The Rome We Have Lost PDF
Preview The Rome We Have Lost
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 14/08/17, SPi THE ROME WE HAVE LOST OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 14/08/17, SPi OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 14/08/17, SPi OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 14/08/17, SPi 1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © John Pemble 2017 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2017 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. 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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 14/08/17, SPi Preface In his memoirs, the French diplomat and elder statesman Jean Monnet recalled how he had repeatedly tried and failed to achieve one of his most cherished ambitions—that of drawing resurrected and regener- ated Europe towards unification by endowing it with a single political and institutional centre. From 1952 until 1955, as first president of the newly created, six-member European Coal and Steel Community, and then as founder and leader of the Action Committee for the United States of Europe, he tirelessly argued for either choosing or creating a city that would function as capital initially of the Community, and subsequently of the European federation that he was striving to con- struct. ‘The Community’, he wrote, ‘would probably have grown up in a different atmosphere if the governments had been sensible enough to found a capital city for it, isolating it from national rivalry and national influence.’ Monnet described how, in Paris in July 1952, discussion of the issue degenerated into haggling and recrimination. A meeting of ministers convened in the morning on Tuesday still had not reached a decision at midnight on Wednesday. ‘France, backed by Italy, pleaded for Strasbourg; Belgium for Liège; the Netherlands for The Hague; Schuman [the French foreign minister] . . . proposed Saarbrücken . . . [and] at three in the morning of Thursday we were in both Strasbourg and Turin.’ Brussels and Paris had been proposed, but the first was rejected by the Belgian prime minister because his electoral mandate was for Liège, and Schuman refused to upset the mayor of Strasbourg by accepting Paris. Weary and bleary-eyed, the ministers finally agreed to com- promise by distributing the institutions between Strasbourg and a city no one had even mentioned—Luxembourg. ‘Everyone was relieved, and that is how the European Coal and Steel Community acquired its “provisional” headquarters in a small town which became the European crossroads.’ OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 14/08/17, SPi vi preface Six years later, after the European Coal and Steel Community had been transformed into the European Economic Community, the wran- gling began all over again. ‘The ministers agreed on the principle of a single site, but disagreed about where it should be.’ Again, the outcome was a patched-up compromise that satisfied nobody. Brussels was selected not to replace but to supplement Strasbourg and Luxembourg. ‘From that moment’, Monnet conceded, ‘dispersion was inevitable.’ The name that is remarkable for its absence in this chronicle of fraught negotiation and indecision is that of Rome. Not even the Italians proposed it. Failing Turin, they would have preferred Milan— which is where meetings of the Council of Ministers of the EEC were held during Italy’s presidency in the 1980s. The foundation treaty of the EEC was signed in Rome in 1957, but the enterprise of integration had begun elsewhere and would continue elsewhere. The treaties and agreements that defined the European Union were signed and dated in Maastricht, Lisbon, Amsterdam, Nice, and Schengen, and the Union’s leading institutions—Council, Commission, Court of Justice, and Parliament—remained scattered between Brussels, Luxembourg, and Strasbourg. Each of these was a capital city—either national or provincial—but none had a significance even remotely comparable to that of Rome in the history, legend, religion, art, and literature that made up the patrimony of the Western imagination, and none was in any way as essential as Rome to the general understanding of what Europe, and being European, were all about. Rome’s diminished profile is most readily explained in terms of determination, on the part of Europe’s post-war elites, to reinvent Europe by orphaning it from its own past—and therefore from a city that had been implicated above all others in so much of that past that was dark and terrible. The recent and still vividly remembered trauma of Italian Fascism had done nothing to dispel the idea, always strong in Protestant and agnostic Europe, that a reek of cæsaro-papal despotism haunted Rome like a malediction, ineluctably pervading and poison- ing institutions of authority and government. Many of the post-war generation of European leaders had been cruelly scarred by Fascist– Nazi tyranny. Monnet’s Action Committee included three Germans who had been driven into exile, and Altiero Spinelli, chief architect of the project of European Union in the 1970s and 1980s, had spent years in a Fascist prison. Yet it could equally plausibly be argued that the sac- rifice of Rome was in the nature of a change in perceptions of the city, OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 