Archives for January 2025

Sean McKeekin: To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism. New York: Basic Books, 2023.

 

By the early 1990s, many assumed that communism had gone away. The Soviet empire had collapsed; Russia itself seemed well on the way to regime change; the ‘People’s Republic’ of China appeared to be moving toward becoming an actual republic ruled by the people. Commercial republicanism/liberal democracy stood firm. But by the 2020s, “liberal democracy seems bereft of energy, if not moribund, while Chinese Communism rapidly assimilates much of the world.” “How did this happen, and why did no one see it coming?”

The “why” isn’t hard to see. The optimists were deluded by their own wishful thinking, aided by Chinese deception. Within the republican regimes themselves, the Left shifted away from the standard appeals to ‘justice for the working man’ toward cultural-Marxist calls for ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’—a shape-shifting that caught their opponents off-guard. The “how” is more interesting.

“Much as we like to imagine that Communism failed because of a cascading groundswell of heroic popular opposition from below, it was actually the disappearance of coercion from above that counted,” since “more than any other system of government known to man, Communist rule required the strong hand of the military and heavily armed security services, all under strict party control.” Communism had advanced only through disasters—World War I, the Great Depression, World War II—which had weakened its enemies, changing the relative power equation between Communists and their enemies. “The real secret of Marxism-Leninism,” to cite the first example of a successful Communist regime change, “was not that Marx and Lenin had discovered an immutable law of history driven by ever-intensifying ‘class struggle,’ but that Lenin had shown how Communist revolutionaries could exploit the devastation war to seize power by force—if the devastation was severe enough, and if they armed enough fanatics and foot soldiers to prevail over their opponents.” The supply of fanatics and foot soldiers renews itself with every generation, as a certain number of youths engage in their own characteristic form of wishful thinking, “dream[ing] of brotherhood between men, of equal rights for women or for racial or ethnic minorities, or, in the current jargon, of ‘social justice.'”

Although communism as an ideal is espoused in Plato’s Republic (albeit without social equality and likely with Socratic irony), and Christianity upheld equality of believers before God, and although Rousseau’s Social Contract, distorted, had inspired Robespierre and the Terror, it was Rousseau’s contemporary, a tax official and teacher named Étienne-Gabriel Morelly, whose Code of Nature convinced an erstwhile land surveyor and political scribbler, François-Noël Babeuf to publish a newspaper, Le Tribun du Peuple, in which he defended the late Robespierre as a “sincere patriot” and founded a still more radical organization, the “Conspiracy of Equals.” These egalitarians attempted to turn soldiers, former soldiers, and police against the regime of the Directory. Babeuf eschewed utopianism, rejecting any “assumption…that a government could be overthrown, that property could be seized and redistributed, without ruthless organization and cleansing revolutionary violence.” He and his close associates were arrested and guillotined by the Directory regime in 1797; Napoleon went on to suppress France’s “last revolutionary embers” during and immediately after his 1799 coup d’état. Utopian socialists, and utopians only, were tolerated for the next several decades, with such men as Henri de Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier enjoying some popularity; it was Henri Leroux, a Saint-Simonian, who coined the word socialisme. “While its meaning was somewhat vague at first, during the years of the July Monarchy (1830-1848) ‘socialism’ caught on among radicals hoping the next revolution would bring about more equal social conditions.” It was during this regime when Pierre Proudhon asserted that property is theft. (A decade later, the liberal Fredéric Bastiat, would reply that the income tax was theft, and the struggle among the ideologues was on.)

Karl Marx would be far more consequential than any of these. Marx rejected natural right altogether, having been decisively shaped by Hegel’s historicism. Marx took Hegel’s “eschatological ‘dialectic,'” whereby the course of events was taken to advance toward ever-increasing human ‘consciousness’—seen concretely in the conquest of nature, the reshaping of nature for human purposes—via a set of conflicts—conflicts of ideas, sentiments, nations—and made it entirely materialistic. Hence Marxian ‘dialectical materialism’: neither materialism nor historical dialectic (much less dialectic itself) were new, but their combination was. As early as 1845, Marx wrote, famously, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” It is of course arguable that any number of previous philosophers had indeed both interpreted and changed the world, indeed that the very existence of philosophy had changed the world, but Marx means that there should no longer be any sharp distinction between theory and practice—that thinking, being only an operation of the brain within a given set of economic and social circumstances, itself fully participated in ongoing material changes, functioning at most as clarifying spur to advance history’s dialectic. 

The way forward, he claimed was to form “a social class that did not even exist”—a class, in Marx’s words, “in civil society which is not a class of civil society, a class which is the dissolution of all classes,” one that would make war not on this or that social wrong but on “wrong in general.” This class, the “proletariat,” will demand “the negation of private property” and thereby effect “the dissolution of the existing social order,” which Marx called “capitalism.” In this project, he continued, “Philosophy is the head,” while “the proletariat is its heart.” While the actual industrial and agricultural workers of his time wanted reforms, not revolution, Marx pressed on, writing that the working class will someday “substitute for the old civil society an association which will exclude classes and antagonism, and there will be no more political power properly so called.” That this “total revolution” will require violence—doing and dying, “bloody struggle or extinction”—a dialectic of force—became clear in his Communist Manifesto, published a year before the European-wide revolution of 1848; “the timing of its release was exquisite.” But although the French monarchy was indeed overthrown, the Second Republic didn’t last long; Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte had won its presidency and then staged a coup d’état three years later, renaming himself Napoleon III, head of the Second Empire. Marx and his friend-collaborator Friedrich Engels fled Paris for London, where enemies of the French tended to be welcomed, or at least tolerated. When his efforts to sustain a “Communist League” failed, he “return[ed] to his true métier, which was not politics as such but political writing.” The result was Capital.

In that tome, Marx claimed that the complexity of modern political economies, in which barter had been replaced by industrial production by wage laborers, had caused the “alienation” of workers from the products they made; the man on the assembly line might never see the ‘end product’ of his work; further, the industrialists’ policy of breaking labor down into its simplest components, which could be performed by machines, women, and children, lowered the wages they needed to pay the men, “immiserating” them as individuals and the workers as a class. “Marxist economics are a zero-sum game. Growth brings only ever more alienated and impoverished workers.” Industrialists are financed by bankers, who provide them with “capital.” Capital moves easily across political borders; it is international. Capitalism and its ruinous treatment of workers “will engulf the whole earth.” But, thanks to the dialectic of history, this circumstance will enrage the workers, sharpen their “consciousness” of their dilemma, while simultaneously increasing their numbers. “Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument,” Marx writes. “The integument is burst asunder,” as “the knell of private property sounds” and “the expropriators are expropriated.” McKeekin remarks that Marx’s thesis “was completely demolished by developments [in Britain] over the next few decades,” but (paradoxically, given his materialism) “his moral critique of the unequal returns to capital was and remains plausible enough to sympathetic readers.”

Marx returned to political organizing in the 1860s, now with more success. In his “Inaugural Address of the Working Men’s International Association,” he stressed the importance of “foreign policy” in the proletarian struggle, the “bond of brotherhood which ought to exist between the workmen of different countries.” And indeed branches of his organization were founded in several European countries, with the French chapter quickly becoming the largest. Marx remained, as he put it, “in fact the head of the whole business.” Although such organizing was useful as preparation for action, it wasn’t legislation or strikes that proved to be “the critical event in the history” of the First International, but the Franco-Prussian War, which ended French domination on the continent and ended the Second Empire. The Paris Commune, a socialist if not Marxist affair, briefly took control of the capital, with Marx calling it “a new point of departure of world historical importance,” although the newly inaugurated forces of the Third Republic quickly crushed the Communards. Marx turned the repression to rhetorical advantage, averring that it had exposed the “undistinguished savagery and lawless revenge” behind the bourgeoisie’s supposed “civilization and justice.” “The very attacks on the Paris Commune, to Marx’s dialectical mind, proved its worth,” as it had proven that Communism could come to power. “Our Association is, in fact, nothing but the international bond between the most advanced working men in the various countries of the civilized world,” to be “forever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new societies,” it “martyrs enshrined in the great heart of the working class.” “In fact”: scientific socialism. “Martyrs”: very much like the early Christian Church, minus God. The head and the heart, the Marxist philosophy and proletarian sentiment, combined.

Factions existed within the International itself. The Russian anarchist, Mikhail Bakunin, led the most influential one that opposed Marx. Marx’s continued residence in London began “to seem suspect to more hardened revolutionaries facing arrest and prosecution on the Continent.” He responded to the dissenters by imposing “a more rigid and centralized administrative structure,” itself a move sure to antagonize the anarchists still further. Anarchism being resistant to organization of any sort, Marx had the edge. Bakunin was expelled, his followers denigrated as sectarians. Marx “won the day” within the International, although Bakunin intensified his polemical assaults, condemning “the stale and lifeless Germanic quality of Marxism,” which, he predicted will “serve as obedient and even willing agents of the inhumane and illiberal measures prescribed by their governments.” Marxists, he rightly noted, are “the most impassioned friends of state power.” In coming to rule they will only dominate “yet another proletariat” with a “new rule” under a “new state.” As soon as the workers rule, they will no longer be workers; “anyone who doubts this is not at all familiar with human nature.” That, of course, is the nerve of the dilemma: Marxists deny the existence of a stable human nature, claiming instead that what is called human nature is malleable, capable of radical reformation if social and economic conditions are radically reformed. Bakunin went on to say that the actual rulers under Communism so-called quite possibly would not be workers at all but the “scientific socialists” or “philosophers”—men like Marx himself, “the most oppressive, offensive, and contemptuous kind in the world” who will, as Marx has shown in his rule of the International, “concentrate the reins of government in a strong hand, because the ignorant people require strong supervision,” a “new privileged scientific and political ruling class,” “concentrating in their own hands all commercial, industrial, agricultural and even scientific production.” Yes, Marxists intend to overthrow “existing governments and regimes,” but only “so as to create their own dictatorship on their ruins.” By the 1870s, Marx disbanded his organization, recognizing that the time wasn’t conducive to revolution, that capitalism had years more to run. He rightly calculated that, like the Paris Commune, the First International would eventually be judged “heroic failures,” “legends to inspire future generations” of socialists. But then again, Bakunin’s predictions about the character of future Communist regimes also ‘came true.’

