Raymond Aron: Aron et De Gaulle. Partie I: De Gaulle et les Parties (1943-1948). Jean-Claude Casanova, ed. Paris: Calman Levy, 2022.

Raymond Aron: Liberté et Égalité: Cours au Collège de France. Pierre Manent, ed. Paris: Éditions EHESS, 2013.

 

Fifteen years younger than Charles de Gaulle, Raymond Aron came of age intellectually at about the same time that de Gaulle came of age politically, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, with a communist tyranny secured in Russia and Nazi tyranny rising across France’s border with Germany. All was not quiet on the eastern front. As republican regimes across Europe grew increasingly endangered, both men, each a staunch republican, prepared for conflict. As a Jew, Aron had what later became the obvious additional concern that neither Hitler nor Stalin much liked his people. (For his part, de Gaulle had taken the side of Captain Dreyfus as a youth, and so could claim few friends among the substantial portion of the French ‘Right’ which adhered to anti-Semitic prejudice.)

In his characteristically deep-probing introduction to “Liberty and Equality,” the concluding lecture in the last course Aron taught at the Collège de France, Pierre Manent provides an overview of Aron’s political thought, aptly remarking that “the work of Raymond Aron is like politics itself: apparently simple of access and nevertheless difficult to grasp in the last resorts and in its final ends.” One might add that Aron’s thought is political in Aristotle’s sense of politics, animated by reciprocity and deliberation, by ruling and being ruled in turn, not a matter of merely seeking influence (as do those, like Hitler and Stalin, who are all-too-sure of themselves) but seeking to be influenced—influenced not by influential persons but by the facts that turn up, by experience and by reflection upon that experience. Aron, Manent writes, spent fifty years reflecting upon politics, “an education” never completed. In politics, there is always something more to learn.

By 1978, the year of his lecture, Aron understood his lifetime, most of it lived in the political, intellectual, and spiritual aftermath of the Great War—that vast deflation of once-fashionable confidence in inevitable historical progress—as “an epoch wherein European politics had begun to put European civilization in danger.” “Germany made the destiny of Aron.” He knew Germany rather well, having spent the ominous years of 1930-1933 in Cologne and Berlin, where he studied the writings of Max Weber. Aron admired the philosophic sociologist’s “sense of the conflict, of the drama and even the tragedy that is the human adventure.” German sociology provided him with “intellectual equipment” indispensable for the coming “black years.”

Unlike most German intellectuals, but exactly like that maïtre of democratic civil society, Alexis de Tocqueville, Aron detested “deterministic evolution” and “historical relativism,” which he regarded as “two strategies opposed to one another but equally ruinous, neutralizing or abolishing the proper character of the historical condition of man and his specific tragedy, which is precisely that man is neither the lord nor the plaything of the times.” Against Hegel and his countless epigoni, “In [Aron’s] eyes, history could never become a substitute for philosophy.” He clearly saw the link between historicism as a philosophic doctrine and modern tyranny or ‘totalitarianism’ as a political ideology and practice. The existence of such a regime, instantiated by the Right and the Left, proved Weber mistaken in one sense: “the administration of things” had not replaced “the government of persons”; on the contrary, persons of tyrannical passion ruthlessly and repeatedly purged the bureaucracies they ruled, turning the remnants to acts of tyranny up to and including mass extermination of enemies real and imagined. Meanwhile, democratic-republican regimes like France’s Third Republic urgently needed to “reconstitute a directing elite, neither cynical nor cowardly, which has political courage without falling into Machiavellianism pure and simple”; additionally, and crucially, that elite needed “a minimum of faith in the common will, lest they fall into tyranny themselves, whether ‘soft’-bureaucratic, as Tocqueville had warned, or ‘hard’-dictatorial, as fascist and communist rulers exemplified.

During his long career, Aron “was, with Bertrand de Jouvenel, the principal representative of French liberalism.” And if his (how you say?) research agenda derived from Weber, his reflections upon European political experience took him in an Aristotelian direction, made him into a political sociologist ‘of an Aristotelian mark.’ For him, liberalism was not a doctrine but a form of politics that “presented the best chances for rationality” and for “a life of human dignity”—rather as the American Founders saw things. The hyper-politicism of Carl Schmitt and the nearly apolitical economism of Friedrich von Hayek amounted to dazzling and deluding extremes that obscured the political character of liberalism—Schmitt, by denying liberalism has political content at all, Hayek by wishing that were true. In Aron’s more sober view, political liberalism consisted of the rule of law (so far, Hayek concurred) but also the understanding that foreign policy cannot be governed by law, even the ‘law of nations,’ but by men, and preferably just and prudent ones; no amount of Hayek’s beloved “spontaneous organization” animated by free trade will suffice. Further, political good “are difficult to produce,” even more difficult than commercial goods because they are often intangible, matters of honor and of justice. As Manent so judiciously puts it, “Aron was a liberal classic more than a classical liberal,” that is, “not so much a modern,” entertaining no “intemperate hopes in progress or in ‘modernity,'” but instead esteeming the classical virtues of moderation, sobriety, and “qualitative merit,” succumbing neither to the madness-inclining spiritedness of modern tyranny nor to the weak and poor-spirited shrinking from political and military reality that progressivist ‘idealists’ nurture but instead exhibiting a “virile acceptance of the limits in which human life is placed.” Virility or manliness need not careen into Achillean bloody-mindedness, if one is un homme sérieux. And so Aron’s classicism remained untainted by “nostalgia for the Greek polis or the ‘ages of faith,'” both no longer humanly recoverable, but is “particularly illustrated in the manner in which Aron conducted his political and sociological inquiries,” in which he located rights not so much in abstract doctrine but “a sort of ‘rule of ends,'” which never, computer-like, ‘prints out’ the prudential choices citizens must make. That is, ‘History’ determines only some things; it gives us our set of circumstances, which we as citizens must then understand, assess, and act within, but are seldom simply compelled by. 

This made Aron the adversary not only of the regime of modern tyranny but of all those persons, however well-intentioned, who want to wipe the slate of our circumstances clean. One should not condemn “the society of which we are members in the name of a past glory or of a regime of the future.” A ‘classical’ soul living in modern circumstances, “Aron accepted the overall characteristics of the modern society and regime.” With Aristotle, he began his inquiries with consideration of the opinions of his fellow citizens—especially, their opinions on liberty and equality, not as ideas simply but as combinations of ideas and sentiments which “orient the evaluations and actions of men.” In testing those opinions against reality, in refining and enlarging the public views, Aron showed us that “the gaze of the wise man encourages the virtue of the citizen.” 

While Manent surveys Aron’s intellectual trajectory, the economist Jean-Claude Casanova’s introductory essay to Aron et De Gaulle hews to the facts of his old friend’s biography. He knew Aron very well, having co-founded the journal Commentaire with him in 1978. He recounts that Aron escaped from Nazi-occupied France in late June of 1940. Like most Frenchmen, he had not heard de Gaulle’s now-famous eighteenth-of June radio ‘Call to Honor,’ broadcast by the BBC from his London exile. But he rightly anticipated that Churchill would never treat with Hitler, made his way to England, and soon found himself the editor of La France libre, a journal dedicated to exactly that purpose. Aron was thirty years old, already the author of the 1939 article, “Democratic States and Totalitarian States,” in which he had accurately described the geopolitical lay of the European land. He shared with Churchill and de Gaulle the confidence that American entry into the war would tip the balance against the Nazis.

