Fall of Eagles: The Mayerling Incident

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19th Century Austria, 19th Century Europe, BBC, Elisabeth of Austria, Fall of Eagles, Franz Joseph I, Mary Vetsera, Mayerling Incident, Rachey Gurney, Rudolph of Austria

I swear I’m not intending to do an episode-by-episode breakdown of Fall of Eagles. It’s just worked out that way, because after looking at the first three posts, I’m going to discuss the fourth episode, “Requiem for a Crown Prince,” which deals with the Mayerling Incident.

Crown Prince Rudolph of Austria-Hungary

When last we left Emperor Franz Joseph I and Empress Elisabeth of Austria-Hungary, they had gotten themselves into a marriage that left Elisabeth rather unhappy. They had three daughters and one son, Rudolph, who thereby became the heir to the throne. Rudolph was quite different from his rather cold, conservative father. He was very interested in natural science and ornithology. Politically he was a Liberal, and so got along rather poorly with his father, but made him closer to his mother (so that he was sort of the opposite of his cousin Wilhelm II of Germany). Rudolph also had quite the eye for ladies, and had a string of mistresses and brief affairs with prostitutes, both before and after he married Princess Stephanie of Belgium, a very conservative woman.

Crown Prince Rudolph

It was not a happy marriage. After having a daughter, Elisabeth, Rudolph reportedly passed his wife the gonorrhea he had acquired from prostitutes, rendering her infertile. The couple became quite cold to each other and both took other partners. Viennese  society in this period has been characterized as frivolous and dissipated, as the Austrian nobility sought to distract themselves from the humiliation that Bismarck and the Prussian army had inflicted on them at the battle of Sadowa, and there was considerable social room for the Crown Prince to dally with women. Minor Austrian nobles frequently paraded their young daughters through society, hoping to snag husbands who could elevate the family’s fortunes.

One such young woman was Baroness Marie Vetsera (usually referred to as Mary). She was a 17-year old girl whose mother Helene was grooming her to find a husband in upper society. Mary was reportedly a striking young woman noted for her dark eyes, her profile, and her elegant neck, as well as her self-confidence. Rudolph began a relationship with her that lasted either 3 months (assuming it began in Nov of 1888, as most accounts seem to think, although some say it lasted about 3 years). She seems to have imaged that the unhappy Rudolph would divorce Stephanie and marry her, despite several people making it clear to her that the pope would never permit the divorce. Her mother wanted her to move on to find a more suitable prospect, but she resisted, perhaps because she resented her mother’s intention to pimp her out for an advantageous marriage. Rudolph for his part was not deeply smitten with her, since he was simultaneously carrying on a relationship with a Viennese actress, Mizzi Kaspar.

Baroness Mary Vetsera

Rudolph appears to have been a rather unhappy man, perhaps even mentally ill. He was taking a good deal of morphine for medical problems and dealing with the effects of gonorrhea and perhaps alcoholism as well. About three months before meeting Mary Vetsera, he asked Mizzi to join him in a suicide pact. She turned down the offer and actually reported it to the police, but they ignored it. He also quarreled with his father about his relationship with Mary, as well as politics.

The Mayerling Incident

On the 29^th of January, 1891, Rudolph and Mary traveled to his hunting lodge at Mayerling. The next morning, Rudolph’s valet, Loschek tried to wake him, but found the door to his room locked. When he and the count’s hunting companion, Count Hoyos, finally chopped the door down with an axe, they found two bodies. Rudolph was sitting motionless beside the bed, bleeding from the mouth. Mary was found lying on the bed, cold and motionless, and appeared to have been dead longer than Rudolph. Loschek mistakenly assumed from the blood on Rudolph’s mouth that he had drunk strychnine, an assumption that caused much confusion later on.

Hoyos caught the next train to Vienna. It was decided, based on court protocol, that only the Empress could tell the Emperor what had happened. This required them to interrupt the Empress’ Greek lesson, which proved challenging because they did not want to tell her why they needed to speak with her and she did not want to be distracted from the lesson. Eventually, though, the Empress received the news and broke down weeping. The Emperor was summoned, but had to wait until the Empress could compose herself, while the rest of the court, who mostly already knew the news, had to try not to cry. When Empress Elisabeth finally told him what had happened, he was deeply affected; some say the news broke him permanently.

The lodge at Mayerling

The Austrian Prime Minister, Eduard Taaffe, issued a statement that Rudolph had died of an “aneurism of the heart.” The court, following Loschek, initially thought that Mary had poisoned Rudolph; even her mother Helene believed that. The next day, a doctor finally examined the bodies and declared that Mary had been shot in the temple and Rudolph had also been shot. It appeared that Rudolph had shot Mary and then, several hours later, shot himself.

Complicating all of this was the decision to smuggle Mary’s corpse out of Mayerling. In an attempt to avoid the press, the body was dressed in clothing and seated (very awkwardly, because rigor mortis had set in) between two men in a carriage. It was taken to a nearby graveyard and hastily buried.

Franz Joseph ordered an investigation by the police, but then quickly pressured them to close it and ordered Taaffe to hide the results. It seemed clear that Rudolph had committed suicide, and by Catholic Church law, suicides could not be buried in consecrated ground, which meant he could not be buried in the Imperial Crypt. Eventually, though, the Vatican issued a dispensation declaring that Rudolph had been in a state of mental imbalance, which meant that he could be buried in the Imperial Crypt.

A newspaper illustration purporting to show Rudolph’s deathbed

Since 1889, all sorts of wild speculation has circulated about what really happened. Had Mary bled to death after a botched abortion? Had her uncles broken into Mayerling and killed him in a drunken brawl? Did he kill her in a drug-fueled rage? Were they murdered by assassins, such as Hungarian Nationalists? Had Franz Joseph orchestrated the murder after his son refused to break up with Mary? Had a Freemason vow forced Rudolph to commit suicide?

Although the full story cannot be easily reconstructed, new evidence turned up in the 20^th century. After WWII, Soviet troops broken into Mary’s grave, hoping to loot it of jewels. In 1959, a young local physician, prompted by the Vetsera family, conducted an investigation into Mary’s body and found no evidence of a bullet hole in her remains. He proposed that she had died in a botched abortion. In 1989, the last Austrian Empress, Zita, claimed that the couple had been murdered because Rudolph refused to support a French plan to depose Franz Joseph in favor of the more Liberal (and potentially pro-French) Rudolph. But she offered no evidence, Given that she was born three years after the Mayerling Incident, she cannot have had any first-hand knowledge of the events.

Then in 1991, a man obsessed with the story actually stole Vetsera’s remains and kept them for two years before being discovered. He paid for a forensic examination, which found inconclusive evidence that Mary might have been hit on the head several times, raising the spectre that a deranged Rudolph might have violently assaulted her because she refused to die with him, or that assailants had somehow broken in and attacked the couple. A report from the time of the police investigation also surfaced indicating that all six bullets in the gun had been fired, and that the gun did not belong to Rudolph. Presumably Rudolph could not have shot himself six times. However, theories that a killer had murdered the couple probably would have been preferable to admitting that the Rudolph had gone mad and shot his mistress and then himself. So it is unlikely that the Emperor orchestrated a cover-up with the humiliating story that Rudolph had become deranged.

Mary Vetsera’s frequently-opened grave

Then just two years ago, crucial evidence turned up. An Austrian bank discovered a deposit box unused since 1926 which turned out to contain a leather folio containing three suicide letters written by Mary the night of her death. Although it is not possible to determine who deposited the letters, the Austrian National Library authenticated the letters. Rudolph himself left behind no fewer than six suicide letters, all but one of which he wrote before departing for Mayerling. Thus it appears that the couple intended to commit suicide, although exactly how it happened is not clear.

What Rudolph’s motives were for his suicide are unclear. The letters he wrote all emphasize that his honor was at stake in some way. He was profoundly in debt; he owed one member of the court a sum equal to a quarter of his entire estate. He also seems to have gotten deeply entangled in a plot by Hungarian Nationalists to make him King of Hungary; the Nationalist Istvan Karolyi may have been trying to blackmail him in some fashion. He does not seem to have killed himself because he loved Mary and was unable to wed her; he spent his last night in Vienna with Mizzi. Instead, he seems to have needed someone else to help him go through with the deed; at one point he asked a male secretary to join him.

What Impact Did Rudolph’s Death Have?

What If is a great historical game, although by definition counter-factual scenarios are impossible to prove. Rudolph’s office of Crown Prince and heir passed to Joseph’s younger brother Karl Ludwig, who is often incorrectly reported to have abdicated immediately in favor of his son, Franz Ferdinand; in fact, he held the title until his death in 1896, when his son became the heir. Franz Ferdinand, of course, was famously assassinated in Sarajevo in 1914, triggering the Great War that ultimately pulled down the three empires that Fall of Eagles focuses on. So, as many people have pointed out, if Rudolph had not killed himself, Franz Ferdinand would never have become the Crown Prince and the assassination at Sarajevo would not have happened, and thus the Great War would not have happened.

Franz Ferdinand and his wife shortly before the assassination

That’s true, but also wrong. There is no way to know whether Rudolph might have decided to go to Sarajevo in 1914 and been shot there instead of Franz Ferdinand. Perhaps Rudolph might have gotten assassinated somewhere else. Or more likely, something else might have sparked the Great War. Franz Ferdinand’s murder was the spark that triggered the war but it was hardly the cause of the whole conflagration.

Franz Joseph held onto his office of Empire for 68 years, a remarkably long reign. He got along poorly with Franz Ferdinand, who insisted on marrying a woman of the low nobility; the emperor considered her inappropriate because she had no royal blood. Although he finally relented, he insisted that the children of the marriage be excluded from the line of succession. The two men clashed repeatedly on political issues. Although both were hostile to Hungarian Nationalism, Franz Ferdinand wanted to grant greater autonomy to other ethnic minorities, and felt that Austria should act more boldly on the European stage. So it’s been suggested that Franz Joseph held onto his crown for so long because he did not want to pass it on to Franz Ferdinand. If Rudolph had been alive, perhaps Franz Joseph would have abdicated, in which case a much more Liberal man would have taken charge of the Empire and might have guided it in a direction that would have prevented the Great War.

