of 1956, when the sympathies of most European intellectuals would swing sharply away from the Soviet bloc, the Atlantic orientation of most other Western Europeans had been decided.
CODA
The End of Old Europe
‘Life changed surprisingly little after the war’.
‘I spent my early years in factory towns and their adjacent suburbs, amid bricks and soot and smokestacks and cobbled streets. We took streetcars for short trips and trains for long ones. We bought food fresh for every meal, not because we were gourmets but because we lacked a refrigerator (less perishable substances were kept in the root cellar). My mother got up every morning in the chill and made a fire in the parlor stove. Running water came in only one temperature: frigid. We communicated by mail and got our news chiefly from newspapers (we were sufficiently modern, though, in that we owned a radio roughly the size of a filing cabinet). My early classrooms featured pot-bellied stoves and double desks with inkwells, into which we dipped our nibs. We boys wore short pants until the ceremony of
This description of industrial Wallonia in the 1950s, by the Belgian author Luc Sante, could as well be applied to most of western Europe in these years. The present author, who grew up after the war in the inner- London district of Putney, recalls frequent visits to a murky sweetshop run by a wizened old woman who advised him reproachfully that she had ‘been selling gobstoppers to little boys like you since the Queen’s Golden Jubilee’— i.e. since 1887: she meant Victoria of course—
In many of its essential features, daily life in the first decade after World War Two would have been thoroughly familiar to men and women of fifty years earlier. In these years coal still met nine-tenths of Britain’s fuel requirements, 82 percent of the needs of Belgium and the other countries of the new European Coal and Steel Community. Thanks in part to the omnipresence of coal-fires London—a city of trams and docks—was still periodically shrouded in the damp fog so familiar from images of the industrial city of late-Victorian times. British films from those years have a distinctly Edwardian feel—either in their social setting (e.g.
The same sense of suspended time hung over much of continental Europe too. Rural life in Belgium could have been depicted by Millet: the hay gathered with wooden rakes, the straw beaten with flails, fruits and vegetables handpicked and transported on horse-drawn carts. Like French provincial towns, where men in berets really did collect a baguette on their way home from the corner Cafe de la Paix (typically named in 1919), or Spain, sealed in aspic by Franco’s authoritarian rule, Belgium and Britain hung in a sort of delayed Edwardian limbo. Post-war Europe was still warmed by the fading embers of the nineteenth-century economic revolution that had almost run its course, leaving behind sedimentary evidence of cultural habits and social relations increasingly at odds with the new age of airplanes and atomic weapons. If anything, the war had set things in reverse. The modernizing fervor of the 1920s and even the 1930s had drained away, leaving behind an older order of life. In Italy, as in much of rural Europe, children still entered the job market upon completing (or more likely not completing) their primary education; in 1951 only one Italian child in nine attended school past the age of thirteen.
Religion, especially the Catholic religion, basked in a brief Indian summer of restored authority. In Spain the Catholic hierarchy had both the means and the political backing to re-launch the Counter-Reformation: in a 1953 concordat, Franco granted the Church not merely exemption from taxation and all state interference, but also a right to request censorship of any writing or speech to which it objected. In return the ecclesiastical hierarchy maintained and enforced the conservative conflation of religion with national identity. Indeed, the Church was now so thoroughly integrated into narratives of national identity and duty that the leading primary school history textbook,
To this was added a new cult of the dead—the ‘martyrs’ of the victorious side in the recent Civil War. At the thousands of memorial sites dedicated to victims of anti-clerical Republicanism, the Spanish Church organized countless ceremonies and memorials. A judicious mix of religion, civic authority and victory commemoration reinforced the spiritual and mnemonic monopoly of the clerical hierarchy. Because Franco needed Catholicism even more than the Church needed him—how else maintain Spain’s tenuous post-war links to the international community and the ‘West’?—he gave it, in effect, unrestricted scope to re-create in modern Spain the ‘Crusading’ spirit of the
Elsewhere in Western Europe the Catholic Church had to reckon with competing and hostile claims on popular allegiance; but even in Holland the Catholic hierarchy felt confident enough to excommunicate electors who voted for its Labour opponents in the first post-war elections. As late as 1956, two years before the death of Pius XII marked the end of the old order, seven out of ten Italians regularly attended Sunday Mass. As in Flanders, the Church in Italy did especially well among Monarchists, women and the elderly—a clear majority of the population as a whole. Article 7 of the Italian Constitution approved in March 1947 judiciously confirmed the terms of Mussolini’s 1929 Concordat with the Church: the Catholic hierarchy retained its influence in education and its oversight power in everything pertaining to marriage and morals. At Togliatti’s insistence even the Communist Party voted reluctantly for the law, though this did not stop the Vatican excommunicating Italians who voted for the PCI the following year.
In France, the Catholic hierarchy and its political supporters felt sufficiently confident to press for special educational privileges in a ‘
Of Europe’s traditional religions, only the Catholics were increasing the number of their active constituents in the forties and fifties. This was partly because only the Catholic Church had political parties directly associated with it (and in some cases beholden to it for support)—in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, France and Austria; and partly because Catholicism was traditionally implanted in just those regions of Europe which were the slowest to change in these years. But above all the Catholic Church could offer its members something that was very much missing at the time: a sense of continuity, of security and reassurance in a world that had altered violently in the past decade and was about to be transformed even more dramatically in the years to come. It was the Catholic Church’s association with the old order, indeed its firm stand against modernity and change, which gave it a special appeal in these transitional years.
The various Protestant churches of north-west Europe had no such allure. In Germany a significant segment of the non-Catholic population was now under Communist rule; the standing of the German Evangelical churches was in any case somewhat diminished by their compromise with Hitler, as the Stuttgart Confession of Guilt by the