After the liberation, he served briefly as André Malraux’s chief of staff during Malraux’s tenure as de Gaulle’s Minister of Information. He quit the editorship of La France Libre in June 1945, now publishing frequently in the journal Combat and in Le Figaro, then as now a leading newspaper in France. It was in this postwar period that he wrote his still-remembered, entirely accurate assessment of the Cold War: “Peace impossible, war improbable,” a formula which invites us to understand that peace isn’t the mere absence of war. Observing the parliamentary maelstrom that re-emerged in France in those years, he also remarked, again rightly, that the division between the Communist Party and the center-Left parties was sharper than the division between the centrists and the Gaullists, that the latter parties were real democrats, the Communists shammers. The controversy between the Gaullists and their fellow republicans was whether the French republican regime should be centered in a unicameral legislature or balanced between the executive and legislative branches, with the executive having charge of foreign policy. In this, Aron sided with the Gaullists, but only after writing an earlier piece, published in 1943, warning against the French (and not only French) tendency toward Bonapartism. 

In the 1950s, unlike most of the French, Aron advocated Algerian independence, considering Algeria too Muslim to remain French. At this time, Gaullists were against decolonization, although de Gaulle himself, having seen the futility of French rule in Syria while posted there in the early 1930s, had likely begun to have other ideas. He also departed from the Gaullists in his friendly sentiments toward the Americans as prior liberators and current protectors of Europe against the tyrannical regimes still menacing France and the rest of Western Europe, nearby to the east. In 1958, while teaching at the Sorbonne, Aron applauded de Gaulle’s return to power as a “legislator” in the Rousseauan but also classical sense of a “founder of institutions”—namely, the constitution of the Fifth Republic. “Raymond Aron admired de Gaulle without always approving of him,” disagreeing with the General’s withdrawal from NATO, his anti-Israeli remarks in the aftermath of the 1967 war, and his call for U. S. withdrawal from Vietnam in 1967. Through it all, Aron remained an “engaged spectator” of the Fifth Republic and of European politics generally. If de Gaulle had what Malraux once called “geological courage,” Aron had geological, rock-solid, good sense.

Nor did he lack civic courage. In the one wartime essay published here, “The Spirit of Bonaparte,” Aron raised a cautionary flag at de Gaulle himself in the form of a monitory history of French absolutism, an ambition for which many suspected the General of entertaining. He begins with a certain jaunty irony: “Since the traditional monarchy collapsed in the revolutionary tempest [of 1789], France has multiplied its political experiences with prodigality,” to wit, three constitutional monarchies (divided between two dynasties), two plebiscitary empires (Napoléon I and Napoléon III), and two parliamentary republics. “But the social structure of France,” French civil society, “was less shaken during this period than those of other great countries of Europe.” The political crises were caused by “conflicts and traditions and ideologies over, as one says today, the principle of legitimacy,” specifically, the aristocratic-monarchic model against the elective-democratic model. That is, what embittered French political life were controversies over the foundation of political life itself, the regime. A form of democratic republicanism finally established itself (firmly, this time) in 1871, though shaken by the Great War and finally overwhelmed by the Nazi Blitzkrieg in 1940. Now, in 1943, humiliated and “vibrat[ing] with a touchy patriotism, the French want to restore “a regime of liberty,” once the Allies throw out the Nazis. France seeks an effective government to repair the ruins and to strengthen the new armature of the country.” She wants no extremism but she does want unity, and, unfortunately, the regimes most successful in promoting unity in recent French history have been Bonapartist—plebiscitary despotisms, phenomena seen in many countries but with distinctive French characteristics.

Napoléon I having been sui generis, Aron concentrates his readers’ attention on his much more ordinary nephew, Louis-Napoléon. Louis-Napoléon regarded himself as one of those providential personages “in whose hands the destinies of their countries are placed,” and it did indeed require qualities owing less to his nature than to his fortune in order for such a mediocrity to ascend to prominence: “his name” and “the circumstances” which “transformed a mediocrity into an emperor.” He owed his popularity to “a cult founded on memory”—the “Napoleonic myth”—bestowed upon this hitherto “unknown person.” He and his political allies reinforced the myth by “purely personal propaganda, approaching commercial advertising,” which included pictures and songs. As to the circumstances, the people were terrified by the workers’ revolt of 1848 and wanted a “party of order” to quell the disturbances. The shrewd parliamentary Adolphe Thiers, who had already acted as a kingmaker in the 1830 “July Restoration” of the Bourbon line, judged Louis-Napoléon “a cretin,” and therefore “an ideal candidate” for the inaugural presidency of the Second Republic, as against the alternative, Louis-Eugène Cavaignac, a capable French general, previously Minister of War, whom Thiers regarded as too sympathetic to the Left. “For the first time, but not for the last time in the history of Europe, the most reactionary elements of the ruling classes gave their approval to an adventurer against a conservative republican,” hoping that the adventurer’s “popularity among the popular classes would be the best barrier against social troubles.” The pattern would be repeated, much more ominously, in Italy with Mussolini and in Germany with the choice of Hitler over Brüning. “Across the country, the masses, overheated by a mythology and maneuvered by the party of order, assured a brilliant victory to a phantom of a hero.” More, this election “confirmed the unpredictable results of a plebiscite organized outside the parties,” an election animated by a passing if powerful sentiment instead of “durable political convictions.” “Inevitably,” the plebiscitary system “favors the candidate who appears the most charismatic, the demagogue more than the bourgeois, the inheritor of the revolutionary general [the first Napoleon] against the conservative general.” This election by the whole people elevated Louis-Napoléon above the assembly deputies, who in any event were factionalized between advocates of a social regime and the petit-bourgeois supporters of commercial republicanism. 

So disunited were the republicans, they proved “incapable of common action, even for defending the Republic” against a president who had begun to believe his own propaganda. Imitating Napoléon I, Louis-Napoléon paraded around the country in military array; he named his own ministers, ignoring the parliamentarians—all of this “a sort of pale prefiguration of the train of gangsterism which surrounds the tyrants of today.” Captains of industry and finance, having rallied to his candidacy in 1848, successfully prepared for “the coup d’état of Napoléon III” in 1852, an event staged in the name of nothing less than republicanism. “Louis-Napoléon, like all plebiscitary chiefs, is in a sense the substitute for a monarch.” But not the traditional, dynastic monarch he invoked “revolutionary dogmas (national sovereignty, civil equality, property) combined with the defense of order and social stability.” Thus was effected “the transformation of an unknown émigré” into the “emperor of France.” 

De Gaulle’s friends in exile may be excused for suspecting that Aron implied in all of this any number of resemblances, real and potential, to de Gaulle himself, especially as Aron went on to consider the career of Georges Ernest Boulanger, another Bonapartist (though not himself a Bonaparte), whose fervent nationalism, expressed in his calls for the recovery of the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, which France had lost in its war with Prussia, earned him the title “General Révanche.” Thiers was gone, but Boulanger had another parliamentary maneuverer, Georges Clemenceau, as his sponsor, early on. The American president, Franklin Roosevelt, indeed compared de Gaulle to Boulanger at this time, so the thought was in the air.

Aron identifies five conditions in which such plebiscitary dictators arise. First, in France, when “the popularity of a man is simply the popularity of a name; ‘Bonaparte’ was associated with national self-respect. To this, add “nostalgia for a certain reconciliation between the heritage of revolutionary romanticism and the stabilization of the established order.” Almost no one in France outside the Army and French ruling circles knew de Gaulle, either, but his speeches in London had brought popularity to his name. Second, the bourgeois classes may rally to the new ‘Caesar’ because they fear social troubles (the Communist Party was the most powerful party in wartime France, organizing much of the underground resistance to Nazi rule) and in light of the impossibility of a monarchic restoration (given the “dynastic disunion” between Bourbons and Orléanists). The third condition of Bonapartism or Caesarism is disdain, sometimes earned, of the parliament. Crucially, in France “the Republic and democracy” are terms that “express rather a certain sentimentality or a certain revolutionary ideology than a choice decided in favor of determined methods of deliberation and government.” The French of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries bore little resemblance to the Americans of 1776-1800. Fourth, Bonapartism thrives when republicans and the French people themselves are divided but long for unity. And finally there are the chances offered by the plebiscitary system of election itself, which (as Louis-Napoléon had shown) lends itself to an eventual coup d’état. 

