motion submerged Europe in a tide of violence and bloodshed from which it has never fully emerged. If Europe did not commit suicide in 1914, it inflicted on itself a wound which has never healed. To see the consequences of this disastrous act, all you need to do in Europe today is to look around.

NOTES 1. Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1960). 2. Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). 

BIBLIOGRAPHY Becker, Annette, War and Faith: The Religious Imagination in France, 1914–1930, translated from the French by Helen McPhail, Oxford, Berg, 1998. Felman, Shoshana and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, New York, Routledge, 1992. McNally, Richard J., Remembering Trauma, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Moyn, Samuel, The Last Utopia, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2010. Winter, Jay, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995.

CHAPTER 3

‘Dying for the Motherland’, or the great lie OLAF B. RADER

The honours accorded to slain soldiers form part of long-standing traditions. Building monuments to commemorate the fallen gave a political and collective significance to their sacrifice. No longer able to apprehend that sacrifice, the twenty-first century is seeking ways to move beyond the concept. Visitors to the historic centre of the little city of Udine, in north-eastern Italy, inevitably come across a large church crowned with a cupola, situated by a roundabout. Its doorway, built from travertine, is flanked by four stone soldiers of combative demeanour, who stand guard. From the style of these sculptures, it is instantly obvious that they date from the Mussolini era. But are these sentinels really guarding the entrance to a church? In fact, on drawing closer, one sees that the figures, each of whom represents one of the armed forces, are standing in front of a communal crypt marking the last resting place of thousands of soldiers. And it quickly becomes clear that this is a monument commemorating the First World War, in particular the confrontations that took place at the Twelfth Battle of the Isonzo in October 1917, which are associated in Italian memories with the word ‘Caporetto’. The Italian name for the municipality of Kobarid, now in Slovenia, has become synonymous with the most crushing military defeat suffered by Italy in the First World War and with a national trauma that had a considerable political impact on the following decades. Moreover, Udine’s San Nicolò Ossuary Temple provides a most effective example of how the constant reconfiguration of a national memory of battles and war victims is presented in material form. First, a commemorative plaque reminds the visitor of the dramatic events that characterized that period; for each of the soldiers, this translated into a type of ‘imitation of Christ’. Indeed, the pockets of a fallen soldier would have contained a piece of paper bearing the lines: ‘All saw the face of Christ in the sombre halo of their helmets, all carried the cross of their bayonets as a sign of martyrdom. And in their pockets was the bread of the final meal, and in their throats, the tears of the last farewells.’1 The building had initially served as a communal tomb

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for the 20,000 soldiers from the region killed in the First World War, whose bodies had been exhumed from various areas and reinterred on this site. This monument, which commemorated the victims and perpetuated the mourning of their loss, therefore played an important role for the survivors and gradually served to honour the memories of the heroes who had died for their country. The soldiers killed in the military campaigns of fascist Italy during the Second World War, such as the Alpini mountain troops sent to Greece and the Soviet Union, were subsequently added to these lists. They even included the names of the resistance fighters, who somehow managed to be a part of the Ossuary memorial. In this way, the site was transformed into a national sanctuary, as confirmed by an inscription serving as an epitaph to the Unknown Soldiers: ‘Et nomen una cum sanguine pro Patria dedimus’ – and with our blood we have also given our name for the country.2 Europe has many monuments to the dead that have been elevated to the status of multifunctional national memorials, the San Nicolò Ossuary Temple being a typical example. Their size corresponds to their effect on national sensibilities and to the military significance of the battles commemorated. This being said, their importance for the communities commemorating their dead is based on the ceremonies that take place there, the frequency of the commemorative events held or the presence of state representatives, rather than on their dimensions. However, there are two other types of memorial, which, although more discreet, play an equally significant role in commemorative culture. Firstly, there are the countless monuments to the dead erected in villages in almost every corner of Europe, especially, of course, in former combat zones. In their various ways, they perpetuate the memory of the sons of these local communities and their sacrifice for the motherland. Generally constructed after the horrific events of the First World War, in many cases they were later extended to include victims of the Second World War and of colonial conflicts. Secondly, churches often have commemorative plaques listing the names of men fallen in combat.

‘DULCE ET DECORUM EST PRO PATRIA MORI’ The honours accorded to soldiers slain in battle are based on a long tradition, as they may assume a particular importance for certain social groups, either for a nation or simply for a specific village or town, or for members of aristocratic families. Battles can indeed become vital elements in a common political consciousness by reinforcing internal cohesion, as they are conducted collectively. In this respect, it is of little importance whether they lost or won, since a traumatic event can be just as unifying as a victory. And when certain events connected with war are felt to have generated a new social group, the ensuing narratives are imbued with a mythical character. As the memories perpetuated through such stories have a particularly close association with the tombs of fallen soldiers, these sites assume great importance in the collective sensibility. This was the case in ancient Greece and Rome, and it remains true of the two major wars of the twentieth century. In this way, for example, the tumuli erected on the burial site of the heroes who

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fought in the battles of Marathon (490 BCE) and Plataea (479 BCE) were an important focus of veneration until the time of the Roman Empire – in other words, for almost 600 years. Unifying practices of this type formed part of what we might describe as the repertoire of symbols common to all European societies that had engaged in warfare; this might well have inspired the line written by the Roman poet Horace (65–8 BCE) in his third Ode: ‘Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.’3 The ideological aspects of this oxymoronic notion of a ‘sweet death’, coupled with the cult of fallen soldiers, have invariably played an important role in the history of Western thought, from Aristotle to the great modern militaristic discourses and also the works of Hölderlin and Körner. Even the major uprisings, such as the French Revolution or those that broke out in Europe in 1848, generated a specific commemorative amalgam based on the cult of the dead and the celebration of victims. ‘Rome or Death’ was the grandiloquent oath that bound together the proponents of Italian unification. Indeed, the rise in nationalism that occurred in the nineteenth century marked a further step in the process of reinforcing the monumental character of the cult of military victims. This is demonstrated, for instance, by the monument to the Battle of the Nations erected at Leipzig a century after the events of 1813.4 It is almost as if lives had to be sacrificed and commemorative rituals developed over the centuries before a country could exist as a political entity and have a future as a nation. The outbreak of the First World War undoubtedly generated the greatest wave of poetry glorifying death in the tradition of Horace − that is, until the use of poison gas, which damaged lung and brain tissue, robbed that end of its ‘sweetness’. The monuments to the dead made their first appearance after the four years of combat. While the victory of the Allied powers could still serve as the driving force in the conception of their memorials, Germany and its former allies had nothing to celebrate. It was simply a case of not forgetting the deaths of hundreds of thousands of soldiers and of giving meaning to the commemorative monuments through ritual whenever this was possible. The major dictatorships of the twentieth century subsequently developed especially elaborate ways of venerating the dead. These echoed the practices of tyrants from previous eras, who accorded particular importance to ostentatious displays accompanying burial rituals and used iconography to serve their purposes. Things have now changed, as we will see later. However, modern popular culture seems to have distanced itself from an official commemorative culture. In this case, the notion of a glorious end is maintained, if we take for example a film such as Zack Snyder’s 300. Here, in an atmosphere reminiscent of a coffee commercial, the deaths of Leonidas and his companions are tinged with an illusory quality. In this way, the countless monuments to the dead built in Europe during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries may be viewed as examples of a fixed veneration – ‘snapshots’ portraying a memoria placed at the service of a homeland, a birthplace, a state or a nation. By examining the commemorative strategies reflected in monuments to the dead, we can often detect whether their function is to lament the death of victims or to celebrate heroes. In other words, do they commemorate the individual demise or the sacrifice made for the motherland?

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For example, Ernst Barlach’s monument to the soldiers slain in the First World War, which stands in Magdeburg cathedral, is clearly intended as a lamentation rather than an exaltation of heroism. This being said, all memorials to the dead share the common task of providing a site for the construction of a meaning that originated in the past and of directing that meaning towards the future. Although in many cases the iconography of these monuments is no longer familiar to us, they are nonetheless an important testament to a memorial culture. Moreover, they show us how the struggle continues after the carnage, the challenge then being to implement a commemorative strategy.

THE POST-HEROIC ERA: THE SOLDIER AS VICTIM What has happened today? Has Europe changed in this respect? Have we really entered what Herfried Münkler terms a ‘post-heroic era’, which, among other things, will cast a new light on monuments to the dead? Have the connections between heroes and victims, repentance, penitence and reconciliation been altered? These questions cannot be answered here with generalizations. Yet a recent example might enable us to demonstrate that essential changes have indeed taken place in many areas of Europe. On 11 November 2014, François Hollande, then president of France, inaugurated the Notre-Dame-de-Lorette International Memorial marking the ninety-sixth anniversary of the Armistice of 1918. This monument represents a remarkable development; it will perpetuate the memory of all the soldiers slain in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region during the First World War, regardless of whether they fought for the enemy or the Allied forces. The ‘Ring of Remembrance’ is constructed in the form of an ellipse. Made of concrete, it has a circumference of over 300 metres and contains 500 metal panels listing the names of the soldiers who fell in Northern France − nearly 580,000 in all. They are arranged in alphabetical order, with no reference to their nationality. After their death, the earth had reunited those separated by nationality, ideology, front lines and trenches. National boundaries will therefore be obliterated through remembrance and, with them, the division between victor and vanquished. In the First World War, the English poet Wilfred Owen (1893–1918), who was killed shortly before the end of the conflict, had revealed the true nature of Horace’s maxim: My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et Decorum est Pro patria mori.5 Nevertheless, it is safe to say that Horace, the author of that phrase extolling a glorious death, did not see it as an exhortation. In the year 42 BCE, he had the opportunity to enjoy the sweet experience of receiving a mortal blow in the Battle of Philippi during the Wars of the Second Triumvirate; he chose instead to abandon his arms and flee the scene.

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NOTES 1. ‘Tutti avevano la faccia del Cristo / nella livida aureola dell’elmetto. / Tutti portavano l’insegna del supplizio / nella croce della baionetta, / e nelle tasche il pane dell’ultima cena, / e nella gola il pianto dell’ultimo addio.’ Information brochure, Parrocchia di San Nicolò Vescoco al Tempio Ossario [Udine, 2015], p. 36, extract from Poesia rinvenuta nelle tasche di un soldato caduto sulle Dolomiti. 2. Ibid., p. 30. 3. Horace, Odes, III, 2, 13. See Carl Werner Müller, ‘Der schöne Tod des Polisbürgers oder “Ehrenvoll ist es, für das Vaterland zu sterben”’, Gymnasium, 96 (1989): 317–40, esp. p. 321 sq. 4. Kirstin Anne Schäfer, ‘Die Völkerschlacht’, in Deutsche Erinnerungsorte, ed. Étienne François and Hagen Schulze, vol. II (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2001), pp. 187–201. 5. Extract from a poem by Wilfred Owen, written ca. 1917–18: ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’, in The Complete Poems and Fragments of Wilfred Owen, ed. Jon Stallworthy (London: Chatto & Windus, 1983). See: http:​/​/www​​.oucs​​.ox​.a​​c​.uk/​​ww1li​​t​/col​​lecti​​ons​ /​i​​tem​/3​​303.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Contamine, Philippe, ‘Mourir pour la patrie’, in Pierre Nora (Ed.), Les Lieux de mémoire, t. II: La Nation, vol. 3, Paris, Gallimard, 1986, pp. 11–43. Hettling, Manfred and Jörg Echternkamp (Eds.), Gefallenengedenken im globalen Vergleich. Nationale Tradition, politische Legitimation und Individualisierung der Erinnerung, Munich, De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2012. Koselleck, Reinhart and Michael Jeismann (Eds.), Der politische Totenkult. Kriegerdenkmäler in der Moderne, Munich, Wilhelm Fink, 1994. Münkler, Herfried, Der Wandel des Krieges. Von der Symmetrie zur Asymmetrie, Weilerswist, Velbrück, 2006. Rader, Olaf B., Grab und Herrschaft: Politischer Totenkult von Alexander dem Grossen bis Lenin, Munich, C.H. Beck, 2003. Schäfer, Kirstin Anne, ‘Die Völkerschlacht’, in Étienne François and Hagen Schulze (Eds.), Deutsche Erinnerungsorte, vol. II, Munich, C.H. Beck, 2001, pp. 187–201.

CHAPTER 4

‘No pasarán’ vs. ‘Viva la Muerte’ Fascism resisted and revisited MANUEL LOFF

The Spanish Civil War has held an iconic status in the fight against fascism. Despite being the first conflict to receive extensive coverage in the modern media, its imprint has been eclipsed by the enormity of the crimes committed by the Nazis and its commemoration has yet to find its proper place in the Pantheon, particularly in Spain. ‘¡No pasarán!’ (‘They shall not pass!’), Dolores Ibárruri’s (aka La Pasionaria’s) famous battle cry of July 1936 for ‘young men’, ‘women’, ‘workers of all stripes’, to ‘rise to their feet [. . .] to defend the people’s freedoms as well as their progress towards democracy’ against the ‘fascist military uprising’ that was leading Spain to a three-year-long civil war has been appropriated, to this day, by all sorts of popular resistance movements around the world. The slogan reproduced the French military battle cry of Verdun 1916 ‘Ils ne passeront pas!’, but the battle to defend Republican Madrid would inspire an entire generation as a symbol of wholehearted and genuine resistance to fascism, opposed to Verdun’s absurd abattoir du monde and to every pointless war. The Spanish Civil War (1936–9), fourteen years after Mussolini’s accession to power in Italy and three years after Hitler’s, changed the world’s perception of fascism. Although its genetic origins may be found in the late nineteenth-century French right wing,1 it was in Italy, during the post-First World War crisis, with Mussolini’s Fascii di Combattimento, that fascism became a powerful political magnet capable of bringing together nationalists, conservatives and reactionary Catholics, spreading throughout Europe soon after socialist revolutions failed everywhere except in Russia. It produced a modern kind of counter-revolutionary regime committed to overcoming historical liberalism and liberal regimes by building up an anti-democratic and anti-Marxist New Order, which would mean ‘the destruction of the values and institutions of the “Western civilisation” of the Age of Revolution’2 – that is, a liberal constitutional and representative state, the rule of law, secularization – under permanent pressure from the workers’ movement for the democratization

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of state and society. They all used the concept of National Revolution to define their own political approach; they all incorporated and conveyed a racist stance, although some, in a few rare cases, did not pass strictly anti-Semitic legislation. After 1933, Hitler’s National Socialism granted an international (or rather historical) dimension to fascism that would be hard to imagine if it had remained a strictly Italian phenomenon. After having imposed a totalitarian structure on all levels of the social fabric, fascist regimes started implementing their pan-European projects, in the name of national and racial unity, pushing ethnic cleansing to inconceivable limits. No collective memory of fascism on a European scale is independent from National Socialism and the Second World War. The bloodiest and most destructive conflict of all times retains a unique role in redefining Europe’s history, is an unending source of memorial sites, objects and narratives and has produced some of the most poignant objects of memory in human culture. Thanks to that genetic connection between the Second World War and fascism, remembering one of the two involves remembering the other. All these fascist or (to varying degrees) fascistized regimes, from the Baltic states to Metaxas’s Greece, from Antonescu’s Romania or Dollfuss’s Austria to Salazar and Franco’s regimes in the Iberian Peninsula, would, one way or the other, be involved in the Second World War, mainly as Axis allies, or as victims of German and/or Italian aggression (Poland, Greece, Yugoslavia), even as nonbelligerent countries like Spain, with its Blue Division in Russia, or friendly neutrals such as Portugal. Except for the latter two, they all succumbed to the Nazi defeat. The Spanish Civil War was the first of the wars launched by the fascists that characteristically mobilized political and religious passion throughout the Western world, drawing numerous volunteers to fight on both sides. It immediately mobilized enough symbolic elements to be perceived either (on the right) as a decisive combat of Western Christian civilization versus communism or (on the left) of democracy versus fascism. This second perception embodied the anti-fascist world view, on which, formally at least, European liberal democracies in the West and selfdesignated People’s Democracies in Central and Eastern Europe were all based, and it became the first political platform ever to enable cooperation between social democrats, liberals and communists, although it endured a severe blow at the end of the twentieth century. About 35,000 left-wing volunteers (communists, anarchists, socialists and liberals of all sorts) from fifty-three different countries rushed, in a spirit of generosity, to Spain to fight fascism in the ranks of the International Brigades (IB), defying almost every government regulation forbidding the crossing of the Spanish border in the name of international Non Intervention. They had to fight not only against the Spanish and Moroccan troops but also against their fellow compatriots as Germans joined the Condor Legion, Portuguese Viriatos enrolled in the Legión Española and 80,000 Italians were sent by Mussolini to Spain as a Corpo di Truppe Voluntarie. ‘The massive enlisting of foreign volunteers to fight for the Spanish Republic is a unique moment in the history of Europe.’3 Having fallen into disgrace in the Soviet Union in the last stage of Stalin’s rule and, consequently, in the eyes of several Communist Parties, the IB volunteers had to wait until the 1990s to see public memorial policies rescue them from relative oblivion. As one of them

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(Adèle Arranz-Ossart) put it, ‘after the fall of the [Berlin] Wall, what remains for ex-combatants in Spain is, above all, Spain itself. [. . .] [The war in Spain] is the best thing we have ever done in our lives.’ In its ‘decisive symbolic dimension’, Spain redrew the European political scene: ‘the liberal, communist and fascist triangle established at the end of the Great War’ was now ‘reduced to a single confrontation between fascism and antifascism’.4 Although anti-fascist volunteers were massively working class, this could have seemed to be ‘a poets’ war’. The death of poets Federico García Lorca (1936), Antonio Machado (1939) and Miguel Hernández (1942), and Miguel de Unamuno’s response to the provocative ‘¡Viva la muerte! Muera la inteligencia!’ (‘Long live death! Death to intelligence!’) shouted at the University of Salamanca by General Millán Astray (in spite of Unamuno’s support for the rebels at the early stages of the war) helped to consolidate the Spanish Republic’s defeat in European progressive memory ‘as a personal tragedy.’ As Albert Camus wrote in 1946: ‘Men of my generation have had Spain in our hearts. It was in Spain that we learned that one can be right and yet be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own recompense.’5 The war in Spain became the first to be widely covered by the modern media (press, photography, radio and film). From Garbo and Bogart to Alvah Bessie, a good deal of Hollywood would engage in campaigns for the Spanish Republic – and would pay the price under McCarthyism. Cinema, as well as fiction, would continue to remember the Spanish war thereafter (from Ken Loach’s Land and Freedom, 1995, Malraux’s L’espoir, 1937, and Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, 1940, to Saramago’s The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, 1984). Guernica, by Picasso (1937), is probably the most popular work of art produced on the Spanish war. In fact, more than the first accounts known to the world of the German concentration camps, years before Auschwitz and the Final Solution, or the brutal Italian warfare in Ethiopia (1935-6), the war in Spain became a major symbol of merciless fascist violence in the European collective memory, exceeding the ferocity of the First World War. Guernica was to become a founding symbol of total war against the civilian population, although other Basque towns, as well as Madrid and Barcelona, had already been bombed by Franco and his allies. Five days after the bombing of the ancient Basque capital, on 26 April 1937, by the German Condor Legion, the Italian Aviazione Legionaria and Spanish Nationalist planes, Picasso painted a large black-and-white panel with which he intended to expose ‘the Spanish struggle [as] the fight of reaction against the people, against freedom’. To his dying day, Franco would deny having ordered the bombing, and, indeed, that Guernica had been aerially bombed at all: the Basque Reds were to be blamed for having blown up the whole town. Until 1977, the Spanish state imposed this ‘official lie’. Germany acknowledged responsibility in 1997; Italy never did. Millions were also moved by the fight on the other side of the barricade. Henri Massis saw in the Spanish fight against the Rojos (‘Reds’) a ‘creative fever blended with the work of blood and death’. Fascists together with right-wing people of order from all around Europe and America were especially impressed by the dramatic accounts of the resistance of military rebels inside Toledo’s besieged Alcázar fortress, according to which its military commander had urged his son by telephone to ‘commend your

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soul God, and shout “¡Viva España!” and die like a hero’ while the Republicans were threatening to shoot him if they did not surrender the fortress. Although Franco’s regime and most of European right-wing memory clung to this dramatic account throughout the years, it was all a myth. As soon as Franco’s troops entered Toledo (September 1936), it became a priority to convert the Alcázar into a lieu de mémoire. The archbishop of Toledo, Plá y Deniel, Primate of Spain, assured believers in 1961 that the alleged dialogue between father and son ‘shall remain immortal’. The most symbolic monument to reflect Franco’s policy of memorializing the war is, however, the Valle de los Caídos (‘Valley of the Fallen’), inaugurated on the twentieth anniversary of Franco’s victory (1 April 1959). In 1940, it was intended to be a ‘grandiose temple for our dead in which over the centuries [Spaniards will] pray for those who fell while following the path of God and the motherland’, but, in fact, out of the 34,000 bodies transferred from cemeteries from all around Spain to be buried in the Valle, several were some of the 150,000 Republicans summarily executed during the war behind the front lines by Falangists and Francoist military authorities, exhumed without the knowledge of their families. Spanish democracy has proved unable to reach consensus on what to do with such a one-sided ‘drifting monument, completely unrooted from contemporary Spanish society as well as from the eternity it sought’6 – and it remains a lieu de mémoire welcoming Neo-fascist rallies honouring Franco (buried in the monument) at every anniversary of the Caudillo’s death. The Church’s institutional memory of the Spanish War continued to present it as a Crusade against ‘godless communism’ until the 1970s. The Vatican ratified (1987– 2007) its dimension of martyrdom when Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI decided to beatify almost 1,000 Spanish clerics (eleven of whom were subsequently canonized) out of around 6,000 killed by anarchist and other left-wing militias during the first months of the war. None of the Basque and Catalan clerics killed by Franco’s forces were ever included in the process. For both fascists and anti-fascists, there was a sense of continuity between the Spanish War and the Second World War. Most of the IB volunteers in Spain fought in resistance movements. Post-1945 European regimes (except for Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal and monarchist post-civil war Greece) were all officially founded on the Allied and Resistance victory over fascism, East and West of the Iron Curtain. However, for most resistance fighters, the post-war period brought disillusion, and Republican Spain’s defeat remained a scar in liberal and left-wing European memory. In Central and Eastern Europe, the de-fascistization process was soon (after 1947– 8) perverted by Stalinization, and national communist regimes were installed. Hegemonic throughout the short cycle of Liberation and Nuremberg (1944– 46), anti-fascist memories were downgraded in Western Europe during the Cold War. Shortly after 1968, the Nouvelle Droite, both national revolutionary and neoconservative, launched a battle for the memory of the whole interwar period, the Second World War and the historical experience of Liberation, in a stance soon perceived as revisionist and/or negationist. Mostly after 1989, an antiantifascist historiography insisted on the syllogism ‘antifascism=communism, communism=totalitarianism, thus antifascism=totalitarianism’. Historiographic and media accounts started equating Nazi-fascist violence with that of the

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Resistance. In fact, since the very end of the war, there have been disputes over the memory of German Heimatvertriebene, the Italian Foibe, and anti-fascist purges in France and Italy. The 1986 German Historikerstreit was no exception: disputes over a fascist past emerged in Italy, France, Spain and Portugal and throughout post-communist Central and Eastern Europe. Since 1999, Spanish political elites have been powerless to stop the public clamour for the ‘recovery of the historical memory’ of Francoist repression, especially of Republican desaparecidos killed during the war behind the frontline – with calls for the search for and exhumation of over 114,000 bodies. In 2007, Parliament passed a Law on Historical Memory; although it does not prescribe the state’s duty to investigate forced disappearances under Franco, right-wing administrations obstruct its application in central, regional or local governments. Fascism, as an object of memory as well as a political category, has continued to emerge in every crisis of representative democracy or economic recession (sometimes, in only one of these two cases). In such moments (the 1980s, early 1990s, since 2008), social fear and economic anxiety tended to strengthen political attitudes and movements that have reprised several slogans and concerns for which the fascists had become popular in the 1930s. They usually refuse to be called fascists but they all remain faithful to the semantics of fascism. Memory tends to be (re)constructed in different layers, according to the context in which remembrance occurs. Since the 1990s, ‘a true social imperative [turned] the witness of genocide or other forms of totalitarian violence ‘into an apostle and a prophet’,7 ontologically taken as a victim. The whole process tended to evolve towards a ‘civil religion’.8 ‘Ignored for decades, survivors of the Nazi extermination camps have been converted [. . .] into living icons’, while ‘other witnesses [. . .] such as members of the resistance who took arms to fight fascism, having been displayed as heroes in another time, have lost their aura or were simply thrown into oblivion, swallowed by the “end of communism”’.9 The end of the Cold War enabled public policies of memory in Western Europe and Germany to produce forms of musealization and history didactics on the Age of Fascism that were less controversial than those adopted (or lacking) until the 1980s. Additionally, a pervasive crise du politique and substantial changes in mainstream moral values at the end of the twentieth century attracted public interest to what may be perceived as a de-politicized/un-political account of fascism and its consequences, for instance when several European states honoured homosexual and handicapped victims of fascist eugenic policies. The chronology of Berlin memorials of victims of National Socialism (Murdered Jews, 2005; Homosexuals, 2008; Sinti and Roma, 2012; Victims of the Nazi Euthanasia Programme, 2014) is an emblematic example of these new public policies of memory. Fascism remains a permanent subject of collective memory all over Europe, although it appears to have dissolved, at the end of the twentieth century, into the concept of totalitarianism, especially in Central and Eastern European countries and Germany. In post-communist societies, fascism is mostly perceived as an obsolete concept manipulated by official propaganda under communist regimes, particularly where post-1989 elites are reviewing under a lenient eye (or openly praising them as patriotic) the fascistized regimes allied to the Nazis, or their fiercely anti-communist

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collaborators. Fascism as a global phenomenon, widely perceived as such from the 1940s to the 1970s, became less and less present in formal statements put forth in memorialization policies and media culture at the end of the twentieth century, except for most of Western and Southern Europe, as well as Russia. Moreover, the general resurgence of extreme-right populist and xenophobic movements since the 1990s and especially in the post-2008 economic crisis has brought fascism back into public disputes over the uses of the past.

NOTES 1. Zeev Sternhell, Ni droite ni gauche. L’idéologie fasciste en France (Paris: Le Seuil, 1983). 2. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 (London: Michael Joseph, 1994). 3. Rémi SKOUTELSKY, Novedad en el frente. Las Brigadas Internacionales en la Guerra Civil (Madrid: Temas de Hoy, 2006). 4. Enzo TRAVERSO, À feu et à sang (Paris: Éditions Stock, 2007). 5. Jean CAMP et al, L’Espagne libre (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1946). 6. Francisco FERRÁNDIZ, El pasado bajo tierra. Exhumaciones contemporáneas de la Guerra Civil (Barcelona: Anthropos, 2014.) 7. Annette Wieviorka, L'ère du témoin (Paris: Hachette, 1998). 8. Enzo Traverso, Le passé, modes d’emploi (Paris: La Fabrique, 2000). 9. Ibid.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Camp, Jean et al., L’Espagne libre, Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 1946. Ferrándiz, Francisco, El pasado bajo tierra. Exhumaciones contemporáneas de la Guerra Civil, Barcelona, Anthropos, 2014. Hobsbawm, Eric, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991, London, Michael Joseph, 1994. Mosse, George, ‘Two World Wars and the Myth of the War Experience’, Journal of Contemporary History, 21 (1986): 491–513. Preston, Paul, The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in TwentiethCentury Spain, London, Harper Collins, 2012. Skoutelsky, Rémi, Novedad en el frente. Las Brigadas Internacionales en la Guerra Civil, Madrid, Temas de Hoy, 2006. Sternhell, Zeev, Ni droite ni gauche. L’idéologie fasciste en France, Paris, Le Seuil, 1983. Traverso, Enzo, Le passé, modes d’emploi, Paris, La Fabrique, 2000. Traverso, Enzo, À feu et à sang, Paris, Éditions Stock, 2007. Wieviorka, Annette, L’ère du témoin, Paris, Plon, 1998.

CHAPTER 5

Nazism A European history JOHANN CHAPOUTOT

Nazism originated in Germany, yet its ideology − in the case of both anti-Semitism and Social Darwinism – arose from a common breeding ground. Operating as a negative aspect of the European Enlightenment, it raises questions regarding the brutality of the Western world, with its colonial conquests, economic exploitation and the glorification of ‘performance’. All these connections appear to reveal its European lineage. At first sight, it would seem clear that a work dedicated to the European memory should include a discussion of the phenomenon of Nazism. The immensity of the material destruction, the intensity of human suffering and the depths of the moral catastrophe produced by the Third Reich and its criminal acts encompass the whole of Europe. The entire continent was affected − from Brest, a city destroyed by the war, to the Urals, where the Nazis sought to establish the frontier of their extensive colonial empire, their Lebensraum in the east. However, presenting Nazism as a European issue can cause raised eyebrows. This is a German question, obviously – but is it really a European one? If one wants to broaden the perspective in this way, why not examine the phenomenon from a Western, or even a global, viewpoint, or view it quite simply as a human, universal concern? It will be evident at this point that the aim here is not to evoke the miseries inflicted on Europe by the Third Reich but to ask ourselves what Nazism tells us, what it reveals to us about Europe − and, indeed, what it betrays. In this way, we will examine the extent to which it constitutes a truly European realm of memory.

THE ‘SPECIAL PATH’ First, we should remember that the most widely accepted, enduring interpretation of Nazism presents it as a strictly German phenomenon – an ideology generated by long-term trends in German history and implemented primarily by the Germans. Theories and controversies have divided historians on this subject since the end of the Second World War. During the 1950s and 1960s, a few young historians (Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Heinrich August Winkler and Thomas Nipperdey), born

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under the Third Reich, too young to have participated in its crimes and traumatized by what their country had instigated, devoted their doctoral theses to a history of the latter half of the nineteenth century. Revisiting that period in the light of the catastrophe, their quest was to discover what aspects of German history, chiefly since 1848, heralded the occurrences of 1933. The answers were rapidly found; the failure of the democratic and liberal revolution of 1848 had prevented the German bourgeoisie from developing a culture based on reason and discussion, while the princes’ victory had prolonged the rule of the old order up to 1918, effectively thwarting the growth of a democratic culture. Furthermore, the wars resulting in German unification had promoted a militarist Prussian tradition, which, combined with political authoritarianism, had frozen the German mindset into a rigid, craven respect for long-established hierarchies. The conclusions resulting from this political and social history seemed to be borne out by the history of mentalities; the failure of the 1848 revolution and the violence of the unification process in 1871 reinforced the effects of a long-standing culture. In Germany, the civil power of the princebishops had been regarded as sacred since the Reformation, their subjects being bound to render unconditional obedience to the ruler. That pledge had been based on divine authority ever since Luther, at odds with the peasants’ social uprising, had evoked the words of Saint Paul :‘[. . .] there is no power but of God.’ Blind conformity, political immaturity, inordinate compliance and respect for the norms would therefore have paved the way for the path that led inevitably to the events of 1933, and from there to the Holocaust. This theory, known as the ‘special path’ or Sonderweg, presents arguments that are interesting when examined in detail and merit discussion on an individual basis. As a general theory and a monocausal explanation of the German catastrophe, however, it has failed to make further headway for some time. Having originated in the 1950s from the trauma experienced by a generation of historians, it tells us more about the historiography of the young Federal Republic of Germany than it does about German history. It was revitalized in the 1990s through the book by the American sociologist Daniel Goldhagen, who asserted that the Holocaust was the result of an eliminationist anti-Semitic sentiment that had existed in Germany since Luther’s day and had been unleashed by the Nazis in all its toxic brutality. So exaggerated were the book’s declarations that it was scorned by a number of historians. Nevertheless, it enjoyed huge success with the general public, re-opening the discussion around the idea of a German Sonderweg. Moreover, a travelling exhibition held in 1995 and entitled ‘The Crimes of the Wehrmacht’ revealed to millions of Germans the fact that Wehrmacht soldiers had participated in genocidal crimes on the Eastern front and in the Balkans. At the same time, the state archives of the former Eastern bloc countries had been opened, allowing historians to initiate a substantial number of investigations into the criminal policies of the Third Reich. Nazism is now being re-examined through the proliferation of works (theses, monographs, essays and articles) written on the Third Reich and the Holocaust since the 1990s. The subject had hitherto seemed thoroughly explored, both from the standpoint of its criminal practices and that of its discourse − in other words, its ideology or ‘world vision’.

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THE POTPOURRI OF NAZI IDEOLOGY In terms of practices, there is no denying that Nazism and its crimes were a European phenomenon. There were Nazis throughout Europe, from Great Britain to Romania and from the Netherlands to Serbia. The Third Reich had no difficulty in finding cohorts, collaborators or those ready to perpetrate the most savage of its acts. The Holocaust would never have been possible without the active cooperation of French policemen and regional prefects, the Hungarian military police, the Croatian Ustashe or anti-Semitic nationalists from the Baltic regions and Ukraine. The Nazis are likewise known to have harboured hopes for a potentially collaborationist government in Great Britain. Furthermore, the last defenders of the government quarter of Berlin in late April 1945 were French and Scandinavian members of the foreign divisions of the Waffen-SS. The non-German Nazi combatants, accomplices and killers were certainly motivated by very different driving forces. These include respect for legality and chains of command (the case of Maurice Papon in France), the desire to preserve a measure of national sovereignty (René Bousquet), radical anti-Semitism, clearly perceived material interests and even an ideological conviction that national socialism and its aims were the fitting responses to a form of crisis in contemporary civilization. At this point, therefore, we can shift our investigation from the practices carried out to the discourses that underpinned and explained them − the ideology or conception of the world developed by the Nazis. The NSDAP’s political propagandists took the term Weltanschauung (world view) from the domains of human science and philosophy. The ‘Germanness’ of the word itself would appear to consign Nazism to the strict confines of that country’s borders. Moreover, the Nazis repeatedly asserted that their ideology was not for exportation, unlike fascism or communism; Nazi ideas only held good as an expression of German lineage and for the German people that they were intended to serve. Other nations, according to Alfred Rosenberg or Otto Dietrich, for instance, were free to conceive a world vision consistent with their objective situation and ‘race’. Despite these precautions and warnings, the founding principles of the Nazi world vision were appropriated elsewhere in Europe and even beyond its confines, examples being the American Nazi movement of the 1930s and, after 1945, the Latin American dictatorships and the Apartheid system of South Africa. One of the reasons for this is the potent ‘potpourri’ formed by Nazi ideology, which comprised a medley of ideas expounded in European and Western culture since well before 1933. During the 1920s, the Nazis were able to present these in a consistent, intensified manner, subsequently applying them in 1933. This was the case with racism, the bedrock of the Nazi ‘world vision’. The practice of dividing and categorizing human beings according to phenotypes (physical appearance) dates back to ancient Greece. The establishment of a hierarchy of human forms and the allocation of separate tasks and vocations on this basis was given a new context with the European expansion into other lands, notably Africa and the Americas. The racism of academic theory (differentialist anthropology) became the racism practised

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by colonizing kingdoms and states. In the nineteenth century, the major colonizing powers, headed by Britain and France, were epicentres of racism. In Germany, a belated colonial power that was far less well-established overseas than its neighbours, racial discrimination was certainly perpetrated as a scientific principle. However, it was of less interest politically than in the case of the imperial metropoles. In press articles justifying their stance, it was an easy matter for the Nazis to remind readers that geopolitically based racism had been institutionalized in London and Paris, and that the United States, a former slaveholding power, had subsequently enforced racial segregation and perpetrated discrimination and lynching. Anti-Semitism likewise has European, Western, origins. Before it was practised on ‘scientific’ grounds during the nineteenth century, it had signalled a rejection based on religion and politics. As such, it has long formed part of Europe’s religious and cultural history. It is worth noting that the Germanic races, especially the Protestants, had never been regarded as markedly anti-Semitic – quite the contrary. In comparison with Eastern Europe and its pogroms, or the Catholic South, Protestant Germany was a refuge for persecuted Jews. This was particularly true of Prussia. Attitudes to the Jewish population seem to have hardened after 1871, notably during the phase of rapid, even brutal modernization experienced by the new Reich. This situation was exacerbated by Germany’s struggles during the Great War and its ensuing defeat. Rejected as a stateless people, the Jewish community was held responsible for this, as were the communists, who were denounced for their internationalist outlook. In this way, the specific nature of German anti-Semitism, which reached fever pitch in the Nazi obsession, appears as a belated phenomenon when one considers its history as a distinctly European shared prejudice.

SOCIAL DARWINISM In the Nazi ‘world view’, racism and anti-Semitism were closely linked to a highly orthodox, albeit radical form of Social Darwinism, whereby various ‘races’ were engaged in a merciless war for domination and survival. This was a highly faithful transposition of teachings that emerged in the late nineteenth century. During this period, Darwin’s categories and concepts of the natural world (the struggle for existence, the survival of the fittest and natural selection) were transferred to a cultural context, notably from the animal kingdom to the human species. The ‘Social’ Darwinists came mainly from Britain (Galton and Spencer, for instance) and France (Clémence Royer and Vacher de Lapouge) – the colonizing metropoles being the first hotbeds of Social Darwinism. This theory justified the political status quo (capitalist and inegalitarian, with social hierarchies reflecting those of the natural world) as well as legitimizing the geopolitics behind colonization (the dominance of superior races was a natural fact). Social Darwinism seems to have been introduced in Germany at a later date and was connected with the publication of The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, by Houston Stewart Chamberlain, in 1899. A subject of Her Britannic Majesty, the author was an ardent Germanophile and Richard Wagner’s son-in-law. Associated with Social Darwinism, the adoption of eugenics

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was thought to improve ‘racial’ and individual traits in the great struggle for survival and was likewise a European, Western ideal rather than a specifically German one. The first eugenic laws, introduced in the early twentieth century, were established in Scandinavia, Switzerland and North America. The preoccupation with eugenics intensified after the Great War, when the extent of the demographic disaster was interpreted not only in quantitative terms (millions had died) but also from a qualitative perspective (the very finest had perished in combat on the front line). This was a widespread phenomenon in countries severely affected by the dramatic population loss, notably France. It was particularly significant in Germany, however, where an entire community of prestigious academics at the forefront of research into the life sciences came together with the aim of perfecting Rassenhygiene. This German term, meaning ‘racial hygiene’, is synonymous with Eugenik. In this case too, although initially Social Darwinism and eugenics had no specific connection with Germany, they were redefined in harsher terms by the Nazis, who began to implement them in 1933. They were practised not only at the internal level (through competition, the cult of performance, sterilization and ‘the destruction of life unworthy of life’) but also on an international scale (through war and the quest for ‘living space’, by destroying populations or reducing them to slavery). This brings us to other characteristics of Nazism, which by no means demonstrate an exclusively German form of atavism or a Germanic idiosyncrasy: nationalism, militarism and imperialism. These were major trends throughout nineteenth-century European history, as was the type of capitalism whose most reprehensible tenets were doggedly espoused by the Nazis. According to Karl Marx, the ‘iron law of wages’ maximizes capital gains by reducing wages to subsistence level − that is, by paying workers no more than is strictly necessary to sustain their capacity for work. This was pushed to its limits in the concentration camps, which were effectively economic empires run by the SS. They were entirely untroubled by the need to ensure the survival of their workforce as the latter was continuously replenished – not through nutrition but by a ceaseless influx of new prisoners.

OUR NAZI LINEAMENTS Is Nazism, therefore, a European and, more broadly, a Western legacy? The question ‘how could such a cultured nation be capable of such things?’ is regularly asked in relation to Germany; would it be equally applicable to Europe as a whole? This is clearly confirmed by the exceptional longevity of the Nazi phenomenon, in both commemorative and cultural terms. TV programmes, movies and rows of bookshop shelves attest to our continuing preoccupation with the subject. There are doubtless many reasons for the consistent presence of Nazism and the Second World War in the cultural and memorial space. In a world that is currently difficult to comprehend, the Second World War offers the reassurance of certitude (we know who the villains were) and a happy ending (the heroes won). The somewhat unclear fascination with the ‘evil’ of Nazism provides a further explanation; although large sections of Europe have now been de-Christianized, it has nevertheless retained certain

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categories of analysis from its Christian heritage (notably the concept of immense ‘wickedness’). Yet the Nazi phenomenon is equally likely to raise questions about the brutality of the European and Western world. Colonial conquest, the economic exploitation of the ‘human factor’, environmental destruction and the glorification of competition, action and ‘performance’ all seem to reveal the long-term existence of ‘Nazi’ characteristics in our mental universe. These have essentially been present since the mid-nineteenth century and were manifested in a particularly brutal and radical fashion between 1933 and 1945. However, they did not originate in 1933, nor did the year 1945 signal their end.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Burleigh, Michael and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany 1933–1945, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991. Chapoutot, Johann, La Loi du sang. Penser et agir en nazi, Paris, Gallimard, 2014. Evans, Richard J., The Third Reich in History and Memory, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2015. Ingrao, Christian, Croire et Détruire, Paris, Fayard, 2010. Snyder, Timothy, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, New York, Tim Duggan Books, 2015. Wildt, Michael, Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus, Göttingen, Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 2008.

CHAPTER 6

The German–Soviet pact A taboo topic CLAUDIA WEBER

The agreement concluded between the two major twentieth-century dictatorships on 23 August 1939 enabled Hitler and Stalin to divide the continent into two great spheres of influence. This temporary alliance – Hitler broke the pact on 22 June 1941 by launching Operation Barbarossa – created a split in Europe’s collective memory. The West commemorates the victims of Nazism, the East, those of Stalinism. It has since proved difficult to unite the two, as Western and Eastern memories crystallized during the Cold War. On 23 August 1939, Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin’s commissar for foreign affairs, and Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s foreign minister, signed a non-aggression pact between their two countries. On 2 April 2009, the European Parliament officially declared that date the European Day of Commemoration for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism. Heated debates had taken place in the Parliament prior to the seventieth anniversary of what is known as the German–Soviet pact. The new Eastern European member nations, Poland and the Baltic States, fought hard for victims of Stalinist violence to be commemorated. This had not been possible during the decades spent under the Soviet Socialist regime. There were debates in the academic community, particularly among historians, over the possibility of establishing a shared pan-European commemorative canon to include the victims of Stalin’s dictatorship. These controversies implicitly involved the Holocaust and its unique place in history. Claus Leggewie, one of the most active historians to participate in the specialists’ debates, spoke of a ‘memorial battleground’ reflecting Cold War positions. The ‘historians’ quarrel’ (Historikerstreit), which arose in Germany during the 1980s, had already emerged as an extension of a long-standing division originating from the late 1940s. This revealed not only Europe’s political and social evolution but also its different approaches to remembrance traditions. In the West, the Holocaust had been the negative founding myth of democratic societies, one of the foremost being the Federal Republic of Germany. In the East, the accounts of the anti-fascist resistance and the glorious victory over Nazism legitimized the Soviet empire, so that the history of violence that included the German–Soviet pact became a taboo topic.

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Overcoming these commemorative traditions born of the Cold War was the political, social and academic imperative of the 1990s, a period characterized by a type of European euphoria, which now seems to have largely subsided. Now that the idea of European integration has lost some of its appeal, these debates (including arguments over the place of the German–Soviet pact in the historical and commemorative canon) have toned down. The alliance between Nazism and Stalinism is often regarded as an Eastern European question. All the parties involved seem to be curiously satisfied with this state of affairs − a status quo ante. Yet the revival of Cold War commemorative logic is highly damaging as it reopens the division splitting the European history of the Second World War in two, both temporally and geographically. Following a lengthy rapprochement and swift negotiations, the German–Soviet pact sealed the alliance between the two major twentieth-century dictatorships, leading to the outbreak of the Second World War in Europe. The treaty enabled Hitler, and shortly afterwards Stalin, to invade Poland. It led to a war of annihilation with unprecedented consequences, particularly in Eastern Europe − the scene of the Holocaust. The barbaric nature of the dual occupation, first German, then Soviet, the brutal destruction of the Second Polish Republic and the Baltic States’ annexation by the USSR in June 1940 allowed the Reich to expand towards territory that would subsequently spend forty years under the Soviet sphere of influence. Although the expansion of the Reich and the extension of Hitler’s power to Western Europe were only made possible through the German–Soviet pact, this is accorded limited importance either in studies or in the public memory. Nevertheless, German aggression towards France and the Benelux countries manifested itself at the same time as the Soviet occupation of the Baltic regions and Bessarabia. Would these brutal acts have been possible without the ‘support’ that Hitler had ‘bought’ with the aid of the pact? When the German–Soviet agreement was broken in June 1941, Hitler ruled over 800,000 square kilometres of European territory, while Stalin had succeeded in extending his empire by 422,000 square kilometres to the West and South-east. The alliance between the dictatorships – whose conflicting ideological positions had been displayed – left its mark on the Western European nations. The pact ‘obliged’ anti-fascist left-wing partisans and Western European Communist Parties to hail the German invasion of their own countries. Including the German–Soviet pact within a collective European memory and historiography does not simply involve commemorating victims of the Stalinist dictatorship together with those of the Holocaust and Nazi extermination policies. Nor is there any question of adopting a relativist stance or of extenuating the Nazi dictatorship – a fear chiefly sustained by the endurance of the East–West divide. On the contrary, by viewing the German–Soviet pact as a historic European event, we broaden our perspective on the links and interaction that facilitated the Third Reich’s campaign of conquest in Western and Eastern Europe. This alliance of dictatorships, which encompassed the whole of Europe, constitutes a point of contact between East and West European memories of the violence that wrought such devastation in the twentieth century.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Haffner, Sebastian, Der Teufelspakt. Fünfzig Jahre deutsch-russische Beziehungen, Reinbek, Rowohlt, 1968. Hilger, Gustav, Wir und der Kreml. Deutsch-sowjetische Beziehungen 1918–1941. Erinnerungen eines Diplomaten, Frankfurt am Main, Athenäum, 1964. Kaminsky, Anna, Dietmar Müller and Stefan Troebst (Eds.), Der Hitler-Stalin-Pakt 1939 in den Erinnerungskulturen der Europäer, Göttingen, Wallstein, 2011. Kershaw, Ian, Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World 1940-41, London, Penguin Press, 2007. Laufer, Jochen, Pax Sovietica. Stalin, die Westmächte und die deutsche Frage 1941–1945, Cologne, Böhlau, 2009. Leggewie, Claus, with Anne Lang, Der Kampf um die europäische Erinnerung. Ein Schlachtfeld wird besichtigt, Munich, C.H. Beck, 2011. Leonhard, Wolfgang, Der Schock des Hitler-Stalin-Paktes, Munich, Knesebeck & Schuler, 1989. Lipinsky, Jan, Das Geheime Zusatzprotokoll zum deutsch-sowjetischen Nichtangriffspakt vom 23. August 1939 und seine Entstehungs-und Rezeptionsgeschichte von 1939 bis 1999, Frankfurt am Main, Peter Lang, 2004.

CHAPTER 7

Résistants and Collaborateurs Words and memories ÉTIENNE FRANÇOIS

Before it came to denote a hero, the French word ‘résistant’ was an adjective, while the word ‘collaborateur’ meant ‘associate’. When Charles de Gaulle called on French citizens to maintain the ‘flame of French resistance’ and Philippe Pétain announced shortly afterwards that he would enter into a ‘trustful collaboration’ with Nazi Germany, the meaning of these words changed. The new definitions and their accompanying grand narrative of heroes and traitors were adopted throughout Europe. That narrative was challenged over time with the emergence of victims, executioners/persecutors and witnesses. Whenever history enters a different phase, experienced by its participants as the dawning of a new era, new terms emerge and establish themselves. They help to define such periods, perceived as a break that transforms the way in which we view the past and present. This linguistic change most commonly occurs through the transformation of an adjective or a participle into a noun. In 1529, for instance, members of the Diet of Speyer sympathetic to Luther’s ideas protested against the repressive measures imposed on them by Archduke Ferdinand I of Austria and the Catholic majority in order to return them to the fold. The word ‘Protestant’, which had simply been a participle prior to this event, was now transformed into a noun that defined adherents to the Reformation as opposed to Catholics. Equally, a word may be given a new definition that eclipses the old one, as was the case with the term ‘Jacobin’. This was initially used as a name for the monks from the monastery of Saint-Jacques in Paris. After 1789, however, it came to denote the members of the revolutionary political society established in a former Jacobin (Dominican) monastery and, more broadly, those who sought to give the French Revolution a more radical character.

WORDS IN THE LIGHT OF HISTORY This is precisely what happened with the terms ‘résistant’ and ‘collaborateur’ during the Second World War. Until 1940, ‘résistant’ was simply an adjective or a

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participle that served to designate either a solid, robust material or the behaviour of a resolutely defiant individual. ‘Collaborateur’, for its part, was solely used to denote an individual who worked with another to achieve a common aim. In other words, they were two ordinary terms with no particular connotations. However, shortly after the Armistice of June 1940 and the ensuing collapse of the French army under the Wehrmacht attack, and even though it seemed inevitable that France had suffered a lasting defeat, these two words underwent a very rapid metamorphosis. ‘Résistant’, an adjective and a participle, was transformed into a noun defining any individual who fought against the German occupiers and their supporters until the final victory was achieved. More generally, it denotes anyone fighting a foreign occupying force and a detested regime. ‘Collaborateur’ is the opposite of ‘résistant’ and its connotations are as negative as the latter’s are positive. It denotes any individual who made common cause with the occupying forces and Nazi Germany and, more broadly, with any hostile occupier and detested regime. How can we account for this dual change of meaning, which at the same time created a link between two previously unrelated terms? First, the transformation of ‘résistant’ into a noun with positive connotations was based on the new significance acquired by the word ‘résistance’. This occurred following the speech given on 18 June 1940 by General de Gaulle, who had taken refuge in London. Urging his compatriots to continue the fight, he concluded with a rallying cry that made an immediate impact: ‘Whatever happens, the flame of French resistance must not be extinguished and it will not be extinguished.’ From then on, therefore, the word denoted a war against the occupying forces and Nazi Germany, to be sealed with a final victory. This metamorphosis was reinforced when the name Résistance was given to an underground newspaper launched in December 1940 by the Musée de l’Homme network. The first organization created to fight the German occupation, the network was founded in Paris in the summer of 1940 by Paul Rivet, Yvonne Oddon, Germaine Tillion, Anatole Lewitsky and Boris Vildé. The newspaper’s first issue came out on 15 December 1940 and began with the exhortation: ‘Resist! This is the cry that comes from all your hearts, in the distress caused by our country’s disaster! It is the cry from all those who have not given in, from those of you who want to do your duty.’ The word Résistance, with a capital R, quickly came to define all the movements and initiatives whose members refused to accept defeat and who fought the occupying foe and its supporters on French soil. The term became fully established when the Mouvements unis de la Résistance, an organization that brought together the three principal French resistance movements, was formed in January 1943. Its significance was further confirmed by the creation of the Conseil national de la Résistance in May that same year. The latter brought in political parties, including the Communists. Both these organizations were presided over by Jean Moulin and were therefore ultimately headed by the Free French and General de Gaulle. The new significance attached to the word ‘collaborateur’ was based on the meeting between Hitler, who was returning from the Spanish border where he had met General Franco, and Marshal Pétain. It took place in Montoire in October 1940 and had been organized by Pierre Laval and Otto Abetz. Of purely symbolic importance, the meeting yielded no immediate, tangible results. A week later,

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however, Marshal Pétain gave a speech declaring his readiness to enter into a ‘trustful collaboration’ with Nazi Germany, in total contrast to the address delivered by de Gaulle on 18 June 1940. This collaboration was to enable France to rebuild herself and to establish her place in the new Europe. The event was viewed with disfavour by the public, particularly on account of the handshake between Hitler and Pétain, whose ensuing speech brought the very word ‘collaboration’ itself into disrepute. The term ‘collaborateur’ was likewise cast in a new, entirely negative light.

TWO NEW TERMS MAKE THEIR MARK ON EUROPE The two new, contrasting meanings of ‘résistant’ and ‘collaborateur’ were rejected by both the Vichy regime and the Germans, who regarded the resistance members simply as terrorists. Nevertheless, their usage became increasingly widespread even before the end of the war. This was also due to the growing sympathy for the Resistance movement and to the strengthening of hostility towards the occupying force and its supporters, the transformations being definitively established with the Liberation. Initially seen as primarily applicable to France between 1940 and 1944, the two concepts were subsequently extended to all other European languages. This occurred through adaptation (‘Kollaboration’ in German and Danish, ‘Kolaboracja’ in Polish, ‘Kolaboracija’ in Croatian and ‘Kollaboratsionizm’ in Russian), through transposition (‘Resistance’ in English, ‘Resistenza’ in Italian) or through translation (‘Widerstand’ in German, ‘Verzet’ in Dutch). All things considered, this was a symbolic victory. It was especially striking given that the notion of ‘résistant’ had to compete with other similar concepts, particularly with that of ‘partisan’, while the war was going on. In France itself, the Resistance anthem was known as the Chant des Partisans, while the Communist Party’s armed units were known as the FrancsTireurs et Partisans (the FTP), although they had been part of the Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur (the FFI) since 1943. The Italian anti-fascist forces belonged to the Resistenza Partigiana, while the principal armed resistance movement in Poland was the Home Army (Armia Krajowa). In Greece, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and the whole of the Soviet Union, the armed resistance was led by partisans. Following the total victory achieved by the Allies over Nazi Germany, the new meanings of ‘résistant’ and ‘collaborateur’, first adopted in 1940, were definitively established in every country that had been a victim of the German occupation. At the same time, that triumph endowed both terms with universal significance. Some of the new heads of state established in both Western and Eastern European countries had been Resistance leaders themselves, such as General de Gaulle of France and Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia. In other instances, representatives of the Resistance movement were included in governments of national unity, where they played key roles. This was the case in Italy, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary. It was also a time when resistance movements everywhere, backed by the armies who had routed the German troops, turned on ‘collaborateurs’. These were pursued, even at the highest level, publicly humiliated − women suspected of amorous liaisons regarded as criminal were treated with particular brutality −

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and in many cases summarily executed before more lawful purges were officially established. This was true of Italy, where Mussolini’s body was publicly displayed in Milan after his execution in April 1945, and also of France, where Marshal Pétain was condemned to death for High Treason in August 1945 following a trial that lasted several weeks (his sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment). It was also the case in Norway, where Vidkun Quisling, who led the pro-Nazi government there from 1942 to 1945, was sentenced to death and executed in October 1945. In Czechoslovakia, Mgr Jozef Tiso, who had governed the puppet state of Slovakia since 1939, was condemned to death and hanged in 1947. Marshal Ion Antonescu, who had become the dictator of the Kingdom of Romania during the war, likewise received a death sentence and was executed there in 1946. Eventually, purging procedures were instituted everywhere. A large number of sentences were passed, ranging from national stripping of rank to the death penalty. In the Netherlands, 66,000 people, 900 of whom were executed, were sentenced in this way. Denmark imposed 46 death penalties in addition to 13,500 other sentences, while in Bulgaria, 135 large mass trials resulted in over 2,500 death sentences.

CONSTRUCTING A HEROIC GRAND NARRATIVE ‘Grand narratives’ of collective memory presenting a normative, almost Manichaean interpretation of the war years developed very quickly in all the countries that had endured Nazi occupation. These narratives were constructed jointly by the new regimes and representatives of the victorious forces. Coherent and convincing, they were accepted by the great majority of the population and played a vital role in the processes of rebuilding and restoring normality after the catastrophe. Despite the differing political and ideological approaches, soon to be accentuated by the Cold War, Germany’s defeat was given equal prominence to that of Nazism (in the West) and fascism (in Eastern Europe). In most cases, too, the 8th or 9th of May became a national holiday. For the formerly occupied countries, the celebration of their Liberation is even more significant than that of the overall victory, and it invariably features the same images. These show the armed Resistance fighters, together with the regular army, entering the liberated country’s capital and being welcomed by a euphoric nation. The comradeship that existed between the national and Allied forces is likewise evident. The artist Sándor Ék painted just such a scene in Hungary in the early 1950s. This large work is an example of Socialist Realism and shows a Soviet T-34 tank, flying a red flag, entering a ruined street in Budapest and being greeted on all sides by a delighted crowd. Indeed, the same recurring characteristics may be found everywhere, in stories and films alike: the key role played by the combatants of the liberated country (both soldiers and resistance members); the joy of a people whose unity gave them the strength to rise again and the twofold effect of the Liberation, which freed nations both from the occupying foe and from politically and socially reprehensible collaborationist regimes. Every country, including those which, objectively speaking, were liberated by external forces, presents its Resistance members and partisans as the true victors of the Second World

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War. They are seen as embodying the unity and resolve of a people determined to achieve their own liberation, standing together in defiance of the enemy, their battle part of a continuing national story. In Italy, therefore, the Resistenza is interpreted as a second Risorgimento, while in the Soviet Union, the ‘Great Patriotic War’ against Nazi Germany is viewed as an extension of the ‘Patriotic War’ fought in 1812 against Napoleon’s Grande Armée.

HEROES AND VICTIMS The other characteristic displayed by these grand narratives is the glorification of the fight waged against the occupying force and, more specifically, of the two distinct categories that best embody it: the heroes and the victims. These heroes are presented as ‘role models’; the term is not restricted to charismatic figures of resistance and triumph, such as de Gaulle and Churchill, Stalin and Dimitrov, Roosevelt and Tito, but also applies to all the resistance fighters and partisans who were killed in combat. These include Jean Moulin, the first president of the National Council of the Resistance, who died after being tortured by Klaus Barbie. In December 1964, Moulin’s ashes were transferred to the Panthéon in the presence of General de Gaulle; the event included a moving tribute delivered by André Malraux and formed the crowning point of the Resistance in France. There was also Marytė Melnikaitė, a young Lithuanian partisan shot by the Germans in 1943 and proclaimed a ‘Heroine of the Soviet Union’ the following year. The word ‘hero’ might refer to an individual or an entire group, such as the Dutch dock workers who went on strike in February 1941 to protest against the arrests of Jews, or those who fought in the Warsaw ghetto uprising of 1943 and were celebrated in the monument created by Nathan Rapoport in 1948. Every country emphasized its heroes’ determination, self-sacrifice, bravery, endurance, dignity and sense of solidarity. The victims, on the other hand, were those vast numbers of civilians who lost their lives in massacres and bombings, mass executions and reprisals. Their innocence was contrasted with the brutality and cruelty of the war waged by Nazi Germany, denounced for its atrocities and crimes against humanity. This explains why these civilian victims are presented as martyrs in so many cases, while the sites where they met their end are sacralized and preserved just as they were following barbaric Nazi attacks. The Lithuanian village of Pirčiupis, for example, was torched by the Wehrmacht and its inhabitants were massacred. In 1960, it was transformed into a memorial to the victims of fascism, its focal point being the statue of a weeping mother. The little town of Lidice in Bohemia suffered the same fate following Heydrich’s assassination in May 1942. Immediately after the war, it was transformed into a site of memory displaying Czech resistance and Nazi brutality. The village of Oradour-sur-Glane was burnt down by the SS Panzer Division Das Reich in June 1944 and its inhabitants were slaughtered. Those of the Italian village of Marzabotto, not far from Bologna, suffered the same tragic fate at the hands of the SS Reichsführer-SS Panzergrenadier Division in September 1944.

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In the occupied countries, the dual figures of the hero and the victim were combined in the person of the political deportee. These prisoners were therefore regarded as leading the hierarchy of victims established in the aftermath of the war. In this way, the prisons and concentration camps in which the deportees were interned became major sites of collective memory and national commemoration. The most striking example of this is Buchenwald concentration camp, which was transformed into a memorial to the international fight against fascism, led by the communists and won thanks to enormous self-sacrifice on the part of all anti-fascist forces. Inaugurated in 1958, the memorial is dominated by Fritz Cremer’s statue of the newly liberated prisoners vowing to fight for the construction of a new world based on peace and freedom.

A VEIL OF SILENCE The incontrovertible condemnation of the Nazi regime and its leaders found its strongest expression in the Nuremberg trials; the grand narratives convey an equally incontrovertible condemnation of the collaborators. These are portrayed as if they represented only a small minority, a quasi-alien element within a nation united in its defiance of the German occupation and its support for the battle waged by resistance members and partisans. This heroic, Manichaean and often simplistic image of the war presents a number of advantages, not only for countries that had experienced Nazi occupation but also for those that had at one time been Germany’s allies or supporters: Italy, Croatia, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Vichy France, Norway and Finland. It helped to rebuild a national unity jeopardized by the conflict, gave meaning to the often immense suffering undergone by these nations, served as a basis for reconstruction and restored an identity and hope for the future to those countries, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe, which had in many cases been totally devastated. It also allowed the murkier aspects of the war and occupation to be concealed under a veil of silence and, finally, it facilitated a tacit process of reintegration through increasingly extensive amnesties involving most of those who had been categorized as criminals. This was the case with high-ranking civil servants from the fascist regime in Italy after June 1946 and also with France in August 1947, January 1951 and, above all, in August 1953. It is therefore easy to understand why this grand narrative was adopted by the immediate heirs of the Third Reich. In this way, Austria presents itself to the outside world as a country that had been forcibly occupied by Nazi Germany from March 1938 and was later liberated by its own resistance fighters and the Allied forces − this enables Austrian society to portray itself as an innocent victim of the war. In the GDR, anti-fascism was elevated to the status of a founding myth that formed the basis of the new state and its social order. The glorification of communist resistance, the commemoration of the victims of fascism and of the country’s liberation by the Red Army, together with the huge number of monuments built to celebrate the Soviet combatants and the memorials established on the very sites of the Nazi reign of terror, all contributed to representing East Germany’s inhabitants as victims of fascism and supporters of the USSR. In West Germany, the radical denunciation

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of the Nazi dictatorship − at least in principle − was accompanied by exculpation strategies. These were not entirely ineffective, insofar as they conveyed the idea that the years between 1933 and 1945 were simply a digression in Germany’s history and acknowledged the fact that many Germans had allowed themselves to become mesmerized by Hitler and his clique, although this had not contaminated German society. Moreover, emphasis was placed on the courage and determination shown by the conspirators on 20 July 1944, these being presented as true resistance fighters. The grand narrative also extended to the neutral countries. Switzerland and Sweden emphasized their patriotism, together with the courage that had enabled them to remain oases of freedom and peace in the midst of a continent crushed by war and tyranny. At the same time, both countries stressed their humanitarianism, their readiness to shelter refugees and the aid they gave to victims − through the Red Cross in the case of Switzerland and the activities of Count Bernadotte and Raoul Wallenberg in that of Sweden. For its part, Franco’s Spain remained discreet with regard to the Caudillo’s sympathetic attitude to Hitler and to the Spanish volunteers sent to fight on the Eastern front, preferring to insist on the country’s strict neutrality; this was presented as a form of resistance. Emphasis was likewise placed on the initiatives taken, even at official level, to welcome a number of Jews fleeing Nazi persecution.

THE END OF CONSENSUS This grand narrative presents two terms as direct opposites: the revered ‘résistants’, on the one hand, and the reviled ‘collaborateurs’, on the other hand. It suggests that the great majority of citizens stood in solidarity with those who fought the good fight, even if they were not directly engaged in the struggle against the enemy occupier or against tyranny. In the 1960s, Western countries gradually began to question these portrayals. While the narrative had proved very useful in the immediate post-war period, when it had helped to rebuild a sociopolitical consensus, it had also allowed the ambiguities and contradictions of the war years to be glossed over, as if one could simply draw a line under a grim past. Over time, however, its credibility weakened, particularly when the distance between past and present grew longer, when it became increasingly ritualized and when other developments brought it into question. The Einsatzgruppen were squads assigned to persecute and slaughter the Jewish inhabitants of territories conquered by the Wehrmacht from 1941 onwards. Between 1958 and 1968, its members were tried in the FRG according to Germany’s own judicial system, the major proceedings attracting much attention. The same was true of the court cases involving the former commanders and guards at Auschwitz, and of Adolf Eichmann’s televised trial in Israel in 1961. This was watched by audiences throughout the world and was covered by twice as many journalists as the Nuremberg trials. All these events raised public awareness of the scale and systematic nature of the persecutions and massacres suffered by Europe’s Jewish population through the ‘final solution’.

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This growing realization was further reinforced by the change in attitude on the part of the Holocaust survivors and the descendants of its victims. Although in the immediate aftermath of the war they had been preoccupied by the need to escape the exclusion they had endured and to build a new life, they subsequently developed a sense of collective identity that centred on the memory of the genocide. This was not only the case in Europe but also, and to a greater degree, in Israel and the United States. That new identity was strengthened by solidarity with Israel and by the wars of 1967 and 1973, which were experienced as a continuation of the persecutions they had suffered under Nazism. As a result, European societies came to recognize that the persecution of the Jewish people and the Nazi’s ‘final solution’ were central to the history and memory of Nazism and the Second World War, and that this fact had hitherto been insufficiently acknowledged. This new awareness was already discernible in the worldwide response to The Diary of Anne Frank, first published in 1947, and in the controversy triggered by Rolf Hochhuth’s play The Deputy (1963). It was further emphasized by the West German Chancellor Willy Brandt when, in 1970, he knelt before the monument to the heroes of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, by the American television series Holocaust (1978) and by Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah (1985). At a more general level, it was also amplified through an approach to contemporary history in which television and witness accounts played an increasingly important role. The new perspective was further reinforced by developments in historical research that cast light on the reality of the war and the occupation as experienced by European society. This gradually raised doubts over what Henry Rousso described as ‘résistancialisme’, a term he coined in 1987 with reference to France. It concerns the claim, developed by Gaullists and Communists alike, that from 1940 onwards the large majority of French citizens resisted the German occupation and the Vichy regime.

THE EMERGENCE OF THE HOLOCAUST AS A TRANSNATIONAL REALM OF MEMORY This shift in perspective placed painful, traumatic memories, which had been passed over in silence or suppressed, at the heart of public debate. It also elicited a critical, uncompromising examination of Nazism, the Second World War and the genocide of Europe’s Jewish population, events that were unprecedented yet were universal in nature. As these developments were occurring, debates over the past and its condemnation in the name of universal values and human rights, tolerance and democracy were taking on an increasingly international dimension. The discussions also encompassed the imprescriptible character of crimes against humanity and the need to integrate this new legal category into national laws. Consequently, far from being diminished and historicized as temporal distance grew, the memory of the Holocaust was becoming increasingly present, acquiring an ethical, political and existential dimension of prime importance. Auschwitz, transformed into a national museum in 1947, became an International Memorial for Victims of Fascism in 1967.

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Together with Yad Vashem, it has been established as the Holocaust’s quintessential commemorative site, becoming the hallmark of the twentieth century in Europe and of the ‘rupture of civilization’ (Dan Diner), which was to be its primary characteristic. As Adam so eloquently stated in Imre Kertész’s Nobel Prize-Winning novel Liquidation: ‘No one can revoke Auschwitz, Judit. No one, and by virtue of no authority. Auschwitz is irrevocable.’1 In France, this gave rise to impassioned controversies and debates regarding the Vichy regime’s policy of anti-Semitism, the complicity that would have existed between large sections of French society, the Vichy authorities and the German occupying force, and the limits of French resistance. The inadequacies of the purging process carried out in the aftermath of the war and the need to reopen files that had been closed all too quickly were likewise debated, leading to the trials of Klaus Barbie, Paul Touvier and Maurice Papon. Similar arguments and controversies arose in Italy with regard to the Resistenza, fascism and its true place in Italian history, while in Austria, the notion that the country was Nazism’s first victim was subject to new scrutiny, particularly in the light of the Waldheim affair of 1986. A similar situation occurred in West Germany during the 1980s, with what was termed the ‘historians’ quarrel’ − essentially a debate over the political culture of the FRG and the importance of continuing to view the Nazi era in a condemnatory light. This would ensure that the memories of the period between 1933 and 1945, particularly the persecution and massacre of European Jews, would form the negative, primary ‘founding myth’ on which a democratic, liberal and western Germany was based. This new perspective on the past was cultivated at the urgent instigation of forces within civil society and characterized by its transnational dynamics, with Israel and the United States playing key roles. Three main outcomes emerged from this development. First, great importance was attached to memory, particularly to the ‘duty of remembrance’, so that forgetting became a blameworthy act. Second, a number of European countries established a policy of repentance for the part they had played in the persecution of the Jewish people. In 1995, for example, French president Jacques Chirac delivered a speech in which, unlike his predecessors, he acknowledged that France had committed ‘irreparable’ acts. New commemorative initiatives launched alongside these policies include the designation of 27 January (the anniversary of the Red Army’s liberation of Auschwitz in 1945) as Holocaust Remembrance Day. This was first established by Germany in 1996 and later, in 2005, by the UN. Similarly, in 1951, Israel had instituted Yom HaShoah. In addition, a ceremony held in the Panthéon in 2007 honoured the memory of some 2,700 French citizens recognized as ‘The Righteous of France’. As the third consequence of this revised approach, the terms ‘résistant’ and ‘collaborateur’ became relativized, having been supplanted by the new semantic pairing of ‘victime’ and ‘bourreau’ – ‘victim’ and ‘persecutor’. With the emphasis now on the fate of the victims, primarily the Jewish population, those who had risked their lives fighting Nazism for ethical and political reasons and had been committed to sheltering and safeguarding persecuted Jews tend to be seen as true ‘résistants’, in comparison with those whose fight had been purely motivated by patriotism. Conversely, the term ‘collaborateur’ is now

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used to describe any accomplices or supporters of Nazi Germany’s extermination policy.

THE IMPACT OF MEMORIES Developments took a different form in Eastern and Central European countries. Their grand narrative presented the victory of 1945 as the result of a fight against fascism that had been collectively waged by the USSR, the Red Army, communists and partisans, paving the way for a future based on socialism and progress. This perspective had been affected by growing doubts that emerged during the 1980s. In Poland, long before 1989, the official narrative of a liberation accomplished by the USSR and the Communist Party had been overshadowed by the memories of the massacre of Polish army officers carried out by the NKVD in Katyń in 1940 and of the Secret Army’s heroic, unaided armed fight. It was likewise the case in Czechoslovakia with the dissident movement Charter 77, and in Yugoslavia, where, after Tito’s death, the grand narrative of the glorious resistance he had led conflicted with the painful memories of various nations such as the Croats, who felt oppressed by the Serbs. The dissolution of the Warsaw Pact in 1991, the restoration of independence to former Eastern bloc countries, Germany’s reunification, the implosion of the Soviet Union and the beginnings of the civil war in former Yugoslavia collectively dealt the death-blow to this grand narrative. Forbidden or concealed memories, now ‘rediscovered’, emerged on all sides, while a desire to re-establish the true story of the past was expressed loudly and clearly. ‘The fight for independence’, declared the Latvian political leader Mavriks Vulfsons in 1990, ‘is a fight for historical truth’. That truth, however, is far from being clear-cut. Several representatives of dissident groups did indeed advocate an insightful, impartial vision of their own country’s past, which would avoid any sacralization and would have the courage to recognize and condemn its negative aspects. Václav Havel, for example, acknowledged that the decision to expel the Sudeten Germans before the end of the war had been ‘morally reprehensible’, while certain Solidarność leaders called for a critical examination of anti-Semitism in Poland, which would include the war years. Yet the loudest voices, who were in the majority, argued for the rehabilitation of their country’s past and for a radical condemnation of communist and Soviet despotism, so that their history would be presented as that of an innocent nation oppressed by external forces. In this case, Communist tyranny, insofar as it lasted several decades, is readily presented as being at least as bad as the German occupation, if not worse.

THE ‘RE-NATIONALIZATION’ OF THE PAST This nationalistic reinterpretation of the past was taken to extremes in the former Yugoslavia during the early 1990s, when it was exploited by the leaders of the warring parties. In the case of Serbia, it involved the rehabilitation of the Chetniks, formerly denounced by Tito, while the nationalism that resurfaced in Croatia went

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so far as to include a revisionist approach to the Ustashe. In this way, the ethnic civil war was a true conflict of memories that exacerbated nationalistic sentiments held in check until the 1980s. It led to massacres on a scale not seen in Europe since the end of the Second World War, obstructing genuine reconstruction after 1995. Nations that had at one point been officially aligned with Nazi Germany translated this revised reading of history into the (at least partial) rehabilitation of former leaders such as Admiral Horthy, King Michael of Romania and Tsar Boris III of Bulgaria. These were presented as defenders of the national identity. And in the countries formerly annexed by the Soviet Union, the new perspective led not only to the demolition of monuments and memorials honouring the USSR, the Red Army and the partisans but also to the rehabilitation and glorification of armed groups which had fought the Soviets − sometimes with the help of Nazi Germany. These include the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (the UPA) and other anti-Soviet armed resistance movements in Lithuania, Estonia, Romania and the Eastern European region of Galicia. They were defined as genuine resistance fighters, whereas the communists and all who agreed to work with them were portrayed as collaborators. As an indirect consequence of this ‘re-nationalization’ of the past, the memories of the Second World War and the Holocaust were relegated to the background. This explains the highly charged disputes over commemoration that have developed − and are still ongoing − in most of these countries and at an international level. While some call for a national narrative that casts their country in the role of victim, others favour a more perceptive, open-minded and critical approach to their history, giving the Holocaust its rightful prominence and staying clear of the notion that Nazism and communism were two interchangeable entities. Two concrete examples provide insights into these conflicts over remembrance. The first is that of Hungary, whose Holocaust Memorial, inaugurated in 2004 in response to international demand, is situated on the outskirts of Budapest, while its ‘House of Terror’, which opened two years earlier, stands in the very heart of the capital. The latter, which commemorates the victims of Nazism and communism, devotes just two and a half rooms to the pre-1944 era in Hungary and around thirty to the period leading up to 1989. The second example is that of Poland, where society falls into two main camps: those seeking to rehabilitate and glorify the nation’s past by presenting Poland as a heroic country, the victim of external aggression, and those favouring an openminded approach to Polish history, placing it in a European context and subjecting it, where necessary, to critical self-scrutiny. Inaugurated in 2004, the large museum dedicated to the 1944 Warsaw Uprising corresponds to this first vision of the past. Featuring interactive exhibits and a strongly emotional dimension, it highlights the insurgents’ heroism and shows that their crushing defeat was not only due to the Wehrmacht’s savage brutality but also due to the absence of Allied support − beginning with the Red Army, then on the other side of the Vistula. More representative of the second approach to history are the museums and memorials established in the former concentration camps, Auschwitz (which had 1.5 million visitors in 2014), Majdanek, Treblinka, Chełmno and Sobibór, as well as the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, established in the former ghetto and inaugurated in

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2013. This is because they preserve the memory of some 3 million Polish Jews who perished in the Holocaust, in addition to commemorating Jews from other lands who were deported and executed in the death camps located in Poland. Moreover, they make no attempt to gloss over the anti-Semitism that existed within a section of Polish society.

‘TO UNDERSTAND WITHOUT ACCUSING OR EXONERATING’ Throughout all these processes of interpreting and reinterpreting resistance and collaboration, historians have been called on as experts responsible for recounting the true story of the past, denouncing some, acknowledging the merits of others and defining what should constitute a ‘legitimate’ memory. This is a difficult challenge, for, as Paul Ricœur rightly stated: ‘It is for the judge to sentence and to punish, and for the citizen to campaign for the preservation of memory, ensuring that it remains impartial; the historian’s task is to understand without accusing or exonerating.’2 As a discipline, history cannot provide answers to everything − far from it. This being said, it is equally impossible to evade those two pressing questions, both ethical and political, addressed by Louis Malle in 1974 with his film Lacombe, Lucien. They are the questions faced at some point, not only by every new generation but by each and every one of us, and to which there is no ready answer: If I had lived during the Second World War, how would I have reacted? What choices would I have made? Or, to adopt the title of Pierre Bayard’s most illuminating essay: ‘Would I have been a resister or a collaborator?’ And the question today is: What must I do to avoid being a collaborator? And what, or whom should I resist?

NOTES 1. Imre Kertész, Liquidation, translated from the Hungarian by Tim Wilkinson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004 [2003]). 2. Paul Ricœur, ‘L’Écriture de l’histoire et la représentation du passé’, Annales HSS, 55 (2000): 744.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bauerkämper, Arnd, Das umstrittene Gedächtnis. Die Erinnerung an Nationalsozialismus, Faschismus und Krieg in Europa seit 1945, Paderborn, Ferdinand Schöningh, 2012. Bayard, Pierre, Aurais-je été résistant ou bourreau? Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit, 2013. Brossat, Alain, Sonia Combe, Jean-Yves Potel and Jean-Charles Szurek (Eds.), À l’Est, la mémoire retrouvée, Paris, La Découverte, 1990. Flacke, Monika (Ed.), Mythen der Nationen. 1945 Arena der Erinnerungen, 2 vols, Mainz, Philipp von Zabern, 2004. François, Étienne, Kornelia Kończal, Robert Traba and Stefan Troebst (Eds.), Geschichtspolitik in Europa seit 1989, Göttingen, Wallstein, 2013.

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Gildea, Robert, Fighters in the Shadows: A New History of the French Resistance, London, Faber & Faber, 2015. Judt, Tony, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, New York, The Penguin Press, 2005. Lagrou, Pieter, The Legacy of Nazi Occupation: Patriotic Memory and National Recovery in Western Europe, London, Cambridge University Press, 1999. Makhotina, Ekaterina, Ekaterina Keding, Włodzimierz Borodziej, Étienne François and Martin Schulze Wessel (Eds.), Krieg im Museum. Präsentationen des Zweiten Weltkriegs in Museen und Gedenkstätten des östlichen Europa, Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015. Rousso, Henry, Le Syndrome de Vichy. De 1944 à nos jours, Paris, Le Seuil, 1987. Rousso, Henry, Face au passé. Essais sur la mémoire contemporaine, Paris, Belin, 2016. Wieviorka, Olivier, La Mémoire désunie. Le souvenir politique des années sombres, de la Libération à nos jours, Paris, Le Seuil, 2010. Wieviorka, Olivier, Une Histoire de la Résistance en Europe occidentale, Paris, Perrin, 2017.

CHAPTER 8

The betrayal at Yalta WŁODZIMIERZ BORODZIEJ

An attractive spa resort in the Crimea, Yalta, was the scene of a summit meeting between Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt in February 1945. The outcome was perceived as a division of global territory in favour of the Soviets and the conference was later denounced, both by the Americans in the Cold War period and by the Poles, who saw it as a betrayal. What would European culture be without the young, well-shod British gentleman, with his corduroy trousers, open-necked shirt, expensive tweed jacket and interest in ‘Ruritania’1? We have an example of this figure in Timothy Garton Ash; as a post-graduate student in the early 1980s, he travelled through Poland, where state socialism was being undermined by Solidarność. In Warsaw, he was astonished to encounter a hitherto unknown phenomenon: ‘When I first came to Poland I kept hearing a very strange word. “Yowta”, my new acquaintances sighed, “yowta!” and conversation ebbed into melancholy silence. Did “yowta” mean fate, I wondered, was it an expression like “that’s life?”’ ‘Yowta’ was, in fact, ‘Yalta’, an attractive spa resort in the Crimean peninsula and the scene of a conference between the key figures in power in the 1940s. The meeting took place from 4 to 11 February 1945 and was held at Livadia Palace, a small residence previously owned by the late Tsar that seems very modest today. Following the Teheran conference in 1943, it was the second summit meeting involving the ‘big three’: Franklin D. Roosevelt, president of the United States; Winston Churchill, prime minister of the United Kingdom; and Joseph Stalin, dictator of the USSR. As with the Teheran summit, France was not invited. The Soviet Union agreed to enter the war with Japan once the conflict in Europe had ceased, receiving in return the promise of being allowed to appropriate certain territories in the Far East. Settlements to be established regarding Germany were ratified, notably the stipulation of unconditional surrender, the division of Berlin into occupied zones/ sectors and the de-Nazification of the whole country. The proposed UN Charter according a right of veto to permanent members of the Security Council was adopted, and a Declaration on Liberated Europe was released. Three principles were agreed on with regard to Poland: the Soviet Union would retain most of the territories it had annexed in 1939; Poland would be compensated for this considerable loss (totalling almost half of its pre-war surface area) by sizeable land acquisitions in the

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north and west, these being at Germany’s expense. In addition, a new cabinet (a provisional Government of National Unity) comprising communists and Democrats who had either stayed in Poland or been exiled to the West would lead the country until elections could be organized. Negotiations over the composition of the new government would take place under the aegis of the Western Allies and the Soviets.

THE EXPRESSION OF A DIVIDED WORLD As soon as the summit had ended, the effects of its reception started to become apparent. Ever since the Battle of Stalingrad, Joseph Goebbels had been trying to transform the war in the East into a fight waged by Western forces against Bolshevism. Two years later, that notion re-emerged. Originally intended to mobilize foreign-occupied territories, the message was now directed at the German ‘people’s community’. Newspapers like the Völkischer Beobachter and Das Reich, a little more subtle in their reasoning, strove to encourage their compatriots to fight to the end in this final stage of the conflict, attributing criminal intentions to the enemy and claiming that a decision to send 6 million ‘German slaves’ to Siberia had been made in Yalta. The population was once more put on its guard against a repetition of the events of November 1918, when ‘the German people’ had allowed themselves to be persuaded to surrender on the basis of the Americans’ seemingly advantageous offer (‘Woodrow’s trick’). It was claimed that President Roosevelt sought to repeat the tactics of November 1918 by separating the German people from their leaders and delivering them to their enemies. In this way, the Allies would again be able to buy a victory cheaply and fraudulently — one they could never have achieved by military means. Nazi propagandists developed the leitmotiv of a Third Reich that was defending Europe against Stalin and also devised the expression ‘iron curtain’, over a year before Churchill’s speech at Fulton. An article in Das Reich, published a week after the conference, stated: ‘The iron curtain has descended over the Dardanelles, shielding Roosevelt and Churchill from public opinion during the meeting between The Three.’ The German people had to be convinced that by maintaining their resolve, they could still thwart the danger of Bolshevism in the West. According to Jost Dülffer: During the final days of the German Reich Yalta became the expression of a divided world. On the one hand, there were the National Socialists defending freedom, and on the other hand, the oppressive forces of the enemy coalition.2 These words may seem astounding – the propagandist discourse could only be rivalled by the Soviet Union’s portrayal of itself as a ‘champion of democracy’. Nevertheless, during this very period, the same contrast between a free Europe and the Bolshevik threat was presented, word for word, by the Polish government-inexile in London. Indeed, they believed that the Yalta summit was responsible for that very division of Europe now denounced by the Germans as dangerous. And in early February 1945, the Poles found themselves almost entirely on the wrong side

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– the eastern side – of the Iron Curtain. This did not appear to be descending ‘over the Dardanelles’, but over their future border with the West, which was yet to be decided. Since 1939, the sole aim of the government-in-exile had been to procure a restitutio in integrum, that is, the re-establishment of the frontiers that had been in place until 31 August 1939. They also hoped to extend Polish territory to the north and west, with a view to foiling the allegedly 1,000-year ‘German march eastwards’ and to safeguarding Poland from a repetition of the invasion of 1 September 1939. Now, however, the new republic found itself pushed westwards, losing about half of its pre-war eastern territory to the Soviet Union and receiving recompense in the form of German provinces to the north and west. Moreover, the three great powers decided to create a new Polish government, essentially formed of the communist administration installed under the protection of the Red Army in the summer of 1944. This was too much; the government-in-exile protested forcefully against the establishment of this bipolar world; the decisions made by the Big Three ‘gave almost half of Poland to Russia and created a situation where the rest of the country would inevitably become one of its vassal states’. As for the ‘vaguely’ described gains in the west and north, Poland would do well to keep its expectations low. The prime-minister-in-exile, Tomasz Arciszewski, saw Yalta as ‘a new partition of Poland’, which would become a Soviet protectorate. The official note issued by his cabinet expressed a ‘vigorous protest’ and its conviction that the Allies’ decision had no legal foundation. By adopting this position, the exiled government was excluding itself from the international political scene. Indeed, this official rejection of the decisions made at Yalta was undermined by the fact that some of the politicians-in-exile, chiefly those who had worked clandestinely in Poland, had sought to cooperate with the communists within the new territorial boundaries as early as 1945. Following the total failure of this attempt in 1947 and the Stalinization of the entire country, this ‘no’ from Poland’s London-based government-in-exile could be seen as a wise decision in principle.

HOW TO WIN THE WAR AND LOSE THE PEACE That feeling was reinforced by the debates over the ‘betrayal’ at Yalta that arose in the United States during the following decade. These took a dramatic turn, and the suspicion that spies had been operating within the State Department led to the verdict formulated by an influential American diplomat in 1948:3 ‘How we won the war and lost the peace.’ Following Dwight D. Eisenhower’s electoral victory in 1952, the Republican Party leader William Knowland asked John F. Dulles, the secretary of state, to release the documents from the Big Three’s secret summit so that this ‘bungling of diplomacy’ could be examined in full. This gave rise to constant arguments in Washington. State Department officials expressed grave reservations. Having read the proofs, a senior official noted the shocking nature of the post-war arrangements for Germany, particularly in the context of the plans being formed to create a European Defence Community, adding that ‘the cavalier disposal of smaller

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countries or the attitude toward France is also not likely to facilitate our foreign relations’. In the end, Dulles ignored the doubts expressed by the diplomats and authorized publication, although this did nothing to resolve the issue. In London, Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden had resumed their positions as prime minister and foreign secretary, respectively. The latter advised the Americans to exercise caution, as the publication of the Yalta documents ‘may make it difficult for us to be as frank as we should wish in future conferences’. By this time, however, the Americans had no choice; US citizens of all political persuasions were awaiting the publication of the papers, which were released on 16 March 1955. Those who had been hoping for a dramatic outcome were disappointed; the documents merely confirmed what had already been published in a number of memoirs. The response outside the United States was generally measured; the work made no waves, even in Moscow, where Pravda predictably denounced, ‘this falsification intended to promote the Cold War.’ The speech made by Churchill in the House of Commons on 17 March, where he firmly stated that there were differences between the American and English versions, was soon forgotten. Nobody seemed particularly interested. Since then, ‘Yalta’ – that transatlantic or, more precisely, American keyword – has remained permanently ensconced in contemporary political archives.

POLAND’S PLACE International tensions began to ease from the mid-1950s as the West came to terms with the Soviet Union. Now, as before, Great Britain and the United States had no plans to re-address the Yalta question. Polish émigrés in London, with their non possumus stance – the memory of Yalta had remained very much alive – played no further role in the crises and upheavals so plentiful throughout the history of the Polish People’s Republic. This was not the case with the entire Polish diaspora. An alternative solution centring on the monthly review Kultura was formulated in Paris during the 1950s. While there was a refusal to recognize reality in London, Polish intellectuals in Paris put their minds to devising plans based on the new map of Europe. Two decisive steps were taken. Firstly, Poland’s new eastern border, as decided at Yalta, was recognized; secondly, attention turned to the question of determining how to undermine Polish state socialism, modifying it so that the country would gradually develop a more Western outlook, bringing about a ‘return to Europe’. Witnessing the development of ideas involving a European federation in the late 1950s, Kultura considered that the borders drawn in 1945 provided sufficient leeway for the complete re-organization of Poland’s relationships, both with her neighbours to the east and with Germany. In this way, Yalta was unquestionably a realm of memory – a realm whose baneful spirit would need to be overcome in order to give future generations the opportunity to fulfil the terms decided there, which included the pledge that Poland would have a parliamentary democracy with free elections. It is quite possible that Kultura’s Parisbased editorial office played a role in this regard that has yet to be brought to light.

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Charles de Gaulle was famously opposed to the decisions made by the Big Three. In September 1967, he made a state visit to the Polish People’s Republic that lasted almost a week. During the one occasion when he discussed the Yalta summit with Polish Communist Party leader Władysław Gomułka, he once more expressed his views on European unity, looking beyond the realities of the Cold War, and on the destructive effect of the decisions made by the Big Three: We have experienced Yalta. We are not certain that America and Russia will ever agree on a means of settling Germany’s future themselves. This would be best settled by Europeans. [. . .] Potsdam and Yalta were negative interventions conducted by the United States and the Soviet Union, who sought to settle a European issue. His Polish interlocutor refrained from answering, even off the record. He could not and would not describe the Soviets as a non-European power, let alone criticize their decisions. Yalta officially remained the birthplace of a happy, socialist Poland. Unofficially, and in private spheres, the conference was still synonymous with a betrayal by the West and a lack of geopolitical perspective with regard to the Soviet Union, the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic and the German Democratic Republic. Fifteen years later, the English gentleman mentioned earlier was writing: ‘Yalta’ (Polish pronunciation ‘yowta’) is the first fact of life in contemporary Poland. ‘Yalta’ is where the story of Solidarity begins. ‘Yalta’ for the Poles means that, after their army had been the first resist Hitler, after Britain had gone to war in defence of Poland’s independence and Polish servicemen had fought courageously in defence of Britain, after some six million of their compatriots (one in every five citizens of the pre-war Polish Republic) had died in the war – after all this, their country was delivered up by their Western Allies, Britain and America, into the famously tender care of ‘Uncle Joe’ Stalin. While it can be argued that Churchill and Roosevelt had no alternative, since when the Big Three met at Yalta in the Crimea in February 1945, the Red Army already occupied the territory of the former Polish Republic, and while in the final communiqué of that meeting Stalin solemnly promised ‘the holding of free and unfettered elections as soon as possible on the basis of universal suffrage and secret ballot’, such a deliverance was an equivocal blessing, for anyone. But to understand why it was in Poland that the first workers’ revolution against a ‘Workers’ State’ erupted in August 1980, you must understand why the prospect of Soviet ‘liberation’ was so particularly appalling to the great majority of Poles in 1945.4 Today, it is almost impossible to know whether the young Englishman had received an accurate impression – or rather, whether the attitude of his Polish interlocutors reflected a broader viewpoint than that of young intellectuals within a certain age group. That impression could not have been wholly unfounded; for what other political reference could the Poles have invoked in 1980 and 1981, when they were pondering Solidarność’s chances?

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‘A KIDNAPPED WEST’ Yet that was only a partial perspective. While objectors sank into melancholy silence at the thought of ‘Yowta’, it was proving advantageous for the party. The Polish United Workers’ Party could certainly make no allusions to fate − building socialism was officially presented as a privilege, not a forced enterprise − but Yalta provided a convenient means of repressing any desires for emancipation. These would have been rejected outright by the Soviets, ultimately the real power holders in Poland since 1945. The reasoning that focused on the betrayal by the West, as untrustworthy in the Cold War era as it had been during the war itself, fitted wonderfully well into this picture. It was through images – or, if preferred, ‘constructs’ – that Yalta was brought back to life. In 1984, while living in exile, the Solidarność generation’s legendary bard, Jacek Kaczmarski, took up the theme. In a song entitled Yalta, he presented the West’s attitude as one of pure indifference, rather than betrayal, linking this with the Soviet policy of expansionism and oppression. This subverted version of the conference in the Crimea was a great success – but only in Poland. A year earlier, Milan Kundera had published his essay Un Occident kidnappé ou la tragédie de l’Europe centrale – The Kidnapped West or the Tragedy of Central Europe. Initially, most Western readers were disconcerted to see the term ‘kidnapped West’ used in connection with Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, yet the work enjoyed an international success that merits an explanation. The Czechs, Slovaks and Hungarians had not been affected, strictly speaking, by Yalta; the decision to establish socialist states in Hungary and Czechoslovakia had been taken elsewhere. Consequently, it was not used as a point of reference in those countries which complained instead of being captured for the East by the Soviet Union. Polish opposition forces entered the debate, introducing Yalta as a metaphor – a symbolic site, as it were – into this unusual transnational exchange of perspectives. This met with mixed success. The notion of a ‘kidnapped West’ had the hint of exoticism required by Western readers, and may have communicated more to an intellectual from Vienna or Trieste than that of Yalta. In London or Rome, and, to a lesser extent, in Paris, the two concepts remained foreign. We now move on to 1989, when the European Community’s cultural agenda included the Bicentenary of the French Revolution. Over the summer, however, that anniversary was eclipsed by the advent of dramatic events that caught the West off guard: the collapse of the Soviet Union’s ‘Satellite Empire’ and the reunification of Germany. The key word ‘Yalta’ played no role beyond Poland’s borders. Yet in Poland itself, the official organ of the Polish United Workers’ Party declared, by way of a warning, that the disappearance of symbolic spheres of influence (Yalta) brought Poland’s western border into question: [. . .] despite appearances, it is always the argument of force that prevails and not the force of argument. [. . .] Questioning the current relevance of the decisions made at Yalta is therefore akin to destroying the basis of our State’s territorial integrity.

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The socialist Polish government was utterly mistaken. It was not Yalta but Potsdam that was rejected during the ‘2+4’ negotiations. Has this all now been forgotten? Not really, thanks to the German historian Stefan Troebst, who recently drew attention to the words used by Russian president Vladimir Putin when he addressed the United Nations General Assembly in New York. In his speech, delivered on 28 September 2015, he praised the ‘Yalta system’: ‘Let’s be fair: it helped humankind pass through the turbulent, and at times dramatic events of the last seven decades. It saved the world from large-scale upheavals.’ In Moscow, the Yalta file, in other words, a Europe carefully split into spheres of influence controlled by the great powers, is not to be found in contemporary political archives but on the desks of the decision-makers. As long as this remains the case, Yalta will continue to be a living realm of memory.

NOTES 1. This fictitious European country was created by British author Anthony Hope. 2. Jost Dülffer, Jalta, 4. Februar 1945. Der Zweite Weltkrieg und die Entstehung der bipolaren Welt (Munich: DTV, 1998), p. 30. 3. William C. Bullitt, ‘How We Won the War and Lost the Peace’, Life, 30 August 1948. 4. Timothy Garton Ash, The Polish Revolution: Solidarity 1980–1982 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1983), pp. 1–2.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Borodziej, Włodzimierz, ‘Versailles und Jalta und Potsdam’, in Hans Henning Hahn, Robert Traba (Eds.), Deutsch-polnische Erinnerungsorte, vol. III, Parallelen, Paderborn, Ferdinand Schöningh, 2011, pp. 360–80. Dülffer, Jost, Jalta 4. Februar 1945. Der Zweite Weltkrieg und die Entstehung der bipolaren Welt, Munich, DTV, 1998. Garton Ash, Timothy, The Polish Revolution. Solidarity 1980–1982, London, Jonathan Cape, 1983. McAllister, William B., et al., Toward ‘Thorough, Accurate and Reliable’: A History of the Foreign Relations of the United States Series, U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian, Bureau of Public Affairs, 2015. Szulecki, Kacper, ‘“Freedom and Peace are Indivisible”: On the Czechoslovak and Polish Dissident Input to the European Peace Movement 1985–1989’, in Robert Brier (Ed.), Entangled Protest: Transnational Approaches to the History of Dissent in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, Osnabrück, Fibre, 2013, pp. 199–229. Troebst, Stefan, ‘Jalta als europäischer Erinnerungsort’, Religion & Gesellschaft in Ost und West, 44/5 (2016): 12–16.

CHAPTER 9

Nuremberg The final battle FABIEN THÉOFILAKIS

This was both the theatre of Nazism and the scene of its denunciation. In the very same small Bavarian city that had witnessed their triumphant parades eleven years earlier, and which they regarded as iconic, the Nazis were brought to justice for their criminal acts in Europe, in trials that form the foundation stone of international criminal justice. Nuremberg, 1934. As the people and their leader express their mutual bond at the second Reichsparteitag des Deutschen Volkes − the ‘imperial congress of the German people’ − Leni Riefenstahl is filming the scene. Her documentary, entitled Triumph of the Will, was to be released in 1935. There are beams of light, military parades, orchestrated processions: ‘Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer’. The National Socialist regime is exhibiting its unity and strength, a propaganda exercise intended both for a domestic audience and for the outside world. Nuremberg, 1945. The day after the trial of twenty-four Nazi criminals opened on 20 November, Robert Jackson, chief prosecutor for the United States, addresses the people of the world: ‘Never before in legal history has an effort been made to bring within the scope of a single litigation the developments of a decade, covering a whole continent, and involving a score of nations, countless individuals, and innumerable events.’ The choice of the city of Nuremberg as the location of the trials was chiefly governed by political and practical considerations; the Americans preferred the proceedings to be held in their occupation zone. The only Palace of Justice to have survived bombardments was to be found in the Franconian region’s capital city, 90 per cent of which had been destroyed. The adjoining prison settled the question of where to incarcerate 21 of the defendants (3 could not be brought before the court), and with 530 offices and 80 court rooms, there was sufficient space for the staff from the four Allied nations. Nevertheless, Nuremberg’s legacy as the ‘Party Congress city’, with its huge architectural complex − the largest still standing in Germany − has left its mark, generating both ‘memorial tourism’ and a debate over the preservation of the Nazi rally grounds in the 1980s, prior to the inauguration of a Dokumentationszentrum in 2001. This complex is a reminder that Nuremberg

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had been envisaged as the emblematic historical site of National Socialist triumph, before it became a European site of memory marking its defeat. From 1927, plans were devised to place the Reichsparteitagsgelände – the site of the Reich Party Congress – at the very heart of celebrations marking Germany’s awakening and the Third Reich’s fulfilment of the country’s historical destiny.

INSIDE THE NAZI IMAGINARY The city – ‘the most German of all German cities’, according to its Nazi mayor Willy Liebel – could count on the support of the ‘Führer of Franconia’, Julius Streicher. It also offered an exceptional historic setting; the Nazis were able to use the ancient heart of Nuremberg for their innumerable parades and to exploit its status as a Free Imperial City that had hosted several Diets (Reichstage) in the Middle Ages. This enabled them to present themselves as accomplishing the ideal of the great Reich, ‘pure’ and everlasting, as symbolized by the Grosse Strasse, a two-kilometre, sixtymetre-wide road linking this new Germany to the Holy Roman Emperor’s castle. The infrastructures were planned so that the Reichsparteitagsgelände would serve as the focal point of national socialism’s two founding myths. One was that of the Führer − the ‘supreme leader’ − who presided over the site and over the whole of Germany, drawing all eyes just as he did on the rostrum in the Zeppelinfeld. The other was that of the Volksgemeinschaft (‘people’s community’), embodied by a million-strong crowd of visitors and immortalized in marble from almost every quarry in Germany. The architectural complex was also intended to affirm the power of the regime, whose constructions ‘should not be designed for 1940, or even for the year 2000; instead, they should project, like the cathedrals of our past, into the centuries of our future’ (Adolf Hitler, 1937). In addition to the Luitpoldarena, a deployment area was designed to hold 150,000 people and used for commemorations of the ‘Martyrs of the Movement’; the site included the Zeppelinfeld, the only element to be completed. The grandstand there was modelled on the Pergamon altar, a supreme example of ancient Greek art held in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. There was also to be a ‘German Stadium’, intended to hold over 400,000 spectators at the ‘German Olympics’ and a ‘Märzfeld’, measuring sixty-three hectares, for the Wehrmacht to exhibit their manoeuvres. The monumental character of the buildings was intended as a physical manifestation of the regime’s totalitarian ambition and of the union between state and party. The aim was also to impress the new Volksgenossen (‘comrades of the people’), who were called on to translate that sense of community into their own lives, understanding that individuals should subordinate themselves to collective discipline. The Congress Hall, with seating for 50,000 people, was described by Hitler as a ‘colossus’. Work on the building came to a halt when the war broke out in 1939, by which time the floor area already measured 275 × 265 metres. At the human level, the regime’s celebrations were intended to display its achievements through the participation of all the organizations affiliated with the National Socialist Party. These included the SA, the SS, the Reich Labour Service and

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its auxiliary formation, which provided support for the Wehrmacht, the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls. Representatives of these groups were selected on the basis of their conformity with Nazi physical criteria. The festivities − which lasted five days in 1933 and eight days from 1937 onwards − were punctuated by days devoted to honouring the pillars of the regime. The crowning point of these occasions was ‘SA and SS Day’, which included an oath sworn by 100,000 new members and a tribute to the dead, with homage paid to the blood-stained flag from the putsch of 1923. The annual rallies came to an end with the outbreak of war in 1939. And yet, until 1945, Nuremberg continued to convey the relationship that the new regime sought to establish between an idealized past − used as an endorsement of its ambitions, a future directed towards the creation of the Greater Germanic Reich and a present centred on the re-organization of domestic policies (the Nuremberg Laws were passed in 1935). The slogans used at these annual events served as a reminder that the Reichsparteitage were a celebration of that seemingly preordained progression towards the fulfilment of Germany’s historical destiny. In this way, the Nazis created a collective imaginary at Nuremberg; this continues to cast a shadow over the city and over the way it is perceived by visitors, even today.

NAZISM ON TRIAL Nuremberg was the city where the Nazi movement had orchestrated its triumphant conquest of power, and where the Third Reich had then staged its retaliation in the face of history. For those very reasons, it became a realm of justice in a defeated Germany, where the first International Military Tribunal set a legal precedent. At the same time, it became a realm of history, which witnessed the first, spontaneous interpretation of Nazism, and a realm of memory, where Europeans became aware of the scale of the Nazi programme that was pursued throughout the continent, while remaining within national contexts. The International Military Tribunal that sat in Courtroom 600 in the Palace of Justice from 20 November 1945 to 1 October 1946 was resolved both to bring one era to a close and to open a door to new horizons. The trials, which began six months after the end of the war, were primarily centred on the crimes committed by the Nazis in Europe. In order to try the state as well as the party, and the elites from the political, military, economic and cultural spheres as well as six organizations regarded as criminal, the Allied prosecutors had to provide proof of the scale of these planned operations, of the Nazis’ crimes against peace through their preparation for wars of aggression, and of their war crimes and crimes against humanity. In this way, through the 2,900 documents presented by the prosecution, the 1,230 presented by the defence and the hearings of 122 witnesses, the Tribunal established a realm of acknowledgement for the victims, who came from every country in Europe. Through the trials, it became clear that the sufferings endured through occupation, persecution and political, economic or racially based deportations, often on a national scale, were the result of this ‘new order’ instituted throughout the continent by the Third Reich. The American prosecutor’s main

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focus was on the documents; however, the witness hearings, conducted in numerous languages, and the unprecedented decision to show film footage revealed the scale of the concentration-camp system, clarifying both the specific aim of eliminating Europe’s Jewish population and the notion of persecution, established as a rationale in the service of the ‘Great Reich’. The reports of the sessions, totalling 16,000 pages, formed the first archival collection of a history of Nazism, produced through the confrontation between the prosecution and the defence. Nuremberg and the sentences passed there (twelve defendants were condemned to death and executed, three were sentenced to life imprisonment, four to various prison terms, three were acquitted and four organizations were declared criminal) symbolized a reversal of history through the victory of the law. Covered by illustrious journalists (Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, John Dos Passos, Ilya Ehrenburg, Louis Aragon, Elsa Triolet, Joseph Kessel and Willy Brandt), the Nuremberg trials became that ‘site of encounter and negotiation between law and history, politics and morals’ (Priemel and Stiller). This realm of memory is not only founded on suffering and the past; Nuremberg also demonstrates the necessity of creating a legal framework and legal norms, a response set out in law and common to all victorious parties, whereby a regime, an ideology and crimes unprecedented in history were brought to trial through the defendants. The Declaration of Saint James’s Palace, issued following the eponymous conference held in London between 1941 and 1942, included the bringing of Nazi war criminals to justice among the Allies’ aims. The Agreement signed in London in August 1945 specifically stipulates ‘the prosecution and punishment of the major war criminals of the European Axis’, to be carried out following the establishment of an International Military Tribunal. Organized at the initiative of the American delegation and based on the English legal tradition, it has remained an institutional legacy thanks to the smooth progress of the trial, which appeared fair and equitable despite legal shortcomings. Although Nuremberg does not mark the birth of international criminal justice as a concept, its principles created a legal precedent that paved the way for an international criminal code. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was adopted in 1948, while International Criminal Tribunals were established to deal with crimes committed in former Yugoslavia (1993) and Rwanda (1994), prior to the creation of the International Criminal Court in 2002, a substantial juridical legacy. In this way, the Nuremberg trials appear to offer alternatives to actions against violence and impunity. The process was ‘never merely a judicial event. It was conceived and pursued as a moral and historical enterprise with which those involved in the business of war and peace should have to reckon [. . .] in the future’. It achieved this by promoting a universal philosophy of international criminal law ‘which reaches beyond the narrow interest of the state and embraces the values of human rights and human dignity’ (Guénaël Mettraux). Lastly, through the coverage it received, Nuremberg was one of the first global media events. Every effort was made from the outset to ensure that the court sessions were given maximum publicity: 240 places were reserved for the press, while journalists from some twenty nations and the major press agencies of the day (RCA, Mackey, Press Wireless and Tass) had the very latest in broadcasting techniques

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at their disposal. The trials were a learning experience not only for the German population, who had to be ‘redirected’, but also for world and European public opinion. Visitors to the memorial in the former Palace of Justice commemorating the trials held before the International Military Tribunal and the twelve following trials, held under American jurisdiction, come both as heirs to a national memorial and as Europeans.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Blumenthal, David A. and Timothy L. H. McCormack (Eds.), The Legacy of Nuremberg: Civilising Influence or Institutionalised Vengeance? Leiden and Boston, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2008. Mettraux, Guénaël (Ed.), Perspectives on the Nuremberg Trial, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008. Priemel, Kim C. and Alexa Stiller (Eds.), NMT. Die Nürnberger Militärtribunale zwischen Geschichte, Gerechtigkeit und Rechtschöpfung, Hamburg, Hamburger Edition, 2013. Radlmaier, Steffen, Der Nürnberger Lernprozess. Von Kriegsverbrechern und Starreportern, Frankfurt am Main, Eichborn, 2001. Tisseron, Antonin, La France et le procès de Nuremberg: Inventer le droit international, Paris, Les Prairies ordinaires, 2014.

