by Simon Winder
So that when I stretch’d out my hand, I caught hold of the Fille de Chambre’s
END OF VOLUME II
Sadly, while A Sentimental Journey was once a cult book, it now seems (to me, anyway) boring and incomprehensible (unlike his endlessly curious and funny Tristram Shandy). This may just be because Smollett got there first in my affections when in my teens. Sterne set up A Sentimental Journey to be a rebuttal of Smelfungus’s egregious book, but I soon get impatient with its tinkly tweeness and side instead with Smelfungus (or indeed Hogarth), shouting at innkeepers and gagging on foreign food. Continuing to keep this sort of British visitor (known to the French as les goddams or les rosbifs, among other things) out of the Channel ports must in itself have been a profound argument in favour of Louis XV prolonging the Seven Years War to Eight Years or even Nine.
Adventures in tiny states
One of the guiding spirits behind the French Revolution was a sense of exasperation at the total irrationality of Europe’s political landscape. Great swathes of territory looked on the map like a spilt packet of muesli, with scattered bits of land arising from some five-century-old family dispute or an emperor’s reward for some long-forgotten piece of battlefield courage. In many ways, it was these scraps of territory which were the most eloquent exhibits in any critique of aristocratic rule. This was even recognized by some of the rulers themselves. The hyper-rationalizing Habsburg Emperor Joseph II, sitting in Vienna in the 1780s, exhausted himself trying to swap his ownership of the remote and awkward Austrian Netherlands for adjacent Bavaria: a demeaning situation that must have done its part to fuel incipient Belgian nationalism. In the end any rationalizing of scattered land fragments was a threat to almost everybody in the Holy Roman Empire. All the little states huddled together in a squeaking panic, warmly encouraged by Frederick the Great. Frederick behaved rather like Lewis Carroll’s Walrus, sobbing with sympathy for the poor little oysters even as he eats them up, and had a wonderful time generally irritating Joseph II by feigning a pro-oyster stance. It would take the cataclysm of the French Revolution to both sweep up the territorial debris and end semi-feudal rule – but even that proved only partial, with many aristocrats still escaping through the Net of Rationalism.
There are so many pre-1789 oddities scattered across the map that it is hard to have any discipline writing about them. I could spend my whole life drifting from anomaly to anomaly, almost all, on closer inspection, having curious places in European history. With inward sobs and special pleadings, I can only realistically restrict myself to talk about two: Montbéliard and Neuchâtel.
Montbéliard is a dozy little town in the south of the Franche-Comté. With its dusty squares, shuttered houses, Café du Commerce and smell of hot baguette, it seems to be an identikit summation of everything that makes France so attractive. But then, you walk around a corner and, perched on a monstrous crag, is a chaotic, toothy, part-ruined German Schloss glowering down – as though you have ambled in a few moments from Jour de Fête into Escape from Colditz. For some four hundred years Montbéliard was an isolated territory, attended by some smaller little splotches around it (including the Fiefdom of Saint-Hippolyte, which need not detain us), owned by the Dukes of Württemberg, whose main territories were unfortunately a hundred miles or more away, with their capital at Stuttgart. Inserted between the Burgundian and then Spanish-ruled Franche-Comté, the lands of the Bishop of Basle and Habsburg-ruled Further Austria, Montbéliard was as spatchcocked and nutty a piece of territory as anyone could hope for. The Dukes were a classic example of rulers whose territory was not big enough to make them serious European figures but also not small enough to be left alone. Their own incompetence and brutality meant that they also had a notably antagonistic relationship with their leading subjects – who could reduce the dukes to raging impotence, gnashing their teeth in their Stuttgart palace – with their endless talk about privileges and exceptions and refusal to be taxed. The Dukes loved Montbéliard, or more properly in their time Mömpelgard, as, even if the place was tiny, they could swank about and be more feudal there. At one moment of particular humiliation, it was the only territory they had left.
