(1840-1902), German psychiatrist.
One of the most prominent psychiatrists in Central Europe prior to Freud, Richard von Krafft-Ebing started his career working in asylums, but the desire to escape the constraints of institutional psychiatry, which had become more akin to routine custodial care than to a gratifying scientific calling, drove him to broaden his professional territory. As a professor of psychiatry at the Universities of Strass-burg (1871-1872), Graz (1872-1889), and Vienna (1889-1902), he became actively engaged in the process in which the main institutional locus of this medical specialty shifted from the asylum to the university. Also, he transcended the institutional confines of psychiatry by developing a private practice, founding a private sanatorium, and advancing its moral role in society. Krafft-Ebing’s general theories of psychopathology were rather incoherent: his work embraced biological models of mental illness, including degeneration theory, as well as a psychological understanding of mental disorders. His ideas about the proper explanation and treatment of mental disorders were more or less geared to the changing institutional contexts in which he worked and the shifting social background of his patients. Moving from the public asylum to the university clinic, and founding a sanatorium and a private practice, he tried to enlarge psychiatry’s domain as well as to attract a new clientele. Whereas the somatic model of mental disease and degeneration theory promoted the scientific status of psychiatry, a psychological approach was more fruitful to attract middle and upper class patients suffering from rather mild disorders like nervousness, neurasthenia, or sexual perversion.
Krafft-Ebing worked in many fields of psychiatry, but he is remembered chiefly as the author of Psychopathia sexualis. This book made him one of the founding fathers of medical sexology. The first edition of this best-seller appeared in 1886, followed soon by several new and elaborated editions and translations in several languages. Krafft-Ebing revised it several times, especially by adding new categories of sexual deviance and more and more case histories. By naming and classifying virtually all nonprocreative sexuality, he synthesized medical knowledge of what then was labeled as perversion. Although he also paid attention to voyeurism, exhibitionism, pedophilia, bestiality, and other sexual behaviors, Krafft-Ebing distinguished four fundamental forms of perversion: (1) contrary sexual feeling or inversion, including various mixtures of manliness and femininity that in the twentieth century would gradually be differentiated into homosexuality, androgyny, and trans-vestitism; (2) fetishism, the erotic obsession with certain parts of the body or objects; (3) sadism and (4) masochism, neologisms actually coined by him, the first inspired by the Marquis de Sade (17401814) and the second by the writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1836-1895).
Krafft-Ebing’s interest in sexual deviance was linked to forensic psychiatry, in which he was a leading expert. Psychopathia sexualis was written for lawyers and doctors discussing sexual crimes in court. His main thrust was that in many cases sexual deviance should no longer be regarded as simply sin and crime, but as symptoms of pathology. Since mental and nervous disorders often diminished responsibility, he pointed out, most sex offenders should not be punished, but treated as patients. Like other psychiatrists in the late nineteenth century, Krafft-Ebing shifted the focus from immoral acts, a temporary deviation of the norm, to a pathological condition. Influenced by the natural-scientific approach in German psychiatry as well as by degeneration theory, he explained perversions as inborn instincts, as deviations of normal biological evolution.
Krafft-Ebing’s work appears to be typical of what Michel Foucault (1926-1984), in his influential The History of Sexuality (1978), designates as the medical construction of sexuality. Under the influence of Foucault, it has become a truism that physicians, by describing and categorizing nonprocreative sexualities, were very influential in effecting a fundamental transformation of the social and psychological reality of sexual deviance from a form of immoral behavior to a pathological way of being. The argument runs thus: by differentiating between the normal and the abnormal and by stigmatizing deviance as illness, the medical profession, as the exponent of a ‘‘biopower,’’ was not only constructing the modern idea of sexual identity but also controlling the pleasures of the body. Following Foucault, several scholars have associated the emergence of sexology with a deplorable medical colonization, replacing religious and judicial authority with scientific control. However, some late-twentieth-and early-twenty-first-century historical studies suggest that medical labeling and its disciplining effects have been overemphasized as the major determinants in the process creating sexual identities. Too readily the conclusion has been drawn that the individuals labeled as perverts were passive victims, trapped in the medical discourse.
To be sure, like other psychiatrists, Krafft-Ebing surrounded sexual deviance with an aura of pathology and he echoed nineteenth-century stereotypical thinking on sexual issues. However, his views were all but static or coherent and there were many contradictions and ambiguities in his work. It was open to divergent meanings, and contemporaries—among them many of Krafft-Ebing’s patients, correspondents, and informants—have indeed read it in different ways. Psychopathia sexualis did not only gratify one’s curiosity about sexuality and make sexual variance imaginable, but individuals concerned viewed it also as an endorsement of their desires and behavior. Its numerous case histories revealed to them that they were not unique in their sexual desire. Krafft-Ebing’s work was the impetus to self-awareness and self-expression, and many suggested that it had brought them relief. What is striking is not only that life histories were so prominent in Psycho-pathia sexualis and his other publications, but that the autobiographical accounts were not forced into the straitjacket of his sexual pathology. Many of the life histories were submitted voluntarily and although their authors demonstrated a considerable degree of suffering, this did not necessarily mean that they considered themselves to be immoral or ill. The medical model was employed by many of them for their own purposes to mitigate feelings of guilt, to give perversion the stamp of naturalness, and to part with the charge of immorality and illegality. Several went to the psychiatrist not so much seeking a cure but to develop a dialogue about their nature and social situation. In fact, Krafft-Ebing responded to these ‘‘stepchildren of nature,’’ as he characterized them. Even if they criticized medical thinking and the social suppression of their sexual desires, he still published their letters and autobiographies uncensored, and he also acknowledged that some of them had influenced him. Lay views and medical views of sexuality overlapped.
