Although the 50 years after the revolutions of 1848 are generally considered to be a time of great industrial progress for nations other than Britain (which had gotten a head start on industrialization earlier in the 19th century), the rate and results of industrialization in these nations varied tremendously. France, for example, ostensibly industrialized earlier than her eastern brethren due to her proximity to England. But, in an effort to catch up to their more advanced neighbors, countries like Austria and Germany industrialized at faster rates – thus each country experienced its own form of progress that was never entirely the same as the others. Along with industrialization, each also confronted a new cultural force: nationalization. In Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914, Eugen Weber examines myriad causes and effects behind the nationalization and industrialization of the French world through the lens of the rural peasant community. On the other end of the spectrum, in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, Carl Schorske describes the formation and cultural development of Vienna as a modern liberal-national capital. Despite the difference both in region and in demography of the subjects of these books, together they nevertheless provide a nearly-full picture of the facts and inconsistencies behind late 19th century liberal nationalization; progress was a solution to countless pre-modern problems, but created as many problems in itself, and the liberal progress championed by the Viennese leaders singlehandedly caused the destruction of the myriad rural European cultures.
Before getting into the details of the nationalization process in France and Vienna, it is first necessary to define the idea of a nation, in order that one may learn to differentiate nationhood from a lack thereof. Weber says, “Just after the First World War, Marcel Mauss pondered the difference between peoples or empires and nations. A people or an empire he saw as loosely integrated and governed by an extrinsic central power.” On the other hand, a nation was “’a materially and morally integrated society’ characterized by the ‘relative moral, mental, and cultural unity of its inhabitants, who consciously support the state and its laws.’” (W, 485) A nation, thus, requires a consciousness in its citizens that rises above their local communities. The nation, not the province, nor the village, nor even the family, must be the first and foremost source of the citizen’s identity. The laws of the nation, not the laws of the town, or the vigilante justice of local strongmen, must be the rules by which the citizen plays the game of life – otherwise, a nation is not a nation. Weber goes on to say, “It is clear that France around 1870 did not conform to Mauss’s model of a nation. It was neither morally nor materially integrated; what unity it had was less cultural than administrative. Many of its inhabitants were indifferent to the state and its laws, and many others rejected them altogether.” We will soon see in more detail what ways France was not a nation in 1870, how it became a nation, and how Schorske’s description of Fin-de-Siècle Vienna provides an example (if heavily flawed) of a national community.
If the nationally-conscious citizen was the building block of the nation, the road was the mortar which bound each and every brick together, to make the nation sturdy. Not that roads were invented along with the national citizen; Weber says “the main roads… stood in the same relation to France as the Nile to Egypt: fertilizing only a narrow strip along their course, become nationally relevant only in terms of their tributaries and of what irrigation could be based on them. There was little expansion before the 1860s.” (W, 196) Old roads existed to serve the empire’s military, the government, and the economic activities of the most important groups near the center of the empire – what they did not serve was the average citizen of the region, who gained no benefit from a large road that ran 100 miles from his or her home and thus delivered nothing to him or her. On the other hand, perhaps there was a road running close enough to this person’s residence that he or she, along with thousands of others, could make use of it. Weber says, “yet amid such immense activity [on these roads], most of the circulation was limited in scope.” (W, 198) The severely limited scope of travel was almost entirely a result of poorly built and maintained roads. The roads were torn up by farming equipment, by wagon wheels, by stones and rain and snow, and neither the country’s administration nor the average member of the rural community cared enough nor had the resources to keep the roads in functional shape for the benefit of their fellow humans (who probably were not part of their local community and with whom they felt no unity).
The problem of roads was not solved by a magical realization amongst French citizens that they should help each other – this is not how nationalization works. The solution instead came from economic necessity. The main problem that the old, non-nationalized road system created was that, “as long as villages remained roadless, the peasants ignored the general market conditions… the peasant sold what he could, when he could, at whatever price he could get. If, like most peasants, he carried his goods to the market, he was very much at the mercy of the buyer.” (W, 207) To the every-growing French electorate in the 1870s and beyond (thanks to slow but sure suffrage reform), such inefficiency was unacceptable. The government, in response to the discontent of its constituents, enacted the Freycinet Plan, which emptied the state’s coffers into the production of functional roads to revive the economy. Despite the nature of the Freycinet plan as “an economic enterprise and undertaken for economic ends,” (W, 209), the Plan nevertheless had the rather drastic (though perhaps gradually realized) effect of laying down the mortar for nationhood that had never existed in such a sturdy state in France’s history.
