Herbert R. Lottman: The Purge: The Purification of French Collaborators After World War II. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1986.

Originally published in the New York City Tribune, December 3, 1986.

 

In 1940, Charles de Gaulle set out to make a political revolution in France. For years he had judged a revolution necessary. Parliamentary republicanism was failing to act decisively to defend the country against Nazi ambitions. When Hitler’s troops circumvented the Maginot Line, occupied northern France, and allowed the establishment of a collaborationist French government under the elderly Marshall Pétain in southern France, de Gaulle escaped to London. As the only member of the last administration of the Third Republic to oppose surrender, he established France Libre, a government-in-exile with himself at its head. De Gaulle intended France Libre not only to participate in an Allied victory over the Axis and the liberation of the occupied territories, but to found a new republican regime with a strong executive capable of assuming responsibility for France, and especially for its military and foreign policies. With its petty intrigues and vacillation, parliamentarism had prevented France from achieving the greatness de Gaulle insisted was in her, and at last could not even protect France from conquest.

Simply to participate in the liberation and to restore parliamentary government were ambitions at that moment beyond the average Frenchman, and the average French politician. De Gaulle’s enterprise assured him unusually big obstacles. Man of the French who joined him in London would have opposed de Gaulle’s envisioned new form of republicanism, had he been so foolish as to make his intention explicit. President Roosevelt reacted badly to de Gaulle’s uncompromising independence, and spent much of the war trying to arrange for his replacement with some more pliable soul. At home, both Right and Left had their own revolutions to pursue.

The Right, still anti-republican a century-and-a-half after 1789, generally supported Pétain and at first admired Hitler. The Left, after enthusiastically supporting the 1939 pact between Stalin and Hitler, just as enthusiastically joined the Resistance after Hitler betrayed Stalin and attacked the Soviets in 1941. French Communists intended to use the Resistance as a vehicle for their own revolution against ‘fascism,’ which they imagined to be as much a product of capitalism as they claimed parliamentarism was. Finally, and predictably, the majority of the French little understood or cared about political ambitions, noble or base. While not actively collaborating with the Nazis, they passively cooperated, hoping for liberation while not seeing much they could do to effect it, and in the meantime wishing to be left alone by their occupiers.

The French purge of collaborators after the war must be seen in this political context. In his sensible, journalistic history of the purge, Herbert R. Lottman rightly begins by observing that “the liberation of France also liberated anger.” Having returned to Paris from the French colonial city of Algiers, where he established himself after his initial stint in London, de Gaulle gave rein to just enough of that anger to quicken justice, while reining it firmly enough to reestablish the rule of law in the midst of war.

In his radio broadcasts before his return, de Gaulle had rarely called for vengeance. He left that to lesser France Libre spokesmen, thus availing himself of popular anger while carefully distancing himself from it. De Gaulle had his allies among the Resistants criticize the circulation of blacklists within occupied France. In this moderation he received fortuitous help from the Communists, late in the war, whose leadership was told by Moscow in June 1944 “that the liberation would not be accompanied by revolution,” and therefore abstained from widespread terror.

In a risky but necessary and successful move, while still in Algiers de Gaulle gave his “Regional Commissioners of the Republic” near-absolute power—executive, legislative, and judicial—precisely to establish the rule of law by extraordinary means, simultaneously denying power to both the Allied armies and Stalin’s Communists. “Above all,” Lottman writes, the Commissioners “were to represent the ‘new spirit’ of post-Vichy France.” Consistent with that spirit, de Gaulle took a strong but not dictatorial position, establishing a system of laws and courts of law in consultation with representatives of centrist political parties and Resistants, particularly the Christian Democrats.

