Nietzsche was among those who saluted the all-conquering Corsican, due to whom ‘man has again become master over the businessman and the philistine’ and, more importantly, over women pampered by ‘modern ideas’. From across Europe, educated young men, suffering from the growth of aspirations, in Byron’s words, ‘beyond the fitting medium of desire’, rushed to fight for Greece’s independence, the Spanish Civil War of its day (and often died just as swiftly and futilely as Byron himself). Thousands of European young men also went off to South America to fight for soul-stirring but poorly understood causes.
Eugene Onegin in Pushkin’s verse novel, the first of the many ‘superfluous’ men in Russian fiction, wears a tony ‘Bolívar’ hat and possesses a statuette of Napoleon and a portrait of Byron (Pushkin, looking for a model freedom fighter in exile in the year of Byron’s death, alighted on the Prophet Mohammed in his cycle of poems, Imitations of the Quran). Russia, trying to catch up with the West, mass-produced spiritually unmoored youth with a quasi-Byronic conception of freedom, further inflated by German Romantics, but living in the most unpromising conditions in which to realize it. Rudin in Turgenev’s eponymous novel is one such ‘wandering outlaw of his own dark mind’. He wants to surrender himself ‘eagerly, completely’ to ‘some nonsense or other’; and ends up dead on a Parisian barricade in 1848.
Even the cossetted English poet Arthur Hugh Clough was moved to note the new burdens of longing and irresolution in Amours de Voyage, a verse novel based on the writer’s own troubled journey through Europe in 1848–9, in which the protagonist decides against plunging into the struggle for Italian freedom:
I do not like being moved: for the will is excited; and action
Is a most dangerous thing; I tremble for something factitious,
Some malpractice of heart and illegitimate process.
Others, such as Rimbaud, weren’t so fastidious. ‘I’m now making myself as scummy as I can,’ he wrote, still aged sixteen, ‘the idea is to reach the unknown by the derangement of all the senses.’ Claiming that ‘one must be absolutely modern’, the French poet moved from long-haired vagrancy in Europe and desertion in Java to gun-running in Ethiopia. Oscar Wilde hailed ‘sin’, an ‘intensified assertion of individualism’, as a necessary release from boredom, stagnation and mediocrity. In Suicide (1897), émile Durkheim grappled with a great mystery of his time: why a staggeringly high number of Europeans chose to kill themselves in an age of rapid economic growth, rising literacy, accelerated communications and increasing self-awareness.
Dostoyevsky had already seen acutely how individuals, trained to believe in a lofty notion of personal freedom and sovereignty, and then confronted with a reality that cruelly cancelled it, could break out of paralyzing ambivalence into gratuitous murder and paranoid insurgency – podvig, or the spectacular spiritual exploit to which characters in Dostoyevsky’s fiction aspire. Russian writers established randomly aimed crime as a paradigm case of free individuals savouring their identity and asserting their will. Mikhail Bakunin, however, was the most influential theorist of this reductio ad absurdum of the idea of individual freedom: the revolutionist, as he gleefully described this figure in 1869, has ‘severed every link with the social order and with the entire civilized world; with the laws, good manners, conventions, and morality of that world. He is its merciless enemy and continues to inhabit it with only one purpose – to destroy it.’ In actuality, too, motley groups of anarchists and nihilists revolted against, in Nikolai Berdyaev’s words, ‘the injustices of history, against false civilization’; they hoped that ‘history shall come to an end, and a new life, outside and above history, begin’.
Attempts at liberation from the burden of history – seen either as intolerable cliché or the pathway to the iron cage of modernity – and a revolution in human consciousness assumed a range of political, spiritual and aesthetic forms in the fin de siècle, from socialism, nationalism, anarchist nihilism and the Arts and Crafts movement, to Italian Futurism, Theosophy and Symbolist poetry. As liberal democracy tottered under the weight of mass politics, and global capitalism suffered its first major recession, mass manipulators emerged to clarify that, as Hugo von Hofmannsthal wrote, ‘politics is magic’ and ‘he who knows how to summon the forces from the deep, him will they follow’.
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This militant secession from a civilization premised on gradual progress under liberal-democrat trustees – a civilization felt as outrageously false and enfeebling – now rages far beyond Europe; and it is marked by a broader, deeper and more volatile desire for creative destruction, even as the fierce headwinds of globalization uproot many landmarks of politics and society.
In retrospect, Gabriele D’Annunzio’s revolt in Fiume crystallized many themes of our own global ferment as well as those of his spiritually agitated epoch: the ambiguous emancipation of the human will, the challenges and perils of individuality, the yearning for re-enchantment, flight from boredom, demented utopianism, the politics of direct action, self-surrender to large movements with stringent rules and charismatic leaders, and the cult of redemptive violence.
With his ‘contempt for women’, he and his Futurist admirers articulated a misogynist fantasy of domination brazenly proclaimed by racial and cultural chauvinists today. Briskly aestheticizing politics, this predecessor of today’s live-streaming militants outlined a likely endgame for a world in which, as Walter Benjamin wrote, the self-alienation of humankind ‘has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order’.
It is sobering to realize that when D’Annunzio opened up the prospects for Wagnerian politics as grand spectacle only about 20 per cent of humankind lived in countries that could even claim to be independent. In Asia and Africa, traditional religions and philosophies still offered to most people the basic and essential interpretation of the world that can give meaning to life, and create social ties and shared beliefs; there also existed a strong family structure and intermediate professional and religious institutions that defined the common good as well as individual identity. These traditional bonds – feudal, patriarchal, social – could be very oppressive. But they enabled human beings to coexist, deeply imperfectly, in the societies into which they had been born.