As more and more private patients and correspondents came up with life histories that did not fit the established perception of psychiatry and bourgeois morality, Krafft-Ebing’s approach became more enmeshed in contradictory views and interests. The psychiatric understanding of perversions moved between scientific control and the realization of the liberal ideals of individual selfexpression, self-realization, and emancipation. Whether the scale tipped to one side or the other depended to a large extent on the social position and gender of the psychiatrist’s clients. Upper and middle class men capitalized on psychiatric models in order to explain and to justify themselves. But lower class men, prosecuted sexual offenders, and most female patients were generally not in a position to escape the coercion that undeniably was part of psychiatric practice as well.
See also Psychoanalysis; Psychology; Sexuality. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Vol.1: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York, 1978.
Krafft-Ebing, Richard von. Psychopathia sexualis: Eine klinisch-forensische Studie. Stuttgart, 1886. Between 1886 and 1903 Krafft-Ebing published twelve editions of Psychopathia sexualis. Reprint, edited by Brian King, Burbank, Calif., 1999.
MiiUer, Klaus. Aber in meinem Herzen sprach eine Stimme so laut: Homosexuelle Autobiographien und medizinische Pathographien im neunzehnten Jahrhundert. Berlin, 1991.
Oosterhuis, Harry. Stepchildren of Nature: Krafft-Ebing, Psychiatry, and the Making ofSexual Identity. Chicago, 2000.
Harry Oosterhuis
KROPOTKIN, PETER (1842-1921), Russian geographer, author, revolutionary, anarchist theorist.
In the years before World War I, Peter Kropotkin was the Western world’s foremost theoretician of the philosophy and politics of anarchism. During the course of his long life, he achieved fame in a number of diverse fields of knowledge. While still in his twenties, Kropotkin was elected to the Russian Imperial Geographical Society as a result of his pioneering explorations in Finland and Siberia. Later, he became a well-known journalist, editor, and author of a number of books, including his inspiring autobiography, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, and his scientific alternative to Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinian evolutionary theory, Mutual Aid.
Kropotkin was born in 1842 into extraordinary privilege, inheriting the title of prince from his father. His formative years were spent on the family’s primary country estate as well in a Moscow mansion surrounded by the culture of serfdom. He attended the empire’s most elite school and served in the military before becoming disenchanted with the possibilities of reform under Tsar Alexander II. In 1872, searching for a new path, he underwent a transformative experience in the Swiss Jura Mountains, where he discovered survivors of the Paris Commune carnage who had established an independent society without allegiance to any government.
Returning to Russia, Kropotkin joined the leading underground revolutionary organization, the Chaikovsky Circle, where he wrote his first anarchist treatise, ‘‘Must We Occupy Ourselves with an Examination of the Ideal of a Future System.?’’ He was arrested and imprisoned by the tsarist police for his activities, but made one of the rare escapes from the infamous Peter and Paul Fortress with help from his comrades still at large in 1876. He fled to Paris, where he immediately established himself as the successor to the deceased founders of modern anarchism, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin. He was arrested by the French authorities for condoning the violent protests of miners in Lyon in his newspaper, La Revolte, and imprisoned for three years, but took his revenge by writing the first comparative history of conditions of penal servitude, In Russian and French Prisons (1887).
Unable to remain in France after his release from prison, Kropotkin moved to London, where he spent the next two very productive decades. He created the English-speaking world’s most influential anarchist newspaper, Freedom, which is still published, and lobbied successfully, with the help of several sympathetic British members of Parliament, against the evils of the tsarist regime in the House of Commons, where his brief was introduced prior to its publication as a pamphlet, The Terror in Russia (1909). One measure of his renown was the invitation he received to write the article on anarchism for the celebrated eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Equally significant was Kropotkin’s shock when he learned that the editors, without his consent, had added a long note to the article listing the acts of political violence associated with the widespread anarchist movement of the time, a subject Kropotkin had deliberately not included.
Kropotkin’s main contribution to political theory remains his critique of authority and his radical concept of a future stateless society in which both freedom and equality would be realized. His argument was grounded in a comprehensive assault on both the liberal and conservative interpretations of the theory of the social contract as conceptualized in Hobbes’s Leviathan (and refined by John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau) as well as the schools of thought and movements oriented around species (Charles Darwin) or class (Karl Marx) conflict. He located numerous examples in ancient, medieval, and modern history of independent and cooperative activities that resulted from collective efforts to overthrow or transcend the abusive power of kings, landowners, armies, and clerics and their justifying legal codes.
