Constructing Charisma

Celebrity, Fame, and Power in Nineteenth-Century Europe

Edward Berenson, Eva Giloi, Edward Berenson, Eva Giloi

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781845459772
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

Railroads, telegraphs, lithographs, photographs, and mass periodicals—the major technological advances of the 19th century seemed to diminish the space separating people from one another, creating new and apparently closer, albeit highly mediated, social relationships. Nowhere was this phenomenon more evident than in the relationship between celebrity and fan, leader and follower, the famous and the unknown. By mid-century, heroes and celebrities constituted a new and powerful social force, as innovations in print and visual media made it possible for ordinary people to identify with the famous; to feel they knew the hero, leader, or "star"; to imagine that public figures belonged to their private lives. This volume examines the origins and nature of modern mass media and the culture of celebrity and fame they helped to create. Crossing disciplines and national boundaries, the book focuses on arts celebrities (Sarah Bernhardt, Byron and Liszt); charismatic political figures (Napoleon and Wilhelm II); famous explorers (Stanley and Brazza); and celebrated fictional characters (Cyrano de Bergerac).

PART I

Constructing Charisma

CHAPTER 1

Charisma and the Making of Imperial Heroes in Britain and France, 1880–1914

EDWARD BERENSON

In 1874, an unknown French naval ensign, Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza, went to Africa to seek a water route from the Atlantic Ocean to the smooth lakelike reaches of the Upper Congo River. He hoped to bypass the 32 cataracts that forbid all navigation on the lower Congo up to what became known as Stanley Pool. In exploring the banks of the Congo, Brazza claimed a huge swathe of Equatorial Africa for France. It mattered little that this territory lacked economic or strategic value. Brazza's extraordinary bravery, his apparent willingness to suffer to achieve a nearly impossible goal, made him one of France's greatest national heroes and its champion of escalating imperial growth.

A dozen years later Brazza's rival, Henry Morton Stanley, world-famous for having “found” David Livingstone, set out in quest of yet another lost European, Emin Pasha. Originally known as Eduard Schnitzer, the Prussian-born Emin served as governor of Equatoria, the Sudan's southern-most province. Stanley's new trip failed to realize its goal: Emin refused to be rescued and returned to “civilization.” En route, Stanley lost half of his European lieutenants and three-quarters of his 700-man African troop. The expedition resulted in the deaths of hundreds of other Africans. But these horrors troubled the explorer's compatriots very little, at least at first. Stanley's courage, drive, perseverance, and initiative struck a chord with British journalists and many of their readers, as did his narrative gifts as a writer. He emerged from Africa a conquering hero, feted by Queen Victoria and lionized by the crowd. His fame enabled him to goad Prime Minister Salisbury into a more forward policy in East Africa than the cautious British leader had intended to pursue.

After the turn of the century, General Hubert Lyautey spearheaded France's effort to seize Morocco, a Muslim country fiercely protective of its independence. The material advantages of this colonial project were slim and the risks large, as France's quest for Morocco brought it to the verge of war with Germany in 1911 and helped precipitate the Great War three years later. Nonetheless, Lyautey, a famous soldier also renowned as a man of letters, became a towering French hero and celebrity, a rare military man elected to the prestigious Académic Française. He would end his career a Maréchal de France, the highest rank a French officer can attain.

Why did these three men earn many of their countries' highest honors and create huge public enthusiasm despite the futility and even the failure of much of what they undertook? Why did they become heroes and celebrities in their respective homelands, individuals capable of influencing public policy and even of altering the course of events? They did, of course, achieve some recognizable successes, especially Stanley, who made important geographical discoveries and who became the first European to navigate the entire length of the Congo. But his final expedition, the one that made him a charismatic hero, accomplished none of its goals and achieved no material gains. Likewise, Brazza won a large colony for France, but what became French Equatorial Africa drained the mother country economically and created a moral burden similar in kind, if not in degree, to the one associated with King Leopold's ghost.¹ As for Lyautey, he succeeded in imposing a French protectorate on Morocco, but the conquest of that country required almost constant fighting there from 1904 to 1925. The losses greatly outweighed the gains.

As we examine the surprising, and in some cases, enduring stature of these men, we can find guidance in the concept of charisma elaborated early in the twentieth century by the canonical German sociologist Max Weber. The actions and perceived accomplishments of the three men studied here endowed them with charisma as Weber and certain of his commentators have understood the term. We are concerned with Weber's original writings, not with the superficial, pop culture renderings common nowadays.² In taking up the phenomenon of charisma, a religious concept Weber borrowed from the Protestant legal scholar Rudolf Sohm, the German sociologist had much more in mind than the personal magnetism and star-power we associate with certain movie idols, politicians, and business tycoons.³ To view someone as charismatic is to develop a significant emotional connection with him or her, to devote, even subordinate, oneself to the individual in question.

