The British Isles amount to a satellite of the European continent, itself an appendage of Asia. Whereas continental Europe looks very easy to reach and easy to hold—essentially a large, flat surface funning from the Atlantic to the Urals—Churchill regarded the British Isles as easy to reach but hard to hold. The English Channel set it apart from the land armies which periodically rampaged through the Continent. Celts, Germans, and Romans all made their mark, but none could simply dominate British space.

Too close to the continent to isolate themselves from it, the peoples of the Britain best used their geography in commercial and maritime activities, preserving a small land army except in emergencies. Such an army, supplementing a formidable navy, could defend the realm while making limited, balanced, and eventually republican government possible, inasmuch as army officers threat civilian rule more effectively than naval officers ever do. If British statesmen acted with prudence, political liberty and commercial prosperity could be established and defended more readily there than on the continent.

For centuries, France posed a principal, and often the principal, threat to British liberty. In Churchill’s telling the French came on to the British scene with éclat in 1066 and the Norman Conquest. A rude awakening, that, but in the end of beneficial one, because it re-linked England to Europe centuries after the Roman Empire had collapsed, preventing Britain from becoming “a Scandinavian empire.” [1] This mattered, because the Normans brought Christian Latinity to the island, which then mingled with the practices of common-law self-government already in place.

Further, the French practice of trial by jury, along with English common law, combined to resist the tendencies toward statism and absolute monarchy that would bedevil Europe in future centuries. Most notably, these Norman and Saxon practices, combined, made Magna Carta possible, two centuries later. When the state-building Tudor dynasty arrived, the habits of English self-government survived it. England retained what Churchill calls “civilization,” which Aristotle would have recognized as the core of any genuinely political way of life, the practice of ruling and being ruled by turns, not by the masterly rule of command-and-obey. The old English admonition, ‘It’s not cricket,’ expresses this idea vividly, at least to those who have seen the game played; eventually, the other side will have its innings.

Conveniently, the Normans couldn’t hold the hard-to-hold island. They left, with Britons happily keeping the Christianity and jury trials the Normans had brought with them. But the French remained a threat. By the twelfth century, King Louis VI had consolidated his power; French, Burgundian, and British rulers fought over the west coast of Europe for the next 400 years. With their loose organization of political and military authority—kings, aristocrats, priests, and cities all circulating around one another in colloidal suspension—the feudal states lent themselves to divide-and-conquer strategies. Accordingly, French monarchs would ally with Scotland against the English; the English countered by playing Scottish faction off one another. The French and the Scots would then support factions in the English civil wars. English kings would attempt to unite the country against France—bringing death and destruction to both sides but also the political wisdom seen in Shakespeare’s history plays, a wisdom imbibed (Churchill tells us) by his great ancestor Jon Churchill, First Duke of Marlborough, who would later intervene decisively and triumphantly in the Anglo-French wars.

In the meantime, the feudal state needed replacing by some more stable order. The Tudors provided this new order: the modern, centralized state, initially a despotic or “absolute” monarchy similar to those then prevailing on the continent, but a welcome relief from feudal turmoil and vulnerability. “If this was despotism, it was despotism by consent.” [2]  Initially, the Tudors allied with the Netherlands against France, thus establishing a sort of geopolitical beachhead on the continent without needing to occupy western France. In the twentieth century, such a move would be called ‘containment.’

It fell to Henry VIII to establish a thoroughgoing continental alliance system, initially with Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Papacy. But Henry understood that a modern state requires a nation to go with it, and a national English state would finally need to sever its ties with Rome. After henry broke with the Church (ostensibly over his marriage to Anne Boleyn, but not real monarch marries without geopolitical calculation in mind), his daughter Elizabeth shifted the anti-French alliance to the Protestant powers on the continent. Although weaker than the Catholic states, European Protestant states would prove themselves capable of keeping the French tied down on the continent.

There would never be another Norman Conquest, but at times it was a near thing—never so much as during the rule of King Louis XIV, whom Churchill abominates as “the curse and pest of Europe.” [3] The Sun King aspired to make all other European states into his planets, even as he successfully reduced French aristocrats to subordination at the Palace of Versailles. here was the first modern threat to English liberty by a despotic regime, now controlling the financial and military resources of a centralized state, undertaking a plausible attempt at continental empire. In his greatest book, Marlborough: His Life and Times, Churchill explains that English statesmen (and, as it happened, a stateswoman, Queen Anne) had two possible choices: intervene militarily on the continent with as big a land army as the nation could muster; or use naval power “to gain trade and possessions overseas” while fighting selected battles on the continent, especially in the Netherlands, where rulers and peoples alike had every reason to fight hard against the French. [4]

With a series of brilliant maneuvers, Marlborough chastened even Louis’s ambitions. Churchill remarks that the general wanted more than mere military triumph, however. Marlborough regarded a political settlement as indispensable to a lasting peace on the continent. He advocated what we now call ‘regime change’ in France—the elimination of absolute monarchy and its replacement by what Aristotle, Cicero, and other classical political thinkers had called a ‘mixed regime,’ one combining monarchic and aristocratic elements in some sort of balance. The modern, centralized state would remain, as any nation needed to defend itself from other peoples organized under such states. But a new regime would control that state. Genuine politics or civilization would then be possible in France and, eventually, in Europe altogether. As Churchill puts it, “There might have been no Napoleon!”

No such luck. But, just as Marlborough had learned from Shakespeare, Winston Churchill had learned from Marlborough; his book appeared in the 1930s, when France (having indeed changed its regime to a republic) had ceased to be a threat but Germany and Russia had replaced it as (if anything) more formidable enemies. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Churchill saw that only regime change would do, and when the opportunity arose, he seized it with a coherent strategic end already in view.

Marlborough’s immediate successors still had Bourbon France to deal with. They had one advantage their ancestor had not enjoyed; Britain was now Great Britain, having solemnized the union with Scotland, ending the threat of encirclement from the north. In the War of the Austrian Succession, France and Prussia allied against Austria, but the Empress Maria Theresa proved more capable than they anticipated, winning Great Britain as her ally, along with Holland and Saxony. She saved Hapsburg rule, although by war’s end “Austria and Holland were no longer great powers on the Continent,” the British had retreated under pressure of factionalism at home, and “the Grand Alliance was dead.” Nothing, Churchill continued, “was settled between Britain and France,” and “the only gainer was Frederick the Great,” who took the opportunity to seize Silesia and its rich coal mines. [6]

Less than a decade later, the Seven Years’ War again pitted Great Britain against France, but this time the British backed Prussia against Austria, now allied with France against Frederick who successfully invaded Saxony after securing the British alliance. British and French troops had already clashed in western Pennsylvania, as Britain tested the strength of France’s containment strategy in North America. The new alliance proved beneficial; France and its allies (at one point including not only Austria but Russia and Sweden) could not reverse Prussia’s territorial gains, while the British broke French imperial designs in both North America and India. While its continental allies held down the French, Great Britain became even greater, becoming the full-fledged British Empire. The major risk to Great Britain, a planned French invasion of the British Isles, failed with two French defeats at sea in 1759. For its part, Prussia, nearly crushed in a four-front war, triumphed when the new Russian Czar, Peter III, abandoned his alliance with France and sided with Frederick, not only withdrawing Russian troops but assisting in obtaining a truce between Prussia and Sweden. This reconfiguration of European politics suited Great Britain well, and lasted for a generation, until the French Revolution and Napoleon.