Although Kropotkin agonized over the ethics of employing violence in the name of genuine liberty, he consistently supported his colleague Paul Brousse’s formulation of ‘‘propaganda by the deed.’’ By this, Kropotkin meant that the assassinations of major political leaders, which had spread like an epidemic in the 1890s across Europe, had to be understood in their proper social context. The ‘‘terrorists’’ who threw their bombs in Naples, Paris, Madrid, Berlin, and London as they cried ‘‘long live anarchy!’’ were motivated by the horrendous conditions of inequality that had become intolerable for the majority of society. In his view, the assassins of terror were representatives of popular rebellion against the immoral authority of state, church, and ruling classes. Left to their own devices, without those institutions of control and oppression, ordinary people would find cooperative methods of production and exchange to replace the vicious competition of capitalism. Kropotkin believed that he was already witnessing the birth pangs of that future society, as municipalities at the federal level (rather than central authorities) in many European towns and cities had created free parks, public entertainment, and cooperative shops operating without profit or managerial hierarchies.
Kropotkin’s influence spread as his followers expanded around the globe. However, his decision to support the anti-German allies in World War I split and seriously weakened the anarchist movement. Nevertheless, he lived long enough to enjoy the consequences of the fall of the Romanov dynasty in 1917. As part of the general amnesty offered by the Russian Provisional Government to all exiles and political prisoners, Kropotkin returned to his native land at the age of seventy-five. His last years were spent encouraging anarchist parties and organizations in Russia despite Vladimir Lenin’s efforts to isolate him and limit his influence. One of his most dedicated disciples, the deported American anarchist Emma Goldman, visited him just before he died in 1921. His funeral was the last public anarchist demonstration permitted in the Soviet Union.
See also Anarchism; Bakunin, Mikhail; Proudhon,
Pierre-Joseph.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cahm, Caroline. Kropotkin and the Rise of Revolutionary
Anarchism, 1872-1886. Cambridge, U. K., 1989.
Joll, James. The Anarchists. Boston, 1965.
Kropotkin, Peter. Memoirs of a Revolutionist. Boston, 1899.
--. Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution. London, 1904.
--. Selected Writings on Anarchism and Revolution.
Edited by Martin A. Miller. Cambridge, Mass., 1970.
Miller, Martin A. Kropotkin. Chicago, 1976.
Woodcock, George. Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements. Cleveland, Ohio, 1962.
Martin A. Miller
KRUPP. Steel, the key material of the Industrial Revolution on which the Krupp family founded its industrial empire in Germany, offers higher strength, hardness, and elasticity than other ferrous metals. In 1811, Friedrich Krupp (1787-1826), an offspring of a prosperous trading family from Essen, founded a workshop for the production of cast steel on a plot of land bought from his grandmother. He hoped to profit from the high demand for steel in a Napoleonic Europe that was deprived of English steel exports as Great Britain sought to weaken France’s supremacy through restrictive trade policies. Technical difficulties, as well as, after Napoleon’s defeat in 1815, the renewed influx of English steel, whose manufacturers dominated European markets until well into the second half of the nineteenth century, led to persistent, severe losses in Krupp’s workshop. On the verge of personal bankruptcy, Friedrich Krupp died an exhausted, frustrated man at the early age of thirty-nine.
EXPANSION UNDER ALFRED KRUPP (1812-1887)
When Alfred Krupp, Friedrich’s fourteen-year-old son, assumed managerial responsibility for the heavily indebted workshop with four employees in 1826, he devoted himself to the business with the monomaniacal energy that was to characterize his career. At the heart of the company’s long-term success lay a reputation for high quality that allowed it to emerge as a competitor of English manufacturers. Alfred Krupp immersed himself in the technical details of steel production, personally supervising production processes on the shop floor throughout his entire professional life. Once the workshop had overcome initial technical problems, it widened its product range to enter new markets during the 1830s. In addition to craft tools and minting stamps for coin production, Krupp began to produce springs, axles, railway wheels, crankshafts, gun barrels and—starting in the 1850s— cannons. Product diversification combined with a rapidly growing workforce. Having gradually expanded to employ 240 people by 1850, in the next two decades the company benefited from dynamic industrialization processes that transformed the Ruhr area around Essen into the core region of the German industrial landscape.
The Krupp industrial complex on the Ruhr River, Essen, Germany. Postcard c. 1900. Mary Evans Picture Library
The company took advantage of expanding steel markets in the manufacturing and railway sectors. During the 1860s, it also developed into a leading military supplier, the Prussian army being its most important customer. Armaments accounted for 56 percent of the company’s turnover in 1876, which led to Alfred Krupp being nicknamed the ‘‘cannon king.’’ By 1873, the steelworks in Essen employed nearly 12,000 people and a further 4,100 workers in subsidiary enterprises.
INDUSTRIAL MANAGEMENT UNDER ALFRED KRUPP
Much of this expansion was predicated on high-risk investment strategies. Until the 1870s, Krupp invariably reinvested profits in new production facilities, subsidiary companies, and large stockpiles. This dynamic expansion, however, came at the price of low reserves, and the policy of immediate re-investment repeatedly subjected the company to major perils during recessions. The steelworks that had impressed domestic and foreign observers as evidence of the industrial power fuelling the German Empire only narrowly averted bankruptcy by laying off more than two thousand laborers in the mid-1870s. Thereafter, Alfred Krupp focused more strongly on the financial consolidation of his company.