In the late nineteenth century, when most political leaders in France and Britain possessed little emotional appeal, a small group of explorers and adventurers, their exploits narrated and amplified by a new mass press, came to be seen as heroic, exemplary men. If government officials often shied away from new imperial commitments, stymied in many cases by public indifference, even hostility, the charismatic authority that enveloped colonial heroes did much to change public attitudes toward imperialism in both countries. Thanks to the aura surrounding these men, many people once opposed to empire came to lend it their support, especially during the years when imperial heroes dominated the news. At times, their untraditional authority pushed governments in the two countries further than they wanted to go, and in many cases led them into dead ends or foreign policy disasters inexplicable but for the charismatic sway these heroes held over ordinary people and political leaders alike. There was nothing rational about sending General Charles Gordon to Khartoum in 1884 or Stanley to rescue Emin Pasha three years later or Jean-Baptiste Marchand to Fashoda or even Lyautey to Morocco. The explanation for these ventures turns on the irrational enthusiasm they generated and the charismatic confidence they wrought.

We have analyzed Weber's understanding of charisma in the introduction to this volume; it will suffice, here, to recall that for the sociologist, “charisma” was first and foremost a way of understanding forms of authority, command, power, or influence (Herrschaft in German) that came neither from tradition nor from law. Throughout history, Weber wrote, most authority derived from one of two sources: political elders who traced their power back into the deep mists of time; or bureaucracies designed to administer and enforce laws developed through rational processes of deliberation and debate. Both forms of authority rested on a structure of rules, whether in the form of “precedents handed down from the past,” or, as in the case of bureaucracy, on “intellectually analyzable” statutes and procedures. But there was a third form of authority opposite to the others in being “foreign to all rules.”⁴ This third, or residual form, harked back to the “gifts of grace” (charismata) that God originally gave to Christ and later came to inhere in certain extraordinary individuals.

As suggestive as Weber's discussion of charisma is for understanding hero worship in general, the sociologist never adequately explained why an individual's extraordinariness inspires people to devote themselves to him or her, to grant authority and to feel “absolute trust in the leader.” He failed to make clear, in other words, why a relationship, an emotional connection, develops between the extraordinary person and those who see him as such.

A variety of theorists have attempted to understand the psychological processes underlying attributions of charisma.⁵ In the early 1980s, Charles Camic turned to Freud and psychoanalytic theory for help in uncovering the prerequisites or sources of charisma. If, as Weber suggested in The Sociology of Religion, the “preconditions for attributions of specialness” or charisma lie in “extraordinary human needs,” Freud's understanding of those requirements, Camic maintained, help us determine when those preconditions exist and what forms they take.

According to Freud, all people have four basic needs: sexuality and aggression (id); the need to rein in sexuality and aggression by conforming to moral standards and restrictions (superego); the need for protection, certainty, and physical security (ego); and the need for achievement and attainment, mastery, and self-regard (ego-ideal). In The Sociology of Religion, Weber had identified “dependency needs” (ego in Freudian terms) as preconditions for the emergence of charismatic figures, namely the magicians and prophets who could satisfy these needs. But, in Camic's view, individuals who could fulfill the other Freudian needs—aggression, morality, self-regard—might also be seen as charismatic. Whether charismatic individuals emerge depends, in this view, on whether the needs in question are ordinary or extraordinary. At first glance, it might seem as though the needs of the id, superego, and ego are ordinary by definition, since everyone is said to have them. But ego psychologists have considered these needs extraordinary when individuals are helpless to fulfill them on their own, when, that is, they depend on others to satisfy them. Those with the ability to do so may be seen as charismatic.⁶ People can become helpless or dependent either as a result of a socialization process that prevents them from acting on aggressive or sexual needs or as the result of the feelings of loss and disorientation that arise in situations of rapid change.

In this Weberian-Freudian view, four different kinds of charismatic figures emerge: those attributed with omnipotence, excellence, sacredness, and uncanniness. Since these categories include a potentially vast array of possibilities, from military leaders to science geniuses, clergymen to movie stars, Camic allows too many different kinds of people, in far too many different situations, to count as charismatic. He fails as well to distinguish clearly enough charismatic individuals from merely celebrated ones.

