Forget Citizenship Tests - What about History?

According to figures released by the Conservative Party today, just 31 percent of schoolchildren in England and Wales study History to GCSE level. Astonishingly, since 1997, over five million children have taken no GCSE in History. Forget citizenship lessons, it is a knowledge of the history of oneself and others that equips people to deal most adequately with their place in the world. Ironically these figures are released the day after Niall Ferguson, at the Hay Literary Festival, pointed out that economists got the credit crunch so spectacularly wrong largely because they were not trained to think historically. ‘There are economic professors in American universities who think they are the masters of the universe,’ said Ferguson. ‘But they didn’t have any historical knowledge. I have never believed that markets are self-correcting. No historian could.’ In Britain’s primary schools history is to be merged (or submerged) into the new discipline of ‘historical, geographical and social understanding’. No further comment is needed.

Speaker ousted and an information revolution

There is much grinding and gnashing of teeth in the broadsheets today over the plight of Britain’s parliamentary democracy. Michael Martin became the first speaker to be ousted from his chair since John Trevor 300 years ago, in the wake of the Members’ expenses scandal played out on a daily basis in the Telegraph and which has effected all parties. Much has been made of Martin’s working-class origins and his Catholicism (he’s the first Catholic to hold the chair since the era of Cromwell), but he is as much the product of a culture of vested interests – in this case, the old, male Labour aristocracy that, until very recently, kept an iron grip on the industrial West of Scotland – as any Old Etonian. And there have been many other recent speakers of impeccable working-class roots such as George Thomas and Betty Boothroyd who have encountered little prejudice (indeed Thomas, a devout Methodist, was accused of sectarianism himself).

However, they lacked Martin’s breathtaking inarticulacy (surely a problem for a Speaker). Reform, though on what scale, now looks inevitable, as does a general election and a trouncing for the Labour Party in the European elections on June 4th. Taking the long view, as historians should, we might draw parallels with the 17th century. No, there probably won’t be a civil war, but we are seeing an information revolution akin to that of the popular printing revolution. The result is an ongoing revolution in ideas, the belief that information should be accessible to all and that new ideas of governance can be expressed by all. Rather than be pessimistic about the future, history suggests we have grounds for optimism. In early modern Britain, the print revolution and the ferment of ideas that resulted, climaxed in the Glorious Revolution, the ‘first modern revolution’, in Steve Pincus’s phrase, that gave us remarkable financial and political innovations that benefitted Britain (and, arguably, the rest of the world) enormously.

Democrats can find good news elsewhere. In India, Monmohan Singh’s Congress Party has won that huge democracy’s 15th election. Even in the contested region of Jammu and Kashmir, the election passed off peacefully, and nationwide there was a 60 per cent turn out (60 per cent of which is under 35). It was a huge setback for the extremist Hindu nationalist BJP under their leader Lal Kishen Advani. Notable is the religious tolerance displayed by the electorate: PM Singh is a Sikh, while the Italian-born Roman Catholic Sonia Gandhi, formed a mother and son political double act with Rahul Gandhi, great-grandson of Jawaharlal. India is still wracked by poverty and bewildering bureaucracy, but democracy remains vibrant in a country whose economy will soon surpass that of its former colonial master.

A Lesson for Political Elites from the French Third Republic

The expressions of public disgust that have followed the Daily Telegraph's revelations over MPs' expenses is a new phenomenon in Britain - but not elsewhere in Europe. The scandal carries echoes, for example, of the Tangentopoli affair in Italy in the early 1990s. This exposure of the corruption of the Italian governing elite led to the implosion of the political system that had misgoverned Italy since the war. It triggered the extinction of the two major political parties, involved - the Christian Democrats and the Socialists - and led to the rise of Silvio Berlusconi.

An even more disturbing parallel with Westminster's 'troughgate' however, is offered by the political violence that convulsed Paris in February 1934, which led to 15 deaths and more than a thousand injuries. Many see these February riots as a critical watershed - the main event that undermined France's Third Republic, and made the debacle of 1940 all but inevitable.

