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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

Notes

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

 

William J. Astore and Dennis E. Showalter: Hindenburg: Icon of German Militarism. Washington: Potomac Books, 2005.

 

Paul Ludwig Hans Anton von Beneckendorff und von Hindenburg was a German aristocrat, it is safe to say. And a Prussian among Germans—a nontrivial distinction, among Germans: the immigrant grandmother of an acquaintance of mine, who spoke almost no English, once perceived that she was being described as a German; “Nein! Nein! Ich bin ein Prusse!” she replied, with due emphasis. Hindenburg, her older contemporary shared the sentiment, saying “I have always felt myself an ‘Old Prussian.‘”

Born into the Junker class in East Prussia in 1847, Hindenburg reached maturity in a Prussia that not only had recovered from its mauling by Napoleon in 1806 but had undertaken the unification of the 37 sovereign German states into one powerful nation-state, the Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm I, Otto von Bismarck, and Helmuth von Moltke. His father was a reserve infantry officer, his mother a Lutheran. Accordingly, “discipline, duty, and obedience to higher authority prevailed in the household, as “even the young Hindenburg’s nurse was known to bark ‘Silence in the ranks!’ to squelch childish complaints.” Already a member of the Prussian Cadet Corps by the age of twelve, he “demonstrated moral uprightness and physical hardiness without showing any particular intellectual qualities.” He rose to the Senior Cadet School in 1863, selected as a page to Queen Elizabeth of Prussia in 1864, and received his first commission in 1865 as a second lieutenant of the Foot Guards, only a year before the Austro-Prussian War. Hindenburg fought bravely at Königgratz in the war’s decisive battle, which left Prussia in the position of fulfilling its ambition to unite the Germanies and to face off against the French, four years later. In the Franco-Prussian War, Hindenburg survived the attack on St. Privat, near Metz, a battle in which his battalion “took heavy casualties.” No chauvinist, he later admired French conduct during the prolonged siege of Paris, also praising the “ruthless postwar suppression of the Paris Commune” after the war was over and the Third Republic had been established. 

After those wars, Bismarck proceeded step-by-step, winning the Kulturkampf of the 1870s against the Roman Catholic Church, which he stripped of it control over education and authority to make ecclesiastical appointments, powers that had compromised his state-building efforts, especially in the Catholic south. He then made an alliance with Austria-Hungary, avoiding any troubles on his southern border, and attempted a rapprochement with the Russian czar, hoping to secure his eastern flank. For his part, by the end of the decade Hindenburg won appointment to the general staff, was promoted to the rank of captain, and married the daughter of a general. His subsequent elevations in rank in the peacetime army came slowly, but they came; he served under Count Alfred Graf von Schlieffen on the imperial general staff in the second half of the 1880s and was granted command of the Ninety-first Infantry Regiment at Oldenburg in 1893, vowing (as an aristocrat might) “to cultivate a sense of chivalry among my officers, and efficiency and firm discipline,” animated by “the love of work and independence side by side with a high ideal of service.” 

Kaiser Wilhelm II acceded to the imperial throne in 1888, causing German foreign policy to enter “a more bellicose phase after the new kaiser dispensed with Bismarck in 1890.” Despite his extraordinary achievements, Bismarck had been too cautious for young Kaiser Willy’s taste. Still, for a time, perhaps somewhat to Hindenburg’s disappointment (war being the condition of rapid promotion in military organizations), peace continued. So did the slow but steady pace of promotions: chief of staff of the Eighth Army Corps in Goblenz, then brigadier general, the major general and commander of the Twenty-eight infantry Division of Karlsruhe in 1900. In 1905, “he reached the pinnacle of his peacetime military career” as lieutenant general and commander of the Fourth Army Corps at Magdeburg, making him “one of only twenty-four corps commanders in Germany.” Seeing no prospects for further promotion, he retired in 1911 at the age of sixty-four.

By then, his political convictions were settled. “The subordination of the individual to the good of the community” was “not only a necessity,” in his eyes, “but a positive blessing,” one that “gripped the mind of the German army, and through it, that of the German nation.” That nation was surrounded by enemies, indeed oppressed by them, as he supposed. The Geist— the spirit, the mind—of that nation would animate its soldiers in the wars of the future, conducted by means of what the author calls “battles of annihilation.” As the historian Heinrich von Treitschke wrote, enthusiastically, war requires “the utter annihilation of puny man in the great conception of the state.” There was a moral claim accompanying German ambition. A popular slogan at the time was “Germanness will cure the world”—cure it of bourgeois money-grubbing, base individualism, and all the other moral niaiseries of liberal democracy. “Anticipating der frishfröhliche Krieg, a short and joyful war, young patriotic Germans answered the call to arms in 1914 with pride and celerity.”

The authors remark that Hindenburg and his colleagues were also Fachmenschen —literally ‘facts-men’ or specialists. Technically astute, loyal to a fault,” they “confined [themselves] to an operational and Eurocentric perspective that eschewed study and reflection about the wider socioeconomic and political aspects of war.” That is to say that they read Clausewitz, but without understanding, or perhaps without wanting to acknowledge, his core teaching, that war is a continuation of politics, rightly limited by political aims. Thus, “lacking firsthand knowledge of the world outside of Europe, or of the world of business and industry within and without Europe, Hindenburg also had little exposure to military grand strategy,” instead trying to solve “difficult operational problems by fostering tactical excellence and an aggressive spirit”—by treating means as ends. In the First World War, Hindenburg shared the prevailing preference for offensive operations. This worked on the Eastern Front, where he and Ludendorff ran things, while it failed on the Western Front, where the French and their British allies were able to arrest their advance with trench warfare.

Hindenburg had anticipated a short war. Russia struck first, however, invading East Prussia in August 1914, driving the Eighth Army back. When the Army’s commander, Maximilian von Prittwitz recommended retreat into West Prussia, Helmuth von Moltke, Chief of the Great General Staff called Hindenburg out of retirement to replace him, adding Erich Ludendorff as Hindenburg’s chief of staff. “Known to be a hothead” who “suffered from nerves when plans went awry,” Ludendorff needed “someone higher ranking…to take command and provide stability and aristocratic presence” to bring out the best in him—that being his “combination of tactical skill, operational insight, and boundless energy.” “In their postwar memoirs, both men celebrated the Hegelian synthesis they had forged during the war,” although as the war went on, Ludendorff became the more dominant partner, quite likely to Germany’s disadvantage. But by the end of August, the two men worked to regroup their forces and counterattack. Meanwhile, the Russians overreached and fell victim to the Eighth Army’s flanking maneuvers at the Battle of Tannenberg—so named by Hindenburg himself, as it was fought in the vicinity of a fifteenth-century Prussian defeat by Polish and Lithuanian forces (not Russians but nonetheless Slavs—close enough for government work). “It is a great joy to me that I was able to wipe out that disgrace,” Hindenburg intoned. “Tannenburg was Hindenburg’s victory,” “a stunning victory” which destroyed the Russian Second Army, induced its commander to commit suicide, and resulted in the capture of 92,000 Russian troops. While this only stiffened Russian determination to fight on, it also buoyed the German Geist and made Hindenburg the nation’s hero.