After the failure of the moderate republic of 1789, Jacobin France declared war on Austria in April 1792, with Prussia allying with Austria against the radical-republican threat. British Foreign Minister Lord Grenville sounded the alarm at a regime ambitious to establish itself as “the general arbiter of the rights and liberties of Europe,” and especially as the ruler of the Netherlands—then as for centuries an indispensable continental ally of Britain. [7] What is more, revolution in France might prove contagious, particularly in Ireland.

With the rise of Napoleon, the threat only intensified. This time, the two geopolitical and geo-military strategies of the powers could not have been starker: a commercial mixed regime wielding the world’s best navy against a military tyranny wielding the world’s best army. Rebounding from his naval defeat at Trafalgar in 1805, Napoleon played to his strength as an army general, defeating Austria and allying with an intimidated Czar Alexander, thereby isolating Great Britain. In an attempt to blockade the island, Napoleon involved himself in Spain, which proved a far better resister of imperialism than a practitioner of it. Once checked the tyrant’s strength became hi weakness. Having eschewed the authority found in legitimacy, morality, civil society, and tradition, tyranny finds its only strength in success and the prospect of future success.

In 1810, the British regime made its move, ordering troops stationed in Portugal under the Duke of Wellington to cross the Spanish border. This further bled the French. And Napoleon’s ally, the czar, was getting restless, tempting Napoleon to still greater glory in an invasion of Russia. Famously, it failed. At the Vienna peace conference, the allies cut France down to its original size and arranged for the restoration of a much-sobered Bourbon family to its former throne. Wisely, the British foresaw the day when France might be needed as a counterweight to Prussian ambitions in the east; the peace was not punitive. Unlike the Versailles Treaty of a century later, the Peace of Vienna settlement disregarded nationalist passions. The “well-being of Europe was to be secured not by compliance with the assumed wishes for the peoples concerned, but only by punctual obedience to legitimate authority” [8] Regime change, yes, but regime change with a view toward a moderate politics, which, under the circumstances, meant the Holy Alliance regimes on the continent. Nationalist democracy was a brew too heady for political consumption by peoples unfamiliar with the common-sense realities of decent political life.

Churchill understood British geopolitics respecting France during the centuries when France was his country’s most dangerous rival as the use of the British Isles as a platform for naval defense of the realm, political and commercial liberty and, ultimately, worldwide imperial power—all of these while containing the major continental power by judicious alliances with the lesser continental powers threatened by France’s very greatness. As the preeminent British statesman of the twentieth century, Churchill would deploy this same strategy, no longer against France but with it.

By the twentieth century, European politics had altered substantially. France was no longer Great Britain’s enemy. Napoleon III’s loss of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 had ruined the reputation of French monarchism for good, and the Third Republic would provide unimpressive but unthreatening government for the next seven decades. Meanwhile, the British regime had liberalized and democratized, with three major Reform Acts extending the franchise to the majority of the male population. The two regimes had become compatible.

Both were militarily worthy allies, as well. The Royal Navy continued to rule the waves. For its part, the French army was far from incapable of defending the Republic; after all, France was the location of the Western Front in the Great War, and that front held against superior German forces. Those who sneer at the supposed loss of French military power and valor in the first half of the new century overlook that. Churchill never did. He knew France provided a nearly indispensable buffer against the ambitions of Germany and, later Russia.

In other ways, European geopolitics also stayed the same. Another potential continental tyrant had arisen: united Hermany, substantially outweighing France in population and in military-industrial capacity. The Prussian aristocrat, Otto von Bismarck, a master of diplomacy and the mastermind of German unification, hoped to moderate French rancor at its defeat in the war by taking Alsace but refusing Lorraine. But the calmer head did not prevail. With both provinces in hand, Bismarck “knew the quarrel with France was irreconcilable except at a price which Germany would never consent to pay,” and built German alliances around “that central fact.” Prudently enough, he set policies which “always included the principle of good relations with Great Britain.” If the German military with its territorial ambitions insisted on making a permanent enemy of the French, at least Bismarck could work to isolate that enemy diplomatically. [9]

In 1890, a new generation of German rulers pushed the old man out. Supposing his moderation uselessly retrograde, the German military attempted to rival Britain for dominance of the seas. Unlike the republican regimes, the oligarchic German regime could plan for aggressive war without political consequence, and it did.

This pushed Britain and France closer together, as France partnered with its old rival and with Russia, enacting what we now call a ‘containment’ strategy against its menacing neighbor. For their part, the Germans allied with Austria-Hungary—Austria having been the one German state from that federation. The balance of power held as long as Europe retained its moral consensus as a predominantly Christian civilization, animated by peaceful sentiments; but already Christianity’s long, melancholy withdrawal had exposed hard nationalist reefs. Added to the formidable new military technologies and the social democratization of modern life, which permitted mass mobilization of armies not seen since the Napoleonic era, nationalist passions “enable[d] enterprises of slaughter to be planned and executed upon a scale, with a perseverance never before imagined.” [10]

By 1912, Great Britain and France had formalized a defensive naval alliance, the British tasked with guarding the Channel and France’s Atlantic coast, freeing the French navy to defend the Mediterranean. When war came two years later, the strategy worked; without British control of the sea lanes, Germany would have severed Allied sea communications and exposed France to a two-front war—the ultimately fatal position of Germany itself. An increasingly desperate German naval command resorted to the use of submarines against merchant ships, a move which led to the American intervention and subsequent German defeat.

On land, the grim features of modern warfare on the Western Front (that is to say, France) are well-known. The trenches constructed by both sides immobilized the conflict, preventing the flanking maneuvers seen in most land wars. Artillery barrages and poison gas attacks ensued, with valorous soldiers pinned in place like insects in a museum collection. Although Churchill registers profound esteem for the French wartime leaders—Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau and General Ferdinand Foch represented the democratic and aristocratic traditions of their nation with courage and wisdom—he has sharp criticism for the initial strategic concept of the French military, summed up in the catchphrase, “L’attaque, toujours l’attaque.” No notion could have been more futile and ruinous.

Fortitude and devotion “rendered a sublime recovery possible” for the French, but the “frightful butchery” which preceded that sublimity needed not to have been so extensive. [11]  Fortunately, France’s Eastern-Front ally, Russia, relieved some of the pressure on France itself. In a pattern to be repeated in the Second World War, initial Germany advances in France caused an overconfident Germany military command to transfer forces to the East, where they gradually wore themselves out. The Germans could no more conquer all of Russia than Napoleon could. By the time the Germans returned their main attention to the Western Front, French and British troops had taken the time to dig in, and their lines held for the rest of the war.