Ever as pragmatic in life as dogmatic in their theorizing, the French restrained themselves. Lottman does not overlook the “few instances of personal revenge,” illegal shootings, and even torture, but he insists that were indeed few, even in the first, anarchic days of liberation. Summary courts martial scarcely reached the highest standards of legal due process, but they probably averted mob violence, and did in fact acquit many individuals. The French bought time for themselves until, “slowly, step by step, the central authority (which was now Charles de Gaulle and his ministers) transferred their headquarters…to Paris, curbed the anarchy, and dominated.” As Justice Commissioner François de Menthon said at the time, “Tomorrow, when one looks back at the way the purge was carried out in France, we won’t have to blush.” The “Commissioner of the Republic” in Lyon, a Socialist with firm Communist ties, spoke more for the spirit of republicanism than for any leftist ideology when he cautioned, “Wrong opinions are never punishable…. The purge must have its limits, both in time and in its very concept. Otherwise, ‘a pure man always finds a purer man to purify him.'” It is hard not to suspect that the French had learned something from the French Revolution, after all.

Although some of the many surviving collaborationists have claimed that deaths numbered over 100,000, and the historian Robert Aron estimates between thirty and forty thousand, Lottman agrees with the estimate cited by de Gaulle in his War Memoirs and corroborated by subsequent researchers: 10, 842 deaths, most of them after some sort of trial. As in so much else, republican government with the rule of law, even a shaky rule of law, proved far less sanguinary than does state terrorism by ideological fanatics, Right and Left. France actually saw fewer postwar arrests and convictions per capita than did liberated Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Norway.

If anything, one might call the purge too lenient, and surely too uneven. Newspaper columnists were among the first to be tried, and a few were executed, but wealthy businessmen for the most part escaped personal injury. (It is true that businessmen would contribute rather more to France’s economic recovery than journalists could; this suggest the unfanatical—some would say cynical—wink that accompanies so much Gallic bombast.) No major literary or other artists stood trial for collaboration—not even the despicable Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who had complained during the war that the Nazis were not killing enough Jews. Sentimentality about artists is as French as doctrinairism and cynicism, but more appealing than either. The French know that artists can correct one another; Lottman tells the story of the old Fauviste painter Maurice de Vlaminck, who, visiting Germany during the Occupation, saw a painting by a Nazi-approved artist, “stepped back, then commented, ‘Looking at that, you see how people lose a war.'”

Despite many injustices, some nearly inevitable and some not, Lottman concludes that “the French need not be ashamed of their purge.” They nonetheless prefer not to discuss it, and this too marks them as a civilized people. The war set those obedient to republican laws and principles against those obedient to the laws of Vichy; the purge attempted to discriminate between the merely obedient and the enthusiasts of collaboration. This task was necessary, difficult, and in some respects impossible. A police official in the small town of Bayeux “pointed out that in a township of four hundred inhabitants it would be possible to arrest five or six persons for collaborationist activity–or ten times that number, and still remain moderate.” The irremediable imprecision of such judgments, and the painfully unlike consequences of them for citizens of villages all over France, make a certain degree of forgetting more than discreet. After the failure of the Fourth, and still parliamentarian, Republic in 1958, de Gaulle and his successors wisely preferred to celebrate France Libre and the Resistance, leaving the purge to students of history.

Robert Morris: Our Globe Under Siege. Mantoloking: J & W Enterprises, 1986.

Originally published in The New York City Tribune, October 1986.

 

Sir Halford J. Mackinder (1861-1947) was a British geographer whose career spanned the zenith of the British Empire and the beginning of its decline. In 1887, he wrote an essay titled “On the Scope and Methods of Geography,” deploring the separation of the humanities from the sciences in the modern university curriculum—anticipating C. P. Snow’s lament on “the two cultures” by some seven decades. “It is the duty of geography,” he maintained, “to build one bridge over an abyss which I the opinion of many is upsetting the equilibrium of our culture.” The discipline of political geography or, as he later called it, “geopolitics,” would teach students both natural science and political science, each reinforcing the significance of the other.

Published in 1919, the book Democratic Ideals and Reality (a scornful glance at President Wilson, that) represented Mackinder’s attempt to show how the seafaring republic of Great Britain could defend itself against the great land powers, Germany and Soviet Russia. But Mackinder faced a grave problem in convincing his fellow Britons of the urgency of this enterprise. “Democracy refuses to think strategically unless and until compelled to do so for reasons of defense.” Unfortunately, tyrants who dream of world dominion love to think strategically.