“To Marx, it was more important that the doctrine was sound than that the organization outlive him.” When German socialists formed the German Social Democratic Party, producing the Gotha Program (named after their founding congress at Gotha, Thuringia in 1875), Marx went on the attack. His Critique of the Gotha Program excoriated the democratic socialists for their “pernicious and demoralizing” bows to liberalism, including parliamentarism. On the contrary, the “period of revolutionary transformation” must consist of “the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat,” with no serious alliances with bourgeois elements, compromises typical of parliamentary log-rolling. When the SPD won nearly twenty percent of the vote in the 1890 election, making it the top vote-getter, Marx gave up on the Germans and began to focus on Russia, just before the radical members of that party, including Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel, dedicated Marxists, turned the party away from the Gotha Program and toward “Marxist orthodoxy” in the Erfurt Program of 1891, which “was based on the Verelendung (immiseration) thesis of ever-deepening inequality and class conflict.” Practically, this meant a turn from efforts to improve working conditions for proletarians in Germany to use the “size and prestige” of the SPD “to set the ideological agenda for the international socialist movement.” In France, for example, Marx’s son-in-law, Paul Lafargue teamed with another Marxist, Jules Guesde, top form the French Workers’ Party, which was similarly internationalist. “The very idea of international coordination of doctrine ran against the needs of nationally or regionally focused reform movements, which must, after all, be particular to their local circumstances,” but this amounted to small potatoes to the real Marxist, who formed the Second International at a congress in Paris in 1889. 

Factionalism again hobbled the movement. In Germany, Eduard Bernstein, “the closest intellectual heir of Marx and Engels,” who had co-written the Erfurt Program with Engels, began to deviate from the master’s doctrine precisely because, in attempting to be a good scientific socialist, he saw that the facts of 1890s did not support the immiseration thesis. The claim “that capital was accumulating in fewer and fewer hands, and classes were being melted down into an ever poorer proletarianized ‘mass’ was not happening.” In fact (to borrow one of Marx’s phrases), industrial organization and ever-improving technology correlated with higher wages for the workers. The average worker’s life had improved, culminating with his rise better “from the social position of a proletarian to that of a citizen” with civic rights. Meanwhile, agricultural workers showed no interest in collectivized farming, preferring “to get their own land.” Liebknecht and Bebel were appalled. “Islam was invincible as long as it believed in itself,” Liebknecht wrote, “but the moment it began to compromise…it ceased to be a conquering force.” Similarly, “Socialism can neither conquer nor save the world if it ceases to believe in itself.” For the hard-core Communists, the secular religiosity of Communism trumped Marxian ‘science,’ although not intentionally, inasmuch as they continued to assert the scientific status of Marx’s doctrine. 

At the Fourth Congress of the Second International in 1900, the two sides papered over the dispute by admitting socialist participation in “bourgeois” governments to be “permissible only as a temporary expedient, adopted in exceptional cases under the force of circumstance.” Bernstein’s Revisionism was rejected. The now-prominent French socialist Jean Jaurès joined with the Russian, Karl Kautsky, declaring, “We are all good revolutionaries; let us make that clear and let us unite!”—echoing Marx’s call at the end of the Manifesto, nearly a half-century earlier. This earned him the condemnation of Bebel and Rosa Luxemburg, German socialists who called him “the Great Corrupter.” By 1903, the Germans had won, and Jaurès, outwardly pliant but “quietly seething,” told a Belgian colleague, “I think, my friend, that I am going to apply myself to the study of military questions.” That is, he foresaw the possibility of national warfare, a war in which German socialists and French socialists would fight for their countries and the Second International would die. 

“The Russian Revolution of 1905 injected new urgency to the question of how socialists might respond to a war between European powers.” Once again, it was war, the stunning defeat of Russia by an Asian power, Japan, that weakened an existing regime sufficiently to render it potentially vulnerable to revolutionary action. However, the socialists in Russia were split between the Leninist, “Bolshevik” (i.e., “Majority”) faction and Julius Martov’s “Menshevik” (“Minority”) faction. Both of these men were in exile when regime troops shot several hundred people in St. Petersburg on “Bloody Sunday,” January 22, 1905. The ensuing labor walkout induced Czar Nicholas II to convene a Russian parliament, the Duma, which legalized labor unions. Rosa Luxemburg endorsed the workers’ revolt, observing that in the “backward” conditions of Russia, “the mass strike” could indeed prove effective, resulting in parliamentarism—which, in backward Russia if not in advanced Germany or France, could be accepted on Marxist grounds. Internationally, the 1905 revolution also induced a recalculation for Jaurès and the French; Russia was an ally of France, providing a needed counterweight to powerful Germany. With Russia now the vanguard of the socialist movement, French socialists could turn pacifist, passing a resolution to resist militarism “by all means” in an attempt to contain the German socialists. “The problem was that absent precise international coordination, any country” that tried to imitate the Russian example of the general strike in, for example, munitions factories or the railways “would consign itself to a crushing defeat from an enemy that suffered no such disruption.” The German Bebel frankly acknowledged this. “Do not fool yourselves,” he told an English delegate to the 1907 Congress in Stuttgart; in the event of war, every German Social-Democrat would “shoulder his rifle and march to the French frontier.” As another SPD delegate remarked, more mildly, “It is not true that workers have no Fatherland. The love of humanity does not prevent us from being good Germans.” A few years later, it didn’t. And in France, poor Jaurès died from a bullet shot by a French nationalist, in July 1914, symbolizing the death of French pacifism among French socialists and indeed “the failure of the pacifist wing of the Second International to prevent the outbreak of European war in August.”

Ever-calculating Lenin hoped that the coming war would hasten the collapse of capitalism. He aimed “to transform politics into warfare” and warfare into politics, now that the bourgeois ruling class had armed their proletarians to fight what he deemed their “imperial war.” After all, previous great-power wars had been “progressive,” accelerating “the development of mankind by helping to destroy the most harmful and reactionary” social institutions (slavery, serfdom) and moderating “the most barbarous despotisms” (Russia, Turkey). Urging socialist soldiers to mutiny, he encouraged a policy of “revolutionary defeatism,” whereby proletarian soldiers would turn their weapons “against the common foe!—the capitalist governments.” To do so, the socialists must take advantage of their wartime bonds with fellow soldiers, working to indoctrinate them. And would not mothers of soldiers join the movement? After all, in the Paris Commune they had fought “side by side with the men.” Moving still further, Lenin published his pamphlets, Socialism and War and Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, in 1916, broadening his call for revolt to colonized peoples worldwide, another front in his envisioned war of workers of the world against international capitalism. “Lenin was prophesying—endorsing and promoting, basically—a whole age of unending armed conflict, of imperialist wars and civil wars and revolutionary and counter-revolutionary struggle, one war begetting another in a global bonfire of violence as Marx’s prophesy from Das Kapital came true and the ‘expropriators were expropriated.'”

That didn’t happen worldwide, but Russia was another matter. The Bolsheviks played only a minor role in the February Revolution of 1917, when the Czar abdicated in the face of socialist agitation and the mutiny of a Petrograd garrison. Lenin proceeded from his exile in Switzerland through Germany not in the fabled ‘sealed train’ but with full cognizance of the German government, which provided them with an escort. Germans calculated that Lenin would further disrupt the Russian war effort, and so he did, although he got a lot more out of that than the Germans did. 

“In his view of politics as sublimated warfare, Lenin reduced revolution to its Marxist essence: Who had more men under arms, the government or its enemies?” By October 1917, Lenin saw that his Bolsheviks had more members under arms than the government did, in Moscow and, a bit later, St. Petersburg. “There was nothing secret or unsuspected about the Bolshevik putsch.” The post-czarist government was weak. “While much of European Russia, and nearly all of Asiatic Russia beyond the Urals, remained outside of Bolshevik control, with the capture of Russia’s two capital cities [i.e., Moscow and St. Petersburg] and Russian military headquarters in the October Revolution Lenin’s Bolsheviks had raised high the red flag.” They did so at a cost. In their peace settlement with Germany, the Communists ceded 1.3 million square miles, a quarter of its territory, on which 44 percent of its population lived, to the temporarily victorious Kaiser Reich.

Marxism hangs its theoretical-practical hat on economics, and it was there that the Soviet Union experienced its most signal failures, immediately. Lenin quickly established the Supreme Council of the National Economy (later renamed the State Planning Commission or Gosplan. “The planned economy” rapidly went out of control—that is, out of the control of people who had owned property and knew how to manage it. “Economic indices, already trending down, declined still more precipitously despite rampant inflation caused by runaway money printing.” In response, the planners effectively attempted to abolish money itself, imposing rationing and banning money payments for rent and fuel. Once they understood that “economic activity of any kind was impossible” without currency, they recurred to the gold standard, that symbol of apex capitalism. But by 1920, industrial production had fallen to eighteen percent of the prewar level.

Russia thus not only shared in the postwar economic depression, starvation, and disease that afflicted Europe but all of these things were exacerbated by the Communists’ bungling. Some five million Russians and Ukrainians died in 1921. Without the aid of Herbert Hoover’s American Relief Administration, the Red Cross, and other, ahem, bourgeois charities, which shipped and distributed more than two million tons of food and seed to Soviet Russia, Lenin’s regime might have fallen in its turn. But by 1922 the famine had ceased, and the influenza epidemic was over. Lenin continued his regime building with “a monopoly over the press, education, culture and Russian intellectual life more broadly.” The Marxist war on the family was implemented, with easy divorce and the first European law permitting abortion. Civil war between the ‘Reds’ and the ‘Whites” (not czarists, as the Leninists pretended, but partisans of republicanism), the latter aided by the European republics and the United States, gave cover for substantial purges, the extent of which McKeekin does not attempt to calculate.