Germany’s main problem, however, wasn’t its morale but its overall war strategy. In 1905, General Alfred von Schlieffen wrote a plan for a two-front war, calling for a short (six-week) war on France, which would be overwhelmed by superior German forces attacking through Belgium, followed by a war against Russia. Moltke had modified the Schlieffen Plan, reducing the number of troops in the West. When that offensive failed Wilhelm II sacked him and put Prussian war minister Erich von Falkenhayn in his place. By now, Germany faced a war on two fronts and a naval war with Great Britain. No contingency plan had been written; “there was no consensus about what to do next,” and Falkenhayn persisted in prioritizing the Western Front, despite continued German successes against Russia. Even that effort was hampered by the failure of Germany and its ally, Austria-Hungary, to coordinate their forces. The Austro-Hungarians proceeded to lose catastrophically in Galicia, with 250,000 causalities and 100,000 captured. Ludendorff complained that Germany was “shackled to a corpse”; for their part, the Austro-Hungarian High Command chafed under German contempt. Such “recriminations notwithstanding,” Hindenburg and Ludendorff reinforced their ally’s position in Poland, and Hindenburg was named Field Marshal.

They urged Falkenhayn to send them the troops they needed to finish the war in the East. “Much of the strategic plot of 1915 and 1916 on the German side revolved around the debate and infighting between ‘Westerners’ led by Falkenhayn and ‘Easterners’ led by Hindenburg and Ludendorff.” In this struggle, “Falkenhayn prevailed in part because he had the kaiser’s confidence.” Eventually, however, Hindenburg’s ascendency continued. “Whereas the kaiser was flighty, insecure, and vain (Viennese wags wrote that he ‘insisted on being the stag at every hunt, the bride at every wedding and the corpse at ever funeral’) Hindenburg exuded confidence and spoke with dignified modesty.” Wilhelm II was quietly and gradually cordoned off from military matters by the military officers themselves. “Hindenburg became ‘the savior of the fatherland,’ a man who had selflessly answered his country’s call to duty well after most men his age had retired,” a symbol of “mature masculinity to thousands of German men,” a “loyal husband and loving father,” combined, to German women, a courageous and just leader to the soldiers. “Larger than life, he nevertheless exhibited proper humility and modesty before God,” “character, rather than intellectual brilliance,” being his “core strength.” In a republican regime, he would have been a latter-day George Washington, but Germany was no republic. And it wouldn’t be long before the young, impetuous Ludendorff would come to dominate the older, more cautious Hindenburg, even as Hindenburg had sidelined the young, impetuous kaiser.

“His directness and devotion to duty endeared him to his soldiers and to the German people.” The esteem was mutual, as he told an American interviewer, the former U.S. senator Albert J. Beveridge (famous for his 1900 speech, “The March of the Flag”): “Our knowledge that we are right; the faith of the nation that we shall win [NB: “shall”]; their willingness to die in order to win; the perfect discipline of our troops; their understanding of orders; their greatest intelligence, education and spirit; our organization and resources” guarantee German victory. It is, of course, not inconceivable that Hindenburg talked that way in the hope of persuading Americans not to intervene on the side of France and Great Britain, but there is no reason to doubt that he meant it, or most of it.

In 1916, Falkenhayn doubled down on his bet that the French would fold. His new strategy, the Ermattungsstrategie, aimed at defeating France in a “war of wearing-down.” It didn’t work: Falkenhayn not only failed to coordinate strategy with the Austro-Hungarians, he failed to share it “with his own army commanders.” The result was the Battle of Verdun, where “Germans gave better than they got” but the French held them off. “Like Tannenberg,” the Battle of Verdun “spawned its own sustaining mythology,” as General Philippe Pétain’s resolute insistence, “They shall not pass!” became the watchword of the French for the remainder of the war. Now, Germany’s campaign on the Eastern Front also faltered, as Russia retook Galician and the Bukovina, capturing half a million Austro-Hungarians while doing so. Had Falkenhayn not gone into Verdun but instead had aided the Austro-Hungarian campaign against Italy, Italy might well have been knocked out of the war, Austria-Hungary could have brought his forces out of Italy in time to halt the Russian offensive in Galicia. These “uncoordinated actions wet the stage for Russia’s greatest victory of the war” and for the success of the British offensive at the Somme River.

By September 1916, with war prospects looking increasingly desperate, Ludendorff’s energy had overcome Hindenburg’s moderation, as the younger man demanded equality in command. Recognizing that the war “had become a colossal Materialschlacht, or material struggle, waged by modern industrial juggernauts,” they conceived the “Hindenburg Program,” a “concerted attempt to mobilize fully, if somewhat belatedly, for total war.” Registering the ethos of the German regime, they supposed that “an economy could be commanded like an army.” It can, but with bad consequences. The long-range consequences should have been obvious: deficit spending leading to inflation, commercial sclerosis caused by the removal of voluntary incentives to work. The medium-range consequence affected the course of the war itself; “the sacrifices required and incurred by modern warfare’s destructive industrialism drove Germany, as well as the Entente powers, to inflate strategic goals to justify national sacrifice.” Even as the “war of wearing-out” slowly exhausted all sides, even as military production goals dislocated the elements of the German political economy, leading to food shortages, rulers needed to make ever more “grandiose political and territorial demands, ruling out opportunities for a compromise peace, which Hindenburg and Ludendorff rejected anyway.” Nor did their mass deportation of Belgian workers to Germany, where they were dragooned into working in factories in order to keep German men on the front lines, make the German regime seem an attractive partner in negotiations. Worse, the average German didn’t fare much better than the hapless Belgians, as his rulers “treat[ed] citizens as subjects who had to put up or shut up.” For example, women were told to pitch in to the war effort or “expect to go hungry”; “barking commands to grieving widows was not the way to win hearts and minds.” Hindenburg and Ludendorff assumed that German hearts and minds had already been won (true) and that they would remain won by dint of an unwavering sense of moral duty, however German persons were treated (false).

Anticipating an Anglo-French offensive in 1917, Hindenburg and Ludendorff prudently put their forces in a defensive posture, withdrawing several miles, leaving booby traps in their wake, constructing a battle zone consisting of pillboxes, trenches, barbed wire, and tank traps, then positioning mobile troops behind all these structures, establishing an “elastic system of defense in depth.” Unfortunately for German fortunes, the wisdom of these military measures was not equaled by their political strategy in the east. Ludendorff pushed for the revival of the kingdom of Poland, expecting to constitute a powerful Polish army to invade Russia. Not only did Poles “not relish serving as cannon fodder for German ambitions,” the policy steeled the weakening czarist regime against any compromise peace. Russia soon “collapsed into Bolshevism,” whose leaders promised to sue for peace, and that “contagion…soon spread to the German army in 1918.” 

Things looked no better at sea, where an effective Entente blockade “continued to bite into the German home front.” Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz and Admiral Henning von Holzendorff successfully urged “unrestricted” submarine warfare against the blockade and against American shipping to the Entente countries. No longer would German sailors board civilian ships to search for contraband; they would simply sink them. Hindenburg and Ludendorff understood that this could goad the Americans into declaring war, but they gambled that the navy could cripple the Entente “before U.S. soldiers reached France in significant numbers,” a decision that “cost Germany the war.” British exposure of the Zimmerman telegram, an appeal to the Mexican government for “alliance and financial support in return for a Mexican offensive to recover Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona,” only further fueled American outrage and hardly persuaded Mexicans. “The Second Reich needed a second Bismarck to emerge, a master diplomat possessing the guile and force of will” to reign in the generals, but it was stuck with Wilhelm II, who averred, “The soldiers and the army, not parliamentary majorities and decisions, have welded the German Empire together. I put my trust in the army.” Hindenburg “found himself becoming an erstatz kaiser.” He and Ludendorff put the blame for Germany’s declining prospects not on themselves but on the hapless Chancellor of the Empire, Theobold von Bethmann Hollweg, whom Ludendorff charged with abetting “German Radical Social Democracy,” with its pusillanimous “longing for peace.” They replaced him with a cipher. Wilhelm II had “essentially granted Hindenburg and Ludendorff the power to fire and hire chancellors at will.” The parliamentary parties fell into line and the military commanders stepped up their implausible propaganda, pretending that war casualties were low, and no shortages of food or other consumer goods existed. 

