Europe: A History (110 page)

BATAVIA

I
N
the mid-seventeenth century, several travellers to Amsterdam recorded their astonishment at the ‘drowning cell’ which they had seen, or heard about, in the city’s house of correction. In order to teach idle young men to work, the candidates for correction would be cast into a sealed cellar furnished only with a running tap and a hand-pump. Whenever they stopped working the pump, they were faced with the imminent prospect of drowning. This installation was a wonderful metaphor for the physical predicament of the Dutch Republic and its dykes. It is also a fine illustration of the country’s ‘moral geography’—what has been called ‘the Batavian Temperament’.
¹

The Dutch Republic in its heyday was famous for its commerce, for its cities, for its seapower, for its canals, windmills, and tulips, for its art, for its religious tolerance, for its black-and-white cattle, and for the puritanical culture of its burgher élite. The picture is true enough. But it provokes two major questions. One concerns the ambiguities which abound in the interplay of the component parts, the other concerns the miracle of how it all happened in the first place—’how a modest assortment of farming, fishing and shipping communities, with no shared language, religion or government, transformed itself into a world empire’. A leading historian of the subject stresses that the miracle was not the work of a class, but of a precocious ‘community of the nation’.
²

The central paradox of Dutch culture lies in the strange contradiction between its frugal, hard-working, God-fearing ethos and its ‘embarrassing’ storehouse of riches. The sober, dark-suited Dutch burghers loved feasting, adored tobacco, built sumptuous houses, furnished them lavishly, collected paintings, indulged in the vanity of portraiture, and amassed money. Sexual relations were relaxed. Family life was companionable rather than patriarchal. Women, by the standards of the time, were liberated, and children were cherished. The accepted practice for raising funds to help the poor was to organize a municipal lottery or an auction of gold, jewels, and silverware.

Over it all there reigned an inimitable freedom of spirit. It was accepted that wealth and security could only be gained by those who were game for the risk:

Here lies Isaac le Maire, merchant, who during his affairs throughout the world, by the grace of God, has known much abundance and has lost in thirty years (excepting his honour) over 150,000 guilders. Died as a Christian 30 September 1624.
³

Much of these matters were well known to Dutch scholars. But the task of recreating this distinctive
mentalité
for the world at large fell to a British scholar of Dutch-Jewish parentage. It has reopened the vexed question of whether national character really exists or not.

ALCOFRIBAS

T
HE
works of François Rabelais, ex-monk, ex-lawyer, and physician, form one of the richest mines of literary and historical treasure that early modern Europe can offer. But their eccentricity aroused the suspicions of an intolerant age, and were first published under the anagrammic pseudonym of Alcofribas Nasier. Studies by Lucien Febvre and of Mikhail Bakhtin illustrate the breadth of scholarly interest which they still arouse.

Febvre, co-founder of
Annales
, was drawn to Rabelais after learning that specialists were leaning to the notion that the inventor of Pantagruel and Gargantua had been a secret and militant atheist. Having invented the community of Thélème, whose only rule was
Fais ce que voudras
(‘Do whatever you would like’), no one could claim that Rabelais was a conventional religious thinker. On the other hand, to charge him with subversion of Christianity was a serious matter. Febvre, in response, produced one of the great surveys of ‘collective mentality’:
Le Problème de l’incroyance au XVI
^e
siècle
(1942). Having examined all the charges of scandal, and all the possible sources of irregular belief, in radical Protestantism, science, philosophy, and the occult, he concluded that Rabelais had shared ‘the deep religiosity’ of ‘a century which wanted to believe’.
¹

Bakhtin, a distinguished Russian Dostoevskian scholar, turned to Rabelais from an interest in psychology. Rabelais has had the reputation of being the master of the vulgar belly-laugh
[NEZ]
.
But he also enters that profounder realm where laughter mingles with tears. Bakhtin emerged with a hypothesis centred on Rabelais’s famous proposition that ‘laughter is the mark of humanity’. ‘To laugh is human, to be human is to laugh.’
Mieux est de rire que de larmes écrire. Pour ce que rire est le propre de l’homme
.

But Bakhtin suspects that modern civilization has seriously repressed this most human of qualities. Europeans, since Rabelais, have grown so inhibited that they only laugh at trivia. Indeed, they no longer know what is sacred in order to laugh at it. It is a profoundly pessimistic opinion parallel to the social analysis of Michel Foucault. One is left wondering whether Rabelais was not the last European to be truly human.
²
[CARITAS]

NEZ

I
N
1532 Rabelais described an imaginary duel of gestures between his fictional hero, Panurge, and an Englishman:

Then the Englishe man made this sign. His left hand all open he lifted into the aire, then … instantly shut the foure fingers thereof, and his thumb extended at length he placed upon the gristle of his nose. Presently, he lifted up his right hand all open, putting the thumb [beside] the little finger of his left hand; and the foure right hand fingers he softly moved in the aire. Then contrarily, he did with the right what he had done with the left, and with the left what he had done with the right.

