Cities of Power. Göran Therborn

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Cities of Power - Göran Therborn

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was soon built and Nelson’s Column erected. Parliamentary reform – now meaning looking forward and not back to some pure past – in 1832 made at least the House of Commons less a medieval privilege and more of a modern representation of the nation. Its new monumental landmark building, the Westminster Parliament, was decided upon in the late 1830s and began to open in 1847 (starting with the House of Lords).

      The eighteenth century saw a gradual nationalization in Britain, of state power as well as of public monumentality. Wars were no longer financed by grants and loans to the king but by a ‘national debt’, a neologism of the 1730s, guaranteed by Parliament. In 1760 the king traded his property and income from it for a parliamentary Civil List grant.* By the time of the Hanoverian invitation to the throne in 1714, the power of Parliament to install a proper Protestant succession to the throne was established.26 The power of the former grew steadily and that of the monarch faded gradually into ritual respect; 1834 was the last time a British monarch could appoint a prime minister against the opposition of the House of Commons.27

      Somewhat bewilderingly, British patriotic celebrations during the Napoleonic Wars ‘subsumed national achievements in glorification of the monarch’.28 Characteristically, the new elegant main street of London’s West End was named Regent Street, though it ended in Waterloo Place, where the prince regent then resided. (Below, we shall encounter some similar national monarchism in Japan.) Enthusiastic and very profitable Scottish investment in the empire furthered national Britishness.

      Around Chaucer’s tomb monument, there developed in the eighteenth century a Poets’ Corner of national memorials in Westminster Abbey, including Shakespeare, Milton and others. In the 1790s, the main church of the City of London, Saint Paul’s Cathedral, put up statues of four national benefactors: the lexicographer Samuel Johnson, the Orientalist William Jones, the painter Joshua Reynolds and the prison reformer John Howard. Linda Colley ends her great work Britons with a conclusion around a prominent 1822 Royal Academy painting, Chelsea Pensioners Reading the Gazette of the Battle of Waterloo, displaying diverse representatives of a victorious British nation.

      Final British victory in the Napoleonic Wars shaped the new national iconography of London, generating Waterloo Place, Waterloo Bridge, Trafalgar Square, the Wellington Arch and Nelson’s Column. The latter, including its reliefs of Nelson’s four major victories and his guard of lions, took three decades to complete (in 1867), even though the column and the statue upon it were visible from November 1843. The government was reluctant to put any money into celebrating the nation’s hero.† No domestic event or hero has ever been commemorated with such grandeur. No national building of worship was added to, not to mention ever replaced Westminster Abbey and Saint Paul’s Cathedral, but the latter expanded its function as a national pantheon with an extraordinarily pompous tomb monument to the Duke of Wellington.

      London grew as an imperial city, the world’s largest by 1800. Apart from national-imperial iconography – including its majestic new Parliament – nation-state London was little nationalized. The old duality of the commercial and financial City of London, with its own Lord Mayor and guild institutions, and, on the other side, the royal and aristocratic Westminster and West End continued, although the two were increasingly connected by new land transport rather than by river boats. Before the nineteenth century, the City (with a capital C), had been a kind of sober, Protestant, liberal area of mercantile residence as well as offices, a sort of ‘Amsterdam’ in contrast to the more luxurious and exorbitant ‘Venice’ of the aristocratic West End. In the nineteenth century it was largely emptied at night, while opening in the morning, filled up with offices of world trade and finance.29

      National London was in the grip of parliamentary power, which did pay attention to the functionality of the capital, establishing (in 1855) the Metropolitan Board of Works, which, overdue, produced the most extensive sewer system in the world and a metropolitan police force, while the City of London maintained its own. It also funded extensions and embellishments of a rather second-rate aristocratic palace (Buckingham), which in the eighteenth century became the townhouse of the Hanoverian kings, without ever allowing a royal presence in London on par with that in Paris of the Louvre or Tuileries, in Vienna of the Hofburg, in Berlin of the Stadtschloss, or of smaller capitals like Stockholm and Oslo. Street layout remained largely traditional, on the whole without parade axes similar to those of Paris, Vienna and Berlin. London was a city of imperial wealth and power, but not of royal or national splendour.

      In some sense the London equivalent of the royal and national-imperial landmark planning of Paris – and the alternative to the grands boulevards – are the West End squares, laid out in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by wealthy aristocrats who were also big urban property owners, with homogenous architecture for aristocratic or gentlemanly townhouses, usually with an enclosed garden in the middle. The squares usually carry the names of their creator-owners, Grosvenor (the family name of the wealthiest of them all, the Dukes of Westminster), Bedford, Russell, Sloane and so on, still bearing witness to the unique British blend of landed aristocracy and urban capitalism. The similar Parisian Place Royale was a royal precedent, discontinued.

      Even if they did not finish the anciens régimes, the French Revolution and Napoleon’s armies rattled or challenged their iconostases, from London to Saint Petersburg, from Madrid to Berlin. In the fissures, new national imagery began to emerge. The Napoleonic invasions spawned ferocious nationalisms, from the guerrillas of Spain to the ‘Patriot’ (or ‘Fatherland’) War in Russia, via the Prussian Wars of Liberation. On the literary front, what the latter-day German historian Hagen Schulze has called Hass-und Totschlagspoesie (poetry of hatred and killing) was unleashed. Saint Petersburg got its first national monuments after the war: statues of the two major Russian commanders Barclay de Tolly and Kutuzov were erected outside the Kazan Cathedral, and Russian folklore motifs were added to the triumphal Narva Gate. The only major capital of Europe where nothing national was allowed – for the time being – was Vienna, the base of the oldest and proudest of the royal dynasties.30

      By the 1830s, the nation-state situation in Europe may be summed up as follows. The two leading states, Britain and France, had become consolidated nation-states by steady evolution and by the failure of the counter-revolutionary Restoration, respectively. The oligarchic confederation of the Low Countries had become a national monarchy and so had, by an 1830 revolution, Belgium. End of the list of nation-states.

      Sweden, in its rustic and modest way, had an evolution rather similar to that of the British, an eighteenth-century post-absolutist, quasi-parliamentary, Estates-governed Age of Liberty, and in the early nineteenth century the Estates deposed a king and asserted their right to make a new constitution before electing a new king. But the Swedish polity was still of four historical estates, not one nation, and coupled to Norway by a personal monarchical union. Denmark was still under absolutist rule, with a king who was also ruling German dukedoms, and as such a prince of the German Confederation. In Spain and Portugal the national banner had been planted, but the battles with royal absolutism had not yet been finally won. Switzerland was an oligarchic confederation of local urban and rural provincial polities, coming together as a nation-state only in 1847. The whole of central and eastern Europe was under princely domination, including the curious case of Greece: a state carved out of the Ottoman Empire by foreign powers on religious, ethnic and geopolitical grounds and put under the absolutist rule of a German prince.

      The nationalization of Europe took more than a century. Only by 1920 were pre-modern patrimonial states gone from the sub-continent. The final blow was the defeat and ousting of the Habsburg, Hohenzollern, Ottoman and Romanov dynasties. Out of this protracted, complex, by no means linear history, we shall here only pick up a few themes bearing upon the capital cities.

      The European national capitals were previous centres of their part of Old Europe, with – except for the Balkans – strong cultural and architectural legacies of Greco-Roman classicism and of the Baroque, the Renaissance and the medieval Gothic. The exceptions were relatively marginal. Before the nineteenth

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