All this notwithstanding, “with Russia’s collapse, prospects for victory brightened,” and on the occasion of a national celebration of his seventieth birthday Hindenburg “issue[d] a ringing manifesto,” telling Germans to give no thought to the aftermath of the war (“this only brings despondency into our ranks and strengthens the hopes of the enemy”) but to “trust that the German oak will be given air and light for its free growth,” and that “God will be with us to the end!” True enough, God being with all sincere Christians—but He is with us when we suffer and die as much as when we live and succeed. In all, for the political landscape of postwar Germany, with a citizenry accustomed to the regime of militarist monarchy, not commercial republicanism, “the barren soil they left behind was far more hospitable to the hardy weeds of fascism than to the fragile flowers of parliamentary democracy.”

At the beginning of 1918, with victory on the Eastern Front secured and the French army weakening, Germany’s prospects on land looked fairly good. If they could secure the Slavic countries, bring them under German hegemony, they might rival or even surpass the United States as a continental power. But unrestricted submarine warfare hadn’t taken out the British navy, enabling Great Britain to continue to reinforce France. With no “grand strategy to win the war,” and no intention to negotiate a settlement, Hindenburg and Ludendorff, especially Ludendorff, determined to launch a mass offensive in the spring, hoping to win the war before the Americans could arrive, that summer. “They were infected by victory disease.” All of this only “confirmed in Western eyes the insatiable appetite of German militarism.” They had reversed the teachings of Bismarck and Clausewitz, prioritizing military over political aims. Whereas tactical and operational war policies “admitted rational solutions by diligent soldier-specialists” such as themselves, strategic and political policy “required collaboration with allies and statesmen, both of whom Hindenburg and Ludendorff held in contempt.”

A major difficulty resulted from their victory in the East. Germany had taken half of Russia’s industrial base and almost 90 percent of its coal mines; the Bolsheviks plotted revenge. The continued threat from Russia, along with the treaty that made Rumania a vassal of Germany and Austro-Hungary, required Germany to maintain three dozen divisions in the regions, with no possibility of shifting them in time for the planned offensive in the West. “In coercing sweeping concessions from Russia and Rumania, Hindenburg and Ludendorff’s reach exceeded their grasp.” They “placed their trust in battle,” hoping for “a larger Tannenberg” to be obtained “through higher levels of frontline effectiveness.” But they simply lacked the means to win on the Western Front, where national armies backed by the resources of their empires opposed them. “This was not Prussia fighting Austria in 1866 or France in 1870.” Once the French and British commanders “accepted the wisdom of a unified Entente command” under General Ferdinand Foch, “total victory by feats of arms was unattainable” for the Germans. A series of “costly offensives” in spring-summer 1918 failed “to shatter the Entente’s will”; the German army was “conquering itself to death.” By now, the Americans had arrived, under the command of General John Pershing. Ludendorff’s lunges at Paris failed, thanks to continued French valor, American reinforcements and, during the final offensive, the Italians. Although the offensives gained substantial territories, they came at the expense of almost a million casualties, with no replacements, anymore.

In addition, Hindenburg resisted the very concept of machine warfare; against the Entente’s 800 tanks the Germans fielded eighteen; they had one-third the number of trucks than the Entente forces. “It is always bad,” Hindenburg intoned, “when an army tries through technical innovation, to find a substitute for the spirit. That is irreplaceable.” The difficulty is that the human spirit is embodied, and the bodies of the German soldiers were being ground up. This fact never quite got through to Hindenburg or Ludendorff, isolated as they kept themselves from the conditions at the front and refusing to believe bad reports. Exhausted German troops faced an Entente counter-offensive along the Marne River, losing another 420,000 in battlefield deaths and 340,000 to injury and capture. That powerful Geist upon which Hindenburg depended evaporated, replaced by German Zerrisenheit, “profound disorientation, dissonance, and despair.” Scapegoats were needed, and they weren’t to include the German High Command, if the commanders could help it. “Far easier to believe a big lie—that radical socialists and war profiteers (especially of Jewish extraction) had betrayed Germany—rather than to accept the disturbing truth that Germany’s betrayers were its most renowned and respect leaders.” Hindenburg and Ludendorff didn’t scruple to encourage this misdirection, preferring to “shift blame from themselves to Germany’s new civilian leaders,” after the surrender and the collapse of the monarchic regime. (He shrewdly “left the armistice negotiations to the new government,” so that “the brush of total defeat…tarred Germany’s nascent parliamentary government instead of the army.”) And while after the war Ludendorff soon discredited himself by allying with Hitler, “Hindenburg’s reputation survived Germany’s collapse largely intact,” “a testament to Hindenburg’s gravitas, as well as the German people’s need for a noble figure who could uphold the nation’s dignity in defeat.” The authors praise Hindenburg for his “invaluable service” in overseeing the demobilization of what remained of the army, “prevent[ing] a military coup.” He also helped to defeat the Communist uprising in Berlin in January 1919, which would have destroyed the Weimar Republic at its outset.

The harsh terms of the Versailles Treaty exacted punishment for the generals’ misjudgment, although most now would say that its punitive terms themselves constituted both an overreach and an underreach, setting up the next world war. Even at the time, General Pershing, “among others, had warned that leaving the German army intact without its experiencing the humiliation of a final defeat would delude Germany into thinking it had been perfidiously sold out rather than physically whipped”; that was the underreaching. Hindenburg himself propagated the stab-in-the-back lie, as it “freed him from blame” for his conduct of the war. The overreaching consisted of the punitive character of the peace, “highlighted and exploited” by the German Right, poorly complemented by the Entente’s complacent failure to enforce those terms. 

The authors remark something now mostly forgotten: that the Weimar Republic was a success, initially. The regime consolidated after fending off the Hitler-Ludendorff ‘Beerhall Putsch’ in 1923, and “by early 1925, political stability and economic prosperity reduced radical parties such as Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) to nuisances,” with the Nazis winning a paltry “less than 3 percent of the parliamentary vote in 1924 and 1928.” In those years, it was rather from Left that the main threat to republicanism came, but in April 1925 Hindenburg’s election to the presidency (having by now dissociated himself from Ludendorff’s Jewish conspiracy claims) stabilized the political atmosphere mostly by simply occupying this largely symbolic office. “Craving stability and national unity, Germans rallied behind Hindenburg as an ersatz kaiser and father to a ‘fatherless generation.'” As president, he toured the country giving speeches in favor of “a policy of strict constitutionalism that did him credit.” He went on to defeat Hitler for the presidency in 1932. But parliamentary dithering and a nearly constant reshuffling of cabinets (twenty in the thirteen years of the regime’s existence), along with hyperinflation, followed by the worldwide financial collapse, ruined the regime and enabled the Nazis to win a plurality of Reichstag seats, voters being more alarmed by the Communists.

Although French commander Ferdinand Foch and Charles de Gaulle (in his first book, La Discorde chez l’ennemi) praised Hindenburg as a patriot, distinguishing him from the younger, more militant Ludendorff, the authors here disagree, characterizing him instead as the embodiment of “militarism gone mad.” A Prussian patriot, yes, but one who refused “to work sincerely for a republican Germany” after the war, allowing himself “to be co-opted by rightist elements and, eventually, by Hitler, through bribes, flattery, and promises of a return to glory for the army.” (For example, Hitler added five thousand acres to Hindenburg’s family estate, after Hindenburg, as president of the Weimar Republic, chose him as chancellor in 1933.) In his partial defense, the authors grant that by the early Thirties Hindenburg was 85 years old, “worn down and fed up.” They guess that he expected his German conservative allies to contain Hitler, still another example of his wishful thinking. At this point, even Ludendorff had more sense, saying of Hindenburg’s handover of the chancellorship to Hitler, “Future generations will damn you in your grave for what you have done.”

