Anthony Tucker-Jones: Churchill Master and Commander: Winston Churchill at War 1895-1945. Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2021.

 

As the dates Tucker-Jones puts in the title of his book suggests, Winston Churchill was at war, in one sense or another, for most of his adult life. He never initiated a war but he fought—first as a soldier, then as a civilian—in most of the many wars his country engaged in during the last half-century of the empire Victoria had ruled, an empire upon which the sun never set and the dust never settled. Churchill fought his wars with a boldness bordering on recklessness; on Aristotle’s continuum of virtue, whereby courage lies between the extremes of cowardice and rashness, he placed himself on the middle-right of the equation as “one of the greatest military and political chancers of all time.” “On occasion he gambled and lost spectacularly,” but when he finally walked out of the casino his pockets were far from empty. A man of supreme spiritedness, “quite simply he loved to be in the thick of it.” And if “throughout his long life he was drawn to the sound of the guns like a moth to a flame,” it must be said that he never flew right into it, only getting his wings and antennae singed on occasion. The same can be said for the British Empire through the end of the Second World War. As the Brits would say, it was often a near thing, but never a fatal thing. 

The young man enlisted in the Fourth Queen’s Own Hussars in 1895. Bored, he arranged approval to go to Cuba as an “observer” to the conflict in which Cubans were fighting against the weakening Spanish Empire. In fine aristocratic fashion, his mother pulled strings so he could write reports for a London newspaper—an opportunity to make money and a name for himself. He found himself sympathetic to the rebels’ cause but critical of their lack of discipline; while the Spanish troops did have discipline, they lacked energy. He was “dismayed” to see Spanish officers fail to order close pursuit of “the retreating rebels.” What Tucker-Jones doesn’t mention is Churchill’s suggestion, in one of his published articles, that the British might take over the island, a notion that may have attracted the unfavorable attention of another young chancer, Theodore Roosevelt, who took an early disliking to the British adventurer. Back in London, the men who had signed off on Churchill’s foray “soon regretted” it, as “the Spanish government expressed its displeasure” with Churchillian journalism to the British ambassador in Madrid. 

This hardly fazed our intrepid reporter. Returning home, he didn’t stay for long, next wangling two trips to India with a promise from Lord Kitchener to put his name on the list for a commission with the British expeditionary force in Egypt sandwiched in between. In his first Indian adventure he joined “the aptly-named Brigadier-General Sir Bindon Blood,” again as a news correspondent, in a punitive mission against Indian rebels at Malakand. “He saw more fighting than I expected,” Sir Bindon recalled, “and very hard fighting too!” Out of this, Churchill wrote not only newspaper articles but his first book, The Story of the Malakand Field Force. Planning a political career, he understood that it wasn’t enough only to act but to think and to write. That, along with an exceptionally kind Providence, saved him from ruin and prepared him for statesmanship. Yes, he was building a reputation, but he was also building a storehouse of well-considered experiences, the foundation of intelligent practice in the future, when he would take charge of the next generation of Bloods.

Kitchener was unhappy at having his arm twisted to accept Churchill, “not only because of his lack of commitment to his military career, but also because he had pulled political strings to get there.” And he didn’t care for the prying eyes of a young lieutenant who could be counted on to publish judgments on his superior’s conduct of the campaign. For his part, Churchill “wanted to take part in the historic recapture of Khartoum,” which he did. In so doing, he “narrowly escaped death” on several occasions “and felt that glory was calling,” not only to himself but to his country, as “this and his earlier escapades in India gave him an unshakable faith in the country’s prowess on the battlefield.” True, “he had finally overplayed his hand” in his self-conceived role as soldier-journalist. “Kitchener was stung by Churchill’s very public criticism of his conduct” of the campaign and the War Office decreed “that serving officers were not to write for the press.” No less a personage than the Prince of Wales weighed in with a rebuke. It must be said that posterity has reaped the greatest benefit from this affair: Churchill’s superb book, The River War. His previous book had been an adventure story; this one teaches lessons in geopolitics. True, “Kitchener and his circle of friends scoffed at the notion of Churchill as some sort of self-appointed military expert,” but technical expertise wasn’t what Churchill or his readers, then and now, need. They have needed a sense of military and political strategy, and that is what Churchill teaches them. Churchill resigned his army commission in May 1899, having calculated that even a brief (if well-publicized) military career would prove a useful entrée to politics. The voters were less impressed; he lost his first parliamentary election. 

Churchill solved this problem by returning to the wars, this time as a journalist simply, in South Africa. There, the Boers, Dutch settlers who resented ever-increasing British imperial encroachments, had already fought one war against their rivals in the early 1880s. But by the 1890s, British gold-seekers had begun to outnumber the Boers in Transvaal and in 1899 the Second Boer War began. “If [Churchill] was to get a book out of this trip he needed to have some adventures. If that meant having some close shaves as always that was a price he was prepared to pay.” That’s what happened. He got caught in an ambush, escaped, wrote a thrilling account of it, and returned (after witnessing and writing about several other battles) to a hero’s welcome in England. “The Churchill legend had begun to gather momentum”; “by the age of 25 he was known worldwide.” This time, he won that seat in Parliament, from which vantage point he saw the eventual, costly, British victory over the Boers. 

Not allowing his newfound fame to go to waste, Churchill “skipped the opening of Parliament,” delaying his maiden speech until mid-May of 1901, rather unprophetically inveighing against “military expenditure and talk of war in Europe.” Three years later, he switched from the Conservative to the Liberal Party and was rewarded with the post of Undersecretary of State for the Colonies in 1905. “He would learn the vast Empire was not strategically or politically integrated and remained wholly reliant on the Royal Navy to defend it.” Appointed to the office of Home Secretary in 1910, he developed an appetite for information provided reformed Secret Service, now divided into an intelligence gathering service (MI6) and a counterintelligence service (MI5). He read evidence showing that German agents were studying the British and their empire with “minute and scientific” precision. He revised his opinion of German intentions and of the need for British military preparedness accordingly and, having already understood the indispensable role of the Navy in imperial defense, he won appointment as First Lord of the Admiralty in October 1911. “The Navy prospered under Churchill, with him overseeing the impressive Dreadnought battleship program, building up the Royal Navy Air Service and introducing a naval staff for the very first time.” Great Britain would need these resources in the conflagration that began in 1914.

Although Churchill had served in the Army and ran the Navy, he had yet fully to attend to the need to coordinate the two branches in combined operations. This contributed to the calamitous defeat in the 1915 attempt to assault the Dardanelles, by which he intended take pressure off the Western Front and come to the aid of the Russians in the east. “In principle, Churchill’s plan was sound; in its execution it was to prove a disaster,” being undertaken too slowly (the Turks, Germany’s allies, had time to mount defenses) and without adequate British ground support. In response to the criticisms, Churchill could only argue that he wouldn’t have “consented to naval operations in February and March had he known sufficient troops would not be available until May.” He offered his resignation, and after some hesitation, Prime Minister Asquith accepted it. “I thought then that I was finished.” He wasn’t. But he did learn that “combined operations with the army and the navy should never be run by committee. There needed to be an overall commander-in-chief with clear goals from the very start.” When the Second World War began, he saw to it that he would act as that commander.

Churchill soon volunteered for Army service in France. Appointed Lieutenant-Colonel of the Sixth Battalion, Royal Scots Fusiliers, he overcame the soldiers’ initial skepticism of their celebrity officer, fresh from a major setback, by careful attention to their needs. His adjutant later testified, “He overlooked nothing.” His battalion saw action in Belgium in the first half of 1916, after which he returned to resume his Parliamentary seat. By 1917, Prime Minister David Lloyd George had replaced Asquith, and he brought Churchill into his Cabinet as Minister of Munitions. This, it should be remarked, made a great deal of sense. As a military strategist, Churchill had been discredited, however unjustly. But in his stint at the Admiralty he had shown himself an excellent administrator of military preparation and supply. Sure enough, Churchill set Army technicians to work developing tanks, which proved useful in fending off the last German offensive in 1918 and in the victorious Allied counter-offensive that followed. 

In the aftermath of the war, the Prime Minister rewarded him with the post of Secretary of State for War and Air. In this capacity, Churchill responded vigorously to the impending threat of a Communist victory in the Russian civil war, which had followed the overthrow of the Czar in 1917. “Churchill warned that Lenin and his Bolsheviks presented a far greater threat than the Kaiser and Germany ever did,” proceeding under the slogan, “Peace with the German people, war on the Bolshevik tyranny.” Although Tucker-Jones laments that “Churchill seemed blind to the reality that the disunited Whites committed just as many appalling atrocities as the Bolsheviks,” he himself seems short-sighted in ignoring the difference in the threat to Europe from a regime of ideologues with international ambitions as distinguished from Whites, who had few if any such designs.

Churchill supported international military intervention in Russia. This “simply roused the population to support the Red Army against the Whites and the foreign invaders.” Lloyd-George was more cautious than Churchill, worrying that Britain couldn’t afford any major drain on its resources after an exhausting war in the West. In addition, he and the majority of his Cabinet blundered in returning 500,000 Russian prisoners of war who had been interned in Germany, against Churchill’s recommendation that they be re-equipped and sent to fight with the Whites. In the event, the Reds absorbed most of these soldiers into their forces, drove back the White armies and headed west toward Poland, where only a last-hour stand by the Poles in August 1920 saved Central Europe, and possibly even Germany, from Communist revolution. “Churchill felt that with a large chunk of the Red Army destroyed, now was the time for the Whites to renew their attack”; the Cabinet disagreed, British troops withdrew, and the Reds crushed the Whites. “Churchill’s attempts to help the Whites had been constantly hobbled by the Cabinet’s insistence on the withdrawal of British troops.” This suggests the thought that the intervention either should not have been launched in the first place or, having been launched, it needed vigorous and consistent Allied support. As to Churchill’s initial judgment, that Communist Russia would prove more dangerous to Great Britain and the world than Kaiser Germany, it’s hard to argue against that.

Churchill also made the right call when he insisted on maintaining the independence of the Royal Air Force against those who supposed it would be more economical to merge it with the army. In addition, he established the RAF officer training college; “this was to prove a vital decision come the summer of 1940 when pilot training was at a premium.” In a sense, the Battle of Britain was won by Churchill’s actions some twenty years beforehand.

Less successfully, Churchill attempted to direct traffic on “Ireland’s bloody road to independence and partition.” Before the war, he “moved from opposing home rule” for the Irish “to supporting it on the basis that Ireland remained under British authority,” inasmuch as an independent Ireland would break up the United Kingdom at exactly the time when Germany was preparing for war. After the war, he was no less “implacably opposed to full Irish independence,” recommending that the RAF be deployed to attack the Irish Republican Army. Less sanguinary policies prevailed, but when the Irish Republican candidates won district council elections in 1920 “a wave of political and sectarian violence” swept through the country. England may have left its religious wars behind, but Ireland had not. Churchill tried to reframe the conflict in economic terms (“If Ireland were more prosperous she would be more loyal, and if more loyal more free”); the trouble was that ‘The Troubles’ weren’t really about comfortable self-preservation. The eventual solution—the 1921 division of Ireland between the mostly Catholic south and the mostly Protestant north—never satisfied Irish Catholics, who continued to demand a united, sovereign Ireland ruled by a Catholic majority. Ireland would simmer throughout Churchill’s lifetime and well beyond it; even in World War II, the president of the Irish Republic, Eamon de Valera, himself threatened by IRA extremists, would refuse to lend much support to the hated English. For his part, Lloyd George discreetly moved Churchill off the problem, transferring him from War and Air to the post of Colonial Secretary.