Roads saved the French peasant from his crippling economic isolation – but in modern city of Vienna, what role could roads have in bringing together a population already united by their shared urban dwelling? In fact, Viennese roads, particularly the Ringstrasse, or Ring Street, which enclosed all of the important national buildings and activities in the city, served the opposite function. “The Ringstrasse designers,” says Carl Schorske, “virtually inverted Baroque procedure, using the buildings to magnify the horizontal space. They organized all the elements in relation to a central broad avenue.” (Schorske, 32) It was not the roads connecting the center of the city (proverbially, the center of the nation), but the road enclosing that center which was given importance. This at first appears fundamentally counter-intuitive – after all, to inspire a national citizen to national consciousness, that citizen’s view should be guided from his own position (on the outside of the ring) to the center, where the united national soul resides. But the Austrian model defies this definition in two ways. The first is that the buildings at the center “represent as in a wind rose liberalism’s value system: parliamentary government in the Reichsrat building, municipal autonomy in the Rathaus, the higher learning in the University, and dramatic art in the Burgtheater.” Thus, it is not that the center of the nation is the brain in which the national conscious resides, but rather that the center of the nation is a compass for each individual citizen to look to in his or her inspired quest to unite with the national conscious – national consciousness does not unite at the center, but instead radiates from within the center.
The second way the Ringstrasse model defies the presumed definition of nationality is that it encourages the citizen to look not vertically (presuming that the farther one gets into the city, the richer the occupants are) but horizontally. Nationalism, according to this model, is not the act of looking to the rich and powerful center for guidance – this is a trait of the empire. Instead, the national citizen should look to his neighbor, his fellows who share the situation as he – fellow artisans, fellow bureaucrats, or fellow workers, depending on his class – and unite with them along the horizontal line (symbolized in Vienna by the grand horizontal avenue). And here, particularly, the Viennese model sheds light on an aspect of the French situation discussed above that may otherwise have been invisible. When the French state decided to revolutionize the road system in the French countryside, they did not do so in order to connect the French peasant to the urban French elite. They built the roads so the French peasant could engage in a national economic market with his fellow peasants. Instead of being isolated to his or her village, with the improvement of roads, the peasant in the south of France had a newfound ability to sell his produce to the peasant in the North, or the shopkeeper in the east, and so on. National roads run rings around the nation, so that the citizens may unite in economic and cultural activities with each other. In this sense, the Ringstrasse, along which the richest and most powerful Viennese movers and shakers lived and worked, served as an example for the many communities along the roads circumventing the center out from the center.
In keeping with Mauss’s quote about the definition of the nation, we have learned now that a nation is made up of citizens who orient themselves, their activities, and their spirits outward to their fellow humans; but according to both Weber and Schorske, a population can only be dragged out of backwardness and arrive at national character through future orientation as well. This future orientation could be both productive and destructive, but we will first examine the productive side. On this, Weber says “To dwell in a town was to rise in the world. The peasant felt inferior because he was a peasant, bound to a condition he despised. In scorning his own station, he shared the scorn of the burghers, who he both resented and envied for having made good their escape from the land.” (W, 286) Here, we do see an element of vertical orientation by the peasant. But this is not to say that this vertical orientation involves the peasant worshiping at the altar of bourgeois values – peasants, just like the bourgeoisie, strive to improve their lot in the world, and often the easiest way for the peasant to do this was to participate in the national scheme. The world was improving around him, particularly in liberal urban centers, where leisure time and better wages lay as if in an Elysian field. In this sense, it was not their altar of their betters at which the peasants knelt and prayed, but at the altar of progress, because progress showed promise for results where old gods and old psalms did not. Weber says “it was not so much that technical progress solved many problems of the past or that new problems did not crop up in consequence. It was rather that men who had been taught to seek mystical causes and magic solutions for their problems now learned to tackle them by different means or, just as important, to put their faith instead in progress and the promise of a better life to come.” (W, 391) Vertical orientation meant orientation toward progress, and progress was the religion of the future, where all problems promised solutions.
If the French countryside was a model for (albeit gradual) economic future orientation, the Ringstrasse was a complementary model for cultural future orientation. Schorske says, on the cultural orientation of the city, “whatever the strengths and weaknesses of the liberal city fathers in defining and developing the public services which are the bone and muscle of the modern city, they took the greatest pride in transforming the city’s face… not utility but cultural self-projection dominated the Ringstrasse. The term most commonly used to describe the great program of the sixties was not ‘renovation’ or ‘redevelopment,’ but ‘beautification of the city’s image.’” (Schorske, 33) Thus the Ringstrasse was not overtly utilitarian, or practical, but ideological. The bourgeois Viennese liberals built the Ringstrasse as an altar at which the population could worship progress as a force of perfection. And the French model, particularly as Weber highlights above, gives us a key to understanding Vienna; like the French peasants who put their faith in progress, the Viennese leaders turned toward the future, and its endless potential for beautiful rationalization, as their new religion.
