The Anxious Triumph

by Donald Sassoon

  The south may have been in ‘western Europe’ but its peasants were barely aware of being Italians. The literacy gap in Italy was particularly pronounced. While in Piedmont, in 1911, only 11 per cent were illiterate, the percentage in Sardinia was 58 per cent and in the deep south, in Calabria, the worst-performing region, it was 69 per cent. Yet, before the unification of the country in 1861, the north–south gap was less pronounced.19

  On the southernmost tip of the Italian peninsula, in Calabria, even after Italian unification, most sharecroppers were serfs in all but name since they were kept in a state of subjugation by the enormous supply of labour that gave the landlords the upper hand whenever the contracts for the renting of land were up for renewal. Many peasants emigrated to Belgium, France, Argentina, and the United States. Some became bandits. The rest lived in perpetual fear – fear of the weather, fear of the landlord, fear of each other, fear of everything.20 In the countryside the weight of tradition and anxiety about change dominated life. This should cause no surprise. Where so much was beyond the control of human beings, it was reasonable to trust in God, to be afraid of novelty, and to pray regularly. And not to trust anyone, hence the proliferation of sayings in local dialect such as Non diri all’amico toi quantu sai cà ’ncunu jornu tu nimico l’ài (‘Do not tell your friend what you know, one day he may be your enemy’).21

  Throughout much of mid-nineteenth-century Europe the standard fare of poor peasants was a porridge made with some stomach-filling starch such as maize to which an occasional ‘treat’ of vegetables or meat would be added. This they ate in the morning, in the middle of the day, and in the evening – day after day, year after year.22 The nutritional value of a maize-based diet was far inferior even to that of wheat. Not surprisingly it was one of the main causes of pellagra – a vitamin-deficiency disease prevalent across southern and eastern Europe.23 In 1891 it killed 4,303 people in Italy, though far more were killed by tuberculosis, typhus, and malaria.24 We don’t in fact know how many died of tuberculosis in the nineteenth century. In France, there were no reliable statistics before 1886 and only for towns of over 5,000 inhabitants. Rural deaths were calculated only in 1906.25 But it is likely that by then, in France alone, some 90,000 died every year of TB.26

  The belief that rural communities were kept together by shared values and a kind of ancient cohesion is a romantic myth that contrasts the individualism of the city to the collectivism of the village. Georg Simmel did have a point when he wrote in 1903 that it was in the city that individuals sought liberation and distinguished themselves from one another, that it was the city which enabled individuals to be individuals and free themselves from historical ties.27 A dark view of the towns prevailed well before industrialization. In his treatise on education, Émile (1762), Jean-Jacques Rousseau lamented that ‘young women from the provinces are soon taught to despise the happy simplicity of their lives, and rush to Paris to share in our corruption. Vice … is the sole object of their journey; ashamed to find they are so much behind the noble licentious behaviour of Parisian ladies, they crave to be worthy of being part of the city.’28 In his poem ‘The Deserted Village’ (1770), Oliver Goldsmith describes the consequence of the forcible enclosure of common land (one of the preconditions of the Industrial Revolution) with the image of a young woman forced to abandon her village to migrate to the town, where she is now poor and ‘houseless’ and ‘shivering’:

  She once, perhaps, in village plenty blessed,

  Has wept at tales of innocence distressed;

  Her modest looks the cottage might adorn,

  Sweet as the primrose peeps beneath the thorn:

  Now lost to all; her friends, her virtue fled,

  Near her betrayer’s door she lays her head …

  In the 1850s a Bavarian journalist and university professor, Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, depicted cities both as symbols and as sources of the worst aspects of the modern world when he wrote: ‘Europe is becoming sick as a result of the monstrosity of its big cities.’ Riehl regarded cities as the home of a rootless proletariat devoid of traditions and familial ties, living in solitude and alienation (a refrain that still endures).29

  A few decades later, as Germany, and most of Europe, was rapidly urbanizing, cities continued to be regarded by many as socially destructive. The German clergyman Christian Rogge expressed widely held anti-urban concerns when he wrote that if the big city ‘becomes a dwelling place for masses of criminals’, mass degeneration will occur and ‘an army of prostitutes and pimps will eat away at its foundations’. Others warned that socialist agitation in the big city would spread to the countryside.30