Or maybe the fact that Rudolph was far more Liberal than his father meant that Franz Joseph would never have abdicated under any circumstances. Like Frederick III of Germany, he had been excluded from any role in government by his father and the Prime Minister. The idea that Franz Joseph would have abdicated in favor of his son seems implausible to me.

In the long run, it’s impossible to say whether Rudolph’s suicide truly matters in the lead-up to the Great War or not. Given that a quarter century passed between his death and the events at Sarajevo, I’m inclined to think that it is a mistake to see his suicide as being a cause of the War.

“Requiem for a Crown Prince”

The episode differs from others in the series by having a first-person narrator (Prime Minister Count Taaffe, played by Emrys James) and by the scenes being time-stamped, presumably to help the audience keep track of the complex events.

After a brief introduction, the story starts with Loschek (Michael Sheard) being unable to get into Rudolph’s room. After discovering what appears to be a suicide note written by Mary on a bowl outside his room, Prince Philip of Coburg (Anthony Newland) shows up because Helene Vetsera has gotten the police to declare her daughter missing, so that everyone is searching for her and there are suspicions she is at Mayerling. They chop down the door but barely go in, and initially suspect that the Crown Prince has overdosed on morphia. Hoyos is dispatched to Vienna to inform the emperor while the other man stays to guard the body.

The emphasis in the episode is split between efforts to deal with the crisis and Empress Elisabeth’s response. Dramatically, the heart of the episode is Rachel Gurney as Elisabeth, who alternates between grief and fury, excoriating Helene Vetsera (Irene Hamilton) for parading her daughter before Rudolph. The empress accuses Helene of having seduced Rudolph years ago and then when Rudolph tired of her, of offering him her daughter instead. Helene is simultaneously grief-stricken and struggling to preserve her family’s prospects at court. The empress weaves a story that Mary poisoned Rudolph after he told her that he could not divorce his wife. But Crown Princess Stephanie immediately concludes that it was a suicide pact, since Rudolph had asked her to die with him the previous year.

Gurney as Elisabeth

The episode emphasizes that the court’s reaction was a mixture of incompetence and cover-up. Hoyos initially tells the empress that Mary Vetsera poisoned Rudolph. The empress however declares that heart failure will be the cover story. When Dr Widerhofer (Kenneth Benda) explains to Prince Philip at Mayerling that Mary must have died first and that Rudolph died from a bullet to the head, Philip immediately tries to twist the evidence to implicate Mary. But Widerhofer insists that Mary died hours before Rudolph. He suggests temporary insanity as a possible excuse.

Back in Vienna, the police get news that there was a hunting accident at Mayerling, but Taaffe says it was poison. He says that the police need to find a way to get Mary’s corpse away from Mayerling without scandal. The police commissioner (Frank Wylie) tries to take charge of the crime scene, but Prince Philip insists that the lodge is imperial ground and outside police jurisdiction. An official of the criminal court shows up to investigate, as does Count Stookau, Helene’s brother, who discovers from a servant that Rudolph died by gunshot, not poison. So he concludes that Rudolph shot Mary, and demands her body.

By this point, Rudolph’s suicide letters have been found, entirely exploding the original story, but the royal family remains unaware. It’s only when Widerhofer tells the emperor that Rudolph shot himself that they discover the truth. It comes out that Rudolph left his money to Mizzi Kaspar, and the empress begins to think that her son might have murdered the unsuspecting Mary.

The police commissioner tries to get a local abbot to take Mary’s body, telling him that she committed suicide on her own on the grounds of the Mayerling estate. But the abbot refuses to receive the body if she killed herself, eventually agreeing to perform a service. The body is given over to Mary’s uncles, who have trouble getting the body to sit in a carriage because of rigor mortis. The police commissioner callously orders Loschek to fetch an axe, presumably to chop off Mary’s legs, but the furious uncles intervene. Stookau threatens to go to the reporters waiting outside the gates to tell them the truth, even if the police try to shoot him, at which point they are allowed to sit beside the corpse in the carriage and hold it up. Helene is forbidden to attend the burial.

Emrys as Taaffe

The episode ends with Taaffe’s thoughts about the situation. He says that Rudolph’s bad character had already destroyed the Liberal cause in Austria. The show takes the viewpoint that Rudolph’s suicide ensured the continuation of Conservatism in Austrian politics and suggests that Franz Joseph might have considered abdicating in favor of his son, but now felt it was his duty to continue on despite his age. He adds that Empress Elisabeth was murdered a decade later by an Italian anarchist just as Franz Joseph was preparing for the 50 year jubilee for his reign.

I am inclined to call this the best episode of the series. The story holds together both as a human drama and as a look inside a political crisis.  To my mind, Rachel Gurney’s scenes are the best in the whole series, conveying a complex mix of grief, anger, the search of an explanation, and decades of court etiquette that constrain her. The barely-contained fury with which she treats Helene Vetsera is simultanously cruel and sympathizable. If you only watch one episode of this series, “Requiem for a Crown Prince” would be a good choice.

This review was made possible by a reader who made a generous donation to my Paypal account and requested I review this series. If you have something you’d like me to review, make a donation and tell me what you’d like me to watch.

Want to Know More? 

Fall of Eagles is available on Youtube. The series is available through Amazon, but if you decide to buy it, make sure you’re getting a format that will play on your DVD player; some versions only play British and European formats.

If you would like to know more about the Mayerling Incident, Greg King and Penny Wilson have written Twilight of Empire: The Tragedy at Mayerling and the End of the Hapsburgs. I haven’t read the book, and the authors are popuar rather than professional historians, but they do seem to have done some serious research for the book.

Fall of Eagles: Wilhelm II

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19th Century Europe, 19th Century Germany, Barry Foster, BBC, Empress Victoria, Fall of Eagles, Frederick III, Gemma Jones, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Otto von Bismarck

In the BBC miniseries Fall of Eagles, Kaiser Wilhelm II looms large, and is probably the closest thing it has to a main character, figuring at some point in the stories of both Austria and Russia as well as Germany. So let’s look at him briefly.

The show devotes its second and third episodes, “The English Princess” and “the Honest Broker”, to the lives of Frederick III (Denis Lill) and his wife Victoria (Gemma Jones). They get along poorly with Frederick’s father Wilhelm I (Maurice Denham), who dislikes the couple’s Liberal political views, which contrast sharply with Wilhelm’s Conservatism. Bismarck (Curt Jürgens) convinces Wilhelm to exclude Frederick from all function in government in the second episode, and then in the third episode invites the young Wilhelm II (Barry Foster) to attend the Foreign Office. Frederick finds this insulting, but his son cannot understand why. The third episode focuses on Frederick’s growing incapacity due to his cancer of the larynx. Wilhelm I’s long life (he died at age 90), combined with Frederick’s cancer, meant that when Frederick finally became emperor in 1888, he only reigned for 99 days, during which his cancer left him almost speechless, and his long exclusion from government meant that he left almost no chance to shape government before it passed into the hands of Wilhelm II, who like his grandfather was essentially a Conservative.

The series emphasizes the poor relationship Frederick and Victoria had with their son. When his grandfather dies, he tentatively talks to Bismarck about a supposed law that says that a man who cannot speak cannot reign, but Bismarck slaps him down. When told that his father is dying, he suspects a plot by his mother. When Frederick dies a few hours later, Wilhelm enters the royal apartments with soldiers and tries to confiscate all of his father’s papers, a concern more important to him than paying his respects to his father. She laments that she feels like the ship of the nation is sinking at sea with all its hopes, and he contemptuously orders her to “go to your room!” This attempt to seize his parents’ papers did in fact happen, but Frederick and Victoria had already sent all of their papers to Windsor Castle the previous year.

Kaiser Wilhelm II

The series presents Wilhelm in almost entirely negative terms. He is vain, self-important, militaristic, foolish, and basically incapable of appreciating anyone else’s needs. He seems to just disrespect his parents for no particular reason, other than one line in which he angrily says she had no tenderness for him as a child.

This depiction is probably unfair to Wilhelm in some respects. Far from the cold relationship with his father the series offers, Wilhelm had great respect for his father, regarding him as a hero of the German Unification. It was his relationship with his mother that was poor. When she went into labor while carrying him, complications resulted in Wilhelm’s left arm being damaged. It never healed, so his arm was crippled his whole life.

Empress Victoria of Germany

This was a difficult issue between mother and son. Both of them blamed her for the injury, and Victoria seems to have considered his handicap an embarrassment. Victoria insisted that Wilhelm learn to ride at a very young age, even though his bad arm made this difficult, and when he fell off, as he did frequently, he was forced to get back on, even when he was crying not to. Later he wrote longingly to her of his desire for her affection, but instead she coldly corrected his grammar. So Wilhelm came to view his mother as harsh and domineering, and consequently he resisted her attempts to give him an more Liberal English-style education, and in later life he came to view his father as having been somewhat emasculated by his mother. So the poor relationship came from both sides, not simply from Wilhelm.

The series provides only hints of this dynamic. In the second episode, the young Wilhelm is shown struggling to learn to ride in one scene, but it’s not clear that his mother was demanding it. That and his comment that she had no tenderness for him (a comment that comes while he is treating her remarkably poorly) are the only hints that there was a more complex dynamic at work, and it’s clear that the series takes Victoria’s side at Wilhelm’s expense. So rather than trying to understand the man, the series simply wants to show why he was such a problematic ruler.