14/08/17, SPi preface vii and attitudes towards it, that were part of an ongoing crisis of modern- ity; and that the decision to rebuild Europe without Rome at its centre was therefore not so much a decision that made history, as a decision that history had made. This book investigates the origins and nature of those long-term changes. It is therefore what the Victorian historian James Anthony Froude would have called a short study of a great subject—for the sub- ject is indeed great: how, why, and with what consequences the Western world moved from cherishing Rome as the keystone of modern think- ing and feeling, to ignoring it as peripheral, and even detrimental, to the revival and redemption of Europe. It argues, controversially per- haps, that the charisma and kudos of Rome in modern times had been less a destructive than a constructive influence, and that the tribula- tions of Europe and the West began rather than ended with the loss of this emblematic and fabled city. If this interpretation is sound, then it follows that the failure of the new Europe to generate any perceptible sense of supranational loyalty or patriotism is in some measure a pen- alty incurred for the replacement of Rome, and the common heritage of identity and purpose that it shaped and nurtured, by aspirations altogether less appealing to the imagination. Never was the time riper, perhaps, for Burke’s famous lament: ‘The age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever.’ My subject is Old Rome, the Rome of the sovereign popes, and New Rome, the capital of the kings and presidents of Italy. These have been much less written about than ancient, or classical, Rome but I cannot claim to have made any momentous new discoveries, or to deal in any other than the common currency of modern historians and critics. What I have hoped to do is give a common habitation and a name to a theme, a story, that has hitherto been less than fully apparent because it has been fragmented and buried, like the ruins of ancient Rome in the architecture of the popes, in other themes and stories. I hope, too, that what I have put together will be useful to readers who are not academic specialists and might appreciate some clarification of the meaning and significance of ‘modernity’, and who wish to deepen their understanding of what Rome now is by measuring it against what it recently was. Because I have had in mind an audience wider than that generally reached by collective research, I make no apology for undertaking OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 14/08/17, SPi viii preface single handed the sort of project that these days is more usually shared by a team of experts; but I do thank all the more gratefully the scholars and specialists who have tolerated and encouraged my efforts. I fear I shall now try their patience even more sorely, for having written about ‘the modern mind’. In justification I plead that in using the term I have taken a necessary rather than a reckless risk. For narrative pur- poses I needed a concept, a hypothetical common denominator, that would suggest those ways of thinking and understanding that educated minds were identifying as ‘modern’ from the end of the seventeenth century. ‘The modern mind’ is both a convenient and an innocent fic- tion. It may never have existed in any discrete and specific sense, but it does no violence to historical truth to allow it notional reality. First among the claimants to my thanks are Andrew Hopkins and Gavin Stamp, who first set me thinking about Rome, modernity, and the meaning of Europe by inviting me to contribute to their confer- ence on ‘Lutyens Abroad’ at the British School at Rome in 1999. I am also deeply indebted to the University of Bristol for the Senior Research Fellowship that has enabled me to continue researching and writing in a scholarly and supportive environment during retirement. My obligation to the anonymous publisher’s readers who assessed the first draft of my text is great; their perceptive and constructive sugges- tions showed me the way to clarification and improvement. The scru- pulous and erudite attention the text has received from the editorial staff at Oxford University Press has been, as always, exemplary. I thank my copy editor Chris Bessant for his sensitive and highly professional handling of the text, and I am profoundly grateful to Di Steeds, who brought back into operation all her considerable editorial experience and skills when I was confined to a hospital bed. Her help as amanu- ensis was invaluable and kept production running smoothly and on schedule at a difficult time. For blunders and blemishes that remain, I alone am responsible. French, Italian, and German works are quoted from published translations when so indicated in the notes; otherwise translation is my own. j. p. Bristol, March 2017 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 14/08/17, SPi Contents List of Plates xi Publisher’s Acknowledgements xiii Prologue: Two poets and three Romes 1 1. Paradise, Grave, City, Wilderness 13 2. Old Rome and the Modern Mind 45 3. The Dying of the Light 68 4. Apollo Deposed 83 5. Far-off Fields of Memory 99 6. The Prisoner in the Vatican 108 7. The Second Coming 127 Notes 139 Picture Acknowledgements 153 Index 155
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