  Similar complaints were manifested by the urban intelligentsia throughout Europe. The world seemed to be full of innocent girls from the countryside who, the minute they stepped into the city, turned into wanton harlots. As a French saying goes: Toute bretonne perd la foi au moment où elle met le pied sur le quai de la gare de Montparnasse (‘Breton girls lose their faith the moment they arrive at the railway station of Montparnasse’). Migrant workers became criminals, thieves, beggars, and prostitutes. They were the dangerous class. Most, of course, became honest urban dwellers rightly attracted by the better life that even the dismal cities of the nineteenth century offered. This was particularly important to young women for whom life in the countryside consisted in overwork, insecurity, fear of not finding the ‘right man’, namely, someone who might work hard and not beat them up too often. In France, women had a crucial role in persuading men to abandon the land and village life, and if the young men could not be persuaded, the girls left alone: in some parts of France, among agricultural workers, three times more men than women stayed behind.31

  As the rural world disappeared, a rose-tinted view of it surfaced, abundantly described in literature. Thus Count Leinsdorf in Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities contrasted the unwelcoming world of cities, the threats of progress, to the happy tranquillity of the countryside:

  His Grace was decidedly averse to what he called mere literature. It stood for something he associated with Jews, newspapers, sensation-hungry booksellers, and the liberal, hopelessly garrulous paid hirelings of the bourgeoisie … What he was thinking of … was fields, the men who worked them, little country churches, and that great order of things which God had bound as firmly together as the sheaves on a mown field, an order at once comely, sound, and rewarding …32

  Cursing cities is an ancient custom. The prophet Zephaniah thundered against Jerusalem:

  Ah, soiled, defiled, oppressing city!

  It has listened to no voice;

  it has accepted no correction.

  It has not trusted in the Lord;

  it has not drawn near to its God.

  (Zephaniah 3:1–2)

  Yet, great civilizations were all based on cities – Babylon, Memphis, Athens, Rome, Venice, Timbuktu, Kyoto, Beijing, Samarkand – while the countryside was a Hobbesian jungle where life was brutish and short. Centuries ago as today, cities were, almost always, the centre of modernity, however one defined modernity at a particular time. Yet the city depends on the countryside whether near, as was normally the case, or far away, as is often the case now. The city obtains from the countryside food and workers, hence it needs trade and migration. A city, Fernand Braudel explained in lyrical tones, would cease to exist unless people were attracted by its lights, its freedoms (real or only apparent), better wages, and also because life in the countryside has become difficult, even intolerable.33 Cities are dependent on the rural world but this dependency coexists with a dramatic cultural separation: urban dwellers look down on those who live in the country. To be an urban dweller is to be a citizen, a civis, a civilized human, a member of the city, of the polis (and hence polite in English, polie in French, and also urbane); to be in the country is to be a ‘villain’, a villano (Italian), villain (French), villanus (Latin), in other words a rural worker, bound to the soil of a villa, i.e. a farm – someone dictionaries define as an ‘ignorant, rude, or unso
phisticated person’.

  In the eighteenth century and earlier, per capita income differentials among European countries, and between Europe and the rest of the world, were relatively minimal. A huge gap between the richest and poorest countries begins to appear only in the nineteenth century, in other words, with industrial capitalism.34 It is thus not surprising that in the ‘periphery’ of Europe, outside the hallowed boundaries of ‘the West’, the situation for those who lived on the land was even worse. The population of the Russian Empire grew rapidly from 74 million in 1860 to 161 million in 1910 (some of this increase was due to annexations), and between 1885 and 1897 the population actually dropped due to crop failures and the subsequent famine.35 Death rates per 1,000 inhabitants were 36.5 when the serfs were emancipated in 1861; by 1913 they had improved a little to 27.1 per 1,000.36