Mackinder asked his readers to stop thinking of Europe, Asia, and Africa as separate continents. In fact they form “incomparably the largest geographical unit on our globe,” holding some 85% of its population. That a single tyranny might someday unite the “Great Continent” or “World Island” posed “the ultimate threat to the world’s liberty so far as strategy is concerned.” Winning the “Heartland” of the Great Continent—north-central Europe and Asia—could enable this tyranny to control the circulation of political and economic power throughout the world. In the twentieth century, Germany and Soviet Russia would vie for this power.

True to Mackinder’s teaching, the democracies ignored him. The Germans did not. Karl Haushofer established the discipline of geopolitics in Germany and, true to the regnant notion of ‘value-free’ social science, willingly advised anyone who listened—including Stalin in the 1920 and Hitler a few years later. Mackinder lived just long enough to see his countrymen interest themselves in his thesis—during the 1940s, too late to avert what Churchill called “the unnecessary war.”

With the invention of nuclear weapons, the democracies suffered another strategic shock. For some two decades, the prospect of thermonuclear war made Western strategists forget or denigrate the importance of geopolitics. But Stalin’s heirs continued to learn Haushofer’s lessons, and methodically acted to acquire military, political, and economic control over strategic pressure points on the World Island. After the Soviets achieved nuclear parity with the United States in the late 1960s, and the communists won Vietnam a few years later, some Western strategists began to remember their geography lessons.

Robert Morris needed no such instruction-by-disaster. Trained as an attorney, he served in U. S. Navy intelligence during World War II, and learned of Soviet intentions at that time in a series of conversations with a top Soviet official. As an aide to several U. S. Senate committees, and also as an educator and journalist, he has advanced Mackinder’s task of overcoming the compartmentalization our universities have imposed, bringing together the insights of several academic disciplines in order to provide a coherent picture of Soviet actions.

Morris sees that the geopolitical war “is the real war, and may be the only war fought” between the United States and the Soviet Union. International politics remains a struggle for sovereignty over territory, despite the increased sophistication of international finance, whose adepts lecture us on ‘global interdependence’ and imagine butter more powerful than guns. By keeping the overall geopolitical realities directly before them, Morris does readers the invaluable service of taking apparently unrelated current events and revealing the pattern they form. Morris helps to make sense of the morning newspaper and the evening news.

He reviews every part of “our globe,” remarking Soviet power on land and sea. On land, Soviet geopolitical designs now center on western Europe and southern Asia. The Soviets often pretend to fear American ‘encirclement’; obviously, the strategy is their own. From the Kola Peninsula (the most heavily militarized region on earth) to eastern Europe, to the economic chokepoints of the Middle East, to the Mediterranean and northern Africa, to several points in and along the Caribbean, the Soviets have constructed a system of bases and alliances capable of interdicting supplies and launching direct attacks on our European allies. In the Pacific, Soviet power bears down upon India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, countries Radio Moscow called (in 1969) “the nucleus of a security system that would eventually embrace all countries from the Middle East to Japan.” As with Europe, the means to this end coordinate land, sea, and air operations, some covert and some not.

These Atlantic and Pacific theaters are linked. Between  the Kola Peninsula and the massively fortified Soviet Pacific coast lies the Arctic Ocean, where icebreakers and submarines extend power between East and West. In the southern hemisphere the route around southern Africa serves the same purpose; Morris devotes two full chapters to this key strategic region, which he knows firsthand. Indeed, Morris knows much of the world firsthand. Although he makes good use of news reports and journal articles, Our Globe Under Siege is no ‘cut-and-paste’ job; it is firmly based on the author’s more than forty years of extensive travel and observation.

Morris saves his most sobering facts for the final chapter. Since the Bolshevik Revolution in October 1917, 1.727 billion human beings have come under the domination of communism. That is slightly more than 36 percent of the world’s population, an average of 70,000 per day. Communists rule 18.7 million square miles, 32.5 percent of the earth’s land area. Further, as Morris so vividly shows, mere numbers cannot convey the geostrategic character of these populations and territories. Even a small point can ground an instrument of unremitting pressure, if it is a fulcrum.