The Dukes had the additional problem of having converted to Protestantism. Mömpelgard was converted by a Swiss-French preacher, Guillaume Farel, and this isolated it from its mainly Catholic neighbours. Within the Holy Roman Empire, Protestant rulers never resolved the problem of how to find jobs for their sons. The Empire’s framework remained organized around Catholicism, and Catholic rulers could find any number of lucrative posts for family members within the Church hierarchy, including such idle, nicely dressed ones as being the canon of a cathedral. The only Protestant route for large families was to bundle everyone into the army. The Dukes of Württemberg went even further – selling their own subjects as soldiers to other countries – but it was a genuine headache for a cash-strapped and sprawling place like Württemberg: how do you keep a respectably parasitic aristocratic lifestyle for family members who – in an odd form of discrimination – were absolutely forbidden from earning any money by, say, settling down to run a pub or shop? Sometimes reigns produced a lot of children and what to do with them all produced ducal despair. For this reason Mömpelgard tended to be handed over to a junior family branch to rule just to spread the limited Württemberger cash around. The absolute low point was Leopold-Eberhard, who ruled at the beginning of the eighteenth century and lived in a frenzy of silliness, betrayal and sexual incontinence (enjoying at one point several daughters of the same guard captain). His legacy was the epic, long-running lawsuit of the ‘Mömpelgard Bastards’, who dogged his cash-free successors in the hope of affording fringe-aristocratic lifestyles.
On the face of it Mömpelgard was just a comic anomaly. Whenever there was a war some bright commander would remember Mömpelgard and invade it. It was a regular pit stop in the Thirty Years War and during the War of the Spanish Succession the garrison was under orders simply to give up at once if anyone in a French uniform appeared. It is a shame that we have no record of what ordinary Mömpelgarders thought of all this. Once Louis XIV had taken Alsace off the Vienna Habsburgs and the Franche-Comté off the Madrid Habsburgs, Mömpelgard found itself in the front line but somehow held on until it featured in the general clearance sale of 1793, becoming together with a chunk of north-western Switzerland part of the wonderfully named new French department of Mont-Tonnerre. After the Napoleonic Wars were over it remained part of France. But Mömpelgard has, like so many such places, curious byways. It was always an enclave of Protestantism and, falling outside Louis XIV’s jurisdiction, it was not affected by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 that ruined Protestant life in the rest of France. The town therefore has the oldest Protestant church in France – a beautifully severe classical box from around 1600. It was also the town where the great Protestant scientist Georges Cuvier grew up. A superb statue of him in the main square pushes the sculptor as far as he can go, by successfully rendering flesh, cloth, hair, fur, paper, leather, silk and a chunk of fossilized bone in bronze. Cuvier’s virtues are almost endless and I felt elated to so unexpectedly bump into him. Minor yet excellent achievements include inventing the words mastodon and pterodactyl, which tap directly into my very earliest and most fervent enthusiasms, as well as being the man who first studied the mosasaur. To mark this dinosaur link the local museum has (alongside superb plaster and resin models of the Pears of the Franche-Comté) a spectacular cast of the skull of Sarcosuchus imperator, an appalling crocodile twice the size of any living one – the fossil ‘une découverte 100% française!’.
Mömpelgard’s other strange claim on everyone’s time is that, after centuries of make-do-and-mend, sexual abasement and middling-dukedom humiliation, the rulers hit pay dirt. Friedrich Eugen, the Duke of Württemberg’s younger brother, lived there and, through the machinations of Catherine the Great and Frederick the Great, his daughter was chosen as the wife of her son and heir, Paul. Catherine had been herself a minor German
aristocrat before marrying the Russian tsar, conniving in his murder and becoming one of Russia’s greatest rulers – so little Sophie Dorothea was following in distinguished footsteps when the heir Paul came to Mömpelgard to whisk her away from the dozy pear orchards of the Jura to the grandeurs and cruelties of the Romanov court. Converting to Orthodoxy and changing her name to Maria Feodorovna, she spent many years under Catherine’s thumb, turning out children. Sophie then found herself eerily echoing Catherine as Paul I (a deeply weird and unpleasant man) was also murdered after a short reign. She tried to do a Catherine and take over the state, but nobody paid any attention and her eldest son became Alexander I. An extraordinarily regal and appealing character, she spent many years working on the fabulous Pavlovsk Palace outside St Petersburg (or rather, watching other people work). She invented the fun idea that she would remain the most senior woman at her son’s court, meaning that she was the central focus rather than the elbowed aside tsar’s wife, marching about resplendent in all kinds of surreal costumes. She lived long enough to see her second son, the cheerless martinet Nicholas I, take over.
