Post-Napoleonic Clubs: What was going on?

How my Spanish Clubland jaunt - and a family trip home to Switzerland - prompted ongoing research into the aftermath of Napoleon

Last year, I spent most of December on a tour of Spain via its historic clubs; I knew Madrid and Andalucia fairly well, but I had never actually visited the rest of Spain. So I combined this with a burgeoning desire to better understand Spanish Clubland, and put together an itinerary of 12 cities which had between 1 and 5 historic clubs which I wanted to visit. I still need to publish a proper write-up of that trip – but this is not it. This is about one of those “Eureka” moments that hits you, when you get out of the library and see things in real life.

The itinerary of my Spanish regional Clubland tour; apart from a detour to Málaga to visit friends for Christmas, each red point was an overnight(s) stopover at a city containing historic Spanish clubs.

                And it’s why, even when historic clubs are bereft of any surviving archives, I insist on visiting them in person wherever possible. You learn so much from seeing the physical layout of a place: how large or small it seems, how it connects with the other spaces, how people move around, how they behave; above all, the feel of a place is something that has to be experienced.  That holds true, whether it’s just one pokey little room, or a vast, sprawling estate.

Spain is full of clubs that are stunning, inside and out. This is the lobby of Barcelona’s Circulo del Liceo, a theatrically-themed club located in a wing wrapped around the city’s Gran Teatre del Liceu. As an avid Wagnerian, I particularly appreciated the four stained-glass windows, each depicting a scene from one part of Wagner’s ‘Ring’ cycle.

                And that’s why I’m glad I went to Castellón de la Plana. It’s not one of the “big name” cities like Bilbao, Barcelona or Seville – all of which I did visit, with some gorgeous and stimulating historic clubs along the way. But those are the three Spanish cities outside of Madrid whose clubs are fairly widely known about abroad. This is typically because when private clubs are looking to add reciprocal clubs to their lists, many tend to be quite strict about only considering establishments with overnight accommodation. Barcelona, Bilbao, Madrid and Seville have the only Spanish clubs which operate overnight accommodation, so they are often the only clubs to appear on the reciprocal lists of clubs abroad. This has led to a widespread perception in the Anglosphere that “There are no clubs outside these four cities” – which couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, Spain developed a huge culture of members’ clubs in the second half of the 19^th century. Like much of the Spanish economy, it was highly devolved – so that there was at least one major club in every sizeable provincial town or city. By 1900, Spain had over 1,000 such clubs. While their attrition rate in the 20^th century was similar to in other countries, that still leaves over 100 of them thriving today. And many remain cornerstones of their local communities, with small (by Anglosphere comparisons) memberships of 300 to 800; but extremely high rates of usage, with over a third of their members coming in every week, to socialise, dine, cook for one another, read the news, and play cards.

Spain’s oldest club, the Real Casino Antiguo, of Castellón de la Plana.

                Castellón de la Plana had one particular point of interest for me: It contains Spain’s oldest club, the Real Casino Antiguo de Castellón. While the Club’s commodious and imposing building on the city’s Plaça Porta del Sol is a more recent construction, dating to 1923, many of the artefacts contained within are much older. Before I jump to my “Eureka!” moment, it’s worth saying something about this handsome clubhouse, which epitomises the Clubland architecture I found across Spain. There is an impressive main hall and staircase, which habitués of Victorian London clubs will immediately recognise. On the left as you go in, is the members-only treble smoking room and a bar, while on the right is the mouth-watering Restaurante Lino Gastronomic, which is open to the public – a fairly common feature among Spanish clubs, and a good way for outsiders to get a sample of the architecture and culinary culture in these clubs. Lunch was inexpensive and delicious, but generously portioned. Upstairs, the private clubrooms taking up the rest of the building are labyrinthian. There is a theatre, ballroom, library, offices, multiple card rooms, and even a cinema, while the basement is given over to a complex of billiard rooms. One special feature, under lock and key – and the one part I wasn’t able to photograph – is the Hemmingway Room inside the main tower turret, which features bullfighting ephemera, and photographs of a visit to the room by Ernest Hemmingway.