Soviet leverage increases yearly. Since the much-heralded heyday of ‘détente’ in the 1970s, sixteen countries have fallen to the communists, most of them close allies of the Soviet Union. And although the Reagan Administration proudly claims no countries lost under its stewardship of our interests, this isn’t quite so. Both Guyana and Suriname have become near-appendages of Soviet and Cuban policy, affording key inroads into South America. During this period the Soviets’ only loss has been the tiny island of Grenada.

The ultimate object of encirclement is of course the United States itself. Sophisticates in the West will dismiss the thought. The Kremlin deceives them by crudeness. Robert Morris is not deceived, and readers who prefer knowledge to sophistication will find this volume a beacon that warns as it illuminates.

 

2017 Afternote: Not long after this was written, the Soviet Union imploded, the victim of internal tensions. Its reach finally exceeded its grasp. But some thirty years later, one notices that China has adapted a similar strategy, now with Russia as a more-or-less junior partner. In particular, the strategy of linking Asia from east to west, from the Pacific to the Middle East, has been pursued with infrastructure projects, especially roads. For its part, Russia continues to work toward the breakup of European alliances, even as it did under the Soviet regime. Far from causing borders to disappear (as some utopians had supposed), computer networks have served to enhance the geopolitical goals of modern states.

 

Jean-Francois Revel (with the assistance of Branko Lazitch): How Democracies Perish. William Byron translation. Garden City: Doubleday, 1984.

Originally published in The Intercollegiate Review, Vol. 20, No. 3, Spring/Summer 1985. Republished with permission.

 

In 1970 the literary succès de scandale in Paris was a polemics entitled Ni Marx, Ni Jésus. Written by socialist pamphleteer Jean-Francois Revel, it owed its scandalousness to one remarkable thing: it was pro-American. Throughout the previous decade, anti-Americanism had numbered among the few sentiments uniting most of the French elites—whether the ‘Right’ of Algérie Française, the Gaullist center, or the various elements on the ‘Left.’ Dismissing all these elements as reactionary, Revel buoyantly asserted that in the 1960s “the only revolutionary stirrings in the world have had their origins in the United States,” and the question of whether or not “the revolution of the twentieth century” will spread “to the rest of the world depends on whether or not it first succeeds in America.” Without Marx or Jesus appeared in America a year later, supplemented by a properly friendly and skeptical “afterword” by Mary McCarthy and an “author’s note” in which Revel generously observed that “in the United States if the classical Left [as represented by Miss McCarthy) does not believe the new revolution is serious, at least it does not try, as in Europe, to stop it in order to be right.”

Americans today who remember the book remember it vaguely They remember Revel as a friend in a bad time, the time when anti-Americanism had become fashionable in America itself. They seldom remember Revel’s argument, and in some ways that is just as well. He made some sensible, astringent criticisms of those who imagined that the Soviet Union, Maoist China, the ‘Third World,’ or Scandinavia could bear a democratic revolution to the oppressed victims of capitalism. But he suffered delusions of his own, calling for “the abolition of international relations” by the establishment of a world government. This government would enable humanity to equalize economic and social conditions, stabilize the birth rate, preserve the environment without ending material progress, and free everyone from “sexual repression” (the latter program being “undoubtedly one of the surest signs of an authentic revolutionary struggle”). If this “total affirmation of liberty for all in the place of archaic prohibitions” sounds rather more like anarchism than anything that could establish a government, it must be said that Revel almost saw this: “We do not need a political revolution so much as an antipolitical revolution.” Even the American “hippies” were not sufficiently egalitarian and libertarian for Revel’s world. He fretted that they disliked technology, which brings material abundance to the masses; worse still, they tended toward religiosity. But at least the American ‘Right’ posed little serious threat. After Goldwater’s defeat, conservatism was surely dead.

A decade and a half later, Revel has abandoned many of his leftist illusions and most of his optimism. How Democracies Perish begins, “Democracy may, after all, turn out to have been a historical accident, a brief parenthesis that is closing before our eyes.” The contemporary world has become an “implacable democracy-killing machine” with components within both democracy and totalitarianism. Revel describes four of these components.

