The cult of national heroes:

Heroism explains the appearance and the spread of public monuments during the nineteenth century and especially of war monuments in the last decades of the same century and, most of all, during the interwar period. They all framed the processes of war commemorations worldwide. The following lines surveys the most important contributions on the relationship between nationalism and heroism, it discusses the functions and the variety of values associated with the concept of heroism as well as the

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role of the pantheons in the spread of the cult of heroes as a part of national history and national identity.

The concept of heroism is many times taken for granted as having the same meaning over time for all social groups and the same functions, Thomas Carlyle’s essay On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1841) being given as an illustration of this perennial perspective and in the same time as an introduction to the study of the cult of heroes. To use the terminology of comparative studies, the concept of heroism was used, for most of the times, as a constant and not as a variable. On the contrary, like any other concept, over a long period of time the concept of heroism had different meanings for different people that lived in different contexts and it served a diversity of uses for as many people and groups. Why and how a certain type of heroism became so widespread during the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth one? What were the factors and agents of this dissemination? What were the cultural trends it intersected?

And what types of audience were they designed for and for what purposes? These are only several of the questions I had in mind when approaching this aspect of the cultural politics of war commemorations.

Historical approaches to the concept of (national) heroism are of a recent date.

Andrei Pippidi discussed the hero cult from the Antiquity to the present days observing that “this civic cult might reveal both contemporary ideologies and a long filiation of ideas or beliefs at work […] one the one hand, in a society deeply divided by old and new conflicts, there was either the hope of coalescing national unity around a popular figure

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or the intention of boldly asserting a popular tendency which should have produced unanimity.”⁴¹ Approaching the making of Vasil Levski as a central hero of the Bulgarian nationalism, Maria Todorova observed that “National heroes are a recognized cornerstone of the symbolic repertoire of nationalism” and “there are typological differences between the place of heroes in different historic formations.”⁴² Linas Eriksonas has comparatively approached traditions of heroism constructed in three countries, Scotland, Norway and Lithuania, observing they are deeply interlinked with the local traditions of nationalism: “Heroic traditions served as glue which helped to sustain national identity in the times when a nation was stateless or partially subjugated.”⁴³ Coming from a tradition of political history, broadened in the last decades by closer attention given to demographic, social and cultural trends, Robert Gerwarth questioned and analyzed the instrumentalization of a political figure like Otto von Bismarck after his death by both supporters and critics for their own political and cultural purposes. While paying attention mostly to Great Men, a special issue of European History Quarterly draws three important conclusions for nineteenth and early twentieth century conceptualizations of heroism: it confirms Ernst Cassirer’s hypothesis that “hero cults tend to be particularly potent and prolific during times of political and cultural crises”; they represented the result of a constant negotiation of different political actors,

41 Andrei Pippidi, About graves as landmarks of national identity (Budapest: Collegium Budapest, 1995), p. 2.

42 Maria Todorova, “National Heroes as Secular Saints: The Case of Vasil Levski,” IWM Working Paper No.1/2002 (Vienna: Institute for Human Sciences, 2002), p. 2.

43 Linas Eriksonas, National heroes and national identities. Scotland, Norway and Lithuania (Bruxelles: Peter Lang, 2004), p. 306.

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intellectuals and social groups; and the role of gender visible in the tendency of depicting the nation as females and the heroes as males while qualities ascribed to heroism were also those ascribed to masculinity such as virility and strength.⁴⁴

From this diversity of approaches one may draw the observation that structurally there are three functions of the hero. First of all, the hero was used to describe a series of actions and facts belonging to a rite of initiation where at the end a youngster becomes a mature person, usually no model of behavior as a mature person being explicitly indicated or prescribed except of overcoming the hardships assumed by the rite of initiation. The narrative concentrated mostly on the beginnings of one’s life, if the hero survived his later life being either ignored or shortly described. This was the role of the Greek-Roman mythology with its numerous heroes during the early modern period and later. This was also the role of the many characters of the modern novels during the nineteenth and early twentieth century in articulating one’s self. And to some extent, this was the way the war experience was preached during the nineteenth century, most famous example being Stendhal’s Charterhouse of Parma (1839).