There, another problem awaited him, as the aftermath of the Great War required the Allies to manage the elements of the now-dissolved Ottoman Empire. In 1921 he chaired the Cairo Conference, aiming at “ensur[ing] effective administration of Ottoman lands ceded to Britain by the Treaty of Sèvres,” signed the previous year. Churchill established Iraq and Transjordan as buffer states protecting Great Britain’s main interest in the region, the Suez Canal. In Egypt itself, nationalists encouraged by the Irish uprising posed a nearer danger. Here, he partnered with his fellow military-political celebrity T. E. Lawrence, who had practiced the same kind of guerrilla warfare in the Middle East that Churchill had seen in South Africa. Lawrence had initially hoped to see a pan-Arab state in the Middle East. But this required defining who was an Arab and who was not; a shared language could not sufficiently unite the many tribes who spoke it. “It may have pained Lawrence, but it was beholden on him to highlight to Churchill that the bulk of Arabia [against the Ottoman Turks] had not supported the rising that commenced in Mecca.” More, the treaty had granted rule over two parts of ‘Arabia,’ Lebanon and Syria, to France, a rival empire. For his part, Churchill never forgot that the jewel of the British imperial crown, India, was riven by conflicts between Muslims and Hindus, who would be watching British policy toward Arab Muslims with considerable interest. Following Lawrence’s recommendation, Churchill made the Hashemite Faisal I king of Iraq, a move that “replicated British policy with the maharajahs of India.” Unfortunately for the future of Iraq, the local tribes were never disarmed. They proceeded to threaten the monarchy rather as feudal lords had threatened the monarchs of medieval Europe. “Although a small Iraqi army was established it was mainly recruited from the Kurds,” not the Arabs. As with Ireland, this settlement didn’t really settle the matter, although it was well received in Parliament at the time. The British did retain the military power to defeat a Turkish attempt to return to Iraq, using RAF bombers to crush them. Rebellious tribes were treated to the same punishment and Iraq was pacified, for a while, by force majeure.

Lloyd George’s governing coalition dissolved the following year and Churchill himself lost his seat in the 1933 election. He returned to Parliament as an independent after winning his seat back in 1924, then rejoined the Conservative Party. He became Chancellor of the Exchequer in the new Tory government headed by Stanley Baldwin, but the worldwide economic depression at the end of the decade knocked out that administration and boosted the Labourites to power. As is well known, as a Conservative M.P. in his ‘Wilderness Years’ Churchill strongly opposed the Indian independence movement and its leader, Mohandas Gandhi, warned about British military unpreparedness in the face of Hitler’s regime and its rearmament in defiance of the Versailles Peace Treaty, and continued to inveigh against Soviet Communism, which now had as it leader a tyrant even worse than Lenin.

With such enormities looming, he understandably paid less attention to East Asia, where he “felt that Japan provided a counterweight to the dangers posed by the spread of Communism in China and the Soviet Union.” In this he was mistaken. Instead of turning north after seizing Manchuria in 1931 the Japanese rulers moved south, where the countries (including China) were much more feebly defended than the Soviet Union was. Against the Japanese invaders, the Chinese Nationalist Chiang Kai-Shek was forced into alliance with Mao’s communists, over whom he had enjoyed the military edge in China’s civil war. In the end, Japan would choose the wrong side in the coming war in Europe and China would be taken by the Communists, but not before causing serious injury to British interests in the region.

Famously, in 1940 Churchill returned to high office as Prime Minister, his reprobation of the British failure to deter Hitler’s ambitions having been thoroughly vindicated. Removing the hapless Neville Chamberlain and installing the worrisome Churchill was the only way the Conservatives could hope to remain in power. Having learned in the failure of the Dardanelles campaign that winning a war requires a commander-in-chief, Churchill “created for himself the new post of Minister of Defence, thereby placing himself directly above the Chiefs of Staff,” thus taking “personal control of the war.” He did this just in time to oversee the evacuation of British and some French troops from Dunkirk, where they were about to be immolated by the German army as it swept through France to the west coast of the English Channel. “Thanks to the heroic efforts” of British officers on the ground, “Churchill narrowly avoided what would have been the worst defeat ever in British military history,” a defeat that might well have caused the collapse of his government and British capitulation to Hitler.

Instead, the Battle of Britain began, matching the Royal Air Force Churchill had fostered against the German Luftwaffe. During the German aerial blitz, Churchill “resolutely toured Britain’s bombed cities to show solidarity and boost morale,” in “stark contrast” with Hitler, who “refused to visit any of Germany’s devastated cities.” By September 1940, the main German aerial assault had failed, it was too late in the year to launch for the Germans to launch a land invasion, and although sporadic bombings continued until 1944 Churchill eventually assured one colleague, “We’re going to win, you know.” Sure enough, frustrated in the west, Hitler turned east, betraying his pact with Stalin’s regime and heading for defeat on a Napoleonic scale. For his part, Churchill planned on deploying the RAF to ensure the tyrant’s ruin by what he called “an absolutely devastating, exterminating attack by very heavy bombers from this country upon the Nazi homeland.”

Throughout the war, Churchill sought to bring together in a coordinated plan the various kinds of warfare he had seen in his near-half century of military study and experience. In 1942, he began to use guerrilla/commando raids in Normandy as preliminary to the major assault that would begin two years later. These forces were gradually expanded; by D-Day they consisted of four Special Service brigades manned by Army and Marine troops. On D-Day itself one of these brigades linked up with the British Airborne Division for coordinated assaults, whereby the air forces would kill enemies and stun those they didn’t kill, making them easier prey for the foot soldiers. Meanwhile, the heavy bombers continued to devastate German cities with area bombing raids, including the firebombing of Dresden, in which some 25,000 people died. Another important dimension of D-Day preparation was the Navy’s war against German submarines, which turned in Great Britain’s favor by mid-1943, ensuring a steady supply of men and material from the United States and Canada. 

Churchill had always understood that the Americans were indispensable to winning the war on the Western Front, saying that his second order of business, after surviving the Luftwaffe attacks on his island, must be to “drag the Americans in.” He went so far as to have MI6 “forge a German language map showing Hitler’s plans to attack South America; FDR took this spurious bit of intelligence seriously, describing it in an October 1941 radio broadcast. In the event, it was Japan that dragged the Americans into the war, and this led to another worry—that FDR might reduce supplies of ships to Britain in order to concentrate on rebuilding the US Pacific fleet destroyed at Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt, however, understood that the Germans posed the more immediate threat to the North American continent, preserved the supply line, and agreed with Churchill on a ‘Europe first’ strategy.

“For Churchill the Japanese threat in the Far East was always an unwanted distraction.” Except for Hong Kong, Malaya, and Singapore, Great Britain’s major Asian holdings were well removed from Japan. He overconfidently assumed that even Singapore was too distant to be threatened. He considered the Navy adequate for its defense, although it was already heavily involved in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean; moreover, British air power in the region was weak, and Churchill preferred to manufacture planes for the European campaign, including many he sent to strengthen the Soviet forces. As a result of this miscalculation, both Malaya and Singapore fell to the Japanese early in 1942. This was such a serious blow that Churchill “considered stepping down or at least relinquishing some of his responsibilities,” but he rallied, added Clement Atlee to his Cabinet as Deputy Prime Minister, but stayed on as both Prime Minister and Minister of Defence. Fortunately for Churchill and for the course of the war, “the ample intelligence warnings about the Japanese threat” he had received were unknown to the British public or Parliament at the time. “It is hard to see how Churchill could have survived the political fallout” if they had been.

Adding to his Asian dilemma, Indian dissidents aimed at taking advantage of the war to fight for independence. Churchill sent Sir Stafford Cripps to offer India self-governing dominion status after the war, the arrangement enjoyed by Canada. Nationalists detested one stipulation: That any Indian state or province “could opt out of the proposed union”; they “wanted a united states of India,” knowing that otherwise the Muslim population in the Pakistan region would readily declare independence—as in fact they eventually did. “Cripps had no magic wand with which to heal the rifts in Indian domestic politics nor could he speed up the process of granting greater autonomy.” Nonetheless, the Indian army and police, who held the real power, “remained steadfastly loyal” to Great Britain for the duration of the war, although Churchill still needed to deploy 100,000 soldiers to put down the nationalist insurrection. “After these tense weeks in the summer of 1942, Churchill knew deep down that Indian independence could not be ignored forever.”

Scarcely one to regard British help with gratitude, Stalin “could never forget Churchill’s military intervention in Russia” after the First World War. Throughout the 1930s, Stalin “was only interested in the survival of Soviet Communism,” and his “support against Fascism” in the Spanish Civil War and elsewhere “simply fueled Soviet totalitarianism in the name of protecting the [Soviet] state.” (This came as a rude surprise to the leftist utopian novelist H.G. Wells, who interviewed the tyrant and learned that he despised Roosevelt’s New Deal as “a move to con the American working class.”) When Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, Churchill “was initially convinced that the Soviet Union, despite the size of the Red Army, would fall swiftly just like France,” reprising the fate of the Czarist regime in the First World War. 

But by spring of 1942, the Red Army had survived, and the Kremlin demanded not only Allied commencement of a push against Germany from the west but postwar control of eastern and central Europe. “Churchill was not prepared to abandon the Poles, as it was Poland’s dismemberment that had brought Britain and France into the war in the first place.” Moreover, Churchill pointed out that Great Britain and the United States simply would not be prepared to launch a western counteroffensive in the near future. Stalin raged, but he had no way to compel the West to act; Churchill was simply telling him the truth, something Stalin was not accustomed to being told by his underlings. Nor could he understand “Britain and America’s preoccupation with the Mediterranean,” which is where they concentrated their efforts in 1943. The was simple: they hadn’t yet mustered the military strength to fight the Germans in northern Europe and permitted themselves to hope that Italy would prove a “soft underbelly” through which northern Europe could be attacked. “Churchill and Roosevelt, thanks to their determination to defeat the Axis powers, made their decisions largely on military rather than political grounds. Stalin in contrast took a much longer-term view of the war. He was determined to safeguard Soviet soil by protecting it from any future surprise attack by Germany.” At the Tehran Conference at the end of the year, Stalin assured FDR that “all he wanted was to ensure the safety of his own country and that he would work towards democracy and peace.” He did not remark that “democracy” to him meant the dictatorship of the proletariat under the triumphant banner of the Communist Party vanguard, and that “peace” meant a world under Communist Party rule. Roosevelt, who often worried more about the British Empire than any impending Soviet one, began to distance himself from Churchill. This left Churchill to worry about Communist inroads in the Balkans, particularly Greece, where civil war between the local Communists and non-Communists had erupted and the latter, with British assistance, managed to hold the line, even though the rest of the Balkans were to be ruled by Communists in the postwar period.