This and much that preceded it indicates that Hindenburg’s patriotism was not so much in question throughout his life. His judgment was the problem. Politics is a better school of prudence than the military, and Hindenburg was schooled in the army.

 

 

Georges Duhamel: Civilization 1914-1917. E. S. Brooks translation. New York: The Century Company, 1919.

Georges Duhamel: America the Menace: Scenes from the Life of the Future. Charles Minor Thompson translation. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1931.

Tomislav Sunic: Homo Americanus: Child of the Postmodern Age. Self-published, 2007.

 

For the European Right, the United States of America has loomed as a menace for a long time, held up as the embodiment of modernity—modernity seen as dehumanization, as the extension of the technological conquest of nature to human nature itself, an extension animated by misconceived notions of equality and liberty. But while Georges Duhamel criticized America for on the grounds of traditional European humanism, the heritage of Athens and Jerusalem, the New Right criticizes it in large measure for adhering to that heritage itself, especially to ‘Jerusalem.’

Georges Duhamel served as a French army surgeon throughout the First World War. In Civilization 1914-1917— a title of bitter irony—he begins with a soldier whose face he saw only for a moment, in the light of a match on a train at night, moving toward the front in 1916. Recalling that he had been in action twelve times to this point, the man said, “I’m always in luck: I have never been wounded but once.” The flare of the match “gave me a fleeting glimpse of a charming face”; “his whole presence radiated a sane and tranquil courage.” This was the “face of France.” This is no chauvinism on Duhamel’s part. The French fought with unremitting valor in that war. Those who deride supposed French poltroonery, along with France’s losses to Germany in 1871 and 1940, forget that the Germany of those years was no longer the Germany Napoleon rolled through at the beginning of the nineteenth century. By the 1860s, the thirty-seven sovereign German states had been united by Prussia into one powerful, militarized country, outnumbering the French by much more than three-to-two by 1914. In wars fought by mass armies, sheer population counted, as indeed the French in 1814 and the Germans in 1944 both learned during their invasions of Russia. “The world knows too little,” Duhamel rightly says, of “those Frenchmen of…grandeur of soul, indomitable intelligence, and touching naivete.”

“Will there ever be a night black enough to rob me of the image glimpsed in that flash of light?” Yet that face was disfigured in the war, where Duhamel “inhaled the fetid breath of fields thickly sown with corpses” in a “kingdom of dust” and mud, punctuated by field hospitals, where a “mass of human larvae writh[ed] on the floor,” larvae themselves covered with the larvae of the flies, feeding on the suppurating wounds of men in agony. “At times, overcome by all this suffering, I would beg for duty outside the camp, in order to let some fresh air in upon my mind and renew the tenor of my reflections,” which turned to “those people in the interior of the country” who “fill[ed] the cafe-concerts, the exhibitions, the moving pictures, the brothels—shamelessly enjoying themselves, the world and the season—and, sheltered by this trembling rampart of sacrifice, refuse to share in the universal distress.” War duty gave Duhamel “the opportunity to know men better than I had known them until then; to know them under a purer light, naked before death, stripped even of those instincts which disfigure the divine beauty of simple souls.” Even in the misery of war, “our race of workers has remained vigorous, pure, worth of the noble traditions of humanity”—men like Rebic, hideously wounded but weeping because he saw “all the trouble I am causing you,” his caregivers. Or the mortally wounded Réchousset, who looked at his “thin, ulcerated legs” and asked, “What’s the meaning of all this?” Or the doctor who told Duhamel, “The very idea of God seems to be something apart” from this “great catastrophe,” adding that the men must be told, “very simply,” that “there are some wounds that we cannot heal,” that only “when people stop making such wounds” will “the problem no longer exist.” “I owe to the war the knowledge of a new anguish—that of living beside a human being whom I knew, in spite of his strength and beauty, to be living under the threat of a terrible doom, and who had no future save that which hope and ignorance gave him.”

And then there was Rabot, a small man, his growth stunted by poor diet as a child, suffering “fearful, interminable dressing, repeated every day for months.” A well-born French lady, accompanied by “handsome, well-dressed,” and “very attentive” officers, entered the hospital, evidently on a fine mission to elevate the morale of the patients. “Rabot,” she told him, “You know already the greatest recompense of all: Glory! The rapturous ardor of combat!” Your suffering is “divine, because it is endured for all”; your wound is “holy,” making a hero a “god,” Christlike. At this, “a religious silence reigned in the ward.” Except for Rabot. He “ceased to resemble himself. All his features drew together, violently agitated in a manner that was almost tragic. A hoarse voice issued in jerks from his skeleton-like chest, and all the world could see that Rabot was laughing.” He laughed for nearly an hour, long after the lady and her retinue had departed. “After that it was as if something had changed in Rabot’s life.” Whenever his dressing was changed and he was “on the point of weeping and felt pain, one could always make him forget it and extort a little smile from him by saying in time: ‘Rabot! They’re going to send for the lady in green.'”

Another time, a train ran over a guard at a crossing called “La Folie.” “We picked up the debris, here and there, on all sides, fragments of bleeding flesh, entrails, and I remember finding a hand closed over a cheese. Death had surprised the man while he was eating.” Duhamel and his comrades carried the body parts from place to place, but no office in the army would accept them. He ended by taking the bloody mass back to his barracks, placing it next to his bed that night. “For a long moment,” listening to the sound of blood dropping from the stretcher to the floor, “I occupied myself with counting the drops while I reflected on many dreary things, the times we live in, for instance.” This was but one among “the uninterrupted file of human bodies” that entered the field hospital. “Sacred human flesh—holy substance that serves thought, art, love, all that is great in life—you are nothing but a vile, malodorous paste that one rakes in one’s hands in disgust, to judge whether or not it is fit for killing.”  As for those officials, reluctant to accept corpses, their type is seen in a civilian bureaucrat, M. Perrier-Langlade, who “was what is called a great organizer.” He keened to interfere in everyone else’s business, entering an office and “at once chang[ing] the position of every object and the function of every man,” his orders falling “like a rain of hail.” “An organization upon which his genius had been exercised would take several weeks to return to its normal functioning,” proving that “men of power who have ideas will never admit that simple mortals can have any.” Another such fellow “seized a fountainpen and was covering the walls with schemas,” “showing us in precise formulas how he wished us to think and act henceforth.” As he put it, “personal experience must abdicate before discipline.”

Consequently, Duhamel writes, “I hate the twentieth century, as I hate rotten Europe and the whole world on which this wretched Europe is spread out like a great spot of axle-grease.” The machines “that used to amuse me once, when I knew nothing about anything…now fill me with horror, because they are the very soul of this war, the principle and reason of this war.” Escape to a primitive society? No use: “I had thought of going to live among the savages, among the black people, but there aren’t even any real black people now. They all ride bicycles and want to be decorated,” decorated for their service in—the war.

There is nothing about America in Civilization 1914-1917. The Americans themselves had only begun to arrive in Europe in June 1917, to be readied for action at the front in October. But Duhamel turned his attention to France’s ally, detesting what he saw. 

Scenes from the Life of the Future (retitled America the Menace by its enterprising American publisher) begins where Civilization left off. “Of all the tasks common to the men of my time none is more urgent than of incessantly reviewing and correcting the idea of civilization,” “that burden of servitudes that is called independence.” Before the Great War, “the ideal of a universal civilization, built up by all that which the arts, the sciences, the philosophies, and even the religions had bountifully contributed to it, knew a period of great breadth and of almost insolent vogue”; “under an apparent pessimism, all the realistic and naturalistic literature of France was a paean in praise of civilization, the redeemer.” This “universal civilization” was to be “both ethical and scientific,” an engine of “both spiritual and temporal progress.” It was “at the height of its fortune when the war attacked it.” 

