Harvest of Death: Huizinga's Critique of Medievalism

10 Harvest of Death Johan Huizinga’s Critique of Medievalism Carol Symes Abstract Johan Huizinga conceptualized and composed his masterpiece during World War I, a great war fought on medieval battlegrounds and on the very soil of the Burgundian borderlands whose decadent culture he had devoted himself to excavating. This chapter investigates the ways that Huizinga’s Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen functions as a critique of medievalism as it had developed in the decades prior to the war and during the war itself. Writing in the neutral Netherlands, and yet strongly attuned to the unfolding events around him, Huizinga both explicitly and implicitly sought to expose the dangers of locating the origins of modernity in an age of political, cultural, and moral decay. In this work, he accordingly exposed the deadly logic of his contemporaries’ passionate and divisive embrace of the bellicose nationalist ideologies undergirding the war as the medieval world continued to furnish the imagery, vocabulary, and emotional charge of wartime propaganda on the Western Front. Keywords: World War I, Flanders Hoe ijverig heeft men in de middeleeuwsche beschaving naar de kiemen der moderne cultuur gespeurd […] Doch bij het zoeken naar het nieuwe leven, dat opkwam, vergat men licht dat in de geschiedenis als in de natuur het sterven en het geboren worden eeuwig gelijken tred houden. [How eagerly have we examined medieval civilization for the beginnings of modern culture. […] But in the search for that new emerging life, we forgot that, in history as in nature, dying and birth always keep pace with one another.] – Johan Huizinga (preface to Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen, 1919) Arnade, Peter, Martha Howell, and Anton van der Lem (eds), Rereading Huizinga: Autumn of the Middle Ages, a Century Later. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press 2019 doi: 10.5117/9789462983724_ch10 230 cARoL SyMeS The grand exposition of Les Primitifs flamands, mounted in Bruges during the summer of 1902, had a galvanizing impact on the 29-year-old Johan Huizinga.1 This fact is well known; what has gone unremarked is the significance of its timing. That summer marked the sexcentenary of the Battle of Kortrijk (Courtrai), fought on 11 July 1302, when citizen militias from Bruges, Ghent, and other Flemish towns had vanquished a heavily armed invading French army on the frontier of then-independent Flanders. It would become known as the De Slag der Gulden Sporen (Battle of the Golden Spurs) because of the hundreds of gilded accessories wrested from fallen French chevaliers on that muddy field, and later dedicated in the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk nearby. Within just a few years after the uneasy formation of Belgium in 1830, the memory of this victory and the politics of its commemoration were becoming symbolic of larger divisions within a multilingual kingdom whose only official language was French. Although German- and Flemish-speaking citizens were free to use ‘the idiom best suited to their interests and habits’, it was decreed that the local varieties of these vernaculars were so numerous ‘that it would be impossible to publish an official text’ in all of them.2 Early efforts to make this medieval battle a point of unifying national pride were therefore unsuccessful. When Nicaise de Keyser’s heroic painting of it was exhibited at the Brussels Salon in 1836, it inspired Hendrik Conscience (1812-1883) – a devotee of Sir Walter Scott and a pioneer of Flemish literature (despite his Francophone father) – to promote a very different narrative in De Leeuw van Vlaenderen (The lion of Flanders).3 In his foreword, Conscience explicitly characterized his historical novel as a celebration of Flemish ‘nationalism’ (‘nationaliteit’, italics original), dedicated to a readership suffering from the ‘regret and shame’ (‘spyt en schaemte’) of a lost Fatherland and eager to repel a new force of French invaders. Unlike these bureaucrats, ‘We Flemings have a history, a heritage, as a country and a people, while the Walloons […] have a history only as separate cities’.4 While proclaiming his loyalty to the Belgian king, Conscience passionately All translations are my own, except as otherwise noted. 1 Haskell, ‘Huizinga and the “Flemish Renaissance”’. 2 Bulletin des arrêtés et actes du gouvernement provisoire, 20 November 1830, nr. 33, reproduced in Coopman and Broeckaert, Bibliographie, I, p. 96, no. 238: ‘l’idiôme qui convient le mieux à ses intérêts ou à ses habitudes […] qu’il serait impossible de publier un texte officiel’. For a selection of relevant translated documents, see Hermans et al., The Flemish Movement. 3 See Hermans, ‘Highs and Lows’. 