The Europeans

Introduction

The first steam engine pulled out of the Gare Saint-Lazare on its pioneering journey to Brussels at 7.30 in the morning, on a sunny Saturday, 13 June 1846. Two more locomotives followed it in sequence while the crowd cheered and the band played to send them on their way. Each of the three trains was made up of twenty open carriages decked out in the French and Belgian tricolours. Their 1,500 passengers had been invited by Baron James de Rothschild to celebrate the opening of the Paris–Brussels railway, which his company, the Chemins de Fer du Nord, had recently completed with the building of the line from the French capital to Lille.

It was not the first international railway. Three years earlier, in 1843, the Belgians had inaugurated a railroad from Antwerp to Cologne in Prussia’s Rhine province. But the Paris–Brussels line was especially important because it opened up a high-speed connection linking France and the Low Countries, Britain (via Ostend or Dunkirk) and the German-speaking lands. The French press heralded the new railway as the beginning of Europe’s unification under the cultural dominance of France. ‘Inviting foreigners to see our arts, our institutions, and all that makes us great is the surest way to maintain the good opinion of our country in Europe,’ reasoned the commission that approved the building of the line to Lille.¹

The first train carried the official dignitaries, the Ducs de Nemours and Montpensier, sons of the French king, accompanied by French and Belgian ministers, police chiefs and various celebrities, among them the writers Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo and Théophile Gautier, as well as the painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Travelling from Paris at the unheard-of speed of thirty kilometres per hour, the advance party reached Lille in the sweltering heat of the afternoon. With their windswept hair and fine clothes covered in dust from the open-air journey, the travellers descended at a temporary station outside the medieval walls, where they were met by the city’s leaders, the Archbishop of Cambrai, and a mounted guard of honour bearing French and Belgian flags. After the playing of the national anthems by a military band, the dignitaries walked in procession through the decorated streets, where such large crowds had assembled that the National Guard struggled to maintain order. Thieves were everywhere, there were scenes of chaos when the drinks ran out, and alarms were raised as a fire broke out in the Palace of Justice.²

The festivities began with a magnificent banquet given by Rothschild for 2,000 people in a vast marquee on the site of the future railway station, at that time being built inside the medieval walls. Sixty cooks and 400 waiters served up generous helpings of poached salmon in white sauce, York ham with fruits, quails au gratin, partridges à la régence, creamed beans, cheeses, desserts and French wines, whereupon the toasts began: ‘To the unity of France and Belgium!’ ‘To international peace!’ Rothschild made a heartfelt speech about the railways bringing Europe’s nations together.³

As evening drew in there was a ‘monster concert’ on the esplanade, where Berlioz conducted a first performance of his Grande Symphonie funèbre et triomphale by 400 bandsmen from the local garrisons. The organizers had insisted on adding twelve cannons to the orchestra which were meant to fire on the final chords of the Apotheosis. But when the moment came they could not be fired because the lighters had been lost, although two were lit with a cigar, which caused their fuses to fizzle in the air, fooling some of the audience into thinking that had been intended all along.⁴

Berlioz had been commissioned to compose a cantata, Le Chant des chemins de fer, to a text by the writer Jules Janin celebrating international peace and brotherhood, ideals which the railways inspired. Composed for a tenor soloist, orchestra and several choirs, the cantata was performed at a banquet in the Hôtel de Ville following the concert on the esplanade. ‘The cantata was sung with uncommon verve and fresh voices,’ Berlioz reported to his sister Nanci. ‘But while I was in conversation in the adjoining room with the Ducs de Nemours and Montpensier, who had asked for me, my hat was stolen, along with the music of the cantata.’⁵ The score was recovered, but the hat was not.

At two o’clock in the morning, the convoy of revellers continued on their journey to Brussels. At Kortrijk, the first Belgian town, the whole population appeared at the station to greet the extraordinary trains from France. At Ghent there was a military parade with a cannonade. For the last stretch of the route, from Mechelen, the front two trains progressed in parallel, entering the station in Brussels, to cheers from the assembled crowd, at the same time. The French princes were received on the platform by Léopold, the Belgian king, and his French wife, Louise of Orléans, the princes’ elder sister. There was a banquet in the Grand Palace, and a ball given by the Belgian Railways in the newly opened Gare du Nord. The station was converted into a ballroom by constructing a wooden floor above the tracks, suspending chandeliers from the glass roof, and importing tulips by the wagonload from Holland. ‘We have never seen a ball as magnificent as this,’ claimed the correspondent of Le National.⁶

In the early hours of the next morning, the visitors from France began their return to Paris. The 330-kilometre journey took just twelve hours – a quarter of the time it usually required to make the trip by stagecoach, the fastest mode of transport before the railway.

