Dear Leila,
In my last letter, I told you about a widespread view of Progress—capital P—that was in wide circulation in the years before the First World War. Today I want to talk about a different view, the one that prompted this whole string of letters I’ve been writing to you lately, about a very different worldview: a notion that the world was on the cusp of a cataclysm. As indeed it was.
As we may be now. I’ll get to that.
In 1900, the European continent (we’ll throw Great Britain into that for the purposes of this discussion) was at the apogee of world civilization—an apex that had been achieved at different points by different regimes such as the Greeks of the Mediterranean and Near East, the Mughals of South Asia or the Aztecs of Mesoamerica. In all these cases, we’re talking about civilizations spanning large geographic areas that dominated their surrounding regions even as they wielded ethnic and religious minorities, with a combination of hard and soft power, into cohesive wholes.
I need to add some caveats to this. “The European continent” in fact consisted of a series of rivalrous powers (though factionalism is always a feature in the history of empires, as indeed was the case for the Greeks, who included Athens, Sparta, and Corinth). The experience of particular individuals on that content varied widely in terms of language, culture, and/or economic circumstances. It might have mattered little to the Romanian mother of twin girls living hundreds of miles from Vienna that she was living at the apogee of a global civilization in 1900, though it might have ramifications for who those daughters could marry, what they might be able to take for granted, and what kinds of aspirations they could realistically have. Making generalizations is a tricky business, but in the end we can’t make sense of the world without them, even as we inevitably distort our picture of reality in doing so.
Anyway, dear grandchild, it was in many ways an exciting time to be alive. Older technologies like telegraphy and railroads had conquered time and space; new ones like automobiles and aviation created vast new possibilities for mobility, literal and figurative. Newspapers, movies, telephony, and the emerging technology of radio opened avenues of mass communication. Less obvious, but more transformative, were the creation of clean water systems, electric grids, and new universities that transformed the lives and health of millions of people on a mass basis. It was, in many ways, a great time to be alive, one marked by more sweeping changes in the past half-century than had ever happened before or since (which includes the centuries in which I have lived, dear one).
And yet.
In addition to a structure of feeling that I have characterized as the Myth of Progress, there was another one in circulation that I’ll call the Myth of Dread. It was widely abroad in the land and competed with the Myth of Progress in the heads—and, more importantly, in the hearts—of the peoples of Europe circa 1914. And as with the Myth of Progress, there were multiple cells in this molecule held together with bonds of thought and emotion (this period also marked the beginnings of modern physics).
The most obvious of these cells in the molecule of dread was geopolitical. The Belle Époque I’ve been talking about is customarily dated to have begun in the wake of French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), which led to the creation of the unified nation of Germany and provoked the short-lived, but long-remembered, Paris Commune, an anarchistic episode in the history of that city lovingly invoked by radicals ever since. For the next four and a half decades, the French government sought to recapture the territory—and sense of military confidence—it lost in the Franco-Prussian War. The newly consolidated German government, by contrast, traditionally hemmed in by its central continental location between great powers, sought to bolster its position and challenged the global dominance of Great Britain with an arms race that included a huge naval buildup and a famous not-so-secret plan for invading France through (neutral) Belgium. Britain, for its part, held back from direct engagement—as it so often did—even as it sought to check German power with feelers to France and to Russia, that perpetual lumbering giant always on the cusp of global greatness. (It had recently been defeated in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05, which marked the beginnings of Asia’s rise from European domination and caused a revolutionary reorganization of Russia’s government that did little to lessen fear of the shaggy bear’s power, in part because it was followed by competent governance and very rapid economic and military growth).
And then there were the sagging empires of the Austrian Hapsburgs and Turkish Ottomans, floundering in the face of challenges by rising ethnic and religious minorities forming breakaway states like Bulgaria and Serbia. One reason why the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in 1914 was his effort to turn the Austro-Hungarian empire into a federation along the lines of the United States, which Serbian terrorists sought to prevent precisely because they feared it would succeed. Indeed, it was the fragmentation of southeastern Europe, reflected in a pair of relatively small wars that erupted in 1912 and 1913, that unwittingly lit the fuse for a global catastrophe in 1914—in part because the various powers involved were primed for it for decades.