4 Conscience, De Leeuw van Vlaenderen, pp. i, vi. ‘Wy Vlamingen hebben eene geschiedenis, eenen voorledenen als Land en als volk terwyl de Walen (Luik alleen) slechts eene geschiedenis van afzonderlyke Steden hebben.’ HARveSt oF deAtH 231 denounced the linguistic and cultural tyranny that had been built into the Belgian state from its inception.5 In 1847, Conscience coauthored a pamphlet explaining the aims of the Vlaemsche Beweging (Flemish Movement), whose goal was total institutional equality for the Flemish language, its universal instruction in schools, funding for Flemish literature and theater, and a requirement that all government officials and army officers be proficient in ‘the Dutch language’ (‘der nederlandische tael’).6 That very same year, his novel’s enormous popularity inspired a play which introduced ‘De Vlaamse Leeuw’ (‘The Flemish lion’), a rousing anthem so evocative of ‘medieval’ sentiments that it is still widely believed to be a folk song.7 He’s fought a thousand years by now for freedom, land, and God, And still his strength is ever young, sprung from his native sod. Should someone think him beaten or taunt him with a blow, He’ll rise right up again in might and lay tormentors low. Chorus: No they will never tame him, not while one Fleming lives Not while the Lion can claw, and not while his teeth can grip. Hij strijdt nu duizend jaren voor vrijheid, land en God; En nog zijn zijne krachten in al haar jeugdgenot. Als zij hem machteloos denken en tergen met een schop, Dan richt hij zich bedreigend en vrees’lijk voor hen op. Zij zullen hem niet temmen, zolang een Vlaming leeft, Zolang de Leeuw kan klauwen, zolang hij tanden heeft.8 5 In 1823, upper- and middle-class Francophone citizens in the Flemish provinces of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands had opposed a measure that would have mandated Dutch as the official language there: it was one of the factors that led to the Belgian Revolution in 1830, when that same powerful linguistic minority prevailed. 6 Conscience and Snellaert, Vlaemsche beweging. 7 Willem van Dampierre was written by Hippoliet Jan Van Peene (1811-1864), who collaborated with the composer Karel Miry (1823-1899). ‘De Vlaamse Leeuw’ was not included in the published script of the play (1850), suggesting that it initially circulated via the quasi-medieval formats of manuscript and oral transmission. It was preserved in the Volks-Almanak voor 1854, bevattende Verhalen, Liedjes, Anekdoten Enz, with music inserted on a separate leaf. It is still identified as a “Flemish folksong” in popular media, e.g., http://muzikum.eu/nl/123-90-2413/het-vlaamsvolkslied/de-vlaamse-leeuw-songtekst.html (accessed 9 August 2017), and is still the ‘national anthem’ of Flanders and of the Flemish separatist movement. 8 I have translated only the first of five stanzas to represent the tenor of the whole. 232 cARoL SyMeS By 1887, when a monumental statue of Kortrijk’s working-class heroes – the butcher Jan Breydel and the weaver Pieter de Coninck – was erected in the marketplace of a fossilized medieval Bruges, this song was underscoring a burgeoning Flemish separatist movement, led not only by intellectuals but by disenfranchised laborers.9 In 1895, their campaign for universal male suffrage (which would not be achieved until 1919) inspired a nascent campaign for Flemish national rights. Defying state-sponsored calls for national harmony, the Algemeen Nederlands Verbond (United Dutch Association) adopted placards featuring the grim-faced warriors of Kortrijk, chained to one another in solidarity.10 In the face of these very real linguistic, political, and socioeconomic ruptures, Henri Pirenne (1862-1935) was striving to give Belgium what every other European nation either had or wanted: a medieval past. The first volume of his attempt ‘to trace the history of Belgium to the Middle Ages, thereby recovering, above all, its unified character’ appeared just two years before the Bruges exhibition and was rapidly revised and reprinted in 1902, coinciding with the sexcentenial commemoration of Kortrijk.11 It was against this embattled medieval backdrop, therefore, that Huizinga inspected the unprecedented display of some 400 Flemish ‘primitives’, many from private collections, assembled in Bruges. He was probably already familiar with the Flemish Movement, which many Dutch intellectuals had long supported.12 But the self-conscious medievalism of Flemish nationalism was probably foreign to him. Although Conscience’s novel was widely read in the Netherlands, there was no analogous attachment to the Middle Ages as a locus of collective identity. The Dutch war of independence from Spain and the Reformation were the touchstone events, making the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the era of national becoming. Perhaps as a result, both medieval history and philology – including the study of Old and Middle Dutch – lagged far behind in the Netherlands. As Joep Leerssen has put it, ‘the constitutional split between Holland and Flanders entailed a divorce between the stock-in-trade of their historical memories’.13 In Bruges, Huizinga thus confronted a culture at once very similar and very different from his own. Meanwhile, his interest in Flemish artworks 9 Leerssen, ‘Novels and Their Readers’. 