The result of all this was Soviet domination of the regions Stalin most wanted to dominate, including much of Germany. As for Churchill himself, he lost the prime ministership in the elections following V-E Day. Voters, and especially British servicemen, were fed up not so much with Churchill but the Conservative Party, which they held largely responsible for the failure to deter Hitler in the first place. One suspects that, having ended the danger of the Nazis in Europe, they didn’t relish the prospect of continuing in the fight against Japan, preferring to leave that to the Americans. In the summer of 1945, they knew nothing of the development of the atomic bomb, which would make any drawn-out campaign in the Pacific unnecessary.

Tucker-Jones concurs with Churchill’s own judgment of his career, writing that “his long apprenticeship” in military affairs prepared him “for the day he became Prime Minister.” By 1940, “no one was as well qualified as he was.” In all, “he chose a role in life and played it well.”

Tucker-Jones plays his own role well, too, although not without flaw. Clear on the menace of the Nazi regime, he is oddly blind to the character of Soviet Communism. Stalin’s “attempts to shape Russia’s future,” he writes, “were founded on the fear of Bolshevism and the impact it could have on the world order. Unfortunately, by championing international intervention” in the aftermath of the First World War “he helped to ensure that the Soviet Union became an enemy of the West until 1941” and fueled “that historic mistrust” that “quickly returned, leading to the Cold War.” This, it must be said, is rubbish. The Soviets had always intended to overthrow what they regarded as ‘bourgeois democracy.’ They were Marxists. 

Desmond Shum: Red Roulette: An Insider’s Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today’s China. New York: Scribner, 2021.

 

Socialism seldom if ever works as advertised. Although socialists intend to equalize economic, political, and social conditions, to do so they must empower themselves. Human nature being what it is, corruption ensues; politics being rule, a ‘new class’ comes to dominate; political economy being what it is, prosperity declines, sooner or later, in the absence of property rights.

In Soviet Russia, Lenin acknowledged the new regime’s vulnerability in his Report on the Work of the Council of People’s Commissars, published in December 1920. “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country. Otherwise the country will remain a small-peasant country, and we must clearly realize that we are weaker than capitalism, not only on the world scale, but also within the country.” Accordingly, all those now counted among the ruling Bolshevik party who have displayed un-Bolshevik leanings in the past must be purged, and the party must enforce strict labor discipline in order to increase economic productivity. A year later, announcing his “New Economic Policy,” Lenin wrote that “our Party must make the masses realize that the enemy in our midst is anarchic capitalism and anarchic exchange”—what ‘bourgeois’ economists call free markets under the rule of law. The Communist Party must control the means of production and exchange. Internationally, Lenin asserts that “the bourgeois countries must trade with Russia; they know that unless they establish some form of economic relations their disintegration will continue in the way it has done up to now.” He announced that the Soviet Union would send diplomats to the 1922 Genoa Conference on international trade since, although as a Communist he was no pacifist, it is better to encourage bourgeois pacifists than bourgeois warriors,” such as those who had invaded the Soviet Union shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution.

It would have been awkward to admit that the Soviet Union needed bourgeois goods more than the ‘bourgeois democracies’ and their supposed capitalist masters needed Soviet goods. What Lenin needed was foreign investments in Russia by those very capitalists. This required a new type of economy, one that permitted capitalist development under the ruling eye and arm of the regime of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Yet “not a single book has been written about state capitalism under communism. It did not occur even to Marx to write a single word on the subject…. That is why we must overcome the difficulty entirely by ourselves.” Under ‘proletarian’ rule, “state capitalism is capitalism which we are able to restrain, and the limits of which we shall be able to fix,” inasmuch as we Soviet Communists, as the vanguard of the proletariat in Russia and indeed worldwide, “are the State.” In one sense, Lenin argued, the New Economic Policy was a strategic retreat, in another an advance in relation to the petty-bourgeois economy of anarchic capitalism and anarchic exchange. “We are now retreating, going back, as it were; but we are doing so in order, after first retreating, to take a running start and make a bigger leap forward.” (Decades later, Mao would appropriate “great leap forward” as the term for one of his own ‘programs.’) In so doing, “we must calculate how, in the capitalist environment” now prevailing in the world, “we can ensure our existence, how we can profit by our enemies,” who intend to “bargain at our expense.” (“Do not in the least imagine commercial people anywhere turning into lambs and, having turned into lambs, offering us blessings of all sorts for nothing.”) The “very difficult task” that lies ahead we must “surrender nothing of the new” regime—we “shall not forget a single one of the slogans we learned yesterday”—”and yet give the capitalists such advantages as will compel any state, however hostile to us, to establish contracts and to deal with us.” Although “our Party” remains “a little group of people in comparison with the country’s total population,” this “tiny nucleus has set itself the task of remaking everything, and it will do so,” as “we have proved that this is no utopia but a cause which people live by.” “NEP Russia will become socialist Russia.” Yes, the capitalists and their investment money will be drawn in, but always under the rule of the Communist regime. Once socialism in Russia had been reinforced by foreign capital, a new policy could commence, with few capitalist features.

China’s path to the New Economic Policy differed, but the purpose was the same. In China, under Mao Zedong’s tyranny, Stalinism came first, not Leninism. But after the old genocidist died (peacefully, in bed, as indeed his role model had done), Communist Party oligarchs began to found Lenin’s latter-day policies more appealing, given the self-induced weakness of their country vis-à-vis the United States, victorious in its Cold War against the regime Lenin had founded. The Party opened China not only to foreign capital but to Chinese capitalists. As Desmond Shum rightly observes, “Starting in the late 1970s, when the Chinese Communist Party gave everyone a breather so it could recover from its own disastrous mistakes, it opened the window a crack and allowed the world to imagine what a freer, more open China could be.” As he correctly sees, this “honeymoon with entrepreneurs…was little more than a Leninist tactic, born in the Bolshevik Revolution, to divide the enemy in order to annihilate it,” a “part of the Party’s goal of total societal control”; in this, the Party remained entirely Maoist—recalling the tyrant’s “Thousand Flowers” campaign, whereby he encouraged his subjects to begin expressing their opinions freely, the better to identify dissenters and to deal with them. And as with the NEP, the Party successfully drew in foreign investors, bringing in the capital they needed from foreigners who, (a) had it and (b) could easily be expelled when their usefulness had been outlived. Also as with the NEP, Chinese with capitalist hankerings and abilities were permitted to use that capital, so long as the Party kept its hands fully on the financial spigot.

With his then-wife, Mr. Shum joined the ranks of enterprising young Chinese the regime played for suckers. Born in Shanghai in 1968, the year of Mao’s brutal ‘Cultural Revolution,” Shum had no family connections with the CCP; his father’s side of the family were landlords—what the Communists called “born rats.” However, his mother’s family had foreign connections, making them useful to the regime, not persecuted by it. They were by no means protected from all the exigencies of the Cultural Revolution, however, having been shipped “to the countryside to learn from Chinese peasants” about the value of hard physical labor. But because they never lost their permits to live in Shanghai, his parents were allowed to take turns in reporting to the villages, with one always staying with their son in the city. Under this arrangement, little Desmond was urged on to achievement with the Chinese equivalent of tough love, which mixed frequent paternal beatings with such maternal admonitions as “Stupid birds need to start flying early.” A decade later, mother and son moved to then-independent Hong Kong (one of those useful foreign connections, the Party chiefs doubtless supposed), and father joined them a couple of years after that. 

“Hong Kong was another world”—a different regime with a different way of life, including “the concept of privacy,” which “didn’t really exist on the mainland.” The concept of privacy stems from the concept of property, especially the concept of self-ownership; the boy had moved into a new kind of regime. This move was the first of several; he would attend college in the United States and eventually settle in Europe, where he lives today. “I became a chameleon, adept at changing skins to match the place,” but retaining the Chinese trait of care for personal reputation, driven by “the fear of looking bad,” of ‘saving face.’ Multiple regimes had engrained this ethos in the Chinese, and the CCP regime had never attempted to eradicate it, only to manipulate it when some individual or group stepped out of line—as in the Cultural Revolution itself, when ‘bourgeois’ elements were assigned farm work under the supervision of peasants, themselves under the rule of the Party. 

Returning to Hong Kong after college, Shum joined an investment firm, with interests on the mainland. After Mao’s death, “the state was effectively bankrupt.” With the accession to Party dictatorship of Deng Xiaoping, a Chinese version of the NEP was firmly installed. Deng and his allies had no “belief in the tenets of free-market capitalism”; they acted out of “necessity,” as Lenin had before them. This, as the slogan went, would be ‘capitalism with Chinese characteristics,’ which predictably consisted of continued Communist Party rule, which means ‘capitalism’ without property rights. If all property belongs to the centralized state, and the state belongs to the Communist Party regime, business requires cultivating the persons who constitute that regime. “I quickly learned that in China all rules were bendable as long as you had what the Chinese called guanxi, or a connection into the system,” the rule of law being infinitely malleable in the hands of the oligarchs. Guanxi is the Chinese “recipe” for “marrying entrepreneurial talent with political connections,” thereby keeping the former firmly controlled by the latter. “In China, connections constitute the foundation of life,” from doing multimillion-dollar real estate deals to getting a vanity plate for your Audi. Accordingly, the children of the regime “functioned like an aristocracy; they intermarried, lived lives disconnected from those of average Chinese, and made fortunes selling access to their parents, inside information, and regulatory approvals that were keys to wealth.” “Basically, the Party said, give us your freedom and we’ll let you make money,” leaving government ministries with “vast gray areas so that if the authorities wanted to target anyone for prosecution, they always could.” This made corruption a growth industry.

“I was a foreigner in my homeland.” To deal with this newly reshaped Communist regime, Shum desperately needed a mentor. He met and eventually married her: Duan Zong, a.k.a. Whitney Duan, a brilliant and well-connected executive in the Great Ocean corporation, which sold hardware to the telecom industry. “She was the first one who lifted the hood” of the CCP regime, the one who showed him its inner mechanisms of power. For his part, he understood finances, advising her on how to raise money for Great Ocean. In this way, and from the start, the Chinese regime pervaded their partnership: “Whitney’s view of passion, love, and sex was that we could grow into them, but it wouldn’t be the glue that would bind us. What would cement the relationship would be its underlying logic—did we share values, desire the same ends,” namely “to make a mark on China and the world,” and “agree on the means”? The means were to work the guanxi network, currying approval of the ruling class of CCP oligarchs, of which ruling body Whitney was a mid-level member. Alluding to Joseph Conrad’s chilling novel, Shum writes, “Whitney invited me on a journey into China’s heart. Each bend of the river carried us deeper. With each twist, we became more and more creatures of China’s ‘system,’ a Chinese code word used to signify the country’s unique amalgam of political and economic power that emanates from the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party.” As it happened, Whitney, herself no scion of the oligarchs, had her own mentor and protector, Zhang Ayi, the wife of vice-premier Wen Jiabao, a functionary who, whatever his interest in “a freer, more open China” may have been, cautiously “hewed to the rules of the Chinese power structure,” which he served as an administrator and not as a Party general secretary—the supreme ruling office held by Mao, Deng, and by the late 1990s, Hu Jintao. While “Auntie Zhang,” as the young couple called her, socialized and opened doors for her proteges, Wen usually looked the other way. And rightly so, in the eyes of his superiors: “China’s state-owned firms were losing buckets of money, so private entrepreneurs like Whitney and me were still crucial to keep the economy afloat and unemployment down.”