But the sense of dread that I’m talking about was not simply a matter of diplomatic maneuvers between governments. It was also something that was going on within their societies. In the very years the Eiffel Tower was being erected in Paris, so was the Basilica of the Sacré-Cœur, a literal bulwark of Catholicism suggestive of the way the legacy of the resolutely secular French Revolution continued to battle with the Church of Rome. In his 2024 book City of Light, City of Shadows: Paris in the Belle Époque (which I acquired in order to write you this letter), the Scottish historian Mike Rapport concisely distills the concerns of some French observers about “decadence, decay and degeneration”:
Commentators at the time fretted about poverty and public health; disease, it was argued, hastened the ‘degeneration’ of the French as a people. They spoke in similar terms about the impact of technology on everyday life and how it made people lazy, caused infertility, or outstripped morality. They wrung their hands about the expansion of popular culture, thought by some to lower standards of good taste; the emergence of the mass media, whose polemics, slander and prejudices risked taking the press’s freedom too far; and the growth of consumerism, which sapped the civic fibre of virtuous, thrifty republican citizens. [Paris was the birthplace of the department store, a landmark in the history of mass retailing.] They worried, too, about the emancipation of women and their status and agency within French society: the challenges articulated by ‘feminists’—the term dates to the 1890s—seemed to traditionalists to threaten family arrangements, and so, by extension, the social order itself (not least, it was sometimes claimed, by imposing a drag on the already flagging birth rate).
In the words of Modris Eksteins, whose book Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, published in 1989 when I was a young scholar and which I finally read (again, thanks to you) when I was an old one, “At the same time tensions were developing between states in this turn-of-the-century world, fundamental conflicts were surfacing in virtually all areas of human endeavor: in the arts, in fashion, in sexual mores, between generations, in politics.”
The word—that structure of feeling—used to describe the emerging world was modernism. It exhilarated, frightened, and disgusted people. And yet, even as the young embraced these ideas, older ones of a generation earlier—those of Charles Darwin and Friedrich Nietszche, saturated in a language of struggle and conquest, mingled in hearts and minds to form the “unspoken assumptions,” in the words of British scholar James Joll, whose 1968 lecture I mentioned a couple letters ago and managed to track down, that precipitated the First World War.
If there was one common feeling that threaded these disparate reactions to modernity, it was this: something’s got to give. Some people were thrilled by this prospect; for others, it was a source of anxiety. But there was a powerful perception throughout Europe in 1914 that something (there’s that vague word again) was going to happen.
And when it did, even those who were most scared experienced a weird kind of relief. So it was, for example, that Erich von Falkenhayn, the Prussian War Minister soon to become the commander of the German army, proclaimed on August 4 that “even if we end in ruin, it was beautiful.” (The mangling of tenses here is striking.)
By coincidence it was captured in the book I happen to be reading for pleasure, Paul Murray’s celebrated 2023 novel The Bee Sting, set in Ireland in the years after the financial crash of 2008. “As a teen, Dickie had been obsessed with the end of the world. Nuclear attack, inferno, killer bees; for a long time, he took it for granted that he would end his days in an internment camp, cholera-ridden, watching the smoking ruins of a razed world through a scrim of barbed wire.” The doctor Dickie sees for his various (psychosomatic) ailments explains that “fantasies like this, fantasies of disaster, of annihilation, of being overwhelmed were not uncommon,” adding that “strange as it may sound, they can actually be an attempt to find relief.” When Dickie responds to this pronouncement with incredulity, the doctor notes that in the face of disaster, “your own situation becomes insignificant. Your responsibility to act, your being as a person even, all that is lifted from you. That’s an attractive idea for some people.”
I do think this structure of feeling captures what a lot of Europeans were experiencing when, finally, after a period of relative equilibrium going back to Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815, a huge continental war finally broke out, serving as, in the words of Ekstein, “an opportunity for both change and confirmation.” For the Germans in particular, he says, “the war was above all an idea, not a conspiracy aimed at German territorial aggrandizement … the supreme test of spirit, and as such a test of vitality, culture and life.” The essence of that test was a matter of willfully throwing away the fears and constraints of everyday life, subsuming oneself into a gigantic wave of collective action.
“Everything tends toward catastrophe and collapse,” Winston Churchill, in charge of the British navy at the time, wrote his wife on July 28, 1914, when war was finally at hand. “I am interested, geared-up and happy.” The Russian minister Alexander Krivoshein told his countrymen that “everything will be superb.” (Less than three years later, he was swept into the vortex of the Russian Revolution, which he ultimately escaped by going into exile in France.) These were not merely isolated or elite sentiments: parades celebrating the outbreak of war swept the continent in the summer of 1914.
That urge, sweetheart, that urge to throw it all away: it’s never felt closer to the surface of your grandfather’s sense of the collective consciousness than it does right now. I hope I’m wrong, even as I watch plates from our national cupboard get shattered. I’ll try to explain this more soon.