Literary Review - August 2007

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HISTORY

cultural themes (he is very good, for example, on Ealing Studios, and the early history of British pop music), but the core of his book, written to accompany the BBC television series, consists of a political narrative that begins with Churchill and Halifax arguing over the merits of a compromise peace in May 1940, and ends with Tony Blair’s supporters egging on David Miliband to stand against Gordon Brown. It is a tale of the rise and fall of ruling orthodoxies, punctuated by crises at home and abroad, and populated by a political class he observes with a broad scepticism, qualified by a degree of respect for individuals with decent and sincere convictions. Edward Heath and Neil Kinnock are both in his good books. The late Roy Jenkins, when asked about his researches into the life of Winston Churchill, replied that he had not felt it necessary ‘to go gwubbing about in the archives’. Andrew Marr has not been ‘gwubbing about’ either. In a strictly factual sense there is not much here that is not to be found in the work of other historians and biographers. But as in the days when he was the BBC’s chief political editor, it is the clarity of his judgements, the arresting insights and the irrepressible wit that keep us hanging on his words. Among his other qualities, Marr is the ideal history teacher that most people never had at school. I picture him, chalk in hand, leaping around the classroom and making the Suez affair or the ‘Winter of Discontent’ intelligible to the most backward pupil. Up his sleeve he carries a fund of funny stories and vivid metaphors to capture the attention of the class. Scotland, he writes, now feels more distant from England than it used to be, and the two countries are like ‘two pieces of pizza being gently pulled apart, still together but now connected only by strings of molten cheese’. Just so, and here he is on the workings of a bafflingly technical topic, the Exchange Rate Mechanism in the days of John Major: Europe’s old currencies ... were supposed to move in close alignment, like a flight of mismatched aircraft in tight formation. They would stick together against outsider currencies, notably the US dollar, behaving almost as if they were one currency. Speculators would not be able to drive them apart. Eventually, they would fuse and become one, which is where

How it all began...

the aircraft analogy falls down, because so would the aircraft. It is a measure of Marr’s professionalism that his judgements inspire the kind of trust which Tony Blair and his allies squandered through spin and outright lies. While not acquitting Blair of his share of responsibility for a disaster greater than Suez, Marr’s explanation of the sequence of events that led him step by step from success in Kosovo to the invasion of Iraq is notably fair-minded and almost awakens our sympathy. As for his claim that Frank Dobson, the first of Tony Blair’s Secretaries of State for Health, was ‘a staunch traditionalist and the man with the filthiest sense of humour in British politics’, who could doubt it? Not that he treats us to any of Dobson’s jokes. Marr is in fact very discreet about the private lives of politicians and only refers to sexual escapades when political history demands it. ‘This history’, Marr concludes with a flourish, ‘has told the story of the defeat of politics by shopping.’ All the visions promoted by the political elites, from the socialism of the Attlee governments to the modernising rhetoric of Wilson and Heath, the Victorian values of Mrs Thatcher, and the Blairite regime of bureaucratic centralism in schools and hospitals, have been rejected by a public that has retreated from citizenship into consumerism. With the role of the state much diminished, and conflicts over ideology and class largely forgotten, there is little now to connect the public and the politicians. It is doubtful, of course, whether the British ever trusted their rulers or ever took much more than a passing interest in politics. But Marr is surely right to argue that challenges such as climate change or the threat from militant Islam can only be met by a country which takes its politics more seriously. Sir John Reith, a pillar of the age of deference, would not have approved of Marr’s more irreverent remarks at the expense of the political elite and he might even have objected to his tactful description of Cherie Blair as ‘unreasonably frightened of not having enough money’. But he would surely have recognised in his fellow Scot another ambitious Reithian with a mission to educate as well as entertain. Seriousness has been out of fashion under Tony Blair, but it may be coming back under Gordon Brown, and not a moment too soon. To order this book at £20, see LR Bookshop on page 37

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LITERARY REVIEW August 2007

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HISTORY

MICHAELBURLEIGH FAILED STATES

THEFORCEOFDESTINY: A HISTORYOF ITALYSINCE1796

★

By Christopher Duggan (Allen Lane / The Penguin Press 688pp £30)