Secondly, the hero was used to postulate and disseminate a model of behavior that was supposed to be copied most of the times in its entirety, the rite of initiation not receiving any attention. This is visible in the teaching of the military deeds of the medieval kings, the life of the Christian saints as well as of the actions and life of those

44 Robert Gerwarth, “Introduction”, Heroes cults and the politics of the past: comparative European perspectives. Edited by Robert Gerwarth, special issue of European History Quarterly, vol. 39, nr. 3, July 2009, pp. 381-387; Ernst Cassirer, The myth of the state (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946), p. 280.

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chosen as national heroes during the nineteenth and twentieth century and integrated in the narrative of national history. Biography as a genre flourished as a consequence of this second function of heroism in the same period. Cultural and especially political personalities or heroes of a lower magnitude were and are the favorite topic of these biographies. The periods of the childhood and youth were rather ignored unless the individual proved prodigious early in his/her life, the narrative dealing mostly with the period of their maturity, their deeds being disseminated or taught as an example or model to be followed.

Finally, in the last half of the century a hero is sometimes used in order to construct a coherent narrative, no matter how analytical it is in the same time, where attention is focused mostly on the pieces of the puzzle describing the context(s) crossed by the hero’s actions rather on the person of the hero. This is visible in the renovations given to the study of biography by the new cultural history of the last decades, the most illustrious examples being Carlo Ginzburg’s The cheese and the worms (1976) and Natalie Zemon Davies’s The return of Martin Guerre (1983).

My focus in this dissertation is on the second function of heroism where it was used to postulate an exemplary way of living or a model of behavior during extraordinary moments. The hypostases of this function of heroism depended on the cultural context it served. In religious contexts, the cult of heroes took the form of the cult of saints. In the contexts of constructing legitimacy for the monarchs, it took the form of the cult of medieval kings and sometimes knights. The revival of the Greek and Roman mythology

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during the early modern period brought back the cult of gods and (founding) heroes.

Finally, the advent of secularism since the eighteenth century established the cult of the Great Men may they be military generals, men of letters, diplomatic and especially political leaders embodying different but sometimes overlapping cultural, political and ideological trends. While the pantheons grouping the last groups are rather inventions of the last two centuries they were structurally grounded in the (Christian) religious calendars as well as in the medieval lists of monarchs. The role of the pantheon(s) and the competitions around it/them are highly visible in France where during the Third Republic republicans included men of letters such as Victor Hugo while Catholics gathered around royal and religious figures such as Joan of Arc. Their role in the promotion of heroism is discussed at the end of this section.

When not used as an anchor and connection at the personal level to a group of readers or to give coherence to an otherwise disorganized, hazardous set of multiple layers of intended or unintended meanings, constructed or projected significances or a more or less unified narrative, historical or fictional, or a more or less technical solution used in novels or recent biographical approaches in historical studies, the hero was instrumentalized by different cultural backgrounds in different intended ways. The utilization of the hero allowed and reveals multiple conceptualizations and different sets of cultural references and vocabularies that are structurally compatible. They sometimes overlap and different forms of hybridization appear but they actually coexist allowing competing and overlapping notions of heroism. An artifact allows multiple readings

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according to the reader’s, viewer’s, user’s background, interests, experience and intentions. So are the concepts of hero and heroism. Romanticism disseminated the pantheon of national heroes once the concept of people/nation started to spread through literature and arts and later through the universities. A military heroism was designed for the benefit of the military training and it was disseminated through the public system of secondary and primary education, the army as well as the ceremonies staged by the nation-state. The religious framework absorbed and presented these national heroes as martyrs and saints. In the Romanian case, Michael the Brave was presented as a martyr for the nation, Stephen the Great and Constantin Brâncoveanu were revered and were even sanctified in the recent years, the military saints of the Byzantine Empire were preached as models as a part of the military training while many of them were adopted as patrons of regiments after 1870s, a practice that was reintroduced in Romania during the 1990s, this time for purely functional purposes and not explicitly intentional for celebrating the historical continuity of the Romanians. Subsequently, those fallen in the Great War were also integrated as martyrs of the nation.

