Kalliope's Reviews > The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914

While from a proud tower in the town
Death looks gigantically down

The City in the Sea – Poe.

This book is really a collection of essays published separately in various journals. Any book tackling the social, political and artistic situation of the world in the couple of decades before it entered its first global war, could only offer a partial view. These essays offer a series of selected aspects of this bellicose universe seen through shifting points of view.

There are considerable absences. For example, Russia and the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman empires are not tackled. Instead we get a focus on Britain, France, the German Empire and the United States. There are additional chapters on Syndicalism, Anarchism, the institution of the Hague Conferences, and on a German Musician.

I have two favorite chapters. I learned a great deal from the one devoted to the US in which Tuchman shows how after the annexation of the Territory of Hawaii the country turned into something different from the days when it was founded. Fascinating was also the account of The Hague Conventions which tackled how, if they fundamentally failed, they also succeeded in starting a protocol that after some developments alleviated some aspects of brutality when humans decide to engage in war.

The least relevant of the chapters was the one dedicated to a German composer. Entertaining in itself it seemed to grant disproportionate attention to Richard Strauss, no matter how beautiful his music is.

And yet, in spite of the merged nature of this collation of essays, an overall picture emerges. From the Proud Tower we can see that it was the social structure of society, with its internal and extreme poles, that pulled a greater and greater tension and finally made the inner strings snap. But the view also offers the realization that if these social tensions were felt in parallel in the countries Tuchman has selected, their logical international relevancy was poisoned by distorting nationalisms.

What could have been a series of revolutionary and coetaneous changes in domestic social pacts, marched instead into a political war against other nations. The book starts with the idiosyncrasies and quirks of the British Lords and finishes with the assassination of Jean Jaurès-- one of the founders of the French Socialist Party-- for being a pacifist. A nationalist shot him fatally a couple of days after the war against Serbia had been declared and four days before the war became general.

Tuchman writes in a very engaging manner, but to me it was at times too engaging. I prefer a more analytical and less journalistic approach. The facts and arguments stay better in my mind.