The main staircase of the Real Casino Antiguo.

                But as I sat in the restaurant eating my mixed grill – a local speciality – for lunch, I was pondering the curiously early foundation date of the city’s Real Casino Antiguo. Clubs hit Spain in a big way from the 1850s to the 1880s; as I’ve noted, they cropped up in virtually every sizeable Spanish town. A few outliers had appeared some two decades earlier, after the “Ominous Decade” (1823-33) – the Ateneo de Madrid in 1835; the Casino de Madrid and Casino de Cartagena both in 1836; and the Sociedad Bilbaina in Bilbao and Real Liceo Casino de Alicante in 1839. This 1830s smattering of Spanish clubs came even though the first of the Carlist Wars (1833-40) was raging across the country all the while. And then…nothing more until the 1850s, by which time the Second Carlist War (1846-9) was over. What intrigued me was why Castellón de la Plana – a perfectly attractive city, but not necessarily a strategically significant travel or trading hub - had a club up and running in 1814.

The smoking room of the Real Casino Antiguo.

                And then it hit me: the end of the Napoleonic Wars. We tend to bracket in the Napoleonic Wars as extending up until 1815, because of the “hundred days” culminating in the Battle of Waterloo. But for much of Europe, the Napoleonic Wars wound down with the first fall of Napoleon in 1814, ending in his (ultimately short-lived) incarceration at Elba.

                Two things were on my mind, about the significance of setting up a club in 1814.

                The first was the context within Europe after the Napoleonic wars.  The Congress of Vienna of 1814-5 foreshadowed a wholesale restructuring of European states, borders and identities after the Napoleonic era – a process which went on for years, if not decades. It also meant a complete reset of trade routes and supply chains, which had been severely disrupted (or in many cases terminated altogether) by the French Revolution and then the Napoleonic Wars, and had particularly impacted Britain. The decade-and-a-half after 1814 saw cross-continental supply & travel networks being reinvented, for the first time in many people’s lifetimes.

                This struck a chord with me, because the previous summer I had visited a number of historic English-style clubs in my native land of Switzerland. The earliest Swiss clubs date to the mid-18^th century, including  the Cercle de la Terrasse of Geneva in 1754, and the Cercle de la Grande Société de Berne and Société du Jardin de Neuchâtel, both in 1759. But a flurry of Swiss clubs were then set up in the 1810s: the Abbaye de l’arc of my home city of Lausanne (which had roots going back to 1691, but was reformulated as a club in 1814); the Cercle du Marché of Vevey and the Société de Lecture of Geneva both in 1818; and the Cercle Littéraire of Lausanne in 1819. Local lore has it that these clubs were inspired by visiting Englishmen passing through Switzerland on Grand Tours, who encouraged the creation of clubs like their own in London – though this is a hypothesis I wish to test in the surviving archives.          

                And it struck me that something was going on; not just in Switzerland or Spain, but across Europe. In Italy, the Societa del Whist-Accademia filarmonica cropped up in the English “Grand Tour” hotspot of Turin in 1814; while in Belgium, the Cercle Royal-Philotaxe opened in 1819, in another favourite Grand Tour stopping-off point, Antwerp. Back home in England, veterans of Waterloo created the first mixed-service military reunion club in the United Service Club in 1815, and the nearby Travellers Club in 1819 was the brainchild of British Foreign Secretary Viscount Castlereagh, based on his experiences of the Congress of Vienna, explicitly designed for members who had returned from Grand Tours as well as for the welcoming of diplomatic guests from abroad. Outside of London, the Clifton Club in Bristol catered to the city’s internationally-connected shipping elites from 1818. The ensuing decade would see this process of ‘clubbism’ accelerate, including the United University Club for Oxbridge graduates in 1821; the Grecian-themed Athenaeum for those interested in the arts, and the Oriental Club for those on colonial service, both in London in 1824; the Western Club of Glasgow, and the St. James’s Club of Manchester, both in 1825; the Malta Union Club of Sliema for colonial servicemen in 1826; the first of the Parisian clubs, the Nouveau Cercle de l’Union in 1828, and the Northern Counties Club of Newcastle for Northumbria’s aristocratic landowners in 1829. And visitors to many of these establishments which have survived will find a striking degree of cultural homogeneity which emerged between them during this period.