Boulanger enjoyed a similar set of circumstances. As a general, then Minister of War in 1885, he’d established himself as a friend of social order. He had some parliamentary support, especially among the Radical Party of Clemenceau. He shrewdly proposed to exclude the military and military families from rule, thus appealing to the Left and turning on his old military chief, Henri d’Orléans, the Duke of Aumale—a likely parallel to de Gaulle’s break with his patron, the great (if now much-diminished) Philippe Pétain, who had lost credit with many of his countrymen by agreeing to head the puppet government headquartered in Vichy, in southern France. The reforms Boulanger had introduced into the army had enhanced his popularity (even as de Gaulle’s advocacy of tank warfare, against the French military establishment in the 1930s, had given him credit after the Maginot Line was breached in 1940). Boulanger effectively played on révanchist sentiments, as of course de Gaulle was quite rightly doing; his propaganda was similar to that of Louis-Napoléon, with its “advertisements like those of American commerce”; he had ‘evolved’ from Left to Right; and he wanted “a strong government” (by which Aron means an executive branch) to balance the parliament, as indeed de Gaulle now wanted. And, in a sentence that must have deeply offended the Gaullists, “Like Hitler never ceasing to denounce the ‘system’ of Weimar, the Boulangerists reprimanded the republican personnel and regime,” rulers who had acceded, Hitler charged, to “the scandal of Wilson”—that is, the Versailles Treaty, its terms understandably hated by Germans—and who had indulged in “factional quarrels” without vindicating the national honor. 

Unlike 1849 and 1851, however, in 1889 the parliamentarians were alert to the danger. And Boulanger was by then only a Parisian parliamentarian, not a president of the Republic, as Louis-Napoléon had been when he staged his coup. Boulanger amounted to little more than a “Caesar of the music-hall,” a point that illustrates “the fragility of these brilliant popularities.” Gaullists, take note? They would surely take offense, and did.

Aron then asks, are Bonapartism and fascism “specimens of the same genre”? Not really. The Second Empire established itself in a period of economic prosperity, not depression. The Bonapartists were supported by small peasant proprietors, defending their landed property; what Tocqueville calls democracy, social egalitarianism, was the heritage of the Revolution, which by now had replaced aristocratic and Church hierarchies, as indeed Marx observed at the time. This, indeed, is what made the political device of plebiscitary election feasible and appealing. By now, too, there were many more city-dwellers, including some petit-bourgeois many artisans, and “even workers” who thrilled to the myth of the charismatic leader, the national hero leading to mass mobilization. Several of these features did indeed resemble the circumstances in which fascism arose, and in nineteenth-century France, as in twentieth-century Italy and Germany, “Popular Caesarism” became possible due to an alliance of a part of the bourgeoisie and a part of the proletariat against dynastic monarchy and against the “menace to the social order” posed by the Left. Still, the comparative extremism of the later fascists was fostered by an economic desperation not seen in France. The French were responding to “social troubles and the weaknesses of all the constitutions” they had seen in previous decades. The fascists exploited economic as well as political crisis, and that made them more radical, more dangerous. In France, it was regime instability that caused “the desire for a strong power, incarnated in one man,” a longing for “unity of sentiment,” in the phrase of the celebrated writer, Maurice Barrès. What occurred in mid-nineteenth century France, was “the anticipation of and the French version of fascism” but never the thing itself. 

“Uncertain of his rights and his fortune, the Caesar is unceasingly pushed toward new enterprises by the insatiable need of renewing the source of his authority, of refreshing the favor if his own people.” Hence Napoléon III’s vain march against Germany, resulting in the catastrophic defeat at Sedan in 1871. “As in so many times in history, the adventure of a man ended in tragedy for a nation.” 

Three years later, Aron looked upon de Gaulle with much more confidence, having observed his decidedly republican, not Bonapartist, policies during the war and its immediate aftermath. In June 1946, the fifth anniversary of de Gaulle’s now-famous radio “appeal” to the French from London, de Gaulle had given a speech in Bayeux, advocating a new constitution in which the executive branch would have independence from the legislative branch—this, to remedy the foreign-policy imbecility repeatedly demonstrated by the parliament-centered and factionalized Third Republic. This speech, Aron wrote, “manifestly pursues a higher ambition” than the resolution of some immediate crisis; de Gaulle aims “to influence the evolution of the political crisis in which the French nation is floundering,” the “central theme” being “that of a State worthy of the name.” “The thought of General de Gaulle is manifestly dominated by one major care: How to prevent the State, torn between rival ambitions, not to disaggregate to the point that the country has only the choice between anarchy and a tyranny.” Such an ambition and such a thought obviously elevated de Gaulle well above a Louis-Philippe, to say nothing of a Boulanger.

Such a reform was urgently needed. “The politicization of l’existence Française—economics, administration, literature—has progressed in a manner recalling the last years of the Weimar Republic.” The supposedly apolitical administrative state itself has been politicized, as well, as the cabinet offices have been divided among the three major parties (republican, democratic-socialist, and communist). “Such a regime, by definition, can offer no promise of stability.” In his proposal for a president installed by a large electoral college, not just the National Assembly, de Gaulle would establish an element within the State that is above the parties, an element which “takes account of the national interests in their continuity.” This “decisive idea, which provokes the most criticisms,” would take executive power out of the hands of party leaders. The president, “foreign to partisan conflicts, would be the equitable arbiter” among them, attending to “the general interest” of the French nation—impartial “with regard to all groups and organizations, passionate only for France and her grandeur.” 

De Gaulle’s proposed constitution is undeniably republican, but is it presidential or parliamentary? The president names the ministers but do the ministers report to the Assembly (as in Britain) or to the president (as in the United States)? Aron says it does neither, that it isn’t inspired by “the Anglo-Saxon democracies” at all. In them, “the stability of the executive” is “rooted in a traditional principle, between the system of two parties and the constitutional mechanism.” In Britain, socialists and conservatives tend to agree on British national interests, especially in foreign policy; in America, the same attitude prevails among Democrats and Republicans (as it did at the end of the Second World War, very much in contrast to the end of the First World War). But in France, as noted, the parties are ‘regime’ parties; France needs the model of the arbiter-executive to a degree that the “Anglo-Saxon democracies” do not. De Gaulle intends thereby to counterbalance “the regime of the parties,” which consists of a regime that cannot actually rule because they each attract substantial voting blocs but share scarcely any conception of what France should be and do. Although de Gaulle’s critics decry his Constitution as undemocratic, true defenders of democracy, Aron insists, want a regime that functions. 