10 The artist was Alfred Ost (1884-1945), a popular Flemish illustrator known for powerful, muscular figures: see Tollebeek, ‘Le culte de la bataille’, p. 224. Wij willen had originally been the name adopted by a Flemish artistic collective in Ghent, founded in 1887. 11 Pirenne, Histoire de Belgique, I, p. vii: ‘de retracer l’histoire de Belgique au moyen âge, en faisant ressortir surtout son caractère d’unité’. 12 See, eg., De Clerq, Tegenwoordig België. 13 Leerssen, ‘Novels and Their Readers’, p. 245. HARveSt oF deAtH 233 had already been piqued by their centrality to a decades-long debate over their ‘national’ characteristics and place in art history.14 Were these ‘primitives’ exemplary of modern progress and a fresh new artistic perspective? Or were they grotesque products of late medieval decline? Alternatively, were they ‘primitive’ in representing a purer, more pious sensibility than the decadent pagan aesthetics of Italy in the same period?15 Regardless of the way the question was framed, the answer had political implications. Jacob Burckhardt’s famous narrative of Italian Renaissance civilization, published in 1860, had removed the artistic products of Burgundy’s ‘Belgian’ court (topic of his maiden monograph, in 1842) from the narrative of Western artistic development; the Swiss historian had insisted that visual art forms were the ultimate indices of a culture’s essence and that Renaissance Italy owed nothing to Transalpine Europe.16 In France, in the wake of the antimonarchical revolutions of 1848, some critics had rejoined that late medieval Burgundian court arts were accordingly more ‘bourgeois’ and therefore more truly French than such ‘elitist’ Italian classicism. Then again, after 1870 and the disastrous loss of Alsace-Lorraine to the new German Empire, Hippolyte Taine’s doctrine of race, milieu, moment was invoked to argue that all ‘Germanic’ arts – including English, Flemish, and Dutch forms – were ugly and decadent. Real French art, like that of Italy, was derived from classical, Roman models.17 The dilemma posed by Burgundian art – Flemish or French? medieval or modern? – was further heightened in 1902 by the fraught politics of the exhibition’s organization. It had initially been planned for (modern) Brussels, to commemorate ‘a moment of national renewal and glorification’.18 When it was belatedly moved to (medieval) Bruges, in close proximity to the divisive battlefield of Kortrijk, the crumbling city’s own powerful aesthetic became a potent factor in the exhibition’s reception.19 On the one hand, visitors’ impressions were primed by the fame of Georges Rodenbach’s modern symbolist novel Bruges-la-morte (1892), with its black-and-white 14 Jongkees, ‘Une génération d’historiens’, pp. 79-80. 15 Haskell, ‘Huizinga and the “Flemish Renaissance”’, p. 447. 16 Burckhardt, Die Kunstwerke der belgischen Städte (1842) versus Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien. At the same time, Burckhardt freely claimed a number of non-Italian, medieval artworks for Renaissance Italy: see Symes, ‘When We Talk about Modernity’. 17 Krul, ‘Realism, Renaissance, and Nationalism’, pp. 252-269. 18 Ibid., p. 278. On the circumstances, see Jongkees, ‘Une génération d’historiens’, p. 83; Haskell, ‘Huizinga and the “Flemish Renaissance”’. 19 On the local, national, and international politics behind the exhibition, see Tahon et al., Impact 1902 Revisited. 234 cARoL SyMeS photographs of a weird medieval cityscape dissolving into mist. On the other, they encountered the exhibit after having walked through those same streets, passing the very houses and churches for which many of these artworks had been created, past the modern memorial to Kortrijk’s heroes in the vast medieval marketplace. There was no separating the medieval from the modern. Indeed, the Flemish poet Karel van de Woestijne, in a lengthy appreciation of the exhibit and its site, explicitly saw both the medieval city and its medieval artifacts as prefiguring the decay of his own modern age.20 Other viewers, however, saw in these ‘primitives’ an antidote for ‘le désastre des arts modernes’21 and called for ‘the renewal’ and rehabilitation of modern art through the ‘mysteries’ of the later Middle Ages.22 To many French critics of modernist art, the exhibition reversed the judgment of the previous generation: clearly, they argued, the art of Burgundy was thoroughly ‘French’. (Had not Rogier van der Weyden been born in Wallonia?) They even expressed umbrage at the Flemish appropriation of ‘their’ French heritage, and arranged for the hastily assembled