An acute sense for self-promotion complemented Alfred Krupp’s business acumen and technical skill. He personally lobbied crowned heads and enjoyed a particularly good relationship with the Prussian monarch and subsequent German emperor William I (1797-1888). This connection led to armaments contracts and lucrative orders for railway equipment. Krupp also wooed potential customers, including heads of state, during spectacular tours of his gigantic production facilities. In 1861, the Prussian king left Essen profoundly impressed after a demonstration of steam hammer ‘‘Fritz,’’ a legendary ‘‘monster’’ weighing fifty tons. Moreover, Alfred Krupp devoted considerable attention to public relations efforts to secure and maintain an international reputation. The company was a regular participant at world fairs on both sides of the Atlantic; its displays usually included superlative exhibits such as the largest steel block or the biggest gun on show.
Armored gun emplacements at the Grusonwerk factory. Engraving by Robert Engels from the book Krupp 1812-1912, published for the Krupp centennial. Mary Evans Picture Library
By his own account a man with an impatient and brash disposition, Alfred Krupp practiced a direct leadership style to assert his authority over all areas within his works. Personal control, however, was increasingly difficult to achieve as the enterprise grew, a process that required the development of formal management routines within growing hierarchical administrative structures. Although Alfred Krupp was forced to tolerate frictions with his managers, he demanded unqualified loyalty from his manual workers. He was the prototypical example of an entrepreneur who conceived of himself as a stern yet benevolent patriarch. In keeping with this authoritarian understanding of business leadership, the company strictly monitored its employees’ private sphere. Workers with socialist sympathies were fired, as were those pursuing ‘‘immoral’’ lifestyles. This high-handed approach to industrial relations went hand-in-hand with Krupp’s sense of responsibility for the wellbeing of ‘‘his’’ workers that led him to offer social
Provisions that were exceptionally generous by contemporary standards. The company sponsored consumer associations offering foodstuffs at subsidized prices, health insurance, and pension schemes, as well as housing programs. As a result of these welfare programs, Krupp’s factory succeeded in attracting and retaining a skilled labor force with low fluctuation rates.
THE STEELWORKS FROM ALFRED KRUPP’S DEATH TO WORLD WAR I
By the time Alfred Krupp died of a heart attack in 1887, his steelworks had become a European industrial giant with excellent connections to the political establishment of the German Empire, and beyond. Krupp was succeeded by his son Friedrich Alfred Krupp (1854-1902), who, while continuing the firm’s social policies, further expanded the business, not least through mergers with competitors. Friedrich Alfred Krupp died under mysterious circumstances amid rumors of suicide on the Italian island of Capri after press allegations of a sexual scandal involving young men. After the turn of the century, Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach (1870-1950), who had married into the family, took over the directorship of the company, which profited from the booming international economy as well as the arms race before World War I. By 1914, the company had become Germany’s largest private employer, with a workforce of eighty-one thousand employees.
See also Germany; Industrial Revolution, First; Industrial Revolution, Second.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Berdrow, Wilhelm. The Krupps. Translated by Fritz Homann. Berlin, 1937.
Epkenhans, Michael. ‘‘Krupp and the Imperial German Navy 1898-1914: A Reassessment.’’ Journal of Military History 64 (2000): 355-370.
Kohne-Lindenlaub, Renate. ‘‘Friedrich Krupp GmbH.’’ In International Directory of Company Histories, vol. 5, 85-89. Chicago, 1992.
Bernhard Rieger
KULISCIOFF, ANNA (1854-1925), Italian socialist.
Born into a Russian Jewish merchant family, Anna Kuliscioff was sent to Switzerland to complete her studies in 1871 but gravitated to a group of politically active Russian students. On her return home in 1873, she joined the populist ‘‘go to the people’’ movement. She left Russia definitively in 1877 for Switzerland, where she met the Italian anarchist Andrea Costa. The years between 1879 and 1881 were decisive in Kuliscioff’s and Costa’s transformation from anarchism to socialism. Her own statement at her trial in Florence in 1879 for membership in a subversive organization pointed to her future political evolution: ‘‘Revolutions cannot be made by [Socialist] Internationals out of thin air because it is not for individuals to make them nor to provoke them; it is the people who do it. Therefore it makes no sense to rise up in armed bands but to wait until these bands form naturally and then direct them along socialist principles’’ (Riosa, p. 5).
After moving between France and Italy, Kulis-cioff resumed her studies at the medical faculty in Switzerland from 1882 to 1884 and then at the University of Naples, where she received her medical degree in 1886. The move to Naples ended her relationship with Costa. In 1885 she met Filippo Turati, with whom she established a personal and intellectual relationship that shaped the Italian Socialist Party from its foundation in 1892 to the post-World War I period. In 1891 they began to edit the socialist journal Critica sociale. In Critica sociale Kuliscioff turned her attention to the problems of women workers, which she integrated into but did not equate with the larger social problem of proletarian emancipation. Kulisci-off opposed autonomous feminist organzations and was instrumental in distinguishing socialist from bourgeois feminism. For instance, she did not involve herself in the largely middle-class campaign for legalization of divorce. She was one of the founders of the women’s section of the Milanese Labor Chamber in 1891. Kuliscioff supported the right to vote for women and the eight-hour day, and at the turn of the century she drafted a proposed law to offer women maternity leave with pay, restrictions on night labor, and a guaranteed day of rest. In contrast to many socialists, she understood that legislation for women was not a step to returning them to the home but was essential to their integration in modern society.