No satisfactory settlement followed the Allied victory. “How is a forty million France to be defended against sixty, seventy, eighty million Germany?” Churchill asked. [12]  Moreover, if it is true that commercial republics don’t fight each other, Churchill and the French both understood Weimar Germany wasn’t a real republic at all. “Powerful classes” in Germany entertained the same revanchisme toward victorious France as the defeated French had entertained after 1871 against victorious Germany. These classes, including the military classes, could appeal to Germany’s “multiplying and abounding youth.” To the extent that Germany was democratic, it was not liberal, and to the extent that Germany was not really democratic, it remained more militaristic than commercial; its industrialists had no reason not to build weapons instead of widgets. [13]

At the Versailles Peace Conference, Marshall Foch argued that France needed control of the Rhineland. The new Bolshevik regime in Russia would no longer serve as a reliable ally of France, he said; the League of Nations would not really guarantee French security; German disarmament would not last; and, given all that, any Anglo-American military guarantees would fail to deter the Germans. The Anglo-Americans pinned their hopes on genuine German regime change and the League; reluctantly concurring, Clemenceau overruled Foch. When the United States Senate refused to ratify the Versailles Treaty, France could only turn to the construction of the Maginot Line system of fortifications, and to alliance with Poland and other central European states wary of Germany. France soon seized the coal-producing Ruhr district of Germany, as well, hoping to cripple German reindustrialization.

These actions prevented the implementation of Churchill’s preferred postwar geopolitical strategy, which consisted of “ending the thousand-year strife between France and Germany” by “weaving Gaul and Teuton so closely together economically, socially, and morally as to prevent the occasion of new quarrels, and make old antagonisms die in the realization of mutual prosperity and interdependence.” As early as 1923, he wrote, “No one could feel assured that a future generation would not see Europe laid in dust and ruin as it had been in this same quarrel as it had been more than once before.” [14]

The stunning conquest of France by Nazi Germany in May and June 1940 stripped Great Britain of its continental buffer, exposing it to nightly aerial raids intended to pulverize its industry and terrify its population into submission. British strategists worried that the German navy might attempt to encircle the island and cut it off from the rest of the empire—parts of which were threatened not only by Germany but potentially by the Soviets, ever alert for spoils of war. Nonetheless, France continued to figure prominently in Churchill’s strategic calculations, perforce in an entirely new way, one that severely tested Churchill’s judgment and equanimity.

Churchill favored Charles de Gaulle to head the French government in exile, and it is important to see why. Quite apart from his impression that de Gaulle had the strength of character to carry on the fight (sometimes against Churchill himself, as the Prime Minister would soon learn), de Gaulle was the only member of the last Cabinet of the Third Republic who refused to accede to the armistice. The collaborationist regime at Vichy, nominally in control of southern France, put a price on his head. Churchill and de Gaulle understood, however, that this one-man link to the Third Republic—this thread of legitimacy, however slight—would enable de Gaulle to rally resistance to the Nazi occupation via the British Broadcasting Company’s microphones. De Gaulle, who turned out to be a fine public speaker, immediately rose to that task.

But realistically, was that all Churchill could do? No mean orator himself, the Prime Minister moved to shore up de Gaulle’s reputation. In his celebrated “Finest Hour” speech of 18 June 1940, Churchill blamed “the colossal military disaster” in France on the French High Command—that is to say, the people who now sat at the top of the Vichy regime—which failed to get their northern armies out of Belgium to reinforce their broken lines to the West along the Meuse River and France’s Sedan district. Yet, while deflecting any blame for the British retreat from France, Churchill also called recrimination “futile and even harmful.” [15] Disappointment and resentment don’t win wars.

Materially, de Gaulle had very little of the stuff that does. Furthermore, the eventual allies who did have that stuff, the United States and the Soviet Union, had no use for de Gaulle and his Free French organization. President Franklin Roosevelt alternated between viewing de Gaulle as Churchill’s stooge and as a highly suspect potential dictator. And of course Stalin had his own network in France; the French Communist Party went underground after the armistice but organized itself to stand up a new French regime in the event the war’s fortunes turned. Desperately needing his allies, Churchill could scarcely alienate them by promoting de Gaulle as the head of some future French government, even had he been inclined to do so.

In his memoirs Churchill tells how he and the Americans dealt with the French in a spirit of justifiable duplicity, with Churchill sponsoring de Gaulle while the Americans stayed “in close and useful contact with Vichy.” By the end of 1941 Churchill urged that this tactic be made part of a policy: If Vichy would cooperate with the Allies in French North Africa, then postwar reconciliation with their regime might be possible; if Vichy continued its collaboration with the Nazis, “the Gaullist movement must be aided and used to the full.” [16]  Churchill trusted de Gaulle no more than de Gaulle trusted Churchill. The Prime Minister suspected that de Gaulle intended to drive a wedge between Great Britain and the United States, upsetting his grand strategy of a permanent Anglo-American alliance. [17]  Add to this the perennial quarrels over British military encroachments on French colonies, particularly Syria—Churchill was trying to win a war, de Gaulle wanted to make sure he didn’t grab any French possessions—and we have the makings of a series of relatively small but perfect storms, lasting to the eve of D-Day itself.

After that great victory, Churchill saw much more clearly what de Gaulle had actually accomplished in his years at the head of a militarily unimpressive government-in-exile. In that time, de Gaulle established an intelligence network on the ground in France, which vetted and readied a network of experienced non-communist administrators, lawyers, teachers, and other personnel who would be ready to stand up a viable government immediately upon liberation. The re-founding of republicanism in France began in London. De Gaulle’s most celebrated ally in this effort was a former departmental prefect named Jean Moulin.

Before his torture and murder at the hands of the Gestapo eighteen months into his mission, Moulin out-organized the French communists. Others carried on, including a courageous lawyer named Michel Debré, future draftsman of the constitution of the Fifth Republic. By D-Day, seventeen Regional Commissioners of the Republic were charged with ensuring the security of Allied armies from behind-the-lines attacks, providing administration, re-establishing “republican legality,” and coordinating material supplies to the population. “Thus,” in de Gaulle’s words, “among the French people, in the face of the Allies as of the defeated invader, the authority of the state would appear: integral, responsible, and independent.” [18]

Churchill attested to de Gaulle’s achievement in letters to Roosevelt. “In practice… I think it would be found that de Gaulle and the French National Committee represent most of the elements who want to help us,” whereas “Vichy is a foe.” [19]  By November 1944, having visited Paris and walked the Champs-Élysee with de Gaulle to the ovation of the crowds, Churchill could report, “Generally, I felt in the presence of an organized government, broadly based and of rapidly-growing strength, and I am certain that it should be most unwise to do anything to weaken it in the eyes of France at this difficult, critical time” in view of “communist threats.” [20]  Although Churchill raged at de Gaulle on several occasions during the war, he never quite got round to getting rid of him, and that turned out to be a very good thing.

Victory against Nazi Germany left standing still another would-be continental tyrant: Stalin and his newly-expanded empire. The Russians, Churchill told his Chiefs of Staff, were now further west than they had ever been except at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, capable of “march[ing] across the rest of Europe and driv[ing] us back to our island.” [21]  After Stalin interpreted the February 1945 Yalta Conference agreements on Poland strictly in terms of Soviet interests and ideology, Churchill frankly admitted to the very ill Roosevelt, “We British have not the necessary strength to carry the matter further.” [22]  Nor could Great Britain’s imperial holdings help; they were lost, and Churchill saw that, too. For real defense, Churchill soon turned to the proposed North Atlantic Treaty Organization; he judged the proposed European Army or European Defence Community a weak reed by comparison. He vigorously supported the Marshall Plan for European economic revival.