Parisian exhibition of ‘primitifs français’ in 1904.23 These dueling exhibitions were among many contemporary manifestations of a much more widespread phenomenon. Huizinga had come of age in a Europe where the medieval past was the nostalgic terrain on which battles for national identity and cultural patrimony were perpetually waged. The adjective ‘medieval’ and the proper noun ‘Middle Ages’ had emerged into common parlance in the 1830s, marking the need for a vocabulary to describe the era of modern Europeans’ emergence into the light of history.24 In Italy, that era was classical antiquity, reflected in the unifying political propaganda of the Risorgimento.25 But beyond the Alps, modern European nation-states had either begun as provincial colonies of the Roman Empire or benighted backwaters: tantamount to the peoples of their own ‘dark’ colonies. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, indeed, the shock of ‘discovering’ the existence of outlandish peoples had been negotiated by 20 Van de Woestijne, De Vlaamsche Primitieven, p. 15. 21 Lafenestre, ‘L’exposition des primitifs français’, p. 354. 22 Mâle, ‘Le renouvelement de l’art’. 23 Jongkees, ‘Une génération d’historiens’, pp. 80-81; Krul, ‘Realism, Renaissance, and Nationalism’, p. 279. 24 Symes, ‘When We Talk about Modernity’. See also Geary, Myth of Nations. This is not to say that there had not been conceptualizations of what we call the ‘medieval’ past in previous centuries; see, e.g., Damian-Grint, Medievalism and manière gothique. 25 That said, medievalism mattered in Italy, too. See, e.g., Di Carpegna Falconieri, ‘Il Medievalismo et la Grande Guerra’. HARveSt oF deAtH 235 associating them with the primitive ‘dark age’ that Europeans themselves claimed to have escaped.26 Thereafter, in the wake of revolutionary failures, the redrawing of Europe’s political map, and a wave of renewed imperial ventures, Europe’s post-Roman and premodern past was opened up to new interpretations. Novel political entities had to be filled with venerable – but disputed – cultural capital.27 Scandinavian, German, and English scholars all tussled for rights to the sole ownership Beowulf. French scholars strove to occlude the fact their national language – exemplified by the Chanson de Roland – had originated in AngloNorman England or independent Picard Flanders. The establishment of history as a professional discipline, subsidized by national libraries and imperial museums as well as universities, sharpened this competition. The Monumenta Germaniae Historica, an ongoing publishing enterprise launched in 1819, counted as ‘monuments of German history’ all historical and literary works produced in the lands of Charlemagne’s ninth-century empire – lands that were located in, or allocated to, France, Belgium, Switzerland, or Italy. Rival collecting and publishing projects followed suit in other countries, requiring an army of philologists and curators.28 The Franco-Prussian War can even be understood as a more weaponized phase of already-entrenched disputes about the medieval origins of national sovereignty.29 Combatants on both sides were aware that the war was being fought on a frontier created when the empire of the Frankish king Charles the Great (d. 814) – or Charlemagne or Karl der Große – was divided among his three grandsons in 840. France’s ‘loss’ of Alsace-Lorraine – or, for the Germans, the (re)gaining of Lotharingia – was rendered all the more significant for the former because this had been Joan of Arc’s homeland. The popular revival of her cult in France was immediate. In 1874, the French government commissioned a gilded bronze equestrian statue of La Pucelle from the sculptor Emmanuel Frémier (1824-1910). It was meant to be prophetic: ‘France would not die because Joan would be reborn’.30 Peoples who had lost the contest for statehood in the realignments of the modern era – as the Flemish had – were also turning to medieval 26 The essential study is that of Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty. See also Biddick, Shock of Medievalism. 27 Geary and Klaniczay, Manufacturing Middle Ages. 28 This argument is developed in Symes, ‘Manuscript Matrix, Modern Canon’. 29 These examples are discussed in Symes, ‘Medieval Battlefields and National Narratives’. 30 De Biez, E. Frémiet, p. 140: ‘La France n’était morte parceque Jeanne venait de renaître.’ Joan was not formally beatified until 1909. Indeed, prior to 1870 and the Catholic revival in France, she had largely been forgotten. 