Kuliscioff was one of the organizers of the 1892 Genoa congress that formed the Italian Socialist Party. During the 1890s she urged the new party to engage itself in the political life of the country. Like Turati she was convinced that a necessary step to the socialist revolution was the democratization of Italy. During the repression after the riots of May 1898 Kuliscioff was arrested along with other leading socialists. On her release after seven months in jail she supported the alliance between the Italian Socialist Party and middle-class liberals for a return to constitutional legality. Kuliscioff joined Turati in urging Socialist support for the Zanardelli-Giolitti government from 1901 to 1903. Giovanni Giolitti, as interior minister, proclaimed government neutrality in labor disputes between private parties, although he was hostile to strikes in the public sector. Giolitti’s failure to deliver substantial reform from 1904 to 1909 disappointed
Kuliscioff, but she never entirely lost faith in the Piedmontese statesman. However, she was aware that concrete achievements were essential if the reformists were to keep control of the Socialist Party. At the party congress in 1908 Kuliscioff joined Gaetano Salvemini in pressing for a program of fundamental reforms, including universal suffrage. In 1910 she broke with Turati by calling for the right to vote for women, which her companion did not favor. She also criticized the Socialist Party’s willingness to accept limited voting reform from the government of Luigi Luzzatti in 1910. When the Giolitti goverment of 1911 accepted almost universal male suffrage, Kuliscioff continued to press for the vote for women on the pages of La difesa delle lavoratrici, the Socialist newspaper for women workers that she directed.
Kuliscioff also broke with the official party position during World War I, when she favored support for the Entente, the alliance of Britain, France, and Russia, over the party stand in favor of neutrality between the contending parties. She supported the first Russian Revolution of February 1917 but was instinctively hostile to the Bolshevik Revolution. Both Kuliscioff and Turati became increasingly isolated in the radicalized politics of 1919 to 1922 and both watched impotently as the Fascists stormed to power.
See also Feminism; Italy; Socialism; Suffragism; Turati, Filippo.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Casalini, Maria. La signora del socialismo italiano: Vita di Anna Kuliscioff. Rome, 1987.
Riosa, Alceo, ed. Anna Kuliscioff e l’eta del riformismo: Atti del Convegno di Milano, dicembre 1976. Rome, 1978.
Slaughter, Jane, and Robert Kern, eds. European Women on the Left: Socialism, Feminism, and the Problems Faced by Political Women, 1880 to the Present. Westport, Conn., 1981.
Alexander De Grand
KULTURKAMPF. The Kulturkampf, or ‘‘struggle for civilization,” was an episode of first-rate importance in modern German history in which Otto von Bismarck (Germany’s chancellor and Prussia’s minister-president; 1815-1898) and his political allies attempted to weaken the German Catholic church’s ties to the papacy, to bring that church under stricter state control, and to forge a common culture across Germany’s confessional divide. Fought chiefly in the Hohenzollern kingdom of Prussia and to a lesser extent in Germany as a whole, the Kulturkampf began in 1871, escalated sharply until 1878, and then gradually wound down until its end in 1887. This dispute took its grandiloquent name following a speech in January 1873 in which Rudolf Virchow (1821-1902), a prominent scientist and liberal politician, described the intensifying church-state disagreement as nothing less than a monumental struggle between two competing cultural viewpoints. The term embodied all the confidence, optimism, and belief in progress so characteristic of liberal thinking during the 1860s and 1870s.
The Kulturkampf owed its origins to complex elements and motives, including the existence of a post-Reformation religious, regional, and cultural divide that separated Germany’s Catholic and Protestant worlds. Even with national unification in 1870-1871, Germany’s confessional division meant that a profound religious rift ran straight through the empire, a rift that shaped and molded the way in which Germans imagined their nation and attempted to construct a national identity. More immediate causes for the Kulturkampf ranged from widespread dismay regarding papal denunciations of progress, liberalism, and modern culture vehemently expressed by the Syllabus of Errors in 1864 to the sweeping claims of papal infallibility promulgated by the Vatican Council in 1870, and from the fears and frustrations among Germany’s Liberals regarding a post-1848 Catholic religious revival to the challenge a rejuvenated Catholicism represented to liberal claims of cultural, social, political, and economic superiority. Without the encouragement and aid of these Liberals, other interest groups, and constituencies, which in turn were energized and emboldened by Bismarck’s endorsement of their cause, it is difficult to see how the Kulturkampf could have descended to the levels of loathing it did, dividing the country into two mutually uncompromising universes. But the Kulturkampf’s beginnings also owed much to Bismarck’s fears regarding Polish political unrest and unfavorable demographic shifts that threatened
German control in Prussia’s eastern districts, his desire to exploit the schism caused by the new doctrine of infallibility within the Roman church and spearheaded by the so-called Old Catholic sect, and his alarm at the reappearance of a Catholic political movement—the Center Party—in 1870-1871 that stood against Germany’s new political arrangements. His principle aims in the Kulturkampf, therefore, were to limit the scope of the damage that might be caused by the infallibility dogma and to consolidate German unity against both Catholics and Poles, who, he repeatedly said, pursued religious objectives and ethnic goals to the detriment of the newly fashioned German Reich.