Gemma Jones as the widowed Victoria

The show perhaps betrays a distinctly British view of German history. Bismarck treats Frederick and Victoria poorly and forces them into an isolated position because he wants more power than Frederick’s Liberalism will allow him. He encourages young Wilhelm’s aspirations as a way to remain in power, even though he privately disdains Wilhelm. So he supports Wilhelm against his parents. Then, at the end of the episode, the young Kaiser Wilhelm turns on Bismarck, whom he considers old-fashioned and not aggressive enough in his foreign policy. Bismarck throws one of his tantrums, which had always previously gotten him way with Wilhelm I, only to discover that it weakens his position with the young kaiser even further. Bismarck goes to the Dowager Empress Victoria seeking her help, but she points out that he’s already destroyed her political influence, so she cannot help him. So the show traces the slow growth of Conservatism, the emperor’s dominance of the government, and German aggression through the inability of Frederick and Victoria to influence the political events around them and through Bismarck’s toxic influence on Wilhelm II. If only, the show suggests, Victoria had been allowed more influence, then maybe the Great War would never have happened.

Later episodes continue this portrait of Wilhelm. He insists on commissioning bad allegorical paintings and sending them to his cousin Nicholas II of Russia, even though Nicholas doesn’t particularly want them. He thinks poorly of his relations but imagines that they respect him a great deal. He sees himself as a master statesman, despite being almost totally out of touch with popular opinion and having rather unrealistic ideas of renewing the League of the Three Emperors. None of this is untrue, but the show makes no effort to show any of Wilhelm’s more positive traits such as his intelligence, his preference for modernism over tradition, and his support for science. Contrary to his current reputation as a hawk, in 1913, the New York Times was celebrating him as one of the most important peacemakers of the previous quarter-century. Nor does the series really explore the idea that his crippled arm might have psychologically led him to embrace militarism as a way to compensate for his lack of traditional manliness. Wilhelm was a profoundly erratic and inconsistent man in some ways, but he was probably not quite the boob the series presents him as.

This review was made possible by a reader who made a generous donation to my Paypal account and requested I review this series. If you have something you’d like me to review, make a donation and tell me what you’d like me to watch.

Want to Know More? 

Fall of Eagles is available on Youtube. The series is available through Amazon, but if you decide to buy it, make sure you’re getting a format that will play on your DVD player; some versions only play British and European formats. If you’d like to know more about Wilhelm II, John CG Röhl’s Kaiser Wilhelm II: A Concise Life is a condensed version of Röhl’s prize-winning three-volume biography of the man and would be a good short (262 pages) introduction to him.

Fall of Eagles: The Unification of Germany

Tags

19th Century Europe, 19th Century Germany, BBC, Curt Jürgens, Fall of Eagles, Frederick III, Gemma Jones, Liberalism, Nationalism, Otto von Bismarck, Unification of Germany, William I of Prussia

As I discussed in my previous post, Fall of Eagles deals with major political events from the perspective of the royal families of Austria, Prussia/Germany, and Russia, but doesn’t both to explain the wider political movements that were driving many of the major events. Liberalism is frequently referenced, but never explained, and nationalism isn’t even mentioned as an ideology. The first episode deals with the Revolutions of 1848 on Austria and Hungary while focusing mostly on the limited viewpoint of Empress Elisabeth. The second episode, “The English Princess”, takes the same approach to the unification of Germany in the 1860s.

The main viewpoint character in this episode is Crown Princess Victoria (Gemma Jones), daughter of Queen Victoria and wife of the Prussian Crown Prince Frederick (Denis Lill), son of King William I (Maurice Denham), who is depicted as hesitant, unsure of himself, and prone to fits of tears. Historically. Victoria and Frederick were Liberals, which as I explained in my previous post means they favored a strong Parliament and other representative elements of government, whereas William I and his Chancellor Otto von Bismarck (Curt Jürgens) were Conservatives, so that they favored a strong monarch with few limits on his authority. But the viewer is left to figure this out mostly through William and Bismarck’s preference for an unrestrained military and a willingness to ignore the Prussian Parliament.

The episode focuses on the tensions between William and his son and daughter-in-law. William demands that Frederick express support for press censorship, and when Frederick gives a speech that dodges the issue, William feels betrayed and accuses Frederick of wanting to usurp the throne, and Bismarck counsels William to cut Frederick out of government duties and isolate them. The series frames this as William being unable to conceive of the idea of ‘loyal opposition’, an idea deeply embedded in British politics. Both Victoria and Frederick resent this isolation and their viewpoint is championed in the series with the way the individual scenes frame the situation.

 

The Unification of Germany

The Revolutions of 1848 demonstrated that there were many Germans who wished to see the unification of the fragmented German nation into a single nation-state. Bismarck, however, wanted to strengthen Prussia and turn it into the greatest European power. While a unified Germany was a way to make Prussia more powerful, there was a serious problem. Austria was a rival of Prussia, and unifying the Germans meant bringing both Austria and Prussia into a new German nation-state, which meant that Prussia would not be able to dominate the new Germany. So Bismarck’s Conservatism was at odds with the goals of German Nationalists.

Otto von Bismarck

Bismarck’s solution to this problem was to use Nationalism as a way to disguise his ambitions for Prussia. Over the 1860s, he waged three wars: the Second Schleswig War in 1864, the Austro-Prussian War in 1866, and the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. He used the Second Schleswig War as an opportunity to promote himself as the defender of the German Nation from Danish oppression, this winning favor with the German Nationalists. When Austria tried to revise the settlement by appealing to a German Diet, Bismarck accused them of violating the terms of the peace treaty and declared war. In fact, Bismarck’s goal was to force Austria into withdrawing from German politics, and the Prussian military trounced Austria brutally at the Battle of Königgrätz, forcing Austria to sue for peace.

Bismarck watching the battle of Königgrätz

Then Bismarch orchestrated the Franco-Prussian War, editing a telegram from William I to the French ambassador in a way that suggested that William had insulted the French. This tricked Napoleon III into declaring war on Prussia. In the brief war that followed, Prussia again triumphed handily. This gave Bismarck the political capital to press for a German unification that excluded Austria and which allowed Prussia to dictate the terms of the unification. The Nationalists rejoiced to see their goal of German unification advanced so far, while the Liberals looked away from Bismarch’s violent methods and toward the constitution that he offered.

On the surface, the constitution appeared to be a Liberal document, establishing universal manhood suffrage and vesting substantial power in what was essentially a two-house Parliament. The Reichstag (functionally the Lower House) was elected by all male citizens over 25, while the Bundesrat (functionally the Upper House) was appointed by the heads of the individual German states, with Prussia getting as many votes as the next four largest house combined and slightly more than 25% of the total votes. The Bundespräsidium or presidency of the German Confederacy was held by the Prussian king, who received the title of Emperor. But when looks closely at the details of the constitution, it actually grants the king of Prussia enormous power, because the Bundesrat held much more power than the Reichstag, and it was dominated by Prussian appointees, which allowed the king of Prussia to issue orders that the Bundesrat carried out. In practice, this was a Conservative constitution dressed up as a Liberal one, and it vastly increased the power of Prussia by making in the dominant state in Germany.

In the series, William I feels so unable to govern that he attempts to abdicate in favor of his son, but Frederick refuses on the grounds that Hohenzollerns do not abdicate. (Whether this detail is true I am unsure of. I haven’t been able to find any confirmation of it.) Instead, William turns to Bismarck, who takes advantage of the fact that the old man just wants to be told what to do, and sets about engineering the unification of Germany to make himself more powerful. The series makes no mention of the Second Schleswig War, and then focuses on the Austro-Prussian War, which is simply blames on Bismarck’s aggression. There is an extended scene in which Bismarck, having defeated Austria in three battles in as many days now wants to negotiate for peace. William and General von Moltke want to press onward and occupy Vienna, hoping to take Austrian land. Bismarck (backed by Frederick, who dislikes war) says that Austrian land has no value to Prussia. It’s understandable why William and von Moltke can’t understand what Bismarck wants because Bismarck never clearly explains what his purpose for the war is. He gets his way by threatening to quit and then orchestrates the Franco-Prussian War, again failing to explain what his motives are. Somehow, victory over France leads the other German states to press William to become emperor, which he resists but which Frederick presses for.

If one does not know what Bismarck was actually up to, this episode would certainly not enlighten one much about the process of German unification. Bismarck comes off as a steely but emotional man who cares little for human lives other than his soldiers and has little respect for the ruler he serves.

This review was made possible by a reader who made a generous donation to my Paypal account and requested I review this series. If you have something you’d like me to review, make a donation and tell me what you’d like me to watch.

Want to Know More? 

Fall of Eagles is available on Youtube. The series is available through Amazon, but if you decide to buy it, make sure you’re getting a format that will play on your DVD player; some versions only play British and European formats.  For those interested in Bismarck himself, try Jonathan Steinberg’s Bismarck: A Life. If you want to know more about Bismarck’s unification of Germany, take a look at DG Williamson’s Bismarck and German Unification, 1862-1890.

Fall of Eagles: The Revolutions of 1848

Tags

19th Century Austria, 19th Century Europe, BBC, Conservatism, Elisabeth of Austria, Fall of Eagles, Franz Joseph I, Liberalism, Milwaukee, Nationalism, Revolutions of 1848

The BBC miniseries Fall of Eagles concentrates on the big political developments and views them through the lens of the monarchs of Austria, Prussia, and Russia. The show touches on a variety of important socio-political developments, but it makes little effort to explain these developments, with the partial exception of Socialism, which gets a full episode devoted to Lenin (Patrick Stewart) and his maneuverings within the Communist party. So let’s talk about the movements that form a critical background to the events in the series.