236 cARoL SyMeS battlefields for meaning and inspiration. Serbs, for whom the Battle of Kosovo (15 June 1389) was the beginning of their subjection to the Ottoman Empire, would transfer that grievance to Austria-Hungary after 1878.31 A young Serb would later strike a blow for the restoration of medieval rights in Sarajevo, on 28 June 1914, just four days after the Scots celebrated the 600th anniversary of their short-lived triumph over the English at Bannockburn. In partitioned Poland, the Battle of Grunwald (15 July 1410) was celebrated as marking the date when the united forces of Poland and Lithuania had trounced an army of Teutonic Knights. For stateless Poles, verbal and symbolic references to this order had become coded ways of referring to German aggression and imperialism.32 The monument to the quincentenary of this battle in 1910, erected in Kraków – former capital of the medieval kingdom – was thus a nostalgic reminder of what Poland had once been and a blatant expression of nationalist aspirations for the future. As such, it was destroyed by the German occupying forces in 1939.33 In this context, we can better appreciate the fact that Huizinga’s first work of explicitly historical scholarship, published in 1912, roundly rejected this dangerous, zero-sum game of nationalistic one-upmanship. As such, it prefigures the critique of medievalism which, as I argue, he advanced in Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen (1919) – long before his passionate denunciations of toxic nationalism in the 1930s. In an essay on ‘The Early History of Our National Consciousness’, derived from a lecture he delivered in the presence of Henri Pirenne, Huizinga debunked the myth that modern nations or national sentiments could be traced back to the Middle Ages, thus countering the whole premise of Pirenne’s history, published a decade before.34 He reminded his audience that Flemish and French artists, among many others, had come together in Burgundy in the service of a cosmopolitan French-speaking court – not a nation-state – and he forthrightly rejected Pirenne’s claim that Burgundian dukes were ‘Belgian princes’.35 In the years that followed, Huizinga would find even more reasons to condemn the recourse to medievalism in the service of modern nationalist 31 Popovich, ‘Medievalism in Serbian Painting’; Johnson, Central Europe, pp. 24-25, 172-175. 32 Johnson, Central Europe, p. 44; Welch, Germany, Propaganda and Total War, pp. 210-212; Clark, Iron Kingdom, pp. 655-670. 33 On the histories generated by this battle, see Jučas, Battle of Grünwald; Gouguenheim, Tannenberg; Paravicini et al., Tannenberg, Grunwald. On the context of its commemoration, see Stauter-Halsted, ‘Rural Myth and the Modern Nation’; Dabrowski, Commemorations, pp. 165-183. 34 Huizinga, ‘Uit de voorgeschiedenis’. See Jongkees, ‘Une génération d’historiens’, pp. 86-87. 35 Pirenne, Histoire de Belgique, II, e.g., pp. 178, 207, 220, 345, 370. HARveSt oF deAtH 237 projects. For even as he worked to compass the rich and overripe culture of medieval Burgundy, the lands of which he wrote became the bloody frontier of the Western Front. If the origins of modernity were to be located in an age of political, cultural, and moral decay – as he posited – then his study of that age can also be read as a searing reflection on his own time, whose paradoxes he both discerned in and projected onto the past. If this was not a conscious process in the early phases of the book’s development, it became evident by the time of its publication. In his preface to Herfsttij, Huizinga appears to paraphrase Van de Woestijne’s evaluation of the Flemish ‘primitives’ displayed at Bruges, which (according to the poet) reflected the worldview of those who ‘looked with awe at the burning gold of that setting sun’ (‘Zij bewonderen het brandend goud dezer avondzon’) and whose art was like a ‘fiercely red but already fading rose’ (‘deze fel-roode, maar reeds welkende roos’).36 Huizinga combines and darkens these two striking images, making himself the viewer of those portents: ‘My gaze, during the writing of this book, was ever fixed on the depth of the evening sky – but on a sky of bloody red, heavy with ominous leaden clouds tinged with the false glow of copper’ (‘De blik is bij het schrijven van dit boek gericht geweest als in de diepten van een avondhemel – maar van een hemel vol bloedig rood, zwaar en woest van dreigend loodgrijs, vol valschen koperen schijn’).37 Just over this horizon of the neutral Netherlands, Huizinga had been observing the deadly efficacy of his contemporaries’ passionate and divisive embrace of nationalist medievalisms. Having played no small part in the bellicose ideologies undergirding the war, they were now furnishing the imagery, vocabulary, and emotional charge of wartime propaganda on all sides. In England, during the first months of the war, references to medieval battles were a leitmotif in newspaper jingoism. On 25 October, the anniversary of Agincourt (1415), a front-page editorial entitled ‘Agincourt and the Modern Soldier’ mused on ‘the difference between battles in the past and battles now’, concluding that there was little difference.38 It was rumored that angelic English bowmen from that nearby iconic battlefield had helped to reverse a desperate situation during the British force’s first major engagement, at Mons on 22-23 August. Arthur Machen’s story on that theme, published in the London Evening News on 29 September, had quickly 36 Krul, ‘Realism, Renaissance, and Nationalism’, pp. 278, 286; Van de Woestijne, De Vlaamsche Primitieven, pp. 17 and 81. 