Today, the bald peak of Mont Ventoux rises white and treeless above the vineyards of Provence, an hour’s drive northeast of Avignon, capped with a weather station and the goal of visiting cyclists. In 1336 the Italian poet Francesco Petrarch climbed to this summit and contemplated the view. Later, after a reviving supper at his inn, he wrote out his experiences. For five hundred years readers paid little notice to the climb. Rather, Petrarch became famous for his lyrical sonnets and rediscovery of Cicero’s letters. Then, in 1860, the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt identified Petrarch, for his inclination to climb a peak for the aesthetic fulfillment of the scenery, as the first “modern man”.

This overlap of ascent, identity and modernity is the subject of Peter Hansen’s The Summits of Modern Man. Through a selective history of mountaineering, Hansen attempts to explain “a particular strand of modernity in which modern man stands alone on the summit, autonomous from other men and dominant over nature” (page 2). The book’s pivot is the paradox that while mountaineering is fundamentally a team activity, representations have mythologised it as an individual conquest. Much of the book is about early ascents of Mont Blanc by Jacques Balmat and Michel-Gabriel Paccard. Hansen discusses chronicles of the Chamonix area, Balmat and Paccard’s original summit on August 8th, 1786, the pair’s ensuing fallout, and centuries of attempts to appropriate the event by poets, politicians and philosophers. Bookending this substantial portion sit meditations on the commemoration of Petrarch and the significance of Hillary and Tenzing’s ascent of Everest.

Hansen begins with the question of beginning itself: what does it mean to say that someone was first to summit a mountain? Following Edward Said’s comment that a beginning is “the first step in the intentional production of meaning” (Said 1985, page 5), Hansen writes that any discussion of firsts stems from a Western mythology that is “unimaginable without the peculiar emphasis on chronological priority and individual autonomy characteristic of … European modernity” (page 3). Histories of discovery or mountaineering are often told as if they follow an inexorable process of enlightenment, disenchantment, secularisation, rationalisation and self-assertion while, in fact, the subsequent description of such categories are themselves modern forms of mythmaking.

Two chapters capture the book’s historical and conceptual core. Chapter Three, “Ascent and Enfranchisement”, takes the reader through the first ascent of Mont Blanc, including the events leading to it and its contemporary political significance. The vexed relationship of Paccard – son of a notary and advocate of “affranchisement” – and Balmat – mountain guide and crystal hunter – exhibit how social status, political events and particular agitators bore on the question of “who was first”. So contentious did it get that Paccard forced Balmat to sign a declaration of second place and, when Balmat reneged, struck him to the ground with what must have been a hefty umbrella. The debate resounded for decades – and as subsequent chapters discuss, centuries. Social categories bissected competing claims; the savant and the paysan were, in ways, overshadowed by Horace-Bénédict Saussure, the third to summit Mont Blanc and lauded for his scientific kit and observations.

Chapter Five, “The Temple of Nature”, charts the rising significance of Mont Blanc and the Chamonix area in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries through the conception, building and refurbishments of Montanvert’s “temple”, a two-windowed, fireplace-equipped cabin which functioned as climbers’ refuge and memorial to ascendants of Mont Blanc. The chapter examines how different factions of the French Revolution interpreted Mont Blanc’s ascents, and how the mountain was mythologised by the likes of Kant, Coleridge, Shelley and Ruskin.

Chapter Nine is a highlight. Jumping eras and protagonists, Hansen explores the 1953 ascent of Everest by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay and demonstrates his grasp of the social and political quirks of a “conquest” in which the British claimed a mountain summited by a New Zealander and a Nepali Sherpa.

Hansen is the cultural historian of mountaineering and readers familiar with his work will find in the book his distinctive fine-grained empirical digging and theoretical elaboration. The joys of The Summits of Modern Man come in extended patches of narrative, in its idiosyncratic characters, and in the historicisation of the “discovery” and naming of Mont Blanc. Hansen covers the late eighteenth-century history of Chamonix and Savoy minutely, including the prominent local citizens and everything that French, English or German authors wrote about exploration, fieldwork and ascents in the region. Happily, Hansen situates romantic generalisations of mountaineering history into the specific, the contingent and the local. On the other hand, however, the depth of his analysis of Savoy politics and refrain from scenic asides can be at times arduous.

While detail runs high, originality trickles. In histories of mountaineering past and present, no four names are covered more regularly and thoroughly than Chamonix, Mont Blanc, Everest and Hillary. And Hansen has already mined this quarry. For Mount Everest, cultures of travel or late British Imperialism, prospective readers should see Hansen’s "Tenzing’s two wrist-watches" (1997), "Confetti of Empire" (2000) and "Partners: guides and Sherpas in the Alps and Himalayas" (1999). And for a history of Himalayan mountaineering, Maurice Isserman and Stewart Weaver’s Fallen Giants (2008) is excellent.

There is, moreover, little in Hansen’s first nine chapters to startle a social scientist. The idea that philosophers and politicians contort nature to serve social purposes is standard fair, as are examples of Western adventurers quick to exploit – and slow to credit – local expertise. For this reason, Chapter Ten, “Bodies of Ice” is a welcome windup, as it broadens the conceptual discussion and speaks to contemporary environmental debates. Hansen uses his historical perspective to dissect the term “Anthropocene” – an epoch which delimits time and situates humans on the summit of planetary turmoil. For Hansen, the Anthropocene is “yet another alternative modernity, a deeply ambivalent assertion of human sovereignty at this particular postcolonial moment” and the latest example of a “summit position”, a periodisation that resurrects the sovereignty of “modern man” (page 290). Like histories of Petrarch and Ventoux, Hansen reckons this contemporary, eschatological and anthropocentric “first” should be tempered by a “deep historical” perspective that eschews beginnings for the processes of becomings that precede and permeate them. 

References

Hansen P (1997) Tenzing’s two wrist-watches: the conquest of Everest and late imperial culture in Britain 1921-1953. Past & Present 157: 159–77.

Hansen P (1999) Partners: guides and sherpas in the Alps and Himalayas, 1850s–1950s. In: J Elsner and J P Rubie (eds) Voyages and Visions: Towards a Cultural History of Travel. London: Reaktion, pp. 210-31.

Hansen P (2000) Confetti of Empire: the conquest of Everest in Nepal, India, Britain, and New Zealand. Comparative Studies in Society and History 42: 307–32.

Isserman M and S Weaver (2008) Fallen Giants: A History of Himalayan Mountaineering from the Age of Empire to the Age of Extremes. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Said E (1985) Beginnings: Intention and Method. New York: Columbia University Press.