First, modern democracy directs energies inward, whereas totalitarianism directs energies outward. Democracy “tend to ignore, even deny, threats to its existence because it loathes doing what is needed to counter them.” Democracy succeeds in the pleasant task of improving its own material life. It fears the consequences of opposing its enemies because it would thereby risk souring its own agreeable existence. It even finds that “it is easier to win concessions from yourself than from the enemy.” Totalitarianism fails to improve its own material life and must therefor turn its attention elsewhere. “War is central to [the Soviet Union’s] ideological system,” as well as to its economic and political structure.

Second, modern democracy “treats subversives as mere opponents for fear of betraying its own principles,” notably that of toleration. Modern democracy tends to blame itself for its own enemies, internal and external, and generates “an industry of blame.” With not a single ideology but dozens contending inside it, modern democracy expends much of its energy on contestation as it were with itself. It has difficulty defending itself against real enemies. “Even conservatives seldom risk naming the threat of totalitarianism as the greatest menace of our time, for fear of seeming fanatical” and thus offending the modern ethos. As a consequence of this, democratic politicians, “whose influence depends, happily, on their persuasiveness, expend so much energy trying to show their undertakings in the best possible light that they eventually lose the habit of thinking about the issues’ substance”—that it, about reality itself. While looking hard at its own current faults, modern democracy often minimizes the faults of leftist totalitarianism, dismissing them as mere ‘stages’ of progress. This suggests that modern democrats often accept the premises of progressivist historicism underlying totalitarian belief and practice. Indeed, “the socialist cause was forged within the democracies themselves in the nineteenth century.” Totalitarianism treats its opponents as enemies, subversives. It never blames itself fundamentally or comprehensively, but limits “self-criticism” to the sort of corruption-baiting one finds in Pravda letters-to-the-editor. It generates an industry of propaganda governed by a single, all-encompassing ideology. But it firmly subordinates propaganda to political calculation, also governed by ideology; any mistakes of perception occur only insofar as the ideology fails to explain reality. But because its ideology encourages power-worship, it often perceives political reality quite acutely—as devotees will. While judging its enemies by their current faults, totalitarianism judges itself by its own alleged future. It can judge its enemies most severely because, according to leftist totalitarianism, its enemies have no future.

Third, contemporary democratic government no longer governs. “The democratic state has stuffed itself with more responsibilities than powers,” a weakness that causes political and social fragmentation. One might say that America retains Madisonian faction while trying to act like a welfare state. Our enemies need not divide us in order to conquer, for our divisions are already here to exploit. In their foreign relations, modern democracies also accept “responsibility”—that is, blame—without sufficient power to govern, or at least channel, the course of events. Democratic politicians vacillate and react; time is rarely on their side. Totalitarian government does not merely govern but tyrannizes. It exercises power without “responsibility” and imposes unity upon its subjects. Democrats falsely imagine that this repression and the misery it causes must eventually halt a totalitarian regime’s expansion. But “the notion that whoever holds power must clear out because his subjects are discontented or dying of hunger or distress is a bit of whimsy that history has tolerated wondrously few times.” It is a notion that “can only occur to a democrat,” who earnestly desires the world to be other than it is (no harm in that) but then confuses his desire with reason. Totalitarians plan, decide, and act; they “can afford to wait,” convinced that time is on their side.

Fourth, modern democracy is at most a neo-imperialism, that is, an economic imperialism. The gains it makes can therefore be threatened by totalitarian insurgents, without their violating “international law.” Totalitarianism is a true imperialism, seizing territory and direct political power along with economic power. Its gains cannot be threatened militarily without violating ‘international law.’ This is true even if those gains were made ‘illegally,’ as “sooner or later de facto power is accepted as rightful power.” ‘International law,’ then, is more than a bit of a fraud, a more useful fraud to totalitarians than to modern democrats.

