Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (76 page)

Censorship, like taxation, was driven forward by war. In Britain and France some of the most stringent constraints on behaviour and the expression of opinion had been introduced during the First or Second World Wars and never repealed. Elsewhere—in Italy, West Germany and some of the countries they had occupied—post-war regulations were a legacy of Fascist laws that democratic legislators had preferred to maintain in place. Relatively few of the most repressive ‘moral’ powers still in force by 1960 dated back beyond the nineteenth century (the most obviously anachronistic being perhaps the Office of the Lord Chamberlain in Britain, responsible for pre-censorship of the theatre, where the posts of Examiner and Deputy Examiner of Plays were created early in 1738). The outstanding exception to this rule, of course, was the Catholic Church.

Ever since the First Vatican Council of 1870, held under the influence and auspices of the avowedly reactionary Pope Pius IX, the Catholic Church had taken an all-embracing and decidedly dogmatic view of its responsibilities as moral guardian of its flock. Precisely because it was being steadily squeezed out of the realm of political power by the modern state, the Vatican made uncompromising demands upon its followers in other ways. Indeed, the long and—in retrospect—controversial papacy of Eugenio Pacelli, Pope Pius XII (1939-1958) not only maintained its spiritual claims, but actually brought the official Church back into politics.

Avowedly on the side of political reaction, from the Vatican’s close ties to Mussolini and ambivalent response to Nazism to its enthusiasm for Catholic dictators in Spain and Portugal, Pacelli’s papacy also took an uncompromising line in the domestic politics of the democracies. Catholics in Italy especially were left in no doubt as to the spiritual impropriety, and worse, of voting against the Christian Democrats; but even in relatively liberal Belgium or Holland the local Catholic hierarchy was under strict instructions to turn out the Catholic vote for the Catholic parties and only them. Not until 1967, nine years after the death of Pius XII, did a Dutch bishop dare suggest in public that Dutch Catholics might vote for a non-Catholic party without risking excommunication.

In such circumstances, it is hardly surprising that the post-war Catholic hierarchy also took an uncompromising line in questions having to do with the family, or moral behavior or inappropriate books and films. But younger Catholic laymen, and a new generation of priests, were uncomfortably aware that by the end of the 1950s the Vatican’s authoritarian rigidity in public and private matters alike was both anachronistic and imprudent. Back in 1900, most marriages in Italy had lasted around twenty years, before being dissolved by the death of a spouse. By the end of the third quarter of the century marriages lasted in excess of thirty-five years, and demand for the right to divorce was steadily growing.

Meanwhile, the post-war baby boom had undercut the demographic case against contraception, isolating the ecclesiastical authorities in their uncompromising opposition. Attendance at mass was down everywhere in western Europe. Whatever the reasons—the geographical and social mobility of hitherto acquiescent villagers, the political emancipation of women, the declining importance of Catholic charities and parochial schools in the age of the welfare state—the problem was real and, as it seemed to the more perceptive Catholic leaders, could not be addressed by appeals to tradition and authority, or suppressed by invoking anti-Communism in the style of the late 1940s.

Upon Pacelli’s death, his successor Pope John XXIII called a new Vatican Council, to attend to these difficulties and bring up to date the attitudes and practices of the Church. Vatican II, as it became known, convened on October 11th 1962. In the course of its work over the next few years it transformed not only the liturgy and language of Catholic Christianity (quite literally—Latin was no longer to be used in daily Church practice, to the uncomprehending fury of a traditionalist minority) but also, and more significantly, the response of the Church to the dilemmas of modern life. The pronouncements of the Second Vatican Council made it clear that the Church was no longer frightened by change and challenge, was not an opponent of liberal democracy, mixed economies, modern science, rational thought and even secular politics. The first—very tentative—steps were taken towards reconciliation with other Christian denominations and there was some (not much) acknowledgement of the Church’s responsibility to discourage anti-Semitism by re-casting its longstanding account of Jewish responsibility for the death of Jesus. Above all, the Catholic Church could no longer be counted upon to support authoritarian regimes—quite the contrary: in Asia, Africa and especially Latin America, it was at least as likely to be on the side of their opponents.

