The Pursuit of Power: Europe, 1815-1914 by Evans Richard J

Author:Evans, Richard J. [Evans, Richard J.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780241295779
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2016-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

MASTERING THE ELEMENTS

Nature in nineteenth-century Europe posed major challenges in other ways too. Great mountain ranges cut one part of Europe off from another: the Pyrenees, separating France from Spain; the Alps, dividing Italy from France, Switzerland, Germany and Austria; the Scandinavian Mountains, dividing Norway from Sweden; and the Carpathians, stretching for nearly a thousand miles along the borders of Poland and the Ukraine on the one side, and Slovakia, Romania and Hungary on the other. With the highest peaks rising to around 8,000 feet in the Carpathians and the Scandinavian Mountains, 11,000 feet in the Pyrenees, and more than 15,000 feet in the Alps, these were vast extents of wilderness. On the lower slopes nomadic shepherds grazed their flocks in the summer, and villagers huddled in snowbound settlements cut off from the outside for months on end in the winter, keeping warm by living with their animals and consuming pickled or preserved food left over from the summer. At a maximum height of around 7,000 feet, the Apennines, running down the central spine of Italy, and the Balkan Mountains, which shadowed them along the north-eastern coast of the Adriatic, were all below the regional snowline, but they posed scarcely less effective barriers to communication.

Mountain crossings had been in use for many centuries, but it was Napoleon who took the initiative in constructing paved roads across the major Alpine passes to aid the movement of troops and supplies, though, as in other mountain ranges, these were closed for long periods during the winter. Mountains themselves posed another of nature’s challenges to human mastery: conquering them became a sport, pioneered by the English High Court judge Sir Alfred Wills (1828–1912), who climbed the Wetterhorn in 1854, leading to the founding of the Alpine Club three years later. In 1865, Edward Whymper (1840–1911) led a party of climbers up the Matterhorn for the first time; they reached the summit in triumph, but at the cost of four men’s lives. Local guides such as the Swiss woodcarver Melchior Anderegg (1828–1914) made a living out of conducting parties up major peaks; but the sport remained above all the province of the British upper and middle classes. Less spectacular but far more popular was the new sport of skiing, brought to the Harz Mountains and the Black Forest by young Norwegians studying at universities in Germany. The locals saw them ‘as a blend of madman and clown’ as they sped down the gentle slopes, but the sport extended to the Alps when resorts like Davos and St Moritz, initially favoured for their dry mountain air, opened in the winter, benefiting from new road and rail connections completed in the 1880s. By the turn of the century ski clubs were coming into existence, with their members teaching local residents to use skis and claiming that the acquisition of this skill ‘transformed local life’ and ‘afforded an enormous extension of liberty to the mountain dwellers’.

Throughout this period much of the uncultivated area of Europe below the Arctic tree line was covered in dense forest.

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