CHAPTER 10

Deportation Shattered lives, shattered futures CATHERINE GOUSSEFF

Two images define the memory of the deportations in Europe: Auschwitz and the Gulag. While in the West, these memories are dominated by the eradication of the Jewish community in the Second World War, the focus in the East is on the 20 million people deported under Stalin, who have left an indelible imprint on its history. Between these two extremes lie the many different journeys of forgotten deportees. ‘Deportation’ is an ancient word, used by the Romans to denote the practice of expelling banished individuals by sea, from a port. It resonates in our memories as a symbol of modern-day totalitarianism in twentieth-century Europe. When considering that century, so marked by the large-scale, forced displacement of entire populations, there is frequently a strong temptation to conflate the history of involuntary departures with that of deportations. It would therefore be useful to begin by re-emphasizing the specific nature of this repressive state practice. What actually distinguishes deportation from other forms of forced migration is that it involves not only an organized departure carried out under constraint but also the existence of a planned destination where, at the very least, the displaced persons find themselves assigned to compulsory accommodation, in conditions of internment and/or in a remote locality, and are generally unable to escape from the circumstances imposed on them. A large number of victims of forced displacements are now being accorded greater attention by post-Cold War historiographers. These include the ethnic German minority populations long established in Central and Eastern Europe, who were expelled from their homes at the end of the last world war and sent back to their ancestral ‘fatherland’. In this context, however, they cannot be regarded as deportees.

FROM WEST TO EAST: A RANGE OF EXPERIENCES Throughout the old continent, the mention of deportation instantly evokes tragic images from contemporary history. However, these images vary from Western to Eastern Europe.

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In France, Italy and the Netherlands, to cite just a few examples, deportation is very closely linked in the national memory to the large round-ups of Jewish citizens and their transportation en masse to the extermination camps, principally Auschwitz. Although in some instances, such as France, memories are divided between the Resistance and the Holocaust, recollections of the deportation of the Jews have prevailed over a longer period. The multiple commemorative plaques placed at the sites where Jewish people were assembled before being sent eastwards, the ritual ceremonies conceived as Days of Remembrance, the inauguration of the Mémorial des martyrs de la déportation in Paris in 1962 and of the much more recent memorial erected in Borgo San Dalmazzo, Italy, in 2001, all reflect the place this chapter of history occupies in national memories. Today, we identify deportation as the opening sequence in the history of the Holocaust, leading inexorably towards death. The practices of deportation have been compared to other historical situations in which certain democratic states have been implicated, such as colonial history. However, due to its extreme scale, the eradication of the Jewish population during the Second World War is the essential reference point for such commemoration. This observation is based on a demonstrable fact; throughout the previous century, the societies in the majority of those countries had never experienced any other traumatic episode directly or indirectly comparable to the deportation of entire populations. Further to the east, in Central and Eastern Europe, the story is altogether different. The experiences undergone in these countries are varied in character, some being due to brutal Nazi policies, others to Stalinism, and, in many further cases, to those of both totalitarian regimes. The history of Poland may be used as an example of the various waves of deportation endured by a population, chiefly during the Second World War and in its immediate aftermath. As the principal scene of the Holocaust, Poland witnessed the almost total elimination of its Jewish population. At the same time, the country also experienced the mass deportations of its non-Jewish citizens. Interned in Nazi concentration camps, they carried out forced labour within the Third Reich. Following the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact in August 1939 and the division of Poland, which was shared between the two allies, the inhabitants of the ‘Sovietized’ regions in the east were exposed to Soviet repression. This mainly took the form of several waves of deportation to Central Asia and Siberia. In post-communist Poland, new sites dedicated to the victims of Eastern policies were added to the older monuments commemorating those of Nazi barbarity. In Warsaw’s Muranowska Street, for example, stands the statue of a railway car piled with crosses in memory of the Poles who were deported or killed in the Katyń massacre. Moving still further eastwards, the experience of deportation is exclusively associated with Stalinist totalitarianism. In the Baltic States, annexed by the USSR in 1940, occupied by the Nazis during the war and Sovietized once more at the end of the conflict, the only reference is the traumatic memory of their citizens’ deportation to the easternmost regions of the USSR. This is highlighted in particular by museum presentations of these countries’ histories. In this way, the central focus of Lithuania’s Museum of Genocide Victims is on the Gulag as a major symbol of the repression endured under the period known as the ‘Soviet Occupation’.

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In Russia, the principal bearer of the Soviet heritage, memories of the deportations and the ‘universe of the concentration camps’ sprang dramatically back to life during the Perestroika years and the decade following the collapse of the USSR. Mainly promoted by the activists of the Memorial Society, this recollection is expressed in a variety of ways, from the books devoted to the victims of repression to the museums erected in different regions of the country. Over time, however, this undertaking to commemorate the Gulag victims has encountered difficulties in achieving a consensus over its legitimacy as an embodiment of the tragic awareness of the Soviet past. Challenged by a state seeking positive associations and intent on glorifying the former Soviet power and the emergence of a modern Russia in the twentieth century, that memory remains on the margins of public life. Despite this, it has the advantage of considerable support, particularly among the ‘punished peoples’.

DEPORTATIONS AND REPRESENTATIONS: TOTALITARIANISM AT ISSUE The geography of memories associated with deportation extends across the old continent, from west to east, and is marked out by those two extreme images: on the one hand, Auschwitz and on the other hand, the Gulag. It is linked to the terms of the great debate over twentieth-century totalitarianism by other pathways, these being the experiences that are dominant, or established as such, in the various parts of Europe. Indeed, the validity of comparing and equating Stalinism with Nazism in terms of criminality was the main area of tension emblematic of the ideologies underpinning the Cold War. Intellectuals in the ‘Eastern bloc’ and the USSR were unable to contribute to the discussions − on an official basis, at least, for some, such as Vasily Grossman in his novel Life and Fate (published in Switzerland in 1980) had pondered the question. In the West, however, this debate played a part in constructing national, partisan discussions; the Gulag was controversially presented as another facet of totalitarian violence and a counterpart to Auschwitz, the expression of the extreme evil of Nazism denounced at Nuremberg. Punctuated by legal controversies, such as the Kravchenko affair (1949) in France, and the heated disputes generated by major works such as Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1951), the debate rebounded ceaselessly over the decades. It returned to the spotlight with Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. Published in various European countries during the first half of the 1970s, the book rekindled the argument over the nature of the Soviet regime. Indeed, the significance of this debate transcended Europe’s bipolar division, judging from the intensity of feeling and controversy aroused by The Black Book of Communism. Written by a group of historians and first published in France in 1997, the work was rapidly translated into practically every language in the old continent. And yet, remarkably, the debates generated by the book remained confined to Western Europe. Free speech had now been established in Central and Eastern Europe, and most societies there carried dual memories of Nazi and Stalinist violence. Despite this, the question of the legitimacy of this comparison failed to arouse strong feelings, or even genuine

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debate. In this way, there is a certain dichotomy between the territorialization of experiences of deportation across the whole of Europe and the localization of the controversy over totalitarianism, which raged in the West. It was through this debate that the Gulag established itself in Western memories. Apart from considering the role of discourses in the portrayals of deportation, it is impossible to draw a comparison between these experiences in the two contexts, Nazism and Stalinism, beyond making a few general observations. The most important of these is the victims’ recollection of the de-humanizing treatment they suffered. In their testimonies, the major break with their condition as human beings was essentially expressed through their transportation to an unknown destination, crammed together in cattle wagons for days, sometimes weeks on end. In his book Journey to the Land of the Ze-Ka (1947), Julius Margolin wrote of travelling in a convoy comprising ten wagons, each containing seventy people. There was an empty space in the middle of each wagon; a hole had been cut opposite the door and two V-shaped planks had been placed over it, to serve as a lavatory. Lying in the dark in this travelling coffin, he lost the sensation of moving over the surface of the earth; it seemed to him as if they were descending ever lower under the ground, outside the land of the living. ‘Empty wagons’, stated Jopie Vleeschouwer, describing the convoys of Dutch Jews heading for Auschwitz, ‘with a barrel in the middle and seventy people standing in a closed van. All they had been allowed to bring was a small bag each. I wonder how many survived the journey.’ The loss of all living space, the overcrowding, the insanitary conditions, the hunger, cold and the acute sensation of being excluded from the human community and of being treated like cattle were the first impressions received by all the deportees. The lives of the prisoners once they were in the camps prompt reflections on the diverse nature of these experiences, not only regarding the differences between the two systems but also regarding the dissimilarities within each one.

THE GULAG AND FORCED COLONIZATION The USSR holds a central place in the history of deportation, both in terms of the number of victims affected and the long duration of the practice, which was in force throughout the Stalinist era. In a period spanning over twenty years, around 20 million people were deported within the immense territory of the Soviet Union. The Gulag, an acronym denoting the main administration of the camp system, became generally accepted as synonymous with the Soviet ‘universe’ of concentration camps. It did indeed administer hundreds of forced labour camps that received millions of prisoners, sent there for political reasons or for criminal offences under ordinary law. Its image was established through certain major literary accounts such as Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales (published in Russian in 1978 and in French in 1980) and Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago (Paris, 1973), which highlighted the extreme suffering inflicted through the system of modern slavery. However, other realities of deportation lie behind its representation in European memories. In addition to prisoners interned in the camps, there were countless examples of groups sent to the most far-flung regions of the USSR and confined there in order to contribute to their

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development. These deportations were mostly due to administrative decisions rather than court sentences. Those involved were not imprisoned in camps, but assigned to accommodation in villages and ‘settlement zones’ in the disadvantaged areas of the easternmost reaches of the country. This was specifically the case with various ethnico-national communities. The list is long, and includes Poles from the regions that had been ‘Sovietized’ in 1939, Soviet Germans deemed undesirable following the Wehrmacht’s invasion of the USSR, Chechens and other peoples ‘punished’ for their alleged collaboration with the Nazi occupiers during the war. It also includes people from the Baltic states and western Ukraine seen as hostile to Sovietization. Six million people endured this repressive practice. Unlike the concentration-camp prisoners, the victims here were entire families comprising several generations, from the youngest to the oldest; in many cases, the most vulnerable family members were unable to survive the new living conditions. Many in these communities recorded their experiences of forced colonization, which lasted longer, on average, than the Gulag inmates’ prison terms. The levels of hardship varied considerably according to the periods involved (the war years and the immediate aftermath of the conflict were particularly arduous), the location and the type of labour carried out. Forestry work, for instance, was considered especially gruelling, more so than agricultural labour in the sovkhoz. Yet, in almost every case, these recollections evoke an existence remote from civilization, where everyone experienced their own particular feeling of damnation in a world without intercession or resources. The story of forced settlements has been told in a great many testimonies, websites and, most recently, narrative feature films such as In the Crosswind (2014) by Estonian director Martti Helde. Yet this chapter of history is largely confined to Eastern European memories and remains unfamiliar to Westerners.

AUSCHWITZ AND FORCED LABOUR The genocidal Nazi programme directed at the Jewish population provides a legitimate explanation for the lesser attention paid to other aspects of Hitler’s policies of forced displacement. Yet these were highly significant, given the large numbers involved. Indeed, the Nazi government deported millions of men and women from occupied zones in Europe, transporting them to the German Reich to carry out forced labour. While using the most violent means possible to create an ethnically homogeneous society in Central and Eastern Europe, the Nazis simultaneously pursued a major policy of forced immigration in Germany. The number of foreign inhabitants in the country rose from 400,000 in 1939 to over 9 million (one-fifth of the entire population) in the spring of 1945. In addition to the contingents of prisoners of war, millions of Soviet, Yugoslavian, Polish and other civilians were rounded up and forcibly transported to Germany. Some were confined in areas near manufacturing plants, like the deportees at Ravensbrück, who carried out work for the Siemens firm. Others were taken to large German cities, where they were installed in huts within enclosed compounds, or were assigned to various regions to carry out agricultural work. The treatment of these forced labourers (Zwangsarbeiter) varied according to each situation and national group. Most of the accounts given by those deported from the East − the ‘Untermenschen’, or ‘inferior

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people’, according to Nazi terminology − describe the feeling of being enslaved, half-starved, unpaid and deprived of basic comforts. For them, in particular, the experience of being unequivocally reduced to a sub-human condition remained an everlasting memory. The experiences endured by a large number of Europeans are therefore framed by forced colonization in the Soviet case, and by forced migration and labour in that of the Nazi Reich. These were violent, inverted versions of modern-day democratic practices of displacement. The Gulag and Auschwitz have imprinted themselves on memories as extreme images of experiences that must never be repeated. The deportees’ many and varied journeys extend between the two, as a gradually developing story. Although they have marked a multitude of lives, it has proved difficult for these journeys to find their own place in the commemorative heritage of twentieth-century Europe.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Hilberg, Raul, The Destruction of the European Jews, Newhaven, Yale University Press, 1961. Jurgenson, Luba and Nicolas Werth, Goulag. Une anthologie, Paris, Robert Laffont, 2017. Naimark, Norman, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth Century Europe, Harvard, Harvard University Press, 2001. Plato, Alexander von, Almut Leh and Christoph Thonfeld (Eds.), Hitlers Sklaven. Lebensgeschichtliche Analysen zur Zwangsarbeit im internationalen Vergleich, Vienna, Cologne and Weimar, Böhlau, 2008. Polian, Pavel, Against Their Will: The History and Geography of Forced Migrations in the USSR, Budapest, Central European University Press, 2004. Ther, Philipp, The Dark Side of Nation-States: Ethnic Cleansing in Modern Europe (War and Genocide), New York and Oxford, Berghahn, 2014 [2011].

CHAPTER 11

The Europe of genocides JAY WINTER

Thanks to a Galician-born Polish lawyer who emigrated to the United States, the word ‘genocide’ and the reality behind it have achieved recognition in international law. This term – which denotes crimes perpetrated against a group with the intent to destroy its very existence – became enshrined in law and discourse after the Second World War, despite the fact that Europe has been unable to prevent its recurrence. In international law, genocide is a crime committed by a state, its agents or its surrogates, aiming at the destruction of a specific social group or people, through mass murder and other acts. On 9 December 1948, the United Nations assembled in Paris voted unanimously to establish this principle, enshrined in a Genocide Convention, which subsequently entered into force on 12 January 1951. There are those who use the term ‘genocide’ to denounce many other crimes committed in the past, such as the slave trade or the dispossession and seizure of the land and lives of American Indians and Australian Aborigines. But the origins of the term and its place in international law arose out of and best capture an extreme development of what I term ‘total war’ in the twentieth century and after. Two years after the Nuremberg trials had established that the leadership of the Third Reich had committed crimes against humanity, revulsion at the murder of European Jewry fuelled the last act of the alliance that won the war. That war was total war, as was the 1914–18 conflict, in part because the boundary between military and civilian targets was obliterated, and in part because in both world wars, states targeted their own citizens for extermination. This was true of the Ottoman Turks with respect to the Armenians and of the Nazis with respect to Jews not only in Germany but in all states and regions under their rule. In Anatolia, deporting the ‘enemy’ within was a nineteenth-century policy turned into twentieth-century murder, when the people deported were sent to the Mesopotamian desert where their chances of survival, aside from murder, rape and pillage, were almost nonexistent. This act of war against civilians in 1915–18 opened the door not only to the Nazi war on the Jewish people but also to genocide led by the Ustashe in Yugoslavia in the 1940s, to genocide led by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in the 1970s, to genocide by Serbs in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s and to the Hutuled genocide in Rwanda in 1994. In this chapter, I describe the genesis of the Genocide Convention, before turning to the development of the language and practice of genocide in the post-1948 period.

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I then turn to the period of contestation of the term, in the 1980s and 1990s, which became especially heated after the fall of the Soviet empire and the Soviet Union. I conclude with some comments on the extent to which commemoration of the Holocaust, or Shoah, serves as both a unifying and a divisive force in European affairs in particular and in international affairs in general.

THE BIRTH OF GENOCIDE Inventing new terms about war is as unusual as adding elements to the periodic table. It happens, but only at rare intervals. One such neologism, which before 1943 was unknown, and which now is commonplace, is the term ‘genocide’. The word has a history, bound inextricably with the life of one particular man – Raphael Lemkin. Lemkin was a Galician-born Polish lawyer trained in the 1920s in international law in Lvov, then in Poland, now in Ukraine. He was a difficult man to like – obsessed, paranoid, a bit of a fabulist about minor matters and supposed achievements with which he adorned his lonely life. Another famous international lawyer, Hersch Lauterpacht, later professor at the University of Cambridge, and an intellectual adversary of Lemkin, was also trained in Lvov in the interwar years, before the Nazis swept away the entire world of Galician Jewry in which they both lived. Both men left Poland, Lauterpacht to Vienna and London in the 1920s, Lemkin in the late 1930s to Lithuania, Sweden and then to the United States, to Duke University and to Yale. Both men contributed significantly to the framing of the Nuremburg Tribunal and to the post-war order of international law in general, and of human rights law in particular. But there the resemblance stops. Lemkin was an outsider; Lauterpacht, an insider; Lemkin never had a permanent post; Lauterpacht was the doyen of international lawyers in Britain, a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Lemkin was emotional, ready to buttonhole anyone who could help his cause, a born lobbyist and a general pain in the neck; Lauterpacht was cool, rational, utterly practical in his sense of what the law could and could not do. Their temperamental differences paled in comparison to the distance between their respective visions of human rights. For Lauterpacht, who was responsible for putting the term ‘crimes against humanity’ in the list of charges against the Nuremburg defendants, individuals (and not groups) had human rights, the crushing of which by the Nazi regime had offended the conscience of mankind. Each and every man, woman and child murdered or abused by the Nazis had rights, indivisible rights, which defined their humanity. The leadership of the Nazi state violated these rights, and had no basis for their claim of obedience to orders or to ‘sovereignty’ as a defence. No state had the right to abuse its own citizens, or those of conquered peoples, in the way the Nazis had done. This was the principle applied by the judges at Nuremberg, and Hersch Leuterpacht framed the ideas which governed their arguments and their judgements. For Lemkin, in contrast, the Nazis’ crimes went beyond the violation of the rights of individuals; their crime was to engage in the step-by-step murder of an entire people, defined not only demographically but culturally. They razed the cultural

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ground on which Jewish life had grown for 400 years; they poisoned the terrain in which the Yiddish language had flourished; they waged a cultural/biological war against a specific group, a people, which was more than the sum of its constituent lives. Lemkin had come to this position from his study of the murder of between 1 and 2 million Armenians during the First World War. His new term ‘genocide’, half Latin and half Greek, invented in 1943, to mean the murder of a people, arose out of Lemkin’s reflections on that catastrophe. He had followed closely the Tehlirian trial in Berlin in 1921, in which a young Armenian was acquitted of the murder of one of the architects of the deportation and destruction not only of his family, but of the entire Armenian people in Anatolia, where they had lived for a millennium. It puzzled Lemkin that in Berlin a man was standing trial for the killing of one person, Enver Pasha, a leading figure in the Triumvirate that ordered the Armenian deportations, whereas there was no law that could have brought Enver Pasha to justice for the deaths, not of one but of millions. Over many years, and in many countries, Raphael Lemkin turned his life into a one-man crusade for the legal recognition that murdering a group, or a people, was a crime in international law. As a consultant to the US Board of Economic Warfare, he wrote his most important book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in 1944. It is there that the term ‘genocide’ emerged as an essential tool for the understanding of Nazi practices of expropriation, terror and extermination. Lemkin’s research on genocide, much of which he never published, went beyond Europe and the two world wars. He was well aware of the actions of the German army in 1904–8 in quelling rebels in south-west Africa, and in attempting to exterminate the Herero and Namaqua people. Lemkin was less Eurocentric than many other commentators on this problem. And yet it took the two world wars in Europe to give force and substance to his term ‘genocide’, the essence of which was certainly prefigured in the imperial world. The term ‘genocide’ suggested that whatever rights states had, the murder of entire peoples went beyond them. This seems common sense today, but that was not the case in 1944. Why was it so hard for Lemkin to reach his destination? The fundamental reason was the sturdiness of the notion of sovereignty both in international law and in political science. For Britain, the First World War was fought to restore the sovereignty of Belgium, illegally invaded and occupied by the German army for four years. Yugoslavia and Poland became sovereign states in 1919 because the allies believed that they had a right to exist as sovereign states. The Nazi invasion of Poland twenty years later was another violation of sovereignty that had to be addressed. Even before the Nazis came to power, war had changed notions of sovereignty, and in a direction which gave leaders virtually total freedom to act in defence of their homelands. As political philosopher Carl Schmitt wrote in the interwar year, war brought a state of emergency, in which the sovereign was all-powerful. The wartime state could (and frequently did) suspend all laws in the interests of national (or imperial) defence. Indeed Schmitt’s very definition of the sovereign was he who

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could declare the state of emergency, that moment when the enemy of the state came into view. The Nazis took that idea and drove it to its (un)natural conclusion. To act for the state was to step outside of the bounds of criminality. The state of emergency erased those boundaries, which limited its war-making capacity. In effect, the Second World War was a conflict between two notions of state sovereignty, one absolute, the other constrained partially – and only partially – by laws. Did the Nazi state have the right to treat its own citizens in any way it pleased? Did it have the right to treat subject peoples as cattle or as vermin? Through British stubbornness in not accepting defeat in 1940, through Russian defiance and unimaginably huge losses from 1941 and through the industrial productivity of the United States from 1942 to 1945, the negative answer to these questions was slowly but surely forced down the throats of the Nazi regime and the German population behind it. But the victorious powers were not prepared to undermine completely the concept of state sovereignty. Stalin, Churchill or Attlee, and FDR or Truman, upheld older ideas of sovereignty, but they agreed there was room for some new limits on state power. A compromise answer between absolute sovereignty and none at all had to be found, respecting the legitimate aspirations of sovereignty and separating them from the behaviour of the Nazi (and later the Japanese) state. That answer, which determined the framework of Nuremberg, was Hersch Lauterpacht’s. Individuals had rights in international law. They could bring to justice those whose actions could no longer be justified in terms of the absolute sovereignty of the state. The Nazi high command were guilty a million times over, and paid with their lives for taking those of millions of others, one at a time. It is important to recognize that at Nuremberg, Lauterbach effectively won the argument with Lemkin, whose plea for justice against those who were guilty of the crime of murdering an entire people was not accepted. The term ‘genocide’ was indeed used by prosecutors, but the Nazi elite did not hang for the crime of committing genocide. They died for crimes against humanity. But this bitter setback for Lemkin was not the end of the story. Lemkin was a man who never took no for an answer. He moved from Nuremberg to New York, and turned to the United Nations as that institution which would recognize genocide in law. This time he waged his own personal war against another jurist, René Cassin. Cassin was de Gaulle’s right-man and a jurist in London during the occupation of France, and was a tireless advocate of the need to limit the sovereignty of the state. He was given the unenviable task of cleaning up the French bureaucracy of the legacy of the Vichy regime and of returning France to a state of Republican legality after liberation in 1944. He then formed a firm partnership with Eleanor Roosevelt to take the United Nations through the steps needed to frame and adopt a Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Note the use of ‘Universal’, not ‘International’. Here was a document denouncing absolute state sovereignty, but on the level of norms rather than of courts and convictions. Neither Lemkin nor Lauterpacht approved of this approach, which they believed had no teeth. Many human rights lawyers today believe that human rights exist only if there are courts to ensure that they are respected. Cassin was not among them. He believed that it

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would take generations before the old idea of state sovereignty accommodated itself to the new notion of universal human rights. And, as we can still see today, he was right. Lemkin, paranoid as ever, saw Cassin (like Lauterpacht) as an enemy, someone who could wreck his own vision of a binding legal commitment to outlaw genocide. He was wrong about Cassin. Their work was in parallel, not in conflict. And they both won. Their two achievements will forever be braided together, because the United Nations, assembled in Paris, on 9 December 1948 approved Lemkin’s Genocide Convention, and on the following day, 10 December 1948, approved the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to the drafting of which Cassin had done so much. It was in this month, just before the Cold War forever froze the wartime alliance, that the victorious powers came together to recognize both universal human rights and the crime of genocide.

METAPHORS OF GENOCIDE: HOLOCAUST AND SHOAH The term ‘Holocaust’ in Greek means a sacrificial offering, totally consumed by fire. The term appeared in the Tindale translation of the Bible in 1526. Later the terms appeared in the letters of German soldiers on the Somme in the First World War to describe the overwhelming firepower of artillery. Its usage as a term referring to the murdered Jews of Europe dates from 5 December 1942, when the English newspaper News Chronicle stated that a ‘Holocaust’ was under way. ‘Nothing else in Hitler’s record is comparable to his treatment of the Jews. . . . The conscience of humanity stands aghast.’ There are many other uses of the term, though without the capital H, and without distinguishing between Nazi persecution from 1933 on and the final solution carried out from 1941 on. The term ‘Shoah’ has a different history, but one which offered an alternative to those troubled by the term ‘Holocaust’. The problem was the use of a term anchored in sacred practices for the ultimate profanity of the extermination of an entire people. In its place ‘Shoah’, or catastrophe, was used as early as 1942 by historian Benzion Dinur to describe the destruction of Polish Jewry. In 1951, the Israeli state established a memorial day using the term ‘Shoah’ for the Judeocide and braiding it together with ‘Mered Ha-getaot’, or Jewish risings in the ghettos. Yad Vashem, the official Israeli monument and archive of the Holocaust in Jerusalem, used the word Shoah in Hebrew from its foundation in 1953 to signify the Jewish disaster of the Second World War, as opposed to the looming nuclear disaster feared by many in the 1950s. The term ‘Holocaust’ entered popular culture as an American television miniseries in 1978, circulated widely in Europe. Similarly, Claude Lanzmann’s monumental film ‘Shoah’ appeared in 1985. It was a documentary film, originally nine hours long, but has appeared subsequently in shorter versions. It has achieved the status of a classic, in part because of the extraordinary interviews Lanzmann managed to conduct, both with perpetrators and with victims. While some observers preferred

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a third term, ‘Churban’, which arose to describe the destruction of the Temple of Solomon, they were very much in the minority. ‘Holocaust’ is the current (2017) Anglo-Saxon term and ‘Shoah’ is the current French and Hebrew term for the Nazi murder of European Jewry.

THE PROBLEM OF COMPARATIVE VICTIMHOOD On 1 November 2005, the UN General Assembly formally designated January 27 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The date marks the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau and is meant to honour the victims of Nazism, and to help fight Holocaust denial. This act was important in another respect. It showed how deeply the term ‘Holocaust’ had become a point of reference not only for Nazi crimes but for those genocides which were perpetrated both before and after the Second World War. This iconic status has caused some serious problems in the commemoration of other genocides. From the 1920s on, Turkish leaders have denounced anyone who dares to use the term ‘genocide’ to describe the destruction of the Armenian population of Anatolia starting in 1915. They became even more irate after the Second World War. They deeply resent any elision between their history and that of Nazi Germany. Indeed, it has been a crime, punishable by imprisonment, for Turks to use the term ‘Genocide’ in public when referring to the Armenian killings during the First World War. Some spokesmen for the regime deny that these deaths occurred or insist that their numbers have been exaggerated; others call them the collateral damage of warfare; some insist that the killing of Muslim Turks was of the same order of magnitude as that of Armenians, and that Armenians sided with their Russian enemies. The response to this point is simple. There were Jews in the Red Army fighting against the Nazis; this fact in no way can be seen as a justification for the Holocaust. The same is true with respect to Armenians who served in the Russian army. Their ‘treason’ is no licence for mass murder. The heart of the problem is that Turkish pride in their national achievement bars makes them blind to their own history. As soon as the word ‘genocide’ arises, they believe that the person speaking is calling them Nazis, alongside the founders of their nation. Elsewhere, the iconic status of the murder of European Jewry in the Second World War causes deep divisions within Europe. Baltes, Hungarians, Poles, Ukrainians and Russians, among others, resent the fact that the emphasis on crimes committed against the Jews occludes crimes against the non-Jewish populations of these countries, both by Hitler and by Stalin. For instance, in 2006 the Ukrainian parliament declared the state-organized famine in the Ukraine in 1932–3, the ‘Holodomor’, as a genocide. The European parliament stopped short of this term, referring in a resolution of 2006 to the Holodomor as a ‘crime against humanity’. Why the difference? Because the privileged and unique status of the Nazi crimes against the Jews is at stake. Since the 1970s, the history of European collaboration with the Nazis has come to occupy an important place in Western European histories of the Second World War;

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not so in Eastern Europe, where, in extreme cases, one even finds instances of the rehabilitation of former collaborators. This was the case in Romania, with Marshall Ion Antonescu; in Hungary, with Lászlo Bárdossy, the former prime minister who had aligned his country with the Axis powers; and in Slovakia, with Monseigneur Jozef Tiso. Executed in 1946 and 1947, these three collaborationist figures became the focus of counter-memories two generations later, a phenomenon that one might interpret as a challenge to Western politico-moral demands. Not only are some groups in Eastern Europe unable to admit that their own nationals were collaborators in genocide, but they also believe that separating the Jews from the other victims of war and privileging their story distorts their own national narratives, which are not at all identical to those in Western Europe. Ironically, at the very time the United Nations decided to sponsor a universal Holocaust Remembrance Day, Eastern European nationalists moved away from a universalism they believed was both wrong-headed and forced upon them. How to remember the Second World War became problematic in constructing a Polish museum of the history of the war in Gdansk. It remains deeply problematic in Hungary. This variance between Eastern and Western European memories is further complicated by the fact that it does not totally encompass the boundary lines of the former Eastern bloc, serving as a guard against any general preconceptions. Together with Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, for example, was one of the so-called Eastern European countries where the extermination of European Jews was addressed by society even before 1989; the Bulgarians were proud of their role in saving ‘their’ Jewish citizens, a role recognized by the State of Israel, which in 1996 expressed its thanks by inaugurating a ‘Monument of Gratitude’ in a park in Tel-Aviv. Ironically, the Jewish problem which disfigured European history from the late nineteenth century on once more makes it impossible to speak of a shared European memory of the Second World War. And without a shared memory, a shared history, ‘our history’ remains out of our reach. Awareness of these impasses and challenges gradually came to light during the early 2000s, notably after two ‘mirror-image’ speeches given in 2004. One of these was delivered by Simone Veil, an Auschwitz survivor and a former French government minister, who addressed the German Bundestag on 27 January, the other by Sandra Kalniete, speaking at the Leipzig Book Fair on 24 March; a former ambassador of Latvia in France, the latter belonged to a Baltic family who had been deported to Siberia. While Simone Veil expressed her ‘alarm’ at the fact that the memory of the suffering inflicted on the Jews, in which the people were sometimes complicit, was on occasion obliterated in the East, Sandra Kalniete sparked controversy by recalling that ‘[Researchers] have shown that both totalitarian regimes – Nazism and communism – were equally criminal. We should never differentiate between them just because one was on the winning side’. The observation of that antagonism led some to explore new avenues. In 2005, on the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Buchenwald concentration camp, Jorge Semprún appealed for the recognition of the Other and their memory, through the integration of the memory of communist crimes into Western Europe,

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and for a mutual openness to one another’s cultures of memory, at a time when the generation of first-hand witnesses was disappearing. The proclamation of 23 August as the European Day of Remembrance, known for a time as The European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism and also as ‘Black Ribbon Day’ in certain countries, clearly forms part of this perspective. Yet that official day, which is not especially popular and whose complexity extends to the very terms used, has had a limited impact.

A FRACTURED HERITAGE? The silence of American and European governments concerning genocide committed in 1994 in Rwanda and the reluctance of the very same governments to intervene in the conflict in the former Yugoslavia have many sources. Among them is the fear that once nations agree in public that a genocide is in process, then they must intervene. Otherwise the term ‘Never again Auschwitz’, a product of Holocaust remembrance, is pure hypocrisy. This predicament of sovereign states brings us back to the Genocide Convention of 1948 itself. This challenge to state sovereignty made it impossible to claim, as the Nazis did, that their government was ‘une chatelaine dans son chateau’, with absolute liberty to dispose of ‘her’ population as she sees fit. But that very commitment to a universal stand against genocide produced restrictions on the foreign policy of sovereign states that they have been unwilling to accept ever since. That is why they have exported the judgement of those guilty of genocide to special courts sitting in The Hague. After the fact, Radovan Karadžić, one of the key figures in the genocide of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica and elsewhere in the former Yugoslavia, was convicted of genocide in 2016. During the killings, there was no international consensus as to how to stop them. Similarly, the Clinton administration resisted using the ‘G’ word to describe the mass murder of Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994, for fear that its hands would be tied by the very word ‘genocide’. This shameful reticence was admitted later, but still serves as a reminder that future genocides are not only possible but unrestricted by the example of the Holocaust or by the Genocide Convention passed in its wake. In Europe, the same blurring of perceptions is evident with regard to the genocide in Rwanda. This blurring may be partly involuntary, in the case of public opinions according to which the Africa of the Great Lakes – and indeed, Africa itself – remains a remote entity. It becomes much more problematic, however, in the case of those European countries present when the massacres broke out in May 1994, in relation to Opération Turquoise, a military operation (led by France), or to the UNAMIR United Nations Mission and the Belgian Blue Helmets. In order to counter the unpleasant impression of having been silent partners in the genocide, steps were even taken to spread a theory involving a ‘double genocide’, placing on an equal footing the extermination of the Tutsis by the Hutus and the Hutu victims of the reconquest of the country by the RPF (the Rwandan Patriotic Front) – which made it possible to invert and dilute the issue of genocidal culpabilities as well as the share of responsibility carried by the Europeans involved.

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There is today in Europe (2017) no common commitment to act in the face of genocide, as well as no common memory either of the Second World War or of the murder of European Jewry within it. Under these bleak circumstances, and in the absence of an in-depth dialogue between memories, the only means of turning divided memories into shared ones, our common history of genocide is bound to remain fractured, divided, contested, incomplete, just like Europe itself.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bloxham, Donald and A. Dirk Moses (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, 2nd edn, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013. Chaumont, Jean-Michel, La concurrence des victimes. Génocide, identité, reconnaissance, Paris, La Découverte, 1997. Droit, Emmanuel, ‘Le Goulag contre la Shoah. Mémoires officielles et cultures mémorielles dans l’Europe élargie’, in Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire, no. 94 (AprilJune 2007): 101–20. François, Étienne, Kornelia Kończal, Robert Traba and Stefan Troebst (Eds.), Geschichtspolitik in Europa seit 1989, Göttingen, Wallstein, 2013. Kiernan, Ben, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2007. Powers, Samantha, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, New York, Basic Books, 2002. Sands, Philippe, East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes against Humanity, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2016. Snyder, Timothy, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, New York, Basic Books, 2010.

CHAPTER 12

Lost lives MIKE PLITT AND THOMAS SERRIER

Each war entails the death of soldiers and civilians. But among those who lost their lives, the victims of the genocide of the European Jewry in the Second World War have had the most intense impact and occupy a dominant place in the collective memory. The submerged world of ‘Yiddishland’, recreated by literature, now carries a universal echo. The writer and artist Bruno Schulz (1892–1942) is known for his portrayal of Jewish life in Poland through his book The Cinnamon Shops. During the Nazi occupation of his native city, Drohobych, his life was saved by Felix Landau, an SS officer and one of the main perpetrators of the Holocaust in Galicia. In exchange, Schulz had to decorate Landau’s villa with frescoes inspired by the tales of the Brothers Grimm. He covered the walls with paintings of princesses and other fabulous beings; yet this final masterpiece did not save the artist, who was assassinated in the ghetto. These decorations were only rediscovered in 2001, by which time Drohobych had become a Ukrainian city. This immediately led to a conflict over inheritance involving Poland, Israel and the Ukraine. Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Remembrance Centre in Jerusalem, finally settled the dispute in its own way, by purchasing the sections of wall directly from the villa’s owners. Who owns the memory of the Holocaust victims? Where is it fostered? In Brooklyn, Tel-Aviv or Paris? Perhaps Krakow and Lviv resumed that mission after 1989? What words are used to express it? Could it be those of the Memorbücher, the chronicles of decimated communities written in Yiddish, which is included in UNESCO’s list of endangered languages? Or those of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s literary evocations, popularized by his Nobel Prize and by sentimental portrayals such as Barbra Streisand’s Yentl, released in 1983? Perhaps those of Voices in the Darkness (1956), the ‘Galician Tetralogy’ by Julian Stryjkowski? Born Pesach Stark, he understood that it was his duty to write, so that he could ‘erect a tomb in memory of his people’1 following the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto. Or perhaps that memory is inscribed for all eternity in the landscapes of Shoah, Claude Lanzmann’s film of the catastrophe? To what material forms is it attached? We are powerfully affected, for example, by Death Fugue (1945) and its haunting refrain: ‘a grave in the clouds where one lies unconstrained’. The poem was written in German by Paul Celan, who was born into a Jewish family in Cernăuți. Cernăuți, together with Lviv, Vitebsk and many other Central European cities, had formed part of a multicultural world with a strong Jewish presence. In previous times

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Polish magnates had welcomed Jewish communities, who were merely tolerated in the Western regions of the Tsarist empire. In this way, before 1939, most of Europe’s Jewish population was concentrated in a vast swathe of land extending from Vilnius to the Black Sea. Subsequently caught between Hitler and Stalin, the area witnessed the worst scenes of the churban – a Yiddish word meaning ‘destruction’. This was the home of the shtetl. Despite the emblematic status of those Jewish villages, the visions of a lost past seemingly revived through the term shtetl probably owe just as much to the imagination. Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern sees the word itself as no more than ‘a caprice of collective memory’. This memory oscillates between two images. One is defined by misery, involving under-development, persecutions and pogroms. The other is sepia-tinted; it mythologizes the emancipation of the Jews, the golden age of the shtetl and the interest in the ‘Jews from the East’ that prevailed in the cultural environments of Saint Petersburg, Berlin, Vienna and Paris between 1890 and 1930. This appeal is reflected in Martin Buber’s fascination with Hasidism and the fame of Marc Chagall. After 1989, the renovation projects carried out in old Jewish quarters such as Kazimierz in Krakow reached over the abyss to forge a reconnection with this past. Krakow and Łódź have their festivals of Jewish culture; Chernivtsi has its poetry festival. Nostalgia lives on; while the Virtual Shtetl portal presents meticulous reconstructions, the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man opens with an American Jewish academic’s sex-related consultation with the Rabbi of a fantasy shtetl. The Galicia portrayed in Joseph Roth’s Radetzky March (1932) or Andrzej Kuśniewicz’s Lesson in a Dead Language (1977) has long been a ‘legendary’ land, where Poles, Jews, Ukrainians and Austrians all coexist. Although these portrayals have been complexified by historians, third-generation family members have still experienced surprise when discovering a strange sense of Otherness during their mission to trace the grandparents they had never known. This provides comedy material for Jonathan Safran Foer in his burlesque novel Everything Is Illuminated (2002), while a family quest sends Daniel Mendelsohn (The Lost, 2006) to the four corners of the earth before he finally discovers his relatives’ last known hiding place.

RESONANCE Reflections on this absence have continued unbroken since 1945. The lost victims have been the focus of harrowing questions and subtle aesthetic experiments, including those of highly contemporary Icelandic–Danish artist Olafur Eliasson and Australian composer Liza Lim, both inspired by Jonathan Safran Foer and Bruno Schulz. These reflections are conveyed through the total absence of the letter ‘e’ in Georges Perec’s work La Disparition, and through the ‘stumbling stones’, inscribed with the names of local Jewish victims, to be found in Germany and other Central European countries. They are likewise expressed through the Holocaust Memorial in Paris, which lists France’s 75,000 deportees, through Micha Ullman’s memorial in Berlin, its empty shelves commemorating the burnt books banned by the Nazis in 1933, through Peter Eisenman’s ‘field of steles’ in Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial and through the chilling experience of pitch darkness in the room known as ‘The Void’, created by Daniel Libeskind for the Jewish Museum in Berlin. These examples

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prompt a final reflection. The memory of those lost in the Holocaust, initially shared by a single community, began to resonate throughout the world during the 1970s and 1980s, achieving an emblematic significance through which it has now gained a dominant status. All conflicts have their lost victims, however – millions in the case of the Second World War. With his novella Le Colonel Chabert, Honoré de Balzac had already created just such a figure in the striking character of the soldier, presumed dead, who returns from the Russian campaign. In a bid to conceal their victims, dictators leave ‘Great Cemeteries under the Moon’, to cite Georges Bernanos’s denunciation of the Franco regime. In this way, memory is unique yet ‘shareable’, despite the potential for commemorative rivalry. This is borne out in the connections between the grief of other stricken communities: the Baltic peoples deported to the USSR in Martti Helde’s In the Crosswind, and, extending well beyond Europe’s borders, the victims of the Cambodian genocide portrayed in Rithy Panh’s film The Missing Picture.

NOTE 1. Quoted by Antony Polonsky, From Shtetl to Socialism (Liverpool, The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, coll. ‘Studies from Polin’, 1993), p. 490.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Friedländer, Saul, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1933–1945, 2 vols, New York, Harper Perennial, 2009. Petrovsky-Shtern, Yohanan, The Golden Age Shtetl: A New History of Jewish Life in East Europe, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2014. http://www​.sztetl​.org​.pl​/en/

CHAPTER 13

Sombre futures MIKE PLITT AND THOMAS SERRIER

What do we mean by the word ‘communism’? The dominant memory in the West is of a utopian ideal and a movement characterized by strong solidarity. The memory in the East, however, is of Real socialism, of mass crimes and an absurd bureaucratic apparatus that tested its citizens’ ingenuity on a daily basis. Yet despite the pain involved in unearthing the past, this system has generated waves of nostalgia. Although its collapse had been desired, it left a sense of bereavement. The centenary of the Russian Revolution, that watershed moment in Russian, European and world history, generated an outpouring of essays and documentaries. This response was entirely justified, as communism has an essential place in any retrospective analysis of the twentieth century. Discussing the memories of communism, however, remains a risky enterprise. Heavy with disappointed hopes and traumatic experiences that even amounted to ‘de-civilization’ (Nicolas Werth), recollections of communism are charged with emotions. These range from retrospective idealization to the most visceral rejection, and include melancholy, remorse and condemnation. It would appear impossible to simplify the diverse nature of these experiences, and yet they are defined by the same all-encompassing term. Nevertheless, communism is almost always presented for the judgement of history as a singular entity, although it should clearly be described in the plural.

COMMUNISM(S) Do we actually see it as a utopian ideal or its manifestations, as a political theory or a project of revolutionary transformation, as a social movement, a secular religion, a regime, a system of domination, a way of life? That explosive event seems to defy any comprehensive definition. Communism has given rise to so many interpretations because it has had so many incarnations: from a socialist utopia to historical materialism, from a movement driven by revolutionary fervour to a betrayal of that movement and from the perversion of communism through Eastern European practices under Real socialism to the hybrid system adopted by presentday communist China. Following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the East German writer Christa Wolf wanted to know ‘what remains’; in short, that question has lost none of its complexity. It also seems to have retained its relevance, judging from

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the global success of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century and the affirmation of the radical left wing in a number of European countries. One might begin by considering the geographical factor. Having remained as a theory and a movement in the West, communism in the East is inseparable from the ‘Real socialism’ practised behind the Iron Curtain. Yet here too, there are significant nuances. Experiences of living under Josip Tito, Erich Honecker, Nicolae Ceauşescu or the ‘Goulash communism’ of János Kádár, or during the tumultuous era of Solidarność were not identical. Nor was every individual at that time a standard ‘Homo Sovieticus’ (Alexander Zinoviev). Russians, Ukrainians and the peoples of the Baltic States were all different, as were the experiences of living through the civil war, the height of the Stalin era, the relative ‘thaw’ of the Khrushchev years, the stagnant Brezhnev period or simply Perestroika under Mikhail Gorbachev. Of course, these generational differences may be found elsewhere − in Poland, for instance, where changes in leadership were accompanied by ideological redirections. This occurred in 1956, when Władysław Gomułka drew a line under the uncompromising Stalinism embodied by Bolesław Bierut and established a local form of national communism. The deep divisions between these periods still persist and must be taken into account. Different habitus have also remained, as seen in the intimate, striking vision of the personal world of the East German family at the heart of Eugen Ruge’s novel In Times of Fading Light (2011), which was made into a film in 2017. The common denominator beyond that diverse picture is surely the ‘principle of hope’ (Ernst Bloch). Communism prospers or survives − depending on the period − through the power of its ideal of a fairer society where man is no longer exploited by man. Its distant sources include Plato’s Ideal City and an indeterminate type of egalitarianism originating directly from the Gospels. This egalitarianism is presented in a much clearer form in a further source of influence: the ‘Icarian’ utopias of Étienne Cabet dating from the 1830s and 1840s. The modern applications of the word ‘communism’ emerged during the French Revolution, with the Conspiracy of Equals led by Gracchus Babeuf. Communism dominated political ideas after 1820, at a time when industrialization and unbridled urbanization were exacerbating inequalities. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels − now the stars of Raoul Peck’s film The Young Karl Marx (2017) − published their Communist Manifesto in February 1848. Translated into every language, it is now inscribed in UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register as a text of outstanding universal value.

OCTOBER: MYTH AND SPECTRE The Communist Manifesto opens with the words: ‘A spectre haunts Europe, the spectre of Communism.’ However, occurring sixty-nine years after the publication of that extensive nineteenth-century history of society, politics and philosophy, it was the October Revolution that created a new spectre, in a much more emphatic fashion. Derrida sees it as ‘a present past, the return of the dead which the worldwide work of mourning cannot get rid of ’.1 The term had formerly heralded a new

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world, to be created by the united proletariat of every nation. October − for some, the dawn of a new era, for others, a catastrophe − is central to these antithetical images. Why October? The fall of Nicholas II and of the 300-year-old Romanov dynasty was, in fact, precipitated by the February Revolution, which broke out on 23 February (now 8 March), according to the Julian calendar used in Russia at that time. A large number of institutions and initiatives for direct democracy were established throughout 1917; these include ‘soviets’ (councils), factory and local committees and Red Guard units. Yet it is the October Revolution, when power was seized by the Bolsheviks, the most isolated and radical revolutionaries of all, which monopolizes the collective memory. Lying embalmed in his mausoleum on Red Square since 1924, Lenin dominates the story, eclipsing Kerensky, the leader of the February Revolution. This may be because, through the storming of the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg, the October Revolution instantly achieved an opening act as majestic and universally famous as the storming of the Bastille in the French Revolution. It is more certainly due to the fact that history is written by the victors, and because a great many of our images of that October were crafted by the regime’s myth factory. The film of the same name, a masterpiece by Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein, was speedily made in 1927 to commemorate the tenth anniversary (as was Vsevolod Pudovkin’s The End of Saint Petersburg) and was one of the great purveyors of images depicting the act of revolution. Like The Battleship Potemkin (1925), which tells the story of the 1905 revolution in Odessa, October, with its wide-angle shots and surging crowds, captures and mythologizes the advance of the people. It succeeds in combining the avant-garde aesthetic, embodied by Kazimir Malevich, Anatoly Lunacharsky and Alexander Rodchenko, with the official art soon to be symbolized by the neo-Classical works of Stalinist architect Boris Iofan. The book Ten Days that Shook the World (1919) by John Reed, a communist journalist and one of the very few American citizens buried in the Kremlin, reflects the worldwide fascination instantly aroused by the event.

MEMORIES OF COMRADESHIP The anticipated symbiotic relationship between the working class and the communist project failed to materialize; it was in intellectual and artistic circles that Marxism exerted a powerful fascination throughout the twentieth century, despite the entirely contrived mythology built around Alexey Stakhanov, that hero of socialist productivity. Its allure spread far beyond Europe’s borders. At a time when anticolonialism and anti-imperialism were at their height, and when anti-Americanism was further reinforced by the spectacle of McCarthyism in the United States, the promise of egalitarianism held a strong appeal for individuals such as Richard Wright, Angela Davis and Frantz Fanon. Early gestures of support for the Third International form part of the cultural history of the 1920s, while the rift between the French Surrealists is part of French literary history and German literature has the dramatist Bertolt Brecht, a ‘true minstrel of the GPU’ (Ruth Fischer). His agitprop play The Measures Taken (1930), with music by Hanns Eisler, is punctuated

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by exhortations from a choir named ‘The Control Chorus’. The reader looks in vain for some hint of irony; ‘The individual has only two eyes / The Party has a thousand eyes.’2 The memory of the great intellectual mobilization that took place in the name of anti-fascism also endures. This reached a peak after 1933 in several Western European countries, from Paris to Prague, with the exception of Nazi Germany. The strongest wave of support and intellectual solidarity with communism occurred in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, when Stalin’s prestige was at its height following the victory of the Red Army over the Third Reich. Just as the ‘Great Patriotic War’ was fuelling nationalist sentiment in Russia, ardent enthusiasm for internationalism arose elsewhere, reinforced by shared experiences of exile. Anna Seghers, Bertolt Brecht and Stefan Heym all chose to live in the Soviet occupation zone on their return to Germany. Although some endured accusations of opportunism (such as Mihail Sadoveanu in Romania and Jerzy Andrzejewski in Poland), the engagement with communism in the name of the future cannot be understood without reference to the past. This is especially true in the case of Tadeusz Borowski, an Auschwitz survivor and one of the first voices to emerge through concentration-camp stories. As he brought his literary contributions to one country – Poland – where old anti-Russian sentiments had been exacerbated by the trauma of the German–Soviet pact, the legitimation of a regime ‘that arrived in red Army vans’ was a particularly problematic enterprise. In The Captive Mind (1953), Czesław Miłosz presents an unsettling account of Borowski’s complex case. Between 1945 and 1949, Moscow established satellite states in Eastern Europe; decades later, many Western witnesses and participants revised their attitude to ‘the Passing of an Illusion’ (François Furet, 1996), in which they themselves had believed. They sought to understand why the post-war generation, their own, had been so susceptible to the siren-call of communism at a time when Stalinism was triumphing. Indeed, the communist movement reached a peak of popularity from 1945 to 1946, when its numbers were boosted by a huge influx of new members. The idea of communism had an incomparable allure during this period. The Party, like its affiliated trade unions, offered all its members ‘red threads’ (Marie-Claire Lavabre) in collective narratives, both major and minor, that structured society for decades. The partial swing away from communism to the extreme right (the National Front in France, the AfD in Germany, etc.) and the drop in voter turnout − the theme of Didier Eribon’s Retour à Reims (2009) – are due in large part to the disintegration of social frameworks. In 1945, the Parti communiste français (then France’s largest party) counted 800,000 members and won 28 per cent of the vote in the legislative elections held in November, while Italy’s PCI had 500,000 members. In those countries, active over-investment in a progressive ideology allowed a generation to drive away a ‘Past Imperfect’ (Tony Judt) of minor and major acts of cowardice carried out during the German occupation. This heroism cost little; Moscow was far away, the world revolution was not so imminent after all and local communist parties, although

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powerful, were comfortably excluded from Gaullist, social reformist or Christian democratic governments. West European Communist Parties dismissed the memory of the troubled years of the German–Soviet Pact (1939–41) and endowed themselves with the heroism of the Resistance; in France, for example, the PC proclaimed itself ‘the party of the 75,000 shot’. Everywhere, from Saint-Germain-des-Prés with its Existentialists to the Italy of Neo-realism, the post-war period is remembered as the golden age of solidarity with communism. Manichaean Cold War claims – ‘anyone against Communism is for Fascism’− also had a powerful influence, which was ably exploited by Communist Parties. Picasso is one such figure. He contributed to the great presentations orchestrated by the Soviet Union, bringing both his fame and his status as the symbol of a Republican Spain, free yet exiled. During the same period, Sartre personified the committed writer; his stance left him totally at odds with Camus, emphasizing the factors that created a gulf between him and his former fellow student Aron. The dictum ‘better to be wrong with Sartre than right with Aron’ remains the sign of a wilful blindness; this was also symbolized by the giant portrait of Stalin put up in front of the PCF headquarters on the Soviet leader’s death in 1953. French cities, especially communist municipalities, still display the signs of this fervour; examples include the Stalingrad metro station in Paris, the avenue Thorez and the boulevard Lénine in the ‘Red Belt’, as well as official buildings, such as the imposing town hall in Montreuil, with their universally recognizable style. The eyes of the most ardent believers opened very gradually. It was the aftermath of the Prague Spring in 1968 that brought Yves Montand and Simone Signoret to the turning point which led them to take part in L’Aveu (The Confession, 1970). The film, directed by Costa-Gavras, is based on the book by Artur London, the communist official who had survived the show trial also set up against Czech Communist Party secretary general Rudolf Slánský during the darkest days of Stalinism. Nevertheless, loyalty to the Marxist system and to the dream of revolution led several intellectuals, from the philosopher Louis Althusser to the British historian Eric Hobsbawm, to underplay the crimes perpetrated by the Warsaw Pact countries: ‘Whatever its weaknesses, [the USSR’s] very existence proved that socialism was more than a dream’,3 explained Hobsbawm. Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski, who wrote the superb Main Currents of Marxism (1976) and was expelled from the Polish Communist Party in 1966, presented his argument to the historian E. P. Thompson: Absolute equality can be set up only within a despotic system of rule which implies privileges, i.e. destroys equality; total freedom means anarchy and anarchy results in the domination of the physically strongest; i.e. total freedom turns into its opposite. [. . .] If I repeat these old truisms this is because they still seem to go unnoticed in utopian thinking; and this is why nothing in the world is easier than writing utopias. [. . .] I have not expected anything from attempts to mend, to renovate, to clean or to correct the communist idea. Alas, poor idea. I knew it, Edward. This skull will never smile again.4

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MEMORIES OF RUPTURE The image of the October Revolution, like that of the 14 July in France, was almost immediately clouded by the explosion of violence and the subsequent spiral of terror that had also occurred in France after the fall of the Ancien Régime. It was likewise clouded by the obvious contrast between the proclaimed objectives of equality and fraternity and the means used to achieve these. Established in the name of the emancipation of the workers and peasants, the dictatorship of the proletariat was a temporary state that had been directed to remain for an indefinite period. This was a price worth paying for the glory of the Revolution in the eyes of its most loyal believers, yet it was considered outrageously immoderate by early resisters and by those dissidents who had distanced themselves from their initial illusions as the century progressed. The myth of revolution divided public opinion from the outset, forcing workers’ movements to choose sides, at the cost of irreparable rifts. The scission between the keepers of ‘the old house’ of socialism (to borrow the words used by Léon Blum at the Tours Congress in 1920) and the self-proclaimed ‘frontline’ of the communist revolution manifested itself, through votes or bloodshed, at the Spartacist Uprising in the Weimar Republic in 1919, at the Tours Congress in France and in the Hungary of Béla Kun. Logically, it was in Russia that the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power and the establishment of war communism instantly generated counter-memories. These were conveyed beyond national borders by those in exile, notably the ‘White Russians’, who had settled in Paris, Munich and Berlin. The spectacle of the years of famine and violence, as well as the information filtering through regarding the criminal acts of the Cheka, led the regime’s opponents to record the first damning, on-the-spot witness accounts. As Alexander Berkman confided to his journal: ‘The Revolution is dead; its spirit cries in the wilderness.’ An anarchist of Russian origin, Berkman had returned to the Russia of the Bolsheviks from America, where he had settled following his difficulties with the Tsarist regime, only to leave almost immediately for a new place of exile.5 Many voices also arose outside Russia. One was that of the Italian writer Ignazio Silone, formerly part of the international communist movement, who witnessed Stalin’s stranglehold on the party and state system. In France, André Gide’s Retour de l’URSS (1936) marked a definitive break with the torch-bearers of Stalinism. The Moscow trials that took place between 1936 and 1938 were of enormous significance for the development of an anti-communist argument. The unprecedented levels of repression were accompanied by a deliberately theatrical presentation of the spectacle of dictatorship. The Stalinist regime knowingly exploited an image of terror. Hundreds and thousands of enemies of the new Soviet order, whether these were actual opponents or purely imaginary adversaries, were systematically condemned and executed, while millions of deportees swelled the population in the Gulag. The assassination of Leon Trotsky in Mexico in 1940 showed the world that the hand of Stalin reached into the farthest corners of the earth, and that none could escape it. The Great Purge marked a break between conformist Stalinist communism and Western intellectuals, prompting a quest for a new political identity. This took the

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form of anti-totalitarianism. ‘Today’, wrote José Ortega y Gasset in his preface to the French edition of The Revolt of the Masses (1937), ‘the right wing promises revolutions and the forces of the left offer tyranny’.6 It was also in 1937 that Polish-born Jewish writer Manès Sperber, then living in Paris, wrote Zur Analyse der Tyrannis. The work appeared a year later in Die Zukunft, a review published for anti-Nazi exiles edited by Willi Münzenberg, a German, and the Hungarianborn Arthur Koestler, soon to become a British citizen. Indeed, between 1938 and 1940, Koestler was working on his novel Darkness at Noon, the fictional story of the trial of a committed communist, Rubashov, who makes a forced confession. The aim behind the presentation of totalitarianism as a concept was not to focus specifically on the Hitler or Stalin regimes but to draw attention to their shared characteristics. The start of the Cold War witnessed the greatest proliferation of such works. The subject was popularized by the works of Hannah Arendt and by 1984, George Orwell’s futuristic novel, written in 1949. Orson Welles’s film adaptation (1962) of Franz Kafka’s The Trial is likewise pervaded by the idea of totalitarianism. The explosive effect of Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate (completed in 1962 and published in Switzerland in 1980) is due to the fact that the author, originally an official Soviet writer, chose the Battle of Stalingrad as the context in which to place the Hitler and Stalin regimes on the same level, although the concept of totalitarianism is clearly not present in his work. Between ‘dream and trauma’ (Karl Schlögel), the ‘Red Terror’ (Jörg Baberowski) remains a stumbling block. The decade between 1990 and 2000 witnessed the publication of more works on the Moscow show trials than on the 1917 Revolution. The purges returned in 1945. Now directed against the leaders of the countries that had fallen into Soviet hands through the advance of the Red Army (Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, the Baltic States, Poland, the GDR and Czechoslovakia), they served as a reminder that the regime headed by the ‘Little Father of the People’ was overwhelmingly repressive. While the East German defector Wolfgang Leonhard and a few others (including Belgian-born Victor Serge and Soviet defector Victor Kravchenko) were describing the Revolution’s ‘dismissal of its children’ (1955), and while Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales were being smuggled into the West during the 1960s, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), the Nobel Prize he received in 1970 and the publication of The Gulag Archipelago in Paris in 1973 were all landmark moments in the Soviet Union’s history of fracturation. In Eastern Europe a gulf, both actual and symbolic, was created between ‘them’ (the nomenklatura) and ‘us’ (the rest of the population), and between official history and counter-memories. Western awareness, meanwhile, was being raised by the coup carried out in Prague (1948), the crushing of the uprising in East Berlin on 17 June 1953 and later, in particular, by the invasions of Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968). West Germany’s Communist Party, the KPD, was banned in 1956. In the aftermath of the Prague Spring, the Communist Parties of Italy, Spain and France developed the theory of ‘Eurocommunism’, based on opposition to Soviet communism. At the same time, large numbers of left-wing anti-Stalinists (who were also opposed to the French Communist Party) established themselves in the 1970s. In 1980, Solidarność became the symbol of the definitive breach, far beyond Poland’s borders.

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The end of the Cold War naturally ushered in a period of assessment regarding communism and Stalinism. The choice of either of those terms was clearly not a signal of neutrality. This critical reappraisal took place in the context of a retrospective examination of the entire twentieth century, inevitably involving a comparison with fascism and Nazism. Through this context, too, the victim became the central figure in a new relationship with the past. The Black Book of Communism reflects these phenomena. A million copies of this collaborative work by academics, published on the eightieth anniversary of the 1917 Revolution, were sold throughout the world. In addition to its impressive collection of documentation, the Black Book’s scandal and success were due in large part to the comparison made by one of its authors, Stéphane Courtois, between the victim statistics resulting from twelve years of national socialism and those representing the eighty years of international communism.

BEYOND BLACK AND WHITE Throughout the 1990s, a process of ‘judicializing’ the communist past, coupled with the establishment of the appropriate institutions, took place in all the socalled former Eastern bloc countries, to varying degrees. In addition to the criminal conviction of certain leaders, this period began with agitated debates over the political exploitation of the investigations and the judicial system, and over the extent of each society’s involvement in the system of dictatorial oppression. These burning questions were presented in the form of a film, The Lives of Others (2006), directed by Henckel von Donnersmarck. In a similar vein, there was a growing tendency to re-examine the communist past at a deeper level, ignoring the typically Good and Evil, black-and-white picture painted of the Cold War era and focusing instead on all the nuances of everyday life and the human capacity for adaptation. This new perspective was in evidence following the ‘knee-jerk’ reaction of demolition, as with the GDR’s Palace of the Republic, when a more measured approach was adopted regarding socialist architecture, from Warsaw’s Palace of Culture to the House of the People in Bucharest, including the large complexes to be found in any former Eastern bloc city. Exploring the memories of daily emotions and of the little spaces of individual freedom that remained despite the social control exerted provides an essential key to our understanding. How else can we comprehend the loyalty to the communist ideal felt by former members of Comintern who had spent ten years in the Gulag, like the German Walter Ruge, ‘Prisoner no. 8403’, or the Franco-Polish Italian Jacques Rossi? How else can we understand the ‘Ostalgia’ of the 1990s, encapsulated in Wolfgang Becker’s film Goodbye Lenin ! (2003)? And how else can we understand the fact that Putin was able to describe the year 1991, which marked the dissolution of the USSR, as ‘the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century’? After the period of blanket condemnation, European memories of the Gulag are now open to a whole host of different experiences, and those directly involved speak for themselves. It was likewise by asking questions, not about socialism but about ‘love, jealousy, childhood, old age. Music, dances, hairdos. The myriad details

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of a vanished way of life’7 that Svetlana Alexievich composed her great, polyphonic requiem Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets (2013), winning the Nobel Prize two years later.

NOTES 1. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, translated from the French by Peggy Kamuf (New York and London: Routledge, 1994 [1993]), p.126. 2. Bertolt Brecht, ‘In Praise of the Party’, in The Measures Taken and Other Lehrstücke trans. Carl R. Mueller (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2001 [1930]). 3. Quoted by Tony Judt, Das vergessene 20. Jahrhundert: Die Rückkehr des politischen Intellektuellen (Munich: Carl Hanser, 2010), p. 129. 4. Leszek Kołakowski, ‘My Correct Views on Everything’, The Socialist Register, no. 11 (1974): 20. 5. Alexander Berkman, The Bolshevik Myth (Diary 1920-1922) (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1925). 6. Cf. Le Totalitarisme: Le XXe siècle en débat, texts selected and presented by Enzo Traverso (Paris: Le Seuil, 2001), p. 151. 7. Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, translated by Bela Shayevich (Melbourne: The Text Publishing Company, 2016 [2013]).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Anstett, Elisabeth and Luba Jurgenson (Eds.), Le Goulag en héritage. Pour une anthropologie de la trace, Paris, Éditions Petra, 2009. Applebaum, Anne, Gulag: A History, New York, Doubleday, 2003. Applebaum, Anne, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956, New York, Doubleday, 2012. Brown, Archie, The Rise and Fall of Communism, London, The Bodley Head, 2009. Dalos, György, Lebt wohl, Genossen! Der Untergang des sowjetischen Imperiums, Munich, C.H. Beck, 2001. Holzer, Jerzy, Komunizm w Europie. Dzieje ruchu i systemy władzy, Warsaw, Dom Wydawniczy Bellona, 2000. Judt, Tony, with Timothy Snyder, Thinking the Twentieth Century, New York, Penguin Books, 2013. Koenen, Gerd, Utopie der Säuberung. Was war der Kommunismus?, Berlin, Alexander Fest, 1998. Kolář, Pavel, Der Poststalinismus. Ideologie und Utopie einer Epoche, Cologne, Böhlau, 2016. Lavabre, Marie-Claire, Le Fil rouge. Sociologie de la mémoire communiste, Paris, Presses de la FNSP, 1994. Lazar, Marc, Maisons rouges. Les partis communistes français et italien de la Libération à nos jours, Paris, Aubier, 1992. Pipes, Richard, Communism: A History, New York, Modern Library, 2001.

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Sabrow, Martin (Ed.), Erinnerungsorte der DDR, Munich, C.H. Beck, 2009. Schlögel, Karl, Terror und Traum: Moskau 1937, Munich, Carl Hanser, 2008. Śpiewak, Paweł, Pamięć po komunizmie, Gdańsk, Słowo/Obraz Terytoria, 2005. Traverso, Enzo, Mélancolie de gauche. La force d’une tradition cachée (XIXe – XXIe siècle), Paris, La Découverte, 2016. Werth, Nicolas, La Russie en révolution, Paris, Gallimard, 1997. Yurchak, Alexei, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2005.

CHAPTER 14

From Torquemada to the Stasi The terror files JOHANN CHAPOUTOT

The Inquisition, with its extreme procedures carried out at the order of the church or state in the name of a dogmatic faith, has left a deep imprint on the European collective memory. It represents the dark, blood-soaked antithesis of modern freedom. This memory has spurred the democratization of political cultures and judicial procedures. It remains relevant during this time of widespread surveillance. The Inquisition is closely linked to the history of the Catholic Church, both European (Languedoc and Spain) and universal (the Americas). Yet we should ‘Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s’ by noting that it originated from temporal power and has been returning to its roots over the centuries, through processes of imitation and transference. In 1199, the newly elected Pope Innocent III published a decree declaring heresy a crime of high treason and giving bishops the power to begin investigations themselves, without the need for formal complaints or accusations by a third party. This procedure, whereby a case was investigated (inquirere) at the authorities’ initiative, is known as ‘inquisitorial’, as opposed to ‘accusatorial’. One originates from Roman law, a source of inspiration for Innocent III in his desire to make the pope the sovereign heir to the Caesars and the church the worthy heir to the Roman Empire. The other is more characteristic of Germanic Law, the basis of the common law developed in England. The Inquisition was inspired by Roman law and closely linked to conceptions of the state and of the sovereignty of the imperial jurists; it resulted from the process of transposing Roman categories of temporal power (plenitudo potestatis, the majesty of the state and the crime of high treason) to the religious matters governed by the papacy, which sought to be both a spiritual and a temporal power. In 1231, when episcopal tribunals were already in operation, Pope Gregory IX created the Inquisition, an institution central to papal authority. Mendicant friars (Dominicans and Franciscans) acted as inquisitors for the Congregation of the Holy Office, which pursued its harsh practices for the next

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600 years, until the nineteenth century in the case of Spain. In 1965, it became known as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which still exists today and oversees doctrinal and disciplinary matters in the church. The inquisitors used exceptional methods. The crime of high treason against God and the risk posed by heretics to the community of believers (Thomas Aquinas likened them to rotten apples in the midst of good fruit) authorized the imposition of absolute secrecy, disproportionate powers for the prosecution in comparison with the defendants, the use of torture and the worst punishments inflicted by temporal powers. The word ‘Inquisition’ evokes terrifying images of torment, of the arbitrary and the absurd and of the stark confrontation between a defenceless individual and an all-powerful institution. In turn, the dread aroused by that institution served as an inspiration to fledgling states during the late Middle Ages. These either sought the help of the Inquisition (as with the Spanish Catholic Monarchs in the late fifteenth century) or used it as a model to develop a legal system. In this way, the state acquired its majesty by following the example of the Church and borrowing the ways of Rome. The first example instantly evokes the image of Tomás de Torquemada, an irascible, ascetic Dominican friar; appointed First Grand Inquisitor of Spain in 1483, he tirelessly pursued Jews who had superficially converted to Catholicism. In the second case, the power of the state over the defendant was embodied by the investigating judge or, more broadly, by a formidable judicial institution.

INSTITUTIONS OF TERROR The Inquisition remains a forceful presence, both in Europe’s long cultural memory and in that of the worlds it conquered. From literature (Friedrich Schiller’s Don Carlos) to films (Jean-Jacques Annaud’s The Name of the Rose, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc and Youssef Chahine’s Destiny), it symbolizes the limitless power of the institution over an isolated and helpless individual. The latter is immersed in a realm of absurdity whose language and labyrinthine processes he can neither understand nor master, as described by Carlo Ginzburg in The Cheese and the Worms. The documentation recording the use of terror by church, and later by state institutions, has proved fruitful for historians, who use it not only for the reconstruction of their histories but as a means of examining the societies that were their victims and, sometimes, their accomplices. The encounter between terror and society is not univocal but dialectical in character; it also involves consent, opportunism and even compliance. This is borne out by the practices of collaboration and informing that are clearly revealed in studies of the apparatus of surveillance and repression used in a contemporary context. Indeed, the Inquisition has inspired all those who have created and managed state institutions designed to instil dread. In this way, the methods it used, its contempt for the defendant and its determination to destroy what he represents, reappear as part of the mechanism of terror used by European states during the twentieth century. They were applied by the Gestapo and the SD, on the one hand, the Cheka, the GPU and the NKVD, on the other, and subsequently by other secret police agencies such as the Securitate in Romania, the Stasi in East Germany and the PIDE

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during the Salazar regime. All acted on their own initiative as a general rule and dispensed with judicial control. As these examples clearly demonstrate, although the Inquisition is returning to its origins, which are those of temporal power, it is a temporal power conjoined with faith. The terror-inducing, violent procedures of contemporary inquisitions, the dread aroused by the arrival of a black car early one morning, by the extortion of confessions and excessive prison sentences all gain meaning in a political context shaped by a powerful − albeit secular − faith. This single truth is unchallengeable and absolute: the salvation of Germany through political biology and war (Nazism) and the emancipation of the proletariat through the activity of the state (communism). It even applies to the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution, presented as the dawn of a new future created through the destruction of the Ancien Régime. Due to the unquestionable nature of those dogmas, the state was required to be active and all-powerful; any means were permissible in order to ensure the salvation and safety of the people – even despite themselves. Indeed, this was one of the main credos of the Inquisition; its members knew what was good or bad in the eyes of God, and this must be imposed on all who had gone astray. In the context of a liberal, democratic political culture, characterized by open debate and opposition, by multiple voices and options, the continued survival of institutions inspired by the Inquisition arouses incomprehension and hostility. Within this culture, the works of Franz Kafka and George Orwell and films such as Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others, Andrzej Wajda’s Danton and Wolfgang Staudte’s Murderers Among Us have acquired an iconic status. From Victor Hugo’s Torquemada to the Grand Inquisitor in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and Roland Freisler in Michael Verhoeven’s The White Rose, and including Antoine-Quentin Fouquier-Tinville, Nikolai Yezhov and Lavrentiy Beria, the character of the inquisitor is eminently repulsive, an object of psychiatric interest and profound hatred. This is borne out by the debates that still rage in France over Maximilien Robespierre. For some, he is a figure of heroic virtue, for others, an inhuman dictator and a secular version of a Dominican inquisitor. From this democratic, liberal perspective, examples of resistance to inquisitorial oppression translate into progress towards the Enlightenment and liberty in the collective memory. Now, in the shadow cast by Nazism, the history of the Marranos, Jews who converted to Christianity for their own survival yet secretly practised their faith in their homes, has been rediscovered and re-examined; the resistance of the Amerindian peoples persecuted by the Congregation of the Holy Office prefigures the continent’s political emancipation in the nineteenth century, when it freed itself of European colonial control. The suffering endured by ‘witches’ heralds the fight for gender equality and women’s liberation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Due to the memory of the brutality experienced during the Catholic Counter-Reformation by the old cults that were still followed in Europe in the Early Modern Period, traditional conceptions of nature and the body, as well as traditional medicine, are now acclaimed. According to Catholic thinking, such practices were to be eliminated, a belief later upheld by the manufacturing and chemical industries of a capitalist system.

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In European culture, as well as in the United States, which was founded on the rejection of religious oppression, the Inquisition is clearly the sombre, blood-soaked antithesis of an emancipatory, modern perspective. It was violent, as opposed to respectful of the individual, secretive and arbitrary as opposed to respectful of rights; it stood for censorship and blacklisting as opposed to freedom to read and to think, and for terror as opposed to a state of felicity. The Inquisition left long blood-stained traces in Europe, together with the memory of an extensive period of terror. These effects fuelled the process of liberalization that not only changed political cultures, but also judicial procedures. In France, in 1897, the Third Republic abolished the Ancien Régime’s system of investigative hearings, which had clearly been inspired by the practices of the Inquisition, allowing defendants access to investigative files. These had hitherto been seen only by the examining magistrate. Today, in addition to social networks, we have a plethora of new information and communication technologies. There are also infinite possibilities for surveillance and for storing the data provided by that same technology in the back rooms of the state or private individuals. In this social context, the inquisitor has taken the form of the information agency and its ‘big data’, whose powers are challenged by free software, encryption and alert systems. Even in the context of the ‘war against terror’, which has achieved general consensus, protests against emergency or exceptional measures remain vigorous. During this time of universal surveillance, the notion of an omniscient, secularized inquisition may no longer be illusory. Nevertheless, it is still far from being an omnipotent force.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Chapoutot, Johann, La Loi du sang. Penser et agir en nazi, Paris, Gallimard, 2014. Gieseke, Jens, Die Stasi, 1945–1990, Munich, Pantheon, 2011. Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel, Montaillou, village occitan, de 1294 à 1324, Paris, Gallimard, 1975. Werth, Nicolas, La Terreur et le Désarroi. Staline et son système, Paris, Perrin, coll. ‘Tempus’, 2007. Werth, Nicolas, L’Ivrogne et la Marchande de fleurs. Autopsie d’un meurtre de masse, 1937–1938, Paris, Le Seuil, coll. ‘Points’, 2009.

CHAPTER 15

The dissident Living in the truth MIKE PLITT

Figures of opposition to state communism in the Eastern bloc countries and the Soviet Union, dissidents played their part in lifting the veil on the ‘communist illusion’ in the West and in bringing about the fall of the Berlin Wall. ‘Dilexit veritatem’ is the epitaph of the historian and French resistance fighter Marc Bloch. His ‘love of the truth’ was also shared by Winston Smith, the protagonist in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 (1949). Smith takes a stand against ‘Big Brother’ and his ‘Thought Police’, so that he can present a truthful picture of the past. A similar struggle occurred after 1945, in the Eastern European countries placed under Soviet influence. Political opponents, artists, writers and scientists defended their positions against Communist Party elites, who claimed exclusive rights over the definition of truth and falsehood. In order to designate those who opposed the communists’ monopoly on power, Western intellectuals revisited the concept of the dissident. Previously used to denote the radical English seventeenth-century Protestants who refused to submit to the Anglican Church, the term therefore acquired a new meaning.

SEEKERS OF TRUTH Dissident activities began to be apparent in the 1950s. One of the first of these occurred within the communist leadership itself. During the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU in 1956, Nikita Khrushchev publicly criticized the crimes of the Stalin regime, thereby introducing the period known as the ‘thaw’ in Eastern and Central European countries. As the head of the communist family – or families – he could allow himself this iconoclastic act. It was otherwise with the Yugoslavian Communist Party ideologue Milovan Djilas, a prototypical dissident. He had experienced his personal baptism of fire in that role in 1948, when he had been sent to inform the Kremlin that Yugoslavia was dissociating itself from the Soviet bloc. Djilas broke with his former comrade, Josip Tito, after publishing a large number of texts criticizing the system and denouncing the nepotism and corruption in communist

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Yugoslavia. His analysis of the problem, which he explored in detail in The New Class1 (1957), led to his expulsion from the ranks of the political elites and long years of incarceration. As a general rule, dissidents like Djilas were devoted followers of communist ideas, which explains their somewhat critical attitude to the concept of dissidence. In their opinion, it was those around them who had deviated from the true path. As a result of their experiences under Real socialism, they strove to correct the obvious flaws in the system, prompting accusations of counter-revolutionary activity. Alexander Dubček’s experience was particularly painful; the first secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, this communist reformer championed ‘socialism with a human face’, maintaining that the party had an obligation to be self-critical. The Prague Spring of 1968 prompted the country’s invasion by Warsaw Pact forces, signalling the death of his project. Dubček was subsequently expelled from the Communist Party and relegated to a position in the Forestry Service.

ECHOES IN THE WEST The fate of East European dissidents was also followed with great attention in Western Europe, especially in left-wing circles, although opinions there were divided. While some regarded the dissidents as courageous fighters, others saw their suffering as a sacrifice necessary for the success of the Marxist revolution. For instance, Rudi Dutschke, the leader of the 1967–8 student uprising in West Berlin, certainly hailed the attempts at reform led by Dubček, but distanced himself from all dissidents who sought to operate outside the system itself. Nevertheless, some showed solidarity with the dissidents. In 1969, when Daniel Cohn-Bendit appeared before a West German court charged with a breach of public order and was asked to confirm his identity, his reply was: ‘Kuroń-Modzelewski’. The Polish historians Jacek Kuroń and Karol Modzelewski had received prison sentences and their activities had been curtailed following their Open Letter to the Party,2 in which they criticized the regime. By his action, Cohn-Bendit turned the left wing of both Eastern and Western Europe into a realm of memory – albeit a modest one. In addition to such expressions of solidarity, the West also played a significant role by providing a forum for dissidents to express themselves, as seen in Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Oscar-winning film The Lives of Others (2007). The protagonist, Georg Dreyman, a playwright who has hitherto toed the party line, decides to write an article on the rise in suicide rates in the GDR for the West German current affairs magazine Der Spiegel. Many dissidents did indeed choose to take the (dangerous) path of expressing their views in the Western media. Their work was published not only in the opinion-based press, but also in reviews devoted to their cause (such as L’Alternative, founded in Paris in 1979 by François Maspero). The publication of literature that was banned in the Eastern bloc likewise had an enormous impact – this was especially true of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, first published in Paris in 1973. In this monumental work, the Soviet dissident gave a hard-hitting description of the Stalinist regime’s internment camps,

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prompting left-wing French intellectuals, in particular, to embark on a critical reappraisal of their communist ‘illusion’ (François Furet). Politicians, particularly in Bonn and Paris, were not always so enthusiastic, fearing that Moscow would take umbrage at these provocations and send its tanks into the Eastern bloc. The strong pressure exerted on dissidents by those in power often took the form of ultimatums. As explained by Adam Michnik, the choice was either freedom through emigration or prison in their native land.3 This was a decision that the author and composer Wolf Biermann did not have to make after his criticism of East Germany’s ruling Communist Party, the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED). In 1965, following a so-called ‘Tabula Rasa’ plenum, he was banned from making public appearances and from publishing his work in any part of the GDR. He was stripped of his citizenship in 1976, while on a concert tour of West Germany. The dictatorship had a profound effect on him, as was evident at the commemorations held by the German Parliament in 2014 to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. During his performance, he took advantage of his opportunity to speak by describing the Die Linke Party (the successor to the PDS, which in turn had succeeded the SED) as ‘vermin’.

THE POWER OF THE POWERLESS The Helsinki Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe was a key event for dissidents. The human rights resolutions adopted there stimulated the ‘Re-Birth of Civil Society’ (Jacques Rupnik) in Central and Eastern Europe. This category also included the human rights petition Charter 77, created by dissidents such as Jiří Hájek and Václav Havel in response to the arrest of The Plastic People of the Universe, Czechoslovakia’s most iconic counter-culture rock band. Havel, a playwright whose work was banned by the regime, was forced to take a menial job in the brewing industry, among others. He wrote key works such as The Power of the Powerless (1978), in which he expressed his support for life lived ‘in the truth’. This text, which was also read in dissident circles outside Czechoslovakia, was the result of the secret meeting between Polish and Czechoslovakian dissidents on a walking path in the Giant Mountains officially named the ‘Friendship Route’. The dissidents also acted as intellectual strategists for the opposition. Both the Polish historian Adam Michnik in A New Evolutionism (1976) and the Hungarian writer György Konrád in Antipolitics (1984) set out guiding principles enabling the opposition to concentrate its efforts on establishing unofficial structures and autonomous social organizations rather than on seizing power. The dissidents likewise conducted major initiatives as historical revisionists. They restored truthful versions of events that had been falsified by party ideologues and broke taboos surrounding undesirable episodes in their national history. Events such as the Katyń Massacre and the self-immolation of Czech student Jan Palach were dealt with in this way, through secret seminars or in underground publications. The impact achieved by these ‘powerless’ individuals over time may be gauged by examining, among others, the life of the scientist Andrei Sakharov, another emblematic figure of Soviet dissidence. In the 1960s, this co-inventor of the

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hydrogen bomb publicly declared his support for nuclear disarmament and respect for human rights. Especially critical of the standard Soviet practice of incarcerating opponents of the regime in psychiatric hospitals, he was exiled to the city then known as Gorky4 in 1980. The lifting of his sentence in 1986 came as a surprise, and was interpreted by many as a sign heralding the era of Glasnost and Perestroika. The European Union’s human rights award, presented at the European Parliament in Strasbourg every year since 1988, bears his name.

THE LEGACY OF DISSIDENCE Given the obviously superior force of the adversary, the dissidents’ commitment to personal freedom of expression and opposition to censorship bring to mind Don Quixote tilting at windmills. However, it was precisely that combination of decency, persistence and the ability to withstand suffering (together with the policy of détente and the flaws inherent in the Eastern bloc systems) that enabled them to play their part in gradually opening the Iron Curtain, paving the way for the peaceful revolutions of 1989. Regarded as moral authorities, some went on to hold important political positions, where they confronted the challenges of young democracies. Rather than facing just one adversary, they now had to steer their countries through the shift to a market economy and to manage methods of dealing with communist crimes. In this way, the positive image some dissidents had enjoyed in their native land became tarnished, as with union leader and future head of state Lech Wałęsa. In Wałęsa’s case, this came about through the ‘Bolek affair’, which saw him accused by the Institute of National Remembrance of having been a communist agent. The Law and Justice Party (PiS) now in power in Poland is likewise attempting to play down his role, and omitted his name on the occasion of an exhibition held in Berlin in 2016 to celebrate Polish–German relations. The tribute paid by Wałęsa’s friend, the film director Andrzej Wajda, in his biopic Wałęsa, changed nothing. Despite all the political controversies he aroused, Wałęsa is still seen outside his native land as the guiding light of a unified Europe. This was clear at the ceremonies held in 2009 to mark the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. During a symbolic celebration in front of the Brandenburg Gate, it was the guest of honour, Wałęsa, who knocked down the first in a set of giant dominos – an allegory of Poland’s contribution to the victory over communism and the reunification of Germany. Dissidents could have become obsolete with the fall of the Iron Curtain. And yet Chinese artist Ai Weiwei and American whistle-blower Edward Snowden might well be seen as new, international versions of this figure.

NOTES 1. Milovan Djilas, The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1957). 2. Published in Britain by Pluto Press, 1969.

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3. Elżbieta Matynia, An Uncanny Era: Conversations between Václav Havel and Adam Michnik (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), p. 100. 4. The name by which Nizhny Novgorod was known between 1932 and 1991.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bahro, Rudolf, L’Alternative, Paris, Stock, 1977. Djilas, Milovan, The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System, New York, Frederick A. Praeger, 1957. Falk, Barbara, Dilemmas of Dissidence in East-Central Europe, Budapest, Central European University Press, 2003. Havel, Václav et al., The Power of the Powerless: Citizens against the State in CentralEastern Europe, edited by John Keane, London, Hutchinson, 1985. Havemann, Robert, Fragen, Antworten, Fragen. Aus der Biographie eines deutschen Marxisten, Berlin, Aufbau, 1990. Konrád, György, Antipolitics, London, Quartet, 1984. Mählert, Ulrich et al., Wechselwirkungen Ost-West: Dissidenz, Opposition und Zivilgesellschaft 1975-1989, Cologne, Böhlau, 2007. Matynia, Elżbieta, An Uncanny Era: Conversations between Václav Havel and Adam Michnik, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2014. Michnik, Adam, Letters from Prison and Other Essays, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1985. Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, The Gulag Archipelago, translated from the Russian by Thomas P. Whitney, New York, Harper & Row, 1974−78 [1973].

CHAPTER 16

The Kosovo Myth TODOR KULJIĆ

In 1389, the armies of the Ottoman Empire defeated the Serbs at Kosovo Polije – the ‘Field of Blackbirds’. This gained mythical status as a site of the resistance shown by the Serbian nobility, but also, more broadly, of Christian resistance to Islam. The myth is regularly reactivated to serve nationalist discourse, whatever its origins. Independent since 2008, Kosovo has not been recognized by Serbia. In the Serbian calendar of holidays, Vidovdan (28 June in the Gregorian calendar) is an important religious and national holiday because it cherishes and celebrates the memory of the battle of Kosovo polje (Kosovo Field). Vidovdan (St Vitus’s Day) commemorates the battle which took place in 1389, when the Serbian army fought against the Turkish army at the Kosovo Field in the south of Serbia. The Serbian Orthodox Church has always highlighted Kosovo not only as the Serbian Golgotha but also as the Serbian resurrection. In 2001, this date was re-established as a state holiday in Serbia, where it had been celebrated in the period from 1913 until the end of the Second World War. In the 1960s, Kosovo was already regarded as a major political problem facing Serbia because of the rise of Albanian nationalism and secessionism, and at the end of the 1980s this problem resurfaced with Slobodan Milošević’s attempt to change the position of Serbia in Yugoslavia by using the Kosovo issue. Kosovo, as a site of memory, has been used ever since for the renewal of Serbian and Orthodox narratives in order to defend the Serbian state and the Serbian Orthodox Church. It was on Vidovdan in 2001 that the former Serbian president Slobodan Milošević was extradited to The Hague Tribunal. In 2008 Kosovo became an independent country which Serbia does not recognize. Before an attempt to explain the role of this ever-emotive Serbian lieu de mémoire, its main details should be given.

1. The Serbs were defeated by the Turks in the battle of Kosovo in June 1389, although the Turkish Sultan Murad was killed in the fighting. It is also undisputable that the bells of one Cathedral in Paris rang in erroneous celebration of the victory of the Serbian army in the battle of Kosovo and that part of Europe joyously welcomed the news about the battle of Kosovo, where the further expansion of the Ottoman Empire met with resistance.

Soon after the battle of Kosovo Medieval Serbia succumbed to Turkish rule and Kosovo became a symbol of the fall of the Serbian state and synonymous with martyrdom. The Serbian Orthodox Church Christianized Kosovo, stating that the

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Serbs chose spiritual salvation and the heavenly kingdom over military victory. Even today, the Church asserts that the entire matter of Kosovo, particularly as seen in folk poems and songs, is in fact an autonomous Serbian experience of Christianity. The historical figure Vuk Branković (1345–97) became the embodiment of a traitor, the Serbian Judas, while Prince Lazar became a follower of Jesus Christ, who was martyred for the liberation of his people. This was a myth. In addition, the Prince’s supper, praised in folk songs and poems, where Lazar and his dukes gathered for the last time on the eve of the great battle, became a symbol of the Last Supper, which Jesus had with his apostles before he died. Apart from its religious function, the Kosovo myth also had a wider social and integrative function. In epic poems, the myth was cherished as part of the idea of indestructible Serbian statehood and as part of Serbian national identity. As a heroic and normative remembrance the myth was a barrier to the Islamization of the Serbs. The motive of conscious voluntary sacrifice in the Battle of Kosovo and the conscious choice of the heavenly kingdom was created by the Serbian Orthodox Church in an attempt to associate the Kosovo myth with the myth of the sacrificed Christ. In addition to this motive, others can be recognized in the myth: revenge, heroism, martyrdom, betrayal and resurrection. The warning of betrayal gives the myth the structure of a covenant; it curses, forewarns and homogenizes the Serbs. The memory of Kosovo is a criterion for establishing national identity. The Kosovo myth serves as a spiritual bridge connecting the gaps in the continuity of Serbian nationhood and statehood. What is more, cherishing Kosovo as a place of remembrance guarantees resurrection, reincarnation after death. Similar leitmotifs of knightly heroism could be found in Europe by the end of the Middle Ages. The theme of the triumph of a hero after death also appears in Islam. This may well be connected with European imperatives regarding remembrance that emerged from the Indo-European tradition. More or less sophisticated epics serving as expressions of ideology for warrior societies appeared even earlier in ancient Greece (The Iliad) and in the Germanic lands (The Nibelungenlied). In terms of social classes, the epic is the Christianized ideology of the knightly class. However, it is also an ideological stereotype. Obviously, Kosovo as a place of remembrance is not a simple geographical designation but a complex pattern and a symbol of the preservation of Serbhood which can be accentuated in various ways. The ethics of Vidovdan and Kosovo impose patterns of desirable patriotic behaviour, while the opposite behaviour is condemned as a betrayal. ‘Of all betrayals, the worst is that of Kosovo,’ wrote the Montenegrin poet-ruler Petar Petrović Njegoš (1813–51). From the social standpoint, Kosovo is a supra-temporal Serbian heroic symbol used for the mobilization of the Serbs in 1804 and 1815 (the Serbian Uprisings against the Turks), in 1912 (the persecution of the Turks from the Balkans), in 1988 (the resistance to Albanian separatism) and in 1999 (the failed defence of the Kosovo region against the NATO alliance). It is a flexible formula used for different purposes. It is not a passive but a proactive formula of pride and struggle, a lofty sense of history and a measure of Serbian patriotism. But Kosovo is also a projective concept as everybody interprets it in their own manner: sometimes it represents a territory, sometimes monasteries and a stronghold of SaintSavaism and sometimes a heroic identity and the glorious past.

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In a narrower thanatopolitical sense, the use of the word ‘Kosovo’ shows not only how death framed in a myth can unite a nation but also how death should unite a nation in reality. Only a heroic death in Kosovo leads to resurrection, and resurrection is an orthodox Christian symbol of integration, renewal and the continuity of the group. Hence, the Kosovo Cycle was a poetic form of thanatopolitics cultivated by the Serbian itinerant epic singers – the guslars. It arose as part of the knightly culture of the Serbian Medieval aristocracy and as a glorious, heroic and perceived, but not excogitated, past. The Kosovo covenant, conceived in the nineteenth century, shows how the non-mortal character of the Serbian nation is accentuated and which values frame it (the Holy Cross, Orthodoxy and Saint-Savaism, but also earthly patriotism). The epic is a culture of the memory of death rhetorically arranged in a specific way, equally noticeable in Homer’s poems and in the Kosovo myth. The theme here revolves around death, victimhood and treachery, while an instrument known as a gusle provides the musical accompaniment. What lies beyond (salvation after death) is an important symbolic capital in every heroic epic. However, while seeking harmony and unity the heroic epic also conceals authoritarianism. The Kosovo epic is a central element of Serbian liberation culture in which admiration of a hero implies obedience to him. In subordination to the head of state (to Prince Lazar or to Slobodan Milošević), a particular identity based on resistance to the conqueror is established and easily assumes the form of a myth and becomes militarized. A difference should be made between the use of the Kosovo myth in terms of liberation and conquest. The vision of the enemy in the Kosovo myth has changed over time. The Arabs were the first, then the Turks, the poturice (a pejorative term referring to converts from Christianity to Islam), infidels, the dahijas (renegade Janissary officers) and finally the Arnauts (Albanians). In a historical sense, the Kosovo myth forms part of the culture of remembrance of the Serbian nation, which did not acquire independent statehood until 1878, after most European nations had done so. The rulers of Montenegro, which also acquired its independence in 1878, likewise used Kosovo for ideological purposes for a long period. When the Turks were defeated in 1913, the Serbian King Petar I Karađorđević (1844–1921) acquired his title as the liberator of Kosovo. Thereafter, Kosovo was used in the fight against Austro-Hungary and then to integrate the Yugoslavian monarchy. The communists did not use it, but Milošević revived it in the mid-1980s, and after him the Bosnian Serbs did likewise in the 1990s. In 1804, 1815 and 1914, the Kosovo myth served a political purpose – ‘The Balkans to the peoples of the Balkans’ – but it also served to support the Serbian invasions (1912–13) and, finally, to reinforce Serbian hegemony in Yugoslavia by the late 1980s. After the abolition of the provincial autonomies in Serbia, Slobodan Milošević tried to organize meetings of solidarity with the Serbs and Montenegrins in Kosovo throughout Yugoslavia. The question of the social conditions requiring the acquisition of the Kosovo myth and its ethics is a sociological one. Which public enemy did most to mobilize this myth? It seems that, as foreigners, the Turks and the Albanians were the main examples of anti-identity with regard to Kosovo. Kosovo as a heroic symbol and a realm of memory endures. This myth persists although often deprived of its original

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meaning. The Kosovo habitus has lent itself easily to new actors (from Medieval Serbian knights, nineteenth-century insurgents, the unitary Yugoslavianism of King Aleksandar Karađorđević (1888–1934), the Serbian heroic outlaws and Chetniks from the twentieth century, to Slobodan Milošević). Its entangled political and religious aspects, in particular, make the Kosovo myth usable in various epochs and easy to emotionalize. Kosovo as a realm of memory may be used in different contexts, secular and religious, as an integrative symbol, and may be adjusted to different ideologies. The Kosovo martyrdom (as a suitable rhetorically and artistically polished form) is not only a striking metaphor which continues to emerge in Serbian crises as a thin red line (the metaphorical meaning of the barrier which the relatively limited armed forces of a country present to potential attackers), but is also a more common Christian formula of Passion, and of Resurrection too. As for its power to mobilize, the Kosovo myth forms a perfect political and poetic version of the saying ‘All things come to he who waits’. Finally, the befitting metaphor of Kosovo serves as a mechanism to reduce the complexity of Serbian martyrdom and to master the chaotic vastness of Serbia’s past, and is therefore a clear criterion for making a distinction between patriotism and betrayal. ‘Tell me how to cut the Gordion knot in Kosovo and I will tell you if you are a patriot.’ One’s attitude to the Kosovo issue is an indicator of patriotism or betrayal. This metaphoric pattern is understood by all, be they ignorant or educated, illiterate or literate. Kosovo is an emotional core of Serbian identity and a pragmatic instrument used to find one’s path at a stormy and indistinct historical crossroads. Kosovo mobilizes the nation and its faith through the recollection of the incomparable martyrdom of 1389, and of resurgence after the defeat. It marks an unusual form of remembrance in Serbian history because it is proactive, as the motive of revenge lies at the heart of its politicization. Revenge in relation to Kosovo is not construed as inherent, but as reactive violence. Indeed, this was the case with the Serbian uprisings against the Turks and with Kosovo itself while it served political purposes, underpinning the concept of the principle ‘The Balkans for the Balkan peoples’. As usual, the idea of a crusade as a motivating force is also perceptible in reactive violence – revenge that guarantees the resurrection and peace of the martyr’s soul. The Kosovo covenant (‘Whoever does not fight at Kosovo, may nothing grow that his hand sows’) played an enduring and important role in Serbian liberation struggles, as an irreplaceable symbolic asset that other nations did not possess. It was a covenant that urged the Serbs to strive to do their utmost, marking a wound that never heals and remains a searing imprint on the national memory, urging revenge.

2. Extending well beyond Romantic laments and the covenant of Saint Sava, the Kosovo myth gradually became part of historical consciousness, forming a core of historical memory surrounded by ‘less important’ preceding and subsequent events. In the nineteenth century, the epic, rhetoricized in this way to become an intangible cultural heritage, was transformed into a distinct idealistic cause that was easy to use politically in order to serve the purpose of creating a modern Serbian state. Few final touches were required.

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In the era of national romanticism, the Kosovo legend homogenized the Serbs in the political and cultural sense. Since the end of the nineteenth century, it has become an important part of broader politics as the myth was also accepted by the Croats and Slovenes as a foundation of the belief in a common Yugoslavian origin, tradition and culture. Independent Serbia appeared as the Piedmont of the South Slav world. Ivan Meštrović (1883– 1962), a Croatian sculptor, created monumental sculptures of Kosovo’s heroes in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Kosovo assumed an anti-Islamic, as well as an anti-Albanian aspect in the early twentieth century. The thin red line between liberation and conquest slowly faded away as is usually the case in wars. A similar process is now taking place in Albania. Victims turn into executioners. Today, this applies not only to Serbs, but also to Albanians, who consider the persecution of the Serbs as vital to the liberation of Kosovo, where the Albanians arrived first, as Illyrians, and where they are also in the majority nowadays. There may be a long war of remembrance between two Kosovo myths, the Serbian and Albanian, each of which presents a hindrance to multiculturalism.

3. In June 1989, during his speech delivered at the Gazimestan memorial to the heroes of Kosovo, Slobodan Milošević declared: ‘Now, six centuries later, we are once more engaged in battles and confronting them. They are not armed battles, although such things cannot be excluded yet’. This marked the start of a new phase in Serbia’s use of Kosovo.

Many see Milošević’s pronouncements in Kosovo in 1989 as the first shot fired in the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. Others argue that the speech was misinterpreted so that Milošević could become a negative figure and an object of hatred; this enabled NATO’s intervention against Yugoslavia in 1999 to be presented as a just war. At all events, stereotypical Western ideas of the Serbs (in movies and in various speeches by Western politicians) were reinforced through Milošević’s speech in Kosovo. The genuinely explosive character of Milošević’s politics actually lay in the fact that he was the first to break with the communist strategy (the basis of Tito’s Yugoslavia) and to call for each nation to focus on nationalism within its own federated state. Although he advocated the continuation of Yugoslavia, by mobilizing the Serbs in Kosovo Milošević effectively provided an excuse for other nations’ claims to sovereignty and independence separatism and nationalism. From this perspective, by using Kosovo, he activated the nationalism of the largest nation in Yugoslavia – the Serbs. It seems difficult to claim decisively that Milošević had already planned the war at that time. The focus was more on checking Albanian separatism and inviting the Serbs to unite. For him, as a communist, the rhetoric of Kosovo proved useful. Zdravko Šotra’s film The Battle of Kosovo (1989) should have served the same purpose. Milošević’s speech at Gazimestan was compared with the assassination at Sarajevo in 1914, the two events being presented as decisive factors in the ensuing

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wars. From this perspective, Kosovo is regarded as an explosive lieu de mémoire, and Milošević as a key detonator of that explosion. But is this really so? Although no trace of chauvinism could be found in Milošević’s speeches on Kosovo, the huge gatherings of Serbs in 1989 marked a break with the communist critique of Serbian nationalism. It was an attempt to consolidate federation, reduce the jurisdiction of the provinces in Serbia and ensure the hegemony of the Serbs as the largest and most dispersed nation in Yugoslavia. As a realm of memory, Kosovo was an instrument that also served to strengthen Milošević’s rule after the fall of the Berlin Wall. His use of Kosovo, therefore, probably served him for a long period, enabling him to offer a new image of the ‘aggressive communist leader’ to Western public opinion, which he otherwise defied. Milošević may have replaced the bygone image of the Soviet enemy in the early 1990s. This position was partially abandoned after the Dayton Peace Agreement was reached in Bosnia in 1995, when Bill Clinton told Milošević that he had made the Accord possible. This marked a break in the demonization of the Serbian leader. The new Albanian uprising in Kosovo, a violent clash between the Serb authorities and the Albanians, the Western belief that Kosovo could become an important NATO military base and the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, all reactivated the Kosovo issue and its symbolic dimension. The Serbian state almost completely withdrew from Kosovo in 1999, Milošević was arrested in 2001 and died in the Hague in 2006. Kosovo declared independence in 2008. Many countries recognized its independence, but this was not the case in Serbia, where the subject of Kosovo still has important symbolic value, although its potential is considerably weaker. Kosovo’s place as a symbolic entity in Serbian politics, whether stronger or weaker, is likely to endure. Its importance as a realm of memory depends not only on local actors, but also on the stability of the Balkans and the policies of the great powers.

4. The use of Kosovo as a place of remembrance seems historically determined. While the Kosovo myth represents a matrix of memory culture in the Balkans, it has been used in various situations, so its effect has depended on the historical context. Initially, obedience to the Turkish authorities was deemed opportune, but this stance was followed by resistance and the persecution of the Turks. Under Tito, the official policy of brotherhood and unity required Serbs and Albanians to live in mutual cooperation, but the Serbs later opposed Albanian separatism in Kosovo. Today, European legislation protects the Serbs and Serbian cultural heritage within an internationally recognized Kosovo. The aforementioned different situations are diametrically opposed to contexts which imposed or limited the strength of Kosovo as a place of remembrance. On the other hand, the Kosovo myth itself was a context, that is, an activated normative component of Serbian identity which fostered liberation and the avenging of Kosovo. That is the reason why Kosovo has been an explosive realm of memory.

