Julius Caesar: The Gallic War. Books II-VII. In The Landmark Julius Caesar. Edited and translated by Kurt A. Raaflaub. New York: Anchor Books, 2017.

 

Caesar knows his enemy, devoting attention not only to gathering and analyzing ‘military intelligence’ but to understanding the Gallic way of life. Of the peoples inhabiting Gaul, two (three, including the Romans in Cisalpine Gaul) are not of the Gallic nation. The warlike Belgae originated in Germany and the Helvetii were the ancestors of today’s Swiss. 

In the fall of 57 B.C., Caesar returned to Cisalpine Gaul, having defeated the Nervii, a Belgic tribe in a tough campaign, temporarily pacifying Transalpine Gaul. But the Veneti, seafaring Gauls who lived along the Atlantic coast, chose not to cooperate, attacking troops under the command of the Roman general Publius Crassus and capturing several of his officers. “They appealed to other nations [i.e., Gallic tribes on the coast] to choose to keep the liberty they had inherited from their ancestors rather than endure slavery imposed by the Romans.” They soon had the region up in arms. “Many considerations urged Caesar to take up this war,” including the capture of Roman officers, the extent of the “conspiracy” among the Gallic tribes, and “most important, the need to keep the other nations from thinking that, because the actions of those in this region were ignored, they could do likewise.” Indeed, “almost all the Gauls were keen to overthrow the existing order and swift and impetuous in stirring themselves up for war.”

Caesar then makes an observation that might easily be overlooked. “He knew that all people are by nature excitable by their eagerness for liberty and loathe the state of slavery.” That is, he never supposes the Gauls to be subhuman. The love of liberty and the hatred of slavery characterize human beings as such. The Romans are no different than the Gauls, that way. What differentiates Romans from Gauls is not nature; it is civilization. The Romans are civilized, the Gauls “barbarians.” Throughout the Gallic War, Caesar gives his readers glimpses of how he understands that distinction. 

Roman civilization quite famously did not prevent the Roman army from waging war harshly. The Romans burned towns, sometimes killing ‘civilians.’ In the war with the Nervii, “the nation and the very name of the Nervii were reduced almost to annihilation,” as “the number of their councilors had been reduced from six hundred to three, and that of their men able to bear arms from sixty thousand to scarcely five hundred.” Nonetheless, Roman harshness did not foreclose Roman clemency after an enemy’s surrender, as “Caesar wished to make it known that he was merciful in dealing with miserable people and supplicants,” taking “great care for their safety, telling them to stay in their own territory and towns and ordering the leaders of their neighbors to restrain themselves and their people from committing outrages against them.” As to the Nervii, their barbarity did not prevent them from “display[ing] enormous bravery: when their front fighters fell, those behind them stood on the fallen bodies and fought from their corpses.” “They had dared to cross a very wide river, climb extremely high banks, and attack over most unfavorable terrain; the greatness of their spirit had made these excessively hard things seem easy.” Barbarity doesn’t mean cowardice.

The Gauls’ barbarity inheres partly in their inability to sustain enterprises they undertake. “Although the spirit of the Gauls is quick and eager to start wars, their minds are weak and hardly able to withstand and absorb major reversals.” This accounts for the cycle of attack, defeat, surrender, renewed attack, seen throughout the war. They lack the Romans’ steadiness of soul. This “weakness of mind” does not mean stupidity. By the following year, the Morini and Menapii refused either to disarm or sue for peace. Instead, they changed strategy,” gathering their belongings and retreated into a large area of woods and swamps, which afforded protection from easy attack. When Roman troops left camp to forage for food, these tribes attacked them, after the manner of what we now call guerrillas; the Romans would counterattack, drive the Gauls “back into the woods, killing many of them, but when they pursued them too far, into places where it was difficult to maneuver, they lost a few of their own.” That is, the Gauls readily learned from battlefield experience and just as readily adjusted their strategy accordingly. The ‘barbarian mind,’ so to speak, wages war intelligently. 

Perhaps the Gauls’ leading vice was “fickleness,” their “unstable nature.” “They easily adopt new plans and tend to be eager for political change.” This being so, Caesar “thought he should in no way rely on them.” Although he gathered information from them as best he could, he found that “they depend on vague rumors and most people give answers that are made up to suit the wishes of their questioners.” When gathering allied tribes for a military campaign, “he could not afford to give the Gauls any time to make their own plans.” Although unreliable allies, they were for the same reason vulnerable as enemies, tending to faction both among and within the tribes. “In Gaul, factions divide not only all the nations, regions, and districts but almost every single household.” There was little need to expend much energy to divide them before conquering them. It was their warlikeness and rebelliousness that made conquest difficult. And with these thumotic qualities came a sense of honor and of shame. “They who used to excel in bravery over all other peoples, were now deeply resentful at having fallen so short of this reputation that they were reduced to enduring the rule of the Roman people.”

Nor did they hesitate to enforce their chieftains’ calls to honor. “The custom of the Gauls to mark the start of a war,” in all the tribes, was to compel men of military age to assemble, fully armed. “Whoever arrives last is, in front of the crowd, subjected to every kind of torture and then killed.”

Politically, “there are only two classes of men” among the Gauls “who enjoy any kind of distinction and honor, since the common people are treated almost like slaves,” “kept down by debt or the enormous taxes they must pay,” required to “formally submit in servitude to the nobles,” their masters. Among the masters, one finds two types. The druids “are concerned with divine matters,” including not only sacrifices but judicial proceedings and education. They exercised considerable authority, inasmuch as “if any person or group does not abide by their decision, they bar them from sacrifices; this is the harshest penalty in that society.” Their training consisted of some twenty years memorizing sacred verses; “they do not consider it proper to entrust these things to writing,” lest “their system of learning be divulged to the common masses.” Among the lessons they did transmit to the others, the doctrine most zealously propagated was that of transmigration of souls, thinking this “a particular incitement to bravery, as it causes men to put aside the fear of death.” Their exemption from military service and taxation attracted many novices to their classes, “eager for such great rewards.” Studies included topics the Greeks and Romans would have associated with natural philosophy (“the heavenly bodies and their motions, the nature of things”) and theology (“the power and authority of the immortal gods”). However, theirs was no civilized religion, with sacrifice of criminals and innocents alike practiced when the gods were said to be in need of appeasement, as when serious disease struck, or a battle impended. The druids would have “immense effigies” made of wickerwork, “fill these with living persons,” and set them on fire.

The other division of the master class consisted of the military aristocracy. Given the warlike character of the Gauls, this class went into action pretty much every year. Barbarity did not preclude extensive trade—so much so that Mercury, not Mars, had “the most important cult” among the Gauls as “the inventor of every art and skill, the guide on roadways and journeys,” and the god “with the greatest power over trade and the pursuit of profit.” The “only kind of influence and power” recognized by the military aristocrats was the number of servants and dependents a man supported. Generally, within the household husbands enjoyed “the power of life and death over their wives as well as their children,” ruling in the manner of the barbaric Cyclopes Aristotle described in the Politics. As with the druids, so with the civil rulers: “The officials keep secret whatever it seems good to hide, and whatever they judge useful they make known to the people at large.” In recent years, the Gauls living near the Roman Province lost some of their military prowess, having acquired “many things to make their lives more agreeable and lavish.” This has made them “gradually become accustomed to losing in war,” making them not only less formidable to the Romans but also to the Germans.

Up to the winter of 54/53 B.C., Caesar had successfully dealt with the Gauls because his outnumbered troops were better disciplined, more mobile, with superior battle gear and weapons, and (the reader is quite accurately induced to believe) better led by their commanders. But now he expected “a larger uprising in Gaul. “Caesar though it was crucial for the attitude of the Gauls, now and in the future, to realize that the resources of Italy were so great, that, even in the event of a setback in war, the loss could not only be made good within a short time, but actually be reversed by an increase in our forces,” an increase his then-ally, the proconsul Gnaeus Pompey, readily granted. He defeated the recalcitrant Menapii in the battle season that followed, along with several other tribes, including the German Suebi.

Caesar returned to Italy in January 52, which was routine, but when he postponed his departure for Gaul a few months later the Gauls believed the false rumor that he had done so because he needed to deal with civil unrest. They began once more to conspire, “commiserat[ing] about the shared misfortune of Gaul,” “urgently searching for men who were willing, at the risk of their own lives, to unleash a war and take up the cause of restoring the liberty of Gaul.” Surely “it was better to be killed in the battle line than to fail to recover the old martial glory and the liberty they had inherited from their ancestors.” Initially, the Carnute tribe took the lead, winning pledges of support from several other tribes, then attacking and looting the town of Cenabum, killing several Roman citizens who lived there for commercial purposes, and a Roman equestrian Caesar had posted there to guard the grain supply. This activated the Gallic rumor mill, the news reaching the territory of the Arverni, 160 miles distant, in less than a day.

The Arverni had been the leading tribe in Celtic Gaul, rivaled only by the Aedui, which had gained the upper hand thanks to their alliance with the Romans. During the time of Avernian dominance, the ambitious warrior Celtillus had sought to found a kingship. He was put to death by the aristocrats. His son, Vercingetorix, “young and very powerful,” saw the Gallic rebellion as an opportunity to regather his family’s clients and complete the founding his father had attempted. But the aristocrats, “who did not think that Fortune should be tested in this way, blocked his efforts” and banished him to internal exile. “Still, he did not desist but enlisted the destitute and outcasts from the countryside”—a ‘populist’ move Caesar’s readers will recall from his account of the brief career of Orgetorix at the beginning of Book I. With this core of support, Vercingetorix persuaded most of the rest of the Avernii “to take up arms in the cause of their common liberty,” driving his opponents out of the territory. His followers proclaimed him king. At that, he reached out to the tribes that had already committed themselves to war against the Romans, and “by universal agreement, he was given the supreme military command.”