A similar story of important unimportance can be told about the nearby micro-state of Neuchâtel (Neuenburg). A compact, tangled and beautiful place, in the sunlight its sandstone buildings give the impression of being made from huge slabs of golden pastry. It shares with Mömpelgard the same sense of ancient self-sufficiency. The town was converted to Protestantism by the same preacher as Montbéliard, Guillaume Farel, in 1530 and the entire contents of its great and ancient church, the Collégiale, were dumped in the River Seyon. The local ruling family died out in 1707 and, admittedly on a somewhat restricted electorate, the inhabitants had an ancient right, otherwise only enshrined still with the Pope and the Emperor, to choose their new ruler. Among the jostle of candidates (including that perennial hopeful Louis XIV), the burghers had the brilliant idea of choosing the Prussian king, Frederick I, on the grounds that he was so far away he would be unlikely to interfere much. Frederick agreed, briefly excited about its possibilities as a launch pad for attacking France, but then stymied by the farcical tangle of neutral and unfriendly territory in the way. Despite attempts to give it to someone else, Neuchâtel remained in Prussian hands (with the traditional Revolutionary and Napoleonic interlude) until 1848, latterly as Switzerland’s only monarchically-ruled canton.
Neuchâtel has many claims on European history, even if it was a dud from the Prussian point of view. It was the home of Philippe Suchard, the great Chocolate Supremo, whose Neuchâtel factory spread so much happiness around the world (the cantonal museum features pre-1914 shop window displays of Suchard products from the wonderfully randomly selected towns of Algiers, New York, Gotha and Ploesti). It was the original home of absinthe. When under the rule of the old Scottish Jacobite renegade George Keith, tenth Earl Marischal, on behalf of Frederick the Great, Neuchâtel provided crucial sanctuary for Rousseau in 1762. Viewed as a moral and religious leper, Rousseau had been hounded from place to place and was eventually kicked out of Neuchâtel too (it became a standard local sport to throw a stone through one of his windows), settling on the pretty if tiny Bernese island of St Pierre to the north-east, before being expelled again, this time moving on to Strasbourg and then to London. To match Cuvier in Mömpelgard, Neuchâtel had Louis Agassiz, professor of natural history at its university and theorist, among many other things, of the Ice Age, the first man to realize that Switzerland was simply the tiny modern remnant of an appalling Greenland-style ice-sheet that once crushed down on the northern hemisphere. One of the Prussian government’s last acts in Neuchâtel was to pay for his research trip to the United States, where he stayed and went on to revolutionize American science.
There is no end to what can be said about Neuchâtel in fact – its calico, its fountains, its freakish automata, its wristwatches, its wonderful Cenotaph of the Counts. Much of its territory was thinly populated Catholic farmland, with families who lived through the terrible expedient of exporting unwanted family members, leaving never to return. Neuchâtel sold its men as soldiers and as tutors and its women as governesses. Like much less grand versions of Mömpelgard’s Maria Feodorovna, Neuchâtel girls were highly valued in Russian aristocratic circles for what was seen as the unique purity of their French. In the nineteenth century this became an even more vigorous asset as the French girls from France were marked as regicidal bacilli. In an upper-class world in which normal conversation was held in French, Neuchâtelaise became essential teachers, scattered on aristocratic estates from the Baltic to the Urals. For these girls it must have been like going to the Moon. To grow up making daisy-chains in some lakeside meadow and chatting with your favourite cow, then a few months later being bundled up in bear fur in a frantic sleigh, its bearded driver invoking the names of all the saints as he races his wild-eyed horses across a frozen lake pursued by howling wolves, must have been quite something.
In the time of the periwigs
There can be few happier hymns to Dutch urbanism than Zaadstraat (Seed Street), one of the principal thoroughfares of Zutphen. From every angle it heaves with charitable and educational foundations, towers, old glass and grand private homes. Of course, on closer inspection there are many more recent architectural fixes and fiddles, but its dominant flavour is at latest early eighteenth century. Delft’s town centre is famously stranded in the later seventeenth century, with much of it still looking like Vermeer’s The Little Street, painted shortly after the accidental explosion that had destroyed much of old Delft in 1654. Everyone must love this flavour of ancient brick, much repainted window-frames and worn steps and I have several times made a hysterical pitch to my ever more frightened and irritated family that we should move to a Delft canal-house and throw ourselves into the language and employment issues later; make it a bit of an adventure. For the Dutch themselves though it was far from an adventure. These great market squares, town halls, churches and homes survive in such profusion because they were frozen or pickled in the nightmarish collapse of the Dutch way of life in the eighteenth century, a collapse only really fixed in the twentieth. What we enjoy now is a spin-off from the wretched experience of living after the Golden Age.