Meanwhile, the short-lived Communist takeover of Hungary saw similar ruling procedures. Under People’s Commissioner for Education György Lukács, sex education was introduced in the primary schools as a part of his aim to rid his country of “‘bourgeois’ morals on monogamy, premarital sex, and female chastity.” Although this attempt at what he called “revolutionary destruction,” the “one and only solution to the cultural contradictions of the epoch,” died with the regime, it was transferred to “the avant-garde Marxists of the Institute for Social Research at Frankfurt University (the ‘Frankfurt School’)” and eventually landed in the West “by way of Frankfurt School disciples such as Herbert Marcuse and Charles Reich.” Lenin sent Soviet troops across Romania in what turned out to be a futile attempt to shore up the Hungarian Communists. He also invaded Poland, nearly taking Warsaw before Polish troops under the command of General Józef Pilsudski, outnumbered nearly two-to-one, drove them back to Ukraine.

Lenin died in January 1924. Before doing so, he initiated two important policies. The first, internal, measure, the New Economic Policy, was intended to strengthen the still-weak Soviet economy by loosening state controls over business without relinquishing Party rule. The second, foreign, policy was support for Chiang Kai-Shek’s Kuomintang, a modernizing armed party that had overthrown the Qing Dynasty. By then, it was fighting against rival warlord armies; Lenin backed them in the hopes of infiltrating the organization with his own agents—the first example of what would become known as a ‘united front’ or ‘popular front’ strategy.

Lenin called his NEP a temporary (if likely to be long-lasting) instance of what he termed, in his ever-inventive rhetoric, “state capitalism.” Money was readmitted, replacing rationing. This “was a painful compromise for the Communist party, a constant reminder of failure,” a concession to bourgeois decadence. Leon Trotsky himself detested it. Stalin eliminated him, along with other rivals for power, but he faced a problem: the NEP and its administrators, the “nepmen,” detested by hard-core Communists, were becoming too successful, their leader, Nikoli Bukharin, too powerful. “Who would vanquish whom, Communism or private capital?” A very bad harvest 1927 harvest served as a pretext for getting rid of the nepmen; after collectivizing agriculture, Stalin ordered the secret police to arrest nearly 2.7 million, throwing them into the newly founded Gulag to endure forced labor. Collectivization spurred peasant resistance; reviving Lenin’s term kulak for disobedient peasants, Stalin initiated a terror campaign consisting of grain confiscations and public hangings. He also ramped up “the confiscation of Church valuables with” (as he put it) “the most rabid and merciless energy.” Yet the resistance continued, with some 8,000 peasant revolts and protest in the first quarter of 1930; in response, the Politburo decreed the “elimination of kulaks as a class.” The population of the Gulag swelled still further. But by killing or imprisoning “the most productive peasant smallholders” and appropriating their lands and produce, Stalin brought down the Great Famine of 1932-33. “Cannibalism was commonly observed” and duly reported to Stalin by the secret police. In Ukraine alone, where the event is remembered as the Holodomor or “Terror-Famine,” “at least 3 million or 4 million victims starved to death, often in gruesome conditions.” In Kazakhstan, with its sparser population, two million starved. All of this coincided with Stalin’s drive to industrialize; he ordered confiscated grain to be sold abroad in order to fund his first Five-Year Plan. He retained other grain supplies to feed the factory workers, “even while deported Russian and Ukrainian ‘kulaks’ and Central Asian nomads, like the nepmen before them, furnished an almost bottomless supply of forced labor for Stalin’s industrialization drive.” McKeekin duly remarks that Western capitalist firms designed the industrial plants, a point acknowledged in an official Soviet history published in 1933, which called the Five-Year Plan “a combination of American business and science with Bolshevik wisdom.” 

Bolshevik wisdom continued on its rampage, as “Stalin found yet more categories of people to punish for his regime’s failures.” The years 1936-38 saw an even greater terror campaign, now called “the Great Terror,” which saw the show trials and ‘purge’ of Communist Party members themselves, those whom Stalin deemed insufficiently fanatical. “Whether out of party loyalty, a sense of guilt for their own role in terrorizing the country, or because they had been tortured in the notorious cells of the Lubyanka prison, defendants invariably confessed all” and faced what Stalin termed “death by shooting.” Ever inventive, Stalin’s Bolshevik wisdom extended the possibility of the death penalty to minors down to the age of twelve, enabling the Man of Steel “to threaten political opponents with the murder of their children, in case guilt and torture were not enough to induce show-trial confessions.” 

McKeekin finds in these atrocities “a certain logic endemic to Communism.” After all, “until the planned economic utopia was achieved, those standing in the way might become casualties in the war between Soviet Communism and its enemies, be they ‘capitalist’ agents, spies of ‘imperialist’ powers, industrial ‘wreckers,’ saboteurs, or mere troublemakers.” When the 1937 census numbers “came in 15 million lower than expected,” Stalin simply ordered the census board members arrested for their act of “treasonably exerting themselves to diminish the population of the USSR.” Communism ruled its subjects by force and spread its regime abroad also “by force of arms.” 

All the while, the Soviet Union enjoyed substantial prestige, around the world. To many, the Great Depression seemed capitalism’s death rattle, the rise of Nazism in the heart of Europe its reductio ad malorem. Sympathetic ‘fellow travelers’ toured Russia, visiting carefully constructed and organized ‘Potemkin villages,’ steered away from the sites of mass murder and squalor. This led many on the Left in the republics to form the Popular Front, the ‘one big Left’ opposed to fascism. “The Popular Front was a godsend,” McKeekin chooses the word with a certain irony, “for Soviet foreign relations,” not least in the United States, where “the once-tiny Communist Part USA, or CPUSA, received instructions from Moscow about the new ‘Popular Front’ doctrine,” including an order to stop calling Franklin Roosevelt a fascist. The New Dealers relaxed their guard, as Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles removed “Stalin-phobes” from the State Department’s East European Affairs Division. Soviet espionage in the United States and in Great Britain enjoyed what should have been a predictable uptick. Meanwhile, Spain and France saw the Left win national elections in 1936, sparking civil war in Spain and another ’cause’ for the Popular Front to back. The Spanish Left had founded a supposedly republican regime, but its two premiers were Communists—a “facade of ‘bourgeois’ parliamentary democracy” with “shadowy Communist advisers and agents—some Spanish, some foreign European, some Soviet Russian—rul[ing] behind the scenes.” 

Stalin himself had no problem in forging a not-so-popular ‘front’ with the Nazis, negotiating arms deals with Hitler’s regime at the same time the anti-Communist ‘fascists’ in Spain, led by Generalissimo Francisco Franco and indeed backed by the Nazis, were defeating the Stalin-backed regime there. Most notoriously, Hitler and Stalin agreed to partition Poland between them. This shocked many of the fellow travelers, and when the Nazis invaded France in 1940, even many French Communists deserted the Party, a bit too late. But with Hitler on the rampage, Soviet territorial acquisitions in Central Europe were downplayed in the Western media. And not only land grabs but regime change, Soviet-style, as Stalin ordered the deaths of more than 25,000 Polish military officers and other officials; their wives and children were deported to “special labor camps” in Kazakhstan. Intimidated, the rulers of Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Romania quickly submitted to Stalin’s dictates, with the usual purges immediately following. Hitler was not amused and began to prepare for war with the Soviet Union; Stalin saw it, prepared for the assault but eventually found that his preparations were inadequate to fend off the initial German assault, which came in June 1941. A timely troop transfer from Siberia (made possible by Soviet intel, which showed that the soldiers wouldn’t be needed against Japan, whose rulers intended to attack the United States, not Russia); American Lend-Lease aid; the same ‘General Winter’ that had ruined Napoleon’s army in the previous century; brutal ‘discipline’ of Russian subjects by the secret police; and “Stalin’s courageous decision to stay in Moscow,” strengthening morale, prevented a crushing defeat, at the cost of tens of millions dead. The 1944 victory in alliance with the Western republics restored worldwide esteem for the Soviet regime, as “the Great Patriotic War was both the finest moment of Soviet history, the one unquestionable geopolitical achievement Communists everywhere could claim as their own, and the movement’s most harrowing and near-fatal episode.” “Oblivious to both horrendous NKVD disciplinary measures and the Lend-lease story, which was little reported at the time, many Westerners generously credited Stalin and his government with the victory.” The fact that “Communist fortunes still depended on military force—on the successes and failures of the Red Army and its clients” and not so much on economic performance or Bolshevik wisdom—went largely unnoticed.

Further, in Central Europe the Soviets were seen as liberators, at first. This soon changed, since “the use of both industrial property and slave labor as ‘reparations in kind’ [for their alliances with the Nazis] had actually been codified into the Yalta agreement of February 1945, approved by both Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, and Stalin was not shy about exploiting either resource.” Germany alone supplied almost two million slave laborers to the Soviet Union. Stalin exacted some one million slaves from smaller Romania. Even Bulgaria, which had refused to offer troops to supplement the Nazi forces in Russia, suffered a “wave of Communist Terror” and subjected to collectivization of its agriculture in “a small-scale Holodomor.” By 1949, “the ‘people’s democracies’ were thoroughly Stalinized, with nearly identical secret police forces, all thoroughly penetrated by and loyal to their Soviet handlers, answering to the Comintern-esque ‘Cominform’ in Moscow, and with state-planed economies that had production targets and mandatory trade quotas coordinated…in the USSR via the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comcon).” When the United States and its allies formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, this served as a useful pretext to maintain the tightness of the screws. [1]

In China, what would prove an even more momentous and enduring Communist revolution followed the war. Previously, the Kuomintang regime under Chiang Kai-Shek had kept Mao Zedong’s Communists underground, following their failed uprising in 1927. Stalin had lost interest in promoting such things there, worrying more about Japan’s imperial moves in neighboring Manchuria. At the same time, however, the invasion helped the Chinese Communists because it forced Chiang to deploy forces to his northern border, taking the pressure off them. This proved temporary; another military campaign against the Communists drove them on the “Long March” to northeastern China, next to the Soviet Mongolian Republic. Seven thousands of 200,000 Communists survived the ordeal. But when Japan invaded in 1937, “it was the Nationalists who did the fighting and dying against Japan, not the Communists,” who “observed from the sidelines.” In 1944, Stalin obtained Lend-Lease equipment for a major incursion into Asia,” where the United States and its allies were still fighting, even as the Nazi regime had been brought down. This enabled Stalin’s army to liberate Manchuria, not the Nationalists. The Kuomintang, America, and Britain “had spent four years softening up Japan’s forces”; the Soviets lost relatively few men in exchange for the victory. “Stalin had played his cards perfectly,” proving once again that Bolshevik wisdom worked better in war than in peace.