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Of course, this realm of memory has not aroused the same degree of emotion in all Serbian people. It mainly inspired those who benefitted from using Kosovo. In 1804, this meant the Serbian poor (the raja), who formed the basis of the uprising against the Turks that marked the start of South Slavic resistance to the Ottoman Empire. In the early twentieth century, Kosovo was a place of interest to Croats and Slovenes mobilized by the idea of Yugoslavia, as it was seen as symbolizing Serbia as Piedmont and pan-Slavic liberation. In 1989, leading Serbian communist politicians were interested in acquiring Kosovo. It therefore appears that the context in which Kosovo has been used has been alternately wide and narrow: nationalistic and supranationalistic, Serbian and Yugoslavian, regional and national. As a realm of memory, Kosovo has not always had the same share of attention. Therefore, while participating in meetings with the Serbs and Montenegrins in Kosovo was a desirable sign of patriotism from 1988 to 1989, in 2015, the dialogue between Belgrade and Pristina was part of the solution to the Kosovo issue as prescribed by the EU. However, some do not comprehend this change in the framework of remembrance, so individuals are faced with a conflict between the norms required in various epochs. From the perspective of different generations, attitudes towards Kosovo in Serbia vary according to age group, and this partly coincides with different political generations. The difference between extreme nationalists from 1989 and ‘lean’ patriots from 2015 is conspicuous. From the sociological point of view, historically different situations have unified the Serbs around the remembrance of Kosovo and the Kosovo covenant to different extents. In some cases, memories and emotions focused on the defence of Kosovo have been rekindled, while in others they have faded away. Certain groups and individuals have continued to keep the ‘Kosovo fire’ burning, while some have only come together around this realm of memory in certain contexts, and others have been immune to those emotions. This applies to institutions as well. The Serbian Orthodox Church has been active in protecting the Serbian monasteries in Kosovo, the Serbian state and the Serbian Academy of Sciences have done so on occasion, while Serbs threatened as a national group have been more worried than those who are safe as a nation. Kosovo has always been ‘the most precious Serbian word’ and the essence of identity for Serbian intellectuals inspired by Orthodoxy; for political pragmatists, it has served as temporary, usable symbolic capital and for citizens who are not nationalistic, the word ‘Kosovo’ simply activates empathy for the Serbian inhabitants of this region. As aforesaid, Kosovo is a projective concept; everybody associates it with whatever they please – with political territory, with monasteries and the defence of Serbian Orthodoxy, with national identity born of resistance, with a glorious past, etc. The different significance, various contexts and usability of Kosovo as a realm of memory in Serbia should always be borne in mind so that the context of the culture of memory is seen as dynamic, rather than static.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Bakić, Jovo, Jugoslavija: razaranje i njegovi tumači (Yugoslavia: Destruction and Its Interpreters), Belgrade, Službeni glasnik, 2011. Djokic, Dejan, ‘Whose Myth? Which Nation? The Serbian Kosovo Myth Revisited’, in Janos M. Bak, Jörg Jarnut, Pierre Monnet and Bernd Schneidmueller (Eds.), Uses and Abuses of the Middle Ages: 19th-21st Century, Munich, W. Fink, 2009. Mihaljčić, Rade, The Battle of Kosovo in History and in Popular Tradition, Belgrade, BIGZ, 1989.

CHAPTER 17

From the Terror to terrorism HEINZ-GERHARD HAUPT

Associated now with Islamist movements, previously with the extreme left wing and before that with anarchists, terrorism has resurfaced in Europe. Yet these acts, perpetrated by individuals or groups, should not allow us to lose sight of the fact that ‘terror’ was originally inflicted through the excesses of the Jacobins during the French Revolution and, more broadly, by police states. That terror has left a profound imprint on the European memory. Hardly any term has been so widely applied in Europe these last few years as the word ‘terrorism’. From the Atlantic region to the Urals and from Malta to Norway, it is used as a reference to violent operations carried out by groups or individuals whose objective is to discredit the authority of the state through symbolic acts, arousing fear and a sense of insecurity in the population. The 9/11, the attacks on the Charlie Hebdo offices and the Bataclan, the Nice truck attack, the bombings in London and Madrid, the assassination of Olof Palme and the attacks in Chechnya, all received wide media coverage in Europe and throughout the world, highlighting the danger posed by terrorist acts to society and the political order. At the same time, the accusation of supporting terrorism assumed crucial importance in international relations. Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, all used this argument to designate their enemies and justify their policies in various regions of the world. The word ‘terrorist’ is readily used as it is ‘an essentially contested concept’ to quote Walter B. Gallie, and is open to different definitions. Those described as terrorists by state authorities maintain that movements dedicated to national or regional liberation are fighting in the name of freedom. In this way, during the Second World War, partisans and resistance fighters were criminalized by the National Socialists and referred to as terrorists, while anti-fascists regarded their combat as legitimate. In the same way, those who committed acts of violence as part of Spanish regionalist movements or during the Irish Civil War were celebrated as heroes. Debates over the nature of political violence form part of the history of terrorism. History alone can reveal the dual significance acquired by the word ‘terror’ in the course of its development. During the French Revolution, the concept referred to the excesses committed by the Jacobins in their bid to impose virtue and civic-

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mindedness. It was therefore used as a criticism of measures taken by the state right up to 1848, when socialists and anarchists, nihilists and political adversaries were all denoted by the generic term ‘terrorists’. However, applying the word ‘terrorism’ to political movements meant that ‘state terror’ (which may be defined as ‘a Police state without the Rule of Law’ according to Bernhard Zangl and Michael Zürn) was frequently overlooked. Studies agree that policies of state terror implemented in the latter half of the nineteenth century and during the twentieth were deadlier than attacks perpetrated by terrorist organizations or individuals. ‘State terror’ refers to measures involving excessive, illegal and generalized violence used by state authorities against groups of individuals. This is not intended to be a study of present-day terrorism. Instead, our purpose is to investigate whether the violent methods used by organizations described as ‘terrorist’ or by state authorities could have had an impact on Europe as a whole, or generated international networks and a European culture of memory. In order to answer that question, we should make a distinction between the immediate reaction and the effect produced by violent events, on the one hand, and, on the other, retrospective historicization and Europeanization. From the 1990s, in the wake of an expansive memorialization policy, a large number of violent acts committed in the past acquired a new significance at European level in the light of subsequent developments. This had not been the case when they originally occurred, or at least only to a lesser degree. Examples include the battles of the ‘Field of Blackbirds’ and Waterloo, the assassination at Sarajevo and that of Tsar Alexander II. However, this historical and historiographical starting point is not the focus of our account. Instead, it centres on the question of discovering whether, and if so, at what point European remembrance networks and strategies developed directly after terrorist acts.

MEMORIES OF STATE TERRORISM In this way, it appears that state-instigated mass terror has generated a much stronger reaction and remembrance culture than terrorist attacks carried out by individuals or groups. The domination of the Jacobins, which resulted in the execution of Louis XVI, the violence of the French civil wars and the legal system’s usage of the guillotine, all formed part of scenarios seen as catastrophic by European Liberals and Conservatives. The two camps resolutely distanced themselves from these events, both in the early nineteenth century and in later years. Fearing the mobilization and demands of revolutionary masses, they were at odds with groups in their own country who defended the French Revolution. Nevertheless, under the influence of Republicans and socialists, a more positive view of the Revolution gradually established itself in opposition to the rejection of the ‘Terror’ evident throughout Europe; this was based on an enduring and frequently cited counter-revolutionary remembrance culture. In this regard, the beginning of the Constitutional period was the first aspect of the Revolution to achieve effective acknowledgement. It was not until the 1880s that Paris city councillors made the decision to name a street after Robespierre.

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The crushing of both the uprising in June 1848 and the Paris Commune are included among the violent events of the nineteenth century whose importance extended beyond France’s borders to become part of the European collective memory. In Conservative and Liberal circles, they were viewed as manifestations of the spectre called Revolution, which, according to Karl Marx, was haunting Europe. Republicans and socialists, on the other hand, saw them as struggles for proletarian emancipation. In June 1848, Parisian workers defended the social measures established through the 1848 Revolution, particularly the National Workshops and the right to work. The Communards of 1871 demanded that the city adopt a self-governing system and continue the fight against German forces. The dangerous nature attributed to the masses, contemptuously described as ‘la canaille’ (‘the rabble’), permeated European remembrance culture in the same way as the bloody repression that followed; this is still evoked and commemorated in Europe by opposition parties and socialists. Karl Marx’s writings on the ‘class struggle’ and the ‘civil war’ in France played a part in anchoring both the June uprising and ‘the biggest massacre in 19th century Europe’ (John Merriman) in the remembrance culture of the socialist workers’ movement. Long after these events, they continued to be seen as a provocation by Conservative regimes and upholders of the status quo and to be the focus of criminal prosecutions. This repression, in turn, contributed to reinforcing their impact on the collective memory. Yet the Republicans, who had come to power in France in 1879, were the only party to attempt to tone down debates over the Paris Commune by granting the Communards an amnesty and authorizing the organization of commemorative events − an astonishing development in the European context. From 1885, memorial ceremonies were held in the Père Lachaise cemetery, at the Mur des Fédérés – the wall against which Communard combatants had been shot. Another manifestation of state-instigated terror to have generated reactions and established a place in European memories was the policy of mass terror implemented by the USSR’s Stalinist regime. In 1937 and 1938, it was chiefly directed at the entire kulak population, but intellectuals suspected of dissident tendencies, ‘socially harmful elements’ and various ethnic minorities were likewise targeted. It cost the lives of over 700,000 people and resulted in the deportation of over 2 million individuals. Born of the Soviet government’s obsessive fear of ‘the enemy within’, this policy was carried out by the NKVD – the secret police – in a clandestine fashion and generally without public trials. Under the regime of surveillance and persecution established in the Soviet Union, public protests and commemorations were forbidden. Nevertheless, these found their place in a vast European and international remembrance culture, where they were widely used in criticisms of Soviet communism and in political debates in several countries. Arthur Koestler’s work Darkness at Noon, which presents a certain interpretation of these events, forms part of a culture of anti-communist remembrance. It was not until 1991, after the political collapse of the Soviet Union, that the memory of victims of the terror could be publicly celebrated in Russia and Eastern Europe with memorials and commemorative tablets.

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GUERNICA, AUSCHWITZ: THE EPITOME OF TERROR Hannah Arendt established the use of terror as the common feature of Stalinism and National Socialism. For the violence carried out from 1933 against democrats, socialists and communists, the Jews, the Sinti and the Romani, and against all individuals declared ‘unworthy of life’ reflects the nature of national socialism. The apparatus of terror and surveillance made it more or less impossible to combat Nazism in Germany itself, and any resistance there could only take the form of small groups. Beyond its borders, however, a broad front composed of politicians, intellectuals, and social and political movements had united under the banner of anti-fascism. Specific realms of memory were formed within this reactive movement, an example being Pablo Picasso’s painting Guernica. Exhibited at the Paris World’s Fair of 1937, it depicts the deadly aerial bombing of the small northern Spanish town by German forces. Within European commemorative culture as a whole, the remembrance culture of the anti-fascist response was greatly augmented by the memory of the defiant partisans and Resistance fighters. This also served to justify alliances and formed a reference point for various movements with democratic leanings. ‘Auschwitz’ has had an enormous international impact as the ultimate manifestation of the national socialist policy of annihilation. It has been endowed with universal significance in writings, memorials and commemorative celebrations, and holds a very specific place in Jewish memorial policies, as well as those of the communists, the Sinti, the Romani and various discrete social groups. Yet not all the various forms of terror perpetrated by the national socialists were recognized at international level. Some remained confined to national remembrance cultures. This was the case, for instance, with the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, which was violently quashed by German troops while the Soviets, stationed on the banks of the Vistula, did nothing to intervene; other members of the Allied forces likewise failed to act. This memory endures above all in Poland, where it triggers public debates and is honoured through commemorative monuments, while remaining essentially contained within the national boundaries. ‘Ethnic cleansing’ is included among the violent policies generally enacted by a state that result in the greatest number of victims. In Europe, an estimated 30 million people suffered in this way during the twentieth century. However, despite the shared experience of flights and expulsions euphemistically described as ‘population transfers’, these ‘cleansings’ have generated neither a European remembrance culture nor European realms of memory. Although the International Court of Justice in The Hague has passed sentences for war crimes committed during such processes, these population displacements, expulsions and exterminations occurred in waves, each one having its specific circumstances and location. For this reason, their memory is honoured within an exclusively regional or national context. Concurrences and links between events that occurred during ethnic cleansing operations have only been established through international legal processes and historiographical studies.

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ERASING TRACES Eras of mass terror were not only periods of remembrance but also of obliteration. Intervention by a political power was intended to intimidate its opponents or to send a clear signal. The total destruction of certain sites, such as Lidice or Oradour, formed part of Nazi policies of occupation. During the suppression of the Paris Commune, Adolphe Thiers, head of the French government, planned to leave the bodies of the dead Communards unburied for as long as possible, in the hope that this would have a dissuasive effect on the people of Paris. The twentieth century, however, witnessed the increasingly widespread practice, at least in Western Europe, of removing the spectacle of physical brutality from public life and presenting the violence committed by a state as a measured act. Under the national socialist regime, therefore, former prisoners were forbidden to speak of their experiences in the concentration camps. During the final months of the war, the Nazis attempted to erase all trace of the camps by forcibly marching the emaciated and often sick prisoners westwards. In the Soviet Union, all discussion and information concerning the terror was prohibited and resulted in criminal charges. After 1945, the Soviet government likewise did everything in its power to eliminate the traces of prison camps and mass execution sites. The communal graves in Sandarmokh, Karelia, containing the bodies of thousands of political victims, were only discovered after 1989. Their existence, like that of a neighbouring prison camp, had been concealed by the Soviet regime. It was not until the 1990s that commemorative monuments could be erected, but these memories remained local in scope. Nation states likewise strove to eliminate the effects of individual instances of terror. In this way, the municipal authorities in Paris concentrated all their efforts on rapidly eradicating all trace of the damage resulting from three anarchist attacks carried out in March and April 1892. The perpetrators had placed bombs in buildings inhabited by legal figures and in the restaurant where an informer had exposed the anarchist François Ravachol. Drawn by the spectacle of this destruction, Parisians came to look at the ruins with their families or asked tram drivers to slow down in front of the bombed restaurant. For its part, the government was keen to re-establish normality with all possible speed and to erase the memory of the attacks from the public consciousness; these could be seen as a failure by the authorities to establish the secure environment promised to citizens.

INDIVIDUAL ACTS OF TERROR IN THE NATIONAL MEMORY In the light of events in our own era and of the 9/11 attacks, we may be inclined to attribute greater international resonance and unifying force to terrorist acts committed by groups or individuals. The memory of the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York is evoked every year throughout the world and has forged a commemorative community, at least in the virtual sense, connected by the media. Many factors have contributed to this, such as international political decisions

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reinforcing the American view of the events as an act of war, and stereotypical images and portrayals broadcast by the media. The theory according to which 9/11 signalled the advent of religiously motivated terrorism has not been borne out, as most terrorist attacks were committed following the Iraq War. With its vast international resonance, 9/11 appears to be an exception. The deadly attacks that took place in London and Madrid in the twenty-first century have already had less of an impact and have not made such a significant mark on commemorative responses within societies, or even within Europe. These reactions are the same in Paris, Brussels, Nice and Berlin; flowers, drawings, remembrance ceremonies and commemorative plaques serve to reflect feelings of grief, the rejection of terrorism and respect for the victims. This search for a commemorative symbolism and language is common to all European countries that have suffered attacks, yet it rarely extends beyond local or national boundaries. Even though the attack on the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo unified European public opinion, with denunciations of the murders and of the assault on press freedom, feelings of identification with the magazine and the memory of the attack quickly faded. The small black-and-white ‘Je suis Charlie’ stickers that were stuck to walls and doors in various parts of Europe have now disappeared. Our past also includes terrorist acts that have generated reactions worldwide, but they have not acquired the momentous character needed to constitute a memory shared at European level. We only have to consider the last twenty years of the nineteenth century, during which there were more assassinations of politicians and monarchs than at any other time. This wave of killings brought several European powers together at an international conference held in London in 1895 for the purpose of discussing preventive measures against terrorists, who were generally equated with anarchists. The latter, for their part, had formed international networks, precisely because they had been pursued in their own countries or exiled. However, the conference yielded only limited results and did not lead to regular collaboration at a European level. Although the rapidly developing mass media continued to cover terrorist attacks in the countries involved, measures likely to have an impact on the collective memory found their place within an exclusively national context. When the Italian anarchist Sante Geronimo Caserio assassinated the French president Marie François Sadi Carnot on 24 June 1894, the date was declared a day of national mourning − but only in France, where a number of streets were subsequently re-named after Carnot. The reactions in French society were partly motivated by xenophobia and directed against the Italian population that had settled in the country. The extensively publicized wave of attacks and assassinations that occurred in Western and Southern Europe in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s certainly highlighted a group of terrorists whose activities had global ramifications and led to a Europe-wide police response; yet these events were received very differently by individual societies and did not form a collective culture of remembrance. The response of the French press in relation to the attacks carried out by the Red Army Faction in the 1960s and 1970s drew on the traditional image of Germany rather than the memories or problems of Europe as a whole. In the same way, attitudes to

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films still depended on national contexts. Germany in Autumn explores the internal conflicts of the FRG, just as Mimmo Calopresti’s The Second Time reflects those of Italy. The memory, public reactions and political significance associated with terrorism remained defined by national boundaries.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Kaminsky, Anna (Ed.), Erinnerungsorte an den Massenterror 1937-1938. Russische Föderation, Berlin, Bundesstiftung zu Aufarbeitung der SED-Diktatur, 2007. Merriman, John, Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune, Newhaven and London, Basic Books, 2014. Ther, Philipp, Die dunkle Seite der Nationalstaaten: ‘Ethnische Säuberungen’ im modernen Europa, Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011. Weber, Matthias, et al., Erinnerungsorte in Ostmitteleuropa. Erfahrungen der Vergangenheit und Perspektiven, Munich, Oldenbourg, 2011.

CHAPTER 18

Berlin Symbol of the twentieth century ÉTIENNE FRANÇOIS

Between 1900 and the fall of the Wall, Berlin experienced both the best and worst of times, embodying the history of a blood-soaked century whose traces are visible in its architecture. As the American historian Fritz Stern was walking through the still-divided city of Berlin with Raymond Aron one day in 1979, the latter wistfully remarked that the twentieth century ‘could have been Germany’s century’. Stern was fond of repeating that this statement reinforced his desire to shed light on the enigma of German history; how could a country have transformed itself into the very epitome of barbarity when, in 1900 or thereabouts, it had seemed set fair to lead Europe towards a future of progress and modernity? Why did Berlin, which had eclipsed all other European capitals in dynamism and prestige, become the ultimate symbol of what Eric Hobsbawm called ‘the age of extremes’, both in reality and through its image in the European mind? These are the burning questions that preoccupy all who come to see Berlin in ever-increasing numbers – it had 13 million visitors in 2016, 40 per cent of whom were foreigners, as opposed to just 3 million in 1993. In this way, everyone who arrives in the city has their head already filled with a multitude of clashing images, which they are hoping to encounter there. The best answer was given by French anthropologist Emmanuel Terray in 1996: Other cities – Rome, Paris – can boast of more ancient origins and of a richer heritage, but only Berlin is so profoundly imprinted with the passions and exaltation of which our species has shown itself to be capable, particularly during the last hundred years. It is as if all the temptations that have set the modern imaginary ablaze have gathered there, together with heroic or demonic figures, where they took form.1 Associated with the latest scientific and technological developments in the early twentieth century, Berlin became the capital city of unbridled nationalism in 1914 – later, in 1918, it represented the Utopian dream of the communist revolution.

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A hub of artistic creativity in the 1920s, ten years later it was one of the cities to be hardest hit by the Great Depression. The capital of the Nazi regime from 1933, the theatre of its triumphs and its megalomania, Berlin was also the centre of a reign of terror, of the Holocaust, and of the conquest and exploitation of a Europe that was to be transformed into ‘Germania’ and that it was intended to rule. Devastated by the bombings and fighting that marked the final stage of the war, it was the site of the unconditional surrender made by a Germany that was now a pariah state, split between the four Allied powers. In 1948, it became the ultimate scene of Cold War hostilities. Located in the very heart of the German Democratic Republic, the city was split in two by the Wall in 1961. West Berlin became a showcase for liberal democracy and capitalist prosperity, while East Berlin embodied a people’s democracy and Sovietstyle socialism. Reunited in happiness and freedom in 1989, a work in progress, the city has now regained all its vitality and its charms dazzle the world. Despite being more driven by the dynamics of contrasting and competing memories than any other European metropolis, Berlin is the very opposite of a city overwhelmed by an obsession with its history. This is partly because it contains very few examples of built heritage that predate the eighteenth century, much of which was in fact reconstructed after the war. More significantly, however, the reconstruction of both the eastern and western sections of the city carried out after 1945 followed the principle expressed by the architect Hans Scharoun, who designed the Berlin Philharmonic: before creating a new society, it was vital to know how to free oneself of the weight of the past. Its status as a capital having been restored in 1991, the city of Berlin has, of course, established a large number of museums and memorials evoking the darkest eras of its history, showing an unusual insistence on taking a selfcritical stance. Such constructions include the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe situated close to the Brandenburg Gate, the ‘Topography of Terror’ installed in the former Gestapo headquarters, the Stasi Museum and the German Historical Museum. Yet, although it takes full responsibility for its past and does not always escape the dangers of competitive victimhood, the city also knows how to re-utilize that past without experiencing excessive scruples, an example being the current Foreign Ministry building. This was formerly the headquarters of the Reichsbank under the Nazi regime, later becoming the head office of the Central Committee of the East German Communist Party. For Berlin’s priority today is to look to the future. The replica of the castle once owned by the kings of Prussia that is currently under construction on the site of the former GDR Palace of the Republic is certainly intended to re-establish (fictitious) historical continuity; however, its chief purpose is to become a major museum of non-European art and a centre for international exchanges and encounters. A living realm of memory, a city in a permanent state of reconstruction and a hub of creative activity, Berlin is the best proof of all that there is no such thing as historical inevitability.

NOTE 1. Emmanuel Terray, Ombres berlinoises. Voyage dans une autre Allemagne (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1996), p. 10.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Buffet, Cyril, Berlin, Paris, Fayard, 1993. Grésillon, Boris, Berlin, métropole culturelle, Paris, Belin, 2002. Hugues, Pascale, La Robe de Hannah. Berlin 1904–2014, Paris, Les Arènes, 2014. Stöver, Bernd, Geschichte Berlins, Munich, C.H. Beck, 2010. Terray, Emmanuel, Ombres berlinoises. Voyage dans une autre Allemagne, Paris, Odile Jacob, 1996.

CHAPTER 19

How to make peace VALÉRIE ROSOUX

The destruction wrought in the twentieth century has scarred the continent of Europe. This long history has given rise to efforts of reconciliation, a delicate process of integration that has characterized Europe since 1945. As a ‘school for war’ before it became a ‘school for peace’, Europe is trying to discard of the ‘black hat of the past’, with varying degrees of success. ‘Far from avenging us anyone who strikes or shoots a German prisoner insults us.’1 These words were written by Robert Antelme in 1945, shortly after he left Dachau. The memory of his fellow inmates, who had lost everything in the war, compelled this former resistance fighter to feel respect for the erstwhile enemy: only the victory of the ideals [. . .] for which they died can possess some sense of revenge. [. . .] These dead are not present at all in the manifestations that could disfigure those who think themselves just, but they are present in those moments when, ‘thinking’ about them no longer, society tries to integrate the meaning of their sacrifice.2 The objective was clear; human dignity must be safeguarded. This form of empathy with the Other encapsulates the attitude adopted by the pioneers of European peacemaking. Over seventy years later, this cause seems to have been acknowledged. In December 2012, the European Union was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Its resilience was immediately emphasized; born of ashes and rubble, the EU is now playing a major role in establishing ‘peace and reconciliation’ throughout the world. The metamorphosis undergone by Europe is held up as an example in Sarajevo, Kinshasa and Kigali. It is certainly true that potential tensions and very real impediments remain within the continent or on its margins; these involve Cyprus, relations between Greece and Macedonia, between the Baltic States and Russia and between Russia and Poland. Nevertheless, this development indicates the possibility of a rapprochement even between so-called hereditary enemies. For a number of historians, the story highlighted in Stockholm extends beyond the notion of constructing Europe, as the continent’s destiny will ultimately be decided ‘less through its divisions than through the way they are resolved’.3 From that perspective, the ruined landscape of 1945 mirrors that of 1918; the latter still bore the traces left by the Napoleonic Wars, the Wars of Religion and the Thirty Years War, each of those violent conflicts having resulted in a period of peace. In this way, the efforts of reconciliation made over the centuries take the form of a

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palimpsest. It is the transformation of the relationships between former adversaries, rather than their rifts, that engages our attention. By signing the Edict of Nantes in 1598, Henri IV of France became known as ‘the King of Peace’, having ended thirty-six years of war. The Pax sit christiana affirmed in the Treaties of Münster and Osnabrück was reflected in marriages between dynasties that had long been mutually hostile. The marriage between Maria-Teresa of Spain and the young Louis XIV in 1639 sealed the Treaty of the Pyrenees, ending the war between France and Spain that had broken out in 1635. After the First World War, the Nobel Peace Prize of 1926 was awarded to Aristide Briand and Gustav Stresemann for their contributions through the Locarno Agreements and the beginnings of the Franco-German rapprochement. Two years later, the Briand-Kellogg Pact excluded the use of warfare. In this way, we might imagine each layer of the millefeuille – the multi-layered structure formed of European memories – adorned with allegorical engravings, sculptures and the like, depicting former enemies coming together under the protective gaze of the entwined figures of Justice and Truth. Meanwhile, the violent wars that tore Europe asunder are explained by the notion that ‘families are best placed to have the worst conflicts’.4 No wonder EU representatives declare that the entire continent was ‘built on reconciliation’, described as ‘the most difficult virtue’.5 Nevertheless, current events remind us that the narrative plot introduced in this way is far from straightforward. The succession of institutional, social and financial crises, in addition to Britain’s decision to leave the EU following the Referendum, all provide ample proof of this. Although the cause may be understood it has yet to be definitively won, so it would be useful to analyse the extent and the limits of reconciliation as a European realm of memory. Our reflections are guided by three main questions. The first concerns the actors who have contributed to establishing this realm of memory. The second involves the process chosen to discern the ‘unfulfilled promises of the past’.6 The third ponders the existence of a specific European model for conflict resolution.

THE ACTORS – AN OVERVIEW In 1945, actors from various backgrounds decided to adopt a fresh perspective with a view to (re)building Europe through negotiation rather than confrontation. The Franco-German case lay at the heart of that sea change. The political context was unprecedented at the time, as the enemy was no longer positioned on the other side of the Rhine but in the East. Faced with the Soviet threat, the French and Germans closed ranks, receiving substantial support from the United States. Although these official gestures of reconciliation soon achieved a stabilizing effect, the impetus for rapprochement initially took form within civil society, through individuals and associations. Like Robert Antelme, many resistance fighters urged the French to resist any temptations to embrace nationalism. As early as October 1945, former deportee Joseph Rovan, who had been imprisoned in Dachau, described himself as ‘a Frenchman who remembers being German’. Born in Munich in 1918, he had fled to France after Adolf Hitler came to power. He envisaged the process of European

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integration as developing through mutual knowledge and exchanges in every type of domain, to include the young, politicians, trade unionists, journalists and figures from the business world. This explains his involvement in the Franco-German Youth Office (the FGYO) and the Bureau International de liaison et documentation (BILD). In the same vein, Jean du Rivau, who had been imprisoned in both Mauthausen and Dachau, launched the twin journals Dokumente and Documents in August 1945. In the preface of the first issue of Documents, he explains that his aim is not to ‘take sides’ but to enlighten both, ‘enabling us to begin talking together at some future point’. Talking, conversing, connecting – those were also the aims tirelessly pursued by historians such as Rudolf von Thadden and Alfred Grosser. This process of forging links recalls the work carried out by Father Franz Stock during the war years. After his theological studies at the Catholic University of Paris, this German priest acted as a bridge between those on either side of the Rhine. From 1941 to 1944, he served as a prison chaplain and assisted thousands of French prisoners, passing messages between the men sentenced to death and their relatives. He remained in France immediately after the war, this time assisting German prisoners and continuing to embody the connection between the two nations described by former German chancellor Helmut Kohl as a ‘community with a common destiny’. Following the activities of these individual figures, a number of cultural, political, professional, religious and sporting associations stepped in. The Franco-German Institute was established in Ludwigsburg in 1948 for the purpose of developing exchange programmes and holding lectures and language classes. As early as 1950, thousands of young people began to help maintain German war cemeteries in over forty countries, fostering reconciliation ‘over the graves’. Large numbers of towns and villages were twinned. A series of meetings took place between historians; these were similar to the gatherings that had already been initiated in France by Jules Isaac just after the First World War. In this way, platforms for dialogue between the two countries had been established well before the Élysée Treaty of 1963 officially set the seal on the reconciliation. The movement went from strength to strength as the decades passed. More than 8 million young French and German people have taken part in exchanges organized by the FGYO over a fifty-year period. It is largely due to the density of this social network that official gestures of reconciliation have had such an impact. The solemn character of these events stems both from the physical setting in which they occur and from the power of the speeches made – or of the silence, which is sometimes preferable. There are a great many such localities, beginning with Reims cathedral, which gave a spiritual dimension to the state visit to France made in July 1962 by German chancellor Konrad Adenauer. Reims is a supreme example of a French realm of memory; not only were the kings of France crowned and consecrated there, on the very site where Clovis I had been baptized, but it was also the target of a German aerial bombing campaign during the First World War. It was therefore in the context of tacit repentance that Konrad Adenauer joined General de Gaulle for Mass in the cathedral. Among the numerous speeches delivered by the two heads of state, the words spoken in German by the General on his visits to Germany aroused an unexpectedly emotional reaction

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among West Germans. After describing the Germans as ‘a great people’, Charles de Gaulle reminded the French that they too, ‘in certain circumstances’, had caused injury to the German population. Significantly, when in Munich, he stopped before the Feldherrnhalle, which had been erected in honour of the Bavarian soldiers killed in the Franco-Prussian War and the First World War, among other conflicts. Since then, no French leader has failed to pay tribute to the ‘fallen Germans’ slain in combat. In addition to Reims and Munich, such locations include Versailles. The celebrations for the fortieth anniversary of the Élysée Treaty in January 2003 were held in the same château that had witnessed the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, indicating a desire to rectify, if not to atone for, the errors of the past. The rapprochement did away with a divisive ‘us’ and ‘them’ approach based on moralizing. Henceforth, the word ‘we’ no longer referred to a people uniformly seen as heroic, just as ‘they’ were no longer stigmatized as the devil’s accomplices. And although their dialogue was not entirely free of ambiguities and disharmony, the representatives of the two states based their cooperation on a mutual acknowledgement of a past finally regarded as ‘shared’. The high point of this process was undoubtedly the moment when François Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl stood hand in hand in front of the Douaumont ossuary in 1984. Depicted in hundreds of cartoons, this gesture became a landmark event, as confirmed by the ceremonies for the centenary of the Battle of Verdun, which were attended by French president François Hollande and German chancellor Angela Merkel in May 2016. State representatives now appear to be viewed in the light of that gesture made in 1984. All are attempting to mitigate the initial approach to past events as the confrontation of two hereditary enemies by introducing a new perspective, seeing them instead as a split between two brother nations. This development extends beyond the Franco-German context. In October 1965, a momentous letter was sent by Polish bishops to their German counterparts following the Second Vatican Council. The words ‘we forgive and ask for forgiveness’ evoked both the suffering endured by the Poles throughout the war and that of the Germans expelled after the defeat of the Wehrmacht. Five years later, on 7 December 1970, Willy Brandt knelt before the monument commemorating the Warsaw Uprising of 1943, an emotional moment for the witnesses gathered there that morning. On the following day, the ‘Warsaw Genuflection’ (Kniefall von Warschau) made headlines all over the world. As was the case with the hand-clasp between François Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl, the gesture aroused great surprise; Willy Brandt’s act was totally unexpected. Its genuine quality formed a complete contrast to the protocol-driven formalities, giving unprecedented intensity to the silence chosen as the means of commemoration. Whether in Warsaw or Verdun, and whether those remembered are civilian or military victims, the critical acceptance of a painful past seems to occur without the use of words. However, these solemn rituals with their performative character are not invariably successful. The well-established, repeated series of staged events struggle to reflect the vitality of the rapprochement process. The shared celebrations jointly attended by Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy on 11 November certainly illustrate the shift

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from duel to duo. But did they arouse the same emotion as the gesture made in 1984? The case of Bosnia appears still more symbolic. Although several ceremonies seem to have duplicated the Kniefall gesture of 1970, none of them appear to have responded to the expectations of a grief-stricken and largely disillusioned population. When the Serbian president Boris Tadić came to Srebrenica in July 2005, the associations representing the victims’ mothers initially refused to let him take part in the commemorations. In 2013, his successor, Tomislav Nikolić, stated that he would kneel and ask forgiveness, but refused to describe the massacre as genocide. Two years later, the Serbian prime minister, Aleksandar Vučić, was pelted with stones and forced to flee a memorial ceremony. These examples provide ample evidence of the gap that can exist between the rhetoric of reconciliation and the social reality. This is illustrated in an even more extreme fashion by the ‘fraternal kiss’, which can also form part of a covertly mocked propaganda apparatus. The embrace that took place on 5 October 1979 between Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and General Secretary of the East German Communist Party Erich Honecker can certainly be classed as an artificial reconciliation. The German Democratic Republic celebrated its thirtieth anniversary in the middle of the Cold War, with a military parade as a backdrop. Indicative of domination rather than friendship, this ‘top-level’ show of affection seemed to have an unsettling effect on the individuals gathered there, most of whom were totally disillusioned. This was confirmed by the mural painted on a preserved section of the Berlin Wall after its fall; the work, which measures fifteen square metres, reproduces the kiss down to the very last detail. Therefore, in order to make an impact and to enable a line to be drawn under certain events, it seems crucial that individual, associative and official initiatives on the part of each group involved should take place together. In this way, the approaches adopted before the end of the Cold War by Václav Havel and the representatives of Solidarność to facilitate a rapprochement involving Czechoslovakia and Poland on the one hand and Germany on the other proved decisive. The fall of the Berlin Wall is a realm of memory in itself; if any doubts remain as to the existence of genuinely European realms of memory it is certainly an exception, proving significant for both sides of the Iron Curtain. The events of 9 November 1989 triggered a succession of symbolic gestures made at every level. As an individual act, the impromptu concert given by Mstislav Rostropovich on 11 November provided further proof that private actors can have a powerful impact on the process of rapprochement. The cellist, previously exiled and stripped of his Russian nationality by the Soviet regime for supporting the dissidents Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov, played a Bach cello suite, dedicating it to all who had died in the name of freedom. At the official level, a ‘reconciliation Mass’ held in Kreisau on the following day was attended by the German chancellor Helmut Kohl and the Polish prime minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki, signalling the dawn of a new era in German–Polish relations. The service appeared to echo the Mass celebrated at Reims, providing an opportunity for a ‘kiss of peace’ and a time for recollection in the very location that had witnessed the meetings of the Kreisau Circle, a group of German resistance activists created between 1940 and 1944. A few weeks earlier, over a million and a half Estonians,

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Lithuanians and Latvians had formed an enormous human chain stretching from Tallinn to Vilnius via Riga − a gesture performed at a social rather than a strictly individual or official level. This act was not, in fact, intended to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact; instead, the 600-kilometre-long handshake known as ‘the Baltic Way’ was a symbolic expression of the independent character of the three states. The image of hands joining across borders brings to mind other such examples, including that of the German author Heinrich Böll and the dissident Russian writer Lev Kopelev, who developed a friendship in 1962. More recently, Nobel Prize winners Wisława Szymborska, Czesław Miłosz and Günter Grass responded jointly to the appeal made in 2000 by the Lithuanian poet Tomas Venclova to engage fully with the scarred memories resulting from the expulsion endured by millions in the aftermath of the Second World War. This experience was especially revealing. As faces bearing the signs of exile clearly reveal even decades after the events, reconciliation can only be envisaged as a long-term process. Following instances of mass violence, we should think in terms of generations rather than years; hence the weight of memories that has to be eased. Recollections of the victims of the Second World War merge with those of the First – nor should we forget the harm inflicted by colonial practices, which have left wounds that are still open, and, indeed, festering. How, then, can the past be re-presented when it continues to divide us? How can it be assimilated, taking into account not only the individuals crushed by its cruelty but also their descendants, who have only just been born? How, in other words, can we lay down ‘the black hat of the past’,7 whose heavy weight we have carried for too long?

THE WORK OF RECOLLECTION – ONE STEP AT A TIME As these questions suggest, this is an immense challenge, summarized by Georges Bernanos in Les Enfants Humiliés, when he explained: ‘the future does not belong to the dead, but to those who give them a voice, who explain why they are dead.’8 Why, then, did European soldiers and civilians perish en masse during the twentieth century? Rather than risk presenting a simplistic interpretation, official European representatives of all parties and national histories essentially choose to say nothing. This is a fairly standard practice. For centuries, silence and amnesty were thought to be the only possible ways to approach any reconciliation process. Winston Churchill referred to this idea in 1946 when he explained that the aim must be to ‘turn our backs on the horrors of the past’. Seven decades later, a complete reversal seems to have taken place, so insistent are European authorities on the importance of ‘the work of recollection’. For Paul Ricœur, the aim behind such an approach is to shape the past by ‘remodelling’ both the stories we tell of ourselves and those told to us by others. The process of locking different narratives together appears the only way to translate the memory of some into that of others.9 With the notion of plurality established in this way, ‘the work of recollection’ inevitably becomes ‘the work of recollections’.

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This type of approach was particularly evident in the meeting between the president of the Federal Republic of Germany, Richard von Weizsäcker, and the president of Czechoslovakia, Václav Havel, in March 1990. The Iron Curtain had just opened. The meeting took place on the fifty-first anniversary of Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the two heads of state embarked on a critical examination of their own countries’ pasts. Richard von Weizsäcker’s immediate focus was on the ‘six years of occupation and oppression brought about by political coercion and armed aggression’. For his part, Václav Havel addressed ‘the faults and sins of [his] forebears’, a reference to the wrong done by the Czechoslovak nation to the 3 million or so Sudeten Germans expelled between 1945 and 1946. However, the two leaders did not confine themselves to acknowledging past failings. Each in turn emphasized the excesses associated with the notion of collective guilt. Explaining that ‘guilt, like innocence, is always individual, never collective’, Richard von Weizsäcker went on to qualify this by adding: ‘yet we are collectively responsible for what we do in the present with the legacy of the past.’ Václav Havel recognized that his people had accepted the principle of collective guilt: ‘We expelled them, not on the basis of any proven individual guilt, but simply because they belonged to a particular nation. [. . .] By acting this way, we harmed ourselves.’10 This clarification of the notions of collective guilt and historical responsibility does not exclude the emergence of tensions, or even instances of regression, as seen in the cooling of relations between Russia and Poland under Vladimir Putin and the Kaczyński brothers. Prior to this, the 1990s had witnessed the acknowledgement made by the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, of Stalin’s part in the massacre of Polish officers at Katyń in 1940, while the first Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, had allowed access to secret documents in 1992. And the series of invectives that resounded through the European Parliament hemicycle during the Greek debt crisis were symptomatic of the emotions that pervaded those discussions. In the eyes of the Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras, Germany had ‘a historical and moral obligation’ to his people and had never compensated for the Nazis’ putting Greece to fire and the sword. He concluded by demanding ‘war damages’ from a Germany seen in terms of its guilty past.11 In addition to that emblematic episode, several instances of defiance have arisen, indicating the burden of Europe’s past. Even in the cases of France and Germany, often held up as examples, controversies still rage. When Willy Brandt favoured the pursuit of Ostpolitik, which involved recognizing Germany’s new western border with Poland, the association of refugees from the former eastern territories of Germany instantly decried him as a traitor. And when Valéry Giscard d’Estaing announced that he was ending the commemoration of 8 May 1945 to focus instead on ‘that which brings us together and unites us’, several political, trade union and French Resistance organizations took to the streets to express their disgust at the ‘outrage against the memory of those who gave their lives’.12 Celebrating the eightieth anniversary of the Armistice of 11 November 1918, Jacques Chirac emphasized the need to commemorate ‘the shared history of combatant nations’; some described themselves as scandalized at the idea that all the participants should be lumped together in ‘an amorphous, asepticised mass’.13

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Despite the vigour of such resistance, a number of official representatives feel that the very confrontations that tore Europe apart have, paradoxically, provided its member states with a specific mission in terms of conflict resolution. In this way, the devastating experience of two world wars, and particularly the after-effects of the Holocaust, is presented as ‘the source of a particular [. . .] sensibility and generosity’.14 Unlike America, which is often criticized for its arrogant, unilateral approach, Europe is seen as having learnt ‘the lessons of humility’ from its past dramas15. It appears as a unique model; having long been a ‘school for war’, it has now become ‘a school for peace’.16 On this subject, it is interesting to note that, while the ‘balance of terror’ between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War enabled confrontations on European soil to be avoided, many states did engage in wars, such as France, Great Britain and Portugal. That variation aside, the message of reconciliation has been delivered in a range of different tones. Javier Solana, the former High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy (PESC), sees reconciliation as one of the principal features of the ‘European model’.17 In 2007, the Museum of Europe explored the very same theme through its exhibition ‘It’s Our History!’ Beginning with the observation that the unification process has taken place in a Europe still bearing the scars of successive conflicts and sufferings, the exhibition presented visitors with the tale of ‘fifty years of European adventure’. The stories told by the twenty-seven European citizens chosen to represent each of the member states began in 1945 – described as ‘year zero’. The initial speeches were unequivocal: ‘In 1945, emerging from the war, Europe had reached its lowest ebb.’18 It is precisely that historical environment of reconciliation in Europe that justifies the ‘added value’ of the Union. This was confirmed by the former president of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, who declared: ‘We have established lasting peace in Europe, based on the reconciliation between former enemies. This is a historic example for the world.’19

THE MODEL – FALLING INTO STEP The aims are ambitious. They involve three main groups of participants, the first of these being the member states of the European Union. The handshakes, kisses and genuflections previously mentioned are not only intended as gestures of mourning for the dead of two world wars. They also include, for example, ‘all the victims’ who died in Northern Ireland. This was the context of the meeting between Queen Elizabeth II of England, and Martin McGuinness, the former leader of the Irish Republican Army (the IRA), who shook hands for the first time in June 2012. Quite apart from the official nature of this occasion, it also had a personal significance for the Queen, whose cousin Lord Mountbatten had been assassinated by the IRA. Despite this face-to-face meeting, described as historic by both sides, Belfast witnessed several more incidents during which a number of police officers were injured. The leaders of Sinn Féin had immediately rejected the idea of such a meeting during the previous year, considering it to be ‘too early’. This example serves as a reminder that, although reconciliation forms a realm of memory reflecting

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the individual and/or family experiences of some European citizens, it remains an aspiration for so many others. The case of Cyprus is particularly representative in this regard. Divided for over four decades, the island illustrates the depth of rifts within Europe. Nevertheless, these limitations have not prevented the EU from seeking to extend the ‘principle of reconciliation’ beyond its borders.20 This brings us to the second group of participants, the task here being to promote the normalization of relations between the EU, or some of its member states, and states outside the Union. In this instance, calls for reconciliation primarily relate to the scars left by a colonial past. In this way, the spokesman for the European delegation at the Durban conference, Louis Michel, talked of securing ‘the historic reconciliation between the North and the South’. His message was unequivocal: ‘Over the centuries [. . .] history in Europe has been marked by great contrasts. The best has accompanied the worst. Europe has been by turns victor and vanquished, dominant and martyred, fraternal and fratricide, a fountain of generous ideas as well as a vehicle for abject concepts.’21 The acknowledgement of an injustice does not invariably lead to expressions of apology, however − far from it. European representatives generally tread with the utmost caution, mindful of the risks involved in taking a penitent approach. These risks vary in nature, ranging from possible punishment at the ballot-box to mass compensation payouts. In this regard, it is telling that France and Algeria have never reached the point of signing their own ‘Élysée Treaty’. Over half a century after the end of the war of independence, the two governments have explicitly given up the idea of securing their reconciliation in the same way as Konrad Adenauer and Charles de Gaulle. The intense resistance shown on either side of the Mediterranean is indicative of the major differences between Franco-German and Franco-Algerian relations. The Franco-German case has been characterized for decades by rivalry and a form of balance, resulting in a paradoxical mix of mutual hatred and fascination felt on either side of the Rhine. In times of war, the Other essentially represented the foe to be defeated, but this rivalry did not preclude a type of reciprocal admiration. German poets and composers are renowned in Paris, while a number of French writers are admired in Berlin. The Franco-Algerian case is a different story altogether. The relations here are far from being evenly balanced, colonial rule having established a clear hierarchy between the parties. No admiration was shown for an Algerian culture that was ignored, if not despised. Here, the Other was not an enemy to be vanquished but a child to be educated – or even a barbarian to be civilized. There is a further, major difference that is worth emphasizing. The Second World War ended in total defeat for Germany. The discovery of the concentration camps meant that this was not simply a military defeat but a moral one. The categorical denunciation of Nazi Germany by the authorities in the FRG enabled the Allies to identify the new Germany as different from the old. In the case of Algeria, the conflict ended not through a military victory by one of the sides involved but following a process of negotiation. The narratives that have developed in both countries since the Évian Accords were signed in 1962 have diverged to such an extent that no shared portrayal of the past has been able to reach across the Mediterranean. Although

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Verdun has come to symbolize a ‘collective martyrdom’ and a ‘shared tragedy’ for all the soldiers involved regardless of their uniforms, sites such as Setif, Guelma and Kherrata, scenes of the massacres on 8 May 1945, continue to arouse controversy, debates over the death toll and other disputes. How could a treaty of friendship be envisaged in such circumstances? The third group comprises participants outside of the EU, its member states and their former adversaries. In this case, calls for reconciliation involve establishing peace between third states. The EU plays a prominent role as a peacemaker all over the world. During his tenure as France’s foreign minister, Michel Barnier emphasized that this was not a question of ‘giving lessons’ but of ‘watching’ and ‘suffering with’ those engaged in bitter conflicts, their daily lives ‘haunted by violence’.22 Whether the case in question is Asia, the African Great Lakes Region or the Balkans, the reasoning remains the same. Armed with the experience of their exemplary reconciliation processes, the European states have ‘granted themselves’ – as François Mitterrand put it – the privilege of ‘explaining to others the costs involved in building a new world’. The method put forward is based on approaching the past at both a judicial and symbolic level. At the judicial level, the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg serves as the example of a key stage in post-war procedures, hence the support for the establishment of International Criminal Tribunals for former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. The symbolic approach to the past is based on the importance of acknowledging the crimes that have been committed, as illustrated by the pressure exerted on Belgrade to pursue a rapprochement with Pristina. Serbia’s admission into the EU is virtually dependent on its acknowledging this call for reconciliation. The clear change of attitude on the part of the Serbian president Tomislav Nikolić is symbolically significant. A fervent nationalist after taking office in June 2012, he rejected the very idea of recognizing Kosovo. However, he softened his stance towards Pristina a little less than a year later, prompted by the economic crisis and, above all, the prospect of European Union membership. A similar development is evident with regard to the crimes committed in Srebrenica, although it is important to consider the limitations of such dynamics. Although European integration unquestionably sets a remarkable example, this is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ mould for every post-conflict situation. Two factors are worth clarifying in this respect. First, the principles for reconciliation gradually formulated by European authorities are not solely the result of a totally unexampled experience. They have also been markedly influenced by the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions established in Latin America and in South Africa during the 1990s, the latter being the most emblematic case of all. Consequently, the roles here have been reversed. Far from dictating the approach to be taken, it appears that European nations are gradually becoming fascinated by the model for reconciliation based on pardon. This notion formed no part of the project initiated by Europe’s founding fathers; the European Community’s foundational texts focus strongly on the idea of shared interests, rather than that of forgiveness. Forty years later, the recommendations have evolved, due to the charisma of such figures as Nelson Mandela and Desmond

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Tutu, together with the development of transitional justice as a favoured method of managing the past. Second, the strong resistance shown to euphoric appeals for reconciliation calls for a decidedly measured approach, both with regard to timescale and to the objectives set out for the former foes. Are they to attain some state of coexistence – a feat in itself following the perpetration of crimes against humanity – or of harmony? And how long will this take – three years, three decades, three generations? A geographical feature of the German city of Koblenz provides us with a particularly apt visual metaphor illustrating the length of time required for such processes. This is the point at which the Rhine and the Moselle converge, and the different colouring of the two rivers presents a striking sight. Far from merging immediately, the rivers retain their own distinct colours for some distance. It is only after flowing downstream, well beyond the point of confluence, that they gradually intermingle and become indistinguishable from one other. As with these flowing waters, the process of bringing together communities affected by a violent past cannot be rushed. We conclude by noting the marked difference between calls for reconciliation expressed by European representatives and those included in the rhetoric of American foreign policy. Rather than placing the emphasis on bringing together diverging and sometimes contradictory recollections, American representatives chiefly insist on the importance of moving forward, concentrating all the attention on the future and its challenges. In this way, the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was quick to declare: ‘We can go work with people who are willing to forget the past and focus on the future’, adding that the United States was not going to work with ‘people who are looking backwards, because that’s not going to get us where we want to go’.23 There is nothing new about this difference in mindset, which some understand as a cultural dissimilarity. At all events, this was suggested by Javier Solana when he observed: ‘When Americans say something is “history” they mean it is no longer relevant. When Europeans say the same thing, they usually mean the opposite.’24 This interest in history and in detours across the past demonstrate, at the very least, that its burden still weighs heavily on the ‘old continent’. The destruction wrought in the twentieth century has scarred the countries of Europe. The obsessive dread of descending yet again into unbridled violence may explain the desire to seek mutual understanding at all costs, not only over the future but also over the past.

NOTES 1. Robert Antelme, Vengeance? (Tours: Farrago, 2005), p. 10. English translation by Jeffrey Haight, On Robert Antelme’s ‘The Human Race’: Essays and Commentary (Evanston: the Marlboro Press/Northwestern University Press, 2003), p. 12. 2. Ibid. 3. John Horne, ‘Guerres et réconciliations au XXe siècle’, Vingtième Siècle, no. 104 (October–December 2009): 3. 4. Elie Barnavi, ‘Faire prendre conscience aux Européens de ce qui leur est commun’, Le Monde, 19 October 1999.

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5. These expressions were used by the former president of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy (New York, 20 September 2011). 6. Paul Ricœur, La Mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli (Paris: Le Seuil, 2000), p. 595 sq. 7. Henry Bauchau, La Déchirure (Brussels: Labor, 1986 [1966]), p. 279. 8. Georges Bernanos, Les Enfants Humiliés. Journal 1939-1940 (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), p. 29. 9. Paul Ricœur, ‘Quel ethos nouveau pour l’Europe?’ in Imaginer l’Europe. Le marché intérieur européen, tâche culturelle et économique, ed. Peter Koslowski (Paris: Le Cerf, 1992), p.110. 10. Richard von Weizsäcker and Václav Havel, ‘Échange praguois sur la culpabilité’, Esprit, no. 162 (June 1990): 5–8. 11. The Greek Parliament, Athens, 8 February 2015. 12. L’Humanité, 10 May 1975. 13. Général Clarke de Dromantin, Le Figaro, 8 May 1998. 14. Guy Verhofstadt, Brussels, 18 December 2001. 15. Guy Verhofstadt, Brussels, 8 December 2001. 16. Jacques Chirac, Belgrade, 7 December 2001. 17. Paris, 6 October 2006. 18. Exhibition catalogue, C’est notre histoire! Cinquante ans d’aventure européene (Brussels: Tempora, 2007), p. 29. 19. Brussels, 24 March 2007. 20. Thierry de Montbrial, Le Monde, 7 April 2007. 21. Durban, 30 August 2001. 22. Tel-Aviv, 19 October 2004. 23. Kinshasa, 10 August 2009. 24. Paris, 6 October, 2006.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bar-Siman-Tov, Yaacov (Ed.), From Conflict Resolution to Reconciliation, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004. Gardner-Feldman, Lilly, Germany’s Foreign Policy of Reconciliation: From Enmity to Amity, Lanham, Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2014. Guisan, Catherine, ‘From the European Coal and Steel Community to Kosovo: Reconciliation and Its Discontents’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 49, no. 3 (2011): 541–62. Mink, Georges and Laure Neumayer, L’Europe et ses passés douloureux, Paris, La Découverte, 2007.

CHAPTER 20

Reconciliation The Asian perspective AKIYOSHI NISHIYAMA

From the Asian perspective, Europe has demonstrated the ability to make peace and to take a critical view of its past. Although economic development has enabled China, Taiwan, Japan and Korea to intensify their trade relations, it has not brought political harmony. ‘For over six decades contributed to the advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe.’ These were the words used by the Nobel Committee to explain its decision to award the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize to the European Union. With the financial crisis at its height, the Committee was no doubt keen to provide the European Union with moral support during challenging times. There is another reason worth emphasizing, however. The conflicts and violence that were raging outside Europe − particularly in the Middle East following the failure of the Arab Spring and in East Asia with its national antagonisms − seemed to underline the merits of European integration. The interest in Europe shown by East Asia and Japan dates back to the early 1980s. Neither the Franco-German reconciliation process led by Konrad Adenauer and Charles de Gaulle nor Willy Brandt’s kneeling gesture in Warsaw were genuinely seen as potential models to imitate. Diplomatic relations were certainly being reestablished between South Korea and Japan and between Japan and the People’s Republic of China during this period, in 1965 and 1972 respectively. However, a supra-national integration project similar to that initiated in Western Europe in 1957 was inconceivable, in terms of both security policy and economics. Nor was there the transnational, societal network that already existed in Europe, through the Christian churches, for instance. Japan ‘discovered’ the task undertaken by Germany to assume responsibility for its past and to achieve reconciliation with neighbouring states as a result of debates over history textbooks. In June 1982, the media reiterated the instructions issued by the Japanese Ministry of Education, which was examining history textbooks submitted for approval; the term ‘invasion’ was to be replaced by the more neutral word ‘advance’ in relation to Japan’s policy in China during the 1930s. The school

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textbooks immediately became a political issue both within and outside Japan, triggering heated protests among liberals and the Japanese left wing, as well as in China and South Korea. The ‘first quarrel’ over schoolbooks prompted Japan to address the matter by using Germany’s dialogues with France (from 1952) and Poland (from 1972) as exemplars. The positive image of Germany, which was working through its past as a criminal Nazi state and striving to achieve reconciliation, was greatly reinforced by President Richard von Weizsäcker’s speech in the Bundestag on 8 May 1985. His reminder that ‘anyone who closes his eyes to the past is blind to the present’ has often served as an admonishment in East Asia. Here, during that same year, the official visit made by the Japanese prime minister Nakasone Yasuhiro to the Yasukuni Shrine prompted outrage, the Shrine being dedicated not only to the soldiers slain in the war but also to those executed for war crimes by the Military Tribunal in Tokyo in 1947. Twenty years later, the issues of the school text books and the visit to the Yasukuni Shrine remain highly charged topics. While history is a unifying factor in Europe, in East Asia it is divisive. Growing political integration has led Europe to take an increasingly collaborative approach to working through the memories of twentiethcentury violence, particularly the two world wars and the Holocaust, these being a ‘negative legacy’. A notable example is the Franco-German history textbook developed at the initiative of the Franco-German Youth Parliament to mark the fortieth anniversary of the signing of the Élysée Treaty by Konrad Adenauer and Charles de Gaulle in 1963. The first volume, published in 2006, was extensively reviewed in the South Korean and Japanese media, and even translated quite shortly afterwards. The political constellation is quite different today, which is also true of East Asia. Nevertheless, economic alignment, democratization and intensified trade have not necessarily led to political rapprochement – far from it. National consciousness has strengthened. Old issues such as that of the ‘comfort women’ have kindled new arguments, while territorial disputes over small islands arouse strong feelings in each of the countries involved. Furthermore, the territorial partitions resulting from the Cold War (concerning China and Taiwan and North and South Korea) remain in place. In these circumstances, it is difficult to establish a historical dialogue, which involves understanding the other’s perspective and showing a willingness to adopt a critical stance with regard to one’s history. This type of approach is very often interpreted as ‘losing face’. Although Europe does indeed serve as a model for East Asia in its current debates over history and reconciliation, each camp uses it in a selective manner. Japan appeals for ‘a community of values’ founded on democracy and human rights, but plays down its terrible military history. China praises Germany’s work on its past, but rejects the ‘Western’ notion of democracy. The ‘East Asian Community’ was much talked of at the turn of the Millennium, yet it now seems increasingly illusory given the persistent tensions. Historically speaking, the decision to pursue policies of reconciliation and integration in Europe was certainly well judged. However, in view of the tensions currently developing there, we would be wise to avoid seeing these victories in an idealistic light.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY He, Yinan, The Search for Reconciliation: Sino-Japanese and German-Polish Relations since World War II, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009. Lind, Jennifer, Sorry States: Apologies in International Politics, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2008. Nishiyama, Akiyoshi, ‘Ein Ziel in weiter Ferne? Das gemeinsame deutsch-französische Geschichtsbuch aus japanischer Sicht’, Revue d’Allemagne et des pays de langue allemande, Strasbourg, Presses universitaires de Strasbourg, no. 41 (2009): 105–23.

CHAPTER 21

Social citizenship SANDRINE KOTT

In the nineteenth century, European countries distinguished themselves by implementing various measures to regulate the market and redistribute wealth. These developed to a considerable degree during the twentieth century, confirming the existence of a European ‘social model’. Today, however, this model is being called into question by neoliberal thinkers and citizens alike. At a time when ‘neoliberal’ is more often used as a way of defining Europe than the adjective ‘social’, examining the subject of the welfare state as a constituent element of European memory seems a daunting task. However, it was in Europe that the social policies underpinning our modern welfare state were developed and put into practice during the late nineteenth century. The widespread implementation of these measures to regulate and supervise working conditions and to achieve social redistribution throughout Europe during the twentieth century gave rise to the expression ‘European social model’. For those who celebrate it, this model clearly has a performative aspect. Through the juxtaposition of the two terms – ‘Social’ and ‘European’ – the European political project is presented as being rooted in the community and achieves additional legitimacy. Moreover, the expression invites us to see social protection as a uniquely European element in a globalized, threatening world. And yet, while the term is relatively popular with European civil servants, politicians and social scientists, a growing number of European citizens are expressing an increasingly marked Euroscepticism. This is based in particular on the sentiment that European institutions would be incapable of safeguarding them effectively from the social consequences of opening markets up to competition − a policy that they promote. Worse still, as a free trade zone, Europe could pose a threat to national social security systems. The inward-looking nationalistic discourses of the last few decades and Britain’s decision to leave the European Union have been fuelled by the idea that it is only Europe’s nation states, rather than Europe as a political and economic construction, that can shield citizens from the destructive social effects of globalization. Before we can examine the history of this opposition between those who extol the European social model and those who see Europe as a threat to their national social benefits, we must first define the terms applied. What ‘Europe’ are we describing? The word is generally used by its harshest critics as a reference to the political European project established in the aftermath of the Second World War. However,

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in order to study the Europeanization of the welfare state and of the memory it evokes, we shall have to broaden our temporal and geographic perspectives and return to the nineteenth century, when the first social welfare laws were established, extending our reflections beyond Western Europe. What do we mean by a Welfare State? In this case, too, it is important to consider its varied spheres of activity. The operations of a welfare state are not confined to redistributive measures involving social security, education or housing, which may not necessarily be state policies although they are implemented within a national framework. Its activities also include the creation of a set of legislative norms that establish the conditions needed to achieve greater social justice; these norms have often been brought up during discussions in Europe.

THE ORIGINS: EMULATION WITHIN EUROPE In the late nineteenth century, Europe distinguished itself from the rest of the world by its responses to social issues. These were developed primarily at state level, although public and community authorities such as municipalities and trade unions likewise played a part. In every European country, the number of welfare measures increased in conjunction with advances in industrialization and the growth of the workforce. Social policies were intended to fulfil a twofold objective: protection and redistribution. Labour legislation rectified the fundamental inequality between workers and employers with the signing of a contract of employment; social assistance and social insurance systems were introduced in order to alleviate insecurity and poverty, as well as to minimize the risk of uprisings triggered by such conditions. The 1830s and 1840s saw the emergence of discussions relating to the protection of child workers, as well as women, in every Western European country. The state, which defended the nation’s best interests, now protected individuals who were unable to defend themselves, having no political rights. In these same countries, during the last third of the nineteenth century, it was the turn of male adult workers to be given the legal protection of the state, with new regulations involving working hours, the introduction of a weekly day off and of more hygienic conditions in the workplace. In the 1880s, the legal framework for the introduction of a compulsory social insurance scheme for workers was established at state level. This was intended as a safety-net to protect them from the vicissitudes of life: illnesses, accidents, disability and old age. Initially introduced in Germany, the measures were subsequently adopted by the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Britain. The insurance contributions were largely funded by the workers and their employers, while strictly redistributive measures such as free education and subsidized housing were generally paid for by local authorities. Expenses covered solely by the state therefore remained moderate, representing around 4 per cent of the gross domestic income in the cases of Germany, Britain and Sweden, and only 1 per cent in the cases of Denmark, France and Italy. Furthermore, these social measures concerned just a small proportion of the population; rural workers, who still represented the great majority of the workforce, were excluded from the initial arrangements. However, unlike the traditional forms of charity, labour legislation and insurance schemes

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established the principle of workers’ rights. These rights, promoted and guaranteed by the states involved, contributed to instilling a sentiment of attachment into those who benefited from them. In this way, social policies became a strong feature of the national identity of citizens from various countries, even developing into national realms of memory. Governments also used social legislation for the purposes of construction (as with Germany), strengthening the nation (as with France) or even as nationalist propaganda. It is widely agreed within each nation that the unique features of national social policies, and even the existence of national social models, need to be emphasized. In this way, unlike Germany, whose social systems focus on workers, the French Republican system is primarily based on the notion of citizenship. In Belgium, the important role of mutual benefit solutions reinforces the political and religious communities that form the basis of national unity; the Ghent System, whereby workers are compensated on the basis of union membership, is an example of this. The British have developed a variety of solutions that enable private systems to flourish alongside, or in addition to, those of the state. These differences, which are essentialized in political discourse, explain why European social policies remain a secondary issue to this day, and why there is still no single social model for all European states. Yet it is perhaps the assertion of these very differences, this desire to emphasize distinctions, that gave the process of creating welfare states in Europe such a characteristically European dimension. A type of European commemorative community emerged through this competition. For although their formulation, implementation and reception were all distinctively national in character, the welfare states of the nineteenth century were constructed through interaction and positive emulation, drawing much inspiration from each other. The first calls for social legislation to be harmonized throughout Europe came from manufacturers. Keen to acquire a well-trained, healthy workforce, they were nonetheless concerned about the risks of unfair competition that would arise from inequalities between national social policies. Exchanges of information on this subject were fostered by the congresses on social welfare that were held regularly from the 1880s, and by the establishment of international organizations at the end of the nineteenth century. The largest of these, the Association internationale pour la protection légale des travailleurs, was founded in Paris in 1900 and held conferences at Basel from 1901. These associations were essentially European in scope. At their congresses, various national welfare solutions, together with their relative differences and advantages, were presented with great gusto. Above all, however, these were occasions when information was exchanged and circulated. Those who regularly met at such events included academics, legal experts, economists and employers, as well as administrators of sickness and pension funds and civil servants, attending in a private capacity. They soon constituted a group of European social policy specialists, who confirmed their expertise by underlining the connection between a modern Europe and social protection systems. Regulating the workplace and improving the living conditions of the workforce would enable European states to increase productivity, at the same time keeping poverty at bay and avoiding the risk of uprisings. This vaguely defined group played an effective role in establishing the welfare state as the realm of memory of a forward-looking Europe.

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It was not the only one of its kind, however. Since the late nineteenth century, socialists and reformist trade unionists with social democratic or Christian convictions had formed international, mainly European associations. These include the International Working Men’s Association, the Second International (which continued the former’s work), the International Federation of Trade Unions (the Amsterdam International) and the International Federation of Christian Trade Unions founded in The Hague. Social demands were a key element of the workers’ internationalist outlook. In this way, the reduction in working hours and the introduction of the highly emblematic eight-hour working day form a realm of memory for the European workers’ movement. After having fought insurance laws in their respective countries as they gave increased power to states that were hostile to the workers’ movement, the Socialist International eventually promoted them. Proletarian internationalism therefore gradually gave way to calls for social progress that would be brought about by coordinating social legislation at European level. Accordingly, during the First World War, representatives of trade unions in Allied countries who had accepted the political truces known as ‘Sacred Unions’ asked for compensation in acknowledgement of their peoples’ sacrifice and argued for the creation of an international workers’ organization within which trade unions would champion workers’ rights. The International Labour Organisation (ILO) was founded in 1919, following the decision of the European Allies, and is seen as a triumph for trade unionism. The first convention set the standard of an eight-hour working day (forty-eight hours a week). This remains in place today as the European standard, forming a strongly emblematic realm of memory associated with workers’ victories.

THE CONFIRMATION OF A SOCIAL AND DEMOCRATIC EUROPE Yet the creation of the ILO was also, and to a large extent, a response to the revolutionary movement that was spreading through Europe from Russia after the First World War. Faced with this danger, the new organization represented and developed a reformist, democratic counter-model. The European identity that forms the basis of a shared memory has therefore not been constructed by bringing together different national European policies, but rather by the manner in which a social and democratic Europe defines and asserts itself when faced with competing systems. At the same time, the interwar period also witnessed the rapid expansion of social protection systems. This was likewise the case for the new countries in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe that had been created following the dissolution of the AustroHungarian Empire. Social policies encompassed increasingly large groups and social spending rose. The conventions developed by the ILO were subject to ratification by the Parliaments of member states; they were not restrictive and the solutions adopted by the various states differed in their details. Nevertheless, its conventions and recommendations gave fairly clear indications of the general directions of these

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policies adopted in different European countries and outlined shared pathways. They were based on the following principles: the regulation of working age and working hours; the contractualization of employment relations; the promotion of workforce training policies; the establishment of social insurance schemes and hygiene policies. Later, during the 1930s, the development of ‘leisure’ policies and the promotion of housing policies were added to the list. These social policies pursued the explicit aim of averting or rectifying injustice and destitution, and combating insecurity. The revolutions that might be triggered by these evils had to be avoided at all costs; with this in mind, social reformers worked to establish conditions favouring the development of collective negotiations between social partners. The same objective was pursued by Jacques Delors fifty years later in 1985, when he brought European social partners together at the Château de Val Duchesse in Brussels. As was the case in the interwar years, these social systems were perceived as part and parcel of political democracy, which they also help to reinforce. In this form, the welfare state is a key element of the European identity shared by a large group directly involved in establishing these types of regulatory social system; their members range from reformist and Christian workers’ movements to moderately minded employers. These measures were fought by communist and anarchist workers’ movements, which saw them as instruments of ‘class collaboration’. This opposing view played a part in reinforcing the concept of Europe as ‘democratic’ or ‘social’. Yet the construction of the European welfare state also involved associations with a distant Other. The social conventions developed in the 1920s by the ILO and ratified in European capitals did not extend to the colonial territories. However, during the technical assistance missions carried out in Latin American countries, Egypt and China in the 1930s, attempts were made to export certain elements of this social model to these nations, although the elements were not adapted. In this dual association with non-European worlds, the role of social policies may be viewed as part of the assertion of a European supremacy based on belief in progress and democracy – values which Europe alone was seen as possessing. This belief in the existence of something resembling a specific European social model was widespread among European nations and fuels an inward-looking discourse common to all extreme right-wing groups in Europe in the early twenty-first century. And yet this model was at odds, and in competition with, the social solutions established in Southern European dictatorships during the interwar period, first Italian fascism. This promoted a corporatist system of social organization whereby social harmony would be guaranteed through the intervention of a strong state. This corporatism, in various forms, exerted a strong attraction on the Catholic dictatorships in Southern and Eastern Europe. The Italian fascists tried to establish a social counter-model through their leisure policies. On this point, they very soon found themselves in competition with the Nazis, who, having re-organized social policies along authoritarian lines, presented themselves as the leading lights of a new social Europe. This ambition achieved its supreme expression during the war, with the creation of an Institute for European Social Welfare Policies and the publication of a periodical intended to replace that of the ILO.

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THE RIGHT TO SOCIAL SECURITY In reality, the Nazi social project primarily served to justify the imperial ambitions of the Third Reich, and to mobilize and exploit European workers in the service of the Nazi war industry. The formulation and implementation of this totalitarian social programme provided the Allies with the opportunity to reassert the importance of social policies in the construction of a democratic Europe and to reformulate their own social model. Article 5 of the Atlantic Charter, issued in August 1941, promised social security for all. A special ILO conference held in New York in November and December 1941 gave representatives of European nations at war with Nazi Germany a further chance to emphasize the important role that social policies would play in building a democratic Europe. The year 1942 saw the appearance of the Beveridge Report, named after the British politician who produced it; its publication, circulation and promotion, together with its negative reception in Nazi Germany, clearly illustrate the role then played by social policies in the definition of the self. Social security had become an aspect of a democratic, united Europe, as opposed to the oppressive, racially hierarchized Nazi dictatorship. Social policies also figured prominently in the programmes of the European resistance movements that formed the basis of post-war Europe. In this context, social rights became equated with human rights during the post-war period. The right to social security, to free choice of employment and favourable conditions of work, to health and education, to rest and leisure, and to form and join a trade union were all included in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948.

IN THE WEST: A THIRD WAY Despite being recognized as universal human rights, social rights were not included in the European Convention on Human Rights signed by the ten member states of the Council of Europe in 1950. Western European organizations initially pursed economic goals. These bodies included the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation, which was founded in 1948 to administer the Marshall Plan and which became the OECD in 1961, as well as the first European communities created by treaty: the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951 and the European Economic Community in 1957. The aim was to establish a free market, which would allow economic growth and establish the conditions conducive to prosperity. Despite the promulgation of the European Social Charter in 1961, social rights were not included among the group of core values that formed the basis of the European project as it took form after the Second World War. At the same time, during the decades that followed the conflict, the model of a protective, redistributive state that guaranteed the security and stability of each of its citizens was establishing itself throughout Europe. In the West, social rights and protection were extended to those sections of the population who had been largely deprived of them, such as rural workers and the self-employed. In the 1970s, the various branches of the social security system covered around 70 per cent of the population. The welfare state became involved in an ever-increasing number of areas,

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and social spending rose to an unprecedented and constant level, accounting for almost 25 per cent of the average gross domestic product. However, countries still differed in both the nature and the extent of the protective and redistributive power of the state. While the Scandinavian countries had established a costly universal system, social protection in Southern Europe remained fragmentary. The lack of a truly Europe-wide social programme, as well as the extent of the differences between countries, has promoted a strictly national interpretation of a welfare state. At the same time, we are witnessing the nationalization of the memories of welfare states; this is influenced by political movements, particularly those born of resistance. The memory constructed in these cases is of a welfare state that arose out of a struggle for liberation, while, in the language of communist resistance fighters, social policies are a benefit that was snatched from the class enemy and their cohorts, the company bosses, in the specific context of the post-war period. Nevertheless, elements of a Europeanization of social policies may be detected in the 1950s. Given the circulation of goods and people, it made sense to bring the social legislation of different states closer together, especially in the area of health and safety at work. This objective was encouraged through the policies of harmonization pursued by the European Commission. In addition, the Council of Europe convoked meetings where experts identified problems and put forward joint solutions, particularly in the field of retirement. And finally, through the decisions of the Court of Justice of the European Communities, and later of the Court of Justice of the European Union (the CJEU), norms were established in the fields of labour relations, gender equality and policies providing support for dependant persons. Together, these systems had repercussions on national legislation, although these were not greatly in evidence and were rarely mentioned by national political figures. For certain groups who struggled to make themselves heard at a national level, such as women, Europe also constituted a space for mobilization and support. Other groups, such as the migrants who benefited from the social rights upheld within the community, were the direct beneficiaries of that Europe-wide harmonization of social policies. The European Health Insurance Card introduced in 2002 was an important tangible demonstration of the Europeanization of social rights. Featuring an image of the European flag, it is identical in every country and, in some cases, it is incorporated into the national social security card. This card is much appreciated by migrants and European tourists; through it, they can construct a European memory of the welfare state. Beyond the material effects of the Europeanization of social policies, the postwar period also witnessed the development of an optimistic, victorious discourse associated with the European welfare state. A representation of the Western welfare state prevailed within a vast liberal social movement whereby social rights, according to the British sociologist Thomas Humphrey Marshall, were the third stage and crowning point of a democratic process initiated by the acquisition of civil rights in the seventeenth century and followed by that of political rights in the nineteenth century. This narrative clearly served to provide a common identity for members of a large European reformist movement that included trade unionists, social democrats and social liberals. These were the groups which developed and

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promoted the truly European social model representing a ‘third way’. This stood midway between the market-driven approach of the United States and the ‘welfare dictatorships’ of Eastern Europe.

THE EAST: A MIRROR IMAGE As with the West, there was no real coordination of national social policies in the East. The international organizations within the Eastern bloc – the Comecon – initially focused on economic aims, like those of Western Europe. According to the discourse here, the very notion of social policy was to be rejected as a capitalist crutch. The communist leaders saw redistribution as the very foundation of socialism; as the process was to be carried out under the aegis of the state, there would be no need for specific arrangements. In reality, various forms of social policy based on the Soviet model were established in the late 1940s. The first of these concerned productive workers and their families, and they were set up within industries by the state. As a response to the dual image of democracy and justice promoted in the West, the communist leaders based their social regime on the notions of equality and security. The attachment to these values was confirmed by the nostalgia − sometimes known as ‘Ostalgia’ − for communism experienced in the 1990s, particularly by those who had lost their jobs or their status. After the transition, they were able to form a type of realm of memory of socialist Europe. Despite these affirmations of distinct identities, each of the two European social models generally developed in association with the other. In the 1960s, the promise of a largely subsidized consumer society in Eastern Europe marked a significant softening of social policy. It was essentially introduced in response to the image of abundance associated with the economic success enjoyed in the West during the ‘Thirty Glorious Years’. Some sections of the Western European left wing used the alternatives that socialist societies seemed to offer in order to encourage the development of social policies. The very low unemployment rates in socialist countries in the 1970s provided an incentive for the introduction of contra-cyclical policies, while Yugoslavia became a model for workers’ self-management. These perceptions of the Other stimulated genuine imitation and justified the soaring social expenses of both political systems. These huge rises, in turn, fostered the construction of identical social memories. The 1950s witnessed discussions on shared problems that transcended Cold War hostility. In 1955, the ILO held a pan-European conference whose agenda included the issues of retirement age and the financing of social security measures. Questions relating to workforce training and income security were discussed at a second meeting in 1974. The joint conversations between the West and the Soviet bloc culminated in the re-assertion of the importance of social progress in the Final Act of the Helsinki Accords, signed in 1975. These convergent attitudes towards social issues were encouraged by broad political trends, and in particular by the Socialist International, which saw them as a peacemaking factor. They were further reinforced by the way in which the two sides exported their model for economic and social progress to developing countries. By offering different yet converging

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routes to modernity, these development policies contributed to the emergence of a collective memory of the European welfare state in non-European countries. It is tempting to see the end of the Cold War and of that productive emulation as an explanation for the stagnation, even the retraction of redistributive and social welfare measures, as well as reason why the European welfare state is becoming a fading memory. Indeed, an economic approach challenging the very legitimacy of these redistributive and regulatory policies and their importance for Europe’s democratic stability began to prevail following the dissolution of the Eastern European socialist regimes and the decline of communist parties in the West. Europeans readily accuse the United States of being the originator of this ‘neoliberal’ school of thought, thereby reflecting the implicit, essential relationship that they have established between Europe and the notion of a welfare state. However, Europe has its own consistent tradition of neoliberal economic thinking. This was demonstrated in the West by the prosperity of the Mont Pelerin Society (founded in 1947, notably by Friedrich Hayek), and by the German Ordoliberalism developed in the 1930s, while in the East it was forcefully expressed during the 1980s. There is therefore a broad school of thought within Europe itself hostile to the idea of a protective state; in every country, this has served as an inspiration for certain movements to the right of the political spectrum. Certain European governments in the 1980s, beginning with that of Margaret Thatcher in the UK, chose to reduce public spending. ‘Brussels’ was unfailingly used as the reason behind these cuts and deregulatory measures. However, it was certainly those conservative forces in favour of deregulation that triggered a tendency to forget the reality of the European social model, although this still endures.

THE WELFARE STATE AT THE HEART OF EUROPEAN IDENTITY Europe clearly constitutes a shared space for the development of social policies and the establishment of the model of a welfare state. This model has been successively associated with modernity, progress, justice and democracy by those who have promoted it. Something we might describe as an ‘environment for European memory’ emerges within this shared space. This environment – and the model it promotes – came strongly to the fore during the wars in Europe, including the Cold War, during which it served as a powerful instrument for popular mobilization. In this way, it may have been periods of opposition to an Other that gave the greatest impetus to the development of a European memory of the welfare state. Moreover, from the late nineteenth century, the construction of this European social model was clearly stimulated by the existence of European organizations that were, and still are, environments where a shared normativity can be developed. Certain limited groups, expert networks, trade union officials, European migrants and all those who have been directly involved in its development and have experienced its benefits continue to preserve the memory of this social model. In other cases, the welfare state may well be included among the European ‘realms of oblivion’, proof of the

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inconsistent character of European memories. Lacking a solidly established status, these memories are indeed ceaselessly threatened by the development of national, even nationalist discourse promulgated by highly organized and more audible groups. Social Europe as a memory is especially fragile. This is because, although European organizations are environments where social norms can be disseminated, and although they provide opportunities for these to be discussed and established, it is the nation states that apply them, and, above all, it is within each nation state that the social solidarity between individuals is put into practice. And yet, although the welfare state does not constitute a dynamic realm of memory, it contributes strongly to European identity. This identity is not necessarily based on the convergence of European welfare states, but on creative emulation and competition between national welfare models, which has been the case since the nineteenth century. Finally and most significantly, this European social identity unquestionably exists in the eyes of others, whose attraction to Europe is also linked to its generous social policies. The memory of a European welfare state may be most vividly present outside Europe, and it is this memory that should be explored.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Barbier, Jean-Claude, La Longue Marche vers l’Europe sociale, Paris, PUF, 2008. Inglot, Tomasz, Welfare States in East Central Europe, 1919–2004, New York and Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008. Kaelble, Hartmut and Günther Schmid, Das europäische Sozialmodell: auf dem Weg zum transnationalen Sozialstaat, Berlin, Sigma, 2004. Kaufmann, Franz-Xaver, Variations of the Welfare State: Great Britain, Sweden, France and Germany Between Capitalism and Socialism, Dordrecht, Springer, 2011. Kott, Sandrine, ‘Constructing a European Social Model: The Fight for Social Insurance in the Interwar Period’, in Jasmien van Daele, Magaly Rodríguez García, Geert van Goethem and Marcel van der Linden (Eds.), ILO Histories: Essays on the International Labour Organization and Its Impact on the World during the Twentieth Century, Berne, Peter Lang, 2010, pp. 173–95. Obinger, Herbert and Carina Schmitt, ‘Guns and Butter? Regime Competition and the Welfare State during the Cold War’, World Politics, 63, no. 2 (2011): 246–70. Petersen, Klaus, ‘The Early Cold War and the Western Welfare State’, Journal of International and Comparative Social Policy, 29, no. 3 (1 October 2013): 226–40. Ritter, Gerhard A., Der Sozialstaat. Entstehung und Entwicklung im internationalen Vergleich, Munich, Oldenbourg, 2012. Ther, Philipp, Europe since 1989: A History, translated from the German by Charlotte Hughes-Kreutzmüller, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2016 [2014].

CHAPTER 22

Human rights A noble idea CHRISTOF MANDRY

The Renaissance, and later the Enlightenment, brought a revolution to Europe, placing human beings and their dignity above all other values, including that of religion. Today, the grandeur of the European Idea is encapsulated in that concept. However, it took centuries to come to maturity and was only established in the twentieth century as a project to counter barbarism. Humanism and human rights form an integral part of the European identity today, even though – or precisely because – Europe’s history includes multiple experiences suggesting the opposite. The central position occupied by the individual and individual human dignity is the result of a long process. Although its principal stages did not develop exclusively in Europe, they all placed the individual at the heart our identity. However, the concepts of humanism and human rights have created a repository of various memories, traditions and acknowledgements, some of which are contradictory and controversial. They are connected by one fundamental element, which also constitutes their greatest challenge – they are both, in their own ways, a project intended to counter barbarism. Yet the sense of a moral and cultural superiority inevitably includes a tendency to dominate other peoples and cultures; this lies like a grim shadow over Europe’s history. Humanism encompasses a multitude of definitions, from that of the Renaissance to secular views of the world. Thanks to the series of related terms – humanity, humanitarian – it still retains positive connotations, even if the current ideal image of humanity has shifted away from that of Renaissance Humanism. In this way, the notion of basing human development on studies of ancient Greece and Rome has lost most of its influence. Human rights now occupy the place long held by humanism. As recent as this concept may be, it is nonetheless the legacy of experiences central to European history.

RENAISSANCE HUMANISM Humanism emerged in Italy in the latter half of the fourteenth century and spread more or less throughout Europe. Its objective centred on the memory of Antiquity.

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Until the twentieth century, the revival and appropriation of that Classical heritage was seen as the ‘royal road’ leading to the discovery of the human within the man. The humanists were fundamentally European in their resurrection of the ideas of Classical Antiquity, insofar as they formed a transnational community and reappropriated a cultural heritage that they saw as a constituent characteristic of Europe. This was reinforced by the fact that the former division between Latin and Greek Europe had become obsolete following the fall of Constantinople, enabling Western Europe to develop a sense of unity and to stand in opposition to an East henceforth seen as entirely Muslim. The humanists championed a new educational method that contrasted with Scholasticism and the teaching provided at the universities. Whereas the latter prepared students to become lawyers, doctors or theologians, in other words, practising specialists, the humanistae sought to form a uomo universale through an education that would give him a superior intellectual status by transcending specializations. Although Classical literature was certainly already known and studied in the Middle Ages, the humanists, as champions of a comprehensive, ethical and aesthetic ideal, promoted the literary and linguistic qualities of Classical works. They contrasted Scholastic Latin, which they deemed inferior, with the style, fluency and rhetoric of Cicero, Seneca and Quintilian. The Humanists regarded urban life, the interest accorded to language and art and the importance attached to the humanity within a human being as an ideal in an era characterized by a fundamental change in the conception of man. The notion of man and his place in the world was no longer presented in terms of an eternal entity with divine origins; instead, he was characterized by his aesthetic and sensory experiences as an individual, by his creative faculties and his technical, political and rhetorical abilities. The Humanists were inspired by Cicero’s writings on humanitas (philanthropia), which were in turn a legacy of Greek thought. Cicero outlined the character of the ideal public orator as courteous, honourable, just and generous. The intensive study of Classical languages, firstly Latin, was seen by the humanists as the expression of humanitas. Following the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottomans in 1453, a number of Byzantine scholars took refuge in Italy. The Greek manuscripts they brought with them led to a rediscovery of ancient Greek literature, thereby placing ancient Greek on the same footing as Latin. In order to emphasize their identification with a Classical ideal that they deemed peerless, several humanists went so far as to Latinize or Hellenize their names. In this way, Philipp Schwarzerd, Luther’s closest associate, chose the humanistic surname Melanchthon. Closely connected to their interest in Classical languages, their philosophical, theological and educational treatises were written in keeping with the traditions of Classical Antiquity. However, the humanists were not sceptical with regard to religion in general, nor were they critical of Christianity. Instead, their interest in original sources led them to examine theological and religious questions in a new light. They produced quantities of critical analyses of the Scriptures, new translations of the Bible and theological treatises. The question of truth was given a historical dimension through critical textual analysis. The most famous example of this was the discovery that the ‘Donation of Constantine’ was a

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forgery, as proved by Nicholas of Cusa and Lorenzo Valla on the basis of a precise philological analysis. In later times, Renaissance Humanism was readily seen as the precursor of modern individualism and of a secular conception of humankind. This interpretation was put forward and developed by Jakob Burckhardt in his book Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (1860); it was translated into English by S. G. C. Middlemore as The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy (1878). In his view, Renaissance Humanism instigated a fundamental distinction between the church and society, resulting in the emergence of the modern individual. Humanism is thus largely perceived as the emancipation of European thought from religion and the harbinger of a process of development to be established with the Age of Enlightenment and the aspiration to political liberty. Two aspects originating from Renaissance Humanism have had a palpable and lasting effect on European thought and culture. The first is the division of history into three major eras: Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Modern Period. In this way, the ‘Middle Ages’ become no more than an intermediate period separating the humanist modern age from the idealized cultural era of Antiquity. This division, with its normative character, remains in force in European historiographical studies. The second aspect relates to education and the lasting impact that humanism has had on teaching in Europe. The educational systems developed by Melanchthon and the Jesuits both laid claim to humanist ideals and made the humanists’ programme their own. Generations of aristocratic and middle-class students have therefore benefited from an education in which Classical literature, style and rhetoric have played a decisive role. For several centuries, Europe cultivated the ideal of an education based on the study of Antiquity, relegating that of contemporary vernacular literature to an inferior status. Although this ideal anticipated cosmopolitanism, it was also based on an undeniable sense of superiority.

1789: THE RIGHTS OF MAN AND OF THE CITIZEN The recognition of human rights is justifiably seen as a remarkable victory. Originally established in Europe and the United States, the concept is taking root in a growing number of countries and has generated a common language in which to condemn injustice, oppression and the deprivation of civil liberties. Europeans see human rights as a key aspect of the modern state, in that they formulate the basic rights that a state must respect when exercising its power. The primacy of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen set out by France’s National Constituent Assembly in 1789 is subject to challenge. It is certainly true that it was preceded by the US Declaration of Independence; issued in 1776, its opening statement defined the fundamental rights of American citizens. Yet it is equally true that human rights may be regarded as a European heritage. For the impact that the French Revolution has had on European history, and on political thought and political and social movements in Europe should not be underestimated. When the countries of Eastern and Central Europe were freed from the Soviet socialist system and rejoined the ‘family circle’ of European states after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, their

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return was likewise seen as a victory for human rights. Most Europeans, almost without exception, agree that the ethics underpinning the concept of human rights are universally valid. This is not to suggest, however, that Europe should be seen as the continent of human rights and that its history may be summarized by three key dates: 1789, 1948 and 1989. A closer examination reveals that the primary importance accorded to these rights in the European consciousness is of much more recent origin than is often supposed; it is the legacy of a painful past and has yet to gain widespread acceptance. Although the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen issued in 1789 may be seen as the political and public fountainhead of the European history of human rights, it should not be assumed that nineteenth- or twentieth-century society was imbued with its principles. The ideal of human rights had to prevail against reactionary and totalitarian forces before being enshrined, in black and white, in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Before that date, however, it had played practically no role during the nineteenth century, soon taking a back seat behind the concept of citizens’ rights. The latter, in turn, applied solely to male European citizens, with women and the inhabitants of the colonies and overseas territories being excluded. The revolutionary Olympe de Gouges went to the guillotine in 1793 as an advocate of citizens’ rights for women, and in most European states women did not obtain the vote until after the First World War − French women, indeed, had to wait until 1944. In the nineteenth century, the ‘rights of man and of the citizen’ were essentially the concern of men and of the liberal bourgeoisie who called for them. Their deeply controversial character is explained by this association with a bourgeois conception of society and the state, which entailed demands for the abolition of social restrictions regarded as outdated. Industrialization brought with it new social classes and enormous social inequality. In this context, the liberal concept of the ‘rights of man and of the citizen’ appeared to be the sole preserve of proprietors, while the needs of an impoverished rural population and of the working masses in vulnerable situations were disregarded. That specific question of how to define the term ‘equality’ in modern society was the subject of the great ideological debates of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The notions of ‘class’, ‘nation’ and ‘race’ (as well as that of ‘civilization’) were central to the political discourse of the day and eclipsed that of human rights. This is clearly seen in the socialists’ opposition to the liberal concept of human rights. For socialists, the notion was based on the presupposition of an equality of natural order that did not exist in society. Socialist movements therefore rejected both the liberal conception of human rights and the liberal state. Instead they promoted social rights, intended to guarantee genuine freedom. Consequently, the socialists developed an entirely different social and political ideal; this formed an alternative to the Western model, as was the case in Europe until 1989, in the Soviet Union from 1917 and in Central and Eastern Europe after 1945, not forgetting nonEuropean states such as China, Vietnam and Cuba. These societies promoted equality rather than freedom; basic social rights such as the right to work, to education, to leisure and food extended to all members of the socialist community. During the twentieth century, it became evident in Europe that the promotion of equality rather

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than freedom led to totalitarianism. Moreover, the disillusion caused by the failure of socialism paved the way for the establishment of human rights ethics in the West, once the welfare state had been instituted there. This provided social protection at a level never achieved in the socialist societies, despite the curtailment of freedom. After the Second World War and the crimes of the Nazi regime, human rights reemerged at the forefront of the political scene. The context was different this time, however, as they served as an instrument of justice following the experiences the world had undergone since the nineteenth century. It was the American president Franklin D. Roosevelt who finally linked the notion of liberal rights with the importance of social security as guarantees of lasting freedom and a peaceful society. This idea would resurface in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, although a number of socialist states considered that the document was not sufficiently ambitious with regard to social rights.

CONTROVERSY AND AMBIVALENCE Although human rights are now considered to be a victory for humanity and occupy a central place in modern European society, their origins remain a matter for debate. As early as 1895, the Austro-German jurist Georg Jellinek expounded the theory that they were born of political struggles for freedom of conscience and of religion and therefore developed from the constitutional texts of North America rather than from the French Revolution. This theory, which was not devoid of anti-French sentiment, therefore constituted an attempt to re-establish human rights as part of an English legal tradition. The academic debate continues to rage to this day. It is worth noting that the importance of this or that historical tradition is likewise being debated through these arguments over origins and antecedents. Are human rights the product of the Enlightenment, or are they founded on a Christian conception of the individual? Are their origins to be found in the natural law of the Middle Ages or of Antiquity, or were they formulated through the Spanish debates over the dignity of the indigenous peoples of South America? In every case, this is a question not only of shedding light on the history of the phenomenon but also of discovering whether this vital and normative aspect of today’s society is Christian or secular in origin. The widespread acceptance of human rights raises an equally important question. How can it be that large swathes of European society are united in endorsing the ethics of human rights, while they hold markedly differing views on other philosophical ideas and conceptions? Like Émile Durkheim, the German sociologist Hans Joas maintained that human rights are an expression of ‘the sacredness of the person’ and, as such, constitute a type of secular religion in the Modern Era. They are therefore perceived on the one hand as the expression of a profound change in mentality, while on the other hand they are regarded as the outcome of a complex process, rather than the result of a single factor in the history of ideas or of a given religious or philosophical conception. The person becomes sacred when the individual human being is seen as possessing the greatest worth, a worth previously accorded to God as a transcendent power, or to the monarch, His representative on

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earth. This is evident in certain changes that have occurred in society’s institutions, values and practices, such as the abolition of torture and corporal punishment and the fight against slavery, as well as the importance given to bodily integrity. The violation of an individual’s physical integrity – through murder, blows and injuries, insults, lack of respect for self-determination and so on – is now seen as the most reprehensible of crimes, a position occupied in former times by heresy and treason. The decisive reason for this fundamental change in values lies mainly in a transformation of sensibilities and perceptions. However, in the European societies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that considered themselves particularly ‘civilized’, the principle of equality before the law came to nothing as soon as minority communities were involved. This was the case with the Dreyfus Affair in the late 1890s, seen by contemporary witnesses as a paradigmatic example of a fight for the rights of the individual against the ‘honour’ of the army and the state. If the democratic rule of law finally emerged strengthened from this fight, it was thanks to key figures in civil society, starting with the activists in the League of Human Rights. European colonialism, which reached its zenith after the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, is another example of these two contradictory approaches. The main nineteenth-century colonial powers were states with a liberal or republican legal tradition, such as Great Britain and France. All European countries justified their expansion on the basis of cultural, scientific and ethical superiority, claiming that their mission was to bring civilization to ‘primitive’ and under-developed peoples. In this sense, the fight against slavery – which explicitly associated itself with human rights – serves as a paradigm on account of its very ambivalence. Initiated in England in the late eighteenth century, the campaign was directed in equal measure against the slave trade and slavery itself, and finally culminated in its abolition (in 1833 in the case of the British colonies and in 1848 in that of the French). At the same time, however, that fight served to justify colonial expansion in the African continent; in this way, the very same European societies that were becoming increasingly democratic at home pursued policies of racist exploitation in their colonies, the pretext being that they were conducting a civilizing mission. This twofold approach exhibited by the European powers was maintained until the latter half of the twentieth century. Even though the issue of human rights emerged onto the international scene with the adoption of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, it was several decades before they were politically promoted. States such as France and Great Britain, which played a key role in the adoption of the UN Declaration, were simultaneously engaged in colonial wars as they refused to dissolve their empires. During these conflicts, they systematically used torture, internment and forced migration, as well as committing other human rights abuses.

TOWARDS A SHARED APPROACH TO HUMAN RIGHTS IN EUROPE It was not until the 1970s that the values encompassed by the principle of human rights were widely shared within Europe and politically promoted. The United

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Nations later established an international forum where questions related to the subject can be debated and revised. Civil society actors devoted to human rights are gaining a higher profile in this way. The activities of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, two of the leading NGOs championing human rights, have contributed to raising public awareness of the issue and have gained widespread support for their cause. Certain factors have helped their endeavour. European societies have embarked on a gradually developing work of recollection; this initially involved the Second World War and later extended to colonialism and the colonial wars. In this way, through an empathetic approach to the Other, the wrongs that were both suffered and committed were eventually seen as acts of injustice inflicted on fellow human beings. Moreover, Western societies have lacked a utopian ideal since communism lost its charms through the policy of repression pursued by the Soviet Union following the Prague Spring. The Helsinki Accords of 1975 fuelled hopes of a détente in the midst of the Cold War era. They likewise contained a statement of principle upholding respect for ‘the rights of man and of the citizen’ invoked by movements championing civil rights in Eastern European states. These movements, such as Poland’s Solidarność or Charter 77, a Czechoslovak initiative, together with dissidents like Alexander Solzhenitsyn, enjoyed considerable popularity in Western Europe, where they were regarded as heroes of the human rights cause. A number of human rights movements were established in the West; active both within their own society and on the international scene, they looked to their respective governments to show a similar commitment to the cause. Despite this, can we truthfully claim that the ‘sacredness of the person’ is an accomplished fact? Are human rights now fully recognized in Europe, after a turbulent history? The reality is that nothing has been achieved. Europeans have been able to close their eyes to the ambivalent attitude that involves acknowledging the theory of universal humanity, while failing to concede the same rights to everyone in practice. With European societies having been unsettled by inequality, terrorism, the arrival of migrants and increasing diversity, restrictions of human rights are looming on the horizon. There is no place on earth where faith in humanity is unshakeable. The challenge confronting us today involves being able to defend human rights in their entirety, despite the dangers that threaten us.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Baab, Florian, Was ist Humanismus? Geschichte des Begriffs, Gegenkonzepte, säkulare Humanismen heute, Regensburg, F. Pustet, 2013. Barth, Boris and Jürgen Osterhammel (Eds.), Zivilisierungsmissionen. Imperiale Weltverbesserung seit dem 18. Jahrhundert, Constance, UVK, 2005. Böhme, Günther, Bildungsgeschichte des europäischen Humanismus, Darmstadt, WBG, 1986. Davies, Tony, Humanism, Abingdon, Routledge, 2008. Hoffmann, Stefan-Ludwig (Ed.), Moralpolitik. Geschichte der Menschenrechte im 20. Jahrhundert, Göttingen, Wallstein, 2010.

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Hunt, Lynn, Inventing Human Rights: A History, New York, W.W. Norton & Co. Inc., 2007. Joas, Hans, The Sacredness of the Person: A New Genealogy of Human Rights, Washington DC, Georgetown University Press, 2013. Moyn, Samuel, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2010. Vöhler, Martin and Hubert Cancik (Eds.), Genese und Profil des europäischen Humanismus, Heidelberg, Winter, 2009.

CHAPTER 23

Enlightenment, Lumières, Aufklärung, Haskalah . . . THOMAS BROSE

In 1758, the Swedish natural scientist Carl Linnaeus introduced the term ‘Homo sapiens’. The ‘wise man’ is an individual who uses his reason to elucidate every aspect of life, relegating knowledge of God to a position of secondary importance. Descartes had already set out his argument: ‘I think therefore I am’ – an indication of the ambitious scope of this intellectual movement, which spread throughout eighteenthcentury Europe generating a new era of modernity. However, this revolution and its legacy have never been the object of universal approval. ‘Dare to know!’ Dare to expose prejudices, to unmask subjugation in all its guises and to make use of your reason in every context. Entire generations have been guided by that ambition upheld by the Enlightenment. Much more than simply a period of history and of philosophy, in this case the eighteenth century, the Enlightenment was a utopian notion directed at liberating the individual and achieving political emancipation. This is the never-ending endeavour to bring about ‘man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity’, as Kant put it. It is an endeavour that continues to influence European intellectual culture and sensibility to this day.

THE ADVENT OF REASON Far from being a more recent definition, the ‘Age of Enlightenment’ was used as a reference to the eighteenth century by its contemporaries themselves, each expressing it in their respective languages: Enlightenment, Lumières, Aufklärung, Illuminismo, Ilustración, Oświecenie, Haskalah and so on. This metaphor transcended borders, heralding the dawn of a new era when reason would elucidate every area of life. Henceforth, the most prominent role was accorded to human reason and its infallible nature, rather than knowledge of God based on revelation or ‘illumination’. Characterized by a passion for truth and the desire to clarify ‘all things’, this new, central idea was gradually established in England, France and Germany, and in Western and Eastern Europe (the Enlightenment reached Russia in the reign of Peter the Great and attained its apogee under Catherine II). Power was no longer

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used as a supreme reference, whether in relation to origins, tradition or possession, being supplanted by the chief characteristic of Homo sapiens – a term introduced in 1758 by Carl Linnaeus of Sweden (1707–1778) − namely, reason. This unique faculty had already been described by René Descartes (1596–1650) in his Discourse on the Method (1637); reason, or ‘common sense’, is ‘the most equally distributed thing in the world’ and ‘the only thing that makes us human and distinguishes us from animals’. In the Discourse, Decartes formulates the principle of his ‘clear and distinct’ method and its keystone: ‘cogito ergo sum’. Over the next century and a half, the idea of autonomous human reason began to prevail in the domains of science, philosophy, politics and religion, becoming the measure of all things and enabling truth to be understood clearly and distinctly. The fundamental aim, expressed with ever-increasing clarity, was to eradicate superstition and fantasy. The reign of reason was expected to establish freedom, sound morals and human rights, and to produce improved scientific and political institutions – in all, it was seen as leading to a world inhabited by happier individuals. However, although the concept of the Enlightenment has become deeply enrooted in the discourse of European identity, it is not always easy to define it in temporal terms, either in an intellectual or a historical context. That difficulty stems first and foremost from the diversity within the Enlightenment movement. This brought together moderate rationalists and adherents of the ‘radical Enlightenment’, which often tends to be underestimated and whose origins, as Jonathan Israel has rightly pointed out, are to be found in Baruch Spinoza’s radical critique of religion Tractatus theologico-politicus (1670). Moreover, this reflects the many different contexts within which the Enlightenment developed and explains the distinct forms it took in Catholic, Protestant and Jewish worlds, for instance.

DEFYING DARKNESS This foundational epoch of Western modernity did not actually begin with the eighteenth century. As Paul Hazard explains in La Crise de la conscience européene, its origins date back to a transitional phase corresponding approximately to the introduction of street lights in European cities, first in Paris (1667), then in Amsterdam (1669), Hamburg (1673), Turin (1675), Berlin (1682) and London (1684). Lanterns and candles, and later oil and gas lamps, lit up the night, encouraging urban inhabitants to gain a new self-confidence and to defy the darkness by creating a new form of sociability. Nocturnal illuminations, the fruits of technology and civilization, extended the space in which ‘citizens’ could gather to exchange their views freely, cutting across religious, social and professional boundaries. As shown by Jürgen Habermas, a new type of sociable existence and communication developed in theatres, salons and Masonic lodges (the first of these was founded in London in 1717), academies and learned societies, literary clubs and cafés. This was the bürgerliche Öffentlichkeit – the public sphere in civil society. It brought together members of the aristocracy and of the bourgeoisie, clerks and authors, shopkeepers and lawyers, irrespective of their social background or religious affiliation. As a result of this process, which developed over vast swathes of Western Europe and

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extended as far as Poland and Russia, the press expanded dramatically; new learned periodicals and newspapers emerged on the scene, together with ‘moral’ weekly publications inspired by the British journals Tatler and The Spectator. New scientific developments, likewise, did not occur in a strict sequence corresponding to the passing centuries. Francis Bacon’s Novum organum scientiarium was published in 1620; in this work he argues for a scientific approach to the world unfettered by metaphysics and involving the creation of laboratories, observatories and botanical gardens. The Royal Society was created in London in 1660, followed by the Académie des sciences in Paris (1666), the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin (1700) and the Russian Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg (1724). Isaac Newton (1642–1727), who developed the principles of modern physics, remained President of the Royal Society from 1703 until his death. Moreover, the founder and first president of the Berlin Society of Sciences and the Russian Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg was none other than Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), the ‘last universal genius’ in European history.

THE DECLARATION OF 26 AUGUST 1789 Although it is not possible to identify exactly when the Age of Enlightenment began, the date of its end is a different matter; this is generally associated with the French Revolution and the proclamation of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen on 26 August 1789. As the year marking the demise of the Ancien Régime, the year 1789 generated tremendous hope in European intellectual circles. The disappointment was therefore all the more bitterly felt when humanist dreams of liberty, equality and fraternity crumbled in the Reign of Terror and Maximilien Robespierre established a dictatorial rule based on the notion of the supremacy of virtue. Counter-revolutionary writers such as Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821) and Louis de Bonald (1754–1840) reacted with strong hostility to the attempt by their antihero, Robespierre, to use violence as a means of furthering human progress. In this, he was following the principle of man’s inherent goodness expounded by JeanJacques Rousseau. Counter-Enlightenment thinkers used the concept of original sin in order to refute that theory. In De la souverainté du peuple (1794), the royalist Joseph de Maistre declared: ‘The philosopher who seeks to prove what man must be by a priori reasoning is not worthy of being heard.’ It was not only in France that the Enlightenment was identified with the French Revolution. For instance, Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) emphasized the analogy between the intellectual revolution of German Idealism and the historical event of 1789. As an inhabitant of Paris, he sought to reveal the close connection between the French and the Kantian revolutions in his work De l’Allemagne (1835): ‘Nature had intended them [Robespierre and Kant] to weigh out coffee and sugar, but fate willed it otherwise and into the scales of one it laid a king, into those of the other, a God.’ From Heine’s point of view, Immanuel Kant, ‘that arch-destroyer in the realms of thought’. exceeded even Robespierre in ‘terrorism’, as his exhortation that man should free himself of ‘his self-imposed immaturity’ brought the reign of the Supreme Being, the God of deism and a religion of ‘slaves’ to an end. Here Heine

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was referring to the famous definition of the Enlightenment given by Kant in the review Berlinische Zeitschrift in 1784: Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from one another [. . .] Sapere aude! ‘Have courage to use your own understanding!’ – that is the motto of enlightenment. From this perspective, the evolution of humankind is understood as a process of improvement, a definition that entails a new and normative philosophy of history. The German historian and philosopher Reinhart Koselleck speaks of a ‘temporalization of history’, which translates into the conception of history as a ‘collective singular’.

