Tag: 19th century Europe

Somber Diminution of European Aristocracy

A few days ago I tweeted a quote from Auerbach’s Mimesis relating to the state of the European aristocracy at the close of the Napoleonic Wars. A new French king was crowned and the old order was put back into place, but the ideals of the revolution continued to circulate throughout European society. The Age of Enlightenment had broken over the continent and rational order was the new program around which civic life was to be organized. Even the aristocracy—above all the aristocracy!—acknowledged the supremacy of reason and welcomed its ascension into the public sphere, but by doing so, they were also implicitly calling into question their own places in the future of Europe. Religion and feudalism, the two great pillars of the medieval society, were now supplanted by the more rigorous, more totalizing forces of modernity. Nobility ceased to serve any practical purpose. It no longer signaled power or even wealth. It became merely a feature of social status, a sign of dignity and moral standing. And so Auerbach writes (I shall quote it fully here since I was not able to do so in twitter’s 140 characters):

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“As these people are conscious that they no longer themselves believe in the thing they represent, and that they are bound to be defeated in public argument, they choose to talk of nothing but the weather, music, and court gossip.” (Mimesis, 456)

In this passage, Auerbach explains why aristocratic life had grown so stale and sedate in the 19th century. In previous ages, men of the aristocracy were daring, inquisitive thinkers. Their educations were wide-ranging and their interests multifarious. The Age of Enlightenment came about in the salons of French marquises, and Italian counts, and the courts of minor German princes. It was the aristocracy that retrieved from antiquity ideas like an organized civil service, the conscript army, and scientific method. They sponsored the translation of classics into vernacular tongues and paid to distribute them in print. But with an employed civil service, there was no need for a court. If the state could levy an army through conscription, there was no need for knights. If scientists could understand natural phenomena through experimentation, liturgical explanations of creation posited by the church became impractical and unreliable by comparison. With the Age of Enlightenment the European aristocracy had essentially dug its own grave. In it’s inevitable culmination, the French Revolution, this was at times very literally the case. But it was not yet the end. The nobles still controlled the land; they still had the support and obedience of the rural peasantry. The European monarchies prevailed against Napoleon and the Revolutionary army. They had preserved themselves for the time being, but they would never be able to reverse the historical inertia generated by the Revolution and the Enlightenment. The aristocracy was discredited and had not the means to argue otherwise. And so, throughout the 19th century and into the industrial age they behaved as delicately as possible so as not to disturb the status quo, and they clung tenaciously to what little they had remaining.

Interest in Art in 19th Century Europe

I have spent the evening reading a particularly meaty chapter in Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis and so have nothing to add to our present discussion which left off last night with interactive poetry. I did however come across some choice bits in Auerbach which are worth sharing. I am reading the second to last chapter in the book. The subject is high art in the late 19th century and the mutual disregard artists and the public had for one another during that period. Auerbach writes, translated from German of course, “It can be safely said that, with few exceptions, the significant artists of the later nineteenth century encountered hostility, lack of comprehension, or indifference on the part of the public… On the basis of this experience many critics and artists became convinced that this was necessarily so: that the very originality of a significant new work had as its concomitant that the public, not yet accustomed to its style, found it confusing and disturbing and could become accustomed only gradually to the new language of form.”

Auerbach describes here a tension between producers and consumers of culture resulting from a transition in attitude and sensibilities that took place over the course of the nineteenth century. Previously it had been the aristocracy that had defined the taste and tenor of cultural exchange, especially in matters of art and fashion. As the European countries began to industrialize, this paradigm changed completely with the elevation of common people through the ranks of society. From this point onward, ethics, lifestyle, appearance, manners, speech, basic values would all be determined by a newly emerged middle class that promoted pragmatism, generation of wealth and, at least by then end of the century, comprised a majority of the populace. Major artists of this time were exponents of the anti-enlightenment tradition of romanticism and found almost nothing redeeming about the bourgeois way of life. Their work was polemically opposed the general public and highly critical of societal values. In response, society ignored them and occupied itself instead with pulp literature and cheap theater. Auerbach’s analysis of the dichotomy is marvelous. I shall quote it at length:

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Written in the 1940s to explain the cultural landscape of the 1860s, but it just as easily could have been describing our own time. We after all are still living in the age of the bourgeois revolution. The middle class remains the defining force in society, and its time and efforts are still tied up with the demands of industry and commerce, of the professional life. I’m so partial to the passage above because Auerbach shows a measured reverence for the achievements of the middle class. There’s almost a kind of sympathy he expresses for the bourgeois’s material inability to absorb high concepts and virtuosic expression. He has none of the resentment for the middle classes exhibited by your typical Marxist, or should I say self-loathing, since most Marxists in this day and age are themselves members of the middle class. Auerbach is willing to acknowledge the value of either side’s position, bohemian and bourgeoisie, and has a clearer view of both for doing so.

Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Trans. Trask, Willard R. 50th anniversary ed. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003. 500-502