Kissing in European politics began in earnest in the middle ages. One day, the English monarchy noticed how much the people of England enjoyed being kissed, especially by their betters, and so they devised a way to use it to keep the kingdom happy and in order.
The King of England kissed the feet of the poor every Maundy Thursday and this did indeed leave a warm after-glow that made serfdom feel worthwhile. Kings also kissed their nobles on the lips, to flatter them with a sense of equality, which kept them happy too. This all worked really well, considering that it was the middle ages, full of violence and cruelty, and you can see just how important it was if you analyse a lapse in the policy. Henry VI banned kissing during the plague of 1439, which led to rumours of the king’s insanity, decades of unrest, and, ultimately, the fall of the House of Lancaster.
In Italy, they had no king to keep the peace, so had to use a pope instead. He got his feet out for the poor every Easter for a little kiss but, in 1508, Pope Julius II was sick from syphilis and his toes had gone purple, so he had to keep his socks on, which ruined the kissing and triggered the decline of the Catholic church in Europe.
Here you see how even a little slip up in the kissing department can be truly catastrophic politically.
After Henry VI lost his crown, the Kings of England were very careful to keep kissing right at the forefront of national policy and England would remain a world leader throughout the sixteenth century (something I think we can feel very proud of to this day).
Desiderius Erasmus - Letter from England (1500) :
Wherever you go, everyone welcomes you with a kiss, and the same on bidding farewell. You call again, when there is more kissing. If your friends call on you, they kiss you, and when they take their leave kisses again go round. You meet an acquaintance anywhere, and you are kissed till you are tired. In short, turn where you will, there are kisses, kisses everywhere. And if you were once to taste them, and find how delicate and fragrant they are, you would certainly desire, not for ten years only, like Solon, but till death, to be a sojourner in England.
On the back of this excellence in kissing, the English monarchy had also been developing a special kind of royal touch that could cure diseases. This was originally pioneered by Edward the Confessor and his crack team back in 1043, with the discovery of a cure for scrofula, a particularly nasty lymph disease that went away if the king touched it. After the break from Rome in 1534, and the establishment of the Church of England, the healing hands of the English monarch became, unbelievably, even more effective - so everything was going really well in our little island and we were basically healthy and happy until Charles I came along. Misunderstanding the science, this king believed he was divine and the poor were dirty and so he said he didn’t want to touch them any more. Of course, this led to Civil War and thousands of people died. Finally Parliament captured the king and said, ‘you are a man of blood and a public enemy to the people of England’ and put him in prison where, in desperation, he touched so many people that his gaolers named him Charles The Stroker.
But it was too late by that point.
Parliament executed Charles I in Whitehall and we started a new English Republic.
We renamed the flagship of the Royal Navy ‘Liberty’ and started calling members of Parliament ‘Senator’ and it was a whole new world and really exciting but (as is often the way with inexperienced regimes) nobody thought to draw up a plan for scrofula. When the sick started turning up at Parliament begging for help, Parliament could do nothing, and so the English realised that Charles the Stroker was actually a saint and they longed to have him back as King again. The middle classes started going to the continent for health care. Most popularly, they went to Amsterdam where they could get touched by Charles’s son, Prince Charles, and then they asked him if he could just come home and cure his country.
1660.
The Solicitor General of the Republic, James Cook, was livid because, way back in 1647, he had actually suggested a free health service for the nation supported by the state, for not just scrofula but other diseases too, which he thought was a great idea. But the people of England said thank you but we definitely prefer being kissed by a king, and so they dragged James Cook through the streets of London, hung him up, dug out his innards and burned them.
Charles II was crowned.
He understood the mystical power of touch and kiss.
Something the puritan state never really got a handle on.
Kissing under Charles was very different from how it had been under his father. The merry monarch kissed his subjects not just on Maundy Thursday but all year round. His political advisors famously encouraged him to take actress and commoner Nell Gwyn as a mistress and this pioneering cross-class kissing told the men of England that he was like them in their desires but unlike them in his attainment, and it made him a star.
He touched people.
Charles touched 96,796 in his long career.
In Amsterdam, a few fans were trampled to death in the crushes trying to reach him.
Soon after Charles, the English got a Dutch King called William of Orange. William stopped the foot kissing and the royal touching, explaining that it made no medical sense and - to prove it - he pointed at loads of his subjects who still had scrofula. The people of England were perplexed but unfortunately, it was too late to have the republic back.
A sad day for the nation.