Against this proposal, the National Assembly had proposed a constitution similar to that of the Third Republic. This merely “codifies and prolongs the current practice without seriously modifying it, the practice of parliamentarism under its present form, that is, the regime of the parties.” De Gaulle’s proposed constitution instead “requires the parties to renounce one part of the power they retain” from the pre-war regime. In so doing, he has consulted “History and the experience it gives to reason,” rather than assuming that the course of history itself must be rational, as Marxists of both the democratic and the Leninist stripe do. In doing so, Aron now sees, de Gaulle’s Bayeux speech “conforms to the ‘style’ of June 18th [1940].” “I am not sure, on my account, that this ’18th of June strategy’ will suffice in the present situation,” in which all the major French parties had been oppressed by the Nazis, united against a common enemy, but it is true that a constitution with an “omnipotent Assembly” and a precedent and cabinet “without real authority” will fail. Against all suspicions of Gaullist Bonapartism, Aron now remarked that the General had in fact exhibited “a sense of the authority of the State, and of respect for legality”; he “has the demeanor of a legitimate sovereign, not of a usurper or a tyrant.” True, he advocates a Constitution with a strong executive, but both the American president and the former German Reich Chancellor did that, and “can one really think that Roosevelt and Hitler were leaders of the same species?” He has “rejected the formulas of presidential power and personal power,” affirming instead “the separation and balance of powers.” “General de Gaulle is not Marshall Pétain.”

The problem with de Gaulle’s proposal is not some alleged despotic intent but its current feasibility. Admittedly, the Bayeux Constitution is “perfectly legitimate on the plane of History,” but on the level of “political struggle” in today’s France it provokes “stirrings that are difficult to foresee that are not all favorable.” During the war, de Gaulle was in accord “with the sentiment of the people,” but now, in 1946, such unity of sentiment is no longer possible. “When General de Gaulle demands a homogeneous government, one well knows he has good reason in theory, but one can ask how a nation so profoundly divided as ours can have a unified government.” In the event, the Constitution for the Fourth Republic, ratified in October, reprised the parliamentary republicanism of the Third Republic, with the three major parties firmly in control of the executive.

Why so? In the United States, a Democratic Party president, Harry Truman can collaborate with a Republican-controlled Congress on many policy decisions. That is because the United States Constitution is “rooted in the habits and national convictions” of Americans. And so, given a perceived common threat, Soviet Communism, American foreign policy will not return to the “isolationism” of the 1930s. Similarly, under Great Britain’s unwritten constitution, a “homogeneous” parliamentary majority supports the Prime Minister. But in France, with its more tortured recent political history, which has spawned ‘regime’ parties, the parties “paralyze the public powers”; even when an executive administration or “government” has been formed, it is a coalition government in which “communists, socialists, and republicans continue their quarrel while feigning to collaborate.” The unspoken underlying dilemma is that one of the major parties, the Communists, do regard the Soviet Union not as a common enemy but as an ally. While the Gaullist presidency would “surmount this impotent union,” the parties are not unhappy with it. “If the Fourth Republic is endangered by dictatorship, it is not because General de Gaulle enjoys great popularity with his ideas on the organization of the State, it is because the coalitions, which pass for inevitable, are revealed to be impotent.” Under such conditions, a real ‘dictator’ might arise to deal with the next major crisis—whatever and whenever that might be. 

Given this danger, simultaneous with the regime of parliamentary republicanism which has left France in it, and given the rejection of de Gaulle’s constitution, what is to be done? “The current crisis amounts to givens that are simple to define but difficult to modify,” namely, the choice between government by a minority party or government by a coalition of two or more minority parties. “In the abstract, the first, thanks to its homogeneity, works better. Meanwhile, the economic and financial crisis continues to worsen. It can be met, but the political system prevents it, thanks to “the game of the regime.” 

By the end of November 1946, de Gaulle had refused to serve under the new constitution, breaking with the centrist parliamentary republicans with whom he had allied. Aron sympathized. Admittedly, “the life of parties cannot be separated from democratic realities,” and anti-democratic regime cause “the reduction of the parties to a unity, the identification of one party and one credo with the state which simultaneously, extends its faction to infinity and augments its authority with the prestige of a pretended absolute truth”—a form of tyranny Mussolini himself named ‘totalitarianism,’ a “confusion of the temporal and the spiritual.” [1] But in France, on the level of civil society, the regime consists of “the masses and their organizations” or civil associations. Under these conditions, it is “difficult to safeguard independence, the capacity of decision” that the “public powers” must maintain, pressured as they are by these organized “social groups.” That is, the political paralysis of the regime of the parties has a civil-social foundation that makes that regime possible and hard to dislodge or to reform. further, in that civil society, and therefore in that regime, there is a “totalitarian party,” the Communist Party, which uses “democratic methods” in an attempt “to found a regime in which it will rule alone it, it and its secular religion and its partisan State.” This is “the fundamental crisis” in France, owing in part to the fact that de Gaulle’s constitution was rejected and “the Fourth Republic exists.” It means that the parties’ “most redoubtable enemy is not outside but within themselves.” 

In April 1947, de Gaulle announced the formation of the Rassemblement du Peuple Français, a movement that amounted to a party against the regime of the parties, a party that aimed at the more nearly presidential, balanced-power republic enunciated in the Bayeux Manifesto. The leaders of the existing parties were quick to express their contempt, a contempt that may have been more affected than real. “Solidly entrenched in their fiefs, the parties must become well assured of their lot and disdain the words of a man who has no other arms than his past and his prestige.” But in reality, “the new regime” of the Fourth Republic “lacks confidence in itself and in the future.” The parties fear the Gaullist movement because they understand, ‘from the inside,’ their own vulnerability. “The Fourth Republic is founded on compromise between incompatible ideas, on the collaboration between parties which always try to continue their fight and govern in common.” Obviously, there can be no “moral unity” or “unity of action” between communists and non-communists without “a common enemy,” as there was during the Nazi Occupation. “The “true dilemma of France is this “coalition of contraries, vegetating in mediocrity and at every instant menaced by paralysis” or by ‘civil war and recourse to authoritarian methods” that would be necessary to end that war, at the expense of the regime of the parties. 

There might be a remedy for this dilemma within the legal framework of the Fourth Republic, Aron hopefully suggests. Potentially, there is a majority of democratic-republicans who, “on condition that they surmount the secondary and anachronistic quarrels, can give life back to parliament and restore the distinction, indispensable in democracy, of the majority and the opposition without such a regrouping” of the parties, “no such regime will be viable.” The only thing they currently agree on is the supposed danger to the Republic de Gaulle poses, but de Gaulle, Aron calmly observes, has respected the rule of law. One may not be entitled to condemn parties in a democracy, inasmuch as they are inevitable in any regime of liberty, but one can surely condemn a regime of “rival parties incapable of a sustained and coherent policy.” “In truth, there can scarcely be doubt about the justice of [de Gaulle’s] critique. The real question is another. What means can emerge?” That is, how can a democratic republican regime overcome the results of serious party factionalism? 

Aron recommends that the centrist party, the Mouvement Républicain Populaire, and the Socialist Party disavow collection with the Communist Party and rule as a majority—in effect forming a true ‘popular front,’ inasmuch as genuine democrats really do have enemies on the Left. This would solve, or at least ameliorate, the problem in terms consistent with the parliamentary republicanism of the Fourth Republic.  De Gaulle’s “attacks on the [Fourth Republic’s] Constitution risk the formation, against the danger of ‘personal power,’ of an artificial and sterile solidarity between the rival parties and to add one more quarrel to those we already have.” “For better or for worse, the Parliament reflects the country: there is hardly more unity in the one than in the other,” since “our official divisions are linked to the past” regime struggles.  France as it is today simply will not adopt de Gaulle’s constitution, although it is within the democratic “cadre” of regimes. It is “vain to invoke a fictional unity.” 