If psychoanalysis plays too loosely with the term charisma, perhaps there is a more precise way to understand the charismatic bond? According to the philosopher Stephen Turner, what makes someone a hero in the eyes of his potential following, a person who in Machiavelli's terms possesses audacity, prowess, and luck (Fortuna), is the capacity to change people's expectations.⁷ Charisma, Turner writes, is the ability to open up new possibilities, to make people believe in the realization of crucial things they had always thought impossible. One way heroes do this is by serving as exemplars and pioneers, by showing through their actions that something thought prohibitively dangerous can, in fact, be done without grievous harm. In the 1960s, civil rights leaders, for example, took risky steps by unilaterally integrating segregated facilities, organizing and leading marches, and enduring prison and beatings before ultimately gaining a victorious release. Their victories encouraged others by showing that undertakings, once thought futile, could now produce success. The heroes' actions thus changed the perceptions of others, broadening their horizons and improving their lives.

Even when the trails heroes blaze are too difficult for others to follow, charismatic figures nonetheless open up new possibilities. They do so by demonstrating what can be done and allowing large numbers of people to associate themselves, however indirectly and vicariously, with what they have achieved.⁸ When an explorer travels, for example, to uncharted regions, he, and occasionally she, does things essentially no one else can repeat. He braves harsh climates, tropical diseases, and potentially lethal attacks, while solving longstanding geographical puzzles and interacting with previously unknown peoples, whose primitiveness appears to highlight European superiority, including the superiority of those in thrall to the heroic adventurer. By accomplishing such feats, the explorer seems to expand the limits of human possibility and broaden everyone's horizons. And when travelers claim new territories for their home countries, they appear to magnify the country's importance, giving it added prestige and standing in the world. That standing rubs off on those following the explorer's adventures, making them feel more significant by virtue of their connection, however imaginary and vicarious, with the hero.

In sum, the charismatic hero, as opposed to the mere celebrity, blazes new paths and opens new possibilities.⁹ He offers inspiration and the ability to participate indirectly in what he has done. He can offer protection and a feeling of strength, instead of the weakness and vulnerability that may have existed before. In doing these things, the hero fulfills what for Weber lay at the very heart of charisma, the ability to produce changes within other people.¹⁰

If Turner's cognitive psychology, like Camic's psychoanalytic one, provides important clues as to why great explorers of the nineteenth century might have developed charismatic authority and bonded emotionally with a large number of followers, there is perhaps yet another, newer kind of psychology to consider. The latter comes from the neuroscientific revolution of the past few decades and especially the recent findings of “affective neuroscience,” the study of emotions and the brain. According to Jaak Panksepp, author of the key synthesis in the field, there are four basic “command systems for emotionality” common to all mammals, including human beings: seeking, rage, fear, and panic.¹¹

In terms of charisma, the most important of the basic four “command systems” is seeking, the vital emotional substructure that “makes animals intensely interested in exploring their world and leads them to become excited when they are about to get what they desire.”¹² This system enables animals to find what they need to survive and eagerly to anticipate those essential things: food, water, warmth, and sex. In humans, the seeking system lies at the root of curiosity and all intellectual pursuits and produces feelings of interest, curiosity, excitement, and eager anticipation. One hypothesis, unprovable but worth considering, is that the actions of certain exciting individuals, people who, for example, undertake daring forays into the unknown, stimulate seeking circuits in the brains of those aware of their exploits. Such might especially be true of newspaper readers who already felt a need for protection, reassurance, and solace, and for that reason had begun to follow the doings of exceptional people in the news. In fact, Panksepp has found neurological evidence that seeking inhibits fear, thus suggesting why those worried about their own prospects or about the future of their country might be drawn emotionally to charismatic figures who seem immune from fear.¹³ In any case, the stimulation they provide could help account for the emotional connection that ordinary people feel toward them and why daring seekers held particular appeal in the late nineteenth century. This was a time when European societies appeared increasingly mundane and bureaucratic, when manliness seemed under assault, and when British and French newspapers brimmed with reports of threats to their countries' safety and well-being.

As for the explorers and adventurers themselves, they appear to be paradigmatic cases of the kinds of people Panksepp would describe as having overactive seeking drives. Such individuals found themselves so moved by what the neuroscientist calls the “foraging/exploration/investigation/curiosity/expectancy/seeking” system that they showed themselves willing, even compelled, to place themselves in situations of unimaginable danger and brave what for most others would be unendurable pain. Individuals such as Stanley, Brazza, and Lyautey seemed motivated more by the quest than the goal—itself often ill-defined; more by the desire to plunge into the unknown than by the need to master it. In the late nineteenth century, the charisma of such individuals depended little on whether or not their missions achieved their purported goals, or whether they returned home with measurable gains. The aura inhered in the quest itself.

Ordinary people, those endowed with normal impulses to seek, may have derived vicarious excitement from the plethora of front-page columns narrating the exploits of those who risked life and limb in the heart of Africa, the deserts of Sudan, the Moroccan mountains and plain. Newspaper readers, who felt their lives constrained by everyday routines, overshadowed by a dangerous present and uncertain future, could look to fearless other...