The Republic had never been widely loved or even respected. Born in September 1870 at the hour of France's greatest defeat and humiliation at the hands of Bismarck's Prussia, the Republic was hated by both France's extreme Right and Left. The Right, ranging from monarchists who had never accepted the French Revolution, to the ultramontane Catholic clergy and the army's officer corps, regarded the Republic as the bastard child of defeat and revolution, and worked continually to discredit it. The Left, representing the rising masses of the industrial working class, blamed the Republic for the bloody repression of the 1870 Paris Commune. Republican legitimacy, in fact, rested on a dangerously narrow base, largely consisting of the professions which gave France its centre-left ruling political class : lawyers, journalists, teachers and academics.

As with current events at Westminster, the issue that truly enraged public opinion was the financial affairs of politicians. Most Parliamentary deputies were widely - and often rightly - thought to be 'on the take' from some crooked financier or vested interest and even the most distinguished politicians were deeply distrusted. Despite leading modest lifestyles (their second homes were both one-storey bungalows), the rivals Georges Clemenceau and Joseph Caillaux, for example, were attacked for their alleged corruption.

During one election campaign, Clemenceau was followed from meeting to meeting by hired hecklers who barracked him mercilessly with yells of 'Ah Yes!' - a not so subtle reference to rumours that he was in the pay of English interests. Caillaux, for his part, was remorselessly savaged by the conservative newspaper Le Figaro; - the French equivalent of the Daily Telegraph, - for his allegedly pro-German policy in the lead up to the First World War. So viciously personal did the attacks become that Caillaux's wife Henriette was provoked into shooting dead the paper's editor, Gaston Calmette, in his office on the eve of the war. Even this, however, did not finish Caillaux's political career.

Two major scandals at the end of the 19th century brought the Republic's shaky reputation to its lowest ebb. In one, a deputy named Daniel Wilson, the son-in-law of President Jules Grevy, was found to be selling favours and contracts directly from the Elysée Palace itself, forcing Grevy's resignation. In the Panama scandal of 1892, Fernand de Lesseps, the engineering genius who had built the Suez Canal, was found to be illegally selling shares in his next venture - the company digging the Panama canal - to politicians. Clemenceau was among those implicated, along with Lesseps' fellow engineer Gustav Eiffel - the man who built the tower.

Popular perceptions that all French politicians were corrupt crooks were by now deeply entrenched,. They were the chief raison d'etre of Action Francaise, a powerful ultra-rightist and monarchist movement founded in the wake of the Dreyfus affair, which continued to grow for the next 30 years. Charles Maurras, the movement's leader, held the Republic to be illegitimate and unrepresentative of le pays réel - the true France. Leon Daudet, the brilliantly scurrilous editor of the Action Francaise newspaper, tirelessly castigated what he described as 'A Government of thieves and assassins'. Trust in the Republic and its political representatives was undermined at the beginning of 1934 by the Stavisky scandal, in which Serge Stavisky, a Russian-born fraudster, was found to have been running multiple 'Ponzi scheme' frauds protected by political friends in high places.

When Stavisky was found shot dead, Action Francaise screamed murder and brought its militants on to the streets along with members of half-a-dozen paramilitary, proto-fascist Leagues even further to the right. For the first time in the 20th century, a French Government was threatened with overthrow by mobs enraged by the financial dishonesty of their masters. On 6th February, the columns of the Leagues, along with members of the French Communist Party, converged on the Place de Concorde, site of the guillotine in 1789. The demonstrators were now after the blood of the politicans in the nearby Chamber of Deputies and a pitched battle developed with the police protecting the chamber.

Slashing the flanks of police horses with razors, rolling marbles under their hooves and pelting the police with missiles, the furious demonstrators repeatedly charged the thin police lines, pushing them back towards the Chamber of Deputies. Shooting broke out, 15 people died and a further 1,435 were wounded in the worst fighting Paris had seen since the Commune. The next day the main target of the rioters' wrath, radical Premier Edouard Daladier resigned and was replaced by a veteran conservative, Gaston Doumergue. Action Francaise and the other Leagues had claimed a political scalp but they had not succeeded in their ultimate aim of bringing down the Third Republic.