RESTRICTIONS AND CONTROLS
Although Pope Pius IX (r. 1846-1878) and others portrayed the plight ofthe church and its adherents as a massive persecution not unlike that of ancient Rome, the Kulturkampf’s regulations avoided a direct confrontation with religious belief per se, emphasizing instead specific limitations and controls on its practice. To this end, Bismarck’s government in 1871 abolished the ‘‘Catholic department” in Prussia’s Ministry of Ecclesiastical Affairs and prohibited all expression of political opinion from the pulpit. Additional legislation in 1872 eliminated ecclesiastical influence in curricular matters and the supervision of schools, prohibited members of religious orders from teaching in the public educational system, and expelled the Jesuit order from German territory. To undercut papal authority, the Prussian government in that same year also severed diplomatic relations with the Holy See. The so-called May Laws, adopted by Parliament in 1873, placed the training and appointment of clergy in Prussia under state supervision or jurisdiction. Still another statute adopted in 1874 permitted the government to intern, strip of citizenship, and/or deport clergy found in noncompliance with the May Laws of the previous year. The Prussian government also introduced compulsory civil marriage in 1874, a step extended to the entire Reich a year later. Legislation accepted in 1875 abolished religious orders and congregations (with the exception of those involved in nursing the sick), terminated state subsidies to the Catholic Church, deleted religious guarantees from the Prussian constitution, and permitted Old Catholics to share church property and endowments with their former coreligionists. In 1874 and 1875, furthermore, Prussian authorities pushed through statutes permitting state agents to take charge of bishoprics where the incumbent was in prison or exile and allowed laymen to assume administrative responsibilities at the parish level. Each of these statutes represented not the next item in a preconceived or comprehensive repressive agenda, but a necessary step to cope with developments that were neither coherently planned nor accurately foreseen.
As a consequence of the Kulturkampf’s legislation, the Roman Church paid a heavy price in terms of decimated clergy, alienated revenues, and widespread hardship for the laity. Bishops, the parochial clergy, and the members of monastic houses paid the heaviest toll. More than half of Prussia’s episcopate went into exile or prison, nearly a quarter of all parish priests lost their pastoral appointments, and a third or more of all religious orders suffered the loss of home and function. Before the Kulturkampf came to an end, the church as an institution lost fifteen to sixteen million marks in state subsidies.
Ordinary Catholics also suffered grievously. Thousands found themselves without spiritual ministration, and for that reason regularity of sacramental observance became increasingly difficult. Others were jailed or fined for participating in demonstrations in support of their church leaders. Still others were the casualties of slander and malice or simply felt the strain of isolation. A purge of the state bureaucracy cost dozens of Catholic civil servants their careers and livelihoods. The Kultur-kampf also subjected the confessional press and its representatives to stricter controls. Police officials harassed, intimidated, censored, or even fined and imprisoned Catholic editors and journalists to silence the news they reported and the opinions they expressed.
CATHOLIC RESISTANCE
Despite the ordeal to which they were subjected, Catholics continued to resist the Kulturkampf’s new church regulations and to disobey the measures designed to intimidate them. The most important forums for the expression of that resistance were the Reichstag and the Prussian Parliament, in which the Center Party dramatically increased its representation between 1870-1871 and 1874. No Catholic political leader better personified that opposition than Ludwig Windthorst (1812-1891), a superb orator and gifted tactician widely acknowledged by friend and foe alike as Bismarck’s most abrasive and formidable parliamentary critic. He organized the Centrist deputies into an obstructionist bloc that kept attention focused on the grievances of their coreligionists.
In addition to the trouble caused by the Center Party and its leader, the government and its supporters also had to contend with widespread and open resistance. This extraparliamentary opposition was expressed through the organization of mass meetings, boycotts, civil disobedience, and petitions, even open defiance and public disturbance on a massive, chaotic scale. Bismarck himself narrowly escaped an assassination attempt in July 1874, and many of his associates received death threats. Imperial Germany, it is said, did not again witness collective action on such a scale until the revolutions that engulfed the country at the end of World War I.
LIQUIDATING THE KULTURKAMPF
This expanding opposition with its promise of interminable conflict, together with his own inability to find a formula for victory within the boundaries of accepted political action and without changing the size and shape of his government, prompted Bismarck by the late 1870s to normalize relations with the Roman Church. He also found himself increasingly distracted from the Kulturkampf by the rapid growth of the Social Democratic Party and the threat he believed this movement represented to Germany’s internal political and social arrangements. But Bismarck’s desire to find a modus vivendi with the Roman Church and its German adherents was also prompted by the accession of a more moderate pontiff following the death of the intransigent Pius IX in 1878. Although the Prussian government initiated contacts between Berlin and Rome, early negotiations proved disappointing. Unable to reach an acceptable compromise with Leo XIII (r. 1878-1903), the new pope, Bismarck chose instead unilaterally to ease the Kulturkampf by legislative and administrative action. Major steps in this direction included the Relief Law of 1880, which relaxed key features of the May Laws, permitted parishes with pastors to aid those without, and paved the way for the return of deposed clergy to vacant parishes and episcopal sees. In addition, Berlin restored diplomatic ties with the Holy See in 1882. These steps, however, including a visit of the Prussian Crown Prince Frederick William (1831-1888) in 1883 to the Roman pontiff, did little to assuage the misgivings of the Center Party and the Roman Curia. What did make the pope more tractable, on the other hand, was Bismarck’s request to Leo in 1885 to arbitrate a colonial dispute between Germany and Spain over competing claims to the Caroline Islands and the Palua Island group in Micronesia. This request produced a more favorable climate for direct church-state negotiations, outflanked Windthorst and the obstreperous Center Party, and led to acceptance of the Peace Law of 1886. This accord required the Prussian government to repeal, reduce in severity, or simply allow to fall into disuse much of the Kultur-kampf legislation. To this end, Prussian authorities abolished the special examinations in philosophy, history, and German literature demanded of ordi-nands by the May Laws, recognized the pope’s disciplinary power over the clergy, did away with the special tribunal that had acted on appeals against episcopal decisions, and reopened diocesan seminaries. The agreement also called for Prussia to resume financial aid to the church and to permit religious orders and congregations—at the discretion of the government—to reestablish chapter houses and to resume their previous activities.