In each of these cultural, social and sometimes political contexts, a hero was conceptualized in a different way and benefited from a set of different qualities that were emphasized in order to maximize his circulation. For example, a national hero like Stephen the Great was able during nineteenth century Romania to achieve a multiple identity with a set of qualities that were popular in different ways in each of these contexts allowing every group to emphasize those qualities that were considered relevant

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in-group. The military tended to put emphasis on his victories, the churchmen tended to put emphasis in his policy of constructing churches while the others tended to put emphasis on his diplomatic skills or on the apparent prosperity his reign represented for the principality of Moldavia in the second half of the fifteenth century. It did not matter if he actually embodied all these qualities in an equal way or to the extent they were emphasized. What was important was to instrumentalize him and his deeds for cultural and political aims that were popular during the late nineteenth century and later.

If contested, contestation for this type of hybrid heroism did not come from a different interpretation of its meaning but the competition was with those who have seen no meaning at all in it. One question left unanswered to a great extent in this dissertation is to whom were these public monuments visible, relevant and useful besides the mass of the people involved in their construction? At the individual level, multiple identities allowed putting emphasis on only one of these aspects while in the same time being in the possession of all of them. For example, a person with a literary education who also passed the military training, who was professionally active in an economic field and who was also religious in nature would identify himself/herself with only one of the hypostases described above while being able to connect with all of them.

The creation of cultural (national) pantheons or the cult of the great men at the end of the eighteenth century and during the early part of the nineteenth century was

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discussed by several authors whose contributions I did not have access to.⁴⁵ Referring initially only to circular buildings similar to the one in Rome where illustrious artists of the Renaissance were buried since the 16^th century, the pantheon came during the nineteenth century to define the selection of exemplary men of a nation and sometimes of a part of the political spectrum whose tombs or sculptures were many times gathered in one building.⁴⁶ Culturally and politically canonized and raised at the level of (national) heroes in order to being commemorated, their persona was subsequently used for furthering a cultural and political agenda relevant at the level of the nation or only for a part of the political spectrum. My own understanding of the concept was mediated by the contributions of Mona Ozouf and Eveline Bouwers. Mona Ozouf discussed the creation of the Panthéon of Paris and its subsequent cultural history.⁴⁷ Eveline Bouwers documented “how a pantheonic ideal type – roughly defined as a temple in which tribute it paid to the nation’s greatest men for the sake of stimulating emulation of their actions – was adjusted to match different societies [ultimately failing] to engage the nation whose existence they semantically and aesthetically trumpeted… [Still] pantheons not only

45 Contributions on the topic unavailable in Bucharest’s libraries (BCU and NEC) include Christian Amalvi, De l’art et la manière d’accommoder les héros de l’histoire de France. Essais de mythologie nationale (Paris: Albin Michel, 1988); Jean-Claude Bonnet, Naissance du Panthéon: essai sur le culte des grandes hommes (Paris: Fayard, 1998); Georges Minois, Le culte des grandes homes: des héros homériques au star system, Paris : Louis Audibert, 2005; Le culte de grands hommes 1750-1850. Edited by Thomas W. Gaehtgens and Gregor Wedeking (Paris: Editions de la Maison de Sciences de L’Homme, 2010).

46 Matthew Craske and Richard Wrigley, “Introduction” in Pantheons. Transformations of a monumental idea. Edited by Richard Wrigley and Matthew Craske (London: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 1-10.

47 Mona Ozouf, “Le Panthéon. L’école normale des morts” in Les lieux de memoire, vol. 1 (Paris:

Gallimard, 1984). Translated in Realms of memory. The construction of the French past, vol. III:

Symbols, Translated by Arthur Goldhammer, pp. 325-346.

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responded to changes in the social world and political order but were actors in this process.”⁴⁸ She analyzed the debates around grouping tombs and statues honoring mostly military figures in dedicated buildings in London (Westminster and St. Paul Cathedrals) and Paris (the Panthéon) before and during the Revolutionary Wars and their replication in Regensburg (Walhalla) and for a short while in Rome again during the first decades of the nineteenth century, thus revealing the divided meaning given to the concept in different countries and cultures, the respective building initially failing to gather national support partly due to the competition from other media of commemoration such as

“churches, public squares, medals or coins, collective biographies (‘pantheons on paper’) wax statues, panoramas, songs and verses, porcelain figurines and so on.”⁴⁹