Universal civilization dissolved quickly because it harbored a contradiction at its core. It is one thing to understand civilization morally, as a means to “make people more human.” It is another thing to understand civilization as the realm of intricately designed machines, a civilization “that may be described as Baconian, since it is wholly based on the applications of the inductive method.” Baconian induction can tell you how to make machines, but it cannot tell you what to use them for. The teleology of modernism was supplied by historicism, in particular by various sorts of historicist progressivism. Historicism takes the results of empirical observation, facts recorded in history, then draws a general conclusion from those acts respecting ‘where history is going.’ Duhamel regards the war as the empirical refutation of this theory—a sort of malign but revealing Baconian experiment—while seeing that the war might be dismissed as a horrible but temporary setback, a sharp dip in the overall upward trend. The example of America is a much better indication of what ‘the end of history’ will look like.

“No nation has thrown itself into the excesses of industrial civilization more deliberately than America.” It began as a sort of tabula rasa, “free of traditions, of monuments, of a history,” a people “with no other ties than their redoubtable selves,” a land of industriousness and of industriousness alone. “American, then, represent for us the future”; because its deck started out cleared, it hasn’t needed to clear out any Old World and Old Regime debris. This is why “in material civilization, the American people are older than we,” a people “who even now are enacting for us many scenes of our future life.” But “before twenty years have passed” (i.e., by midcentury) “we shall be able to find all the stigmata of this devouring civilization on all the members of Europe.” Just as Tocqueville saw Europe’s future in American “democracy”—that is, in the condition of civil-social equality—so Duhamel sees it in American industrialism, American ‘machinism.’

And like Tocqueville, Duhamel voyaged to America. After boarding the ship that took him across the Atlantic, he fell into a conversation with the captain, who described a fantastic ‘potential’ scheme for diverting the Gulf Stream for some purpose he thought good: “What makes the strength and greatness of America is that there are always Americans who think seriously about everything.” Among those things Americans had thought of and enacted was a thoroughgoing inspection of Duhamel’s person and property at his port of entry, including an explanation of laws prohibiting alcoholic beverages, a health exam, and a plethora of customs rules, minutely enforced—fully two hours of “administrative fuss,” the institutionalization of M. Perrier-Langlade. The ship itself, a technological marvel, speeds the traveler comfortably to his chosen destination, but these “astonishing facilities offered by science to the traveler are thwarted by the dictator who speaks in the name of that same science,” holding that science “does not admit of doubt.” “Faith in science,” a new religion, is the faith of America. A physician justifies Prohibition by saying that while “that law is irksome to me sometimes…I am thankful to the State for protecting me, if necessary, even from myself.” 

American culture, such as it is, partakes of the same “new barbarity.” The movie theater “had the luxury of some big, bourgeois brothel—an industrialized luxury, made by soulless machines for a crowd whose own soul seems to be disappearing.” American soullessness reveals itself in the music it tolerates in such a place, “a sort of soft dough of music, nameless and tasteless,” a pastiche of fragment from European classics—the wedding march from “Lohengrin,” a bit of Haydn’s “Military Symphony,” the first allegro of Beethoven’s “Seventh Symphony,” a few bars of Wagner’s “Tristan” and Shubert’s “Unfinished Symphony” (“Poor symphony! It had never been worse ‘unfinished’ than it was here.”). All polished off with a round of…jazz, that “triumph of barbaric folly.” “Was there no one to cry murder? For great men were being murdered. All those works which from our youth we have stammered with our hearts rather than with our lips, all those sublime songs which at the age of passionate enthusiasms were our daily bread, our study, and our glory, all those thoughts which stood for the flesh and blood of our masters, were dismembered, hacked to pieces, and mutilated. They passed by us now like shameful flotsam and jetsam on this wave of warm melted lard.” “The cinema is a pastime for slaves, an amusement for the illiterate, for poor creatures stupefied by work and anxiety,” a “spectacle that demands no effort, that does not imply any sequence of ideas, that raises no questions, that evokes no deep feeling, that lights no light in the depths of any heart, that excites no hope, if not the ridiculous one of some day becoming a ‘star’ at Los Angeles.”

And then there was vaudeville, The Ziegfield Follies, with its bare-legged showgirls, pop vocalists, and “young comedians in flaring trousers and short jackets, who raced upon the stage, spouted four jokes and raced off again”; they “seemed like living symbols of the young American—likable, uneducated, taking what comes, without initiative or individuality.” The ‘acts’ “succeeded one another in a dizzy jostle.” “Hurry, hurry! Faster, faster!” No boredom must be permitted, but neither must anything rouse the American citizen from “his bovine slumber.”  Above all, American entertainment rejects thought. “A people stupefied by fugitive pleasures that are only skin-deep, and that are obtained without the smallest mental effort, will some day find itself incapable of doing any task that requires sustained resolution, or of advancing even a little through the energy of its thought.” Do not cite American manufacturing achievements against me, as counter-evidence. “A building rises two or three stories a week. Wagner needed twenty years to put together his Tetralogy, Littré a lifetime to build his dictionary.” Indeed, the greatest European buildings, the cathedrals, took many decades to complete.) American arts, the arts of the machine age, of the forward rush of Progress, “subject our hearts and minds to no tests,” striving to “gratify us to the limit” while “procur[ing] for us always a painful sensation as of unquenched thirst.” Although “its essence is motion,” it “leaves us dull and motionless, as if paralyzed.” Duhamel remarks to one American, you are poor because “Time is the greatest wealth, and you never have any.” 

Still another form of American self-entertainment may be found in the football stadium, a structure “belong[ing] to that sort of architecture which is cynically frank about its utilitarian purpose.” That purpose is, once again, to rev up a “plebeian crowd, without distinction and without authority” with glee clubs, bands, songs, and shouts organized by the captain of cheerleading squad. “With a megaphone in her hand, and with her skirts flying in the wind, she screamed, flounced about, gave play to leg and haunch, and performed a suggestive and furious dance de ventre, like the dances of the prostitutes in the Mediterranean ports. From time to time she reassembled her aviary”— her cheerleading subordinates—and “encouraged it to a fresh outburst of shrill screaming.” The sound of America is not music; the sound of America is noise.

The result is what Tocqueville called soft despotism, attained partly by political means but mostly through culture. “This slavery has established itself so stealthily and advanced with such caution that men could hardly keep from accommodating themselves to it.” Who can argue against “obviously reasonable principles of hygiene, morality esthetics, and social civilization”? When enacted, such principles provide a sense of security to each citizen and “quickly assume the character and strength of organic habits.” “In the modern state, most men good-humoredly recognize their incompetence in a multitude of things, and modestly delegate every power to specialists whose zeal is all the greater because it rarely goes unpaid.” The modern states “go beyond their rights,” but citizens do not notice that they are on the road to serfdom. They travel that road on automobiles, with “rouged and powdered young girls pilot[ing] mastodons to and from school.” Those mastodons will soon end up in the elephant graveyard of the automobile junkyard, emblems of “the great country that does not produce in order to enjoy in moderation and in reason, but that enjoys as it acquires—feverishly and without sense—so that it may be able to produce a little bit more.” On the highway, Duhamel saw in the interior of a car “a symbol of the world of the future,” a “charming woman with manicured nails and beautiful legs, who smoked a cigarette while traveling between fifty and sixty miles an hour, while her husband, seated on the cushions of the rear seat, with a set jaw scribbled figures on the back of an envelope.”