The eighteenth century mocked the Dutch. What was for Britain and France a time of boom and drama was for the Dutch Republic a disaster. If you were, say, Russian, historically your hopes could never have been high, but for the Dutch to have known such fortune – a fortune intimately linked with Calvinist predestination – and to then participate in such failure was truly horrible. Even maps of the world taunted their owners, preserving high-water-mark reminders in far south-east Asia (Arnhem Land, Van Diemen’s Land, the Tasman Sea, New Zeeland) of a long-lost supremacy, just as much smaller-scale maps of New York remained littered with fossil remnants of Dutch North America (Staten Island, Brooklyn, Harlem, Bronx, the Tappen Zee, Yonkers, Spuyten Duyvil). Mauritius had been snatched by the French, its very name replaced by Île de France, losing for now the connection with Prince Maurits, once Governor of Dutch Brazil, another distant memory. The second half of the eighteenth century was further mocked by the Stadtholder William V, aged three at his accession in 1751 and whose terrible inability to rule became clearer with each passing year (in a self-critical moment he himself looked back on his own military training and said that he qualified perhaps to be a corporal).
Disasters came from every direction. The revered cows once glowingly painted by Cuyp were devastated by wave after wave of rinderpest. The fishing fleet collapsed, the navy shrank, entire industries seized up in just a generation. Leiden’s huge textile industry fell to pieces and the town’s population nearly halved, with farm animals grazing on its once grand squares. Salt refining (a Dordrecht speciality) nearly stopped. In a horror specially reserved for the Dutch, creatures called ‘pile worms’ appeared in the 1730s and began munching their way through all the wooden bits of dikes. After about 1720, the Dutch East India Company (abbreviated in Dutch to VOC) was no longer dominant in
Asia, and after about 1740 the Dutch lead in technology disappeared. Everyone in Leiden was proud of how Peter the Great had come there to see its great scientific triumphs and tour the Hortus Botanicus; that Linnaeus had published his Systema Naturæ and Fundamenta Botanica there – but by the second half of the century it was clear that it had become a backwater. Even worse, the Austrian Netherlands were thriving, with Brussels a boomtown and, during the long and vigorous viceroyalty there of Charles Alexander of Lorraine, canals, roads and industry sprang up and the population went up in a sneak preview of the Belgium to come. What had made the Dutch Republic so successful in the seventeenth century somehow conspired to wreck it in the eighteenth, with the particularly unfair feeling that Britain and France had copied Dutch techniques and then used their larger scale to crush Dutch competition. Meanwhile in The Hague, William V (his very name a derisive parody of his great predecessors William the Silent and William III) presided over his pettish, corrupt and self-indulgent court, an era that would be remembered as ‘the age of periwigs’.
It was in this atmosphere that the extraordinary excitement around the American Revolution surged across Europe. The eighteenth century saw rising European globalism, rapid economic growth (for some countries), adventure and enterprise – but it was incremental and had few of the astonishments that had made the previous two centuries so mind-boggling. Now everyone was used to drinking coffee, tea and chocolate and the last dodo was long since eaten. In this world of relative dynastic steadiness (Britain: people called George; France: people called Louis), the American revolutionary years of 1775–83 were a feast of fun: intellectually challenging, with widely sought engravings of new heroes and, above all, the happy spectacle of British disaster. After Britain had pigged out on its winnings from the Seven Years War, dumped its friends and become Europe’s first super-power, it was too good to be true that after so short a period of lording it, it might lose its biggest colony. The French poured everything they could into messing the British about, and around 1780 it looked as though their empire might crack up completely. For the Dutch, the great temptation emerged: should they, as the French proposed, join forces in the Indian Ocean and carve up the British Empire there, just as the French and the Americans were doing in the western Atlantic? William V remained neutral and pro-British, but as the American War unfolded and the British became both ferocious and despairing in its prosecution, the Dutch were awkwardly placed. Not least, the almost unbelievably tiny but enterprising Dutch West Indian island of St Eustatius became the key entrepôt supplying weapons to the American rebels. American naval vessels attacking shipping around the British Isles used Dutch harbours. ‘Neutrality’ became increasingly intolerable to the British, who boarded and confiscated at will ships thought to be providing goods for the Americans.