That honour belonged to Hitler when his blitzkrieg burst through the feeble French defences in 1940. But the Third Republic had died long before. Beset by constant scandals, split between Left and Right, rejected altogether by powerful and influential sections of the French population, it's little short of a miracle that it lasted 70 years. When it did die, it was already a hollow shell, despised by its own people. The history of the Third Republic is the story of a self-fulfilling prophecy: an object lesson in what happens when a political elite really did behave as shabbily as its many enemies accused them of doing. Perhaps our own rulers should study it.

Mobile Culcha

Marcel Berlins has a timely piece in the Guardian today on the ubiquity of mobile phones in museums; not used for conversation, of course, but as cameras. The British Museum is plagued by this phenomenon, as is the V&A’s current Baroque exhibition; of tourists standing arms outstretched capturing the image of an object that they will no doubt never look at again. If they were to, they would be better off buying a postcard, contributing to the museum’s coffers in the process.

What is worse, as Berlins observes, are visitors having their picture taken before an object – the Rosetta Stone, for example – to prove they were there. It’s OK, we believe you; we’d be more impressed if you developed your memory beyond the capacity of a goldfish. Perhaps museum staff should point such purveyors of rudeness in the direction of Frances A Yates classic The Art of Memory in which the great scholar elucidates the mnemonic techniques employed by the likes of Dante and Cicero. Then again, museum authorities could just take the sensible and welcome step to ban the use of mobiles for any purpose within their confines, just as classical music venues and theatres do. Or would the current ‘culcha’ secretary, Andy Burnham, override such restrictions on ‘access’ to the mnemonically impaired?

The Prime Minister who took the bus to work

One of my most cherished possessions is a lithograph, This England, by the Polish exile Feliks Topolski. It was part of the Schoolprints collection commissioned as the Second World War came to an end by the husband and wife team of Brenda and Derek Rawnsley. Derek, a pilot, was killed before the conflict was over. The series was commissioned so that impoverished schoolchildren would have the chance to look at something ‘good’ as they laboured in their classrooms. At its centre are the wartime leaders Winston Churchill and Clement Atlee, the Cavalier and Puritan united for the nation’s good, surrounded by its institutions: the army, the police, the judiciary, the church and the people. It may be significant that Topolski had survived the carnage of his native Poland to become a British citizen in 1947. He wasn’t embarrassed by democracy and freedom, and his is a wonderfully romantic and inspiring vision of Britain, made all the more appealing by the current slew of sleaze emanating from the Commons.

Frank Field, the MP for Birkenhead whose personal integrity and moral centre mark him out as a shining light among our current crop of parliamentarians, has collected an intriguing array of writings by Atlee, the modest and clear-minded politician who took the bus to work. Attlee’s Great Contemporaries: The Politics of Character is published by Continuum at the end of this month. Atlee’s book reviews, are especially striking, precise and measured, benefitting from his proximity to the great people and events of his day. In a review of Violet Bonham Carter’s account of her friendship with Churchill, Atlee describes the great war leader (and his fierce political rival) as a mix of ‘energy and poetry’. Perfect. In the essay, ‘The Pleasure of Books’, Atlee ponders his own library of 3,000 volumes. Recalling his early love of Rossetti and Browning, as he grows older he finds himself drawn ever more to Shakespeare and Milton. He prefers Trollope to Dickens, and Austen to all. He praises Gibbon and ‘sundry Italians: Machiavelli and Cellini and, of course, Dante.’ He wears his learning as easily as he bore great responsibility. Today’s politicians prefer to draw attention to the football team they support. Such is the cultural cringe.