Aron also does not share de Gaulle’s conviction that “it is necessary to reconstruct Europe as a neutral zone established between the giant empires.” Nor does he think that it is possible to establish a socio-economic system between communism and capitalism—de Gaulle’s conception, drawn from Catholic social thought prior to the First World War, of labor-capital ‘association.’ In both his foreign and domestic policy proposals, “I fear that the president of the RPF fishes with optimism.” As of now, April 1947, “the evolution of our politics depends less on the French and their words than on the world and its tragic conflicts,” no matter how much de Gaulle, and not only de Gaulle, may detest that reality.

By July, Aron had become editor of Le Figaro. In its pages, he published a careful analysis of the French political situation. The Socialist prime minister had excluded Communist Party member from the government—a hopeful sign. The partisan constellation was now configured with the Communists on the left, the MRP and the Socialists in the center, and the Gaullists on the right. Under the Constitution (recently adopted in a third referendum), “the Assembly is sovereign, but it does not encroach upon the prerogatives of the government.” Nonetheless, the executive powers themselves are weak. As a result, “the Constitution functions badly, but the faults experience has revealed are not exactly those which the critic,” de Gaulle, “passionately denounced in advance.” The second chamber, the Council of the Republic, has withered because both the Communists and the Socialists prefer unicameralism; it had little legal authority, anyway, and now has little moral authority, either. Having taken all responsibility for itself, the Assembly has acted irresponsibly, failing to address the major issues confronting France—import policy and the Monnet Plan (the first fruit of postwar French economic central planning which sought to modernize the French economy by increasing productivity), foreign trade, and foreign investment under the dirigisme of Jean Monnet’s General Planning Commission. More, the Assembly members have failed even to “accomplish their traditional tasks” of ordinary legislation. Aron wants to see an orderly governing process, whereby the governmental ministers conceive and apply a program, the Assembly members “attend thoughtfully to the quality of the laws,” and the administrators perform the “essentially technical” task of carrying out those laws at the direction of the ministers, the “government.” Unfortunately, the instability of the governments, dominated by the Assembly, prevents them from performing their duties, while the Assembly members lack the “competence and interest” to perform the executive and technical tasks. This leaves technical matters to administrators, unsupervised and the political matters to the groups that pressure the Assembly. No real deliberation occurs in the legislative branch. “How can one be surprised that Parliament falls, little by little,” in prestige?

In reality, then, “France is governed by the administration.” The “great functionaries” in the bureaucracies hold “a considerable part of the real power.” The parties distribute ministerial posts, but the civil-social pressure groups (Aron calls them “syndicates”) can obstruct them when the parties appear to act “contrary to their interests.” This “transfer of power from assemblies to the administration is neither a new phenomenon nor an exclusively French phenomenon. It is the fated result of the increasingly ample capture [of power] of the State” by administrators. “Only the administration has the competence and the continuity”—given the short life of governments and of parliamentary coalitions—that is “necessary for directing and orienting the economy of the nation.” Characteristically, the moderate Aron regards this as “not a question of rebelling against an irreversible evolution” but “a matter of adapting old institutions to the new tasks, of asking oneself in what condition such a regime will be effective.” Because administrative rule alone won’t work, either. “Left to itself, administration becomes at once arbitrary and impotent,” as seen in “the sclerosis of our army” between the world wars. And when government ministers attempt to ‘politicize’ the administration, “one does not have the impression that the government knows better than [popular] opinion,” that it refines and enlarges the public views, or that it even has the force or the courage to execute its decisions in the face not so much of administrative recalcitrance as pressure-group opposition. “Government, parties, administration, syndicates tolerate one another reciprocally. Unfortunately, their complex relations achieve not action but disorder and paralysis.”

In twentieth-century “mass societies,” the “same problems appear—namely workers and leaders of enterprise organize themselves into syndicates” in an attempt to influence the vast and complicated apparatus of the modern state. How can such societies “establish the necessary collaboration between the syndicates, on the one hand, and the State on the other,” especially given the emergence of state bureaucracy or administration as effectively a fourth branch of power? And how can modern states under democratic-republican regimes, with governments representing the popular will, “maintain the sense of the national interest, if they represent particular interests of social groups and political parties”?

The “totalitarian regimes give a brutal, primitive response” to such questions. “Reserving to one party the exclusive right to political action, integrating into the State all the particular groups, in creating a monopoly of ideology and propaganda, they suppress the problems rather than solving them. It is good to denounce this barbaric simplification. Now one must find a solution The Fourth Republic has not resolved these problems. To speak truly it has not even posed them or thought about them.”

De Gaulle and his “Rassemblement” have thought about them. But if “all the French were Gaullists in 1944,” only “forty percent of the electors voted for the RPF in October 1947.” In 1944, Gaullism had become “the symbol and the guide of the nation in combat,” de Gaulle an arbiter, neither partisan nor doctrinaire. Now, the RPF is “the first party of France,” but still a party. The “three great parties” reorganized themselves “under the shadow of Gaullism” in the aftermath of the war. When de Gaulle recognized this and resigned as the head of the provisional government, this decision, “surprising as it seemed at the time, takes in retrospect a logical meaning.” The parties had regained “the reality of power.” Having no party, de Gaulle “little by little lost his authority.” “He ran afoul of growing economic difficulties, without either the taste to study them or an overall conception for mastering them. He attempted, in the name of a fictional national unity that had not survived the war, to assume an arbitrating function more or less illusory.” Yet in attempting to regain political authority at the head of his own party, he now participates in the impotence of the Parliament. 

Can he overcome that impotence? “If in the long term, this structure,” the Fourth Republic, “less constitutional than social and political, will not be modified, the regime will be paralyzed, and the country condemned to stagnation in the chaos.” What is needed is a “homogeneous majority” that can “break away from the syndicates under the control of the Communists,” who had succeeded to that extent in staging their long march through the institutions, and “bring them back to the legitimate function of defending professional interests, along with parliamentarism, the decline of which the crystallization of social groups has precipitated.” In the election, “the Rassemblement has pulverized the MRP and is ready to push socialism to the wall,” too. It has no doctrine, having downplayed the notion of worker-capital association, but it has a will to restore individual liberty and the liberty of the State from the syndicates and the parties. “Strong power of free citizens: the formula maintains a radical accent, provided that the first term does not erase the second.” 

For their part, the Communists, the only ideologically coherent party, need another Popular Front à la 1935, but they have alienated the Socialists by claiming that democratic socialists are no more than agents of American imperialism. Yes, they have an ideology, but what an ideology it is—one that depending upon denying reality. Quite apart from the falsity of the charge, “we have an obvious need of American aid.” The RPF, however, could bring the “government sustained by a homogeneous majority” that Aron has been hoping for.” 

This possibility proved just as illusory as Aron’s previous hopes for an RPF-Socialist coalition. Recognizing reality, de Gaulle reluctantly approved the formation of NATO in 1949, then rejected the proposed common market in coal a year later. By 1951, economic recovery and the nascent Pax Americana in Western Europe had reduced de Gaulle’s appeal, and the so-called Third Force, a renewed alliance of democratic socialists and the MRP, led by the skilled parliamentarian Guy Mollet, took control of the government. By the mid-1950s, De Gaulle retired to his home in the village of Colombey les Deux Églises to write his Mémoires de Guerre, seemingly removed from politics for the remainder of his life.

But then things took a turn.

 

 

Note

1. Aron’s phrase may remind Anglophone readers of Temporal and Eternal, the title of a collection of several writings by the Catholic writer, Charles Péguy. However, Temporal and Eternal was published in 1955. It is possible that Aron borrows and adapts the phrase from the original works, published before the First World War; de Gaulle was a careful and sympathetic reader of them. 

 

John D. McDermott: Red Cloud: Oglala Legend. Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society, 2015.