His way of ruling was distinguished by two qualities: “the utmost scrupulousness in preparation” (he especially concentrated on building up his cavalry) and “the greatest severity” in punishing those who disobeyed him or defied his laws (“when a significant crime was committed, he burned or elaborately tortured the offender to death,” while severing the ears or gouging out an eye of lesser criminals, sending the man back to his village “as a terrifying example to the rest and to deter others”). In this, he seems to have sought to emulate Roman celerity and discipline, barbarically. “By employing such brutal methods, he swiftly assembled an army.” 

His first target was the Bituriges, a tribe under the patronage of his tribe’s great rivals, the Aedui. Upon receiving an urgent request for assistance, the Aedui, acting on the advice of officials Caesar had left in-country, sent reinforcements. But these forces turned back, claiming (truly or falsely) that they had heard the Bituriges planned to betray and ambush them. Be this as it may have been, the Bituriges joined the Arverni against Rome and Rome’s Gallic allies. 

Upon learning this, Caesar left Italy. Seeing the need to move quickly and undetected, he moved from the Province into Cisalpine Gaul with only a small cavalry escort, intending to join up with the army troops who had spent the winter there. He fought three successful battles with Vercingetorix, then marched to Avaricum, the largest town of the Bituriges. For his part, Vercingetorix regrouped, calling a meeting of his supporters. It was time to “pursue a very different strategy than they had employed up till now,” he told them, quite sensibly. If Gallic cavalry could not defeat Roman cavalry, it could still harry the Romans when they attempted to forage for food and other supplies. They are far from home; weaken them; fight a war of attrition, particularly by destroying anything that they can use to feed their animals. “There is no difference between actually killing the Romans and stripping them of their animals—for when they lost these, they would not be able to continue the war.” As for us, “the comfort of personal property should be considered unimportant.” Burn the villages in this region, so there will be nothing for the Romans to commandeer. This is our land, and we know how to find food in it. “If these measures seemed burdensome or harsh, then the Gauls ought to realize that it would be much more painful for their wives and children to be dragged off into slavery while they themselves were put to death: for this would be the certain fate of the conquered.” As barbarians, they may not have understood Caesar’s well-established policy of offering clemency to those who surrender. His rhetoric consists of appeals to cunning (as a people they are enormously clever”) and fear.

The strategy itself won some success. It was handicapped by the Bituriges’ tearful supplication, heeded by his troops, not to let their capital, Avaricum, be destroyed. Using his own intelligence-gathering network of scouts and messengers, Vercingetorix surveilled the Roman troops as they laid siege to Avaricum “and was able to give orders in response” to their movements, “doing great damage” to the foraging Roman forces. “This happened even though our men planned everything they could to frustrate him, varying their routes and timing their outings at irregular intervals.” Caesar’s own rhetoric invoked not fear but justice, telling his men that “it was better to endure every kind of hardship than to forgo taking bloody revenge for the Roman citizens who had perished a Cenabum through the treachery of the Gauls.” He then planned an assault on the Gauls’ encampment, protected by a swamp. Having invoked the spirit of just vengeance, he then moderated it, calming the soldiers who wanted to fight their way through. Caesar “would deserve to be judged guilty of the most terrible injustice if he did not place a higher value on their lives than on his own welfare.” He returned their attention to the siege, which ended with a storming of the city, during which the ignore plunder but, “in a frenzy, motivated by the slaughter at Cenabum and the hardships of the siege…did not spare even the aged, women, or babies.” Only 800 of the 40,000 of the residents escaped to Vercingetorix, who carefully kept them apart from his troops, fearing “that the compassion erupting among the rank and file by their massed arrival might lead to a mutiny in the camp.”

This precaution taken, he again addressed his councilors, telling them that the Romans “had won not by their bravery, and not on the battlefield, but by some cunning and by their expertise in siege warfare, in which the Gauls had been inexperienced.” The Romans had of course already defeated his soldiers several times on the battlefield, and his own strategy had scrupulously avoided an open battle, but he was able to blame this new defeat “on the shortsightedness of the Bituriges” and “the excessive willingness of the others to yield to their wishes,” as he himself “had always been opposed to defending Avaricum.” His new strategy was to bring in other Gallic tribes that had not yet joined the war effort, “thus creating a single will for the whole of Gaul, and when the Gauls were united in agreement, the whole world would not be able to resist them.” Impressed by his courage and by his reminder that he had wanted them to burn and abandon Avaricum, the Gauls stayed with him. “Whereas setbacks usually diminish the authority of a commander, his stature, by contrast, was enhanced day by day following this calamity.”

Caesar intended to lure them out of their camp into a final battle, but Aeduan messengers interrupted him with an urgent appeal. His allies, the Aedui, were wracked by political faction, as two men claimed the office of kingship. “The entire nation was in arms,” the council divided; civil war loomed. “Only Caesar’s diligence and authority, the envoys concluded, could prevent this from happening.” As a Roman, Caesar well knew “the disasters that tend to arise from civil discord.” In this case, they might include an appeal to Vercingetorix by the weaker faction. He journeyed to Decetia, the capital city, and decided the issue based upon the Aeduan law of succession. He then “exhorted the Aedui to put controversies and dissension out of their mind and, putting all these issues aside, to focus all their efforts on the war that was at present taking place” in expectation of the rewards he would distribute to them, according to their service in the battles to come.

Returning to the military campaign, Caesar found himself tracked by Vercingetorix’ troops as he pushed into the territory of the Arverni, where he intended to besiege the capital, Gergovia. Vercingetorix arrived there first, establishing himself on high ground and organizing his forces for defense—a “frightening spectacle.” Vercingetorix daily consulted with his officers and sent his units of cavalry out to harass the Romans, testing “how much fighting spirit and courage each of his followers had.” He also bribed the newly installed Aeduan king to turn against the Romans. Unanimated by gratitude, King Convictolitavis asked his fellow tribesmen, “Why should the Aedui come to Caesar and make him the arbitrator concerning their own laws within their own justice system, any more than the Romans came to the Aedui?” He deputized a man called Litaviccus to lie to the Aeduans, telling them that the Romans had executed two of the “leaders of our nation” without a trial, telling them that the same was in their future if they did not march immediately to Gergovia and fight with the Arverni. He ‘avenged’ the Aeduans for the supposed atrocities by torturing and murdering some Roman citizens who were traveling with his army, seizing their supplies. One loyal Aeduan, Eporedorix, reported these enormities to Caesar, at the same time “begg[ing] Caesar not to let the nation defect from its friendship with the Roman people because of the perverse plot of some young men.” “This news was deeply disturbing to Caesar, because he had always treated the nation of the Aedui with special favor.” He quickly marched four legions of lightly armed men to impede the Aeduans’ march, but not to kill any of them; he also dispatched Eporedorix and a close friend of his to circulate among the Aeduan troops and tell them the truth about Litaviccus’ deception. 

Meanwhile, the Gauls at Gergovia had launched an attack on the weakened Roman forces there. For their part, the Aeduans, “corrupted by the crimes they had committed and entranced by the profit they were making form the plundered goods,” continued their rebellion. Compounding the Romans’ misery, Caesar’s surprise assault on Gergovia led to defeat, when his men advanced too far on disadvantageous ground and failed to hear his call for a strategic retreat in the midst of the battle. The next day, he reprimanded them. “As much as he admired the enormous courage of his men, whom neither the camp’s fortifications nor the hill’s altitude nor the town’s walls had been able to hold back, as much did he have to condemn their lack of discipline and, yes, arrogance—that they had thought they understood better than their commander how a victory could be won and how everything would turn out. from his soldiers he needed discipline and self-control as much as courage and greatness of spirit.” That was the mark of Roman civilization, even in war, against Gallic barbarity. 

After assuring the men that the setback owed much to the “unfavorable terrain,” little to the “enemy’s bravery,” he marched towards the Aeduans, who, in accordance with Vercingetorix’s strategy, had posted cavalry at key points along the route in an attempt to block the Romans from getting to their grain supplies. Caesar briefly considered retreating to the Province and regrouping in its safety, but not only would that have been “shameful and unworthy of his reputation,” it would have put in jeopardy his colleague Labienus, whom he had deployed separately with several legions. 

With the Aeduans now enlisted on his side, Vercingetorix reiterated his strategy of using his cavalry to deny the Romans access to grain and fodder. He reminded them that mean the Gauls must accept “with equanimity rendering their own store of grain unusable and burning their own buildings”—a fit exchange for “gain[ing] power and freedom forever.” Hoping to draw Caesar back to the Province, he also began to launch raids on it. 

Caesar saw that it would be difficult to obtain reinforcements from the Province or from Italy, now that the Gallic cavalry patrolled the roads from them. Instead, he hired Germen cavalrymen and light-armed infantry from several friendly tribes there. He then marched his troops in the direction of the Province, hoping to deceive Vercingetorix into believing that he had ordered a full-scale retreat from Gaul. Vercingetorix took the bait, telling his cavalry commanders to say that “the Gauls were on the point of victory.” Do not let the Romans return and gather their forces for another campaign. Attack their baggage train, take their supplies and, not incidentally, “their prestige.” 

Unaware of the German threat, the Gallic cavalry lost a battle along the Arar River. After Vercingetorix retreated to the town of Alesia, combined German and Roman forces attacked again, winning again amidst “huge slaughter.” Vercingetorix escaped with a remnant of his cavalry. This notwithstanding, “there remained “in all of Gaul such a powerful and unanimous desire to restore their liberty and recover their old-time marital glory that people were moved neither by favors hey had received” from the Romans “nor by the memory of friendship,” instead throwing themselves “into this war with all their passion and resources,” assembling eight thousand cavalrymen and some 250,000 infantry and marching toward Alesia, to end the Roman siege. “Not a single man among them all doubted that the mere sight of such an enormous force would overwhelm any resistance.” The decisive battle occurred in November of 52 B.C., settled by another cavalry assault, which broke the Gallic force and took the town. 

