Nationalism and Culture (76 page)

If one compares the superlative culture of the great federalistic epoch in Italy with the rubbishy culture of the unified national state which had hovered so long before the eyes of the Italian patriots as the highest goal of their ambition, one comprehends at once the enormous difference between the two organizations. Their cultural outcomes were quite as different as the intellectual assumptions underlying their whole social structure. The adherents of national unity, and especially Mazzini, who had staked his very life on this idea, were firmly convinced that a united Italy was destined to march at the van of all the peoples of Europe to

initiate a new period in human history. With all the visionary exaltation of his political mysticism INlazzini declared:

In me survives the faith in Rome. Within the walls of Rome life has twice unfolded as unity of the world. While other peoples vanished forever after the completion of a fleeting destiny, and none came twice to the front, life there went on eternal and death was never known. . . . Why should there not arise out of a third Rome an Italian people, whose emblem floats before me; why not arise a third and greater unity, which shall set in harmony earth and heaven, right and duty, which, not to the individual but to the peoples, to the free and equal, shall speak a luminous, unifying word about their mission in this earthly vale?

Mazzini believed in the divine destiny of Italy in the coming history of Europe with the mystic rapture of one divinely possessed j for him it was the intellectual concept of the Unita Italiana through which alone could the "historic mission" of Italy be set to work. For him national unity was first of all a question of powerj for, though the people was always on his lips, still this people remained for him always an abstract concept which he constantly strove to adapt to the requirements of his national state. Only out of political unity could Italy acquire the strength which would fit it for the fulfillment of its alleged mission. Hence Mazzini's outcry against federalism:

This young Italy is unitary; for without unity there is no real nation, because without unity there is no power, and Italy, surrounded by unitary nations, which are strong and jealous, must, above all, be powerful. Federalism would reduce it to the powerless condition of Switzerland, and under stress of necessity it would fall under the influence of one or another of the neighboring nations. Federalism would give new life to the rivalries of different localities, which today are quenched, and so lead Italy back to the Middle Ages. . . . Seeking the destruction of the unity of the great Italian family, federalism would render utterly vain the mission that Italy is called to fulfill for humanity.*

Mazzini and his adherents hoped from the erection of the unified national state a mighty upsurge of Italian culture, which, once it was freed from the fetters of foreign domination, would unfold to an undreamed-of greatness. Before everything, however, Italian unity was to establish the freedom of the people and put an end to every type of slavery. How often had the Italian patriots celebrated in extravagant words the natural urge toward freedom of the Italians and with a quite especial pride boasted of it to the French. Carlo Pisacane, the fiery socialist patriot (who was, it is true, no adherent of Mazzini's political metaphysics

* Allgemeine Unterweisung fur die Verbriiderung des Jungen I (alien, 183 I. {Aus Mazzinis "Politisc/ien ScAriffen." Leipzig, 191 i.) Band I, p. 105.

though he esteemed him highly as a man, and who gave his life for the liberation of his country in 1851), in his great work, Saggi storico-politki-militari suW Italia, passes a very unfavorable judgment on the French. He called them a people without a sense of freedom who, indeed, always had freedom on their lips, but were inwardly completely enslaved and, moved by their thirst for glory, cast themselves on the neck of any despot who came along. With this he contrasted the instinctive love of freedom of the Italians, who could never be induced in sheepish surrender to assign their destiny to a dynasty j and he kept repeating that a united Italy could never be built by the power of a privileged minority, but must arise from the freedom of the people. Mazzini and his followers had no better opmion of France and made no secret of their sentiments.

