Making everyone Greek citizens: athletes, and ideals of nationhood in nineteenth-century Britain, France, and Germany

This chapter explores the multiple Hellenomanias operative in processes of nation-building in Europe and the United States over the long nineteenth century. Developing Hans Kohn’s classic distinction between ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’, or ‘civic’ and ‘ethnic’ nationalisms, it focuses upon phenomena of Hellenomaniac expression in two distinct spheres: the design and construction of civic buildings and practices of physical culture. At the same time as democratic political monuments—ranging from Laboulaye’s ‘Liberty Enlightening the World’ to the parliamentary buildings of France and Austria—were springing up in testament to the universalist, cosmopolitan ideals of ‘civic’ Hellenomania, development in the human sciences—from Winckelmannian neoclassical aesthetics, through historical linguistics and physical anthropology’s characterisation of mankind according to ‘races’—promoted an alternative understanding, which posited the ancient Greeks as a particular, ethnic ancestor to northern Europeans in particular. Both these ideals found resonance beyond the academy, in particular national movements (the German Turnverein, English public school culture, and Hippolyte Taine’s ‘culture musculaire’) as well as internationalist endeavours such as the revival of the Olympic Games. The chapter explores the interplay between different strands of these two Hellenomanias in different national contexts, paying particular attention to the role of alternative conceptions of physical culture in rivalry between French and German culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. It ends with a discussion of the further recasting of Hellenomania in Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art of the fin-de-siecle, as avant-garde figures such as Cezanne, Renoir, and Picasso turned to the Greeks to paint a new picture of the ‘vie moderne’.

refuse it to tyrants'. 10 In the USA, the classicising statue of 'Liberty Enlightening the World', inaugurated in 1886, was designed to symbolise the universal, humanistic aspirations that the two new Republics of the modern world, the French and the American, shared. The statue was conceived by Édouard de Laboulaye (1811Édouard de Laboulaye ( -1883, the French political thinker, U.S. Constitution expert and abolitionist, and designed by Laboulaye's friend, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi.

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Laboulaye had intended the statue as a gift of the French to the American people and a Republican celebration, on both sides of the Atlantic, of the spread of the Enlightenment principles of democracy and freedom from slavery and oppression across the world. By 1903, however, the statue had acquired an additional meaning, which is perhaps best expressed in the American poet Emma Lazarus's proclamation of the USA as 'Mother of Exiles' in her 1883 poem, 'The New Colossus'. The poem, together with the experience of international mass immigration into the USA at the turn of the twentieth century, changed the meaning of the statue from liberty enlightening the world to American liberty welcoming the world to its shores.

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The civic conception of the modern nation produced parliamentary democracies whose classical roots were most visibly acknowledged in the classical style of the buildings which housed the representatives of the people, as also discussed by Lambrinou in this volume.
According to the civic view, it was, in the first instance, all the people of the state, who, transformed into citizens, constituted the nation. In Europe, the attempt to turn ancien régime states into magnified and modernised versions of democratic Athens began in Paris. The central site of its metamorphosis was the Palais Bourbon, which, after its confiscation by the revolutionary government in 1791, was transformed from an aristocratic private palace into the home of the French National Assembly (Figure 5.1). Over the following decades a succession of distinguished architects, sculptors, and painters moulded the Palais into a symbol of French democracy. A host of architectural, sculptural, and other decorative features proclaims its Athenian roots. These include a neoclassical façade consisting of a pedimented portico supported by twelve columns, and statues of Athena and Themis (representing, respectively, prudence and the legislative process), standing on either side at the bottom of the steps that lead up to the portico.
13 Designed by the architect Bernard Poyet, the façade was completed in 1810. Another Athenian reference can be seen inside the building, in the seventeenth-century Gobelins tapestry which hangs in the salle des séances (also known as l'hémicycle, because of its shape), the French Parliament's debating hall. The tapestry reproduces Raphael's famous 'School of Athens' from the Vatican and shows Plato and Aristotle debating, thereby 'evoking the Greek origins of democracy'.
14 The tapestry was hung directly above the desk of the President of the Assemblée Nationale who guides the discussions. It thus confronts the French deputies, also reminding them of the principles of democratic debate. 15 Many other parliamentary buildings in Europe were also built in the Greek style in the course of the nineteenth century, as traditional monarchies were challenged by democratic movements largely inspired by the French Revolution.

