The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (5 page)

Alfred Picard, the engineer who organised the Paris Exposition, recommended that visitors start with the Palace of Teaching and Education. Education, he said, was the source of all progress. The palace showed curriculums and methods of instruction from infant schools to university in France as well as other countries. The United States exhibit was worth a visit, said the Hachette guide, to see the curious teaching methods favoured by the Americans. (It did not specify what those might be.) There were also special displays for technical and scientific education and adult evening classes. As Europe’s economy changed, governments and business alike had realised that they needed a better-educated population. The late nineteenth century saw the spread of universal education and literacy. On the eve of the Great War, even Russia, widely regarded as the most backward power in Europe, had almost half of the children who lived in cities and towns in elementary school and 28 per cent of those in the countryside – and the goal was to make that 100 per cent by 1922.

The increase of public libraries and adult education classes encouraged reading and publishers responded to the new mass markets with comic books, pulp fiction, thrillers, and adventure stories such as Westerns. The mass newspaper, with its big splashy headlines and lavish use of illustrations, made its appearance. In 1900 the
Daily Mail
in London had a circulation of over 1 million. All this contributed to widening the horizons of Europeans and also to making them feel part of larger communities than their ancestors would have done. Where once most Europeans would have seen themselves as members of their village or town, they now increasingly felt themselves to be German or French or British, part of something called a nation.

There were no exhibits in Paris devoted to the art of government itself but there were many which showed the increasing number of things that governments did, from public works to the well-being of their citizens. Governing in the new Europe was more complicated a
task than it had been even thirty years previously because society was more complicated. The spread of democracy and the extension of voting rights also meant that an expanding public demanded more. No government wanted large numbers of disgruntled citizens. The memories of Europe’s many revolutions were all too fresh. Moreover, the move by all of Europe’s armies, except the British, to conscripting young men for a limited number of years meant that the ruling classes had to depend on the co-operation and goodwill of the masses. As Prince Yevgeny Trubetskoy, one of the more intelligent Russian aristocrats, said, ‘it is impossible to govern against the people when it is necessary to turn to it for the defence of Russia’.
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Governments were finding that they had to provide more than basic security for their populations. This was partly in hopes of avoiding social conflict but also because a healthier and better-educated workforce was better for the economy and for the military. Germany’s great Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, pioneered the modern welfare state with such things as unemployment insurance and old-age pensions in Germany in the 1880s, and his example was followed throughout Europe. Governments also realised that they needed better information – statistics became an important tool in the late nineteenth century – if they were to govern efficiently. Governing now required trained servants. The old amateurish ways in armies or bureaucracies, where young men were chosen on the basis of family and connections, no longer were good enough. Officers who could not read maps or who did not understand tactics or logistics could not manage the increasingly large modern armies. Foreign offices could no longer provide congenial refuges for gentlemen who liked to dabble in foreign affairs. And the arrival of the new and unpredictable factor of public opinion meant that governments could no longer manage their foreign affairs with a free hand.

Better communications, including the new fast and cheap public post offices and the telegraph, not only brought Europeans into contact with each other and fostered nationalist feeling but also made them aware of what was going on in other countries. Cheaper and easier travel also helped. In the cities the horse-drawn vehicles were gradually giving way to newer forms of transportation such as electric trams. The first branch of the Paris Métro opened in time for the Exposition. (And the first Métro pickpockets started their activities too.) Railway and
canal networks spread out across Europe and the steamship lines crisscrossed the oceans. In 1850 there were only 14,000 miles of railway track in the whole continent; by 1900, over 180,000. The visitors to the Paris Exposition came from all over Europe and even further afield like the thousands of Americans who were in Paris that summer. A new phenomenon had appeared: mass tourism. Where once travel for pleasure was only for the rich and leisured – think of the Grand Tours that young noblemen would make in the eighteenth century – it was now within reach of the middle classes and even the prosperous working classes. In the 1840s an enterprising Englishman, Thomas Cook, started to use the new railways to organise outings for temperance societies. By the end of the century, Thomas Cook and Son was organising travel for thousands of tourists a year. In 1900, inevitably, the firm laid on a special programme of visits to Paris and the Exposition.