But bright spots remain. Yesterday BBC Radio 3 was named Radio Station of the Year. Though the core of its content remains classical music, its history output is considerable. In a year when the 400th anniversary of John Milton’s birth was wilfully neglected by much of the media, Radio 3 broadcast readings of Samson Agonistes and Anton Lesser’s astonishing performance of Paradise Lost. Night Waves, the excellent evening discussion programme, regularly tackles historical subjects; last night it looked at changing interpretations of the Norman Conquest. Almost every day offers an unexpected delight; witness Jonathan Keates’ recent broadcast on Purcell and poetry. Words and Music, the Sunday evening programme which was singled out for its own award, has brought Britain’s rich legacy of poetry to the fore. The daily essay has tackled the Homeric epic and the good death. The same impulse which gave rise to the Third Programme, today’s Radio 3 was that which created the Schoolprints. It is Arnold’s urge that all should have access to the best. Atlee would have approved.

Some Great Public Servants

Journalists and bloggers were working overtime this weekend coining names for the current discredited Parliament. The ‘Rotten Parliament’ sounded suitably authentic with its echoes of the Rump, while the ‘Parliament of Thieves’ struck a Chaucerian note, reminding me at least of the great medieval poet’s little-known work the Parlement of Foules. Perhaps the most overwrought was the fiercely Calvinistic ‘Whorehouse of Ill-repute’ suggested by Cranmer, the blog devoted to religion and politics. Overwrought, but not entirely inaccurate.

To take one’s mind off the sleaze I suggest watching the excellent documentary on Henry Purcell that was the first episode in Charles Hazlewood’s BBC2 series The Birth of British Music. No composer managed to marry words and music quite like Purcell and his short life (he died just 36) and his work provide a crash course in English early modern history.

For example, we see the rise of a specifically English aesthetic informed by the nascent pursuit of antiquarianism revealed in his wonderful stage work King Arthur. Purcell was just one genius among many, working in Wren’s newly conceived London and setting poetry by Dryden. The programme’s historical context was provided by History Today contributor Leo Hollis whose The Phoenix: The Men Who Made Modern London, recently published in paperback, is an atmospheric and entertaining account of Purcell’s city.

Do watch the programme and read Hollis’s book. Both serve to remind us of what great public servants can achieve.

Nigel Jones: When the World Sneezed.....

by Nigel Jones

The current outbreak of Swine 'flu has unsettling parallels with the devastating global pandemic of Spanish 'flu that, even before the age of inter-continental air travel, at its peak swept around the world in just three catastrophic months from October 1918 to January 1919 - and killed more than 21 million people - twice as many as had just died in the First World War, which ended in the week when mortality from the 'flu was at its height.

The Spanish 'flu was the third greatest pandemic in recorded history, bearing comparison only with the Plague of Justinian, which scoured the eastern Roman Empire around Byzantium for half-a-century from A.D. 542, killing a reported 100 million people; and the 'Black Death' - a pestilence, believed to be bubonic plague, - which raged from 1347-1350, and killed more than 60 million - 25 million of them in Europe; around a third of the continent's total population.

The origins of the Spanish 'flu are still steeped in mystery. It came in two waves. The first, deceptively mild in character, apparently began in March 1918 in Spain - from where the outbreak acquired its name. The epidemic was remarkable for the number of victims struck down, some eight million Spaniards were affected, from humble peasants to King Alfonso XIII himself. But in the vast majority of cases the illness passed within three days, and most victims made a full recovery after taking to their beds suffering the familiar gamut of 'flu symptoms : coughs and sneezes; high temperatures; aching limbs; headaches and sore throats.

The first wave apparently receded. It now seems, however, that this outbreak was merely an overture, and that a more deadly variety of the same type A 'flu virus, of the sub-strain H1N1 - worryingly, the same virus that is causing the current outbreak of Swine 'flu - was already incubating. Throughout the spring and summer of 1918, outbreaks of a flu-like illness were reported all over the world - from China to Sierra Leone, from Peru to Kansas, and from Scandinavia to the crowded trenches of the western front. Some epidemologists believe that the virus may have originated with pigs kept in close proximity to British troops at the great Etaples training camp near Boulogne, which then - like the Mexican outbreak - 'jumped species' and hit humans.