                Of course, given the strictures of wartime, Grand Tours across Europe for English aristocrats had all but ceased from the late 1780s to the mid-1810s. But there is good reason to believe that when the Grand Tours came back with a vengeance, they were somehow embedded within this European wave of clubbism. Did the English travellers on these tours export clubs to continental Europe, as per the legend? I don’t know – and I wouldn’t jump to conclusions – but I suspect they certainly played a part around the assertion of cultural norms, and the spread of fashionable mannerisms.

                Was Spain even a part of this process, or a mere outlier? The customary Grand Tour route involved an anti-clockwise route through France, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, the German states and the Netherlands, perhaps with an extension to Greece (within the Ottoman Empire) along the way. While Castellón de la Plana is only five miles from the Ballearic coast, it was certainly not a staple of most Grand Tours. Yet I am not sure whether the process of ‘pan-European clubbism’ was driven by Grand Tours. I wonder if it was as much driven by reasserted trade routes and entrepreneurs? I have already written about how the Georgian clubs of London were imported from prototypes in (pre-independence) north America and Italy; and how the early proprietorial clubs were driven by highly international (especially European) staff and managers, drawn to the port city of London. Early London club staff were Italian, French, Dutch, Ottoman and Portuguese, and depended heavily on imported international luxury goods to give the new clubs added social cachet. And the availability of luxury foods and wines, and their consumption in club premises, may have been as much of a driver. Going against this was the trend from the early 19^th century onwards for clubs to be member-led, rather than staff-led or proprietor-led.

                The second major theme that occurred to me – and which I am still trying to think through – is the effect on Clubland historiography.

                The creation of British clubs over the ages has often been framed in terms of ‘waves’, set around certain themes. The mid-18^th century saw the reconstitution of White’s (originally a fashionable hot-chocolate-shop-cum-gambling-den) as London’s first club in 1736, and this was followed by the creation of the Cocoa Tree Club around 1746, Boodle’s in 1762, Brooks’s in 1764, the Savoir Vivre Club in 1772, and Goosetree’s by 1773. We are then told that – aside from a few outliers - there were relatively few new establishments of note, until the development of a string of political clubs in the 1830s which followed the 1832 Great Reform Act. (This was then followed by further waves of London club-building in the 1860s, 1880s & 1890s.) I’ve done as much as anyone else to promote this Whiggish narrative around the primacy of the Reform Act – it was the topic of my PhD thesis and first book.

                But I wonder if I’ve done an injustice in simply waving away the significance of the 1810s and 1820s? Far from seeming like an ‘outlier’ period, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that some major cultural phenomenon was underway across the whole continent, redefining the boundaries of European culture in the post-Napoleonic age. And it may well be that the travellers who led this process were continental European as well as English.

                Apologies if you’ve read this hoping for a fully-digested narrative – at this stage, I have only questions and hypotheses, rather than answers. But it is a train of thought that has been occupying my mind a lot, over these last few months. I have applied – unsuccessfully so far – for a string of research grants, stipends, scholarships and fellowships, to further explore the theme, but Clubland history remains a deeply unfashionable field in today’s academia (and British universities are in crisis); which is a pity, as I think that expanding our understanding of how socialising trends evolved (for good or ill) has a huge amount to teach us today, from social cohesion and polarisation, through to better understanding what has made the norms of the hospitality industry.

                But as a work-in-progress, I thought it might well be the sort of thing that would be perfect for this new Substack. As ever, I’m very keen to hear thoughts and tip-offs for possible lines of research, as I continue to mull this over.