37 Huizinga, Herfsttij (2nd ed.), pp. vii-viii. 38 ‘Agincourt and the Modern Soldier’. 238 cARoL SyMeS passed into popular mythology.39 A year later, when the quincentenary of Agincourt arrived, the Times acknowledged it by quoting the whole of Shakespeare’s ‘St. Crispin’s Day’ speech, from Henry V, under the headline ‘1415. October 25. 1915’. Across the channel, the French, too, seized on this day as an occasion to revisit the actual site of the battle with their English counterparts. The new French weekly L’illustration printed a photograph of a French light infantry battalion commander delivering a lecture to a delegation of English officers, shown studying maps of the medieval battlefield on which they stood. Five centuries ago, the French and English armies met on the field of Agincourt. […] The French nobility, victim once more of their own audacity, was torn in pieces by the soldiers of Henry V. Today, on the battlefields of the Artois, the two armies are brothers in the same fight, inseparably united by the shared memory of past antagonisms. […] And at the same time, the English can also pay sincere homage to Jeanne d’Arc […] for on the identical spot of yesteryear’s battle, [French infantrymen] invite their Britannic neighbors to join together in calling forth a memory of mutual esteem. 40 Joan herself came into her sanctity during this war. Officially beatified in 1909, the miracles necessary to her canonization in 1920 were rapidly accruing. When the cathedral of Reims was largely destroyed by German shellfire on 19 September 1914, she appeared on countless postcards and placards to remind the horrified world – unused as yet to the targeted destruction of cultural patrimony – that this had been the place of the first French king’s baptism (Clovis, in 496) and the place where she herself had led the Dauphin to be crowned in 1429. In one such image, she confronts a complacent Kaiser Wilhelm, brandishing her white banner and pointing at the burning Gothic edifice with her sword. ‘Nothing satisfies you, murderer of babies, king of bandits and vandals […] you blaspheme and you destroy 39 On this phenomenon, see Clarke, Angel of Mons. 40 ‘1415-1915: Le Cinquième centenaire d’Azincourt’: ‘Il y a cinq siècles, les armées française et anglaise se recontraient dans la plaine d’Azincourt. […] La noblesse française, victime une fois de plus de son orgueilleuse témerité, y était taillée en pièces par les soldats d’Henri V. Aujourd’hui, sur les champs de bataille de l’Artois, les deux armées fraternisent dans une même lutte, inséparablement unies par la mémoire même des antagonismes passés, ardents mais loyaux. Et de même que les Anglais, cette année, ont pu rendre à Jeanne d’Arc un hommage sincère […] sur le lieu même de la bataille de jadis, invitèrent leurs voisins britanniques à évoquer communément un souvenir d’estime mutuelle.’ HARveSt oF deAtH 239 our beautiful cathedrals’. 41 It was said that she would appear to rally the timid, or that she could be glimpsed at the head of an army of historic heroes, to avenge the loss of her homeland. 42 In October of 1918, the cover of the American Red Cross Magazine featured Joan and her medieval ally, St. George, riding with George Washington into the breach of the retreating German army. In Belgium, German propaganda stressed the importance of the Flemings’ shared Germanic ancestry and language: a policy known as Flamenpolitik.43 In 1917, Flemish prisoners of war in the German camp at Göttingen were even encouraged to organize a formal celebration of their national holiday on the anniversary of Kortrijk. 44 A photograph of unknown provenance shows members of the Vlaamse Werkkring (Flemish Working Circle) on that occasion, with a rough placard displaying the Lion of Flanders.45 The printed program of the day’s proceedings announces a special address by one of the camp’s prominent prisoners, René Gaspar (1893-1958), a young professor of Germanic philology at Louvain who had been captured after the German occupation of the city and the deliberate destruction of the university’s medieval library, town hall, and church. 46 The title of his lecture was ‘Het Vlaamse Volkslied’ (‘The Flemish folksong’). On the same day – as Gaspar probably knew – a fellow philologist, Adiel Debeuckelaere, published an open letter to King Albert I, vehemently protesting the abuse of Flemish soldiers by their French-speaking officers, who prohibited such celebrations in their ranks, along with Flemish literature and all other cultural expressions. As he pointed out, those same officers were perfectly willing to learn various African languages when they served in the Congo, but at home they treated the Flemings like slaves and savages. If the Germans had been successful in establishing a Flemish University in Ghent, Debeuckelaere declared, that was the fault of the government which had ignored calls for linguistic and cultural equality since 1830. 