His troops scattering and fleeing back to their tribal lands, Vercingetorix surrendered. Ever-prudent Caesar “put aside the captives from among the Aedui and Arverni, hoping to use them to restore close ties with these nations,” turning the rest of the captives over to his army—one slave per soldier. He brought Vercingetorix to Rome, displayed him in a procession, then had him executed.

In Caesar’s account, then, the Romans defeated the Gauls not because they loved liberty more or fought more bravely. Nor was their military strategy superior to the Gauls. The Romans won because they were civilized and the Gauls were barbarians. Both peoples were harsh with enemies, but the Gauls were savage; their priests practiced human sacrifice, their military and civilian rulers practiced torture. Caesar’s Romans do not engage in these excesses, although they are quite capable of destroying enemy towns and killing all the inhabitants. Further, Caesar exercises clemency with those who surrender to him. In his rhetoric, Caesar invokes spiritedness, the desire for just vengeance, while immediately moderating it; in his rhetoric, Vercingetorix deprecates Roman reason, which he calls mere cunning and skill. Caesar’s Gauls are weak-minded, unable to sustain major military reverses and prey to rumors; Caesar’s Roman are steadfast, capable of courage, not mere bravery. Gaul is ruled by priests and warriors, Rome by civilians capable of war who have subordinated the priests to civic purposes.

 

 

 

Julius Caesar: Gallic War. In The Landmark Julius Caesar. Edited and translated by Kurt A. Raaflaub. New York: Anchor Books, 2017.

 

Caesar came, saw, and conquered, frequently, but why? In his excellent introduction to this volume, Kurt A. Raaflaub remarks that the Gallic War goes well beyond military history, encompassing geopolitics, comparative politics, and ethics. He calls Caesar’s book “an education in Romanness,” and truer words have seldom been written. One may add that for Caesar, Romanness isn’t merely Roman. Romanness is the preeminent example of what man, a citizen, and a country should be. Scarcely some latter-day ‘cultural relativist,’ Caesar intends to show Romans why they deserve the vaster empire he and his men have won for them and what virtues will be needed to keep it. He does so, not in the manner of a moralist—a Seneca, a Cicero—who names and describes the virtues, inquiring into human nature, but as one who shows these virtues in actions. The original title of the book was Res gestae—simply, “achievements,” and particularly public achievements. ‘Caesar’ is the public man, almost exclusively, not the private man who married, cut business deals, and wenched. ‘Caesar’ isn’t Julius; he is the model Roman and therefore the model man and citizen, preeminently worthy of emulation, just as ‘De Gaulle’ in Charles de Gaulle’s memoirs isn’t Charles but the model Frenchman, the man ‘of Gaul’ who understands that when the French follow that part of their heritage that the Roman conquest bestowed upon them, “all is well.” 

Caesar designs the Gallic War as a narrative proof of the Roman right to empire, the justice of Romans’ claim to rule the others. The three parts into which Gaul is divided, ruled by the Belgae, the Aquitani, and the Celts, differ in languages, institutions, and laws, and the peoples of Gaul also differ from the surrounding peoples—Germans, Britons—and from the many Gallic tribes even differ from one another—the Helvetii from the Boii from the Sequani, and so on. But almost all of these tribes and peoples strive for rule by means of warfare. Some are more warlike than others, but there isn’t a commercial republic, a Venice or a Singapore, among them. In Caesar’s victories, in his way of war and his way of peace, Romanness demonstrates its superiority over Gaulishness, Germanness, Britishness. Given the universal human political purpose of ruling, and the universal human military means to that end, the Romans excel everyone because their regime, their way of life, brings them victory and sustains them in their rule over their defeated rivals.

Romanness could weaken, however. Caesar sees that, too. The “most warlike” Gauls are the Belgae “because they are the farthest from the civilized sophistication” of Transalpine Gaul, the province ruled by Rome; “merchants come to them least often with imports that foster an effeminate disposition; they are also the closest to the Germans living across the Rhine River, and they are constantly at war with them.” The Helvetii, too, “surpass all the Gauls except the Belgae in bravery,” fights the Germans “in almost daily battles, either trying to keep them out of their own country or else actually waging war in the Germans’ territory.” Potentially, Rome might endanger itself by its own civilized way of life, which might foster ‘effeminacy’ or weakness, cowardice, softness. To keep the edge of its moral sword sharp, to maintain the virtus of its citizens, it needs war, imperial rule, even if that rule might, if fully secured, lend itself to what Montesquieu would later call the decadence of the Romans.

At the same time, warlikeness alone fails on the battlefields it craves when set against Roman civilization. In 61 B.C., “the most noble and wealthy person” among the Helvetii was Orgetorix. “Tempted by desire for kingship,” he allied with the aristocrats (his fellow ambitieux) and “persuaded his nation to leave their own territory with all their forces” on a mission to “take over the whole of Gaul and rule it.” Geopolitically, “the Helvetii are closed in on all sides by natural boundaries”: the Rhine River on one side, separating them from the Germans, the mountain range separating them from the Sequani, and the waters of Lake Lemannus and the Rhône, separating them from the Roman province. We can break out of nature’s confines, Orgetorix asserted, since we “excel all others in bravery.” But Orgetorix never got out of (the future) Switzerland, betrayed by an informer and brought to trial. A ‘populist’ of sorts, as indeed Caesar himself had been and would continue to be, on his own road to kingship, Orgetorix escaped by summoning some ten thousand slaves and freedmen clients from throughout the country. He was soon hunted down and recaptured, dying by what might have been suicide.

But even so, “the Helvetii did not give up their efforts to realize their intention to migrate from their country.” In 58 B.C., with their Gallic allies, including the Boii (latterly the Bohemians or Hungarians), they planned a mission to occupy the territory of the Santones. But between that territory and Helvetia lay either the territory of the Sequani or the province of the Romans. Geographically, the route through Transalpine Gaul was the easier to traverse. News of this plan brought them to the attention of Caesar, “hastened to leave the city” of Rome and, “by the most strenuous marches possible…hurried to Ulterior [or ‘Cisalpine’] Gaul and arrived near Genava.” Repeatedly, Caesar will cite Romans’ excellent ‘intel,’ as we now call it, their “celerity,” their quickness to act in light of such information, and their energy in so acting. The surprised Helvetii assured him that they merely intended to pass through the Roman province, doing no harm. They asked permission to do so, which Caesar had no intention of granting, for several reasons. One concerns justice and memory. He “remembered well that the Helvetii had killed the consul Lucius Cassius, routed his army, and sent it under the yoke”—this, nearly fifty years earlier. That is, he “remembers” the event not from experience but from the histories he has read, and perhaps from the accounts he heard as a child. Romanness is mindful; Romanness remembers. Romans write histories. More immediately, knowing not only the plan of the Helvetii but their warlike nature, he doubts that such a people, with their “hostile attitude,” “would be disciplined enough to refrain from committing outrage against persons or property” as they passed through Roman territory. Romanness is mindful in more than justice and in memory but in prudence.

In his prudence, Caesar duly noted that his legion alone could hardly survive a battle with the Helvetii on their own territory. Temporizing, he told their emissaries that he would consider their proposal, that they should return at a set date for his answer. This would enable Roman reinforcements to arrive. Meanwhile, he set his soldiers to work building a long wall and digging a trench along it, placing outposts at intervals along these structures and fortifying them, “so that he could prevent the Helvetii from crossing over more easily if they tried to defy his orders.” When the emissaries returned, he cited “the custom and precedent of the Roman people,” which “did not allow him to let any people make their way through the Province.” Custom and precedent being defenseless in themselves, “he made it clear that he would prevent them if they tried to apply force.” This they did attempt, but his defensive measures prevented them from crossing the Rhōne. 

This left the Helvetii with the alternative possible route, thought the territory of the Sequani. Geographically, this passage was too narrow to traverse without their permission, and that was not forthcoming. They asked an ally of theirs (Caesar calls him their “friend,” in the Aristotelian sense of a political friend), an Aeduan, Dumnorix, to serve as an intermediary, as he was “very influential among the Sequani,” owing to his “kindness and generosity to them.” [1] (His bond with the Helvetii was his marriage to the daughter of Orgetorix, the originator of their planned expedition.) Like his late father-in-law, Dumnorix wanted the kingship of his people “and was eagerly scheming for political change; thus he wanted to have as many nations as possible bound to him through his favors.” He agreed to the proposed diplomatic intervention and succeeded in winning both the Sequani’s and the Aedui’s consent to Helvetian passage into the territory of the Santones.

Well informed as always, Caesar learned of this and liked it no more than the Helvetii’s preferred route through the Province. In this, he displayed his prudential sense of geopolitical advantage. The Santones lived near the Province; Helvetian occupation of that territory “would place the Province in great danger with a warlike population, enemies of the Roman people, right next to land that was open to attack and very abundant in grain crops.” Again exhibiting Roman celerity and energy, “he rushed to Italy by long marches,” enrolled reinforcements and returned to Transalpine Gaul “by the shortest way through the Alps.” By June of 58, he had five legions poised across the Rhône from the Helvetii. Calling attention to Roman prudence again, he notes that before leaving for Italy he had installed his legate Titus Labienus as the officer in charge of the fortifications along the river. Labienus was a tribune of the Roman plebeians; Caesar’s political and military friendship with him betokens Caesar’s own ‘populist’ strategy in Roman politics. Caesar is the wiser Orgetorix; where the ambitious Gaul failed, he will succeed, both as conqueror of Gaul and, not so long afterwards, king of the empire he expanded far northward. 