 

Liberalism and Conservatism

The monarchs in the series make repeated references to ‘liberals’, but exactly what liberals wanted is never directly addressed. Liberalism arguably goes back to the late 17^th century, at least as a philosophical movement, but it blossomed as a political movement at the end of the 18^th century with the American and French Revolutions. 19^th century Liberals, broadly speaking, sought to build on the principles of representative democracy established in those two revolutions (as well as in the 18^th century British Parliament). Liberals favored a strong representative body such as a parliament, and wanted this parliament to be elected based on a wide franchise (the right to vote). Different Liberals advocated for a different basis for the franchise: ownership of land, an independent income, adult male status (universal manhood suffrage), or universal suffrage (which would grant women the right to vote), but they all agreed that the general population ought to be directly represented in government. Because they wanted a strong representative element in government, they generally wanted a more restricted executive (either a king or an elected leader) whose powers were clearly defined. Typically, though not inevitably, Liberals wanted to establish a written constitution that clearly laid out the powers of the different segments of the government.

Liberals also tended to favor a notion of basic rights that included such things as freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of religion. In the mid-19^th century, British member of Parliament and political philosopher John Stuart Mill articulated what became for more than a century the classic statement of Liberal freedom. He argued that the only reason the state was justified in coercing a citizen was to protect that person from interfering with another citizen’s free exercise of their rights. In Mill’s view, the government had no right to restrict what its citizens could think, say, or believe, and could only restrict what they could do to protect the rights of other citizens.

John Stuart Mill

The opposing political position was Conservatism, which emerged out of a reaction against the French Revolution. Conservatives tended to follow the principles of British member of Parliament and political philosopher Edmund Burke, who rejected the idea of human equality in favor of a society in which different people had different levels of wealth and political rights based on inheritance. A society with many different competing social groups, Burke argued, could only change through a process of compromise, which would ensure moderation, slow change, and stability. As Burke saw it, monarchy was the best guarantor of stability because kings had the most to lose during a political upheaval.

Edmund Burke

From Burke’s theories, it followed that what was needed was a strong monarch with wide and less-strictly defined powers. That meant that Conservatives resisted representative institutions or wanted them fairly weak. They favored the political rights of the aristocracy over the rights of the general population, and typically wanted limits on the freedoms that Liberals championed. For example, they often maintained the need for some degree of censorship of ideas and liked the idea of a state church. The Austrian, German, and Russian monarchs in this series are all voices for Conservatism, but the show never identifies them as such because the series is told from their point of view, and to them these positions are simply self-evident. They seek to govern the way their ancestors did, and as a result, they view Liberals as unjustified upstarts.

 

Nationalism

When I teach Modern Western Civilization, I always have to spend a day talking about Nationalism, because it’s an ideology that had a huge impact on 19^th and 20^th century Europe. I tell my students that they will have a hard time wrapping their heads around it because they think they know what a Nation is, but they’re wrong. In 20^th century terminology, a nation is basically just a synonym for a country. But in 19^th century terms, a Nation is not a place but rather a group of people. Nations were comprised of people who had a broad set of common characteristics, typically seen as a common ancestry, shared language, shared religion, and shared cultural values such as a particular style of music, cooking, clothing, and so on (although different Nationalists focused on different sets of these traits).

So, for example, the French are clearly a Nation in the 19^th century sense of the term. They have a shared ancestry, a common language, tend toward a cultural Catholicism mixed with agnosticism or atheism, a sophisticated cuisine (which they actually teach in primary schools to ensure that children will embrace it), an inexplicable love of lousy Euro-pop, and so on. In contrast, modern Americans are not a Nation; we do not have a common ancestry, we do not all speak one language (although English predominates, many speak Spanish, for example), we do not all belong to a single religion or denomination, and we have a wide range of styles of cooking and music. In other words, what 19^th century people called a Nation we would probably call an ethnic group.

On a social level, Nationalists emphasized that people ought to draw their primary sense of identity from their nation and should be loyal to it. They wanted to convince people that they belonged to a Nation. On a political level, what Nationalists wanted was a Nation-State, that is, a political state (a country) whose boundaries included all the members of the nation. So French Nationalists wanted (and to a considerable extent already had) a state of France that included all the French-speaker parts of Europe. There were a few bits along their eastern frontier that were not part of France, but overall, the French nation was mostly in France.

But other European Nationalists were not so lucky. They tended to have one of two problems. German Nationalists had the problem that ‘Germany’ was not a county in the early 19^th century, merely a geographic region like the Midwest. The German Nation was divided up between several dozen small states, each of which was its own country. Italian Nationalists had a similar problem; ‘Italy’ was a geographic term, not a country. These Nationalists pursued a goal of National Unification, seeking to pull their fragmented Nations together into one Nation-State

In Eastern Europe, the Nationalist problem was quite different. There were several dozen small Nations that were subsumed into other countries. The classical example (very relevant for this series) was Austria (or after 1867, Austria-Hungary). Austria-Hungary was technically the union of two separate kingdoms, Austria and Hungary, which were united because the Hapsburg dynasty had inherited the crowns of both states. This state was a multi-National state (in 19^th century terms). The western half of Austria was predominantly German, but the eastern half included more than a dozen other National groups, including the Hungarians, the Czechs, the Slovaks, the Poles, the Croats, the Serbs, and so on. What Nationalists of each of these different groups wanted was for their Nation to be an independent Nation-State, completely separate from Austrian control. Nationalism was an existential threat to Austria, because if it got a strong foothold there, it would pull Austria apart.

Map of Austria showing all the major Nations

Nationalism often, though not inevitably, went hand in hand with Liberalism, because Liberalism offered Nationalists tools to potentially achieve their goals with. Rights such as freedom of speech and freedom of the press meant that Nationalists could spread their ideas freely in the face of governments that opposed them. The establishment of a representative legislature based on a wide franchise would mean that Nationalists could try to achieve National Independence or Unification through democratic methods.

 

The Revolutions of 1848

In 1848, these movements produced a set of upheavals known as the Revolutions of 1848 (also sometimes called the Spring of Nations). Starting in France and eventually breaking out in about 50 different countries, Liberals and Nationalists, among others, agitated for political change. But different segments of the population wanted different things, so the uprisings were not truly coordinated, even within the same country or region. The Revolutions of 1848 were too complicated to explore in detail here, because they played out differently in different countries. So I’ll restrict myself to just Austria and Germany.

In Austria, a group of Viennese university students began a protest in March of the year, demanding an Austrian constitution and a legislature elected by universal manhood suffrage. Emperor Ferdinand I ordered his troops to open fire on the students, killing several and provoking Viennese workers to join the protest in anger over the killings, causing the protest to develop into an armed insurrection.

Ferdinand tried various measures to appease the insurrectionaries. He fired his unpopular chief minister Metternich and ordered the drafting of a constitution in April, but the proposed constitution did not establish a wide franchise and so was rejected. After fleeing Vienna, Ferdinand established an elected legislature.

About the same time this was happened, a Nationalist insurrection broke out in Hungary seeking Hungarian independence. The Nationalists adopted a Liberal agenda known as the 10 Points, which included things such as freedom of the press, freedom of religion, the election of government ministers in parliament, and the abolition of legal and tax privileges for certain classes of people. Eventually Ferdinand sent Austrian troops into Hungary, but they were defeated. This action provoked vehement opposition in Vienna, forcing Ferdinand to abdicate in favor of his nephew Franz Joseph I.

Franz Joseph late in life

Hungary briefly established a Hungarian Republic led by Regent-President Louis Kosuth, whose forces defeated the Austrians several times over the next year. But in May of 1849, the situation turned in favor of Austria when Czar Nicholas I decided to support Franz Joseph. By August, Austrian and Russian forces had crushed the rebellion and re-established Austrian control over Hungary, bringing an end for a generation to Hungarian Nationalist efforts to achieve independence.

The situation in Germany is messier, because ‘Germany’ wasn’t one country, but rather about 3 dozen countries, most of which saw some form of upheaval. In Prussia, which after Austria was the largest of the German states, protesters took to the streets of Berlin in March, demanding a constitution, parliamentary elections, freedom of the press, and the unification of Germany. King Frederick William IV played for time by agreeing to allow a liberal constitution. establishing an elected assembly, and embracing the principle of German unification. In May, the Prussian National Assembly met for the first time, tasked with drafting a liberal constitution. But then in December, Frederick William dissolved the Assembly, imposed a Conservative constitution that vested most of the power in the hands of the king, and allowed the establishment of a bicameral legislature.

Frederick William IV

But in May of 1848, the All-German National Assembly convened in Frankfurt am Main with representatives elected from across the German states (including both Austria and Prussia). It was an overwhelmingly middle class and Liberal group of representatives. It drafted a proposed German Constitution and decided to offer the crown of the proposed new German Empire to Frederick William, who had continued to indicate support for the unification of Germany. But Frederick William contemptuously declared that would not receive “a crown from the gutter.” Frederick’s rejection was driven by two things, his hostility to revolution and his staunch belief in the divine right of kings; he refused to accept that a group of people could select their own ruler. Only God could choose rulers, and if people could choose their ruler, logically they could depose him as well. Frederick William’s refusal of the crown spelled the end of the so-called March Revolution across Germany.

That failure, incidentally, caused large numbers of Liberals and Socialists to flee Germany for the United States. A very sizable number of them ultimately came to my home town Milwaukee, making it the most German city outside of Germany for about a century. The heavily German character of Milwaukee was still fairly evident as I was growing up in the 70s, although it’s mostly faded away now. The heavy Socialist presence in the city is the reason Milwauke had three Socialist mayors in the first half of the century and played such an important role in the growth of the American Labor Union movement.

The Revolutions in Fall of Eagles

The first episode, “Death Waltz” opens with a brief narration about the Revolution of 1848 in Austria.