  In 1897 (the date of the first Russian census) the majority of the Cossack population of Ukraine was illiterate, and largely rural. These provinces had no distinct national institutions, though they produced a considerable proportion of the country’s coal, steel, and cereals. Most Ukrainians were poor peasants using simple wooden tools and living under straw roofs. The incidence of typhus, dysentery, and diphtheria among them was the same as that of central Russia. Rich Ukrainian families intermarried with wealthy noble Russian families and were assimilated into an imperial elite, but few of these Russified nobles maintained a practical interest in their native land.37

  In Moldavia and Wallachia (present-day Romania) the situation was no better. A French diplomat travelling in the area in 1848 manifested his dismay that ‘at the doors of Bucharest … entire families … live huddled together, far from daylight, in underground cabins. Then, near such misery, as a natural counterpoint, cheerful villas, splendid and opulent monasteries, built on the wooded hillside, present themselves to my sight.’38 In Romania, wooden ploughs were still employed at the end of the nineteenth century, fertilizers and even beasts of burden were barely used, and there was no systematic crop rotation – just as in Flanders in the twelfth century.39 Decades later, conditions in the countryside were still dismal. In 1879, 10 per cent of conscripts were found by the medical authorities to be infirm. Charles Arion, who reported these data in 1895, added: ‘The condition of the peasants between 1864 and 1879 can be summed up in two words: crushed by taxation and submission to the tyranny of the first newcomer, a Jew or a Greek, agent of the landlord.’40

  DISMAL CITIES

  Industrialization and migration from the land accelerated the historic decline of the peasantry. Urbanization was rapid, though it was not as closely correlated with industrialization as one might think. Cities have existed for thousands of years. They are not a modern invention, and are not the harbingers of capitalism. Ur in Mesopotamia, it is estimated, had a population of 65,000 in 2000 BC, Babylon had 200,000 people in 430 BC, and Rome reached 450,000 in 100 BC. At the height of its power, in the second century AD, Rome may have had one million inhabitants, the largest European city before London in 1800.41 Around AD 800 there were seven cities in the world with over 200,000 inhabitants: Chang’an (now Xi’an), Luoyang (one million each), and Hangzhou in China; Kyoto in Japan; then, further to the west, Baghdad (with probably 700,000 inhabitants), Constantinople (the only European example), and Alexandria.42 Pre-Columbian America was more urbanized than Europe around 1500: Tenochtitlán (now Mexico City), a clean, elegant city, had perhaps 250,000 inhabitants, whereas Paris, then the largest city in Europe, only 225,000.43

  By 1700 the city in the world with the largest population was probably Istanbul, followed by Beijing and Isfahan; London, then as now western Europe’s largest city, was the fourth largest, Paris fifth. By 1800, London had almost caught up with Beijing and was followed by Canton, Istanbul, and Paris; Naples was eighth – all other cities in the league of largest cities were in Asia.44 Rapid urbanization, however, is a modern phenomenon. Between 1850 and 1910 the level of urbanization in Europe (towns being defined as agglomerations of at least 5,000 inhabitants) rose from less than 15 per cent to 32 per cent (see Table 4).45

  Table 4 Urban Population as a Percentage of Total Population*

  * Urban region: at least 5,000 inhabitants

  ** Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, and Serbia

  Source: Paul Bairoch, ‘Une nouvelle distribution des populations: villes et campagne’, p. 221.

  Urbanization led to the partial demise of rural industry.46 In pre-industrial times, the rural village used to be flexibly structured: the movement to towns used to have a largely seasonal character, with rural workers working in towns during the winter when they were not busy in the fields. The factory system, however, requires a continuous and fairly standardized work practice and precise skills. Migration from the countryside soon acquired an increasingly permanent character.47

  With the growth of towns and industry a new cleavage developed. Many peasants became workers (or domestic servants, a major occupation in the nineteenth century), but those who remained in the countryside were less cut off from the rest of the world than before. The globalization of the world made itself felt even there.