In the middle of America is Chicago, “the tumor, the cancer, among cities,” a place of noise and “tainted fogs,” where gargantuan buildings are thrown up in months only to be torn down tomorrow, “putting into its place something else, bigger, more complex, and more expensive.” In such a city, “the artist “must fall into step,” obey, “either hurry or quit.” “All the ideas that animate” Chicago architecture “smell of fashion and of death.” Its slaughterhouses only add not only to the physical but to the spiritual stink, lending the city “the natural and intimate odor of American luxury” in sanctuaries of “carnivorous humanity, the realm of scientific death.” “You have put into practice a sort of bourgeois communism,” he tells one Chicagoan,” with the “same suppression of the individual.” Before seeing it, who could have imagined Chicago, “the ant-hill, the city that is not even ugly, but that is haggard and inhuman as a drunkard’s nightmare”? “I gazed through the window of the nocturnal city, unbridled and shaken with all the furies and with all the lust that seemed to me to be seeking everywhere, even in the rain-sodden clouds, the phantom of joy, pure human joy, forever driven from the world.” The “genius of America” does “not know the soundest ambition of all: the ambition to defy time.” In America, “everything is too big; everything discourages Apollo and Minerva.” Nature itself is tyrannized, as “the greatest river in the world,” the “legendary Mississippi,” which begins not far from Chicago, can barely be seen for the docks, oil tanks, and levees that crowd its banks. 

In a sense, America opposes time’s ravages not by making monuments that will last but by idolizing statistics, by following the law of averages. Duhamel includes his dialogue with an American businessman, a manufacture of mattresses, “a genius in the field of trade.” They discussed insurance. Railroad crossings, they agreed, are dangerous. To reduce the danger, the railroad owners could invest in modifying the crossings but insurance against injuries and deaths is less expensive. When Duhamel ventured to suggest that numbers “do not cover every aspect of the question,” Mr. Stone (Duhamel isn’t above naming him that) dismisses such “sentimental considerations,” considerations which would falsify the arithmetic “without helping anyone.” But does this not “lower the standard of public morals?” No, Mr. Stone replies, because insurance “settles a loss that otherwise might have no chance of fair compensation.” To put it more systematically, Stone argues that railroad accidents will be more numerous than they would be if the railroad companies fixed the crossings, but those accident victims who would be injured at the improved crossing would go uncompensated. Duhamel suggests that it would be better, morally, if the number of accidents were reduced. Stone may well think that the companies would be sued by the (less numerous) victims, so they will need insurance anyway, although presumably their premiums would be lower. In his own business, he wants insurance against employee theft because he prefers not to “spy on my employees to find out whether they are honest” nor to “trust to their conception of good and evil, to scruples of their conscience.” He would rather insure each of them “for a sum corresponding to the harm he can do me.”

Duhamel observes that Mr. Stone has drifted into moral language, despite his attempt to brush it off as mere sentiment. He then brings down a rather heavy hammer, Henri Bergson, who distinguishes “the extensive,” which can be measured, translated into numbers, and “the intensive,” which “is subject to no measure.” “To that question insurance makes an answer that I find disquieting, but that all the rest of the world is beginning to approve: according to the insurance people, the common measure between the extensive and the intensive is money.” Stone replies that this is “one of the greatest achievements” of the insurance industry: it permits disputants to resolve their conflicts peacefully, “conflicts that threaten to perpetuate themselves in anger and hatred.” That is, qualitative/”intensive” disputes, if pressed, must lead to violence, precisely because they admit of no worldly measure. To this, Duhamel can only say that modern civilization oversimplifies, “pretend[ing] to harmonize the universe” by “commercial[ing] certain moral values.” Insofar as it does this, modern civilization becomes uncivilized, reducing acts of faith, hope, and contrition to a cash nexus.” Thus, “almost all scientific discoveries”—in this case, the “law of compensation”—are “big with a certain amount of good and with a notable quantity of evil.”

A more sinister example of the cash nexus in America was slavery. As did Tocqueville, Duhamel reserves a place for the dilemma of race in America. The slavery his predecessor saw is gone, but racial segregation remains. When another of his dialogic partners calls this problem insoluble, Duhamel meets his interlocutor with irony. “Until this moment I have never had any assured belief in immanent justice,” in the conviction “that every fault is punished in the end.” But now I see that “the unnumbered crimes of the slave-trade and of slavery that were the foundation of American prosperity cannot be expiated, and that those crimes have pierced the side of American happiness with an incurable wound—do you not find that, from the moral point of view, the idea is consolatory, and, all things considered, beautiful?”

Duhamel does not expect that this incurable wound will kill America, and in a way that is the problem. America prospered with slavery but it continues to prosper, to an even greater degree, without it. This makes it a menace. In Alabama, Duhamel asks a bull breeder why one of the bulls is “so bad-tempered.” He wasn’t always that way, the breeder recalls, but after he fought another bull and killed it, “he has been crazy with pride”; now knowing “what conquering is,” the bull “wants to conquer everything he sees.” For his part, Duhamel “thought sadly of the great peoples who glory suddenly intoxicates”—his own France, under Napoleon, cannot be far from his mind—peoples “who, alas, have no rings in their noses” with which they can be restrained, like the bad-tempered bull. America was not so much intoxicated by its victory in the Great War but at “the moment when the home market became too small for the United States,” and it took its commercial and manufacturing way of life worldwide.

Tocqueville saw the future of Europe, of the world, in the democracy he saw in America. Duhamel undertakes the same attempt. “By means of this America I am questioning the future; I am trying to determine that path that, willy-nilly, we must follow.” He invokes Maurice Maeterlinck’s comparison of modern life to the nests of ants and termites—the “same effacement of the individual, the same progressive reduction and unification of social types, the same organization of the group into special castes, the same submission of everyone to those obscure exigencies which Maeterlinck names the genius of the hive or of the ant-hill.” Human beings differ from insects, however, in their inventiveness. They will find new ways to subject themselves to inhuman tyranny. And so, “if steel machinery refuses to make profitable progress, nothing remains except to turn to man and modify the human machine” by means of “scientific human breeding and selection,” to “create a body of people, sexless, devoid of passion, exclusively devoted to the instruction, the feeding, and the defense of the city?” Eugenics had already been proposed and assembly lines implemented in Duhamel’s lifetime.

Those who have emigrated to America are dupes, “miserable multitudes” drawn to the light of Liberty’s torch like insects to the flame. “What has their new country given them in exchange for their sacrifices? It has given them new needs and new desires. The whole philosophy of this industrial dictatorship leads to this unrighteous scheme: to impose appetites and needs on man.” But “the supreme luxury is silence, fresh air, real music, intellectual liberty, and the habit of joyous living,” “delicate riches” for which no one in America cares. Americans only want “to keep selling, even on credit, above all, on credit!” pushing back “the limits of the market, unceasingly to put off till the morrow the threatening saturation point.” Immigration homogenizes, lending itself to the same thoughts, the same desires to produce and consume; with commercial and personal credit, faith in money has replaced faith in God. “Spread everywhere with infinite variations, the American system now has the whole world for its field,” seemingly “compatible with every political system,” turning even the Soviet Union “into a colony” of American materialism. And it is inescapable, since “there are no revolutions among the insects.”

The only hope is in collapse, unpredictable collapse: if “someday without anyone’s knowing why, without anyone’s foreseeing it, without anyone’s succeeding in explaining it after the event, the incredible machine foes off the track, collapses, and falls in cinders. For in the case of man, you never know.” 