Although both sides acknowledged the end of the Kulturkampf by mid-1887, not all restrictions and controls disappeared or even fell into disuse. The guarantees of religious freedom, abolished from the Prussian constitution at the height of the Kulturkampf, were not reinstated. Civil marriage was retained, as was state supervision of schools, the right of Prussian subjects to disassociate themselves from formal church affiliation, and the state’s power to veto ecclesiastical appointments. The separate department for Catholic affairs in the Ministry of Ecclesiastical Affairs was not revived. Prussia’s authority to deprive recalcitrant clergy of their citizenship and to deport them physically was not lifted until 1890. The Jesuit Law, despite a partial repeal in 1904, was not abandoned until 1917. And restrictions against political use of the pulpit remained in force until 1953. While the final settlement brought a close to the Kulturkampf as a formal conflict, it did little or nothing at all to end less-overt forms of discrimination or what Catholics derisively called a ‘‘silent’’ Kulturkampf.
AFTERMATH AND LEGACY
The Kulturkampf left permanent scars, both for the Catholic populace and for Prussian and German society as a whole. Although Catholics suffered grievously during the Kulturkampf, when assessed in terms of its larger purpose—as a means to eradicate Catholicism as a major factor in Germany’s political life, to break Catholic opposition to governmental policy, or to consolidate national unity—the Kultur-kampf was a conspicuous failure and a disappointment to its proponents. Despite Bismarck’s best efforts, the Center Party remained unbroken and even established itself as a potent political force that he could not ignore. Catholic morale did not disintegrate, and Catholics remained a coherent bloc within German society. The Polish-speaking inhabitants of Prussia’s eastern provinces also continued to resist demands for conformity. Even the intention to forge national unity across Germany’s religious divide only served to create more dissension because the Kulturkampf left Germany more divided than ever, divided by suspicion, fear, and mutual misunderstanding. As the defining experience of their lives, the Kulturkampf entered deeply into the collective memory of countless Catholics and influenced the attitudes and behavior of their community well into the twentieth century.
It is good to remember, of course, that the Prussian Kulturkampf as a ‘‘culture war’’ did not stand alone. Similar conflicts, less well known and on a smaller scale, occurred elsewhere in Europe and even in Germany itself. Following Europe’s midcentury revolutions, Catholic areas witnessed a vigorous religious renewal. Fashioned and dominated by the clergy and sustained within an institutional framework of new associations and organizations, this revival introduced a new, popular morality encouraged by missions, revival meetings, pilgrimages, and other forms of religious expression and practice. This reshaped Catholicism, like the secular, liberal, and anticlerical political culture with which it often collided, was a transnational phenomenon. It is not surprising, therefore, that from the mid - to later nineteenth century lesser German states such as Baden or Hesse-Darmstadt, or Switzerland, France, Belgium, and countries elsewhere in Europe experienced cultural clashes similar to Prussia’s Kulturkampf.
See also Bismarck, Otto von; Catholicism; Catholicism, Political; Center Party; Germany; Liberalism; Pius IX; Prussia; Windthorst, Ludwig.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Anderson, Margaret Lavinia. Windthorst: A Political Biography. Oxford, U. K., 1981.
Blackbourn, David. Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Nineteenth-Century Germany. New York, 1994.
Clark, Christopher, and Wolfram Kaiser, eds. Culture Wars: Secular-Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-
Century Europe. Cambridge, U. K., 2003.
Gross, Michael B. The War against Catholicism: Liberalism and the Anti-Catholic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Germany. Ann Arbor, Mich., 2004.
Mergel, Thomas. Zwischen Klasse und Konfession. Katho-lisches Biirgertum im Rheinland 1794—1914. Gcittin-gen, 1994.
Ross, Ronald J. The Failure of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf: Catholicism and State Power in Imperial Germany, 1871-1887. Washington, D. C., 1998.
Schmidt-Volkmar, Erich. Der Kulturkampf in Deutschland 1871-1890. Gottingen, Germany, 1962.
Smith, Helmut Walser. German Nationalism and Religious Conflict: Culture, Ideology, Politics, 1870-1914. Princeton, N. J., 1995.
Sperber, Jonathan. Popular Catholicism in Nineteenth-Century Germany. Princeton, N. J., 1984.
Weber, Christoph. Kirchliche Politik zwischen Rom, Berlin und Trier 1876-1888. Die Beilegung des preufiischen Kulturkampfes. Mainz, Germany, 1970.
