Postwar

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.[150]

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 Francois 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 Opera, the Comedie Francaise—and the state-monopolized radio and television stations. But after De Gaulle returned to power and installed Andre Malraux as his Minister for Culture, the situation there was transformed.

The French state had long played the part of mecene. 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 Casares, Gerard Philipe—worked in Avignon. It was there, as well as in such unlikely venues as Saint-Etienne, 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.

In Germany, as elsewhere in Western Europe, public spending on the arts expanded quite dramatically in the post-war decades. But because cultural and educational matters in West Germany fell under the authority of the Lander, there was considerable duplication of effort. Every Land and most significant towns and cities had an opera company, orchestra and concert halls, a dance company, subsidized theatre and arts groups. By one estimate there were 225 local theatres in West Germany by the time of reunification, their budget subsidized by an amount varying from 50-70 percent, either by Land or by city. As in France, this system had its roots in the past—in Germany’s case the pre-modern micro-principalities, duchies and ecclesiastical fiefs, many of which had maintained full-time court musicians and artists, and regularly commissioned new works.

The benefits were considerable. Despite the cultural self-doubt of post-Nazi West Germany, the country’s generously financed cultural institutions became a Mecca for artists of all kinds. The Stuttgart Ballet, the Berlin Symphony Orchestra, the Cologne Opera and dozens of smaller institutions—the Mannheim National Theatre, the Staatstheater of Wiesbaden and so on—offered steady work (as well as unemployment benefits, medical coverage and pensions) to thousands of dancers, musicians, actors, choreographers, theatre technicians and office staff. Many of the dancers and musicians especially came from abroad, the US included. They, no less than the local audiences who paid subsidized rates to watch and hear them perform, benefited hugely from the flourishing European cultural scene.

Just as the 1960s never really happened in many places until the early seventies, so the stereotyped 1950s—staid, stuffy, sterile, stagnant—were largely mythical. In Look Back in Anger, John Osborne has Jimmy Porter revile the phoniness of post-war prosperity and self-satisfaction; and there is no doubt that the veneer of polite conformity that was not swept away until the end of the decade was intensely frustrating to many observers and especially the young.[151] But in fact the 1950s saw much original work—a lot of it, in theatre, literature and cinema especially, of more enduring interest