Duhamel’s wrote his jeremiad in the name of the old European civilization, against modernity and its attempt to conquer nature with the technologies generated by Baconian science. The Croatian New-Right political scientist, Tomislav Sunic detests that civilization as well, hearkening to a certain conception of pre-Biblical, pre-Socratic Europe. But unlike Duhamel, he sees in America and “Americanism” the nadir of the West, biblical and philosophic. “The former European conservative palaver needs to be reexamined.”

But New-Right neopaganism is not his initial stance, although he does devote a few sentences, early on, to conjecturing that “Americanism…could have become a true motivating force of creativity for a large number of people of European extraction” in the United States had it “renounced Biblical moralism and adopted instead a neo-Darwinian, evolutionary, and racialist approach in its domestic and foreign policy” (as indeed Indiana Senator Albert J. Beveridge proposed at the beginning of the twentieth century). “Racialism and eugenics had numerous supporters in America and both fields were well combined with early American liberalism,” that is, progressivism.” For the most part, however, in his early chapters he limits himself to deploring America as the product of Enlightenment—that is to say, modern—notions, especially equality and progress. 

Egalitarianism and progressivism made Homo americanus and Homo sovieticus “twin brothers.” The difference was that the American elites were smarter than the Soviet elites, preferring an easygoing soft despotism, the ideology of “fun,” to the “physical terror” wielded by the Leninists, which provoked resistance. “Communism kills the body, in contrast to Americanism which kills the soul,” but most people would rather let their souls die than have their bodies die. Sunic assigns the cause of the twinship of American and Soviet man to “the same principles of egalitarianism, however much their methods varied in name, time and place.”

The problem is obvious: the equality described as a self-evident truth in the Declaration of Independence is founded on natural right, the Soviet principle of equality on historical right. The American Founders hold that all men are created equal, but only with regard to their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and not on the ’empirical’ grounds of equal intelligence or moral character. Few if any of the American Founders themselves supposed themselves the moral equals of George Washington, to take one example. The founders of the Soviet Union held not that all men are created equal (as atheists, they denied that men were created, in the first place), but that ‘history,’ conceived as the conflict between socioeconomic classes, proceeds ‘dialectically’ toward an inevitable outcome in egalitarian communalism. Further, the effort to hurry ‘history’ along to that consummation was utterly unrestricted by any regard for life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, or, of course, property, which was held to be the shibboleth of the hated ‘bourgeoisie’ and its ‘capitalism.’ It is simply not true that “discourse about the end of history has been a standard theme in America over the last two hundred years.” The Americans argued not from ‘history’ but from natural rights, holding democratic and commercial republicanism to be the best regime for securing natural rights.

Despite his animus against the Declaration of Independence and his esteem for the racialist Southern writer, George Fitzhugh, Sunic more or less sees this, although he prefers not to admit it openly. He argues, rather, that once the flood gates of egalitarianism open—however modest this may appear at the beginning—the logic of equality will gather momentum and will end up eventually in some protean form of proto-communist temptation.” That is, Sunic avails himself of the same logic of historicism that he deplores, although in this case it is a logic of inevitable decline, not of progress. He equally partakes of the relativism of historicism, dismissing Thomas Jefferson as merely “a man of his epoch” whose “intellectual legacy can only be understood within the spirit of his time, ” who “certainly did not consider native Indians or Africans to be his equals”—a claim that ignores the actual understanding of equality Jefferson propounded. But to the historicist, it doesn’t really matter what Jefferson thought. “What Jefferson and his likes had in mind is of little importance; what is important is what his successors and non-European American interpreters had in mind two centuries later,” namely, “justification for copying paleo-communistic practices,” such as thought-policing on the basis of ‘political correctness.’ Historicism commits him to the perilous strategy of political prediction. There are, he claims, “looming inter-racial riots in America, which will likely break up America,” he claims, without explaining why such riots, were they to occur, would ruin the country any more than the ones that actually happened in the last century did. 

Sunic blames the epidemic of political correctness on the post-World War II effort to sustain the regime change in western Germany in the aftermath of Nazism. “Although Fascism, as an organized political system, no longer poses a threat to Western democracies, any criticism—however mild it may be—of egalitarianism and multiculturalism can earn the author or politician the stigma of ‘fascism,’ or even worse, of ‘anti-Semitism.'” Thus, “principles of vilification of an intellectual opponent or a political adversary have become the rule in postmodernity.” One must ask, when has vilification of intellectual opponents and political adversaries not been the rule? Ancient Athens, whether pre- or post-Socratic? Rome? China, ancient or modern? Have intellectual opponents and political adversaries often been subject not merely to vilification but death, more or less throughout human history? 

At the end of World War II, “the liberal and communist tenets of free speech and freedom of expression did not apply at all to the defeated side which had earlier been branded as ‘the enemy of humanity.'” But when were freedom of speech and of expression tenets of communism? And was fascism not in principle an enemy of humanity, being based, in its Nazi version and in its later Italian version, upon a doctrine of biologically-based racial superiority, a superiority so pronounced that it claimed to entitle its proponents to enslave and kill members of the inferior races? 

“The entire West, including America itself, has become a victim of collective guilt which, strangely enough, is induced more by intellectual self-denial and by Christian-inspired atonement, and less by state repression,” since the despotism remains ‘soft,’ needing not “to resort to violent means” for its enforcement but by “a cultural smearing campaign.” One might reply to this, that does not need to subscribe to that soft despotism, which has indeed prevailed in many sectors of intellectual and political life in the West, to blame it on influences other than regime change in postwar Germany or on Christianity. It is indeed to a substantial extent true that “post-communist and post-Marxist intellectuals” “relentlessly avocat the ideology of multiculturalism, egalitarianism, and globalism.” It is silly to blame this on “Judeo-Centric modern historiography.” But that is what Sunic proceeds to do in the second half of the book.

The argument runs as follows. The real founding date of America was 1619, not 1776 or 1789, when the Constitution was ratified. “Biblical vocabulary has played a much stronger role in American public affairs than the much-lauded American constitutionalism or the praised rule of law” because “despite the fact that America’s founding fathers were men of the Enlightenment, opposed to religious fanaticism of any sort, the Calvinist heritage continued to have the upper hand in formulating the American political character and American society at large.” Sunic offers no proof of this, and no proof of his charge that America’s “obsession with moralistic preaching borders on mass delirium,” unbeknownst to “most Americans.” As for religious freedom, “what is the point of talking about tolerance in a system where Biblical conformism” in the form of Bible-established moral convictions, even among ‘secularists,’ “is considered a norm by all”? Worse still, “of all Christian denominations, Calvinism was the closest to the Jewish religion and…the United States owes its very existence to Jews,” some of whom bankrolled the American Revolution. “From its inception, America was an ideal country for Jews.” More, “Jewish influence in America is not only the product of Jews; it is the logical result of Gentiles’ acceptance of the Jewish founding myths that have seeped over centuries into Europe and American in their diverse Christian modalities,” with “postmodern Americanism” being “just the latest secular version of the Judean mindset.”

This was understood by “the best anti-Semitic brains” of the 1930s, who were harnessed by “the government in National Socialist Germany” to “document every nook and cranny of Judaism in the Soviet Union and America.” But alas, Sunic sighs, “at the beginning of the 21st century, these books are either banned or derided as unscientific and anti-Semitic prose.” It is not clear why anti-Semitic brains would not produce anti-Semitic prose, or why those opposed to anti-Semitism are wrong to describe their prose as anti-Semitic. But to be fair to Sunic, what he wants to say is that almost all anti-Semitism is ill-founded because it is Christian, or Christian-derived, and “Was Jesus not a Jew?”  His point is to formulate a way “to counter strong Jewish influence in Americanism without lapsing into anti-Semitism” of the sort that Christianity-ladened anti-Semites uphold. Sunic is, strictly speaking, anti-Judaic and therefore anti-Christian. [1] “The West, and particularly America will cease to be Israelite once it leaves this neurosis” of “yearning to become Israelite” and “returns to its local myths,” the myths that predated the arrival of Judaism and Christianity in Europe, when the anti-Semite of Europe and America ceases “lug[ging] behind himself a Levantine deity that is not of European cultural origin.” 

