Orlando Figes – The Europeans

I cannot think of any book or other piece of culture, written or produced in the nineteenth century, which is not enriched and enlivened by reading Orlando Figes’ The Europeans. It is magisterial, dazzling, and breath-taking. With every page another brick is added to that great edifice that is nineteenth-century European culture, we learn some new name or other detail, another colour is added to the painting which portrays in a vividness that leaves even the greatest realist author red-faced and shaking with jealousy, the world as it once was, the hopes it had.

This is a work of history, with three individuals at its centre. Pauline Viardot was a great opera singer; her husband Louis was a great scholar, activist, and collector; and her lover and friend Ivan Turgenev was not just a writer but the foremost figure promoting the cultural exchange between European nations in the arts. Through their stories and the history that surrounds them, Figes details pretty much everything worth knowing about the (high) cultural development of the 19^th century. We learn of changes in the publishing business, the rivalries of opera houses, the development of gambling in spa towns, the growth of tourism and the creation of guidebooks, and much more besides.

Structurally, The Europeans is a halfway house between the creative and brilliant biographies of Richard Holmes and the barrage of facts we might associate with history proper. Whereas Holmes tends to prioritise people over facts – I rarely feel I learn that much when I read him – Figes goes into much more detail on the latter, so that his recreations are much less vivid, even as their world is much more so. Each chapter is for the most part thematically linked, whether it be the topic of leisure and spas, or the English and their formality, so that even though at times Figes can seem to be adding a random aside on this or that topic, nevertheless it all fits into a wider picture.

And this picture is culture: “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.” Kenneth Clark once wrote that all the world’s great artistic leaps have come in periods of increased internationalism, and Figes’ story takes us into one of those. Beyond the Viardots and Turgenev, the real hero of the narrative has wheels and races along a metal road – it is none other than the steam train.

In Figes’ view, the railway can be held partly responsible for almost all the great changes of Europe’s nineteenth century. How did the Revolutions of 1848 spread like wildfire? Because people were able to travel quickly, bringing news from one place to the next. International railways turned towns like Baden-Baden into equally international cosmopolitan centres. They allowed for musical and theatrical groups to cover a much wider geographical range than they had previously, thus leaving them better positioned to negotiate contracts. Pauline sang in all the major European capitals during her career, for example, and even spent a season across the Atlantic in the United States. They also shaped Europe’s touristic map, as package tours first developed in this period, and bulk-buying tickets on the railway was one way that people like Thomas Cook were able to turn a profit. Figes even goes so far as to suggest that the short story as a form developed out of the railways, as people wanted something shorter to ride on their journeys. This seems a stretch too far, but it’s hard to overstate the railways’ importance.

Much as with Holmes’ The Age of Wonder, which I wrote about recently, we learn about the little inventions that brought major changes – the railway being unable to cover every manifestation of progress in this century. We learn that painters were able to paint en plein air for the first time because of the invention of tin tubes for their oil paints – previously they were stored in animal skins and would dry out for anything longer than the most preliminary of sketches. We also learn about photography and the way that it impacted literature and the other arts, or the advent of mass printing music.

However, with that all said, the main inventions were not technological, but capitalistic. Music became popular not only because of the piano but also because of sheet music. A situation developed where popular sheet music motivated people to go to watch the original performances, which in turn motivated more people to buy the scores. The Europeans is full of such symbiotic relationships. At the same time, we are introduced to countless crafty businessmen who develop in embryonic form many of the things we might take for granted about marketing and advertising today. In a world without international copyright or performance rights, authors and composers had to take ingenious steps to secure themselves an income.