“Whitney shared with me her plan to groom Auntie Zheng and others in the Party hierarchy.” Mr. Shum became her sole trusted sounding board for these strategies and tactics. Once the two women decided he “possess[ed] the necessary business acumen to complement Auntie Zhang’s political heft and Whitney’s networking flair,” and had proven entirely trustworthy, he was in. “In addition to my expertise on financial matters, the quality that attracted them was that I was a blank slate,” with “no baggage.” He could be shaped to the task they had in mind, even as the regime had shaped them. True, the business deals they arranged together would never be “as sweet as those available to China’s red aristocrats,” who got “access to monopoly businesses” and “routinely marshaled the entire judicial system of the nation for their personal benefit,” but as long as they remained innocent of illegal activities—or so they thought—they stood to make a fortune. And they did.

Their major project was the construction of the “Airport City” in Beijing. The Shums needed approvals from seven ministries at each phase of construction; it took three years to get them, prior to putting a shovel in the ground. More, “like all businessmen in China,” they “paid extremely close attention to the macroeconomic policies and the political whims of the central government,” inasmuch as “every major aspect of the economy was controlled by the state, despite all the talk about capitalism in China.” As for Shum himself, he also needed his wife to sign off on any expenditure, as “she used money as a way to control our relationship” even as the regime used its power to control their money. Rule of law be damned: “the courts functioned as a tool of Party control,” the Party consisted of persons, and persons demand attention. “Guanxi wasn’t a contractual relationship per se” but a “human-to-human connection, built painstakingly over time.” Given project deadlines, this made starting up difficult, “but the more I got directly involved in relationship building the more approvals we received,” and the more money they made.

Most of “China’s nouveau riche” expected that the regime eventually would change, become more like a commercial republic, “more transparent and more open as private enterprise grew to dominate the economy.” After all, “we saw how capitalists like us were becoming essential to [China’s] modernization.” They didn’t consider that what might be true now might not be true a few years later. Regime change “probably wasn’t in the cards anyway, but back then we didn’t know that.” They only knew that “Communist China’s founder, Mao Zedong, had relegated capitalists like those in my father’s family to the bottom rung of society” but by 2001 “the Party had officially changed its policy on capitalists when then Party boss Jiang Zemin made a speech that welcomed all leading Chinese, including entrepreneurs, into the Party’s ranks.” The prospect of a Leninist or Stalinist purge of those ranks was unthinkable, outside the upper echelons of the regime, of whose deliberations the Shums had no inkling. 

The regime had no intention of changing. Events near and even within its borders strengthened that intention. In 2004 Taiwan, long ruled by a rightist oligarchy, democratized. This “shook Communist Party bigwigs because they saw in it a potential road map for mainland China and thus a threat to the Party’s monopoly on power.” The new Taiwanese president’s determination to wrest long-accumulated riches from the erstwhile ruling Nationalist Party chieftains made CCP officials especially nervous. An oligarchy that maintains its unity seldom relinquishes its power, but fissures began to develop, with some Communists “supportive of China’s peaceful evolution toward capitalism and a more pluralistic political system” since “state-owned enterprises couldn’t survive in the long term because of their inherent inefficiencies.” But when the preeminent reformers contemplated their own political demise, they fell back on Leninism, reaching out to Goldman Sachs and United States Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to help them list shares from Chinese Telecom in the New York Stock Exchange. “Paulson and others interpreted” such moves “as a way to privatize China’s economy. But actually, the Party’s goal…was to save the state-owned sector so that it would remain the economic pillar of the Party’s continued rule” by “employing Western financial techniques” to strengthen that rule. (More modestly, Lenin had ordered adoption of ‘bourgeois’ accounting practices in Soviet Russia.) For his part, Shum made contact with an operator named Joshua Cooper Ramo, who was convinced “that China’s mix of authoritarian political system, meritocratic government, and semi-free market economy constituted a new model for development around the world,” a model he promoted in his new job at Kissinger Associates, “which made its money doing a foreigners’ version of Whitney’s guanxi business in China.”

Shum also set up a scholarship at Harvard University to support graduate students studying China; the ever-naïve political philosophy scholar Michael Sandel cleared the way for the deal. In China, Shum adds, “every university…is run by the Communist Party,” which CCP secretaries “who are usually far more powerful than school presidents, deans, or principals.” Unlike the Americans, the Chinese rulers tolerate nothing untoward. The “central message” to Chinese university students is to “enter the party system and serve the state” and to “entice leading scientists, both Chinese and foreign, to move to China to teach and conduct cutting-edge research.” The Shums “worked with think tanks overseas to help educate Chinese scholars about how democracies functioned and how they set foreign policy.” It didn’t occur to them that such knowledge might be used for more than one purpose.

“Startled at the liberal tendencies of my fellow capitalists, the Chinese Communist Party, starting in the mid-2000s, moved to weaken the moneyed class, uproot the sprouts of civil society that we’d planted, and reassert the Party’s ideological and economic control of Chinese society” by “bolster[ing] state-owned enterprises to the detriment of private firms.” Why, the Party began to ask, should the Shums have “the right to develop the logistics hub” at the Beijing Airport? “Ever since it had seized power in 1949, the Chinese Communist Party had used elements of society when it needed them and discarded them when it was done.” The Shums and many other capitalists were about to be tossed into the CCP’s Dustbin of History. Even such heavyweights as Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba, and Pony Ma, the CEO of Tencent, “were compelled to serve the Party,” services which included gathering intelligence on foreign governments and corporations.

The 2008 global financial crisis accelerated this movement by “validating a belief inside the Party about the superiority of China’s political and economic system to that of the West.” As far as the Party elite was concerned, “peaceful evolution into a more open society and economy would be a recipe for disaster for the Party and for China,” and all hands must push against “Western ideas” which “would only weaken China.” “Private entrepreneurs, who had saved China’s economy just a few years before, were now painted as a fifth column of Western influence.” “We thought our wealth could foster social change. We were wrong.” Chinese capitalists had overlooked the fact that without firm property rights enforced by judges, their holdings were never their property in the first place. Policies new or old may change, but “the nature of the Chinese Communist Party” does not, retaining its “almost animal instinct toward repression and control.” By the late 2000s, “state-run firms stabilized and the Party no longer needed the private sector like it had in the past.” The status of capitalists shifted from necessary evil to “a political threat.” Notwithstanding all this, Shum continued to present a brave face to foreigners. As late as 2013 he told an Aspen Institute “Leadership in Action” forum that “the Chinese Communist Party was opening up and trying to adapt” to the “rising tide” of Chinese who had become “interested in their rights.”

Premier Jiang Zemin began to order the arrests not only of rich ‘commoners’ but even of the privileged children of the Party, the main difference being that “red aristocrats got a prison sentence” whereas “commoners got a bullet in the head.” The Shums prudently sold their stake in the airport hub, hedged their bets with overseas investments, and even considered abandoning their policy of cutting “backdoor guanxi deals.” There Whitney drew her line in the shifting Chinese sands. “She feared that if we stopped relying on her connections to win contracts in China she’d become irrelevant and that I might become too independent”—rather as Chinese oligarchs feared the capitalists they’d encouraged. Despite her lifelong Christianity, the regime had embedded itself in her soul. She “wanted to double down on her way by continuing to insinuate ourselves into the upper echelons of the Party and cultivate even more members of the red aristocracy.” 

For their next enterprise, they chose a hotel development project. “We were on a mission to make this the best real estate project China had ever seen”; somewhat immodestly, he gave it the name, “Genesis.” Unfortunately, but by now predictably, the Shums began to argue with each other more and more. (“She seemed to relish contradicting me.”) Having “shaped and facilitated my success,” Whitney “now felt that I was challenging her authority and she worried that I no longer needed her,” a suspicion Desmond is quick not to deny. Having perfected her skill at “playing the guanxi game,” she “feared the day when it and, by extension, she were no longer needed.” Having arranged their own marriage on pragmatic grounds, they could scarcely maintain it when those grounds shifted. When charges of corruption hit Auntie Zhang’s husband, the respectable lady demanded that Mrs. Shum take the blame, which she did, thereby vindicating the trust of her mentor whilst ruining herself. “Whitney’s Christianity might have played a role. But more than that was her commitment to the relationships that she’d built.” The scandal was part of an internal CCP struggle, and its upshot was that the accused officials, including Auntie Zhang’s family, were invited to “donate” their wealth to China—an invitation they accepted. Under pressure, Whitney turned not to God but to “the divination of a fortune teller.” As Shum explains it, “In its seventy years of power, the Party had destroyed traditional Chinese values and had essentially outlawed religion. In the vacuum, superstition took hold”—confirmation from Asia of Chesterton’s mot affirming that when people stop believing in God they don’t start believing in nothing but in anything. Two more real estate deals soured, and in 2013 Desmond moved out, preferring martyrdom neither to the regime of Marx nor the regime of Jesus.

By then, the new Party boss, Xi Jinping, had doubled down on the “anti-corruption campaign,” that is, the purge of Party challengers to his authority. Although Shum says “this type of grandstanding wasn’t usual in China and it marked a break with Party tradition,” it was really only the old moonshine in a new bottle, inasmuch as purges of Party members and indeed of whole social classes have remained part of that “tradition” since it was established, very much in imitation of the “tradition” of Bolshevism. “By 2020, China’s authorities had investigated more than 2.7 million officials for corruption and punished more than 1.5 million, including even national-level leaders and two dozen generals.” The purge extended beyond persons to include ideas; the Party issued a “Briefing on the Current Situation in the Ideological Realm” warning “that dangerous Western values, such as freedom of speech and judicial independence, were infecting China and needed to be rooted out.” Such “extremely malicious” notions were “banned from being taught at China’s schools and universities.” To emphasize the point—in Marxism practice must always unite with theory—CCP “security services” undertook “a withering crackdown on lawyers and other proponents of a civil society” while the democratization of Hong Kong was “curtailed” and its regime undermined. Elections in Hong Kong proceeded, but as Shum plaintively asks, “What good was one man, one vote, when the only candidates you could vote for had first been vetted by Beijing?” When Hong Kong residents took to the streets in protest, the CCP ordered Shum and others with Hong Kong ties to march as counter-demonstrators. “Everyone was there because of self-interest and to gain brownie points in Beijing.” Undaunted, Shum wrote a report for Xi Jinping advocating “democratic loosening” on the island. “The Party ignored my advice, preferring to pass a “national security law” outlawing free speech there. As the “anti-corruption” campaign continued, Sherlock Shum “finally concluded that it was more about burying potential rivals” to Xi “than about stamping out malfeasance.” 

