Barbara W. Tuchman, The Proud Tower: A History of the World Before the War, 1890-1914. New York: Macmillan, 1966. 528 pp.The First World War's centennial inspired a blizzard of books examining both its origins and military conduct. Despite volumes from formidable writers like Christopher Clark, Max Hastings and Margaret Macmillan, the standard remains Barbara Tuchman's books on the war's origins. Undoubtedly there are more scholarly writers than Tuchman, an unabashed "popular historian," but none are as readable and engaging; for that matter, few are as insightful.
A former writer for The Nation, American Heritage and other periodicals, Tuchman first gained fame writing The Guns of August (1962), a blow-by-blow account of the war's opening month, a best-seller which earned her a Pulitzer Prize (which we'll review separately, if time and opportunity permit). Her next book, The Proud Tower (1966), is a prequel to that earlier work, sketching the prewar tensions in Europe and America with entertaining portraiture and vivid, telling detail.
Barbara Tuchman
In retrospect, society came to view the prewar period as a lost idyll of prosperity and progress. Violet Bonham Carter, for instance, called Edwardian England "was a time of booming trade, of great prosperity and wealth in which the pageant of London Society took place year after year in a setting of traditional dignity and beauty." Tuchman explodes this myth by showing a mixture of torpor and tumult beneath the West's civilized skin. "A phenomenon of such extended malignance as the Great War does not come out of a Golden Age" (xiv), Tuchman observes, showing that the tensions that produced conflict were inseparable from their ages.Where The Guns of August follows a straightforward narrative, The Proud Tower consists of complementary but self-contained essays on different countries and social movements. The driving tension lies within nations as often as between them, conflicts of class and national identity. We read, for instance, about England's conflict between the landed aristocracy under the affably footloose Edward VII and middle class parliamentarians. Sometimes the tension produced genuflection, as when socialist Robert Blatchford converts Lady Warwick to socialism (29-30); other times scorn or incomprehension, as when Arthur Balfour praises a parliamentary colleague whose words he can't understand (45).
Edward VII
Tuchman's at her best in these segments, chiding the House of Lords for "lean[ing] back comfortably and follow[ing] its natural bent, which was to do as little work as possible" (36) and encouraging dissent and violent rebellion. Or the conservative military establishment who kept the British Army "fully prepared for the Crimean War" (57) and unable to best the Boers, let alone Germany. Or nobles like Spencer Compton Cavendish, Duke of Devonshire, a high-ranking Lord who embodies a class secure in its superiority, obsessed with leisure and infuriated by minor slights (43):At a dinner party in 1895 [Cavendish] arrived tired and hungry after a long day in Committee and sulked in silence when the first courses proved to be fancy but insubstantial French dishes instead of the solid fare that liked. When a roast beef was brought in, he exclaimed "Hurrah! something to eat at last" and thereafter joined in the conversation...Eighteen years later [author Wilfred] Ward met the Duke again at the British Embassy in Rome and confronted by a blank face reminded him of the place of their previous meeting. Thereupon the Duke exclaimed with feeling, "Of course I remember. We had nothing to eat." The inadequate French dishes..."had dwelt in his mind for nearly twenty years."
There is also an illuminating chapter on the Dreyfus Affair, focusing on the false conviction of Captain Alfred Dreyfus for espionage. Still smarting from the humiliation of the Franco-Prussian War and the failed Paris Commune, precariously perched between Republic and reaction, France inflated this incident into a cause celebre that sharply divided the country. From 1897 through 1899, as the Comte de Vogue observed, "The finest souls in France flung themselves at each other with an equal nobility of sentiments exasperated by their fearful conflict" (171).
France's Civil War of Words
For conservatives (France's military and government establishment), the case became an issue of France's honor, with Dreyfus a stand-in for the Jews and secular liberals who sought to erode it. The French Left (Georges Clemenceau) joined with intellectuals (Emile Zola) and honest soldiers (Colonel Georges Picquert) who valued a free society over national chauvinism. Even after uncovering the real spy, Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, the French government refused to admit its mistake for years, imprisoning Dreyfus on Devil's Island and shaming France before the world.At the same time, the United States evolved from the Gilded Age's corrupt stupor into an empire. Urged by expansionists like Theodore Roosevelt and Alfred Mahan, America declared war against Spain, leaping upon her colonial possessions in Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. For every Admiral Mahan who proclaimed "The jocund youth of our people now passes away never to return; the cares and anxieties of manhood's years hence forth are ours" (157), there was a William James who decried "the way the country puked up its ancient principles at the first touch of temptation" (161).