Europe was starting to look more like the world we know. Cities were getting rid of their old slums and narrow laneways and building more spacious roads and public spaces. In Vienna, the government opened up for development the swathes of land that had protected the approach to the old city walls. The Ringstrasse with its huge public buildings and elegant apartment blocks became the symbol of the new modern city. And Vienna, like other European cities, was cleaner and more salubrious by the end of the century, brighter too as electric lights replaced the old gas ones. You were surprised and delighted whenever you revisited one of the great European cities, recalled Stefan Zweig, the famous Austrian writer, in his autobiography. ‘The streets were broader and finer, the public buildings more imposing, the shops more elegant.’
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Prosaic improvements such as better drains, indoor bathrooms and clean water supplies meant that the old diseases such as typhus and cholera which had once been commonplace began to vanish. At the 1900 Exposition the Palais de l’Hygiène showed off new systems of heating and ventilation for public buildings such as hospitals and one room, devoted to the conquest of disease, gave a bust of the great Louis Pasteur the place of honour. (A Canadian visitor said she would have enjoyed those exhibits more ‘had there not been so many horrid Frenchmen about’.)
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In another exhibit, for fabrics and clothing, the French showed off the work of their best couturiers but also the ready-made clothes which
were bringing fashion within the reach of the middle-class consumer. New consumer goods – bicycles, telephones, linoleum, and cheap newspapers and books – were becoming part of everyday life, and the big new department stores and catalogue shopping were making them available to everyone who could afford them. And that was an increasing number of Europeans. Thanks to mass production, what had been luxury goods were now affordable by ordinary households. In the 1880s German factories were producing 73,000 pianos a year. Public entertainments and amusements were both cheaper and more elaborate. The new medium of film stimulated the building of special cinema theatres, often beautifully decorated. The French also had their café-concerts where for the price of a drink or a coffee patrons could watch a singer or two, perhaps a comic, even dancers. In Britain, the public houses, with their bright lights, shining brass, overstuffed chairs and embossed wallpaper brought a touch of glamour to an evening outing for members of the lower classes.

Europeans were also eating much better. One of the palaces at the Exposition showed the glories of French agriculture and foods (as well as a colossal sculpture of the apotheosis of a bottle of champagne) but others such as the Palais de l’Horticulture Etrangère showed foodstuffs from around the world. Europeans were becoming accustomed to pineapples from the Azores, mutton and lamb from New Zealand or beef from the Argentine, brought in the new refrigerator ships or packed into tins. (Campbell’s tinned soup won a gold medal at the Paris Exposition.) Improvements in farming and the opening up of new agricultural lands around the world as well as cheaper and faster transportation brought a drop in food prices by almost 50 per cent in the last third of the century. Life was good, especially for the middle classes.

Stefan Zweig, who was nineteen in 1900, has left a picture of his carefree youth. His family were prosperous and indulgent and let him do whatever he pleased at the university in Vienna. He did a minimum of academic work but read widely. He was just starting on his career as a writer, publishing early poems and his first articles. In the last thing he ever wrote,
The World of Yesterday
, he chose to call the time of his youth before the Great War ‘the Golden Age of Security’. For the middle classes in particular, their world was just like the Habsburg monarchy, seemingly stable and permanent. Savings were secure and
property was something to be passed down safely from one generation to the next. Humanity, particularly European humanity, was clearly moving onto a higher plane of development. Societies were not only increasingly prosperous and better organised but their members were also kinder and more rational. To Zweig’s parents and their friends the past was something to be deplored while the future was increasingly bright. ‘People no more believed in the possibility of barbaric relapses, such as wars between the nations of Europe, than they believed in ghosts and witches; our fathers were doggedly convinced of the infallibly binding power of tolerance and conciliation’.
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(At the start of 1941 Zweig, by now in exile in Brazil, sent his manuscript to his publisher. A few weeks later he and his second wife committed suicide.)