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There were also some notable exceptions to the classicising idiom of modern Western democracies' parliamentary buildings. These show the tension between civic and ethnic definitions of the national self, between universalising principles and particularistic traditions.

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Gothic was also chosen for the Hungarian Parliament (1885-1902, to associate Hungarian with British liberal institutions as well as in contrast to the Austrian Parliament, to Page 9 of 40 affirm Hungary's historical identity and claim to self-rule ( Figure 5.

From Civic to Ethnic Hellenomania
As argued above, the late eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries were dominated by what we might call, a political, civic Hellenomania. It was a movement for universal liberty, equality, and fraternity, whose most significant expression was the building of parliaments-houses of the representatives of the will of the people-inspired by ancient Greece. The second half of the nineteenth century also saw a quite distinct but similarly widespread attachment to another side of ancient Greece, which we might call, ethnic Hellenomania. Ethnic Hellenomania did not entirely replace but threatened and sometimes even subdued the core impulses of its civic counterpart.
Civic Hellenomania had promised universal human emancipation, solidarity, and inclusion regardless of gender, religion, ethnicity, or social background. The ethnic view saw nations as old, historical communities, based on 'blood' (in the sense of ethnic, i.e. genealogical continuity) and the transmission of cultural traditions from one generation to the next.
Consequently, ethnic Hellenomania produced exclusivist and particularist tendencies which made access to the Greek world depend on proof of Greek ancestry. It adopted as its focal theme the Greek body and the Greek cult of the body-the Greek concern for physical health, strength,

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The rise of physical anthropology as a new science of man also focused attention on the Greek body. Its 'father' was Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840), the German anthropologist, physiologist, and comparative anatomist of the University of Göttingen. Physical anthropologists divided mankind into 'races', a category intended to enable organisation of the wide diversity of human physical traits into a stable and finite system of more or less permanent physical types, whose characteristics were transmitted from one generation to the next through biological inheritance. Their attempts produced a large number of typologies or classifications, depending on the physical traits each scientist focused upon, but many of which involved hierarchies of 'superior' and 'inferior' races ranked according to subjective judgements.

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Through the idea of race, physical anthropology tried to make ethnicity (in the sense of genealogical continuity) visible, by tracing physical similarities among peoples in time and space. It also sought to explain cultural diversity through racial determinism, claiming the covariation of physical with cultural, including linguistic, traits.

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The notion of Aryan superiority and Semitic inferiority was one of the most influential theories of racial determinism. It complemented the polarisation of inferior Black and superior White races and had a direct impact on the European continent. It produced, on the one hand, Belvedere, preferring what they considered to be more realistic sculptures.

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On the basis of this sculptural evidence (however badly copied or idealised we now know it to have been) and literary sources, such as physical descriptions of Homeric heroes, physical anthropologists saw the Greek body as the fullest embodiment of the white, Indo-European, Indo-Atlantic, Aryan or Caucasian race, also called homo europaeus. This was believed to be the superior human race, excelling in beauty, intelligence, language, morality, and strength. Physical anthropologists tended to describe the Greeks as blond and the Greek head as a perfect oval, with regular and symmetrical features, and noses that were perpendicular, continuing their foreheads. They also saw in ancient Greek sculpture, and especially in fifth-century BC Athenian sculpture, a specifically Greek conception of beauty: the beauty of the well-balanced athletic body. As a result, physical anthropologists and medical scientists explained the beauty of the ancient Greeks as the result of two factors: race and athletics. Greek athletic institutions, most notably the gymnasia, cultivated the natural beauty of the Greeks in ways that made their bodies healthy, robust, muscular, symmetrical, and well-proportioned.
These anthropological ideas, which saw in the Greek body the physical type of the European race, turned all Europeans into potential Greeks. At the same time, there was a broad consensus, even among critics of ideas of European racial superiority and racial determinism, as well as critics of the very idea of race (e.g. Friedrich Max Müller, Matthew Arnold, Jules Michelet, Georges Clémenceau, and others), that care for the body as practised in the ancient Greek gymnasia was necessary for the physical regeneration of modern nations. It was widely held that modern human bodies were being destroyed by the sedentary and indoor life of industrial civilisation whose centres were the unsanitary north European cities.