And so on to the birth of democracy. Politicians saw their moment and immediately leapt into the gaping hole created by William of Orange’s royal no-kissing policy. They offered to do it instead. After all, voters and wives of voters still wanted to be kissed and English politicians would kiss them ‘the English way’. That is - on the mouth - which flattered the voters mightily with a sense of equality (just like the medieval nobles experienced) and it was much better than the stupid French cheek kiss. Aspiring members of the British Parliament began to complain of lip fatigue and mouth infections and the slobbering poor but the wives of the voters were happy and if they were happy, the voters were happy.
Except for a growing, sneaking suspicion …
If he tongues you when he kisses, ‘tis an argument of his lust.
(Edward Ward, 1707 : Advice to Ladies)
The Enlightenment. The ladies actually already knew about it. But Englishmen started to feel more and more uncomfortable about the potential link between kissing and sex, which they hadn’t really noticed before. Then, in 1784, the Duchess of Devonshire (a woman) led a political campaign and this aberration confirmed that election kissing definitely led to sex and she was fucking the butchers to get them to vote and it was completely obscene and had no place in the British political arena.
The irresponsible actions of the Duchess of Devonshire confirmed the demise of the political kiss in England and, by the nineteenth century, only one section of the population seemed to have kept a level head about the whole affair: babies. As the nineteenth century dawned, only babies continued to refuse to throw their weight behind election campaigns, unless they got a decent kiss in return.
This persists to the present day. A little corner of sanity in an increasingly irrational world.
And now, politicians have to take their kisses where they can.
FOCUS : THE SOCIALIST FRATERNAL KISS
This particular political kiss was developed by the Russians in the late nineteenth century. Russian communists would greet each other lip-to-lip, spontaneously and joyously, crying, ‘We are brother and sisters!’ (just as early Christians had done) and this enabled an extraordinarily rapid shift from feudalism to communism, because everyone loved it.
After the Bolsheviks won the revolution in 1917, they decided all friendly socialists should do it, not just in Russia but all over the world and so they formalised it and called it the Socialist Fraternal Kiss.
Some commentators argue that this formalisation somewhat diminished its original charm.
Even the Asian socialist leaders started to join in, despite their historic antipathy to social kissing, but in 1959 Mao Zedong famously turned down a kiss from Nikita Khrushchev. This was called the Sino-Soviet split. To top it off, Mao asked Nikita to join him for a swim in the deep end of his private swimming pool when he knew Nikita couldn’t swim, which was just mean.
Kissing never resumed between the two nations, with Chinese protocol clear on the matter: ‘Handshake. No embrace.’
They wrote that down.
One of many sad days for the people of the People’s Republic of China.
Now Krushchev desperately wanted to kiss someone, so he turned his lips to the west but he saw that Europe was sort of kissing itself and he decided the only thing to do was to build the Berlin Wall so he did that and then he demanded that everyone on the Russian side of the wall kiss him instead.
And so it was that Eastern Europe felt the full force of the Soviet kiss.
Here you see it, ably demonstrated by Breshnev (for the USSR) and Honecker (for East Germany) in 1979.
We might remember the radical Anabaptists of the Reformation (the ones who annoyed Luther), who declared: ‘The brothers and the sisters, each to each, shall greet one another with an holy kiss. Those not in the fellowship shall not be greeted with a kiss, but with the words May the Lord Help You.’
The kiss of Breshnev and Honecker would end up painted on the wall itself in 1990, with the words: My God, Help me Survive this Deadly Love.
The Berlin Wall.
The Wall that parted our fathers.
The Wall of War - the ‘Cold War’, so-called because during these years even kisses such as those pictured above failed to create any real warmth, and we all felt a distinct shiver whenever we imagined living out the rest of our days in nuclear bunkers, like frozen meat.
But as we know, walls that are built with the intention of preventing kissing, whether they be built of concrete, bricks, or paper, will never last.
EXERCISE LESSON FIVE
Climb the walls.
If you like climbing the walls to music, I offer Auf des Strasse nach Süden sung by live by Tony Marshall on German TV in 1978.
The audience clapping should get you off to a good start.
Or, if this is too easy for you, try the later version, Looking for Freedom sung live by David Hasselhoff in Berlin to millions of people in a pure moment of 1980s ecstasy.
Images
15th Century picture of Clovis I
Kiss of Peace
Oh I wish I kept notes
A book of hours
Beatlemania : I’ll find this one some day
Nell Gwyn : Anonymous
Charles II touching for King’s Evil : Engraving by R White
More beatlemania…
X : Nan Goldin (detail and without colour)
Humours of an Election : Hogarth
More Hogarth. coming soon.
Rise and Monty Kissing, New York City : Nan Goldin 1980 (detail and without colour - a personal favourite)
Some cartoons of the Duchess of Devonshire from News rags
Some photographs of politicians
Stalin
The Kiss : Régis Bossu 1979 (later painted on the wall by Dmitri Vrubel)
I’ll come back to this
Date of publication : 24.5.20