 

Born in 1821, during the Monroe Administration, the Oglala chief Red Cloud witnessed the ruin of his way of life at the hands of the American empire of liberty. The dispute turned, in many ways, on what ‘liberty’ means. The American meaning of liberty contradicted the Oglala meaning of liberty, and this reflected the contradiction between the regimes that drove the conquests undertaken and the empires established by the Oceti Šakowin or Lakota and the United States. The Oglala tribe numbers among the seven political groups or ‘Council Fires’ of the Lakota. The Lakota arrived in what are now southern Wisconsin, northwestern Illinois, and northeastern Iowa in the seventeenth century, driven out of Upper Mississippi by the Ojibwas or Chippewas, who called them the ‘Sioux’ (a term that may mean ‘snake’ and is therefore rejected by many Lakota). In alliance with the Hurons, the Chippewas also successfully resisted encroachments by the powerful Iroquois to the east, who had driven the Hurons out of the Finger Lakes region, earlier. 

If this suggests that northern and western North America prior to European colonization was no less roiled by warriors than Europe itself, the suggestion has merit. By the late eighteenth century, the Oglala and some of their fellow Lakota, the Brules, moved west across the Missouri River, searching for game, reaching the Black Hills of today’s South Dakota by the early nineteenth century. During this time, they fought and usually defeated the several non-Lakota tribes in the region, prompting Red Hawk, a medicine man and contemporary of Red Cloud, to pronounce his people “superior to all others of mankind.” According to the Lakota civil religion, all mankind, and indeed all of what Western philosophers call ‘Being,’ finds its unity in the Wakan Tanka or Great Spirit, which “dwelt in every object, whether of nature or of man’s making.” Such unity does not preclude hierarchy, however, and to the Lakota, “when whites tried to take them away from their lands” under the policy called ‘Indian removal,’ “they threatened not only Lakota livelihood but Lakota essence as well”—an essence the Lakota judged to be of the highest merit. The essence of the Americans was the same as the essence of the Lakota insofar as they both instantiated the same Spirit, but at very least the Lakota deserved to continue their way of life on their Spirit-granted land, having won it from the other tribes. This meant that American military victories were not mere instances of physical overpowering but called into question the (so to speak) metaphysical status of the Lakota, which they had proven to their own satisfaction in battle. 

McDermott contrasts the Lakota and American regimes. The Lakota dwelling, the tipi, with its conical shape represented “the wholeness and unity” of the world animated by the Great Spirit. So did the camp circles. The tipi is easily assembled and reassembled, designed to serve a nomadic way of life whereby the Oglala “move[d] over the land from one place to another in chase of the buffalo and to harvest fruits and other wild foods from spring through fall.” As Red Cloud put it, “no house imprisoned us.” The American settlers, by contrast, built four-cornered houses, symbols of “security and immobility, meant to protect the few who occupied it and keep out the uninvited”—in a word, property. Red Cloud, however, had no desire “to dig the earth to make food and clothing grow from it.” Such stark regime differences quite understandably led to war.

The Lakota regime was well-adapted to warfare. “Like other Oglala boys, Red Cloud received warrior training,” with battlefield courage revered as “the greatest of virtues to which a young warrior should aspire.” The virtues inculcated by the Oglala regime find parallels in the regimes of the Gauls as Julius Caesar describes them, including generosity in addition to courage. As a young man, Red Cloud claimed some 80 ‘kills’ of enemies, many of them Crows and Pawnees, becoming what a friend of his called “a terror in war with other tribes.”. When the United States Army took over the fur trading settlement, Fort Laramie, in 1849, Red Cloud “immediately saw the differences between the Lakota and white approaches to warfare,” differences again reflective of the two regimes. Lakota warriors themselves fought in a sort of ‘nomadic’ fashion, with no organized formations; the American more resembled the Romans, forming in lines. Knowledge of the American way of war proved “most useful” to Red Cloud, Red Cloud said.

“Red Cloud grew up in a world of intrigue and violence,” in which the Oglala fought the Pawnees, Omahas, Crows, Utes, Shoshonis, and other non-Sioux tribes, while also fighting one another. Red Cloud killed the leader of his grandfather’s enemy, Bull Bear, in 1841; this enhanced the young man’s prestige among his people, prestige he needed to rise in the tribal hierarchy because he was a second son, not in line to inherit a chieftainship. He continued to exhibit his prowess in the next decade and a half, by which time he had achieved the status of a chief “recognized by Lakotas and whites alike.” 

Up to the late 1840s, the few Americans Amerindians saw in the region “brought firearms and other material good that benefited Lakotas,” and such traders were welcome. The California gold rush brought an influx of travelers, not settlers, but travelers carried disease, hunted, burned wood, used the prairie grasses for grazing the livestock they brought with them. To help supply and protect Americans, the United States government established forts in Nebraska, Wyoming, and Idaho. In 1851, five tribes signed an agreement with the U.S. to guarantee safe passage to travelers and acceding to the presence of the forts in exchange for annual payments in the form of goods. But this did not settle territorial disputes between the Lakota and the Crow, who continued to fight one another; nor did it prevent a serious incident a few years later, when U.S. Army Lieutenant John L. Grattan blundered into an exchange of fire with some Brules, who killed him and the men under his command. A retaliatory expedition led by Brevet Brigadier General William S. Harney resulted in a devastating defeat for one of the Brule encampments; unintimidated, the Lakota agreed in council to “exclude whites, other than traders, from the region north of the north Platte River and West of the Missouri,” to sign no more treaties, and to make war on the Crows in order “to gain control of the buffalo country near the Powder River.” The Lakota won that war, with assistance from their Cheyenne and Arapaho allies, in 1860, as the Americans readied themselves for civil war.

Unfortunately for the Lakota, in 1858 Americans had discovered more gold and silver in what is now Colorado. “These regions became magnets drawing fortune-seeking whites in large numbers, some of whom wished to cross the Lakotas’ new sanctuary en-route.” The United States government supported their intentions, with Army Captain William F. Raynolds marking out a wagon route between the Oregon Trail and the Yellowstone-Missouri Basin, roughly along the same line as what would soon be called the Bozeman Trail, named after wagon train leader John M. Bozeman. In the wake of the Army’s victory of the eastern Sioux, resulting in the seizure of Sioux lands in Minnesota, Red Cloud went to war to prevent that from happening to his own people. “Shall we permit ourselves to be driven to and fro—to be herded like the cattle of the white men?”

One of the main problems the U.S. government faced was lack of firm control over the Army officers, travelers, and eventual settlers in this distant part of the continent—a circumstance similar to that faced by President Jackson in his dealings with Georgians covetous of Amerindian land in the 1830s. One egregious instance of such infirmity occurred in November 1864, when an Army troop under the command of Colonel John M. Chivington attacked a peaceful Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho village, killing 53 men and 110 women in what is now known as the Sand Creek massacre. The carnage “shocked even some of the most hardened Indian-haters,” and Chivington resigned his commission to escape military prosecution. Striking back, an allied force of some 3,000 Plains Indians defeated U.S. forces at Platte Ridge Station, Wyoming, with Red Cloud participating as one of the war-party leaders. “By the end of 1865, Red Cloud was fully committed to stopping white migration and settlement in the Powder River Country and to preserving the superb hunting grounds east of the Bighorn Mountains for his own people. By doing so effectively, he had inspired like minds among the Lakotas, and from then on he was a force to be reckoned with.” 

