Industrialization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries concentrated wealth in the hands of a tiny minority, accentuating the contradictions of an incomplete modernization. Heavy taxation made unification an economic burden on the poorest; hundreds of thousands emigrated to the United States. Some who stayed joined protests. These ranged from apocalyptic outbursts, such as the Lazzaretti in Tuscany, to peasant revolts and brigandage. Young men disillusioned with Mazzini’s republicanism found Marx’s proletarian revolution too impractical for a peasant country; they were attracted, however, by the anarchist doctrines of Bakunin. Incontestably, Bakunin, feuding with both Marx and Mazzini, achieved his greatest influence in Italy in the 1870s. His followers included Errico Malatesta, a beacon to anarchists across Europe until his death in 1932, and Italy’s pioneering feminist, the Russian-born Anna Kuliscioff, who between them launched several uprisings.
These revolts, lacking popular support, inevitably flopped – the ageing Bakunin travelled to witness one fiasco in Bologna in 1874. Failure forced the young anarchists to turn away from public movements and grow more conspiratorial and self-aggrandizing; the idea of ‘propaganda by the deed’ – now manifest universally in video-taped, live-streamed and Facebooked massacres – grew naturally from the suspicion that only acts of extreme violence could reveal to the world a desperate social situation and the moral integrity of those determined to change it.
A series of murderous bomb attacks in 1878, including an unsuccessful one on Italy’s new king, Umberto I, inaugurated a Continent-wide surge in propaganda by the deed. Assaults were aimed at the German emperor and the king of Spain. In March 1881 a group called the People’s Will assassinated the Russian Tsar, Alexander II. This successful strike inspired a meeting in London of Europe’s leading anarchists, including Malatesta and the Russian Peter Kropotkin. Much emphasis was now placed on acquiring the right technical skills for making bombs. And while the leaders held conferences and published theoretical works, small cells of terrorists sprang up all over Europe and even America. Over the next quarter of a century heads of states, including the presidents of France (Carnot) and the United States (McKinley), the king of Italy (Umberto I), the empress of Austria (Elisabeth) and the prime minister of Spain (Canovas), were murdered.
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Nevertheless, messianic supremacism remained the dominant ideology in Italy, largely because the extravagantly promised nation seemed stuck in a limbo of development. And it was the country’s best-educated men, especially writers, who railed most stridently at the meanness of post-Risorgimento Italy, for which they blamed its bourgeois ruling classes.
The writer and editor Giovanni Papini wrote in 1905 that the post-Risorgimento generation had created a bureaucracy, laid down laws, built railroads, even raised economic standards, but ‘failed to give national life that content, those attitudes and ideals which are the expression of a great culture’. Papini himself moved from a flirtation with Max Stirner’s philosophical egoism to Mazzini’s millenarian nationalism, since, as he wrote, ‘a nation lacking a messianic passion is destined to collapse’:
I feel – like a Mazzinian of the old days – that I can have a mission in my country … Rome has always had a universal, dominating mission … [It] must become once again the centre of the world and a new form of universal power take its seat there … The Third Rome, the Rome of the ideal, must be the fruit of our will and our work.
Giosuè Carducci, the first Italian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, and Alfredo Oriani, a popular novelist, deepened Mazzini’s nationalist ideology based on forms and symbols. Carducci lamented that the Risorgimento had promised an imperious ‘Rome’ but instead saddled Italy with a venal ‘Byzantium’. Oriani made it seem that all roads leading to the Third Rome had to be bloody:
War is an inevitable form of the struggle for existence, and blood will always be the best warm rain for great ideas … The future of Italy lies entirely in a war which, while giving it its natural boundaries, will cement internally, through the anguish of mortal perils, the unity of the national spirit.