He attacked and routed the Tigurini, one of the four Helvetian tribes, along the east side of the Arar River (today’s Saône). This was the tribe that had killed Lucius Cassius and sent his army under the yoke. “Thus, whether it was by chance or by the design of the immortal gods, the part of the Helvetian people that had brought this immense calamity on the Roman people was the first to suffer punishment”; having been elected Pontifex Maximus, Caesar allows himself the occasional glance at Rome’s civil religion. And the occasional glance at his family: “Caesar was avenging not only a public outrage but a private one as well,” as “the Tigurini had killed the legate Lucius Piso, the grandfather of his father-in-law, in the same battle in which they had killed Cassius.” The Roman memory is long, and so is the reach of its justice.

Caesar had his soldiers built a bridge over the river in order to pursue the other Helvetii, who “were very disturbed at his sudden arrival.” They had taken twenty days to get across the river but Caesar, in his celerity—made possible by Rome’s superior civilization in the form of military engineering—got across in only one. The unpleasantly surprised Helvettii sent emissaries to him, and the head of the delegation argued as follows: make peace with us and we will go and stay wherever you say, but if you continue to wage war, “remember the Romans’ past misfortune and the warlike spirit the Helvetii had always shown.” Our virtue is bravery, not cunning—evidently a suggestion that Caesar’s surprise maneuver must have been some sort of trick. The emissary thinks and speaks like a citizen of Crete or Sparta as described in the opening of Plato’s Laws. Caesar replies that he does indeed remember the Romans’ past misfortune at the hands of the Helvetii, “and to the extent that the Roman people had not deserved what had happened to them, he was even more outraged.” You Helvetians were the tricksters, then, catching the Romans off guard by attacking them for no reason. And currently, they had attempted to trespass on Roman territory and had “rendered the lives of” Rome’s Gallic allies, the Aedui, Ambarri, and Allogbroges, “miserable.” As for your past victory, again speaking as Pontifex Maximus, with Roman auctoritas, “it was the habit of the immortal gods,” whose memories are even longer than those of the Romans, when they wished to take vengeance on people for a crime, to give them unusually good luck for some time and hold off punishing them in order to cause them even more pain later from the drastic change in their circumstances.” All this notwithstanding, Caesar exhibited another Roman virtue, magnanimity; he would overlook these acts of injustice if the Helvetii provided hostages (insurance against any treaty violation) and compensated the Aedui and the Allobroges for the damages they had inflicted upon them. The Helvetian rejected the offer, proudly announcing that the Helvetian way was “to receive hostages, not give them”—thereby illustrating the difference between Roman magnanimity and Helvetian hubris.

Preparing to continue the war, Caesar demanded the grain his Aeduan allies had promised for his troops and animals. He then learned something about the Aeduan regime. Their “highest official” admitted to him that the unofficial and real rulers of the Aedui were holding back the grain and making patriotic appeals to the Gauls to expel the Romans. The hapless man protested that “there was no way that he could gain control over these people,” and that in betraying their secret plan he was putting his own life at risk. The Aeduan regime was no ally of Rome, at all, and Caesar suspected that its head was Dumnorix, the Aeduan who had ties with both the Helvetii and the Sequani. Liscus admitted as much in a private conference, explaining that Dumnorix, “a man with singular boldness, armed with huge influence among the lower classes because of his generosity,” had obtained lucrative conflicts by intimidating all rivals, thereby “accumulat[ing] lavish means for bribery” and supporting a small private army. He hated the Romans because he calculated, as the husband of a Helvetian, that the Helvetii would support his ambitions for a kingship, while the Romans, if victorious, would reduce the influence he had amassed. 

Caesar would have done just that, except that Dumnorix’s brother, Diviciacus, had long exhibited “the highest devotion to the Roman people, the greatest goodwill toward himself, and outstanding loyalty, justice, and moderation”; Caesar “was afraid that punishment of Dumnorix would strike Diviciacus to the heart.” The true Roman exhibits fides, trustworthiness. Moreover, to rule like a Roman, one must understand political friends and enemies alike, not only in their political ambitions but in their family connections. In their interview, Diviciacus tearfully confessed that he knew of his brother’s treachery, acknowledged that he had even undermined Diviciacus’ own position among the Aedui, but still begged Caesar not to deal with him “too harshly.” He asked this out of “brotherly love” and also because all the Gauls would assume that it was Diviciacus who had betrayed his brother to the Romans. In response, “Caesar took his right hand. He calmed him and asked him to stop begging. He said that Diviciacus’ friendship was worth so much to him that he would refrain from punishment for the outrage done to the Roman state and overlook his own hurt feelings in order to accommodate Diviciacus’ wish and requests.” He contented himself by bringing Dumnorix before him, laying out the charges against him, then letting him off with a warning and taking the precaution of “assign[ing] guards to Dumnorix so that he could be informed of what he did and with whom he spoke.” 

Having thus assured himself allied support, he moved against the Helvetii. At the town of Bibracte he fought and won a “long and bitterly contested battle,” which resulted in Helvetian surrender with the exception of 6,000 men from the tribe of the Verdigeni, who fled across the Rhine into German territory. Caesar ordered their pursuit and capture, punishing them with death. As for the remaining Helvetii, he ordered them to return to their own territory after they rebuilt the towns and villages they’d burned. “He did not want the land they had left to remain empty; it was good land for agriculture”; without them on it, “the Germans living across the Rhine would cross from their own territory into that of the Helvetiii and thus become the neighbors of the Gallic Province and especially of the Allobrogres.” A Roman understands the need for geopolitical buffers.

The war finished, Caesar received emissaries from “nearly all of Gaul,” who offered congratulations on his victory. Although they knew he’d waged war for the sake of Rome, “the outcome had proven no less useful” to them. “The Helvetii had been extremely prosperous in their homeland, but they had left it with the intention to wage war on Gaul in its entirety, to establish their rule over it, and to choose, out of a great number of possibilities in the Gallic territory, whatever area seemed most suitable and fertile, turning all the other nations into tribute-paying dependents.” With Caesar’s permission, they requested a secret meeting amongst themselves, the outcome of which was a petition to Caesar, delivered by Diviciacus. 

Caesar’s political friend explained that Gaul had many tribes but only two main factions, the Aedui leaders of one, the Averni of the other. With their principal allies, the Sequani, the Aedui had attempted to break the military deadlock by inviting the Germans into Gaul. “Then, when these wild barbarians got a taste for the fertile land, the way of life, and the wealth of the Gauls,” they brought over still more troops, which now numbered around 120,000. The Aedui and their client states had “lost their whole leading class, their whole council, the whole of their cavalry class” in war with this coalition, either in battle or as hostages. Even the Germans’ Sequani allies had had a third of their lands confiscated by order of the German king, the tyrannical Ariovistus. He had ordered them out of another third. “It would not be many years before all the Gauls were driven out of their own territory and all the Germans had crossed the Rhine.” Only Rome could prevent this. 

Caesar assured them that he could and would. The Aedui were longtime allies of Rome. “Given the greatness of the empire of the Roman people,” he considered their distress “extremely shameful both to himself and to his state.” German expansion was also dangerous “to the Roman people,” given the unlikelihood that such “a wild and barbarous people” as the Germans would content themselves with the conquest of Gaul, only. Marauding German tribes had descended into the Italian peninsula before. To these threats to Roman honor and Roman lives, he added the character of Ariovistus, who had become “so proud and arrogant that his behavior was no longer tolerable.” His regime was tyrannical, the enemy of Roman republicanism. Moreover, “Caesar came to believe that he should take action against this threat as quickly as possible” because the Gauls who had talked with his own soldiers had frightened them with tales of German military prowess. “Panicked babbling” threatened to make cowards of them all, de-Romanizing them, undermining not only the Roman empire but the Roman regime that had cultivated the virtues by which Romans had won that empire, preeminently courage.

After Ariovistus refused to meet Caesar’s emissaries, Caesar called a meeting of his officers. As a citizen of the Roman republic, Caesar had studied the art of rhetoric, and he now exhibited it. He argued as follows: Ariovistus “would not reject either Caesar’s or the Roman people’s friendship,” once he had duly considered his proposals. “But if, driven by insane rage, he should start a war, what did they actually have to fear? Why had they lost trust in their own bravery or Caesar’s competence?” The Cimbrian and Teutonic tribes had in fact been defeated, decades earlier, by troops under the command of Gaius Marius. The Roman army had also put down a slave rebellion in Italy, winning a dangerous civil war. Given these victories, “it could be judged how beneficial firmness of courage is”—in contrast to the insane rage of the barbarian tyrant, which is no virtue at all. Indeed, the Germans had often been defeated by the Helvetii in their never-ending wars, and we just defeated the Helvetii. The only reason Ariovistus had rolled up his victories against the Gauls was that the Gauls were war-weary and because the Germans had surprised them. “His victory had thus been achieved by calculation and planning rather than bravery”—the same argument the Helvetian emissary had deployed against Caesar. “Though such a strategy could work against inexperienced barbarians” like the Gauls, “not even Ariovistus himself could hope that our armies would be fooled by it.” If any of your fellow officers conceal their fear “by pretending concern for the grain supply or the narrow roads,” you should understand that they are as arrogant as the Helvetii had been, “lacking confidence in their general’s ability to do his duty or else by daring to tell him how to do it.” As a matter of fact, Rome’s Gallic allies have already guaranteed the grain supply and he, Caesar, had mapped out a good route into German-ruled territory. His authority derives not only from his capability but his virtue: “Whenever armies had refused to obey their general’s orders, it was because of a setback when the general’s luck failed, or lese some crime had been found out and financial misconduct prover,” but “his own life had been shown to be blameless throughout, and his good fortune was apparent from the war with the Helvetii.” Having readied a just and reasonable peace offer, having exposed his enemy’s irrationality, having exhibited his own good fortune, owing to his own courage and prudence, and relying on his officers’ fides with respect to their commander’s authority and on the officers’ and soldiers’ courage—the virtue Gallic gossip about Ariovistus’ enormities had tested—it was now time to act. He drew the logical conclusion, a command to action: “move camp during the fourth watch of the coming night, in order to find out as soon as possible whether his soldiers were motivated by self-respect and duty or by cowardice.” However that may turn out, he still has his 10th Legion, “about which he could not have any doubts and which would in the future serve in the function of a praetorian cohort,” a just honor in return for their fidelity and courage. No worry of that, however, since “By the time Caesar had ended his speech, the attitude of all those present was marvelously transformed, and they were filled with the greatest enthusiasm and passion to start the war.”