THE SEPARATION OF POWERS Debates over the significance of the Age of Enlightenment are not solely of an abstract nature but also involve conceptions of politics. The essence of power has been a crucial question since the beginning of the Modern Era. In his Querela Pacis (1517), Desiderius Erasmus (ca. 1469–1536) expressed his support for the idea of a European peace congress, before issuing warnings against intolerance and wars of religion. The Dutch scholar and jurist Hugo Grotius followed suit with De Jure Belli ac Pacis in 1625. This work, which established him as the founder of the Enlightenment philosophy of natural law, contains the famous phrase ‘etsi deus non daretur’ (‘As if God did not exist’). His follower, Samuel von Pufendorf (1632–1694), declared in turn: ‘it is the duty of all men to consider themselves as naturally equal in dignity.’ In Leviathan (1651), Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) describes the state of nature – which prevailed during the English Civil War, for example – as ‘the war of all against all’, contrasting it with political governance. Taking into account the potential risk of annihilation involved, he asserted the importance of individuals agreeing to a social contract that would see all their natural rights handed over to an absolute sovereign. John Locke (1632–1704), the ‘Father of Liberalism’, developed an opposing argument, whereby citizens created a political power (the executive) by means of a contract; its legitimacy was founded on the participation of Parliament (the legislative power) in decision-making. His political philosophy was later to influence the United States Declaration of Independence (1776). De l’esprit des lois (1748) by Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, is the culmination of a comparative analysis of European legal systems. This work took its author on various travels, which included a stay in London. Already a member of the Académie française, he then became a member of the Royal Society. In chapter 6 of this monumental work, Montesquieu sets out the principle of the separation of powers: legislative, executive and judicial. He concluded that the strict separation between the executive and judicial powers must be maintained in order to guarantee freedom and avert the threat of tyranny and despotism that might otherwise prevail.

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Although this principle is often associated with the Enlightenment, it is not included in the Constitution of the first French Republic (1791), which was based on the concept of popular sovereignty developed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78). Furthermore, it is no coincidence that Montesquieu’s tomb was desecrated during the revolution. According to Rousseau, man, in his natural state, was born free but was ‘everywhere in chains’. In his Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men (1755), the author argued that humankind had effectively been corrupted by the creation of private property. The only solution lay in a social contract that would establish a new system with regard to both public and private property ownership. Rousseau’s anthropological perspective on equality met with a vigorous rebuttal on the part of Edmund Burke (1729–97), the ‘Father of Conservatism’. However, he influenced the educational systems of Johann Pestalozzi and Joachim Campe, as well as that of Ellen Key, who sought to establish ‘The Century of the Child’ in her book of the same name, published in 1900.

THE DEIST BIBLE Three events occurred to upset the established order before the Age of Enlightenment, relativizing the universality of the Christian faith in old Europe and undermining the revealed religions’ claim to truth: the discovery of America (1492), the German Reformation (1517) and the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48). This process of relativization, which was widespread throughout Europe, was an essential element of the Enlightenment’s transnational dynamics, expressed, among other ways, through the large number of exchanges and intellectual interactions that took place across the Republic of Letters. However, it operated in a specific manner in each European country, according to the different political and religious contexts and intellectual traditions involved. The first signs of the Enlightenment emerged in England earlier than in France or Germany. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 established a constitutional monarchy and a fundamental consensus between religion and politics, in contrast to the absolutism prevailing in France. With the Act of Toleration, William of Orange (1650–1702) allowed limited religious freedom, based on the Dutch model. This applied to ‘non-conformists’ and Protestant ‘sects’, but not to Roman Catholics. His reign instigated a period of optimism (the Augustan Age), which developed for the most part with no explicitly stated aim of elucidation. This explains why the term ‘Enlightenment’ was forged at a later date, from the notion of Aufklärung. However, the reference to deism, described by Ernst Troeltsch as the Enlightenment’s philosophy of religion, created a profound connection between Britain and Continental Europe. In his text De Veritate (1624), Edward Herbert of Cherbury (1583–1648) establishes reason as the instrument to verify faith. The ‘Father of English Deism’ maintained that humankind is able to make use of previously established truths of reason with which it can gauge the ‘reasonable’ character of positive religions. John Locke (1632–1704) provided a solid foundation for empirical philosophy with his key work, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (published in 1690), in which he rejects an intense form of

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Christianity based on the theory of innate ideas. However, in The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695), he concedes that the Bible provides moral support and guidance for the masses. English deism reached its zenith with Matthew Tindal (1653–1733). His key work, Christianity as Old as the Creation (1730), in which he maintains that natural and revealed religions are identical, has rightly been described as the ‘Deist Bible’. The demise of deism came about through the work of the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–76), who dealt it ‘a mortal blow’ (Ernst Cassirer). A sceptic hostile to metaphysics, Hume was refused a professorial chair in his native Edinburgh. The philosopher’s explanation of the origin and history of human nature was based on his ‘science of man’, which postulates the existence of a natural instinct − a ‘natural belief ’. Hume was not exempt from the accusation of stereotypical portrayals of the ‘race war’ (Michel Foucault), as seen in his essay Of National Characters (1753–4). Such stereotypes appeared ‘natural’ to him: ‘I am apt to suspect the Negroes, and in general all other species of men to be naturally inferior to the whites.’

THE CENTURY OF VOLTAIRE Unlike England, which evolved as a constitutional monarchy, France developed an increasingly radical approach to the criticism of religion under the absolute rule of Louis XIV. Pierre Bayle (1647–1706) showed considerable ingenuity in his attacks on the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685). He presented the re-establishment of Catholicism as the sole state religion and the ban on Protestantism imposed by the Revocation as antithetical to the principle of freedom of conscience. His Dictionnaire historique et critique (1695–7) won him fame throughout Europe and served as inspiration for the Encyclopedists. Footnotes, an innovation introduced by Bayle, signalled the existence of opposing authorities, so that the contents of the Bible underwent a process of historical and critical relativization. In the wake of René Descartes, Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709–51) developed a radical atheism. His essay on L’Homme-machine (1748) made waves throughout Europe. Frederick II offered him refuge at his court in Potsdam and appointed him Court Reader. In the nineteenth century, Karl Marx described La Mettrie as an advocate of ‘mechanical materialism’, as opposed to his own ‘historical materialism’. The influence of Voltaire (1694–1778) spread far beyond the borders of the French kingdom; such was his impact on the French Enlightenment that many describe it as the ‘Age of Voltaire’. Despite the virulence of his anti-clericalism and his radical war against the Catholic Church as the state religion (‘Crush what is infamous!’), he defended deist viewpoints – thereby positioning himself at variance with the avant-garde atheists and materialists of the French Enlightenment. In Le Fanatisme, ou Mahomet le prophète (1741), he attacks the absolutist claims of all monotheistic religions. In his Dictionnaire philosophique (1764) he uses pejorative terms in relation to the Jews, describing them as ‘contemptible’, and likewise drew on racist discourse. Like David Hume, he believed that intelligence and character were not shared in equal measure among the peoples of the world and that ‘negroes’ did not possess the aptitude for cultural development. Voltaire was to

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inspire both d’Alembert and Diderot (who resided at the Court of Catherine the Great of Russia from 1773 to 1774) to publish the Encyclopédie − the symbol and conveyer of Enlightenment principles. It contained over 70,000 entries covering every branch of knowledge, encompassing the church, society, science, the state, the law, education and the economy. This was a substantial opus − seventeen volumes accompanied by eleven volumes of illustrations appeared between 1751 and 1772, the last volumes being published in 1780 and bringing the total to thirty-five. With 4,000 subscribers, it was a commercial success and reinforced the bourgeois public sphere. In 1791, Voltaire’s mortal remains were transferred to the Panthéon in a triumphal procession. There, he is presented and celebrated as an ‘immortal’ figure whose defence of equality will be forever remembered. The Calas Affair was a legal scandal that serves as a symbol of that commitment and has become a realm of memory. Jean Calas, a Huguenot cloth merchant from Toulouse, was wrongly accused of having murdered his son (who had committed suicide), in order to prevent him from converting to Catholicism. After having admitted to this under torture, the accused retracted his confession, but was nonetheless sentenced to death. In 1762, he was executed on the wheel and his body was burnt. A quintessential intellectual, Voltaire successfully brought about the rehabilitation of this victim of a miscarriage of justice. Voltaire et l’affaire Calas, a Franco-Swiss production, was shown on television in 2007. The year 1998 saw the launch of the Voltaire Programme, a Franco-German exchange scheme associated with the philosopher’s stay at the court of Frederick the Great.

AN INTERCONNECTED EUROPE The universal scholar Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) and the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) are the two great figures in the Holy Roman Empire who respectively marked the beginning and the end of the Aufklärung. The structure of the Empire, which was split into small political territories that Heinrich Heine was later to describe as Kleinstaaterei, presented an obstacle to political revolution; however, it did nothing to prevent the development and circulation of ideas that challenged the status quo. In this way, Johann Christoph Gottsched (1700–66) described a crisis from which he finally emerged thanks to Leibniz’s Theodicy (1710): ‘I began to see the order and truth in the world that had previously appeared as a labyrinth.’ Nevertheless, as if in response to the article in the Encyclopédie dedicated to Lisbon, the optimism of the European Enlightenment was soon shattered when an earthquake destroyed Portugal’s capital in 1755. In Candide ou l’Optimisme (1759), Voltaire attacked Leibniz’s aphorism: ‘Everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.’ One generation later, Johann Georg Hamann (1730–88) therefore rejected metaphysical works as a source of salvation, finding liberation through another book: the Bible. Hamann responded to Voltaire’s ode Au roi de Prusse with his own Au Salomon de Prusse, a violent denunciation of the Philosopher-King Frederick II, which no publisher would accept on account of its virulence. Hamann, who had translated David Hume, drew Kant, a fellow native of Königsberg, out of his ‘dogmatic torpor’, also providing him with material to pursue his reflections.

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In his essay on the Enlightenment, Kant states that it essentially involved ‘man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity’, a condition that had ‘all but become his nature’. These interconnections forged during the European Enlightenment are characteristic of its era. One of the greatest contributions to the Italian Illuminismo was made by Cesare Beccaria (1738–94). One of the founders of criminology, this Milanese philosopher and jurist became the leading critic of reactionary forms of punishment in Europe, such as the practices of the Inquisition, torture and hanging. In his major work, On Crimes and Punishments (1764), he called for the immediate abolition of the death penalty – a position at odds with that of Kant and Goethe. This treatise was translated into almost every European language during the eighteenth century, the French and German versions appearing in 1765 and 1766, respectively. In this way, Beccaria is regarded as the precursor of penology in the Western world, including North America. In Beccaria’s view, the defendant should be presumed innocent until proved guilty, while the principle of proportionality should be observed in matters of punishment and revenge should play no part in the process. Since 1964, the German Criminological Society has awarded the Beccaria Medal in recognition of exceptional contributions to his discipline. In 2007, the European Union launched the programme ‘The Prevention of and Fight against Crime’, part of a project bearing the name of this Italian jurist. In Poland, the Age of Enlightenment – Oświecenie – is closely associated with the reign of King Stanisław II August Poniatowski (1732–98), the last king of independent Poland. The first Partition of Poland in 1772 saw Russia, Austria and Prussia dividing Polish territory among themselves, a procedure approved by Voltaire as a supporter of Frederick II. The king and council of the state of Poland subsequently implemented reforms intended to strengthen their remaining territories. In this way, Europe’s very first minister of education was appointed in Poland in 1773. The country was at the forefront of constitutional developments. The Polish Diet adopted a modern Constitution in 1791, following in the wake of the American Declaration of Independence and the Constitutional Convention of 1787, and the French Revolution. Poland became a constitutional monarchy, establishing a separation between the executive and legislative powers. The middle classes were the chief beneficiaries of new entitlements, but rights were also granted to the rural and Jewish populations. Although Poland had to wait until 1918 to regain its independence, Poniatowski’s reign nonetheless contributed to spreading the values of the Western Enlightenment. Poland’s National Day, now celebrated on 3 May, commemorates an event whose significance extended to the whole of Europe: the adoption, in the eighteenth century, of the continent’s first National Constitution.

NATHAN THE WISE The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries also opened new perspectives in the Jewish world as the Enlightenment spread from Berlin through Königsberg to Russia. In Hebrew it is known as the Haskalah, meaning ‘wisdom’ and ‘education’, from the

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Hebrew root s-k-l. In the late nineteenth century, the greatest number of its supporters were to be found in Germany (in the context of the ‘Judeo-German Symbiosis’) and it also had adherents in several Eastern European countries. However, it came up against opposition, particularly in Poland and further to the east, from the Hassidim, who called for a revival of traditional Judaism based on the Talmud, a rejection of modernity and an intense piety. The great precursors of the Haskalah (the maskilim) include Prussian-born Moses Mendelssohn (1729–86). In addition to his Talmudic studies, he devoted himself to secular subjects (languages, mathematics and the natural sciences) and was committed to bringing the Jewish community closer to German culture, translating biblical texts from Hebrew into German. From an Orthodox rabbinic perspective, this was blasphemy. The Jewish philosopher was opposed to both the French atheistic stance (La Mettrie) and to empirical scpeticism (Hume); this ‘German Socrates’ owes his fame to Phädon: or On the Immortality of the Soul (1767). In Jerusalem: or On Religious Power and Judasim (1783) he calls for the Jewish faith to be recognized as a religion of reason with a ‘revealed law’. In the nineteenth century, Jewish reformers embarked on a methodical exploration of their own tradition. In this way, Leopold Zunz (1794–1886) founded the Association for Jewish Culture and Science in Berlin in 1819. The Prussian Academy of Sciences had already elected Moses Mendelssohn as a member in 1771, although Frederick II refused to endorse this decision despite being the very epitome of an ‘enlightened despot’. However, Mendelssohn gained the support of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–81). The playwright was to immortalize his friend Moses in Nathan the Wise (1779), a dramatic poem in which he sets out his vision of the peaceful coexistence of universal religions: Christianity, Judaism and Islam. The Nazi regime, based on a racist ideology, banned performances of this play in 1933. It was staged again twelve years later to mark the re-opening of the Deutsches Theater in 1945, when it formed a moving plea for religious freedom and tolerance in the wake of the Holocaust.

MODERN AMBIVALENCES Although the Enlightenment was not originally a revolutionary movement, its philosophies and the possibilities they offered contributed to the intellectual upheavals that occurred throughout the nineteenth century. An early example of this was provided by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831). He sets out his thesis in the preface to his Philosophy of Right (1820–1), stating that Minerva’s owl, the bird of wisdom and the symbol of the Enlightenment, only begins its flight as dusk falls − in other words, the business of philosophy is purely to provide retrospective analyses and theories. This gave rise to much controversy, notably on the part of some of his followers. Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72) defined himself as a reformer. Calling himself ‘Luther II’, he claimed to be the first person to have brought to light The Essence of Christianity (1841), as a philosopher of the nineteenth century Enlightenment. Karl Marx (1818–83) took the Hegelian conception of religion and human rights to the extreme. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was to go even

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further, criticizing not only the philosophy of Kant (the Categorical Imperative) but also all the forms this took during the nineteenth century, including both bourgeois morality and socialism. He regarded these as products of a Judeo-Christian synthesis that gave rise to a ‘morality of slaves’ and resulted in a state of decline. The extension of the right to life to ‘the surplus of deformed, sick and degenerate individuals’, as he states in Beyond Good and Evil (1886), seemed to him suicidal and nihilistic. Nazism pushed that logic to its furthest extreme. Hitler invoked the notion of ‘the will of the people’, a legacy of nineteenth-century Scientism (beginning with Social Darwinism), and also applied an anti-humanist interpretation of Nietzsche’s thinking. In doing so, he exploited the achievements of the Enlightenment − democracy and the separation of the powers – putting them at the service of totalitarian rule. In Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno sought to reveal the ambivalent aspects of the modernity inherited from the Age of Enlightenment. Just as it had given rise to new forms of occultism, without this being intended or always realized, the Enlightenment’s absolute belief in reason carried within it a form of irrationality that facilitated a ‘return to barbarism’. Adorno draws a parallel between the Holocaust and the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. These two catastrophes, as he writes in Negative Dialectics (1966), were so devastating as to have an everlasting effect on European culture.

1989: INTO THE LIGHT The principles of the Enlightenment generated a certain scepticism on the part of several Western intellectuals after 1945, including the Frankfurt School and philosophers such as Paul Ricœur and Jacques Derrida. From the 1970s, however, they gained new impetus in Europe’s eastern regions, transcending geographical frontiers to add their weight to the triumph of individual freedom and political emancipation. Three Central and Eastern European countries provide exemplary cases of populations regaining their rights as citizens after subjection to a totalitarian form of power. Poland’s Solidarność revolution was launched in 1980. As noted by José Casanova, workers and intellectuals such as Lech Wałęsa and Tadeusz Mazowiecki made references to both human rights and the Catholic Church. Pope John Paul II called for the reunification of Europe and the end of the Yalta Agreement. In the GDR, pastors and militant Protestants played key roles in the ‘Peaceful Revolution’. After the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968, Czechoslovakia’s artists and intellectuals formed a new movement in defence of human rights, issuing Charter 77 in 1977. Referring to the Final Act of the Helsinki Accords of 1975, Václav Havel based his argument on human rights, invoking the principles of freedom of thought, conscience, religion and belief. The ‘Velvet Revolution’, a popular non-violent uprising, subsequently took place in 1989. In this sense, the year 1989 provided proof that the Enlightenment had not come to an end. Although the historical context is radically different, it continues to inspire all who fight for the freedom of the individual, human rights and political emancipation, at an international level. This desire to be part of the legacy of Enlightenment critical thought and of its spirit of tolerance is reflected in the introduction to the European

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Constitution proposed by the Polish journalist Stefan Wilkanowicz in 2003. The Constitution was never adopted: We, the people of Europe [. . .] Aware of the richness of our heritage, which draws on the attainments of Judaism, of Christianity, of Islam, of Greek philosophy, of Roman law and of humanism, whose origins are both religious and non-religious, Aware of the value of the Christian religion, which is the essential source of our identity, aware of the frequent acts of betrayal against those values that have been committed by Christians and non-Christians, Remembering the good and the bad that we have brought to the inhabitants of other continents, Regretting the catastrophes caused by the totalitarian systems born of our civilisation, [. . .] We want to construct our shared future.1

NOTE 1. Published in Tygodnik Powszechny, 26 September 2003. Quote taken from the introduction to the book Die kulturellen Werte Europas, edited by Hans Joas and Klaus Wiegandt (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2005).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Adorno, Theodor W. and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, translated from the German by Edmund Jephcott, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2002 [1947]. Adorno, Theodor W., Negative Dialectik, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 1966. Bourel, Dominique, Moses Mendelssohn. La naissance du judaïsme moderne, Paris, Gallimard, 2004. Brose, Thomas, Johann Georg Hamann und David Hume. Metaphysikkritik und Glaube im Spannungsfeld der Aufklärung, 2 vols, Frankfurt am Main, Peter Lang, 2006. Casanova, José, Public Religions in the Modern World, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1994. Damme, Stéphane Van, À toutes voiles vers la vérité, Paris, Le Seuil, 2014. Darnton, Robert, The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie, 1775–1800, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1979. Delon, Michel, Dictionnnaire européen des Lumières, Paris, PUF, 1997. Doering-Manteuffel, Sabine, Das Okkulte. Eine Erfolgsgeschichte im Schatten der Aufklärung. Von Gutenberg bis zum World Wide Web, Munich, Siedler, 2008. Habermas, Jürgen, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, translated from the German by Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1989 [1962].

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Israel, Jonathan, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001. Israel, Jonathan, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity and the Emancipation of Man 1670–1752, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006. Israel, Jonathan, Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights 1750–1790, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011. Joas, Hans and Klaus Wiegandt (Eds.), Die kulturellen Werte Europas, Frankfurt am Main, Fischer, 2005. Lutz-Bachmann, Matthias (Ed.), Postsäkularismus. Zur Diskussion eines umstrittenen Begriffs, Frankfurt am Main, Campus, 2015. Schmidt-Biggemann, Wilhelm, Theodizee und Tatsachen. Das philosophische Profil der Aufklärung, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 1988. Schneider, Werner (Ed.), Lexikon der Aufklärung. Deutschland und Europa, Munich, C.H. Beck, 2001. Sorkin, David, The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews and Catholics from London to Vienna, Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2008. Taylor, Charles, A Secular Age, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2007. Todorov, Tzvetan, L’Esprit des Lumières, Paris, Robert Laffont, 2006.

CHAPTER 24

Democracy, far from Athens . . . GESINE SCHWAN

In ancient Greece, those who played no part in the life of the polis − therefore, in politics − were known as idiotes. Today, individualism and the focus on economics have changed the established order and distanced the notion of democracy from its exacting origins. Yet it remains the basis on which Europe has sought to construct itself since 1945. In Greece today, however, the law is dictated not by politics, but by creditors. In 2011, when the Greek prime minister George Papandreou announced his intention of holding a referendum, the German chancellor Angela Merkel reacted with alarm and indignation. Papandreou stated that the radical agreement over the proposed ‘aid package’, concluded between the Greek government and the ‘Troika’ formed by the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund, should be put to a democratic public vote. The agreement would place considerable limits on the sovereignty of Greek democracy. Germany and the European Union responded angrily; here was a country in debt and dependent on financial aid provided by foreign powers, whose prime minister, after lengthy negotiations, now had the audacity to call for a vote to gauge the reactions of his people. As if there was an alternative solution to the agreed measures – as if the Greeks were in a position to make different decisions – as if their democracy had anything to say, faced with the demands of the financial markets – how arrogant of Athens! However, it was very clear in this case who the dependent was, and who called the shots! From then on, the German chancellor hammered the point home; democracies needed to adapt themselves to the financial markets. This quite natural aim to see Democratic Greece comply with the decisions of foreign financial institutions aroused vigorous opposition in Germany, even in conservative circles – particularly in the case of Frank Schirrmacher, head of the arts and science department at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. In the eyes of these critics, the desire to suspend political freedom and democracy with no other form of procedure sent a devastating signal. Yet this did not change the fact that Greece’s hand was being forced.

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It would be difficult to find a clearer example of the gap between the public expression of the values that define Europe, on the one hand, and the current political practices of the European Union, on the other. Jerusalem, Athens and Rome are regarded as Europe’s foundational cities and, as such, they have major symbolic significance. The French philosopher and writer Paul Valéry, for example, defined Europe in a few words, stating in essence that everything originating from those three sources, Athens, Rome and Jerusalem,1 may be identified as truly European. Jerusalem embodies the Judeo-Christian religious tradition (now also that of Islam) and Rome embodies law, while Athens was the source of Classical philosophy, political freedom, civic equality – in all, democracy. Those who currently have the last word in the European Union – in particular certain elements within the German government – fail to acknowledge the tension created between submission to creditors and political and democratic freedom that poses a genuine challenge today. Moreover, their stance echoes that of the Athenians of ancient Greece, as described by Thucydides, one of the forefathers of European historiography, in his major work, The History of the Peloponnesian War. The part known as the ‘Melian Dialogue’2 is particularly significant here. As they had suffered a military defeat at the hands of the Athenians, the Melians – according to the standpoint taken by the Athenians in the Dialogue – were in no position to assert any right to justice or freedom. Decisions were to be made by the dominant party (in this case, the Athenians), while the defeated party (the Melians) were to be subjugated. Here, a radical distinction is established between the principles of freedom and justice in force within the democratic polis, on the one hand, and those applicable to outsiders, on the other. The latter had no right to call for justice.

THE SOURCE OF INSPIRATION Therefore, although the foundations for the universal claim to liberty and democracy were undoubtedly laid in the Athens of Classical Greece, those principles were only respected within its polis. It is more accurate to describe this universalization as the result of developments in the European history of human rights (which were not actually recognized in Classical Athens, democracy being the privilege of free citizens and not applicable to women, outsiders or slaves − even less to barbarians). It is also the result of political democracy, as demonstrated since the UN declaration of Human Rights in 1948 and expressed through the professions of universal faith in democracy to be found in European treaties. The United Nations promulgation of ‘sustainable development goals’, issued in September 2015, provides a very recent example of this. Nevertheless, Athens continues to exert its influence to this day, reaching across the centuries as a European realm of memory. It attracts millions of tourists, who make pilgrimages to the Acropolis and the Agora. For this was the city which, around 2,500 years ago, witnessed the first reflections on the world to be conducted in a systematized manner; these were to provide an endless source of inspiration for future eras. This bold endeavour involved examining the myth-

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based interpretation of this world as the work of the gods and their sphere of action, and envisaging it as a comprehensible metaphysical system that could be justified on a rational level. As a further innovative development, thoughts were devoted to ways in which citizens of equal status could coexist peacefully. The freedom and equality enjoyed by citizens were seen as the basis to create the conditions required by ‘human nature’; these would likewise lead to a ‘good’ and successful life, as defined at a philosophical, and therefore a universal, level. This enabled Aristotle − one of the towering figures of Classical Greek philosophy, together with Plato − to establish the basis for universal human rights and democracy. All humans were beings endowed with reason. They were ‘political animals’; in other words, they were made to live as a community within the polis. The right to have equal access to civic freedoms and to participate in politics originated from Aristotle’s initial hypothesis. However, this was not the reality experienced by slaves, women or even by Aristotle himself, who, as an immigrant originally from Chalcidice, enjoyed no civic rights in Athens. However, the city of Athens observed the principles of civic and juridical equality, established by the law and founded on philosophical concepts, as opposed to the traditional social hierarchies and inequalities. Politics were regarded in a positive light as the demonstration of a coexistence adapted to these principles and, as such, the domain of free and equal citizens. The individual who concerned himself solely with his own affairs was an ‘idiot’, the Greek word being idiotes. The pejorative sense of this word, which has endured to this day, also stems from the fact that the Athenian conception of the citizen and the Classical philosophical meaning attached to the term ‘human being’ entailed accepting one’s responsibility within the polis. The growing general dominance of economic thinking and of individualism has diminished much of the value accorded to political responsibility over the last few decades. From this perspective, those who are not solely involved with their own concerns, but go into politics, are often regarded as today’s ‘idiots’.

PERICLES’S FUNERAL ORATION What can our memory of Athens achieve in these circumstances? It can inspire and reinforce the actions of those who continue to believe that a free and just community provides the conditions for a successful life. For Athens revealed both the many perils that threaten democracy and the cultural wealth and dignity that can enrich human life in the polis founded on freedom, endowing that life with a unique status. The speech known as Pericles’s Funeral Oration provides an exemplary illustration of this; we return to Thucydides, who includes his version in his History of the Peloponnesian War. In the year 431 or 430 BCE, the famous Athenian politician delivered a speech in tribute to the men slain in combat at the end of the first year of the war against Sparta. This oration essentially served to justify the fact that Athens had asked these victims to sacrifice their young lives. This justification was based on the Constitution and the political culture of the Athenian polis. Athens is described

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in the Oration as ‘education to Greece’ and, in contrast to the city of Sparta, which was not free, it embodied liberty, equality, openness to the world, selflessness and independence. [. . .] our system of government does not copy the institutions of our neighbors. It is more the case of our being a model to others than of our imitating anyone else. Our constitution is called a democracy because power is in the hands not of a minority, but of the whole people. [. . .] And, just as our political life is free and open, so is our day-to-day life in our relations with each other. We do not get into a state with our next-door neighbor if he enjoys himself in his own way [. . .] We are free and tolerant in our private lives; but in public affairs we keep to the law [. . .] We give our obedience to those whom we put in positions of authority, and we obey the laws themselves, especially those which are for the protection of the oppressed [. . .] When our work is over, we are in a position to enjoy all kinds of recreation for our spirits. There are various kinds of contests and sacrifices regularly throughout the year; in our own homes we find a beauty and a good taste which delight us every day and which drive away our cares. Then the greatness of our city brings it about that all the good things from all over the world flow in to us [. . .] Our love of what is beautiful does not lead to extravagance; our love of the things of the mind does not make us soft. We regard wealth as something to be properly used, rather than as something to boast about. As for poverty, no one need be ashamed to admit it: the real shame is in not taking practical measures to escape from it. Here each individual is interested not only in his own affairs but in the affairs of the state as well: even those who are mostly occupied with their own business are extremely well-informed on general politics – this is a peculiarity of ours: we do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business; we say that he has no business here at all. We Athenians, in our own persons, take our decisions on policy or submit them to proper discussions [. . .] When we do kindnesses to others, we do not do them out of any calculations of profit or loss: we do them without afterthought, relying on our free liberality3. The French president, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, had sought to have the speech given by Pericles included as the introduction to the European Constitution. Following the reception of this text throughout history, we find echoes of it in the famous Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln’s tribute to the fallen soldiers of the American Civil War.

THE DEMANDS OF DEMOCRACY Governing a people in this way required a widespread culture, and the Athenians regularly attended the theatre. Moreover, the regime was constantly jeopardized by illegal practices and the potential for tyranny. We know of two political responses that countered such risks in the case of Athens. The first involved a stringent approach

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and dissuasion through ‘draconian’ punishments; however, the code written by Draco (born ca. 650 BCE) registered only those punishments that were actually in force at the time. The second is the ‘Wisdom of Solon’; committed to the principle of justice, Solon (ca. 640–558) banned the use of enslavement as punishment for debt and emphasized the vigilance necessary when faced with the risk of tyranny through abuse of great power. The memory of the Athenian polis owes its revival in the twentieth century principally to Hannah Arendt. Her personal analysis of the two totalitarian systems, and of the experiences of exile and statelessness, undoubtedly played a key role in her desire to analyse the theory of political responsibility and to call for its application in practice; seen as the essential attribute of good citizenship in the tradition of the Athenian polis, it is intended to guard against the return of murderous policies. In the wake of Karl Jaspers, she considered that appreciating the importance of genuine communication and understanding was a crucial mission. This would enable the inevitable conflicts to be transcended or managed, but would also, in principle, prove productive in the political domain. Her major preoccupations included the shared acknowledgement of a love for truth, the risk of the destruction of the democratic community through falsehoods, and that of permanent dishonesty. After the Second World War, Germany was the focus of particular observation. Was the country going to develop into a viable democracy? Measures such as the ‘reeducation’ process conducted by the United States were intended to play a part in reversing the priority that the Germans traditionally accorded to economic success (also applicable in the context of dictatorship) rather than to civil and political freedoms. The following decades witnessed constant references to survey results apparently confirming this change of mentality. If these results were to be believed, the Germans had transformed themselves into genuine Democrats over several generations. Nevertheless, it remained to be seen how things would evolve during times of crisis and in challenging economic circumstances. The current refugee crisis and the impressively welcoming culture evident at the very heart of civil society prove that democratic values have indeed become remarkably deeply embedded into German society. Despite this, there are still resentments, hatreds and significant acts of violence. Not only do these run counter to the respect shown to refugees in the Athenian polis, they also contravene the core values of our democracy – and of the law itself. The confrontation between certain elements within the German and Greek governments that has taken place since the banking crisis provides this story with a somewhat piquant ending. While the Athenians, faced with the European Union and the ‘Troika’, continue to defend the prime importance of democratic selfdetermination, Berlin has continued to prioritize economic success over democratic elections or referendums. From a political and cultural standpoint, Berlin has therefore returned to the early days of its post-war democratization, just as the Greek government is raising the image of Athens as a realm of memory. We can draw inspiration from this image to the benefit of the European Union and its cohesion as a democratic body.

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NOTES 1. Cf. Paul Valéry, ‘La crise de l’esprit’ (1919), in Œuvres I (Paris, Gallimard, coll. ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’, 1957), pp. 988–1013. 2. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, V, 84–116. 3. Ibid., 37–40; English translation by Rex Warner (London: Penguin, 1972), pp. 143–51.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Den Boer, Pim, Heinz Duchhardt, Georg Kreis and Wolfgang Schmale (Eds.), Europäische Erinnerungsorte, vol. 2, Munich, Oldenbourg, 2012. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, translated from the Greek by Rex Warner, London, Penguin, 1972. Valéry, Paul, ‘La Crise de l’esprit’ (1919) in Œuvres I, Paris, Gallimard, coll. ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’, 1957, pp. 988–1013. Ziegler, Ruprecht, Justus Cobet, Barbara Patzek, Regina Hauses, Helga Scholten and Joachim Lehnen, ‘Metropolen europäischer Kultur. Eine Geschichte vierer Städte’, Unikate, 34 (2009): 8–33.

CHAPTER 25

Reason The limitations of an ambition RÉMI BRAGUE

Reason occupies an important place – perhaps the foremost place – among the founding principles of European, and later Western civilization. Yet Europe is currently undergoing a somewhat paradoxical twofold process of development. This involves, on the one hand, a rationalism made all the more aggressive due to a perceived threat from outside forces, and on the other, a circumspect approach resulting from the horrors of the twentieth century, which shook faith in reason. Since the birth of their culture in ancient Greece, Europeans have believed it to be more effective than others at enabling humankind to reach its fullest potential, emphasizing what is seen (in this context, at least) as the essence of humanity − namely, the logos. This word has multiple significations and has been translated into Latin as ratio, which primarily means ‘calculation’; ‘reckoning’. This is the root of our word ‘reason’, still to be found in the now-outdated French term for an accounts book: ‘livre de raison’. Our modern era is regarded as the culmination of the endeavour to create the European being. The favoured narrative presents the ages of man succeeding one another in a relentless progression that corresponds to individual development, with the attainment of modernity as an ‘age of reason’. This would have succeeded a Classical age that was both innocent and naïve, followed in turn by a Medieval period seen in terms of a tormented adolescence. In that context, Reason was to assert itself before its enemies, the most dangerous of these being religion. During the French Revolution, on 10 November 1793, the goddess Reason, played by an actress, was celebrated in Paris in front of the cathedral of Notre-Dame itself. This apotheosis was the crowning point of an older process that began with the Radical Enlightenment, when Newton’s work on celestial mechanics (1688) achieved exceptional success and was regarded as proof of the power of reason. However, Maimonides had already seen a geometrical theorem on the phenomenon of asymptotes as a triumph of reason over the imagination, while Galileo regarded the Copernican hypothesis as the assault of reason on the senses.1 Its superiority in matters of morality having long been established, by Plato among

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others, it subsequently entered the domain of the theory of knowledge; its way was paved by the assertion ‘nothing is without reason’,2 a principle which Leibniz placed on an almost equal footing as that of identity. Yet the superiority of reason in questions relating to conduct inevitably re-emerged in other contexts, being adopted by certain doctors and economists when calculating the advantages of reasonable behaviour. In this way, Tanneguy Duchâtel wrote: ‘It is concern for the future and the subjection of his sensory appetites to the precepts of reason that demonstrate a man’s morality, indicating his progress on the path of civilisation.’3 The possession of reason, defined according to Enlightenment criteria, is an essential human attribute, just as a lack of reason serves as a principle for exclusion from humankind.4

REASON BEFORE THE EMERGENCE OF EUROPE The prominence accorded to reason in the Age of Enlightenment had been heralded by an extensive intellectual environment of considerably more ancient origin, even pre-dating any notion of Europe as we understand it today. It is often said that European culture originates from two principal sources, symbolized by two archetypal cities: Athens and Jerusalem. Rationality is seen as the preserve of the ‘Greek’ aspect of the European heritage, while morality and spirituality are considered to be the ‘Jewish’ domains. In reality, both these sources of European culture include examples of rationality; in some cases it appears in an explicit form, in others, less so. This is also true of the biblical source, according to whose teaching the world was not created through an irrational process but by the Divine Word (davar, logos, verbum). This representation of a world made through command has ancient Middle Eastern origins, its first attestation probably being the Sumerian concept of enem, or awatu in Akkadian.5 The Hebrew Bible contains no abstract concepts, these being the exclusive domain of philosophy, which is of Greek origin. It proceeds as a series of accounts, presenting the fundamental constituents of reason − nature and conscience − in narrative form. The first of these, nature, is the constituent on which every philosophical enterprise depends. It is certainly true that the word is not to be found anywhere in the Old Testament, and the term used to refer to the natural world (teva) only appears later in the Mishnah, where it is associated not with growth (the Greek word physis) but with imprinting and giving form.6 However, the concept is implicit from the first account of the Creation. Each thing is created ‘according to its species’ (Gen. 1.12, 21, 24-25), rather than being a chaotic mixture of characteristics. Each creature possesses its own properties, remaining faithful to these distinctions when it multiplies. In other words, reproduction occurs ‘according to the species’ which is reproduced. The idea that a creative act was brought about through a word and the fact that this resulted in a natural system formed of distinct living beings are linked. The beings created in this way form a ‘sentence’ in which every word has its own meaning, establishing the connection between Creator and created. God can only wait for each of these entities to produce the effects that express the inherent logic of their nature. In this way, the owner of the vineyard must wait for his vines to produce grapes (Isa. 5.1-7).

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The second constituent of reason is conscience. Logos has a practical as well as a theoretical dimension. According to Kant and his ‘primacy of practical reason’, it is even better suited to the former domain.7 The Greek logos already possessed this ethical dimension; Aristotle saw it as central to every virtue.8 As suggested by a prophet, humankind had always been aware of good and evil: ‘He has told [huggad] you, o man, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you, but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?’ (Mic. 6.8). The presence of this knowledge in the hearts of human beings was therefore imparted by ‘word’, prefiguring what would later be known as the ‘voice’ of the conscience. The New Testament, which was able to make use of the system of Greek philosophical concepts, echoed the first words of Genesis: In the beginning (archē) was the Word (logos) (Jn 1.1). Man’s response to this is ‘rational worship’ (logikē latreia) (Rom. 12.1). The Early Church Fathers confirmed the rational nature of faith, and even of its focus, God. Justin Martyr described Christianity as the true philosophy that he had failed to find in several other schools of thought. According to Gregory of Nazianzus, faith (pistis) was the ‘achievement of human reason’, and for John of Damascus, the true philosophy was the love of God. Manuel Palaeologus formulated the principle that acting in an unreasonable manner (sun logō) was contrary to God’s nature.9 The dignity of reason was therefore confirmed at the highest level, being founded on God. The great figures of Scholasticism established themselves in the tradition of these Church Fathers, their quest being to explore the divine mystery through rational thought. This was ‘faith seeking understanding’ (fides quaerens intellectum) in the words of Saint Anselm, once more quoted by Hegel.10 When Father Brown, the detective created by G. K. Chesterton, unmasks a bogus priest, the latter asks how he had seen through his disguise: ‘“You attacked reason,” said Father Brown. “It’s bad theology”.’ At an earlier point in the story, he had declared: ‘I know that people charge the Church with lowering reason, but it is just the other way. Alone on earth, the Church makes reason really supreme. Alone on earth, the Church affirms that God himself is bound by reason.’11

THE IRRATIONAL: EXTERIOR FORCES The modern world witnessed both the celebration and the regeneration of reason. The Rationalist Union, a French organization founded as late as 1930, signalled a reaction against a rising tide of what was perceived as irrationality. Where is this to be found? The Reason of Classical Antiquity was to have cast a light that would never be dimmed. Its demons were of an exterior nature, such as the inferior faculties of the soul: the senses in the case of Plato’s Phaedo or the passions and the imagination, according to the Stoics and Spinoza. It was possible to reconsider such demons as a succession of foes encountered throughout a process of development; education, at an individual level or a collective level, constituted a move towards reason, ever further from an initial state of darkness. Any blameworthy characteristics belonged to the past, or to its residual, anachronistic elements. In this way, Descartes12 speaks of

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the ‘prejudices’ of childhood, while those of the collective childhood of humankind are presented in the rhetoric of the Enlightenment as the powers of darkness. Few thinkers dared to condemn reason. The stance taken by Luther, who attacked it as ‘Aristotle’s whore’,13 found little support even within his own church. But is this a final judgement? Martin Heidegger, for whom ‘reason, glorified for centuries, is the most dogged adversary of thinking’,14 contrasts it to a more direct access to one’s thoughts. ‘Reason’, stated David Hume in a famous paradox, ‘is and ought only to be the slave of the passions’.15 He consciously set himself against an ancient philosophical tradition according to which reason was actually intended to restrain them.16 Is reason a sufficient driving force in itself? Passions alone provide us with motives for our actions. Indeed, passions may very well enlist reason, or a perverted form of it, to serve their ends; the pretext of establishing and promoting the use of reason may even be used as a means of masking interests. We have a clear enough example of this in the history of the colonization of Africa and of large areas in Asia carried out by European powers. Whereas the conquest of South America had been justified on the grounds of spreading the faith, the pretext in the former cases was that of civilization; reason was to be introduced to peoples who were supposedly unaware of its existence, or even resistant to the concept. Was it not the case that reason ‘which we boast of so much, and which causes us to see ourselves as masters and emperors over all other creatures’ was given to us ‘for our torment’?17 Leopardi clearly expressed what may have been the notion behind Hume’s statement: reason produces unhappiness and poses a threat to the human species by undermining the illusions on which life is based. It is a light that should illuminate, not incinerate.18 The crisis in the Classical world may also have been a crisis of reason, this being a focus of disenchantment. At the social level, it was connected with philosophy’s inability to emerge from its elite realm and to offer the masses a way out of their despair,19 a further indication that ‘the major limitation of Classical civilization was its aristocratic character’.20 Why choose reason? It would only make sense to choose the reality that it reveals if we do not restrict the meaning of ‘that which is’ to concrete actuality, which we are bound to accept with a resigned ‘this is the way it is’, echoing the young Hegel as he contemplated the Alps. At a pinch, we can accept that which is, since it is necessary to do so, by making use of the intellectual honesty that Nietzsche regarded as ‘our last virtue’.21 Yet it cannot, in any event, be loved, as it simply does not arouse this emotion. Can ‘that which is’, as such, become the object of love? From what viewpoint might it appear worthy of being loved?

THE MALADIES OF REASON If reason can be over-active, it can also err through its absence. In the first instance, the arrogance of philosophy comes into play. Curiously, this expression first appears in the writings of an eighteenth-century ‘philosophe’, Voltaire:

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‘[. . .] the arrogance of philosophy / Sours the peaceful sweetness of our fair days.’22 Reason should not be overestimated. An entire system of apologetics took this wise recommendation as its starting point; lower the status of reason through scepticism in order to clear the way for faith. In this way, the work of Michel de Montaigne is re-established within a tradition of Christian scepticism, while Blaise Pascal flirts with it through his exhortation ‘humble yourself, weak reason’.23 Even Kant alluded to this in his famous statement: ‘I had to deny [aufheben] knowledge to make room for faith.’24 Reason errs through its absence when, without yielding to the blows of its enemies, it takes itself out of the game. This idea can be illustrated by the image of fatigue and sleep. In his famous Vienna Lecture of 1935, for example, Edmund Husserl explained that the chief danger facing Europe, not as a continent but as an internal ‘teleology of reason’, was quite simply weariness (Müdigkeit).25 The doubt that he cast over philosophy had been – or must have been – corroborated by very real events; the Great War had broken out in a continent that had prided itself on its rationality. The Holodomor (extermination through famine), followed by the Holocaust, had shaken Europe’s confidence in reason. Since then, post-modern man has remained in a state of despair, having abandoned the notion of progress born of the Reason that was central to Enlightenment thought. It would therefore appear that arrogance poses less of a danger today than its polar opposite: an excessive humility that might be described as pusillanimity. This is an age-old notion, being a vice described by Aristotle as mikropsukhia and by Descartes as ‘lowness’ or ‘vicious humility’.26 What is new, however, is its application in the context of intellectual study, which has hardly any precedent apart from Socrates’s warning against the temptation of a ‘hatred of discourse’ (misologia). This is presented by Plato as comparable to the misanthropy that besets an individual whose excessive trust has been abused on one occasion and who distrusts the whole human race forever afterwards.27 The ‘dare to know’ (sapere aude), regarded by Kant as the motto of the Enlightenment, was more preached than practised.28 A combination of arrogance and humility characterizes Positivism, a system where reason did not concern itself with the unworldly and any notion of transcendence was rejected. This did not only involve an external divine force. According to its founder, Auguste Comte, it was important to resist any attempt to understand the underlying causes of phenomena, resigning oneself simply to describing their laws.29 Behind all this one can detect man’s temptation to regard himself as self-sufficient – ‘exclusive humanism’. Excessive pride and excessive humility go hand in hand; the claim that we alone are capable of determining our own limitations is, in fact, the height of arrogance.

THE IRRATIONAL: INTERIOR FORCES Something akin to the suicide of reason took a fairly concrete form in modern times. Rather than remaining a principle of unity in European history, reason was put to the service of imperialist national ambitions. Revolutionary France, for instance, pillaged

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Europe while providing it with a Civil Code; England colonized a ‘superstitious’ Ireland and Germany brought order to the anarchy that had emerged in Poland. Conversely, cultural domains perceived their task as compensating for, or complementing, the rationalism attributed to the French Enlightenment and its supposedly ‘arid’ effect. In this way, the Germany of the Romantic movement was described by Madame de Staël as ‘the country of thinkers and poets’, while the Germany of 1914 saw itself as fighting for Kultur against Franco-British Zivilisation. The Russia of the Slavophiles was presented as the soul that considers the totality of all things, as opposed to reason, which analyses, deconstructs and, essentially, destroys. The idea according to which reason can be a danger to itself is powerfully presented by Kant in the Transcendental Dialectic, which appears in his ‘First Critique’. Caught in its own net, reason becomes mired in contradictions when it is no longer guided by sensibility. The Kantian revolution overturned the Classical hierarchy of the faculties of the soul, which placed less value on the inferior faculties such as perception and imagination. Kant rehabilitated the senses.30 The inferior faculties no longer represented fetters or traps for reason – instead, they were useful safeguards preventing it from becoming its own victim. The Nietzschean idea of a ‘fidelity to the earth’31 is therefore an indirect consequence of Kant’s defence of sensibility, despite Nietzsche’s opposition to the latter. The idea of a dialectic of Enlightenment was first expressed in the renowned work of the same name by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno.32 If reason was now undermining its own foundations, the historic Enlightenment project involving the total rationalization of life was doomed to failure. Modernity – which had set out to accomplish this project and had always understood itself to be an attempt, an experiment – had failed to fulfil its own promises. It fed itself, in a parasitic fashion, on what it could not reproduce, an idea first defined by Charles Péguy.33 We now turn to a famous etching by an Enlightenment painter, Francisco de Goya. It depicts a man sleeping at a table, leaning on his arms, while strange creatures emerge from the background. A large cat sits behind the chair and another may be seen behind the sleeping man. Hovering bats and birds of prey cover him with their shadows. One of the birds is about to alight upon the sleeper’s shoulder, just as the Holy Spirit, in the form of a dove, descends onto the shoulders of the Evangelists. The caption reads: ‘The sleep [sueño] of reason produces monsters.’34 We are not told why reason is asleep or why it has nightmares. The image is complex; the sleeping figure is probably the painter himself; sheets of paper and a paintbrush lie on the table. He is no brutish creature, but entirely human − male, adult and well dressed. The birds assailing him, one of which has seized a paintbrush, resemble owls; these are associated with Minerva, Goddess of Reason. The sitting cat with triangular ears appears to be a lynx, whose piercing eyes symbolize the Enlightenment. The title itself is ambiguous; the Castilian word sueño also means ‘dream’, like the Russian COH. Does the danger come from the fact that reason is asleep, or from the very impossibility of totally losing consciousness? The sleeper’s dreams are all the more dangerous as they are those of reason itself; man will therefore ‘dream according to principles, hallucinate with reason’.35

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THE IRRATIONALISM OF RATIONALISM Those whom reason should mistrust the most are its friends. For those who call themselves ‘rationalists’ are not genuinely so. According to Heidegger, irrationalism squints in instances where rationalism is blind.36 And Leo Strauss cruelly notes: ‘Der “Irrationalismus” ist nur eine Spielart des modernen Rationalismus, der selbst schon “irrationalistisch” genug ist’37 – ‘“Irrationalism” is merely a variant of modern rationalism, which is itself quite “irrationalist” enough.’ A great many self-proclaimed rationalists relegate reason to second place, as originating from the irrational. It is explained by the Darwinian idea of the survival of the fittest as a mode of behaviour necessary for the struggle for existence through natural selection, a being endowed with reason having more advantages than others. In this way, the American biologist Edward O. Wilson wrote as an introduction to a popular work on the science that he had helped to found: ‘The human mind is a device for survival and reproduction, and reason is just one of its various techniques. [. . .] The intellect was not constructed to understand atoms or even to understand itself but to promote the survival of human genes.’38 The comprehensibility of ‘that which is’ presents us with a reality that is all too often regarded as self-evident, with no attempt being made to elucidate this in turn. However, the greatest minds were not afraid to acknowledge this enigma. Albert Einstein, for example, stated: ‘What is eternally inconceivable about the world is that it is at all conceivable.’39 What would be needed, therefore, was a philosophy of nature that could at least convey the rationality of the natural world, establishing a logos of the logos, so to speak. For the followers of the two biblical religions, all these phenomena, or rather, all these hypotheses, came after the logos. In the beginning was the logos alone − the Logos alone is the first principle. The British physicist Fred Hoyle had mocked Abbé Lemaître’s theory of the expanding universe by describing it as a ‘Big Bang’, an expression that has since been accepted and has lost its original pejorative connotation. Yet that image of the beginning of all things suggests meaningless noise rather than a definitive principle accessible to reason. The assertion that the Essence of all things is ultimately rational in nature provides no answers to the questions put by science, which the latter has undertaken to discover for itself. Yet it has provided science with the very basis of its operations, which it consequently cannot and must not see. Nietzsche had certainly recognized this supposition as a belief originating from the Bible. In his view, although we might be the most fervent devotees of the Enlightenment, ‘we are still pious’, as our belief in reason is still a ‘metaphysical faith’, an indirect consequence of a choice deriving from Greek philosophy and Christianity. Our enlightenment is the glow of a fire lit by Plato.40 Nietzsche was keen to see us cast off the last links connecting us to this belief. But can we? And should we wish to?

NOTES 1. Moses Maimonides, Guide des égarés, I, 73, translated from the Arabic by S. Munk (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 1970), p. 410; Galileo, Dialogo sopra i due massimi

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sistemi del mondo, Ptolemaico e Copernico, 3, edited by Ferdinando Flora (Milan: Mondadori, 2008 [1632]), p. 340. 2. Job 5.6 Vulg.; Bernard of Clairvaux, De laudibus Virginis matris, I, PL183, 56c; Isaac of Stella, Sermon 37, PL 194, 1813; Nicholas of Cusa, De Sapientia, II, § 35, p.58. 3. Tanneguy Duchâtel, De la Charité dans ses rapports avec l’état moral et le bien-être des classes inférieures de la société, II, ch.I (Paris: Mesnier, 1829), p. 178. 4. John Locke, The Second Treatise of Civil Government, VI, § 60, edited by J. W. Gough (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966), p. 30. 5. William F. Albright, From the Stone Age to Christianity: Monotheism and the Historical Process (New York, Doubleday, 1957 [1940]), p. 195. 6. See Ernest Klein, A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the Hebrew Language for Readers of English (New York: Carta Jerusalem, 1987), s.v., pp. 239–40. 7. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, edited by Karl Vorländer (Hamburg: Meiner, 1967), pp. 138–40. 8. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, II, 6, 1106b36-1107a2 (hōrismenē logo). 9. Justin Martyr, The First Apology, 46; Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration XXIX (Theological Orations III), 21; John of Damascus, Dialectica, 3, PG, 94, 533c; Manuel II Palaeologus, Dialogue avec un musulman, VII, 3bc, edited by Théodore Khoury (Paris: Le Cerf, 1966), p. 144. 10. Saint Anselm, Cur Deus Homo, I, 1; PL 158, 362B; SC no. 91, p.212; Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse, § 77n., Werke, edited by H. Glockner, vol. VIII, p. 183. 11. Gilbert K. Chesterton, ‘The Blue Cross’, in Father Brown: Selected Stories (London: Collector’s Library, 2003), p. 33 and p. 28. 12. René Descartes, Principia philosophiae, I, § 71; AT, vol. VIII, pp. 35–6. 13. Luther, Wider die himmlischen Propheten, von Bildern und Sakramenten [1525], WA 18, p. 164; Letzte Predigt [1546], WA, 51, p. 126. 14. Martin Heidegger, Holzwege (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1950), p. 247. 15. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, II, III, 3, p. 415. 16. Plotinus, I, 4 [46], 2, 41, v. I, p. 82; Immanuel Kant, Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, op. cit., I, I, I, § 3, n. 1, p. 28. 17. Michel de Montaigne, Essais, I, 40, edited by Jean Céard et al. (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 2001), p. 400. 18. Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone, [23 October 1821], edited by Lucio Felici (Milan: Newton Compton, 2007), p. 422b and ibid., 22, p. 20b. 19. Maria Zambrano, La agonía de Europa (Madrid: Mondadori, 1988 [1945]), pp. 52–3. 20. Henri-Irénée Marrou, Décadence romaine ou Antiquité tardive? IIIe -VIe siècle (Paris: Le Seuil, 1977), p. 139. 21. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel [Extracts from the Diary of his Journey through the Bernese Alps], in Werke in zwanzig Banden, edited by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971), v. I, p. 618; Friedrich Nietzsche, Morgenröte, V, § 456, in KSA, v. III, p. 275; Fragment I [145], August

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1885- Spring 1886, in ibid., v. XII, p. 44. See also my article ‘Possiamo amare la verità?’ Philosophical News, no. 2: La verità (March 2011): 48–52. 22. Voltaire, À Horace, 1772. 23. Pascal, Pensées, Br. 434; vol. II, p. 347; also see Br. 282, p. 205. 24. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Preface to the second edition. 25. Edmund Husserl, ‘Die Krisis des europäischen Menschentums und die Philosophie’, in Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie, edited by Walter Biemel (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1962 [1936]), p. 348. 26. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, IV, 3, 1129b9-11; 1125a19-27; René Descartes, Traité des passions, III, § 159; AT, vol. XI. p. 450. 27. Plato, Phaedo, 89cd. 28. Immanuel Kant, Was ist Aufklärung? First paragraph. 29. Auguste Comte, Discours sur l’esprit du positivisme, I, p.138 sq. 30. Immanuel Kant, Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht, § 8-10; Werke, vol. VI, pp. 432–6. 31. Friedrich Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra, I: Von der schenkenden Tugend, 2; KSA, vol. IV, p. 99. 32. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung. Philosophische Fragmente (Amsterdam: Querido, 1947). 33. Charles Péguy, De la situation faite au parti intellectuel dans le monde moderne devant les accidents de la gloire temporelle [1907], in Œuvres en prose complètes, edited by Robert Burac (Paris: Gallimard, coll. ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’, 1988), vol. II, p. 725. 34. Francisco de Goya, Los Caprichos, no. 43 (ca. 1799). 35. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, Allgemeine Anmerkung zur Exposition der ästhetischen reflektierenden Urteile, edited by Karl Vorländer (Hamburg: Meiner, 1963), p. 123; see also Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht, § 40; Werke, vol. VI, p. 510. An evocation of Terence’s The Eunuch, v. 63. 36. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, § 29 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1960), p. 136. 37. Leo Strauss, ‘Philosophie und Gesetz. Beiträge zum Verständnis Maimunis und seiner Vorläufer’ [1935], Einleitung, no. 1, in Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Heinrich Meier (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1997), vol. II, p. 9. 38. Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), pp. 1–3. 39. Albert Einstein, ‘Physik und Realität’, Journal of the Franklin Institute, 221–3 (March 1936): 313–47, quotation p. 315. 40. Friedrich Nietzsche, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, V, § 344; KSA, vol. III, pp.574–7.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Adorno, Theodor W. and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, translated from the German by Edmund Jephcott, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2002 [1947]. Brague, Rémi, Le Règne de l’homme. Genèse et échec du projet moderne, Paris, Gallimard, 2015. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, translated from the German by H. B. Nisbet, with an introduction by Duncan Forbes, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1975 [1822]. Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Pure Reason, translated from the German and edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998 [1781].

CHAPTER 26

History as inspiration FRANÇOIS HARTOG

For two centuries, history has been used to build the grand narrative of Europe as the epicentre of civilization. ‘I was the beautiful and much-worshipped Clio’, wrote Charles Péguy. The Muse Clio has now been dethroned by another: Mnemosyne (Memory), who holds her to account while bringing about a profound change in our relationship with time. Is History a European site of memory? This is a highly iconoclastic question, and one that would still have seemed astonishing, or even shocking, to the historians of the 1970s. More to the point, they would simply have found it incomprehensible. It had already been established that there was memory on the one hand and history, their domain, on the other hand; history began at the very point where memory ended. The upheavals that have occurred since then have notably generated an unremitting, growing emphasis on the quest for memory in Europe and elsewhere. They have led to the examination of History both as a discipline and as one of the major beliefs of the modern world, a world that is now no longer ours. And can the History that was associated with this modern world, serving to define it and make sense of it (creating precisely what we call a ‘sense of history’), still be seen as ours following these events? Although the term ‘History’, introduced by Herodotus in the fifth century BCE, has endured un-supplanted for twenty-five centuries, the ways in which it has been applied and understood have been many and varied. For each era has adapted it to serve its own purposes, while preserving elements of previous implementations; these elements have not invariably been the same and have always been subject to revision. A familiar and convenient presence, it was soon regarded as clearly selfevident. On each occasion it underwent a process of renewal, as it allowed events that had occurred and were occurring to be addressed in a systematic manner, offering new insights into the world and its past. What could be more important than gaining greater understanding in order to achieve better responses to the present? This would apply both to one’s own and to every successive present to come. Clio had been acknowledged as the Muse of History since the days of Antiquity, as the events that she recounted in song acquired great renown (kleos). Indeed, the first historical accounts in ancient Greece were those of the epic sagas; before Herodotus, there was Homer. History has long celebrated great deeds, princes

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and renowned men to serve as examples worthy of imitation (or unworthy, as the case may be). Today, however, it appears that our European societies have replaced Clio with Mnêmosunê, or Memory, established as the Mother of the Muses by Hesiod in the seventh century BCE. In this way, the connection has been inverted, as it were, with the mother succeeding the daughter. It is no longer History who judges and assesses Memory. Instead, it is Memory who turns to look at History, questions it, may even reject it and generally finds it difficult to understand what it could have represented between the late eighteenth and late twentieth centuries, for a world that it had aspired to serve as a new religion. This period corresponded to the establishment and affirmation of a modern world, where nations and colonial empires walked hand in hand. Two world wars later, however, a drained and devastated Europe abandoned its empires and threw itself headlong into the process of reconstruction. Another era dawned; this was to be the period of the Cold War, the arms race and East–West rivalry. It ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, followed by the collapse of the Soviet empire. The history of these events is well known, and it is not the focus here. In hindsight, those 150 years appear to represent an era of universal history. This particularly eventful, troubled and violent period has revolutionized the world. As well as scientific discoveries and technological advancements, there was devastation; as well as social progress, there was aggressive exploitation and as well as democratic regimes, there were brutal dictatorships. Deaths occurred in their millions; mass crimes and genocides were perpetrated at unprecedented levels and with unparalleled intensity. Has History – and by ‘History’, I mean the concept of history, or more specifically, the modern concept – played a role (its role) in all the circumstances that facilitated this unique trajectory? It is a trajectory that represents more than the mere addition of a new element to the long-established linear succession of empires, as set out in the Book of Daniel, with its recognizably providentialist approach to history. We start from a general premise: the concept of history will inevitably change as soon as our relationship with the past begins to alter. For, ever since the first calendars were developed, human groups have always had a social approach to time, viewing it in religious, political and economic terms. And the system of breaking down time into clearly defined ‘historical’ periods coincided with the advent of what we describe as ‘the Modern Era’.

HISTORY: A RELIGION During the 1870s, at a time when history was recognized as an established force, Pierre Larousse defined it in the following manner: The historical movement, inaugurated by Bossuet in the seventeenth century, continued in the eighteenth by Vico, Herder and Condorcet, and developed by so many remarkable figures in our nineteenth century, can only assert itself further in the near future. History has now become a universal religion, so to speak. [. . .] It is destined to be for modern civilization what theology was for the Middle Ages, and the queen and moderator of the conscience of the era of Antiquity.1

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What had enabled such faith in history and its future to be expressed in this way? The answer is, a long journey, whose principal stages were marked out as follows: the recognition that history is made by humankind; a shift from a conception of perfectibility still measured against a divine ideal, to the notion of Reason marching towards progress; the emergence from the constraint of 6,000 years of biblical chronology; and the opening that offered the view of a limitless future. Time, in the words of Ernest Renan, now appeared as ‘the universal factor, the great coefficient of the eternal “becoming”’. So much so, indeed, that ‘all the sciences, spread out according to their purpose at one point in time, became historical, and history, that of human societies, revealed itself to be the youngest of the sciences’.2 There had been a shift from a concept of history as the mistress of existence and associated with rhetoric, to that of history as the mistress of a world in a constant state of alteration, a history that aspired to becoming a science. The old notion of historicity was being discarded in favour of the modern perspective. This was characterized by the predominance of the idea of the future and by a growing gap between the ‘space of experience’ and the ‘horizon of expectation’, to adopt the concepts used by the German historian Reinhart Koselleck. The future is the telos: the aim. The light that elucidates the past emanates from this. Time is no longer simply a principle of classification; instead it is the driver, the operator of history as a process, this being the other name, or the true name for Progress. This history, which is formed by man, is experienced as if it were accelerating. In this world, which has now become historical, all we can do is believe in history; this belief may be imprecise, considered (theorized by philosophers of history, such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx) or contested, but it is increasingly widely shared. This idea was most clearly expressed by Alexis de Tocqueville in 1840: ‘When the past no longer elucidates the future’, he wrote, ‘the spirit walks in darkness’.3 With these words, he was noting that very shift away from the old notion of historicity (whereby the illumination emanated from the past) and, at the same time, providing the principle for the modern perspective, in other words, the key to understanding the world since 1789. From that point onwards, it would be the future that illuminated the past and traced its developments. France and Europe were to be seen in terms of the future – in this case, in terms of the example offered by America with a view to the future – for signs of that inevitable progression towards the equality of conditions.

‘THE IDEA OF A PEOPLE ON THE MOVE’ In this way, the spirit would not be walking, or would no longer be walking, in darkness. A new era required a new history, since the history associated with the old ‘regime of historicity’ was no longer operational; it had ceased to illuminate. Under the old regime of historicity (which was in force up to 1789, to use that symbolic date), individuals certainly had a sense of their own present, lived in that present and tried to understand and master it. But in order to find their bearings and to give meaning to their experience from a historical perspective, they took the past as their starting point, the idea being that it would impart intelligibility, examples and lessons. History served as the inventory of those examples and provided the

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narrative for those lessons. The modern regime took the opposite standpoint; one should look to the future, which elucidates the present and explains the past. And it was important to advance towards that future with all possible speed. It guides historical experiences, and history is teleological; the aim indicates the route already taken and the path yet to be followed. All modern national and imperial histories were conceived and written according to this model, first in Europe, then in the rest of the world. It became the pattern from which the various histories were cut, and provided both a criterion for entry into the modern world and an indication of the distances yet to be traversed. The notion of ‘already’ applied to Europe (the central point), while that of ‘not yet’ was associated with the rest of the world (the periphery). The discovery and shaping of history as a process governed by progress corresponded to the glory days of philosophies of history, whether these were universal or related to Civilization. As indicated by François Guizot in his courses at the Sorbonne in 1828: ‘it appears to me that the idea of progress, of development, is the fundamental notion contained within the word civilization.’ There were two aspects to the notion: the development of human society and of individuals themselves. In short, this was ‘the idea of a people on the move, not in order to change their locality, but to change their condition’. So true was this idea that there would be ‘a universal history of civilization to write’.4 It was not until the twentieth century that the word ‘civilization’ was first used in the plural. Carried along at speed, the modern age brought with it notions of anachronism, of relics, of innovation, of backwardness and, in the wake of Charles Darwin, of evolution. Applied to the human sciences by Herbert Spencer, this became evolutionary theory. The advent of the railway was quickly regarded as ‘a new era in the history of humanity’; in 1837, the poet Adelbert von Chamisso expressed his desire to ‘take the train that was harnessed to the Zeitgeist – I would not have been able to die in peace if I had not taken a look at the future that was unfolding from the height of this triumphal chariot’.5 This was surely the most evocative and optimistic way to describe the adoption of the new regime of historicity. A few decades later, Karl Marx, himself a railway enthusiast, was to describe revolutions as ‘the locomotives of History’. Beyond Europe, the modern age changed the status of indigenous peoples from that of children (as they had been presented in the discourse of missionaries and colonizers since the sixteenth century) to that of primitive groups. Although not completely outside of time, they lagged far behind and, at all events, they were placed outside history and had none of their own – or none that was genuine, according to the new meaning attached to the modern concept of History. This had established it as the governing force of the world and the ‘new theology’: the universal Clio. In the same way, it was the task of those colonizing the indigenous individuals to ensure that they entered History by taking up their places in its train − by force if need be, but for their own good. A striking change took place in our relationship with time during the century that separated Jean-Jacques Rousseau from the founders of ethnology. In his Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (Discourse on the Origin

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and Basis of Inequality Among Men) (1755), Rousseau invites the philosopher on a journey: The whole earth is covered with nations of which we know only their names, and we take it upon ourselves to judge humankind! Let us suppose that a Montesquieu, a Buffon, a Diderot, a d’Alembert, a Condillac, [. . .] were travelling [. . .], observing and describing [. . .]. Let us suppose [. . .] [that they] then created, at their leisure, a natural, moral and political history containing everything they had seen, we ourselves would see a new world emerging from their pens, and in this way we would learn to know our own.6 Here, the philosopher and the indigenous individual are still on the same level – in the same time period. A few decades later, with the Société des observateurs de l’homme, founded in 1799, the philosophical journey was already undergoing a process of naturalization and temporalization. It now began to involve a return to the origins of humankind. Through indigenous peoples we could ‘retrace the history of our own ancestors’ and by observing them we could develop ‘an accurate scale indicating the different degrees of civilization’.7 The word ‘civilization’ was still used in the singular and the central point was the standard on which these assessments were based. The further a group was from the centre, the lower it was down the scale. With evolutionism, however, the process of temporalization was fully established and the indigenous individual became primitive. He was seen less as our ancestor and more as the last contemporary of the woolly mammoth. Although he was placed within a time period (and was no longer seen as outside of time, like Rousseau’s man ‘in the state of nature’), it was a time long gone. He was a living anachronism, or an isolated, prehistoric hill. Encountering indigenous tribes was akin to visiting ‘the monuments of the past’, stated Lewis Henry Morgan. Edward Tylor, another of the founding fathers of ethnology, saw the indigenous Tasmanians as Palaeolithic peoples, stating that Palaeolithic man had ceased to be a philosophical inference to become a tangible reality.8 When they were first encountered in the very early nineteenth century, however, it still seemed to the first explorers that these groups represented humankind in a happy, natural state. The ‘children’ of former times had become very ancient, although this did not prevent them from still being treated like children. These references to Palaeolithic peoples were directly associated with the development of prehistoric studies during the same period. The Antediluvian Man of Jacques Boucher de Perthes (1788–1868) made way for Prehistoric Man. A large number of archaeological digs were carried out; basing their work on the new discoveries, the first ethnologists established a general framework. They introduced the notion of ethnological time and determined the stages in this process of human development, which they split into three distinct states: savagery, barbarism and civilization. In his Ancient Society, published in 1877, Lewis Henry Morgan refined these distinctions. The state of savagery was divided into lower, middle and upper stages, in accordance with the archaeological model, as was that of barbarism. The civilized stage, unsurprisingly, was divided into ancient and modern, thereby joining that well-established couple, the Ancients and the Moderns.

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In this way, there were two aspects to the modern regime of historicity: that of progress and acceleration (in Europe, therefore at the ‘centre’), and an evolutionary stage (occurring elsewhere, on the periphery). Modern man, at one extreme, was seen as increasingly preoccupied with the future, while primitive man, at the other extreme, vegetated in a condition of temporal stagnation, or in a permanent present. And every imaginable combination or intermediate temporal regime could be established between those two opposite poles – the possibilities for classification were endless! Colonial powers were able to use these to their own advantage. There was no denying that the process of evolution applied to the entire world. However, Europe alone (primarily Germany, Britain and France) had been capable of extracting, as it were, that unprecedented time known as the modern age from the future; like an alchemist, it transmuted the previous age, that of the old regime of historicity (likewise the result of amalgamation), into a new era. That laborious operation, which took place over several centuries, had not been written into Europe’s destiny from time immemorial; things could have turned out otherwise. All one can say is that it was made possible through a set of circumstances, some of which I have indicated. History, led by this futuristic time, was ready to weave its grand narratives onto what we might describe as prepared ground. These were the very narratives that the nations of Europe used to reinforce their choices and justify their domination, on the one hand, and, on the other, to intensify their rivalries and fuel their antagonisms – until both aspects succumbed to total, self-induced blindness during the Great War.

HISTORY AS MOVEMENT Two allegorical works reveal the historical moment that we might define as European, in the way the term has just been applied. The first shows history as it takes flight: that is, at the point when the modern regime of historicity was set in motion. The second shows its fall, with a History well and truly grounded and time in suspension. Our first example is a painting celebrating the glory of Napoleon. It was the work of Alexandre Véron-Bellecourt, an academic painter who created a number of images portraying the imperial gesture. Entitled Clio montre aux nations les faits mémorables de son règne (Clio shows the nations the memorable events of his reign), it was exhibited at the Salon in 1806. And Clio is indeed depicted there; dressed in the Classical style, she is shown pointing to what she has just inscribed on a large tablet, namely, the great deeds performed by Napoleon. A group of men, some wearing exotic attire, are gathered around her like studious pupils in front of a blackboard. One is an Indian in a feathered headdress; others are from Turkey, the Orient, even China. The Louvre is seen in the background. Napoleon is present in the form of his bust, which represents him in the style of a Roman emperor. It bears the inscription ‘Veni, vidi, vici’, an indication that he is the new Caesar. There are several scrolls at Clio’s feet (her previous work), on which we can discern the names Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon. Following the Classical tradition, the scene is set out according to the principle of historia magistra vitae: a great man is

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portrayed as an exemplary figure in the manner of Plutarch, and Clio appears as the bestower of glory. Yet there is something more, which stems from the very dynamism expressed by the painting. Napoleon is not only Caesar − he is also the incarnation of History; he is that moving force whose effects are felt in all the corners of the earth. He is the ‘Spirit of the World’ as recognized by Hegel, who saw him on horseback at Jena. In his Mémoires d’outre-tombe (Memoirs from Beyond the Grave), FrançoisRené de Chateaubriand describes Napoleon as having been Destiny itself for sixteen years − a Destiny who was never still, ceaselessly on the move as he pursued his plans to restructure Europe. He was ‘[this] conqueror who straddled the earth’. Two characteristics of modern history manifested themselves through him: control over the fates of countries and of men, and speed of execution; history was never at rest. Napoleon would suddenly emerge when he was expected elsewhere or at later time. Under the influence of a time that had become both an actor and a process, the world became synchronized, a development that even involved China. This translates into the composition of the painting. The modern regime of historicity was proceeding at a gallop. In order to be written, history shifted its focus from establishing synchronisms (essential to the concepts of ‘before’ and ‘after’) to operating a process of synchronization. This set out the concepts of ‘earlier than’ and ‘later than’, together with notions of ‘advancement’ and ‘belatedness’ (the exoticism of the costumes being an indication of this), ‘already’ and ‘not yet’, according to a timescale. The conqueror is also the great synchronizer; he is both cosmokrator and chronokrator: the master of the world and the master of time. His gallops across Europe, artillery regiments in tow, the Civil Code in his luggage, likewise express a disruption to temporal systems. This allegory represents a position midway between the historia magistra and the new history. The flight of the eagle also represents that of history.

MEMORY AS CONJURATION At the other extremity of the arc, the fall of history is translated into a second allegory. This is a sculpture, created by Anselm Kiefer in 1989. Entitled The Angel of History and also known as Poppy and Memory, it is a direct reference to Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History. This, in turn, had been inspired by Benjamin’s contemplation of the work by Paul Klee, which the artist had named Angelus Novus. Now, the Angel’s only appearance is in the form of a heavy bomber made of lead; Kiefer had obtained quantities of this metal, which had come from the roof of Cologne Cathedral. Rather than seeming ready to take off, the large plane with its crumpled cabin and wings looks as if it has been unearthed during an archaeological excavation. The history whose messenger it was, the history of deaths and destruction, has already taken place. Thick books, likewise made of lead, are scattered over the wings to the right and left of the cabin. Poppies emerge from their pages; these explain the sculpture’s alternative title, Poppies and Memory, which was inspired by Paul Celan’s collection of poems Mohn und Gedächtnis. Published in 1952, it explores the themes of remembrance and forgetting in relation to the Holocaust. According to Celan, the

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poppy ‘suggests forgetfulness’. The flower, which both induces oblivion and prevents recollection, ultimately produces a state of forgetting that is impossible to forget. Our interest in this case lies in the allegory of a grounded history; the Angel will never take flight again, and nor will the plane. Time has been stopped, and a deathly silence hangs in the air. The spectator is confronted with a past that is still present or a present that has no date. All that can be established here is a relationship where recollection and oblivion merge, or rather clash, and whose silence, with its multiple valencies, has been its chief form of expression for years. Once the proud conveyer of technological progress, as was the railway in the 1830s, the aeroplane is fixed to the ground, and is itself a testimony in ruins. It now forms part of the devastation that it has produced. Can the modern age, that of the modern regime of historicity, reactivate itself, and what glories could Clio proclaim? Relating to 1945 but conceived in the late 1980s, Kiefer’s sculpture is associated with Remembrance; its purpose is to remind us of the catastrophe and to banish oblivion. It chimes with the growing emphasis on Memory and reinforces its visibility. Two Memorials (among many others) reflect that situation, in which Remembrance has become the standpoint from which to consider History. We are indeed in the state that has been described in psychoanalytic terms as ‘belated understanding’. Through their conception and their architecture, these monuments are already testimonies in themselves. The first is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, which was finally inaugurated in Berlin in 2005. Located on a plot near Hitler’s bunker, it was created by the American architect Peter Eisenman. Visitors discover a field covered with 2,700 unevenly arranged grey concrete slabs, suggesting a ruined, abandoned cemetery. Without being given any indications or explanations, they are invited to wander among the stelae and allow themselves to be emotionally affected by the site. In this wordless labyrinth, recollection operates through feeling. If visitors want history, they have to make their way to the Information Centre on the lower ground floor. There, a permanent exhibition documents the various stories of the extermination through words and images. This history centre, which formed no part of the initial plans for the project, serves as a support to recollection. The ‘realm of history’ has therefore been placed at the service of a realm of memory, for the monument’s primary purpose is to function as such. Retracing history, Memory likewise took possession of the 1914 war, even as its last combatants were disappearing. Multiple events were held to commemorate its centenary. On 11 November 2014, for example, the president of the French Republic inuagurated a new memorial: the ‘Ring of Remembrance’, or the Notre-Dame-deLorette International Memorial. This site, located near Arras, already accomodated the National Necropolis, which had been inaugurated in 1925 and contained the remains of the soldiers slain in the violent engagements that had taken place on the ridge of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette between 1914 and 1915. The work of architect Philippe Prost, this large memorial is elliptical in form, with one end overhanging the edge of the plateau. The inner surfaces of the plaques around the Ring bear the names of the 580,000 combatants killed between 1914 and 1918. Forty different nationalities are represented here; the names are set out in alphabetical order and no additional details are given. Entering the Ring through a trench, visitors penetrate,

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so to speak, the memory of the site; should they so wish, history can provide them with further details regarding these names, which are duly lisited in the official records of the warring parties. But there is nothing more here, nothing beyond this. The Ring closes in on itself. Its precarious structure (or at least, position) may be intended to suggest the fragile nature of memory. If the site were no longer visited, if the names were no longer spelt out, then oblivion would be the conclusive winner of the encounter. In this way, from Véron-Bellecourt’s painting to the ‘Ring of Remembrance’, via Kiefer’s Angel of History and the Berlin Memorial, the progress of History has evolved into paths of Memory. This has been the general trend and the shift that has led from the launching of the modern regime of historicity to its questioning, from a glorious, imperious future to an uncertain, threatening one, and from futurism to ‘presentism’, in Europe at all events. For quite some time now, at least since the ‘suicide of Europe’ pronounced by Paul Valéry in 1919, Europe has no longer occupied the central position, and its Clio − its universal Clio − has lost her bloom. It would be entirely inaccurate to maintain that historians, completely unaware of what had happened and was continuing to happen, simply reiterated Pierre Larousse’s mantra. Doubts have been expressed, questions have arisen and reformulations have been suggested. For example, the founders of the Annales movement, Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, sought to re-instate the connection between the past and the present at the heart of the historian’s approach. In the domain of anthropology, Claude Lévi-Strauss rejected evolutionism in his Race and History (1952), arguing that civilizations should be viewed as spread out in space, rather than in time. The notion of progress should therefore be downgraded from its status as a ‘universal category’, to become simply that of a ‘particular mode of existence proper to our society’.9

THE END OF HISTORY It remains for us to endeavour to reach Clio, this time not from within Europe but from outside it. For this modern Clio was part of the baggage carried by the colonizers, who sought to objectivize and naturalize her by presenting her as the mistress of the world and of time. In turn, the triumphs of conquest and domination helped to validate her relevance. Once we had set aside the Christian belief system involving a history based both on Salvation and on providentialism, and once the modern age was underway, evolutionism provided a new operational framework. Marxism then introduced a scientific approach to history and, after 1945, ‘development’ and ‘modernization’ became the watchwords of the large international organizations such as the UN, and of the dismantling of colonialism. The process then occurring was none other than a change in the modern regime of historicity; everyone could have their own carriage in the train of History, or even their own locomotive. Temporal acceleration, the primacy of the future, the nation and nationalism, in other words, the teleological history associated with this, were certainly still in evidence. Yet there were also variations, involving revolutions in one form or another, which built on the class struggle as a driving force. One of the issues in these cases was to identify who was destined for the role of the proletariat. The Chinese Revolution had a huge

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impact. Marxism was able to help drive out the colonizers, but at the same time, it formed the most advanced point of the modern regime of historicity. It asserted the need to do away with the past, its injustices and its (religious) superstitions, and to be ready to sacrifice the existing generations, flushing out counter-revolutionaries in order to hasten to advent of the future. It is highly enlightening to read the observations made by the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty as a member of the now-famous Subaltern Studies Group, which was established in the 1970s when it brought together South Asian historians influenced by Marxism. Describing the early days of his career in Kolkata, he notes that ‘Marx was a household Bengali name’. His German origins were never commented on, nor were the intellectual concepts he applied or the history of their development in European thinking. In short, the question of a connection between a thought and its geographical origins did not arise. Chakrabarty took for granted the ‘universal pertinence of European thought’.10 It was only several years later, while he was living in Australia, that he was able to embark on a process of reflection that led to his ‘provincializing Europe’ − his book of the same name quickly became a major reference work in the field of postcolonial studies. Provincializing Europe meant understanding to what extent Marx was not ‘a household Bengali name’! That is, it meant assessing the extent to which the concepts he applied had a history, and, above all, putting oneself in a position to perceive the distance separating these concepts and the non-Western realities that they were intended to capture. This critical revisiting of European history is interesting, as it confronts the difficult question of knowing what to do with it today. Yet there have been other, more radical options, with voices that have called (and are still calling) for its complete and permanent rejection as part of the baggage brought by the colonizers; Europe should not be provincialized but forgotten. The time lapse that occurred between the date represented by Kiefer’s aeroplane (which takes us back to 1945) and the date of the sculpture (1989) indicates the amount of time it took Europe to realize that the modern regime of historicity had shattered in 1945. This is despite (or perhaps due to) the fact that the following decades were characterized by a frantic race towards progress and modernization, an arms race and a race towards oblivion in the context of East–West antagonism, all punctuated by Cold War crises. These years no doubt also obscured the horizon. The year 1989 was that of the fall of the Berlin Wall and signalled the collapse of the Soviet empire. We can recognize this as the final blow dealt to the modern age and to the modern concept of history. For the ideology that had sought to be the most forward-looking of all (and which resulted in tens of millions of deaths) had failed dismally. Although the star had actually been dead for quite a while, its light continued to reach different corners of the Earth, and the schools of historical thought affiliated to it endured − some endure still. However, the revolutionary fervour of the 1950s and 1960s resulted in failure, leading some progressives to reject a modernity that had deceived them yet again. The Tricontinental conference held in Havana in 1966 had brought together representatives from Africa, Asia and South America for the first time, and was just one of the organizations keen to champion such movements. In the Middle

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East, the Iranian Revolution of 1979 had opened up a new avenue and enabled ‘a religious discourse to replace the references and discourses of the Left’.11 Another future, which sometimes exhibited apocalyptic nuances, was taking shape on the horizon. The modern concept of history was definitively losing its ability to provide meaning, while what we describe as fundamentalism, as well as certain indigenous movements, was gaining power and visibility. And what of Clio, once so ‘worshipped’? Does she still have a place in today’s world? Or, in other words, is a different concept of History about to replace the modern concept, which is no longer and can no longer be in tune with the world of this new century? As we have seen, Memory now occupies centre stage both in Europe and elsewhere. A culture of remembrance, manifested through a great many memorials and punctuated by numerous commemorative events, both large and small, has established itself and taken form. From one perspective, history, that of historians, has placed itself at the service of this Memory, whose own approach is notably historian-like in its own right, with its focus on investigation and its preoccupation with archives and traces of every variety. Its concern is with voluntary memories and with reconstruction rather than rediscovery, with memories of loss and of a void that needs to be filled; these are not personally experienced, nor could they have been, as a process of transmission could not have occurred. They are memories to be recognized in the public sphere as a right – a right to Remembrance. Furthermore, historians have sought more accurate ways of expressing the reality of a postcolonial world that has also cast off the divisions imposed at Yalta. Discarding national, imperial and colonial histories, they have offered responses – techniques, almost – in the form of ‘connected history’, ‘shared history’, ‘interconnected history’ and finally ‘global history’, with a view to freeing themselves from the modern regime of historicity and its teleology. One thing is certain: if a new concept of History is to emerge (perhaps one without a capital ‘H’ this time), it will not be manufactured in the workshops of Europe. Before 1789, there were histories − we may be about to rediscover updated forms of history in the plural. And in this way, the time when History existed in the singular, or when it was History with a capital ‘H’, will only have lasted a moment – one moment in the life of Clio.

NOTES 1. Pierre Larousse, Grand Dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, vol. 12, article entitled ‘Histoire’. 2. Ernest Renan, ‘Lettre à Marcelin Berthelot’, in Œuvres complètes (Paris: CalmannLévy, 1947), I, p. 634. 3. Alexis de Tocqueville, De la démocratie en Amérique (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1981 [1835–1840]), II, p. 399. 4. François Guizot, Histoire de la civilisation en Europe (Paris: Hachette, 1985 [1828]), p. 62, 58. 5. Adelbert von Chamisso, quoted by Reinhart Koselleck, ‘Gibt es eine Beschleunigung der Geschichte?’, in Zeitschichten (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), p. 176.

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6. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes [1755], Œuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, coll. ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’, 1964), vol. III, pp. 213–14. 7. Jean Copans and Jean Jamin, Aux origines de l’anthropologie française. Les mémoires de la Société des observateurs de l’homme en l’an VIII (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1994), p. 76. 8. Edward Tylor, quoted by G. W. Stocking Jr. in Victorian Anthropology (London: Free Press, 1987), p. 283. 9. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Anthropologie structurale (Paris: Plon, 1958), p. 368. 10. Ibid., p. 21. 11. Ahmet Insel, ‘Des sociétés brutalisées’, Esprit, May 2016, p. 69.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2000. Hartog, François, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time, translated from the French by Saskia Brown, New York, Columbia University Press, 2016 [2012]. Hartog, François, Croire en l’histoire, Paris, Flammarion, 2013. Koselleck, Reinhart, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, translated from the German by Keith Tribe, New York, Columbia University Press, 2004 [1988]. Morgan, Lewis, Ancient Society or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization, London, MacMillan and Company, 1877.

CHAPTER 27

Liberty leading the people EMMANUEL FUREIX

It would be difficult to find a more renowned and ambiguous image than this work by Eugène Delacroix, which he painted immediately after the 1830 Revolution. The history of this painting and of its usages has been punctuated by scandals, misinterpretations and misappropriations. Today, it has its place among the images of the world as an embodiment of the People, whoever they may be, fighting for a cause. The general public often mistakenly identify it as an allegory of the Republic, or even as a scene from the revolution of 1789. The image has become commonplace and ubiquitous, having been used in every material format throughout the twentieth century, and has lost its original reference. It has gained in plasticity what it has lost in historical ‘truth’. It addresses everyone, communicating to all the notions of Revolution, Republic, Liberty, Freedom and the People – eroticized or merchandised – each in turn or all at once. Its image has now even been adapted for commercial purposes to serve every possible global marketing need. When it was first exhibited at the Salon of 1831, the painting was greeted with incomprehension. It depicts a scene at the barricades in Paris; the date is set as 28 July 1830, that is, at the point when the uprising against Charles X turned into a popular revolution. The three colours omnipresent in the painting − from the bodies of the insurgents to the towers of Notre Dame – are consistent with the mood of the time; the same is true of the composite mass of people of every class grouped around the barricade, and also of the pyramidal composition inspired by Théodore Géricault and the corpses littering the ground. In contrast to these, an imposing, half-naked female figure stands out starkly, her gaze fixed to one side as she proudly brandishes the tricolour flag. The image aroused the consternation, even the disgust of its contemporaries. They had little difficulty in recognizing the allegory of Liberty, with her Phrygian cap, but this allegory was too ‘realist’ in style, too ‘sexualized’; the whiff of ‘the rabble’ emanated from her every pore. The immaculate purity appropriate to nude allegorical images was totally absent here; surely those were hairs in the young woman’s right armpit, and red patches and beads of perspiration on her grimy skin. She was ‘a woman of ill repute’, ‘shameless’, ‘a street-walker’, a ‘pensionnaire de Bicêtre’ (a reference to the former prison and lunatic asylum in the southern suburbs of Paris). For the critics of 1831, that flesh-and-blood Liberty was an off-putting sight, both sexually and socially. Moreover, Delacroix reversed the vantage point traditionally associated with scenes of combat, placing

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the spectator directly in front of the insurgent masses, who seem about to emerge dramatically from the painting. The canvas all but explodes with the social tensions and the promises of freedom brought by the revolution, an effect that Delacroix had probably not intended to produce. Heinrich Heine, who was present at the Salon, noted: ‘What the character seems to represent is actually the untamed strength of the people, who are freeing themselves of their burden.’ This undoubtedly explains the painting’s belated success and widespread appropriation. The work was bought by Louis-Philippe and initially installed in the Throne Room at the Tuileries Palace but was soon placed in storage, being perceived as dangerous, and was not put back on permanent public display until the 1860s. It was in the twentieth century, however, that it became the polymorphous icon that we know today, lending itself to the most varied applications. For the French, the painting came to embody the Republic and the Sovereign Nation. A caricature by the comics artist Calvo, taken from a comic strip published from 1944 to 1945 (La bête est morte!), shows the Liberation of Paris (in August 1944) portrayed in the manner of Liberty Leading the People. He replaced the characters’ heads with those of animals – Marianne and the French are shown as rabbits, the Germans as wolves – but retained the setting with its barricades. In a more official register, a fragment of Delacroix’s painting even made its way onto 100-franc banknotes in 1978, when its republican symbolism appeared in the most conventional form. From a foreign perspective, that quintessentially French Marianne sometimes prompts an ironic response. During a superstar-style visit to France made by Pope John Paul II in 1996, a German caricaturist, Klaus Stuttmann, subverted the conventions. He reproduced Delacroix’s painting, replacing the image of Liberty with that of the Pope and adding the scathing caption: France has found its definitive version of History.

REWORKINGS Another iconic application, this time carried out on a transnational scale, involved inserting a reproduction of Delacroix’s painting into another, contemporary image of revolution. The image obtained in this way becomes ‘dialectical’ (Walter Benjamin). Through this process, ‘what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation’. In this way, the anti-fascist German photographer John Heartfield created a photomontage that carried a pointed message by inserting a fragment from Liberty Leading the People above a snapshot immortalizing a group of Spanish Republicans in Madrid in 1936; the two sections are linked by these words: Liberty herself fights in their ranks. The revolutionary potential presented by Delacroix’s icon remains powerful today. In 2012, for instance, Palestinian graffiti artists painted an adapted image of Liberty Leading the People onto the separation wall surrounding the town of Bethlehem (replacing the red cap with the keffiyeh and the French Tricolore with the Palestinian flag), which sparked outrage. Israeli soldiers quickly erased part of the fresco. In a further example, Delacroix’s iconic revolutionary scene reappears in flesh-and-blood form on a regular basis; this involves a greater or lesser degree of awareness as the case may be. Photographs of protesting crowds frequently include

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micro-scenes reflecting the image of Liberty Leading the People, immediately associating them with revolutionary history. On 13 May 1968, during a potentially revolutionary situation, the photographer Jean-Pierre Rey immortalized a young woman in this way; sitting on the shoulders of a Parisian protester, she brandishes a North Vietnamese flag. The Liberty of 1830 appears to have forced her way into the contemporary photograph. Similar codes were applied at an anti-far-right demonstration held on 1 May 2002. And on 11 January 2015, following the Charlie Hebdo attacks, the crowd perched on top of the statue group Le Triomphe de la République in the Place de la Nation in Paris, while a huge pencil and the Tricolore flag dominate the foreground, was a compelling reminder of Delacroix’s barricade scene. The image, captured by the freelance photographer Martin Argyroglo, was published throughout the world.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Hadjinicolaou, Nicos, ‘La Liberté guidant le peuple de Delacroix devant son premier public’, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 28 (1979). Toussaint, Hélène, La Liberté guidant le peuple, Dossiers du Département du Louvre no. 26, RMN, 1982.

CHAPTER 28

The aura of the image HORST BREDEKAMP

Although it flourished in the polytheistic Age of Antiquity, the image was banished by the three monotheistic religions that were developing in Europe. According to the Jewish, Christian and Muslim faiths, God could not be represented in visual form. Yet with the gradual conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity, figurative art began to assert itself. From the moment the face of Christ replaced that of the emperor on coins in Constantinople during the late seventh century, Christianity appropriated the image and continued to enrich its unique iconographic tradition. On 22 August 2016, a trial opened at the International Criminal Court (the ICC) in The Hague; it concerned ‘alleged war crimes and the destruction of historical monuments and buildings of religious significance’ in Timbuktu. Four years earlier, a Jihadist militia group had destroyed centuries-old mausoleums and monuments. These acts had aroused worldwide alarm, especially as the monuments in question had been included in UNESCO’s list of World Heritage Sites since 1988. The destruction of the Buddhas of Bāmyān, in Afghanistan, in March 2001, the attack on the twin towers in New York on 11 September that same year, the vandalizing of numerous ancient sites in the Syrian town of Palmyra in 2015 and the actions carried out in Mali are the most prominent examples of Islamic iconoclasm that have occurred over these last few decades. The Bāmyān statues symbolized Buddhism, the twin towers, a way of life and a Western system of finance, the mausoleums of Timbuktu, a deviation from the true path of Islam and the monuments in Palmyra, the polytheism of Antiquity and the Christian religion. These acts may be described as global from two standpoints; they have a ‘horizontal’ dimension, in the sense that they could occur anywhere, yet they also have a ‘vertical’ dimension, as they refer to all conceptions of time, presenting a contrast between the eschatological definition of a here and now and the heritage bequeathed by the past. These acts of violence were part of a fight against the materialization of religious doctrines in all its forms, manifested through objects or sites. The aim was to eliminate all materialized forms of memory. The fact that the trial for one of those crimes was held at the ICC is not devoid of symbolic significance; iconoclasm, just like its repression, is an inherent, indelible part of Europe’s own experiences. In the 1970s, when iconoclasm first became the subject of analytical research, the studies focused on destructive acts carried out in Europe through dictatorships, revolutions or religious movements. The intention

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was to provide greater insight into the historical significance of contemporary events such as the Chinese Cultural Revolution or the destruction linked to the protest movement of 1968. These studies came to the conclusion that iconoclasm was probably a thing of the past. Given the rapid development of electronic methods of communication, they were also governed by historical distance; as the German art historian Martin Warnke observed in a groundbreaking essay published in the early 1970s: ‘Cameramen, filmmakers, publicists and research institutes have taken over from the sculptors and colour virtuosos of previous centuries.’ Despite the visionary character of this assertion, however, the following decades demonstrated that iconoclasm was not a bygone phenomenon. Indeed, every time a situation arose involving historical rupture, iconoclasm resumed the role it had previously occupied, now in a new set of circumstances. In this way, the collapse of the USSR led to the destruction of several statues from the Stalinist period, while the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein as American troops seized Baghdad in 2003 was seen as an emblematic act. The most significant discovery, however, was that iconoclasm, which might have been seen as an archaic phenomenon, was in fact completely compatible with the most cutting-edge media of the contemporary age. This has notably been the case since the launch of the internet. The shock and outrage felt by the Western world at the destructions in Bāmyān were due to the fact that they could not be ascribed to a backward, rural environment and to a retrograde form of Islam; on the contrary, they were accompanied by a media presence that instantly produced a worldwide impact. The issue of iconoclasm is therefore a highly contemporary one and is continually appearing in new forms. The acts that have just been described aroused consternation not only on account of the systematic methods used to perpetrate such destruction but also because they signalled the return of a European issue that had been deemed no longer relevant. The history of violence that was thought to have ended in Europe returned, this time at a global level. Now that a phenomenon previously viewed as specifically European had re-emerged through exterior forces, it became necessary to think of Europe in terms of its relationship with the world.

THE LEGACY OF ANTIQUITY It has not been possible to find an accurate and satisfactory way of defining Europe, either today or in previous eras. Yet what unifies Europe as a cultural space and constitutes its originality is the conflict between an age of Antiquity that favoured images, and was even fascinated by them, and a post-Classical period characterized by a latent hostility towards them. The effects of that conflict are still felt today. The Olympian gods were able to share worship among themselves, so that Mars, Venus and Minerva, for instance, could embody various aspects of the material world, ideas and passions. This world of the gods, which was divisible and at times discordant, included nature, and with it matter and the sensory realm, which explains the central role played by images in the polytheistic cosmos.

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All the monotheistic religions rose against this conception of the world of the gods, matter and form. Early Christianity placed itself firmly within the tradition of Judaism, according to which the divine was categorically un-representable. This was one of the fundamental tenets of the early Christians. This spiritual conviction likewise pervaded Islam, although to a lesser degree than in the case of early Christianity. If Europe was marked by the influences of Judaism, of Christianity and (at least through Spain and the Balkans) of Islam, then this continent embodies the three universal religions originally hostile to the image. Initially, these three monotheistic faiths shared the certainty that God was beyond the world He created, so that it would be impossible to represent Him here without reducing Him, an unacceptable act. Accordingly, any portrayal amounted to blasphemy. The Rhineland Regional Museum at Trier holds a curiously amorphous stone sculpture whose upper section becomes gradually narrower; it is a particularly expressive illustration of the critical attitude to the image that long prevailed in early Christian times. Its abstract appearance calls to mind the first works created by Constantin Brâncuşi or Naum Gabo. However, its origins date back both to ancient times and to the Middle Ages. Initially, it was indeed a sculpture representing Diana or Venus, comparable to the Venus of Capua now held in Naples. However, after Trier had converted to Christianity, this pagan statue was put in chains and for centuries it was subjected to showers of stones hurled by pilgrims. The metamorphosis of the powerful goddess into a shapeless form was intended to discredit the belief that the divine could be contained within a sculpture. This sculpture at Trier is one of the most striking examples of the hostile attitude to the image that characterized postClassical Europe for centuries.

CHRISTIAN ICONOGRAPHIC PRACTICES The unremitting development of figurative art despite this theologically motivated hostility to images is one of the miracles of European culture. That art drew its inspiration from the Classical legacy, which it revised and adapted in the most varied ways. This all began in secret. In the second century CE, wealthy Christians who wanted to mark their possessions with a significant sign succumbed to the temptation of using Christian themes, such as that of the Good Shepherd, in a cryptic manner. The situation changed when the Emperor Constantine put an end to the persecution of Christians, beginning a development that was to see Christianity becoming a state religion. The ways in which the emperor was portrayed in images were then adapted to suit the purposes of Christian iconography. The figure of the sun god, Sol Invictus, which had been incorporated into the cult of the emperor, was used in this way to represent Christ. A momentous development occurred in Constantinople in the seventh century CE, when the emperor’s portrait on coinage was replaced with the image of Christ, which even appeared on battle flags. The cross on which Christ suffered was then transformed into a support for His image, portrayed in circular form; the icon of Christ became a symbol of the state, and a guarantee of the unity

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of the Empire. In the conflict between Judaism, which prohibited such pictorial representation, and the pagan age of Antiquity, where imagery played a prominent role, Christianity adopted the Classical standpoint. Charlemagne succeeded in re-appropriating Classical culture by reconnecting with ancient sources in order to establish them as the cultural norms of his empire. He authorized the creation of large-scale sculptures, using such works for his own purposes on occasion. His approach therefore ran counter to opinions that had long prevailed, although he never questioned the commandment prohibiting the worship of graven images. The Libri Carolini, a theological treatise which was written in the late eighth century at Charlemagne’s command and played a key role in the schism between the Latin and Greek Churches, certainly remained faithful to the principle of condemning the worship of images. However, they also highlighted the important role that statues could play in creating communities. The bronze equestrian statuette, representing Charlemagne as a crowned emperor holding the insignia of his power (a sword and a globe), is a perfect expression of that ambition. Once part of the treasury of Metz Cathedral, it is now in the Louvre. In practice, however, it was not always possible to maintain that subtle distinction between religious worship and the adoration of the image. Remarkable sculptures from the tenth and eleventh centuries, such as the Gero Crucifix in Cologne Cathedral (one of the first monumental sculptures of the Middle Ages), the Golden Madonna of Essen Cathedral and the statue of the Virgin presented to Paderborn Cathedral by Bishop Imad of Paderborn, all contained relics. This made the boundary between the veneration shown to the relics contained in the statutes and the veneration of the statues themselves all the more tenuous. The most striking example of this is provided by the reliquary-statue of Saint Foy in the Abbey Church at Conques that bears her name and has become a major site of pilgrimage. The saint, resplendent amid an extraordinary display of forms and materials, is seated on a throne, immobile and aloof. The dominant feature is the metallic body of this majestic figure, adorned with precious stones and enamels. And yet, despite the highly objectionable character of the statue, it silenced critics. This example of excess was minutely described by Bernard d’Angers, who was Scholaster of Angers Cathedral in the first half of the eleventh century and disapproved of religious representations. During a journey to Conques, he contemplated a statue placed on the high altar at Aurillac and asked his travelling companion sarcastically: ‘Brother, what do you think of this idol? Would Jupiter or Mars have thought such a statue unworthy of them?’ The first time he set eyes on the reliquary-statue of Saint Foy, he reiterated his opinion that this type of idolatry was ‘irreconcilable with the laws of the Christian religion’. On the following day, however, that opinion underwent a complete change. The bishop, hitherto totally opposed to this form of devotion inherited from Antiquity, noted the miracles performed by the statue and its relics and became a firm adherent. Bernard d’Angers could not have known how justified he had been in his initial criticisms. An analysis of the statue’s interior has indeed revealed that her dress and throne, in their current form, correspond to a version created after 984. This concealed a golden robe of more ancient origin, under which lay a piece of wood

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dating from the ninth century containing the relics of Saint Foy. The statue’s face, on the other hand, was the funerary mask of an emperor dating from the fourth or fifth century. This ancient head had such a forceful presence that it had even been deemed acceptable to change the gender of Saint Foy. This had given the statue such evocative power that even hardened rationalists such as Bernard d’Angers abandoned all their reservations. Like the statue at Trier, that of Saint Foy embodies the highly complex and productive contradiction that underlies Post-Classical European iconographic culture.

ACTS OF ICONOCLASM AND THE AESTHETICS OF DESTRUCTION In response, there was a hardening of the fundamental objections to the portrayal of religious subjects, and particularly to their representation in three-dimensional form. This ultimately found its expression in religious – and, more frequently − socio-revolutionary iconoclasm. It gave rise to a paradoxical phenomenon, which involved the iconoclasts themselves endowing the destroyed and mutilated representations with the very life that they had sought to tear from the artworks. In this way, when describing the Hussite Rebellion, chroniclers who remained faithful to the Catholic Church noted with outrage that the insurgents inflicted the types of punishment to works of art that suggested ‘they believed that they were touching living people’. The Anabaptists proceeded in the same fashion; in Münster Cathedral, for example, they rained so many blows onto the face of an abbess that the sculpture was left completely covered with the marks of the attack. It is likewise said of the Huguenots that they decapitated sculptures, sparing none, as if these were ‘living saints, who could experience the pain’. The destruction of the tomb of King Louis XI at Cléry-Saint-André carried out by Protestants in 1562 was reported in the following manner: ‘And, just as if they felt him to be alive, they hacked off his arms, legs and, finally, his head, with the violence of an executioner.’ Following the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, religious iconoclasm became a thing of the past, yet the analogy established between the image and what it represents still endures. This leads to attacks on communities or individuals through the destruction of the works of art that symbolize them. Through condemnatory acts of this type, the history of the Western world became a battleground (as it still is) on which the destructive confusion between image and body was unleashed. The iconoclasm practised in the French Revolution served as a model during events that occurred in the fairly recent past. The Reign of Terror began in August 1792 and was inaugurated by the demolition of everything that belonged to the Ancien Régime. The first acts of this type included the destruction of equestrian statues of kings, among them that of Louis XIV on the Place des Victoires in Paris. The sculpture was derided as being ‘as hollow as power itself ’. These acts, which continued to be carried out until 1794, reached their apogee with the attacks on Medieval churches and their sculptures. The decapitations of the statues of the kings in the cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris carried out between December 1793 and September 1794 were a new example of an aesthetic of destruction; this had already

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found expression in the practice of defacing artworks during the Reformation, the aim being to reveal them as abominations. The fact that several churches survived, unlike the original cathedral at Arras, with its ‘holy candle’ relic, is little short of miraculous, given that this was a time when religious buildings were seen as reflections of monarchic despotism and, as such, deserved to be pulled down. Frenzied acts of this nature reoccurred during the time of the Paris Commune, when the destruction wrought included the toppling of the Vendôme column and the burning of the Hôtel de Ville and the Tuileries Palace in May 1871. In the twentieth century, the most dramatic examples of iconoclasm occurred in the wake of the anti-clerical campaigns of the Soviet Revolution, the anti-Stalinist reactions in Hungary in 1956 and those following the collapse of the USSR in 1989. Above all, it was important for a new power to be seen erasing every trace of the symbols of the defeated regime in a display of iconoclasm. A specific type of iconoclasm emerged in all the totalitarian states of the twentieth century, in particular under the Nazis. This involved the suppression and, in certain cases, the destruction of all forms of modern art representing ethnic groups and persecuted cultures, as a result of which all symbols of Nazism were later banned and destroyed.