47 41 Photomontage by Boulanger/Gloria, 1914: see Bihl, ‘Le bombardement de la cathédrale de Reims’. For numerous other images, see Bouxin, ‘Le martyre de la cathédrale’; Harlaut, ‘L’incendie de la cathédrale’. 42 One famous story is retold by Van Dyke, Broken Soldier. 43 De Schaepdrijver, ‘Violence and Legitimacy’. 44 Tollebeek, ‘Le culte de la bataille’, p. 226. On the broader context, see De Schaepdrijver, ‘Occupation, Propaganda’. 45 This image, labeled ‘Flamingantische Soldaten vieren de Vlaamse feestdag’, included in the Wikipedia entry for ‘Battle of the Golden Spurs’, was deleted on 5 February 2017, according to the revision history for this page. 46 Lipkes, Rehearsals, pp. 444-452. 47 Debeuckelaere, Open brieven. 240 cARoL SyMeS In 1940, an older Huizinga would decry the fetishization of ‘folkish’ national anthems that fostered toxic nationalist sentiments. 48 In 1919, a younger Huizinga had presciently noted: ‘How eagerly we have examined medieval civilization for the beginnings of modern culture’!49 How eagerly had the French and the Germans vied to establish sole claim to Charlemagne’s imperial greatness and their disputed medieval border; how deeply had claims to modern sovereignty been staked in the medieval past; how often had the literary and artistic monuments of the Middle Ages been the site of proxy wars that had finally, in late summer of 1914, broken out in real violence. Nor was this tragic process arrested by the armistice. Even as Huizinga wrote these words, his former colleague at Leiden, the Ghent-born Willem Lodewijk de Vreese (1869-1938), an eminent professor of medieval philology, was helping to write a medievalist manifesto. Addressed to Woodrow Wilson and the delegates to the Paris Peace Conference, it argued that the principles of self-determination should apply to the Flemish people ‘living in Belgium’, by virtue of their medieval vernacular and culture (‘Pro Flandria servanda: Vlaanderen’s Recht en Eisch tot Zelfstandigheid gesteld, toegelicht, gestaafd’ [‘Pro Flandria servanda: Flanders’ right and claim for autonomy: Formulated, explained, justified’]). René Gaspar, the former Flemish POW, would head the committee charged with translating it.50 Although these activists’ argument for Flemish national sovereignty was far less specious than the narrative of ‘medieval’ Belgian unity concocted by Pirenne at the turn of the century, it was being advanced by scholars exiled for their pro-Flemish activities during the war, which made them vulnerable to charges of collaboration and rendered their petition politically impossible. But even had that not been the case, Woodrow Wilson’s special intellectual advisor, the American medievalist Charles Homer Haskins, had already been decisively influenced by Pirenne’s anachronistic argument. Haskins deplored the Germans’ ‘deliberate attempt to divide [Belgium’s] people into two separate Walloon and Flemish states’, despite the ‘fact’ that ‘her [Belgium’s] national history goes back into the Middle Ages’, when it was the ‘middle kingdom’ of Charlemagne’s partitioned empire.51 Perhaps 48 Huizinga, Patriotisme en nationalisme, trans. as Huizinga, ‘Patriotism and Nationalism’, p. 153. 49 Huizinga, Herfsttij, p. vii: ‘Hoe ijverig heeft men in de middeleeuwsche beschaving naar de kiemen der moderne cultuur gespeurd’. 50 De Vreese et al., Pro Flandria servanda. 51 Haskins and Lord, Some Problems, pp. 48, 50, 53. In 1917, Flemish activists in German-occupied Belgium had been encouraged to form a parliamentary council, which issued a declaration of independence on 22 December of that year. HARveSt oF deAtH 241 deliberately, Haskins did not even mention the importance of the Flemish language and medieval heritage, because these were being accepted as decisive to other bids for self-determination, elsewhere in Europe.52 The Flemish cause was therefore lost. The following year, 1920, Ernest Claes (1885-1968) published his popular novel, De Witte, which reduces Flanders’ storied medieval past to a young boy’s role-playing obsession.53 In 1924, Huizinga himself delivered one of the Lectures on Holland to an audience of American students at the University of Leiden, in which he studiously avoided a nationalistic, teleological, and anachronistic narrative of the Low Countries’ collective and separate histories.54 Rereading Huizinga’s Herfsttij while bearing the contemporary weight of medievalism in mind, we can begin to discern the author’s own growing consciousness of his argument’s contemporary implications. Most of