Although he doesn’t put it this way, Shum testifies to the obvious fact that Xi has played something of the role of Stalin to Deng Xiaoping’s Lenin, shutting down China’s version of the NEP with a resounding purge. Xi also returned to Mao-style one-man rule, ending term limits on the ‘presidency,’ “thereby opening the way for him to be emperor for life” under the Maoist title, “the people’s leader,” a.k.a. CCP Chairman, vanguard of the vanguard of the proletariat. 

Even as their marriage had been founded, and had foundered, on habits of heart and mind inculcated by the regime’s way of life, the Shums’ divorce followed the same pattern. “From an early age, we Chinese are pitted against one another in a rat race and told that only the strong survive”—Social Darwinism with Chinese characteristics. “We learn how to divide the world into enemies and allies,” that “alliances are temporary and allies expendable,” fodder for betrayal “if the Party tells us to” implant a knife into someone else’s back. Whitney had their divorce case moved to Beijing “because she thought she could play her guanxi game and determine the settlement,” but her dear husband had learned a tactic or two from her, leveraging her admitted ‘corruption’ to intimidate her into what he deems a fair settlement. As perhaps it was. Be that as it may have been, she had no problem allowing their son to go to school in England, where her husband had emigrated. This may have been a mother’s self-sacrifice for the sake of her child, although at this point the jaundiced reader might suspect she had been content to get the boy and its father out of her hair. 

In 2017, four years after the divorce, “Whitney” (Duan) Shum disappeared. “Where is Whitney Duan?” her ex-husband asks. “Is she even alive?” In accordance with the Party’s “investigative system,” shuanggui, the Central Discipline Inspection Commission may “hold people suspected of violating Party regulations” as long as it chooses. And it may do as it pleases with them. Understandably, Mr. Shum and his son have remained in western Europe. 

 

 

 

 

François René vicomte de Chateaubriand: Travels in America. Richard Switzer translation. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1969.

 

In July 1791, Chateaubriand left for the newly-founded United States on a fishing vessel chartered for seminarians from Saint-Sulpice heading for Baltimore. He aspired to find the nonexistent ‘passage’ through the American Northwest to “the Polar Sea.” (“In France there is courage; courage deserves success, but deserving it does not always ensure it,” he now admits.) Like most French explorers, “lone men abandoned to their own devices and their own genius,” unaided “by the government or private companies,” Chateaubriand had no companions after he set foot on the dock. 

The France he left still had a king; Chateaubriand had served in the Royal regiment for several months during the winter of 1790-91. But “the revolution was proceeding rapidly: the principles on which it was founded were mine”—mostly derived from Rousseau—but “I detested the violence which had already dishonored it”; in America he sought “an independence more in conformity with my tastes, more in sympathy with my character.” He knew that many refugees from the revolution had already fled to the “land of liberty,” Ohio; “nothing better proves the high value of generous institutions than this voluntary exile of the partisans of absolute power to a republican world.” And more: “This continent unknown to the rest of the world through all ancient times and through many centuries of modern times; the first savage destiny of this continent, and its second destiny since the arrival of Christopher Columbus; the domination of the European monarchies shattered in this New World; the old society ending up in the young America; a republic of a kind unknown then, announcing a change in the human mind and the political order; the part my homeland had in producing these events; these seas and these shores owing part of their independence to the French flag and French blood; a great man coming forth in the midst of discord and wilderness; Washington living in a flourishing city in the same place where a century earlier William Penn had bought a bit of land from some Indians; the United States sending back to France across the ocean the revolution and the liberty which France had supported with its arms; finally, my own plans, the discoveries that I wanted to attempt in these native solitudes, which extended their vast kingdom behind the narrow empire of a foreign civilization—those are the things which confusedly occupied my mind.”

The young man wisely brought with him a letter of introduction to George Washington from the Marquis de La Rouairie, whom the General had known as “Colonel Armand,” having fought alongside him during the American revolutionary war. He took a stagecoach to Philadelphia, the nation’s capital, “rolling along the highways of the New World, where I knew no one, where I was known to no one at all,” along a terrain disagreeably flat and featureless. Philadelphia, however, proved “a beautiful city with wide streets” along the Delaware River, which “would be an impressive river in Europe” but “not remarkable in America.” Still, even a fine American city lacked the distinction of its European counterparts. There were few monuments and no old ones. “Protestantism, which sacrifices nothing to imagination and which is itself new, has not raised those towers and domes which which the ancient Catholic religion has crowned Europe. Almost nothing at Philadelphia, New York, Boston, rises above the mass of walls and roofs. The eye is saddened by this level appearance”—what his older brother’s yet unborn nephew, Alexis de Tocqueville, would consider one aspect of democracy in America. “The United States gives rather the idea of a colony than of a nation; there one finds customs, not mores. One has the feeling that the inhabitants do not have their roots in the ground. This society, so fine in the present, has no past; the cities are new, the tombs date from yesterday…. There is nothing old in America save the forests, children of the earth, and liberty, mother of all human society; that is, in itself, worth many a monument and ancestor.”

The experience of American liberty shocked the twenty-three-year-old aristocrat, who had taken his republicanism from reading “the ancients,” schooling himself on “the rigidity of the early Roman manners.” On the contrary, in Philadelphia he saw “the elegance of dress, the luxury of carriages, the frivolity of conversations, the disproportion of fortunes, the immorality of banks and gaming houses, the noise of dance-halls and theaters.” He might as well have been “in an English town,” under a monarchic regime. “I did not know that there was another liberty, daughter of the enlightenment of an old civilization, a liberty whose reality the representative republic has proved. It is no longer necessary to plow one’s little field, reject art and science, have ragged nails and a dirty beard, in order to be free.” American liberty began to liberate him from Rousseau. And indeed he would return to France in the summer of 1792 after reading of Louis XVI’s arrest, fighting with the Army of Princes against the too-Rousseauian Jacobins, who had revealed themselves as no friends of liberty, ancient or modern. 

President Washington—according “to my ideas at the time,” Cincinnatus—did not disappoint. In him “I found the simplicity of the old Roman,” unpretentious, with “an air that was calm and cold rather than noble.” Neither, however, did Washington overawe him; “I admire [greatness of soul] without being crushed by it” while greatness of fortune “inspires me more with pity than with respect.” At table, he “listened to me with a sort of astonishment” when Chateaubriand described his project. The well-bred young man saved the moment by exclaiming, “It is less difficult to discover the Northwest Passage than to create a people as you have done,” earning himself an invitation to dine again the next evening. This time, the conversation turned to the French Revolution, Washington showing his guests a key to the Bastille, sent him by Lafayette. “If Washington had seen the conquerors of the Bastille in the gutters of Paris as I did, he would have had less faith in his relic. The seriousness and the force of the revolution were not in those bloody orgies.” 

“Such was my meeting with this man who liberated a whole world. Washington descended into the tomb before a bit of fame could be attached to my name; I passed before him as the most unknown individual; he was in all his brilliance, and I in all my obscurity. My name did not perhaps remain a whole day in his memory. Yet how happy I am that his gaze fell upon me! I have felt warmed by it for the rest of my life: there is a power in the gaze of a great man.”

Chateaubriand brings out the character of that greatness by comparing Washington to the other great man he met—Buonaparte, as he calls him, refusing to write the imperial name, Napoleon, with which the parvenu grasped at legitimacy. The Vicomte’s return to France from England in 1802 came when the Emperor granted a general amnesty to the political exiles. A year later, when The Genius of Christianity appeared, Chateaubriand found himself in favor, as his book comported well with the ruler’s courtship of the Catholic Church. But the following year Napoleon arranged the execution of Louis XVI’s cousin, Louis-Antoine, the Duke of Enghien, on false charges of conspiracy to overthrow him. Chateaubriand broke with him and soon found himself relegated to internal exile, away from Paris. “If one compares Washington to Buonaparte, man to man, the genius of the first seems less soaring than that of the second.” Washington was no Alexander, no Caesar, no lion or eagle among men. “He defend[ed] himself with a handful of citizens on a land without memories and without fame, in the restricted circle of the domestic hearths”; “he does not place his foot on the necks of kings” after defeating the greatest generals of his time, “rush[ing] from Memphis to Venice and from Cadiz to Moscow” across Europe and beyond it. 

Washington “acts slowly: one could say that he feels he is the envoy of future liberty and that he is afraid to compromise it. It is not his own destiny this hero of another sort bears, it is that of his country; he does not allow himself to toy with what does not belong to him.” His battle trophy was the United States of America. “Buonaparte has no trait of this grave American,” wishing “only to create renown for himself” and “hold[ing] himself responsible only for his own fate” in a mission he knows “will be short.” In “crushing [the anarchy] of the Revolution “he stifles liberty and finally loses his own liberty on the last field of battle.” Prometheus-like, chained to the rock of Elba, “as long as he struggles against death,” Europe “does not dare to lay down its arms”; once he died, “what did the citizens have to mourn?” “Washington raises a nation to independence; a retired magistrate, he peacefully falls asleep beneath his paternal roof amidst the regrets of his compatriots and the veneration of all peoples.” 

As a result of their lives, “the republic of Washington still exists” in 1827, when Chateaubriand published his Travels. “The empire of Buonaparte is destroyed.” Whereas “the name of Washington will spread with liberty from age to age,” marking “the beginning of a new era of mankind,” “the name of Buonaparte will also be repeated by future generations, but it will be attached to no blessing and will often serve as authority for oppressors, great or small.” [1] “Buonaparte could also have enriched the public domain: he was acting on the most civilized, the most intelligent, the bravest, the most brilliant nation of the earth. What would be the rank he would occupy today in the universe if he had joined magnanimity to what he possessed of the heroic, if combining Washington and Buonaparte at the same time, he had named liberty the heir of his glory!” But “in his eyes men were but a means of power; no sympathy was established between their happiness and his.” As the pharaohs of Egypt “placed their funeral pyramids not in the midst of flourishing countrysides but in the sterile sands,” where they “rise like eternity in solitude,” so “Buonaparte built the monument of his fame in their image.” 

From Philadelphia Chateaubriand journeyed to New York, “a gay, populous, and commercial city,” then to Boston “to salute the first battlefield of American liberty.” Later, in Albany, who finally met a man who talked sense to him about his proposed adventure. “Mr. Swift made some very reasonable objections.” I needed companions and equipment, and “even if I were fortunate enough to cross so much wilderness without accident, I would arrive in frozen regions where I would perish from cold or hunger.” “He advised me to begin by acclimating myself, by making an excursion first into the interior of America, learning Sioux, Iroquois, and Eskimo, living some time among the Canadian scouts and the agents of the Hudson’s Bay Company.” Annoyed but sobered, Chateaubriand hired a guide and horses, heading first for Niagara Falls, then to Pittsburgh and Ohio—without abandoning his hopes for find the Northwest Passage, later on.

