While open conflict grows ever closer, we reflect on the cultural background of 100 years ago.
The cultural roots of the Great War certainly go back through the arch under the Eiffel Tower. It was built in Paris to be the central wonder the Paris Worlds Fair of 1888. And that cultural heritage, along with the world wars, echoes down to us to the present day in a very real sense.
The tower was built in response to the Crystal Palace, the central feature of England's Great Exhibition of 1851. France's forward looking cultural leadership has never shown more brightly than in the choice of this architectural icon. It was consciously meant to convey the triumph of industrial capitalism over agricultural land ownership, which had been the foundation of power back into the distant mists of history. The victory of of process over person.
And though the actors in this drama couldn't imagine it, modes of governing based on the pre-eminence of land owning classes would be swept away in the unforeseen aftermath of war, and in their place centers of power based on industrial production and distribution.
It was all predicted by Eiffel and the Paris Exhibition! Instead of a sprawling greenhouse of glass, they erect a tower of iron to colonize, not the land, but the undeveloped (and unowned) territory of the sky. It was this monumental shift in human perspective that made war inevitable for people who had no way of seeing what was right in front of their eyes.