Revel uses imagery, rhetoric, some facts, and clear deductive logic to show how these four components function. Deductive logic proves especially useful because democrats “eagerly believe the Communists’ pure propaganda, reserving their skepticism for the genuinely revealing doctrinal statements,” which “they dismiss as mere talk.” (He recalls that the French ambassador in Berlin yattered about “détente” with Hitler in 1937, and that the ambassador’s hapless successor excitedly supposed the existence of “hawks” and “doves” among the Nazi elite). In fact, totalitarian doctrine, ‘Right’ or ‘Left,’ has been the only consistently reliable guide to totalitarian action. Because totalitarianism attempts to unify theory and practice (but does not unify either with its rhetoric) its doctrine and the (often unstated) logical deductions therefrom tell us more than pages of data. For example, given the propensity of Communist subjects to flee their countries, “the only way to convince oneself and the rest of humanity that the socialist system is best is to see to it that there are no other systems.” Totalitarian imperialism serves first of all to convince; this is what it means to claim (as Leninists do) that there is a logic of history. It is a ‘logic’ that only real logic can expose—in both senses of that word. The ‘logic’ of history has military consequences. The Soviets’ alleged fear of encirclement, “the greatest strategic farce of modern times,” is inexplicable strategically. But not politically. “Let’s be logical: the only way for the Soviet Union to make certain its borders are not threatened, that they are fully secure, is to have no borders at all or, if you prefer, borders that coincide with the entire world.” One can call this paranoia, but it must be said it is a most purposeful paranoia, consistent with the allegedly dialectical progress of ‘History.’

To counter totalitarian imperialism, modern democracies have constructed the edifice of ‘détente,’ an attempt to elevate a condition between states (the word means relaxation of tensions) to the status of a principle, a ruling idea. Its purpose is clear enough: peace. But the means of obtaining genuine peace by the means of ‘détente’ elude democrats’ eager grasp. The “principle that inspired the first massive transfusion of Western aid to the Soviet Union after 1922” prefigured the economic principle of “détente”: “East-West trade will civilize Communism.” In the 1920s, “after several years of Western liberality, what really happened was the forced collectivization of the land, extermination of the peasants, purges and the Great Terror of the 1930s.” The results of similar Western liberality in the 1970s were less spectacular but far more damaging to the world as a whole. They included a massive Soviet arms buildup, domination of large sections of Asia and Africa, increased use of espionage and terrorism—all accompanied by a reversal of Khruschev’s ‘de-Stalinization’ at home. Faced with this contemptuous exploitation of their hopes, the democracies find it impossible to reduce trade with the Soviet Union for more than the briefest periods. They tell themselves that such a punitive action might only anger the Soviets. Once again, Revelian logic clears the artificial fog that makes these movie-set props believable. “Either Western economic cooperation is negligible to the U. S. S. R., which makes the whole theory of détente absurd, or it’s important to the U. S. S. R. and suspending it would be an effective sanction.” Not a supremely effective sanction, to be sure: grain embargoes cannot extract Soviet divisions from Afghanistan. But sanctions can at least make our own economic system, for whose health many democrats care more than anything else less dependent upon the actions of enemies who care neither for democrats’ comfort nor for that of their own subjects.

Given all this, Revel has earned his pessimism. His suggested policy changes, stated in necessarily general terms, seem rather weak. Two are negative: do not fear war because the Soviets avoid it when they see the possibility of losing; make no concessions without “manifest, equivalent and palpable counter-concessions.” Centrally, he suggests “mainly” economic reprisals against “any Soviet encroachment.” He would supplement this with espionage and some propaganda. Perhaps these suggestions might turn out to be more effective than they appear; up to a point, one might even say, “the more Soviet conquests, the more burdens for them and the more targets for us.”

But the problem remains. Democrats prefer not to target their enemies at all. The democratic character itself finds tyranny seductive and deadly. Plato’s Socrates describes the scion of democracy, his appetites sated, driven by the “sting of longing” to be “the leader of the idle desires that insists on all available resources being distributed to them”: “this leader of the soul takes madness for its armed guard and is stung to frenzy. And if it finds in the man any opinions or desires accounted good and still admitting of shame, it slays them and pushes them out of him until it purges him of moderation and fills him with madness brought in from abroad” (Republic IX, 537b). The problem of educating the young democrat to defend himself against those who would use his desires to serve tyranny remains the problem for those who cherish liberty. It is an increasingly formidable problem. Modern tyranny, totalitarianism, distinguishes itself from ancient tyranny in part because it is not so innocent of philosophy. So far as a polemicist may educate, the pessimistic Revel guards modern democrats from the tyrannical sting of longing, making amends for the earlier, dreaming Revel who let himself unguarded.