Tyrants being moved more by the actions than by the words of others, Ariovistus, recovering his reason, now agreed to the meeting he’d earlier refused. With a precautionary guard, Caesar came to the enemy camp, offering an alliance. Reminding Ariovistus of gifts he’d received from Caesar and the Senate in the past and of the Romans’ firm alliance with the Aedui. The Aedui had enjoyed “a position of leadership” among the Gauls before their alliance with Rome. Rome had done nothing to ruin that position, it being “the habit of the Roman people to wish not only that their allies and friends were not deprived of anything that belonged to them but also that their influence, status, and honor were enhanced.” Germans too can enjoy such an alliance, if they desist from making war on the Aedui or their allies, return the hostages, and bring no more men across the Rhine. To this, Ariovistus replied that he crossed the Rhine at the invitation of the Gauls; the Gallic lands he ruled were granted to him by the Gauls; the Gauls started the war against him, and he won; he was prepared to renew the war if the Gauls offered war, but in any case, he had fought an exclusively defensive war. As to the Romans, he had arrived in Gaul “before the Romans did.” The Romans “were wrong in obstructing him in pursuing his rights.” He doubted the alleged firmness of the Roman-Aedui alliance, in view of the lack of mutual military support in recent wars. If it came to war between himself and Caesar and if he killed Caesar, “he would be doing a favor to many noblemen and leaders of the Roman people,” who disliked and distrusted the ambitious general, but if Caesar left and agreed to his “unlimited control over Gaul, Ariovistus would reward him on a grand scale, and whatever wars he wanted waged, he would carry them out for him with no effort or danger on his own part.”

Drawing upon Roman memory, preserved in Roman histories, Caesar denied that the Germans’ claim on Gaul predated that of the Romans, recalling the victory of Quintus Fabius Maximus over the Averni and Ruteni and 121 B.C. At the time, “the Roman people had forgiven them and neither turned their country into a province nor forced them to pay tribute,” unlike Ariovistus. The Senate had decreed Gallic freedom: “after it had been defeated in war, [it] was to live by its own laws.” This implies that the gradual conquest of Gaul the Germans were undertaking could have no legitimacy in the eyes not only of Caesar but of the Roman republic. 

Sure enough, while this talk was going on, Ariovistus’ horsemen had been moving closer to the site, harassing the Roman troops. Ending the discussion, Caesar withdrew with his soldiers, making sure that a report of this conduct and of Ariovistus’ words circulated throughout his camp. “The army was fired up much more and inspired with an even greater keenness to fight.” Upon receiving another invitation to parley, Caesar declined to attend personally, sending emissaries instead, whom Ariovistus put in chains. This was a just casus belli. In September 58, the two armies fought along the Dubis River. Though outnumbered, the Romans won and the Germans fled, as did Ariovistus. 

“Having, in a single summer, brought two very significant wars to a conclusion, Caesar led the army to winter quarters among the Sequani.” Leaving Labienus in charge, he then returned to Cisalpine Gaul where, as provincial governor, he presided over the judicial hearings—that is, returning to civil life in peacetime and the rule of justice under law, which must be secured before it can be practiced. Such is Roman gravitasi, seriousness.

The First Book of the Gallic War shows why a statesman like de Gaulle rested content with the historical memory of the Roman conquest while bitterly resisting the Germans. In his estimation, from antiquity to the midpoint of the 20th century, Germany never really abandoned its barbaric ethos. Despite its vaunted Kultur, German still remained the home of “sublime and glaucous monsters,” with a military elite that perpetually overreached itself because it lacked mesure. German thinkers often despised mere ‘civilization,’ contrasting it with that Kultur, and that, in de Gaulle’s view, typified the problem. By contrast, the Caesar of the Gallic War embodies a measured, balanced, civilized regime, exhibiting the classical virtues of courage, moderation, justice, and prudence, along with the crowning virtue of magnanimity. Frenc grandeur, as de Gaulle understood it, owed its origin to this Roman greatness, blended with the energy and independence, the passion for self-government, native to the Gauls and later refined by the influence of a Christianity both Roman and rightly ‘imperial’ or ‘catholic.’ 

Neither de Gaulle nor Caesar saw anything unrealistic about these virtues, as Machiavelli famously proclaimed, arguing instead for what he called virtù, which substitutes vulpine shrewdness for classical prudence and leonine rage for classical courage, eschewing justice and moderation, and ignoring magnanimity. Contra Machiavelli, the classical virtues lend themselves to mindfulness of what de Gaulle calls “the realities”: provisioning and organizing troops, forming alliances, seeking knowledge of shifting political and military alliances, knowing how to speak to military officers and soldiers alike. He does not show how to speak to civilians from patricians to plebs, although he indicates that he can do that, too; in this, de Gaulle was far more instructive. But he does show that military virtues can entitle the victors to rule an empire, if those virtues encompass a substantially wider range than a warrior people’s characteristic bravery and cunning. In the Gallic War, Caesar teaches Romanness to his readers, elevating the ambitious souls of those who study it with the most ardor to citizenship in Rome and to civilization in the world.

 

Note

1. The political friendship illustrated here is the friendship between equals. Political friendships or alliances may or may not be between equals; in Latin, the words for equal and unequal friendships are not the same.

 

Charles Maurras: The Future of the Intelligentsia & For a French Reawakening. Edited and translated by Alexander Jacob. London: Arktos Press, 2016.

 

Almost no one reads him in America. Catholic-sympathizing royalists—Maurras himself was an agnostic whose writings were anathematized by the pope in the 1920s—one who came down on the wrong side of French regime struggles from the Dreyfus ‘affair’ to the Vichy demi-government’s collaboration with France’s Nazi conquerors, tend to get little notice, here. Yet in France, the spirit of Action française, the movement whose journal Maurras edited from its inception in 1899, survives in attenuated form, and so does the organization—no longer a full-fledged political party but a sort of think-tank dedicated to teaching young ‘Right-wing’ activists. It remains staunchly monarchist and patriotic, opposing both French republicanism and federation within the bureaucratized auspices of the European Union. Maurras himself remains a perceptive cultural historian, and not without some telling political thoughts, despite his almost uniformly bad political judgment and virulent antisemitism.

Maurras admits his own imprudence near the beginning of his 1905 book, The Future of the Intelligentsia. Characteristically, he wraps his admission in hauteur: paying homage to his friend, the writer René-Marc Ferry, founder of a short-lived journal Minerva, Maurras recalls, “We imagined that the Attic olive tree and the Latin laurel united in the French fashion would definitely make the people rush to us,” but “we did not take into account a small fact,” that “the good people were dead,” that the “refined and cultivated society” of old Paris “does not exist any longer.” “We did not want to believe it,” and in encouraging the Quixotic effort Ferry proved himself “too good for your century.” “The enlightened love of letters, and much more the love of philosophy” have perished. Without the “humanist literature,” the arts and sciences become increasingly barbaric, as European politics has become. “I would like to be wrong, but, after so many years of very refined intellectual life, a French high class that does not want to read any more seems to me to be close to its downfall,” and “the bad taste of the new masters” now dominates. Although he detests what he takes to be the internationalism of French Jews, he respects their esteem for “an intelligentsia”; Jews “would not commit the pathetic errors, the omissions, the confusions in which the good faith of our friends may allow itself to get lost.”

Very well, then. Ferry’s strategy didn’t work because it no longer could work. Political and social circumstances have changed. Since “today, everybody is armed and trained,” so too must the intelligentsia be. “For a long time, we have no longer been able to walk and discuss things under the plane trees,” like the interlocutors in Plato’s Phaedrus. We intellectuals must therefore move from political philosophy to political action. “Action! And I ask for nothing better.” Move from the Phaedrus to Maurice Barrès’s Les déracinés, the novel chronicling young Frenchmen from Lorraine who lose their way, morally and spiritually, in contemporary Paris. Restoration of the life of the mind can only come from vigorous political action, now, action in defense of French monarchy and, to the extent now possible, France’s traditional way of life. Can this be done? “No mind can flatter itself that it has a really satisfactory and certain knowledge of the future. To foresee, even try to foresee, is a sickness of the heart” because “the future is either fear or hope,” and to fear and hope rightly comes only from underlying sentiments well refined. The first of these is patriotism, the opposite of deracination, love of one’s own soil and the ways of one’s own people. Thought severed from the sensibility fostered by the old regime has only led to the “mechanism of modern moeurs,” its power animating the “electric wagon that moves dividing the world into plebeians and patricians.” Modernity founds itself on the “material forces” of “blood and money”; discarding its kings and aristocrats, the French have “passed under the rod of the financial merchants who are of another flesh than ours, that is to say, of another language and another thought”; here is the locus of his animus toward Jews, Germans, and (not incidentally) the great commercial republics of England and America. “Fortunately, the conquering force is not single,” as “blood and money combat each other.” If only the intelligentsia will act, act not as a moderating arbiter between the two forces but as a force that tips the balance from money to blood, to nationality, then it will reverse intellectual deracination and vulgarization while winning an ally with the material force intelligence needs to protect itself but cannot wield directly. “The interest of the man who thinks may be to have more money, but the interest of thought is to attach itself to a free country, which only the hereditary virtue of blood will be able to maintain. In this free country thought equally reclaims order, that which blood can establish and maintain.” Maurras recognizes the need for “wise and prudent” action, even as he fails signally, and will continue to fail signally, to achieve wisdom and prudence. 