ATTHISTIMEof year many readers may be about to holiday in Italy. One indispensable item for the journey is Christopher Duggan’s brilliant and monumental The Force of Destiny, which deserves to be the standard history of modern Italy for the foreseeable future. Leave a pair of shoes at home and take Duggan instead. His chronological starting point, when much of the peninsula was overrun by Napoleonic armies, was unpropitious. Before, and for decades after the Risorgimento, Italy was merely the ‘geographical expression’ which Metternich had spoken of in 1847. The flat plains of the Po may have had good roads, but only two led to Rome and they were unsafe. Two roads snaked southwards, one through the malaria-ridden Pontine Marshes, but they both terminated at Naples, leaving Apulia, Basilicata and Calabria to their own devices. These regions and Sicily itself were best reached by sea. East-west travel across the Apennines was virtually impossible. By the 1840s, by which time a few Italian states had managed to construct 620 kilometres of railway track, Britain had 10,000, Germany 6,000 and France 3,000 kilometres respectively. Apparently there was a problem with tunnels; the Catholic Church thought darkness encouraged immorality. Since trade mostly went abroad from the ports, a national internal market evolved very slowly. Another major obstacle to communication was language, a problem common across nineteenth-century Europe. In 1861 only 10 per cent of the population spoke Italian, the vernacular Tuscan of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, while only a further 20 per cent could understand and read it, without speaking or writing it well. Eighty per cent of people spoke dialect. When two Milanese aristocrats visited Sicily’s mountainous interior in 1853, the inhabitants thought they were Englishmen. When Camillo Cavour visited the South after unification, he was always relieved to encounter priests, since they were the only locals who spoke Italian, a language that came less easily on paper to the Piedmontese statesman than French. All of which is to say that the peoples of Italy’s cities and villages had intense local attachments, of which the strongest was the ‘amoral familism’ that corrupted a Catholic virtue into a chauvinistic clannishness. The only exceptions to

this rule were the tiny minorities who pursued the utopian vision of a united Italy. They initially operated through successive conspiracies, often propagated and commemorated via literature, painting and song, subjects to which Duggan brings expert ears and eyes. Much of this product recalled vanished glories, or retouched epic events like the Crusades, the Sicilian Vespers or the voyages of Columbus in red, white and green. Patriotic opera-goers imposed their own meanings on works of Bellini and Verdi, shouting ‘Yes, Yes’ when the Druids shrieked ‘War, War’ in Norma, even though the Druids’ oppressors were Romans rather than the Austrians who ruled northern Italy. This reviewer is not going to quibble with the modish concept underlying most of the central chapters of the book. Duggan is a firm believer, so to speak, in the process whereby political movements sublimate religion (obviously Catholicism in this case), although he tends to assume, rather than prove, how that process of metastasis operates. Here we need a bit more empirical political science and less vivid anecdotage. The political religion of Italian nationalism was actively preached as a gospel by people who saw themselves as apostles or missionaries, for the only precedent for such a mass conversion was the propagation of Christianity by the early Church, and the northerly pools of heightened religiosity that resulted from the Counter-Reformation. The national movement was instrumentalised in the service of the colder-eyed ambitions of the Piedmontese state. As the author of a major biography of the politician Francesco Crispi, Duggan is extremely good on the mechanisms of postUnification nation-building, through primary education, military conscription into the armed forces, the saintly cults of Cavour and Garibaldi and so on, all areas in which Crispi played a leading role. But Duggan also highlights the manifold weaknesses of what resulted. The Catholic Church was unreconciled to the outcome for decades, instructing Catholics not to stand for office or to vote. There was a monarchy, but the King, Vittorio Emmanuele, could hardly bring himself to visit Rome. There was a parliament, at Montecitorio, but this was so poorly attended that there was often no quorum, while politics as such became a byword for clientelism and pork-barrel corruption in which railway lines were built in the middle of nowhere to assuage some shady interest. A system called ‘transformism’ became normative. It was almost worthy of Gordon Brown, in the sense that nominal opponents were ‘transformed’ into members of a vaguely progressive centrist government bloc, the leading practitioner of this being the liberal Giovanni Giolitti, a real political survivor. Leading intellectuals like Gaetano Mosca and Roberto Michels inveighed against such a system in which an ideational legal Italy was imperfectly imposed on the myriad squalors of the real place. Alliances with Austria

LITERARY REVIEW August 2007

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