“1848. The Eagle trembled. New and revolutionary forces are suddenly unleashed. Student protests and demonstrations by a starving and resentful population lead to traditional ideas of monarchy and government being questioned throughout Europe. When Hungarian nationalists took to the barricades in Vienna, the young emperor Franz Josef of Austria ordered his troops to crush the rebellion. Men died in their thousands. Hundreds were shot and hundreds were executed and those leaders who escaped were hanged in effigy. As blood ran in the streets of Vienna, the emperor and his court waltzed beneath glittering chandeliers.”

While everything in that passage is technically correct, it omits the point that the protests toppled Emperor Ferdinand. More importantly, it fails to explain what the protestors wanted. There’s no explanation of Liberalism’s primary principles or indeed any mention of Liberalism at all, and no explanation of what the Hungarian nationalists wanted, or that by late in 1848 it was looking as if the Hungarian nationalists were going to win.

As the voiceover ends, we see the domineering Archduchess Sophie (Pamela Brown) discussing the court protocol with Princess Helene of Bavaria, who is supposed to marry the young emperor. But Franz Joseph (Miles Anderson) instead falls deeply in love with Helene’s sister Elisabeth (Diane Keen), defies his mother and marries her. All of this happened in 1854, not 1848 as the episode suggests. (The only clue to this is a flashback that isn’t obviously a flashback, in which Helene and Elisabeth’s tutor refers to the Revolution of 1848 and the Hungarian revolt.) The rest of the episode concentrates on Elisabeth’s rather unhappy marriage with Franz Joseph. Although he loved her deeply, her feelings for him were rather cooler, and she got on very poorly with Sophie, who sought to control her domestic life.

Keen and Anderson as Elisabeth and Franz Joseph

The episode focuses a fair amount of time on Elisabeth’s growing interest in Hungary and her sympathy with the Hungarian desire for ‘freedom’, as the episode summarizes Hungarian Nationalism. There’s no discussion of the idea of a Hungarian Nation, only that the Hungarians wanted a greater voice in government. The episode asserts that Elisabeth’s dissatisfaction with her personal life made her deeply sympathetic to the Hungarian desire for freedom. One scene touches on one of the underlying issues of Nationalism though. Elisabeth insists on wearing a tiara that mimics a Hungarian style of headdress, which is implicitly a statement of support for the Hungarians, despite Sophie’s efforts to get her to wear something more German. (See the photo above.) The idea that Germans and Hungarians would dress differently because they were different Nations is not explained, so the viewer is left to read between the lines why this tiara is an issue.

Empress Elisabeth of Austria

(Elisabeth, by the way, was one of the great beauties of 19th century Europe. She spent between 2 and 3 hours a day on her hair, exercised and dieted aggressively, and managed to maintain a 16 inch waist despite three pregancies; later in life she had only a 19 1/2 inch waist. After she turned 33, she refused to sit for any more portraits, so that her image in the public mind would always be one of youth and beauty.)

That the Revolutions of 1848 also played themselves out in Germany is not mentioned directly, although Frederick William’s rejection of the ‘crown from the gutters’ is references in a later episode.

To my mind, failing to explain Liberalism and Nationalism in any direct way is a mistake of the series. While the narrative of the event is clear enough for the viewer, the series doesn’t really explain what the issues driving events were, except in the most basic sense that people wanted self-government.

 

Want to Know More? 

Fall of Eagles is available on Youtube. The series is available through Amazon, but if you decide to buy it, make sure you’re getting a format that will play on your DVD player; some versions only play British and European formats.

Fall of Eagles: First Thoughts

Tags

19th Century Austria, 19th Century Europe, 19th Century Germany, 19th Century Russia, Barry Foster, BBC, Charles Kay, Fall of Eagles, Nicholas II, Wilhelm II

Apparently my requested reviews of I, Claudius inspired another reader to donate to my Paypal account and request a review of Fall of Eagles, a 1974 BBC miniseries. So my next couple of posts are going to be looking at this sprawling series. 19^th century European history is a good ways outside of my wheelhouse—I’m not familiar with the current scholarship on Imperial Germany or Russia, for example—so watching the series was a fun expedition into a period I know less about than I would like. Unfortunately, that also means that I’m less likely to catch serious errors of fact or interpretation. Hopefully I won’t make too many mistakes in my comments.

Fall of Eagles tells the story of the end of three great empires brought to ruin by the Great War, namely Hapsburg Austria, Hohenzollern Germany, and Romanov Russia (each of which used an eagle in their heraldry hence the title of the series). It starts in 1848 and runs down to 1918, managing to cover about 70 years of history in 13 episodes. Unlike most miniseries, such as I, Claudius, Fall of Eagles is not a continuous narrative but is more like 13 fifty-minute plays that attempt to show the viewer the reasons why World War I was fatal to these three dynasties. Each episode focuses on one of the three states in question. The three Austria episodes are almost entirely self-contained in terms of their cast. The later Germany and Russia episodes do occasionally have some cross-over, with Kaiser Wilhelm II (Barry Foster) appearing in a couple of the Russia episodes. In some cases, the same actor plays a particular character in multiple episodes, while in others, the same person is played at a later stage of life by a different actor. Like I, Claudius, one fun element is spotting famous British actors in these historical roles. Among the bigger names in the series are Michael Gough, Freddie Jones, Gemma Jones, Colin Baker, Patrick Stewart (in a particularly impressive performance as Lenin), John Rhys-Davies, Miriam Margolyes, and Marius Goring. It’s amusing to watch Alfred Pennyworth plot to smuggle Captain Picard and Gimli son of Gloin into Russia to establish the Soviet Union.

One downside to this 13 short plays approach is that the episodes are somewhat inconsistent in their quality. Whereas most episodes of I, Claudius were written by Jack Pulman and therefore had a consistent voice and characterization, most of these episodes were written by different authors, with the result that the episodes veer in their treatment of various characters. Foster’s Wilhelm II is mostly a vain, foolish man given to absurd gestures such as mailing his cousin Nicholas II (Charles Kay) unwanted allegorical paintings, but in the last episode he suddenly becomes much more reflective, insightful, and serious; in some episodes he loves Nicholas, while in others he thinks the Tsar an idiot. In some episodes the Russian city is referred to as St Petersburg, while in others it’s Petrograd. In one of the Austrian episodes, the emperor is consistently referred to as the All-Highest, following the strict court protocols, but in the other episodes, he’s referred to more familiarly.

Willy loves fancy clothes

The series has a LOT of story to tell, and sometimes struggles to find a way to convey all the necessary information. The series mostly concentrates on the three royal families, but episode 9, “Dress Rehearsal,” rather jarringly focuses on the Russian Foreign Minister Alexander Izvolsky and his meetings with other European foreign ministers as he tries to orchestrate free Russian passage through the Dardanelles. Most of the episodes employ an omniscient third-person narrator (Michael Hordern), who explains developments like riots and battles as the series shows maps, line drawings, photographs, and early film footage. At other times, one of the characters offers in-story narration in the form of letters or diary entries from their point of view. The result is a valiant but not entirely successful mélange of drama, history lecture, and primary source reading that makes the series half-documentary, half-dramatization.

But if you watch the series closely, you realize that each episode shows one or more steps down the road to ruin. For example, episode 7, “Dearest Nicky,” shows how the 1905 Russo-Japanese War revealed Russia’s profound military weakness and how Wilhelm II tried to use the situation to persuade Russia to abandon its alliance with France and Great Britain. The failure of those negotiations meant that Russia remained committed to going to war against Germany even though it was clear that it lacked the resources to do so successfully. “Dress Rehearsal” deals with Austria’s decision to annex Bosnia-Herzegovina, thereby setting up the motive for the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand (Peter Woodthorpe) in the next episode, and Izvolsky’s failed maneuverings reveal just how politically incompetent Russian leadership was by this point. So unlike most historical series, this one is actually intent on teaching the viewer something about the past more than just telling an entertaining story.

Another problem with the series is that it wasn’t willing to directly depict violence, even when that violence was integral to the story. Episode 4, “Requiem for a Crown Prince,” opens with the discovery that the Emperor’s son and heir has just committed suicide and closes with the narrator basically saying “Oh, by the way, the empress was assassinated a few years later.” Episode 10, “Indian Summer of an Emperor” culminates in the assassination of the Austrian Archduke, but the whole incident is simply described by someone rather than shown. In the next episode, “Tell the King the Sky is Falling” Grigory Rasputin (Michael Aldridge) is shown becoming an enormous problem for the Tsar’s government, undermining every attempt to solve the empire’s political problems. The next episode starts with the narrator essentially telling us “Rasputin was murdered and thrown into a river.” The whole effect is to somewhat obscure key moments in the narrative by shoving them off-screen. The fate of the Romanovs is only obliquely described by the German empress, leaving the viewer entirely in the dark as to why they were executed. Obviously, standards for violence on television were quite different in the 70s than they are today, but they could easily have shown scenes leading up to the violence and then cut away.

The series offers some fine performances. In addition to Stewart’s excellent turn as Lenin, there’s Foster’s pompous Wilhelm II, Gemma Jones’ bitter Empress Victoria of Germany, Rachel Gurney’s grieving Empress Elisabeth of Austria, and Gayle Hunnicutt’s increasingly neurotic Empress Alexandra. Kay manages to make Nicholas II simultaneously ineffectual and sympathetic, which is no easy feat.

The doomed couple

Overall, Fall of Eagles is not as good as I, Claudius, and in some ways it feels a bit like a dry run for the more successful BBC series that came the next year. But as a historical series that actually tried to educate its viewers, it’s an impressive experiment, though one that was never repeated (to the best of my knowledge).

As noted, this is a requested review. If there is a movie or tv show you would like me to review, please make a generous donation to my Paypal account and let me know what you would like me to review. If I can get access to it (and think it’s appropriate for this blog), I’ll review it. Just don’t make me review Empire again.

 

Want to Know More? 