Among the Iroquois near Albany, he met M. Violet, a “dancing master among the savages,” who played a fiddle while the Indians “jumped like a band of demons,” men and women “daubed like sorcerers, their bodies half naked, their ears slit, ravens’ feathers on their heads and rings in their noses.” “It was a rather strange thing for a disciple of Rousseau to be introduced to primitive life with a ball given for Iroquois by a former kitchen boy of General Rochambeau.” More somberly, Chateaubriand conversed with the Sachem of the Onondaga tribe of the Iroquois nation, who “complained of the Americans, who would soon leave to the people whose ancestors had welcomed them, not even enough earth to cover their bones.” Later, Chateaubriand remarks that “the nations that peopled [Lake Erie’s] shores were exterminated by the Iroquois two centuries ago,” refusing to make his hosts into mere victims, recognizing that what was soon to be done to them, more or less peacefully, they had done to others, violently.

The Indians themselves already had “taken on something” of European manners, with horses and flocks, cabins “filled with furniture and utensils bought at Quebec, Montreal Niagara, Detroit, or the cities of the United States.” “Hospitality is the last primitive virtue remaining to the Indian in the midst of the vices of European civilization”; “once received in a cabin, one became inviolable,” as “the hearth had the power of the altar,” “mak[ing] you sacred.” In those homes, the children were “never punished,” obeying grandparents and mothers but not fathers. The children nonetheless remain unspoiled. “If the savage child obeys no one, no one obeys him: there lies the whole secret of his joy and his reason,” since if they were to demand anything of their parents they would simply be ignored. They pay attention to their fathers not as patriarchs but as exemplars, each boy “studying the arts that he sees his father practicing.” “They are neither noisy, annoying, nor surly; they have in their appearance something serious like Happiness, something noble, like independence.” Were we Europeans to attempt to raise children this way, “we would have to start by relieving ourselves of our vices.”

It was on a river somewhere near Lake Superior, alone in nature and not with human beings ‘white’ or ‘red’ that Chateaubriand could at last, if briefly, fall into a Rousseauian reverie, as he recorded in his diary at the time. “The sky is pure over my head, the water limpid under my boat, which is flying before a light breeze…. Primitive liberty, I find you at last! I pass as that bird who flies before me, who travels haphazardly, who has only an embarrassment of riches among the shadow. Here I am as the Almighty created me, the sovereign of nature, born triumphantly by the waters, while the inhabitants of the rivers accompany my course…. Is it on the forehead of society or on mine that is engraved the immortal seal of our origin? Run and shut yourselves up in your cities; go and subject yourselves to your petty laws; earn your livelihood by the sweat of your brow, or devour the pauper’s bread; slaughter one another over a word, over a master; doubt the existence of God, or adore him in superstitious forms. I shall go wandering in my solitudes.” He had the wit and the realism to add, “Without the mosquitoes, this place would be very agreeable.”

Men fight over such natural beauty and fertility. In Kentucky, “for more than two centuries the nations allied with the Cherokees and those allied with the Iroquois nation fought each other over hunting rights there. No tribe dared settle on this battlefield.” But “will the European generations be more virtuous and freer on these shores than the American generations they have exterminated?” No: slaves will “till the soil under the whip of the master in this wilderness where man paraded his liberty,” with “the riches of the soil bring[ing] about new wars.” Still, there remains the wilderness itself, where “fireflies shone in the darkness and were eclipsed when they crossed a moonbeam.” “The traveler’s reverie is a sort of plenitude of the heart and emptiness of the mind which allows one to enjoy his existence in repose: it is by thought that we trouble the felicity which God gives us: the soul is peaceful; the mind is troubled.” The older Chateaubriand simply comments, “The 36 years that have passed since my trip have brought much enlightenment and changed many things in the Old and the New World; these years have necessarily modified the ideas and rectified the judgments of the writer.”

How so? Chateaubriand continued his researches in the intervening decades. More than half of his book consists of his discoveries in the books of others—his narrative of the North American voyage drifting off after his account of Kentucky, like the rivers there. He seems to have been determined more to preserve and publicize knowledge of the vanishing Indians than of the rising Americans, perhaps assuming that the Americans would take care of themselves. As an ardent reader, if no longer a disciple, of Rousseau, he finds the American Indians more interesting than the American Europeans or their African slaves. As a professional writer, he may also have an eye on the interests of his own readers. As of the 1820s, Chateaubriand could still write that his account of the Indians’ ways of life “shows America as it is today.” Only a few years later, Tocqueville would reverse his great kinsman’s emphasis, calling attention not to the Indians, whose aristocratic moeurs would die with them, nor even to the American Founders (although he took considerable care to describe their handiwork, the U.S. Constitution), but to the way of life of what he called the world’s “sample democracy,” in whose civil-social equality he saw the future of both republicanism and despotism in the modern world.

Regarding the “manners” of the Indians, Chateaubriand corrects Rousseau. “There are two equally faithful and unfaithful ways of painting the savages of North America.” You might “speak only of their laws and their manners, without entering into details of their bizarre customs and their habits which are often disgusting to civilized men.” If so, “all you will see will be Greeks and Romans, for the laws of the Indians are grave and their manners often charming.” Alternatively, you might reverse this approach, looking solely at the Indians’ customs and habits, ignoring their law and manners. “Then you will see only the smoky, filthy cabins to which retires a kind of monkey endowed with human speech.” But are you sure that your European ancestors were any better? A Roman writer “complained of being forced to listen to the language of the German and to frequent the Burgundian who rubbed his hair with butter” (not unlike the experience of cultivated persons in the America of the 1950s, forced to listen to barbaric slang and to frequent youths who dosed their hair with Vitalis). “Indeed, I do not know if the hut of old Cato in the land of the Sabines was much cleaner than that of an Iroquois. Sly Horace might leave us some doubts on that score.” To invoke our contemporary language, Chateaubriand is no ‘racist.’

He also recognizes ‘diversity’: “If one gives the same traits to all the savages of North America, the portrait will be unrealistic; the savages of Louisiana and Florida differed in many ways from the savages of Canada.” He will generalize without losing sight of particulars.

In considering any regime, one wants to know who rules. Generally speaking, “age is the source of authority” among the Indian nations and tribes. “The older a man is, the greater his influence”; the Great Spirit being eternal, He is the patriarch of patriarchs. The families patriarchs rule perpetuate themselves initially by an engagement ritual, whereby the family of the young man proceeds from the elder’s cabin to the cabin of the girl’s mother. They consult her dreams. If favorable, the wedding will proceed; if unfavorable, the dreams may be “conjur[ed] away” by “hanging a red necklace on the neck of an idol of oak.” Chateaubriand adds, “Among civilized men too, hope has its red necklaces and idols.” After that, “a considerable wait ensures before the conclusion of the marriage,” as “the prime virtue of the savage is patience,” the virtue of hunters and warriors, who stalk their prey, and of gatherers and farmer, who wait upon the seasons. Closer to nature than the civilized man, the savage has no timepieces to rule him. “Whatever the young man’s passion, then, he is obliged to affect an air of indifference and to await the orders of the family,” occupying his time by building a new cabin. 

Peoples who live according to nature must view war differently than civilized peoples do. “In Europe they marry in order to escape the military laws; among the savages of North America no one could marry before having fought for the homeland. A man was not judged worthy of being a father until he had proved that he could defend his children.” This “manly custom” means that a man isn’t eligible for marriage unless he is a warrior and that “a warrior did not begin to enjoy public consideration until the day of his marriage,” until he shows readiness to procreate in peace, to perpetuate the nation in addition to defending it. Polygamy and even permission to “offer their wives and daughters to strangers” aim at strengthening families, not at weakening them, as such practices would do in Europe. “They think that they will make their family happier by changing the paternal blood”—a sort of controlled radicalization of the incest prohibition, the protection against inbreeding. To the Indians, such practices have a spiritual dimension, too, as they believe “it is the father who creates the child’s soul; the mother engenders only his body.” They choose the names of their children from the maternal line, intending the child to take “the place of the woman whose name he has received,” giving “life, so to speak, to the ancestors,” “communicat[ing] a kind of immortality to the ancestors, by supposing them present in the midst of their posterity” and “augment[ing] the attention the mother gives childhood by reminding her of the attention given hers,” with “filial tenderness redoubl[ing] maternal love.” 

The intention of linking those alive to those who are dead—of maintaining the bonds of families, of tribes, and of nations across generations—also accounts for the extraordinary “veneration for the dead” seen among the American Indians. “Lawful property is recognized only where the ancestors are buried,” which is why Indians show such revulsion against selling their lands. “Shall we say to our fathers: Arise, and follow us to a foreign land?” [2] Chateaubriand attributes this conviction to one of the differences between savage and civilized peoples. “Civilized peoples have monuments of letters and arts to preserve the memories of their homelands”—great cities, with their “palaces, towers, columns, obelisks,” expanses of cultivated fields, written chronicles. “The savages have nothing of all that.” Even their “traditional songs vanish with the last memory that retains, them, with the last voice that repeats them. Therefore for the tribes of the New World there is only one monument: the tomb. Take away from the savages the bones of their fathers, and you take away from them their history, their law, and even their gods; in the eyes of posterity you strip these men of the proof of their existence as well as the proof of their nothingness.”

Indeed, “the true God makes Himself felt even in the false religions, and the man who prays is worthy of respect,” as the Indians show themselves worthy in their celebrations of marriage, funerals, and harvests. For the Indians as for “the ancient Greeks and most primitive peoples,” religious observance comes less in the form of words than of action, in dancing. “They dance to receive a guest, to smoke a peace pipe; they dance for the harvest; they dance for the birth of a child; they dance above all for the dead.” They dance for the hunt and the dance for a war, when the procession of warriors is followed by the march of “the medicine man, the prophet or augur interpreter” of dreams. Upon returning from a military expedition, “heads, hearts, mutilated members, and bleeding scalps are hung on pikes planted on the ground. They dance around these trophies, and the prisoners who are to be burned are present at the spectacle of these horrible pleasures.” In Shakespeare’s plays depicting then-recent English history, the heads of dead captains were exhibited on the heads of pikes.

It is almost needless for Chateaubriand to say that the Indians lack modern science. Looking at the night sky, they “scarcely know anything other than the north star,” which “serves as their guide at night.” They know their territorial surroundings intimately, however, and if they would “ban from the treatment of the ill the superstitious customs and the quackery of the priests, they would know all the essentials of the art of healing,” as their knowledge of herbal medicine “is almost as advanced among them as among the civilized peoples.” Chateaubriand has some (uncharacteristically Voltairean) fun describing the ministrations of the ‘medicine men.’ With respect to childbirth they take the opposite view of ‘the moderns’: Faced with a “difficult birth,” they “suffocate the mother, who, struggling against death, delivers her fruit by the effort of a last convulsion. They always inform the woman in labor before having recourse to this means; she never hesitates to sacrifice herself.” Indeed, when demanding respect for ‘indigenous cultures,’ egalitarians frequently overlook such customs, among which is the common feature of the four principal Indian languages, namely, the use of “two genders, the noble gender for the men, and the nonnoble gender for the women and male or female animals.” “In saying of a coward that he is a woman, the word woman is made masculine; in saying of a woman that she is a man, the word man is made feminine.”

