THE PURSUIT OF POWER
By Richard J. Evans
Illustrated. 819 pp. Viking. $40.
Europe is more than the sum of its parts. Its history is not merely a collection of national pasts standing side by side. Historians have long understood this. So did the 19th-century Italian nationalist and revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini, whose dream of a united and democratic Italy rose proudly within his vision of a “United States of Europe.” For Mazzini, all peoples should equally enjoy liberty and all nations the independence to pursue their own destinies, but those of Europe would also freely associate with each other in a peaceful confederation. The challenge in producing any European history lies in ensuring that this broad, continental landscape is allowed to shine, while not obscuring the local detail and nuance. The latest book by Richard J. Evans, the president of Wolfson College, Cambridge, adroitly achieves this balance.
“The Pursuit of Power,” a volume in the Penguin History of Europe series, unpacks the fascinatingly complex and interconnected range of historical forces at work between 1815 and 1914, showing how Europeans shared broadly similar experiences, but with strong local variations in form, intensity and timing. The enviably Tolstoyan scale of the book allows Evans, first, to immerse the reader in a narrative that moves seamlessly from Russia to Iberia and all points in between. Second, it allows him to explore almost every nook and cranny of European life in this 100-year period, from the high politics of courts, diplomats and military commanders to the squalid slums of Europe’s expanding industrial cities; the analysis is enlivened by eyewitness observations and interwoven with cultural detail. The narrative is also set in a wider, global context, as Europeans struck out both into the world as merchants, investors, missionaries and migrants and at the world as conquering imperialists — by 1914, European (and American) colonies accounted for 57 percent of the world’s population.
The central dynamic of this multilayered story is provided by the book’s title, which signifies the multiple ways in which Europeans strove to acquire and wield power. States competed with one another for strategic security and empire. Elites like the nobility clung to their status, influence and authority as they felt the economic and political ground shift beneath their feet and were challenged by nonnoble groups, like the middle classes. Peasants sought to empower themselves by struggling for emancipation from manorial burdens or serfdom. The growing working class organized and sometimes rose up for greater control over wages, working conditions and social welfare. Europe’s women campaigned to break through the laws, traditions and attitudes that restricted their lives and denied them a formal political voice.
With themes like these, politics figure prominently: This 100-year period was, after all, demarcated at one end by the carnage of the Napoleonic Wars that ended in 1815 and, at the other, the industrialized horror of World War I, beginning in 1914. In the years between, conservative regimes battled for the future with revolutionaries, most notably in 1848 (at the heart of a particularly trenchant chapter), when the continent was swept by a cascade of revolutions. Nationalists fought for the unity of their peoples and independence from foreign rule. During the last decades, even the most reactionary regimes yielded to some of the pressure: By 1914, every major European state (including Russia after the revolution of 1905, foreshock of the greater upheaval in 1917) was governed through a parliamentary system of one kind or another. Feminists across Europe battled on what Evans calls “democracy’s final frontier,” meaning the struggle for woman suffrage, and they scored a few successes, winning the vote in Finland (1906) and Norway (1913). The analysis sweeps the reader along at a fast pace, punctuated by vivid descriptions of combat on the barricades, diplomatic double-dealing and battlefield butchery.
Yet political conflict and transformation are only part of Evans’s story. Among the pleasures of reading “The Pursuit of Power” is learning how the great forces that altered the face of the continent forever — including industrialization, the growth of the cities and the introduction of rapid transport and communications — emphatically transformed, in the short space of a few generations, the day-to-day world of all Europeans. One of the achievements of this volume is to put a human face on economic and social developments that in most college texts are inevitably explained by statistics like railway mileage or mortality rates. Evans’s analysis has such data, too, but he also devotes considerable space to describing how ordinary Europeans experienced and responded to the changes. Life was altered almost beyond recognition as workers moved from small-scale workshops to the machine-driven factories powered by coal and steam. Once, their days at the bench or loom were determined by the natural rhythms of daylight and by local custom; now their lives were regulated by the relentless workings of industrial technology and the inflexible rule of the clock.
Artisans, workers and peasants paid the heaviest price for the great transformation: Evans peppers his descriptions with the details of grindingly harsh working conditions, horrifying industrial accidents — trains careering off their rails, miners drowning as their pits flooded — and the miserably teeming conditions in which so many Europeans lived.
Yet the quality of life eventually improved for most people, often in small but myriad ways. Workers occasionally went on strike over their working hours, but by 1875 the annual production of 2.5 million watches — once a luxury item of the well-to-do — shows that they were at least beginning to afford the means of knowing when their shifts would end. In 1815, the fastest that people could travel was at a horse’s gallop; by 1914, Europeans were thundering across the countryside on steam-powered trains, plowing the oceans on great liners or zipping to work on bicycles and — in the larger cities — on trams and underground trains. In 1886 the German inventor Karl Benz unveiled a harbinger of the future, the first “horseless carriage” or “automobile.” Among the beneficial spinoffs from the chemical industry was the invention of aspirin, which Europeans began to pop as long ago as 1897. Whereas Europeans previously inhabited a world lit by candles or gaslight, electricity began to illuminate their streets and homes: Milan was one of the first cities in the world to become completely ablaze with electric lighting.
Europeans also began to enjoy new forms of culture and leisure. As standards of schooling and literacy improved, so workers and peasants became enthusiastic readers, with the expansion of the periodical press spurred by the arrival of “popular” (often sensationalist) newspapers, while book readers devoured cheap, melodramatic novels. Auguste and Louis Lumière presented the first-ever motion picture in Paris in 1895; when the film showed a train powering toward the camera, some of the audience panicked and stampeded to the back of the room. Shopping changed, with the first department stores flourishing across Europe’s cities from the middle of the century, in multistory buildings that soon boasted such newfangled inventions as elevators; when Harrods in London first installed an escalator in 1898, staff members were on hand with smelling salts and (more promisingly) brandy for the benefit of those upset by the experience.
Europeans even behaved differently in bed: By 1914, a decline in the birthrate in most parts of the continent suggested that people wanted fewer children to protect their new standards of living, perhaps clumsily assisted by the earliest rubber condoms, which were the thickness of a bicycle inner tube. With its skillful interweave of political conflict and transition, economic transformation, social upheaval and cultural change, “The Pursuit of Power” bears witness to an old world fading, inside and outside the home, and a new, modern one taking shape.