As for France, Churchill recurred to his original intention after World War I: peace between Gaul and Teuton. Accordingly, he opposed the Morgenthau Plan, which would have reduced the Germans to agrarianism, and also French proposals (first floated by the new, short-lived de Gaulle administration in 1946, but more or less universally applauded by all French  factions at the time) to keep the western portion of Germany broken up and weak. This was revanchisme in the wrong place, at the wrong time. Germany was indispensable to resisting Soviet power; it was now on the front line, and the French—and indeed his fellow Britons, their family members killed by German bombing—needed to see and accept that brute fact.

“Never before has there been such a clear need for one country to be strong as there is now for France,” Churchill told the French. French greatness can return if the French “unite in the task of leading Europe back in peace and freedom…. By saving yourselves you will save Europe and by saving Europe you will save yourselves.” [23]. Neither French nationalism alone nor European internationalism alone could suffice. They must be intertwined. [24]  Seven decades on, France, the United Kingdom, and the rest of the European countries continue to debate the right terms of that balance.

At this time, Charles de Gaulle could not agree to the resuscitation of Germany: French public opinion remained even more powerfully anti-German than British public opinion. But de Gaulle would later concur with Churchill’s wise judgment. When he returned to power in 1958, founding the Fifth Republic, de Gaulle reached out to his Western German counterpart, that great and good Rhinelander Konrad Adenauer, to form exactly the sort of entente cordiale Churchill had advocated.

througho0ut his long and eminent career, Churchill had hoped to preserve the greatness of Britain by maintaining the Empire and Commonwealth, by a strong Anglo-American partnership, and by increased European cooperation on a republican basis. Except for the “special relationship” with the Americans, he could not achieve these things; the tyrannies he helped to kill had injured Great Britain too much, before dying. That notwithstanding, his actions and words endure as a legacy of statecraft, a testimony to the geopolitics of liberty.

 

 

Notes

1. Winston S. Churchill: A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. 4 volumes. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1956-58. Vol. I. 176.
2. Ibid. II. 17-18.
3. Winston S. Churchill: Marlborough: His Life and Times. 6 volumes. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1933-38. Vol. I. 258.
4. Ibid. III. 195.
5. Ibid. VI. 84.
6. A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, op. cit. II. 157-158.
7. Ibid. III. 285-291.
8. Ibid. III. 384-385; IV. 7.
9. Winston S. Churchill: The World Crisis, one-volume edition (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1942), 7-8.
10. Winston S. Churchill: The Aftermath (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1929), 481-483.
11. Ibid. 559.
12. Ibid. 222-223.
13. Winston S. Churchill: The Gathering Storm (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1948), 26.
14. Ibid. 28.
15. The Aftermath, op. cit. 486.
16. Winston S. Churchill: Blood, Sweat, and Tears (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1941), 348.
17. Winston S. Churchill: The Grand Alliance (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1950), 631, 651.
18. Ibid. 801.
19. Charles de Gaulle: War Memoirs, three volumes, Richard Howard translation (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1959), II. 199-200.
20. Churchill to Roosevelt, 20 June 1944, in Warren F. Kimball, ed.: Churchill & Roosevelt: The Complete Correspondence (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 195.
21. Churchill to Roosevelt, 16 November 1944, ibid. 391-392.
22. Martin Gilbert: Winston S. Churchill, Volume 8, Never Despair 1945-1965 (Hillsdale: Hillsdale College Press, 2013), 38.
23. Martin Gilbert: Winston S. Churchill, Volume 7, Road to Victory, 1941-1945 (Hillsdale: Hillsdale College Press, 2013), 1250.
24. Winston S. Churchill: “France and Europe,” speech at Metz, 14 July 1946, in Robert Rhodes James, ed.: Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches 1897-1963, 8 volumes (New York: Bowker, 1974) VII. 7359.
25. See Churchill to Duncan Sandys, November 1946, in Gilbert, Never Despair, 286-287.

Robert Gildea: Fighters in the Shadows: A New History of the French Resistance. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015.

Originally published in Law and Liberty, February 29, 2016.

 

To this day, every major political grouping in France offers its own account of the opposition the country mounted against the Germans in World War II, leaving it to historians to sort things out. Robert Gildea has produced a well-researched and balanced book on the subject, guiding readers through the factional snags.

Moral and political fragmentation in fact is the major theme here. As conflict with Nazi Germany loomed, the French were horrified at the prospect of another Great War, and unnerved to the point of military paralysis. So factionalized was the society that it found no unity even against the aggressor. Insofar as most French citizens agreed on anything, it was that their hero of the earlier conflagration, Marshall Philippe Pétain, was right to counsel surrender. In 1940, they gave peace with the Nazis a chance—under their direct rule in the north, under the collaborationist government at Vichy in the south.

Nuclei of resistance to the occupier formed at once, but, as Gildea shows, with little strength or cohesiveness. Except for Charles de Gaulle, recently made a general, no member of the last Cabinet of the Third Republic continued the fight. The handful of parliamentarians who wanted to start a government-in-exile were arrested by the Vichyites in Casablanca, released, and placed under surveillance. Some French communists went underground but they were in the minority–the party line was to take no stand against Hitler, who was in a non-aggression pact with Josef Stalin until Hitler broke it by invading Russia in June 1941.

Most of France’s North African colonies sided with Vichy—recall Captain Renault in the movie Casablanca—and although sub-Saharan France saw strong pockets of resistance (for black Africans, a new order founded upon Aryan triumphalism looked even worse than French colonialism), how would those colonies be organized as effective fighting units against the German military machine? General de Gaulle made his famous appeal for unity from his exile in London. Few in France heard it; fewer still heeded it, even among the isolated resisters.

Although throughout the conflict, the resisters’ numbers grew, the schisms among them continued even as Allied forces gathered, took the war to the enemy in multiple fronts, and weakened the Nazi grip on France. De Gaulle and his “Free France” (later “Fighting France”) organization eventually dominated the field, but the political splinter groups frustrated him then and after the war, and the story of the Resistance itself became a matter of contention in the political fights to come.

Into this historiographic free-for-all wades Gildea, who teaches modern history at Oxford. He holds decidedly Laborite political convictions—at one point he pauses to regret that the French missed their chance, in the aftermath of the war, to form a new Popular Front coalition of social democrats and communists, which might have made for “a French-style Labour Party.” But he is too much the historian to give himself over to partisanship. This even-handed book leavens its social and political analyses with stories gleaned from the archival and oral-history sources he so evidently loves.

When honest academic historians sift through competing partisan narratives, trying to figure out what really happened, they sometimes miss what those narrative are aimed at: not historical accuracy but myth-making, and often of an honorable kind. De Gaulle, for example, wrote his War Memoirs (1955) not as history in the academic sense but as a political testament, a means of unifying the French along the lines of a stable republican regime animated by renewed patriotism.

