Inventing Europeans: The Birth of Modernity and the Shaping of European Culture (Ideal Country Translation Series, No. 060)

On June 13, 1846, the Paris-Brussels railway opened. At the invitation of Baron Rothschild, the company's owner, 1,500 passengers boarded the inaugural train. Among them were the Dukes of Nemours and Montpensier, sons of King Louis-Philippe I of France, French and Belgian officials, and such celebrated figures as Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, Théophile Gautier, and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. During the journey, Hector Berlioz conducted an orchestra performing his Grande symphonie funèbre et triomphale aboard the train. This was not the first international railway, but it was considered the most important, since it connected France with the Low Countries, Britain, and the German-speaking regions. With railways crossing national borders, a new era in European culture began. Writers, artists, opera companies, orchestras, and actors became frequent travelers, crisscrossing countries by train to hold concerts, art exhibitions, reading groups, and salons. Convenient cross-border transport also opened international markets to mass-produced, inexpensive reproductions of paintings and printed books and sheet music.

People across Europe began to see the continent as a whole and to share a common culture: they read the same books, listened to the same music, admired the same paintings, and watched the same plays. Eventually, they began to call themselves “Europeans,” viewing Europe as a space for cultural exchange, translation, and circulation that transcended national borders. Thus, nineteenth-century Europe ushered in the age of cultural globalization. The railway age revolutionized mass transport and travel, while advances in printing technology strengthened the market for mass-produced works. Art and culture ultimately became businesses, and whether a work would endure for generations or disappear into history was left to the forces of the capital market.

Through the stories of Russian writer Ivan Turgenev, French soprano Pauline Viardot, and art critic Louis Viardot, Figes depicts the brilliant internationalist culture of the nineteenth century. He shows how writers, artists, and musicians of the time became transnational cultural intermediaries, connecting European countries into a cultural community through a flourishing cultural sphere. This brought the people of Europe together under a shared identity, “Europeans,” and established European culture and its literary and artistic works as classics of world civilization.