The way of life common to all the Indian nations and tribes is warfare. “War is the great affair of the savages and the foundation of their politics; it has about it something more legitimate than war among civilized peoples because it is almost always declared for the very existence of the people who undertake it: it is a matter of preserving hunting lands or fields appropriate for farming. But by the very reason that the Indian applies himself to the art which causes death only in order to live there result from it implacable furies among the tribes: they are fighting over the family feuds. The hatreds become individual; as the armies are not large and each enemy knows the name and the fact of his enemy, they also fight fiercely through antipathies of character and by individual resentments; these children of the same wilderness carry into their external quarrels something of the animosity of civil disputes.” Warriors compose one-fifth of the community, with fifteen being “the legal age of military service.”

The tribal council decides on war, although their resolution “binds no one” and “taking part is purely voluntary.” In preparing for that war, the military chief or sachem withdraws from the community for two days and the women are forbidden to approach the warriors, “although they may speak” to the sachem, “whom they visit in order to obtain from him a portion of the booty taken from the enemy, for the savages never doubt the success of their enterprises.” Only then do the warriors approach him, telling their plan of battle. As in so much else, the warriors sing, vaunting over the atrocities they intend to commit. (“I shall cut off the fingers of my enemies with my teeth; I shall burn their feet and then their legs.” Cole Porter would have no place.) The warrior’s song also extols “his own honor” and the honor of his family. His audience responds in kind: “Nothing is as noble, nothing is as handsome” as the warriors; “they have all the qualities and all the virtues.” Chateaubriand adds that “the Spartans had this custom too.” In keeping with this military ethos, in wartime “the natural indolence of the savages is suddenly replaced by an extraordinary activity; the gaiety and martial ardor of the young men communicate themselves to the nation. There are established kinds of workshops for the manufacture of sleds and canoes”—a rare instance of manufacturing industry in a martial civil society. The one check on a military expedition is religious. If the medicine man, or even one of the warriors, suffers from an unpropitious dream the action is called off. Thus “absolute liberty and unenlightened religion govern” hand-in-hand.

On the battlefield, the warriors taunt their rivals, calling each other “limping, cross-eyed, short; these words inflicted on the self-esteem augment their rage,” with “the frightful custom of scalping the enemy heighten[ing] the ferocity of the combat.” “This trophy is often taken with such skill that the brain is left uncovered without having been penetrated by the point of the instrument.” Honor, ferocity, battle-trophies and spoils: the thumotic character of the Indians’ regimes slights rational strategy, as “it is rare for the victors to pursue the vanquished”; they would rather “stay on the battlefield to strip the dead, to bind up the prisoners, to celebrate the triumph with songs and dances” and to “mourn the friends they have lost.” The corpses themselves are a valuable source of protein. As for the prisoners, the women “have a fine privilege” of saving them by “adopting them as brothers or husbands,” especially if the women “have lost brothers or husbands in the battle.” Once adopted, a defeated warrior never betrays his saviors, showing “no less ardor than his new compatriots in bearing arms against his former nation,” to the extent of killing his father or his son in the next battle. Unsaved prisoners are burned alive, as proposed in the battle hymns; alternatively, they might merely be enslaved. There are some variations among the nations when it comes to prisoners, however. “The Iroquois, renowned moreover for their cruelty towards prisoners of war, had a custom one would almost say was borrowed from the Romans, which bore evidence of the genius of a great people: they incorporated the conquered nation into their own nation without making them slaves; they did not even force then to adopt their laws; they only subjected them to their customs.” 

The work of Christian missionaries has softened some of these severities. “It was in the name of a God sacrificed by men that the missionaries obtained the abolition of human sacrifice. They planted the cross in place of the torture stake, and the blood of Jesus Christ redeemed the blood of the prisoner.” In reaction, “the Sachems, rigid partisans of the old customs, deplored that humaneness, a degeneration they said, of the old virtue.” O tempora, O mores. More generally, the influence of Christianity has “wiped out” the practice of worshipping the sun and its concomitant use of public sacrifices. Indians have retained their Manitous, typically a bird, fish, or other animal, although sometimes an inanimate object, chosen by each person and held as sacred to him. “The hunter is careful never to kill or wound the animal he has chosen for Manitou.” This is in keeping with the Indians’ animism, whereby not only men but animals are said to have souls animated by “divine intelligence.” Surrounded by nature, the Indians have no understanding of nature as philosophers understand it; they believe that natural objects can change their shapes, like Ovids who take their poetry as knowledge.

As indicated in the description of warfare, “dreams play a great role in the religion of the savage; their interpretation is a science, and their illusions are held for realities.” With a remaining trace of Rousseau, Chateaubriand comments, “Among civilized peoples, it is often the contrary: the realities are illusions.” “You can find in all that enough religion, falsehood, and poetry, to learn, to be led astray, and to be consoled.” 

Respecting politics, Chateaubriand corrects the mistaken claim that American Indians have no governments, their lives never having left the level of the family and its patriarch. In fact, “among the savages are to be found all the types of governments known to civilized peoples, from despotism to republic, passing through monarchy, limited or absolute, elective or hereditary.” They have also discovered federalism—necessary because the extent of their territories makes it impossible to govern far-flung tribes within a given nation from a central location, when it comes to routine matters. Human beings are indeed political animals, as “men need to protect themselves against the arbitrary before fixing the relations with one another”; for this reason, “political laws are born spontaneously with man and are established without antecedents” and are “found among the most barbarous hordes.”

By contrast, civil laws such as laws governing private property and criminal law are formed not by necessity but by customs, and were initially enforced by families. “Vengeance was justice: natural law prosecuted among the uncivilized that which public law reaches among the civilized.”

All the North American Indian nations share some political characteristics. As mentioned, they are divided into tribes. Each tribe has a hereditary chief and a military chief, whose right to rule derives from election, “as among the old Germanic peoples.” Each tribe has its own name and emblems, the latter used as insignia in war and seals on treaties. As in ancient Greece and Rome, names of both tribes and individuals derive from some circumstance of their lives or some distinctive characteristic, e.g., Beaver Killer, Broken Leg, Beautiful Voice.

The national councils consist of tribal chiefs, military chiefs, matrons, orators, medicine men, although they “vary according to the makeup of the peoples. Although “nations so simple should have nothing to debate in politics,” on the contrary council deliberations are often complex, covering treaties, embassies, alliances, elections, offers of mediation. “All these affairs are discussed with order; the reasons pro and con are clarified,” often with “a profoundness and judgment few statesmen in Europe would be capable of.” 

As to the several regimes seen among the Indian nations, Chateaubriand begins with despotism, “such as is found among most of the peoples of Asia and such as there existed in Peru and Mexico.” Wherever they are established, such regimes may feature “luxury and administration” but at the cost of civilizational stagnation, as the tyrant “always keeps the right of life and death over his subjects, and they are careful to close themselves up within a mediocrity which excites neither the cupidity nor the jealousy of power.” Without reward for industry, “the genius of man” never “arrive[s] at liberty through enlightenment.” In North America, the Natchez nation, originally from Mexico, exemplify the despotic regime. Among the Natchez, the tyrant, likening himself to the sun, claimed ownership over the harvest, enabling him to control the distribution of wealth and to invent a “hierarchy of offices which involves a host of men in power through their complicity in oppression.” Each subject “saw himself obliged to bear to The Sun a part of his hunt or his catch,” to obey him without hesitation or compensation, and to submit to judgments by the Sun under laws the Sun ordained. His female counterpart, the Squaw Chief, took for herself “as many husbands and lovers as she wished”; “she then had the objects of her caprice strangled.” To keep the tribal chiefs satisfied with his rule, the Sun decreed “a general prostitution of the women, as it was practiced at certain Babylonian initiations.” Religious superstition was encouraged by priests intent on “fortify[ing] tyranny by the degradation of the people’s reason.” At the funerals of the chiefs more than 100 subjects were sacrificed in an act of mass suicide, their oppressors “abandon[ing] absolute power in life only to inherit the tyranny of death.” 

Summarizing the general characteristics of the Natchez regime, Chateaubriand observes: “On one side naked men, the liberty of nature; on the other, demands without equal, a despotism that foes beyond the most formidable examples among civilized peoples. The primitive innocence and virtue of the political state in its cradle, the corruption and crimes of a decrepit government: what a monstrous combination!” Without private property, for which “the savage nations” have “an invincible aversion,” and with the crops stored in granaries controlled by the chief, the Natchez suffered. Once the public granary was destroyed and the public field was divided into family plots, each worked and harvested but not owned by a family, the Natchez began to prosper. As for the Sun and the Squaw Chief, they “were only remembrances of the past, remembrances useful to the peoples, with whom it is never good to destroy the authority of the ancestors.” The Natchez “continued to maintain the perpetual fire in the temple; they did not even touch the ashes of the old chiefs placed in that edifice because it is a crime to violate the asylum of the dead, and, after all, the dust of tyrants presents lessons as great as that of other men.” 

The Muskogee nation (dominant partners with the Seminoles in the Creek confederation) has a limited monarchy. Their chief is called the Mico; he receives ambassadors and other foreigners and presides over the council, convoking to deliberate on questions of war and peace. Elected by the council of tribal elders and confirmed by the warriors, he “must have spilled blood in combat or have distinguished [him]self by force of reason, genius, or eloquence,” owing his power “only to his merit.” “In the council itself, where he receives so many honors, he has only his voice; all his influence is in his wisdom.” Mothers discipline their children by warning, “Be careful, the Mico sees you”—inculcating “the invisible despotism of virtue.” He wields the same “dangerous prerogative” as the Sun once held among the Natchez, control of the public granary; so far, he has not abused it. 

The Mico and the council of elders reverse the functions of officers in limited monarchies seen among “civilized peoples,” with the Mico making the laws and the council executing them. “These savages thought perhaps that there was less peril in vesting a council of elders with the executive power than in putting this power in the hands of a single man,” while “a single man of mature age and of a reflective mind better elaborates laws than a deliberative body.” This arrangement has worked well but the council suffers from what Chateaubriand judges to be “a capital vice,” having placed itself “under the immediate direction of the grand medicine man, who leads it through fear of enchantments and through the interpretations of dreams.” The Muskogee priesthood thus “threatens to capture various powers.”