REPRODUCTION: REINFORCING THE AURA Despite these numerous forms of iconoclasm based on religion, politics or ethnicity, the diversity of Europe’s visual cultures is probably unmatched. These are rooted in the paradoxical development of Christian iconographic culture. The early Christians’ aversion to any figurative image was overcome by considering the image of Christ not as a representation but as a body that had left its imprint. According to Western tradition, icons of this type are attributed to Saint Veronica, who handed Christ her veil while he was on the way to Calvary. He wiped his face on it, leaving traces of sweat and blood. The image formed by this physical matter was not an image in the strict sense of the word; these were particles that had come from the body of Christ. In this way, the true image (vera icon) is the result of bodily traces; Saint Veronica’s veil, a model for all the canvases to come, became a medium on which the particles from Christ’s body were imprinted. Veronica’s icon gave rise to innumerable copies. The shape outlined on the cloth, the face without a neck and the hair that hung down on either side had the value of truth; this was the face of Christ. And, having been imprinted, the face itself was seen as a relic. Although Saint Veronica’s icon was not, strictly speaking, an image, through its status as a copy the treasures of divine grace were rediscovered in the reproductions it generated. The copy was legitimized by the very fact that it conveyed the sacred substance of its origin. The same process occurred with all other icons. But the images created by Christ Himself, through tactile contact, were known for their specific characteristic of quite frequently reproducing themselves. Legend has it that a famous image of this type, which has not survived, imprinted itself on the cloth that was concealing it. The Mandylion was likewise said to have reproduced itself. According to the story, when

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that image was hidden in a wall, being under threat of destruction, it imprinted itself into a brick, thereby creating the Keramidion. For this reason, reproduction in the Christian sense of the term does not diminish the aura of the original − on the contrary, it is strengthened and amplified through the process. From Late Antiquity, Christianity drew inspiration from images of Christ, the Virgin Mary, the saints, the stylites and other charismatic figures; these were all reproduced in large quantities. The same principle was applied to these reproductions as to the images obtained through imprint; to reproduce a form was to transmit the redemptive power it contained. Even the mass-produced religious figurines were of equal value; the authenticity of the original image and the redemptive power emanating from it could be transmitted to every one of its reproductions. Such images were also printed on paper, a process that developed through the same momentum. Indeed, Johannes Gutenberg initially produced devotional images, a fact that is not often acknowledged. Even in the cases of physicochemical imaging techniques and electronic visual media, where the emphasis tends to be on the technical means used to transmit the image rather than on the content, following the principle that ‘the medium is the message’ (Marshall McLuhan), that original sanctity has never been diminished, let alone surpassed. Quite the contrary; mass production has given those two fundamental themes − the ability of the reproduced image to retain a trace of the original and the shift of emphasis from content to medium − new sources of energy. This was especially true of photography, which was invented in 1839. The ability of Saint Veronica’s icon to retain the immediate impression of what had been reproduced was a principle that now manifested itself everywhere, through photographs. If, as William Henry Fox Talbot put it in 1844, photographs were imprinted ‘by the hand of nature’ rather than having been created by artists, this medium suddenly seemed to have created the possibility of authentically reproducing forms originating from a higher force, as they were represented in works of art. In the same spirit as Talbot, who reprised the legend of Saint Veronica by replacing Christ with the word ‘Nature’, photographers endeavoured to bridge that gap between the two. Although it may vigorously challenge this, photography is a variation of Saint Veronica’s icon and has never been able to free itself from that sacred magic. This was demonstrated in a particularly striking way by Roland Barthes in La Chambre claire. To this day, the procedures invented by the sciences to make the invisible visible are still fuelled by that initial religious tension, that effort to reveal the unseen. Although this is not readily admitted, the same framework of religious interpretation is covertly in operation, from the first radiographs to images on a nanometric scale or the farthest reaches of space, oscillating between spiritually based criticism of the image and the need to give visibility to the non-representable.

THE RECEDING IMAGE This paradox is one of Europe’s most singular features. The fundamentally hostile attitude to the image gave rise to an iconographic culture that spread not in spite

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of this initial hostility but rather because of it. Still today, European iconographic practices tend to involve integrating negation into art itself, in a reflection conducted by art on its own negation. There is probably no other cultural domain where the question of the image’s justification and determination to be an actual image has become such a major theme of artistic practice itself. This is particularly true of the art created since the beginning of the Modern Era. Michelangelo’s last sculpture, the Pietà Rondanini, which is held in Milan, is one of the most remarkable examples of a work capable of demonstrating the structural validity of this principle. Indeed, it should be seen as the negation of itself. Unfinished, like many others, it represents Mary holding Christ in a vertical position after He has been taken down from the cross. The extremely slender appearance of the figures of Christ and Mary and the linear outline of the group viewed from the side create the impression that it consists of a single arc, justifiably bringing to mind the abstract sculptures of the twentieth century. In his version of the Holy Face, which is exhibited at the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, the Spanish painter Zurbarán simulated the tactile character of the veil in a trompe-l’œil effect, so that the face of Christ stands out in contrast as an ephemeral, plaintive form that appears to emerge from the depths to which it will return. While the realistic-looking cloth imposes itself on the gaze, the face of Christ seems to fade in the manner of a shadow. The image negates itself, but the impression of a vera icon is all the more powerful as a result. It is that very negation of itself that endows the image with grandeur. Lucio Fontana’s split canvases, painted in the twentieth century, likewise involve a process of iconizing the image through its destruction. The splits in the canvas, recalling those that were ripped with sabres during the Middle Ages, produce an inimitable image while at the same time preventing the possibility of creating another. This dialectic was, and still remains, the reason for the exceptional nature of the culture of the image in Europe, based on the interaction and opposition between iconoclasm, hostility to the image and representation. Its formal realm, which resists negation while incorporating contradiction, enabled this culture to make the remote visible and to convey to the world the process of thinking in terms of oppositions. The tribunal at The Hague recalls a European history of conflict that gave rise to the theological, conceptual and artistic shift from violence to creativity.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Barthes, Roland, La Chambre claire. Note sur la photographie, Paris, Le Seuil, 1980. Beck, Herbert and Horst Bredekamp (Eds.), Kunst um 1400 am Mittelrhein. Ein Teil der Wirklichkeit, exhibition catalogue, Frankfurt am Main, Liebighaus Museum alter Plastik, 1975. Belting, Hans, Das echte Bild, Munich, C.H. Beck, 2005. Berns, Jörg Jochen (Ed.), Von Strittigkeit der Bilder. Texte des deutschen Bilderstreits im 16. Jahrhundert, 2 vols, Berlin and Boston, De Gruyter, 2014.

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Bœspflug, François, Dieu et ses images. Une histoire de l’Éternel dans l’art, Montrouge, Bayard, 2008. Bredekamp, Horst, Theorie des Bildakts, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp Verlag, 2005. Christin, Olivier, Une révolution symbolique. L’iconoclasme huguenot et la reconstruction catholique, Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1991. Didi-Huberman, Georges, Images in Spite of All, translated from the French by Shane B. Lillis, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2012 [2003]. Dupeux, Cécile et al. (Eds.), Bildersturm: Wahnsinn oder Gottes Wille? Exhibition catalogue from the Bern Historical Museum, Munich, Wilhelm Fink, 2000. Freedberg, David, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1989. Fricke, Beate, Ecce fides. Die Statue von Conques, Götzendienst und Bildkultur im Westen, Munich, Wilhelm Fink, 2007. Fureix, Emmanuel (Ed.), Iconoclasme et Révolutions. XVIIIe-XXIe siècles, Ceyzérieu, Champ Vallon, 2014. Gamboni, Dario, The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the French Revolution, London, Reaktion Books, 1997. Kessler, Herbert L. and Gerhard Wolf (Eds.), Holy Face and the Paradox of Representation, Bologna, Mondadori Electa, 1998. Latour, Bruno and Peter Weibel (Eds.), Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2002. Leuschner, Eckhard and Mark R. Hesslinger (Eds.), Das Bild Gottes in Judentum, Christentum und Islam. Vom Alten Testament bis zum Karikaturenstreit, Petersberg, Michael Imhof, 2009. Naef, Silvia, Y a-t-il une ‘question de l’image’ en Islam?, Paris, Téraèdre, 2004. Réau, Louis, Histoire du vandalisme. Les monuments détruits de l’art français, 2 vols, Paris, Hachette, 1959. Warnke, Martin (Ed.), Bildersturm. Die Zerstörung des Kunstwerks, Munich, Hanser, 1973.

CHAPTER 29

1968 A wildfire ROBERT GILDEA

The winds of May ’68 blew right across Europe. In Paris, they represented freedom, in Prague, anti-communism, and in Germany and Italy, anti-fascism. Although these causes were different, they had two points in common: the youth of the protesters and the desire to draw a line under the Second World War. Memories of the events of 1968 have been diverse, divided and subject to change over time. Although the memory of Paris’s May ’68 seems to occupy the centre of the field, other events were also memorialized almost as soon as they had happened in order to define and legitimate protest movements: the police shooting of Benno Ohnesorg in Berlin on 2 June 1967, the battle of the Via Giulia in Rome on 20 March 1968, Polish protests in March 1968, the Prague Spring and its crushing by Soviet tanks on 20 August 1968. The memory of these events was contested from the outset. Conservative voices expressed hostility to the violence they witnessed in university debates or on the streets that recalled previous revolutions. Moreover, memories of 1968 have changed over time, their fortunes rising and falling, shaped by the legacy of the Second World War, by the Cold War, Third World revolutions and globalization. There was no single memory of 1968 but a plurality of memories. They were both local and national and did not amount to a European memory. Memories were shaped by different national traditions going back to the Second World War and earlier. The barricades in Paris drew on a long tradition of revolution going back to the 1871 Paris Commune and 1848. Protest movements in Italy were inspired by anti-fascist movements against what were felt to be fascist legacies in Italian state and society. In West Germany, stories of anti-Nazi resistance by communists and the July 1944 bomb plotters were sometimes evoked but German youth struggled under the burden of the Nazi past of their parents. As Gudrun Ensslin told the SDS after Ohnesorg’s death, ‘You cannot talk to the people who made Auschwitz!’ In Eastern Europe, anti-fascism was the official ideology of the communist regimes but it had lost its appeal as young people became disillusioned by what they saw as the regimes’ stale and sclerotic Stalinism. When Rudi Dutschke visited Prague

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in April 1968, bearing the gospel of Marxist revolution, he was not understood by Czechoslovak activists for whom Marxism led only to communist dictatorship and who coveted the democracy and consumer goods that Dutschke despised. The somewhat fragmented European memory of 1968 acquired greater coherence in a wider, global framework. Anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements were firing the Third World from Cuba and Africa to Vietnam and Cultural Revolution China and provided models of ‘revolution within the revolution’ that challenged what European radicals widely denounced as Stalinism. Large-scale portraits of Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Mao Zedong and above all Che Guevera graced all major European protests, such as the international demonstration against the Vietnam War in Berlin in February 1968. Some Third World protests, such as that in Mexico, brutally crushed by the regime in October 1968 ahead of the Olympics, did not become part of the memory of 1968 for some time. Other global movements, such as the American Civil Rights movement, inspired the civil rights campaign in Northern Ireland and second-wave feminism in much of Europe, but could not compete with the dynamism of Third World revolution. The inspiration provided by Third World revolutions in 1968 also had the effect of dividing memories. The image of the guerrilla consecrated violence but also split those for whom 1968 was a political struggle from those for whom it was a peaceful social and cultural revolution. After the initial 1968 protests were crushed by the authorities, activists divided between those who looked to change social relations and attitudes through the counter-cultural press, a communal living and feminist, lesbian and gay activism, and those who went down the road of armed struggle. These were inspired by the Palestine Liberation Movement, culminating in the 1970s in murders perpetrated by the West German Red Army Faction, the Italian Red Brigades and Action Directe in France. Conservative and even moderate opinion seized the opportunity to brand 1968 as protest that led inevitably to sexual excess and to terrorism. When the victory of the North Vietnamese in 1975 precipitated the flight of the Boat People, Third World revolution was no longer imagined as liberating but pilloried as a path to dictatorship and atrocity. The force of criticism had an impact on the choices and trajectories of former ‘68ers themselves. Some activists of Jewish origin, appalled by the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972, abandoned their radicalism and became Zionists. Other former gauchistes realized that the way forward was not by a head-on clash with the state but through local, non-violent and highly symbolic conflicts. Alternative memories formed around iconic struggles such as the LIP watchmakers’ strike of 1973 in Besançon, campaigns against nuclear plants at Wyhl in Baden and Gorleben in Lower Saxony, the alternative religious commune of Isolotto outside Florence, anti-psychiatric experiments in La Borde near Orléans and in Trieste, and the celebration of avantgarde culture in Hungary’s Balatonboglár chapel. Western Marxists who had looked down on the reformism of the Prague Spring now grew tired of Marxist slogans and were seduced by the new, anti-communist rhetoric of human rights among dissidents in Eastern Europe. This was highlighted by the Charter 77 movement in Czechoslovakia and the Gdańsk strike of 1980 which launched Solidarity.

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The memory of 1968 changed dramatically over time, in a dynamic relationship with the fortunes of the Cold War and other global events. The criticism of 1968 as the incubator of excess intensified in the 1980s. The return of the Cold War over the question of Pershing II and SS-20 missiles isolated political radicals. In Nous l’avons tant aimée, la revolution (1986) Dany Cohn Bendit, wondering whether he was a ‘has been’ or ‘the last of the Mohicans’. He interviewed a number of former activists colleagues across Europe, including Red Brigaders now in prison and Joschka Fischer, who swore that he had now broken with violence. Grand narratives told the story of the shift of 1968 from ‘Years of Hope’ to ‘Days of Rage’ (Todd Gitlin) or from ‘The Years of Dreams’ to ‘the Years of Gunpowder’ (Hamon and Rotman). Studies were published based on oral history of the ‘generation’ that had made 1968 and carried its memory. These concentrated on an élite of activists such as the Maoists of the Gauche Prolétarienne, who were not necessarily typical of the student and youth movement, and had hit the buffers of political radicalism. Activists who had kept the faith, such a Pakistani-born Tariq Ali or gayrights militant Guy Hocquenghem, vented their spleen on former comrades who had ‘sold out’ to party politics or the media. The twentieth anniversary provided a media opportunity to pillory the 1968 generation for their excesses. ‘Le Procès de Mai’, broadcast on French television on 22 May 1968, and introduced by repentant Maoist Bernard Kouchner, criticized the subversion of universities, political violence and ultra-feminism. The end of the Cold War and the collapse of communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe divided memories once again. One narrative held that the liberations of 1968 led naturally to those of 1989. Gábor Demszky, who became liberal mayor of Budapest in 1990, argued that ‘’68 brought a real change, after that the world turned to a more cultured and fortunately more westernized direction [. . .] it was the end of the eastern Soviet system’. Former ’68ers like Dany Cohn Bendit and Joschka Fischer emerged as leaders of the Green movement in France and Germany, the first elected a European deputy 1994, the second becoming German foreign minister in 1998. On the other hand, the crimes of communism that were now exposed were used to tar former ’68ers as stooges or useful idiots of communist regimes. From Denmark to Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, they were publicly exposed and pressed to repent. The Third World became a stage on which former activists could perform and link 1968 to the movement against global capitalism. At the turn of the millennium much more sympathetic individual accounts of 1968 were published, combining the personal and the political, such as the English edition of Luisa Passerini’s Autobiography of a Generation (1998), Sheila Rowbotham’s Promise of a Dream (2000) and the publication of Rudi Dutschke’s diaries, Jeder hat sein Leben ganz zu leben (2003). Around the fortieth anniversary of 1968 in 2008, a highly negative view was expressed for electoral reasons by Nicolas Sarkozy. He vowed to ‘liquidate the heritage of 1968’ and to consolidate a majority of anti-’68ers. But the memory of 1968 was reinventing itself. In many quarters, it rewrote itself as much as a lifestyle or ethical revolution as a political one. It was often defined not as one year but as les années 68, embedded in ‘the long 1960s’. These might nevertheless

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be captured in iconic moments or gestures, such as Dany Cohn Bendit’s smile at a riot policeman outside the Sorbonne in May 1968 which, he said, ‘fait rimer liberté avec plaisir’. The stories of activists interviewed in fifteen European countries between 2007 and 2010 combined celebration of much of their achievements with regrets about things that had gone wrong, while being positive about how they had reworked their experiences of 1968 in their personal and professional lives. They had a sense of being part of a European conversation, despite misunderstandings and mistranslations. Arguably, the memory of 1968 has inspired a new generation of young people angry about global capitalism, growing inequalities and the ecological crisis who then became involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011 and its global echoes. As Jeffrey Weeks, a former ’68 veteran and gay-rights activist, said in 2010, ‘I don’t look back nostalgically to that 1968 moment. I actually see it as having opened up possibilities, which are still continuing.’

BIBLIOGRAPHY Artières, Philippe and Michelle Zancarini-Fournel, 68. Une Histoire Collective, 1962– 1981. Paris, La Découverte, 2008. Cornils, Ingo and Sarah Waters (Eds.), Memories of 1968. International Perspectives, Bern, Peter Lang, 2010. Gassert, Philipp and Martin Klimke (Eds.), 1968: Memories and Legacies of a Global Revolt, Washington, DC, German Historical Institute, 2009. Gildea, Robert, James Mark and Anette Warring (Eds.), Europe’s 1968. Voices of Revolt, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013. Ross, Kristin, May ’68 and Its Afterlives, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 2002.

CHAPTER 30

1989 The end of illusions GYÖRGY DALOS

Some had predicted that it would be the end of history − implicitly understood as the end of conflict. The view on the horizon looked radiant with the promise of freedom to come. However, the future failed to live up to expectations, and post-Cold War Europe now seems fragile and disillusioned. Was the widespread collapse of communism foreseeable? Whatever the case may be, it was an event often envisaged with pleasure in the kitchens of Eastern European dissidents during the early 1980s. In March 1985, I wrote an article for Kursbuch, a cultural review published in West Berlin, which could be described as the product of those conversations, a scenario involving the dissolution of the Eastern European military alliance that was fairly close to reality: The Warsaw Pact has been dissolved, the Soviet troops stationed in Eastern Europe are leaving the region to the sound of military music and under a deluge of flowers. The former Eastern Bloc countries are beginning to take charge of their own affairs. They are holding free elections in which a number of parties are allowed to participate, leading to the establishment of parliamentary institutions. These countries are opening their borders and guaranteeing individual freedoms, including the right to own private property within reasonable limits. Everything else – the McDonald chain, unemployment and peep-shows – happens spontaneously. I did, however, have enough intuition to add the following to this bold dream: Yet it must be assumed that nothing will have prepared those countries for such a change. This is because, on the one hand, the Soviet type of system had paradoxically remained so unnatural to these societies that it had been necessary to maintain it by force of arms in countries so resistant to oppression, and on the other hand, because democratic, pluralist thought has practically no fundamental tradition there. Four years later, a fascinating process was underway; the regimes in the small Warsaw Pact states were toppling like dominos. This occurred in the following

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order: Poland, Hungary, the German Democratic Republic (the GDR), Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Romania. The regimes in Yugoslavia and Mongolia, which were structured in a similar fashion, collapsed a little later; the last to fall was that of Albania, the harshest, most tenacious and most isolated of all. Vietnam followed China’s example. While retaining the Communist Party’s key role, in other words, that of sole party, the country shifted to a model somewhat more focused on market forces. The resignation of Mikhail Gorbachev in late December 1991 also signalled the collapse of the Soviet Union and the birth of over a dozen independent states on its former territory. All of these claimed to favour, verbally at least, liberal democracy and the market economy. Today, there are just two traditional adherents to the concept of ‘Real socialism’: Cuba and the dynastic dictatorship of North Korea, which is extremely isolated and possesses a nuclear arsenal. The common characteristic of this world was the total lack of a global vision. Marxism-Leninism, which provided all socialist models with historical legitimacy, was at best an official ideology known only to a few initiates, and it remained unfamiliar to the general public. This was confirmed by a radio programme broadcast in Budapest in 1985, in which a journalist went to Karl Marx Square and asked passers-by a few questions about the individual who had given his name to this prominent part of the Hungarian capital. The result of this on-the-spot survey caused a huge stir: REPORTER: Who was Karl Marx? PASSER-BY: Oh, don’t ask me things like that. REPORTER: Why not? PASSER-BY: I haven’t got time to study that sort of thing. REPORTER: But you must have heard about him in school. PASSER-BY: The thing is, I was absent a lot. ANOTHER VOICE: He was a Soviet philosopher, a friend of Engels. WOMAN’S VOICE: Yes, of course, he was a politician and he translated − what was his name now? – Lenin, that’s it; he translated Lenin’s books into Hungarian. REPORTER: Can you tell me who Karl Marx Square is named after? WOMAN’S VOICE: After Karl Marx. REPORTER: Where did he live? WOMAN’S VOICE: Well, he’s dead. REPORTER: Do you know who Karl Marx Square is named after? VARIOUS VOICES: No, we don’t know, we’re from Szeged. The collapse of the dictatorships in the six Soviet satellite states mentioned earlier was inextricably linked to their connections with Moscow. For as long as the Soviet regime barred reforms in Eastern Europe, any attempted uprisings, or even open rebellions, could be contained, by armed interventions if need be. The popular uprising in Hungary in 1956 was followed by the Prague Spring of 1968 and by the Solidarność movement in Poland. But no sooner had the Kremlin itself announced fundamental changes and its two new watchwords, perestroika (reconstruction) and glasnost (openness), together with its ‘new approach’ to foreign policy, than the centrifugal tendencies already present were brought to light – particularly as Moscow,

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their leader and model, was unequivocally working on a change of direction. The replacement of the old guard, from János Kádár to Erich Honecker and including Todor Jivkov, was initiated directly by the Kremlin. Its own economic difficulties, caused by the modernization of its industries, led the Soviet Union to reduce its deliveries of raw materials to the Eastern bloc states, gradually at first, then more drastically. This was certainly a deciding factor, as was the growing reluctance on the part of the USSR to acknowledge its share of responsibility in the unfortunate decisions made by the various governments. By June 1986, Gorbachev had already theoretically established his plan of gradually withdrawing from Eastern Europe, while discussing the relationship between the Soviet Union and its ‘brother states’ in a small, closed circle: ‘Basically, we don’t need this leadership role; that involves commitments.’

ECONOMIC COLLAPSE The first cracks threatening the economic stability of the various socialist states emerged in the 1970s. Taking advantage of the Détente, these countries had taken out bank loans guaranteed by Western governments. By the mid-1980s, they had accumulated debts totalling $80 billion. Yet this sum was not the decisive factor – Mexico had amassed an immeasurably greater debt all by itself. What was becoming untenable was chiefly the fact that the economies structured according to the model provided by Moscow were incapable of functioning without regular help from the Soviet Union. Poland and Hungary were top of the debt list; even after interest had been waived, they remained in difficulty. The GDR fared a little better, benefitting both from the advantages of the ‘internal German market’, which involved no customs duties, and deliveries from the Soviet Union. According to the venomous comment made by a Soviet expert, the leadership of the Socialist Unity Party (the SED) behaved ‘like a sweet little calf assiduously sucking on two mothers: the FRG and the USSR’. Confronted with economic ruin in the early 1980s, the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu reacted in a totally absurd fashion by ordering the repayment of the $11 billion worth of loans obtained from the West. This preposterous idea destroyed the Romanian people’s means of subsistence. The impact of these economic difficulties – and the social hardship connected with them – varied according to the country concerned. The powers of the communist élites in charge likewise differed, as did their peoples’ attitudes towards them. On the eve of the period of Soviet reform, Poland was the only country where the crisis was ready to erupt. Despite the introduction of martial law in 1981, the state had failed to crush both Solidarność and other opposition bodies, while suppressing the strike action. As for the situation in Hungary, the description ‘precritical’ would be the most accurate definition. Large sections of the population had no doubts regarding the authority of their leaders, although the latter were obliged to make constant concessions in order to be accepted. In this way, János Kádár saw improving standards of living as essential to maintaining social harmony; in his view, this required an increase of ‘5 per cent per annum’, since anything below this threshold would mean that ‘people would experience no improvement’. Moreover,

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‘small freedoms’ were granted, such as the ability to travel to the West more easily and a relaxing of censorship rules for artists. All of these made the Hungarian People’s Republic ‘the happiest barrack in the camp’. The leaders of the GDR likewise activated a consumer culture within the principles of the ‘unity of economic and social policy’ – making the Eastern half of Germany a very prosperous state by socialist standards. In the same way, the party leadership in Prague concerned itself with the well-being of the dual nation in order to stave off any political activity. Miloš Jakeš, the last general secretary of the country’s Communist Party, displayed mixed feelings when describing the results: ‘People are gorging, which gives no cause for concern, and always ask for more. But they are less and less keen to work.’ In Bulgaria and Romania, where material benefits were hard to provide, the regimes counted on nationalism as a means of mollifying the population, often to the detriment of minority national groups – in Bulgaria, this meant the Turks, while in Romania, it meant the Hungarians and Germans.

COMMUNIST SOCIETY As a result, the arbitrary character of the state became the focus of resistance. Outside Poland, that resistance was chiefly expressed by small groups of dissidents, isolated voices who were courageous enough to criticize the regime; it was also expressed, from time to time, by officials who sought reform. The latent dissatisfaction only erupted in extreme cases, such as in the Romanian town of Braşov in the autumn of 1987, when workers considered themselves to have been cheated out of their full wages. But this type of periodic confrontation never ended in a nationwide dispute. The passive character of societies in Eastern bloc countries can easily be explained by the all-powerful state, the atmosphere of terror created by the secret police, sometimes overtly, at other times covertly, and by widespread spying. However, that passivity arose mainly from people’s negative attitude towards their era. Hundreds of millions of citizens, from Vladivostok to Plauen, believed that their living standards would remain unchanged for several generations, and maybe for the rest of eternity. Small, marginal improvements might be made; there might suddenly be a greater choice of goods in the shops, or Western films might be shown at the cinema, factory wages might rise, or a collection of poems might be authorized for publication – yet these would all be occurring against the same uniform, gloomy background of a lack of freedom. The leaders had a similar vision of their own system, but it was inverted, being positive. At one time or another, in the Communist Party training schools of the 1950s, they had all learned by heart the theory behind the socio-economic systems formulated by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels; primitive communism had been succeeded by slavery, then feudalism, which in turn was replaced by a dominant capitalist system; later, marking the very highest point of world History, humankind attained the state of socialism and its even more perfect variation, communism. Nothing was seen beyond the boundaries of that society but a world that belonged to the past, a single hotbed of crisis. And now, through the cruel irony of history, those very states that regarded themselves as the ultimate in economic development

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found themselves reduced to begging for loans from countries whose capitalist systems were regarded as retrograde. While the Eastern model continued to falter, the West, and Western Europe in particular, was beginning to look increasingly like a genuine Utopia in the eyes of the citizens on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

THE ‘REPUBLICAN MOMENT’ The first commentaries on the events of 1989 described a series of revolutions that were to result in the collapse of the communist system. Those who took part in these events used adjectives that established their true nature − the ‘Peaceful Revolution’, the ‘Velvet Revolution’, the ‘Singing Revolution’ − as the processes had developed without bloodshed in the small Eastern bloc states, with the exception of Romania. However, the Soviet Union’s perestroika, initially established at the highest level, soon gave rise to conflicts that were essentially nationalist in character, forms of local civil wars that finally destroyed the regime without developing into a general confrontation between the authorities and society. The various nations involved in these events certainly experienced moments of euphoria, with hundreds of millions of participants witnessing the manifestation of their wish for a radical change. This was the case in Poland after the installation of the country’s first non-communist government, in Hungary after the reburial of Imre Nagy and his comrades, in the GDR on the day the Wall was opened, in Bulgaria, when crowds gathered in front of the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, in Czechoslovakia, during the week of protests in Wenceslas Square, and, finally, during the uprising in Romania, when the dictator standing on the balcony of the Central Committee headquarters was directly confronted with the anger of his people. Central Committees everywhere found themselves forced to relinquish the key role granted to them by the Constitution, while people everywhere called for free parliamentary elections. Yet these periods of power vacuums, which Machiavelli described as ‘republican moments’, were short-lived. Gradually, elite rivals both old and new took the political initiative, and the romanticism and poetry of the street protests gave way to the prosaic reality of privatization, the crude system of accumulation associated with neo-capitalism and its by-products: mass poverty, the oligarchy economy and political antagonism. After this process, in hindsight, it seems as if the massed crowds of 1989 were simply history’s walk-on actors. The young democracies, which proclaimed their independence from the USSR, were chiefly inspired by the idea of Europe. One of the most popular features of the Hungarian programme for democracy, for instance, was the slogan encouraging the country to ‘jump into the European train’. From 1988 to 1989, the brand, new uncensored press described the continent in glowing terms. The author Peter Esterhazy even suggested ironically that everyone who uttered the word ‘Europe’ should be obliged to deposit a forint into the state coffers – which, given Hungary’s double-digit inflation rate, would have done very little to help public finances. In reality, people hoped that they would soon be able to join what was then known as the European Community; they likewise assumed that the adoption of the political and moral values of freedom and democracy would speed up the process

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of transformation. A number of Hungarian citizens, including career politicians, hoped that the GDR’s entry into the community of free European states would also lead to the rapid admission of the Hungarian Republic. As we know, the reality was that Hungary, Poland, Romania and Bulgaria had to spend fifteen to seventeen years knocking on the door. The only former Eastern bloc country that had no difficulty clearing that hurdle was the GDR – but only after the reunification. The main concern then was to resolve the German issue, which had symbolized the split that divided the entire continent for several decades.

THE REUNIFICATION OF GERMANY Shortly after the resignation of Erich Honecker, which had unquestionably been instigated by Moscow, his successor Egon Krenz made his first official visit to the Kremlin, on 1 November 1989. The dialogue between Krenz and Mikhail Gorbachev took a memorable turn, due to oil deliveries that the USSR had failed to make. KRENZ: We’re starting from the principle that the GDR is a child of the Soviet Union, but reasonable people have a responsibility to recognize their paternity, or at least to give their name to their child. (Laughter). GORBACHEV: You need to be aware of this; no serious politician, neither Thatcher nor Mitterrand, Andreotti or Jaruzelski, is hoping for German reunification. The most important thing for us concerning German affairs is to keep on following the same line that we’ve successfully followed up to now.1 At a meeting of the Politburo, however, the Soviet leader expressed his deepest thoughts in an unofficial comment: ‘We can’t keep maintaining it [the GDR] without the support of the Federal Republic.’ This was just one week before the fall of the Wall, which was to call into question the existence of the Western Europe’s former communist outpost. In late January 1990, Gorbachev was talking to a close associate: It’s now clear that the reunification [of the two German states] is inevitable, and we have no moral right to oppose it. [. . .] Our society will be hard hit by the loss of the GDR, and even more by its submersion into the FRG. There are millions of frontline soldiers still living among us. Our society’s conscience will have to sustain a severe shock.2 At the same time, however, he was still refusing to acknowledge that the disintegration of the Eastern bloc was the sign heralding the dissolution of the Soviet Union. For it would not be possible in the long term to deny Lithuania, Georgia or the Ukraine the same sovereignty that had just been accorded to Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Romania. The reunification was undoubtedly the Federal Republic of Germany’s greatest success. Yet Gorbachev had been right when he noted that not all the European partners would share the same view. After the collapse of the Soviet empire that was shortly to follow, Germany clearly became a major focus of preoccupation in

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Europe. However, the process of uniting ‘what belongs together’ (Willy Brandt) was not without its difficulties; in the same way, the ‘blossoming landscapes’ (Helmut Kohl) that were promised in the new Länder were in no hurry to manifest themselves. Even more importantly, the mentality of East German society clearly had more in common with that of Polish or Czech society than that of the West Germans. The FRG made a few errors in this regard. Chief among these was the process of automatically transposing the Western political party system onto the former East Germany, resulting in the disappearance of a number of democratic parties. While dozens had presented themselves as candidates in the free elections to the People’s Chamber (Volkskammer), the only specifically ‘East German’ party that now remained was the post-communist PDS, which the losers in the reunification process regarded as their representative.

DIVISIONS In countries not lucky enough to be ‘submerged’ by a rich and powerful Western nation, developments proceeded in their own way. The legacy of the former system was treated in very different fashions. In Germany, the citizens’ movement, which was still powerful, led relatively quickly to the opening of the Stasi archives to the public, through a commission known as the ‘Gauck authority’. In this way, an institutional framework enabled these sensitive issues to be brought to light. Yet other post-communist governments, more wary, were in no hurry to allow access to state security service files. In Poland, former dissident leaders even opted openly to draw a line under the past (gruba kreska); in Hungary, likewise, there were calls from the democratic camp demanding the destruction of espionage files. This attitude was linked, on the one hand, to the peaceful, consensual character of the revolutions of 1989 and 1990, and on the other hand, to the fear of compromising citizens’ movements if too many informers in their own ranks were unmasked. Influential social bodies such as the churches were fiercely opposed to the examination of such archives. Nevertheless, it proved impossible to maintain a total silence – little by little, stories involving specific cases filtered through, sometimes spread by the media, sometimes exploited in confrontations. At any time, Catholic and Protestant bishops, famous film directors and writers, notable figures from the world of sport or heads of government could be suspected of having collaborated with the communist secret police. The lack of transparency and the confusion made any verification difficult, even impossible. But the fact remains that, at the same time, former salaried collaborators with state secret service organizations, such as the StB (Czechoslovakia), the principal intelligence agency known as III/3 (Hungary), Darzhavna Sigurnost (Bulgaria) and the Securitate (Romania), were occupying positions in all the post-communist governments. The transition undergone by the Eastern European countries had particularly momentous consequences on domestic policy. The restoration of sovereignty involved the creation of dozens of new national boundaries and currencies, as well as a proliferation of new symbols. However, it also led to the partition of certain

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states; this process was carried out peacefully in the case of Czechoslovakia, but in the form of a brutal war in that of Yugoslavia. The enormous costs connected with the post-communist transformations and the rapid pace of globalization, which the small member states struggled to maintain, gave rise to tensions within these multinational societies. Skilfully manipulated by nationalist forces, these frictions culminated, in some cases, in bloody confrontations. Racism, anti-Semitism, discrimination against the Roma and other evils of pre-war Central and Eastern Europe, which had been carefully swept under the carpet during the dictatorships, now manifested themselves more openly. Following the expansion of the European Union in the east and the south of the continent, and particularly during the global financial crisis, which severely affected most of the former Eastern bloc states, the European institution became a target. In the populist language of the East, the role taken by Brussels was similar to that of Moscow in the Brezhnev era. Europe’s new problems are not all linked to its engagement with the East, however. Since 1989, the global situation has become more unstable, and conflicts that would previously have been the subject of tough negotiations presided over by the superpowers look increasingly likely to go out of control; wars (in Afghanistan, Iraq and, more recently, in Syria) are becoming cyclical occurrences, prompting a mass exodus that severely tests Europe’s solidarity and ability to be a welcoming host. Centrifugal tendencies (as with Brexit) have increased sharply, and the aggressive stance displayed by Vladimir Putin may be perceived as the signal of a new Cold War. Let us return, however, to the year 1989 and its place in the collective memory of the former Eastern bloc countries. We cannot help noting, not without a certain sorrow, that it took just twenty-five years for the events of that time to be pushed into the past. As paradoxical as this may seem, the fact is that while the new media amasses ever more information detailing the great upheaval, we are gradually losing active knowledge of that period. Vehicles of the emancipation movement, such as Charter 77 and the trade union Solidarność, now scarcely exist. Most of the democratic parties that had taken their seats in parliament during the period are no longer favoured by the electorate. That generation of protagonists and witnesses are gradually leaving the scene. Debates over the events of 1989 are becoming much less frequent and only involve specialist groups. Political elites now only sporadically refer to the history that preceded them, when marking anniversaries, for example, more for the purposes of legitimization than remembrance. And that is not the worst fate that could befall the legacy of 1989.

THE LEGACY OF 1989 The aim of Jarosław Kaczyński, formerly an activist in the Justice Defence Committee (KOS), and now leader of the Law and Justice Party, is to establish authoritarianism in Poland based on a religious, nationalist doctrine; in this aim, and by inhibiting press freedom and seeking to outlaw abortion, he is treating the moral capital of the European emancipation movement in just the same cavalier fashion as Viktor Orbán. Formerly the founder of Fidesz, then a liberal youth movement, the prime

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minister of Hungary has become the defender of ‘non-liberal democracy’, which comes down in practice to an increasingly personalized form of power accompanied by the dismantling of the independent institutions and acquisitions of 1989. We can but hope, however, that the courageous efforts of the generation of 1989 will have brought an enduring historical phenomenon to life, and that this gain will help bring about ‘the slow revolution of self-determination’, a wish expressed by György Konrád in the late 1970s. Bright futures were immediately tinged with disappointment. As Bärbel Bohley, who took part in the dismantling of the Berlin Wall from the GDR, declared: ‘We wanted justice and we got the rule of law.’ This indicates the gap between the moral aspiration of the citizens’ movements of Eastern Europe and the rationally motivated political acts carried out by the West on the European Cold War front. Naturally, the free world celebrated the Polish pope, the electrician Lech Wałęsa, the non-conformist Czech playwright Václav Havel and images showing borders being opened, the collapse of the Wall and the execution of despots. The father of perestroika, although vastly unpopular in his own country, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace. But the whole point for the West had actually been to prove its superiority, and the last thing it sought, or that could be achieved, was the economic incorporation, or, to put it more poetically, integration of all these bankrupt countries. Things were therefore allowed to pursue their own course, and the rules of the game were being increasingly dictated by the nascent process of globalization. In 1989, the most obvious sign emerged when the financial manna stopped falling from the skies. In the summer of that wonderful year, President George Bush Senior made a speech in Budapest, during which he promised just $25 million of aid to boost the Hungarian market economy. Warsaw was only offered $100 million at the very most, although the communist prime minister Mieczysław Rakowski and the trade union leader had both been dreaming of $10 billion. Even when it came to credit, vigilance was the watchword, if Poland were not to be let loose ‘like a child in a candy store’, remarked John Sununu, governor of New Hampshire, who accompanied Bush on the visit. And indeed, the former Eastern bloc states, freed from their dictatorships, were queuing at the gateway to their future, full of childish hopes. The American government was somewhat less wary of opening its purse-strings when it came to invading its neighbour, Panama, in December 1989. About 24,000 US troops were despatched to depose its leader, Manuel Noriega, who had links with drug cartels. That conflict, which swiftly ended in American victory and left several hundred dead, was just the beginning of a series of military interventions conducted by the world’s last superpower. These operations, involving for example the endless war in Afghanistan or the invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, had nothing in common with the conflicts of the previous era, which had been ideologically based on East–West antagonism. The United States is now indirectly engaged, politically or financially, with current conflicts in the Middle East, and is faced with belligerent forces of an entirely different type, such as Islamic State and other Islamist terrorist groups. Added to this is the fact that the Russian Federation

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is gradually regaining its status as a world power and seeks to exert a destabilizing influence, especially in the EU.

A PYRRHIC VICTORY Despite these difficulties, linked precisely to that historic year, 1989, the European Union is an entity in its own right. Its expansion in Eastern and Southern Europe has resulted in a coalition of twenty-seven states whose members could not be more different, politically, economically, socially or culturally. Yet, while globalization has reinforced the tendency towards unification, so major cities from Madrid to Wrocław have become a single market place, it has also triggered an inward-looking reaction on the part of nation states. A new division appears to be emerging, making the fall of the Wall seem like a Pyrrhic victory. Twenty years after the collapse of the Eastern bloc, the continent’s new solidarity was put to the test by the global financial crisis, and it is now being seriously jeopardized by the influx of migrants from all over the world. Our heroic freedom fighters of Gdańsk, Timişoara, Leipzig and Prague are gradually making their appearances as wax figures in Madame Tussauds. The question of whether this really is the ‘End of History’, as seen by Francis Fukuyama, or simply, as I believe, the advent of an extremely unpleasant new period of history, will not be settled here. The fact remains that, having previously engaged with the movement that culminated in the events of 1989, I am forced to observe that if we were then less free and bold in our words than in our thoughts, we have now become even more fearful and desperate in our thoughts than in our words.

NOTES 1. György Dalos, Gorbatschow. Mensch und Macht (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2011), pp. 213–14. 2. György Dalos, Lebt wohl, Genossen! Der Untergang des sowjetischen Imperiums (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2011), p. 125.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Dalos, György, Der Vorhang geht auf. Das Ende der Diktaturen in Osteuropa, Munich, C.H. Beck, 2010. Garton Ash, Timothy, The Uses of Adversity: Essays on the Fate of Central Europe, New York, Random House, 1989. Kowalczuk, Ilko-Sascha, Freiheit und Öffentlichkeit. Politischer Samisdat in der DDR, 1985–1989, Berlin, Robert-Havemann-Gesellschaft, 2002. Trojanow, Ilija, Die fingierte Revolution. Bulgarien, eine exemplarische Geschichte, Munich, DTV, 2006. Wagner, Richard, Sonderweg Rumänien. Bericht aus einem Entwicklungsland, Berlin, Rotbuch, 1991.

CHAPTER 31

Europa the nymph ULRIKE GUÉROT

This is one of our most ancient myths; Europa, a young nymph, becomes captivated by a bull − a disguise assumed by Zeus − who carries her westwards from the East. But was the young girl who gave her name to our continent seduced or abducted? This ambiguity is part of the very nature of Europe, now assailed by its nation states. This is one of the most ancient myths of Antiquity, and one of the most deeply enshrouded in mystery. It has been repeatedly depicted in drawings and paintings, and cast in bronze. Ovid produced a detailed account of the tale that has been handed down, adapted and embellished over the centuries to the present day. Each historical period represented its own female Europe being carried away on the bull in the way that it chose to see her, and – we might suppose – in the way she chose to see herself. If the myth has remained so perennial, it is above all because it remains ambiguous, and because the delicate nature of its subject is often condensed into one image − a young woman on a bull. However, it lends itself to a variety of possible interpretations. Was this really a love story, as Ovid would have us believe? Or, conversely, was it an abduction, or even a rape? ‘According to the accounts by Hesiod and Bacchylides, Europa, who had been gathering flowers for a bridal bouquet together with other nymphs, including Nora, was carried away by Zeus as a bull, breathing saffron from his mouth; deceived, like Nora.’ This account of Zeus, in the guise of a bull, carrying Europa away on his back was given by Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker in his work Über eine Kretische Kolonie in Theben, die Göttin Europa und Kadmös den König (Of a Cretan Colony in Thebes, of the Goddess Europa and of King Cadmus), in 1824. He therefore presents Europa as having been duped, which is not conveyed by a large number of images showing the young woman astride a bull. Zeus used saffron, the noblest of all spices at that time, in order to approach Europa, at the very moment when she was gathering flowers for a bridal bouquet. Whom was she about to marry? Was this the abduction of a wife-to-be by a nondescript-looking and possibly unattractive older man who wanted to take Europa away from a young bridegroom? Did Zeus seduce or abduct Europa, daughter of the Phoenician king Agenor? It is precisely that thin line that separates the matriarchal and the patriarchal definition

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of the myth of Europa; while seduction is permissible, abduction is not. In this way, the myth symbolizes both romantic relationships and the battle of the sexes, in which balance must always be maintained. It symbolizes that moment during which seduction can turn into sexual assault. In this way, the story of Europa and the bull demonstrates the principle of an affinity charged with tension, which is always transcending every imaginable frontier in new and contradictory ways; it is an affinity subject to constant changes, like the continent that owes its name to the myth. Europe’s frontiers have changed ceaselessly throughout history, almost as if the desire to alter its boundaries was the continent’s fundamental characteristics. The myth therefore relates precisely to the situation in which Europe finds itself once more, in the form of its struggles with the nation states that are assailing European unity. In the Early Modern Era, Queen Europe was presented in the form of a map − a well-endowed female form clad in a flowing robe, in which all the monarchies and peoples of the period – Germania, Francia, Bulgaria, Scotiae and Greca − had their traditional, natural places. To borrow a somewhat earthy expression, one might say that all her people were slipping under Europe’s skirts. The image of a female Europe as a map – which recalls the symbolic representation of the Danube as a maternal river and the Garden of Eden – conveys the notion of fecundity and a feeling of security. However, this portrayal of Europe as royal, and even sublime, disappeared from European cartography with the development of the nation states in the Modern Era, during the early sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. At the same time, images began to appear – in the works of Titian, for instance – of Europa as a flaccid, fleshy figure, clinging to the horns of the bull while being dragged along the ground. The rape of a Europe without borders by European nation states had begun. It boded ill for the female Europe whenever the nation state, that masculine Leviathan represented by Thomas Hobbes as a mighty, even soldier-like figure with his beard and his spectre, grew more powerful. In 1933, Max Beckmann painted Europa as a body available to all and sundry, hanging like a sack from the back of the bull. The Rape of Europa was the title given to a video installation in 2012 that conveyed the structural violence of the European financial crisis in an almost physical fashion. It was revealed that Europa’s mother, Telephassa, had considered the bull unworthy of Europa, whose only response could be to deprive him of love. In this way, if history is dominated by the masculine force – fixed in the topoi in the form of the nation state, war, the market, power or the army – the feminine Europe will suffer. She therefore needs to dehorn the bull. How? The Amazons had attached bulls’ testicles to their heads following their victory over the Thracian army; the Phrygian cap, as worn in the French Revolution, was originally associated with these. In the figurative sense, this would mean that Europa would need to castrate the bull in order to free herself. In other words, the tail of the Leviathan, or nation state, needs to be cut.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Guérot, Ulrike, ‘Res Publica Europaea: A Citizens-Based Concept to Re-Think Political Integration of Europe’, in Riccardo Fiorentini and Guido Montani (Eds.), The European Union and Supranational Political Economy, London and New York, Routledge, 2015, pp. 133–55. Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan, edited by Christopher Brooke, London, Penguin Classics, 2017 [1651]. Lohse, Christian and Joseph Mittlmeier (Eds.), Europas Ursprung. Mythologie und Moderne, Festschrift der Universität Regensburg zum 50-jährigen Jubiläum der Römischen Verträge, Regensburg, Universitätsverlag Regensburg, 2007, pp. 119–30. Renger, Almut-Barbara and Roland Alexander Issler (Eds.), Gründungsmythen Europas in Literatur, Musik und Kunst, t. I: Europa – Stier und Sternenkranz. Von der Union mit Zeus zum Staatenverbund, Göttingen, V&R unipress, 2009. Spieler, Reinhard, Max Beckmann 1884-1950. Der Weg zum Mythos, Cologne, Taschen, 1994.

CHAPTER 32

In the beginning, there was the epic JONAS GRETHLEIN

Homer has nourished European culture in a multitude of ways. His two epic poems, The Iliad and The Odyssey, have provided the model for all works of literature and made their mark on the art of narrative. The stories of Achilles, Hector, Andromache, Ulysses and Penelope have travelled across the centuries. In addition to that distinction, Homeric epics also contain a reflection on transmission; heroes are on a quest for glory, and what is glory if not a means of imprinting one’s presence on the collective memory? ‘Everyone who now reads and writes in the West, of whatever racial background, sex or ideological camp, is still a son or daughter of Homer.’1 These words were written in 1975 by Harold Bloom, the American professor of humanities and literary critic, who accords Homer a central position in Western culture. As striking as it is, that assertion does not take the radiant energy of the Homeric epic fully into account; far from limiting their influence to the Western world and to literature, The IIiad and The Odyssey have extended their reach to a great many other traditions and to virtually all forms of art and media. It is no less true, however, that Homer has hugely enriched European memory in multiple ways. In a fitting reversal of roles, The IIiad and The Odyssey, which presented themselves from the outset as realms of memory for ancient Greek epics, paved the way for their own role as a central force in European memory and culture.

THE MYSTERIOUS HOMER Did Homer really exist, and if so, who was he? These questions have given rise to a maze of conjectures dating back to the days of Antiquity. A number of cities, including Smyrna, Argos and Chios, as well as Athens, have each claimed to be the birthplace of the poet. Whatever the disagreements over his life may be – as reflected in various ancient biographies – it has never been disputed that Homer was the quintessential poet, or indeed, that the Greeks owed their culture and identity to him. As recently as ten years ago or thereabouts, the Austrian poet and literary critic Raoul Schrott caused something of a stir when he maintained that Homer was a eunuch scribe in the service of the Assyrian state.

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Since the third century BCE, when Alexandrian philologists carried out methodical comparisons and commentaries on The IIiad and The Odyssey, Homer’s works have been the continual focus of scholarly analyses. In the Middle Ages, the Homeric epic was only known to Latin Europe through the Ilias Latina, a meagre compilation written in Latin. Its importance grew considerably in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, thanks to several translations into modern European languages. The Iliad played a major role during the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns, the debate over the ability of Classical works to continue serving as a model for the age. The German philologist Friedrich August Wolf inaugurated modern research on Homer by asserting that The IIiad and The Odyssey should not be attributed to a single author, Homer, but were instead the product of a long oral tradition; the debate over the genesis of the two epics has continued to this day. Public interest in academic debates over Homer has often been fairly widespread. Troy was the focus of particular fascination as a realm of memory in the true sense of the term, in other words, as a city that had been besieged by the Achaeans, led by Agamemnon. In the 1870s, the German businessman and archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann led the excavations of Hissarlik, in former Anatolia, and confirmed that the objects and jewellery found there belonged to the time of Homer’s Troy. This aroused the enthusiasm of the educated public, despite the sceptical reaction of several scholars. Homer and Troy were once more in the news in the early twentyfirst century, when Joachim Latacz, a Classical philologist from the University of Basel, used non-Greek sources – namely Hittite – and recent excavations at the archaeological site of Troy to present his theory that The Iliad was the account of a historical conflict. In his view, Homer’s epic told the story of a war that had taken place in the twelfth century BCE, during which Troy was destroyed. Latacz emphatically maintained that the ‘enigma’ of Troy was about to be solved; this caused great excitement among the general public, although specialists remained unconvinced. Written in the eighth or seventh century BCE, The Iliad is primarily the reflection of the social world that existed at the beginning of the Greek Archaic Period and is hard to associate with an event dating back to the twelfth century BCE. It would be equally strange to read it as a history book, and one would have the greatest difficulty trying to pinpoint the stages of Ulysses’s wanderings on a map of the Mediterranean. Schliemann’s accounts also enable us to explore the political dimension of the realm of memory that Homer has become. During the excavations at Hissarlik, Schliemann discovered a vast cache of several thousand objects, including precious items made of gold. These artefacts, which became known as ‘Priam’s Treasure’, were loaned for a brief period to a museum in London and were then exhibited in Berlin, before being taken to Russia by the Red Army at the end of the Second World War. For decades, this treasure was thought to have vanished, and it was not put back on public display until after the collapse of the Iron Curtain. Heated debates then erupted in Germany and Russia over whether the latter had the right to retain the treasures, which had in the meantime been declared part of Russia’s national heritage, or whether they were simply the spoils of war and should be returned to Germany. Turkey likewise made its claims. The example of Priam’s Treasure does not only indicate the political and commemorative dimensions of the legacy of

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Antiquity but also how its cultural and symbolic capital as a realm of memory can become the focus of conflict.

THE SOURCE OF EUROPEAN CULTURE The study of Homer is not confined to Classical scholarship. Other disciplines have examined the world and characters of the heroic Greek epic. The German philosophers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, for instance, used The Odyssey in their book Dialectic of Enlightenment in order to explain how the Aufklärung could have led to the barbarity of the Nazis: ‘[. . .] no work bears more eloquent witness to the intertwinement of enlightenment and myth than that of Homer, the basic text of European civilization.’2 For if Ulysses (also known as Odysseus) is able to survive the dangers posed by the Cyclops Polyphemus and the sea monsters Scylla and Charybdis, it comes at the cost of self-renunciation: The nimble-witted man survives only at the cost of his own dream, which he forfeits by disintegrating his own magic along with that of the powers outside him. He can never have the whole, he must always be able to wait, to be patient, to renounce; he may not eat the lotus or the cattle of Hyperion, and when he steers through the narrows he must include in his calculation the loss of the companions snatched from the ship by Scylla.3 In contemporary literature, too, The Iliad and The Odyssey form a solid anchor point. The myth of the Trojan War appears in works as varied as the play by the French dramatist Jean Giraudoux, La guerre de Troie n’aura pas lieu, W. H. Auden’s poem ‘The Shield of Achilles’ and Kassandra, the fictitious autobiography of East German writer Christa Wolf. The story of Ulysses related in The Odyssey has perhaps had more of an impact than The Iliad and that of the anger of Achilles. Ulysses, by Irish author James Joyce, with its complex stream-of-consciousness-narrative mode, is one of the major literary works of modernism. The Greek author Nikos Kazantzakis presented his own Odyssey, an epic comprising 33,333 verses, and the story has served as the basis of a large number of other works. The character of Penelope, for example, is a consistent presence in feminist texts, such as The Penelopiad by the Canadian author Margaret Atwood (2005). This novel is presented as the antithesis of The Odyssey. There, the author gives a voice to all the female characters who remained unheard throughout the epic poem; the serving maids, who were killed in Homer’s work as a punishment for disloyalty and for succumbing to acts of lust with their suitors, defend themselves in Atwood’s work by presenting themselves as the innocent victims of rape. Omeros, the epic poem by Caribbean writer Derek Walcott, demonstrates that Homer has crossed the frontiers of Western tradition and entered that of literary works that critically confront the history of European colonialism. The Albanian writer Ismaïl Kadaré also drew inspiration from Homer in addressing questions of freedom and origin within the context of communist Eastern Europe. In his novel The File on H (1981), two Homeric specialists from Ireland (who bear a resemblance to Milman Parry and Albert Lord, the scholars of

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epic and comparative literature) come to Albania in order to gain greater insight into the genesis of The Iliad and The Odyssey in the light of living traditions of oral epic poetry. In this way, they discover the intense emotional world of the rural Balkans and the ethnic strife incubating there. While Homeric themes occupy a pre-eminent place in modern literature, The Iliad and The Odyssey have also made their mark in an entirely different way – on European narrative techniques. Although they are based on oral traditions and were circulated mainly in the form of public readings for centuries, their stories are not told through a simple linear narrative but have astonishingly sophisticated structures. The two epics take place within a brief timescale – fifty-one days in the case of The Iliad and forty-one days in that of The Odyssey – yet they are linked to a much wider context through references to past and future events. The Iliad recounts the entire story of the Trojan War, The Odyssey, all the adventures of Ulysses. Whereas The Iliad, strikingly, makes only indirect allusions to the death of Achilles and the fall of Troy, in The Odyssey, Ulysses himself recounts his most dramatic experiences. As well as examples of direct speech and nonchronological presentation, Homer’s epics also contain other narrative techniques such as circular structure and narration through a reflector figure, or internal focalization – the story recounted from the viewpoint of a single character – that were widely appropriated before they became the common basis of traditional European narrative structure. The Iliad and The Odyssey display two types of narrative pattern whose influence has extended to the present day. The Iliad is based on a plot that may be defined as tragic. It centres on a hero destined to die, whose fate illustrates the fragility of the human condition. Achilles is the finest of the Achaeans and the greatest hero of the battlefield, yet he only achieves his eternal glory through his premature death. His end casts a cloud over The Iliad; this becomes increasingly darker, more extensive and more oppressive. The concept of the tragic hero was not exclusive to Greek tragedians, as historians also dealt with the theme. In The Histories, written nearly 300 years after Homer, Herodotus presents historical events as a succession of kingdoms that grew and flourished before finally disappearing, while Thucydides portrays the city of Athens as a tragic hero. Still today, The Iliad’s tragic plot is re-encountered in a large number of modern narratives, both fictional and historical. The Odyssey, on the other hand, is based on a romantic plot; the hero departs, is obliged to undergo a large number of ordeals and finally returns to a happy reunion. The comedies written by the Greek dramatist Menander in the late fourth century BCE perfected the teleological model of the scenario presented in The Odyssey. All the elements of the plot work together like cogs in a wheel, so that a seemingly insurmountable problem is solved in the end. The influence of The Odyssey has also extended to the genre of the novel, which was to develop at a later date, during the Roman imperial period. The separation of Ulysses and Penelope and their subsequent reunion have become the standard model of the romantic plot featuring a young couple forced to part with each other and only reunited after experiencing a number of adventures.

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Greek narratives, with their over-simplified characters, can certainly appear far removed from our own, yet they still served as inspiration for the novels of the Early Modern Era. The Aethiopica by Heliodorus, in particular, were translated into modern European languages in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and served as a model for a number of novels, such as Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda by Miguel de Cervantes. Nowadays, the romantic scenario is found in countless works of light fiction. If The Iliad and The Odyssey continue to function so well as realms of memory, it is not only due to the way in which their themes have been treated but also to the legacy that Homer has bequeathed to literature by providing it with these two fundamental narrative patterns. Homer’s influence is not restricted to literature but is also clearly manifested in the visual arts. Three very different artistic works illustrate the wide-ranging effect of his legacy on the pictorial art of the Modern Era. In the painting Ulysses and Nausicaa on the Island of the Phaeacians, by Rubens, we see Ulysses emerging naked from the undergrowth as Nausicaa turns towards him and her companions attempt to hide. The sky is still partially overcast, an indication of the tempest that Ulysses has just survived. We re-encounter Homer in a totally different form in the work of Cy Twombly. The ten paintings Fifty Days at Iliam depict the Trojan War in an abstract, but highly expressive manner; the names of the Homeric heroes, incorporated into the images, leave no doubt as to their theme. The last example is the series of collages created by Romare Bearden, in which he combined the ancient myth with the traditions of African American culture. Here, the characters from The Odyssey appear as members of African tribes and the background recalls the landscapes of Africa. What makes these collages particularly engaging is the process of distantiation at work, with a major European realm of memory being projected onto the continent of Africa. The Homeric epic is also a recurrent movie theme. In 2004, the Trojan War was transformed into a Hollywood blockbuster, Troy, by German film director Wolfgang Petersen, with Brad Pitt in the role of Achilles, Orlando Bloom as Paris and Diane Kruger as Helen. In this screen version, the death of Achilles and the fall of Troy are shown as part of the action, which was not the case with Homer’s epic, whereas there is no sign of the gods who regularly appear in his work. While Petersen’s film digs deeply into the heroic tradition, the Coen brothers use The Odyssey as the central reference point for a comedy. O Brother, Where Art Thou? is an Odyssey set in Mississippi, in which we follow the adventures of the convict Everett McGill and his companions after their escape from jail. Many of their experiences, such as the encounter with a one-eyed Bible salesman, are satirical reworkings of Homeric motifs. Everett is finally reunited with his wife, most appropriately named Penny. In contrast, the theme is given a serious treatment in the film Ulysses’ Gaze, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1995. Made by Greek film director Theo Angelopoulos, it presents a contemporary Odyssey set in the war-ravaged Balkans, a region whose great past can only be rekindled through melancholy. Although the list includes several other movies or video games, such as Battle for Troy (2004), the films Troy, O Brother and Ulysses’ Gaze illustrate both the importance of ‘Homer’ as a realm of memory and the many and varied ways of approaching him. Homeric subjects inspire both artistically ambitious films

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and entertainment designed for the general public; the same theme can be used for satirical purposes or as the basis of an intense evaluation of the current situation in Europe.

HOMER: A VANTAGE POINT FOR REFLECTION The Homeric epics possess the gift of inspiring reflections on the reality of modern Europe. Many young British poets who fought in the First World War drew on Homer’s works. The ‘War Poets’, as they are known, are a testament to the fact that the epic ideal of glory and of a glorious death had caught the imaginations of the former public school boys in those trenches filled with poisonous gases. L’Iliade ou le poème de la force, an essay written in 1939 by Simone Weil, presents a completely different interpretation. Basing her argument on a large number of quotes from The Iliad, the French philosopher maintains the diametrically opposing view that Homer is in fact demonstrating the devastating effects of force, both on those who use it and on their victims: ‘No one has ever described with such bitterness the misery of man, which renders him unable even to comprehend his misery’ (§ 22). The works of Italian writer Primo Levi demonstrate the attempt to understand the experiences of the twentieth century in the light of The Odyssey. After the Second World War, Levi, a chemist by profession, wrote a series of reports, narratives and essays detailing his experiences as a prisoner in Auschwitz. References to The Odyssey recur constantly in his texts, together with The Divine Comedy, particularly in If This Is a Man (1947), The Truce (1963) and If Not Now, When? (1982). In Levi’s view, Ulysses embodies the humanist principle; although his existence is threatened, he retains his dignity and finally succeeds in prevailing. In comparison, those who have been deprived of their subjective sense of self and their humanity live in the camp like shadows. At the same time, Ulysses, who both relates and creates his adventures at the court of the Phaeacians, also serves as a model for Primo Levi, who is trying to come to terms with his traumatic experiences through his autobiographical narratives. Homer’s enduring presence in the European cultural memory is confirmed by the countless press articles and television documentaries that use the word ‘odyssey’ to describe any adventurous voyage involving hardship. It is manifested, in particular, by the word’s inclusion in a large number of European languages: odyssey in English, odissea in Italian, odisea in Spanish, odisseia in Portuguese, Odyssee in German, odüsszeia in Hungarian, odyseja in Polish and so on. Yet, just as a dead metaphor can be revived, the Homeric origin of the concept of ‘odyssey’ can be reactivated. This is demonstrated by the British journalist Patrick Kingsley in his book The New Odyssey: the Story of Europe’s Refugee Crisis (2016). It describes the crisis, taking the fate of Hashem al-Souki of Syria as an example. The book’s Prologue includes a quotation from The Odyssey: If any god has marked me out again for shipwreck, my tough heart can undergo it. What hardship have I not long since endured at sea, in battle! Let the trial come.4

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The Homeric character of their journey endows the refugees with dignity, and, indeed, a heroic status, but also, and above all, it gives them a place within Europe. As this brief glimpse has demonstrated, Homer’s reception extends across Europe and beyond; it has taken a variety of different forms and its multiple facets are sometimes contradictory. With The Iliad, war has been magnified and yet at the same time recognized as the greatest threat to loom over civilization. While Adorno and Horkheimer saw Ulysses as the symbol of that dialectic of Enlightenment that culminated in the barbarity of national socialism, Levi used him as a model in the way he managed to withstand the terrors of the concentration camp. As realms of memory, The Iliad and The Odyssey form a vantage point from which countless artists, writers and intellectuals have viewed their own experiences. Seen through the prism of Homeric epics, contemporary history, from the First World War to the refugee crisis and including Auschwitz, comes into sharper focus.

HECTOR AND ANDROMACHE: A LEGENDARY FAREWELL The encounter between Hector and Andromache in The Iliad is a Homeric motif. In the second half of Book VI, Homer describes how Hector reaches Troy as the fighting continues to rage at the gates of the city. While on his way to find Paris and to ask for offerings to be made to Athene for the protection of his men, Hector sees his wife, Andromache, at the Scaean Gate. The scene culminates in their dialogue. Andromache, who is carrying their son Astyanax, implores Hector not to risk his life and to stay with her in the city. Hector rejects this plea; while he would certainly be risking death in battle, as a hero, he cannot refuse to fight. As he takes his son in his arms, Astyanax takes fright and begins to cry. Before they part, Hector appeals to his wife to attend to her household duties and then departs for battle, as ‘war is the business of men’. Contrary to her fears, Hector is not to die in combat – yet. Andromache has no suspicion that he is to be killed by Achilles; even as the Greeks and Trojans gather round his body, she is preparing a bath for her husband. The farewell between Hector and Andromache has been a focus of interest since ancient times. Sophocles replicates the episode in Ajax, when the eponymous hero encounters the captive slave girl Tecmessa together with their son Eurysaces. The echo of the epic poems gave weight and significance to the issue of the status of illegitimate children, a problem besetting Athens during this period. Aristophanes evokes the scene in an entirely different context when his character Lysistrata quotes Hector’s statement ‘war is the business of men’ in her own manner: ‘war will be the business of women!’ While Sophocles concentrates his attention on the child, Aristophanes gives prominence to the relationship between the sexes outlined through the episode in The Iliad. In both cases, the heroic scene serves as a background to the treatment of topical issues. The farewells between Hector and Andromache have also been depicted in ancient paintings. There are only a few vase paintings representing warriors’ farewells whose inscriptions might identify them as portrayals of the Homeric scene.

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However, this motif seems to have been favoured in Roman painting. Plutarch tells us that while Brutus was leaving Italy, his wife, Portia, burst into tears at the sight of one such image (Plutarch, The Life of Brutus, 994 D-E). Andromache’s laments epitomize the pain of farewells. Two frescoes depicting the moment when Hector leaves his wife and son have survived: one is in Pompeii’s Casa del Criptoportico, the other in the Domus Aurea in Rome. The English poet Alexander Pope (1688–1744) emphasizes the modernity of Book VI of The Iliad, when he praises Homer’s ability to arouse admiration and terror in the spectator: ‘In the present Episode of the Parting of Hector and Andromache, he has assembled all that Love, Grief and Compassion could inspire.’5 In Friedrich Schiller’s poem ‘Hector’s Farewell’, the Trojan hero responds to his wife’s lamentations in a lyrical manner: Though the ardent hopes, the thoughts I cherish, All in Lethe’s silent stream may perish Yet my Love shall never die! The poem first appears in the second act of The Robbers (1782), where it is recited by Amalia, who believes her beloved Karl von Moor to be dead. Even after Schiller, the theme continued to fascinate such diverse writers as the Russian poet and essayist Osip Mandelstam, Scottish poet Carol Ann Duffy and Michael Longley, who shifted the context of the farewell to that of the troubles in Northern Ireland. The parting of Hector and Andromache occupies an even more pre-eminent place in modern painting than in poetry. The theme was widely admired in Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In France, Jacques-Louis David, whose painting Andromache Mourning Hector gained him admittance to the Académie, later revisited the theme with his drawing The Departure of Hector (1812). It was reprised in Italy, with Pompeo Batoni, in America, with Benjamin West, and in Germany, with Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein. In the autumn of 1917, Giorgio de Chirico created a particularly remarkable work entitled Ettore e Andromaca. A pair of articulated dolls are depicted standing between two red walls and a set of wooden scaffolding that appears to be supporting them. The woman’s body is turning towards the man’s, while the latter leans his head towards his companion’s, which is slightly raised. In this way, the woman’s head casts a shadow that covers the man’s neck and part of his face. Their tiny feet help to maintain the delicate balance of the connection between the two characters. This balance creates the impression of tenderness and fragility so often attributed to the couple; the abstract quality of the two figures and their featureless faces endow this scene with an air of timelessness. However, it was a highly topical subject when de Chirico painted it, as Italy was then being subjected to growing pressure and mobilizing an increasing number of troops. Before their departure, many of the conscripts would go to a photography studio to have their picture taken with their wives or fiancées. Through de Chirico’s own interpretation of this theme in the enigmatic world of his pittura metafisica, the motif of the warrior’s farewell, already such a popular subject for ancient vase paintings, connected with a contemporary issue of vital relevance.

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This theme, which he revisited repeatedly in his paintings and sculptures after 1917, was to be extended by Andy Warhol, who greatly admired his work and reproduced Ettore e Andromaca in his silkscreen prints. These highlight the iconic aspect of the theme and divest it of the specific context it was originally given in de Chirico’s image. This reflection on the original and the copy was reprised in turn by the New York artist Mike Bidlo, who made copies of several of de Chirico’s paintings in 1989 and 1990. These reproductions, which were as accurate as possible, included Ettore e Andromaca, and were shown in an exhibition entitled NOT de Chirico. Ettore e Andromaca is not the only painting by de Chirico to have been copied by Warhol and Bidlo, and de Chirico is not the only artist whose work has been reprised in this way in order to become the focus of a reflection on the status of art. Yet the leitmotif of the farewell and of the possible loss of the beloved male figure lends particular intensity to reflections on presence and absence, ambience and reproduction.

MEMORY IN THE EPIC: THE EPIC AS A REALM OF MEMORY The Iliad and The Odyssey represent one of the pillars of European memory culture. Memory already plays a not inconsiderable role in the epic – indeed, the epic itself becomes a creator of memory. Its heroes are haunted by the theme; not content with making constant references to the past, often seeking legitimacy for their current aims, they are also and above all obsessed by the question of knowing how they, in turn, will be remembered in future times. Glory (kleos in Greek) is one of the motivations – if not, indeed, the chief motivation – that drives the heroes. Hector is a good example of the preoccupation with the memory they will bequeath shared by all the heroes in The Iliad. In Book VII, when he engages the Greek hero Achilles in combat, certain of his victory, he is already envisaging his place in posterity: [. . .] but I will send His body to the fleet, that him the Greeks May grace with rites funereal. On the banks Of wide-spread Hellespoint ye shall upraise His tomb, and as they cleave with oary barks The sable deep, posterity shall say – ‘It is a warrior’s tomb; in ancient days The hero died; him warlike Hector slew.’ So men shall speak hereafter, and my fame Who slew him, and my praise, shall never die.6 While the statements ‘posterity shall say’, ‘so men shall speak hereafter’ and ‘shall never die’ emphasize the extent of his renown in temporal terms, the fleet represents its circulation in physical space. Hector’s preoccupation with glory is expressed in the fact that he reverses the purpose of the tomb; these exist in order to commemorate

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the people buried there, but in Hector’s imagination, his adversary’s tomb becomes a monument to his own glory. We clearly see elsewhere that the epic itself is the medium that will ensure the heroes’ lasting glory. At the court of the Phaeacians, Ulysses introduces himself with the words: I am Laertes’ son, Odysseus. Men hold me Formidable for guile in peace and war: This fame [kleos] has gone abroad to the sky’s rim.7 Ulysses is certainly not yet in a position to relate all of his adventures to the Phaeacians, and a number of ordeals still await him, but Homer attracts his listeners’ attention with the fact that the glory of Ulysses will be perpetuated through the epic. For it is The Odyssey that will carry his kleos ‘abroad to the sky’s rim’. The prediction made by Thetis, recounted by Achilles in Book IX of The Iliad, expresses the same idea: If still with battle I encompass Troy, I win immortal glory, but all hope Renounce of my return. If I return To my beloved country, I renounce The illustrious meed of glory, but obtain Secure and long immunity from death.8 Achilles chooses the first option; he will remain in Troy and achieve perpetual glory through his mors immatura. The commentators of ancient times had already noted that The Iliad was the vehicle of his renown and would ensure its enduring place in the collective memory. Like that of Ulysses, the speech made by Achilles has a double dimension. Not content with recounting every detail of the history he describes, Homer has his two heroes utter the words that relate back to his own poetic work. Homer also indirectly casts light on the lasting memory his work will establish, by emphasizing the limitations of other means of commemoration. The Greeks built such an enormous wall in front of Troy that it threatened to obscure the renown (kleos) of those previously built by Poseidon and Apollo. Yet the Greeks’ wall was destroyed by floods, and whereas The Iliad will enjoy immortal fame, the vanished structure will no longer stand as testimony to the Trojan War. We see with this example that, contrary to Hector’s hopes, monuments are not the basis of lasting remembrance. The shortcomings of the material conveyers of remembrance clearly highlight the superiority of the orally transmitted epic – the latter does indeed guarantee everlasting glory. The Homeric epic is not only a major realm of memory in terms of European history; it is also an exemplary illustration of the way in which memory functions. The Iliad and The Odyssey still eloquently proclaim the heroism of Achilles, Ulysses and Hector to this day, but they are much more than just narrative accounts of their

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brave deeds. This is demonstrated by the multitude of ways in which Homer’s works have been received and adapted, all of them different and fresh. Not only does the Homeric epic appear in the light of each new era, it also simultaneously transforms its own past into a present. Through its confrontation with contingency and fragility but also through its accounts of what can be achieved by force and cunning, through its multifaceted descriptions of the human condition, Homer’s work presents its readers with a permanent invitation to reflect on the nature of human life and on what gives it meaning.

NOTES 1. Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 33. 2. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, translated from the German by Edmund Jephcott (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag GmbH, © 1987 by S. Fischer, English translation © 2002 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University), p. 37. 3. Ibid., p. 45. 4. Homer, The Odyssey, Book V, verse 220 sq. Translated from the Greek by Robert Fitzgerald (New York: William Heinemann, Ltd.), 1961. 5. Alexander Pope, The Poems, vol. 9: The Odyssey of Homer. Books I-XII, edited by Maynard Mack (London: Methuen, 1967), p. 349. 6. Homer, The Iliad, translated from the Greek by William Cowper, The Poetical Works of William Cowper, ed. the Rev. H. F. Cary, A.M. (London: William Smith, 1839), p. 291. 7. Homer, The Odyssey, Book IX, verse 18 sq. Translated from the Greek by Robert Fitzgerald (New York: William Heinemann, Ltd.), 1961. 8. Homer, The Iliad, translated from the Greek by William Cowper, The Poetical Works of William Cowper, ed. the Rev. H. F. Cary, A. M. (London: William Smith, 1839), p. 304.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Graziosi, Barbara and Emily Greenwood (Eds.), Homer in the Twentieth Century: Between World Literature and the Western Canon, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007. Grethlein, Jonas, ‘Memory and Material Objects in the Iliad and the Odyssey’, JHS, no. 128 (2008): 27–51. Hall, Edith, The Return of Ulysses: A Cultural History of Homer’s Odyssey, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. Hartog, François, Memories of Odysseus: Frontier Tales from Ancient Greece, translated from the French by Janet Lloyd, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2001 [1996]. Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, translated from the German by Edmund

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Jephcott, Frankfurt am Main, Verlag GmbH, © 1987 by S. Fischer, English translation © 2002 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Kingsley, Patrick, The New Odyssey: The Story of Europe’s Refugee Crisis, London, Guardian Faber Publishing, 2016. Ulf, Christoph (Ed.), Der neue Streit um Troia. Eine Bilanz, Munich, C.H. Beck, 2003. Vandiver, Elizabeth, Stand in the Trench, Achilles: Classical Receptions in British Poetry of the Great War, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010. Weil, Simone, L’Iliade ou le poème de la force, Paris, Payot & Rivages, 2014 [1940–1941].

CHAPTER 33

‘You shall have no other gods but me’ ÉTIENNE FRANÇOIS

Although Jerusalem was the birthplace of Christianity, it developed primarily on European soil. Indeed, for over 1,000 years the two appeared to form a single entity. However, European Christianity is deeply fragmented, reflecting the schisms that have fractured it and the variety of cultures and interests that it represents. Yet it shares a fundamental characteristic with Judaism and Islam, the two other faiths that have forged Europe’s religious heritage: the worship of a single God. For over 1,000 years, Europe and Christianity appeared to form a single entity. There are still a great many people today, both in Europe and elsewhere, for whom this remains the case. Yet when the Convention chaired by Valéry Giscard d’Estaing was drafting a European Constitution in the early 2000s, opinions were divided over the place that Europe’s Christian heritage should be accorded in its introduction. Some favoured an explicit reference to Christianity and were therefore at odds both with those who sought the inclusion of Europe’s other religions and with those against any mention of religious faith, on the principle of maintaining a strict separation between church and state. In order to break this deadlock a compromise was made, and the Constitutional Treaty signed on 29 October 2004 by the leaders of the twenty-five member states of the European Union contained a reference to ‘the cultural, religious and humanist inheritance’ on which the values of contemporary Europe were based. This episode, which may bring to mind Gretchen’s existential question to Faust regarding his religious beliefs, is revealing on two counts, being associated with two fundamental questions that divide European opinion: Does Europe have Christian roots, and what place should it accord to religions?

THREE MONOTHEISTIC FAITHS: ONE DOMINANT, TWO MARGINALIZED While the origins of Christianity are external to Europe, like those of the other two monotheistic religions – Judaism, without which Christianity would not exist, and

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Islam, which is defined broadly in relation to the two preceding monotheistic faiths – their histories are no less entwined. Judaism was present in Italy from the first century BCE. Christianity established itself in what was to become Europe with the first generation after the death of Christ, as confirmed by the travels through Greece made by Paul of Tarsus in the mid-first century CE and the martyrdoms of the Apostles Peter and that same Paul in Rome around twenty years later. Islam entered the Christian and Graeco-Roman worlds less than a century after the death of the Prophet (632 CE), when the Umayyads crossed the Straits of Gibraltar in 712 CE. The three monotheistic religions were therefore present in Europe before the latter existed as such, and shared the characteristic of being revealed religions that all accorded fundamental importance to memory, ‘Zakhor’ in Hebrew; the exhortation ‘Remember’ occurs repeatedly in the Bible. Christianity is entirely centred on the figure of Christ, on his appeal: ‘Do this in memory of me’, and on his presence as the resurrected Son of God. European memorial cultures, on the other hand, are the descendants of the memoria conceptualized by Saint Augustine of Hippo in his Confessions (written between 397 and 401 CE) and subsequently translated into material form in the Middle Ages, through the practices of religious orders, the liturgy and sacred art, as a means of expressing the relationship between the living and the dead in a more effective manner. As for Islam, although it defines itself as ‘the “natural” religion of humanity’ (Rémi Brague), it is also a historical religion that conveys the memory of its founder. It is certainly not the case, however, that these three monotheistic faiths have had equal influence on European history and identity. This imbalance is primarily due to the differences separating the three faiths somewhat simplistically known as the religions of ‘the three holy books’. The God of Judaism is identified with the destiny of the Chosen People, who are awaiting the Messiah. Conversely, while there can be no doubt that Christianity fully absorbs its biblical heritage, everything in the Bible is interpreted in terms of a preparation for the coming of Jesus of Nazareth. For Christians, He is the only Son of God the Father, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried, rising again on the third day, as set out in The Apostles’ Creed, for the salvation of humanity. A universal faith, like Christianity, Islam is the religion of Allah, knowledge of whom is entirely based on the revelation He made to His Prophet Mohammed through the archangel Jibrīl between 610 and 632 CE. These revelations, which the archangel made to Mohammed in Arabic, were recorded in the eternal and inimitable text, the Qur’an. The history of their establishment and circulation is an even more significant factor in the unequal impact of the three monotheistic faiths on European memories. As the religion of a Chosen People for whom it was important to maintain a separate status, Judaism remained the faith of a minority community long regarded as foreign and viewed with suspicion, being held responsible for the death of Christ. The imprint that Judaism has made on the collective memory and the influence that it has exerted on European culture certainly far exceed the reduced number of its practitioners in Europe. This is due, in particular, to the central place occupied by authors and philosophers of Jewish origin in the cultural history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe. Yet that influence also stems from the fact that Christianity

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makes as many references to the Old Testament as to the New, and extends its message to everyone, both free men and slaves. Islam, a universal, missionizing and conquering religion, like Christianity, has always been at a disadvantage on account of its chronological belatedness in relation to the latter. From the eighth century to the present, the number of Muslims in Europe has always been notably higher than that of Jews. Yet Islam’s centres of gravity always remained at the edge of the continent, in Muslim medieval Spain or in the Ottoman Empire at the height of its expansion in Europe, which occurred in the late sixteenth century. That expansion itself never succeeded in extending beyond the margins of a continent that very quickly came to see Islam as a religion of infidels and the quintessential enemy of Christianity. There was consequently a refusal to regard the Muslims present in Europe as European in their own right. For nearly a millennium – at least until the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 – Christianity and Europe therefore seemed to form one sole entity. Although Christians had been pursuing their missionary activities in the four corners of the earth and European countries exerted almost worldwide dominance, thereby giving Christianity a global dimension, Europe (Russia included) still contained two-thirds of the world’s Christian population on the eve of the First World War. Moreover, most European countries identified themselves as Christian and had sovereigns who not only ruled by divine right but were even, in many cases, anointed. Apart from the pope, these included the tsars of Russia and Bulgaria, the emperors of Germany and Austria-Hungary, and the kings or queens of England, Italy, Denmark, Spain, Greece, Norway, the Netherlands, Romania, Serbia and Sweden. The sole exception was France; formerly known as ‘the eldest daughter of the Church’ and ruled by a king whose title was ‘His Most Christian Majesty’, it had become a republic following the French Revolution and, moreover, had passed a law separating the churches from the state in 1905. A radical transformation has occurred in the space of just one century. Europeans identifying themselves as Christians currently account for just a quarter of the world’s Christian population. Those who believe in the divinity of Christ and the resurrection are even fewer in number. According to a survey carried out in France in June 2016 and involving a representative sample of young people aged eighteen to thirty, 45 per cent defined themselves as Christians, but only 16 per cent saw the existence of God as certain, whereas 30 per cent believed it was no more than probable. The prevailing attitude seen here has been characterized by British sociologist Grace Davie as ‘believing without belonging’.1 Agnosticism and atheism are more widespread in Europe than in any other continent in the world; however, its recent history has been marked by a hostility to Christianity and by persecutions whose radical, brutal character recalls the worst tyranny of the first centuries of our era.

AN EVER-CHANGING MONOTHEISTIC FAITH Christianity was established in Europe in the first century CE and quickly imposed itself as the dominant, even exclusive, religion. It would be a great mistake,

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however, to deduce from this that its imprint on the continent was of a uniform nature. Indeed, from its earliest origins, Christianity, like Judaism and Islam, has been characterized at least as much by its diversity and plurality as by its unity. This is the case with Christianity’s foundational texts and with those comprising the Old Testament; it is equally true of the writings that have been part of the Western canon since the late fourth century CE, beginning with the Gospels, which describe the birth, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus from four different, not entirely superposable perspectives. We encounter the same diversity in the multitude of languages and cultural traditions that form part of Christianity: Aramaic as the language spoken by Jesus and the majority of his disciples, Hebrew and Greek in the case of the Old Testament, Greek in the case of all the New Testament texts and the writings of the authors who became known as the ‘Church Fathers’ from the sixteenth century onwards. These included Ignatius of Antioch (ca. 35– 107 or 113 CE), Clement of Alexandria (ca. 150–220 CE) and John Chrysostom (345–407 CE). Between them, they established the fundamental aspects of Christian doctrine in the first centuries of our era. The Latin Church Fathers, such as Ambrose of Milan (339–94 CE) and Augustine of Hippo (354–430 CE), were both more chronologically belated and fewer in number. The dominance of the Greek language in the early days of Christianity is confirmed by the fact that, despite the gradual separation of the Greek and Latin churches, the majority of Christianity’s key words are Greek in origin, from ‘Christ’, ‘apostles’, ‘Bible’ and ‘Gospel’ to ‘ecclesiastical’, ‘pope’, ‘episcopal’, ‘priest’, and ‘monk’, and including ‘dogma’, ‘theology’, ‘catechism’, ‘cathedral’ and ‘basilica’. This diversity stems from the divisions that have occurred from the early days of Christianity to the present; mostly conflictual in nature, these have resulted from different, even opposing ways of interpreting, modernizing and living Christ’s message. The two rifts that have had the most profound impact are, on the one hand, the gradual separation of Greek and Latin Christianity, which culminated in a schism in the Middle Ages, and on the other hand, the split in Latin Christianity following the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century and the consequences this entailed. It was undoubtedly the case that the majority of Europe’s Christians, whether Orthodox, Catholic or Protestant, continued, at least in theory, to recognize each other’s faiths through certain shared fundamental principles: belief in the Holy Trinity, in Jesus as the resurrected Messiah, references to the Old and New Testaments, the ‘Our Father’ and the Nicene Creed, baptism and the Ten Commandments – beginning with the first, ‘You shall have no other gods but me’. However, these shared tenets were established belatedly, and not before the meeting of the Council of Nicaea. The first ecumenical conference of bishops, the Council was convoked by the Roman Emperor Constantine I in 325 CE. The Nicene Creed was subsequently re-affirmed, firstly by the Edict of Thessalonika, issued in 380 CE by the Emperor Theodosius I, who established Nicene Christianity as the official religion of the Empire, and later at the Council of Constantinople, convoked by the same emperor in 381 CE. Moreover, the differences far outweigh the shared foundational beliefs, whether these involve the figures of Jesus, Mary or the saints, the conception of the church, the sacraments or the ministry of the priesthood –

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to say nothing of dissimilarities in worship, sensibilities and culture. The World Council of Churches (the Catholic Church is not a member of this organization) was founded in 1948 and is based in Geneva. It currently comprises no fewer than 345 different churches, bringing together half a billion of the world’s Christians. All of these confess ‘the Lord Jesus Christ as God and Saviour according to the scriptures, and therefore seek to fulfill together their common calling to the glory of the one God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit’. Yet each of them knows from experience that individual beliefs are characterized by an infinitely greater diversity than the doctrines and structures of those same churches.

VARIED CONTEXTS The varied nature of Christian memories in Europe is not only the result of personal approaches; the different contexts in which Christianity was established play an equal, perhaps an even a greater role here. These include, for example, the differences between the countries whose conversions had taken place in the Latin or Greek languages and the contrast between those who converted to Christianity before the Edict of Milan issued by the Emperor Constantine in 313 CE and those who did not adopt the Christian faith until the tenth century, or even later. The latter group includes the Scandinavian countries, Russia, Prussia and the Baltic States. There is also a difference between those who became Christian by peaceful means (broadly speaking, those countries where Christianity had spread before the sixth century) and others where it had been imposed by force. The latter case includes the forced conversion of the Saxons by the armies of Charlemagne, as well as conversions imposed on their subjects by kings who had themselves become Christian, motivated as much by politics as by religion, as with Poland, Hungary and Bohemia. The diverse character of these memories also stems from the centuries-old interconnection of Christianity’s destiny with that of the countries, states and cultures in which it developed. This is reflected in the efforts repeatedly made by all the medieval sovereigns of Europe to legitimize their rule through the Christian religion, extending their authority over the church in their country so that it became an instrument of their power. The Spanish monarchs, for instance, were styled ‘Catholic Majesties’, while the kings of France were known as ‘His Most Christian Majesty’ and English sovereigns were granted the title ‘Defenders of the Faith’. The crown of the kings of Hungary was known as ‘the Crown of Saint Stephen’, Saint Sava was the patron saint of Serbian royalty and the tsars of Russia traditionally exerted influence over the Orthodox Church. This diversity is also the result of the different forms of overlap between nationalism and Christianity that developed in most European countries, particularly during the nineteenth century. This was the case with the motto ‘Gott mit uns’ (‘God with Us’), to use just one example. It was first adopted by the Prussian monarchy when the Kingdom of Prussia was established in 1701, and was subsequently stamped into the belt buckles of Prussian and German soldiers up to 1945. Indeed, up to the early twentieth century, virtually all the countries in Europe were still defining themselves as Christian, although they would immediately add that their ‘national’

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interpretation of Christianity was superior to that of other nations, which justified their unique status. This mode of reasoning later found violent expression in the war in former Yugoslavia. Finally, that diversity may also be explained by the various methods used, from the early nineteenth century, to implement the new principle of equal rights for all Europeans from the same state, regardless of their religion, and to bring about the separation of church and state that this entailed. This process, which was not without its conflicts, was eventually implemented in three principal ways. The first involves the minority of European countries, such as France and Belgium, which established themselves as laïcités, or secular states (there is no reference to the term in the French law of 1905 and its concept was untranslatable). The second involves the Soviet Union during the 1920s, and later the Central and Eastern European countries governed by atheistic Communist Parties. These pursued anti-religious policies until 1989, expressed in phases of persecution alternating with a limited form of tolerance. The third and final example involves those European countries (now in the majority, especially since the collapse of communism) that have established various forms of partnership between the state, the churches and other religious communities. These arrangements include concordats agreed with the papacy, agreements concluded with Protestant Churches or the Jewish community, an alliance between the Russian government and the Moscow Patriarchate and the Turkish State’s administration and total control of the country’s religious life. The extreme diversity that prevails in Europe today comes as no surprise, given that its population comprises members of different Christian churches, practitioners of other faiths or those with no religious affiliations. In 2010, the 730-million-strong population of Europe (Russia included) was composed of 554 million Christians (35 per cent of whom were Catholic, 27 per cent Orthodox Christian and 14 per cent Protestant), in addition to 44 million Muslims (6 per cent), 4.3 million Buddhists (0.6 per cent), 1.4 million Jews (0.2 per cent) and, finally, 127 million individuals who followed another religion or had no religion at all (17 per cent). The marked contrasts between the various countries are equally unsurprising; at one extreme, there are those whose Christian inhabitants are in a minority, such as the Czech Republic (29 per cent), Albania (33 per cent) and the Netherlands (39 per cent), while at the other extreme are countries such as Greece, Malta, Romania, Moldavia and Armenia, the vast majority of whose inhabitants define themselves as Christian, according to the statistics presented by specialist research institutes.

A HISTORY OF ENCHANTMENT AND VIOLENCE In a famous essay written almost exactly a century ago, the sociologist Max Weber asserted that the growing importance Europe accorded to rationality, the sciences and technology had led to ‘the disenchantment of the world’. This may well appear pertinent in the context of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a period characterized by increasing secularization. However, a conclusion of this type, echoed today by the philosopher Marcel Gauchet when he argues that Christianity is ‘the religion of the end of religion’, completely fails to take account of Christianity’s

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cultural legacy and long-term contribution to Europe, which we might describe as an ‘enchantment of the world’. Indeed, for over a thousand years, the primary aim of the churches has been to proclaim the existence of a God who is both Creator and Saviour, to sanctify His name and to strive for His greater glory (Ad majorem Dei gloriam). All possible means have been used to achieve this end, initially through beauty and images. The mission was to bring the story of His resurrected Son and His message of salvation to the world, to let it know that the meaning of earthly life lay in the imitatio Christi − in other words, in faith, hope and charity − to remind it that death had been vanquished, and to cultivate the remembrance of all those who had witnessed these things, so that the whole of humanity should be prepared for the return of the Lord in all His glory at the end of time. It is impossible to do justice to the treasures of the imagination, inventiveness and creativity deployed by the Christian religion in pursuit of this vast enterprise. The great sanctuaries with their frescoes, statues and stained glass bear witness to this today, as do the inexhaustible sources of inspiration offered to medieval artists in the form of two thirteenth-century works, the Speculum maius, written by Vincent de Beauvais, and the Légende dorée by Jacques de Voragine, which recounts the lives of around a 150 saints and martyrs. Countering this, however, are memories of confrontations and endlessly recurring conflict, from Christ’s crucifixion and betrayal by a number of His disciples to the innumerable splits and ruptures, schisms and heresies that have punctuated the history of Christianity and continue to do so. These conflicts themselves are all the more violent as they centre on the fundamental themes of truth or error, true faith or superstition, God or the devil, excluding all compromise. They are, indeed, overdetermined by the radical nature of the Christian message – ‘I did not come to bring peace, but a sword’ (Mt. 10.34) – by the apocalyptic vision of salvation, by various forms of millenarianism and by the extent of Christianity’s consequence following its establishment as a state religion in the fourth century. Anti-Judaism and hostility towards Islam as fundamental aspects of Western thought and of its vision of the world, the crusades – both outside Europe and within the continent itself − multiple wars of religion, the Inquisition, witch hunts and every other form of intolerance are all examples that reveal the dark side of persecution and violence, and the bloodier elements of European memories of Christianity.

AN IMPRINT LEFT ON TIME One example of Christianity’s profound effect on the European memory is the Christianization of time. The origins of the calendar and the names of the months used in Europe date back to Julius Caesar (hence the name Julian calendar); the calendar we use today, however, was introduced by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582, and is therefore known as the Gregorian calendar. Furthermore, the numbering of the years is calculated everywhere on the basis of the date determined in the early sixth century as that of Christ’s birth. Everywhere, too, since the third century, the days have been grouped into sections, each forming a seven-day week, while the adoption of Sunday both as the day of rest and as the Lord’s day (dies dominica in

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Christian Latin) dates back to the decree issued by Emperor Constantine in 321 CE. The great liturgical feast days – Christmas, Easter and Pentecost – are recognized as such in the vast majority of European countries; everywhere, likewise, the feast days and public holidays linked to Christian celebrations outnumber those of secular origin. And although the feast days that were initially Christian have now lost much of their original religious character, all the attempts that have been made to abolish the Christian calendar, notably during the French Revolution, have met with failure. The Christian calendar, on the other hand, is used across the world, to the point where this has been interpreted as a ‘Theft of History’ (Jack Goody). The same is true of the Christianization of the European space. This was implemented through the system of dioceses that was inherited from Late Antiquity and spread across the entire continent in the Middle Ages, and also through the network of parishes (together with cemeteries and sanctuaries) that structured the continent’s villages and towns, the religious orders (mainly Benedictines and Cistercians) whose dominion extended to the entire Latin Christian world, their abbeys and priories, and all the pilgrim ways. The various regions of Christian Europe were linked through these pilgrimage routes, which succeeded the road network built in the Roman Empire, so that all roads did indeed ‘lead to Rome’. The most visible expression of this Christianization of geographical space is provided by the toponymy of Europe’s towns and villages. Today, over a tenth of the municipalities in France bear the name of a saint, 255 of them being ‘Saint Martin’. These are named after Saint Martin of Tours, who was born in Pannonia in 316 CE and died in 397 CE; the patron saint of the Merovingian and Carolingian dynasties, he is one of the most famous holy figures in the Christian world. Everywhere in Europe there are cities and towns bearing the name of their patron saint, from Santiago do Cacém in Portugal and San Gimignano in Italy to Saint Petersburg in Russia, Saint Andrews in Scotland and Agios Dimitrios in Greece. This influence over time and space also extends to surnames. In a large number of cases, these were formed from first names or Christian names, which were long regarded as more important. This explains, for instance, why ‘Martin’ is the most common surname in France. Gone are the days when the vast majority of parents had their children baptized – for the most part directly after their birth – and gave them a Christian or biblical name. Nevertheless, in Europe today, the parents who continue to give their children Christian first names far outnumber those who have them baptized. Moreover, everywhere in Europe (although in this case, too, there are considerable variations between the countries) first names of Christian origin are by far the most numerous. Finally, the sheer wealth of our material religious heritage demonstrates the lasting imprint Christianity has left on European memories. The chief examples of this are the countless religious buildings constructed in Europe over the centuries, from Antiquity to the present day. These edifices, which include cathedrals, abbatial, collegiate and conventual churches, abbeys, convents, priories, parish churches and chapels, are all distinguished by their extraordinarily varied styles and richly historical character. They feature very prominently, and with good reason, among the European examples included in UNESCO’s register of World Heritage Sites,

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accounting for about a third of the cases listed. Nowadays, their aesthetic, cultural and tourist appeal undeniably prevails over their function as religious or sacred buildings. This being said, they greatly outnumber the buildings associated with other faiths. France, for instance, contains just over 100,000 ‘Christian religious edifices’ (primarily Catholic), as opposed to 22,000 mosques, 500 synagogues and 300 Buddhist temples.

CHRISTIAN THOUGHT AS A LEGACY Christianity’s impact on European history and memories is by no means limited to the aspects just described, but also extends to a number of other domains. Although these are now considered secular, their origins reveal motivations initially born of Christianity or, more frequently, developments that were connected to it but proceeded independently of it, or even ran counter to it, either through a transfer of sacrality or through secularization. ‘Western thought and its vocabulary originated from the great theological debates of the early Church’, as Denis de Rougemont rightly stated. The great philosophies themselves, those of Descartes and Kant, of Hegel, of Auguste Comte and of Marx, were originally theological stances. Discounting theology means breaking with the most fruitful tradition of Western culture. Indeed, it means condemning oneself to remaking all the discoveries that were already made and formulated, over one thousand five hundred years ago, by the Church Fathers and the great heretics.2 An example of this is the notion of the ‘individual’, one of the key values espoused by Europeans today. Associated with the ideals of dignity, liberty, equality and universality, it is understood nowadays as an entirely secular concept, if only insofar as it applies both to the followers of a religion (whatever it may be) and to those who identify themselves as atheists or agnostics. Nevertheless, its origins date back to the concept inherited from the Bible and the early days of Christianity, according to which every human being is one of God’s creatures and was created in His image, endowed with freedom and reason and saved from sin by divine grace and the freely given sacrifice of Christ. This conception was rooted in the legal definition of the Person applied in Roman law and skilfully appropriated by the Christian religion. The same is true of the concept of human rights, which is associated with that of the individual; its origins are largely Christian, although its principles were formulated in secularized terms emphatically opposed by the church, notably in the Syllabus of Errors of 1864. Gender equality is another example of those indirect legacies that are largely Judeo-Christian in origin, but which were later secularized and established independently of the churches, or even in opposition to them. Women occupy a significant place in the Bible. Established from the outset in the story of the Creation, it is maintained through the role they played in the public life of Jesus. This is equal in importance to that of men, from His mother Mary, without whose freely given assent Jesus could not have been born, to the women who came to His

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tomb and were the first witnesses of the resurrection. However, the priestly and episcopal ministries have subsequently been the sole domain of men, for despite the maternal, Marian character of the church, it is guided by male, celibate priests in the name of God the Father. It was not until the latter half of the twentieth century that the Protestant churches began to depart from this rule. Yet the religious life was always open to women as well as to men (thereby establishing Christianity as based on duality rather than dualism) so that the abbesses who presided over the great abbeys of the female religious communities were invested with extensive powers. Furthermore, the role played in the life of the church by female saints and mystics – from Hildegard of Bingen to Mother Teresa and including Saint Catherine of Siena, Saint Teresa of Ávila and Saint Thérèse of Lisieux – cannot be over-emphasized. The assertion made by Christ Himself of the indissolubility of marriage, the recognition of its sacramental character at the Second Council of Lyon in 1274 and the rule imposed by canon law whereby the union between a couple must be based on their freely given mutual consent can all be viewed as indications of the worth accorded to the status of women, despite the gender inequality that prevailed in the societies of the time, both in law and in practice. The considerable influence exerted on languages, literature and the sciences in Europe by Christianity and religion provides us with a further example of those indirect legacies. Until at least the High Middle Ages, clerics in the Western Christian world had a monopoly on the written word and education (transmitted through the universities), which is one explanation for the dominance of Latin as the language of the church and of scholarship until the nineteenth century. Moreover, in the case of several countries, the promotion of vernacular languages to a literary context was often linked to religion. Dante’s The Divine Comedy, for instance, played a significant role in the development of modern Italian, while Luther’s translation of the Bible had a similar influence on the German language. Indeed, all European languages abound in words and phrases that have biblical or religious origins, although these initial contexts may now have been forgotten. These include nouns: ‘judas hole’, ‘talent’, ‘propaganda’ and ‘deluge’, images such as the Judgement of Solomon, the Road to Damascus, the Good Samaritan and the Eleventh Hour labourers, and expressions such as the return of the Prodigal Son, the search for the lost sheep, pouring new wine into old bottles and separating the wheat from the chaff. Our last example – in a list that could easily be much longer – is the connection between politics and religion. As recorded by the Evangelists, Christ invited those questioning Him to ‘render under Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s’, and likewise emphasized that His kingdom was ‘not of this world’. In doing so, he was rejecting all forms of theocracy from the outset and laying the foundations for the independent status of political power and politics with regard to religious power and religion. It was certainly the case in Europe that politics and religion had a close-knit, complementary relationship until the late eighteenth century, although this state of affairs was founded on the division between the temporal and spiritual domains that facilitated the growing independence of the political world from that of religion. The secular elements of this interaction help to clarify the famous statement made by German legal

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expert Carl Schmitt: ‘all significant concepts of the modern theory of the State are secularised theological concepts.’ This also correlates with the description ‘secular religions’ used by sociologists such as Raymond Aron in relation to the European political and ideological movements of the twentieth century.

THE UNDERSIDE OF MONOTHEISM: DOUBT AND ATHEISM Although it was dominant until the late seventeenth century, the Christian memory has never been exclusive. Christianity and Islam cohabited perfectly peacefully in medieval Europe − and at times more combatively − with a Muslim presence in Sicily until the late eleventh century, in Spain until the late fifteenth century and in south-eastern Europe from the fourteenth century. It also coexisted with Judaism (which spread more or less across the continent despite the repeated expulsions imposed on the Jewish population), to say nothing of the various non-Christian beliefs or heresies that persisted in many rural regions. The most famous of these was the Cathar heresy, denounced by the church in the twelfth century as undermining the foundations of the Christian faith. Christianity has never gone unchallenged, despite the preaching campaigns of the Franciscan and Dominican orders, the establishment of the Inquisition and the crusades conducted against both the Cathars and the pagan peoples of the northeast, as well as repeated expulsions − the Jews were banished from England in 1290, from France in 1394 and from the territories of Spain and Portugal in 1492 and 1497, respectively, while the Moriscos were expelled from Spain in 1609. Just one example of defiance is the case of the miller Frioul Menocchio, who was burnt at the stake after his second trial, conducted by the Inquisition in 1599. During his first trial in 1584 (when he was acquitted), he spoke frankly of his own cosmogony and beliefs, which called into question the very foundations of the church’s authority and doctrine, as described by Carlo Ginzburg, The churches had established themselves as the sole guardians of the religious truth and fundamental dogma of Christianity, of the revelation and even the existence of God. This claim became the focus of increasingly radical criticism in the latter half of the seventeenth century. It was initially expressed in an indirect manner, as with the Dutch Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632–77), who advocated a Rationalist interpretation of the Bible according to which God and Nature were one, and Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), a French Huguenot who took refuge in the United Provinces and whose Dictionnaire historique et critique laid the foundations for a philosophy of doubt. This critical approach developed during the Age of Enlightenment in both England and France, through Deist philosophers who rejected all revealed religion such as John Locke, Voltaire and even Immanuel Kant on the one hand, and through the first Materialists, such as Julien Offray de La Mettrie and Denis Diderot, who rejected not just the excesses of religion but religion itself, on the other. These ideas were reprised and developed in the nineteenth century by Ludwig Feuerbach in The Essence of Christianity (first published in 1841), by

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Karl Marx, who regarded religion as no more than a sign of alienation, by Friedrich Nietzsche, through his concept of the death of God, and by Sigmund Freud, for whom religious beliefs were illusory. They formed the basis of a radical criticism of Christianity and of the militant atheism that was then establishing itself in Europe. They could be said to represent the hidden face of Christianity’s 1,000-year-old domination, for just as there is no anti-clericalism without a clergy, so there is no atheism without monotheism. This has given rise to a paradox, for while the imprint of Christianity is far more marked in Europe than in any other continent, it is also the continent where Christianity has experienced the most violent hostility. This was expressed in the policy of de-Christianization implemented during the French Revolution, and in an even more pronounced manner with the militant atheism and anti-religious persecutions of the 1917 Soviet Revolution, the communist regimes installed after the Second World War and the anti-Christianism of the Nazi regime. Atheism is more widespread in Europe than in any other continent today, although again we see enormous differences between individual countries. Sweden would appear to be the most atheist country in the world, with non-believers accounting for 85 per cent of its population, against 35 per cent in the case of the UK, 29 per cent in that of France and 21 per cent in that of Belgium, according to recent surveys.

A WORLD MEMORY A universal religion with a missionizing agenda, Christianity very soon sought to extend beyond the confines of Europe. The discoveries, conquests and evangelical activities that characterized the new age of European expansion formed part of a process of re-organizing the world that mirrored the internal divisions of Christian Europe and gave rise to highly charged debates. Examples range from Bartolomé de Las Casas and his commitment to a missionizing, colonizing operation that respected indigenous peoples, via the ‘black legend’ of Spanish colonial practices developed in the United Provinces and the Protestant countries, to the expulsion of the Jesuits from the Portuguese and Spanish colonies and the suppression of their order by Pope Clement XIV in 1773. Spain, Portugal, France and later Belgium and Italy practised the Catholic religion, the United Provinces, England, the Scandinavian countries and subsequently Germany had turned to Protestantism, while Russia had adopted Orthodox Christianity. These different faiths emulated and competed with one another, a state of affairs that reached a peak in the nineteenth century and is reflected today in the religious architecture of the countries that converted to Christianity. On the one hand, there are the imposing Baroque constructions, often adapted to local styles, that one finds in Central and South America, the Philippines, Goa and Macao, and on the other, the many Neo-Gothic and Neo-Roman churches built in Africa and Asia in exact imitation of nineteenth-century European examples. Whatever judgements may be passed on Christianity’s expansion into nonEuropean territories and the methods it applied, the consequences this has entailed are fundamental to Europe’s relationship with the world. Today, three-quarters of

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the global Christian population live in non-European countries, and Christianity likewise finds its most vibrant expression outside the continent. Moreover, in a type of role-reversal between Europe and the rest of the world, the dynamism of global Christianity is contributing in its turn to a renewal of Christian faith in Europe. This is evident both in the election of Pope Francis − the first non-European pope since the eighth century − in 2013, and in the fact that Europeans now make up no more than 45 per cent of the cardinal electors.