Maurras links intelligence to spirituality, the spirituality of the Catholic Church. He is thinking of the French Catholic Church, remaining a sharp critic of spiritual internationalism along with financial internationalism. Under this noticeably ‘secularized’ Catholicism, “if one wishes to avoid an individualism that suits only Protestants, the moral question becomes once again a social question: no customs without institutions.” As in Barrès, so in Maurras: the individual can cultivate himself only as a member of immortal nation, and the nation cannot survive if it attempts to rule itself under the regime of democracy. 

It is here that Maurras begins his cultural history of France, a history intended to counteract the contemporary illusion that the power and prestige of men of letters is at its zenith. After all, most intellectuals now suppose, under democracy “the most certain of facts is that we live under a government of public opinion,” and we intellectuals “are the people who extract this opinion and set it to work,” even “creat[ing] it, bring[ing] it into the world,” making us “masters of everything.” “The swords of yesterday have been beaten not into ploughshares but into printing presses,” instruments of the coming “sovereignty of the intelligentsia.” Maurras dismisses this illusion. “No conception of the future is more wrong, even though it is presented to us with equal clarity and warmth.” 

The intelligentsia consists of men of letters, poets, orators, philosophers—those who wield “the power of the word”—but Maurras will center his historical account on the men of letters. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, “letters served their function as an adornment of the world,” striving to “soften polish, and amend common moeurs.” “They were the interpreters and, as it were, the voices of love, the sting of pleasure, the enchantment of long winters and long old age”; “they did not yet claim to govern.” An absolute monarch, a Louis XIV, “would not at all have tolerated” such pretensions,” and when orators, philosophers, and poets ventured to present the best regime for the state they did it ‘Platonically,” “almost always by avoiding seeking an immediate application and a serious realization.” They might invoke pagan themes but seldom if ever “deviat[ed] from the doctrines of the Gospel.” In all this, they displayed “measure and character.” The effects of letters on customs were “indirect and distant”—intentionally so. 

The eighteenth century saw an entirely different approach. The Enlightenment intelligentsia aimed at reform and indeed at revolution; more, they aimed at ruling, first undermining the existing regime with satire and then reaching for control of it. This could happen because “the genius and modesty of their predecessors of the grand siècle had ensured their credibility.”  Rousseau enjoyed the authority to “usurp the attributes of the prince, those of the priest and even of all the people, for,” being Swiss, “he was not even the subject of the king, nor a member of any large military state of significance in the Europe of that time.” To hold in one’s hands monarchic, priestly, and popular authority amounts to tyranny, “the general dictatorship of letters.” Moreover, in the eighteenth century “letters reigned not as virtuous or just,” not according to the natural principles of politics, “but precisely as letters,” “call[ing] itself Reason.” This so-called reason “accorded neither with the physical laws of reality or with the logical laws of thought”; its victory was therefore “absurd.” “When the royal authority disappeared, it did not at all, as is said, cede to the sovereignty of the people; the successor of the Bourbons is the man of letters.” The Bourbons unwittingly collaborated in their own demise. Thanks to the efforts of the intelligentsia, “a new order of feelings was introduced in hearts, and affected practical life, towards 1789.” They, and the French aristocracy, crucially including the military officers, by then “seriously doubted the justice of their cause and the legitimacy of this work of leadership and government that they had in public office.” Maurras remarks that the same sort of timid abdication occurred again in the revolution of 1848-1850, and not only in France. It was not a matter of lacking coglione, as Bonaparte rather unkindly asserted. “The Revolution had taken place in the depths of their mentality,” minds molded not by philosophy but “philosophism.” 

From 1789, “no government was more literary,” a judgment confirmed by the political sociologist Michael Mann, who writes that the French revolutionaries would have made “a fine ‘Department of Western Civilization.'” [1] “The governing ideas are the ideas of the ‘philosophes,'” Maurras observes, and “the system of morals and institutions that they had formerly composed in private, they imposed steadily on public life.” Since “the majority of the ideas of that time were imprecise,” general, abstracted from social and political reality, the revolutionaries’ actions “entailed a large number of mutilations and destructions even when [their method] served just ideas,”; reaching for the realization of ideals that could exist only in their minds, “our men of letters were therefore induced to spare neither things nor persons.” As for their sometime collaborator and eventual successor, Napoleon Bonaparte, “one should savor the ideologue in him”; “he represents the crowned man of letters,” the self-conscious beneficiary of Rousseau and Voltaire, the continuer of the Revolution “and with it all that the literature of the eighteenth century dreamed of,” turning it into the Napoleonic Code. This gave Napoleon’s regime coherence. But it was the coherence of “dreams without substance.” To this day, to the beginning of the twentieth century, “all our misfortunes flow from these mendacious appearances,” which “contradict the profound necessities of the real order.” In this, Napoleon may rightly be considered the heir of Enlightenment rationalism and “the greatest poet of French Romanticism.” 

Despite this, he was also “the last of the nationalist statesmen” in France and a military genius. In this aspect of his soul and his actions Napoleon I “personifies the ironic and harsh response of the military men of the XIX century to the literary dreams of the XVIII.” Infected though they were by “philosophism” (Napoleon himself claimed, perhaps pretended, that “I draw up my battle plans from the dreams of my sleeping soldiers”), the harsh facts of warfare kept them at least partially grounded in reality. 

This left nineteenth-century France with a knot of contradictions, never unraveled. Revolutionary literature was universal, but nineteenth century politics was nationalist. Revolutionary literature understood labor-capital relations as individualistic, man to man, worker to boss, but nineteenth century economics was industrial, impersonal, corporate. These relations were concealed, if poorly, by the “absurd, odious, and fragile core of the legal fictions” that supported them. Since “the men of letters did not understand anything of the workers movement but what it presented in a revolutionary way, instead of building with it, they contradicted it in its organizational work and stimulated it in its destructive effort,” “embitter[ing] it and lead[ing] it to violence.” “Thus everything that the force of events undertook that was useful or necessary”—the possible rapprochement between workers and capitalists—the “literary intelligentsia led astray or contested methodically.” The authority of these intelligentsia quite rightly began to decline. Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Balzac, Hugo—none wielded the authority of Voltaire and Rousseau. The men of letters who did share in ruling France—the royalist prime minister after the Bourbon restoration, the Comte de Villèle, Napoleon III’s prime minister, Émile Olivier, and Third Republic prime minister Léon Gambetta—all “presented themselves as practitioners [of politics]; they would have been offended by being put in the same company as Rousseau.” “Their common ambition was to present themselves first of all as statesmen and men of action,” as indeed Maurras and his allies sought to do in the next century, with considerably less success.

Despite its decimation in the Revolution, the old aristocracy survived. Understandably, aristocrats viewed the parvenu intelligentsia with suspicion. Understandably but ill-advisedly: “It would have been wise to restrain sly smiles and to retain insults that were often paid dearly.” “The inorganic condition of society, the instability of governments, in this regard, permitted only movements of passion.” That is, contra Tocqueville’s advice, the aristocrats failed to reassume their rightful function, and “neither a directed politics nor a tradition” would be rebuilt. [2] The remnants of “old France” might invite the intelligentsia into its parlors from time to time, but never admitted such persons into their confidence, and so never exerted influence upon them. As a result, “the French intelligentsia of the XIX century continued its career of a dethroned old queen by separating itself increasingly from this other defeated queen, the French high society of the same period,” isolating itself from her or revolting against her. It appealed, Caesarlike, Napoleonlike, not to “its natural public” but to the crowd and drew much of its inspiration not from French but from German and English sources. The patriotism French letters and their readers accordingly declined.

Meanwhile, industrial capitalism and its captains of industry enriched not only themselves but spread affluence throughout the country. “The new luxury was in its principle an increase in comfort, a more intelligent adjustment of life, the means of being worth more, of acting more, the multiplication of the facilities of power.” It enables “the rich man of today…to move as he pleases,” making him more cosmopolitan, more ‘internationalist,’ than the old aristocrats, who were bound to the land and the people on and near their land. Money no longer leveled class distinctions, as it had done in the time of transition of the ruling classes from the feudal lords to the bourgeoisie. Money now “accentuated the old separations or rather dug quite new ones.” One separation that widened was that “between the French intelligentsia and the representatives of the French interest, French power, those of the past or of the present.” “Incorporeal in nature, incapable of possessing or administering the material order, the intelligentsia penetrates this new life and this new world as a visitor,” having no part in it.

Today, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the mechanized character of industrial capitalism “has complicated the material life of the French higher classes,” differentiating it from the other classes, very much including the intelligentsia, which “find[s] itself rejected and excluded from a certain circle of life.” Modern life in the new regime has left the men of letters behind. Insofar as they do participate in that regime, they themselves become industrialized, so to speak. Like capitalists, they produce works appealing to the ‘mass market.’ They do make money, but not enough to join the ranks of the really rich. Their prosperity amounts only to “the false colors of glory,” not the real thing. A writer today, lacking the patronage of the old aristocrats, now find themselves subject to “the most diffuse and soft, the most fleeting and colorless of popularities.” “As a pure business, literature, is thus a bad business and men of letters are very small manufacturers,” with “mediocrity” as “the dividend of the best merchants of paper copies.”

