Manuel Borutta

A Colonial Sea: the Mediterranean, 1798–1956

The Mediterranean has been a colonial sea since ancient times. While historians of the pre- and early modern world still tend to describe this region with the Braudelian paradigms of unity and continuity, the historiography of the modern Mediterranean suffers from the widespread fragmentation of national and regional studies, including important contributions on the colonial history of North Africa and the Middle East. In this context, the editors invited scholars to re-think the Mediterranean of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century as a colonial and, most importantly, a colonised sea. Therefore the special issue brings together historians and geographers from North Africa, Europe and North America in order to reconstruct colonial interactions, relationships, entanglements and shared experiences between Europe, the Maghreb and the Middle East from late eighteenth century, when the European colonisation of the Mediterranean began, until the erosion of the imperial order in the 1950s.

Anti-Catholicism and the Culture War in Risorgimento Italy

The culture wars of the nineteenth century affected all aspects of European societies: politics and religion; media, arts and science; private and public sectors; urban and rural areas; upper and lower classes; men and women; and adults and children. What was at stake in these conflicts was the place and meaning of religion: while liberals strove to differentiate between politics and religion in public and private spheres, democrats and radicals wished to replace faith by knowledge. Various religious denominations — Protestant, Jewish and Catholic — fought against secularization and for the political and public character of the Church and religion, asserting the supremacy thereof over state and science. As Europe’s public religion par excellence, Catholicism was at the heart of these debates: the pope incarnated the fusion of temporal and spiritual power. Catholic rituals and symbols dominated public space, and ultramontanism openly challenged the rationalist project of modernity.1

Comparing Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs: Introduction

After 1945 and 1962, Germany and France witnessed immigration movements of unprecedented scale and type. Military defeat and the loss of significant parts of their territory pushed millions of refugees and expellees from Central and Eastern Europe and from North Africa to the two neighboring countries: the Germans from the East (Vertriebene) and the French of now independent Algeria (rapatries, later often referred to as Pieds-Noirs). This demographic influx from former national provinces and imperial borderlands posed serious financial, logistical, and administrative challenges for both societies. Since many of these immigrants and their ancestors had lived far away from the core regions of postwar Germany and France — speaking unfamiliar dialects or different languages, practicing different cultural and religious traditions — they were perceived as culturally different, if not inferior, and were rejected by many of their fellow citizens.

SETTEMBRINI’S WORLD: GERMAN AND ITALIAN ANTI-CATHOLICISM IN THE AGE OF THE CULTURE WARS

This article analyses the progressive anti-Catholicism of liberal and democratic forces that was responsible for the outbreak of the culture wars in the nineteenth century. Liberals and democrats connected anti-Catholicism with projects of bourgeois and secular modernity. They wanted to spread bourgeois values such as the belief in freedom, progress and rationality, the separation of public and private spheres, a heterosexual matrix and modern work ethics compatible with industrial capitalism. Moreover, they aimed to secularise modern societies: to privatise religion; to differentiate religion from other spheres of such as politics, science and arts; or to substitute faith with knowledge. I will position this progressive anti-Catholicism within the European context of the culture wars. I will first define these transnational conflicts and the crucial role played by Catholicism, then compare the anti-Catholicism within the culture wars of different confessional and national contexts – Germany and Italy – and finally explore cross-border aspects such as anti-clerical media transfers and scandals, Orientalist constructions of a Catholic ‘Other’, and the appropriation of these anti-Catholic theories of secularisation by social scientists after the culture wars.1