the major sentiments and trends which Huizinga attributes to the ‘life- and thought-forms’ of late medieval Burgundian culture are also those of his own generation. ‘We newspaper readers’, he says, cannot appreciate the power of the spoken word or the lure of images; and yet medieval imagery, along with medieval slogans, mobilized whole modern populations.55 Ostensibly arguing for the radical alterity of the medieval psyche, Huizinga constantly analyzes that of modernity – and often signals that he is doing so, as when he evokes the emotional responses aroused ‘even today’ by public processions and other patriotic shows.56 When he describes the ‘drive for revenge’ (‘wraakbehoefte’) that characterized medieval Burgundian politics,57 he is also describing that which motivated the French to recapture Alsace-Lorraine: the drive so vividly captured by Albert Bettanier’s famous painting, La Tache noire (The black stain) of 1887. When Huizinga laments ‘the strongly emotional character of partisanship and princely solidarity’ that was advanced through medieval ‘party tokens, colors, emblems, devices, and mottoes’, he also reveals how national ‘medieval’ stereotypes were distilled and infused into wartime propaganda.58 His discussion of mourning and its monuments prefigures and predicts the near-universal medievalism (Gothic, Romanesque, Celtic) of Great War memorials – from those which 52 Haskins and Lord, Some Problems, pp. 14-15. 53 Leerssen, ‘Novels and Their Readers’, pp. 235-237. 54 Huizinga, ‘How Holland Became a Nation’. 55 Huizinga, Herfsttij, p. 6: ‘Wij krantenlezers’. 56 Ibid., p. 12. 57 Ibid., p. 25. 58 Ibid., p. 29: ‘Het sterk bewogen karakter van partijgevoel en vorstentrouw, […] er uitging van al de partijteekens, kleuren, emblemen, deviezen, kreten.’ 242 cARoL SyMeS depict Joan cradling a fallen French soldier to the medieval knight leading a Scottish regiment from Bannockburn to the Somme.59 Examples like these could be multiplied ad infinitum. ‘It is a wicked world. The fires of hatred and violence burn brightly’, he observed.60 Placing Huizinga’s masterwork in the context of belligerent medievalism not only illuminates our reading of that text, it restores Huizinga’s later denunciations of patriotism and nationalism – the ‘two forces that, for good or evil, are straining and convulsing the world like a fever’ – to their key place in his own intellectual genealogy.61 When his younger contemporary Pieter Geyl (1887-1966), a longtime supporter of Flemish separatism, assailed him as ‘the accuser of his age’, he was denouncing Huizinga’s humane antipolemics of the 1930s as aberrations unworthy of his previous scholarship, especially Herfsttij.62 Noting that Huizinga had been among the many intellectuals galvanized by Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West (Der Untergang des Abenlandes, 1918), Geyl alleged that this work – contemporaneous to Herfsttij – was the source of Huizinga’s later, supposedly derivative, disquiet.63 A survivor of Buchenwald, Geyl had a vested interest in arguing that only ‘countries that had fallen under totalitarian regimes’ were responsible for the tragedies of the 1930s and 1940s.64 He thereby dismissed, or failed to acknowledge, the dangerous medievalism that had inflamed the hatreds of the previous war, informed the Paris Peace Conference, and contributed so much to the violence of his own time. So even if his vision was partly veiled, even from himself, Huizinga had seen that the roots of World War II were planted in the medieval-manured soil that had produced World War I. In 1932, when his early champion Gabriel Hanotaux finally managed to get Le déclin du Moyen Age published for a French audience, Hanotaux’s preface looked forward as well as back. ‘Let us’, he wrote, ‘read this book with the profound attention that it merits.’65 Let us, in our own foreboding moment, do the same. 59 Ibid., p. 91. See Symes, ‘Medieval Battlefields and National Narratives’; Goebel, Great War and Medieval Memory. 60 Huizinga, Herfsttij, p. 44: ‘Het is een booze wereld. Het vuur van haat en geweld brandt hoog.’ 61 Huizinga, ‘Patriotism and Nationalism’, p. 97. These lectures were pref igured by In de schaduwen van morgen. 62 Geyl, Huizinga als aanklager van zijn tijd. 63 Ibid., p. 214. 64 Ibid., p. 193. 65 Hanotaux in Huizinga, Le déclin du Moyen Age, p. 7: ‘Qu’on lise le livre avec la profonde attention qu’il mérite.’ HARveSt oF deAtH 243 About the Author Carol Symes is Associate Professor of History and Medieval Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her first book, A Common Stage: Theatre and Public Life in Medieval Arras (Cornell University Press, 2007) was the recipient of numerous prizes. Her current project, “Mediated Texts and Their Makers in Medieval Europe” is under contract with Penn Press. She is also writing a book about medievalism during World War I. [email protected]