Despite America's quick victory over Spain, a bloody guerrilla war in the Philippines showed the consequences of their new "cares and anxieties." "The public was not happy about the Philippine adventure and confused as to its duty," Tuchman writes (159). As the war dragged on, a curious alliance of old-time conservatives (Speaker of the House Thomas B. Reed), industrial magnates (Andrew Carnegie) and progressives (William Jennings Bryan, Mark Twain) united against the war. Their efforts caused much sound and fury, but affected little. The United States still wrestles with its identity as outwardly benevolent republic and reluctant empire.
America becomes an empire
A long, uneven but intermittently fascinating chapter views Germany's increasing bellicosity through the lens of kultur. Richard Strauss dominates the chapter, a pompous composer whose baroque works infuriate Kaiser Wilhelm but capture the spirit of a sick age. Tuchman views with fright Strauss's operas (especially the hyper-violent Elektra), Frank Wedekind's despairing Spring Awakening and Pandora's Box, and Frederic Nietzsche's ubermensch philosophies as embodying a national affliction; in the words of one observer, "a torrent of sex foaming over jagged rocks of insanity and crime" (322).Tuchman treats the prominence of these death-cult thinkers and artists as no coincidence; their violent pessimism provide an illuminating extension of German character, more conventionally embodied in its overseas ambitions, swelling military and blustering, warlike Kaiser. After all, Thomas Mann, in 1914, would proclaim "German Kultur will enlighten the world" as German troops razed Belgium and invaded France. In Wilhemine Germany, art and bellicosity worked hand-in-hand, two sides of a dangerous coin.
The Hungry Kaiser
Less satisfactorily, Tuchman also depicts rising tides of radicalism. She contrasts the muddled, murderous nihilism of turn-of-the-century anarchists, who bombed restaurants and assassinated kings, tsars and presidents without real hope for success, with the era's determined but disorganized socialist movements. Tuchman provides brief but lively accounts of poverty and labor unrest - the Homestead and Pullman strikes in America, Spain's "Tragic Week" of 1909 - yet her analyses of their ideology often prove muddled and patronizing.The book's major faults, though, are egregious sins of omission. Tuchman admits that "my process has been admittedly highly selective" (xv) yet many of these excluded topics seem too obvious for any writer to ignore. This makes long segments of The Proud Tower not only incomplete but unsatisfactory.
For one, Tuchman's England is so ensconced in its do-nothing nobility that she barely mentions their colonial adventures. Britain fought major wars in Sudan, South Africa and China during the period in question, yet none of these conflicts earns more than a few sentences. Only the Anglo-French showdown with Germany in Morocco warrants any detailed explication, as part of Tuchman's chapter on peacemaking efforts. Surely this violent British expansionism contrasts or complements their domestic complacency, but Tuchman doesn't finesse the issue, merely ignoring it.
Bad faith peace negotiations
One also questions why so many players in the Great War remain mostly off-page. Tsar Nicholas II stumbles in and out of the narrative, dismissed (not unfairly) as "a narrow, rather dull-witted young man of no vision" (236) who battles anarchists and convenes peace conferences without generating a personality. Tuchman discusses the abortive Russian Revolution of 1905 without connection to the Russo-Japanese War which helped trigger it. But Russia fares better than other future belligerents - Austria-Hungary, Serbia, Ottoman Turkey and Italy - who barely warrant mentioning.Even so, Tuchman perfectly encapsulates era's essential tragedy. Everyone seemed to sense the brewing conflict, yet did little to stop it. Two peace conferences at the Hague in 1899 and 1907 achieve nothing, with none of the concerned powers willing to do more than mouth platitudes. "To renounce war is in a sense to renounce one's country," a French attendee declared (252), while British Admiral Jacky Fisher asserted that "The supremacy of the British Navy is the best security for the peace of the world" (259). Aside from token humanitarian concessions like outlawing dum-dum bullets, these negotiations foundered.
For many leaders, examining the internal dissent rending their own countries, sought to direct their energies externally. Kaiser Wilhelm, with a huge Army, new Navy and outsized ambitions, eagerly challenged her rivals on and off the continent, admitted his intention to "rely on God and my sharp sword!" (266) And French author Romain Rolland, riled by the Dreyfus Affair, proclaimed "I would rather have this life of combat than the mortal calm of mournful stupor of these last years. God give me struggle, enemies, howling crowds, all the combat of which I'd be capable" (204).Given this bellicosity, it's little surprised that high-minded sentiments for peace failed. What's stunning is how little the participants tried, how eager they were for conflict, acting as if these conferences were merely a dumb show to convince themselves that they were, indeed, civilized. Soon Romain Rolland, and the rest of the Western World, would receive a "life of combat" beyond their wildest dreams.
Other historical book reviews:
- From the Jaws of Victory (1970, Charles Fair)
- The Reason Why (1953, Cecil Woodham-Smith)
- The Siege (1970, Russell Braddon)
- The Sad, Sorry World of Watergate Memoirs
