Western Civilization - History Of European Society

Europe in an Age of Dictatorship, 1919–39559

smaller portion of labor unions than they had been in
1913, though nearly one million British workers had
been lost. This pattern was repeated across the conti-
nent. Although most of the major powers granted
women’s suffrage during or after the war, old attitudes
about women remained strong.

The Changing Conditions

of Life in Europe

Although Europe endured tragic difficulties following
World War I, seeing the era solely in terms of its prob-
lems would be misleading. Historians must keep many
perspectives on the past. Cultural historians, for exam-
ple, explore the mixture of vitality and decadence
known in America as “the roaring twenties.” The
Weimar Republic is a tragic failure in the history of
democracy, but its vigorous cultural history fascinates
historians who look at expressionist painting, Bauhaus
architecture, or the novels of Thomas Mann instead of
dictatorship and depression. Historians of popular cul-
ture find an exciting interwar world by considering the
impact of the automobile (private autos in use in Britain
rose from 79,000 in 1919 to 2,034,000 in 1939), aircraft
(British Imperial Airways began overseas passenger ser-
vice in 1924 and the German Lufthansa airline started
service in 1926), or the telephone (introduced in Lon-
don in 1879 and still limited to an elite of 10,000
homes in Britain on the eve of the war, the two mil-
lionth phone was installed in Buckingham Palace in
1931). Historians of science treat epochal develop-
ments in physics, where scientists such as Albert Ein-

stein, Max Planck, Enrico Fermi, and Ernest Rutherford

transformed understanding of the physical world; the

atom, long considered the indivisible basis of all matter,

was first split in 1932.

Among the many differences from the past that are

examined by social historians of the early twentieth

century, the most notable may be the dramatic decline

in infant mortality rates (see table 28.2). Under the bio-

logical old regime, between 20 percent and 30 percent

of all babies never reached their first birthday. By 1940

most of Europe had a rate below 10 percent as a result

of the accelerated conquest of epidemic diseases. The

death rate from diphtheria for British children fell by 49

percent, measles by 76 percent, and scarlet fever by 83

percent. Hundreds of thousands of Europeans who

would have died of contagious diseases in the nine-

teenth century now reached adulthood. In 1921, two

French scientists developed a vaccine against tuberculo-

sis, the greatest scourge of Belle Époque Europe. The

most remarkable life-saving discoveries of the interwar

era—the antibiotic treatment of wounds and diseases—

did not have a great impact until the generation of

World War II. Two of the twentieth century’s most im-

portant Nobel Prizes in Medicine were awarded to men

whose work contributed greatly to the conquest of dis-

ease: Scottish bacteriologist Alexander Fleming in 1945

and German chemist Gerhard Domagk in 1939. (The

Nazi government made Domagk decline the prize,

however.) Domagk’s work led to the development of

sulfa drugs, a treatment nontoxic to humans yet power-

ful in combating infectious diseases. Fleming discovered

penicillin in 1928, though its development was left to

others (Ernst Chain and Sir Howard Florey shared the

1945 Nobel Prize) and the drug was not synthesized

Deaths of infants under one year of age, as a percentage of live births

Year Britain France Germany Russia

1900 15.4 16.0 22.9 25.2

191 01 0.5 11.1 16.2 27.1

192 08. 0 12.3 13.1 n.a.

193 06. 0 8.4 8.5 n.a.

194 05.7 9.1 6.4 n.a.

n.a. 
not available.

Source: B. R. Mitchell, European Historical Statistics, 1750–1970(London: Macmillan, 1975), pp. 130–31.

TABLE 28.2

The Decline of Infant Mortality in Europe, 1900–40