McDermott pauses to offer a telling observation about the Lakota way of war. A leader like Red Cloud would set strategy and lead his men to battle, but during the battle itself the warriors would fight as they chose, vying for “battle honors.” (As indeed Red Cloud himself had done, as a young warrior.) That is, they fought the way the Gauls fought the Romans or, for that matter, the way the Greeks fight in the Iliad. For their part, the Americans fought in imitation of European models, themselves based on Roman practice.  Regimes animated by individual honor or heroism resist military discipline.

By the mid-1860s, covered wagons weren’t the only problem faced by the Plains Amerindians. Americans were building railroads, which frightened the game and thereby deprived the Lakota of their livelihood. Red Cloud saw no alternative to continuing the war that he had thus far prosecuted with some success: “White man lies and steals. My lodges were many, but now they are few. The white man wants all. The white man must fight, and the Indian will die where his fathers died.” 

The war lasted from 1866 to 1868. Red Cloud faced U.S. forces strengthened with the end of the Civil War. He responded exactly as Vercingetorix had responded to the legions of Julius Caesar, using tactics of “stealth, swift movement, and surprise attacks designed to hurt and harass the enemy while exposing the war party to minimum risk were hallmarks of the Plains Indian military tradition,” a tradition necessarily continued because Red Cloud’s warriors “lacked up-to-date firearms, and many still depended on bows and arrows, lances, knives, tomahawks, or war clubs.” Like the great Gaul commander, Vercingetorix, who knew better than to fight the Romans alone, he offered alliance with his erstwhile enemies, the Crows, who declined to join him. By the beginning of 1868, Red Cloud, making a realistic calculation of his reduced chances, offered negotiation with the Americans, but insisted on continued Lakota rule over the Powder River valley. Seeing that there were other routes to Montana, the Grant evacuation ordered the evacuation of U.S. forts along the Bozeman Trail, signing an agreement with another prominent Lakota chief—the Brule, Spotted Tail—but not with Red Cloud. [1]

The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 set aside the Great Sioux Reservation in the western half of today’s South Dakota and part of today’s North Dakota. Although the treaty language stipulated that these lands were reserved “for the absolute and undisturbed use and occupancy of the Sioux,” it also stated that Americans had the right to construct railroads, wagon roads, mail stations, “or other works of utility or necessity, which may be ordered or permitted by the laws of the United States”; it identified a large area between the Black Hills and the Bighorn Mountains as a place where Reservation Indians could hunt, but only so long as the buffalo population “remained sufficiently numerous.” Once the buffalo disappeared, the land “would revert to the public domain and only Americans, not Indians, would be allowed to settle there.” That is, the treaty recognized Lakota sovereignty within the Reservation but set in motion the conditions under which that sovereignty would soon become impossible to maintain. In tacit recognition of this likelihood, the United States supplied “a variety of specialists, services, infrastructure, and equipment” to encourage the Lakota “to give up their traditional way of life and take up agriculture on the Euro-American model”—the policy of regime change the Washington Administration had successfully implemented with the five Southern Amerindian tribes, before the Georgians took it upon themselves to drive them out. Americans established an “agency” or headquarters along the Missouri River, where guaranteed food rations and clothing allotments would be distributed. The rival Crows signed a similar treaty, which established a reservation in southern Montana.

Red Cloud demurred. He did not want regime change for his people. “What he did want, he said, was some powder and lead to fight the Crows,” which Fort Laramie commander Major William Dye promptly refused. Red Cloud nevertheless agreed to peace with the Americans, since the Bozeman Trail was being abandoned by them, and that had been the casus belli. At the same time, he wanted Dye to understand that the existing regime ethos and organization of the Lakota would make “the young Lakota warriors…difficult to control.” (Indeed, Lakota chiefs and American civilian and even military authorities faced similar problems of obtaining obedience from subordinates.) Warrior regimes valorize young men; chiefs rule them by persuasion and authority, but such rule can be tenuous. Indeed, although he remained “the most influential tribal chief among the Lakotas, “the young warriors began to drift away from Red Cloud, preferring the uncompromising chiefs Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull.” In one sense, the warriors were right: the Fort Laramie Treaty “was an undeniable strategic victory for the whites because it set the stage for the eventual dispossession of the Sioux.” In another sense, Red Cloud saw more clearly than they that the Americans could no longer be stopped if the Americans chose not to be stopped. He “would spend the remainder of his days as chief attempting to ameliorate European-Americans’ impacts on his people.” He was caught in between a policy of regime change which might have preserved his people under the new conditions—although that, too, would have left them with the same risks taken by the Five Civilized Tribes of the South, which had led them to the Trail of Tears—and the predictably futile military resistance led by the war party. 

Red Cloud confirmed his prudential sense that American advance was irresistible during his visit to Washington, D.C. in June 1870. He announced his rejection of the Fort Laramie Treaty, claiming that U.S. government translators had lied to Lakota negotiators about its terms. He also made a successful speech in defense of this position to a sympathetic audience at Cooper Union in New York, including a defense of the moral character of his regime. (“We do not want riches, but we want to train our children right. Riches would do us no good”—as indeed they would not, in the eyes of a warrior.) But he saw the vast numbers of Americans and assessed their military and economic power. Sobered, when he tried to relate what he had seen to his people at home, they dismissed his stories as impossible, some “believ[ing] that the whites had been able to make Red Cloud see only what they wanted him to see,” having cast a spell over him. Nor could Red Cloud effectively resist this consensus, given “the influence of warrior societies in Lakota affairs” and the repugnance which they felt for the agrarian way of life. By 1872, seeing that war was hopeless and the conditions of peace ignoble, Red Cloud refused to ally with Lakota in northern areas who had not signed the Fort Laramie treaty: “You must carry on war yourself. I am done.” He might not be able to win consensus among his own people, but he retained his power to refuse the requests of outsiders.

He undertook rather to deal with the Americans at what had been titled the Red Cloud Agency, located just south of where he had located his camp. John J. Saville was the first agent there, and his “job was not easy.” Warriors from the northern tribes would arrive and demand supplies they were not entitled to have; when the intimidated Saville handed over the good it diminished those supplies for those who had signed the treaty. In order to determine the quantity of supplies he needed, Saville needed to take a census of those living at the Agency, but the Lakota wouldn’t stand for it, “fearing that the count would result in reduced rations.” As for Red Cloud himself, he had to deal with increasing factionalism among his people. Some did come to accept life on the reservation and the regime change the Americans wanted them to undergo; others also stayed but resisted regime change; some wanted a reservation of their own. Yet the U.S. government dealt with Red Cloud as if he were the “principal chief of the reservation Sioux and expected him to control all the reservation Oglala. Even if he could have done that, some of the residents were Brules, not Oglala, and Red Cloud had no real authority over them. The United States had assigned Saville more responsibility than his real power warranted; it had assigned Red Cloud more responsibility than his real authority warranted.

This situation might have continued for a long time. It didn’t, after General Philip Sheridan sent George Armstrong Custer to explore the Black Hills. Custer confirmed the discovery of gold, there. Red Cloud and Spotted Tail were willing to enter negotiations for the sale of the Black Hills; although “the power of Wakan Tanka was concentrated in all its multiplicity in the Black Hills,” that didn’t mean that the region was sacred and never to be sold, but rather that it was primarily a source of wealth and therefore saleable at a fair price. Those who opposed the sale at the time, notably Sitting Bull, also considered it as a place of great natural resources—a gift of Wakan Tanka to the Lakota but not sacred land. Negotiations went nowhere, as President Grant met with a Lakota delegation including Red Cloud and told them to relinquish the Black Hills or lose their government-supplied food and provisions. As the impasse continued into the summer of 1875, U.S. military commanders ordered “miners and other unauthorized whites to leave the Black Hills and the other unceded Indian territories described in the Treaty of Fort Laramie” and to stay out “until new arrangements were negotiated with the Indians.” The negotiations saw no progress, with both sides hardening their positions. 

