The Proud Tower

Barbara Tuchman “The Proud Tower: A portrait of the world before the War (1890-1914),” 1966, The Macmillan Co. 463 pp

Barbara Tuchman (1912—1989), a particularly renowned historian, is best known for “The Guns Of August” published in 1962, a book still considered a must read for anyone seriously interested in WWI, a book I read long before blogging existed.  “The Proud Tower” supplements understanding of that period by providing background of the world leading up to the WWI tragedy. This pre-war period had the most accelerated rate of change in history, a time of outlandish privilege alongside crushing poverty.  The Western European world was rapidly moving from agricultural to an industrial society.  We see the self-satisfied English aristocracy oblivious to the assault on their privilege, an assault replicated in all Western European countries as well as in the U.S.  This assault was from the miserable poor whose conditions gave rise to international anarchists.  It was a time “of expanding forces which were building tensions between classes and among nations.  Industrialization, imperialism, the growth of cities, the decline of the countryside, the power of money and the power of machines, the clenched fist of the working class, the red flag of Socialism, the wane of the aristocracy, all these forces and factors were churning like the bowels of a volcano about to erupt.” (P. 182) 


Tuchman concentrates on society rather than the usual historian’s preoccupation with the state.  She brings to life the Edwardian aristocracy and the end of their reign; the Anarchists and various shades of Socialists of Europe and America;  Germany and its’ Kaiser, with especial emphasis on Richard Strauss; the French Dreyfus Affair and all that affair illustrates of French society at this time, the U.S. and its’ rush to embrace Imperialism. 

My Notes:

Pg. 13:  In Great Britain before WWI there was a belief in the superior fitness conferred by inherited ownership of land and in the country’s need of the services of these superior people in governing the nation.  Their credo was the exact opposite of the idea prevailing in the more newly minted United States, that there was a peculiar extra virtue in being lowly born, that only the self-made carried the badge of ability and that men of easy circumstances were more likely than not to be stupid or wicked, if not both. 

Pg. 45:  Mr. Harry Chaplin was the visible symbol of the English country gentleman.  Undaunted by the most abstruse problems of government, he would tackle and advocate for such subjects as bimetallism as a cure for economic ills.  Once after a two-hour discourse on this recondite subject, he mopped his brow and leaning over to Mr. Balfour, asked, “How did I do, Arthur?”

            “Splendidly, Harry, splendidly.”

            “Did you understand me, Arthur?”

            “Not a word, Harry, not a word.”

Pg. 63:  So enchanting was the vision of a stateless society, without government, without law, without ownership of property, in which, corrupt institutions having been swept away, man would be free to be good as God intended him, that six heads of state were assassinated for its sake in the twenty years before 1914.  They were President Carnot of France in 1894, Premier Canovas of Spain in 1897, Empress Elizabeth of Austria in 1898, King Humbert of Italy in 1900, President McKinley of the U.S. in 1901, and another Premier of Spain, Canalejas, in 1912.  Not one could qualify as a tyrant.  Their deaths were the gestures of desperate or deluded men to call attention to the Anarchist idea.

Pg. 118:  In the U.S. the abdication of the rich from governing was born out of the success of the American Revolution and the defeat of Hamilton’s design to organize the State in the interests of the governing class.  Jefferson’s principles and Jackson’s democracy had won.  The founding fathers and the signers of the Declaration had been in the majority men of property and position, but the very success of their accomplishment ended by discouraging men of their own kind from participating in government.  With the establishment of universal manhood suffrage, men of property found themselves counting for no more at the polls than the common man; being far outnumbered they retired from the combat.  No President after the first six came from a well-established family.

Pg. 173:  The French Dreyfus Affair:  Evidence indicated that in 1894 military secrets had been passed to Germany by some artillery officer on the General Staff.  Dreyfus, besides fitting the requirements, was a Jew, the eternal alien.  As a person he was not liked by his brother officers.  Stiff, silent, cold and almost unnaturally correct, he was without friends, opinions or visible feelings. His guilt was immediately presumed.  When motive and material proof could not be found, the officers who were charged with the inquiry made up for it by helpful construction and fabrication.  The dossier they assembled, later to be known as the “Secret File,” was persuasive enough to cause the General Staff chiefs sincerely to believe Dreyfus guilty, but it lacked legal proof.  The Secret File was submitted to the judges but withheld from the Defense.  The death penalty for political crimes having been abolished in 1848, the sentence was life imprisonment.  On the prisoner’s refusal to confess and persistence in maintaining his innocence, he was ordered confined to Devil’s Island.  This was a barren rock off the coast of South America, two miles long and five hundred feet wide.  Here Dreyfus was confined alone but for his guards. 

Pg. 263:  During the 1899 Hague convention the U.S. stood alone and fought for the right to use gas in warfare.  The U.S. was joined by Great Britain in the stand to allow dum-dum (expanding) bullets.

Pg. 299:  Nietzsche’s alluring concept of ‘rule by the best,’ of a new aristocracy which would lead humanity to a higher plane, of man rising to superior fulfillment to become Ubermensch, seduced the imagination of Europe.  It stirred both the yearning hope of human progress as well as the beginning disillusionment with democracy.  Nietzsche rejected the democratic idea of equal rights for all men as hampering natural leaders from realizing their full capacities.  Where Lord Salisbury had feared democracy as leading to political, and Charles Eliot Norton to cultural debasement, Nietzsche saw it as a ball and chain holding man back from his highest attainment.  He saw the dominant weight of mass tastes, opinions and moral prejudices as a ‘slave morality.’  Mankind’s leaders should live by a ‘master morality’ above common concepts of good and evil.  The goal of human evolution was the Ubermensch, the higher man, the ‘artist-genius’ who would be to ordinary man as ordinary man was to the monkey.

Pg. 304:  Prussia had enforced full-time school attendance for children from seven to fourteen since the 1820’s and by the nineties had two and a half times as many university students in proportion to the population as England. 

Pg. 408:  In 1899 Great Britain the twelve-hour day and seven-day week were normal for unorganized labor.  Sunday rest and the ten or nine hour day were the hard-won privileges of skilled labor in the craft unions, which represented barely one-fifth of the labor force. 

Pg. 409:  Both the Socialists and Anarchists believed that collective ownership was the answer to the terrible riddle posed by the Nineteenth Century: that the greater the material progress, the wider and deeper the resulting poverty.  Marx drew from the riddle the central theme of his system: that this inherent contradiction within capitalism would bring about its breakdown.  He proved it from the economic analysis of history.  The effect of the Industrial Revolution had been to transform the worker from an independent producer who owned his own tools into a factory hand, a propertyless, destitute member of society, dependent for his livelihood on the capitalist who owned the means of production.  Through the capitalist’s accumulation of profits derived from the surplus value of the worker’s product, the exploiters were becoming richer and the exploited poorer.  The process could only end in the violent collapse of the existing order.  Trained in class consciousness and prepared for this event, the working class would, at the moment of ripeness, rise in revolution to usher in the new order.

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Pg. 459:  At the end of June 1914 news that Serbian patriots had assassinated the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, in Sarajevo Bosnia, provided a sensation of the kind to which Europe was accustomed.  It passed without causing undue public alarm.  Then suddenly, a month later, on July 24, with terrible impact came the announcement that Austria had delivered an ultimatum to Serbia of such ‘brutality,’ that it could only be interpreted as a deliberate attempt to provoke war.