These changes were not universally welcomed even among the Catholic Church’s own reformers—one delegate to Vatican II, a young priest from Crakow, would later rise to the papacy and see it as his task to restore the full weight of moral authority and influence of an uncompromising Catholic hierarchy. Nor did Vatican II achieve a reversal of the steady fall in religious practice among European Catholics: even in Italy, attendance at mass fell from 69 percent of all Catholics in 1956 to 48 percent twelve years later. But since the decline of religion in Europe has by no means been confined to the Catholic faith, this was probably beyond their powers. What Vatican II did achieve—or at least facilitate and authorize—was the final divorce between politics and religion in continental Europe.

After the death of Pius XII, no pope and almost no bishop again presumed to threaten Catholics with serious consequences should they fail to vote the correct way; and the once-close link between Church hierarchy and Catholic or Christian Democratic parties in the Netherlands, Belgium, West Germany, Austria and Italy was prised open.
¹⁴⁵
Even in Franco’s Spain, where the local Catholic hierarchy had enjoyed unusual privileges and powers, Vatican II wrought dramatic changes. Until the mid-sixties the Spanish leader forbade all outward manifestations of non-Catholic religious belief or practice. But in 1966 he felt constrained to pass a law allowing other Christian churches to subsist, though still privileging Catholicism, and within four years full freedom of (Christian) worship was authorized. By lobbying successfully for this belated ‘disestablishment’ of the Catholic Church in Spain and thus putting daylight between the Church and the regime during Franco’s lifetime, the Vatican was to spare the Spanish Church at least some of the consequences of its long and troubling association with the ‘ancien régime’.

This
rupture culturelle
, as it became known in Belgium and elsewhere, between religion and politics and between the Catholic Church and its recent past, played a crucial role in the making of ‘the sixties’. There were, of course, limits to the Vatican’sreforming mood—for many of its participants the strategic impulse behind Vatican II was not to embrace radical change, but to head it off. When the rights to abortion and the liberalization of divorce were put to the vote a few years later, in predominantly Catholic countries like Italy, France or West Germany, the ecclesiastical authorities vigorously if unsuccessfully opposed them. But even on these sensitive issues the Church did not go to the wall, and its opposition no longer risked fragmenting the community. In a society well on the way to being ‘postreligious’, the Church accepted its reduced place and made the best of it.
¹⁴⁶

In non-Catholic societies—which meant Scandinavia, the UK, parts of the Netherlands and a minority of German-speaking western Europe—the liberation of the citizen from traditional moral authority was necessarily more diffuse, but even more dramatic when it came. The transition was most striking in Britain. Until the end of the 1950s, British citizens were still forbidden to gamble; to read or to see anything that their betters judged ‘obscene’ or politically sensitive; to advocate (much less engage in) homosexual acts; to practice abortions on themselves or others; or to get divorced without great difficulty and public humiliation. And if they committed murder or certain other major offences, they could be hanged.

Then, beginning in 1959, the skein of convention began to unravel. Following the Obscene Publications Act of that year, an uncensored work of adult literature could be shielded from charges of ‘obscenity’ if it was deemed to be ‘in the interests of science, literature, art or learning’. Henceforward, publishers and authors could defend themselves in court by invoking the worth of the work as a whole, and could invoke ‘expert’ opinion in their defense. In October 1960 came the notorious test case of
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
, in which Penguin Books were prosecuted for publishing in Britain the first unexpurgated edition of D. H. Lawrence’s otherwise unremarkable novel. The
Chatterley
case was of particular interest to the British not just because of the hitherto illicit passages to which they were now exposed, but also thanks to the inter-class eroticism on which its notoriety rested. Upon being asked by the prosecuting counsel whether this was a novel he would let his ‘wife or maidservant’ (
sic
) read, one witness replied that this would not trouble him in the least: but he would never let it into the hands of his gamekeeper.