Sunic does not expect a revival of ancient paganism, preferring a “modern version of it, “a certain sensibility and a ‘way of life.'” The effort to construct this sensibility will include recurrence to “ancient myths, fairy tales, and forms of folklore that bear the peculiar mark of pre-Christian themes,” but much more “forging another civilization, or rather, a modernized version of scientific and cultural Hellenism,” with the polytheism of the ancients translated into a moral code that “stres[ses] courage, personal honor, and spiritual and physical self-surpassing”—that is, a warrior ethic that acknowledges hierarchy against egalitarianism, including the hierarchy of “biological Darwinism. “In pagan cosmogony, man alone is considered a forger of his own destiny (faber suae fortunae), exempt from historical determinism, from any ‘divine grace,’ or economic and material constraints.” At the same time, Sunic claims that the polytheism of pre-Christian religions “offers homage to all ‘gods’ and, above all…respects the plurality of all customs, political and social systems, and all conceptions of the world—of which these gods are sublime expressions”—well, except for the God of the Bible. “Democracy and independence—all of this existed among the early predecessors of Americans in ancient Europe, albeit in its own unique social and religious settings.” Avoiding such severe Biblical dichotomies as good and evil, the pagans were so much more tolerant than Western civilization became, under the Bible’s baleful influence. 

This is, of course, rubbish. Human sacrifice, including child sacrifice, was practiced among ancient Europeans (including the Greeks) as well as by ancient Americans. And indeed it was practiced by the best (and worst) anti-Semitic brains in Germany and Russia during the 1930s. Judaism prohibits it. Nor did the ancients regard themselves as masters of fate; fate may favor the bold, favor the ‘makers,’ but no one in pre-Socratic Greece or in the ancient world generally denied its ultimate authority. As for toleration, religious or otherwise, the Greeks killed Socrates and the Romans killed Christians. “Who can dispute that Athens was the homeland of European America before Jerusalem became its painful edifice?” Who can dispute that pre-Biblical Athens was every bit as warlike and intolerant as post-Biblical Athens? 

Sunic attempts to leverage these claims into a critique of U. S. foreign policy. He dissents from Europeans who claim that American military interventions in the post-World War II decades have “had as a sole objective economic imperialism.” (He does, however, praise the German geopolitician Karl Haushofer, who “had some influence on the views held by National Socialist Germany”; actually, he tutored Hitler and Rudolf Hess during their imprisonment in the early 1920s. Haushofer claimed that “American economic imperialism [was] irreconcilable with the notion of Germany’s self-sufficient large spaces (Grossraum), i.e. an international regime best suited for co-existence with different states and cultures”— a capacious and tolerant place, indeed, had it not entailed genocide and enslavement of ‘inferior races,’ at least in its Nazi version.) The intention has rather been “the desire to spread American democracy around the world,” an ambition that military challengers to America “ran the risk of being placed outside the category of humanity or labeled as a terrorist.” He fails to produce an example of American policy makers who have placed military “challengers” to America as outside the category of humanity. As for the terrorists, well, they are terrorists. “Why not point out that Bible-inspired American ideology can be as intolerant as Islamism”? I can only answer: probably because it isn’t.

Sunic doesn’t limit his complaints to the postwar era, however. Pre-war Germany “was on the way of becoming a major Euro-Asian steam-roller ready to challenge America’s access to energy sources in the rimland countries of the Middle East and the Pacific Basin.” If so, why were Americans not at war with the biggest empire in the world at that time, Great Britain? As Sunic would have it, America was really to blame for Hitler’s declaration of war, since the United States had engaged in “illegal supplying of war material to the Soviet Union and Great Britain” before that declaration; had fought German submarines in the Atlantic; and, horror of horrors, had permitt[ed] “incessant anti-German media hectoring by American Jews.” He quotes with approval the assessment of “German scholar Giselher Wirsing, who had close ties with propaganda officials in the Third Reich,” who wrote, “In degenerated Puritanism lies, side by side with Judaism, America’s inborn danger.”  But never mind, regimes and policies aside, even if “there were some replica of America, with the same geographical size, the same military capability, and sharing the same democratic values—it is very likely that present day American would sooner or later find itself on a collision course” with it. Why does Sunic think so? Because, for all his interest in culture, Sunic prefers not to notice the importance of political regimes and the obvious fact, understood since Montesquieu, that commercial republics don’t make war against each other. 

Sunic concedes that it might, realistically speaking, be “preferable to have American-staged security to some vague notions replete with fear and violence.” Unfortunately, ‘Judaic’ America instead sets for itself “absolute foes that merit total annihilation,” as seen, he alleges, in the American Civil War, the “firebombing of defenseless European cities during the Second World War,” and the overall “destruction of Germany.” The argument founders on the observation that the secessionist states were scarcely annihilated, the defenseless European cities were the sites of the German military industries, and Germany wasn’t destroyed. In fact, West Germany, as distinguished from Soviet-controlled East Germany, became the economic powerhouse of Europe within a generation, thanks in part to American aid and protection from the Soviet empire. “Nobody knows the exact number of Germans killed by American forces during and after World War II,” although one must observe that is likely to be considerably fewer than 11 million—the generally accepted number of innocents murdered by the Nazis, quite apart from the deaths inflicted in the wars they started. Predictably, Sunic calls that number exaggerated. Sure, maybe it was only seven or eight million.

As for ‘postmodernism,’ Sunic follows the French scholar Christian Ruby in distinguishing it from “neo-modernity.” The latter is “more convivial and more egalitarian in its sources, having its philosophical root in the philosophy of Kant and universal reason,” all of which Sunic despises. Postmodernity “has its inspiration in nihilist and pro-fascist philosophers, Nietzsche and Heidegger.” (Nietzsche, who died two decades before Mussolini invented fascism, utterly despised German nationalism, but let that pass.) Sunic has a good old time ridiculing Leftists for appropriating postmodernism for egalitarian causes (“they abhor every aspect of fascism yet, on the other, their theories are inconceivable without the extrapolation of Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s prose”). Postmodernity’s only good aspect is that “it is self-destructive.” In his characteristically desultory fashion, he soon turns to lauding George Fitzhugh, the pro-slavery author of Cannibals All! “Black slavery was to Fitzhugh a matter of fact; a social bond necessary for black Americans, who due to their incapacity to equally participate in free trade and cut throat competition, are far better off in farm bondage in the South supervised by a paternalistic white farmer, than working for a Northern white crook who pontificates about human rights and strips them of human dignity. In what sense are 21st century blacks in America better off than their predecessors?” (They aren’t enslaved, for starters, and exhibit no inclination to return to either slavery or post-slavery Southern segregation.) Blacks, according to Sunic, along with “other races and individuals,” lack “the stamina and the genes to compete in the free market.” “Only a true aristocratic society, where leaders are role models, can have lasting legitimacy.” 

“In the near future, Americanism, similar to the former system of communism, will only function as an elementary form of mass survivalism in which interracial wars will be the norm.” Or so Sunic hopes.

 

Note

1. That anti-Semitism has its origins not fundamentally in racism but in anti-Judaism is the argument of Dennis Praeger and Joseph Telushkin: Why the Jews? The Reason for Antisemitism (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984. For a review, see “Anti-Jewish Malice” on this website under “Bible Notes.”