As so often happened in U.S.-Amerindian affairs, the Army couldn’t enforce its own edicts. Miners filtered back into the Black Hills. The Army did move to enforce a command that non-treaty Indians in unceded territory move to the reservations, and when many refused to comply, the Great Sioux War of 1876-1877 began. Sheridan planned a three-pronged march against the recalcitrant Lakota and Cheyenne, intending “to force the Indians into a general area where they could be engaged by any of the columns.” For his part, Lieutenant Colonel Custer was assigned five companies of the Seventh Cavalry Regiment to block a possible Indian escape in the south by occupying the Little Bighorn Valley, believed to hold a large Indian village.” He and his men famously fell victim to their gross underestimation of Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors in the valley. Nonetheless, the overall campaign resulted in the crushing defeat of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. True to his word, Red Cloud took no part in the war.

Loss of the war meant loss of the Black Hills. The U.S. government offered to pay for the Black Hills in exchange for not only the Black Hills but relocation—some to what is now South Dakota and others, including the Oglala and the Brules, to “Indian Territory” (now Oklahoma), where the land was better for farming. Red Cloud joined several other Oglala chiefs in signing the treaty, making “no secret of their displeasure in doing so.” On the American side, General George R. Crook, who had commanded one of the three Army forces in the 1876 march against the non-treaty Indians, suspected Red Cloud of secretly aiding those Indians who had continued to resist militarily. He removed him as chief of the reservation Indians, replacing him with Spotted Tail; this meant that the Brules, not the Oglala, would have their chief recognized by the United States as “overall chief of the Sioux.” 

In 1878, Red Cloud and his people did move, but not to Oklahoma. They settled along White Clay Creek, just south of the town of Pine Ridge on the today’s Nebraska-South Dakota border. The Office of Indian Affairs concurred with this decision, establishing the Pine Ridge Agency as the home of Red Cloud’s much-diminished people. “The government’s struggle to remake Lakota society would continue in earnest at Pine Ridge.” 

Spearheading the move for regime change was a thirty-year-old agent named Valentine McGillycuddy. A critic of U.S. government mistreatment of the Lakota, he had been appointed to his position after meeting with Commissioner of Indian Affairs Ezra A. Hayt and Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz in January 1879. “McGillycuddy made it his mission to start his charges on the white man’s path through education, Christianization, and agriculture”—the longstanding American policy of regime change. Unfortunately, he was temperamentally ill-suited to be a founder, “lack[ing] patience and finesse.” He told Red Cloud, “The white man has come to stay; and wherever he places his foot the native takes a back-seat.” When Red Cloud protested that this was not right, the would-be Christian agrarian educator offered that “it is not a matter of right or wrong, but of might and destiny.” By now, Red Cloud knew all about might and destiny but continued to detest the prospect of regime change. “The Great Spirit did not make us,” the Lakota, “to work. He made us to hunt and fish. The white man can work if he wants to, but the Great Spirit did not make us to work.” The Black Hills weren’t sacred, but the Lakota way of life was; since the Black Hills had been taken from the Lakota by the “white man,” the white man therefore “owes us a living for the lands he has taken from us.” McGillycuddy had no interest in perpetuating U.S. government payments to the Lakota but rather in standing them up for self-sufficiency. The way of self-sufficiency could no longer be hunting and fishing but farming, that is, regime change. For this purpose, he intended “to settle Indian families on individual homesteads throughout the reservation,” undercutting the authority of the chiefs, which depended upon economic and social communalism. As McGillycuddy observed in a report to his superiors, the chiefs’ “glory as petty potentates will have departed,” once this policy was enacted. He went so far as to undermine Lakota family structure by “encouraging” parents “to send their children to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.” As an alternative, Red Cloud supported the Holy Rosary Mission, established by Jesuits in 1887 near the Pine Ridge Agency. McGillycuddy didn’t much like Catholics, and had kept them out of the reservation, but the Lakota had had good relations with a Jesuit missionary, Father Pierre-Jean De Smet, who had lived in the area in the 1830s through the 1860s. McGillycuddy outright forbade Indian religious ceremonies and practices, particularly the Sun Dance, his actions reinforced by the 1883 Code of Indian Offenses issued by the Secretary of the Interior, prohibited polygamy, the practices of the traditional medicine men, and (perhaps reflecting the growing American sentiment for prohibition of alcohol) the presence of liquor on all Indian reservations.  “The code, which outlawed several key elements of Sioux culture, was a terrific blow to the Lakota people and to Red Cloud’s prestige.” The U.S. government then added the Major Crimes Act in 1885, which eliminated Indian judicial control over cases involving felony crimes, transferring that authority to federal courts. To enforce the code, McGillycuddy moved to replace the Indian police force with Americans.

Weary of “the bickering, charges and countercharges, threats, and confrontations emanating from Pine Ridge,” and perhaps none too happy with a Republican Party appointee in the position, the Cleveland Administration removed McGillycuddy in 1886. “Red Cloud had finally won.” His temporary replacement, Captain James M. Bell of the Seventh Cavalry, proved less annoying, and Hugh D. Gallagher, the permanent agent, quickly “established a rapport with Red Cloud and the other chiefs.” However, the Allotment Act of 1887, which advanced the policy of eliminating communal property and settling families on tracts of 160 acres, followed by the 1889 Sioux Act, which divided the Great Sioux Reservation into six smaller units and provided for the sale of the surplus to settlers, revived Red Cloud’s animosity. This time, he was outvoted by his own people, who acceded to the new arrangements. But with additional restrictions on Indian settlement, they were left with the task of “cultivat[ing] essentially barren land in a semi-arid climate.” 

The years 1889-1890 saw another round of deadly epidemics. This led to the Ghost Dance movement, a religious revival, which Red Cloud explained: “There was no hope on earth, and God seemed to have forgotten us. Some said they saw the Son of God; others did not see Him. If He had come, He would do some great things as He had done before.” The revival coincided with the arrival of still another agent, Daniel F. Royer, “whose political connections were his sole qualification for office.” Terrified by the Ghost Dance, he “dispatched a frantic plea for military protection.” The arrival of army troops in turn terrified the Ghost Dancers, who fled the reservation; simultaneously, a band of Minneconjou Lakota left their reservation and headed for Pine Ridge. Intercepted by U.S. cavalry at the end of December and refusing to disarm, they fought and died near Wounded Knee Creek, losing at least 175 men, women, and children while killing 25 U.S. cavalry and wounding 39 others. Red Cloud correctly predicted that the surviving “hostiles” would eventually surrender and settle in the reservation. As for himself, “My sun is set. My day is done. Darkness is stealing over me.” He died in 1909. 

Red Cloud shared with Vercingetorix what would later be called a ‘guerrilla’ strategy. This shows that military strategies suggest themselves to human beings as such, when they face similar circumstances. Both the Lakota and the Gauls loved liberty, understood as living free of rule by foreigners; this, too, may well reflect human nature. And they were both brave in battle. Yet Red Cloud, as Americans understood him, excelled Vercingetorix. as Caesar understood him, in steadiness and prudence. Constrained by young warriors who wanted only to fight and win honor, himself preferring the way of life of the hunter to that of the farmer, neither he nor his regime was quite civilized in the Roman (or the American) sense, but he had a statesmanlike quality that sets him above the Gaul. 

 

Note

1. For a careful study of Spotted Tail’s life, see Richmond L. Clow: Spotted Tail: Warrior and Statesman.  Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society, 2019.

 

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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