Penguin Books were acquitted of obscenity, having called thirty-five expert witnesses in their defense, and the decline of the moral authority of the British Establishment can be dated from that acquittal. In the same year gambling was legalized in the United Kingdom. Four years later the death penalty was abolished by the incoming Labour Government, and under the leadership of Roy Jenkins, a remarkable reforming Home Secretary, Labour oversaw the introduction of state-financed family planning clinics, reform of the law on homosexuality and the legalization of abortion in 1967, and the abolition of theatre censorship in the following year. In 1969 there followed the Divorce Act, which did not so much precipitate a dramatic transformation in the institution of marriage as reveal its extent: whereas in the last year before World War Two there had been just one divorce for every fifty-eight marriages in England and Wales, forty years later the ratio would approach one in three.

The liberal and liberalizing reforms of 1960s Britain were emulated across northwest Europe, albeit with varying delays. The Social Democratic-led coalition governments of West Germany, under Willy Brandt, introduced similar changes there in the course of the later Sixties and Seventies, constrained in their case less by law or precedent than by the reluctance of their coalition partners—notably the economically liberal but socially conservative Free Democrats. In France, abolition of the death penalty had to await the arrival in power of François Mitterrand’s Socialists in 1981, but there—as in Italy—the laws on abortion and divorce were rewritten in the course of the early Seventies. In general, with the exception of Britain and Scandinavia, the liberated ‘Sixties’ did not actually arrive in Europe until the Seventies. Once the legal changes were in place, however, the social consequences flowed rapidly enough: the crude divorce rate in Belgium, France and the Netherlands tripled between 1970 and 1985.

The diminishing standing of public authorities in matters of morality and personal relationships in no way supposed a decline in the role of the state in the cultural affairs of the nation. Quite the contrary. The broad Western European consensus of the age held that only the state had the resources to service the cultural needs of its citizens: left to themselves, individuals and communities would lack both means and initiative. It was the responsibility of a well-run public authority to deliver cultural nourishment no less than food, lodging and employment. In such matters Social and Christian Democrats thought alike, and both were heir to the great Victorian-era improvers, though with far greater resources to hand. The aesthetic revolt of the Sixties changed little in this respect: the new (‘counter-’) culture demanded and obtained the same funding as the old.

The 1950s and 1960s were the great age of the cultural subsidy. Back in 1947 the British Labour government added sixpence to local taxes to pay for local artistic initiatives—theatres, philharmonic societies, regional opera and the like: a prelude to the Arts Council of the 1960s, which spread public largesse across an unprecedented range of local and national festivals and institutions, as well as arts education. The financially strapped French Fourth Republic was less forthcoming, except to traditional, prestige venues for high culture—museums, the Paris Opéra, the Comédie Française—and the state-monopolized radio and television stations. But after De Gaulle returned to power and installed André Malraux as his Minister for Culture, the situation there was transformed.

The French state had long played the part of
mécène
. But Malraux conceived of his role in a wholly new way. Traditionally, the power and purse of the royal Court and its republican successors had been deployed to bring artists and art to Paris (or Versailles), sucking the rest of the country dry. Now the government would spend money to place performers and performances in the provinces. Museums, galleries, festivals and theatres began to sprout across provincial France. The best known of these, the Avignon summer festival under the direction of Jean Vilar, began in 1947; but it took flight in the course of the fifties and sixties when Vilar’s productions played a major part in the transformation and renewal of French theatre. Many of France’s best known actors—Jeanne Moreau, Maria Casarès, Gérard Philipe—worked in Avignon. It was there, as well as in such unlikely venues as Saint-Étienne, Toulouse, Rennes or Colmar, that the French artistic renaissance began.

Malraux’s encouragement of provincial cultural life depended of course on centralized initiative. Even Vilar’s own project was typically Parisian in its iconoclastic objectives: the point was not to bring culture to the regions but to break with the conventions of mainstream theatre—‘to bring life back into theatre, into collective art . . . to help it breath free again, released from cellars and drawing rooms: to reconcile architecture and dramatic poetry’—something that could be more easily accomplished away from Paris, but with central government funds and ministerial backing. In a genuinely decentralized country like the Federal Republic of Germany, on the other hand, culture and the arts were a direct outgrowth of local policy and regional self-interest.