Soon national boundaries were being crossed by railways everywhere. A new era for European culture had begun. Artists and their works could now move around the Continent much more easily. Berlioz would travel on the line from Paris to Brussels on his way to Russia for a concert tour in 1847 (at that time he could only get as far as Berlin by railway, but on his second tour of Russia, twenty years later, he could travel all the way from Paris to St Petersburg by train). From these decades, the railways would be used by orchestras and choirs, opera and theatre companies, touring exhibitions of artistic works, and writers on reading tours. The formidable weight of many artistic enterprises, which would have required incredible numbers of horses and carriages, was relatively effortlessly moved by steam power. An international market would be opened up for cheap mass reproductions of paintings, books and sheet music. The modern age of foreign travel would begin, enabling Europeans in much greater numbers to recognize their commonalities. It allowed them to discover in these works of art their own ‘Europeanness’, the values and ideas they shared with other peoples across Europe, above and beyond their separate nationalities.

How this ‘European culture’ was created is the subject of this book. It sets out to explain how it came about that by around 1900 the same books were being read across the Continent, the same paintings reproduced, the same music played at home or heard in concert halls, and the same operas performed in all the major theatres of Europe. How, in sum, the European canon – which forms the basis of today’s high culture not just in Europe but all around the globe where Europeans settled – was established in the railway age. An élite international culture had existed in Europe since at least the Renaissance. It was built on Christianity, Classical literature, philosophy and learning, and had spread through Europe’s courts, academies and city states. But it was only in the nineteenth century that a relatively integrated mass culture was able to develop right across the continent.

The Europeans is an international history. It looks at Europe as a whole, not divided into nation states or geographic zones, as in the majority of European histories, which have mostly focused on the role of culture in the nationalist movements and nation-building projects of the nineteenth century rather than on the arts as a unifying force between nations. My aim is to approach Europe as a space of cultural transfers, translations and exchanges crossing national boundaries, out of which a ‘European culture’ – an international synthesis of artistic forms, ideas and styles – would come into existence and distinguish Europe from the broader world.⁷ As Kenneth Clark once said, nearly all the great advances in civilization – and the glittering achievements of European culture in the nineteenth century undoubtedly were one – have been during periods of the utmost internationalism, when people, ideas and artistic creations circulated freely between nations.⁸

In many ways the book is an exploration of the railway age as the first period of cultural globalization – for that is in effect what the creation of a European market for the arts in the nineteenth century represents. There were many who opposed this process from the start – nationalists, most obviously, who feared that the international flow of cultural traffic would undermine their nation’s distinct culture and originality – but nobody was capable of stopping it. In ways beyond the political control of any nation state, the great technological and economic transformations of the nineteenth century (the revolution in mass communications and travel, the invention of lithographic printing and photography, the ascendancy of the free-market system) were the hidden motive forces behind the creation of a ‘European culture’ – a supranational space for the circulation of ideas and works of art stretching right across the Continent.

At the heart of the book is the new relationship between the arts and capitalism which developed in the nineteenth century. There is as much in it about the economics of the arts (technologies of production, business management, marketing, publicity, social networks, the problem of combating piracy) as there is about the works of art themselves. My focus is on forms of art that were most engaged in the capitalist system through their printed reproduction for the marketplace (the main source of profit for literature, music and painting) or because they functioned as a business once they lost State subsidies (e.g. opera). Sculpture and large public works of art are of less significance for my thesis. In the end it was the market that determined the European canon, deciding which works would survive, and which (a much greater number) would be lost and forgotten.

Three people stand at the centre of this book: the writer Ivan Turgenev (1818–83), the singer and composer Pauline Viardot (1821–1910), with whom Turgenev had a long and intimate relationship, and her husband, Louis Viardot (1800–1883), a now forgotten but in his time important art critic, scholar, publisher, theatre manager, republican activist, journalist and literary translator into French from both Russian and Spanish (everything, in other words, that is not the artist but on which the artist depends). Their biographies are woven through the narrative, which follows them around Europe (between them they lived at different times in France, Spain, Russia, Germany and Britain, and travelled widely through the rest of it), engages with those people whom they knew (almost everyone of any real importance on the European cultural scene), and explores those issues that affected them as artists and promoters of the arts.

In their different ways, Turgenev and the Viardots were figures in the arts adapting to the market and its challenges. Pauline had been born into a family of itinerant singers, so commercial enterprise was in her blood; but she was extremely skilful in her exploitation of the new economy and, as a woman, unusually independent for this patriarchal age. Louis acted as her manager in the early years of their marriage. As the director of the Théâtre Italien, one of Europe’s major opera houses, he had quickly learned how to operate in a free market, but his business acumen was always moderated by an academic temperament. As for Turgenev, he had been born into the Russian aristocracy, whose sons were expected to enter public service and live off their estates. He had no head for business when he started out as a writer.

Through their international connections, Turgenev and the Viardots were important cultural intermediaries, promoting writers, artists and musicians across Europe and helping them establish foreign markets for their work. The people who attended their salons at various times in Paris, Baden and London represent a Who’s Who of the European arts, high society and politics.

This was an international culture that vanished on the outbreak of the First World War. Turgenev and the Viardots were cosmopolitans, members of a European cultural élite, capable of living anywhere on European soil, provided it did not compromise their democratic principles, without losing any of their nationality. They found their home in ‘European Civilization’. Burke’s famous phrase – that ‘No European can be a complete exile in any part of Europe’⁹ – might have been designed for them.