In the autumn of 1918, the Great War, which had ravaged Europe for four years, was nearing its conclusion. A starving and blockaded Germany, having fruitlessly spent its remaining reserves of men and material in its five unsuccessful Spring offensives, was being driven remorselessly back towards its own frontiers by the Anglo-French armies. The Allies were boosted by great draughts of new blood in the shape of hundreds of thousands of American 'doughboys' - strapping young US recruits pouring into France aboard every trans-Atlantic troopship. With savage irony, and as with today's Swine flu, it was these fit young people who appeared most susceptible to the 'flu virus - in the crowded troopships and training camps they fell ill and died like flies.

One terrifying aspect of the lethal virus was the speed of its onset. In Cape Town, a doctor boarded a tram for a routine three mile journey to his parents' home. First the conductor literally dropped dead on his platform. Then a passenger succumbed. Then another passenger. Finally, the driver died. The doctor completed his journey on foot.

The 'flu was no respecter of rank : the tough commander of the US Expeditionary Force, General 'Black Jack' Pershing went down - but survived. In October, while 50,000 Americans died in battle, 70,000 of them were hospitalised with 'flu, of whom 32 percent died.

The 'flu affected the course of the war. The Allied offensives almost ground to a halt because so many soldiers were sick. Had the high command but known it, however, the malnourished Germans were in an even worse state. The negotiations to end the conflict were held up for 48 hours when Prince Max of Baden, the Kaiser's last Chancellor, fell sick with 'flu, overdosed on palliative drugs, and went into a coma.

Other fatally afflicted victims included; the great sociologist Max Weber, who died in June 1920 when the pandemic was long past its peak; Lenin's lieutenant Jakov Sverdlov; and the Austrian erotic artist Egon Schiele, who had to watch the funeral cortege of his bride Edith, pregnant with their first child pass by before returning to his sickbed to die.

Two days after Schiele's death, the Armistice was signed on November 11th. The same week, 'flu deaths in Europe reached their height with more than 2,500 people dying in Paris and London respectively : a death rate of 55.5 % per 1,000 that was comparable with mortality in the great London Plague of 1666. Two of the world leaders who gathered in the French capital to hammer out the Treaty of Versailles, British premier Lloyd George and US president Woodrow Wilson, both caught the 'flu - and lived. But the young British diplomat, Sir Mark Sykes - whose controversial Sykes-Picot plan to carve the Middle East into British and French spheres of influence - did not.

Strangely, Sykes had a posthumous role to play in a search for a vaccine to prevent a repetition of the pandemic. He was buried in a lead casket at his family mausoleum at Sledmore, near Driffield in east Yorkshire. It was thought that the lead might have preserved Sykes's corpse, and that the virus might still be lurking in his DNA. Sadly, when his tomb was opened in September 2008, the coffin had split and the body was too decomposed to yield a clue to the deadly organism that had wreaked so much havoc in a world already devastated by war.

Without a vaccine, public health authorities - just as today - were essentially helpless as the pandemic swung its sword and killed millions. The only way of attempting to avoid infection - then as now - were the ubiqutous facemasks and staying away from crowds. Once infected, however, retiring to bed and eating bland but nourishing food such as soup offered the best hope of recovery. One moribund patient, however, got better after an exhausted nurse fell asleep on his oxygen pump, blowing his body up like a balloon, but apparently saving his life. The great scientist J. B. S. Haldane swore by this 'oxygen cure' ever after. The pandemic also spared Joseph Pilates, German founder of the eponymous exercises, who, interned in the Isle of Man, claimed that all those who had adopted his yoga-like routines in his prison beat off the 'flu.

We must all hope that today's world, already menaced by economic breakdown, can avoid the fate prophesised by Albert Camus in his 1947 novel The Plague:

"He knew...that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and enlightenment of mankind, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city".

Influenza Panics of the Past

As the media frenzy over Mexican swine fever threatens to overwhelm us all, History Today looks to its archives to shed light on previous responses to pandemics:

• The 1957 Influenza Pandemic
  
• Pox & Paranoia in Renaissance Europe
  
• The Great Small Pox Epidemic
• Medicine Focus Page