The warriors serve under a completely independent war chief. Consonant with their military way of life, the Muskogees “seized Florida after having wiped out” or having enslaved “the Yamasees, its first inhabitants.” They forced the Seminoles into confederation with them. “Inclined to idleness and feasting,” renowned for their poetry and music, they have slaves to cultivate the land, although a married slave’s children “regain their natural right” of liberty “by birth.” “The misfortune of the parents is not passed on to their posterity; the Muskogees did not want servitude to be hereditary: a fine lesson that savages have given to civilized men!”—most noticeably the European Americans who live nearby. This notwithstanding, the Yamasee remain “timid, silent, patient, abject” even in freedom: “Such is slavery,” which, “whatever its mildness…degrades the virtues.” “This Yamasee, former master of the Floridas, is still of the Indian race; he fought like a hero to save his country from the invasion of the Muskogees, but fortune betrayed him. What made such a great difference between the Yamasee of old and the Yamasee of today? Two words: liberty and servitude.” Europeans, take note.

Far to the north, the Hurons and Iroquois live under “aristocratic republican” regimes. The Hurons supplement their tribal council with a hereditary chief, who rises to power through matrilineal succession. If war or disease extinguished a royal line, “the noblest matron of the tribe” chose the new chief; “the influence of women must have been considerable in a nation whose politics and whose nature gave them so many rights.” Whereas in Asia “the women are slaves and have no part in the government,” but “spared in general from the harshest work of the fields,” and among nations of German origin “the women were free, but they remained strangers to the acts of politics,” among Amerindian tribes women “participated in the affairs of state but were employed at those painful tasks which have devolved upon man in civilized Europe.” “Slaves and beasts of burden in the field and on the hunts, they became free and queenlike in the family assemblies and in the nation’s councils,” in a manner reminiscent of the ancient Gauls.

The Iroquois originated in the Huron nation, leaving it to settle on the south bank of the Saint Lawrence River. Initially “a peaceful agricultural nation,” they developed warlike characteristics in their struggles with the Adirondacks (now called the Algonquians), “a warlike hunter people” who scorned “the emigrating Hurons.” “Resolv[ing] to perish to the last man or to be free,” the Iroquois discovered in themselves “a warrior genius, which they had not suspected,” defeating the Algonquins, who then allied themselves with the Hurons and the French. After the Dutch arrived at Manhattan, the Iroquois acquired firearms, “in a short time” becoming “more skillful in operating those arms than the whites themselves.” An “implacable” war began, lasting “more than three centuries,” at the end of which “the Algonquins were exterminated and the Hurons reduced to a tribe taking refuge under the cannon of Quebec,” settling along the shores of what’s now called Lake Huron.

The Iroquois republic has three councils: the council of participants, the council of elders, and the council of warriors—a version of what Aristotle calls a mixed regime. The council of participants, the “supreme council,” represents families; representatives are elected by the women, “who often choose a woman to represent them.” The male-dominated council of elders served as a body to which decisions of the council of participants could be appealed. Thus, while “the Iroquois had thought that they should not be deprived of the aid of a sex whose unbounded and ingenious mind is very resourceful and is capable of acting on the human heart,” they “had also thought that the decrees of a council of women could be impassioned.” The council of elders “tempered and so to speak cooled” their decrees, serving also as “the moderator between the council of participants and the council composed of the body of young warriors,” another group of persons inclined to be impassioned. 

Not every member of the councils enjoyed the right to speak in meetings. Instead, each tribe chose orators, individuals who had “made a particular study of politics and eloquence.” In Europe and (as Chateaubriand likely recalls) in France, giving such importance to designated rhetoricians “would be an obstacle to liberty.” Not so among the Iroquois, because the individual members of the councils never felt bound by the deliberation of the councils. Consent was based on deference to elders, not obedience to decrees. This way of life retained the spirit of liberty without undermining social and political order.

The Iroquois republic was federal as well as aristocratic. They divided their nation into five cantons, entitled to “make peace and war separately.” In case of disputes, neutral cantons offered “their good offices” to both sides. As a result of all these institutions, “the Iroquois were as famous for their politics as for their arms,” and this included foreign policy, where they deployed a balance-of-power strategy against the French and the English, although they usually favored the English, who counterbalanced the alliance of the Algonquins and the Hurons with the French. 

“Such was the Iroquois before the shadow and the destruction of European civilization were extended over him.” Generally, Chateaubriand estimates, there are now no more than 400,000 Amerindians in North America. They remain valiant warriors. Only a decade earlier, seeing an opportunity during the War of 1812, the Creeks fought hard against the Americans, at times practicing cannibalism. Although he doesn’t seem to know about the Washington Administration’s earlier policy of regime change, he sees its effects: “These savages had made notable progress in civilization”—indeed, the Americans had numbered them among the “Five Civilized Tribes” in the southeast since the Founding period. This progress was especially noticeable in “the art of war,” as they used artillery with great effect. Politically, they had instituted a rather rough form of impeachment, “judging and put[ting] to death one of their Micos…for having sold lands to the whites without the participation of the national council.” Now, in 1827, the state of Georgia claims that it bought the “rich territory” of the Muskogees and the Seminoles; although “the American Congress has placed an obstacle before this claim…sooner or later the Creeks, the Cherokees, and the Chickasaws, pressed in the midst of the white populations of Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia, will be obliged to undergo exile or extermination.” 

The future looks no better for the northern tribes and nations. Alcoholism, disease, and war, “which we have multiplied among the Indians, have precipitated the destruction of these peoples.” But these are not the sole reasons for Indian “depopulation.” “The Indian was not savage; the European civilization did not act on the pure state of nature; it acted on the rising American civilization; if it had found nothing, it would have created something; but it found manners and destroyed them because it was stronger and did not consider it should mix with these manners.” Catholicism, with its long experience in prudently melding Christianity with paganism, would have done better than Protestantism did in implementing such a strategy. “The Protestant governments of America occupied themselves little with the civilization of the savages; they thought only of trading with them. Now commerce, which increases civilization among peoples already civilized and among whom intelligence has prevailed over manners, produces only corruption among peoples whose manners are superior to their intelligence.” Having learned to barter with the Europeans for arms, alcohol, and trinkets, they declined. Dealings with these foreigners also deranged the Indians’ regimes, corrupting the delicately balanced councils when wars did not kill their leaders. By now, in the 1820s, most tribes “are simply led by a chief”; their councils are ineffectual. And with the establishment of American and English military outposts in tribal territories, Indians come to expect gifts and protection from these new ‘chiefs,” finally coming to “look upon [themselves] as a species inferior to the white.” “What need to govern oneself when one has only to obey?”

What if Europeans had never landed in the Americas? “Putting aside the great principles of Christianity, as well as the interests of Europe, a philosophical spirit could wish that the people of the New World had had the time to develop outside the circle of our institutions.” If so, “who knows whether we would not have seen one day land on our shores some American Columbus coming to discover the Old World?” Alternatively, “I wondered” if France had retained its colonies until the time the American English won their independence. “Would this emancipation have taken place? Would our presence on the American soil have hastened it or retarded it? Would New France itself have become free? Why not?” Chateaubriand thinks that France’s fortunes on continental Europe would have been better, with a place to send its excess population, a large market for its products, timber for its navy.” Instead, “we are excluded from the new universe where mankind begins anew.” “France has disappeared from North America like those Indian tribes with which she has sympathized and of which I glimpsed a few remains.”

“If I were to see the United States again today, I would no longer recognize it: there where I left forests, I would find plowed fields; there where I cleared a trail for myself through the brush, I would travel on highways. The Mississippi, the Missouri, and the Ohio no longer flow in solitude; great three-masted vessels sail up them and more than 200 steamships animate their shores,” now dotted with cities. This new regime cannot but influence old Europe, whose scholars and writers initially “had not the least idea of the revolution which in the space of forty years took place in men’s minds.” But beyond the material riches of America, the “most precious” treasure has proved to be liberty; “each people is called upon to draw from this inexhaustible mine.” “The discovery of the representative republic in the United States is one of the greatest political events in the world. That event has proved…that there are two types of practical liberty One belongs to the infancy of nations; it is the daughter of manners and virtue—it is that of the first Greeks, the first Romans, and that of the savages of America. The other is born out of the old age of nations; it is the daughter of enlightenment and reason—it is this liberty of the United States which replaces the liberty of the Indian.” Only a few years later, Tocqueville would describe this as the replacement of aristocratic liberty with democratic liberty.

Chateaubriand wonders if America can “preserve her second kind of liberty.” It may well divide. “Has not a representative of Virginia already defended the thesis of the old Greek and Roman liberty with the system of slavery, against a representative of Massachusetts who defended the cause of modern liberty without slaves, such as Christianity has made it?” And are the western states, far removed from the Atlantic states, “not want a separate government,” too? Will “foreign immigration” not “destroy the homogeneity” of the Americans? And “will not the mercantile spirit dominate” Americans, making “self-interest begin to be the dominant national faith,” again to the destruction of the nation by civil or international war? Chateaubriand expects international war to come not from Europe but from the new republics of Spanish America, where republicanism has taken a very different form, inflected as it has been Spanish customs, ideas, principles, and prejudices, including a disinclination to educate the people. [3] “If the military spirit took hold of the United States, a great captain could arise,” and “liberty is not certain to preserve her patrimony under the guidance of victory,” any more than France had done, after the victories of Napoleon.

Even so, “liberty will never entirely disappear from America.” Ancient liberty, “daughter of manners,” proved more fragile than modern liberty, “daughter of Enlightenment.” Manners are readily corruptible by the advance of civilization itself, with its “brilliance and luxury.” Enlightenment still “shines after the ages of oppression and corruption,” fortifying itself with time; “thus it does not abandon the liberty it has produced,” being its “generative principle.” Chateaubriand holds out this hope, perhaps, more for Europe, still afflicted with the political descendants of Bonaparte and the Jacobins, than for America, whose dangers lay ahead. 

Chateaubriand concludes with an account of the end of his trip. He returned to Europe in July 1792. “A simple argument between me and my conscience brought me back to the theater of the world.” He had left for the United States “full of illusions; France’s troubles were beginning at the same time as my life was beginning; nothing was finished in me or my country.” He never discovered the Northwest Passage and so “had not carried glory away from the midst of the forests where I had gone to seek it” but had rather “left it behind sitting on the ruins of Athens.” And so he ceased being a traveler in America and “returned to be a soldier in Europe.” This vocation of the sword failed him even as the vocation of the staff had done. There remained the vocation of the pen. His readers already knew that this was his true vocation, so he does not pause to say so.

 

Notes

1. See Montesquieu: “Dialogue between Sulla and Eucrates,” for the same observation regarding the legacy of tyrants who restore republicanism, or claim to restore, republicanism.
2. See Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges: The Ancient City, for the same observation.
3. Chateaubriand prefers not republicanism but “representative monarchy” as the regime appropriate for the much more heterogeneous populations of South America. “From the Negroes, Indians, and Europeans has come a mixed population, lethargic in that very gentle slavery which the Spanish manners establish wherever they reign.” Constitutional monarchs would serve such societies better, as that regime “destroys individual pretension to the executive power and unites order and liberty.” Unfortunately, already “talented people are rapidly disappearing” from the region. “A tiny Europe is being arranged patterned on mediocrity; to reach the new generations it will be necessary to traverse a desert.”