Emotions in History – Lost and Found

Emotions lost and found: Conclusions and perspectives

205 Emotions lost and found: Conclusions and perspectives We have come to the end of our intellectual journey. It took us from the French president’s anger to global empathy; it fathomed women’s rage and allowed us to question men’s cold blood; it introduced us to honour cultures and examined practices of social shaming. With regard to time, we travelled from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, in some cases going even further back in time. Geographically, the journey started in the midst of Europe, in Brussels, from where we set off in different directions: mainly to France, Great Britain, and the German-speaking countries. On our way, we encountered Spanish hombres de honor and Sicilian mafiosi, met Algerian and Turkish immigrants, and briefly crossed the Balkan war theatre. Omitting Northern and Eastern Europe altogether , due to lack of language skills and expertise, the book focused on Europe’s western and central 206 areas. Despite manifold national and regional differences , they share cultural traits and political institutions , commercial developments and social movements that proved pivotal for the way in which the economy of emotions was structured and evolved. Furthermore, throughout the modern period, those areas were closely interconnected, for better or worse. As much as people, goods, and news circulated more or less freely, emotional codes and styles informed and borrowed from each other, from the Age of Sensibility (succeeded by the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars) to the Age of the Therapeutic (preceded by the Second Thirty Years War). Yet, these codes and styles did not apply to all people living in Western and Central Europe during the modern period. How men and women, adolescents and senior citizens, peasants and city dwellers dealt with their emotions, how they regulated, managed, navigated and reflected upon them, did not follow the same pattern. Immigrant communities harboured emotional regimes that frequently differed substantially from those of the host society, and were radicalised even further once those differences became judged as cultural markers on both sides. Within the host society, social subcultures, particularly in adolescence , constructed their own universe of feeling that 207 often bore little resemblance to how other youth or adult groups set up their economy of emotions. To give a contemporary example: “Emos” have become a significant subculture within urban European youth culture in recent years. They deliberately set themselves apart from others by cultivating special dress codes, musical styles and emotional communication that sometimes verges on the auto-aggressive. Their outer appearance and behaviour have very little in common with self-assertive, abrasive youth gangs, and they do not match the culture of coolness as it pervades late modern Western mainstream society.258 Keeping this heterogeneity in mind, it is highly questionable to speak of emotional regimes, styles and codes tout court and imply that they pertain totally to social systems or national territories. Historically, we might be tempted to assume that late modern societies show less social and cultural diversity than early or premodern ones. Advanced consumer economies and all-pervasive media coverage seem to provide more homogeneous patterns of consumption, communication and appearances. The proliferation of self-help literature, for instance, addressing unisex and unisocial audiences, invites us to think that their advice and counsel is sought and followed by each and everyone. However, this is at best half-true. For a start, social 208 norms and prescriptions as they are defined by the genre, do not always translate into practice, let alone produce uniform behaviour. Even if a message is not completely lost on readers (it rarely is), they might find it hard or unfeasible to follow the rules. Furthermore, those rules and prescriptions as they are transmitted via media images and therapeutic handbooks are in no way unique, let alone only relevant to our times. In early modern Europe, religious texts like sermons, prayer books, and spiritual writings worked as powerful emotional educators conveying strong normative scripts. On more worldly matters, advice manuals began to get published by the end of the late eighteenth century and were circulated widely during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In contrast to previous and present efforts, those books were more exclusive as they were written for, and directed at, segregated audiences: young versus adult men/women, rural versus urban, Catholic versus Protestant, rich versus poor. The general tone was set, however, by the educated upper (and) middle classes all over...