His Golden Age of Security and the evidence of progress before the Great War were greatest in western Europe (including the new Germany) and in the developed parts of Austria-Hungary such as the German and Czech lands. The great powers, combining wealth, territory, influence and military power, were still all European: Britain, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy, and, on Europe’s eastern edge, Russia, a nation which had always been seen as not quite European, was starting its dramatic rise to world power. Still considered by many in the West to be stuck somewhere in the sixteenth century, Russia was in fact on the verge of an economic take-off – and perhaps a political one as well. The Russian displays at the Paris Exposition included the obligatory homage to the glories of Russian history and civilisation but they also showed locomotives, machines, and weapons. In the special pavilion devoted to Russia in Asia, visitors could sit in railway carriages which rocked gently to and fro to give the illusion of movement while a painted panorama showing the vast new lands of the Russian east rolled past. The message was that a dynamic Russia was acquiring new colonies, linking them with the Trans-Siberian Railway, and bringing them the benefits of modern civilisation including the technology to develop their rich natural resources.

This was not just wishful thinking on the part of the Russians. From the 1880s onwards Russia’s development by most measures had been extraordinary. Like later success stories, the Asian Tigers after the Second World War, for example, it was shifting from a primarily agricultural economy to an industrial one. Russia’s growth rates – an average
of 3.25 per cent per year – matched or exceeded those of world leaders such as Great Britain and the United States when the latter two had been at a similar stage. Although the war with Japan and the subsequent revolutionary upheavals in 1905 set Russian development back, it picked up again rapidly in the last years before the Great War. By 1913 Russia was the biggest agricultural producer in Europe and in industry was catching up fast with the other industrial powers. On the eve of the war, it was fifth among the world’s nations in industrial production.
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And there was evidence, mixed to be sure, that Russian society and politics were moving in a more liberal direction.

What would have happened to Russia if the Great War had not come? Or if Russia had somehow managed to stay out? Would there have been a revolution in 1917? Without the war and the collapse of the old regime, would the Bolsheviks, that revolutionary splinter group, ever have been able to seize power and impose their rigid and doctrinaire policies? We will never know but it is not difficult to imagine a different, less bloody and less wasteful path for Russia into the modern age. And it is tempting to imagine a different future for Europe as well. It had so much to celebrate in 1900 and so did its other great powers. Britain still was secure and prosperous even though it had rivals around the world and in Europe. France seemed to have put its decades of revolutions and political upheavals behind it and had recovered from its humiliating defeat by Prussia and its German allies in the war of 1870–71. Germany had Europe’s fastest-growing economy and was rapidly spreading its influence east and south through trade and investment. It looked set to become the powerhouse at Europe’s core – and without any need to use its powerful army; as it had at last done in the late twentieth century. Austria-Hungary had survived, which was a triumph in itself, and its many nationalities enjoyed the benefits of being part of a larger economic and political unit. Italy was gradually industrialising and modernising.

The colonial displays at the Exposition hinted too at the extraordinary power that a very small part of the world had amassed in the course of the previous centuries. Europe’s countries dominated much of the earth’s surface whether through their formal empires or by informal control of much of the rest through their economic, financial and technological strength. Railways, ports, telegraph cables, steamship lines,
factories around the world were built using European know-how and money and were usually run by European companies. And Europe’s dominance had increased dramatically in the nineteenth century as its scientific and industrial revolutions gave it, for a time at least, an edge over other societies. The first Opium War at the end of the 1830s between Great Britain and China saw the British using an armour-plated steamship (appropriately named the
Nemesis
) against a Chinese navy still equipped with the junks that had served China well for centuries. In 1800 before the gap in power opened up, Europe had controlled approximately 35 per cent of the world; by 1914 that figure was 84 per cent.
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True, the process had not always been a peaceful one and European powers had come close to war several times over the spoils. By 1900, however, the tensions caused by imperialism seemed to be subsiding. There was not much left to divide up in Africa, the Pacific or Asia, and there was, or so it seemed, a general agreement that there should be no sudden land grabs in such declining states as China or the Ottoman Empire, tempting though their weakness made them to imperialists.