One of the major underlying narrative strands concerns the shifting fortunes of cosmopolitanism in the century. We can see this through the example of the German-born Jewish composer Meyerbeer, who was naturalised as a Frenchman and at ease in both countries. Later on, there came Wagner, whose antisemitism is the stuff of legend and whose music and self-presentation were all designed to make himself as German as possible. “I am the most German of all of them, I am the German spirit”, he wrote in his diary. Next to Wagner, another nationalist figure was Dostoevsky, whom we meet acting like an ass at the gambling salons, but even the great cosmopolitan Turgenev himself temporarily falls into patriotic fervour at the time of the Crimean War. We would do well to remember that war is not a thing that lends itself to rational feelings, and Turgenev later regretted his emotions.

If once the railway had allowed internationalism to flourish, and places like Baden-Baden to develop into highly cosmopolitan centres, it also played its part in destroying that same world. Part of the reason the Prussians under Bismarck were able to wage war so effectively was due to their masterful logistic exploitation of train tracks to shift personnel and materiel towards the front. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, which left Germany unified, also marked the end of the world of the spas. The French now shunned places like Baden-Baden, which were subsumed into the new Reich. The Viardots and Turgenev, who had lived there happily, were forced to sell up and leave in the hostile environment that formed after Germany’s victory.

Still, as I said, these things ebb and flow. The Berne Convention of 1886 established international copyright; the socialists conducted their Internationals; the International Red Cross and women’s liberation movements all grew after this period – internationalism returned, just as nationalism would a little later.

The lives at the centre of this story are well chosen, not just because they were artistic and connected to many of the cultural developments that Figes discusses in The Europeans. Rather, they are well-chosen because they were, in the truest sense, heroes of a cosmopolitan, European culture. Turgenev’s library had books in nine languages. His love letters to Pauline, and hers to him, switched language to German whenever anything saucy needed to be written, because Louis could not understand that language. They lived in what is now Germany, the United Kingdom, and France; and Turgenev obviously grew up in Russia. Through their travels, they saw all of Europe and a great many Europeans. All the great musical names, all the artists, all the writers, knew them and visited them. Turgenev and Pauline in particular were vital in establishing Russian culture in Germany and France, and those cultures in Russia.

But all this does leave us asking what it actually means, this Europeanness? Figes follows a show-don’t-tell approach, giving us a view of what it looks like more than a prescriptive definition. He notes that for Turgenev, “the “Europe” he inhabited was an international civilization, a Republic of Letters based on the Enlightenment ideals of reason, progress, and democracy”. This chimes with Paul Valéry’s view that European culture is a “shared inheritance” based on “a desire for understanding and exchange”, or Stefan Zweig’s that it is “a supranational realm of humanism”. In short, it is a world of cultural interchange and growth in shared values, that sees what binds us more than what drives us apart. There is no space in this world for a God-bearing people, as Dostoevsky saw his own to be. There is only space for people themselves. 

On my census form last year, I wrote that I was European, as well as British and Scottish and English. I meant it seriously. I have been to eleven countries inside Europe, which I admit is a poor total, but I have every intention of visiting them all. I speak, badly, more languages than just my own. (We learn in The Europeans about the shocking cultural isolation of even the most educated Brits. Plus ca change). But more importantly, I feel a bond with these people, all of them, who are trapped on the same stretch of rock as myself. The nitty-gritty of it, the religious and geographical and political questions, are honestly unimportant. Like Turgenev, Europeanness is a set of values which I can feel, even if I am merely projecting my own views. It is a culture where I feel at home, far more than I do even in American literature, to which I am no stranger.

If I go in search of ideals, it is a European one that I find closest to my heart, not a British one. Cosmopolitan, welcoming, intelligent, dutiful, open. These are important things to me, more so than the stuffiness and seriousness and coolness that I associate with my own country. Just as it is important to me to travel, to wander this continent, to learn its languages, to meet its people. The European project is an individual project just as much as it is a political one (about which one can disagree). I must make myself European, and one thing I hope this blog will become is a statement of those painful efforts. I am grateful for Orlando Figes’ work not because it shows a world that is better than our own – because it certainly wasn’t, as his saddening section on women composers easily demonstrates – but because it provides the hope and strength needed to act in the service of the ideals its heroes believed in. Reading it, we can all become Europeans.