Culture Mobilized

The half-century prior to 1914 was not just a belle époque of world fairs and art nouveau; it was also a period of increasingly contentious international relations, characterized by the developing force of public opinion. Patriotic humanities scholars acquired a new role as public intellectuals, ‘explaining the ways of history to men’. The French–German debates over Germany’s annexation of Alsace-Lorraine in 1871 were a formative moment in the longer time-frame of alternating lost wars between 1804 and 1918, marking the crystallization of French revanchism and German triumphalism. These debates became the breeding ground, paradoxically, both of Ernest Renan’s seminal and still authoritative ‘voluntaristic’ theory of national identity and of a type of chauvinistic propaganda that reached almost hysterical levels in 1914. The fervent jingoism of the Great War, fomented and rationalized by learned disquisitions from prestigious academics, marks the zenith of nationalism as a force in European relations. One committed participant, Emile Durkheim, recognized that self-righteous patriotism could lead to something like national narcissism.