The temporal direction of this orientation, however, was the subject of much heated debate in Vienna. Though there were many parties to this debate, it is through Otto Wagner that we may see the strongest connection between Schorske’s Vienna and Weber’s French countryside. On Wagner’s grand designs, Schorske says, “recognizing the hopelessness of rebuilding the old city, [Wagner] left that task to the historicists and recommended only the necessary minimum of regulation and renovation to the existing city. His sights were set where the future lay: on the periphery and the surrounding countryside. There the city might yet be rationally planned.” (S, 98) In Otto Wagner’s mind, the formation of the future nation could not occur by luring the people of the countryside into the national network; the network (with its hub in the city) must extend outward in order to find and subsume the constituents it desires. This it does first and foremost by extension, as in Weber’s argument, of roads – but roads are only the first step. The ultimate nation, in order to reach its future ideal, must simply be a macrocosm of the city. The countryside ceases to be the countryside, where peasants and farmers reside in blissful isolation – instead, the great maw of Vienna must continue to reach out and consume the rural world until the whole nation consists of apartment complexes and stone streets. Though this plan seems drastic, Wagner was certainly not alone in his view of nationalism as being a conquering force – the expansion of the French nation was equally ravenous.
Thus Wagner takes us from the beautiful side of progress to the dark, destructive underside – a side that applied to the French peasants as much as it did to any other nationalized peasant population. As technological and national progress tended to benefit the peasant, most of this destruction was of the rural culture. Nationalization, according to Weber, was a civilizing mission: “a nation cannot or should not conquer ‘major peoples,’ but ‘to bring into a larger unity groups without a clear cultural identity, to draw in, to enrich, to enlighten the uninstructed tribal mind, this is the civilizing mission we cannot renounce.” The peasants were to the new national bureaucracy what Africans were to the imperialists of the same time period: noble savages. Twisted, backward, and unclean, the peasants needed to be purified through submission to the tidal wave of nationalization that swept the countryside. And this tidal wave swept up nearly every aspect of the myriad peasant cultures. There was “The relegation of serious observances to the status of children’s games,” (W, 331) there were “no holy days left to celebrate, only holidays—free time—to enjoy not as a collective communion but as evasion,” (W, 398) and “modern fashions, which had been penetrating the countryside since mid century, had crushed local costume and headgear out of existence.” (W, 228)
And finally, the parliamentary Reichsrat building in the Ringstrasse championed the hammer that swung the final blow to the local autonomy of the countryside that was so antithetical to the nationalist ideal. It was not the peasants who came to the Reichsrat and sat on the parliament – it was the new, insecure liberal bourgeoisie who sat, as they did in France, and expressed their revulsion at the backwardness of the un-national people. Weber, to this point, describes the tradition of vigilante “justice” in the form of charivaris (public humiliations practiced by rural French communities), and how it was brought to an end by the rising nationalization of rural administrators: “Our good mayor,” who Weber quotes earlier as revolted by charivaris, “has summed everything up: the practice linked to ‘ignorance and barbarism,’ hence condemned by progress; the efforts of new ‘authorities’ to supplant the old; the stress on the rule of law (one can no longer just do as one liked); the denunciation of traditional fines as sheer blackmail.” (W, 401) The distinction between new and old authorities is key – it is not, in fact, that until their nationalization, the peasants were an uncontrolled barbaric mass. They had authority figures to whom they looked, they had laws that punished wrongdoers, they had a justice system – but the fatal flaws of this archaic rural law were that it was inconsistent and generally unwritten, and thus open to exploitation. Any band of hoodlums could make themselves the village authority of they displayed enough strength. Just like the isolation of markets in the case of the roads, laws and practices were also isolated and unique to each area. To the nationalizing bourgeoisie and the Reichsrat, this would not do – rationalization of the nation and maximum efficiency could not be achieved unless the peasants learned to cooperate and follow the centralized, unexploitable laws of the new nation.
It is a simple fact that Vienna is not the capital of France – mistaking the city for the actual model of French nationalization, Paris, would be nearly impossible – but one learns nothing not already known by comparing the French countryside to Paris, or Vienna to the rural Austria. But to superimpose each upon the other is to reveal something new about both. Vienna and the Ringstrasse provide a unique model for French nationalization, and a unique view on the force of progress and futurism, and how these apply to the countryside. In turn, the French countryside, in all its backwardness, provides a model of the unconquered lands which the bourgeoisie all across modernizing Europe had on its mind. The city is the spider which spreads its unifying web across the land, where before, isolation from the capital reigned supreme. The innumerable revolutionary technologies of the 19th century—fertilizer, railroad, steam power, education—that incubated in cities like Vienna slowly spread to the countryside, destroying old religions, old practices, and old laws in their path, all in the name of rationalization and efficiency. To the champions of these forces, “the necessity of expansion appeared as a psychological value. Invincible bourgeois urbanite that he was, Wagner had no doubt that ‘the majority of men would rather live in a metropolis than in a small city or the country… Making a living, social position, comfort, luxury, the presence of intellectual and physical facilities, entertainment in the good and bad sense, and finally art,’” were all revealed to the everyman through nationalism. (Schorske, 96) Progress, vis-à-vis nationalism, was the name of the European game.
Aidan Lilienfeld, for “European History 1815-1914” at the University of Chicago, December 2015
Haus Lilienfeld 