Fall of Eagles is available on Youtube. The series is available through Amazon, but if you decide to buy it, make sure you’re getting a format that will play on your DVD player; some versions only play British and European formats.

Penny Dreadful: A Few Last Thoughts

Tags

19th Century England, 19th Century Europe, Ethan Chandler, Eva Green, Ferdinand Lyle, Homosexuality, Joan Clayton, Josh Hartnett, Larry Talbot, Lycanthropy, Patti Lupone, Penny Dreadful, Polari, Simon Russell Beale, The Wolfman, Victorian England, Witchcraft

For the past couple of posts, I’ve been covering Showtime’s Penny Dreadful. There were a couple of other small points that I couldn’t really develop into full posts, so I thought I’d just put them together in one quick post.

1. Penny Dreadful riffs on Victorian science-fiction, occult, and horror stories. At least it does in theory. It’s got Frankenstein and his monster, Mina Harker from Dracula, Dorian Gray, and Josh Hartnett’s Wolfman. But as I’ve already pointed out, Frankenstein isn’t a Victorian character; he’s from the Regency period a full two decades prior to the Victorian era. And the Wolfman isn’t a particularly Victorian character either. Although there were a handful of short stories published about lycanthropes in the 19th century, the major Wolfman stories are 20th century. The earliest novel on this theme (that I know of, at least) is 1933’s The Werewolf of Paris. The character in this novel, set in the 1870s, is not a wolfman, but a classic werewolf (he turns totally into a wolf, rather than a wolf/human hybrid). But the novel helped inspire the 1935 horror film, The Werewolf of London, whose protagonist, played by Harry Hill, is the first Wolfman. Werewolf established two of the key tropes of such films, namely that lycanthropy is spread by bites and that transformation into a werewolf is governed by the moon. That in turn helped inspire 1941’s The Wolf Man, with Lon Chaney Jr. as the unfortunate title character. Maybe if we average out the Regency era Frankenstein with the Depression era Wolf Man, we get the late Victorian era. (Incidentally, Josh Hartnett’s character is eventually revealed to be named Ethan Lawrence Talbot, Lawrence Talbot being Lon Chaney Jr’s character in The Wolf Man.)
2. Vanessa Ives (Eva Green) watches her witch mentor Joan Clayton (Patti Lupone) burned to death sometime in the 1880s. In reality, the last person executed in the British Isles for witchcraft was the elderly Scottish woman Janet Horne, who was sentenced to detain Scotland, along with her daughter, in 1727. Her daughter managed to escape custody, but Janet was smeared with pitch, paraded through town, and burned alive. Laws decreeing the death penalty for witches were repealed a few years later, so the idea that a group of angry townspeople would burn Joan to death in the 1880s is pretty far-fetched.
3. Simon Russell Beale’s flamboyant homosexual Egyptologist Ferdinand Lyle was one of the great charms of season 2. But he has a rather 20th century sense of self. In the last episode he refers to himself as a ‘queen’, using what so far as I know is a term that only emerged in the 1950s.He also describes himself as belonging to a ‘tribe’, but I’m not sure that a 19th century gay man would have thought of himself in those terms. If the show had been more interested in an historically accurate portrayal of homosexuality, it should have had Lyle using polari, a wide-spread British slang system used by homosexual men (among others) in the 19th and 20th century. Polari was a complex mixture of Italian, Romani, London English, rhyming slang, back slang, sailor slang, and thieves’ cant that was employed by gay men to covertly signal their homosexuality to other men and have discrete conversations about sexual activity. For example, “Vada the dolly dish, shame about her naff riah” means “Look at the attractive man, shame about his bad hair.” Although some words (like ‘naff’ in the above example) have become common British slang, polari sadly began to die out as homosexuality won a wider social acceptance in the late 20th century. If you’re interested in polari, check out this short film in which two men have a conversation in it.  (Ignore the number 4–I can’t get the auto-numbering to turn off)
4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8yEH8TZUsk

Correction: In an earlier version of this post, I incorrectly wrote that Claude Rains played the Wolf Man in the 1941 movie. While Rains was in the film, it was of course Lon Chaney Jr. in the title role. 

Penny Dreadful: Vanessa’s Tarot Deck

Tags

19th Century England, 19th Century Europe, Joan Clayton, Patti Lupone, Penny Dreadful, Showtime, Tarot Cards, The Occult, Vanessa Ives, Victorian England

My past few posts have dug into Showtime’s Penny Dreadful. In this (fairly brief post) I’m going to discuss the Tarot cards Vanessa Ives (Eva Green) uses periodically. In the second season, it’s revealed that she got the cards from her witch mentor Joan Clayton (Patti Lupone), a witch who lived from at least the 17th century down to the 1880s. Exactly where and when Joan acquired the deck is never explained, but it seems like it should be fairly old, given that everything else in her house seems to be. So perhaps it’s something she acquired in the 17th or 18th century.

Vanessa’s Tarot deck is purple with white line drawings, and rather pretty, albeit rather sparse on details.

Vanessa’s Tarot Deck

But historically, Tarot cards looked nothing like this, and to judge from the art style, it’s obviously a deck that originated no earlier than the 1990s.In fact, they were designed for the show by Irish graphic artist Anais Chareyre. So while the deck is aesthetically quite nice, it’s wildly anachronistic. They might as well have given Vanessa a Lexus to drive around Victorian London in.

So What Did Tarot Cards Look Like? 

Playing cards arrived in Europe from Mamluk Egypt (probably) in the late 14th century. The earliest surviving decks were created in the 1430s and 40s for the dukes of Milan, and are consequently known as the Visconti-Sforza decks. These decks are thought to be the first to use the non-suit ‘trump’ cards, now usually called the Major Arcana, which feature allegorical images of various sorts. They featured the symbols of the minor suits arranged in geometric patterns and the court and trump cards as figures against dark backgrounds. But no complete set of these cards exist today–the deck as it is currently known is cobbled together from more than a dozen partially-surviving decks.These cards were all hand-painted, because the printing press had not yet been invented.

Visconti-Sforza Tarot cards

The first great age of Tarot cards, however, was the 18th century. The so-called Tarot of Marseilles was probably the most widely-used deck in the period, and its structure closely resembles the modern Tarot deck: 4 suits of Wands, Swords, Cups, and Coins; 4 court cards for each suit, with cards for King, Queen, Knight, and Valet; 21 numbered trump cards that close to the modern ones (some of the names are different, and Death has no name); and an unnumbered Fool. The trumps are individual figures against a blank background.

The show doesn’t give us much to go on, but my guess is that this is the Tarot deck that Joan Clayton would have used. It appears to have originated in the late 1400s, and is documented in France in 1499. The use of playing cards for divinatory purposes goes back to the mid-16th century, but the idea that specific cards had set meanings seems to be an 18th century notion.

There were a wide range of Tarot decks in circulation in the 19th century, but generally speaking, they looked a lot like the Tarot of Marseilles artistically. Some decks began leaving out the non-suit trump cards, because they were an awkward fit for use in card games.

By the late 19th century, Tarot decks were gravitating more toward the style of modern playing cards (and are often called ‘playing tarot’ cards). The Tarot Nouveau was popular in the period of the show, although Vanessa wouldn’t have used that deck, because the Major Arcana (the unique cards like the Moon or the Devil) were stripped out since they weren’t used in tarot games of the period.

Tarot Nouveau

However, Tarot cards didn’t really circulate in England prior to the 1870s. That’s when English occultists took note of the French tradition of Tarot cards for divinatory purposes. So in realty, a 17th century English witch like Joan Clayton probably wouldn’t have had a Tarot deck at all, unless she had spent time in France. Nor were Tarot cards part of English folk magic. The people who were responsible for the rising interest in Tarot cards in England were occultists like Madame Blavatsky, Annie Besant, and Eliphas Levi, all of whom were interested in a loftier notion of educated magic that they claimed stretched back to ancient Egypt.

The deck most people are familiar with today, in which each card has a specific scene on it, is called the Rider-Waite Deck or the Rider-Waite-Smith Deck, because it was designed by English occultist Alfred Waite, drawn to his instructions by Pamela Colman Smith, and published William Rider & Sons. It first appeared in 1910, so Vanessa couldn’t have used that deck. And once this deck had been issued, other occultists began producing their own deck in the 1920s and 30, and the genre has proliferated ever since.

Rider-Waite cards

 

Want to Know More?

The Penny Dreadful Tarot is available on Amazon. To judge from the comments, the card-stock is poor, and the imagery on the cards bears no relationship to the traditional readings of the cards, so this is probably a deck better appreciated for its artistry than given serious use. If you want to get a deck of Tarot cards for doing readings, I would suggest the traditional Rider-Waite deck. There’s a reason it’s became the classic deck; its rich symbolism allows for a lot of different readings.

Penny Dreadful: The Devil’s Autobiography

Tags

19th Century England, 19th Century Europe, Ethan Chandler, Ferdinand Lyle, Josh Hartnett, Penny Dreadful, Showtime, Victorian England

In the second season of Showtime’s Penny Dreadful, the characters pilfer a box of objects from the British Museum. According to the show, the objects represent the writings of a 11^th century British Carthusian monk who was possessed by a demon. He began writing on whatever he could get his hands on, ultimately scratching words onto an assortment of random objects in a bizarre pidgin language derived from Latin, Greek, Arabic, Sanskrit, and several other languages. This hodgepodge language is referred to repeatedly as Verbis Diablo, “the Devil’s Language”. The resulting text turns out to be a sort of autobiography of a fallen angel. It’s a cool idea, but there are a few problems with it.