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As George Mosse has observed, the Greek physical ideal was implicated in all European nationalist movements, 'whether German, Czech or Jewish'.
37 And in the context of international competition for power, wealth, and prestige, there arose in Europe a new competition as to which nation looked more Greek. I shall here concentrate on Germany, Britain, and France.
It was in Germany that the Greek physical ideal found its first modern practical application as a national and liberal ideal in the Turnverein, the German gymnastics movement. 39 It should be noted that GutsMuths believed that the exact replication of the Greek physical type was unattainable.
Consequently, he urged his phlegmatic and over-refined contemporaries to emulate the energy and robustness of both the ancient Greeks and the ancient Germanic tribes.
While retaining GutsMuths' repertoire, Jahn substituted the German tribal ancestor for GutsMuths's Greek man as the supreme example of modern health and physical vigour. Jahn was also innovative, adding to GutsMuths's gymnastics the horizontal bar and parallel bars.
Jahn's gymnastics movement developed in the context of German defeats by France in the Napoleonic Wars and in the spirit of Fichte's anti-French patriotism.
40 Its aim was to build a strong, 'soldierly' national body that could fight against French occupation of German lands.

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Becoming part of regular school curricula after 1815, the gymnastics of GutsMuths and Jahn were seen, especially in the prelude to German unification in 1871, as a way of becoming German: 'Gymnastics our way, Germanness our aim'.

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Ethno-racial conceptions of the French nation competed and coexisted with the civic conceptions of the Third Republic, which replaced Louis Napoleon III's defeated Second Empire. At the centre of these new visions, which combined with a strong militarism, was the Greek physical ideal. Claims to Greek ancestry and thereby to Greek physical-racial powers or, rather, potential powers gave the French a sense of superiority over the Germans.
60 They led the French to believe that they could become militarily superior to the Germans and thus defeat them en revanche. This they could do by developing their Greek body to its full potential through physical education.

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The change in Renoir's art from the 1880s onwards was not only thematic, a turn away from images of modern urban life towards more classical themes, but also stylistic. What admirable beings the Greeks were. Their existence was so happy that they imagined that the Gods came down to earth to find their paradise and to make love. Yes, the earth was the paradise of the Gods . . . This is what I want to paint.

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Consistently with his ideas, Renoir painted not only the Mediterranean paradise in his landscapes, but also the Greek gods and heroes who, like the men and women of Provence, were tanned by the sun, strong and healthy.
The current of Hellenomania to which Cézanne and Renoir contributed so creatively was so powerful that if a foreign artist, such as Picasso, wished to become French, this artist had to draw innovatively from the Hellenic tradition. Christopher Green has described Picasso's art as 'sometimes serious, more often ironic applications to belong as a French classicist'.

Conclusion
Following the American and French Revolutions, Europe embarked on a long and complex process of nation-building. This involved redefinition of collective identities, appealed to the masses, and transformed radically the way of life of ordinary people. During the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries two specifically ancient Greek cultural traits, and their material manifestations, helped to define modern European national identities in decisive ways: the citizen and the athlete. Indeed, the transformation of modern mass societies into 'nations' was achieved, at least partly, through programmes of mass Hellenisation.
While producing distinctive cultural currents across Europe, which I have called civic and ethnic Hellenomanias, the ideals of the citizen and the athlete could also be combined in a variety of ways, producing multiple, overlapping universalist and particularist permutations: for example, the citizen and the athlete could coexist in the ideal of what we might call the 'citizenathlete' that we find, briefly, during German unification as well as in Britain and Republican France from the second half of the nineteenth century; muscular Hellenomania could be detached from particularistic, ethnic associations, and become universalised, giving rise even to muscular Judaism; muscular Hellenomania could become intertwined with national religious traditions,