The pantheon illustrates the extension of the concept of heroism from monarchic, military and diplomatic figures to men of letters and science of the past or present. The cultural component of the pantheons of nineteenth century Bavaria/Germany and France became even more important than the military one. As a part of each national pantheon of Europe, one may discern three types or groups of heroes who were the object of public celebrations, anniversaries, commemorations and to whom public monuments associated with the cult of these heroes were dedicated during the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth one. First of all, they were dedicated to former

48 Eveline G. Bouwers, “Introduction: the journey of the European pantheonic imagination” in her Public Pantheons in Revolutionary Europe. Comparing Cultures of Remembrance, c. 1790-1840 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 1-15. The combined quotes are from pages 5, 6 and 10.

49 Eveline G. Bouwers, Public Pantheons in Revolutionary Europe, p. 7. Her research on the English case was previously published as “Whose heroes? The House of Commons, its commemorative sculptures and the illusion of British patriotism, 1795-1814,” European Review of History, vol. 15, nr. 6, 2008, pp.

675-689.

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rulers or historical figures, most of the times promoted as national (founding) heroes in order to promote political and national unity. During the eighteenth century they were the recent rulers such as Louis XIV or Peter the Great whose reign’s political and social decisions were used for further strengthening the central power in France, Russia etc.⁵⁰ With the advent of nationalism aimed at overcoming internal political disputes during the social unrest of the nineteenth century preference in choosing national heroes was given to rulers of the period of the Middle Age. This group of figures was the most actively used in the process of cultural mobilization for war before the First World War. In addition to this first group, there were other two groups of heroes that were included in different cultural and political pantheons. One group was represented by the men of culture and science who lived, most of them, during the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries and contributed to the European or the local expansion of knowledge and infrastructure or to the advancement of literature or arts. They were first included in the pantheons created in the early nineteenth century and later they spread in all major urban areas. Finally, the third type or group was represented by men associated with the major political decisions contemporary to or still directly affecting the moment or the period when their monuments were built. This group spread most of the times in the second half of the nineteenth century and it included most of the time statesmen and later politicians of different traditions, military leaders and sometimes royal figures who recently died.

50 Charlotte Chastel-Rousseau, “Introduction” in Reading the royal monument in eighteen century Europe. Edited by Charlotte Chastel-Rousseau (London: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 1-10.

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The dissemination of the pantheon of heroes was carried out not only through historical writings and public monuments but also though literature and arts. Literature and painting contributed to the articulation of an uncontested unitary perspective on the national history by referencing each other and visually reinforcing the perspective of national unity. Literature and paintings, and later public monuments, contributed some times to the construction of the cult of national heroes in the Romanian public sphere in a more effective way than the professional historical writing did. Subordinating history to the cultivation of language and especially illustrating models or flaws of character, they could not have done differently given their selective nature manifested through sampling and focusing on events that looked minor at the scale of national history but were more accessible to the reading public.⁵¹

In the Romanian case, similar to the other European cases, clustered around the concept of the political and cultural unity of all speakers of the Romanian language and articulated through literature, arts, historical writings and public monuments, the cult of (national) heroes was further popularized through theaters, schools, barracks, museums and popularizing books and it was used as a set of anchors for teaching a national history of continuous struggle against the never ending invading enemies, thus contributing to the mentioned above process of cultural mobilization for war. This national historical memory served as the basis for political discourses invoking the past as a point of

51 The basic survey of the Romanian literature is George Călinescu, Istoria literaturii române: de la origini până în prezent [The history of the Romanian literature: from its origins to the present]

Foreword and edition by Alexandru Piru (Bucharest: Editura Minerva, 1988, c1941). English edition:

History of Romanian literature. Translated by Leon Levitchi (Paris: Unesco, 1988).

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reference and (anti)model for their present; it accommodated the growing number of anniversaries celebrating the modern Romanian state as well as the commemoration of the Romania’s War of Independence and of the Great War as major chapters of the national history; and it justified and it legitimized the support for the Entante during the First World War and it served as the basis for Romania’s proclamation of war to Austro-Hungary in August 1916.

In document War commemorations in inter-war Romania (Pldal 66-78)