Author: Mark Hannam

I recently read a biography of Napoleon, written by the French historian Georges Lefebvre, first published in 1935.  I wanted to learn about him through the work of one of his own countrymen, for whom his historical importance would not be in doubt, but who nevertheless understood the many shortcomings of his rule, first as Consul and then as Emperor.  I had become aware that, despite studying European history at school until I was eighteen, I had never learned much about Napoleon, and that his portrayal in England was often rather cartoonish – a short, pompous man, who over-estimated his abilities and deserved to be ridiculed – with an emphasis on his dictatorial character.  By contrast, contemporary accounts by philosophers, novelists, and poets, celebrate Napoleon as the man who abolished Feudalism across Europe, introduced religious toleration, granted civil rights to the Jews, drafted constitutions, and who cut down the power of the church and the landed aristocrats.  Rather than a figure of fun, for many people of his day he was a symbol of progress, the champion of the rights of the people against the old elites.  Lefebvre’s book was exactly what I needed, and I think I now have a more balanced view of one of the Europe’s great but flawed leaders.

Early in the book, Lefebvre describes preparations for the Battle of Marengo (1800), which took place near a small town in Piedmont, roughly at the centre of the triangle formed by Turin, Milan, and Genoa.  In May, Napoleon led the French forces over the Alps and into northern Italy, ready to face the Austrian army.  As I read this, I remembered that this event is also described at the start of the novel Vertigo, by W G Sebald, a German author who lived much of his life in England and whose works have acquired something of a cult status.  I picked up my copy of Vertigo and re-read the first sentence:  In mid-May of the year 1800 Napoleon and a force of 36,000 men crossed the Great Saint Bernard pass, an undertaking that had been regarded until that time as next to impossible.  How odd!  For, according to Lefebvre, Napoleon had decided to lead the army to the Great Saint Bernard Pass which, having been crossed in 1798 and 1799, was a passage familiar to French armies.  Had the French army crossed the Alps using that pass twice before, or did they do so in 1800 for the first time?    Whose version of events should I trust?

Continue reading “Making stuff up”

On the last day of last year, I left my hotel in the centre of Den Haag and walked a short distance to Mauritshuis.  Built in the mid-seventeenth century, initially as a splendid family home in the city centre, it has for the past two-hundred years housed first the Dutch royal and now the Dutch state art collection, which includes very impressive paintings by Rembrandt and Vermeer, Fabritius’s beautiful small painting, The Goldfinch, along with a large collection of other works.  It is a wonderful museum, where I spent two enjoyable hours looking closely at these great artworks.  It is also a rather traditional space, with paintings displayed in rather traditional ways.

On leaving Mauritshuis, I walked north-east through the Haagse Bos for around an hour, before turning north into parkland at the outer edge of the city, until I reached the Museum Voorlinden.  This very modern building opened a decade ago and houses the largest private art collection in the Netherlands.  While there are some good paintings hanging on the walls, perhaps more impressive are some of the sculptural installations that were made specifically for the site.  There is a large corten-steel structure by Richard Serra, comprising six standing curved plates, each around 5 metres high, whose combined weight is more than 200 tons.  Walking in between these plates along a maze-like pathway, that narrows and widens alternately, creates rapidly changing feelings of claustrophobia and safety.  After passing through the work, visitors can climb a staircase and look down on the entire structure, seeing the sculpture from above now that they have escaped from within.

Continue reading “Art spaces”

He came to my house once, many years ago.

Back in 1993, I ran a by-election campaign in Hackney for the Labour Party, occasioned by the resignation of a local councillor who was found guilty of fraud and sent to prison.  The campaign included typical canvassing activities such as knocking on the doors of local houses and flats, and talking to the residents to try to identify those voters who were likely to support our candidate.  We had selected an ambitious young activist, who was well connected in senior Labour circles, and one Sunday morning he turned up at my house, ready to go canvassing, accompanied by the MP for Hartlepool, who was the Labour Party’s former director of communications. 