Ronald J. Ross
KUTUZOV, MIKHAIL (1745 1813), Russian field marshal.
Field Marshal Kutuzov’s career is emblematic of the evolution of a uniquely Russian military institution following the reign of Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century. It was Peter who had thoroughly reformed the kingdom of Muscovy’s armed forces by establishing a standing conscript army and professional officer corps, modeled on Western standards, to defend and expand his newly proclaimed Russian Empire. He also decreed a lifetime obligation of state service for the nobility, preferably in the army, to staff his new state edifice. At a moment of crisis almost a century later, Kutuzov, a native Russian, would defeat a foreign invader, preserve the ruling dynasty, and project the empire to its apogee of power.
Born in 1745 into a noble family, the son of a career officer and general, Mikhail Kutuzov began his military career as a cadet at the Artillery-Engineer School. He entered formal service at the age of nineteen, in the context of a remarkably successful series of wars that established Russia as a Great Power and its army as a formidable force. After service in campaigns against Poland in the 1760s, Kutuzov was transferred south, where during wars with the Ottoman Empire he served intermittently for the next twenty-five years, being wounded twice and losing sight in his right eye. Rising in the ranks, a protege of the legendary Marshal Alexander Suvorov, Kutuzov exhibited the strategy, tactics, and leadership that distinguished the evolving Russian military ‘‘school,’’ emphasizing speed, mobility, tactical flexibility, shock action, and the bonds of morale between officer and soldier.
Following a brief period in government service and retirement, Kutuzov reached the peak of his career during the wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon. His fortunes would suffer, however, because of his unhappy relationship with Tsar Alexander I (r. 1801-1825). At the battle of Austerlitz in 1805 it was Kutuzov who correctly discerned Napoleon’s intentions and thus counseled withdrawal, yet was personally overruled by Alexander, who ordered attack. Alexander never forgave Kutuzov for the ensuing debacle, and the general would never again enjoy the full trust of the tsar. Kutuzov went off to war successfully with the Turks, but at the height of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in summer 1812, he was languishing as commander of the St. Petersburg militia. Yet in the face of continuing retreat, mounting political pressure, and Kutuzov’s own notable reputation, the tsar reluctantly appointed him to overall command.
Contending with an acclaimed adversary, scheming comrades, a resentful sovereign, and a volatile populace, Kutuzov first ordered the army to halt its retreat and fight, which it did at terrible cost at Borodino on 7 September. The battle was a tactical victory for Napoleon, but was strategically indecisive. Kutuzov then decided to continue his predecessor’s strategy of deliberate withdrawal, culminating in the fateful decision to abandon Moscow itself, while skillfully maneuvering his forces out of the Grande Armele’s reach. He thereby sought to present Napoleon with a strategic vacuum that would frustrate his desire for a decisive battle leading to a negotiated peace. In belated recognition of Kutuzov’s checkmate, Napoleon ultimately made his decision to retreat from Russia in late October. Kutuzov had his forces shadow the Grande Armele along its path over the next two months, yet again sought mostly to avoid decisive battle. He instead allowed attacks by peasant militia, guerrilla bands, and detachments of Cossacks to bleed Napoleon’s forces and later let the even more brutal adversaries of bitter cold and desperate famine do their work for him.
However Kutuzov’s strategic vision and tactical shrewdness employed first in deliberate retreat and then cautious pursuit, not decisive attack, won him only the disgust of many of his fellow generals, as well as of the tsar himself. Further, with regard to the military campaign beyond the empire’s borders, Kutuzov saw the defense of the Russian state as the army’s primary duty. He thus found himself at odds with Alexander’s increasingly messianic vision of himself as the crusading protector of dynastic legitimacy and European law and order. Appointed to nominal command of the coalition armies nonetheless, Kutuzov would not see the final campaign against Napoleon. He fell sick and died in April 1813.
The historical memory of Kutuzov contrasts sharply with official distrust of him. While scholars continue to debate the character of the conflict as a ‘‘national’’ struggle, it is undeniable that in the face of a brutal invasion and occupation, the Russian people perceived the war not as one of defense, but survival. Kutuzov became emblematic of the sacrifice, determination, and sense of unity demonstrated in the Russians’ resistance. He embodied the popular, as opposed to the dynastic, interpretation of the victory, a status immortalized by Leo Tolstoy’s literary portrait of Kutuzov in the novel War and Peace.
See also Austerlitz; Borodino; French Revolutionary Wars and Napoleonic Wars; Military Tactics; Napoleon; Russia.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Fuller, William C., Jr. Strategy and Power in Russia, 16001914. New York, 1992.
Kagan, Frederick W., and Robin Higham, eds. The Military History of Tsarist Russia. New York, 2002.
Pinter, Walter. ‘‘Russian Military Thought: The Western Model and the Shadow of Suvorov.’’ In Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, edited by Peter Paret, 354-375. Princeton, N. J., 1986.
Riley, J. P. Napoleon and the World War of 1813: Lessons in Coalition Warfighting. Portland, Ore., 2000.
Tarle, Eugene. Napoleon’s Invasion of Russia, 1812. Translated by Norbert Guterman and Ralph Manheim. 1942. Reprint, New York, 1971.
Gregory Vitarbo
World History