AFTER SECULARIZATION The dawn of a new Modern age in the late eighteenth century marks a decisive quantum leap in the history of accretion, re-interpretations and transformations that characterize European Christianity. The Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution and the accelerating growth experienced by Europe during this period triggered a structural sea change generally seen as a process of secularization and de-Christianization. Its repercussions on the religious domain are well known, involving an increasing decline in the influence of the churches, the rapid development of agnosticism and atheism and a transformation in beliefs − very few people nowadays believe in Christ’s actual presence in the Host, in miracles, in the existence of the devil or in the resurrection, exactly as they did in the Middle Ages or the Early Modern Period. The churches certainly attempted to rise to this challenge throughout the nineteenth century. One method involved denouncing the ‘errors’ of the new age. This approach was particularly characteristic of the Catholic Church until the Second Vatican Council, which was held from 1962 to 1965 and marked a turning point through its policy of reconciliation with the age of Modernity. The other method involved the development of ‘alternative modernities’, such as Marian apparitions, the Protestant ‘Revival’ and an ecumenical approach as opposed to the divisions of bygone days. Supported by the churches, Christians played a key role in launching the process of European unification in Western Europe after 1945, as was the case in Central and Eastern Europe following the collapse of communism and of the Soviet Bloc. In this way, while Christianity seems at risk of disappearing in certain (predominantly Western) countries, others have preserved a strong Christian identity, not forgetting the new-found vitality of the Orthodox Church. Nevertheless, a profound change in the places occupied by the three monotheistic religions has taken place in Europe over the last three generations. The influence of Judaism, with its diversity and vibrancy, had characterized the nineteenth century and the first third of the twentieth; it has now all but disappeared from Eastern Europe’s ‘Bloodlands’ (Timothy Snyder) and remains traumatized by the Holocaust. Christianity’s loss of influence in a number of countries began to accelerate drastically in the last third of the twentieth century. Islam, on the other hand, is expanding rapidly, due both to migration and to the militant approach adopted in a number of quarters. And if the question of religion plays a much greater role in today’s Europe than it did in the last decades of the twentieth century, it is primarily on account of this new Islamic presence and the challenge it poses.

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‘Is Christianity going to die?’ wondered the historian Jean Delumeau in 1977, pursuing the question in the light of recent developments in Western Europe, the repercussions of the events of 1968 and the accelerating decline of institutional Christianity3. What does the future hold for Judaism, Christianity and Islam in Europe? What will become of the legacies that Christianity has bequeathed to our continent? This is impossible to predict, as history is characterized by its openendedness, by surprises, chance and the unforeseen; moreover, although we may sometimes be tempted to forget this, we know very well that all civilizations are mortal, starting with our own, as Paul Valéry reminded us after the First World War. And yet the rich heritage of Christian memories, Christianity’s continuing ability to renew itself after more than 2,000 years, the depth of the imprint left by Judaism and the vitality of Islam, together with the challenge it presents, are all much more indicative of an open, diverse future for the monotheistic religions in Europe.

NOTES 1. Survey conducted at the request of the daily newspaper La Croix by the OpinionWay research company between 9 and 17 June 2016, using a representative sample of 1,000 individuals aged from eighteen to thirty. The results were published in the same newspaper on 25 July 2016. 2. Denis de Rougemont, La part du Diable (New York: Brentano’s, 1942), p. 21. 3. Jean Delumeau, Le christianisme va-t-il mourir? (Paris: Hachette, 1977).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Brague, Rémi, Eccentric Culture: A Theory of Western Civilization, translated from the French by Samuel Lester, Notre Dame, Saint Augustine’s Press, 2009. Brague, Rémi, On the God of the Christians (and on One or Two Others), translated from the French by Paul Seaton, Notre Dame, Saint Augustine’s Press, 2013. Buc, Philippe, Holy War, Martyrdom and Terror: Christianity, Violence and the West, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Casanova, José, Public Religions in the Modern World, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1994. Casanova, José, Europas Angst vor der Religion, Berlin, Berlin University Press, 2013. Davie, Grace and Danièle Hervieu-Léger (Eds.), Identitiés religieuses en Europe, Paris, La Découverte, 1996. Delumeau, Jean, Que reste-t-il du paradis?, Paris, Fayard, 2000. Ginzburg, Carlo, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, translated from the Italian by John and Anne Tedeschi, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980 [1976]. Laurens, Henry, John Tolan and Gilles Veinstein, L’Europe et l’islam. Quinze siècles d’histoire, Paris, Odile Jacob, 2009. Lauster, Jörg, Die Verzauberung der Welt. Eine Kulturgeschichte des Christentums, Munich, C.H. Beck, 2016.

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Nirenberg, David, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition, New York and London, W.W. Norton, 2013. Taylor, Charles, A Secular Age, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2007. Weiler, Joseph H. H., L’Europe chrétienne? Une excursion, Paris, Le Cerf, 2007. Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, Seattle and London, University of Washington Press, 1982.

CHAPTER 34

Barbarians, savages and us THOMAS SERRIER

Originally used in ancient times to denote those who spoke no Greek, the word ‘barbarian’ was later applied to anyone living on the fringes of the Roman Empire. The ‘savage’ then appeared on the scene, discovered through the conquest of the New World, while today we have the socially marginalized figure of the ‘feral’ youth. The barbarian takes multiple forms and is difficult to apprehend, but he is first and foremost the antithesis of the civilized individual. As Montaigne put it: ‘Each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice.’ Visitors entering the Pergamon Museum in Berlin are immediately struck by a 113-metre-long frieze featuring an astonishing gigantomachy – a battle between the Giants and the Olympian gods. The great Pergamon altar, a masterpiece of Hellenistic art dating from the second century BCE, depicts scenes of a fierce combat between civilization and barbarism. If there is a single domain that barbarians well and truly invaded in the Age of Antiquity and have occupied ever since, it is that of collective imaginaries, first Greek and Roman, then European (and Western) – and there is no need to travel to the German capital to confirm this. From its first configuration as a Christian geographic entity in the medieval era, Europe came into being through a process of transcending that opposition, which was intrinsic to the world of the ancient Greeks and the Roman Empire. Yet the Greek-versus-barbarian duo has continued to be applied metaphorically throughout the centuries. Used as a criterion for inclusion and exclusion, the definition of that ‘asymmetrical couple’ (Reinhart Koselleck) slips into every discourse of segregation and into every process of determining territories ripe for domination. From the limes of ancient Rome to the walls of the present day, the dividing line separating what is inside from what lies outside can be applied to contexts of social confrontation, imperial and colonial relations or ever-present national antagonisms. The only constant is the fact that the barbarian is always the Other – the neighbour, the stranger − both a rival and a threat. The barbarian has no independent existence; he exists only in the eyes of ‘civilized’ beings, such as the more chauvinistic French citizens of 1914, for whom German Kultur in its entirety was simply barbaric, or the Germans who regarded ‘French civilization’ as mere decadence. The first recorded use of the term dates from the Graeco-Persian Wars. Although the Trojan War had not acquired the

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significance of a battle between Greeks and barbarians in the works of Homer, it was presented as such by Herodotus when introducing Book I of his Histories, ca. 440 BCE, for explicitly commemorative purposes: Here Herodotus of Halicarnassus presents the results of his Enquiry, so that time will not eradicate the memory of men’s actions and so that the great feats performed by both Greeks and barbarians will not be condemned to oblivion. Although rigorously sidelined, the barbarian became central to Athenian thought. Barbarians appear on stage in plays by Aeschylus and Euripides, while Aristotle wrote a treatise on ‘barbarian customs’, although sadly this has not survived. But what exactly is a barbarian? He was originally recognized by the sounds he made, by his ‘borborygmus’ (‘rumblings’) which were a world away from the logos of the ancient Greeks. And as logos denotes both thought and word, it was but a short step to the conclusion that those incapable of expressing themselves through language were probably less than human, and not so very far removed from the animal state. The barbarian’s Otherness manifests itself both physically and morally. He is identified by his distasteful characteristics: he is dishevelled, drinks out of skulls, is blindly devoted to his tribe and its leader and has an insatiable urge for drink and warfare – in short, he possesses all kinds of traits that prevent him and his ilk from establishing a free city-state. Nevertheless, being a potential foe, the barbarian was not invariably presented as a mere foil for the hero. Where was the glory in vanquishing him if there was no peril involved? Endowed with superhuman strength, he was certainly portrayed as capable of great feats well before Conan the Barbarian or Game of Thrones appeared on the scene. The archetype was established by the naked Dying Gaul in Rome’s Capitoline Museum, with his mass of thick hair and luxuriant moustache. Greek, and later Roman, rhetoric and iconography conveyed the image of a fight to the death, interrupted only by the barbarians’ submission to the Empire. For instance, the scenes that had been chiselled into the Column of Arcadius in Constantinople showed the victory over the Goths under Gainas in 400 CE. In practice, however, the physical or social boundaries between the civilized world and the barbaric land of crocodiles (Egypt), of wild beasts (Libya) or of dense forests (Germania) were far from impassable. In the case of Rome, the former enemy might well become a citizen at some future date. In the fourth and fifth centuries, certain barbarians even formed blood ties with the imperial family. Stilicho married the niece of Theodosius I and became the father-in-law of the Emperor Honorius. And the family of the last Western Roman Emperor, Romulus Augustulus, who was deposed by Odoacer in 476, originated from outside the limes, despite his quintessentially Roman name.

THE TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE OTHER The Greek–barbarian dichotomy was dissolved, both in the philosophical and political sense, with the advent of Christianity and its universal message. In the

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words of the Apostle Paul: ‘Where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ is all, and in all’ (Col. 3.11). The concept of the barbaric Other, once a marker of cultural alterity, later became an instrument used to condemn the moral barbarity that lies dormant within us. Already, in ancient Greece, Strabo’s Geography had presented the barbarian as being closer to nature and therefore the embodiment of a certain type of virtue, while Tacitus portrayed the peoples of Germania as the ‘noble savages’ described in a later era. Two long-enduring ideas now took root. One associated our barbarian ancestors with the fountain of youth that would bring about our regeneration; the other centred on the contrast between the innocence of the ‘savage’ and a society that had lost its way. The nationalist movements that emerged in the nineteenth century drew much inspiration from these sources, with their historical or romanticized material. Despite complex theories on the Frankish or Gallo-Roman origins of France, and despite various potential narratives, the scenario inaugurating the history of ‘our ancestors, the Gauls’ remains Caesar’s victory over Vercingetorix. In the same way, Arminius (or Hermann), who belonged to the Cherusci tribe and defeated Publius Quintilius Varus, was a prominent figure for German nationalists, while Attila the Hun and the Vikings play a similar role in the national narratives of Hungary and Scandinavia. The Nazis used virile Sparta, rather than democratic Athens, as the model for their ideology of racial superiority. The link they established between Nazism and Antiquity was entirely illusory, as the forebears of the Herrenrasse (‘master race’) were Germanic and Nordic heroic figures. The discovery of the New World, 400 years earlier, had a destabilizing effect on the Greek–barbarian duo, which was now joined by the figure of the ‘savage’. At the same time, the issue of the common humanity shared by settlers and indigenous inhabitants was the focus of much debate. The missionary Bartolomé de Las Casas vigorously championed this principle: ‘There is no man or race that is not barbaric when perceived by another man or another race. [. . .] In this way, just as we consider the peoples of the Indies to be barbarians, so they judge us likewise, as they do not understand us.’1 This view was fully supported by Michel de Montaigne, who declares in his Essais: ‘Each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice.’ Later, with reference to the wars of religion, he questions the justification of any Christian claims to superiority over indigenous peoples, as Europeans ‘surpass them in every kind of barbarism’. While the natives of the New World were initially perceived in the light of the ancients’ accumulated conceptions of barbarians, the Age of Enlightenment saw the establishment of a teleological vision of humanity as a chain leading from the savage state to the creation of society. In addition to the contrived historical continuities created between barbarians and modern nations, the nineteenth century witnessed the introduction of a new narrative based on social class. Following the Silk workers uprising in Lyon, the Journal des débats issued on 8 December 1831 spoke of the ‘internal struggle taking

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place in society between those who have and those who have not’, stating that the ‘barbarians who threaten society are not from the Caucasus nor from the steppes of Tartary; they are in the suburbs of our manufacturing towns’. It seems that the stereotypical image of ‘feral’ inner city youth had already been formed. At the same time, the colonial expansion of the imperial European powers reactivated the discourse of the ‘white man’s burden’ (Rudyard Kipling). The intention had been to bring enlightenment and progress to the ‘heart of darkness’, although the enterprise could result in a nightmarish scenario of inverted values, as in Joseph Conrad’s homonymous masterpiece. Now the focus of unease and repudiation, this discourse of civilization was largely dominant at the height of European imperialism. Paris, London, Vienna and Berlin all had ‘human zoos’ displaying indigenous tribes – Expo 58, the World’s Fair held in Brussels, actually included a Congolese village set up in Tervuren. Yet critical voices were raised even in earlier times; Alexis de Tocqueville, for instance, noted in 1847: ‘we have made Muslim society much more wretched, more disordered, more ignorant and more barbaric than it had been before it knew us.’2 There was a fundamental contradiction between Europe’s long-vaunted universal humanism and Aimé Césaire’s definition of ‘a civilisation that uses its principles to play tricks’, as set out in his Discours sur le colonialisme (1950). However, this was never questioned until Europeans had lived through their twentieth-century experiences as a ‘dark continent’ (Mark Mazower). The criticism levelled through a historical materialist approach was radical in character, as expressed by Walter Benjamin, for whom ‘There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism’, while a more structural perspective is provided by Claude Lévi-Strauss: By refusing to consider as human those who seem to us to be the most ‘savage’ or ‘barbarous’ of their representatives, we merely adopt one of their own characteristic attitudes. The barbarian is, first and foremost, the man who believes in barbarism.3 Surely this remains a concern for our times.

NOTES 1. Bartolomé de Las Casas, Apologética historia sumaria, edited by Edmundo O’Gorman, 2 vols (Mexico: UNAM, 1967), vol. 2, III, p. 254. 2. Cf. Sylvie Aprile, 1815-1870: La révolution inachevée (Paris: Belin, 2010), p. 250. 3. Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p. 256; Claude Lévi-Strauss, Race and History (Paris: UNESCO, 1952), p. 12.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Bancel, Nicolas, Pascal Blanchard, Gilles Boetsch, Eric Deroo and Sandrine Lemaire, Zoos humains et exhibitions coloniales. 150 ans d’invention de l’autre, Paris, La Découverte, 2011. Barbero, Alessandro, Le jour des barbares. Andrinople 9 août 378, Paris, Flammarion, 2006. Dumézil, Bruno (Ed.), Les Barbares, Paris, PUF, 2016. Hartog, François, Anciens, modernes, sauvages, Paris, Galaade, 2005. Koselleck, Reinhart, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, translated from the German by Keith Tribe, New York, Columbia University Press, 2004 [1988]. Modzelewski, Karol, L’Europe des barbares. Germains et Slaves face aux héritiers de Rome, Paris, Aubier, 2006. Todorov, Tzvetan, The Fear of Barbarians: Beyond the Clash of Civilizations, translated from the French by Andrew Brown, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2010 [2008]. Vlassopoulos, Kostas, Greeks and Barbarians, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013.

CHAPTER 35

Rome The history of a city, the history of the world ARNOLD ESCH

Rome is much more than a city – it is a concept. Synonymous with power and grandeur, it has successively embodied the Empire, the Church and the Renaissance, and occupies a unique position at the heart of the global imaginary. Realms of memory do not emerge through academic research alone but originate from a variety of accumulated factors. In this way, they encompass collective representations and experiences, sublime ideas and trivial realities, and this is how they may be recognized. While the cultivated concept of Rome has been the object of continuous study, much less attention has been paid to the indistinct, amorphous image that pervades the collective memory of the city. Yet this image is based on collective representations whose diversity and significance provide the best illustration of that memory and how it continues to function. There are doubts in some quarters as to whether a collective European memory can exist unless it has first come into being through a national memory. For this reason, it would be better to approach the memory of Rome by first considering its national representations. Even by simply drawing on the works of Petrarch, Chateaubriand, Goethe or Byron, it should not be difficult to create a dense network of quotations forming a multinational patchwork of representations of the city – after all, this is the general procedure in such cases. But before we start producing edifying quotations, we should clarify our approach. This essentially involves studying Rome as a reference point for the various nations of Europe, asking what specific significance the city has for each of them and then seeking out the common denominator of these ‘bilateral’ images of Rome. When Sweden, Spain or Hungary describe their relationship with the capital, are they also describing something they have in common? In what areas are these shared features concentrated? And finally, are there any reflections on Rome that have been formulated in such a way as to have immediate universal significance, presenting the city as a common European − or even global − reference point and a realm of shared origin and memory?

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ROME IN NATIONAL COLLECTIVE MEMORIES If we are to include the entire spectrum of ideas that have helped to develop the image of Rome, we might begin with those novels devoted to the city that have been the most widely read in various countries. The Germans’ image of Rome, for example, was not greatly influenced by Latin textbooks; instead, the strongest impact was made by a novel written for young people that appeared in 1876. A Struggle for Rome by Felix Dahn describes the defeat of the Ostrogoths in Italy and was read avidly by entire generations of German boys and girls; this was a struggle for Rome, not against it. In fact, the only struggles that Germany waged decisively against Rome were, first, the Battle of Teutoburg Forest culminating in Arminius’s victory over the Roman legions in the year 9 CE, and second, Martin Luther’s fight against the Roman papacy, identified as the Antichrist, during the Reformation. We might also include the period of the Kulturkampf (the ‘struggle for civilisation’) conducted by Otto von Bismarck against the Catholic Church in the decade following the unification of Germany. Every other situation is a battle for Rome, even if this is not apparent, a case in point being any criticism made of the real Rome in the name of the idealized city, that imaginary capital that the German public sought to champion by reading A Struggle for Rome. Ultimately, everything vanishes amid the clamour of the battles of the Nibelungen, in the novel as in historical reality. For young German readers took Rome extremely seriously. There is another side to the range of influences that have made their mark on the image of Rome. In order to clarify this without taking an overly abstract approach, we will now examine, at a practical level, the ways in which the various nations carry out their studies of the city. The first point to note is that Rome contains no fewer than twenty-three non-Italian research institutes run by seventeen different nations (excluding cultural institutes); these specialize in archaeology, history and art history, and were almost all founded in the latter half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries. No other city in the world can boast such a wealth of foreign research institutes, all focusing on the study of its culture and history. The reason why so many nations readily devoted substantial sums of money to establishing these types of institutes was because they were regarded as worthwhile investments. Each European country involved was less concerned with paying homage to Rome, and thereby reinforcing the foundations of its humanist culture, than with highlighting the share of Roman heritage to which it laid claim and the potential advantages this would bring in terms of greater insight into its own culture. And indeed, the Vatican archives contain whole series of documents vital to the reconstruction and understanding of the history of every European country in the Middle Ages; it is the sole repository of such documents, which have no equivalent in local or national archives. In other words, Rome continues to bring us much more than we bring her. Through their work on the memory of Rome, the nations of Europe are looking to improve their construction of their own identity. Rome itself provides a number of opportunities to highlight its real or presumed links with various other peoples,

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and to formulate them as specific acknowledgements addressed to the city. These might involve the creation of cultural or research institutes invariably presented as indispensable and fully justifying the sums invested in them, or festivities celebrating the centenaries of such institutes, the installment of a new principal in one of Rome’s national secondary schools or an ambassador’s inaugural or valedictory speech, with their different emphases in the separate cases of the Vatican and the Quirinal.

ROME: COMMON GROUND Once we start investigating the shared features of these various ‘bilateral’ memories involving Rome and other European countries, we cannot fail to note the many areas of overlap. In every instance, remarkably, references to Rome place as much emphasis on the elements common to all European nations as they do on specifically national aspects. In Rome, therefore (and in Rome alone), national and European perspectives overlap to such an extent that they eventually become one. And Rome really has given everything to everyone, starting with a common language; it has also provided a high culture endowed with considerable integrative power, Roman law and canon law, as well as the example of a well-organized Empire, its preservation, prestige and infrastructure. Later, it offered the treasure of divine Grace and a universal church with its functions and revenues, whose centre of activity became a site for pilgrims from all over the world. Even so, the memory of ancient Rome remains perennial. As is customary with the spolia, or remains of bygone times, Christian Rome retrieved its pagan legacy and recycled a whole series of architectural objects and Classical sculptures in order to build and decorate its churches, and even to ensure that they served as indications of Rome’s new sovereignty. For in Rome, Antiquity has not been content with mere survival; it has remained alive in the true sense of the term. No nation has regarded its conquest by the Romans as a source of displeasure – including those on Europe’s periphery, from the Portuguese to the Romanians. What other empire could claim as much? Naturally, there were also examples of resistance, of hostile reactions to Rome’s ambitions. This was especially true of the Germanic peoples, who challenged the expansionist aims of ancient Rome at the Battle of Teutoburg. In the Middle Ages, however, the Germans embraced Rome’s legacy, retrieving the trappings of Empire and Emperor for their own purposes, with the establishment of the ‘Holy Roman Germanic Empire’! In a famous scene included in the second chapter of his Annals, Tacitus presents a powerful description of the confrontation between Arminius, the victor of the Battle of Teutoburg, and his brother Flavus, who fought for the Romans. As they stand facing each other on either side of the river Weser, they trade the respective accusations of ‘Roman’ and ‘Barbarian’. Yet in the Middle Ages, the ‘German kings’, in other words, those chosen as the heirs to imperial power, were effectively established on the Roman bank of the river. Elated to be in Rome for his coronation in 996 CE, the young Emperor Otto III made a speech that has gone down in history, during which he declared to the city’s inhabitants that he was essentially more Roman than they were! Nevertheless, being far less sentimental than the Germanic nations,

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the Romans remained unimpressed, and were not moved to embrace the idea of a regenerated Rome offered to them by the young Saxon. The historian can gauge the extent to which Rome lives as a concept purely by the truly astonishing fact that one might write of this concept without even mentioning Rome’s life as a comune, its inhabitants, or its day-to-day realities − in other words, without mentioning the history of Rome as a city. When we speak of the city stricto sensu, we are clearly underlining the fact that Rome has a more commonplace historical relevance that exists alongside the concept of the capital and of the universal powers − the Empire and the papacy − established there. The word ‘Rome’ is often synonymous with these powers. And unfortunately for the city, it is measured against that concept; this separation between idea and reality would be unthinkable in the case of other cities, even Florence or Venice. Moreover, not content with measuring Rome in its current reality against its former grandeur, we judge the Romans of every era by comparing them with ancient Roman consuls, martyrs and Renaissance artists. The activities of the pickpockets operating on the 64 bus route are contrasted with the military discipline of ancient times. Any broken water pipes in front of a hotel are pointed out with derision and prompt vague memories of the Ancient Roman system of aqueducts. In this sense, too, the past has a strong presence in Rome. It might even overwhelm the city’s contemporary inhabitants, without the safeguard of their natural temperament. Emperors, kings and presidents all pass through the city under the untroubled gaze of the modern-day Romans, who observe these coming and goings secure in the knowledge that they themselves are there to stay.

BETWEEN EUROPEAN AND UNIVERSAL MEMORIES Are there any narratives that clearly present Rome as a universal reference point in the history and collective memory of Europe? Is there a European memory of Rome that is more than the sum of national memories? And if this is the case, can we determine whether such a concept of Rome is only active in the minds of Humanists and historians, or whether it has been assimilated by the general public? In other words, can we discover whether it has penetrated the collective memory? We begin with another episode where the notion of grandeur is conveyed in simple terms. A medieval chronicle written by Dudo of Saint-Quentin recounts an event that took place in the year 860 CE. A Viking chieftain, having advanced into the Mediterranean with his longships, conquered the little town of Luni, near Pisa, in the belief that he had actually seized Rome, the capital of the world – ‘ratus cepisse Romam caput mundi’. This astounding story is poignant rather than ridiculous – how had that barbarian pictured Rome in his mind’s eye? What nebulous, fragmented images had formed his notion of the Urbs, leading him to mistake a run-down provincial town for the great city? Perhaps he had been told, while pillaging Hamburg, for example, that it was the ‘Rome of the North’. Then again, perhaps the mere sight of Luni’s amphitheatre had been enough to convince him; it would certainly have been the first time in his life that he had set eyes on such a monumental vision – this must be none other than Rome itself!

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And that is what we expect of Rome. It is a concept born of the soul, rather than the brain; before we have any sight or knowledge of the city, we can conjure up images of Rome simply by uttering its name. We are also looking for the traces of these rudimentary representations when we examine the grandiose phrases formulated to describe Rome, which are far greater in number than those applied to any other city, regardless of the subject involved. In this way, Rome’s monumental quality is reflected in the words: ‘Roma quanta fuit, ipsa ruina docet’ – ‘How great Rome was, its very ruins tell.’ One might tell oneself that this is simply ‘poets’ talk’, but it is not the case here. The fact that the monumental ruins can be equated with Rome’s former greatness (quanta fuit) is specific to the city and not at all self-evident. Thucydides, for instance, said of Sparta that if that city were to be abandoned, its remaining temples and buildings would give no indication of how mighty it had once been (1.10. 2). In other words, ‘Sparta quanta fuit’ holds no meaning, whereas ‘Roma quanta fuit’ does. It was Rome’s pagan monuments that enabled the Christian Middle Ages to ensure that the city maintained a high profile. Rome has inspired more imposing phrases of this type and more poetic statements than any other historical entity. These have reflected its supra-temporal character (‘Quando cadet Roma, cadet et mundus’ – ‘When Rome falls, so shall the world’): its uniqueness (‘Par tibi, Roma, nihil’ – ‘nothing can equal Rome’); its exemplarity (as the quintessential Urbs); its authority (‘Roma locuta causa finita’ – ‘Rome has spoken, the case is closed’); its global supremacy (‘Roma caput mundi’ – ‘Rome, capital of the world’); its status as a replica of the world (‘Rome was all the world, and all the world is Rome’ – Joachim du Bellay), in addition to other attributes. These sayings immediately place Rome in a class of its own, and one of them alone would be enough to convey an idea of immeasurable greatness to any barbarian. Rome is more than a European realm of memory here; it is a global, universal realm of memory, just as it had been when the world and Europe were still one and the same. Rome has continued to be this universal reference point, transcending any ordinary national or European dimension. It is a focal point or ‘creature’ of the world, as seen by the German historian Ferdinand Gregorovius (1821–91), who also wrote that the city was enough to make one ‘more philosophical than a hundred winter evenings spent reading Aristotle’. No one who embarks on a study of Rome can fail to note its universal dimension. In his Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud chose the example of Rome’s accumulated strata of ancient remains in order to illustrate the layers of memories buried within the human mind − everything that is ‘past in mental life’. Citing several topographic features in the city, he demonstrates ‘that in mental life nothing which has once been formed can perish – that everything is somehow preserved’. Rome has only ever inspired lofty comparisons and only appears as a reference in grand statements. Both Venice and Constantinople, for example, have been presented as a ‘Second Rome’, the ‘Third’ being Moscow. Moreover, as well as conferring legitimacy, Rome spreads her favours evenly. She provided emperors with arguments against popes, and popes with arguments against emperors, at the

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same time offering emperors arguments against municipalities, and so forth. One might have aligned oneself with Caesar or, equally, with his assassins, with triedand-tested traditions or with the Gracchi brothers and their reforms; those with yet more radical tendencies could even champion Spartacus. The concept of Rome is like a huge storage chest; the items it contains are taken out one by one, each serving the needs of different eras. For in Rome’s case, all conclusions are possible, and anything may be said. The historian Alexander Demandt wondered what history would have lacked and how it would have evolved if Rome had never existed, or if it had merely been a commonplace Etruscan or Celtic city. There would have been no Roman Empire, no Latin as a universal language, no Roman Gaul and no Pontius Pilate.

MULTIPLE APPROPRIATIONS Once a common denominator has emerged, it is interesting to note any divergences. Each European nation has always considered its own relationship with Rome as exceptional and consequently taken a defensive stance against its neighbours. This was particularly evident during the nineteenth century. Some saw themselves as the only worthy heirs to the concept of empire, others as the only genuine inheritors of political ingenium. ‘Ah, but we are the true interpreters of Roman culture!’ cried others, whose claims were challenged in turn by those of ‘the elder daughter of the Church’, the list goes on. All things considered, experiences of the city were also objectively dissimilar. The French were cardinals in Renaissance Rome, whereas the Germans were bakers, and the image of Rome forged from the humanist perspective was already substantially different from that of the pilgrims. And then came the Reformation! At first sight, it might appear that Europe itself was split in two by this movement, insofar as only the Catholic half continued to look to Rome. Yet this was only the case in matters of ecclesiastical authority, for the image of the city itself rose far above such divisions. Even controversies over Rome involved references to it − after all, what would the Protestantism of former times have been without the existential need to grapple with Rome, as well as the resulting satisfaction? Indeed, we might ask ourselves why Protestant historians have been so drawn to the history of the papacy. While they have certainly maintained a critical distance in their writings, they have expressed the greatest respect for its historical dimension, not contenting themselves with a denominational perspective. Leopold von Ranke’s History of the Popes is proof enough of this. The Archives of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith have recently been opened, enabling us to note that in 1838 one of the authorities on pontifical censorship advised against including Ranke in the Index librorum prohibitorum. The reason for this was the Protestant historian’s approach to his history of the papacy, which was less polemical in spirit than that of certain French or Italian – and therefore Catholic − historians of that time. In this way, the broad basis of Europe’s shared attitudes to Rome certainly includes distinctively national, denominational and cultural features. Moreover, the various historical periods have had their own specific ways of being close to the city or

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distanced from it, as the case may be. The feeling of being unable to disregard Rome seems to have become relatively weaker in the eighteenth century, for example. Papal Rome, which had long since lost its importance, became a target during the Age of Enlightenment; as the epicentre of a clerical State, it was the focus of scorn in modern theories of nationhood. It is true that Montesquieu’s Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence and Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire both date from the eighteenth century. Yet the former is much more of a treatise on the principles of historical developments using the example of Roman history than a history of Rome itself, while the latter already effectively belonged to a new era and became a model for future generations of historians. Once he had arrived in Rome, the archaeologist and art historian Johann Winckelmann lost all desire to live elsewhere, even if it meant converting to Catholicism – yet, through the city, he was already glimpsing signs of Classical Greece. Although the ancient ruins continued to create their majestic impression, the eighteenth century, unlike other eras, found fewer things in Rome to inspire admiration and memories. Conversely, the nineteenth century developed another perception of Rome – quite literally, in fact. This was demonstrated by the new gaze that painters brought to bear on the city and its surrounding rural areas. The first examples of such works were produced by late eighteenth-century English and French artists, with Germans and Scandinavians then following suit. Gone were the Rococo-style shepherds, while sombre clouds now filled the Roman skies. Images of country folk dancing merrily gave way to scenes showing agricultural labourers sweating with exertion as they toiled. Another change occurred through an explicitly analytical historiographic approach that produced a different image of Rome. Dilettantism was increasingly marginalized and the history of ancient Rome was no longer seen as that of the archetypal fallen empire; instead, much greater emphasis was placed on the interest it presented as an object of scientific investigation. These studies covered areas such as agrarian and fiscal systems and social structure – all far removed from literary themes. From then on, Rome seemed a legitimate location to establish precisely this type of research institute, another shared European idea.

REINVENTIONS OF ROME The nineteenth century also witnessed a yet more momentous occurrence in the form of a change to Rome itself, which acquired a new political status by becoming the capital of a unified Italy in 1870. This prompted unparalleled advancements in social and urban modernization. However, Rome’s new political role was not designed to reinforce her position as a reference point for Europe. It was primarily the Italianization of Rome through the nationalist movement (and later through fascism) that caused the city to become detached from the intellectual fabric of Europe − not intentionally but in practice. The very fact that modern Rome was now raising her voice was unusual and unsettling for non-Italians, most of whom still saw the city in terms of its past. Who would have said such a thing as ‘Rome or Death’ before that time? In 1870, once the country had accomplished its national

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mission and Rome had been established as the capital of a unified Italy, the German historian Theodor Mommsen put his famous question to the Italian politician Quintino Sella: ‘And what are your intentions for Rome now? One cannot remain in Rome without some cosmopolitan project.’ In this way, he was reminding Italians, who had just ‘de-papalized’ and nationalized Rome, that nobody, not even they, could appropriate the city quite so easily. In other words, he was emphasizing the need for Italians to continue ensuring that Rome remained a European − even a universal − realm of memory. When historians are working on similar themes, they are generally asked to specify the focus of their research; is it the Florence of the Renaissance or the Spain of the Age of Discovery? This is not the case with Rome. There is no need for particular details. It is not the historian who makes something of Rome, but Rome that makes something of the historian. What is genuinely eternal about the eternal city? It must surely be the fact that Rome, having headed a vast empire that created the foundations of several European countries, was able to rise again after her fall and achieve a different but equally dominant status as the head of another universal realm – that of the Church. But equally, it is the fact that the city reclaimed her role as the cultural and artistic hub of Europe after the Middle Ages, generating such unforgettable creative impulses and endowing the continent with her own inexhaustible vitality.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Esch, Arnold, Wiederverwendung von Antike im Mittelalter. Die Sicht des Archäologen und die Sicht des Historikers, Berlin, De Gruyter, 2005. Freud, Sigmund, Civilization and Its Discontents, translated from the German by James Strachey, New York, W.W. Norton and Company, 1962 [1930]. Fumaroli, Marc, Rome dans la mémoire et l’imagination de l’Europe, Rome, Unione internazionale degli Istituti di archeologia, storia e storia dell’arte in Roma, 1997. Giardina, Andrea and André Vauchez, Il mito di Roma. Da Carlo Magno a Mussolini, Rome and Bari, Laterza, 2000. Kasper, Walter, ‘Rom’, in Christoph Markschies and Hubert Wolf (Eds.), Erinnerungsorte des Christentums, Munich, C.H. Beck, 2010. Matheus, Michael, ‘Rom’, in Pim den Boer, Heinz Duchhardt, Georg Kreis and Wolfgang Schmale (Eds.), Europäische Erinnerungsorte, Munich, Oldenbourg, 2012, pp. 263–79. Vian, Paolo (Ed.), Speculum mundi. Roma centro internazionale di ricerche umanistiche, Rome, Unione internazionale degli Istituti di archeologia, storia e storia dell’arte in Roma, 1992.

CHAPTER 36

Europe The promise of law MICHAEL STOLLEIS

The particular attention accorded to law is a distinctive feature of European history. The rules and principles developed here have resulted in a collection of wide-ranging laws and the establishment of constitutions intended to safeguard them. In this way, the promise of law is surely the quintessence of Europe’s legal heritage. Constantly interpreted and applied from its earliest origins, the law has put its stamp on Europe. Priests, philosophers and jurists developed and drew up rules, precepts and principles of ‘justice’, making decisions in real-life cases that gradually gave rise to legal codes and texts. Individuals and their families, peoples and entire states have fought for their ‘rights’. The basic principles for the defence of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen were formulated on European soil, as was the case with the constitutions instituted in the latter half of the eighteenth century in order to safeguard them. This range of laws pertaining to all human beings regardless of locality or era has now become universal and forms part of the European heritage, in the broad sense. While all other cultures have certainly developed rules to govern community life by establishing themselves within a more general religious and ethical context, Europe remains unique in its specific focus on law. This is clearly demonstrated through a comparison between Europe’s history, culture and legal systems and those of the rest of the world.

THE LETTER OF THE LAW Europe has always perceived itself as a homogenous intellectual entity, an approach that transcends the diversity of its population and languages, and the many wars and peace treaties that have punctuated its history. Throughout the Middle Ages, the worlds of Latin and Greek Christianity were viewed as a unit that took the form of an ellipse, one focal point being Eastern Rome (Constantinople) and the other, Western Rome (Rome itself). The Eastern Roman Empire fell when Constantinople was conquered by the Ottomans in the mid-fifteenth century. The Latin West then regrouped, essentially comprising those countries shaped by the Roman Catholic

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Church, including England, the Scandinavian and Baltic countries, Poland and Lithuania, together with the south-eastern belt extending from Hungary to the Balkans. Likewise the Tsarist and Orthodox Christian Russian Empire was also included, excluding its Siberian and Asian territories. This ever-changing part of the world, characterized by its many and varied languages, cultures, dynastic loyalties and religions, has viewed itself as a ‘legal space’ based on written laws, on adherence to those laws and on rationality since the Age of Antiquity. The fundamental principles of law were engraved in stone or metal, as was the case in the ancient Middle East under Hammurabi (1792–1750 BCE) and with the ancient Jewish Decalogue, which dates from around the seventh century BCE. Being readable and transmittable, they generated a tradition. This was also the case with the Athenian laws of Solon (594 BCE), the law code of the Cretan city of Gortyn (500–450 BCE) and principally with the legendary Law of the Twelve Tables (451–450 BCE); despite the uncertainties relating to their text, they mark the origins of Roman law, whose influence has extended worldwide. This focus on written text correlates with the notion that the ‘word’ set down by authority is a key aspect of any directive. However obscure that ‘word’ might be, and however often it has required interpreting, the ‘word’ as used in a juridical context expresses an objective based on normative beliefs linked to language. It is of little importance whether the directive was issued by a deity, by a human being acting on behalf of that deity or by an earthly authority of some kind. What matters above all is that it should be expressed and transmitted – this implies that it will be respected, the very definition of the legalistic perspective. Arbitrary acts committed outside the law are consequently proscribed. All those who seek to commit a transgression of the law or to interpret it differently are required to ‘argue’ their case. These are the premises that form the foundation of juridical structures and codes, and of the rational approach intrinsic to juridical thinking.

THE THREE ‘MIRACLES’ OF THE MIDDLE AGES In order to clarify the role played by the law in Europe, it is important to note that the intellectual legacy of the Age of Antiquity was appropriated in a series of movements during the Middle Ages and the Modern Era. The first of these occurred during the ‘Carolingian Renaissance’, when the imperial status, titles and legislative activity of the Roman principate were adopted and the early texts of the ancient corpus were revived. The eleventh and twelfth centuries were characterized by a second, much more intense movement. During this period, the Emperor Frederick I (also known as Frederick Barbarossa) used Roman law to consolidate his power, granting privileges to the centre for legal studies in Bologna (1158) and thereby initiating what we might call the first ‘miracle’ of the twelfth century: a flourishing, shared European legal culture. Following the establishment of these law schools in Bologna and Pavia, the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries saw the inauguration of similar schools in Padua, Naples, Montpellier, Avignon, Toulouse, Salamanca, Valladolid, Lérida, Coimbra,

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Krakow, Vienna, Pécs, Heidelberg and Cologne, to name only the most important. This open, mobile training process resulted in a network of European ‘jurists’ − in other words, a specific professional body that transmitted specialized knowledge with more exacting requirements. These legal experts were no longer products of ecclesiastical monastic or cathedral schools; they now had their own faculties in universities endowed with privileges where one could also study elements of rhetoric and philosophy, and gain qualifications as a notary, a lawyer or a diplomat. This initial ‘miracle’ was based on a tradition never entirely disrupted during the wave of invasions and the early Middle Ages. It was apparent not only in the ‘legislation’ of the Germanic tribes which had become integrated into the Roman Empire (the Leges Barbarorum) but also in several annotated fragments belonging to the juridical tradition of ancient times. However, with the burgeoning urban growth, the expansion of long-distance trade and the increasing legalization of society also occurring during this period, more was required. The texts forming the Digest (a compendium of legal decisions made by ancient Roman jurists that had been all but lost) were gradually rediscovered in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, a fortunate development of historic global significance in this context. This collection of writings first re-emerged in southern Italy; it was later brought to Pisa and finally, in 1406, to Florence, where it is now held in the Laurentian Library as the Codex Florentinus and is regarded as a genuine treasure. The main part of the voluminous body of texts drawn from the ancient Roman juridical writings of the later Republican period and the Empire had now been recovered. This codex was created by the Emperor Justinian I, who reigned in Constantinople from 527 to 565 CE. Between 529 and 534 CE, he had the ancient imperial decrees and accompanying legal decisions (in the form of constitutiones, edicts, mandates and rulings) brought together in the Codex Iustinianus. A commission then compiled the principal citations (numbering around 10,000) relating to about 2,000 legal texts from the Classical period and arranged them in order. In this way, a comprehensive work comprising fifty books was created with astonishing speed; known as the Digest, it came into use towards the end of 533 CE. A short textbook, the Institutes, was later added to the Codex and the Digest, and was intended to introduce students to Roman law. The juridical space was therefore essentially complete; once its operations had been reactivated in northern Italy, it went on to play a key role in world history and became the foundation for the European conception of law. The second ‘miracle’ also occurred in Bologna in the twelfth century. The early days of Christianity had witnessed an accumulation of conciliar decrees, papal decisions, dogmatic texts and collections of canonical writings. In 1139, a similar compilation project was undertaken, this time by a cleric named Gratian. On his own initiative, he brought together all these early works to create a collection of around 4,000 legal texts accompanied by commentaries. The Decretum Gratiani, which bears his name, begins by defining the religious sources of law and goes on to deal with questions involving the law of persons, of ecclesiastical administration, procedural, patrimonial, monastic and matrimonial law, as well as criminal law and the law of public penance. The last section of the work, entitled De consecratione,

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is a treatise on the sacraments. Although this collection was compiled in a private capacity, it soon acquired the force of law. As was the case with Roman law, it became the focus of academic studies conducted by the following generations of ‘canonists’ and ‘decretalists’ and was later analysed and developed in various treatises. New compilations subsequently appeared, and in 1582 all the elements were finally integrated into a comprehensive work entitled the Corpus Iuris Canonici, which remained in force until 1917. The Corpus iuris civilis and the Corpus iuris canonici − the Romano-Italian ‘Body of Civil Law’ and ‘Body of Canon Law’ − intermingled in subtle ways. Procedural and criminal law originated from canon law; this transformed secular trials and established the idea of individual responsibility (deriving from the notion of transgression), while canon law adopted the concepts and system of general law. Despite the gradual separation of spiritual and temporal powers that began in the eleventh century, the two sides remained closely connected, the secular and ecclesiastical worlds being regarded as complementary. The power structure of the church, its financial system and above all its legislative power, all served as models for the secular states emerging in ‘Latin’ Europe. The parallel pathways followed by canon law and ‘general’ Roman law drew even closer together as both were applied in practice, a mutually enriching process that also helped them to adapt to new economic circumstances. This movement continued for almost seven centuries, only losing its dynamism in the nineteenth century; this was partly due to the rise of nationalism and the establishment of national civil codes, and partly to the church’s loss of worldly power through the processes of secularization that began to occur circa 1800. All nation states, whether old or new, then established their own civil and criminal codes, their own judicial systems, their codes of procedure and of commerce, their own systems of company, insurance and industrial law. The ancient foundations of general law were chiefly preserved through the civil codes, although they were organized on a new, systematic basis. Even now, these codes still bear traces of the structures and regulatory methods of the ancient law originating from Rome. The third ‘miracle’ of the Middle Ages occurred with the re-appropriation of Classical philosophy, particularly that of Aristotle, acclaimed by Saint Thomas Aquinas and the scholastics as the quintessential philosopher. His Politics, which dates back to the fourth century BCE, was translated into Latin by William of Moerbeke (ca. 1215–1286). As well as being the most widely taught and analysed work on political theory, this was the text most frequently adapted to the new circumstances prevailing in the Middle Ages and the Modern Period. It formed part of the basic university curriculum, including that of legal specialists, and was invested with new force by Protestant states through the Neo-Aristotelianism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Thanks to Aristotle’s Politics and the many commentaries devoted to it, the whole of Europe learned to distinguish between good and bad types of regime, to perceive the benefits of a ‘mixed’ constitution and to define ‘good governance’ and the ‘common good’ as the purpose of political communities − in all, to examine the various ills connected with statehood and their possible remedies. This work, together with all the ancient literature on the subject of the state, beginning with Cicero and Tacitus, and in addition to those elements of

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Roman law relating to public law, provide us with an overview of the questions then dominating European politico-juridical thought: How is a state created? How does it acquire legitimacy? What is the best constitution? What is sovereignty and who has state authority? What are the conditions pertaining to the state? Who holds the legislative power? Who has the right to raise taxes and for what purposes? This European, trans-denominational debate achieved something that was to prove essential to the understanding of all Europeans: a consensus on the elementary principles of a scientific approach, on the juridical foundations of a legitimate authority and on its limitations, being subject to superior norms including the (controversial) right to resist a sovereign acting illegitimately. Without this now obvious link between authority and the law, the constitutional movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would have been unthinkable. Without the ancient theory of mixed types of state (respublica mixta) and without the regular experience of the principle of ‘rex regnat, sed non gubernat’, in practice since the sixteenth century, neither the separation of government and administration nor the modern doctrine of the separation of powers would have been accepted. Without the experience of centuries of self-governing within corporations or municipalities, there would have been no modern democracy. ‘Quod omnes tangit, ab omnibus approbari debetur’ (‘What concerns everyone should be approved by everyone’) was one of the principles of medieval times. The idea that the people should be the supreme source of legitimacy was formulated in the fourteenth century by Marsilus of Padua. We should certainly take care to avoid seeing these premises in terms of the modern principle of democracy and of popular sovereignty; nevertheless, they are the source of the currents of thought that subsequently established themselves and have made their mark throughout history, in quite different contexts.

THE BIRTH OF UNIVERSAL PUBLIC LAW Natural law and the law of nations (ius naturale, ius gentium Europaeum) developed throughout Europe from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Drawing on Aristotle’s works and Roman and medieval law, they accompanied the birth of the modern state as a rational theory of law applicable to every community. They gradually gave rise to a ius publicum universale, later to be known as the ‘general theory of the State’ and finally as ‘(European) constitutional theory’. In this way, they prepared the ground for the organization of power relations within a state (chiefly through the invention of an imaginary contract linking those in power to their subjects) and for the clarification of the rights and duties of individuals and sovereigns alike. Basic democratic principles, the rights of man and of the citizen marking the distance between the individual and state authority, the balance and controls in force that alter certain functions of the state – all these figures of thought characterizing the modern constitutional state result from a tradition that dates back to ancient times. The debates over these issues followed a genuinely European process. From Saint Thomas Aquinas and Marsilus of Padua, Thomas More and Machiavelli, Jean Bodin, Johannes Althusius, Thomas Hobbes, Samuel von Pufendorf, John Locke and JeanJacques Rousseau to the political thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,

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all the leading theoreticians created endless variations on this basis, each taking the political situation of their own era as their starting point. The earliest expressions of this include the great constitutional documents of the Middle Ages: the Magna Carta of 1215 and the Golden Bull of 1356. For this reason, they are included in UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register. The state has certainly taken multiple forms in Europe, with as many different historical variations as there are landscapes, regions and languages. Europe has experienced centralized and federal states, parliamentary and presidential regimes, direct and representative democracies, monarchies and republics. These variations are the result of a long progression from Saint Augustine’s imaginary Civitas Dei (City of God) to secular government, through the medieval period with the close connection between church and state. Legislation has been the essential instrument of the state since the sixteenth century; the omnipotence of God gave way to the legislative omnipotence of the sovereign, who was nonetheless bound by its fundamental laws. In its modern form, it is known as a constitutional state. This progression, which is astonishing from a historical viewpoint, gave rise to what one might call ‘general European constitutional law’. It was underpinned by a theoretical and practical consensus on the basic elements of a constitution. The aim was to form parliamentary democracies, founded on a liberal electoral law, which would also be constitutional states with independent judges and would provide effective human and civil rights guarantees. These states sought to organize their functions so that they operated along both horizontal and vertical axes, thereby avoiding abuses of power. All the functions of the state were to be carried out ‘publicly’. Minority groups were to secure particular guarantees and all citizens were to enjoy a minimum of economic equality and protection against the vicissitudes of life. These were the premises that directed the development of the future European legal and constitutional systems.

GENERAL EUROPEAN LAW To a certain extent, therefore, the three aforementioned ‘miracles’ of the Middle Ages can be seen as a single phenomenon comprising mutually supportive elements. The juridical science that began to emerge from the Roman law texts in the twelfth century left its mark mainly on private law. The ‘general law’ resulting from this was set out in national civil codes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They could never have been established without the solutions prescribed and developed over the preceding centuries in order to settle the type of conflicts characteristic of civil law. This enables a comparison to be made between the legal systems now operating in Europe and all the processes directed towards the harmonization of European law, an endeavour justified on both political and economic grounds. Everything suggests that it will be some time before complete ‘juridical unity’ can be achieved in Europe, at least as long as it remains a specific type of body comprising political groups, whose various states retain their essential legislative powers. Europe has always preserved its unity and diversity, including that of its legal systems.

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The ‘trinity’ supporting ‘Latin’ Europe – Roman law, canon law and the theory of the state – should not be seen as a force that suppressed or constrained every specific local law. This was far from being the case, as the Europe of the Middle Ages and the Modern Period was always ‘multi-normative’. Over the centuries, several layers were added to the ancient, traditional juridical customs (known as ‘customary law’) that were transmitted orally. One example of this is feudal law, established on pledges of protection, military aid and land allocation. It retained its function until the emergence of mercenary armies in the fifteenth century, but was then transformed into a system akin to property law. A large number of municipal and regional laws likewise coexisted. Moreover, the structuring of society into ‘estates’ characteristic of this period involved the establishment of laws specific to each category, with canon law for the clergy and commercial and corporation laws for traders and artisans, respectively. From the fifteenth century, the directives issued by the authorities with a view to ensuring ‘good order’ extended to the towns and rural areas. These dictates regulated community existence in general, echoing the Aristotelian concept of a ‘good life’. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they amalgamated to become comprehensive public order regulations, vast numbers of which were produced between that period and the late eighteenth century. This ‘multi-normativity’ naturally gave rise to significant problems, chiefly due to jurisdictional competition. Each judge had to consider the profession and affiliation of the individual involved, the authority of the particular court and the nature, in practical terms, of the law to be applied. Which of the numerous laws in force should take precedence and which (in the case of a flaw) should be seen as subsidiary? Initially, local law was generally regarded as paramount − which naturally had to be demonstrated − with Roman law given secondary status. However, this situation was reversed through the gradual establishment of a system that introduced learned judges trained in Roman law. From then on, it was largely assumed that ‘general’ Roman law would prevail, although it could be rendered inactive by proof of the existence of specific local laws. While it is true that secular ‘general law’ is specific to Europe, it is also the case with canon law. Its distinction from secular law, established from the very outset, played a crucial role in developing the modern conception of the separation of church and state, leading to the basic right to individual and collective freedom of belief. Although each European nation has established its own specific version of separation between church and state, it is a commonly held view that the secular and religious powers belong to different spheres and have different forms of legitimacy. However, the Orthodox Churches of Russia, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Greece and Syria, which all originated from the ‘Eastern Rome’ of the Byzantine Empire, took another approach and are characterized by more marked interconnections between church and state. ‘Roman’ religious law was generally more centralized. The legislative power of the papacy was strengthened in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, so that ‘Rome’ had its own central regulatory authority, enabling it to maintain control over the various dioceses and to direct specific developments. Disputes were settled by the Rota Romana tribunal. And in 1582, once the Correctores Romani had prepared

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and established the administrative aspects of the central core of the Corpus iuris canonici, the papacy reached an advanced stage in the codification process ahead of all secular states and powers. Modern public law, understood as a combination of constitutional law, the general theory of the state, natural law and the law of persons, then proceeded to develop from different sources. While it originated from the ancient legacy of Roman law and from Graeco-Roman conceptions of the state, it also regulated power relations within the various European countries. In this way, it gave rise to specific institutions such as parliaments and sovereign courts, together with specific ‘fundamental laws’ that anticipated the future constitutions of nation states. These form the basis of the current ‘European Constitution’, as defined in the Maastricht and Lisbon Treaties. Although its political prospects are now clouded by much uncertainty, and whatever the future may hold, its fundamental constitutional principles remain rooted both in Roman and canon law and in the political philosophy of the Age of Antiquity, the medieval period and the Modern Era.

‘COMMON LAW’: THE ENGLISH LEGAL TRADITION The account that has just been given applies to Continental Europe, whose shared juridical culture arose mainly from Roman law. For several reasons, England (but not Scotland), Scandinavia, Russia and the Western provinces of the Ottoman Empire remained outside the influence of the Roman Ius commune. Nevertheless, due to various factors, these countries still formed part of European juridical culture. Diligent escholiers (students) attended the classes held throughout Europe in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period. There were no admission quotas and no linguistic obstacles, as all the teaching was done in Latin. If only for this reason, the knowledge of legal matters acquired in the various regions of the continent eventually became amalgamated, even though these areas themselves developed different judicial systems. Local law, preserved in collections of legal decisions and codes, was applied whenever the courts were presided over by prominent local figures outside the profession, rather than ‘scholarly’ judges trained in Roman law. In other countries, particularly in England, a specific justice and judicial training system developed after the Norman Conquest of 1066. County, manorial, city and borough courts coexisted with ecclesiastical courts during the Middle Ages. As royal power developed, three central courts were established: the Court of Exchequer, the Court of Common Pleas and the Court of King’s Bench, whose decisions shaped the ‘common law’ that remains in force in England to this day. This varied collection of laws was first set in order by twelfth- and thirteenth-century legal experts (Ranulf Glanvill and Henry of Bracton) in their pioneering texts, and was later subject to the approval of Parliament. The latter also introduced statute law in the thirteenth century, so that judicial and legislative law-making now coexisted. When solutions were not available through the common-law courts, the shortfall in legal protection was remedied by a separate body − the Court of Chancery − headed by the Lord Chancellor and based on the principle of equity. Here, as with the other royal tribunals, learned judges also receptive to Roman law were

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to be found in increasingly large numbers. The barristers, a powerful, structured group of specialist advocates, were also responsible for training apprentice jurists; however, they presented an obstacle to the ‘scientification’ and ‘nationalization’ of the justice system, processes that were developing on the continent. During the power struggle that pitted the king against Parliament in the seventeenth century, the majority of barristers sided with Parliament, thereby championing common law. The four works by Sir Edward Coke, Institutes of the Laws of England (1628, 1641), played a major role in this regard. Subsequently, in the eighteenth century, England boasted a coherent legal system based on common law, best demonstrated by Sir William Blackstone (1723–80) through his Commentaries on the Laws of England, which appeared in four volumes from 1765 to 1769. The teaching of English law in universities developed on this basis and the system later extended to the Commonwealth and the United States, following a process similar to the propagation of Roman law. Common law, which now forms the largest ‘legal family’ in the modern world, therefore originated as a legal system specific to England as an island nation. Yet it is unquestionably part of Western European law, by dint of its connection to ItaloRoman law (particularly through the canon law of the medieval Church), coupled with the fact that that it developed its own process of ‘scientification’ similar to that of Continental Europe. England, in turn, has made a crucial contribution to European constitutional thought. A long succession of major documents (Magna Carta Libertatum, 1215, the Petition of Right, 1628, the Habeas Corpus Act, 1679 and the Bill of Rights, 1689) led to the core European and American constitutional texts, and thence to the European tradition of human rights. In the same way, the works of political theoreticians such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill played a key role in European debates over the construction and limitations of state power, the political community and freedom. Viewed as a whole, therefore, the European legal and constitutional space together with the Commonwealth, its tradition of common law and its vital contributions to reflections on the state form a historic entity whose constituent elements are closely intertwined. With the emergence of America as a world power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Anglo-American law became a global legal system in its turn, as had been the case with Ancient Roman law. Between the twelfth and twentieth centuries, Italo-Roman law shaped the development of the legal systems operating in Continental European nation states, expanding its influence throughout the world in its own way, through transference and appropriation.

EUROPE: A ‘LEGAL SPACE’ Over 2,000 years separate these early beginnings from the legal systems of the present day. Descriptions of Europe as a ‘legal space’ or a ‘legal community’ are both declarations of a claim and assertions of legitimacy, in three respects. When the construction of the European institutions began in 1947, the first aim was to create a shared space based on human rights. The Universal Declaration of

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Human Rights was adopted by the then newly formed United Nations, which had been founded in Paris on 10 December 1948; this was followed by the European Convention on Human Rights and the foundation of the Council of Europe and the European Court of Justice (in 1950 and 1952). In this way, as a legal space, Europe assimilated its ancient ethical and juridical heritage; having undergone wars, genocides and expulsions, it was to be established and taught as a new version of the ‘Tables of the Law’. In his speech in Zurich on 19 September 1946, Churchill called for a ‘United States of Europe’, excluding Britain and the Soviet Union. The one immediately accessible aim relating to this vision was based on economic cooperation. This began with the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), which was followed by Euratom and finally by the establishment of the European Economic Community through the Treaty of Rome in 1957. For decades, Europe’s activities as a ‘legal community’ were confined to the exercise of Community law, trade in goods and services, and later to the introduction of a single currency and the abolition of border controls, at least in the ‘core’ of Europe. Shortly afterwards, further expansion occurred at a political level with the creation of the European Union. The process, which was demarcated by the Treaties of Maastricht (1993) and Lisbon (2009), gave the organization its ‘constitutional’ character. The concept of Europe as a ‘legal space’ has therefore been central to the construction of the European institutions. Since the European Court of Human Rights began operating on a full-time basis in the 1990s, and following the wave of refugee arrivals from 2014 to 2017, the link between European law and human rights has regained its pre-eminence, resulting in certain tensions regarding European economic and social interests. In this way, Europe is an economic space, a political entity and a champion of human rights. None of these aspects can be viewed in isolation, and this is the crux of the issues faced today. There is also a third way of considering the expression ‘a legal space’ as applied to Europe. This involves the notion of reinstating the all but submerged Ius commune, championed by legal historians and specialists in comparative and economic law − in other words, of reviving the ‘general law’ that served as a foundation and a historical starting point for most European states.

LAW AS A FOUNDATION It is no coincidence that this third aspect has preoccupied legal historians and inspired different publication and research projects since the late 1940s. During that period, the European Ius commune was seen both as an essential means of activating Europe’s intellectual reconstruction and as an initial step towards achieving the aim of juridical unity. Following the catastrophe of the two world wars, the Italo-Roman law of the Middle Ages and the Modern Era conveyed a vital message: Europe should amount to more than a network of nationalistic states beset by hatreds and self-destructive tendencies. The continent was considered fortunate in possessing the precious legacy of a pre-national system of general law; this had to be reclaimed,

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updated and used for the construction of a new Europe. From the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries, the countries of Europe had shared a juridical culture based on rationality whose principles ensured homogeneity. At the same time, after the Second World War traditional canonistic thought experienced something of a renaissance, boosted by an atmosphere particularly favourable to the church. Indeed, the canon law of the Catholic Church was the perfect counterpart to Roman law. It applied to all Catholics in the domains of matrimonial, patrimonial and procedural law, and in relation to punishments decreed by the church. It left its imprint on everyday life from Norway to Sicily and from Poland to Spain, forming a parallel European legal system that likewise contributed to forging closer connections between the countries of ‘Latin Europe’. It also encompassed England and was still used by the Lutheran and Calvinist churches in the sixteenth century, following the Reformation. The birth of the nation states in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries ruptured this complex European juridical world of general and canon law. States with fixed frontiers were established within the continent. Uncompromising on their sovereignty, they entrenched their borders, developed territorial administrations and fiscal frameworks and set about defining their own specific judicial systems and legal codes. All these codification processes were carried out in the languages of each nation concerned, such as Denmark (1683), Bavaria (1756), Prussia (1794), France (1804), the Habsburg Empire (1811), the German Empire (1900) and Switzerland (1912). The Catholic Church itself joined this codification movement and the Code of Canon Law was promulgated in 1917. Overall, the ‘scientification’ process of the nineteenth century bore its fruits; no other approach would have been possible while the bourgeoisie were in power. Yet it sounded the death-knell for European juridical unity based on ‘Roman law’. Consequently, Europe had to be or (re-)become a ‘legal community’ in the twentieth century. The goal was both to embed the various national economies within a new, shared juridical structure and to set the course for a general, enduring form of ‘law’ applicable to all member nations and comprising reliable institutions that would be unaffected by changing political winds. The vision of a European Constitution was already taking shape in the background. The legal systems operating within EU countries today are set out in voluminous collections of treaties and legal norms; procedures originating from the European Union are much in evidence, as are recurrent tensions between nation states and ‘Brussels’. The notion that this Union should, in the long term, build its own identity and merge into a federal state is a highly controversial one. Europe is currently experiencing a period of markedly inward-looking tendencies on the part of its nation states. Will the European Union manage to hold its own in a situation characterized by dominant non-European powers and the meteoric rise of globalization? And if it does, what means will it use to achieve this? We can be sure of one thing, at least; Europe cannot draw a line under two millennia of traditions forged by Roman and common law, and, should it ever be tempted to do so, it would come at the cost of its own destruction. It is impossible to dissociate debates over Europe’s future Constitution from its legal heritage.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Bogdandy, Armin von, Pedro Cruz Villalón and Peter Huber (Eds.), Handbuch Ius Publicum Europaeum, vol. 1, Heidelberg, C.F. Müller, 2007. Coing, Helmut, Europäisches Privatrecht 1500 bis 1800, 2 vols, Munich, C.H. Beck, 1985, 1989. Häberle, Peter and Markus Kotzur, Europäische Verfassungslehre, Baden-Baden, Nomos, 2016. Koschaker, Paul, Europa und das römische Recht, Munich, Biederstein, 1966 [1947]. Kuttner, Stephan, Repertorium der Kanonistik (1140–1234), Città del Vaticano, 1937. Landau, Peter, Europäische Rechtsgeschichte und kanonisches Recht im Mittelalter, Badenweiler, Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2013. Legendre, Pierre, L’Autre Bible de l’Occident: Le Monument romano-canonique. Étude sur l’architecture dogmatique des sociétés, Paris, Fayard, 2009. Stein, Peter, Römisches Recht und Europa. Die Geschichte einer Rechtskultur, Frankfurt am Main, Fischer, 1996. Wieacker, Franz, Privatrechtsgeschichte der Neuzeit, Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1967 [1952]. Zimmermann, Reinhard, Roman Law, Contemporary Law, European Law: The Civilian Tradition Today, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001.

CHAPTER 37

The three beacons Jerusalem, Athens and Rome ÉTIENNE FRANÇOIS

Europe’s story begins with Jerusalem, the sacred city, with Athens, the birthplace of democracy and with Rome, the seat of empire – together, they form its age-old foundations, steeped in mystique. ‘Jerusalem, Athens, Rome. The three harmonious cities’, wrote Victor Hugo in his book of observations, Choses vues, in 1867. To explain this initially surprising choice of adjective, he added: Three glowing beacons − Truth, Beauty, and Greatness − combine to form Perfection. One of these beacons shines forth from each of those three cities. All light radiates from them alone. Truth emanates from Jerusalem. [. . .] Beauty, from Athens and Greatness, from Rome. The ascent of humanity has been achieved through these three cities. Revered by all Europeans, they were long regarded as the true hub of the world. Jerusalem was placed in the centre of medieval world maps; Athens was the home of the Platonic Academy; Rome had its Umbilicus Urbis (literally the ‘navel of the city’), which was located in the Forum and marked the heart of the capital and the Empire, while the blessing Urbi et orbi (‘to the city and to the world’) is given by the pope each Easter and Christmas. The three cities clearly occupy a central position in the collective European imaginary and have therefore been the focus of continuous disputes over the centuries, with rival powers claiming them as exclusive possessions. This remains the case with Jerusalem − the extreme example − to this very day. It also explains why they continue to attract pilgrims, admirers and visitors from all over Europe and the rest of the world, keen to discover their roots and establish their presence there. Jerusalem is Judaism’s quintessential holy city; the site of two temples, it is also known as the City of David and the Daughter of Zion. It is the city of the Wailing Wall and of the yeshivas, in addition to being home to the largest ‘ultra-orthodox’ Jewish community, the haredim, while East Jerusalem contains half of the inhabitants of the Israeli settlements established in the Palestinian Territories. It is equally sacred in the eyes of Christians, as the scene of the Cleansing of the Temple by Jesus, of

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the Passion, the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. Established as one of the Five Patriarchates, it contains around forty Christian churches, most notably the church of the Holy Sepulchre. This was built in the early fourth century at the initiative of Saint Helena − mother of the Emperor Constantine − who discovered the Holy Cross. It is shared by Orthodox Christian communities − Greek, Coptic, Ethiopian and Syriac − as well as the Armenian Apostolic and Catholic churches. Muslims likewise consider the city of Jerusalem to be holy, as it was from there that the Prophet Mohammed journeyed to heaven. The rock from which he ascended is now marked by a shrine with a golden dome that was completed in the year 691 or 692 CE. Jerusalem also contains the Al-Aqsa mosque, built by the second Caliph, Umar, who conquered the city in 637. It is the third holiest city of Islam, after Mecca and Medina. Athens and Rome contain a large number of archaeological and research centres, most of which were established during the nineteenth century. The oldest of these is the French School at Athens, founded in 1846. Enduring sources of inspiration, these three cities are also notable for the extensive influence they have exerted over the whole of Europe. The layout of synagogue buildings was inspired by that of the temples in Jerusalem, just as the majority of Christian churches are set out in the form of a cross with their choirs facing Jerusalem, as reflections of the city of Christ’s Passion and Resurrection. Jerusalem is also the source of a great many venerated relics that are preserved in various sanctuaries, notably the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris. All of Europe’s cities have sought, at some point, to present themselves as a replica of one of those three. Vilnius was known as ‘the Jerusalem of the North’ prior to the Second World War, while Geneva became ‘the Protestant Rome’ following the Reformation and Edinburgh, in turn, was known as ‘the Athens of the North’ in the eighteenth century. Imitations of the Classical architecture of ancient Athens sprang up more or less everywhere during the neo-Classical period. Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, built between 1788 and 1791, was inspired by the propylaea in front of the Acropolis, while the Parthenon served as the model for the Walhalla, that imposing temple overlooking the Danube. Built between 1830 and 1842 as a memorial to leading figures in German history, it was commissioned by Ludwig I of Bavaria. Its architect, Leo von Klenze, also created the neo-Classical designs for the reconstruction of Athens, which had become the capital of the new kingdom of Greece after its liberation from Ottoman rule. The country’s new monarch, Otto I, whose father was Ludwig I of Bavaria, acceded to the throne in 1830. All the major cities of Europe have their own triumphal arches; the majority of these were based on the Arch of Titus, the Arch of Septimus Severus or the Arch of Constantine, all of which are in Rome. They also boast obelisks inspired by the Twelve Egyptian Obelisks of ancient Rome, domed churches modelled on the Pantheon and radial avenues extending outwards from a central square, in imitation of the Piazza del Popolo; this layout is found in Versailles and Saint Petersburg, for instance. Ironically, however, Washington is the finest illustration of a city whose urban design and architectural style reflects those of ancient Athens and Rome. Each of these three cities both inspired and produced countless artistic creations, a notable example being the sculptures from the Parthenon transported to London

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by Lord Elgin and now held in the British Museum. Works of this kind are regularly encountered in museums, together with the even larger quantities of reproductions and copies they hold. The influence of Jerusalem, Athens and Rome has extended throughout Europe. The objects of widespread admiration and reverence, these are the cities that played the most vital role in shaping and defining Europe; without them, it would be impossible to understand.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Boriaud, Jean-Yves, Histoire de Rome, Paris, Perrin, 2012. Elon, Amos, Jerusalem: City of Mirrors, Boston, Little, Brown & Company, 1989. Lemire, Vincent (Ed.), Jérusalem, histoire d’une ville-monde, Paris, Flammarion, 2016. Meier, Christian, Athen. Ein Neubeginn der Weltgeschichte, Berlin, Siedler, 1993. Tsiomis, Yannis, Athènes à soi-même étrangère. Naissance d’une capitale néoclassique, Marseille, Éditions Parenthèse, 2017. Vogel, Jakob, ‘Jerusalem: Zur spannungsreichen Topographie eines europäischchristlichen “Errinerungsorts” im 19. Jahrhundert’, in Kirstin Buchinger, Claire Gantet and Jakob Vogel (Eds.), Europäische Errinerungsräume, Frankfurt am Main, Campus, 2009, pp. 88–102.

CHAPTER 38

Islam Both foreign and integral to Europe JOHN TOLAN

Although the subject of Islam now provokes impassioned debates, Europeans are familiar with its religion and culture, which were brought to the continent through the Arab conquests of 711 CE and have been explored and studied here ever since. In the Middle Ages, Islam was regarded as a rival, and therefore dangerous monotheistic faith whose founder was a false prophet. Conversely, it was a focus of fascination in the Age of Enlightenment – indeed, Napoleon was described by Goethe as a ‘new Mahomet’. In 1916, Belgian historian Henri Pirenne was placed in a detention camp by the German military forces of occupation. In captivity, as Europe was torn asunder in the Great War, he reflected on the birth of Europe, which he placed not in classical Greece or Rome but much closer to home, in the Carolingian heartlands that straddled what were now Germany, France and the Low Countries. And the midwife of that birth, so to speak, the outside factor that made it possible, was Islam. By turning the Roman Mediterranean into a Muslim lake, by cutting Northern Europe off from commerce with the East and South, the Islamic conquests provoked the foundation of a new civilization based in Northern Europe. As he subsequently wrote in 1922: ‘Sans l’Islam, l’Empire franc n’aurait sans doute jamais existé, et Charlemagne, sans Mahomet, serait inconcevable.’ Over the past century, Pirenne’s thesis has been critiqued, nuanced and revised: he had exaggerated the importance of trade between Northern Europe and the pre-Islamic Eastern Mediterranean and underestimated the continued links between Latin Europe and the Muslim Mediterranean world. For some of these historians, Medieval European history is on the contrary a story of the gradual inclusion of Latin Europe into the wider oecumene centred around the Near East and the Mediterranean, facilitated by the trading of Italian merchants in the Levantine ports, by scholars who translated and transmitted Arabic learning to the Latin world, by princes, Muslim and Christian, who imposed their rule on mixed populations of Jews, Christians and Muslims. Europe became Europe, it seems, in partnership with and in opposition to Islam, conceived both as an ‘Abrahamic’ religion close to and rival of Christianity and as a civilization that could allure and repulse those Europeans who contemplated from

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near or afar. Islam has been present in Europe since the troops of Tariq ibn Ziyad crossed the straits of Gibraltar in 711: Muslims were present in Spain from until the expulsion of the Moriscos in 1609, as well as in Medieval Sicily and Southern Italy. With the Ottoman expansion into Europe in the fourteenth century, Muslims arrived in the Balkans and have remained until today in Albania, Bosnia and elsewhere. In Spain, Sicily and Ottoman Europe, Muslim elites ruled over mixed societies where Christians and Jews lived as dhimmis, protected but subordinated minorities. Islam provides hence an essential religious and legal framework for some Europeans, while for others it is a rival monotheism and a civilization that can seem variously menacing or enticing, exotic or familiar.

NAMING ISLAM ‘Islam’ in Arabic means submission, submission to God’s will; a ‘Muslim’ is one who has submitted to God’s will. Yet these words entered European languages only belatedly: ‘Islam’ was used in French for the first time in 1697, in English in 1818; musulman can be found in French from the mid-sixteenth century on, and ‘Moslim’ in English as of 1615. Before then, the terms for Muslims generally referred to ethnic origin were ‘Arab,’ ‘Turk,’ ‘Persian’ and ‘Moor’. But they were most commonly known to Medieval Europeans as ‘Ishmaelites’ or ‘Saracens’. Ishmael, according to Genesis, was Abraham’s eldest son, born of Hagar, handmaid of Abraham’s wife, Sarah. The angel of the Lord who announced to Hagar the birth of her child tells her ‘he will be a wild man; his hand will be against every man, and every man’s hand will be against him; and he shall dwell in the presence of all his brethren’ (Gen. 16.12). Sarah later bears a child, Isaac; when Isaac is weaned his parents have a feast, and Sarah sees Ishmael mocking his younger brother, so she tells Abraham, ‘Cast out this bondwoman and her son: for the son of this bondwoman shall not be heir with my son’ (21.10). God tells Abraham to heed his wife, consoling him by announcing that ‘of the son of the bondwoman will I make a nation’. When Jerome, living in Jerusalem at the turn of the fifth century, wrote his commentaries on the books of the Old Testament, he explained that Ishmael’s descendants, properly known as Ishmaelites and Hagarenes, ‘now call themselves Saracens, falsely usurping the name of Sarah, thus appearing to be born of a free lady’. Here Jerome links the biblical story of Ishmael and his descendants with Greco-Roman ethnography on Saracens, notably traditions found in Ptolemy (in his Geography, ca. 150) and Ammianus Marcellinus (mid-fourth century). Fourthcentury chronicler Eusebius, who is one of Jerome’s principal sources, mentions Σαρακηνοί (Saracens) in several of his works, identifying them as descendants of Ishmael. But etymologically the name has nothing to do with Sarah, and Arabs did not refer to themselves as ‘Saracens’. In the early fifth century, two centuries before the Hijra, Jerome forges a vivid image of Saracen barbarity; the ferocity and hostility of the Ishmaelites is predicted by God and his angel and grounded in the sacred history of Abraham’s family. Medieval Latin authors have the same reflex when confronted with ‘Saracen’ conquests of large swathes of the former Roman Empire. Bede, writing from a

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Northumbrian Abbey in around 730, reiterates Jerome’s commentary of Gen. 16.12 and then adds, ‘now his hand is truly against all: as the Saracens have conquered all of Africa, most of Asia, and part of Europe.’ For Jerome and Bede, the words that the angel spoke to Hagar bear important meaning for understanding not only biblical history but also the eternal truths about the descendants of Ishmael, the Saracens, whose ferocity is clearly announced by the angel: it is an immutable characteristic of a clearly identifiable people. While for modern historians (not to mention medieval Muslims), the rise of Islam marks a clear break in the history of the ‘Saracens’, from the biblically informed vision of Christian history, that transformation is imperceptible: Bede’s Saracens are essentially the same as Jerome’s. In the following centuries, European authors would integrate scattered information about Muhammad and Islam into this schema, without fundamentally altering it. Jerome and Bede portrayed the Saracens as idolaters, and this notion was to remain strangely persistent in European culture. Richard Johnson’s extremely popular Famous Historie of the Seaven Champions of Christendom (1596) recounts the adventures of a thoroughly English St. George in Egypt, where he finds a dragon ready to devour Sabra, daughter of King Ptolomie. He slays the dragon and asks the princess to ‘forsake thy Mahomet’ and become a Christian; she says she is ready to abandon her county and her gods for love of him. George subsequently destroys idols of Mahomet and converts Saracens en masse, massacring those who refuse baptism. Johnson has dreamt up what one might call an Anglican crusade. The good St. George, who abhors images and idols, delights in their destruction and in the conversion of the idolaters to the True Faith. The image of Saracens worshipping idols, with Mahomet (or Mahon, Mahound etc.) as their chief god, is vividly expressed in the twelfth century by poets, chroniclers and hagiographers. At about the same time, an anonymous French poet composed the Chanson de Roland, the foundational text of what was to become one of the major genres of Medieval literature, the chanson de geste. The earliest written text survives in one manuscript, currently in Oxford, dating from the midtwelfth century. We find ‘pagans’ worshipping a triad of idols: Mahumet, Apollin and Tervagant. Where Raoul de Caen and other chroniclers were interested in recent events in the Holy Land, Roland situates the dramatic conflict in Spain, pitting Charlemagne’s Frankish army against the Saracen hordes. The pagans swear by their gods, including Mahumet, whom they invoke in battle. ‘Pagans are in the wrong and Christians are in the right’, proclaims Roland as he rides into battle (1015). It is on the battlefield that this is to be proven: those who invoke Mahumet as they go into battle are defeated, and the victors show their righteousness by destroying pagan idols.

MAHOMET, FROM FALSE PROPHET AND IMPOSTER TO STATESMAN AND LAW-GIVER Geert Wilders, parliamentarian of the Partij voor Vryheid (Dutch extreme right) to discredit Islam, attacks its prophet, whom he calls a terrorist, a paedophile and psychopath. Wilders is not the first, far from it, to exploit the figure of Muhammad

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for the purposes of European politics. The 2005 controversy over the cartoons of Muhammad published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten illustrated the potentially explosive nature of Western views of the Muslim prophet, as did the killing of cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo in Paris, in January 2015. Tinged by the history of European colonialism and orientalism and by terrorism that claims Islam as its justification, the controversy has provoked a flood of polemics and violence. For centuries, Muhammad has been at the centre of European discourse on Islam. For Medieval crusade chroniclers, he was either a golden idol that the ‘Saracens’ adored or a shrewd heresiarch who had worked false miracles to seduce the Arabs away from Christianity; both these depictions made him the root of Saracen error and implicitly justified the crusade to wrest the Holy Land from Saracen control. Such polemical images proved tenacious; in slightly modified forms, they provided the dominant European discourse on the prophet through the seventeenth century. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, variants of the image of Muhammad as an ‘impostor’ have been used to justify European colonialism in Muslim lands and to encourage the work of Christian missionaries. Muhammad occupies an important and ambivalent place in the European imagination: he figures as the embodiment of Islam, alternatively inspiring fear, loathing, fascination or admiration, but rarely indifference. In 1409, Laurent de Premierfait, humanist at the court of French king Charles VI, writes a biographical sketch of ‘the disloyal traitor Machomet’, whom he calls a ‘false, lying prophet and magician’. Machomet, Laurent tells us, was a merchant, and travelled with his camels to Egypt and Judea, where he spoke with Jews and Christians, learning from them parts of the Old and New Testaments. He travelled to the province of Corozan, where he sold spices and other goods to the powerful and rich lady ‘Cadige’ (Khadīja), who marvelled at him. Machomet was an enchanter and sorcerer, and he was thus able to convince ‘this powerful and noble woman’ that he was ‘the Messiah, that is the son of God that the Jews awaited’. Machomet goads his followers on to war: the Arabs conquer large swathes of Persia and of Heraclius’s empire. God, in order to show people the true nature of ‘the traitor Machomet’, struck him with epilepsy; Cadige was ‘very perturbed’. But Machomet was not to be so easily foiled: he explained that the Archangel Gabriel had come to speak to him, and that he fell down because he was awed by the brightness emanating from the face of the Angel. Machomet wrote laws mixing novelties with items gleaned from the Old and New Testaments: the book is the ‘vile and undignified Alcoran’. Laurent concludes by saying that Machomet then died and went straight to hell. His ‘stinking corpse’ (puente charoigne) was placed in an iron casket, which was taken to a temple in Mecca that had magnets in the ceiling: hence the coffin was suspended in mid-air, offering a bogus testimony to the sanctity of the false prophet. The first European author to portray the prophet in this way was the Byzantine chronicler Theophanes, who penned a chronicle of world history about 815, which was subsequently translated (ca. 875) into Latin by papal librarian Anastasius. For Theophanes, ‘Μουάμεδ’ (Mouamed), ‘the leader and false prophet of the Saracens’, is important enough to merit a brief biographical sketch. Theophanes claims that

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the Jews had first flocked to Mouamed, thinking he was their long-awaited Messiah; when they saw him eating camel (a forbidden food), they realized their error, yet some of them stayed with him out of fear ‘and taught him illicit things directed against us, Christians’. Theophanes describes Mouamed’s marriage to Khadīja and his travels in Palestine, where he sought out the writings of Jews and Christians. Mouamed had an epileptic seizure, and at this Khadīja became distressed; he soothed her by telling her: ‘I keep seeing a vision of a certain angel called Gabriel, and being unable to bear his sight, I faint and fall down.’ Khadīja sought the advice of ‘a certain monk living there, a friend of hers (who had been exiled for his depraved doctrine)’. Laurent de Premierfait gives his Machomet a Christian sidekick, a priest who has fallen out with the pope and is clearly seeking revenge. The ultimate model for this deviant Christian is Bahīra, the Christian monk who (according to various hadiths) recognized in the young Muhammad the future prophet. Here, Theophanes has the monk tell Khadīja that Mouamed was indeed a prophet to whom the Angel Gabriel came in visions. Mouamed then promised to all who fell fighting the enemy a paradise full of sensual delights: eating, drinking and sex. He said ‘many other things full of profligacy and stupidity’. In the twelfth century, various Latin authors elaborated on these elements to create, in verse and in prose, colourful legends of Mahomet as a trickster and scoundrel; these subsequently were incorporated by thirteenth-century encyclopedists like Vincent de Beauvais and James of Voragine, becoming the standard European biographies of the prophet. These scurrilous legends were reworked and rewritten by various European authors of the following centuries, even by those who had access to more reliable information, including Latin translations of the Qur’ān. Johann Israel de Bry and Johann Theodor de Bry published, in 1597, The acts of Mechmet I Prince of the Saracens, offering a blend of these traditions, supplemented by the first printed images of these scenes. Their life of Mahomet is followed by a series of prophecies concerning the end of Ottoman rule. The final prophecy is attributed to Mahomet himself, who prophesied that his ‘law’ (lex Maumetana) would disappear after 1,000 years, which is to say in 1621, the author explains. Their work is meant both to reassure their readers (the Ottoman threat will disappear within twenty-five years) and to inspire in them a strong contempt for the ‘Mahometan law’. The unacknowledged subtext is that their readers might well fear that the Ottoman threat is anything but on the wane and that they might feel that Ottoman Islam, with its recognition and toleration of diverse religious communities, should be admired rather than despised. The Enlightenment saw a reassessment of Islam’s prophet. Indeed for radical republicans and deists, Muhammad became a hero to recruit posthumously to their cause, in spite of – or perhaps rather because of – the animosity expressed to him in traditional Christian polemics. In the quarrels over religious and political systems, Islam became one rival faith system among many, neither better nor worse than many of the Christian denominations; the religious toleration of the Ottoman Empire became a model for some Englishmen. Henry Stubbe (1632–76) penned his Originall and progress of Mahometanism in 1671, presenting ‘Mahomet’ as an ‘extraordinary person’ with a ‘great soul’. Far from corrupting or deforming Christianity, Mahomet tried to return to its purest expression. Stubbe traces the

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history of Judaism and early Christianity, accenting the doctrinal and institutional fractures and the pagan origins of much of Christian practice and doctrine. Jesus himself never claimed to be God and indeed most early Christians, being Jews, did not consider him to be God; the introduction of the doctrine of Jesus’s divinity caused sharp divisions among the early Christians. Christianity, Stubbe affirms, had degenerated into a variety of paganism, devoted to the ‘three gods of the Trinity’ and to a goddess, the Virgin Mary. The saints, and the devotions given to them, ‘differed little from that of the pagans to their heroes and lesser gods’. Into this world, dominated by divided, corrupt Christianity and shaken by wars between Byzantium and Persia, steps Muhammad. An orphan at the age of six, he is raised by his uncle Abu Talib, who saw to it that his nephew received an education and became familiar with the tenets of the different sects of Judaism and Christianity. Muhammad grew in the esteem of his countrymen, who took him for a prophet. He preached simplicity, wore rough wool garments and slept on a straw mattress on the floor. Muhammad ‘framed his poems’ in pure Arabic, praising God in his unity, calling on people to adore Him. He preached against the idols and provoked the hostility of some of the Meccans, but his uncle Abu Talib protected him. Shortly after his uncle died, in 622, Muhammad emigrated to Medina, where ‘he erects a prophetical monarchy’. There ‘he wrote at sundry times the greatest part of his Alcoran’. Stubbe relates how Muhammad rallied the Medinans and their allies into the submission of Mecca and the rest of the Arabian Peninsula. ‘His followers became more fixed and endeared to him, and they who had embraced his religion out of fear persisted in it out of affection and conscience.’ Stubbe was a friend and admirer of Thomas Hobbes, with whom he corresponded frequently. His Muhammad fits well the model of the benevolent monarch of Hobbes’s Leviathan, using the precepts of a simple, natural religion to enforce morality and uphold authority, without handing over power to a class of grasping priests. Stubbe’s work is not a mere academic exercise in the history of religion: it is a polemical work aimed at the Anglican church and the monarchy. Like Muhammad, the king should strip the priests of their power and ban superstitious doctrine, returning to the simple, rational monotheism of the early Christians. He should also allow for the practice of diverse cults, just as the ‘Mahometans’ do. Stubbe’s work circulated in manuscript: it would have been mission impossible to find a publisher in Britain. But it was known to John Toland, George Sale, Henri de Boulainvilliers and others who used the prophet as a figure of an enlightened reformer. It is well known that in 1741 Voltaire cast Mahomet as the archetype of fanaticism in his drama Le Fanatisme, ou Mahomet le prophète: tragédie. What is much less known is that the philosopher subsequently revised his view of the Muslim prophet, in part due to his reading of George Sale’s English translation of the Qur’ān. In his Essai sur l'histoire générale et sur les moeurs et l'esprit des nations (1757), Voltaire charges that the Qur’ān contains ‘contradictions, absurdities and anachronisms’, but other passages he describes as ‘sublime’. His description of the message of the Qur’ān and the life and teachings of the prophet cast him very much in the role of a biblical figure. ‘How was it that Mahomet and his successors, who began their conquests exactly like the Jews,’ Voltaire asks, ‘achieved such great things, and that

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the Jews did so little?’ (49). The reason is that the Jews kept to themselves, not wanting to mingle with the conquered, whereas ‘the courage of the Arabians was more enthusiastic, and their conduct more generous and bold’ (49–50). The Arabs are superior to the Jews and this explains their success. Mahomet is greater than Alexander. Indeed, he becomes, for Voltaire, the great man against whom others are to be measured, a touchstone that he returns to time and again in the Essai sur les mœurs. Napoleon Bonaparte saw himself as a new world conqueror and legislator walking in Muhammad’s footsteps. In his Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène, Napoleon describes Mahomet as a model statesman and general who knew how to motivate his troops and as a result was a far more successful conqueror than Napoleon, holed up on a windswept island in the South Atlantic. If Mahomet promised sensual delights to his faithful, it is because that is all they understood: this manipulation, far from being cause for scandal (as it had been for European writers since the twelfth century), provokes only the admiration of the former emperor. For Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Napoleon himself was a ‘new Mahomet’. Goethe began to write a tragedy about the prophet, hoping to offer a portrait of the great man that would correct the injustice of Voltaire’s Mahomet. Many nineteenth-century authors (such as Alphonse de Lamartine or Thomas Carlyle) wrote biographies depicting the prophet as a visionary, a hero, a legislator to his people. The prophet of Islam had become a restorer of monotheism, a model law-giver, an archetypal prophet, an admired statesman: a figure that provoked debate and disagreement, but that was a central figure of European cultural, political and religious history.

THE QUR’ĀN In the most basic sense, the Qur’ān is part of the European heritage because it arrived in Europe in 711, a year that saw the Muslim conquest of much of the Iberian Peninsula; it has been an integral part of the lives of Muslim Europeans ever since. To Christian European readers, the Qur’ān was both troublingly familiar and quite foreign. One vivid illustration of this is the reaction of Riccoldo da Montecroce, a Florentine Dominican who travelled to Baghdad in the late thirteenth century to learn Arabic, study the Qur’ān and (he hoped) convert Muslims to Christianity. He marvelled at the beauty of the city, was delighted by the warm and gracious welcome from Muslim scholars but managed to convert no one. He describes how, as he studied the Qur’ān, he was perplexed that God should permit (even seem to condone) its ‘blasphemies’: that Jesus is man, not God; that he was in fact a Muslim who never claimed to be God; that the Apostles, Abraham and other biblical figures were Muslims. This alternative reading of sacred history is deeply troubling to Riccoldo and other Christians. The first Latin translation of the Qur’ān – indeed the first translation into any language – was made by Robert of Ketton in 1143. The goal of this first translation, as that of many later ones, is to provide material for the refutation of Islam, seen as a deviant, heretical version of Christianity. Robert and his collaborators produced annotations in the margins of the manuscript that guide the reader of the ‘diabolical

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Alcoran’ by pointing out passages that would seem particularly shocking to the Christian reader. The reader is constantly told to note the ‘insanity’, ‘impiety’, ‘ridiculousness’, ‘stupidity’, ‘superstition’, ‘lying’ and ‘blasphemy’ of what he is reading. The annotations qualify Muslim traditions on Jesus and the Virgin as ‘monstrous and unheard-of fables’. For the annotators, the devil and his follower Muhammad are the authors of this heresy; they accuse Muhammad of being too fond of women and of playing on the Saracens’s lust by promising them houris in heaven. Yet not all the marginal glosses are hostile: some on the contrary highlight passages that are in accordance with the Bible; there are numerous neutral ‘nota’ (take note) and an occasional ‘bene dictum’ (well said). Paradoxically, Robert has taken care to translate the text into an elegant (if at times contrived) Latin worthy of a sacred text. Other Medieval and Renaissance scholars translated the Qur’ān into Latin, in order to combat the ‘errors of Muhammad’. Yet these translators generally made an effort to give fair and accurate translations of the Muslim holy book. When they had trouble understanding the text, they had the same reflex as Muslim readers: they consulted the work of Muslim Qur’ānic exegetes. The Latin Qur’ān is both the pseudo-revelation of an enemy religion and a canonical text translated, copied and commented upon with the utmost care by rigorous scholars. It repulses and offends at the same time as it fascinates and attracts. Indeed, while some excoriated the ‘Alcoran’ and its presumed author Muhammad, others scoured it for positive proof of the truth of Christianity. A thirteenth-century tract written in the Latin East, De statu Sarracenorum, emphasizes the common elements between Christianity and Islam, presenting Qur’ānic praises of Jesus and Mary, and offering reassuring predictions of the imminent and massive conversion of Muslims to Christianity. In a similar spirit, but far more systematically, fifteenthcentury theologian Nicolas of Cusa composed his Cribratio Alchorani (Sifting the Qur’ān, 1461), in which he sought in the Muslim holy text the confirmation of Christian truth, while explaining away its rejection of such essential Christian doctrines as the Incarnation and Resurrection. In 1542, the Basel city council jailed Theodore Bibliander for endeavouring to print, in Latin, a collection of texts about Islam, including Robert of Ketton’s translation of the Qur’ān. The city fathers proclaimed that it was dangerous to publish the ‘fables and heresies’ of Muhammad. It took the intervention of Martin Luther himself to convince the councillors to free their prisoner and to allow him to publish the Qur’ān. Luther was convinced that there was no better way to combat the Turks than to permit everyone to see for themselves Muhammad’s ‘lies and fables’. The Qur’ān was published the following year, with a preface by Luther. Bibliander’s volume contained not only the Qur’ān but also an arsenal of Medieval polemical texts and a preface by Bibliander himself narrating the life and career of the ‘heresiarch’ Mahomet. The polemical intent is loudly trumpeted on the title page, in which ‘Machumetis Alcoran’ (‘Muhammad’s Qur’ān’) is described as the work of Satan and Antichrist, containing ‘perverse doctrines’ and ‘superstition’. The title page reassures the readers that they will also find in the volume the ‘refutations’ of this doctrine by various Christian authors. Yet the work is given very special treatment: three large deluxe volumes, graced with marginal comments: the closest

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equivalent production was the Zurich bible of 1543. Bibliander’s approach to the text is above all that of the humanist: he carefully collates variant manuscript readings, offers marginal glosses to guide the reader through the text and to give quick access to those passages which expose important Muslim doctrines, in harmony or at variance with Bibliander’s own Protestant Christianity. Hence his reading is not invariably polemical, and he makes the text of the Qur’ān available to an unprecedented number of European Christian readers. Ambivalence and controversy were also to accompany the first English translation of the Qur’ān, published in April 1649, just three months after King Charles I had been beheaded in the English Civil War. The authorities arrested the printer, confiscated the printed copies and held a hearing which eventually cleared all involved and authorized the publication. The translator Thomas Ross wrote a preface justifying the publication of the Qur’ān while at the same time implicitly criticizing the new rulers of England. There is no danger, he assured, that such a ‘rude’ and ‘incongruous’ text should seduce Englishmen any more than it had other Europeans. Why then would the Cromwellian authorities attempt to prevent its being published? Ross cannot of course criticize them openly, but he gives a good idea of what he thinks, insinuating that English society is threatened by those who no longer follow the Gospel, whose behaviour shows their ‘instability in religion’: the Turks, but also the Cromwelians who have killed the king and attacked the church. Subsequent royalist writers compared Cromwell to Mahomet and lambasted the government for permitting the publication of the ‘Turkish Alcoran’, proof of their impiety. Parliamentarians reacted in kind: Andrew Marvell condemns monarchists whose rantings are ‘prophecies fit to be Alcoraned’. In 1738 Voltaire wrote to his friend Nicolas-Claude Thieriot, ‘there is a devil of an Englishman who has made a very beautiful translation of the holy Alcoran’. George Sale’s English translation of the Qur’ān had been published in London in 1734. Voltaire was not the only attentive reader of Sale’s Qu’ran; others included Rousseau, Jefferson and Goethe. Sale’s Qur’ān was a monument of Enlightenment erudition: building on the most recent Orientalist scholarship and on the traditions of English radical republicanism (in particular Henry Stubbe and John Toland); his is the first translation of the Qur’ān in a European language that was not presented as a means to refute Islam or to ‘expose’ the errors of the Turks. Sale prefaces his translation with a 187-page ‘preliminary discourse’ entirely devoid of denigration or polemic: a scholarly presentation of the life of Muhammad, the composition of the Qur’ān, an analysis of Qur’ānic doctrine and a history of the emergence and expansion of Islam. Goethe also read and appreciated Sale’s Qur’ān. In 1772, David Friedrich Megerlin published a German translation of Die türkische Bibel, oder der Koran, which he describes as ‘Muhammad’s book of lies’. Goethe wrote a scathing review, called the translation a ‘miserable production’, saying that he longed for a translator who could read the Qur’ān ‘in a tent’ under ‘oriental skies’ and who would produce a book full of the sensibilities of poets and prophets. While some Christian readers continued to anathematize the Qur’ān, others, increasingly, came to see it as an important poetic and cultural product worthy of respect and interest.

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The nineteenth-century Orientalist study of the Qur’ān, conducted primarily in German, was crucial to the ‘secularization’ of the Muslim holy text, its analysis as a historical and literary document, subject to the same kind of textual criticism that biblical scholars were at the same time applying to the Bible. Abraham Geiger (1810–74) was a prominent scholar in the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement. In 1833, as student at Bonn, he wrote a prize essay Was hat Mohammed aus dem Judentume aufgenommen? (What has Muhammad taken from Judaism?). As the title indicates, Geiger, like Jewish and Christian polemicist before him, saw Muhammad as the author of the Qur’ān who used Jewish and Christian sources. But for Geiger, Muhammad, far from being an imposter, was convinced of his mission as a reformer who, inspired by Jewish teachers, transmitted to the Arabs versions (sometimes modified) of biblical narratives and laws. Geiger sought to show that the Qur’ān is largely derived from Rabbinical Judaism, that it reflects what Muhammad had learned from his Jewish teachers faithful to Torah, Mishna and Talmud. Islam, then, is a form of Judaism, truer to the spirit and Law of Moses than was Christianity. Geiger’s essay won acclaim from other specialists of Islam; indeed it heralded new directions in the study of the Qur’ān, and more generally in comparative religion. Gustav Weil was a fellow student with Geiger at Heidelberg and shared his methods of applying the tools of biblical criticism to the text of the Qur’ān. Still, Weil’s approach to the Qur’ān showed more sympathy and more maturity than that of the twenty-three-year-old Geiger: he placed the Qur’ān in a broader context of Jewish, Christian and pre-Islamic Arab textual history. His careful attention to the language of the suras, their formulaic elements and their structure many ways represent the foundation of modern European Qur’ānic studies. Theodore Nöldeke followed up on Weil’s methods and insights in his Geschichte des Qorāns (1860), which has been indispensable to Qur’ānic scholars ever since. These scholars took Islam and the Qur’ān seriously, submitting it to the same kind of rigorous textual criticism that they used to understand Bible and Talmud. Moreover, some of these scholars collaborated and corresponded with like-minded Muslim reformers and exegetes. Indeed, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, it is impossible to separate ‘Muslim’ and ‘Western’ scholarship on Islam, as the two have largely blended in a globalized academy. Twenty-first-century European Qur’ān scholarship, notably in Berlin and Paris, brings together scholars from throughout the world and builds on centuries of careful textual scholarship by Muslims and non-Muslims.

ANDALUSIAS OF THE MIND English essayist and novelist Tariq Ali, in his Islam Quintet (1992–2010), creates a series of evocative portraits of interactions between Jews, Christians and Muslims in the Medieval and early modern Mediterranean world. Each novel depicts a tension between cultures of humanism and tolerance (in which intellectual life flourishes, and Jew, Christian and Muslim are neighbours and friends) and surging waves of intolerance: in twelfth-century Egypt and Syria (The Book of Saladin, 1999), at the twilight of the Ottoman Empire (The Stone Woman, 2001), in twelfth-century

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Norman Sicily (A Sultan in Palermo, 2005). The first novel in the series, Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree (1992), set in Granada at the turn of the sixteenth century, opens with a bonfire of Arabic books ordered by Cardinal Francisco Ximenes de Cisneros, an ominous sign that Andalusian civilization has come to an end. In the face of growing persecution by their new Castilian overlords, Muslim villagers realize that if they are to avoid the fate of their Jewish neighbours, expelled in 1492, they must choose between voluntary exile, conversion and rebellion. Consciously or not, Ali is echoing the image crafted 170 years earlier by Heinrich Heine, in his play Almansor (1823), set in the sixteenth-century Alhambra, dramatizing the contrast between tolerant Islam and bigoted Christianity. The protagonists are Muslims subjected to increasing persecution at the hands of their new Christian overlords. One character laments, On the tower where the muezzin called to prayer there is now the melancholy tolling of church bells. On the steps where the faithful sang the words of the Prophet, tonsured monks are acting out their lugubrious charades. The protagonist Almansor reports to his friend Hassan that ‘Ximenes the Terrible’ has burnt the Qur’ān at Granada; Hassan responds, ‘That was only a prelude; where they burn books they will, in the end, burn human beings too.’ Numerous twentieth- and twenty-first-century Europeans portray Medieval Islam, in particular Andalus (but also Baghdad and the Ottoman Empire) as a haven of tolerance in a violent world. We find the same image in Enlightenment authors such as Sale or Voltaire. Saladin, according to Voltaire, ‘never persecuted anyone for his religion: he was at the same time conqueror, humane, and a philosopher’. Treating captives mercifully, distributing alms to the poor (be they Christian, Jewish or Muslim), allowing all to worship in their holy places, signing and faithfully keeping peace treaties that his Christian adversaries were to break, he is, for Voltaire, a model of an enlightened monarch. He paints a similar portrait of Saladin’s nephew, al-Kāmil, who listens bemusedly to the missionary sermon of a barefoot Italian fanatic, Francis of Assisi. In a Europe riven by confessional divisions, marked by religious violence and state-sponsored persecution of religious minorities, some invoked an idealized Muslim tolerance of religious difference as a model for European polities. Martin Luther sought to counter those Germans who admired Muslims for their piety and justice and who would prefer the Sultan’s dominion to the oppression at the hands of their compatriots. ‘Some praise the Turk’s government because he allows everyone to believe what he will so long as he [the Sultan] remains the temporal lord.’ ‘Since now’, he writes in 1530, ‘we have the Turk and his religion at our very doorstep, our people must be warned lest, either moved by the splendour of the Turkish religion and the external appearance of their customs, or offended by the meagre display of our own faith or the deformity of our customs, they deny their Christ and follow Muhammad.’ In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, travellers and returning captives wrote of their impressions of Algiers, Salé or Constantinople. These portraits varied: some accented the hardships of those who were deprived of their freedom, forced to work in often degrading and difficult conditions, denigrated (at times literally

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spit upon) by Turks or Arabs. Yet at the same time, many of these travellers were impressed by the sophistication and wealth they saw and expressed admiration at the tolerance shown to a confusing mix of Jewish, Christian and Muslim communities speaking a Babel of languages. And travellers noted that some of the Europeans who gained their freedom (or who came voluntarily) were happy to stay on and did quite well in the Ottoman army and administration. Indeed, the Ottomans and their Barbary allies seemed to offer more possibilities for advancement and enrichment than many European societies. The Ottoman world provoked unease, as it was a legendary land of wealth, culture and opulence. The supposedly hedonistic culture of the Turk was denounced by those who feared its appeal to European men and women, including those who never left their island, but who could be enticed into consuming Ottoman wares, such as coffee. Enlightenment philosophes evoked the Ottoman Empire’s religious tolerance as a model. In 1763 Voltaire published a pamphlet entitled Catéchisme de l’honnête homme. It takes the form of a dialogue between a Greek monk and an ‘honest man’. The two meet on a street in Aleppo, and the monk asks the honest man what his religion is. The latter responds, ‘I worship God, I attempt to be fair, and I try to educate myself.’ He makes clear that he doesn’t think much of Old Testament or the New. God has proved unable to stop the bickering of Christian sects. In Europe Christians persecute and kill each other, affirms honnête homme; the monk responds that he hates persecution and thanks heaven that ‘The Turks under whose rule I live in peace persecute no-one.’ ‘Ah! May all the peoples of Europe follow the example of the Turks !’ responds the honnête homme. Here Voltaire’s aim, as always, is to écraser l’infâme: in particular, the violent, repressive and irrational policies and doctrines of the Catholic Church. Here Islam and Mahomet have become a foil for Christianity and Jesus. Jesus, a circumcised Jew who respected kashrut and died the death of a criminal, bears no resemblance to Christians, who have renounced the Jewish laws he followed. Mahomet, on the contrary, benefitted from divine favour, as his military victories show; he established a law which is still followed by Muslims throughout the world. A number of reform Jews of nineteenth-century Central Europe looked to Medieval Muslim Spain, as permitting the flourishing of a ‘golden age’ of Jewish letters and culture. We see this in the poems and novels of Heinrich Heine and in a whole generation of Ashkenazi reform Jews who dreamt of transforming themselves and their co-religionists into sophisticated, elegant, cultured Sephardim. But nothing speaks more eloquently of this image of Andalus than the string of Moorish-style synagogues built throughout Central Europe in the nineteenth century. The legal emancipation of Jews meant, among other things, they could buy land and build synagogues to serve not only as houses of worship for growing communities but as prominent symbols of their new place in European society. While many synagogues were built in ‘Christian’ styles, with only decorative elements distinguishing them from churches, a number of reformed Jewish communities chose the Moorish revival style. In Leipzig (1855), Vienna (1858), Budapest (1859), Berlin (1866) and elsewhere, sumptuous synagogues rose up, graced with domes, horseshoe arches, elaborate stucco tracery and towers that looked like minarets. The Budapest

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synagogue still stands on Dohány Street in Pest; most of the other Moorish revival synagogues were destroyed by the Nazis. In late twentieth- and twenty-first-century Europe, the idealization of the ‘convivencia’, or peaceful coexistence between diverse faiths living under benign Muslim rule, serves diverse rhetorical purposes. For post-Franco Spanish politicians, convivencia has provided a powerful countermyth to the ‘leyenda negra’, which associated Spain with Inquisition and bigotry: suddenly it seemed that Spanish history could offer a model for Europe, one of peaceful integration and religious and ethnic diversity. For regional and civic authorities in Andalusia or Toledo, convivencia has provided a positive self-image to inspire civic pride and attract tourists. Elsewhere the convivencia model has been useful for those who want to argue – against both Islamic extremists and right-wing European nationalists – that Islam is a religion and culture of tolerance. The presence and visibility of Islam has provoked controversies in twentiethand twenty-first-century Europe: debates about the construction of mosques and minarets, the wearing of head-scarves or veils, halal meals in school cafeterias etc. These debates can provoke islamophobia (‘Islam is incompatible with republican values’), islamophilia (‘Islam is a religion of tolerance’) or more nuanced or ambiguous reactions. Whether one sees Islam as foreign to Europe or as an integral part of European culture, when one tries to define Europe, one ends up speaking about Islam.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Ali, Kecia, The Lives of Muhammad, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2014. Arkoun, Mohamed (Ed.), Histoire de l’Islam et des musulmans en France du Moyen Âge à nos jours, Paris, Albin Michel, 2006. Burman, Thomas, Reading the Qur’ān in Latin Christendom, 1140–1560, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. Efron, John, German Jewry and the Allure of the Sephardic, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2016. Elmarsafy, Ziad, The Enlightenment Qur′ān: The Politics of Translation and the Construction of Islam, Oxford, Oneworld, 2009. Gole, Nilüfer, Musulmans au quotidien: une enquête européenne sur les controverses autour de l'Islam, Paris, La Découverte, 2015. Gole, Nilüfer (Ed.), Islam and Public Controversy in Europe, Farnham, Ashgate, 2013. Gruber, Christiane and Avinoam Shalem (Eds.), The Image of the Prophet between Ideal and Ideology: A Scholarly Investigation, Berlin, De Gruyter, 2014. Horden, Peregrine and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History, Oxford, Blackwell, 2000. Laurens, Henri, John Tolan and Gilles Veinstein, L’Europe et l’islam: quinze siècles d’histoire, Paris, O. Jacob, 2009. Neuwirth, Angelika, Der Koran als Text der Spätantike: ein europäischer Zugang, Berlin, Verl. der Weltreligionen, 2010.