To his credit, notwithstanding his national profile and reputation, this famous visitor spent a couple of productive hours talking to local electors, he completed his canvass returns accurately, and was friendly towards the six or seven others party members who were out working that morning.  Our candidate duly won the by-election and served on Hackney Council for five years, before being elected MP for Rhondda in 2001.  He has been at Westminster ever since.  His canvassing companion had an even more successful political career – as a Cabinet Minister, a European Commissioner, and more recently as Ambassador to the United States of America – at least until this week, when he was arrested and charged with misconduct in public office.  It is now more than thirty years since I welcomed Peter Mandleson into my home, to support our modest efforts in what was a minor local political campaign. I have not spoken with him since, and I have moved house three times, but his public disgrace feels a little bit personal, as if some of his taint still lingers on in my life.

Continue reading “They have more money”

In 1932, Bertrand Russell published an essay in Harper’s Magazine called In Praise of Idleness, in which he provides a clear and succinct definition of work: work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so .  The second kind, he continues, is capable of indefinite extension: there are not only those who give orders but those who give advice as to what orders should be given.  Today, nearly a century later, the first kind of work remains very important, including energy extraction, industrial production, farming and food distribution, textiles and clothes manufacture, building construction and renovation, transportation and storage, painting and decoration, and – arguably – most professional sports, but the numbers of workers employed in altering the position of matter is proportionally far smaller than it was when Russell’s article was written.  The second kind of work – management and its ancillary disciplines – has grown significantly in scale and complexity in the last hundred years, although qualitative improvements in its outcomes remain hard to demonstrate. 

Russell set out to argue that, a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by the belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work.  Idleness – or laziness – was once the prerogative of the ruling class, he wrote, whether the slave owners of ancient Athens or the aristocrats of feudal Europe.  In these societies, the small number of men and women who were rich did no work, but lived comfortably by forcibly appropriating surpluses created by the work of many others, who were left merely with sufficient to survive (and not always that much).   In his day, Russell observed that within the new capitalist ruling class, the men and their sons prided themselves on their own hard work, which they believed justified their wealth, but were determined that their wives and their daughters should lead lives of leisure.  Russell concludes his essay with the claim that technology now allows for all members of society to enjoy much greater leisure time, if only work and resources were move evenly shared: modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all; we have chosen instead to have overwork for some and starvation for others … we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines … in this we have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish for ever.

Continue reading “Work hard”

At the junction of Fournier Street and Brick Lane, about 15 minutes’ walk from where I live, there is a building that has hosted religious services for almost three hundred years.  From the mid-eighteenth century it was used as a chapel by the Huguenots, the French Protestants who congregated in the Spitalfields area after having been forced to flee their homeland following persecution by the Catholic church, enthusiastically supported by the French king, Louis XIV.  Around sixty years later, the building was taken over by the Methodists – another group of Protestants, who, like the Huguenots, dissented to submit to the authority of the Anglican Church – and was used by them for almost a century.  In 1891, the building was occupied by the local Jewish community, many of whom were recent immigrants from Russia and parts of Eastern Europe (including what are now the Baltic States, Belarus, Poland, and Ukraine), and it became known as the Great Synagogue of Spitalfields.  By the mid-twentieth century, many Jews had moved away to other parts of London and its suburbs and, in the 1960s and 70s, the local area repopulated as a result of yet another wave of migration, this time from Sylhet – a region in what was then East Pakistan and is now Bangladesh – who came to work in the textile industry that was concentrated in east London at that time.  In 1976, the building was renamed the Jamme Masjid Mosque, and for the past fifty years it has served as a religious centre for the local Muslim population. 

Last month, I spent a few days in Köln, on the banks of the Rhine, home of the famous Catholic Cathedral, which is reported to attract around six million visitors each year.  This building was first started in 1248 – five hundred years before the Huguenot chapel opened – but was not completed until 1880 – shortly before the building on Brick Lane converted to a synagogue.  The Cathedral is huge and impressive, and thirty years ago it was designated a UNESCO world heritage site.  Despite its very different scale and grandeur, and despite its longevity – almost three times as old – and despite the fact that it was built by the same branch of the Christian church that persecuted the Huguenots, when I stood outside Köln Cathedral in the cold December air, looking up at its spectacular twin Gothic spires, I was reminded of the Brick Lane chapel/synagogue/mosque.  Not because the buildings are visually similar, but because both are suggestive of the sharp contrast between the durability of building materials and the transitoriness of human beliefs.

Continue reading “Change of use”