“I am told that socialism will sort everything out.” Maurras doubts that very much, rejecting the Marxist dream of the omnicompetent ‘new man’ of communism. A writer, Maurras quite sensibly maintains, is seldom a good printer or paper merchant, the example of Benjamin Franklin notwithstanding. In expecting historical laws to transform human nature, socialists bet on a chimera, no strong horse. “Socialism cannot change very much in this natural law”: in human nature one sees not “fixed quantities that may vary with the economic and political conditions but a psychological relationship that is maintained when the quantities are altered,” ensuring that the ‘type’ of the man of letters seldom combines with the ‘type’ of the businessman. “The merchant remains a merchant and the poet a poet,” regardless of whether wealth becomes equalized across those two classes. And, of course, this will result in the constant recurrence of economic inequalities, whatever the socialist rulers may intend. Meanwhile, under the actual prevailing conditions of capitalist industrialism, writers for now can make money, although Maurras foresees the consolidation of publishing houses that will erect barriers to entry for the men of letters to come. A century later, even the Internet, which promised and delivered on its capacity to ensure every writer a means of publishing, becomes increasingly ‘policed,’ as it already is under the state-socialist regime of China. “That is the fact of all forces. It is impossible to approach them without their seeking to submit and enslave.”

Conditions of literary work under the new oligarchy will force the writer “to exchange a little of outspokenness for money,” causing him to flex “his taste, his opinions before the financial power of his newspaper, journal or bookshop.” Literary independence remains only for those who are independently wealthy (in the past, La Rochefoucauld) or those content in poverty (Diogenes, St. Francis).  Having “proposed to have the world at his feet,” he “suddenly finds himself prostrated before the world.” He begins to lose “his raison d’être, the secret of his strength and his power, which consists in being determined only considerations of the intellectual order. His thought will cease to be the pure mirror of the world and will participate in these simple exchanges of action and passion that form the life of the vulgar person. Thus, the only liberty that there is will be threatened in him; in him the human mind runs a risk of being captured.” And they will be hunted, since “the moment that the intelligentsia has become a capital and it can be exploited very fruitfully, human types had to be born to hunt for it because there is the most magnificent interest in it.”

What is more, and more menacing, there is “a peril that seems more pressing when one observes” it arises: the peril of entanglement in “the market of politics.” There, intellectuals are in demand. “In fact, after our 100 years of Revolution, the masses decorated with the title of a public think that they have been clothed once again with the sovereignty of France”; “whoever directs public opinion is the actual king.” In economic terms, this produces “a surplus value…in favor of these directors of opinion,” those whose “private opinion makes public opinion.” As noted, those who make private opinion are those who pay the intelligentsia, who are merely the ones with the ability to make public opinion. Since the democrats aren’t stupid and ignorant, they tend to suspect the oligarchic mind and the commands it issues behind the intelligentsia’s hired hand. Since the oligarchs are now internationalists, they use their hired hands to shape, or rather misshape, French public opinion in forms that no longer serve the rights and interests of the French. And those oligarchs may not even be from France.

Maurras cites the examples of the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. Before the first war, the “liberal press” in France claimed that Prussia embodied the principles of Voltaire and Frederick the Great against the ‘reactionary’ Catholic monarchy in Vienna. This struck French observers of Bismarck as what we’d now call a bit of a stretch, but no matter—Bismarck himself had already put many among the intelligentsia on his payroll, who went to work deceiving “the benighted masses” about the Iron Chancellor’s intentions. [3] The sad fact is that “patriotism does not make itself felt equal in all the members of the same fatherland,” and it often “requires very large public ills” to remind the public of it. These came soon enough, as an unprepared France lost the 1870 war and the Bonapartist regime collapsed, replaced not by a legitimist monarchy but by the Third Republic. “The democratic journalists, who repeat with a victorious tone that one does not buy opinion, should study in Bismarck how to dupe it.”

“The illusion of French politics is to believe that good sentiments can be maintained and perpetuate themselves by themselves and, in this way sustain in a constant manner the overwhelming care of the state.” On the contrary, Maurras insists, “Good sentiments are good accidents,” unless reinforced by and within institutions, institutions which “should be defended and maintained at all costs.” What France lacked in the 1860s and still lacks now is not patriotism: “We lacked a well-constituted state,” one that “would have been able to police its press and impress on it a suitable direction.” The French state, democratic-republican in name, oligarchic in fact, “a machine to earn money and to consume it, a mechanism without morality, without a fatherland and without a heart,” readily sold itself to the Prussians, leaving itself unprepared for the war in which the victors seized Alsace and Lorraine. “A blind and fluid force, an indifferent power, equally capable of destroying the state as of serving it, the national intelligentsia,” having become like the money it chased, “could be turned against the national interest when foreign money willed it.”

Prussia then, Germany now, along with England, despite their commercial and financial heft, retain their monarchs. There, “money cannot constitute the leader of the state because it is birth and not opinion that creates” the monarch. The monarchic circle “has its own law, irreducible to the forces of money, inaccessible to the movements of opinion: the natural law of blood,” of heredity, of family. This “difference in origin is radical,” functioning “in parallel with the powers of money,” ruling and being ruled by those powers reciprocally, but still capable of “resist[ing] them.” And they can also “direct opinion and ensure the competition of the intelligentsia and reprimand it against the solicitations of money.” The natural law of public opinion, embodied by passion, flows where it will; the quasi-natural law of money flows where it finds opportunities for increase; the natural law of blood flows through the more stable channel of heredity, “a political power distinct from money and opinion.” Even religion proved susceptible to the money power, since by now the state has taken control of religion, and money control of the state. (Maurras neglects to mention that the French state, following Machiavelli, had largely taken control of the French Catholicism during the seventeenth century, which was one reason why the “philosophists” targeted both.) And as for the universities, once ordained and controlled by the Church, they now belong to the state, too, and “through its subsidies, the state controls or at least supervises our different literary or artistic bodies and associations,” as well, binding them to “its master money.” “The French state is uniform and centralized; with its bureaucracy reaching every school reading-desk in every little village, such a state finds itself perfectly armed to precent the constitution of any serious adversary, not only against itself but against the plutocracy of which it is an expression.” 

What of the revolutionaries? The businessmen have ensured their complicity along with that of everyone else, funding both ‘Right’ and ‘Left.’ “In this way it oversees the attacks and can direct them,” especially against any wealth that “retains something personal”—landed wealth and small business, interests more likely to retain a sense of patriotism, sentiments favoring the national rights and interests. Under these conditions, “the intelligentsia will be debased for a long time.” “A foolish moralism will judge everything,” the judges partisans “hypnotized by an idea of the good and evil conceived without any nuance and applied fanatically” in the manner of Tolstoy, that great novelist, inane religionist and vacuous political thinker. “A patrician class in the order of things but a truly democratic barbarity in thought, that is the classification of the near future.”

As for the more distant future, it may improve if the intelligentsia “tries to regain again its order, its fatherland, its natural gods” against an equally disordered, fluid democracy and oligarchy, internationalism, and the unnatural god of money now worshipped universally. To do this, “the best elements of the intelligentsia” must ally themselves with the old aristocrats,” “forc[ing] itself to respect and support our old philosophical and religious traditions.” It may then begin to perform “the true function of the intelligentsia, to see and make visible what regime would be the best, to choose it authoritatively and even to orient the other forces in this direction”—the direction of monarchy. Can the intelligentsia, by exposing public opinion “to feel the profound nullity of its powers” in the face of the oligarchs, not be persuaded to “sign the abdication” of the democracy’s “fictive sovereignty”? Admittedly, that would “demand a commonsense act from one who is deprived of common sense,” but “is it not still possible to find absurd reasons for an act that is not that at all?” In the event, both the Communists and the Nazis would find absurd reasons for absurd and vicious acts, so Maurras’s hope could have had plausibility to some of his fellow litterateurs. “Exposed to perish under a victorious quantity, intellectual quality absolutely does not risk anything in making an effort; if it loves itself, if it loves our last relics of influence and liberty, if it has some visions of the future and some ambition for France, it is fitting for it to lead the reaction of the desperate, “ally[ing] itself with those who try to do something beautiful before sinking.” “In the name of reason and nature, consonant with the ancient laws of the universe, for the welfare of order, for the duration and progress of a threatened civilization, all hopes are borne on the ship of Counter-Revolution.” The problem was that the modern tyranny of Communism and Nazism appealed to the illusion of mass empowerment, whereas Maurras aimed at disillusionment of the democrats, at admitting that they were mistaken in wanting power.

Some four decades later, writing in the middle of the Second World War, and now aligned with General Pétain’s not-so-sovereign regime in Vichy, Maurras continued to ask, “How will France awaken?” [4] In answering, he taps into the Heideggerian vein: “The actions by which France, in the course of its trials, has made an end of its forgetfulness of itself, and has regained possession of its real being its true personality and physical and moral qualities, which are part of its destiny” will stem from asking, “What do we do, what have we done, what are we used to doing and what will we do to emerge from this abyss of evils?” We must consider France’s “past rebirths.” He thus offers a political history of France complementary to the ‘cultural’ history he had written in 1904.

France consists of two strains: the Gallic type, “perfectly defined in the tribes that followed (or did not follow) Vercingetorix around 80 BC,” and the Roman type, whose representatives conquered the Gauls. “France thus had at that time all it needed to have” well before the Franks (themselves a Romanized Germanic people) invaded in 420 AD. “We are Gallo-Romans.” From the Gaul, France received the virtues of bravery and the “taste in intellectual matters and in matters of eloquence”—the “art of fighting and that of speaking well.” Generosity, enthusiasm, ardor, “the readiness to take risks, the instinct to undertake enterprises and conquests, a mystical philosophy, but learnt from at the highest speculations of the great ages of Egypt Greece and Etruria, a religion full of poetry, a poetry full of dreams, fierce and graceful, or sublime, ritual which ranged from human sacrifice to the solemn picking of the sacred mistletoe by the priestess in a white robe armed with a golden sickle, and, in nature, a serious effort at clearing a vast extent of forests, an already scientific agriculture and nascent industries that were much advanced”: such were the ethos and the actions of the Gauls. Writing only three years after the debacle of 1940, Maurras would inspirit the French, again.