One of my favorites among the many remarkable persons Gildea describes is the French woman résistante who, upon being asked by one of her astonished Nazi captors, why she had taken up arms against the Reich, answered “Quite simply colonel, because the men had dropped theirs.” The men needed to recover from their humiliation after the war if they were once again to become citizens. De Gaulle understood that, too. While carefully separating the poetic from the prosaic, he is a historian who never forgets the indispensable political and therefore human need for poetry. When he quotes de Gaulle’s ringing celebration, in a liberated Paris in 1945, of “One France, the true France, eternal France,” Gildea observes the exaggeration while showing his readers the need for it.

Small in number, resisters nonetheless came from every one of the factions—Left and Right, soldiers and civilians, Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant (the word “Resistance” itself alluded to Protestant resistance to Catholics during the sectarian civil wars of the seventeenth century), and atheistic. Gildea takes care to show how women proved crucial to the Resistance, not so much as combatants but in the dangerous tasks of carrying messages and sheltering fugitives—crimes punishable by prison or death. He also gives full credit to foreign combatants, including veteran from the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War, and the many courageous and resourceful Jewish refugees from Central and Eastern Europe who found shelter in Vichyite southern France until late 1942, when the Nazis elbowed aside the French collaborationists and assumed direct rule as in the north.

The fundamental split that emerged, once the defeat of the Nazis and the collaborators was assured (and de Gaulle knew it was, early, telling Churchill so on the day after Pearl Harbor), was between the French republicans, led by the exiled de Gaulle—initially from London, then from Algiers—and the communists. For a short time, these two Resistance wings allied, thanks to the work of one of the really great men the war brought forward, Jean Moulin.

A prefect before the war, displaced by the Vichyites, Moulin (1899-1943) found his way to London and met de Gaulle in October 1941. De Gaulle needed someone to bring the several Resistance organizations together under Free French coordination, and in Moulin he found someone with the courage, organizational savvy, and persuasive powers to do that. Moulin returned to France, where he made contact with key leaders of all factions, many of whom spun their own mythologies, most of them featuring inflated estimates of the number of men they commanded. Through Moulin, de Gaulle hoped to persuade the communist and also the romantic-revolutionary republican factions to delay their quixotic guerrilla actions and await the Allied landing, still two years away. By the beginning of 1943, Moulin had managed to get them all to agree to this, more or less.

This astonishing achievement was almost immediately imperiled by Moulin’s capture, torture, and death at the hands of the Gestapo. (Two decades later, André Malraux said, “He revealed not a single secret—he who knew them all.”) But before he died, Moulin established the innocuously titled Committee for General Studies, eventually headed by Michel Debré, who went on to write the constitution of the Fifth Republic in 1958. What the Committee ‘studied’ was the identities of non-communist French men and women who were qualified to assume the functions of government as soon as the Allies drove out the Nazis. Immediate rule of France by well-vetted Frenchmen would prove indispensable to reestablishing French republicanism because the only well-organized force in what remained of French civil society was the French Communist Party, whose chairman, Maurice Thorez, was spending the war in Moscow, where he received his instructions for the postwar struggle.

For their part, the communists never fully recovered from the infamy of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, but it must be noted that many exhibited great courage once they focused on the real enemy. Their own myth, Gildea observes, amounted to an atheist’s version of Christian martyrdom. This never quite convinced most Frenchmen, many of whom suffered the reprisals that followed communist heroics. But there can be no doubt that communists exhibited valor equal to any other group that fought the occupiers.

Meanwhile, in Washington, President Roosevelt and Secretary of State Cordell Hull detested de Gaulle, supposing him to be a would-be Bonaparte intent on founding a dictatorship. Fortunately, the wiser heads of Secretary of War Henry Stimson and Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower prevailed.  The Americans let de Gaulle deal with the communists, the more idealistic but none-too-well-organized republican résistants, and the Vichyites, as U. S., British, Polish, and some French troops (most of them not civilian résistants but men battle-hardened in North Africa) rolled up the Germans on the Western Front, while the Red Army, along with Poles under the command of Soviet officers, closed in from the east.

Gildea handles a substantial mass of facts and competing stories with the deft and practiced touch of a master of the historical craft. The story he tells is far more complex than the one I’ve told here, and he unfolds it with seasoned aplomb. Of course no review should be without its cavils, and mine is that he doesn’t do full justice to de Gaulle’s intention. It is not true that “the only ambition of de Gaulle was to strengthen the state and to secure his leadership role within it.” That was half of the goal, and only the first half. It makes him sound too much like the Bonapartist bogey imagined by FDR, even though Gildea himself disputes FDR’s more sinister interpretation. De Gaulle was equally concerned to restore French republicanism, if in new form.

Since at least the early 1930s, when he had lobbied the French Assembly for support of his plans for mobile army forces to supplement the passive defenses afforded by the Maginot Line fortifications, de Gaulle had witnessed the chaos, even imbecility, of parliamentary politics in France. Without shading into Bonapartism, he understood the need to establish an independently elected executive. This was especially important in the countries of Europe, where troops could pour across a national border faster than any parliament in an invaded country could act. De Gaulle had longed for such a regime change in the interwar years, and he dedicated his remaining life to founding and perpetuating a French republicanism that could defend itself.

Among the stories told about the Resistance, Gildea seem to favor the more recently told ones: those that lend themselves to a feminist emphasis on “highlighting a devotion to others rather than to their own glory’; those that show Jews as both victims and résistants; and those celebrating the rescuers who sheltered all types of résistants, a perilous thing to do. What he terms the “humanitarian narrative,” I observe, fits better into today’s demi-regime of the European Union, and better into his own democratic socialism, than into what he calls “the Gaullist myth of national liberation.” It better fits the EU than “the communist myth of popular insurrection,” too. Socialism in our day is more likely to come in on a blitzkrieg of bureaucratic paperwork in the name of just this sort of soft humanitarianism.

One may prefer the tougher and more forthrightly political myth of Gaullism, as I do. Robert Gildea is nonetheless right to think that all of these stories bring facts to the table, and to give to every résistant some portion of the honors distributed here.

 

Geoffrey Hawthorn: Thucydides on Politics: Back to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

 

The reader may safely ignore the sinking feeling he may get upon reading the subtitle. Although Hawthorn offers a few pages on contemporary international politics, he has written no tendentious, ‘lessons-from-Thucydides’ screed. Much more ambitiously, and fortified by careful study of the text, he sets out to be Thucydides’ Thucydides, tracing the historian’s narrative, probing, judging, guessing, arguing with other scholars and with Thucydides himself, always illuminating. Like his philosophic mentor, Bernard Williams, Hawthorn displays a resolutely English intelligence, venturing no grand theories but bringing out defensible arguments from sensible consideration of details mastered. The result is that rarity, a readable commentary on a classic book, teaching readers how better to think about politics and war in and among communities that seek, somehow, to rule themselves.

What makes politics difficult is the number and complexity of the causes that operate in human life. Explicitly, Thucydides attributes the Pelopponesian War to one main geopolitical cause: Spartans’ fear of the rise of the Athenian empire, backed by its navy. He makes another cause visible, slightly beneath the surface: Two distinct regimes, one oligarchic, the other democratic, distrust one another, each concerned that the other might aid the partisans of its domestic regime rivals. Hawthorn proceeds with caution, however, as Thucydides’ book “has never been easy to read”; a “possession for all time,” its author calls it, but not easily owned by any reader, now or in antiquity.

