The review of "Tramonto di un’epoca"

“Enough of this chronology!”, Sergei Sazonov, Russian Foreign Minister at the outbreak of the First World War, is said to have once remarked to those who continued to rely exclusively on political and diplomatic intrigues to explain the causes of the war. Barbara Tuchman, author of The Guns of August—one of the best-known and most accessible accounts of the summer of ’14—takes this call to broaden the scope of inquiry as her starting point, convinced that “the so-called diplomatic origins of the Great War are merely the patient’s temperature chart; they tell us nothing about the cause that brought on the fever”.

The result is an essay focused on societies rather than states and economies, full of colourful anecdotes, some of which are also indicative and symptomatic of a climate which, whilst on the one hand was permeated by a belief in progress and science, on the other was harbouring nationalistic hatreds and social tensions destined to erupt sooner or later.

The essay begins in 1895, when the last distinctly aristocratic government came to power in England, comprising scions of the social class that had ruled the country and its vast empire since the Middle Ages. Tuchman’s perspective reveals an undeniable admiration for those she dubs ‘the patricians’, members of a class that had learnt ‘the art of governing through the control of large estates’ and regarded the right to administer the state as something that belonged to them by right.

Yet in the final decades of the nineteenth century, the mortal enemies of that aristocracy—which was experiencing its twilight splendour—were also gaining ground: anarchists, socialists and revolutionaries. During that period, in fact, both Europe and the United States were terrorised by a wave of attacks striking from Spain to the United States, from Russia to France, targeting crowned heads and heads of government. In Italy, this was the case of King Umberto I, assassinated by the anarchist Bresci on 19 July 1900. A separate discussion concerns the Dreyfus affair, namely the treason trial against the French army officer accused of spying for the enemy (namely Germany), which soon proved to be a ramshackle plot tinged with anti-Semitism. “For two years, from the summer of 1897 to the summer of 1899, that old world in the throes of dissolution seemed to convulse in the spasms of its death throes”. Like other crises, large and small, that followed in quick succession, the wound seemed to heal with the presidential pardon and then with Dreyfus’s rehabilitation, but it was only an apparent, superficial resolution – a sinister prologue to the outbreak of the first, terrible, modern war.

Barbara W. Tuchman
, "The End of an Era
", Neri Pozza, 573 pp., 30 euros