These men had no slightest intimation that their efforts must lead immediately to just that condition which they urged against the French as a reproach. No unified state has thus far opened new outlooks to cultural aspirations, but has always led to the degradation of all higher cultural forms. Every national-political unity results in an extension of the struggle of small minorities for political power, which always has to be purchased by a lowering of intellectual culture. Above all, however, national unity has never yet established the freedom of a people, but has always merely reduced its implicit slavery to a definite norm, which is then proclaimed as freedom. Though Pisacane might cherish the illusion that a genuine nation could harbor in its bosom no privileged classes, orders or castes, experience has thus far always shown us that the national state is constantly busied in setting up new privileges and in dividing the people into castes and orders, because its very existence is based on this division. How clearly and forcibly had Proudhon told Mazzini and his adherents what Italian unity would bring to the people:

Every original characteristic in the various districts of a country is lost by the centralization of its public life—for that is the proper name for this so-called "unity." A centralized state of twenty-six million souls, such as Italy would become, suppresses all liberties of the provinces and municipalities in favor of a higher power—the government. What is this unity of the nation in reality? It is the merging of the separate folk-groups in which men live, and which differ from one another, into the abstract idea of a nation, in which no one breathes, and no one is acquainted with another. . . . To govern twenty-six million people who have been robbed of all dominion over themselves calls for a gigantic machine; then to set this machine in motion, a monstrous bureaucracy, a legion of officials. To protect it from within and without, there is required a standing army, officers, soldiers, mercenaries; these will from now on represent the nation. Fifteen years ago the number of officials in France was estimated at six hundred thousand. The number has not diminished since the couf d*etat. The strength of the army and the navy

is proportionate to this number. All this is indispensable to unity. This is the usual cost of a state, a cost which, because of centralization, is constantly increasing, while the freedom of the provinces is constantly diminishing. This grandiose unity calls for fame, glitter, luxury, an imposing civil list—embassies, pensions, benefices, and so on. In such a unified state everyone has his hand out, and who can count the chiselers? The people! Who says unified nation means a nation that is sold to its government. . . . And the profits of such a unified regimen? They are not for the people but for the ruling classes and castes in the state.''

The brilliant Frenchman had recognized clearly the moving principle of efforts at unity. Everything which he prophesied for the Italians has been made good to the very last letter. If Pisacane and his friends believed that only in France could it happen that an entire nation would put itself in the hands of any adventurer who made great promises, and especially who gratified their thirst for glory, the example of Mussolini has since shown us that national-political unity prepared Italy for exactly the same sort of thing. For this also is a result of governmental centralization. The more completely personal initiative and the impulse to self-reliance is smothered in man, the stronger in him becomes the belief in the "strong man," who is to end all his troubles. Moreover, this belief is just a bit of political religion which is deeply implanted in the nature of man by the feeling of dependence on a higher power.

What Proudhon so clearly foresaw because his mental perspective was not clouded by blind faith in the state, our modern socialists—from social democracy to the various factions of Russian Bolshevism—cannot see even today, because the egg shells of their Jacobin ancestors still stick to them. National unity brought to Italy only the bureaucratizing of public affairs and the debasement of higher cultural activity for the advantage of the political plans of its statesmen and their mistress, the bourgeoisie. The delight of the modern bourgeoisie in the unified state is so great merely because it opens an outlook for their policy of exploitation such as a federation of small communities could never afford.'For the material interests of small minorities in a country the unified national state has always been a blessing. For the freedom of the people and the shaping of higher forms of culture it has always been a misfortune.

How the efforts at centralization of the unified national state worked out in France has been shown in the first part of this work. Here, too, the accumulation of all political authority in the hands of the king went on at the expense of all the local rights and liberties of the municipalities and the provinces till it reached the dimensions of that unbounded policy of world power typified by Louis XIV and plunged France and the con-

'' La Tcdeiaticn et Vljnitc en Italic. P.iris, 1862, p. 25.

tinent of Europe into an abyss of misery and intellectual barbarism. One must not allow himself to be blinded by the pompous splendor of the French court, which brought in poets and artists from all over the world to strengthen its prestige and to deify the person of the ruler. For the French autocracy, art served the same ends as formerly for the Roman Caesars.