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Silverstein, Adam and Guy Stroumsa (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Abrahamic Religions, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2015. Thomas, David et al. (Eds.), Christian Muslim Relations a Bibliographical History, 7 vols, Leiden, Brill, 2009–15.

CHAPTER 39

Arab culture, European culture JOHN TOLAN

From Petrarch to contemporary examples, the fruitful connections between the Arab and Latin cultures have often been called into question, as if this dialogue were threatening to contaminate Christendom. Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) denounced what he saw as an intellectual enterprise that sustained European colonialism by portraying the ‘Oriental’ as an inferior, child-like subject in need of direction from the more advanced, mature European. One of Said’s principal targets was French linguist Ernest Renan, who had affirmed a sharp distinction between the mindsets of the Aryans or IndoEuropeans, inclined to polytheism, mythology, the perception of multiple truths and possibilities (and hence also to science) and that of monotheistic Semites, Jews and Arabs, who had no mythology and no propensity for philosophical or scientific thinking. ‘I am the first to recognize that the Semitic race, compared to the Indo-European race, really represents an inferior composition of human nature’ (‘Je suis donc le premier à reconnaître que la race sémitique, comparé à la race indo-européenne, représente réellement une combinaison inférieure de la nature humaine’), affirmed Renan in his Histoire générale et système comparé des langues sémitiques (1843). Yet such views, which Said sees as Orientalist dogma, were in fact roundly refuted by other Orientalists. Ignác Goldziher published in 1876 a devastating learned rebuttal of Renan’s arguments, Der Mythos bei den Hebräern und seine geschichtliche Entwickelung. While Orientalists such as Goldziher have a little problem showing the weakness of his arguments, Renan’s ideas continue to be evoked admiringly today by those who seek to denigrate or minimize Arab contributions to European culture. Such issues were not new in the nineteenth century. Five centuries earlier, Francesco Petrarch railed against the influence of Arab authors on European science and letters. He affirmed that the Greeks had laid the foundations for the science of medicine and that the Arabs, mediocre doctors, should be banished from the field. Arabs were poor scientists, bad poets and lousy philosophers: ‘I hate the entire race’, he harped, in particular Averroes (Ibn Rushd), whom he calls ‘a mad dog’. Petrarch’s humanism rejected Medieval scholasticism, which had been built in no

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small part on the edifice of Arab learning. In the eleventh century, Constantine the African, native of Ifriqiya (present Tunisia), emigrated to Italy and provided translations of Arab medical works that had a profound impact on the teaching and practice of medicine; a century later, in Toledo, Gerald of Cremona translated Avicenna’s (Ibn Sina) Canon, which became the standard textbook used in European medical schools until the seventeenth century. Indeed, translations from Arabic to Latin had a tremendous impact in the way Europeans read, taught and thought about topics as different as optics, astronomy, navigation, pharmacy, mathematics, philosophy and even theology. It is this influence that Petrarch resents and combats, both out of his reverence for Greek and Roman Antiquity and for his fear for the contamination of Christendom: he called for new crusades to take back the Holy Land and charged that the ‘dog’ Averroes ‘barks against Christ’. Indeed, through much of the Middle Ages, a gulf separated the intellectual cultures of Latin Europe and the Arab world. For twelfth-century promoters of Arabic learning in Latin Europe, the Arabs were the world’s intellectual masters. Englishman Daniel of Morley speaks disdainfully of Paris’s schools of logic and theology: science is to be found in Toledo, and in Arabic. Adelard of Bath lambasts his nephew for studying under the logicians of Laon, who like dumb beasts are led by the ‘bridle’ of authority; Adelard’s teachers, the Arabs, follow pure reason, he crows. These polemics attest both to the ubiquity and value of Arabic learning in Latin Europe and the unease it provoked. Some of those who acknowledged its importance worried about its possible pernicious effects. Symphorien Champier (1471–1538), who taught medicine in Montpellier, acknowledged the value of Avicenna’s work but warned his readers against the bad influence that the ‘empty and barbarous philosophy’ of that ‘impious apostate’ could have on the Christian doctor. He cursed the doctors from European medical schools who allowed their university curriculum to be dominated by ‘Arabs, Persians, Indians, and Mahometans’. Yet in the Renaissance others saw in Arabic learning the key to the occult sciences of alchemy and astrology: for Rosicrucians, in particular, Arabia was the fount of esoteric wisdom. In the following centuries, the scientific revolution in Europe made such debates less prevalent. Nineteenth-century Orientalists returned to such issues as they argued about the legitimacy of Europe’s colonial empires and about emerging notions of race and nation. Goldziher’s opposition to Renan shows that (pace Edward Said) Orientalists took very divergent positions in these debates. The question of the historical links between Arab and European culture has taken on fresh urgency, and often a polemical or apologetic tinge, since the middle of the twentieth century, in the context of decolonization in the Arab world and large-scale immigration of Arabs in Europe.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Arkoun, Mohamed (Ed.), Histoire de l'Islam et des musulmans en France du Moyen Âge à nos jours, Paris, Albin Michel, 2006. Laurens, Henri, John Tolan and Gilles Veinstein, L’Europe et l’islam: quinze siècles d’histoire, Paris, Odile Jacob, 2009.

CHAPTER 40

Averroes Aristotle’s messenger RÉMI BRAGUE

A notable authority on Aristotle, the Andalusian philosopher Averroes lives on in European memories, embodying a form of humanism before the term was coined. Yet he was also a man of his time, working in the service of a Muslim caliphate in Spain, and in this capacity he justified the notion of jihad. The Muslim Andalusian philosopher, jurist and physician Ibn Rushd (1126–98) occupies a prominent and secure position in the collective memory of relations between the Latin West and Medieval Islam. His name was quickly Latinized − less than a generation after his death − an indisputable sign of his assimilation into European culture. This was also the case with his contemporary, the Jewish philosopher, jurist and physician Maimonides (1135–1204) and the Persian philosopher and physician Avicenna (980–1037). We now see him as a humanist before the term existed, or even as a bridge between Arab and Western culture. He was the hero of Destiny (1997), a film by Egyptian director Youssef Chahine, who received the Cannes Film Festival’s fiftieth anniversary Lifetime Achievement Award. The movie portrays him as a champion of tolerance and wisdom exposed to the hostility of fundamentalists. Six years later, France’s first private Muslim school, which opened in Lille, was named the Lycée Averroès in his honour, while an interuniversity exchange scheme involving students from the Maghreb and the European Union is known as the Averroes Programme. But who was the real Averroes, and what is the basis of this reputation? He descended from a long line of jurists who served Spain’s Muslim dynasties, and his grandfather had been the Grand Qadi (chief judge) in Córdoba, where he himself was born. He too worked in the service of the Almohad Caliphate and was appointed Grand Qadi of Seville (1169) and later of Córdoba. As the private physician to the sultan of Córdoba, he was loyal to his ruler and upheld the latter’s policies, including the preaching of jihad against the Christian kingdoms of Northern Spain. Towards the end of his life, however, he was accused of heresy, fell into disgrace and died in exile in Morocco. In 1166, Averroes was commissioned by his sovereign, the Caliph Abu Yuqub Yusuf (who died in 1184), to produce commentaries on Aristotle’s writings. He therefore

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created compendiums of all the works of Aristotle available to him, some of which he paraphrased. He also produced a word-by-word explanation of five of these texts, to which he devoted three separate commentaries. His aim was to reproduce Aristotle’s thinking in all its purity, free from errors in translation, gaps or previous additions. Averroes saw Aristotle as embodying the very highest point of human intelligence. As his works were intrinsically true, a sound understanding of these was all one required to attain the truth of all things − and every truth could surely be found there. In this way, he already refers to the nerves in his theory of perception, although it was Galen (ca. 129–216 CE) who later discovered their role. Averroes was keen to avoid adding to Aristotle’s work, yet this did not prevent him from putting forward highly original theories in instances where a text was obscure. These include the notion of a separate intellect, a type of universal and immortal understanding supposedly shared by all of humankind. As Averroes was then regarded as the most knowledgeable authority on Aristotle’s work − as well as the latest − his major commentaries were quickly taken up by Western philosophers, theologians and writers, although their approaches differed. Some saw his contributions as essential; Dante, for instance, placed him in Limbo among the philosophers and poets of pre-Christian times, while Raphael later included him in his fresco, The School of Athens. Others, such as Thomas Aquinas, denounced him as a ‘perversor et depravator’ of Aristotle’s philosophy, with his theories on the eternity of the world and the unity of the intellect – yet this did not prevent him from making use of Averroes’s commentaries. Unlike Christians, who favoured the major commentaries on Aristotle, Jewish readers preferred the compendiums. They were equally interested in The Incoherence of the Incoherence, a defence of philosophy written by Averroes in order to refute the criticisms made by Persian theologian and philosopher al-Ghazālī (1058–1111). In his treatise The Incoherence of the Philosophers (1095), the latter had denounced philosophy as a threat to faith. In the same way, Averroes’s great juridico-theological texts, principally the Decisive Treatise and the Exposition of the Methods of Proof Concerning the Beliefs of the Community, were taken up in the fifteenth century by the Jewish scholars Simeon ben Zemah Duran and Elia del Medigo, while they remained unknown to Christians. During the Renaissance, Averroes’s commentaries attracted the attention of neoPlatonists such as Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. Latin translations of these works were subsequently published in Venice in 1550, as were those of Aristotle himself. Such was Averroes’s prestige as a champion of philosophy and reason that in the neoClassical Age the authorship of a Latin treatise known as The Three Impostors was ascribed to him. It was impossible to trace this text, supposedly a satirical indictment of the three monotheistic medieval religions, as it had never actually been written. Philological research on his writings was launched with Ernest Renan’s monograph, Averroès et l’averroïsme (1852), which portrayed him as representing a ‘rational science that was learning to dispense with revelation’. Later, in 1931, the Union Académique Internationale decided to bring out critical editions of his work in the original Arabic and of its Latin and Hebrew translations.

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Paradoxically, however, Averroes was neglected by the Arab world for centuries and was only rediscovered during the Nahda, the Arab Renaissance movement that emerged in the nineteenth century. His writings, then presented as visionary, were used as part of a call for reform and for the emancipation of Muslim societies. The resonance that Averroes’s work has had for Christian and Jewish scholars over the centuries, the criticism he encountered in his latter years and his belated rediscovery by reformers in the Arab world all contribute to our understanding of his prestigious status today. Nevertheless, it should be remembered that he was the official philosopher of the Almohad Caliphate; his treatise The Incoherence of the Incoherence includes the remarks: ‘[. . .] it is necessary for every man to concede the principles of religion and invest with authority the man who lays them down. The denial and discussion of these principles denies human existence, and therefore heretics must be killed.’1

NOTE 1. Tahāfutal-tahāfut, XVII, § 17, translated from the Arabic by Simon Van Den Bergh, published and distributed by the Trustees of the ‘E.J.W. Gibb Memorial Trust’, 1954, (E-text conversion Muhammad Hozien), pp. 419–20.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Arnaldez, Roger, Averroès, un rationaliste en islam, Paris, Balland, 1998. Renan, Ernest, Averroès et l’averroïsme [1852], in Œuvres complètes, vol. III, Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 1949. Urvoy, Dominique, Averroès. Les ambitions d’un intellectuel musulman, Paris, Flammarion, 1998.

CHAPTER 41

The barricade The shield of the people EMMANUEL FUREIX AND THOMAS SERRIER

A lopsided wall built of paving stones and sacks, the barricade serves as a rampart for insurgent fighters. This defensive barrier has made regular appearances in Europe, emerging in 1588, 1830, 1848 and 1871. Although gradually becoming obsolete, having given way to other methods of protest, it enriches the collective imaginary associated with revolutionary confrontation. Although that motley structure, the barricade, is absurd in many respects, it has played a dynamic role in shaping collective imaginaries. Defined by Alain Corbin as ‘a machine for producing [the] People’, it has given meaning to a succession of insurrectional confrontations, created political martyrs and heralded the advent of emancipation. The historian Mark Traugott, one of the most notable authorities on this subject, has counted 155 separate events in Europe that featured the use of barricades, from the late sixteenth to the late nineteenth centuries. In France, for example, they were erected in Paris during the period of the Fronde in 1648. Until the late eighteenth century, however, they continued to be used in a localized manner and in isolated circumstances, only truly coming into their own during the revolutions that took place between 1848 and 1849. They then became the quintessential image of the ‘People’s Spring’ and, as such, achieved the status of a European realm of memory, marking a cycle that ended in frustration and repression. Following this high point, any episode involving barricades would be experienced as a resurgence evoking the long-lost days of 1848. But what exactly is a barricade? A makeshift structure, it is put together using random objects such as paving stones, furniture, upturned vehicles, bits and pieces from nearby construction sites and so on. In Les Misérables (1862) Gavroche compares the barricade to ‘Old Mother Gibou’s tea’, a concoction made from vinegar, oil, eggs and flour. Yet equally, as was the case in Paris in 1848, it can resemble a perfectly aligned fortress. Improvised in one manner or another, barricades invariably seal the alliance between insurgents defying local and/or national powers. They serve multiple purposes: strategic, social, political and symbolic. They cut off the adversary’s communication, hinder their attacks and shield the insurgents.

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They forge sociability, bringing together neighbours and comrades whose time is divided between combat, moments of enervation, chatting, singing and issuing shouts of defiance. But they also affirm the people’s mastery over the urban space, defining a sovereign status and marking a boundary between ‘them’ and ‘us’. Yet despite its glorious precedents in Paris − in 1588, 1648, 1795 and 1827 − this image of the barricade was not established until 1830, when it was incorporated into the repertoire of insurrectional activity and revolutionary symbolism, becoming a synecdoche for modern revolution. The same term, derived from a ‘barrique’ (a barrel) placed across a roadway, emerged in English, German, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Russian and Swedish, confirming the barricade as a European phenomenon. In July 1830, over 4,000 barricades were set up in Paris during the ‘Three Glorious Days’. Others appeared in the provinces, in Nantes and Lyon, with more being erected in Brussels, Liège and Ghent in the months that followed. The Warsaw insurgency was described as ‘the heroic boulevard of European freedom’ by the French newspaper Le Moniteur in July 1831, just before the city fell back into Russian hands. Europe’s rulers were gripped by the fear of revolutionary contagion. The Duke of Baden banned anyone from crossing the Rhine between Strasbourg and Kehl, while Tsar Nicholas I of Russia denounced the reign of Louis-Philippe, brought about by the July Revolution, stating: ‘I regard this example as dangerous and I will never pretend otherwise.’1 Revolutionary dreams were shared throughout Europe, although these were soon dashed. In January 1834, a member of the Société des droits de l’homme was still able to write: ‘This European insurrection [. . .] which will finally free the old world of the shackles of slavery, has begun!’ Visually, the barricades crystallize that contradiction between emancipation and reactionism.

PARIS: THE NERVE-CENTRE The fervour displayed at the barricades of July 1830 and February 1848 rekindled memories of the French Revolution, also conveying the idea of a specifically Parisian nerve-centre and a Europe-wide phenomenon. In Autumn Leaves (1831), Victor Hugo refers to the ‘subterranean galleries underneath the kingdoms of Europe – all branching out from the great central revolution, the crater of which is Paris’.2 Later, the Communard Jules Vallès was to describe the city as the ‘bivouac of revolutions’. Humble participants, such as the joiner Désiré Lapie, a member of the Montmartre battalion of the Committee of the National Guard during the Paris Commune, were likewise proud of the fact that ‘if Paris raises its voice it will be heard from the ocean to the Ural mountains, for nothing can withstand a free people’. Yet this Francocentric perspective was not exclusive to the French. German thinkers, for example, from Heinrich Heine and Ludwig Börne of the Young Germany Movement to Karl Marx, left-wing Hegelians, writers and political theorists all accorded the Parisian barricades of 1830 and 1848 a central place in their work and reflections. A play by the young Friedrich Engels featuring a barricade was performed in Brussels

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In 1847; it ended with the abdication of the ruler of a small German state, which was then declared a republic. Later, in his essay Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century, the embryonic version of a work that never came to fruition, Walter Benjamin notes his reflections on the links between Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s urban renewal programme and the spectre of the barricades of 1848. Barricades were considerably more widespread throughout the continent in 1848 than in 1830. They appeared in the streets of Palermo in January and in Paris in February; in March, they were set up in Munich, Berlin, Vienna, Milan, Venice, Budapest, Krakow and Iaşi; in May, they were seen in Naples and Prague. These street wars included professional participants who travelled from country to country in Europe joining the insurgents in their battles. The Polish general Ludwik Mierosławski, for instance, fought in Poznań against the Prussians in the spring of 1848, later travelling to Sicily to take part in the Risorgimento in early 1849. He then made his way to the Baden region, the last bastion of the German uprising of 1848, before going into exile, firstly in Switzerland and later in Paris. The Russian anarchist and internationalist Mikhail Bakunin was active at the barricades, travelling from Paris to Prague and from Prague to Dresden. Similarly, expatriates and students present in Paris in February 1848 took the street battles to their own homelands. Yet ordinary citizen-combatants, embedded in their native land, were equally conversant with the activities at the barricades of neighbouring countries, brought to them through images and stories. Some twenty years later, the Polish fighter Jarosław Dombrowski was mortally wounded at the barricades in the rue Myrha in Paris, during the Bloody Week that signalled the end of the Paris Commune. Remembered in Poland as one of the heroes of the anti-Tsarist uprising of 1863, his memory lives on; in the early twenty-first century, he featured as one of Europe’s travelling revolutionaries in The Cry of the People, a comic book by the graphic novel artist Jacques Tardi devoted to the Parisian insurrection of 1871. In retrospect, the barricades of 1848 have certainly achieved the most enduring iconic status of all. Brought to the whole of Europe through broadsides and illustrated newspapers, they shaped contemporary historical awareness. Although the urban décor in the background might vary, the archetypal barricade possesses an intangible quality. A pile of boards and paving stones crowned with a sacred banner, it was peopled almost exclusively by heroic male figures. These were sometimes accompanied by flesh-and-blood ‘Amazons’, as opposed to the allegorical figure in Eugène Delacroix’s painting of 1830. The barricades were dismantled as soon as the fighting was over and every trace of them was effectively eliminated, leaving visual memory with nothing to focus on but those stereotypical images.

THE BARRICADE AS AN ALLEGORY OF INSURRECTION A few of the barricades of 1848 were captured in daguerreotype images. Later, however, the act of photographing them became a genuine assertion of sovereignty. In 1860, Gustave Le Gray was asked by Giuseppe Garibaldi to take photographs of the city of Palermo, which had been conquered by the insurgent Red Shirts. In 1871,

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during the Paris Commune, the monumental barricade that closed off the Place de la Concorde and was (mistakenly) reputed to be impregnable was immortalized in images taken by Auguste Hippolyte Collard and Bruno Braquehais. However, the mainly anonymous photographs showing the considerably more basic barricades erected in the eastern districts of the capital and manned by federated groups vividly portray the people of Paris reconquering their city. The barricade may be presented as having an untamed, poetic, roguish or plebeian character, as reflected in the well-known, enigmatic ‘Song of Gavroche’: Je suis tombé par terre, / C’est la faute à Voltaire, / Le nez dans le ruisseau, / C’est la faute à Rousseau. (I’ve fallen to the ground, / It’s all Voltaire’s fault, / My nose in the gutter, / It’s all Rousseau’s fault). It has slipped into the collective memory through the classic literary works of the latter half of the nineteenth century, including, of course, the novels of Victor Hugo, Gustave Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale (1869) and L’Insurgé (1886) by Jules Vallès. The great works of literature, which have continued to appear in countless popular, commercialized forms, might therefore be seen as repositories of dreams; this explains why the political imaginary of the barricades has remained particularly powerful, even as their strategic functions are diminishing in importance. The barricade fell into disuse as an instrument of street combat after 1871 − according to Leninist orthodoxy, it was ineffectual as a revolutionary tactic. As a symbol, however, it has long continued its work of weaving the broken threads of insurrections and dreams. As a tried-and-tested structure, the barricade was still contributing to the emotions of protest during the twentieth century through the potent influence of collective imaginaries, even as it revealed its inability to adapt to the modern forms of total, mechanized conflict that succeeded the trench warfare of the First World War. The striking contrast between the arms used by the insurgents and the means of repression applied during the Spartacist revolt of January 1919 has been documented for all time by the photojournalist Willy Römer and by Alfred Döblin, the author of Berlin Alexanderplatz and Karl and Rosa. The latter work, a biography of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, forms the final part of the trilogy November 1918. Set in Berlin, Barricades in Wedding (1931) is a proletarian novel whose author, Klaus Neukrantz, died in a Nazi concentration camp in 1941, having reinvigorated the legend of the barricades. In Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell conveyed the febrile atmosphere at the barricades in Barcelona in 1936. However, we already note a form of aestheticization at work on the Parisian tradition of spontaneous street combat through the glossy images of the Liberation of Paris taken by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Doisneau in 1944. The barricades put up by the Warsaw insurgents during that same year could not protect them from the merciless retaliation of the Nazi occupier. Archival images of the insurrection that took place in East Berlin on 17 June 1953 show how obsolete traditional methods had become, as protesters face the Soviet T-34 tanks seen advancing freely through the war-ravaged German capital, which resembles a ghost town. In the photographs that circulated throughout the world during the

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anti-Soviet uprisings in Budapest (1956) and Prague (1968), there were no flimsy piles of stones and torn-off pieces of boarding, no still-life images from a bygone age; instead, the face-to-face confrontation between the individuals and tanks seen in the prints reveals a raw brutality. The barricades came into their own once more in Paris in May 1968, and in Italy during the same year, indicating the revival of an old collective imaginary associated with insurrection and of memories of the 1871 Paris Commune. However, the replication of the barricade scenario and the parodic scenes of revolution played out in the Latin Quarter were at odds with the romantic image of the 1968 protest movement, contributing to the hostility shown by upholders of public order and occasioning some bewilderment in other European countries. Have the barricades had their day? The structures set up around Kiev’s Maydan Square in 2014 would suggest otherwise. Nevertheless, the rhetoric of the barricade lives on mainly through its inclusion in the repertoire of a whole collection of politically committed literature. This is reflected in the work of the singer and former East German dissident Wolf Biermann, whose songwriting is fuelled by the grand narrative of the crusade. Historical references transmitted in this way survive chiefly as part of collective imaginaries, even those that have now faded. Today’s protest movements are seeking forms of association and intervention to be used by the next generation; such methods are therefore removed from the phantasmagoria associated with nineteenth-century social struggles. From the Nuit Debout campaign in Paris to the various global versions of the Occupy Wall Street movement, they continue to urge protesters around the world to climb – metaphorically, at least − onto the barricades.

NOTES 1. Quoted, as with the following references, from Emmanuel Fureix, ‘Les Émotions protestataires’, in Histoire des émotions, vol. II: Des Lumières etc., ed. Alain Corbin. (Paris: Le Seuil, 2016), pp. 299–322. 2. Quoted in Rodney Farnsworth, Mediating Order and Chaos: The Water-Cycle in the Complex Adaptive Systems of Romantic Culture (Amsterdam-New York: Editions Rodopi B.V., 2001), p. 54.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Aprile, Sylvie, Jean-Claude Caron and Emmanuel Fureix (Eds.), La Liberté guidant les peuples. Les Révolutions de 1830 en Europe, Paris, Champ Vallon, 2013. Corbin, Alain and Jean-Marie Mayeur (Eds.), La Barricade, Paris, Publications de la Sorbonne, 1997. Hazan, Éric, La Barricade. Histoire d’un objet révolutionnaire, Paris, Autrement, 2013. Jaworski, Rudolf and Robert Luft (Eds.), 1848-1849. Revolutionen in Ostmitteleuropa, Munich, Oldenbourg, 1996. Traugott, Mark, The Insurgent Barricade, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2011.

CHAPTER 42

The strike Emancipation at work MARIE-CLAIRE LAVABRE

While there have been countless strikes, generating memories expressed in diverse forms, the concept of the strike has fuelled a collective imaginary characterized by a longing for emancipation combined with nostalgia for past experiences of solidarity. It has its own heroes, both real and fictional, from the coal miners in Germinal to the strikers of 1936 and the Gdańsk shipyard worker Lech Wałęsa – all extensively portrayed in literature and films. The European imaginary has been fuelled by a type of nostalgia for strikes. This is based on the strike as a concept, rather than strikes as a historical reality, from the Charter of Amiens (1906) and its advocation of general strikes as a form of industrial action to the French youth protests of 2006 and their rallying cry ‘(G)rêve général!’ – a play on the words ‘strike’ and ‘dream’. This is a nostalgia for a sense of community, for solidarity in action, for the triumph of dignity amid the euphoria of comradeship and for the hope shared by the oppressed. It has emerged in a Europe where the space for strike action is becoming increasingly restricted, while the legitimacy of the dissatisfaction it reflects is being challenged. The rapid rise of industrialization in the nineteenth century and the concomitant growth of an underprivileged proletariat gave rise to an antagonism that was expressed through new practices. A form of social protest then emerged, accompanied by rituals and symbols, marches and red flags; as it was not entirely unprecedented, it soon established itself as the main reflection of the contradiction between capital and labour. Yet when we pause to consider the terms used to describe it, the ambiguous, even inexact connotations attached to the French noun ‘grève’ immediately become apparent. With the verbs ‘faire grève’ and ‘se mettre en grève’ − to strike, to go on strike − an active form is used to denote a passive state, emphasizing the action of refusing to work, rather than the state of inactivity experienced in France (ca. 1845–8) and Spain (1855). The polysemous English word ‘strike’ had acquired the modern meaning of withholding labour as a way of compelling employers to consider workers’ demands at the earlier date of 1768. The term originates from the idea of ‘striking’, or ‘downing’ one’s tools. The German and Polish words Streik and strajk appear to be associated with this.

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The strike must surely be one of the most intrinsically contradictory examples of social phenomena, to the point of being dialectical in character. It is a form of applying pressure – a show of strength, in fact – as well as the exercise of a freedom, or even of a right, that is continually subject to restriction and challenge. According to each context, whether in the past or the present, it involves the acceptance of financial loss in order to achieve a pay rise, a refusal to work in order to safeguard one’s employment, a fight to improve working and living conditions or a manifestation of hostility towards the introduction of regressive measures and threats to existing rights. Strikes come in many different forms; they can be organized or spontaneous – an extreme example being ‘wildcat’ strikes − intermittent or continuous. There are industry-wide, rotating and general strikes, as well as protest, insurrectional and even revolutionary strikes; they can be motivated by economic or political reasons, taking the form of a war of attrition, a go-slow or a work-to-rule action. In every case, strikes involve the experience and consolidation of group unity, while at the same time, they dramatize and exacerbate social friction. Nowadays, we might use the word ‘strikes’ with reference to ancient Egypt, the Late Roman Empire, the Middle Ages or the ‘women’s strike’ incited by Lysistrata in the eponymous play by Aristophanes. In doing so, however, we are applying the term retroactively and anachronistically, or even as a metaphor − perhaps as the first indication of the strike as a future realm of memory. In this case, it becomes associated with the rebellions of all exploited individuals whatever their gender, such as domestic and galley slaves or serfs. For the strike is essentially the emblematic embodiment of the nineteenth-century workers’ revolt. This was the case both in Europe and in the New World, where successive waves of European immigrants boosted the development of industrialization and the expansion of capitalism. It explains why the strike is still perceived in two completely opposing ways; for some, it represents organization, solidarity and hope, for others, disorder, danger and alarm.

GOING ON STRIKE The closely associated phenomena of industrialization, social protest and workers’ organizations all emerged throughout Europe during that long nineteenth century, which extended into the twentieth. However, the speed of these developments varied from place to place, as did the traditions that took root. Accordingly, German and British strikes – long, tough, well organized, supervised, sustained and financially backed by powerful trade unions – are commonly compared with those of France and Italy − recurrent, sporadic and at times violent. In this way, national, and even local, memories of these events unquestionably take precedence; hardly any strikes are remembered throughout Europe, with the exception of a few emblematic cases, such as those of Asturias, the Ruhr, the mining regions of France and Britain, and the major centres of the port, car and textile industries. Strikes have been experienced in multiple ways. Dominant in some instances, subordinated or even concealed in others, the memory they have generated is

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invariably divided, almost by its very nature. For some, it is built on defeats and unfortunate experiences, on the flag stained ‘red with the blood of the worker’ (Paul Brousse, 1877), on repression and betrayal. For others, however, it lives on through past victories, through individual and collective recollections of solidarity, and through joys and triumphs both big and small. There have been countless strikes, creating countless memories. These, in turn, are expressed in diverse forms, including militants’ autobiographies, local commemorations, oral archives compiled by historians, documentaries based on retrospective accounts and, most recently, through the European and global cinema. The strike, on the other hand, relates to a collective imaginary that is constantly being reactivated, even now, when strike action is decreasing. It draws its potency from a rejection of submissiveness during moments of exultation that may involve the workers destroying their tools, or symbolically appropriating them in the case of a sit-down strike; they then experience the power of a collective body, discovering the dignity habitually denied to a thoroughly downtrodden workforce, mired in fatigue and in the problems of everyday life. Certain figures – primarily male manual workers – come to the fore; wage slaves and soldiers of rebellion, they include miners, dockers and steel and metal workers. These conceal other figures, such as rural workers or those in feminized occupations traditionally less prone to striking. These images of the strike are also associated with certain dates marked in the common calendar, starting with 1 May − as a celebration of ‘International Workers’ Day’ rather than ‘Labour Day’. For in this case too, there are implications attached to the name of the tradition established as part of the widespread commemorations of the labour movement, the workers’ struggle and the general strike for an eight-hour working day in the nineteenth century. These implications relate to the remembrance, division and superimposition of various traditions. ‘Workers’ Day’ places the emphasis on working people, while ‘Labour Day’ is used when the aim is to eliminate or play down any particular focus on the workers’ movement. The terms ‘Fête du muguet’ (muguet being the French for lily of the valley), ‘May Day’ or ‘Spring Festival’ might even be used instead. Nevertheless, the significance of 1 May certainly originated from the activities of the trade unions; having been chosen as a day for a general strike accompanied by protest marches, it even became a public holiday in Europe. The first example of such protests had occurred in the United States in 1886, where the general strike that took place on 1 May had resulted in the execution or imprisonment of several trade union leaders. A resolution to organize a general strike on 1 May 1890 was subsequently adopted at the congress of the Second International held in Paris in 1889. Then in 1891, troops opened fire on protesters at Fourmies in northern France, killing nine people, including four young women and two children. The strength of the collective memory of such events, which focuses on the workers’ movement rather than the working class, will surely vary according to the power of the trade unions and political parties likely to claim it as their own and thereby preserve it. The collapse of dedicated organizations hit by crises has unquestionably contributed to the fading of that memory in the public space, at both national and European level.

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THE STRIKE IN FILM AND LITERATURE Although the participants retain the memory of their strikes, whether joyful or sombre, there are certain iconic strikes whose impact continues to reverberate at a transnational, and in some cases, a European level. Images, particularly in the form of films, bring their memory to life and even tell their story. Apart from a few specialist historians or activists, could anyone in France or Germany even have imagined the experience of the first textile workers’ strike, held in northern Italy in 1905, without seeing Mario Monicelli’s The Organizer? Released in 1963 and recently re-edited, the film tells of the injuries, insecurity and fear endured by the workers in that period of rapid industrialization, of their solidarity and pride in their struggle. Yet it is also a tale of betrayals, strikebreakers and ‘scabs’, of attempts to escape the life of a factory worker, of the alarm of the affluent classes and of individual examples of conflict, from the employers’ use of blackmail to the necessity of retaining one’s job when threatened by competition. All the themes are there; woven together in this way, they create a perennial image of the strike as experienced both before and after the 1960s, the period of transformations and shifts that also led to the protest movements of 1968. It was the world of literature, however, that produced a true monument to the strike, in the form of Émile Zola’s Germinal. Although the novel is set at the end of the Second Empire, Zola drew his inspiration from his first-hand observation of the major strike held at Anzin from March to April 1884 and of the living conditions of the miners and their families in their cottages at Denain. The description of the strike, its development and its final repression is presented in a realistic manner and is therefore somewhat ambivalent. The novel takes its title from the Republican calendar (‘Germinal’ being the first month of spring), and in this way it constitutes a metaphor for the awakening and growing power of the workers’ political consciousness. The story begins with the description of a man, who is ‘unemployed and homeless’, as he walks alone ‘through the thick, dark ink of a starless night’1; yet it ends ‘[b]eneath the blazing rays of the sun’, on a ‘morning of new growth’, filled with the distant sounds of men at work: ‘a black and avenging army of men, germinating slowly in its furrows, growing upwards in readiness for harvests to come, until one day soon their ripening would burst open the earth itself.’2 Well known throughout the world, translated and republished on a regular basis, Germinal was adapted to the cinema on several occasions during the twentieth century. The most recent film version of the novel was made in 1993 and had a notable impact, particularly at local level. Schools named after Émile Zola and organizations such as the Association Germinal help to promote the memory of the coal mines, flying the flag for this region with its disused industrial sites and enabling it to reclaim its former glory and lineage. On the other hand, the reference to Germinal has its problematic side, as the poverty of the workers, described in the starkest terms, is also perceived as degrading, or even as being intrinsically, inseparably linked to the onset of irrational violence.

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The strikes that marked the apogee of the 1905 Russian Revolution were given their own, quite different emblematic representation in Sergei Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin. This was made in 1925, the same year that Strike was released, although that had been made a little earlier, in 1924. Eisenstein’s first full-length film, Strike, tells the story of an archetypal workers’ strike and its violent repression; its compelling, unforgettable ending secures its legacy. The strikes launched immediately after the electoral victory of France’s Front populaire had a decidedly joyous character, associated with workers dancing in the yards of the factories they were occupying, with the ‘singing madman’ Charles Trenet and with the introduction of paid holidays. Although this took place during uneasy times already overshadowed by menace, the memory of that seemingly improbable flurry of joy remains virtually untarnished to this day. This is reflected in the iconography that accompanied the rather low-key commemoration of the Front populaire in 2016. It is perhaps more emphatically confirmed by the cheerylooking photo of ‘Fiat workers shut in the yard of the factory at Nanterre during the strikes of 1936’ that appears in La France rouge;3 this ‘book-object’ was designed to stimulate curiosity and interest in the archives of the French Communist Party, described as a ‘national heritage’. Nevertheless, only joyful images are featured in the chapter devoted to the Front populaire; this includes photographs of crowds of strikers and huge demonstrations, a poster, set against the background of a red flag, celebrating 1 May 1936 as a day of unity, and an ‘album of the summer of ’36’. The cinema has made its own contributions, such as Jean Renoir’s Life Belongs to Us, which was contemporaneous with those events, and the better-known They Were Five, a film full of joy, enthusiasm and songs directed by Julien Duvivier and starring Jean Gabin. However, the ending originally planned by Julien Duvivier, deemed too pessimistic for the mood and tastes of the day, was replaced by another. Whether celebrated or reviled, the legacy of the protest movements of 1968 appears to lie chiefly in sexual liberation and cultural changes. In reality, with the exceptions of Italy, which had its ‘rampant May’ and ‘hot autumn’, and France, factory workers and wage-earners in general were not particularly convinced by the student rebellion and the societal and political ideal it expressed. Under the general heading ‘The left-wingers of May ’68’, La France rouge devotes just two pages to the events. Modestly illustrated, they include one photograph of a work site occupied by strikers and two showing protests featuring trade union banners, accompanied by the curiously bitter comment: ‘The Grenelle Agreements yielded wage rises − but the PCF (the French Communist Party) would no longer be seen as a party of revolution.’ Yet the film The Return to Work at the Wonder Factory, an example of cinéma direct, contains a memorable scene in which a young female factory worker tearfully refuses to go back inside ‘that lousy prison’. She too is a symbol of the France of 1968, along with the stencilled poster images of the students from the Fine Arts Academy and Daniel Cohn-Bendit, known as ‘Dany le Rouge’. Moreover, traces of those days remain in the form of sit-ins and factory occupations, strike committees and general assemblies. New types of protest were also devised, such as the strike held by the female workers at the Joint Français company in 1972 and the LIP watch factory strike of 1973; the latter was the subject

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of a 2007 documentary entitled Les LIP. L’imagination au pouvoir. The stories of the new activists who emerged − women, immigrants, young people from rural regions and unskilled workers – are now being retold retrospectively. In this way, the 2010 film Made in Dagenham is based on the strike held by the female employees at the Ford Dagenham plant in England, which also took place in 1968. The final credits feature interviews with some of the very same women who took part in that fight for equal pay, which still seems an inconceivable event. Released in 1976, Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900 is certainly part of this tradition, with its portrayal of rural workers’ strikes in southern Italy. The film’s poster popularized Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo’s monumental painting, Il Quarto Stato. An explicit reference to L’Histoire socialiste de la Révolution française by Jean Jaurès, the ‘fourth estate’ is depicted here as a group of workers advancing forward, led by two resolute-looking men, their jackets slung over their shoulders, and a woman carrying a child. There is something ambiguous about the demeanour of these three figures, which suggests that they may either be accompanying the strikers or attempting to hold them back in order to shield them from the confrontation to come. This magnificent image of the rise of the ‘little people’ inspired the creation of a monumental collective painting in Wallonia, a region hard hit by industrial decline. Entitled Il Quarto Stato en 2014, the work was inaugurated on the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty. However, while the work by Pellizza da Volpedo is associated with struggle, and consequently with hope, it is worth noting that the fourth estate has now become the ‘fourth world’ and, as such, it will inevitably be associated primarily with severe poverty. A major industrial dispute, the UK miners’ strike (1984–5) marked the beginning of a new perspective on representation in a world characterized by de-industrialization, workforce defeats and, significantly, an environment where confrontation was stigmatized, particularly in the case of strikes. However, the effects of Margaret Thatcher’s economic policy provided much material for the British cinema, thereby reinforcing collective memories of the distress suffered in working-class communities. The brutal character of that period is used as the context or focus of films like Brassed Off (1996) and Billy Elliot (2000), to name only the most popular and best-known productions, yet they also highlight the resistance of working-class culture and the feeling of solidarity experienced by the strikers. There is little documentary material concerning the strikes that took place in Eastern Europe, as specialists themselves have indicated. Although not formally prohibited, they were regarded as wrongful in view of the discipline expected of socialist workers; as such, they were virtually invisible, if not inconceivable, rather than non-existent. Despite this, a large number of strikes were held − in East Berlin (1953), Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968) and Poland (1956, 1968 and 1970). Poland was also the scene of one particular example of industrial action that made the Lenin shipyard at Gdańsk a household name throughout Europe. Initiated in 1980, it involved several thousand workers and had its own key personality in the form of the mustachioed Lech Wałęsa, a practising Catholic. The Solidarność movement soon expanded to an unprecedented level and prompted a huge wave of sympathy across Europe. It was the subject of a film, directed by Andrzej Wajda and

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entitled Man of Iron, which centres on a worker involved in the Gdańsk strike. This is a sequel to Man of Marble (1977), based on the disappearance of a discredited former Stakhanovite worker-hero of the Stalinist period. Man of Iron was awarded the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1981, a few months before the declaration of a state of emergency in Poland and the imposition of martial law, measures which appear in retrospect as a temporary halt in the move towards a post-communist era. The strikes described in this account are just some among a great many others, a few of which have been briefly mentioned. All European, they took place in England, France, Italy and Poland during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They involved farm labourers, miners, car factory, textile and port industry workers, and varied groups of activists: men and women from urban or rural localities, the ‘labour aristocracy’ and militants. This selection, which cuts across countries, regions, locations and branches of activity, features a variety of participants, some more iconic than others. The cinema plays a significant role here, as one of the vehicles of collective memory. There has been no attempt to produce a completely representative account of forms and types of strikes, but the examples chosen do give an idea of their diversity. What emerges is the symbolic dimension of the strike as a favoured, dramatized and ritualized expression of social tensions, and of the workers’ fight against their exploiters − the lowly versus the powerful and the poor versus the privileged. Whether antagonistic or defensive, victorious or defeated, the strike appears primarily as the memory of a community of interest experienced through action, shaped by solidarity and focused on the future. Yet today, as in the past, apart from certain exceptions rooted in particular localities, it appears that the strike as a realm of memory has been assigned to other actors in the form of political, intellectual or cultural figures − and it is they who formulate the ways in which it is represented in the public space.

NOTES 1. Émile Zola, Germinal, translated from the French by Peter Collier (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Oxford World’s Classics, 1993 [1885]), p. 5. 2. Ibid., p. 524. 3. Bruno Fuligni, La France rouge. Un siècle d’histoire dans les archives du PCF (18711989) (Paris: Les Arènes, 2011).

BIBLIOGRAPHY ‘200 ans de révoltes ouvrières’ (special feature), L’Histoire, no. 404 (October 2014). Fuligni, Bruno, La France rouge. Un siècle d’histoire dans les archives du PCF (1871– 1989), Paris, Les Arènes, 2011. Laba, Romain, ‘“Solidarité” et les luttes ouvrières en Pologne, 1970–1980’, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 61 (March 1986). Lippolis, Mario, Ben Venga Maggio e′i gonfalon selvaggio, Carraia, Academia dei Testardi, 1987.

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Perrot, Michelle, ‘Les vies ouvrières’, in Pierre Nora (Ed.), Les Lieux de mémoire, t. III, vol. 3: De L’archive à l’emblème, Paris, Gallimard, 1997. Pudal, Bernard and Jean-Noël Retière, ‘Les grèves ouvrières de 68, un movement social sans lendemain mémoriel’, in Dominique Damamme et al. (Eds.), Mai–Juin 68, Paris, Éditions de l’Atelier, 2008. Rossel, André, 1er Mai. 90 ans de luttes populaires dans le monde, Paris, Éditions de la Courtille, 1977. Verret, Michel, ‘Mémoire ouvrière, mémoire communiste’, Revue française de science politique, 34, no. 3 (1984).

FILMOGRAPHY (FILMS LISTED IN ORDER OF THEIR APPEARANCE IN THE TEXT) The Organizer, an Italian-French-Yugoslavian co-production directed by Mario Monicelli, with Marcello Mastroianni and Annie Girardot, 1963. Germinal, a French-Italian-Belgian co-production directed by Claude Berri, with Miou-Miou, Renaud and Gérard Depardieu, 1993. Strike, a Soviet production directed by Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein, 1924. The Battleship Potemkin, a Soviet production directed by Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein, 1925. Life Belongs to Us (La Vie est à nous), a French production directed by Jean Renoir for the French Communist Party, 1936. They Were Five (La Belle Équipe), a French production directed by Julien Duvivier, with Jean Gabin, 1936. The Return to Work at the Wonder Factory (La Reprise du travail aux usines Wonder), made by students from IDHEC (the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques) in 1968, and shown in Reprise, a French documentary film directed by Hervé Le Roux, 1997. Les LIP. L’imagination au pouvoir, a French documentary film directed by Christian Rouaud, 2007. Made in Dagenham, a British production directed by Nigel Cole, 2010. 1900, an Italian-French-German co-production directed by Bernardo Bertolucci, with Burt Lancaster, Robert De Niro and Gérard Depardieu, 1976. Brassed Off, a British production directed by Mark Herman, 1996. Billy Elliot, a British production directed by Stephen Daldry, 2000. Man of Iron, a Polish production directed by Andrzej Wajda, 1981.

CHAPTER 43

Class society, class struggle The echo of the past HARTMUT KAELBLE

Terms such as ‘management’ and the ‘precariat’ have replaced the language of class society, with its references to the bourgeoisie and the working class, in our discourse. The memory of class society, however, still forms part of the collective imaginary, although without the addition of any leading new notion. It conjures up, on the one hand, an image of stable, prosperous times, when everyone had a place and a future, in contrast to the insecurity that characterizes our perception of the present. On the other hand, it excludes the negative experiences – not only the wars and the economic crises of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries but also the insecurities and dark futures of past European class societies. The notions of social classes and the class struggle have become increasingly less prevalent in Europe since the 1980s. The same is true of the terms associated with them, such as the ‘bourgeoisie’, the ‘petty-bourgeoisie’ or the ‘working class’; their use has decreased in written language in Germany, France, Italy and Poland, as well as in Britain and Spain, both of whose languages have been established in non-European societies. Other concepts, such as the ‘precariat’, ‘personnel’, ‘management’, ‘poverty’ and ‘wealth’, now prevail in their place. Large-scale surveys on European societies likewise reveal that the focus on class conflict, classconsciousness and, more generally, on the carefully drawn dividing-lines between social classes has all but disappeared. The class society and the class struggle were distinctive features of the old continent from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1970s, in comparison with modern non-European societies like those of the United States and Japan. Are these notions now gradually fading into obscurity? Although our language might suggest otherwise, reminders of the class society remain omnipresent in our memories and everyday lives. City centres throughout the continent reflect the golden age of the European bourgeoisie, with their museums, opera houses, theatres, railway stations, department stores, schools, cafés, public parks, squares, monuments and fountains, as well as universities and churches that were peculiarly restored in the nineteenth century. A large number of former industrial cities still retain many of their factories and the impressive villas built for the factory owners, as well as the working-class districts that survived

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both world wars and the demolition mania of the 1960s. Red flags, raised fists and protest marches with their large banners are still a vivid presence in our memories, preserved mainly in the form of street names. We remain attached to 1 May as a public holiday and we still hold strikes. We continue to wear suits (middle class) and caps (working class); we drink eau-de-vie (proletarian) and wine (bourgeois); we cook with butter (middle class) and lard (working class); we watch football (working class) and tennis (middle class). These vestiges of distinct lifestyles still form part of our everyday lives. Are they ‘empty shells’ that have simply been filled with different contents, or reminders of the class struggle and the class society?

MEMORIES OF PROSPERITY Although the term ‘class society’ is rarely used nowadays, a great many aspects of pre-1970s industrial societies trigger feelings of nostalgia. Public debates regularly contain references to a time of powerful trade unions and of a skilled working class, confident in the future and proud of their occupation and environment, and of proprietor-bosses who took responsibility for their companies instead of leaving them to managers solely preoccupied with their careers and salaries. This was a time when the members of a cultivated middle class (Bildungsbürgertum) were distinguished by their lifestyles and shared values (the family, work, art and culture), characterized by their professions and concern with the common good, and more interested in culture than in money. They were also the days of newspapers and of journalists who earned a respectable living by writing for the print media. The norm was to have one job for life, providing the working class with a livelihood and enabling the middle class to secure their children’s futures; salaries, incomes and living standards all rose steadily. It was a time of large, traditional families and few divorces, when immigration rates were low and religion gave life meaning. It was also a time when citizens could count on the state to provide them with social security benefits in old age and sickness, a time of non-deregulated, reliable public services − the railways, the post office, municipal savings banks and transport and electricity providers − of a loyal electorate and of stable political parties with growing numbers of supporters. The sovereignty of individual states was acknowledged, yet European integration was generally accepted. The list of these constantly recurring references could well be expanded − but to what extent do they reflect the reality of European industrial societies between the mid-nineteenth century and the 1970s? Although this is a difficult question to answer, these representations are certainly still present in our memories. Memory and history writing are different. Memory delves into the past to find what it sees as the most important contrasts to the present, in order to create a type of ‘stockpile’ of nostalgia. In the case of pre-1970s Europe, that memory masks three specific aspects. First, it causes one to forget that Europeans were very often gripped by fear when faced with social upheavals and the prospect of a new dawn presented to them in glowing terms. In reality, the thought of the future did not inspire a great deal of confidence during this period.

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Second, it also conceals the fact that a substantial section of European society was excluded, until the mid-twentieth century, from the benefits described in those recollections. A great many Europeans lived in extreme poverty in rural localities, with many being forced to emigrate, while the bourgeoisie often faced serious financial crises, and most state social insurance systems offered only limited allowances and support. Thirdly, a standard career path was by no means the rule − instead, high immigration rates that generated conflicts tended to be the norm. Memory is prey to its own internal contradictions, with positive recollections coexisting alongside those of the dark times that preceded the 1970s. Vividly present, they include two world wars, the Great Depression of the 1930s, the period of inflation in Germany, the looming threat of civil wars in the interwar and immediate post-war periods, and international tensions and fears of nuclear annihilation during the Cold War. The rose-tinted memories previously described were chiefly associated with the ‘Golden Age’ (from the 1950s to the 1970s) and were very much the exception rather than the rule during the long century that saw the development of industrial society. However, these memories vary according to individual countries, political trends and social contexts. As soon as we look at concrete cases, it becomes clear that there is no longer a European consensus on memory. Collective memories in a number of Central and Eastern European countries are closely linked to the communist system and its social structures; in Western Europe, conversely, they are more associated with democracy. The collective memories of Social Democrats, Liberals and Christian Democrats are each characterized by their own chosen themes, yet all share the nostalgia associated with that bygone period. Visions for the future have become rare. How can we explain this nostalgia for a period dominated by industry and by the class society? It should first be remembered that in most cases, those memories do not correspond to lived experience. Nowadays, only those aged sixty or over have first-hand knowledge of pre-1970s society, which they experienced as adolescents or young adults. Conversely, for the majority of Europeans, pre-1970s society is part of a vanished era known only through books, museums, television and the accounts given by their elders. That indirect memory can no longer be challenged on the basis of individual examples and is subject to transformations brought about by public debates and new collective experiences. Moreover, due to a lack of mobilization by clearly defined social or political groups, the memory of industrial society, its social classes and their struggles, may be used by very different actors. However, that nostalgic memory plays a key role, as it shines a critical light on the present and identifies the shortcomings of contemporary society, which vary according to the political perspective. They include the decline of a cohesive industrial working class, confident in itself and in the future; the emergence of the ‘precariat’; uncertain prospects for ever-increasing numbers of university graduates; a welfare state in crisis, with repercussions on the pension system; growing social inequality regarding assets, income, housing and health; the weakening of nation states as a result of globalization; and a European Union beset by crises and disputes over its decisions.

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There is no satisfactory way of designating these positive recollections and their ‘bygone’ aspect, while the terms ‘industrial society’, ‘capitalism 2.0’, ‘organized capitalism’, ‘knowledge society’ and ‘individualized society’ do little to convey the feeling of loss and rupture associated with the 1970s. That being the case, why do we not simply speak of a ‘class society’? There is a reason for this. The situation in Europe from the latter half of the nineteenth century to the 1970s did not exactly conform to the revolutionary theory of a class society. The contradictions between the interests of labour and capital certainly played an important role, but as a general rule they were not insurmountable, as there was always room for compromise − the socialist revolution did not continuously threaten to break out. Large parts of society fell outside those reductive categories of ‘capital’ and ‘labour’ and could not be pigeon-holed in that way. They included small-scale farmers, domestic staff, a great many shopkeepers, hauliers, artisans and lower-grade civil servants. Governments, law courts and public administration services were not simply and solely regulated by capital holders. In the same way, the educated middle class, journalists, writers and academics did not simply and solely champion the interests of those capital holders. Furthermore, the notion of the class society is certainly far from adequate as a means of conveying positive recollections of the industrial society of the past. As that concept was − and still is − associated with negative connotations in many European languages, it is worth briefly reviewing its history.

THE CONCEPT OF SOCIAL CLASSES This concept was created by an educated middle class in the first half of the nineteenth century and immediately presented a negative vision of the future, with a dividing line separating the bourgeoisie from the lower classes. The latter contained, on the one hand, the ‘deserving poor’, who were to be pitied. Cast into penury through new developments beyond their control, they were nonetheless capable of escaping their circumstances by leading a better life thanks to education, mutual assistance and charitable associations. Although members of this social category might achieve middle-class status, there was also a risk that they would remain confined within their impoverished class. The ‘masses’, on the other hand, were perceived as the dangerous social classes − intractable, unpredictable, wild, destructive and uncivilized, they represented a threat. It was not until the mid-nineteenth century that the term ‘class society’ began to reflect the contemporary situation, although it remained broadly negative. Factory workers now occupied the most prominent position among the lower classes, who were still perceived as either objects of pity or troublemakers. Originating from the educated bourgeoisie, this concept took on a radical character in the works of Karl Marx; the class conflict of the capitalist system was to lead to revolution and to the abolition of social classes. The class society lost its negative associations late in the day, when industrial societies were fully established. The concept was first used to describe existing society with no mention of inevitable social crises, or even of revolutions, in the late nineteenth century with the work of sociologists

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such as Werner Sombart, Maurice Halbwachs, Max Weber, Vilfredo Pareto and Thorstein Veblen, although the last two exemplified a different approach. Besides status groups (Stände), Max Weber distinguished four major social classes: those privileged by their property and education; the petty bourgeoisie; the non-propertyowning intelligentsia and specialists, including technicians; and, lastly, the working class. The notion of the class society underwent further developments after the First World War. It was perceived in a negative manner by Europe’s three rival political systems: communism, democracy and fascism. Despite their opposing views, all aimed either to abolish it or at least to attenuate it. This negative perception endured after the Second World War. Indeed, the Cold War context of political and intellectual confrontation was hardly conducive to the re-adoption of the purely scientific, late nineteenth-century conception of the term. All these considerations remain applicable today, perhaps less so in English than in other European languages. There do not appear to be any signs of an imminent return to that neutral usage, let alone of the class society being associated with positive memories. It is therefore difficult to find a notion for the reconfiguration currently taking place in practices and memories. Nobody nowadays, or hardly anybody, refers to ‘the class society’; yet we continue to inhabit the buildings and factories of that period, often lovingly restored. The clothes, food, drinks, films, pictures, photos and novels of that time are still present in our lives; those positive collective memories accompany us and stimulate public debates. This discrepancy contains within it the inevitable demise of both the industrial and the class societies. Conversely, it also highlights the shortcomings of our society today: social uncertainty, growing social inequalities, transformed nation states and the constant questioning of new fundamental social and political directions.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Boch, Rudolf, ‘Fabriken’, in Pim den Boer, Heinz Duchhardt, Georg Kreis and Wolfgang Schmale (Eds.), Europäische Erinnerungsorte, 3 vols, vol. II: Das Haus Europa, Munich, Oldenbourg, 2011, pp. 535–42. Chauvel, Louis, ‘Le retour des classes sociales’, Revue de l’OFCE, October 2001. Eley, Geoff and Keith Nield, The Future of Class in History: What’s Left of the Social? Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2007. Kocka, Jürgen, Arbeiterleben und Arbeiterkultur. Die Entstehung einer sozialen Klasse, Bonn, Dietz, 2015. Pleinen, Jenny, ‘Klasse, Version: 1.0’, in Docupedia-Zeitgeschichte, consulted on 10 March 2015. http:​/​/doc​​upedi​​a​.de/​​zg​/Kl​​asse?​​oldid​​=​1063​​14. Tilly, Charles, ‘Social Class’, in Peter N. Stearns (Ed.), Encyclopedia of European Social History, vol. III, New York, Scribner, 2001, pp. 3–18.

CHAPTER 44

The female imprint A supplement to history MARIE-CLAIRE HOOCK-DEMARLE

Although female figures − such as Europa, Britannia and Marianne − have often been used as allegories of power, women have had very few opportunities to exert that power during the course of history. It took exceptional personalities to enable them to acquire social visibility, a gradual process. Their emancipation from the constraints of family or religious life and their entry into the public sphere were both achieved through organized resistance, culminating in the impact made by The Second Sex (1949), with its groundbreaking statement: ‘One is not born a woman, but becomes one.’ ‘[W]hy should they not add a supplement to history, calling it, of course, by some inconspicuous name so that women might figure there without impropriety?’ asked Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own (1929). A close examination reveals that the European imaginary, both past and present, appears to be teeming with female figures, beginning with that of Europa. Her story is one of abduction, and might be seen as an early example of gender relations that also established the gender hierarchy in the new continent. Over the centuries, each of the various states comprising this nascent Europe adopted its own emblematic figure. They include Italia Turrita, her mural crown of towers surmounted by a fivepointed star; the ‘Mother Russia’ invoked in ‘The Field of the Dead’, composed by Sergei Prokofiev for Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky; and Britannia, a Roman goddess re-imagined as a national emblem in the reign of Elizabeth I, with whom she was associated. There is also Germania, first conceived as a captive lamenting the eponymous territory conquered by the Romans, re-invented in the nineteenth century to personify national unity after the Napoleonic Wars, and later seen as the female warrior-guardian of the Reich − and there is Marianne, the symbol of the French Republic, who emerged during the Revolution. All these allegorical figures, implanted within centres of power or standing, sentinel-like, at frontiers, are now embedded into the European geopolitical landscape. They appear in the form of statues on the public squares of Paris and London, in images such as the painting of Germania (1848) that once hung in Frankfurt am Main’s Paulskirche and in monuments such as the Niederwalddenkmal (1883), which overlooks the Rhine,

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while every town hall in France has its bust of Marianne. All have made their mark on the composite, and sometimes clashing, narrative of European history. Yet despite the prominence that might be accorded to these figures in the collective European imaginary and in the construction of realms of memory, their presence was primarily intended to reflect the glory of different nations or to commemorate historical and political events or wars exclusively directed by men. Paradoxically, these women icons were purely constructs of the male imaginary. This was a genuine case of usurping the female body, as such figures clearly do not represent the women that constitute that ‘other half ’ of Europe. Where, then, might we find the milestones that punctuate the long journey of a whole section of Europe’s population in its quest for visibility and acknowledgement? The domain of modern statistics quite evidently provides no answers; unlike the parish records that became widespread throughout Europe in the seventeenth century, these gave no indication of women’s real demographic weight until the late nineteenth century. Then, alongside the household records dominated by the father/head of the family, columns for individual records included the clearly stated heading: ‘Sex. Male or Female’. There was a ‘fog’ around women’s activities that long prevailed in censuses throughout Europe. ‘Until 1914 no State succeeded in producing satisfactory records of female activities. [. . .] In this way, [women] sometimes appeared as “inactive” in the column against their husbands’ names, depending on the census taker.’1 How can we uncover the realms of memory pertaining to women when, until recently, there have been no histories devoted to them? ‘Can there be such a thing as a history of women?’ asked Michelle Perrot in 1984, tracking down a story that had yet to be unearthed. As Gisela Bock noted in her work Frauen in der europäischen Geschichte (2000): ‘When the history of women was discovered in Europe in the mid-1970s, there had long been a need to legitimise the simple question of whether or not they had a history.’2 With the appearance of A History of Women in The West (1994–96), the last decade of the twentieth century offered much more than the small ‘supplement’ with its ‘inconspicuous name’ suggested by Virginia Woolf. This is a panoramic account that brings to light, layer by layer, a vast archaeological site of female realms of memory, hitherto submerged in the silence of history. These realms, highly varied in character, evolved over time and in conformity with the specific methods used by the women who constructed them. There were personalities, ‘Great Women’ – if we might allow ourselves to use this neologism – who left their mark and created realms of memory in their own manner, either through strategy or as acts of provocation, revendication or transgression. And those voices, actions, writings and isolated destinies were transmitted from generation to generation, often orally. In this way, groups of women gained prominence and substance, gradually mastering the forms of sociability that gave them visibility, even power, in the European public space. Broader-based, better-organized resistance and emancipation movements subsequently established the ‘other half ’ in the public, civic and political space, with considerable disparities in terms of time and location. Finally, the impact of The Second Sex (1949), with its groundbreaking statement:

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‘One is not born a woman, but becomes one’, paved the way for another history, this time appropriated by women. Simone de Beauvoir’s hard-hitting critique opened their eyes to the ‘situation’ in which they had been placed, and to their own roads to freedom.

OF CERTAIN GREAT WOMEN Abducted by Zeus, Europa quietly succumbs. Yet one woman established her presence in the collective memory during the days of Antiquity, a time when girls were married at increasingly young ages and moved directly from their fathers’ authority to their husbands’. The female condition was therefore reduced to that of a wife (uxor) or mother (matrona). The fame of Antigone, who openly defied her uncle Creon when he forbade the burial of her rebel brother Polynices, has lived on over the centuries. This was a political confrontation, and Antigone’s words, as set down in the eponymous tragedies by Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides, signal the emergence of the autonomous female voice and of female resistance to the established order. Antigone is present at crucial moments in European history, from Robert Garnier’s Antigone ou la piété (1580), written in the sixteenth century, an era ravaged by religious wars, to Jean Anouilh’s play Antigone (1944), in which she appears as a figure of Resistance. Another iconic female figure later arose from the most silent of all the masses comprising the ‘other half ’ − the peasantry. This was Joan of Arc, whose presence in the collective memory fulfils a dual purpose. On the one hand, she is presented on horseback as a curiously asexual female warrior, as with Emmanuel Frémiet’s equestrian statue (1874). In this form, she has frequently been used as a rallying point for nationalist mobilization. Yet on the other hand, she is also ‘Jehanne la bonne Lorraine’, sentenced by a tribunal of Church authorities to be burnt at the stake, as witches were, and immortalized by François Villon in the Ballade des dames du temps jadis (1460). Elevated to the status of a quintessential memorial figure and even canonized, Joan regularly re-emerges at key moments in various art forms: in plays by Friedrich Schiller (1801), Charles Péguy (1910) and Bertolt Brecht (1930); in operas by Giuseppe Verdi (1845) and Arthur Honegger (1938); and in films directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer (1928) and Robert Bresson (1962). As a sacralized female figure, Joan has her place in the feminine memorial narrative, beside the Virgin Mary and Saint Geneviève. Yet at European level, a large number of holy women like Saint Elizabeth of Thuringia, daughter of the king of Hungary, became significant memorial figures through their exemplary lives, while others such as Hildegard of Bingen and Saint Teresa of Ávila – both of whom were declared doctors of the Church in the twentieth century – command respect for the strength of their faith and the impact of their writing. In a different context totally unrelated to mysticism, other powerful, less legendary women have left their mark on the collective memory, beginning with the Empress Theodora. Despite having been a courtesan, she married Justinian, emperor of Constantinople, and inspired a number of reforms favourable to women

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included in the Code of Justinian, promulgated in 529 CE. A more recent example is Queen Louise of Prussia, who attempted to coax Napoleon into offering favourable terms when she met him at Tilsit in 1807, following Prussia’s defeat at the Battle of Jena. She became the emblematic figurehead of the Wars of Liberation launched against Napoleon in 1813, and still served as a reference point for courage and female virtue in imperial Germany in 1871, when she was seen as the ‘mother of the nation’. Others, who had suzerainty over sought-after territories, had the power to produce dramatic changes in the European geopolitical landscape through their marriages with kings of France or England, examples being Anne of Brittany and Eleanor of Aquitaine. Another female ruler, Elizabeth I of England, had such a profound impact that her reign is known as the Elizabethan era. Catherine II, a German princess who became the all-powerful Empress of Russia and is the only female monarch to be known as ‘the Great’, and Maria-Theresa of Austria, who pitted herself against Frederick II, both subsequently played a part in generating a new attitude to women and their genuine potential as rulers. Even so, the title of Élisabeth Badinter’s biography of the latter, Le Pouvoir au féminin. Marie-Thérèse d’Autriche, I’impératrice-reine (2016), still caused a few raised eyebrows. In some cases, however, powerful women such as these sought to eradicate associations with their own gender – a contradictory aspect of the ‘second sex’. The self-proclaimed ‘Virgin Queen’ Elizabeth I, for example, rejected the image of frail femininity: ‘I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too’ (Speech to the troops at Tilbury, August 1588). Christina of Sweden, whose official title was ‘King of Sweden’, likewise rejected marriage and motherhood, and adopted male attire. Paradoxically, therefore, certain ‘Great Women’ associated with female power have a more fragile character as emblems than the female allegorical figures that are products of the masculine imaginary. Over time, the European memory became peopled with key female figures from very different domains. As they cannot all be included here, a few renowned travellers will be mentioned by way of example. One of the foremost of these is Maria Sybilla Merian (1647–1717), the daughter of the great printmaker whose panoramic engravings of European cities appear in the journal Theatrum Europaeum, which he published. A naturalist who specialized in insects and butterflies, she spent two years in Surinam, having travelled there by ship with her daughter at her own expense. Other notable figures are Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, whose long stay in the East (1716–18) is described in her Turkish Embassy Letters, and explorers of remote parts of the globe such as Alexandra David-Néel. Three women from the emphatically male domain of painting made their mark on the European cultural landscape of their day. All were daughters of painters and therefore developed their talents in the home, as women had no access to fine art academies. All possessed a spirit of independence rare for their time and travelled in Europe. Artemisia Gentileschi, who grew up in the shadow of Caravaggio, had great strength of character, braving the public trial of the man who had raped her. This strength is reflected in her portraits, the first of the genre to be painted by a woman. In the same way, she is known for the violence in her paintings depicting biblical heroines slaughtering their oppressors. Angelika Kauffmann and Élisabeth

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Vigée-Lebrun, born in 1741 and 1755, respectively, each played their part in constructing the collective memory of a turbulent period. The former, who was born in Switzerland, made her living painting portraits of the celebrities of her time. She travelled between Italy and London, becoming a member of the Royal Academy in 1768. The latter lived through all the dramatic events of her day (she died in 1842) never ceasing her work as a portrait-painter at the royal courts of Europe, from the Versailles of Marie-Antoinette to Vienna and Russia, where she spent six years in exile. All bore witness to their times with violence or with grace, showing intense dedication to the task of tracing the outlines of a female cultural realm of memory through their art. Female scientists, on a par with their male counterparts in terms of ability if not of accolades, had to fight hard to gain recognition for their work and discoveries. They include Caroline Herschel, who discovered comets and was the first woman to be elected to Honorary Membership of the Royal Astronomical Society, the mathematician Margaret Cavendish and Madame du Châtelet, who translated Isaac Newton. The achievements of a woman in science were not acknowledged until the early twentieth century, when Marie Curie, who had emigrated to Paris from Poland, was awarded two Nobel Prizes. A large number of women have evidently made their mark on Europe’s cultural history, yet the grand memorial narrative shaped by men and institutions reflects little interest in this fact. The Académie française did not elect its first female member, Marguerite Yourcenar, until 1980, and there have only been seven female academicians to this day. Similarly, it was quite some time before those temples of memory, Westminster Abbey, the Panthéon in Paris and the Walhalla, built in the nineteenth century by Ludwig I of Bavaria, acknowledged or received any female presence. Although Westminster Abbey contains a number of royal burial vaults, women feature chiefly as consorts. Elizabeth I lies there, yet, curiously, she shares a tomb with her half-sister Mary Tudor, and their epitaph places no special emphasis on royalty: Regno consortes et urna, hic obdormimus Elizabetha et Maria sorores [. . .] (Partners in throne and grave, here we sleep Elizabeth and Mary, sisters [. . .]). The list of forty-eight renowned national figures commemorated in the Abbey includes just five women: Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Jenny Lind, and the much more contemporary figures of Diana, Princess of Wales and the Shakespearean actor Dame Peggy Ashcroft, who died in 1991. In 2015, Bavaria’s Walhalla contained just twelve busts and plaques commemorating women, although the busts of great figures numbered 130 in total. Only two female figures from more recent times had finally been included there: Sophie Scholl (2003) for her resistance to Nazism and Edith Stein (2009) following her canonization by the Catholic Church, the bust of Käthe Kollwitz being added in 2018. And the Panthéon, dedicated to ‘Great Men’, has proved highly resistant to the notion of receiving a ‘Great Woman’. At this point in the twenty-first century, out of eighty illustrious figures buried there, just five are women: Marie Curie, Germaine Tillion, Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz, Sophie Berthelot and Simone Veil. Two of them, although fully deserving of the

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honour, were buried symbolically, as their coffins did not even contain their remains. Various attempts have been made to secure a place in the Panthéon for Olympe de Gouges, George Sand, Louise Michel and Simone de Beauvoir, but all have been unsuccessful. Should we conclude from this poor record that women have had so little effect on the European memory that their presence has barely been noted? And that even those thrust into the limelight on account of their remarkable lives are there despite being members of the ‘second sex’? Or perhaps we should ignore official commemorations when looking for the imprints that women have left on the collective memory?

FORMS OF FEMININE SOCIABILITY When we consider the ‘other half ’ in its entirety, it becomes clear that the female condition − the result of religious and political factors as much as social ones − was hardly conducive to women’s inclusion in Europe’s grand memorial narrative. Apart from a few exceptions, they have been consistently excluded from history, its political events and its warriors; seen as the weaker sex since the story of Adam and Eve, their relationship with men was characterized by their dependence. Although there were genuine changes to this relationship, through the French Revolution, for instance, or through certain legal codes such as the Allgemeines Landrecht für die Preussischen Staaten (1794), it remained unaltered in a number of domains. The Code civil, which Napoleon established in all the territories he conquered and which remained in force, in several cases, until 1900, clearly redefined the place and role allotted to each sex within the family. The ‘marital power’ and ‘paternal power’ to be exercised by husbands and fathers were both held up as fundamental principles, translating into man’s duty to protect and woman’s duty to obey. Women did not have the right to manage their property autonomously, and in France, a woman could not open a bank account without the explicit consent of her husband until the mid-twentieth century. The rarity of exceptions to the rule only serves to underline the constraints such laws placed on women’s slightest hopes of independence. Marital power was not ordinarily exerted in the world of international commerce, so women were free to run their own business affairs. This accounts for the unusual visibility of the heroine of Daniel Defoe’s novel Roxana, The Fortunate Mistress (1724). After becoming wealthy in her own right, she eventually marries a Dutch merchant and styles herself, splendidly, as a ‘She-Merchant’. Widows, likewise, were not subject to the constraints of those dictates and enjoyed certain freedoms, becoming heads of households and, in some instances, of businesses. A case in point is Glückel of Hameln; married to a wealthy Jewish merchant, she took over his business when she became widowed in the late seventeenth century, assuming control of his commercial dealings firstly in Hamburg and later in Metz. She was also a diarist, and her personal memoirs are the first example of this type of female realm of memory. A different female voice was heard through the memoirs and correspondence of these widows, who also include Goethe’s mother, known as ‘Frau Rat’ (‘Madam Councillor’). Bettina von Arnim presented this native of Frankfurt − who expressed herself frankly − as a key female figure, both in her writings on Goethe and in those devoted to the social issues in the Prussia of her day.

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Such examples, however, were few and far between. The women comprising that ‘other half ’ clearly could not, as an entire body, create their own realms of memory, where they could apply strategies ensuring that women achieved full recognition. Until the rupture created by the French Revolution, that task could only be carried out by a minority of women privileged by birth or fortune; over the centuries, they were able to develop the forms of sociability that would impact on European history in the long term. This approach mitigated women’s exclusion from domains of power, by giving them a cultural role in society that established their influence for posterity. Highborn women were the first to grasp its importance. In the mid-twelfth century, Eleanor of Aquitaine, estranged from her husband, Henry II of England, created a ‘Court of Love’, gathering around her the most famous troubadours of the day. Her sublime indifference to their origins, which were often humble, marks an early challenge to the hierarchical social order and an initial step towards the open sociability of the salons of future eras. This route was pursued in the Italian Renaissance, with the courts of Isabella d’Este at Mantua and Elisabetta Gonzaga, her sister-in-law, at Urbino. Both were cited as exemplary models by Baldassare Castiglione in his work Il libro del cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier, 1528). In addition to receiving painters, literary figures and scholars from all over Europe, these courts also demonstrated two consistent features of the newly emerging feminine forms of sociability; they established a network of exchanges between two cultural environments and were cosmopolitan in character. The Parisian salons of the Age of Enlightenment, two centuries later, were based on this model, even though many salonnières, or hostesses, were not of noble birth and social codes were no longer governed by hierarchies and court etiquette. These places of sociability claimed by women as their own were distinguished firstly by their location, being deliberately situated away from centres of power. Paris was chosen rather than Versailles, where certain salonnières were not even received. Madame Geoffrin, who represented a bourgeoisie that was riding high both socially and intellectually, was married to the director of the Saint-Gobain mirror glass manufactory, a situation that provided her with a handsome fortune but no aristocratic title. Madame Necker was the wife of a banker from Geneva. Although he became a minister under Louis XVI, her place was in Paris, where she presided over her salon together with her daughter Germaine – the future Madame de Staël. Madame du Deffand, who came from the minor provincial nobility, chose to establish her salon in the former convent where the disgraced Madame de Montespan had found refuge. The choice of each location symbolized the spirit of independence that distinguished this new generation of women. Some of them, having lived through the Régence (the minority of Louis XV) and experienced the atmosphere of freedom and the open-mindedness characteristic of that period, decided to assert their presence in both the temporal and the spatial sense. In this case, too, cosmopolitanism prevailed; established at a European level, it extended even as far as Russia. As well as receiving the great minds of the day − Voltaire, Jean le Rond d’Alembert, Denis Diderot, Jean-François Marmontel and Jean-Jacques Rousseau − Madame du Deffand and Mademoiselle de Lespinasse vied with each

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other in attracting passing foreign visitors to their salons. These were known as the ‘Bureau d’esprit’ (‘centre of intellect’) in the case of Madame du Deffand and the ‘Laboratory of the Encylopaedia’ in that of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse. Lord Chesterfield, Henry Bolingbroke and even John Law were habitués of Madame de Tencin’s salon. A generation later, Melchior Grimm, author of the Correspondance littéraire (a newsletter with European subscribers), and Horace Walpole frequented the salons hosted by Madame d’Épinay and Madame du Deffand respectively. Stanisław Poniatowski, the future king of Poland, found an almost maternal form of refuge in the salon hosted by Madame Geoffrin, who later travelled to Warsaw. Established within the geographical and social landscape of Europe, these spaces generated forms of sociability and communication that profoundly altered relationships between the sexes. By favouring conversation and epistolary exchanges, these salonnières introduced, and skilfully subverted, two modes of expression that had been granted to women as they belonged to the private space. This had been demonstrated in her day by Madame de Sévigné, who corresponded principally with her daughter. The correspondence conducted by Madame Geoffrin with Catherine the Great, and by Madame du Deffand with Horace Walpole and Voltaire now have their place among the cultural landmarks of the Age of Enlightenment. Although female cultural spaces did not disappear during the French Revolution, they dispersed, establishing themselves outside France, while new ones were expressly created elsewhere. Between 1798 and 1802, a Circle was formed at Jena − the term ‘salon’ was now associated with the pre-revolutionary world consigned to the depths of history. This group brought together men and women from the Frühromantiker generation, in other words, the early German Romantics. During this iconic interim period, members of the Circle gathered in one location and scandalized public opinion by applying the revolutionary principles of universality, equality and fraternity in their everyday lives. The group notably included the Schlegel brothers, the wife of one brother and the companion of the other. Friedrich Schlegel lived with Dorothea, a daughter of the Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, who had settled in Berlin. Caroline Michaelis married August Wilhelm Schlegel after an adventurous episode as a ‘Jacobine’ in the short-lived Republic of Mainz; she later left him for the philosopher Friedrich Schelling, who was also part of the Jena Circle. These two unusual women played an active part in discussions on relationships between the sexes, couples and marriage. In his novel Lucinde, published in 1799, Friedrich Schlegel caused a scandal by creating a heroine (modelled on Dorothea) who stood on equal terms with men in every domain, including gender roles, conjugal life and writing. The creed of this new woman was set out in the Catechism of Reason for Women of Quality and published in the group’s journal, the Athenäum: ‘I believe in infinite Humanity, which existed before it draped itself in the veils of masculinity and femininity. I believe that I do not exist in order to obey or for my own amusement, but in order to be and to become.’3 This tempestuous pioneering group was not an isolated case. Various salons were also held in Berlin at the turn of the eighteenth and

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nineteenth centuries. They welcomed foreign visitors who had been attracted to the centres of sociability created and presided over by two Jewish hostesses from the city: Henriette Herz, the wife of a doctor, and Rahel Levin (who became Rahel Varnhagen in 1814). These quintessential feminine spaces were the product of a paradoxical society, Berlin’s Jewish community. Although protected by Frederick II, it had no civil rights, but was still able to create a place for itself in a tolerant city: ‘precisely because the Jews stood outside of society they became, for a short time, a kind of neutral zone [. . .],4 Rahel referred to her first salon (she opened a second in 1826) as her ‘garret’; this was a symbolic name, signalling a desire for what Virginia Woolf defined as ‘a room of one’s own’ − a private space that stood outside social conventions and norms, where she could receive a small group of individuals (Menschen), irrespective of gender or differences in social status. The experience of the garret salon, consolidated by a vast correspondence that was to be Rahel’s life’s work, formed part of an endeavour to create a space that reflected a real mix of cultures within Europe, through dialogue and epistolary exchange. Another centre emerged, this time far from Berlin but in close contact with the city’s spaces of sociability. It was to remain a true ‘laboratory of Europe’ and acquired a sanctum-like quality as an authentic female realm of memory. The Château de Coppet, where Necker had sought refuge after 1790, was the location chosen by his daughter to spend a period of exile between 1804 and 1814; this had been imposed on her by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1803. Standing on the banks of Lake Geneva, which had remained neutral territory, it was therefore ideally positioned as a central point on the border between countries and cultures, and was also a port of call for those in transit between the great capitals of Europe. A place of exile distanced from centres of power, Coppet was transformed by Madame de Staël into an environment of open sociability that fascinated Stendhal, a visitor there in 1817: I have been told of a most remarkable gathering − the Estates General of European opinion − that took place this autumn on the shores of Lake Geneva. [. . .] Do I need to name the astonishing personage who was the heart and soul of this assembly? As I see it, the phenomenon has attained political significance.5 Using the exteriority and diversity that characterized her location and her company, Madame de Staël brought about a paradoxical inversion, transforming her place of exile into an intercultural space where she received a varied mix of foreign visitors. While they stayed under her roof, they retained their own languages and cultures of origin. On the threshold of the contemporary age, she transformed the home of a female author − a feat later attempted by George Sand at Nohant in the province of Berry − into one of the few feminine realms of memory.

IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF ‘PARADOXICAL’ FEMALE CITIZENS Despite being an inveterate bachelor, Theodor von Hippel, a judge and later mayor of Königsberg, birthplace of Immanuel Kant, wrote opuscules on marriage,

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women and education. In an essay entitled On Improving the Civil Status of Women (1793) he noted the impact of the French Revolution on ‘one of the two hemispheres of the human species’: ‘For several centuries, Europe had only one face. Despotism and enslavement, ignorance and barbarism reigned everywhere; and why, after such a long period of oppression, should women not be elevated to their rightful status as human beings?’6 Von Hippel was giving a new context to a centuries-old European debate on the battle of the sexes; known as the Querelle des Sexes or the Querelle des Femmes, the topic was notably addressed by Christine de Pisan in La Cité des Dames (1405). As Gisela Bock observes: ‘in the Querelle des Sexes, which has left more of a mark on the culture of the modern era than any other theme, the central issue was the dignity and worth of the “other” sex.’7 However, the terms chosen by von Hippel underline the paradigm shift that had taken place in the perception of that ‘other half ’ of the human species. It was no longer a case of asserting their ‘dignity’ and ‘worth’, words strongly associated with Christianity and morality, but of women’s right to the status of human beings and to education, a recurring theme, sometimes conceived in a mixed-gender context. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) appeared at the same time. The author of this work, Mary Wollstonecraft, was a first-hand observer of the French Revolution and witnessed Marie-Antoinette’s journey to the scaffold. Echoing Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791), she entered into the debate, criticizing Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and his outmoded ideal of womanhood as exemplified by Rousseau’s character Sophie. She was not the only woman to demand civil rights for the ‘other half ’ of the human species. In 1791, Olympe de Gouges published her Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne (Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen), in which she argues that women, as individuals in their own right, are themselves active citizens. Caught between the universalist ideal and the reality of gender inequality, Olympe de Gouges certainly left her mark on the collective memory but paid the price on the scaffold. She epitomizes the paradoxical nature of the female citizens described by Joan W. Scott: ‘I do not think of these women as exemplary heroines. Instead I think of them as sites − historical locations or markers − where crucial political and cultural contests are enacted [. . .]’8

MOVEMENTS AS REALMS OF MEMORY Little inclination to emancipate women was shown during the first French Empire. The same was true of both the Bourbon Restoration, initially established in Paris and later in Vienna, and the Victorian Age, which spanned three-quarters of the century. All presented serious obstacles to the visibility of women and to their aspirations. The limited prospects of the ‘second sex’ were reflected in the official slogan ‘To man, the State; to woman, the family’, in The Angel in the House, a bestselling

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poem first published in London in 1854, and in the German doctrine of the ‘3 ks’ (Kinder-Küche-Kirche − children, kitchen, church). Moreover, the process of industrialization, which spread from Britain to continental Europe, created social Conditions that impacted particularly on women from the group known as the labouring class. For a fleeting moment, women’s field of action had been public and political; the quest for new bearings resulted in a shift from the political to the social sphere. This change in perspective, punctuated by the various revolutions that occurred throughout Europe during the nineteenth century, translated into new modes of expression and highly varied forms of engagement that imprinted themselves into the narrative of collective memory. The route taken by female authors, whose literary reputation had already been established, reflects this somewhat paradoxical approach. The 1840s witnessed the emergence of the ‘woman of the people’, who might be a factory worker, a villager or a home worker. Such characters appeared, for example, in George Sand’s Le Compagnon du tour de France (1840), Louise Otto’s Schloss und Fabrik (1846) and, a little later, George Eliot’s Silas Marner (1861). The real centres of influence were those ephemeral yet public forums, newspapers and periodicals: La Voix des femmes, founded by Eugénie Niboyet, The English Woman’s Journal and Frauen-Zeitung founded by Louise Otto in 1849. These publications sometimes presented work by female authors who explored social issues, conducting their investigations in the ‘colonies of the poor’. They include the Berlin-based writer Bettina von Arnim, with Dies Buch gehört dem König (1843) and, at European level, Flora Tristan with Promenades dans Londres (1840), followed by Tour de France, written in 1844 but not published until 1973. All these studies carried condemnations of the toil and the arduous existence endured by female workers, as was the case with the washerwomen of Nîmes described by Flora Tristan, and argued for decent working conditions and women’s right to education. In essays such as Marion Reid’s A Plea for Woman (1843) and The Subjection of Women (1869) written by John Stuart Mill and his wife Harriet, British writers called for women’s civil and civic rights, emphasizing emancipation through education. These landmark works, sometimes established within a commemorative narrative, were marginalized, or even suppressed, in the nineteenth century. It was not until the end of the century that a realm of memory in the form of movements began to evolve throughout Europe, although there were discrepancies and divergences that sometimes jeopardized its development. These movements took forms and names hitherto associated with the masculine domain, a new departure for women; they included Bund and Verein, Suffrage Association and National League, and Union or Conseil national. One of them in particular, the British Suffragette Movement of the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, has an enduring place in the collective European memory. The movement, which developed within informal circles such as the Langham Place Group, re-established women at the heart of the political realm through its commitment to achieving civic rights, equality and the right to vote. Its members carried out their activities publicly, and sometimes violently, at a time when events could be recorded by ever-ready photographers or

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even shown in cinema newsreels. The suffragettes made a lasting visual impact in this way, with images of women breaking windows or chaining themselves to the railings of official buildings. The many women’s movements established in Continental Europe at the dawn of the twentieth century were less prominent. More reformist in character, they were chiefly committed to obtaining civil rights. Women in France, often influenced by Saint-Simonianism, struggled to form a structured movement, despite the presence of a few strong personalities such as Hubertine Auclert and Madeleine Pelletier. The latter, whose principal mission was to ensure that girls were educated to become individuals, wrote in 1906: ‘[Women] will be individuals before being a sex.’9 In Germany, the Frauenfrage (the ‘woman question’), a term based on the Arbeiterfrage (the ‘labour question’), gave rise to a powerful but divided movement. In 1894, the Bürgerliche Frauenbewegung (a middle-class women’s movement) founded the Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine (the BDF). An institution in its own right, the BDF created a feminine space in the form of an active network focused on civil rights, education, women’s working conditions, prostitution, issues relating to motherhood and child protection. Initiated by Clara Zetkin in 1889, the Proletarische Frauenbewegung was a movement of proletarian women with which Rosa Luxemburg also had some involvement. Invoking the writings of socialists August Bebel, with his Die Frau und der Sozialismus (1879), and Friedrich Engels, with Der Ursprung der Familie (1884), it established itself as part of the socialist movement, with its strikes, marches and congresses. In this way, it created a political and international realm of influence where the cause of women’s rights gave way to that of the working classes, for whom gender equality was not a pressing concern. It is one of the paradoxes of those nineteenth-century feminine realms of memory formed of movements that modelled themselves on masculine movements, parties and unions at the risk of losing their own specific character. This was the case in Germany in 1914, when Gertrud Bäumer, then president of the Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine, backed the parties that had just established an accord with the imperial government. The movement was to dissolve, as was the case with political parties and trade unions, in May 1933.

OF LANDMARK BOOKS The task of singling out a feminine realm of memory for the first half of the twentieth century inevitably involves making a difficult and arbitrary choice. Not one but two works stand out; written by female authors, they were published at key moments marked by the crystallization of a feminine memorial narrative. In the first of these, A Room of One’s Own (1929), Virginia Woolf decries women’s social position; this had remained unchanged in Britain, despite their having gained the vote in 1918 and despite her observation: ‘No age can ever have been as stridently sex-conscious as our own. [. . .] The Suffragette campaign was no doubt to blame.’10 This situation called for a shift in perspective; it was time for women to construct their own memory, beginning with a new approach to the self. And in an emblematic statement that redirected the course of women’s history, the writer adds: ‘I should

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remind you how much depends on you, and what an influence you can exert upon the future. [. . .] I find myself saying briefly and prosaically that it is much more important to be oneself than anything else.’11 Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, another feminine realm of memory in literary form, was published twenty years later. A generation separates Woolf from de Beauvoir, but these were twenty tragic years for the women of Europe. Subjected to the experience of dictatorship in Nazi Germany, Italy and Spain, they were forced to submit to family-centred ideologies and state policies; some tried to resist and paid the price by being exiled. They endured the policies of persecution and extermination perpetrated by racist and anti-Semitic regimes regardless of the victims’ gender. As had been the case with the First World War, large numbers of women had become heads of households as a result of the Second World War, which also precipitated them into the world of industry, including armament production. And once it was over, they found themselves back in the domestic environment, re-assigned to their traditional female role. The condition of women had certainly improved by 1949; the Code civil had been revised, everyone now having obtained the right to vote, while the right to work had been enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Nevertheless, the fundamental problem remained. Rejecting the notions of the ‘eternal feminine’ and ‘biological nature’ tenaciously upheld for centuries, de Beauvoir acknowledged that women were ‘what they had been made’, but emphasized their duty to break free from that ‘situation’. In doing so, she inverted the constituent elements of the age-old gender debate and, arguing for ‘differences in equality’, presented gender relations from an alternative perspective: ‘mutually recognizing each other as subject, each will yet remain for the other an other’.12 Published twenty years apart, these two books made their mark on the collective European memory pertaining to women, who, as de Beauvoir put it, had inherited an oppressive past and were striving to construct a new future.13 Being ‘oneself ’, as advocated by Virginia Woolf, meant being an autonomous ‘other’ for Simone de Beauvoir − indeed, the original title of The Second Sex was The Other. This marked a turning point in women’s history. Firstly, the rights demanded by feminist movements were themselves of another type: control over their own bodies, the right to have abortions and equality in public life. Furthermore, the 1960s saw the struggle extend beyond Europe and take on a global dimension. Influenced by the emergence of ‘women’s studies’ in the United States, it came to encompass all minority groups − women, the Black community, colonized peoples, migrants – in the process of achieving emancipation and acknowledgement through integration. This was the beginning of another commemorative narrative, one that established the history of women and its specific realms of memory within a universal context that has yet to be fully evaluated.

NOTES 1. Jacques Dupâquier, Histoire de la démographie. La statistique de la population des origines à 1914 (Paris: Perrin, 1985), p. 334.

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2. Gisela Bock, Frauen in der europäischen Geschichte (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2000), p. 346. 3. Athenäum. Eine Zeitschrift 1798-1800, I (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1798), p. 176. 4. Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman, translated by Richard and Clara Winston (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), p. 58. 5. Stendhal, ‘Genève 6 juillet 1817’, in Rome, Naples et Florence (Paris: Delaunay, 1817), p. 336. 6. Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel, Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Weiber (Frankfurt am Main: Syndikat, 1977 [1793]), p. 243. 7. Gisela Bock, Frauen in der europäischen Geschichte, p.15. 8. Joan W. Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 16. 9. Madeleine Pelletier, ‘Les femmes et le féminisme’, La Revue socialiste, 1906, Paris, Société nouvelle de librairie et d’édition, volume XLIII (January-June 1906), p. 44. 10. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, first published in the review Forum in March 1929, and then by The Hogarth Press, London, and Harcourt Brace & Co., New York, in September 1929. Quotation from A Room of One’s Own (London, Penguin Random House Vintage Feminism Short Edition, 2018), p. 132. 11. Ibid., p. 148. 12. Simone de Beauvoir, Le Deuxième Sexe, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), II, p. 576. 13. Ibid., II, Introduction.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Arendt, Hannah, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess, translated from the German by Richard and Clara Winston, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997 [1958]. Badinter, Élisabeth, Le Pouvoir au féminin. Marie-Thérèse d’Autriche (1717–1780), l’impératrice reine, Paris, Flammarion, 2016. Beauvoir, Simone de, The Second Sex, translated from the French by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, London, Penguin Vintage Classics, 2015 [1949]. Bock, Gisela, Frauen in der europäischen Geschichte, Munich, C.H. Beck, 2000. Davis, Natalie Zemon, Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1995. Duby, Georges and Michelle Perrot (Eds.), A History of Women in the West, 5 vols, translated from the French by Arthur Goldhammer, Cambridge MA, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1994–1996 [1991–1992]. Frevert, Ute, Frauen-Geschichte: Zwischen Bürgerlicher Verbesserung und Neuer Weiblichkeit, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 1986. Gerhard, Ute, Unerhört. Die Geschichte der deutschen Frauenbewegung, Hamburg, Rowohlt, 1990. Hoock-Demarle, Marie-Claire, L’Europe des lettres. Réseaux épistolaires et construction de l’espace européen, Paris, Albin Michel, 2008.

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Hufton, Olwen, The Prospect Before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe 1500–1800, London, Harper Collins, 1995. Lilti, Antoine, Le Monde des salons. Sociabilité et mondanité à Paris au XVIIIe siècle, Paris, Fayard, 2005. Ozouf, Mona, Les Mots des femmes. Essai sur la singularité française, Paris, Fayard, 1995. Perrot, Michelle, Les Femmes ou les silences de l’histoire, Paris, Flammarion, 1998. Perrot, Michelle (Ed.), Une histoire des femmes est-elle possible? Paris, Rivages, 1984. Scott, Joan W., Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man, Cambridge, MA and London, Harvard University Press, 1996. Wilhelmy, Petra, Der Berliner Salon im 19. Jahrhundert (1780–1914), Berlin, De Gruyter, 1989. Woolf, Virginia, A Room of One’s Own, with an Introduction by Jeanette Winterson, London, Penguin Random House Vintage Feminism Short Edition, 2018 [1929].

CHAPTER 45

Homosexuality Muzzled desire RÉGIS SCHLAGDENHAUFFEN

During the time spanning its ‘invention’ by Sappho on the Isle of Lesbos and the legalization of same-sex marriage, homosexuality was the object of almost continuous repression in Europe. It has taken a long time for the memory of these persecutions to establish itself in the public space; this has only recently been achieved, through campaigning by the LGBTQI rights movement. Europe abounds with realms of memory associated with homosexuality − from ancient Greece, where male homosexuality was celebrated, to the legalization of same-sex marriage in the Netherlands in 2001. The list includes the denunciation of sodomy as a sin, the emergence of the term ‘homosexual’, coined by the Hungarian writer Karl-Maria Kertbeny in 1869, and the period of repression under the Nazis. Inevitably, with such a profusion of sites incorporating memories of homosexuality shared at European level, the tour presented here is an abridged version. Our temporal and spatial journey, during which we will travel from the Age of Antiquity to the present, reflects the development of four major commemorative tendencies. The first stage of our journey takes us to Mytilene, on the Aegean island of Lesbos; it was here that the poet Sappho was born, in the seventh century BCE. Her love poetry highlighted female same-sex desire and the veneration of Aphrodite at a time before the notion of sexual orientation had even been conceived. We travel next to the rue Montorgueil in Paris, where the tone changes completely, as this was the site of the last execution for sodomy in France, which took place in 1750. In 2014, a memorial plaque was placed at the corner of the rue Montorgueil and the rue Bachaumont in the second arrondissement, a tribute to the last two men to be burnt at the stake on the place de Grève for this reason. We continue on to Italy, a country that played a central role for male homosexuals in exile. One of the major figures to find refuge there was the lawyer Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825–95), whose pseudonym was Numa Numantius. As well as coining the term ‘uranism’ in 1865 (shortly before the emergence of the word ‘homosexuality’), he was the first to make a public announcement of his love for men. After a period of imprisonment, he went into exile in L’Aquila, where he devoted his time to publishing a literary review entitled Alaudæ. A few hundred kilometres further

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south, opposite Naples, lies the small island of Capri, which was frequented by a number of gay European artists. Baron Adelswärd-Fersen (1880–1923) was one of the visitors who succumbed to the charm of the ‘blue grotto’, a place where men communed with nature and where the Emperor Tiberius swam with his male favourites, as noted by Roger Peyrefitte. The Villa Lysis, ‘a sanctuary of love and pain’ built by Adelswärd-Fersen, now hosts exhibitions with a particular focus on the theme of homosexuality in art. Realms of memory associated with the violent repression of the gay community during the Nazi period, the concentration camps were scenes of unspeakable suffering endured by the ‘pink triangle’ inmates, the name given to those arrested for their homosexuality. The process of giving visibility to people martyred for their sexuality was initiated in 1984 in the Austrian town of Mauthausen, with the laying of a plaque in the form of a pink triangle inscribed with the words ‘totgeschlagen, totgeschwiegen’ (‘beaten to death, silenced’). Since the early 2000s, the fate suffered specifically by homosexual prisoners has been included in the guided tours held in former camps such as Dachau, Sachsenhausen and Natzweiler, now memorial museums. No picture of this process would be complete without an understanding of the role played by the Schwules Museum in Berlin. Europe’s first ‘gay museum’, it was inaugurated in 1985 and boasts a library and an archive centre. Steeped in the distinctive history of the city that was the gay capital of Europe in the early twentieth century and in the legacy of Doktor Magnus Hirschfeld, founder of the German gay emancipation movement (1897), the museum recounts the history of homosexuality in Europe to the present day. In the 2010s, it expanded its offering to include the struggles shared by the whole lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community, and now holds exhibitions devoted to lesbians and transgender people. Another result of the mission to uncover a memory long left in the shadows is Amsterdam’s Homomonument. Unveiled in 1987, it is the oldest monument in Europe dedicated to victims of homophobia and to the cause of gay emancipation. Created by the artist Karin Daan, it was inspired by the pink triangle worn by the gay inmates of the Nazi concentration camps. An LGBT information kiosk and a urinal stand close by, the latter having been used by men as an informal meeting place for decades. The Homomonument is the scene of various celebrations throughout the year, including the Drag Queen Olympics and the party celebrating Queen’s (now King’s) Day. We conclude with the Spartacus guide, published since 1970 and established as one of the gay publications that form a paper version of a realm of memory. In the manner of the Michelin Blue Guides, it produces an annual index of gay tourist destinations, as well as noting national and European political developments regarding homosexuality. In this way, it reflects the constant transformation of the political and memorial landscape of sexual minorities in Europe.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Aldrich, Robert (Ed.), Une histoire de l’homosexualité, Paris, Le Seuil, 2006. Downing, Lisa and Robert Gillett, Queer in Europe, London, Routledge, 2011. Schlagdenhauffen, Régis (Ed.), Homosexuel-le-s en Europe (1939–1945), Paris, Nouveau Monde, 2017.

CHAPTER 46

Counter-revolution The revenge of the vanquished JEAN-CLÉMENT MARTIN

History’s vanquished groups are enshrined in memories of counter-revolution, from the Vendée uprising to the La Manif pour tous protest movement. These are at variance with the ‘official history’ of the Age of Enlightenment and the French Revolution, forming part of the ‘other side of contemporary history’ following the events of 1789, as observed by Honoré de Balzac. The Europe of the counter-revolution is certainly a muted presence in the collective memory, but it is a presence nonetheless. Above all, although it has been unable to impose its vision, it has an effectiveness that should not be overlooked, attesting to the enduring character and vigour of the criticism and hostility directed at the memory of the eighteenth-century revolutions. Continuing in the old transnational traditions of princely alliances and solidarity between communities that transcend state boundaries, it is associated not only with itineraries, regions and sites but also with heroes, martyrs and princes. Regarded as the ‘vanquished’ parties of history, these figures are regularly cited in criticisms of ‘official histories’ that have not conceded them a place. Presenting their story involves uncovering ‘The Other Side of Contemporary History’, to use the title of a novel by Honoré de Balzac. Once the revolutionary and imperial wars were over, the Europe born of the Congress of Vienna in 1815 was recomposed according to counter-revolutionary principles. Not only were kingdoms and principalities redistributed but above all there was a determination on the part of the victors − Austria, Prussia, Russia and Britain – to guard against any re-emergence of the revolutionary ideas that had circulated throughout Europe, from Ireland to Naples and from Madrid to Warsaw. In 1815, the counter-revolution appeared triumphant. Yet this apparent hegemony was soon swept away by successive waves of liberal, republican and social revolutions. These shook the whole of Europe from the 1830s to the First World War, re-shuffling the cards and altering the very nature of the opposition between revolution and counter-revolution, as the totalitarian and authoritarian regimes of the twentieth century were not their successors. The legacies of the counter-revolution have not disappeared, however; its principal feats

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of arms are still celebrated, together with its key sites, its heritages, engagements and practices. In this way, a genuine counter-revolutionary (or ‘white’) political culture has had a lasting effect on memories and landscapes. This is particularly pronounced for having been reactivated in the 1990s, notably in Italy, France and Spain, where a series of counter-revolutionary sites of memory are still weighted with powerful, all-pervading associations.

THE WARS OF THE VENDÉE Whether in France, Italy, Spain or even Switzerland, certain regions in particular made their mark on the confrontations between revolution and counter-revolution that took place in the 1790s. But after 1793, the Vendée region established itself as the most famous example of this supra-national war, due to the scale, length and toll of its combats, which left about 200,000 dead. The conflict came to an end in 1796, was briefly resumed in 1799 and flared up once again from 1814 to 1815; a final uprising occurred in 1832, when the duchesse de Berry’s attempt to seize power was followed by the whole of Europe. Although counter-revolutionary uprisings were occurring throughout western and south-eastern France at the same time, neither the ‘chouans’ of Brittany nor the ‘barbets’ of Nice have achieved the same level of renown as the ‘Vendéens’. In Italy, counter-revolutionary insurrections (known as insorgenze) took place first in Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna, and later in Naples and the southern regions, the time lapse being linked to the First Italian Campaign under Napoleon and the entry of French troops into the peninsula in 1796. The south was the scene of particularly savage confrontations that continued until 1815. The repression of the Neopolitan Republic in 1799 and the acts of ‘brigandry’ carried out by Michele Pezza, known as Fra Diavolo (Brother Devil), had a particularly vivid effect on the public imagination. Pezza, a young guerrilla leader, fully lived up to this nickname in his resistance to the French Army, which had him executed in 1806. Fifty years later, the fall of the kingdom of Naples and the advent of Italian unification gave rise to another major occurrence of brigantaggio, some groups being led by the descendants of the insurgents of the 1800s. Massacres took place on the border between Austria and Switzerland, and in the cantons of central Switzerland, notably Nidwalden. The Tyrolean Rebellion against the Napoleonic Empire took place between 1807 and 1810, under the leadership of Andreas Hofer and in the name of tradition and Catholicism. Portugal and Spain did not enter into such confrontations until after 1832, when the dynastic quarrels between Liberals and Legitimist monarchists mobilized Europe and triggered provincial uprisings. Portugal’s Douro region and the Spanish region of Navarra became versions of the Vendée in their turn, rallying to the respective causes of dom Miguel I and Carlos de Borbón, Legitimist pretender to the Spanish throne. Spain was beset by the ‘Carlist’ wars, fought in the names of the latter and his descendants, from 1833 to the 1870s. Throughout the nineteenth century, rural, Catholic regions, attached to the traditions of their community and to local elites, formed a wall of resistance to

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revolutionary and republican ideas that even invites comparisons with the Vendée. And now, 200 years later, they are still identified with this opposition, as political movements in France, Italy and Spain continue to maintain their memory and to demonstrate their relevance to the present day. The town of Estrella in the heart of Navarra has not forgotten the brief period of history that saw it become the capital of Carlism, while the controversial Catholic priest and intransigent Carlist Manuel Santa Cruz Loidi has been the subject of literary works and films. Similarly, a museum in the Passeier Valley has been dedicated to Andreas Hofer; known as the ‘Chouan of the Tyrol’, and the ‘Martyr of Freedom’, he was celebrated by all the bishops of the region in 2009. Yet it is Italy that has chiefly kept these memories alive, at the initiative of ‘antiJacobin’ committees. This is evident in Tuscany, Verona, and above all near Potenza, in the region of Mezzogiorno, where La Storia Bandita (the story of the brigands) has been presented in La Grancia Park since 1999, inspired by spectacles at the Puyde-Fou park in the Vendée region. This theme park remains the archetypal example of its kind. Inaugurated forty years ago, in 1977, it has become one of France’s leading historical attractions. Also featuring a museum complex in the neighbouring localities, Les Lucs-sur-Boulogne and La Chabotterie, the area is known throughout the world. The Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Pope John Paul II and the Polish Primate Cardinal Jozef Glemp were all visitors there in the 1980s and 1990s. To this day, therefore, these regions remain anchoring points for discussions and ideological arguments based on the antagonism between revolution and counter-revolution and, more broadly, between Enlightenment and Tradition. The classification of the Vendée conflict as genocide remains an objective for right-wing French and Italian groups at this early stage in the twenty-first century.