“Its subject though is clear. It is politics: men (all men) seeking power over others using it to pursue ends that are sometimes clear, sometimes not, never being sure what the outcomes will be.” Thucydides “allows one to see that politics is rarely admirable but always unavoidable, owes less to reason than we might suppose and allows no practical, moral or constitutional closure”; on the other hand, “at no point can it be said that character does not matter.” Contingencies dominate politics and war, and character matters very much indeed if there are no comforting ‘iron laws of History’ to put one’s trust in.

In writing his history, Thucydides’ intention “was almost the opposite of that of his most prominent predecessor, Herodotus,” who seeks to preserve the memory of “the great and wondrous achievements displayed by the Greeks and the barbarians, and especially their reasons for fighting each other,” in the Persian War. In writing what he calls his “inquiry,” Thucydides aims not so much as remembrance as usefulness; the usefulness of his narrative derives from its truthfulness, to the historian’s careful measuring of “the distances between what was thought and said and what transpired.” What is more, “Logoi, the accounts people give, their analysis, reflection, calculation and debate, are [themselves] important erga, things done, political acts to be seen as such in the light of others.” Hobbes understood this, remarking that Thucydides’ way of writing “secretly instruct[s] the reader, and more effectually than can possibly be done by precept.” He meant that in presenting both the arguments and the actions, the speeches and the deeds, of the principal statesmen on both sides of the conflict, Thucydides impels his reader toward figuring out the truth of the matter for himself, and so to fortify himself, to take possession of this possession for all time. And given the permanence of human nature and the political life natural to human beings, what has happened in the Peloponnese in the fifth century B.C. “can be expected to happen again or some time in the future,” in “much the same ways,” as Thucydides himself remarks. His alert readers will have readied themselves for that likelihood. Histories too are both logoi and erga.

Thucydides begins his account of the second Peloponnesian War before the first war, which began in 460. After two invasions of Greece by the Persian Empire, repelled by Greek victories at Salamis, Plataea, and Mycale, Athens formed the Delian League as what we would now call a deterrent against any subsequent Persian ambitions and a defense in case those ambitions re-ignited. The League became the foundation of their own empire, itself founded on the navy it built in defense against the Persians. The Spartans didn’t join the League, their long-term commitment to any alliance effectively prevented by the prospect of a rebellion of the helot class at home. When the Spartans first asked for, and then declined Athenian assistance in putting down such a revolt in the nearby polis at Messenia, the offended Athenians ended the alliance with Sparta; “an open difference first emerged,” Thucydides writes, between the two regimes. The first war lasted from 460 to 445, ending in a treaty which was supposed to last for thirty years. According to its terms, “Sparta was to retain its allies in the Peloponnese and Boeotia and also Megara, all of which were to be self-governing, so long as they did not move to what by this time was coming to be called ‘democracy.'”

The second war began in 431. The worrisome naval dominance of Athens spurred the Spartans to action, but “there was no ultimate necessity to this,” inasmuch as the Athenian navy might not have been built up at all, absent the Persian threat of two generations earlier. Athens engaged in no provocations under the terms of the treaty. “The Spartans would not appear to have had anything, as he puts it, that they could no longer bear; anything material to fear.” Why, then, did it happen?

Distinguishing between aitia (the unspoken but real reason for an action) and prophesis (the reason spoken publicly), Thucydides identifies the Spartans’ fear as the “truest” but least openly stated motive for fighting the second war. Other, publicly stated but subsidiary arguments were the arguments of their allies, especially the Corinthians, who disputed quarreled with Athens and one of its allies over influence in a couple of poleis in the 430s, disputes fueled by the Corinthians’ “pride or honor.” For their part, in the course of these quarrels events took the Athenians “further than they appear to have wanted to go,” as an intendedly deterrent show of naval force escalated. Thucydides and Hawthorn concur that the Athenians were at least “in the right by the terms of the thirty-ear peace” in acting to defend one of its allies against Sparta’s ally, the Corinthians, angered at “the repeated indifference” of Athens and its ally “to their standing and honor as a serious power,” and also somewhat ashamed at “having so openly to depend on Sparta,” a dependence belying their claim to be such a power. But “the true reasons” for the war lay in Sparta.

Sparta’s king, Archidamos, a man “with a reputation for intelligence and moderation,” cautioned that Sparta lacked the naval resources to fight Athens successfully at this time. He called for patient war preparation and an effort at finding more allies. Knowing the character of the Spartan regime, a timocracy or rule of the honorable, he urged them against feeling shame at such a slow and cautious policy, appealing to the honor victory will bring, and observing that the victorious polis “will be the one trained in the hardest schools of necessity.” He lost the rhetorical battle in the assembly of timocrats to an ephor who called decisiveness the “true prudence,’ claiming that the gods were on the side of Sparta and its allies—a ‘prudentialism’ that actually played the Spartans’ love of honor. Nonetheless, in action as distinguished from argument, Sparta sent three separate delegations to Athens, offering peace. It was Pericles, who had established himself as de facto monarch over the Athenian democracy, who persuaded his countrymen to reject the peace offers, correctly observing that Sparta was ill-prepared for war. “A majority of Athenian citizens appear to have been pleased to face war,” as “they believed they had the edge.” We must conclude, then, that “the true reasons” for the war did not lie in Sparta, at least not exclusively. Thucydides and Hawthorn leave this point for the reader to figure out.

Pericles placed his bet on Athenian sea power, demonstrating it by a couple of minor naval operations against poleis the Corinthians had seized from local rulers. It was in the first winter of the war that Pericles delivered his funeral oration praising soldiers fallen that summer in skirmishes, an oration directed at Athenian farmers forced into the city by the Spartan threat and at Athenians displeased at his reluctance to prosecute the war more vigorously. He needed to make both groups more ardent lovers of the Athenian polis, and he did so by an appeal to the kind of honor that fits the regime of democracy, consisting of pride in material strength; the glory of the fallen; the virtues of democracy itself, including law-abidingness and private freedom; courage in foreign policy; and finally by appealing to a sort of prudence congenial to democracy, Athens’ policy of making friends by conferring favors, not receiving them—a practice that weakens one’s friends. The refutation of Pericles came not in words, of which he was the master, but nature, in the form of a plague, which made death inglorious. Pericles nonetheless mounted two expeditions the following summer; “perhaps he simply wanted to get as many soldiers and sailors out of the city he could afford to,” or (again, perhaps) “he was putting on a show to distract discontent.” In any event, he deflected blame from himself, delivering still another speech appealing now to fear: Though self-governing within, Athens acts the tyrant with foreigners; like all tyrants, they may have been wrong to take power but would imperil themselves by letting it go. He ends with an invocation of the glory of Athens, but only as a coda to a grimmer message.