According to a recent study, ‘thumbing the nose’ or ‘cocking a snoot’ is the most widespread of all European gestures. It conveys mockery. In France it is known as
le pied de nez
or ‘fool’s nose’, in Italy as
marameo
or ‘mewing’, in Germany as
die lange Nase
, in Portugal as
tocar tromfete
‘to blow the trumpet’, in Serbo-Croat as
sviri ti svode
‘to play the flute’. It is more common and less ambiguous than the Fingertips Kiss, the Temple Screw, the Eyelid Pull, the Forearm Jerk, the Ring, the Fig, the Nose Tap, and the V-sign—all of which have important regional and contextual variations.
¹

It is debatable whether there is a culture of gestures exclusive to Europe or to Christendom. But there is no doubt that gestures change over time. The English, who literally refused to kowtow in China, also abandoned bowing at home in the late eighteenth century, inventing the handshake as an easier form of sexless and classless greeting. ‘À l’anglaise donc’, said Madame Bovary in 1857 when offered a gentleman’s hand. In the twentieth century, however, the English became much more obstinately reticent, frequently refusing to shake hands while Continentals did so routinely.
²
They stand at the opposite end of the European spectrum to the Poles, whose readiness to bow, to embrace both sexes, and to kiss hands in public has survived two world wars, modernization, Fascism, and even Communism.

TORMENTA

A
T
the Midsummer’s Fair in mid-sixteenth-century Paris, cat-burning was a regular attraction. A special stage was built so that a large net containing several dozen cats could be lowered onto the bonfire beneath. The spectators, including kings and queens, shrieked with laughter as the animals, howling with pain, were singed, roasted, and finally carbonized. Cruelty was evidently thought to be funny.
¹
It played its part in many of Europe’s more traditional sports, including cock-fighting, bear-baiting, bull-fighting, and fox-hunting,
[LUDI]

Two hundred years later, on 2 March 1757, Robert François Damiens was condemned in Paris ‘to make honourable amends’:

He was brought in a tumbril, naked except for a smock, and carrying a torch of burning wax in his hand. The scaffold stood on the Place de Grève. Pincered at the breasts, arms, thighs and calves, his right hand holding the knife, with which he perpetrated the said act, he was to be burned on the hand with sulphur, to be doused at the pinion points with boiling oil, molten lead, and burning resin, and then to be dismembered by four horses, before his body was burned, reduced to ashes, and scattered to the winds.

When the fire was lit, the heat was so feeble that only the skin on the back of one hand was damaged. But then one of the executioners, a strong and robust man, grasped the metal pincers, each l 1/2 feet long, and by twisting and turning them, tore out huge lumps of flesh, leaving gaping wounds which were doused from a red-hot spoon.

Between his screams, Damiens repeatedly called out, ‘My God, take pity on me!’ and ‘Jesus, help me!’ The spectators were greatly edified by the compassion of an aged curé who lost no moment to console him.

The Clerk of the Court, the Sieur de Breton, went up to the sufferer several times, and asked him if he had anything to say. He said no …

The final operation lasted a very long time, because the horses were not used to it. Six horses were needed; but even they were not enough …

The executioner asked whether they should cut him in pieces, but the Clerk ordered them to try again. The confessors drew close once more, and he said ‘Kiss me, sires’, and one of them kissed him on the forehead.

After two or three more attempts, the executioners took out knives, and cut off his legs… They said that he was dead. But when the body had been pulled apart, the lower jaw was still moving, as if to speak … In execution of the decree, the last pieces of flesh were not consumed until 10.30 in the evening…
²

Damiens was being punished for attempted regicide. His immediate family were banished from France; his brothers and sisters were ordered to change their names; and his house was razed. He had approached Louis XV as the King was entering his carriage, and he had inflicted a small wound with a small knife. He made some sort of complaint about the Parlement. He made no attempt to escape, and said that he only wanted to give the King a fright. Nowadays, he would be assessed as a crank.

Torture had been an established feature both of legal proceedings and of executions since Roman times. St Augustine recognized its fallibility, but admitted its necessity. Torture at executions was thought to have a didactic purpose. Death was the least part of the penalty when the convict was to be impaled, disembowelled, burned at the stake, or broken on the wheel.
[VLAD]

Damiens’s death was the last of its kind in France. The Enlightenment did not approve. Shortly afterwards a Milanese, the Marquis Cesare Beccaria-Bonesana (1735–94), published a tract,
Dei delitti i delle pene
(‘On Crimes and Punishment’, 1764). It argued that torture was both improper and ineffective. Translated into many languages, with a preface by Voltaire, it was the catalyst of reform across Europe. It is widely seen as the starting-point of a long progressive trend which was to press first for humane methods of execution, and eventually for the abolition of the death penalty. The ‘cruelty curve’ was to decline until liberal opinion held that torture degrades, not the tortured, but the torturer and the torturer’s masters. But that was not the whole story. And torture in Europe did not come to an end.
⁴
[ALCOFRIBAS]