President Harry Truman—the man who, with great good fortune, had replaced Henry Wallace as Roosevelt’s vice president, averting the debacle of saddling the United States with a Communist sympathizer as president, upon FDR’s death—understood the threat Stalin posed in Europe and the United States, but not his machinations in China. Stalin made a show out of recognizing the Nationalist government while putting his forces in control of a naval base at two ports, “giving [him] control over Manchurian communications with the outside world.” He also exacted pledges from Mao to end the civil war and form a unity government with Chiang, neither of which Mao had any intention to keep. Nor did Stalin want him to. He supplied his ally with a raft of military equipment and told him to “expand towards the north.” “By October 1945. “Manchuria, the richest and most industrialized region in China, was likely lost for good to the Chinese national government, owing to Soviet wiles and American naïveté,” while Stalin, never won to ignore a quid pro quo, stripped the country of “almost $900 million worth of good and equipment.” As to a promise made to Chiang to withdraw Soviet troops three months after the end of the war—well, no.

No less naïve than Truman, United States Army Chief of Staff George Marshall visited China in an attempt “to establish a coalition government between Chiang and Mao—two mortal political enemies whose civil war had just bloodily resumed.” Inanely, Truman had warned Chiang that US aid to his government would be cut off if it were used to fight Mao. As a result, “by 1947, the proxy conflict in China was wholly one-sided: Stalin provided Mao with whatever he needed in Manchuria…while the United States forbade Chiang to use American arms to defend his government against the Communists.” That is, even as the US administration announced its “Truman Doctrine,” committing aid to support “free peoples” against “Communist subversion or armed aggression,” that policy was ignored in China. By the time Truman saw what was happening it was too late. The “People’s Liberation Army” took Beijing in January 1949; “so rapid was the advance of Mao’s Communist armies that Stalin himself was taken aback,” worried that a strong Communist China with its capital at great distance from the Soviet Union might well spin out of his control. Too late for him, too. Mao proclaimed the founding of the People’s Republic of China at the end of the year, soon invading Tibet and sending troops into Korea to aid the Communists there and initiating the usual campaign of state-sponsored terror at home. As for “the cultural sphere, Mao channeled Hitler more than Stalin,” launching an “anti-intellectual thought-reform campaign” which “saw public book burnings so colossal that they were measured by the volume,” with 237 metric tons of books “torched” in Shanghai alone. These were replaced by more suitable ideological fare under the slogan, “Learn from the Soviet Union.” 

Mao cannot be said to have mellowed in subsequent years. During a 1957 trip to Moscow, “he hinted that the ultimate goal was for the Communist world to win a world war with the capitalist powers—a war that, he predicted with curious confidence, would kill ‘a third,’ or ‘if it is a little higher it could be half,’ of the world’s population, which he reckoned at ‘2.7 billion people.'” Not to worry: as he put it, “imperialism would be erased, the whole world will become socialist” and “after a few years there would be 2.7 billion people again.”

Meanwhile, in lieu of that prospect, Mao launched his program of forced industrialization, the “Great Leap Forward.” He took a similarly long view of things, coining still another slogan, “Three Years of Hard Work Is Ten Thousand Years of Happiness.” Here, the calculation was “one dead worker for each million cubic meters of soil removed”; at that rate, one of his minions remarked, I can “move 30 billion cubic meters” at the expense of a mere 30,000 dead. In the event, some 45 million Chinese died by famine in the years 1958-1962, although the Chinese Communist Party admits only 20 million. This was too much even for the reigning Soviet tyrant, Nikita Khruschev, who ventured to criticize the “Leap,” even as he had criticized some of Stalin’s excesses in his well-publicized “Secret Speech” at a Communist Party Congress, a few years earlier. “Of course,” McKeekin notes, “what most animated Khruschev and his audience” at that point “was not Stalin’s crimes against the Soviet people as such, but his treatment of Communists.” That was going too far.

As far as Mao was concerned, Khruschev was the one who had gone too far. His laxity had inspired rebellion against the Communist regimes in Hungary and East Berlin. Stalemated in Europe, Khruschev pushed into the newly-christened ‘Third World’ in the wake of declining French, Dutch, and British imperialism there. He supported Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, Nasser in Egypt, Nkrumah in Ghana, Castro in Cuba, and Communist movements throughout Latin America. After Khruschev himself was deposed by his fellow Politburo members, the Soviets continued these efforts. By the 1970s, the future of Communism looked bright, even if the Sino-Soviet rift widened.

The Chinese regime successfully tested an atomic bomb in 1964 and launched the “Cultural Revolution” in 1966. This time, the Soviet Union was no longer the model, Mao having published his “Little Red Book” not of Bolshevik but of Maoist wisdom a couple of years earlier. Chinese youth, organized as the “Red Guards,” killed somewhere between 1.5 and 2 million Chinese while brandishing this new bible, despite the protestations of Leonid Brezhnev, now head of the Soviet Politburo. Mao also funded Pol Pot, the Cambodian Communist Party leader whose Red Guard equivalents eventually murdered something like a quarter to a third of all Cambodians—in terms of percentage of population, the worst genocide in modern history. Most Western historians blamed North Vietnam and the United States for igniting the catastrophe by their conduct in the ongoing Vietnam War, “ignoring the Chinese role entirely.”

Back in the West, the United States and its allies attempted to blunt Soviet advances with the policy of détente, initially proposed by French president Charles de Gaulle in the mid-1960s. It didn’t work because regimes finally determine policy, foreign as well as domestic, and the Soviet regime didn’t change. “The only real price Brezhnev paid for détente was Western scrutiny of certain Soviet human rights abuses,” about which it lacked the power to do much. Détente did lead to an even more futile policy of entente conceived by West German Chancellor Willy Brandt; his Ostpolitik resulted primarily in an increase of spying and bribery by East Germany in West Germany.

While undermining the republics, European Communists talked peace. “The crowning jewel of Soviet peace propaganda was the ‘nuclear freeze movement’ that swept across Western Europe and the United States in the early 1980s.” The election of the strongly anti-Communist Ronald Reagan to the presidency provoked “fears and anxieties…about the terrifying prospect of nuclear war” among many, so it wasn’t as though the campaign had no genuine support in the West, “but when the Soviet archives were opened in 1991 it was revealed that the campaign was also highly organized and funded by the Kremlin” to a tune of almost $600 million—equivalent to $1.8 billion in 2023 dollars. The Politburo hoped “to lull Western Europeans to sleep as Moscow deployed a new arsenal of mobile, medium-range SS-20 missiles targeting their capital cities, ideally causing a NATO split between the United States and its European allies, whose leaders might not trust that American presidents would really risk courting the obliteration of Washington, New York, Chicago, and other US cities with a retaliatory nuclear missile strike to defend Bonn, Paris, or London.” The nuclear freeze and the missile buildup, “we now know, were planned out together.” When the Reagan Administration rejected calls for the ‘freeze,’ and instead planned to station its own intermediate-range nuclear missiles in West Germany, mass marches were staged in NATO capitals as well as Vienna and Stockholm. “None other than Ostpolitik designer Willy Brandt, who was corresponding regularly with Soviet officials about the nuclear freeze movement, headlined the…protests in Berlin.” That is, the Politburo had convinced millions of West Europeans (and not a few Americans) that blame for the supposedly impending nuclear holocaust lay not with “the regime whose deadly arsenal of mobile, medium-range SS-20 nuclear missiles were now aimed squarely at them…but rather the US government trying to defend them.” [2]

It all might have worked, had not the European nations ruled by the Communists not begun to ‘demonstrate’ even more impressively, beginning with the Solidarity movement in Poland. “Here was a general strike of the laboring masses against ‘proletarian dictatorship,’ giving the lie to the claim of Communists to rule in the name of the workers” in what Brezhnev, working himself up into a state of moral indignation, termed a “brazen challenge” aimed at “provok[ing] unrest in socialist countries and stir[ring] up grounds of all kinds of renegades.” While Bulgaria remained loyal (the daughter of the local tyrant there briefly became a feminist glamor girl, a sort of Eastern Bloc Gloria Steinem), this played better in the West than it did in the Middle East and Central Asia, “as the Soviets were about to discover in Afghanistan.” As to the West, however, Reagan won re-election in a landslide (primarily on the strength of the economy, which had rebounded from its 1970s doldrums), the Pershing missiles were installed, and the nuclear freeze movement, now defunded, deflated.

There had been “a time when [Afghanistan’s] capital, Kabul, was the shining hope of Communist modernizers,” as Afghanistan under King Ghazi Amanullah Khan “was one of the first foreign countries to recognize and signed a Treaty of Friendship with the USSR in 1921, which paved the way for decades of Soviet investment in the country,” continuing far beyond Khan’s abdication in 1929. Although the United States “made some inroads in Kabul in the 1950s” as part of its strategy of containing Soviet expansion, the war in Vietnam precluded any really effective engagement and the Soviets subsidized the newly-formed Afghan Communist Party, beginning in the mid-1960s. The Party staged a successful coup in 1978. But “like the British before them and the Americans after, the Soviets swiftly discovered that political coups or regime changes in Kabul did not necessarily register in the Afghan countryside,” with its ever-feuding tribes, many animated by fundamentalist forms of Islam. As in the 1920s, so in the 1970s and 1980s, the tribal chiefs declared jihad against the modernizers and their foreign backers. The Politburo decided to commit military specialists and KGB advisers in support of the Communist regime, subsequently sending in the Red Army, at a cost of some 1,700 dead every year. In reaction, the West paused détente, imposed economic sanctions, increased military spending (including the anti-missile missile system, called ‘Star Wars’ by its embattled domestic critics), and supported the jihadis. 