The Italians weren’t alone in working themselves up into a militarist lather during the nineteenth century. The British Empire may have been originally acquired in a state of absent-mindedness. But, by the 1870s, the relentless expansion of capital, the endless dynamism of competition and acquisition, and international rivalry made empire seem indispensable to the pursuit of economic interests and national glory. France, fulfilling Tocqueville’s deepest desires, expanded its colonies dramatically after 1870. So did Germany, which acquired a colony in South-West Africa, and also managed to secure a naval base in remote China. And more and more people became part of imperialist projects in the Europe-wide peaking of appropriative mimicry. For the imperial nation did not just demand duty from its citizens; it asked for dynamism, speed and sacrifice – a whole new relationship with history.
Italy, signing the Triple Alliance with Germany and Austria in 1882, had signalled its intention to be an imperial power. D’Annunzio would rhapsodize enviously about the ‘German instinct for supremacy’ and the ravenousness of Kipling’s England, ‘opening its jaws to devour the universe’. ‘Never,’ wrote the poet and wannabe imperialist, ‘had the world been so ferocious.’ He hoped for Italy to join the feral party. But Italy, scrambling late for Africa, suffered the ignominy of losing a war to Ethiopia in 1896, shattering the dream of an easy empire. Italy’s scramble for China quickly descended into farce. In 1899 the Italian government sent a telegram to China’s tottering Qing rulers, threatening war after being refused a naval base on Chinese territory. It then sent a second cable withdrawing its threat – but the second telegram arrived before the first one.
The militant Zionist Jabotinsky, who was then a pacifist student in Rome reporting on Italian events to his compatriots in Odessa, spoke of the ‘malcontento’ in Italy and ‘the ‘incredible dissatisfaction’ which ‘would sooner or later lead to rebellion’. The young, who had grown up after unification, felt a deeper hatred of a cosmopolitan class of bankers, industrialists and landlords, who seemed to be supervising a sham parliamentary democracy, representing only themselves. The novelist and playwright (and later nationalist leader) Enrico Corradini pointed out that ‘all the signs of decrepitude, sentimentalism, doctrinairism, immoderate respect for fleeting life and for the weak and lowly – are exhibited in the intellectual life of the middle class which rules and governs’.
Ultra-nationalism and imperialism were a corollary of this hatred of ineffective democracy, liberal individualism and materialism. The defeat by Ethiopians made military glory even more imperative; Italy, it seemed, could only regain its grandeur through war, and its confirmation as an imperial power on a par with Britain and France. War could also get rid of dead wood and consolidate a new national community.
News of the Russo-Japanese War, and the sacrifices made by Japanese civilians for a famous victory, confirmed that war and nature red in tooth and claw were the essence of the modern era. Corradini wrote of the beauty of mechanized slaughter. In Rome in 1908 crowds emerged from the royal premiere of D’Annunzio’s The Ship, a sadistic drama of murder, sexual jealousy and suicide infused with exhortations to virile conquest, chanting a line from the play, ‘Fit out the prow and set sail for the world.’ The Futurist Manifesto, authored by the playwright’s fans the following year, reflected, with its exuberant exalting of war as the world’s sole hygiene, a bellicose mentality that had long been in the making.
Superman for Dummies
D’Annunzio’s own work and life were shaped from the mid-1890s onwards by the Nietzschean idea of the superman: the individual authorized by his successful self-overcoming personality to scorn ordinary mortals and their conventional morality. Running for parliament in 1897, despite his contempt for politics, D’Annunzio confessed to a friend: ‘I have just come back from an electoral trip; and my nostrils are still full of an acrid smell of humanity.’
Disdain for the com
promises of democracy and sluggish masses would in Fiume in 1919 mutate into Byronic postures of military and existential heroism and a heavily stylized mass politics. The French men of letters had originally imported literary language into politics. The Germans critiqued the levelling effects of modernity with an explicitly aesthetic ideology; and Wagner had constructed the first great spectacles in art. But D’Annunzio, though labelled ‘Wagner’s monkey’ by Thomas Mann, actually wielded a greater power of seduction in the new era of mass media and politics. Recoiling from tediously deliberative liberal democracy, he offered an existential politics of flamboyant gestures. ‘It seems to me,’ he wrote, ‘that the word, addressed orally and directly to a multitude, must have as its only purpose action, violent action if necessary.’