The monarchistic state in no way advanced the development of a popular literature and art, as is so often thoughtlessly asserted. On the contrary, it first created the wide gulf between the people and literature, which in no other country was so sharply apparent as in France of the ancten regime. This came about because French despotism pursued its aims with a rare consistency and was always intent on subjecting to its will every sphere of social life in order to implant the spirit of authority in every stratum of the people. Before the effective establishment of the monarchy a rich culture flourished in the cities of France, especially in the southern part of the country, where intellectual life was freer and more active than in the north, the most important stronghold of royal power and ecclesiastic scholasticism. The lyric poetry of medieval France, extraordinarily rich in content, owes much to the graceful flexibility of the Provengal language. Even more important, it drew upon popular sources and found its surest basis in life itself. The poetic spirit of the South hovered about the Provencal minnesingers and troubadours and gave to their art its form and its implicit moving force. But the troubadours were not merely singers of ballads, they were also the heralds of popular opinion, and their sirventes or "battle-hymns" influenced social events to a high degree. In these songs there stands out strongly a burning hatred for Rome and the domination of the church. Not for nothing was the South the land of heretics and dissenting sects, feared in equal measure by pope and king.

The jabliauXy strange mixture of epic and didactic poesy, which were sung or recited by wandering minstrels (conieurs) and which concerned themselves with everything which gave purpose or content to the life of man, had an even deeper hold on the people. In these songs satire played an important part and not rarely served to set public opinion in motion. The Christian mystery plays, which often had a genuinely insidious and blasphemous content, attained also in medieval France their first regularly artistic form, out of which the drama was later developed. At that time there still existed an intrinsic alliance between the people and literature. And with Francois Villon, who has been called the actual creator of French poetic art, this alliance is evident in every strophe; his Great Testament provides glorious evidence of this. Likewise Rabelais, the brilliant satirist and opponent of romanticism, who understood his time better than any other man, stood with both feet in the life of the people; so that his two

immortal works, Garganttca and Pantagruel, remain today genuine folk-books.

With the victory of absolutism and the unified national state this relation was changed fundamentally. This became quickly apparent after Louis XI (that sinister being who has been called "the spider of Europe" and who carried out his plans with a mad obsession that shrank from no means that promised success) had broken the resistance of his great vassals and so laid the actual foundation for the absolutist unified state. Francis 1, who is generally acclaimed as having made available to Frenchmen the higher intellectual culture of the Italian Renaissance, selected Machiavelli's Prince as his model and in his patronage of classic studies pursued a quite definite political purpose. In the old fahliaux, mystery plays, and folk songs there still lived the memory of a past which had tried to free itself from royal despotism. Francis determined that from that time on, poetry was to avail itself of classical material and turn its mind toward Rome, instead of attaching itself to the customs and institutions of an epoch which might awaken in the people a yearning for the things they had lost.

What Francis I had begun his successors and their priestly satellites carried on with stubborn zeal. So literature became court literature—and entirely estranged from the people. Poets no longer drew upon the rich popular sources which, under despotic domination, withered more and more. As once in Rome, so now at Versailles and in Paris, all art revolved about the person of the king and the sanctified institution of the monarchy. Men took every conceivable pains to bind poetic creation by fixed rules and sacrificed the living spirit to a dead erudition which had lost all relation to real life. Everything was regimented and bureaucratically ordained, even the language. All the instruments of power had been earlier employed to eradicate along with the heretics of the South also their language, the Provencal. In 1635 Richelieu established the French Academy in order to subordinate language and poetry to the authoritarian ambitions of absolutism. Only what from above was found correct in style and unobjectionable was to be allowed to achieve immortality; nothing else had a right to exist. Boileau in his Art Poetique gave to poetry in general a definite plumb-line which was followed with slavish assiduity not only in France but in other countries, and so for a long time closed every new outlook for the development of literary art. All the French classics suffer from this restriction of the spirit and seem to us unrelated to the world and lacking in inner warmth. When Corneille was so daring as to disregard the prescribed rules in his Cid, the Cardinal quickly made him see reason by setting the Academy in action against him. Thus it had happily come to pass that language, literature and art were bureaucratized. Can one wonder that even Voltaire, who in his dramatic works went the academic way, found Shakespeare a "savage"?