  In fact peasants had been in movement for much of the nineteenth century. Some went to ‘their’ cities, but many migrated to ‘foreign’ cities, a global urbanization movement that shows no sign of abating. The favoured destination was the Americas. As a result the white population of the United States grew rapidly, partly due to a high fertility rate, partly to declining mortality rates, but above all due to the massive levels of immigration that accounted for between 25 per cent and 33 per cent of total population growth in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, including 28 million of the 40 million Europeans who migrated to the Americas.48 Most immigrants were employed in the rapidly expanding industrial sector. Even in 1810, American industrial development was on a level with that of France, Switzerland, and Belgium.49 If, before the Civil War, the USA was a largely agrarian economy (44 per cent of free males were classified as farmers in 1850), by 1900 it had become an industrial country, in which one third of the population lived in cities of 100,000, where farmers accounted for less than 20 per cent of the total population, and blue-collar workers 35.8 per cent.50 Despite this demographic shift, the USA was still the world’s main agricultural producer.

  Until the 1870s the European migration to the United States came mainly from Britain, Germany, and Scandinavia – all groups that (except for the Irish Catholics) assimilated fairly easily with the existing, overwhelmingly Protestant white population. Those who arrived later, after 1880, came mainly from eastern and southern Europe. They were Jews, Catholics, and Orthodox Christians. By the early 1900s these new immigrants constituted two-thirds of all arrivals.51 They did not assimilate so easily – hence the enduring existence of ‘hyphenated Americans’ (Polish-Americans, Jewish-Americans, Italian-Americans, etc.) even in the closing decades of the twentieth century. Many migrants did not settle but returned to their country of origin, some because they had ‘succeeded’ and returned to buy a business or land or retire, others because they had failed or were homesick or because new opportunities had arisen back home. Half the Italian emigrants who left Italy between 1880 and 1950 returned home.52 What attracted European migrants to the USA was not its democracy or its modernity, but, quite simply, the prospect of improving their standard of living: ‘America meant more than anything else abundant and better food, superior houses, clothing, medical care, and education.’53 Nevertheless those who went to the USA were a minority of those who emigrated: during the nineteenth century, for every European who left Europe, nine moved within Europe: Irish to England, Italians to France and Belgium, Jews from the Tsarist Empire to Germany and France.54

  Immigrants left the parlous conditions of the countryside, but what they found in cities was seldom better. An investigation published by two radical French journalists, the brothers Léon and Maurice Bonneff, tells of their visit to a working-class home in Lille in 1908. The home is in a narrow and muddy street; t
he staircase has no ramp; inside lies an emaciated woman. She is twenty-six years old but looks fifty. The room where she lives with her husband and their five children is four metres by two. She is illiterate. Her husband leaves for work at five in the morning and returns at seven in the evening. She coughs uninterruptedly, has tuberculosis, and will not live long.55 In 1902 the local hospital estimated that malnutrition was the direct cause of TB in 68 per cent of the 519 workers affected. The situation barely improved in the succeeding six years.56 In Houplines, near the Belgian border, the Bonneff brothers visited the home of a textile worker where meat was eaten only twice a year, namely on 1 May, the international day of the working class, and on 14 July, the anniversary of the Revolution – but only because the municipality distributed it to the needy.57

  In his 1819 poem ‘Peter Bell the Third’ (a satire on Wordsworth), Shelley had decreed that ‘Hell is a city much like London’. Decades later, for many people it was still hellish. In 1873, not far from Kensington Palace, the birthplace of Queen Victoria, stood Jennings’ Buildings, a slum consisting of eighty-one two-storey wooden tenements, with over 1,500 people in accommodation meant for 200. They shared forty-nine toilets. There was no drainage, and, until 1866, no drinking water. As a result, the mortality rate was over twice that of their wealthier neighbours in Kensington.58

  Maud Pember Reeves, a member of the Fabian Society, in her famous report Round About a Pound a Week (1913) on the conditions of working-class households in Lambeth, offered a detailed account of the problems facing a young working-class mother. Life was a constant struggle to care for her family: ‘That the diet of the poorer London children is insufficient, unscientific, and utterly unsatisfactory is horribly true. But that the real cause of this state of things is the ignorance and indifference of their mothers is untrue.’59 Yet, while the housing conditions were terrible (vermin infestation, overcrowding, rudimentary cooking, and sanitary facilities), families seemed to be eating meat fairly regularly (with the husband, the main – often the sole – breadwinner, taking the lion’s share of the meat and fish).60