In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev was chosen as General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party. In an attempt to “revitalize the Soviet economy in order to ramp up military spending (italics added), he introduced another Five-Year Plan,” which included perestroika or “reconstruction.” That is, he and his Politburo colleagues enacted a new version of the NEP. Although the economy never came close to matching the West in its production of consumer goods, its improvement did enable him to outstrip even the substantial U.S. military buildup. In so doing, however, the Soviets overspent, putting that buildup into question, while the Chinese Communists, after Mao’s death, introduced their own version of a NEP without overspending. The difference in the future, short, history of the Soviet Union and the future, long history of the People’s Republic, originates there. But there was also Western investment in China, contrasting with the withdrawal of investment from the Soviet Union. Western businessmen had been mesmerized by the sheer size of the Chinese ‘market’ since the nineteenth century; absent any military adventurism by China, they remained so. Businessmen told Western politicians, and perhaps themselves, that increased trade and investment would liberalize the regime. It didn’t; the Chinese “never made so much as a nod toward political liberalization, imposing a policy allowing families to have only one child (leading to “thousands of gruesome coerced late-term abortions”) and crushing a democratization movement led by students in the spring of 1989. His military and secret police allies overthrew Gorbachev, that year; he could not summon the forces he needed to keep him in power; soon, the restive captive nations in eastern and central Europe rebelled, and there wasn’t much the weakened regime could do to stop them. In Russia, the regime “vanished once the sword was shattered,” whereas “in China, the sword was still there.” 

Today, China is more powerful than ever, even if its ‘image’ in the West is far less attractive than was that of the Soviet Union often was. “Few hard-core Western Communists, and fewer still progressive reformers and women’s rights activists, look to Beijing today for inspiration in the way so many did to Moscow in the 1930s and 1940s, or again in the 1970s and 1980s.” Yet “in terms of raw economic and the institutional and often personal leverage that comes with it, the CCP has been more successful than the Soviets ever were,” purchasing “politicians, firms, and real estate,” not to mention technicians and business executives, sending its students to work in Western research laboratories and its spies everywhere, and, when that reaches its limits, stealing technology. They take many of these tactics from Lenin and Stalin, but they have learned from the mistakes of their predecessors. They have outnegotiated their enemies. “In exchange for the United States granting China unprecedented access to its market and easing the legal path for US multinational corporations to outsource manufacturing to China, the CCP conceded—nothing.” If anything, Communist Chinese methods of surveillance and political censorship have increased in the West, not only in the universities but in private corporations. “Far from dead, Communism as a governing template seems only to be getting started.”

 

Note

1. The apparent exception, Yugoslavia, in which the Communist Party chief Josip Broz Tito, having led the resistance to Nazi occupiers during the war, taken power, and effected a regime change to tyranny in 1945, pursued a foreign policy independent of Moscow. Unfortunately, “in his political and economic policies” in Yugoslavia itself “Tito was arguably more Stalinist than Stalin”—a “pioneer in political terror himself.”
2. For a contemporaneous statement in opposition to the ‘freeze,’ see “Thoughts on the Nuclear ‘Freeze'” on this website under the category, “American Politics.”

 

 

 

Georges Clemenceau: Grandeur and Misery of a Victory.  F. M. Atkinson translation. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1930.

 

“Man is so great that his greatness appears in his consciousness of his misery”: in alluding to this aphorism of France’s most distinguished Christian, Clemenceau tacitly lays claim to a unique status, the Pascal of atheism. As head of the vigorously anti-clerical Independent Party in France, Clemenceau carried on the secularist tradition of French republicanism, a tradition born in the 1789 revolution, then brought into the Third Republic and the twentieth century. A firm realist, he had no more patience for secular utopians on the Left than he had for what he regarded as the pious utopians on the Right. Early on, he worked as a journalist, but he ended up as Prime Minister, twice (1906-09, 1917-29) and Minister of War, as well (1917-20). He was no paper politician, and he ran his country’s show, well, during one of its worst crises, when he was in his late seventies.

A decade later, near the end of his life, he hadn’t lost any of his considerable gift for polemic. Marshall Ferdinand Foch, a hero of the Great War, wrote his Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de la guerre, 1914-1918, which would be published posthumously in 1931. [1] In it, he ventured to criticize his civilian boss, both for decisions made during the war and especially for his decision to drop France’s claim to the Rhineland in exchange for security guarantees from Great Britain and the United States. Foch and Clemenceau’s career-long political rival, Raymond Poincaré, wanted to retain the Rhineland. The secular-clerical dispute may well have underlain some of this. Foch was an ardent Catholic, Poincaré the head of the center-Right Democratic-Republican Alliance; the Rhineland was the Catholic region of Germany. Clemenceau, who tells us that he had appointed Foch commandant of the prestigious École de Guerre, despite the fact that the man’s brother was a Jesuit (and therefore suspect of monarchism), saw portions of the manuscript and went on the attack. An “impudent farrago of troopers’ tales,” a ” stale mess of military grousings” by a man who was “unconsciously seeking his revenge for conflicts with authority that did not always end in his favor”—such were these memoirs. Clemenceau assures his readers that he remains serene: “Once he has seen himself thus half-way suspended between heaven and earth, and has escaped being smitten by stars hurtling form their orbits, it is not the childish nonsense of a great soldier suffering from attacks of nerves, nor the wordy flux of a few hack scribblers, that can perturb a philosopher upon whom is laid the task of sustaining others himself sustained of none.”

Admittedly, Clemenceau writes in his Foreword, addressed directly to Foch, “you have to your credit the Marne, the Yser, Doullens, and of a surety, other battles besides.” As indeed Foch had. He began the war as commander of the XX Corps, part of the Second Army under the command of General Joseph Joffre. In August, French troops advanced into German-held territory in what turned out to be an overreach. As the XV Corps fell back from the German counteroffensive during the Battle of Lorraine, Foch conducted an orderly retreat to the city of Nancy, saving it from further German advance. By October, he had been appointed Assistant Commander in Chief in the Northern Zone, still serving under Joffre. In September, troops under his direction retook Châlon in the First Battle of the Marne; in October, his troops won the Battle of Yser (“had it been lost, it was he who would certainly have borne the responsibility”), and the First Battle of Ypres. His fortunes reversed in 1915, when as commander of the Northern Army Group troops under his command took heavy casualties during the Artois Offensive and the Battle of the Somme; he was transferred to the Italian front and Joffre was sacked, replaced by General Robert Nivelle. But in 1917, when a major French offensive failed, Nivelle in turn sacked, and General Henri Pétain appointed Commander-in-Chief of the French Army, Foch was returned to the main theater, serving as the French military representative to the inter-allied Supreme War Council and soon becoming Generalissimo over all Allied forces. (“It was at Doullens that Foch, without any one’s permission, laid hold of the command. For that minute I shall remain grateful to him until my last breath.”) From then on, he went from triumph to triumph, countering the German spring offensive in 1918 by holding firm against a surprise German attack at Chemin des Dames that May, then overseeing Allied victories in the Second Battle of the Marne and the Grand Offensive of that September, leading to German acceptance of an end to hostilities two months later. He ended the war as Marshal of France. “This frightful war brought us out good general, and many of those who have the right to risk an opinion will perhaps tell us that Foch was the most complete of them all,” an “admirable chief in the name of France in deadly peril.”

So, it was no ordinary high-ranking military officer that Clemenceau took on. “You challenge me. Here I am.” He was no ordinary French statesman. “I belonged to the generation that saw the loss of Alsace-Lorraine” in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, which led to the toppling of France’s last monarchy and the founding of the Third Republic. “I stood up against Germany in the Casablanca crisis,” that is, Germany’s challenge to French influence in Morocco, where Kaiser Wilhelm II had supported Sultan Abdelaziz. “After demanding apologies from us” for France’s bombardment of the city, the Kaiser “was forced by my calm resistance to be satisfied with mere arbitration, as in any other dispute”—this, in marked contrast with “the humiliating cession of an arbitrary slice of our Congo to Germany” in 1911 by the Caillaux administration and (he adds, unfairly) the Poincaré administration succeeding it, a cession that traded French territory for German recognition of Morocco as a French protectorate. Clemenceau frankly acknowledges that “this book is not to be regarded as a series of memoirs” but “a reply upon certain points” in light of “the broader considerations that are essentially imposed in such a subject,” the principal of those being that France’s so-called rulers of the 1920s “seem to have forgotten, all nearly in the same degree, that no less resolution is needed to live through peace than war.”

Germany remains France’s enemy, but “I see everywhere nothing but faltering and flinching,” with no prospect of assistance from his country’s erstwhile allies. “England in various guises has gone back to her old policy of strife on the Continent, and America, prodigiously enriched by the War, is presenting us with a tradesman’s account that does more honor to her greed than to her self-respect”—referring to the Coolidge Administration’s insistence that France repay the loans she had arranged during that war. In France, “the vital spark is gone,” but not quite in Clemenceau himself, who, although “an old, done man myself,” finds himself “at grips with a soldier of the bygone days, who brings against me arguments within the comprehension of simple minds—now, when I had changed my workshop and meant to end my days in philosophy.” [2]

One of Foch’s complaints against Clemenceau concerns the prime minister’s conduct in the wake of the French defeat at Chemin des Dames during the Third Battle of the Aisne in spring 1918. Clemenceau replies that the attack would not have happened if Foch had not failed to anticipate the place where the Germans would strike. As a result, German forces advanced within eighty miles of Paris, closer than they had been since the initial year of the war. “Anybody can make a mistake, but there is no real reason for clinging to an opinion in the teeth of the evidence,” which Foch had before him and discounted. Foch resented Clemenceau’s sharp questioning on this point, yet “in such an emergency, when the very life of the country was at stake, a head of the Government had to have the power of making up his mind promptly and of finding the happy meeting between severity and moderation,” resisting “the currents of public opinion clamoring for penalties without knowing on whom they were to fall.” (“I must admit that the Parliamentary system as we know it is not always a school for stout-heartedness.”) Clemenceau accordingly appeared before the French Assembly, “compl[ying] unhesitatingly with all the demands for information”; “there was a speedy return of confidence when it became clear that I meant to hide nothing.” At the same time, “I took everyone under my shield, to the great astonishment of those who had told me that by throwing all the responsibility on the Commander-in-Chief I should regain the authority belonging to my position.” Given this, “on what grounds does he accuse me of persecuting him?”