• There were no 11^th century British Carthusians. The Carthusian Order was founded in 1084 by the German Bruno of Cologne in the Chartreuse Mountains of France. The order didn’t arrive in England until 1181, when Henry II founded a Carthusian house at Witham as penance for ordering the murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket. (Fun fact: In the 18^th century, the Carthusians gave their name to green Chartreuse liquor, which they distilled.)
• The collection of objects were apparently housed at this Carthusian monastery and then somehow manage to pass to the British Museum with the collection intact. The fact that this bizarre collection somehow stayed together is somewhere between improbable and miraculous. In 1541, Henry VIII ordered the final dissolution of all English monasteries. The result was the movable property of the monasteries was broken up and scattered. The most important example of this was the monastic libraries, which were for the most part sold off book by book. Modern historians have spent a great deal of energy trying to recreate the catalogs of these lost libraries, and a small number of books have been traced to specific monasteries. In a situation like this, it is hard to imagine that a random collection of worthless objects with gibberish written on them would somehow have stayed together for more than four centuries.
• What makes this even more improbable is that the objects the monk wrote on include a dead bird, a goose-feather quill, and a butterfly the size of a dinner plate. How the hell did any of those things survive nearly a millennium without simply rotting away?
• Verbis diablo is gibberish Latin. Verbis means ‘words’, but diablo doesn’t mean anything in Latin. In Spanish it means ‘Devil’. Proper Latin would be Verbis diaboli, “The Devil’s words”. While verbis can mean ‘language’, it’s not really the most likely way Latin would express the phrase “the Devil’s Language”. A Latin-speaker would probably use lingua (literally, ‘tongue, language’) instead. Perhaps the phrase is supposed to be a pidgin of Latin and Spanish, but that seems unlikely too, since the term seems to be a scholarly one rather than some sort of colloquialism.
• One of the phrases in the autobiography is lupus dei, “the wolf of God”. Josh Hartnett’s Ethan, whose father made him learn Latin as a child, repeatedly mistranslates this phrase as ‘the hound of God’ (the Egyptologist Ferdinand Lyle makes this mistake at least once as well). It’s hard to see how anyone who knows Latin as well as Ethan seems to could confuse canis for lupus. Both words are common Latin, about as common as ‘dog’ and ‘wolf’ are in English, and the two words are about as dissimilar in Latin as they are in English. While someone looking at a wolf might mistake it for a dog, the mistake is a fairly implausible one linguistically, especially given that Ethan suffers from lycanthropy and therefore the word for ‘wolf’ probably has some special meaning for him.

 

Want to Know More? 

I got nothing.

I suppose if you want to know more about the history of Satan, you could take a look at Elaine Pagels’ The Origin of Satan. There’s also Jeffrey Burton Russell’s Lucifer: The Devil in the Middle Ages.

Penny Dreadful: The Problem with Frankenstein

Tags

19th Century England, 19th Century Europe, Billie Piper, Dracula, Frankenstein, Henry Treadaway, John Clare, Mary Shelley, Penny Dreadful, Romanticism, Rory Kinnear, Showtime, The Enlightenment, Victorian England

Showtime’s Penny Dreadful is set in the late Victorian era, specifically the early 1890s, and features a cast suggested by Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Both Frankenstein and his Monster, called Caliban and later John Clare, are prominent characters in the story, which takes place in London. But the series’ version of Frankenstein represents a pretty sharp deviation from Shelley’s character.

 

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Although popular imagination views both Dracula and Frankenstein as Victorian works of literature, they come from opposite ends of the 19^th century, and in fact Frankenstein is not a Victorian novel at all, having been published in 1818, just under two decades before Victoria became queen. Frankenstein is roughly contemporary, not with Dracula, which was published in 1897, but with the novels of Jane Austen, all of which were published in the 1810s. And the events of Shelley’s novel are set at an unspecified period in the 18^th century, meaning that Frankenstein probably created his creature around the period of the French Revolution at the latest. So Penny Dreadful’s Frankenstein is a long way from his proper context.

Frankenstein is usually seen as one of the greatest examples of Romantic literature (as well as one of the first works of Science Fiction). The Romantic movement was a reaction against the rationality of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. While the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment sought to use science and human reason to explain all the mysteries of nature, Romantic artists and authors were much more attracted to the grandeur, power, and mysteriousness of nature. Romantic painters loved depicting shadowy moonlight landscapes, medieval buildings ruined by the passage of time, and a contrast between the immensity of the landscape and the smallness of humanity.

Mary Shelley

Whereas the Enlightenment favored the power of reason to explain things, Romantic authors and artists favored the internal experience of their own emotions, which they struggled to express in painting, music, poetry, and prose. The content of their creativity was supposed to emerge from the artist’s own imagination, and to express their inward reality more than the objective external reality. Shelley’s inspiration for her novel was reportedly a waking dream she had. Because Romantics sought to express their own interior feelings, another major theme in Romanticism was the isolation of the individual, both within nature and within society. Romantic characters in novels struggle to convey their feelings to those around them, find themselves overwhelmed by their emotions, and, overcome by a sense of isolation and the inability to communicate with others on a deep level, often commit suicide.

Shelley’s novel explores many of these themes. In her novel, Frankenstein is a brilliant scientist who discovers how to create life. In other words, he uses the tools of science to usurp one of the most mysterious facts of nature, the power of life and death. In doing this, he is transgressing the limits of nature and exploring What Man is Not Meant To Know; Shelley practically created this now-clichéd theme in Science Fiction. Thus from a Romantic point of view, Frankenstein is doing something foolish, and demonstrating the errors of the Enlightenment. The novel describes the process by which he learns the error of his ways.

He creates his Monster through an unnamed process, literally putting together an enormous human body and reanimating it. Both the modern idea of the Monster as being stitched together and the idea of electricity as the tool for its reanimation are later cinematic additions to the story. But the Monster is hideous, and unable to exist in human society, because Frankenstein is not truly the master of life and cannot replicate the beauty of nature, only crudely imitate it.

The Monster is never quite given a name, but there are several references to it as Adam, so that’s what I’ll call it. In contrast to the arrogant Frankenstein, who foolishly blunders into things he doesn’t understand, Adam is the Romantic hero. He is a deeply sensitive man who simply wants to fit into society and find friends, but is unable to do so because of his monstrous appearance. Tormented by his isolation, Adam demands that Frankenstein create a mate for him, but Frankenstein is disgusted by his own efforts and destroyed her, which drives Adam into seeking revenge by killing Frankenstein’s fiancée Elizabeth.

Although Adam is ugly on the outside, he is human on the inside. Frankenstein is just the opposite. Although to outward appearances he is a great and wise man, inwardly he is a sort of monster: selfish, arrogant, obsessed with discovering the secrets of nature and keeping them for himself. He steals corpses to cobble together Adam’s body. He is gradually consumed by his hatred of his creation.

Finally, Adam flees northward into the arctic, pursued by the increasingly weak Frankenstein. Discovered by a ship’s captain, Frankenstein relates his tale. He is wracked by guilt and has came to realize his folly. But he dies before he can destroy his creation. Adam appears to mourn his creator and then declares his intention to commit suicide. He is last seen on an ice floe, drifting into the darkness, still alone in the vastness of nature.

 

Penny Dreadful’s Frankenstein

The series’ Frankenstein (Henry Treadaway) is a far cry from Shelley’s character. Both men are scientists, and Treadaway’s character occasionally voices skeptical, if not atheist viewpoints. But he’s not the moral monster of the novel. He’s quite sensitive and loves Romantic poetry by figures like Wordsworth and Keats, as well as Shakespeare, whereas Shelley’s character is primarily interested in science. Only when he smothers Brona (Billie Piper) in the season 1 finale does he demonstrate any of the arrogant assertion of the power of life and death that so characterizes Frankenstein in the novel, and even then, his act can be viewed as trying to make amends for failing Caliban (Rory Kinnear).

Treadaway as Frankenstein

The biggest issue, for me at least, is a moment in the third episode of season 1 when Caliban explicitly tells Frankenstein “you are a Romantic.” But Shelley’s Frankenstein isn’t a Romantic. He’s too arrogantly obsessed with understanding the secrets of nature to be a Romantic. In fact, he’s the anti-Romantic. The whole point of the novel is that Frankenstein’s lack of appreciation for the power of nature causes much sorrow.

The series does a better job of depicting Caliban as a Romantic figure. He too likes poetry, and in the second season takes his name from the Romantic poet John Clare. Like his creator, he is a sensitive soul, and what he wants most of all is what Adam wants, a mate. He demands that Frankenstein reanimate a woman for him, and threatens to kill Frankenstein’s friends until he does so, thus driving Frankenstein to eventually murder Rose Tyler Brona.

Kinnear as Caliban

(One nice thing the series does in the second season is to collapse Frankenstein’s beloved, Elizabeth, with the ‘bride’ he starts to make for Adam in the person of Brona/Lily Frankenstein. That creates an interesting love triangle for Frankenstein and his creation to grapple with. Actually, ‘triangle’ isn’t the right word, because Dorian and Ethan are also interested in her, but Ethan thinks she’s dead. I think the correct term for this geometric shape is a ‘clusterfuck’.)

Overall, the series loves Romanticism. Malcolm Murray quotes Keats’ Ode to a Nightengale, for example. In fact, the series’ creator, John Logan, has admitted that the series’ ultimate origin was Wordsworth’s poetry. Wordsworth led him to read Percy Bysshe Shelley, which led to Frankenstein, which led to Dracula.

For a show set in the 1890s, it’s perhaps not unreasonable that the well-educated characters would enjoy the poetry of half a century before. But why don’t any of them read poets closer to their own day, such as Gerard Manley Hopkins, Matthew Arnold, or Algernon Swinburne? Why don’t any of them quote Gilbert and Sullivan? Why doesn’t the Bohemian Dorian Gray read the works of the Bohemian Oscar Wilde? That’s such an obviously meta thing for the show to do, I’m a bit sad they didn’t think of it.