This means that Pericles’ de facto monarchy still rested on the democracy. Pericles “was fighting for his political life.” And he did so successfully, thanks to his extraordinary strengths of character and intelligence in “direct[ing] and where necessary distract[ing] the citizens and control[ling] them.” “No other leader after Pericles managed to dominate the city for so long,” as “they were lesser men.”  The later, famously disastrous, expedition to Sicily, an unnecessary and separate war that was “a mistake to have thought of fighting.” Even this was not enough to bring defeat in the Peloponnesian War, which resulted by subsequent factional infighting. “The defeat was an avoidable disaster”; “Athens, it can be argued, could have won.”

At the beginning of the war, and for years thereafter, neither side could devise a sound strategy for sustaining an attack on the other. Insofar as Pericles arrived at a strategy, it was defensive—to exhaust the invading Spartans on land while commanding the seas. He had no idea as to how Athens might actually defeat Sparta or Corinth. Accordingly, Thucydides presents the several events of the first eighteen years of the war as illustrations of “the circumstance and experience of war in general and its attendant political complications” rather than elements of any grand plan. For example, the 429 Spartan expedition against Plataea, Athens’ ally, “reveals much about the lack of strategic thinking, the problems of distance between the cities and their commanders in the field, and above all, the dangers of relying on allies whose natural first interest was their own.” The Athenian statesmen faced similar imponderables. For himself and his readers, Thucydides evidently commends pondering imponderableness.

The speeches by Athenian statesmen Cleon and Diodotos on the question of whether to slaughter the Mytilenaeans for attempting to break their alliance with Athens and go over to the Spartans affords Thucydides the chance to examine political speech as action. The passions of fear, anger, and hope not only cause men to divide into political factions, they also “cause men to divide within themselves and slide into self-deception.” In their speeches, both statesmen “deliberat[e] on the politics of deliberation,” Cleon concluding that “the delights of oratory cancel common sense” and Diodotos maintaining that the “haste and high emotion” which saturate political debate, coupled with the audience’s assumption that every speaker advances his self-interest, making democratic Athens “the only city so clever that it is impossible to do good here openly and without deceit.” Getting down to reality, however, both men admit that the democracy does not and cannot rule foreign cities democratically; their dispute centers instead on how to conduct such rule under this circumstance. Cleon advocates slaughtering the Mytilenaeans in order to deter other cities from rebelling; Diodotos advocates sparing all but the ringleaders of the rebellion by pretending that most Mytilenaeans are not guilty and by fortifying the pro-Athenian Mytilene faction. “The difference between Cleon and Diodotos was merely that one was afraid of what might follow if Athens did not use extreme force, the other of what might follow if it did.” Sure enough, the Athenian assembly votes for Diodotos’ policy—but not for the prudent reason he had given. “This was war; ambitions were urgent, nerves were on edge and there was anger everywhere…. One can be struck less by the fact that speech was idle than by the fact that men in these circumstances gave time to it at all.” The war between the two alliances ignited civil wars—that is, regime wars—throughout Greece. In Thucydides’ words, “practically the whole Greek world was in turmoil as everywhere there were rival efforts by the leaders of the populace to bring in the Athenians and by the oligarchs to bring in the Spartans.” Atrocities ensued in this struggle for domination, as “reckless audacity,” “daring without logismos,” and the abandonment of moderation ruled men’s souls. Hawthorn supplements this analysis, writing that it was “the disruption of everyday relations” in wartime that made formerly political disputes so poisonous, converting political rivals into “enemies of an intensely personal kind.” “Civil strife inverts values and subverts the semantics of peace,” by which he means that such words as ‘sincerity’ and ‘moderation’ meet contemptuous dismissal, as men combine cynicism and indignation in a way not seen in normal circumstances. He rightly observes that Thucydides nonetheless does not “follow the mischievous sophists of his time” in denying truth altogether. Thucydides “grip on enduring truths of the human condition remains bleakly sure.”

By winter 424-423 the Spartans were “in despair,” the Athenians optimistic in light of what Thucydides calls “their current run of good luck.” He concurs with the Athenian statesmen (including Pericles and Diodotus) who understood that hope is “as dangerous, indeed, as despair.” The gods do not compel human beings to acts of folly, nor do “chains of antecedent causes” (what thinkers latterly call ‘History’). For him Ananke or necessity inheres in being bound by what one believes themselves “to be in their own or someone else’s eyes, compelled by the real or perceived power of others, and impelled by their own.” The now-careless Athenians and the now-hesitant Spartans played out this form of necessity in their conflict over the polis at Megara, on the isthmus connecting Attica to the Peloponnese—a ‘geopolitical chokepoint,’ as we now say. Megara has broken with Athens in 446, but in 424 democrats seized rule there; this notwithstanding, the popular party feared the Athenians, who were hardly ‘democratic’ in dealing with their allies. Athenian and Spartan troops confronted one another, Thucydides himself a commander of the Athenians, Brasidas the Spartan general. Brasidas is one of the few Spartan commanders Thucydides respects; he “could be diplomatic” and “he also moved with speed”—neither trait characteristically Spartan. Brasidas also understood supply chains, targeting the polis at Amphipolos, a major Athenian source for the timber they used for the masts their navy depended upon. Upon receiving a desperate call for assistance from the Athenian general stationed nearby, Thucydides had no way to respond in time. “Necessity now descended on Thucydides,” who went into exile for the next two decades. “Had he not,” Hawthorn remarks, “we might not have the text we do.” Meanwhile, the prudent Brasidas proved a mild conqueror, giving other members of the Athenian empire/alliance good reason to consider switching sides. In effect, Brasidas enacted the kind of proposal Diodotos had proposed to the Athenians themselves. But these poleis underestimated Athenian power and resolve, “preferr[ing] to make their judgments on the basis of wishful thinking rather than prudent foresight,” as Thucydides puts it.

This brings Hawthorn to consider the idea of ‘interest,’ for which no Greek word existed when Thucydides wrote. The Greeks thought rather in terms of a closely connected set of ideas: dunamis or physical power; arche or command; and cratos or rule. Taken together, they amount to aitia or ‘real interest,’ sometimes translated as ‘real reason’ or ‘real purpose,’ a translation Hawthorn rejects as a touch too rationalistic. “The power of Athens’ dominion or ’empire,’ the Athenians had explained in their speech at Sparta (to an audience that would surely have known), enabled them to allay their fears, maintain their honor and pursue their ‘self-interest’ in material gain.” Athenians and men generally must therefore understand where power was (in the authority of custom, law, office, sheer force, even “occasionally in the force of the better argument”), what to use it for (cementing unity at home and among allies, punishing, conquering, deterring, and how to deploy it (alone or in alliance with others). By the year 421, these complex considerations proved so entirely imponderable that both sides agreed to a truce. When it ended the following year, both Cleon and Brasidas were killed in battle, removing the two most effective pro-war statesmen from the principal contending poleis. Athens and Sparta settled on a peace treaty, but their allies, fearing hegemony over themselves would lock into place as a consequent, continued in their restiveness. “For most of the time, political entities in Greece were driven by the wish to rule themselves.” Such a necessity, and such an ‘interest,’ inheres not in the gods or in ‘History’ but in human nature.