He knows the Gallic vices, too, the worst of which was already observed by Julius Caesar in his Gallic Wars. “His most powerful ally against the Gauls was, in Gaul itself, the discord of big children” whose “outburst of contrary opinions had betrayed commands there and paralyzed action.” Fickle and factitious, “the Gaul is like a wolf to the Gaul.” Rome gave Gallia the unity of direction and order it never had on its own. “This was naturally, and properly, the Roman contribution: order and reason.” Under Roman rule, the Gauls thrived; “hardly had Rome fallen upon them than they began to rival them in all the arts of written eloquence, rhetoric, jurisprudence, philosophy, poetry.” In designing their buildings, the Gauls learned from the Romans but soon innovated, an effort yielding first Romanesque and then Gothic architecture. In politics, the Gallic “mosaic of clans” and “the imperial statism of the centralizing Caesars” gave way to “lineaments of a new aristocratic, hierarchical, monarchical status: the feudal order.” In this new political form, as a result of it, “souls themselves were gradually transformed and here was developed in them a synthesis of emotion and intelligence, of illuminating consciousness and generous movement” defined by “the extreme vigor of a natural élan” now “orderly, enlightened, and reasonable,” and “the forces of the heart magnified by the thought that directs them.” “This definition allows us to identify our France with the eternal and universal culture that was foreseen by the ancient Hellene Anaxagoras as an expression of humanity: ‘At first all things were entangled and confused, Mind emerged to distribute them according to an order.'” The Gallo-Roman “civil state of our fatherland” combined “Gallic strength” with “Roman order.” Subsequent ethnicities, whether Greek Iberian, Moorish, Burgundian, Basque, or Scandinavian, all became integrated into the national union, a consolidation made more thoroughly and more readily because “all their distant dissimilarities were equally received into the bosom of the same uniform religion which (note well) spoke to God and men in Latin, prayed and chanted in Latin,” the language of the Roman Catholic Church.

Owing to France’s Gallo-Roman ethos, French women have taken on a far different aspect than women of other nationalities. “The English woman is a child, even as an old wife or as a grandmother; among us, the Gallic spirit, in its feminine, sensitive and generous aspect, has brought about the fact the men allow themselves to be led by the nose.” “The French woman is, in France, everywhere a queen: at the salon, the farm, the shop, the large store. There is no woman in the Académie française, but she is the great elector of it.” “This deep penetration of the French woman by the virile spirit and the French man by feminine sensitivity is not better observed anywhere else than in the religion of France,” animated as it is with a serious “rigorous orthodoxy…understood and defended in it with clarity and vigor.” In the French we see “the androgyne of Plato, the male and female being which grants the scepter alternately to the mind and to the heart when it does not confer sovereignty, as often happens, to the simultaneous synthesis of both”— a “taste of internal truths, of moral experience,” disciplined by “an iron logic, the nuances of a subtle judgment which chooses and excludes, which cuts and rejoins.” [5]

To those who might suggest that this is all a bit ‘much,’ Maurras rejoins, “Why should I be modest about my fatherland, which has been conquered?” 

After the Roman retreat, France was reunited twice, first under the Franks (Clovis, Dagobert, Pepin, Charlemagne), then under French kings, beginning around 700 AD, when French aristocrats joined forces and crowned duly recognized monarchs, who proceeded to make themselves “indispensable to the population by repelling the new invasion’s and rendering increasingly more specialized police services,” eventually assuming “the role of overlords, supreme arbitrators and senior judges. It was a centralized judicial system under the monarchy, a system which combined feudal and Roman law, which did the most to keep France united, providing civil peace at work, on the streets, and in the markets. To this “benevolent authority [there] corresponded voluntarily that generous obedience wherein the real citizen finds a benefit and honor, wherein the power from above commands confidence from below”; although not fully political in Aristotle’s sense, monarchic rule enjoyed the consent of the governed. “The governed and the governing met each other halfway.” 

Conversely, “every French crisis began with the head of the state,” when the lesser aristocracies and/or regents ruling on behalf of a child-king became “the scourges of the monarchy” and “the scourges of the nation.” Such rebellions did not signify tyranny but a “regression” to the Gallic spirit of faction, when “the rods of the faces began to separate and act alone,” just as their ancestors had done before the arrival of the Romans. For more than seven centuries, the monarchic regime would recover and reunite France.

It was the overthrow of the monarchy by republicans in 1789, followed by the Jacobin insurgency three years later, which plunged France into “the era of ever deeper invasions in the century-and-a-half which followed.” Decapitating the king decapitating the unifier of the factions; once freed, the factions invited foreign exploitation and conquest of the country. The Bonapartists who tried to reconstitute monarchy lacking legitimacy; it is one thing to be a leader, another to be a king. The Bourbons who briefly restored the true monarchy, and even the Orléanists who made a legitimist claim, restored unity and peace to France, but their work was ruined by “an elected democratic leader, Napoleon III,” whose “foolish foreign policy” led him to defeat and strong executive rule to discredit. This latter Napoleon produced the defeat at Sedan, the loss of Alsace and Lorraine, “a tribute of five billions and, much worse than that, the establishment of the democratic republic,” since Bismarck prevented any monarchical restoration.” The Third Republic’s notorious factionalism left the state in a shambles, eventuating finally in total collapse in the face of Nazi-German assault. 

“Royalty supposes…a prime moral element which consists of two principles that are adhered to, alive and practiced: orders and obedience”—a “legitimist state of mind.” If and when the English, Americans, and Russians combine to liberate France, that moral element and the regime it supports must and can return. Surely we have learned the lesson republican regimes have taught us. “Why should we not govern ourselves any longer? Well, because it is a shenanigan: we govern ourselves badly, we do not even govern ourselves.” Republicanism means “the government of the worst canaille, sometimes basely cynical, sometimes so hypocritical that it sprinkles bloody holy water in both cases.” There remains one legitimate heir to the French throne: the Comte de Paris, Henri d’Orléans. And he is a real Frenchman, not a foreigner called in by necessity, as the French were forced to do more than once in their happier, monarchic centuries. Elections cause division and war, monarchs unity and peace. As a result, “the next day can no longer fail to arise when, with negligible exceptions, each Frenchman will see his personal fate hung directly on the fate of France and when the latter fate will be felt to be threatened so much that the least functionary, the least boss engaged in industrial or agricultural exploitation, the least proletarian who is father of a family will be held by the throat by a double and same necessity: to maintain for himself and his family members the condition of a French life and not to have a false idea of his condition.” “The wish for ‘Long live France’ is only the seed of another wish: ‘Long live the king.'”

It took a real statesman to right French politics, insofar as they could be righted. Instead of compromising himself by collaborating with the Nazis, Charles de Gaulle opposed them from the beginning, urging his countrymen to rearm themselves in accordance with the practices of modern, mobile warfare in the 1930s, then exiling himself first to London, then to Algeria, after fighting in the Battle of France in 1940. And although manifestly concurring with some of Maurras’s diagnosis of France’s cultural-political ills, especially its neglect of France’s Roman or Latin characteristics, as contrasted with what de Gaulle called its “Mediterranean restlessness,” he saw that if modern tyrants appealed to the democracy, and legitimist monarchists could only hope that the democracy would come to its senses, the way to defend the democracy against tyranny was to provide republican regimes with a strong executive, a monarch within a republican regime. He said to Malraux, “Our sensitive souls called me a Maurras when I re-established the republic,” but “can you see Maurras going into battle to enforce universal suffrage in the Presidential elections?” But on the other hand, “What democracy? Stalin, Gomulka, Tito, yesterday Peron? Mao? The United States had its monarch—Roosevelt—and it misses him.” De Gaulle understood that Maurras was attacking the parliamentary republic, the First, Second, Third, and Fourth Republics. The Fifth Republic, the one he founded, differed from all the others because it featured an executive, a president, with the authority to defend the country. In failing to reinvigorate federalism in France, as Maurras wanted, and in delaying but failing to prevent France’s drift toward European internationalism, away from the confederal “l’Europe des patries,” which Maurras also wanted, de Gaulle identified the same enemy Maurras had deplored: “In all this lot, my only enemy, and France’s, has always been money.” [6] 

 

 

Notes

1. “Just like the members of a modern department, no one two centuries later would read any of their works had their authors not become world-historical terrorists.” Michael Mann: The Sources of Social Power, Volume II: The Rise of Classes and Nation-States, 1760-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
2. Although Maurras evidently owes this insight to Tocqueville, he makes no mention of that, likely preferring not to encourage an alliance between the aristocratic class of “old France” with the democracy.
3. Historians now suspect that Napoleon III was intimidated by Bismarck’s threats in a conference they held shortly before the war. The two hypotheses do not necessarily contradict one another.
4. As Alexander Jacob observes in his useful introduction, Maurras quite characteristically supported the Vichyite Pétain but not the Vichyite Pierre Laval. Pétain represented to him the true, Roman or Latinist character of France, whereas Laval was a German sympathizer through and through. This fine but politically irrelevant distinction landed Maurras in prison after the war, convicted of treason by French republicans.
5. In Plato’s Symposium, it is the comic poet Aristophanes who tells the story of the three sexes seen in human beings in their original nature: male, female, androgyne. In order to teach a due humility to humans, Zeus cuts all of them into halves: the originally round, two-headed, four-legged, four-armed humans become one-headed, two-legged and two-armed, but each of these halved humans longs for its former ‘other half,’ with the original males longing for males, the original females longing for females, the original androgynes longing for individuals of the opposite sex. In alluding to this story, Maurras invokes the comic poet, not the tragic poet Agathon or the philosopher Socrates, both of whom offer different accounts of the nature of erotic love. Maurras wants his readers to think of the true France as neither tragic nor rationalist but happy because balanced, untormented by unrealizable longings or irreconcilable ‘factions’ in its ‘soul.’
6. André Malraux: Felled Oaks (Terence Kilmartin translation, New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1971, pp. 93, 116). Money, but without the antisemitic edge Maurras gave to his critique.