Foch also charges that Clemenceau pushed the Americans, under the command of General John Pershing, to join the fighting prematurely, before the raw troops had been adequately trained. “Everyone knows that the American troops, in the first rank as far as bravery is concerned, were first and foremost excellent soldiers in a state of mere improvisation,” and “it was essential, at all costs, to avoid a defeat for the first appearance of the American Army on the scene,” although “it was heart-rending to see our men being mown down unceasingly while, under the command of their good leaders, large bodies of American troops remained idle, within earshot of the guns.” “My country’s fate was every moment at stake on the battlefields, which had already drunk the best blood of France.” Foch and President Poincaré concurred with the sentiment but hesitated at pushing the American general too harshly. Clemenceau suspected that Pershing’s reluctance derived not from military necessity but from political shrewdness: “the great democracy inclined to throw in her full power for the supreme victory on the last battlefield.” Among the three French principals, “the dispute turned simply on what action ought to follow from the establishment of the sole command,” whereby Pershing was subordinate to Foch. Foch and Poincaré temporized, the latter saying that they should have recourse to the American forces only if “the situation becomes really desperate.” “At that rate,” Clemenceau ripostes, “we might have waited until the defeatist campaigns” in the civilian population “had utterly gangrened minds that were already turning septic before making up our minds to lay hands or the traitors”; rather than saving lives, such “timidity is surely responsible for the shedding of too much blood.” What good is supreme command if the commander will not command, attempting “to please everyone.” But although “the Marshal had the power to command, he preferred to suggest.” Had the Germans “felt the shock of the American arrival in the field,” they “were bound to realize that all hope of winning the War was thenceforth lost for them.”

Throughout the war, then, “Marshal Foch was a great soldier on the field of battle. All very well, but is that enough?” He lacked the spirit of obedience to civilian command, “his soul lack[ing] that inflexibility in the performance of duty which is the surest sign of moral and intellectual greatness in the soldier no less than in the civilian.” While Foch in his memoir calls Clemenceau “despotic and Jacobin,” Clemenceau remarks, “Too many of our soldiers, and even of our civilians, have an annoying propensity for believing that the world is made for them.” 

The Armistice ended the war, “after four nerve-wracking years, lived through in the anguished expectation of the worst” from “the most stupendous mass of military forces most formidably equipped.” And although “mutual butchery cannot be the chief occupation of life,” and “the glory of our civilization is that it enables us—occasionally—to live an almost normal life,” both victorious and vanquished countries will regroup within their borders with new alliances beyond their borders. “What will be the new equilibrium to which we are tending fortunately we do not know,” but Clemenceau knew one thing: Germany’s “November Revolution” beginning in 1918, establishing the Weimar Republic, “was mere window-dressing, and that, with the aggressor of 1914 not a whit cured of his insane folly, we should continue without respite to be subjected in a new setting, to the same attack from the same enemy.” This supposed revolution overthrew the empire while leaving in place the military officers, judges, and bureaucrats of the Kaiserreich. In starting the war, the Germans “flung aside every scruple…hoping for a peace of enslavement under the yoke of a militarism destructive of all human dignity.” And with Europeans locked in ever-renewing death struggles, “there might result, by some unforeseen turn of the wheel, an Americanization of Europe and its dependencies.” If so, it will occur thanks to Germany’s “characteristic tendency to go to extremes,” with her slogan, Deutschland über alles, a slogan appealing to “the intolerable arrogance of the German aristocracy, the servile good nature of the intellectual and the scholar, the gross vanity of the most competent leaders in influence of a violent popular poetry,” all of which “conspire to shatter throughout the world all the time-honored traditions of individual, as well as international, dignity.” Indeed, that “peculiar mentality of the German solider” [was] the cause of the premature exhaustion that brought him to beg for an armistice before the French soldier, who was fighting for his independence.” That German immoderation, however, bespeaks a universal human trait, the French not excepted. “Man is manifold and various” and for this reason men “do not know themselves.” Man “lives in the shifting hours, and not, as simple souls [i.e., Christians] would have it, in absolute eternity.” Human complexity, variety, and temporality befog minds and hearts; immoderation is only one manifestation of that. Even “Napoleon, who, with Alexander and Caesar, was one of the greatest military geniuses in history, never understood himself even at S. Helena, where, if he could have summed himself up, balancing his strength against his weakness, he might have towered above all the common run of conquerors.” “Where shall we find the man capable of interpreting himself?” 

Not in the Frenchman. He won the war “with his gallant allies,” then “planned and made his peace on a basis of reasoned idealism”—that is, an abstract, neo-Kantian idealism that “will perhaps end by making us lose the peace.” We French do not see that “visions without the action they call for are only empty words,” that “peace or war, we are in the midst of a relentless struggle for power.” This being so, “Woe to the weak!” Better to “turn your back on the purveyors of soothing syrup!” And while “our defeat would have resulted in a relapse of human civilization into violence and bloodshed, the question is to know what contribution to moral progress our victory can and must furnish, it be maintained.” To achieve such progress, “all we lacked later,” in the decade following the war, after Clemenceau left office, “was a statesman of some strength of purpose.” Instead, France got Poincaré and Aristide Briand, who have been unable to stand up to English and American efforts to strengthen the fundamentally unreformed German regime and, in the American case, have been able to keep France on its knees by demanding repayment of its war debts. In initiating the war, Germany had counted on Allied disunity; this did not occur, to a fatal degree, during the war itself, but it has intensified during the subsequent decade of peace. As for Great Britain, it “may yet suffer more from this than the insight of her latter-day politicians yet allows them to suppose,” as they continue to ” believe herself obliged to multiply causes of dissension among the peoples of the Continent, so as to secure peace for her own conquests,” her own still-extensive Empire,” her metropole being “an island defended by the waves.” Unlike the French and the Americans, the Brits aren’t swayed by ‘idealist’ illusions.  Regrettably, their realism is out of date.

Before turning to his account of the Versailles Conference, Clemenceau undertakes a brief survey of previous peace treaties in modern Europe. “It is well known that the Treaty of Westphalia,” asserting the principle of non-intervention in the internal affairs of European states by other states, “claimed to have founded European law.” That is, it was an international law, agreed to by the sovereigns who signed it, assuring state sovereignty by limiting sovereign actions. “The French Revolution proved clearly that it had not succeeded. And as Napoleon proved the same thing with regard to the French Revolution, all this imbroglio of wars sent us back to where we had to begin all over again.” That is, neither monarchic nor republican regimes could establish a lasting peace, particularly when confronting one another. Following the failures of regimes of ‘the one’ and regimes of ‘the many,’ in the Congress of Vienna, following the Napoleonic Wars, “it was the turn of the European aristocracies,” ‘the few,’ to try their hand at peacemaking. That lasted until the catastrophe of 1914. 

The Versailles Conference reminds Clemenceau of the French General Assembly in 1789. The French republicans “talked Montesquieu from the tribune without discovering the meeting-ground of what should be taken and what left in order to attain a happy blending of the revolutionary and the stable elements.” At Versailles in 1919, as in revolutionary Paris, “those whom ideology sends forward to the assault of phenomena will come up against too many people who are but the mass of incapacity in revolt,” while experienced statesmen, “those whom life has made modest,” are “glad to try” to come to some sensible arrangement. “I was there. My eyes met the eyes of friends. My hands touched brotherly hands. I hoped. I desired.” At home, in the Assembly, Poincaré and his allies have done their best to undermine his efforts. “What will remain of the greatest effort of the human civilizations for an enlargement of universal civilization I shall not attempt to foresee, after ten years of talk in which victors and vanquished have gone on the same tack to shatter, one by one, every guarantee of success.” Such are “the unchanging realities of international problems.” Their grandeur and misery are the human grandeur and misery, as discernible by the Christian Pascal as by the atheist Clemenceau.

“Our fathers awaited the Messiah. The Messiah is within us. The problem is to set him free.” That hasn’t happened; the self-governing peoples haven’t governed themselves well. Among the former Allies, “too many people prefer, in general, to let themselves drift with the times, while the overthrown enemy in the shadow, or even in the full light of day, is planning a turning of the tables.” Meanwhile, “our humanitarian countries, bound to unite willy-nilly against all excesses of violence, and finding themselves no longer linked by the immediate fear of a common enemy,” have returned to their petty rivalries amongst themselves. England pursues its imperial interests, America pursues its commercial and financial interests, and the French have abandoned “our own cause.” This could be seen at the Versailles Conference itself, where “the same sincerity, the same ardor in the preparation of mass murder,” exercised itself “in the fogs of verbal idealism.” Such are “the contradictions of this life of ours, ever doomed to disappointment.” 

Versailles saw international regime struggles papered over with formulas of internationalist humanitarianism. Now, American commercial republic exhibits “a vehement energy that carries a population of a hundred millions to the excesses of a materialistic power, that, once let loose, no one will be able to master,” although this new economic mastery will result in “the same eventual outcome as the onslaughts of those conquerors, who, in spite of so many apparent triumphs, came to grief in the end. So it was with Napoleon….” As for President Wilson, “he had too much confidence in all the talky-talk and super-talky-talk of his ‘League of Nations.'” What could such an organization actually do, when denied “all executive power”? [3] The British delegation consisted not of idealists but of gentlemanly devotees of the main chance: Prime Minister David Lloyd George, with his “bright, two-fisted smile”; Arthur Balfour, “the most courteous of adamantine men”; Bonar Law, “the prince of balance, who would have been a first-class Frenchman had he not been wholly British”; Lord Robert Cecil, “a Christian who believes and is fain to live his belief, with a smile like a Chinese dragon to express a stubborn mind banged, barred, and bolted against arguments; and Lord Milner, “a brilliant intellect crowned with high culture that culminates in a discreet sentimentality,” a man of “extreme gentleness and extreme firmness.” As for the Germans, they are “unscrupulous,” a fact “the French like nothing so much as to forget.” This cannot end well, since “the progress of murder machines goes faster than that of organizations for peace.” “A good organization for butchery, functioning smoothly, could, with a sufficient number of Zeppelins, in a few seconds destroy a town—a whole people, in fact—without even some report from a secretary of maid-of-all work League of Nations being left for the eye of the historian of this last phase of progress.” It is true that “an assembly of widely varied individuals…all characterized by a common body of ideas as to the rights of peoples to govern themselves according to a representative system which, with all its imperfections, will nevertheless remain an achievement far and away nobler than the violences of conquest,” a “sign of an emancipation of human societies emerging from the realm of primitive violence to shape themselves to the reactions that establish freedom.” But how effective is it likely to be, when “the same opponent, who joins to his wealth of intellectual culture a fundamental lack of moral culture, who, with rare impudence, asks us to found the new peace upon the prodigious lie of Germany’s innocence” remains in the heart of Europe? “Our European countries, and those organized on European lines, need only go back to their familiar slipshod management of everyday life for the vanquished foe to dare to rear his head arrogantly as if he were the victor,” and “to demand a reckoning from those who had put an end to his wrongdoing.” “Most losers curse their judges, and as long as a loser can argue his point with big guns it will be well to walk warily.” 