“Political anxiety” and “radical uncertainty” ensued. “All believed that whatever their interests were—and to most, beyond their immediate security, these were not clear—they could not be assured of realizing these without an alliance with at least one other state; and then could not be assured that the alliance they made would not excite opposition from yet another and therefore undermine the purpose they had in making it.” Under such circumstances, no clear strategic thinking came forth, anywhere. Emotions ruled in place of either principled or prudential reasoning. However, Thucydides “nowhere indicates that he himself thought of the emotions, feelings, pathe or pathemata as a class,” neither using the word nor even using an especially rich set of words indicating the variety of emotions. He usually restricts himself to fear, hope, and anger, and inclines to conceive of a ‘tight fit’ between what we would analyze as motive (including emotions), intention, and action: “pre-volitional, pre-reflective commitments to one or another state of affairs, commitments that we can discover in what we and others think of how we and they act,” often covered by the Greek word, eros. Hawthorn doubts that these “commitments” “are those that we might feel now or even immediately grasp,” and gives the example of hubris. To us it suggests pride, especially pride flouting divine or human authority. “For fifth-century Greeks, by contrast, hubris was a deliberative act, the direct and amoral practice of demeaning others for the sheer pleasure of doing so.”

As seen, above all, in Alcibiades. “Driven by a restless desire for personal power,” “compulsively competitive and prone to jealousy,” supremely confident, “Alcibiades delights in not merely in defeating his rivals but in humiliating them.” The spirit of Alcibiades pervaded the Athenians generally in their dealings with the polis at Melos, a minor ally of Sparta. If the most celebrated speech in Thucydides remains Pericles’ funeral oration, a call for love of country, for taking ‘pride’ in being an Athenian in the praiseworthy sense we use the term today, the most infamous speech remains the Melian ‘dialogue’ of the year 416, goes far beyond the ‘foreign policy realism’ attributed to it by most scholars today. In fact no ‘realistic’ motive spurred the Athenians to take Melos; “it was not particularly rich” and “had little strategic significance.”  Rather, having lost on land to the Spartans at Mantinea, the Athenians wanted “to demonstrate their superiority in moving at sea” by acting and speaking in a manner “directly insulting to the Spartans.” When the Melians dared to reject the Athenians’ demand of unconditional, they were rewarded by the death of all their men and the enslavement of their women and children. Their ‘point’ (as we would say) was that Sparta could do nothing for them. “It was theater, the demonstration to others and oneself of one’s power to demean and an expression of pleasure in doing so.”

All this noticed, “Not everything in politics in war is necessity, interest, or the thrill of doing down opponents.” There is also “restlessness, a diffuse and unfocused disposition to find something to act against.” Hawthorn regards the Athenians’ ill-fated second expedition against Sicily in 415 as an instance of this; “most of them did not know quite what they had in mind.” Alcibiades fomented such mindlessness, making “his self-flattery theirs.” (“And they were enchanted.”) In the wake of the triumph at Melos, “Athenians were affirming to themselves what Athens could once again be”; they were making Athens great again, to adapt a phrase from the American scene. But in the event they “had propelled themselves to a distant venture the purposes of which had been poorly defined and for which, almost whatever they intended, their own resources were inadequate, local support lacking, the opposition formidable and their leadership uncertain. Only clever tactics and luck could redeem it.” They didn’t, and Alcibiades skipped over to the Spartan side, having decided that Athens must not be allowed to sin even once against demagoguery. And he gave his new sponsors good advice: Defeat the Athenian strategy (it turns out that he could discern one) of encircling Sparta by establishing a military foothold a few miles north of Athens. Meanwhile, in Sicily the Athenians lost and their generals executed. “For the first time, writes Thucydides… the Athenians had in Syracuse come up against a city like their own: a rich and democratically inclined place whose internal divisions they could not exploit.” That, but mostly ill fortune, caused their defeat and humiliation. Moderate General Nicias and vigorous, daring General Demosthenes’ virtues had served Athens well for a decade, but in the new circumstances they failed. Narrowly considered, Alcibiades was right to get out of town. After all, if Fortune’s wheel spun again, “he might return to lead it.”

The Athenian defeat clarified matters. The politics of the war became “simpler than before”:”The Athenians wanted to save themselves and what they could of their dominion, and the Peloponnesians and disaffected parties in Athens’ subject states wanted to end it.” Ever resilient, the Athenians gathered their wits and, for once, submitted to “good discipline in everything,” initially under a board of elders. It didn’t last, but the disaffection with democracy endured. Ever alert, Alcibiades saw that the Athenians might now be persuaded that they needed him, and let it be known that he would obligingly return if an oligarchy replaced the democracy.  The prominent general and politician Phrynicos prudently supposed that Alcibiades cared no more for oligarchy than for democracy, preferring himself to either, and that Athens’ restive allies didn’t care what the regime in Athens was, only that it oppressed them; in a rare, not to say unique event, Alcibiades found himself out-schemed and his return blocked. Nonetheless, in 411 the democracy collapsed, initially replaced by the oligarchic regime of “the 400” (which included Phrynicos), then by “the 5000,” a regime whose exact nature remains unclear (oligarchy? mixed regime?), but which did not include Phrynicos, who had been assassinated in the meantime. However they might be classified, the “new rulers in Athens believed that they faced a simple choice: Athens had either to get support and protection from Persia or to make a new peace and alliance with Sparta.”

Before the new regime could do much more than consolidate, Athens sustained another defeat, worse than the one in Sicily: the loss of Euboea, the breadbasket of their empire, located perilously close to the Piraeus itself. But the Spartans as usual exercised caution and didn’t go for the knockout. Alcibiades, who had defected from Sparta to Persia in 412 was reinstated as a general by the new regime at Athens, helped to organize defenses, and the war continued, although Alcibiades took care not to return to the city itself until 407. Thucydides abruptly ends his history with the events of 411; he died in 404. By then the Peloponnesian forces were about to win the war, having finally achieved superiority over the Athenians at sea—”an ironic end” for the ships-proud regime. Still, and as always, “Thucydides allows one to see” that “things could have gone differently until the very last days.” Reality may constrain, but events march forward in no inevitable course.

Hawthorn situates himself between the stance taken by Jacqueline de Romilly—that the statesmen Thucydides portrays acted according to rational strategies—and that of Hans-Peter Stahl, who claims that the Athenians and human beings generally act according to emotions defying rational understanding. He adopts instead Nietzsche’s view, that thought and action both “are guided by pre-rational commitments,” but that the combination of these three forces “explain what people make happen, which can sometimes be nothing.” Accordingly, Thucydides exhibits a preference for moderation in politics, a resolute search for the best evidence in uncovering what political men did and intended to do, not regardless of what they say but with the knowledge that what they say, however deceptive, itself constitutes a political fact.

War may be, as Thucydides writes, a violent master, but not an all-powerful one. Tyche or fate does not rule absolutely; the Athenians, for example “were not predetermined to be defeated in Sicily.” “Although all events have causes, these are many and varied, and they and their effects often occur in unexpected conjunctions with others… and except when subject to the unassailable power of another, and sometimes even when they are, people are not bound to act in just one way.”

For all of these reasons, “there can be no resolution” in political life “and, for reasons we may never know, Thucydides was saved from any temptation to arrive at one.” He may or may not have deliberately left his book unfinished, but it is right that he did.