‘BLACK’ OR ‘WHITE’ INTERNATIONALS The ongoing ideological activity should come as no surprise. This is a genuine realm of memory, built on two centuries of political militancy and with its own networks. Closely scrutinized by all European counter-revolutionaries since 1794, the Vendée uprisings and the royalist Chouan revolt became the focus of ardent enthusiasm in the nineteenth century, inspiring pilgrimages, reflection and works of art. The failure of the uprising in western France led by the duchesse de Berry in 1832, together with the exile of Charles X and his family, marked the beginning of an intense period that saw various pro-Bourbon ‘white’ groups circulating constantly among themselves. Driven out of France, the Vendéens took part in the ill-fated Portuguese and Spanish Legitimist insurrections of 1834. They re-encountered one another in the movements formed in defence of the Papal States in 1848, and, most notably, in the Papal Zouave corps until the final defeat of 1870. Some had fought, in vain, in the armies of the King of Naples against Giuseppe Garibaldi. The scale of these relocations should not be underestimated; they involved thousands of people and were organized around personalities such as the duchesse de Berry and Monseigneur Xavier de Mérode, the Papal States’ powerful Pro-

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Minister of Arms. They collected funds, chartered ships, had publications produced, supported artists and maintained their own emissaries, whom they sent to governments in power. In the majority of cases, counter-revolutionary units consisted of young volunteers from the Legitimist nobility or the regions mentioned here; they were sometimes joined by mercenaries, and the army as a whole had a cosmopolitan character. They were collectively known as ‘the white international’, a reference to their monarchist ideology, or ‘the black international’, if the emphasis was on their connection to the Roman Catholic clergy. The arrival of the ‘sons of Saint Louis’ in Spain in 1823, mobilized by King Louis XVIII of France in order to crush the Liberal government there, could be regarded as the first of these ‘international’ interventions. The most recent took place between 1936 and 1939, when Carlists and foreign Legitimists, mainly French, joined forces with pro-Franco troops, a more or less successful venture. The most far-flung expedition prompted by the conflict between revolutionary and counter-revolutionary forces was conducted by the French Legitimist Georges de Villebois-Mareuil, who travelled to South Africa to fight with Boer forces against the British government in the Second Boer War (1899–1902). Of course, these routes also led to expulsion. The fallen kings, Charles X of France and Francesco II of Naples, were driven into exile, as were the pretenders to the thrones of Portugal, Spain and France, dom Miguel, don Carlos and Henri V, to name only the most prominent examples. Many spent time in England before converging on the hospitable lands of the Austrian Empire and its Italian territories. The French settled in Frohsdorf and Goritz/Gorizia, where the last three kings of France still lie entombed in the Franciscan monastery in Nova Gorica. Several generations of Carlists settled in Trieste, which explains why a chapel in the Basilica of Saint Justus contains the tombs of so many claimants to the Spanish throne. The white international may remain in memories as a lingering presence, yet only nostalgic activists continue to follow these itineraries, while recollections connected with the ‘white regions’ have retained a vivid character. Now, in the twenty-first century, counter-revolutionism refers to a mentality or a claimed identity rather than a banner for political mobilization. We end, appropriately, with the situation in Europe in this second decade of the twenty-first century. One cannot help wondering whether the political or societal movements currently producing such a destabilizing effect might reactivate ‘counter-revolutionary’ dynamics and traditions. Yet it would be wise not to jump to conclusions, bearing in mind the example of the French Front National, for although some ways of thinking originate from national counter-revolutionary ideology, processes of identification and remembrance do not occur automatically; this has been demonstrated by the FN’s relatively weak electoral performance in the ‘counter-revolutionary’ zones of western France. The links to be established are certainly more subtle. For instance, at European level, there is evidence of a strong resurgence of ultra-conservative ideas in former Eastern bloc countries, even though it is difficult to establish connections between different national groups. Throughout Europe, particularly in the former

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Eastern bloc, debates arose over the revolutionary heritage from 1975 to 1989, influenced by the success of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s works and Hannah Arendt’s comparative analysis of Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism. These form the basis of criticisms directed at ‘modernity’, utopian ideals and the questioning of traditional ‘values’. The failures of the Enlightenment, the Terror and Socialism have all served as stereotypical examples in the arguments used by the militants belonging to the French movement La Manif pour tous (Protest for All). Yet it is impossible to turn the clock back and nobody wishes to do so; the counter-revolution of the past will not become the new future. What it will do, however, is provide a legacy in the form of signs and emblems which, combined with others, will trigger unconscious automatic responses that still lie dormant.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Dumons, Bruno and Hilaire Multon (Eds.), ‘Blancs’ et contre-révolutionnaires en Europe. Espaces, réseaux, cultures et mémoires (fin XVIIIe-début XXe siècle). France, Italie, Espagne, Portugal, Rome, Collection of the French School in Rome, 454, 2011. Dumons, Bruno (Ed.), Rois et princes en exil. Une histoire transnationale du politique dans l’Europe du XIXe siècle, Paris, Riveneuve Éditions, 2015. Martin, Jean-Clément (Ed.), La Contre-Révolution en Europe, XVIIIe-XIXe siècles. Réalités politiques et sociales, résonances culturelles et idéologiques, Rennes, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2001. Martin, Jean-Clément (Ed.), Dictionnaire de la Contre-Révolution, Paris, Perrin, 2011. Rienzo, Eugenio Di, Nazione et Controrivoluzione nell’Europa contemporanea 17991848, Milan, Guerini e associati, 2004. Schönpflug, Daniel and Jürgen Voss (Eds.), Révolutionnaires et Émigrés. Transfer und Migration zwischen Frankreich und Deutschland, 1789–1806, Stuttgart, Thorbecke, 2002.

CHAPTER 47

The spectre of decline JOHANN CHAPOUTOT

The dread of a major demographic and cultural ‘replacement’ allegedly occurring in European societies is currently the focus of theories formed by its extreme right. It may be the last incarnation of a concept of decline that has regularly re-emerged in the history of European ideas ever since the fall of Rome. If Europe is haunted by one spectre it is certainly that of decline, which is no doubt due to the long shadow cast by the fall of Rome. Over the centuries, this has come to be known as the ‘Fall of the Roman Empire’, yet it would be more accurate to say that the languages, administrative structures, methods and norms originating from Rome underwent a long process of metamorphosis. This is therefore much more a case of ‘Rome’ surviving than disappearing. Nevertheless, the end of the Caesars’ reign over the West in the fifth century and the construction of the barbarian kingdoms had a strong impact on the collective imaginary of the christianitas that was to evolve into Latin Europe. In the same way, the capture of Constantinople has had an enduring influence on the Graeco-Orthodox imaginary that has lasted to this day. The question of Rome’s end first arose long before that end actually occurred, during the first century BCE, when the Roman Republic was being torn asunder by civil wars. The historians, rhetoricians and philosophers of the day lamented the loss of the mos maiorum − those virtuous ways of their ancestors whose disappearance had had a corrosive effect on the foundations of the Eternal City. Figures such as Sallust, Livy and Tacitus, who experienced the last days of the Republic and the birth of the principate we know as the ‘Empire’, deplored the mediocrity of their contemporaries in comparison with the merits of bygone generations. Railing against moral atrophy in both public and private life, they predicted Rome’s imminent collapse when faced with enemies such as the Germanic peoples, who had not abandoned themselves to the delights of luxury and culture. Around the fourth and fifth centuries CE, Christians saw the fall of the Rome of the Caesars as the just punishment inflicted by God on a corrupt, idolatrous and sinful city. The interpretations made by the pagans of the first century and the Christians of the fifth were fundamentally identical; moral decadence − or a sinful nature – was reason enough to necessitate political and geopolitical demise. For the Christians, however, death entailed the happy prospect of resurrection; the collapse of the pagan Empire brought with it the promise of a Christian reign. Yet at the

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same time, it carried a lasting and fearsome warning, as the right hand of God would smite any christianitas that failed to honour its baptismal pledges. Throughout the period that came to be known, much later, as the ‘Middle Ages’, learned exegetes and fervent hermeneutic scholars watched keenly for any signs presaging the imminent and inevitable ‘end days’ of Christendom. These would usher in the Millennial reign of Christ and allow entry into the kingdom of heaven. This way of thinking was a permanent feature of medieval Christianity. Characterized by anxious observation coupled with joyful lamentation, it involved watching over the dying subject in order to anticipate its legacy. Clerics and preachers felt the world’s pulse, pronounced it to be old and withered and announced its imminent demise. Surges of eschatological fervour occurred in the wake of major catastrophes such as the Great Plague epidemics that decimated the West both demographically and culturally. The turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was a period of intense sermonizing, during which the West experienced what Jean Delumeau termed a ‘pastorale de la peur’ − pastoral ministry based on fear. Preachers fulminated against decadence and exhorted their flock to repent before they should suffer divine punishment. It would be impossible to understand the Reformation, that major rift in Western Christianity, the subsequent wars of religion or the millenarianism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, without knowledge of this context. The Protestant reforms were fully established within teachings based on the notions of decadence and the Apocalypse; the corrupt character of papal Rome, the ‘Great Babylon’, was the sign and revelation (the literal meaning of the term ‘apocalypse’) of an imminent end and of the need to ‘reform’ behaviour. The obsession with decline may well have been pushed into the background by the ‘Great Discoveries’; these refer to the expansion of the Christian West into the five continents of the world that took place from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. The discovery of new worlds and the astonishing rewards to be obtained through expeditions and conquests enabled Europeans to believe that their world was not so old after all. In the same way, the discovery of different peoples had a rejuvenating effect, to the wonderment of contemporaries. In making contact with ‘native’, ‘natural’ or ‘original’ inhabitants, Europeans were able to believe that they had been called to govern a new world, provided that the recently ‘discovered’ peoples could be converted to the true faith. A new mood emerged in the West. Scholars and experts, less inclined to see the problem of decline as the order of the day, marvelled instead at the powers of reason, which enabled humankind to explore the world, map it and discover its laws. This seemed to be a time of joy in discovery − as reflected in the Encyclopédie project − and for reconstructing cities and human groups, a task undertaken by philosophers, who explored the issues of natural states, natural laws and social contracts. Far from being in decline, humanity would regain its first flush of youth by following the examples of the Hurons and other native peoples of the New World and obeying the laws of nature; these decreed that humankind should be characterized by solidarity and goodness. This optimism reached its peak in the eighteenth century, when Voltaire was celebrating commerce and the sciences as instruments of peace and prosperity, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau was proclaiming his conviction that man was naturally good and benevolent.

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Nothing could mar this mood of confidence, not even the spectacle of ancient ruins. The bleached skeletons of the Roman temples had inspired the Renaissance poets Pierre de Ronsard and Joachim du Bellay to write elegiac laments; yet when the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum were found in the eighteenth century, preserved in the volcanic ash that had engulfed them, the discovery was greeted with enthusiasm. Johann Joachim Winckelmann marvelled at humanity’s eternal youth, preserved within the canon of antique statuary, while the generation of future French revolutionaries saw these revived cities as the ideal model for the new communities to come. Indeed, according to Karl Marx, the Revolution was acted out ‘in Roman dress’. The very word ‘revolution’ itself seems to push the fear or obsession triggered by the notion of decline far into the background. Borrowed from astronomy, the term indicates a return to origins, a full rotation back to one’s initial position (re-volvere), executed by the political community in order to return to the prime inspiration of birth. The revolutionaries were not alone in casting admiring glances at Greece and Rome. To the members of the Romantic generation, absorbed by the memory of Antiquity, the word ‘history’ rang with a message of hope. They sympathized with the Greek cause in the war of independence that saw Greece pitted against the Ottoman Empire. To the English poet Lord Byron, who died at Missolonghi in 1824, the ‘Isles of Greece’ and their ‘eternal summer’ represented salvation, as opposed to the decadence of a Europe wholly given over to commerce.

THE END OF A WORLD; THE END OF THE WORLD Experienced by some as a re-birth and a liberation, Revolution is seen by others as a catastrophe − the end of a world and the end of the world itself. The notion of decline re-emerged through counter-revolutionary culture. This did not occur in the immediate moment of Revolution, which was dominated by violence; a plot by satanic forces had unleashed chaos in Europe, causing altars to be destroyed and kings beheaded. While ideas born of the Revolution were gradually taking root in the nineteenth century, ideas of decline were beginning to preoccupy its enemies, a list that had included the British statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke. Notions of suffrage, sharing and equality were taking hold in Europe, which had been unable to free itself of the evil of Revolution and was therefore set for an inevitable demise. This fear was echoed by another notion − that of degeneration. As a result of the advancements made in the natural sciences during the nineteenth century, and of their growing prestige in the hierarchy of disciplines, the ideas and concepts they generated gained ground. Palaeontology had proved that a species could degenerate and become extinct. The degeneration of the body was studied and treated within the discipline of medicine. It was an easy matter to transfer that notion to the community, or to the human species, and the decadence-degeneration duo became a commonplace theme in the scientific age. While this was, of course, a right-wing stance, it was also espoused by the left, a case in point being Naturalist writers such as Émile Zola, who described physical enfeeblement as concomitant with a weakening of moral fibre. The right wing saw the concept of decline either in religious terms (Christianity was repudiating its traditions and violating divine laws)

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or in those of racial biology. Some, like Arthur de Gobineau, gave way to a fatalistic vision of the demise of the white race, while others, such as the British, French and German Social Darwinists, argued for decisive action to prevent the Aryan, Nordic and Caucasian races from vanishing into the ‘swamp’ created by racial mixing. Meanwhile, in the Russia of Vladimir Pecherin, Alexander Herzen and Fyodor Dostoevsky, a lasting rift had developed between ‘Westerners’ and ‘Slavophiles’, the latter being motivated by a shared aversion to a materialistic, individualistic and decaying West. This attitude resurfaced through Alexander Solzhenitsyn after 1991 and is also evident in the Eurasianism and Neo-Russianism of today. The Great War did nothing to reduce these obsessions. The bloodbath of the first global conflict stoked irrational fears of the extinction of the ‘white race’, which had spent four years engaged in a fratricidal war. In addition, colonization came under mounting criticism, seen as a trap due to being one cause of racial mixing. This was particularly evident in Germany, where protests arose against the French colonial forces’ occupation of the Rhineland. By mobilizing against the biological degeneration allegedly taking place, a regime such as Nazism was able to impose its idea of a race war, followed, at the later date of 1938, by Italian fascism. With Western democracies under the threat of obsolescence, the regimes that claimed to be at war with decadence − bourgeois decadence, in the case of Soviet communism – had the wind in their sails and took it upon themselves to promote the emergence of a ‘new man’. After 1945, despite both the victory over Nazism and the Thirty Glorious Years, the idea of decline remained a constant. It is now only seen in terms of religion or race by marginal political movements, but those movements can be active and vociferous whenever their moment arises. Decline featured as a leitmotif in the criticism levelled at the consumer society by the left-wing students of the 1960s. As they saw it, in an increasingly enervated, almost necrotic West, hearts and souls needed re-immersing in the revolutionary experience, such as those taking place in the developing world; at the same time, individuals should reform their own ways through community life and the rejection of consumerism and money. After the lessening of revolutionary activity in the 1970s and 1980s, it was the turn of right-wing fears of decline to resurface. They saw it everywhere − in the decrease in the ‘white’ population, and in the loss of ‘reference points’ and ‘values’ that would cause the West to become vulnerable to stronger powers. The idea of decline was previously underpinned by the expectation of the world’s regeneration, a religious and millenarian stance. It has now largely given way to a feeling of hopelessness with regard to the future – a latent despair that fuels religious and political extremism. This makes it more dangerous today than ever before.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Carozzi, Claude and Huguette Taviani-Carozzi, La Fin des temps. Terreurs et prophéties au Moyen Âge, Paris, Stock, 1982. Chapoutot, Johann, Le Nazisme et l’Antiquité, Paris, PUF, 2013.

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Chapoutot, Johann, La Révolution culturelle nazie, Paris, Gallimard, 2017. Cohn, Norman, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, New York, Oxford University Press, 1957. Sternhell, Zeev, The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition, translated from the French by David Maisel, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2009 [2006].

CHAPTER 48

Brussels and the EU The Exit from History? BO STRÅTH

A capital in both the geographical and figurative sense, Brussels lay at the heart of the construction of Europe initiated after the war, as a symbol of peace and solidarity regained. Yet it now embodies the technostructure and neoliberal deregulation rejected by a large number of Europeans. As a lieu de mémoire Brussels and ‘Brussels’ are closely connected. Brussels is the physical site of commemoration and ‘Brussels’ is the mental Erinnerungsort in a transferred, figurative sense. ‘Brussels’ is the metaphor for Brussels, just as ‘the ship of the desert’ is the metaphor for the camel. ‘Brussels’ is the metaphor for the whole post-1945 European unification project, which is more or less successfully guided and controlled from Brussels. ‘Brussels’ stands for acronyms such as ECSC, EC, EEC, EU, EMU, and so on. ‘Brussels’ provoked and still provokes agreement and disagreement, admiration and disgust, obedience and disobedience in the political decision-making centres, at the tables of those familiar with it and in the mass media across Europe. ‘Brussels’ and Brussels overlapped in the 1960s when the Berlaymont building became a lieu de mémoire ; it is located at the Schuman roundabout, just a stone’s throw from the Parc du Cinquantenaire/the Jubelpark with its U-shaped building complex. The present triumphal arch there, erected in 1905, replaced the arcade by Gédéon Bordiau. The complex was erected for the 1880 National Exhibition in commemoration of Belgian independence fifty years earlier. By then, Belgium was not only a bi-lingual nation and a state in its own right; it was also an empire, with the Congo as the jewel in its crown. However, King Leopold, in the capacity of a private investor, was the formal ‘owner’ of the colony, not the Belgian state. The horrors of that royal enterprise were to scandalize Europe a quarter of a century later. In 1880, however, the territory radiated imperial and royal power that shone over Belgium. Today, it is repudiated and raises critical questions. Is Berlaymont the new symbolic and physical centre of a new and more civilized empire or the site of commemoration of a post-colonial world? Soon after its completion in 1967, Berlaymont became the brand image for the new Europe, the Temple in the City on the Hill, and, indeed, the modern Mount Horeb

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where the ten commandments were once given. Yet it was a brand that transmitted rule-governed technocracy and grey bureaucracy rather than pomp and circumstance. The number of European civil servants grew rapidly after the establishment of the EC in 1958 and the commission required ever more office space. Constructed in the grounds of the Dames de Berlaymont (a 300-year old convent with a school for upper-class girls, which was relocated to Waterloo, another European lieu de mémoire) the new building took shape. It has a cruciform design and its architecture, which was state-of-the-art, was inspired by the UNESCO secretariat building in Paris (1958). The Commission, the Council and the embryonic Parliament were all accommodated there. Berlaymont, as the embodiment of the promise to end all wars made in 1945, became the European Quarter, with its Triangle building and its high-rise Charlemagne building housing the DGs for economic and financial affairs and for trade, the symbol of European economic power before the euro crisis. It also contains the Justus Lipsius building, home of the Council since 1995, the Espace Léopold/Leopoldruimte, which became the real centre of the European Parliament, although the Louise Weiss building in Strasbourg has remained the official seat, and several other buildings. The skyline of the European Quarter radiated power and modernity, technocracy and progress, virility and youth, throwing a veil over the asbestos contamination discovered in 1990. Yet, as a locus of memory, Brussels speaks of more than empires and European institutions. A little way beyond Berlaymont lies its historic heart: the Grand Place, whose medieval guild houses were destroyed by the French in 1695. Splendidly rebuilt, they were in disrepair by the early nineteenth century, but were restored at the end of that same century, reflecting the vicissitudes of European history. The Grand Place speaks of cosmopolitanism, but also of a local patriciate, and, unlike the triumphal arch, evokes local, rather than global power. The lieu de mémoire of the new Europe, next to that of the old empire, shows the ambiguity of the European integration project. Is Europe an alternative to the old empire, or its continuity? There are good answers to support either opinion, and it may equally be seen as a mixture of the two, but there is no undisputed, unambiguous view. Europe is contradictory and escapes definition. Europe is both an alternative to the old Europe, with a new direction, and the continuation of the Europe of empires and their vices: two lieux de mémoire, side by side in Brussels, the symbolic representation of two imaginaries, competing and overlapping, demarcating and reinforcing. Brussels has annexes that are likewise sites of memory: there is Kirchberg in Luxembourg, where numerous banks, European institutions and authorities stand side by side; there are other centres of financial and political power, among them the European Court of Justice, mediating between the powers. The Quartier européen in Strasbourg with the European Parliament’s Louise Weiss building is another such annexe. The name of the EP building is, in turn, a lieu de mémoire of the recent European past in all its violent struggles and fights for reconciliation. Louise Weiss, born into a cosmopolitan family from Alsace, founded the weekly Europe Nouvelle in 1918, became a suffragette in the interwar years, and later, a Gaullist member of the European parliament at the age of 86.

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Maastricht and Lisbon are other annexes that form part of Brussels’s collective memories; Maastricht on account of the Treaty on European Union that was signed there in February 1992, and Lisbon as the symbolic representation of European hubris as well as recovery after defeat. At its meeting in the Portuguese capital in March 2000, the European Council declared that by 2010 Europe would be ‘the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world, capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion’. The Treaty of Lisbon in December 2007 was an attempt to bring order to the mess created by the refusal of the electorates in France and the Netherlands to accept the proposed constitution in the spring of 2005. The European leadership licked its wounds by presenting a substitute treaty aiming to ‘complete the process started by the Treaty of Amsterdam (1997) and by the Treaty of Nice (2001) with a view to enhancing the efficiency and democratic legitimacy of the Union and to improving the coherence of its action.’ Earlier, references to ‘Brussels’ legitimized political decisions and silenced opposition in the member states. The fact that during the last ten years or so, references to ‘Brussels’ have had the opposite effect says much about the European project. Nowadays, to say that ‘Brussels’ requires something provokes strong opposition where previously an accepting silence reigned. Brussels and ‘Brussels’ as sites of European memory do not primarily embody European institutions and events as such, but the translation of collective experiences into viable future-orientated horizons of expectation. Various images of the future produced by ‘Brussels’ emerged : 1. Europe as the technocratic rescuer of the (West) European nation states based on social welfare for political allegiance and legitimacy in the framework of the Cold War; 2. De Gaulle’s ‘Europe of the nations from the Atlantic to the Urals’; 3. The post-de Gaulle plans for a federal Europe (the Werner Plan for an economic and monetary union and the Davignon Plan for a security-based political union) against the backdrop of the collapse of the international financial order created at Bretton Woods in 1944; 4. The evaporation of the federal plans, and escape from that situation under the banner of a European identity; 5. The transformation of the dreams of a European demos inherent to the concept of identity in the neoliberal vision of citizens of the European market; this involved a fundamental reconceptualization of the political language under the motto ‘united in diversity’. These are all intertwined – memory bundles representing continuity as well as discontinuity After the collapse of the market-based economic world view in 2008, the austerity campaign to save the euro soon lost the capacity to convince and mobilize. Austerity politics created a European North-South divide in addition to the old EastWest division of the Cold War, which the expansion that occurred in 2004 failed to overcome. The imagery of the future seems to be that of re-nationalization and deEuropeanisation. Stronger nationalist and xenophobic language goes hand in hand with increasingly authoritarian government styles that exploit and underpin the nationalist wave, while at the same time ‘Brussels’, as the custodian of the market freedoms, looks ever more like an ancien régime.

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When the early stages of the European integration project were negotiated in the 1950s in Paris and the castle of Val Duchesse outside Brussels, a key experience was that political stability required a strong welfare economy and that democracy was a potential threat to stability. The peacemakers in Versailles after the First World War had proclaimed democracy as the way forward, without any further, precise thoughts on how to establish and guarantee it. The experiences of the economic crisis in the 1930s proved how easily democracy could become lost without a strong social commitment. The proclamation of democracy in Versailles in 1919 lacked a social foundation. On the basis of this experience, welfare became the currency with which to buy political allegiance in the negotiations on the European Coal and Steel Community and on the European Economic Community in the early 1950s. The economy based on the common market would provide resources for welfare. Through a general distribution of welfare, the European leaders created a contrast to the hardships in the Soviet system. Economic strength through (West) European free trade and competition that would promote economic efficiency provided the tool for domestic social peace through welfare and for external armed peace in the Cold War balance of terror. The integration project would, furthermore, entangle the economies of Germany and France in a tight web of economic dependencies that would prevent a new war between them. The early architects of the European integration project were keenly aware of the effects of the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the ensuing developments, and of the fact that these developments had a democratic origin. They were particularly attuned to the dangerous effects of political extremes. In the early 1950s the communists in France and Italy won 20–25 per cent of the votes, a result which frightened Western leaders. This prompted the notion that welfare had to legitimize democracy. Leaders such as Schuman, Adenauer and De Gasperi concluded in their design of a memory-based future that democracy could be self-destructive, that it was not automatic: in short, that it relied on a finely-tuned balance between being driven by and guiding public opinion. Rule-governed enlightened technocracy held at arm’s length from unreliable populations was the goal that drove them. The new Europe of the 1950s was understood as Western Europe, distinct from communist Eastern Europe. In the 1960s this cohesive image split into two alternative approaches to the future. The federalists, on one side, were championed by Jean Monnet and his successor as president of the Commission, Walter Hallstein. This side aimed to condense and centralize ‘Brussels.’ Then there was the opposite approach, which one might call ‘imperial’; its key figure was Charles de Gaulle, whose motto was l’Europe des patries, from the Atlantic to the Urals. His Europe was certainly hierarchical and centralized, too, but under French leadership rather than the technocratic rule-monitoring in Brussels. He sought to dissolve ‘Brussels’ and replace it with ‘Paris.’ Before de Gaulle, Britain had also tried to dilute ‘Brussels’. After the Second World War, the country was exhausted and it soon became clear that the Empire was doomed. In this situation, its government wanted to prevent a strong Europe

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with federal characteristics from replacing the influence that Britain had had over Europe since the Napoleonic wars and even before, and did what it could to dash the negotiations on the Rome Treaty. When this strategy failed the British government soon knocked at the door wanting to enter the club. De Gaulle feared a Trojan horse and refused repeatedly to open the door. The 1960s, with promises of social stability and permanent affluence that lay ahead seemed to corroborate the policies of ‘Brussels’, but no solution is permanent and radical protests emerged around the question of how to distribute the affluence. The ‘1968’ movement wanted more democracy. This was a generational revolt initiated by a generation which had lost contact with the Weimar experiences and wanted more of the pie and, in particular, more individual freedom, new family models, less hierarchy and less convention. This centrifugal movement, in turn, provoked a response. Jean Monnet and Willy Brandt, the German Chancellor since 1969, both favoured the notion ‘dare more Europe and dare more democracy’. Their goal was to re-establish ‘Brussels’ as the guardian of the lessons that Europe had learned in the past and as the guide to the future. They wanted to draw a line between themselves and de Gaulle and to achieve reconciliation with ‘1968.’ As soon as ‘1968’ had forced de Gaulle to abandon the political scene they launched the Werner and the Davignon Plans, looking towards a federal and at the same time more democratic (Western) Europe through the plan for an economic and political community with coordinated fiscal politics. Willy Brandt’s projects for a more federal Europe and for reconciliation with Eastern Europe were connected and reinforced one another in his attempt to establish a more sustainable peace than the Cold War balance of terror. In 1971, the dollar and the international order based on it collapsed. A little later, the oil crisis and the recurrence of mass unemployment for the first time since the 1930s alerted Europe. The memories of the preludes to the Second World War, just a little more than a generation earlier, frightened the European leaders and the economic elites. They failed to develop a European crisis therapy, however. The search for solutions was carried out in the nation states. National subsidy packages to ailing companies and their employees, and national consolidation politics outdid the struggle for a European solution. The work on the Werner Plan stalled and the power of ‘Brussels’ declined. At the European Council meeting in Copenhagen in December 1973, with Britain at last as a new member after de Gaulle had left, there was total disagreement among the leaders concerning the Werner Plan. They decided, as a face-saving strategy, to proclaim the concept of a European identity. This new idea was sufficiently vague and distant to make an agreement possible. ‘Brussels’ acquired new meaning. The declaration was a means of escaping from the crisis by using the image of a European identity which, in turn, generated ideas regarding a European people, a demos. The declaration obscured the urgency of political action and institution building. The focus was, for the most part, on the emerging people, in all its vagueness, as opposed to policies in response to the transformation of the economy and the labour markets. There was little discussion of what the European identity meant in more precise terms.

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The declaration of a European identity in 1973 attracted little attention during the crisis-ridden 1970s. However, in the 1980s, a quarter of a century of political and academic obsession with the concept of identity began. ‘Identity’ replaced the former key concept of welfare. Under the aegis of Altiero Spinelli’s Crocodile Club, the European Parliament, whose members were directly elected for the first time in 1979, made ‘Brussels’ synonymous with democracy and infused new life into the concept of identity. The Crocodile Club was an informal group of members of the European Parliament, founded a year after the first direct election, who worked on achieving deeper European integration with the ultimate goal of creating a federation. A committee, fittingly named the People’s Europe, was set up to look into new ways of engaging the public symbolically with Europe. The committee delivered its report in June 1985. It dealt with ‘important aspects of special rights of citizens, of education, culture and communication, exchanges, and the image and identity of the Community’, which would make ‘a substantial contribution to the realization of an ever-closer union among the peoples of Europe’. The suggestions included a Community driving licence, a Euro lottery, the establishment of 9 May as Europe Day, a Community joint study exchange programme, European sports teams, a European flag, anthem and emblem in order to give ‘the individual citizen a clearer perception of the dimension and existence of the Community’. Together with the notion of European citizenship, the concept of European identity was linked to ideas of a European democracy and a European internal market. The image of a European democracy was connected with branding and symbol creation; democratic people(s) were envisaged as free individuals, based on the idea of a market, as opposed to persons tied to one another through social bonds organized on mainly national levels. Europe’s business community was firmly in favour of these plans for intensified European integration under the guidance of the market concept. This was the point where Margaret Thatcher’s empire intervened to disconnect identity language from market language. She confronted the rhetoric of identity, which in its ritualized form suffered from a lack of political substance. Thatcher embraced the fundamental neoliberal reconceptualization of social relations. There is no such a thing as society, she argued, only individuals and families. Reform was a concept which had connoted social improvement since the nineteenth century. Now it was cleansed from social substance. Economic efficiency became the new meaning of the term. Austerity with a moral dimension of purification replaced the old imagery of an affluence that lay ahead. ‘Brussels’ was Thatcher’s target and ‘Brussels’ reacted to the attack by adapting her new language. John Major, Thatcher’s successor, fought Jacques Delors’s plan to combine the internal market with a social Europe in the negotiations on the Maastricht Treaty. Given the deficient construction of the monetary union, which in the long run steered the project towards austerity, this was a missed opportunity to link the social and the economic in a virtuous circle. Instead, it marked the beginning of today’s vicious circle. The Major government managed to negotiate an opt-out from this very modest protocol, which Tony Blair abolished in 1997. However, Blair’s decision did

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not imply a substantial move towards a social Europe. Labour and social democratic leaders like Blair and Schröder pursued the neoliberal dilution of the imagery of a social Europe through the Third Way. The rhetoric of identity, with its implicit vision of a European people, did not sit well with these developments. Historically, national identities had emerged in industrializing states through policies for social integration. The belief that a new market identity would create European community came to nothing. ‘Brussels’ tried to save what it could of European cohesion undermined by market forces and invented a new motto for the EU: unity in diversity, with unity standing for ‘Brussels’ and diversity for benign ‘nation’; in retrospect, this looks like an attempt to square the circle with words. The new language played down the concept of a European identity. In 2000, at the time of the adoption of the Lisbon agenda for 2010, this discreet shift of imagery looked like a clever move. The collapse of the neoliberal worldview in 2008 cast the move in a different light. Diversity no longer connoted unity based on a market. The expectations invested in the market concept, with ‘Brussels’ as guarantee, gave way to images of the market as something horrific. ‘Brussels’ broke with its most fundamental market rule whereby in capitalist economies profits and risks, wins and losses go hand in hand. ‘Too big to fail’ became the new key term for the legitimization of rescue packages worth billions given to collapsing banks which had played the market and lost. When, as a next step, the restructured finance industry began to speculate against the debt-ridden states, ‘bazookas’, ‘firewalls’ and ‘fire power’ were new terms mobilized in the struggle conducted by ‘Brussels’ against the Market, with trillions of euros used as a weapon. The verbal U-turn in Brussels was a contradiction that spread confusion and disorientation. By contrast, the subsequent language of austerity directed at the citizens of Europe provoked frustration and wrath. Willy Brandt’s and Helmut Kohl’s vision of a European Germany shifted increasingly towards the practices of a German Europe under growing tensions between East and West, North and South. After the capitulation of the Greek government in the summer of 2015, European unity crumbled against the backdrop of the emerging refugee crisis. Several governments refused to follow Merkel’s policies. The interrelated euro and refugee crises were the catalysts of a development that saw ‘Brussels’ lose ever more control and credibility. Today, the localization of the European lieux de mémoire is increasingly defined in national, not European terms. Since 2008, ‘Europe’ and ‘Brussels’ have become delegitimizing terms, in contrast to their previous legitimizing function. In the history of Europe, which we are now beginning to see more clearly once again, its nations and empires increasingly constitute its lieux de mémoire. Political leaders like de Gaulle and Thatcher represent the European legacy of empire and updated versions of its civilizing mission: ‘l’Europe des patries from the Atlantic to the Urals’ under French leadership, and the neoliberal Transatlantic community under Thatcher and Reagan with no state and no society as the alternative to de Gaulle’s state-based society. One might add Merkel in her civilizing campaign for

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economic efficiency through a purifying and chastening austerity during the euro crisis, but the subsequent refugee crisis overstretched her empire. One might add other emperors like Gerhard Schröder and Jacques Chirac in their violation of the rules of the stability pact in acts of raw demonstration of power, but also in their opposition to the American crusade against Iraq. One might add Tony Blair and José Maria Aznar in their military campaign against Iraq on the side of the USA. The new-old national empires challenged Europe’s claim to be the new empire, rather than challenging Europe itself. The masters of Europe as an empire were, in the end, its nation states. In contrast to this tendency to present Europe as an empire, however, there is also the tendency to see Europe as a community, Europe as a union, as dreams of federation based on social cohesion. Political leaders like Monnet, Hallstein, Brandt and Delors personify this mental site of commemoration that transcends the imagery of Europe as an empire of nations, with their ideas of Europe as achieving social and economic unification beyond its nation states. In their view, the economy provided social cement. Their economic Europe was a means to achieve a social Europe rather than an end per se. The question is how far from each other these two imaginative memory trends of empire and of federation, of market power and of social cohesion, of national and of European state craft really are and were, and to what extent they transcend the history of Europe as nations and nationalism. The British Brexit referendum in 2016 had links to both trends. A few agitators dreamt of a new British empire without the EU but their dream was hardly a main concern among the voters. The chief concern of Brexit supporters was based more on the lack of a social perspective in Britain, for which they blamed ‘Brussels’, depicted as a monster that produces social inequalities and fears about the future. The historical irony here is that the British governments, more than any other since 1973, have fought against a social Europe. The British voters invested their hopes in social cohesion in the historical locus of social integration: the nation state. Brexit is not about reinvigorating the old dream of the British empire, replacing a European empire that never came off. Brexit is an expression of despair and a memento mori to those who remain. Brexit is a challenge to Europe. A challenge means a threat but also a chance, an opportunity. To take that chance would be to create a social Europe with a political capacity for redistribution and to form the outlines of a new Europe built on the ruins of the memories of the old one. As sites of memory and commemoration, the urban architecture of Paris, London and Berlin radiates the idea of world empires and national power much more than it radiates European unity. Here one must add Rome, of course, the European origin of both empire and of the post-1945 European unification. The same goes for the architecture of Brussels representing both empire and European unification, not in an entangled form but set side by side. The buildings of the European Quarter express the power of a new Europe with an influence over the future and the Triumphal Arch close by connotes past glory built with the profits garnered from the Congo. The question for the future is whether the progressive imagery of a new

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Europe is about to become more of a historical category, whether the European Quarter is about to represent the past rather than the future. As a ‘past future’ the European Quarter might survive as a site of commemoration fed by remaining rites and political practices; whether it survives as a beacon in a Europe torn apart by xenophobic nationalism, or as a foundation myth in a Europe that has overcome yet another crisis is another question, a question involving challenge and chance. One thing is clear, however: history has not come to an end and there is no exit from history. There are yet more lessons to draw from history: it teaches us, but we never learn from it, and often it does not come about as we think or want to believe.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Balibar, Étienne, We, The People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Community, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2004. Bartolini, Stefano, Restructuring Europe. Centre Formation, System Building, and Political Structuring between the Nation State and the European Union, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005. Grimm, Dieter, Europa ja – aber welches? Zur Verfassung der europäischen Demokratie, München, Beck, 2006. Guérot, Ulrike, Warum Europa eine Republik werden muss! Eine politische Utopie, Bonn, Dietz, 2016. Habermas, Jürgen, « Im Sog der Technokratie. Kleine politische Schriften XII, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 2013. Kaelble, Hartmut, Sozialgeschichte Europas: 1945 bis zur Gegenwart, München, Beck, 2007. Mair, Peter, Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy, London, Verso, 2013. Milward, Alan, The Rescue of the European Nation State, London, Routledge, 1992. Salais, Robert, Le viol d’Europe: Enquête sur la disparition d’une idée, Paris, PUF, 2013. Stråth, Bo, Europe’s Utopias of Peace: 1815, 1919, 1951, London, Bloomsbury, 2016.

Overview Work in progress CAROL GLUCK

Europe is – and has always been – an idea: a geographical, cultural, economic, political idea defined against its Others, whether Asia, the New World, Islam or ghosts of its own recent past. These volumes make it clear that Europe is now also a memory space, burdened by the weight of its twentieth-century experience of fascism, totalitarianism, genocide and war – searing memories – while reaffirming its choice of cultural touchstones, from Homer to human rights, from Rome to Brussels – ‘grand narratives’ and ‘cradles’ of value. Europe as a political project, which is to say, the EU, figures even when it is not directly mentioned. In contrast, the divisions between the ever-present pasts of Eastern and Western Europe appear constantly, underlining the limits of the Europeanization of memories of the Second World War. After 2000, Western Europeans deployed their version of Holocaust memory, which had taken a painful half century to produce, as a kind of European memory-solvent that new Eastern European members of the expanded EU were urged, almost required, to share. A few years later, the Baltics and others turned the tables, demanding EU recognition of their own wartime past of occupation, partition and deportation. Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27, now marks the liberation of Auschwitz that is so important in Western European memory, while August 23 has become the European Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Stalinism and Nazism (in that order), commemorating the Molotov-Rippentrop Pact of 1939 that figures as a day of infamy for many Eastern Europeans. But these dates carry different meanings, not only between Western and Eastern Europe but within each region as well. And even when memory icons sound the same in East and West – anti-fascism, resistance, victimization, for example – they do not necessarily mean the same thing. The weight of the twentieth-century past thus falls differently in a European memory-scape that consists of at least two ‘Europes’, if not more, when it comes to memories of the Second World War. The historical reasons for this seem clear: war memory in East and Central Europe was ‘reset’ after the end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union in 1989–91. These political changes broke up the national narratives so long frozen in place under Soviet influence, enabling the story to be retold from the start, beginning with the invasions of 1939–40, only now with doubled wartime victimization by both Hitler and Stalin, compounded by the subsequent decades of communist domination. Where French, German and other Western Europeans had been nationally and collectively practicing the politics

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of war memory for nearly five decades by the time the Cold War ended, in Eastern Europe, the ‘post-war’ can be said to have begun afresh in the 1990s, as the war was retold in newly national and nationalist terms. The result was the currently inflamed politics of memory between Russia and the Baltics, and between and within other Eastern European societies. East Asia experienced a similar reset of war memory after the end of the Cold War and the decline of American domination over Japanese foreign relations and over its war story, which had also been frozen since 1945. Once Japan’s belated confrontation with its wartime actions in Asia began in the 1990s, the competing national narratives unleashed the conflicted geopolitics of memory that vexes relations between Japan, China and South Korea today. East Asia and Eastern Europe thus share a chronopolitics of memory, but with a difference. For, if there are two Europes in the evolving terrain of war memory, there is as yet no ‘Asia’ at all, proving that in the history of memory, ‘Europe’, if still a work in progress, nonetheless exists as a conceptual continental lieu de mémoire. Europe as a cultural narrative operates in a different memory register, demanding neither identity nor unity, and therefore more diffuse, less nostalgic than Pierre Nora’s original versions. Europe’s conceptual boundaries blur and slip in geopolitical terms, sometimes including Russia, sometimes not, skirting the Ottoman Empire and so on. But we see too how memories moved across borders, shape-shifting as they went, creating connections and commonalities among individuals, localities, ethnicities, regions, nations and the world. The Holocaust became a travelling trope evoked in different contexts. A singular European ‘genocide’ extended to multiple genocides, now to be remembered in places as far-flung as Cambodia and Rwanda. Processes of reconciliation ranged from Franco-German relations through Truth and Reconciliation Commissions to calls for Japan–China–South Korea to come to terms with the colonial and wartime past. Resistance and collaboration, like justice, human rights and Marxism, are no longer European but global. It’s a question of scale, and careful attention here to scalar relations among domains of memory is changing the very notion of lieux de mémoire. Indeed, the notion of ‘sites of memory’ has experienced the same sort of conceptual sprawl that now afflicts the term ‘memory’ itself. For if memory is a discursive space – a labile topology of meaning – it is also a time. And that time coincides with the late-twentieth-century surge of past-mindedness, which made memory the obsession of the age. Europe’s chosen pasts as well as the sites of memory selected for examination here reflect the historicity of the contemporary moment, in particular, the quarter-century since the end of the Cold War. In this respect, the three volumes are themselves a memory piece, a product of this single freeze frame of history, in which the horrors of the twentieth century still loom large and the indeterminacies of time and space, past and future, ‘Europe’ and elsewhere, endow the whole with a sense of a ‘work in progress’. As idea and reality, ‘Europe’ is a work in progress. As an ever ongoing process, individual and collective ‘memory’ is also by definition a work in progress. And as the expression of a still modern sensibility, which tries but seldom succeeds in disavowing either temporal linearity or cultural coherence, the lieux de mémoire are, even after all these years, a historical work in progress as well.

INDEX

Abetz, Otto  49 Act of Toleration  168 Adelswärd-Fersen, Baron  347 Adenauer, Konrad  133, 139, 143 Adorno, Theodor W.  187, 238 The Adventures of Simplicius Simplicissimus (Grimmelshausen) 9 ‘After the War: the Renaissance of Europe’ (manifesto) 7 Age of Antiquity  207, 208, 210, 263, 277, 283, 346 Age of Voltaire  169 Ai Weiwei  108 Albanian (new) uprising  115 Alexander I of Yugoslavia  113 Alexander II of Russia  119 Alexievich, Svetlana  99 al-Ghāzāli, Abu Hamid  308 Ali, Tariq  218, 300 All Quiet on the Western Front (Remarque)  9, 21 Althusius, Johannes  280 Althusser, Louis  95 American Declaration of Independence 171 American intervention in Iraq  7 Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch 162 Ancient Society (Morgan)  196 Anouilh, Jean  333 Antelme, Robert  131, 132 anti-clericalism  169–70, 259 Antigone (1944)  333 anti-Judaism 254 Antipolitics (Konrád) 107 anti-Semitism  39–42, 56–7, 59, 227 anti-war sentiment  7 Antonescu, Ion (Prime Minister)  51, 85 Aquinas, Thomas  102, 279, 280, 308

Arab and European culture Arabic learning in Latin Europe  305 Arab world  306 Avicenna’s (Ibn Sina) Canon, textbook in European medical schools  306 intellectual cultures of Latin Europe 306 Orientalism (1978)  294, 305 Arab Renaissance movement  309 Arab Spring  143 Arab world  306, 309 Arch of Constantine  289 Arch of Septimus Severus  289 Arch of Titus  289 Arendt, Hannah  75, 97, 121, 180, 352 Armenian genocide  20–2 Aron, Raymond  258 Artemisia Gentileschi  334–5 Ashcroft, Peggy  335 Astray, José Millán 35 Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal (President)  25 Athens  2, 176–80, 183, 236, 239, 242, 265, 288–90, 308 Atlantic Charter  151 Atwood, Margaret  238 Auclert, Hubertine  342 Auden, W. H.  238 Austen, Jane  335 Averroes 307–9 Arab Renaissance movement  309 Averroes Programme  307 champion of philosophy  308 commentaries on Aristotle’s writings 307–8 compendiums 308 Philological research on writings  308 Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (Lemkin) 81

370

Aznar, José María (Prime Minister)  364 Babeuf, François-Noël 92 Bacon, Francis  166 Bakunin, Mikhail  315 Balkan Wars  9 ‘the Baltic Way’  136 barbarians/savages Age of Antiquity  263 ‘barbarian customs’  264 Capitoline Museum  264 concept of barbaric Other  265 Greek-barbarian dichotomy  264 inclusion and exclusion  263 logos 264 multiple forms  263 New World  265 ‘noble savages’  265 Pergamon Museum in Berlin  263 racial superiority  265 social boundaries  264 superiority over indigenous peoples 265 transformations of the Other  264–6 ‘white man’s burden’  266 Barbie, Klaus  52, 56 Bárdossy, László 85 Barlach, Ernst  30 Barnier, Michel  140 barricade as allegory of insurrection anti-Soviet uprisings in Budapest (1956) and Prague (1968) 316–17 1871 Paris Commune, memories of 317 emotions of protest  316 monumental barricade  316 Spartacist revolt  316 description 313–14 Paris barricades of 1848  314 ‘bivouac of revolutions’  314 Parisian barricades of 1830 and 1848 314 Young Germany Movement  314 revolutionary symbolism  314 Barricades in Wedding (Neukrantz)  316 Barroso, José Manuel (President)  138

INDEX

Battle for Troy (2004)  240 Battle of Tannenberg  9 Battle of the Nations in 1813  10 Battle of Verdun in 1916  16 The Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein) battles of Waterloo  118 Bäumer, Gertrud  342 Bayard, Pierre  59 Bayle, Pierre  169, 258 Beccaria, Cesare  170 Becker, Wolfgang  98 Beckmann, Max  234 Benjamin, Walter  198, 205, 266, 315 Bentham, Jeremy  284 Beria, Lavrentiy  103 Berlin Berlin Philharmonic  126 capital city of unbridled nationalism 125 castle 126 Cold War hostilities  126 Memorial to the Murdered Jews  126 museum of non-European art  126 reconstruction 126 ‘Topography of Terror’  126 Berlin memorials of victims of national socialism 37 Berlin Wall, fall of  35, 105, 107, 108, 135, 158, 193, 201, 228, 229 Bernanos, Georges  90 Berthelot, Sophie  335 Bessie, Alvah  35 Beyond Good and Evil (Kant)  173 Bidlo, Mike  244 Biermann, Wolf  107 Bierut, Boleslaw  92 Bill of Rights, 1689  284 The Black Book of Communism 75 ‘Black Ribbon Day’  86 Blackstone, William  284 Blair, Tony (Prime Minister)  363, 364 Bloch, Marc  xiv, xv, 105, 200 Bock, Gisela  332, 340 Bodin, Jean  280 Bogart, Humphrey  35 Bohley, Bärbel 228 ‘Bolek affair’  108 Böll, Heinrich  136 Bordiau, Gédéon 358

INDEX

Boris III of Bulgaria  58 Borowski, Tadeusz  94 Brâncuşi, Constantin  209 Brandt, Willy  55, 134, 137, 143, 362, 364 Brankovi, Vuk  111 Braquehais, Bruno  316 Brecht, Bertolt  93, 94, 333 Bresson, Robert  333 Brezhnev, Leonid  135 Briand, Aristide (Prime Minister)  132 Briand-Kellogg Pact  132 The Bridge on the Drina (Andrić) 9 British Suffragette Movement  341–2 Brontë, Charlotte  335 Brussels and the EU after the Second World War  361 annexes of commemoration  359 austerity campaign  360 austerity language  364 Berlaymont 358–9 British Brexit referendum in 2016 365 declaration of European identity in 1973 362 economic efficiency  363 euro crisis  364 European crisis therapy  362 lieu de mémoire, new Europe  359 Maastricht and Lisbon, memory annexes 359 market language  363 metaphors 358 motto for the EU  363 National Exhibition, 1880  358 People’s Europe  362 post-1945 European unification project 358 proclamation of democracy in Versailles 360 Transatlantic community under Thatcher and Reagan  364 Treaty of Amsterdam  360 Treaty of Lisbon  359 Treaty of Maastricht  359 Treaty of Nice  360 Buber, Martin  89 Burke, Edmund  168, 340, 355 Bush, George (President)  228

371

Bush, George W. (President)  11 Caesar, Julius  254 Calas Affair  170 Calopresti, Mimmo  124 Campe, Joachim Heinrich  168 Camus, Albert  35 ‘capitalism 2.0’  329 Capitoline Museum  264 The Captive Mind (Miłosz) 94 Carlism 350 ‘Carlist’ wars  349 Cartier-Bresson, Henri  316 Casanova, José 173 Cassin, René 82 Castiglione, Baldassare  337 Castro, Fidel (Prime Minister)  217 catastrophe centenary commemorations (2014– 18) 13–15 civil society commemoration  14 First World War commemorative products 14–15 Great War pilgrimage  14 identity claim  15 museums or memorials  14 organized by central state  13 tour and travel companies  14 divided memories: Western and Eastern Europe  24 Easter Rising against British rule 24 Russian revolutions  24 innovations in remembrance cenotaphs 16–17 cult of names  16 firepower 15–16 growth of artillery  15–16 industrialized warfare, revolution 16 practices for the dead and the missing 17–18 Red Cross, role of  16 martyrs/martyrdom 26–7 linguistic divide  26 Protestant countries  26 Villes Martyres 26 successor states ideology of self-determination,

372

Wilson’s 25 Irish independence  25 Polish war of independence from 1918 to 1921  25 Turkish and Armenian states  25 technology audio recorders, video recorders 19 books and ephemeral publications 19 images of victimhood  19 internet and social media  20 post-traumatic stress disorder  19 recording/preserving/retrieving 19 witness/witnessing 21–4 children of Holocaust survivors 23 first-person/family stories  22 memoirs and films  21 promotion of human rights  22 soldiers who fought  21 therapeutic effects of remembrance 23–4 transmission theory of traumatic memory 23 traumatic experience of survivors 23 Truth and Reconciliation Commission 23 victims of the Armenian genocide 21–2 Catherine II  334 Catholic Counter-Reformation  103 Cavendish, Lady Margaret Lucas  335 Ceauşescu, Nicolae (President)  92 Celan, Paul  88, 198 cenotaphs  10, 16, 17 ‘the century of extremes’  125 Césaire, Aimé 266 Chagall, Marc  89 Chahine, Youssef  307 Chakrabarty, Dipesh  201 Chamberlain, Houston Stewart  42 Charles VI of France  294 Charles X  350 Charter 77  2, 57, 107, 162, 173, 217, 227 The Cheese and the Worms (Ginzburg) 102

INDEX

Chesterton, G. K.  184 Chinese Cultural Revolution  208 Chinese Revolution  200–1 Chirac, Jacques (President)  56, 137, 364 Christianity 249–53 early days of  278 Europe and  248 Latin 251 Medieval 354 nationalism and  252–3 Serbian experience of  111 Christianity, Medieval  354 Christianity as Old as the Creation (Tindal) 168 Chrysostom, John  251 Churchill, Winston (Prime Minister)  52, 61, 64, 65, 82, 136 The Cinnamon Shops (Schulz)  88 The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (Middlemore) 158 civil religion, evolution of  37 civil rights campaign  217 class society capitalism 2.0  329 concept of social classes  329–30 European bourgeoisie  326 exclusion from benefits  328 factory workers  329 industrial society  328, 329 Max Weber’s classification  330 non-property-owning intelligentsia and specialists 330 organized capitalism  329 petty bourgeoisie  326, 330 privileged by property and education 330 social upheavals  327 working class  327, 330 Clinton, Bill (President)  115 Clovis I  133 Cohn-Bendit, Daniel  106, 218, 219, 322 Coke, Edward  284 Collard, Auguste Hippolyte  316 Commentaries on the Laws of England (Blackstone) 284 communism(s) interpretations 91 October: myth and spectre Communist Manifesto 92

INDEX

February Revolution  93 October Revolution  92–3 principle of hope  92 Real socialism  91–2 rupture, memories of assassination of Leon Trotsky  96 war communism  96 Communist Manifesto 92 comradeship, memories of Great Patriotic War  94 intellectual mobilization  94 Marxism 93 Neo-realism 95 opportunism 94 over-investment in progressive ideology 94–5 satellite states in Eastern Europe  94 Comte, Auguste  186, 256 Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith  102, 273 Conrad, Joseph  xi, 266 Constitutional Convention of 1787  171 Constitutional Treaty, 2004  248 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide 71 Corbin, Alain  313 corruption 105 Counter-revolution black or white internationals  351 counter-revolutionary’ zones  351 expulsion 351 French movement La Manif pour tous (Protest for All)  352 Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism, analysis 352 Portuguese and Spanish Legitimist insurrections of 1834  350 royalist Chouan revolt  350 Vendée uprisings  350 Congress of Vienna in 1815  348 revolutions 348 Vendée, wars of Carlism 350 Carlist wars  349 counter-revolutionary uprisings 349 Italy, insurrections  349 La Grancia Park since 1999  350

373

repression of the Neopolitan Republic in 1799  349 Tyrolean Rebellion  349 Courtois, Stéphane 98 Cremer, Fritz  53 Curchod, Suzanne  337 Curie, Marie  335 customary law  282 Daan, Karin  347 d’Alembert, Jean le Rond  337 Darkness at Noon (Koestler)  97, 120 Darwin, Charles  195 David, Jacques-Louis  243 David-Néel, Alexandra  334 Davis, Angela  93 da Volpedo, Giuseppe Pellizza  323 Death Fugue (1945)  88 de Balzac, Honoré  90, 348 de Beauvoir, Simone  336, 343 de Berry, duchesse  349, 350 de Bonald, Louis  166 de Borbón, Carlos  349 de Boulainvilliers, Henri  296 de Cervantes, Miguel  240 de Chateaubriand, François-René 198 de Chirico, Giorgio  243 de-Christianization  259, 260 Declaration of Saint James’s Palace  71 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen  158, 159, 161, 166 Declaration on Liberated Europe  61 decline, concept of ancient ruins  355 counter-revolutionary culture  355 Eurasianism and Neo-Russianism  356 Graeco-Roman imaginary  353 ‘Great Discoveries’  354 Italian fascism  356 Medieval Christianity  354 palaeontology 355 racial mixing  356 Reformation 353 Romantic generation  355 Soviet communism  356 suffrage/sharing and equality, notions of 355 Thirty Glorious Years  356 victory over Nazism  356

374

Defoe, Daniel  336 de Gaulle-Anthonioz, Geneviève 335 de Gaulle, Charles (President)  49, 50, 52, 65, 82, 133, 134, 139, 143, 361 de Gobineau, Arthur  356 de Gouges, Olympe  336, 340 deism  166, 168, 169 Deist Bible  168–9 Delacroix, Eugène 315 de La Mettrie, Julien Offray  169, 258 de Lespinasse, Mademoiselle  337, 338 Delors, Jacques (President)  150, 363 Delumeau, Jean  261, 354 de Maistre, Joseph  166 de Mérode, Xavier  350 Democracy aid package  176 Athenian polis 180 demands 179–80 draconian punishments  180 European Union and Troika  180 financial markets, demands of  176 Jerusalem and Athens  176 Melian Dialogue  176 Pericles’s Funeral Oration  178–9 source of inspiration Athens of Classical Greece  177–8 principles of civic and juridical equality 178 de Montaigne, Michel  186, 265 Demszky, Gábor 218 de-Nazification 61 The Departure of Hector (1812)  243 de Perthes, Jacques Boucher  196 d’Épinay, Louise  338 d’Épinay, Madame  338 Deportation Auschwitz and forced labour deportation by Nazi government 77 forced colonization in the USSR 78 forced immigration in Germany 77 treatment of these forced labourers 77–8 definition 73 Gulag and forced colonization  76–7

INDEX

Gulag victims  75 history of Poland  74 Holocaust 74 Jewish citizens  74 Katyń massacre  74 Nazi concentration camps  74 and representations  75–6 de-humanizing treatment, recollection of  76 experiences, Nazism and Stalinism 76 Kravchenko affair (1949) in France 75 Soviet Occupation  74 Stalinist totalitarianism  74 The Deputy (1963), Hochhuth’s play  55 de Rochechouart, FrançoiseAthénaïs 337 de Ronsard, Pierre  355 de Rougemont, Denis  256 Derrida, Jacques  7, 173 Descartes, René  165, 169 de Sévigné, Madame  338 de Staël, Madame  337, 339 d’Estaing, Valéry Giscard (President)  137, 179 d’Este, Isabella  337 Destiny (1997)  307 de Tencin, Claudine Guérin 338 de Tocqueville, Alexis  13, 194, 266 de Torquemada, Tomás 102 de Unamuno, Miguel  35 de Varagine, Jacobus  254, 295 de Villebois-Mareuil, Georges  351 Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer and Adorno)  173, 238 The Diary of Anne Frank 55 Diderot, Denis  170, 196, 258, 337 Dietrich, Otto  41 Dimitrov, Georgi (Prime Minister)  52 Dinur, Ben-Zion  83 Djilas, Milovan  105 The Disasters of War (Goya’s series)  9 Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men (Rousseau) 168 Discours sur le colonialisme (Césaire) 266

INDEX

discovery of America (1492)  168 dissidence dissident activities  105 East European dissidents  106 Helsinki Conference on Security and Co-operation 107 human rights  108 legacy of dissidence  108 literature 106–7 1967–8 student uprising in West Berlin 106 nuclear disarmament  107–8 powerless individuals, achievement of 107–8 seekers of truth  105–6 ultimatums 107 Döblin, Alfred  316 Doisneau, Robert  316 Dokumentationszentrum 68 Dombrowski, Jarosław 315 Dostoevsky, Fyodor  103, 356 Dreyer, Carl Theodor  333 Dreyfus Affair  161 Dubček, Alexander  106 du Bellay, Joachim  355 du Châtelet, Émilie  335 Duchâtel, Tanneguy  183 du Deffand, Madame  337, 338 Duffy, Carol Ann  243 Dülffer, Jost  62 Dulles, John Foster  63 Duran, Simeon ben Zemah  308 du Rivau, Jean  133 Durkheim, Émile  160 Dutschke, Rudi  218 Duvivier, Julien  322 Eden, Anthony  64 egalitarianism  92, 93 Eichmann, Adolf  54 Eichmann trial of 1961  22 1848 Revolution  120 Einstein, Albert  188 Eisenhower, Dwight D. (President)  63 Eisenman, Peter  89, 199 Eisenstein, Sergei  93 Eisler, Hanns  93 Eliasson, Olafur  89 Elizabethan era  334

375

Elizabeth I of England  331 Élysée Treaty  133, 134, 139, 144 emancipation of the Jews  89 Engels, Friedrich  92, 223, 314, 342 Enlightenment 103 Act of Toleration  168 Age of Voltaire  169 analysis of European legal systems 167 anti-clericalism 169–70 autonomous human reason  165 Calas Affair  170 concept of popular sovereignty  168 declaration of 27 August 1789 counter-revolutionary writers  166 intellectual revolution of German Idealism 166 Deist Bible  168–9 Hegelian conception, religion and human rights  172 interconnected Europe  170–1 American Declaration of Independence 171 Constitutional Convention of 1787 171 during the European Enlightenment 171 Leibniz’s aphorism  170 Partition of Poland in 1772  171 principle of proportionality  171 Judeo-Christian synthesis  173 Locke, John (Father of Liberalism) 167 mechanical materialism  169 Nathan the Wise (1779)  171–2 Haskalah 172 Peaceful Revolution  173 radical Enlightenment  165 re-establishment of Catholicism  169 scientific developments  166 Scientism 173 separation of powers  167–8 sociable existence and communication 165 United States Declaration of Independence (1776)  167 Ensslin, Gudrun  216 epic European culture, source of

376

Homeric epic  240 The Iliad and The Odyssey 239 romantic scenario  240 visual arts, Homer’s influence  240 Hector and Andromache, farewell ancient paintings  242 Ettore e Andromaca (painting) 244 Homer 236–8 European cultural memory  241 Priam’s Treasure  237 public interest in academic debates 237 scholarly analyses  237 War Poets  241 memory 244–6 Hector’s preoccupation with glory 244 illustration of memory  245–6 means of commemoration  245 Ulysses 245 Erasmus, Desiderius  167 Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip (President)  118 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Locke)  168 The Essence of Christianity (Luther II)  172, 258 Esterházy, Péter 224 ethnic cleansing  34, 121, 122 Ettore e Andromaca (painting)  244 eugenics, adoption of  42–3 Eurasianism 356 Europa the nymph ancient myths of Antiquity  233 masculine force, domination of  234 principle of affinity  234 European bourgeoisie  326 European Civil War  9 European colonialism  161, 238, 294, 305 European Convention on Human Rights  151, 285 European crisis therapy  362 European cultural memory  241 European Day of Commemoration for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism 45 European Health Insurance Card  152

INDEX

European history  1, 7, 9, 10, 39, 43, 46, 85, 156, 158, 159, 166, 177, 186, 201, 214, 245, 249, 256, 276, 291, 332, 333, 337 Europeanization  119, 147, 152, 360, 367 of memories  367 European Social Charter in 1961  151 European Union  7, 11, 26, 108, 138, 143, 146, 152, 171, 177, 180, 227, 229, 248, 286, 307, 328, 359 Nobel Peace Prize  131, 142 Euroscepticism 146 Everything is Illuminated (Foer)  89 extreme-right populist movements  38 Fanon, Frantz  93 fascination with Hasidism  89 Fascism anti-antifascist historiography  36–7 anti-fascist volunteers  35 civil religion, evolution of  37 democracy vs. fascism  34 destructive conflict  33 Guernica, by Picasso (1937)  35 international Non Intervention 34 Italian brutal warfare in Ethiopia (1935–6) 35 McCarthyism 35 martyrdom dimensions, Vatican  36 as object of memory  37 revisionist and/or negationist 36 Spanish Civil War (1936–9)  33 Spanish fight against the Rojos (‘Reds’) 35 totalitarianism, concept of  37 war memory, monument of Franco’s policy 36 Western Christian civilization vs. communism 34 Fascist military uprising  33 February Revolution  93 Febvre, Lucien  200 female imprint battle of the sexes  340 Europa, story of  331 feminine sociability  336–9 centres of sociability  339

INDEX

choice of location  337–8 Circle 338 Code civil 336 cultural role in society  337 marital power  336 Parisian salons of Age of Enlightenment 337 places of sociability  337 rupture by the French Revolution 337 ‘salon’ 338 great women  333–6 Catherine II  334 Code of Justinian  334 Elizabeth I of England  334 Empress Theodora  333–4 female Academicians  335 female scientists  335 Gentileschi, Artemisia  334–5 Kauffmann, Angelika  334–5 Merian, Maria Sybilla (1647–1717) 334 renowned national figures  335–6 Vigée-Lebrun, Élisabeth  335 Wars of Liberation  334 Wortley Montagu, Lady Mary  334 of landmark books  342–3 Code civil 343 emergence of ‘Women’s Studies 343 A Room of One’s Own (1929)  342 The Second Sex 343 Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948  343 male imaginary, constructs of  332 ‘Mother Russia’  331 movements as memory British Suffragette Movement 341–2 emergence of the ‘woman of the people 341 Frauenfrage 342 Saint-Simonianism 342 women emancipation  341 neologism 332 ‘paradoxical’ female citizens  339–40 resistance and emancipation movements 332–3

377

Ferdinand I, Archduke of Austria  48 Feuerbach, Ludwig  172, 258 The File on H (Kadaré) 238 Final Act of the Helsinki Accords of 1975 173 First World War  9–10, 13, 21, 28–31, 33, 35, 81, 83–4, 132–4, 149, 159, 241–2, 261, 316, 343, 348, 360 commemorative products  14–15 Fischer, Joschka  218 Foer, Jonathan Safran  89 Foreign Affairs and Security Policy (PESC) 138 former Eastern bloc countries  98 Fouquier-Tinville, Antoine Quentin  103 Franco, Francisco  35, 49 Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP) 50 Frederick II (King)  169–72, 339 Frémiet, Emmanuel  333 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen  158–9 French Revolution  30, 48, 66, 92, 93, 103, 118, 119, 158, 160, 166, 171, 182, 211, 234, 250, 255, 259, 260, 314, 336–8, 340 Freud, Sigmund  259 Fukuyama, Francis  229 Gabin, Jean  322 Gabo, Naum  209 Gallie, W. B.  118 Garbo, Greta  35 Garibaldi, Giuseppe  315 Garnier, Robert  333 Garton Ash, Timothy  61 Gauchet, Marcel  253 Gauck authority  226 gay museum  347 Geiger, Abraham  300 Genocide Convention of 1948  86 genocides, Europe birth of genocide  80–3 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in 1944  81 genocide, definition  81 Lemkin (Lawyer)  80, 82 Nazis’ crimes  80 sovereign, definition  81–2

378

Tehlirian trial in Berlin in 1921  81 Universal Declaration of Human Rights 82 violation of sovereignty  81 comparative victimhood antagonism 85–6 ‘Black Ribbon Day’  86 European collaboration with the Nazis 84–5 January 27, International Holocaust Remembrance Day  84 status of the murder of European Jewry 84 variance, Eastern and Western European memories  85 genocide in 1994 in Rwanda  86 Holocaust 83–4 Shoah 83 war against civilians in 1915–18  79 Gentileschi, Artemisia  334 Geoffrin (Madame)  337, 338 Germanic Legend of the Nibelungen 9 German Ordoliberalism  154 German Reformation (1517)  168 German-Soviet pact European integration  46 historians quarrel, Germany  45 non-aggression pact  45 German uprising of 1848  315 Gero Crucifix in Cologne Cathedral  210 Ginzburg, Carlo  102, 258 Giraudoux, Jean  238 Glemp, Józef 350 Glorious Revolution of 1688  168 Goebbels, Joseph  62 Golden Madonna of Essen Cathedral 210 Goldhagen, Daniel  40 Gonzaga, Elisabetta  337 Gorbachev, Mikhail (President)  92, 137, 225 Gottsched, Johann Christoph  170 Grass, Günter 136 Great Depression of the 1930s  328 Great Discoveries  354 Great Patriotic War  52, 94 Great War  8, 13–21, 24–6, 42–3, 186, 197, 291, 356 pilgrimage 14

INDEX

Green movement  218 Gregorian calendar  254 Grenelle Agreements  322 Grimm, Melchior  338 Grosser, Alfred  133 Grossman, Vasily  97 Grotius, Hugo  167 Guevara, Che  217 Guizot, François (Prime Minister)  195 The Gulag Archipelago (Solzhenitsyn)  76, 106 Gutenberg, Johannes  213 Habeas Corpus Act, 1679  284 Habermas, Jürgen  7, 165 Halbwachs, Maurice  330 Hamann, Johann Georg  170 Hammurabi 277 Haussmann, Georges-Eugène 315 Havel, V. (President)  57, 135, 137, 173 Hazard, Paul  165 Heartfield, John  205 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich  172, 184, 185, 194, 198, 256 Heidegger, Martin  185 Heine, Heinrich  166, 170, 205, 301, 302, 314 Helde, Martti  77, 90 Helsinki Accords  153, 162 Helsinki Conference on Security and Cooperation 107 Henry II of England  337 Henry IV of England  338 Henry IV of France  132 Herbert, Edward  168 hereditary enemies  131 Hernández, Miguel  35 Herschel, Caroline  335 Herzen, Alexander  356 Herz, Henriette  339 Heym, Stefan  94 Hirschfeld, Doktor Magnus  347 ‘historians’ quarrel  56 history Clio, Muse of History  192 Cold War, period of  193 concept of history  193 culture of remembrance  202 discovery and shaping of history  195

INDEX

East-West antagonism  201 evolutionism  196–7, 200 Marxism 201 memory as conjuration  198–200 Kiefer’s sculpture  199 Memorials 199 modern age  195 as movement dynamism in paintings  197–8 synchronisms 198 narratives 195 naturalization and temporalization 196 as a religion  193 Tricontinental conference  201–2 The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Gibbon)  274 The History of the Peloponnesian War (Thucydides) 177 A History of Women in The West 332 ‘historytainment’ 7 Hitler, Adolf  8, 45, 46, 50, 54, 84, 89, 97, 132 Hobbes, Thomas  167, 234, 280, 284, 296 Hobsbawm, Eric  125 Hochhuth, Rolf  55 Ho Chi Minh (President)  217 Hofer, Andreas  350 Hölderlin, Friedrich  30 Hollande, François (President)  31, 134 Holocaust  18, 40, 46, 74, 83–4, 368 children of survivors  23 January 27, International Holocaust Remembrance Day  84 Memorial, Hungary  57–8 Memorial in Paris  89 memory anti-Semitism, France  55 Auschwitz, International Memorial for Victims of Fascism  55 commemorative initiatives  55 memory, importance  55 policy of repentance  55 survivors 55 Waldheim affair of 1986  55 Holocaust (1978)  55 Holocaust Remembrance Centre in Jerusalem 88 Holodomor 186

379

Homer 236–8. See also epic European cultural memory  241 Priam’s Treasure  237 public interest in academic debates 237 scholarly analyses  237 War Poets  241 Homo sapiens 165 homosexuality 346–7 gay museum  347 gay publications  347 Italy, male homosexuals in exile  346 lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community  347 Mytilene 346 ‘pink triangle’ inmates  347 repression of the gay community  347 Honecker, Erich  92, 135, 222, 225 Honegger, Arthur  333 Horace  30, 31 Horkheimer, Max  173, 187, 238 Horthy, Miklós 58 Hoyle, Fred  188 Hugo, Victor  288, 314, 316 Human rights controversies abolition of torture and corporal punishment 161 acceptance of human rights  160 Dreyfus Affair  161 European colonialism  161 policies of racist exploitation  161 intended to counter barbarism  156 renaissance  157 (see also Renaissance humanism) rights of man and citizen, 1789  158– 60 after the Second World War  160 equality, promotion of  159–60 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen  158–9 industrialization 159 Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948  159 shared approach in Europe Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch  162 Civil society actors  162 Helsinki Accords of 1975  162

380

Hume, David  169, 170, 185 Humphrey, Thomas M.  152 Hundred Years’ War and the Wars of the Roses 9 Hussein, Saddam (President)  208, 228 Husserl, Edmund  186 Hussite Rebellion  211 Ibárruri, Dolores  33 iconoclasm. See also images anti-clerical campaigns of Soviet Revolution 212 anti-Stalinist reactions  212 Hussite Rebellion  211 Islamic 207–8 monarchic despotism  212 practised in French Revolution 211 Ideal City, Plato’s  92 If This Is a Man (Levi)  9 The Iliad and The Odyssey (Homer)  236–40, 242, 244–6 images Christian iconographic practices 209–10 Christian themes  209 iconoclasm, acts of anti-clerical campaigns of Soviet Revolution 212 anti-Stalinist reactions  212 Hussite Rebellion  211 monarchic despotism  212 practised in French Revolution 211 Islamic iconoclasm  207–8 receding image abstract sculptures  214 Pietà Rondanini, Michelangelo’s last sculpture 214 split canvases  214 reliquary-statue of Saint Foy  210 reproduction images printed on paper  213 photography 213 Veronica’s icon  212 visual cultures  212 sculptures, creation of large-scale  210 statue’s interior  210 tradition of Judaism  209

INDEX

The Incoherence of the Philosophers (alGhazālī) 308 Industrial Revolution  260 industrial society  328, 329 Inquisition, 171, 254, 258, 303 Catholic Church  101–3 Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith 102 Episcopal tribunals  101 ‘inquisitorial’ 101 investigative hearings  104 methods of ‘Inquisition’  102 period of terror  104 rejection of religious oppression  104 resistance to inquisitorial oppression 103 violent procedures  103 Institutes of the Laws of England (Coke) 284 International Day for the Eradication of Poverty 323 International Monetary Fund  176 ‘International Workers’ Day’  320 In the Crosswind (2014)  77, 90 Iofan, Boris  93 Iranian Revolution of 1979  202 Irish Civil War  118 Irish independence  25 Isaac, Jules  133 Ishmaelites and Hagarenes  292 Islam ‘Abrahamic’ religion  291 Andalusias Babel of languages  302 controversies 303 Enlightenment philosophers  302 ‘golden age’ of Jewish letters and culture 302–3 haven of tolerance  301 idealized Muslim tolerance of religious difference  301 interactions, Jews/Christians/Muslims 300 peaceful coexistence  303 English radical republicanism  299 Ishmaelites and Hagarenes  292 Mahomet European discourse on Islam  294 ‘Mahometan law’  295

INDEX

marriage to Khadīja 294–5 portrayal of the prophet 294 preaching 296 progress of Mahometanism  295–6 prophecy 295 restorer of monotheism  297 teachings 296 2005 controversy  294 meaning 292 Qur’an English translation  299 Latin translation  297–8 publishing of  298 Qur’anic doctrine  299 Rabbinical Judaism  300 ‘secularization’ of the Muslim holy text 300 Saracens 293 trade between Northern Europe and the pre-Islamic Eastern Mediterranean 291 Islamic iconoclasm  207–8 Islamic terrorism  11 Israel, Jonathan  165 Italian fascism  356 Jackson, Robert H.  68 Jakeš, Miloš   223 Jaspers, Karl  180 Jaurès, Jean  323 Jellinek, Georg  160 Jerusalem  2, 18, 83, 88, 172, 177, 183, 288–90, 292 Jerusalem: or On Religious Power and Judasim (Mendelssohn)  172 Jesus Christ  249, 251, 252, 296, 298, 302 Joas, Hans  160 Johnson, Richard  293 Journey to the Land of the Ze-Ka (Margolin) 76 Joyce, James  238 Judaism 248–9 anti-Judaism 254 Rabbinical 300 tradition of  209 July Revolution  314 Justinian I  278

381

Kaczyński, Jaroslaw  227 Kádár, János  92, 222 Kafka, Franz  97, 103 Kalniete, Sandra  85 Kant, Immanuel  11, 164, 166, 167, 170, 171, 173, 184, 186, 187, 256, 258, 339 Karadžić, Radovan  86 Katyń Massacre  107 Kauffman, Angelica  334 Kauffmann, Angelika  334–5 Kazantzakis, Nikos  238 Kertbeny, Karl-Maria  346 Kertész, Imre  56 Kiefer, Anselm  198 The Kindly Ones (Littell)  9 Klee, Paul  198 Knowland, William  63 Koestler, Arthur  97, 120 Kohl, Helmut  133, 134, 364 Kołakowski, Leszek  95 Kollwitz, Käthe 335 Kolyma Tales (Shalamov)  76, 97 Konrád, György  107, 228 Kopelev, Lev  136 Körner 30 Koselleck, Reinhart  167, 194 Kosovo myth abolition of the provincial autonomies 112 acquisition of Kosovo myth/ ethics  112–13, 115 Albanian nationalism and secessionism 110 barrier to Islamization of the Serbs 111 battle of Kosovo polje (Kosovo Field) 110 Christian formula of Passion  114 heroic deaths  112 homogenization of the Serbs  115–16 Kosovo martyrdom  114 martyrdom of 1389  113 Milošević’s use of Kosovo  115 as a place of remembrance  115–16 resurrection and reincarnation  111 Saint-Savaism  111, 112 Serbian experience of Christianity 111

382

Serbian liberation culture  112 Serbs defeat by the Turks  110–12 symbol of preservation of Serbhood 111 war of NATO against Yugoslavia  114 Krenz, Egon  225 Kun, Béla 96 Kuśniewicz, Andrzej  89 Kuro, Jacek  106 Lacombe, Lucien (Film, Louis Malle in 1974) 59 La Disparition (Perec)  89 Landau, Felix  88 Lanzmann, Claude  55, 83, 88 Larousse, Pierre  200 Latacz, Joachim  237 Lauterpacht, Hersch  80, 82 Laval, Pierre  49 L’Aveu (The Confession, 1970)  95 Law, Europe common law, English legal tradition 283–4 Court of Chancery  283–4 justice and judicial training system 283 major documents  284 ‘scientification’ and ‘nationalization’ of justice system  284 European Court of Human Rights 285 European Economic Community  285 general European law canon law  282 Modern public law  283 ‘multi-normativity,’ problems  282 ‘Roman’ religious law  282–3 secular ‘general law’  282 theory of the state  282 unity and diversity  281 law as a foundation codification processes  285 Italo-Roman law  285 matrimonial, patrimonial and procedural law  286 letter of the law  276–7 Eastern Rome (Constantinople) 276 engraved law code  277

INDEX

Western Rome (Rome itself)  276 written text  277 Middle Ages  277–80 Ancient Roman juridical writings 278 Aristotle’s Politics 279 ‘Carolingian Renaissance’  277 Christianity, early days of  278 codex 278 invasions and the early Middle Ages 278 law schools  277 Politics (Aristotle) 279 procedural and criminal law  279 re-appropriation of Classical philosophy 279 Romano-Italian ‘Body of Civil Law’ and ‘Body of Canon Law’  279 natural law and the law of nations 280–1 universal public law  281–2 Law, John  338 Lebensraum 39 Le Gray, Gustave  315 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm  166, 170, 183 Lemkin, Raphael  81 Leonhard, Wolfgang  97 Leopold (King)  358 Les Misérables (Gavroche)  313 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim  172 Lesson in a Dead Language (Kuśniewicz) 89 Lévi-Strauss, Claude  200, 266 Lewitsky, Anatole  49 liberal youth movement  227 liberty Delacroix’s painting  205 image of Liberty Leading the People 205–6 Liberation of Paris  205 photographs of protesting crowds 205 reworkings 205–6 uprising against Charles X  204 Libeskind, Daniel  89 Liebel, Willy  69 Liebknecht, Karl  316 Life and Fate  9, 75

INDEX

Lim, Liza  89 Lind, Jenny  335 Linnaeus, Carl  164, 165 LIP watchmakers’ strike of 1973  217 The Lives of Others (2007)  106 Locarno Agreements  132 Locke, John  167, 168, 258, 280, 284 Loidi, Manuel Santa Cruz  350 Longley, Michael  243 Lorca, Federico García 35 Lost lives, reflections  89–90 Louis XI of France  211 Louis XIV  132, 169 Louis XVI  119, 337 Louis XVIII (King)  351 Lunacharsky, Anatoly  93 Luther, Martin  269, 298, 301 Lutyens, Edwin  17 Lutyens’s monument  17–18 Luxemburg, Rosa  316, 342 Maastricht Treaty  285, 363, 389 McCarthyism  35, 93 McGuinness, Martin  138 Machado, Antonio  35 Machiavelli, Niccolò 280 Magna Carta Libertatum, 1215  284 ‘Mahometan law’  295 Main Currents of Marxism (Kolakowski) 95 Malevich, Kazimir  93 Malle, Louis  59 Malraux, André  35, 52 Mandela, Nelson (President)  140 Manuel II Palaiologos  184 Marcellinus, Ammianus  292 Margolin, Julius  76 Marie-Antoinette  335, 340 Marmontel, Jean-François 337 Marshall Plan  151 Marsilius of Padua  280 Martyr, Justin  184 Marxism  93, 95, 200–1, 217, 368 Marxist revolution  106, 217 Marx, Karl  43, 92, 120, 169, 172, 195, 223, 314, 329, 355 Mary I of England  335 Massis, Henri  35 Mazowiecki, Tadeusz  135, 173

383

The Measures Taken (1930)  93 mechanical materialism  169 Medigo, Elia del  308 Megerlin, David Friedrich  299 Melnikaitė, Marytė 52 memories armed resistance  50 ‘Collaborateur’ 49–50 communist resistance, glorification of 53 death sentences  51 dissolution of Warsaw Pact in 1991 57 Einsatzgruppen, persecution of the Jewish people  54–5 heroes and victims  52–3 civilians 52 Heydrich’s assassination in May 1942 52 Nathan Rapoport in 1948  52 prisoners 53 Warsaw ghetto uprising of 1943 52 Holocaust, memory anti-Semitism, France  55 Auschwitz, International Memorial for Victims of Fascism  55 commemorative initiatives  55 memory, importance  55 policy of repentance  55 survivors 55 Waldheim affair of 1986  55 impact of memories fight for independence  57 socialism and progress  57 narratives 50–1 comradeship 51 ‘Great Patriotic War’  52 Liberation, celebration of  51 second Risorgimento, Italy  52 neutral countries, grand narratives 54 Nuremberg trials  53 reconstruction and restored identity 53 re-nationalization Holocaust Memorial, Hungary 57–8 museums and memorials,

384

Poland 57–8 rehabilitation 57–8 résistant, transformation of  48–9 memories of the events, 1968 anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements 217 anti-’68ers 218 anti-fascism 216 anti-Nazi resistance  216 civil rights campaign  217 collapse of communist regimes  218 criticism of 1968  217 Green movement  218 LIP watchmakers’ strike of 1973  217 Palestine Liberation Movement  217 protest movements  216 return of the Cold War  218 stories of activists  219 student and youth movement  218 Third World revolution  217 victory of the North Vietnamese in 1975 217 Mendelsohn, Daniel  89 Mendelssohn, Moses  172, 338 Merian, Maria Sibylla  334 Merkel, Angela  11, 134, 176 Mestrović, Ivan  114 Michael I of Romania  58 Michel, Louis  139 Michel, Louise  336 Michnik, Adam  107 Mierosławski, Ludwik  315 Miguel I  349 Mill, John Stuart  284, 341 Milošević, Slobodan (President)  110, 112, 114 Miłosz, Czesław 136 Mirandola, Giovanni Pico della  308 The Miseries and Misfortunes of War (Callot) 9 The Missing Picture 90 Mitterrand, François (President)  134, 140, 225 Modzelewski, Karol  106 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact  74, 136 Molotov, Vyacheslav  45 Monicelli, Mario  321 Monnet, Jean  361 monotheistic faiths

INDEX

after secularization  260–1 agnosticism 250 atheism  250, 258 ‘Catholic Majesties’  252 Christianity 249–53 Christianization of geographical space 255 ‘Church Fathers’  251 Constitutional Treaty, 2004  248 de-Christianization 259 diversity, methods  253 dominance of the Greek language 251 before the Edict of Milan  252 enchantment and violence  253–4 anti-Judaism 254 memories of confrontations and conflict 254 establishment and circulation  249–50 Europe and Christianity  248 gender equality  256–7 Gregorian calendar  254 influence on languages, literature and sciences 257 Inquisition 258 Islam 249 Judaism 248–9 Latin Christianity  251 material religious heritage  255–6 nationalism and Christianity  252–3 Neo-Gothic and Neo-Roman churches 259 non-Christian beliefs or heresies  258 Papacy 253 politics and religion  257 Rationalist interpretation of the Bible 258 Spanish colonial practices  259 ‘Theft of History  254, 255 Montand, Yves  95 Montesquieu  167, 168, 196, 274 Morgan, Lewis Henry  195, 196 motherland, dying for churches, commemorative plaques  29 national memorials  30 post-heroic era  31 role for the survivors  29 ‘Mother Russia’  331 Mother Teresa  257

INDEX

Moulin, Jean  49, 52 Münkler, Herfried  31 Münzenberg, Willi  97 Murad IV  110 Murderers Among Us (Staudte)  103 Musil, Robert  10 Mussolini, Benito (Prime Minister)  33, 34, 51 Napoleonic Wars  9, 11, 131, 132, 331, 361 National Revolution, concept of  33 Nazi extermination policies  46 Nazism 76 anti-Semitic sentiment  40 1848 revolution, failure of  40 German phenomenon  39–40 Holocaust 40 ideology 41–2 anti-Semitism 42 ‘Germanness’ 41 racism 41–2 lineaments 43–4 Social Darwinism  39, 42–3, 173 adoption of eugenics  42–3 atavism or a Germanic idiosyncrasy 43 ‘racial hygiene’  43 ‘special path’  39–40 Third Reich  40 Negative Dialectics (Adorno)  173 neologism  80, 332 Neo-realism 95 Neo-Russianism 356 nepotism 105 Neukrantz, Klaus  316 The New Class (Djilas)  106 A New Evolutionism (Michnik)  107 Newton, Isaac  166 Nice truck attack  118 Nicholas II  93 Nicolić, Tomislav (President)  135, 140 Nietzsche, Friedrich  172, 173, 185, 187, 188, 259 9/11 18 1984 (Orwell)  105 1917 Revolution  97 1917 Soviet Revolution  212, 259 Nöldeke, Theodor  300 Noriega, Manuel Antonio  228

385

Notre-Dame-de-Lorette International Memorial 199 Novum organum scientiarium (Bacon) 166 Nuremberg achievements, display of  69–70 annual rallies  70 architectural complex  69 Declaration of Saint James’s Palace 71 festivities 70 ‘German Stadium’  69 International Criminal Tribunals  71 legal framework and legal norms  69 media events, broadcasting techniques 71–2 Nazi imaginary  69–70 Nazism on trial  70–2 International Military Tribunal  70 Nazis’ crimes against peace  70 service of the ‘Great Reich’  71 ‘Party Congress city,’  68 trials, location of  68 O Brother, Where Art Thou? 240 Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011  219, 317 October Revolution  92–3, 96 Oddon, Yvonne  49 Of National Characters (Foucault)  169 On Crimes and Punishments (Beccaria) 171 On Improving the Civil Status of Women (Hippel) 340 opportunism  94, 102 oppression  66, 158, 301 dictatorial 98 rejection of religious  104 Organisation for European Economic Cooperation 151 organized capitalism  329 Orientalism (1978)  294, 305 The Origins of Totalitarianism (Arendt) 75 Orwell, George  97, 103, 105, 316 Ossuary memorial  29 Ostalgia  98, 153 Paine, Thomas  340

386

Palach, Jan  107 paleontology 355 Palestine Liberation Movement  217 Palme, Olof (President)  118 Panh, Rithy  90 Papandreou, George  176 Papon, Maurice  56 Pareto, Vilfredo  330 Paris Commune  120, 122, 123, 212, 216, 314–17 Paris Peace Treaty of 1919  21 Parthenon, sculptures  289 Passerini, Luisa  218 Patočka, Jan  1 ‘patriotic gore’  20 patriotism  10, 54, 56, 116 and betrayal  113 Serbian 111 Peaceful Revolution  173, 224 peace, making of actors 132–6 artificial reconciliation  135 ceremonies 133 Father Franz Stock  133 Franco-German Institute  132–3 image of hands joining across borders 136 Kniefall gesture of 1970  135 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, anniversary of  136 monument, Warsaw uprising  134 official gestures of reconciliation 133–4 recollections, victim of world war I and II  136 ‘reconciliation Mass’  135 rituals 134 Briand-Kellogg Pact  132 Henri IV of France, ‘the King of Peace’ 132 Locarno Agreements  132 model case of Cyprus  139 denunciation of Nazi Germany 139 ‘Élysée Treaty’  139 Franco-German and Franco-Algerian relations  139 International Military Tribunal at

INDEX

Nuremburg 140 reconciliation 140–1 Nobel Peace Prize for European Union 131 Nobel Peace Prize of 1926  132 work of recollection anniversary of the Armistice  137 instances of defiance  137 message of reconciliation  138 Ostpolitik 137 Peace of Westphalia in 1648  xiii, 211, 250 peasants’ social uprising  40 Pecherin, Vladimir  356 Peck, Raoul  92 Péguy, Charles  187, 192, 333 Pelletier, Madeleine  342 The Penelopiad (Atwood)  238 Perec, Georges  89 Perrot, Michelle  332 Pestalozzi, Johann  168 Pétain, Philippe  48–51 Petar II Petrović-Njegoš 111 Peter I of Serbia  112 Petersen, Wolfgang  240 Petition of Right, 1628  284 Petrovsky-Shtern, Yohanan  89 Peyrefitte, Roger  347 Pezza, Michele  349 Phädon: or On the Immortality of the Soul (Mendelssohn) 172 Philosophy of Right (Hegel)  172 photography  18, 35, 213, 243 Piketty, Thomas  92 Pirenne, Henri  291 Pitt, Brad  240 Plea for Woman (Reid)  341 Poniatowski, Stanisław II August  338 Pope Benedict XVI  36 Pope Clement XIV  259 Pope Gregory IX  101 Pope Gregory XIII  254 Pope Innocent III  101 Pope John Paul II  36, 173, 205, 350 Poppy and Memory (Kiefer)  198 popular sovereignty, concept of  168 post-Cold War (1989) authoritarianism 227 boost in market economy  228

INDEX

collapse of the dictatorships  221 communist society Communist Party training schools 223 dominant capitalist system  223–4 divisions 226–7 emancipation movement  227 Gauck authority  226 racism and discrimination  226 transition, Eastern European countries 226 Eastern European military alliance 220 East-West antagonism  228 economic collapse internal German market, advantages of  222 martial law in 1981  222 1970s 222 unity of economic and social policy 223 freedom fighters, wax figures in Madame Tussauds  229 Germany, reunification of  225–6 globalization 229 legacy of 1989  227–9 liberal youth movement  227 Marxism-Leninism 221 Real socialism  221 ‘Republican moment’  224–5 Hungarian programme for democracy 224–5 neo-capitalism 224 resignation of Gorbachev  221 ‘postmemory’  23 Prague Spring of 1968  95, 97, 106, 162, 173, 216, 217, 221 ‘Priam’s Treasure’  237 ‘principle of hope’  92 Prophet Mohammed  249, 289 Protest movements  216 Prussian Academy of Sciences  172 Pudovkin, Vsevolod  93 Putin, Vladimir (President)  67, 98, 118, 137, 227 Queen Elizabeth II  138 Race and History (Lévi-Strauss) 199

387

‘racial hygiene’  43 Radetzky March (Roth)  89 Radical Enlightenment  165, 182 Rakowski, Mieczysław (Prime Minister) 228 Ravachol, François 122 Real socialism  91–2, 106, 221 Reason Copernican hypothesis  182–3 European culture, origin  183 Hebrew Bible  183 irrational, exterior forces  184–5 crisis in the Classical world  185 Reason of Classical Antiquity 185 irrational: interior forces Civil Code  187 dialectic of Enlightenment  187 irrationalism of rationalism  188 ‘Big Bang’  188 ‘metaphysical faith’  188 logos  182, 184 maladies of reason  185–6 modernity as an ‘age of reason’ 182 New Testament  184 Positivism 186 Radical Enlightenment  182 Scholasticism 184 ‘teleology of reason’  186 The Reasonableness of Christianity (Locke) 168 reconciliation  140–1, 368 artificial 135 Franco-German history textbook  144 reconciliation 143 issues of school text books  144 Japan and the People’s Republic of China 143 mass 135 processes of  368 South Korea and Japan  143, 368 2012 Nobel Peace Prize to European Union 143 war crimes, Military Tribunal in Tokyo (1947) 144 Red Army Faction  123 Red Cross, role of  16

388

Reed, John  93 Reflections on the Revolution in France (Burke) 340 Reformation  48, 286, 289, 353 Reign of Terror, French Revolution  103, 211 Renaissance humanism Ancient Greek literature  157 Cicero’s humanitas 157 Classical Antiquity  157 eras of history  158 ‘Middle Ages’  158 Modern Period  158 new educational method  157 revival and appropriation of Classical heritage 157 translations of the Bible  157 Renan, Ernest  194 Renoir, Jean  322 ‘résistancialisme’ 55 Retour à Reims (Eribon)  94 The Revolt of the Masses (Gasset)  97 Rey, Jean-Pierre  206 Ricœur, Paul  59, 136, 173 Rights of Man (1791)  340 Rivet, Paul  49 The Robbers (1782)  243 Robert of Ketton  297 Rodchenko, Alexander  93 Romania uprising  224 ‘Roman’ religious law  282–3 Romantic generation  355 Rome ‘bilateral’ images  268 Classical sculptures  270 ‘de-papalized’ and nationalized Rome 275 Doctrine of the Faith  273 between European and universal memories monumental quality  272 notion of grandeur  271 universal realm of memory  272 Italianization of Rome  274 life as a comune 271 in national collective memories  270 Papal Rome  274 Reformation 273 Renaissance Rome  273

INDEX

Roman law and Canon law  270 Roman papacy, fight against  269 Vatican archives  269 Venice and Constantinople  272 Römer, Willy  316 A Room of One’s Own (Woolf)  331, 342 Roosevelt, Franklin D. (President)  52, 61, 62, 65, 82, 160 Rosenberg, Alfred  41 Rostropovich, Mstislav  135 Roth, Joseph  89 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques  166, 168, 195, 280, 299, 337, 354 Rousso, Henry  55 Rovan, Joseph  132 Rowbotham, Sheila  218 Roxana, The Fortunate Mistress (Defoe) 336 Royal Astronomical Society  335 Royal Society  166, 167 Ruge, Walter  98 rupture, memories of  96–8 Russian Revolution  24, 91, 96, 322 ‘Sacred Unions’  149 Saint-Simonianism 342 Sakharov, Andrei  107, 135 Sale, George  296, 299 Sand, George  336, 339 San Nicolò Ossuary Temple  29 Sarkozy, Nicolas (President)  134, 218 Scharoun, Hans  126 Schelling, Caroline  338 Schelling, Friedrich  338 Schiller, Friedrich  102, 243, 333 Schlegel, Friedrich  338 Schliemann, Heinrich  237 Schloss und Fabrik (Otto)  341 Schmitt, Carl  11, 81, 258 Scholasticism  157, 184, 305 Scholl, Sophie  335 Schröder, Gerhard  364 Schulz, Bruno  88, 89 Scientism 173 Scott, Joan W.  340 Second Boer War (1899–1902)  351 The Second Sex (Beauvoir)  331, 333 Second World War  160 armed conflict  9

INDEX

continent of war Battle of the Nations in 1813  10 commemorative practices  10 ‘European Civil War,’ concept  9 traditional alliances, learn of  10 ‘cult of the nation in arms’  7 Great War  8 post-war period: pax europeana attack on the Christmas Market in Berlin (2016)  11 Islamic terrorism  11 Napoleonic Wars  11 60 million deaths  8 Securitate in Romania  102 Seghers, Anna  94 self-sacrifice  52, 53 Semprún, Jorge  85 Serbian Uprisings  111, 116 Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree (Ali) 301 Shalamov, Varlam  76, 97 Sheehan, James J.  7 Shoah  18–20, 55–6, 80, 83–4, 88 Shoah (1985)  55 Silk workers uprising in Lyon  265 Silone, Ignazio  96 Singer, Isaac Bashevis  88 Singing Revolution  224 Slánsky, Rudolf  95 Snowden, Edward  108 Snyder, Zack  30 social citizenship East German Ordoliberalism  154 Helsinki Accords  153 ILO, pan-European conference 153 low unemployment rates  153 ‘neoliberal’ school of thought  154 ‘Ostalgia’ 153 socialism 153 workforce training and income security 153 emulation within Europe insurance contributions  147 International Federation of Christian Trade Unions  149 International Federation of Trade Unions 149

389

international organizations  148 Proletarian internationalism  149 ‘Sacred Unions’  149 socialists and reformist trade unionists 149 social legislation  148 social policies  147 welfare measures  147 European social model  146 Euroscepticism 146 neoliberal 146 right to social security  151 social and democratic Europe  149– 50 corporatism 150 ILO conventions  149 ‘leisure’ policies  150 social policies  150 social protection systems  149 ‘third way’ European Health Insurance Card 152 Europeanization of social policies 152 European Social Charter in 1961 151 Marshall Plan  151 Organisation for European Economic Co-operation  151 rural workers and the self-employed 151 Welfare State development  146, 154–5 Europeanization 147 social classes, concept of  329–30 Social Darwinism  39, 42–3, 173 adoption of eugenics  42–3 atavism or a Germanic idiosyncrasy 43 ‘racial hygiene’  43 socialism  34, 37, 41, 57, 61, 64, 66, 69, 91–2, 95–6, 98, 106, 121, 126, 153, 160, 173, 221, 223, 352 Socialist Realism  51 Solana, Javier  138, 141 Solidarność movement  323 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander  76, 97, 106, 135, 162, 350, 352, 356 Sombart, Werner  330

390

Song of Roland 9 Soviet communism  97, 120, 356 ‘Soviet Occupation’  74 Soviet Union, demise in 1989–91 367 Spanish Civil War (1936–9)  18, 33 Spartacist revolt of January 1919  316 Spartacist Uprising  96 ‘special path’ or Sonderweg 40 Spencer, Herbert  195 Sperber, Manès 97 Spinelli, Altiero  362 Spinoza, Baruch  165, 184, 258 Stakhanov, Alexey  93 Stalinism  45–6, 74–6, 92, 94–6, 98, 121, 216–17, 367 Stalinist totalitarianism  74 Stalin, Joseph  8, 45, 46, 52, 61, 82, 84, 89, 97, 105 Stanisław II (King)  170 Stasi in East Germany  102, 226 Staudte, Wolfgang  103 Stein, Edith  335 Streicher, Julius  69 Stresemann, Gustav  132 strike after electoral victory of Front populaire 322 apogee of 1905 Russian Revolution 322 associated with certain dates  320 description 318–19 dominant/subordinated or even concealed 319–20 in film and literature Billy Elliot (2000)  323 Brassed Off (1997)  323 ‘Dany le Rouge’  322 Germinal 321 ‘labour aristocracy’  324 Man of Marble (1977)  324 1900 323 The Return to Work at the Wonder Factory 322 Solidarność movement  323 general strikes, form of industrial action 318 UK miners’ strike (1984–5)  323 ‘wildcat’ strikes  319

INDEX

Stryjkowski, Julian  88 Stubbe, Henry  295 Stuttmann, Klaus  205 The Subjection of Women (Reid)  341 Sununu, John H.  228 Szymborska, Wisława 136 ‘Tabula Rasa’ plenum  107 Tadić, Boris (President)  134, 135 Tardi, Jacques  315 Teheran conference in 1943  61 Ten Days that Shook the World (Reed) 93 terrorism assassination at Sarajevo  118 assassination of Olof Palme  118 assassination Tsar Alexander II  118 attacks in Chechnya  118 Auschwitz 121 battles of ‘Field of Blackbirds’  118 battles of Waterloo  118 erasing traces  122 eradication of trace of damage 122 erase of Nazis camps  122 intervention by a political power 122 Ethnic cleansing  121 Guernica 121 individual acts of terror  122–4 international conference (1895), for preventive measures  123 9/11 attacks  122–3 religiously motivated terrorism 123 Irish Civil War  118 Nice truck attack  118 ‘population transfers’  121 Spanish regionalist movements  118 Stalinism and national socialism  121 state terrorism, memories crushing of 1848 revolution and Paris Commune  120 execution of Louis XVI  119–20 USSR’s Stalinist regime  120 terrorists, definition  118 terrorists  50, 118, 119, 123 Thatcher, Margaret (Prime Minister)  xi, 154, 323, 363

INDEX

Thieriot, Nicolas-Claude  299 Third Reich  9, 21, 39–41, 44, 53, 62, 69–70, 74, 79, 94, 151, 331 Third World revolution  216–17 Thirty Glorious Years  153, 356 Thirty Years War (1618–48)  8–11, 131, 132, 168 Thompson, E. P.  95 Tillion, Germaine  49, 335 Times of Fading Light (Ruge)  92 Tindal, Matthew  169 Tischbein, Johann Heinrich Wilhelm 243 Tiso, Jozef (President)  51, 85 Tito, Josip Broz (President)  50, 52, 57, 92, 105 Toland, John  296 tombs of the Unknown Warrior  17 ‘Topography of Terror’  126 Torquemada  102, 103 totalitarianism, concept of  36–7, 73–6, 97, 160, 352, 367 Touvier, Paul  56 trans-European gathering (2003) 7 Traugott, Mark  313 Treaty of Amsterdam  360 Treaty of Lisbon (2009)  285, 359 Treaty of Maastricht (1993)  285, 359 Treaty of Nice  360 Treaty of Rome  285, 361 Treaty of the Pyrenees  132 Treaty of Versailles  134 Treaty on the European Union  359 Trenet, Charles  322 Trepkowski, Tadeusz  9 Triumph of the Will (documentary)  68 Trojan War  238–40, 245, 263 Truth and Reconciliation Commission  23 Tsar Nicholas I  314 Tsipras, Alexis (Prime Minister)  137 Tutu, Desmond  140 Tylor, Edward Burnett  196 Tyrolean Rebellion  349 UK miners’ strike (1984–1985)  323 Ullman, Micha  89 Ulrichs, Karl Heinrich  346

391

Ulysses  236–42, 245 UN declaration of Human Rights in 1948  160, 161, 177 UNESCO list of endangered languages  88 list of World Heritage Sites  207 Memory of the World Register  281 United States Declaration of Independence (1776) 167 Universal Declaration of Human Rights  82, 151, 159, 161, 285 ‘Un Occident kidnappé ou la tragédie de l’Europe centrale’ (Kundera)  66 US Declaration of Independence  158 Valéry, Paul  177, 200, 261 Vallès, Jules  314, 316 Veblen, Thorstein  330 Veil, Simone  85, 335 Velvet Revolution  173, 224 Venclova, Tomas  136 Vendée, wars of. See also Counterrevolution Carlism 350 ‘Carlist’ wars  349 counter-revolutionary uprisings  349 Italy, insurrections  349 La Grancia Park since 1999  350 repression of Neopolitan Republic in 1799 349 Tyrolean Rebellion  349 Verdi, Giuseppe  333 Veron-Bellecourt, Alexandre  197, 200 Vienna Congress  11, 348 Vietnam War  217 Vigée Le Brun, Élisabeth  334–5 Viktor Orbán 227 Vildé, Boris  49 Villes Martyres 26 Vincent of Beauvais  254 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Wollstonecraft) 340 Voices in the Darkness (Stryjkowski)  88 von Chamisso, Adelbert  195 von Clausewitz, Carl  11 von Donnersmarck, Florian Henckel  98, 103, 106 von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang  171, 268, 291, 297, 299, 336

392

von Hindenburg, Paul (President)  9 von Hippel, Theodor  339 von Klenze, Leo  289 von Pufendorf, Samuel  167, 280 von Ranke, Leopold  273 von Ribbentrop, Joachim  45 von Sanders, Otto Liman  25 von Schlegel, A. W.  338 von Thadden, Rudolf  133 von Weizsäcker, Richard (President)  8, 137, 144 Vučić, Aleksandar (President)  135 Wagner, Richard  42 Wajda, Andrzej  103, 108, 324 Walcott, Derek  238 Wałęsa, Lech (President)  108, 173, 228 Wallenberg, Raoul  54 Walpole, Horace  338 War and Peace (Tolstoy)  9 ‘war books boom’ (1928–34)  21 War communism  96 Warhol, Andy  244 War Poets  241 Warsaw ghetto uprising  52, 55 Warsaw insurgency  314 Warsaw Pact  95 Warsaw Uprising  58, 121, 122, 134 Wars of Liberation  334 Wars of Religion  132 Weber, Max  253, 330 Weeks, Jeffrey  219 Wehrmacht’s invasion of the USSR  77 Weil, Simone  241 Weiss, Louise  359 Welles, Orson  97 ‘the white international’  351 The White Rose (Verhoeven)  103 ‘wildcat’ strikes  319 Wilkanowicz, Stefan  174 William of Moerbeke  279 Wilson, Edmund  20 Wilson, E. O.  188

INDEX

Wilson, Woodrow (President)  25 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim  274, 355 Wolf, Christa  238 Wollstonecraft, Mary  340 Woolf, Virginia  19, 331, 332, 339, 342, 343 World Council of Churches  252 Wortley Montagu, Lady Mary  334 Wright, Richard  93 xenophobia 123 xenophobic movements  38 Yalta Agreement  173 Yalta, betrayal at Bicentenary of the French Revolution 66 Big Three’s secret summit  63 divided world  62–3 de Gaulle’s opposition to decisions made by Big Three  64 ‘German march eastwards’  63 ‘German slaves’ to Siberia  62 Kultura in Paris  64 re-organization of Poland’s relationships 64 settlements, Germany  61 socialism 66 Soviet Union as ‘champion of democracy’ 62 Yeltsin, Boris (President)  137 Yentl (Streisand)  88 Yezhov, Nikolay  103 Young Germany Movement  314 Yourcenar, Marguerite  2, 335 Yusuf, Abu Yaqub  307 Zedong, Mao  217 Zhivkov, Todor  222 Zola, Émile  321, 355 Zouaves, Papal  350 Zunz, Leopold  172