The Versailles Treaty was “the work of President Wilson,” who wielded “the ultimate authority of his military help” along with “the outward power of language that broke away from past traditions.” The American president was “the inspired prophet of a noble ideological venture, to which he was unfortunately destined to become a slave.” Wilson “was a doctrinairian in the finest sense of the word: a man with excellent intentions, but with rigidly fixed and crystallized emotions.”  He “had insufficient knowledge of the Europe lying torn to pieces at his feet” precisely because American foreign policy, enunciated in the Monroe Doctrine, ensured such ignorance by keeping European affairs at arm’s length. Clemenceau acknowledges that, under Wilson’s prodding, “for the first time in history, a search was made for firm ground on which to build a system of justice between nations who up till this time had lived by violence alone,” an “attempt at general reconstruction in a Europe completely out of joint.” But such a reconstruction needed a government to make it effective, and a government was neither arranged by the treaty nor likely to result in subsequent years. Wilson’s attempt in effect to substitute what eventually came to be called ‘transparency’—in his slogan, “open covenants openly arrived at” in the stead of the secret treaties that led to a war spurred by miscalculations on all sides—exemplifies a “misreading and disregarding of political experience” nearly unprecedented “in the maelstrom of abstract thought.” When reality began to set in, when the United States Senate recurred to America’s longstanding ‘isolationism’ by rejecting the treaty, this brought on “the disaster of a separate peace” between America and Germany. The Monroe Doctrine is “an empirical precaution against the enterprises of aggressive European conquerors” that “leaves the field open” in the rest of the world for “the enterprises of aggressive European conquerors.” The problem with this for Americans is that “America cannot renounce her connection of Europe.” “The nations of the world, although separated by natural or artificial frontiers, have but one planet at their disposal, a planet all the elements of which are in a state of solidarity.” You may intend to carry on with your worldwide trade, but “is it certain” that foreign countries “will never consider you from any other point of view?” “China and Japan have a history to work out”: Will those peoples, in working out that history, regard America with benevolence? Although “you may be able perhaps for a time to isolate yourself from your planetary fellow-citizens…I find you in the Philippines, where you do not belong geographically.” You yourselves must find some urgent reason to be there, in an Asia that evidently is not so distant from your shores as to lead you to ignore it. In the late war, you found yourselves confronted “with the alarming persistence of German aggression.” Small world. Reality imposed itself.

What is more, along with his misunderstanding of Europe, Wilson’s “knowledge even of America” proved “insufficient,” as seen in his failed negotiations with the senators who eventually refused to ratify the Versailles treaty. The isolationists of the U. S. Senate and the internationalism of Wilson both sought to settle that difficulty once and for all. “All or nothing. Friends, that is no motto for human creatures.” Idealist internationalism foundered, without the safety hoped for by the isolationists. “The Americans are fine soldiers. But their military preparedness was, and will always remain, insufficient to make them a decisive factor to be reckoned with at the psychological moment in case of war.” Even so, “they have come nearer to us on the path of friendship than they themselves believe and will never consent to lend themselves to the universal grabbing of Deutschland über Alles.” True, in 1796Washington recommended a policy of non-entanglement in European alliances. “There were at that time many reasons for this. But can it be said that circumstances may not change? Is there a man on the face of the earth capable of devising a recommendation in foreign policy for all eternity?” Having “left not only France, but the whole of a Europe founded upon right exposed to the dangers of a new outbreak of war, America will be judged by history to have too quickly turned a deaf ear to the call of her destiny.”

Europeans did no better, given “the eternal problem of mankind”: “to live in society is to be always in a state of mutual confronting, with fleeting periods of mutual agreement.” [4] “The War, officially finished, went on under new guises.” After all, Clausewitz was right to think that “war and peace, springing from the same state of mind, are identical fundamental activities both aiming at the same end by different means.” This being so, “after Germany’s brute act of force in 1914, accompanied as it was by every villainy at the command of barbarism,” only two “possible forms of peace” were available to Europe: “the maintaining of military domination”—the permanent occupation of most of German soil—or “a grouping of states banded together to represent abstract justice in Europe, and capable of forming an impassable barrier to the unruly outbursts of the spirit of conquest,” an alliance that could not itself “become a force for domination” because comprised of commercial republics uninterested in such domination. Such an alliance became possible when anti-republican Russia dropped out of the alliance against Germany, as “the Russian champions of oppression in Europe collapse[d] before the German champions.” “Freed from the so-called help of allies who upheld oppression,” the French “could build up our higher moral forces again,” appealing to “the right of nations to govern themselves, which is the basis of all civilization” and “implied the total freeing of all nations” from imperialism. This “assertion of his own personal dignity for each man and every man under the aegis of the individuality of his nation, admitted to the concert of civilized peoples,” in turn implies that “liberation must not be translated by the annexation of a conquered territory.” Poland, “suddenly set free and recreated,” became the first such liberated nation; “then all over Europe oppressed peoples raised their heads, and our war of national defense was transformed by force of events into a war of liberation,” a war that made possible “a peace of justice, a Europe founded upon right, the creator of independent states whose military power is augmented by all the moral energies generated by the necessity for asserting themselves in all spheres of international life,” a “body of forces superior to anything that could come from a powerfully organized frontier.” Under such conditions, “throughout Europe the words right, liberty, and justice would mean something,” unlike the prevailing conditions today: a League of Nations impotent in the face of German war preparations—these, under the sham republicanism of the Weimar regime, before the political triumph of Hitlerism, which came a few years later. “Defeat substituted for victory, that was what we accepted without finding a single word to assert our right to our Continental life by the establishment of guarantees within the new order created by a most costly victory.”

Across the channel from the Continent, England has yet to understand that its empire, which has remained intact since the war—unlike those of Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey—cannot survive. After witnessing the ceremonial victory march of American soldiers in Paris beneath a statue of George Washington, Prime Minister Lloyd George turned to Clemenceau to say, “Do you know that you have just made me salute one of England’s greatest defeats,” the loss of its North American colonies, a loss ably assisted by the French? As a matter of fact, Clemenceau did know that. “There have been plenty of victories and defeats between us” (England had won the Seven Years’ War, expelling France from its own colonies.) But “it is pretty obvious that today you could never govern America from London.” More, “already your Dominions are asking you for a reckoning” and “India is becoming burdensome” to you. “The conqueror is prisoner to his conquest; that is the revenge of conquered nations.” Looking back at this exchange, Clemenceau finds nothing to recant. “Historically, England was our oldest enemy.” But “now that we have each saved the other, and the best of the blood of both nations has been freely spilt in doing it, why not “try to make a lasting peace in honor of those but for whom we should be no more?” As of now, however, England prefers to play its old game of “offshore balancer” on the Continent, even as the Americans prefer to play their old game of military isolation combined with commercial and financial intervention.

As for France, “It is high time for the French nation to take a firmer grip on itself and to substitute a policy of determination for this confusion born of timidity, through which the threat of a compact mass of barbarism is kept hanging over our heads.” “You must have courage enough to face responsibilities and strain every nerve to action; our people, however, when they get to the bottom of their own minds, find mere velleities, not wills.” But “it is easier to reform our neighbors than ourselves.” “France, now asleep, will no doubt wake up one day,” and “France will not die.” After all, “prudence and courage are not mutually exclusive, as many people choose to think.”

“Peace is a disposition of forces, supposed to be in lasting equilibrium, in which the moral force of organized justice is surrounded by strategical precautions against all possible disturbances.” Since “the idea of force is deeply rooted in man, as in the whole universe,” and “law is controlled and ordered force,” it is crucial that conquerors, who impose ordered force upon the vanquished, adjure “a sham and invented equity,” an unjust law. Under the terms of the Armistice, Clemenceau, Foch, and Poincaré all wanted the Rhine to become the border between France and Germany, reclaiming Alsace and Lorraine. They also wanted the Rhineland to become an independent state after a period of occupation by French troops. This raised the question of “what we should do with the inhabitants of the Rhineland” who, after all, were “living in their own home, which, in modern ties is sometimes not a bad argument.” The “open violation of peaceful territories” with accompanying “massacres, deportation of all who resisted, enslavement of the rest” (“as we saw in Belgium under the German occupation”) would not do, given “the principles of the French Revolution”—among the most prominent of which was popular sovereignty. “Gladly would I have seen them become French. But I was not sure of their consent,” in view of their refusal “to be Prussians under compulsion.”

None of this troubled Foch or Poincaré, however. “Foch, being a soldier, [was] loth to abandon the tradition of conquest,” contending in defense of his policy that “a peace that gave Alsace-Lorraine back to us,” without the addition of the Rhineland, “would only give us ‘a frontier of defeat.'” “From the most distant times warriors of all countries have had nothing but a system of annexation for their policy of aggressive defense, and this conception of an organization of military disequilibrium has merely maintained the warlike habits it had been intended to abolish. That is how Europe was brought into the state of anarchy from which the happy issue of our great war might make it possible to save her.” Such is the issue of regimes of “military autocracy,” a point Napoleon had already driven home, or should have driven home, to all Europeans, a century before. While “the keynote of the Treaty of Versailles is the liberation of the peoples, the independence of nationalities…the keynote of the policy of Marshal Foch and M. Poincaré was the occupation of a territory by force of arms against the will of its inhabitants,” a policy no longer feasible under modern conditions and never just in the long term. 