He also tapped into a loathing of liberal-bourgeois civilization that had intensified all through the nineteenth century. Even a profound sensibility like Tocqueville had indulged a hyper-masculine dream of grandeur, heroism, self-sacrifice, power and conquest – the martial virtues apparently depleted by self-seeking liberal-bourgeois individualists. In 1919, Fiume’s international cast of rebels served as a reminder – in the interregnum before another round of mechanized slaughter – of an increasingly militarized will to power, trampling into the dust the liberal Enlightenment assumption that rationally self-interested individuals would use science and moral self-control to create a good society. Unlike his fellow artists, D’Annunzio articulated both his disaffection with liberal-bourgeois civilization and an awesome plan to overcome it. Raising the stakes to life or death, he presaged the political magicians – at least one of them a failed artist – who would beguile angry masses with promises of superhuman action and mythopoeic visions of a radiant future.
The demagogues were helped by the repeated failure of liberal-bourgeois democracy to respond to the masses of people struggling with the fear and uncertainty provoked by the vast and opaque processes of modernization. From the 1870s onwards, as Italy and Germany became unified states, a suspicion intensified across Europe that parliamentary democracy, easily manipulated by elites with sectarian interests, was deceitful, or at least incapable of achieving general well-being. The trio of Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto and Robert Michels, three pioneering sociologists, simultaneously sought to expose the hypocrisy, cynicism and egotism of self-serving elites behind the rhetoric of democracy.
They were not ‘neo-Machiavellian’ for the sake of it. The old liberal model, which evidently worked to protect the rights and freedoms of privileged individuals, had failed to confer democratic citizenship on ordinary people, let alone bring them economic rewards or restore their sense of community. Meanwhile, cities were growing uncontrollably, condemning most of their inhabitants to physical and moral squalor, and even its posher inhabitants to much fear and anxiety about the rising masses.
The spirit of history seemed to falter in its march, or at any rate require a massive push from human beings. One proposed answer, calamitous in its consequences but emerging from the experience of liberalism and democracy and meant to overcome their failure, was to have gigantic state projects, in which non-bourgeois elites would harness the strength of the masses – what we now call ‘totalitarianism’.
An intellectual revolution prepared the way for it, starting with Darwin’s idea that evolutionary progress was contingent on a violent struggle for existence. Social Darwinism, as it rapidly developed, applied Darwin’s theory of natural selection – of the progress of species by adaptation to changing local environments, preserving the ‘favourable variations’ and rejecting the ‘injurious variations’ – to society at large. Progress still looked as inevitable as when Adam Smith first linked it to mimetic desire and aggressive mutual competition, but after Darwin and the rise of the masses the workings of the invisible hand no longer seemed adequate.
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Drastic measures were needed; and eugenic thinking, as it became respectable in the wake of popular Darwinism, fed on a widely felt need for a systematic alternative to an old model that looked unsuitable for a struggle that only the fittest would survive. So did the vogue for looking at the world as a struggle between races. Bogus notions of the ‘Aryan’ and ‘Jewish’ races had swiftly gone mainstream in the second half of the nineteenth century along with anxieties about birthrates, immigration and mass politics. E. A. Freeman, the Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, was no outlier in his claim in the early 1880s that the United States ‘would be a grand land if only every Irishman would kill a negro, and be hanged for it’.
Imperialists in Britain and America considered it their manifest destiny as members of superior races to rule over their dark-skinned inferiors – their ‘new-caught, sullen peoples, / Half-devil and half-child’, as Kipling put it. For other Europeans envying Anglo-America’s territories and resources, racial categories began to seem an ethical as well as a scientific way to classify and organize a nation (and to exclude inferior and undesirable people). Anything that promotes, in Hitler’s later words, ‘the health and vitality of the human species was morally good’. Thus, race in the late nineteenth century appeared, in France as well as Germany, an attractive collective subject, a replacement for the selfish liberal individualist.