And while we’re talking about the late 19^th century, would it kill Dorian to wear a fucking tie occasionally? For a show set in the high society of late Victorian London, he’s rather absurdly louche. The whole point of Wilde’s Gray is that the man appears reputable on the outside but is corrupt on the inside. The trope doesn’t work very well if he dresses in a way that rejects social convention.

 

Want to Know More?

Penny Dreadful is available at Amazon.

You have read Shelley’s Frankenstein, haven’t you?

If you want to know more about Romanticism, a good place to start would be Romanticism: A Very Short Introduction.

Penny Dreadul: The Grand Guignol

Tags

19th Century England, 19th Century Europe, André de Lorde, Dr Frankenstein, Eva Green, Frankenstein's Monster, Henry Treadaway, Josh Hartnett, Max Maurey, Paula Maxa, Penny Dreadful, Rory Kinnear, Showtime, The Grand Guignol, Timothy Dalton, Victorian England

The Showtime series Penny Dreadful, set in London in the early 1890s focuses on the occult underworld of the late Victorian period, using a variety of characters inspired by and in some cases directly taken from 19^th century literature. Sir Malcolm Murray (Timothy Dalton), Vanessa Ives (Eva Green), and Ethan Chandler (Josh Hartnett) are searching for Mina Murray, who would under other circumstances be the Mina Harker lusted after by Dracula. Meanwhile, Victor Frankenstein (Henry Treadaway) pursues his quest to master the secrets of life and death, while his first creation, here called Caliban (Rory Kinnear), takes work as a stage hand at the Grand Guignol Theater in London, while Dorian Gray (Reeve Carney) carries on his decadent life with prostitutes, libertines, and kinksters.

As the show depicts it, the Grand Guignol Theater stages plays of graphic violence that attract a London crowd eager for horror. While many viewers probably think the theater is just a fabrication of the show, it was actually a real place.

Trigger Warning: This post describes some fairly graphic violence and has a photo some may find disturbing.

 

Le Théatre de Grand Guignol

The Grand Guignol Theater (literally ‘the Theater of the Big Puppet’) was founded in Paris in 1897. Its original aim was to be a home to naturalistic theater that explored the lives of men and women who were not thought to be appropriate subjects for theater, namely the criminals, prostitutes, orphans, and similar figures who resided at the bottom of the lower class. It originally served as a forum to critique the social inequities of its day; it takes its name from Guignol, a traditional French puppet character who is sort of a combination of Punch and Judy and Jon Stewart.

However, in 1898, the Theater acquired a new director, Max Maurey, who remained in charge until 1914. Working with the playwright André de Lorde, he pioneered an entirely new style of theater, naturalistic horror, which the Theater explored until its eventual closure in 1962. Whereas most 19^th century horror was supernatural tales of vampires and ghosts, de Lorde’s plays were stories of human madness. He wrote around 150 plays, many of them co-authored with psychologist Alfred Binet, the inventor of IQ testing. Their characters commit appalling acts of violence and degeneracy against each other.

In “A Man of the Night”, a necrophiliac breaks into tombs to violate the corpses. The nanny in “The Horrible Passion” strangles the young children entrusted to her. “The Laboratory of Hallucinations” depicts a doctor who finds his wife’s lover in his operating room and he revenges himself by performing a graphic brain surgery until the now-deranged lover drives a chisel into his brain. “The System of Dr. Tar and Professor Feather”, based on a short story by Poe, deals with a madhouse in which the inmates believe themselves to all sorts of objects and creatures, while the staff treat them as if they actually are those things until the patients revolt and turn the tables on the staff. “The Torture Garden”, set in China, focuses on a European woman who loves watching people being tortured until some revolutionaries decide to punish her by inflicting the same on her. Some plays explored the effects of diseases such as leprosy, rabies, and syphilis on their victims. Hypnosis, panic, and other altered states of consciousness were another popular subject. (A few of de Lorde’s plays have been translated into English. His “At the Telephone” is quite tame by Grand Guignol standards, but it gives a sense of his style.)

“The Torture Garden”

The Theater’s most famous actress, Paula Maxa, was called the Most Assassinated Woman in the World, because over the course of her career she was shot with rifles and revolvers, scalped, hanged, disemboweled, strangled, guillotined, crushed by a steamroller, dismembered, burned alive, poisoned, operated on, doused in acid, and more; she performed in an estimated 3,000 rape scenes. Despite this, the plays were not generally misogynistic so much as misanthropic; both men and women behaved abominably and both men and women were victims and killers.

“The Woman who Loved Heads”

The plays also addressed a wide range of social prejudices, such as hostility to immigrants and strangers, fear of infection and uncleanliness, class prejudices, fear of technology, and so on. True crime stories were another inspiration.

As the preceding description demonstrates, the Theater specialized in gore and graphic violence on stage. They created a wide range of special effects involving blood squibs, fake knives that spurted blood, animal intestines and eyeballs, blood pumps, fake body parts, and similar tricks. Gouging out eyeballs was a particularly favored effect. It also employed sound rather than music to heighten the psychological impact of the violence. Another trick involved the schedule. The plays were short enough that 5-6 plays were performed in a single night. The tales of violence alternated with bawdy sex comedies, producing a sort of whipsaw between ribaldry and horror that the Theater called la douche ecossaise, “the hot and cold shower”.

A scene from one of the plays

These plays had no moral or deeper meaning. The whole point was simply to trigger intense emotions of fear, disgust, and horror, although some plays also employed eroticism. Maurey felt that a play was a bust if it didn’t cause at least two faintings a night. The theater employed a physician to tend any theater-goers who required assistance. The intensity of the plays, the sensational subject matter, the clever publicity, and the violation of 19^th century social mores made the Theater successful for 5 decades. It was attended by everyone from factory workers to European royalty. Anais Nin was a fan, as was the future revolutionary Ho Chi Minh, who was working in Paris as a pastry chef. The boxes in the balcony were known for sexual goings-on, as horrified theater-goers sought release from the intensity of their feelings.

Unfortunately for the Theater, after World War II, it went into decline, because the war had dulled the appetite for such bloody spectacle. Its last director, Charles Nonon, once said, “We could never compete with Buchenwald. Before the war, everyone believed that what happened on stage was purely imaginary; now we know that these things–and worse–are possible.”

But by the late 1970s, as memories of the war had faded a little and a new generation grown up, interest in the Theater’s genre began to re-awaken, in the form of the American slasher film. Films like The Hills Have Eyes, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Friday the 13^th are arguably cinematic descendants of “The Laboratory of Hallucinations.” Other horror films, such as Halloween and Nightmare on Elm Street, rejected naturalistic horror in favor of more supernatural stories but still fed the appetite for graphic violence that Le Grand Guignol pioneered. It was the inspiration for Anne Rice’s Théatre des Vampires in Interview with the Vampire, and it has lent its name to any work of over-the-top gore. Some of de Lorde’s works are still periodically performed today, often around Halloween and a few theater troupes specialize in Grand Guignol theatrics today.

 

Penny Dreadful

The version of the Grand Guignol in the show is not an exact copy. It’s located on the wrong side of the English Channel, and it’s open a half-decade too soon. Nor are its plays all naturalistic; the second play we see is a story about a werewolf who kills a young woman, while the third play seems to involve a male victim who goes up to Heaven. Nor does the theater seem to employ the Hot and Cold Shower. Its shows are apparently all gore. Caliban runs the below-stairs equipment, attaching hidden hoses to pumps that spurt fake blood. From the few snippets we see, the plays were also not scripted in a naturalistic style, but rather emphasized a more artificial style of acting; the second play involves rhyming couplets.

(There was a short-lived London Grand Guignol, but much later, opening in 1920.  The London Grand Guignol, as it was simply called, copied the French theater’s approach, performing 4 to 6 short plays in a night’s entertainment that emphasized madness, revenge, and gore. Many of the scripts were direct translations of the French originals, while others were original plays, include several bawdy satires by Noel Coward. But the London stage was subject to censorship by the Lord Chamberlain, limiting what they could do. As a result, it closed after only two years.)

Penny Dreadful’s Grand Guignol

The show uses the Grand Guignol as a tool to reveal the brutality of its London society. One of the major themes of the show is the moral corruption and violence that lurks just underneath the fancy clothing and sophisticated society of London. The poor prostitutes of the city are repeatedly murdered by a serial killer and Dorian presides over decadent sex parties. Later Dorian takes Ethan to an underground club where people place bets on how many rats a dog can kill.

And just as the London Grand Guignol’s plays are supernatural rather than natural, so too do the human sins of its characters have supernatural effects. Vanessa’s sexual sins serve as a catalyst for her mediumistic abilities, make her vulnerable to possession, and set Mina on the path toward becoming a vampire.

Despite all this, the show plays the same game Ridley Scott’s Gladiator does. It wants to leave us appalled by the cruelties of the Victorian era: the casual violence of the rat-killing scene and the blood-lust of the men and women watching it, the cruel medical treatments of the asylum Vanessa is committed to, the way Caliban is subjected to unprovoked assault simply because his face is scarred. It tells us that we are superior to our Victorian forebears because we can recognize these things for the horrors they truly are.

Frankenstein and his monster having a reunion

Yet at the same time, the show is itself a Grand Guignol of sex and violence because we  watch it for those same horrors it condemns. It offers us a spectacle of graphically dismembered women and their children, of tubercular prostitutes who spit blood during sex, of Caliban literally ripping another of Frankenstein’s revenants in half with his bare hands. The show hypocritically draws us in with the same violence and sexual displays that it invites us to look down on and feel superior to. This technique demonstrates that despite the passage of time, we’re not so far removed from our ancestors after all.

 

Want to Know More?

Penny Dreadful is available on Amazon.

There are a number of books about Le Grand Guignol. Mel Gordon’s Theater of Fear and Horror and Richard Hand and Michael Wilson’s Grand Guignol are two worth looking at; the latter includes a number of complete scripts of the theater’s plays.