A sounder solution had already been found. At Versailles, in response to Foch’s territorial ambitions, Prime Minister Lloyd George had proposed the Treaty of Guarantee, which “unit[ed] us with England and America for the assured maintenance of peace where Germany was concerned.” This treaty “gave us what was nothing less than the ultimate sanction of the Peace Treaty,” “the keystone of European peace, far above all theories.” “The English House of Commons, “which had never pledged its military help in advance to any people, had readily grasped the fact that a new situation called for decisions of a new character” and accordingly ratified the treaty unanimously. “France will never forget this.” But when the U. S. Senate refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles, it voided the Guarantee Treaty as well. “Such are the risks that democracies run with their frail Parliaments.” Germany now has “an indirect invitation” to “try again.”

Germany will accept that invitation, having given itself over to a “monstrous explosion of the will to power, which threatens openly to do away entirely with the diversities established by many evolutions, to set in their place the implacable mastery of a race whose lordly part would be to substitute itself, by force of arms, for all national developments.” As proof, Clemenceau cites a manifesto signed by ninety-three German intellectuals justifying the war, “the bloodiest and the least excusable of military aggressions,” at its outset. In this, they followed the claims of the Prussian general and military historian Friedrich von Bernhardi, who regarded war as an instrument of progressive historical development, necessary for Germany, a country “condemned, by her very greatness, either to absorb all nations in herself or to return to nothingness.” Adding to this chorus was the chemist and philosophy professor Wilhelm Ostwald, who averred, “Germany has reached a higher stage of civilization than the other peoples, and the result of the War will be an organization of Europe under Germany leadership”; zoologist and ‘race scientist’ Ernst Haeckel, who “demanded the conquest of London, the division of Belgium between Germany and Holland, the annexation of Northeast France, of Poland, the Baltic Provinces, the Congo, and a greater part of the English colonies; and the Prussian Hegelian Adolf Lasson, who assured his readers that “we are morally and intellectually superior to all men,” “peerless” in our nature, our organizations, and our institutions”—Germany being “the most perfect creation known in history.” To which Clemenceau can only reply, “Ordinary laymen who talked in this strain would be taken off to some safe asylum.” He is unkind enough to add, as proof of his own experience with Germans, “I have sometimes penetrated into the sacred cave of the Germanic cult, which is, as everyone knows, the Bierhaus.” There, “the popular rumblings of a nationalism upheld by the sonorous brasses blare to the heavens the supreme voice of Germany.” Despite Hindenburg’s later protestations that the war was only “the supreme measure resorted to in preservation of our existence against a host of enemies,” Clemenceau cites the former German ambassador in London, Karl Max, Prince Lichnowsky, who published My Mission to London 1912-1914 in America in 1917, giving evidence that the Kaiser Reich had indeed intervened in Serbia, knowing “that it meant running the risk of a universal war.” Looking next to the future, Clemenceau goes on to cite the German General Hans von Seekt, who had served as Chief of staff to General August von Mackensen on the Eastern Front during the war, who wrote, in his 1929 book, The Future of the German Empire, that Germany seeks to reestablish itself “as a great military power,” one that can settle what he takes to be the “grotesque” existence of “the Polish corridor,” which is “already considered impracticable by England. “Solving” this and other treaty restrictions, van Seekt writes, “is the battlefield of Germany foreign policy,” a “struggle now beginning” in which “we need force.” “The principal discovery” we French need to make “is that it needs at least two to maintain an honest peace.

“Too many public men, blinded by too high an opinion of themselves, have not realized the profound problems of a lasting peace,” which requires “both sides to have the same fundamental ideas of right and the same quality of good faith.” Exactly so, one notices, a century later.

This is why, “whether by spoken word or written word the preaching of universal love so far has principally produced mere empty echoes.” Defeat brought Germany “to words of quasi-peace, soon belied by a renewal of implacable activity,” even as “the victors, divided, are drowning themselves in a deluge of verbose invocations to a metaphysics of peace, adapted to all kinds of immediate self-interest.” And so, the United States aimed to make “a new Europe,” only to walk away, taking with it the military guarantees that could have perpetuated that Europe. Americans have made a “separate peace” with Germany, establishing profitable trade relations, then demanded repayment of loans it made to France, monies that it used to hold Germany back “during four interminable years”—thereby “securing for itself the advantages of the battles that it had never fought,” having made, by its intervention, “a great and heroic gesture” but nonetheless paying “but a mere comparative trifle of shed blood, in return for which you have had a prodigious recompense of gold, owing to the stupendous development of your industries while ours were being systematically destroyed.” “That was a high emprise of downright materialism the like of which had never been seen” and “America has broken us in the economic sphere for an indeterminate time.” Clemenceau advises Americans, “Do not despise Europe. Your judgments might prove double-edged. Do not treat us too badly. No one knows what fate history has in store for you. A weaker brother is often useful in time of need.”

Specifically, Anglo-Americans heeded the advice of John Maynard Keynes in his 1919 book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace. Keynes argues that “world prosperity was dependent on the prosperity of Germany, and that Germany would suffer from a disastrous economic instability so long as Germany should be called on to meet obligations beyond her capacity to pay.” This argument also persuaded Clemenceau’s successor as Prime Minister, the socialist Alexandre Millerand. Negotiations with Germany commenced, fruitlessly, with the later Poincaré Administration insisting that there must be no moratorium on German payments without securities. Under Poincaré’s orders, France occupied the industrial Ruhr region of Germany, which concentrated German minds on settling matters. In 1924, the Allied Reparations Commission produced the Dawes Plan (named for Commission chairman and U. S. Vice President Charles G. Dawes), which traded German reparations for French and Belgian withdrawal from the Ruhr. (Clemenceau does not let the fact that an American chaired the commission that settled a point contained in the Treaty of Versailles, which America hadn’t ratified.) But these terms were soon abrogated, after the League of Nations, now “in charge of the question of disarmament,” set up a new commission of financial experts headed by another American, Owen D. Young, which in 1929 further reduced German reparations in exchange for yet another French military withdrawal—this, from the Rhineland. All France now had to rely on for its security was the Locarno Treaty of 1925, pledging to guarantee existing boundaries between France and Germany, a pledge that Clemenceau rightly supposed would prove useless. To the Americans, he writes, “Come to our villages and read the endless lists of their dead and make comparisons, if you will.”

Meanwhile, the Germans had been manufacturing arms in excess of the terms set by the Treaty, including what later came to be called ‘dual use’ aircraft (passenger planes that could be equipped with bombs), adding to these imported arms from the Soviet Union, which at the time expected the German Communists to seize power, as they had nearly done in the aftermath of the war. Evading the cap on army size, the German government had also authorized “so-called sports clubs,” offering military training for soldiers and future officers. While “unquestionably and naturally, in Germany, as everywhere else, the workmen, peasants, and lower middle class are true pacifists, and view the possibilities of new butcheries, with horror…all the sons of the governing classes, all the young men who attend the high schools, the colleges, and the universities of Germany find there Nationalist or Populist professors who continually din into their ears the Deutschland über Alles,” and “in this lies the great danger to peace,” as “it will be these same young men who will direct the destinies of Germany.” German policy has reversed a Christian teaching: “A lie sets her free.” With the assistance of the Anglo-Americans, who fail to see the future political and military consequences of their economic policy, Germany prepares, “with the most scientific preparations,” at that, to “start on another criminal venture before she has expiated the last.” As for France, “We shall take up the atrocious War again at the point where we left it off.”

But will the French “have the courage to prepare for it, instead of frittering away our strength in lies that no one believes, from conference to conference”? “Since the world began,” the means to peace “can be summed up in the words, Be strong.” While “Germany remains faithful to this truth,” “the Governments that have succeeded one another in France since 1920…have dandled our people from concession to concession without making them understand, first of all, that a nation with a past like ours could not accept peace at any price..[and] secondly, that with neighbors like the Germans this peace could only be ensured by making the necessary sacrifices.” The “Fortified Regions” strategy, seen in the soon-to-be infamous Maginot Line, has prevailed, while “ten years have been lost in useless wrangling” at the negotiating table over reparations, disarmament, and finances. France has seen a fatal divorce between patriotism and republicanism, its leading liberal and socialist politicians and intellectuals having committed themselves to an internationalism that will leave the country helpless against the coming German onslaught, with Aristide Briand, the socialist politician then enjoying his eleventh term as Prime Minister, as “the leading light of French defeatism.” Co-author of the Locarno Treaty with the German Prime Minister Gustav Stresemann, “M. Briand has perhaps a sense of responsibility—but he shows no signs of it.” Surely, “is it not fairly clear that the very idea of a fatherland, which is still so potent among us, has lost some of its native strength in the hearts of those who have deliberately allowed themselves to be despoiled of that French pride so essential if the fatherland is to live and not die?” This weakness among the governing classes of France has resulted in “a retrograde peace” owing primarily not to economic, military, or even political defects (although all of those are present) as to “flaws of character,” which “are as much to be dreaded in peace as in war, since they lead a man just as inevitably to surrender his dignity his will, his personality, everything that constitutes his worth in the widely differing circumstances of peace and of war.”

Today’s France has no Napoleon, “no man of genius” (who nonetheless flung “all his victories down the abyss on the plain of Waterloo, where for a time a semblance of order was established in Europe”). “My wish would simply be that the French people should dare to trust itself, and that is precisely what it is denied my eyes to see.” 

Finally, then, “it is not Foch’s gossip that haunts me, it is the future of France.” Like all men, he is “good and bad—together.” “Let us accept,” with Pascal, “the fact of our human condition, with its greatnesses and its failings.” (“We are constantly hearing of the superman. And what of the subman —what of him? It is easier to come together for developments of barbarism than for the refinements of civilization.”) As always, however, Clemenceau will not take the Pascalian wager, contenting himself by saying that if we accept the human condition of grandeur and misery we will “have no need of so many fictions to create for ourselves a figure designed to our own vanity.” In the end, “France will be what the men of France deserve.”

 

 

Notes

1. In English, The Memoirs of Marshal Foch (New York: Doubleday, Doran and Company, 1931).
2. See Georges Clemenceau: In the Evening of My Thought. Charles Miner Thompson and John Heard, Jr. translation. (London: Constable and Company, Ltd., 1929).
3. Charles de Gaulle thought much the same of the proposed ‘United States of Europe’: “Good luck to this federation without a federator!” 
4. Or, as de Gaulle put it, “Treaties are like jeunes filles. They last as long as they last.”