Social disorder and economic crisis also helped the rise of Marxist parties, and made class, the working class, and specifically trade unions, appear as another likely collective agent of history and spearhead of social renewal. As the nineteenth century ended, a range of haughty doctrines of progress through willed human intervention exerted a broad emotional appeal among educated men. And there were highbrow intellectuals at hand to offer textual encouragement, and even specific guidelines to agitators like D’Annunzio. Soon after he went insane in 1888, Nietzsche’s ideas of the self-overcoming superman, the will to power, and the morality of war started to explode across the world.
Obscure for much of his life, a spate of translations made Nietzsche the prophet of restless young men everywhere. Nehru noted the rage for him at Cambridge University in the first decade of the twentieth century. But young Jews in Russia, Chinese exiles in Japan, Muslims in Lahore and many other men acutely conscious of their vulnerability were fortifying themselves through Nietzschean resolves to ‘resist all sentimental weakness’ and to acknowledge that ‘Life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overwhelming of the alien and the weaker, oppression, hardness, imposition of one’s own form, incorporation, and at least, at its mildest, exploitation.’
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Artists like Flaubert and Baudelaire had long been railing against the bourgeois cults of humanitarian progress, and spinning dreams of virility. Baudelaire in The Flowers of Evil (1857) saw descent into the abyss as the only antidote to the tedium and soullessness of life with the conventionally enlightened bourgeois. In between painstakingly mocking the latter, and its cults of progress, Flaubert indulged in elaborate fantasies of violence and sex in his historical fictions, Salammbô (1862) and The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1874). J. K. Huysmans in À Rebours (1884) detailed his attempts to overcome his disgust at ‘everything that surrounds me’. Zola in his late nineteenth-century novels deplored at length the sterility, vanity and hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie. Max Nordau’s best-selling broadside Degeneration (1892) fixed the characteristic features – bleak pessimism, ennui, enervation – of the fin de siècle sensibility.
But Nietzsche seemed to answer most thrillingly, as the century ended, a general feeling of malaise: he seemed best able to discern, as Lu Xun, China’s iconic modern writer, claimed, ‘the falsity and the imbalances’ of nineteenth-century civilization. He confirmed the sense that old practices and institutions were failing to respond to the imperatives of development and progress, but he also seemed to amplify a widely felt need for a New Man and New Order.
Nietzsche’s writings provided a kind of pivot into a new set of questions and range of possibilities, which had not been present a century earlier when Rousseau first offered his political cure �
� a coherent and united community of patriotic citizens – to the discontents of modernity. He seemed to be turning away from sterile reason to life-sustaining myth, from moral notions of good and evil, truth and falsehood, to aesthetic values of creativity, vitality and heroism. As a detractor of both liberal capitalism and its socialist alternative, Nietzsche seemed to be offering, with his will to power, an unprecedented scope for human beings to reshape the world: to create, in effect, one’s own objects of desire, values, ideology and myths.
To his youthful followers across the world, he provided the intellectual framework for several quintessentially modern and pressing projects: the radical trans-valuation of inherited values, the revolt against authority and its shibboleths, the creation of new forms of superabundant life, and politics in the grand mode. This is why Zarathustra’s promise of a great leap from the debased present into a healthier culture, even a superior mode of being, recommended Nietzsche to many Bolsheviks (much to Lenin’s displeasure), the left-wing Lu Xun, and fascists as much as to anarchists, feminists and aesthetes. Iconoclasts of all kinds could interpret Nietzschean self-overcoming as a call to grandiose political action as well as an apolitical exhortation to individual reinvention. The German writer Lily Braun wasn’t the sole fin de siècle feminist to claim to ‘need the flashing weapons from his armoury’.
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Nietzsche, however, was only one of the thinkers and artists in the intellectual revolution of the fin de siècle who attacked the shared assumption of mainstream politics – the liberal conception of society as an aggregate of formally equal, self-seeking individuals – with their exhortations to world-historical tasks and hardness. Henri Bergson captivated many artists in France and Italy, including Proust, with his theories of intuition, involuntary memory and élan vital, which also influenced many prevalent political notions such as collective consciousness of a class or race, the esprit of the nation and the sovereignty of the individual.
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