Certain Ideas of France: Essays on French History and Civilization 0313323410, 9780313323416

Table of contents :
Contents
Foreword
Preface
PART I Culture and Society
CHAPTER 1 Ary Scheffer and His Time
CHAPTER 2 The Paris of Émile Zola
CHAPTER 3 Pierre de Coubertin: Sport and Ideology in the Third Republic, 1870– 1914
CHAPTER 4 Commotion at the Sorbonne: The Debate on the French University, 1910– 1914
PART II Intellectuals and Politics
CHAPTER 5 Reluctant Crusaders: French Intellectuals and the Dreyfus Affair
CHAPTER 6 Robert Brasillach and the Temptation of Fascism
CHAPTER 7 An Intellectual in Politics: Raymond Aron, 1905– 1983
PART III Politics and Diplomacy
CHAPTER 8 Constants in French Foreign Policy
CHAPTER 9 Was de Gaulle Right?
CHAPTER 10 Charles de Gaulle and Charles Péguy: A Certain Idea of France
PART IV History and Historians
CHAPTER 11 Gabriel Hanotaux: An Historian in Politics
CHAPTER 12 The Annales School and the Writing of Contemporary History: The First Fifty Years
CHAPTER 13 Fernand Braudel: Historian of the “Longue Durée”
Notes
Index

Citation preview

Certain Ideas of France

Recent Titles in Contributions to the Study of World History The Supranational Politics of Jean Monnet: Ideas and Origins of the European Community Frederic J. Fransen We Built Up Our Lives: Education and Community among Jewish Refugees Interned by Britain in World War II Maxine Schwartz Seller Nationalism, Globalization, and Orthodoxy: The Social Origins of Ethnic Conflict in the Balkans Victor Roudometof Diplomats Without a Country: Baltic Diplomacy, International Law, and the Cold War James T. McHugh and James S. Pacy Chinese Nationalism in Perspective: Historical and Recent Cases C.X. George Wei and Xiaoyuan Liu, editors By the Sword and the Cross: The Historical Revolution of the Catholic World Monarchy in Spain and the New World, 1492–1825 Charles A. Truxillo Passion, Politics, and Philosophie: Rediscovering J.-P. Brissot Leonore Loft Sanctions and Honorary Whites: Diplomatic Policies and Economic Realities in Relations Between Japan and South Africa Masako Osada Personal Policy Making: Canada’s Role in the Adoption of the Palestine Partition Resolution Eliezer Tauber One King, One Law, Three Faiths: Religion and the Rise of Absolutism in Seventeenth-Century Metz Patricia Behre Miskimin South Sea Maidens: Western Fantasy and Sexual Politics in the South Pacific Michael Sturma America Perceived: The Making of Chinese Images of the United States, 1945–1953 Hong Zhang

Certain Ideas of France Essays on French History and Civilization

H.L. WESSELING FOREWORD BY EUGEN WEBER

Contributions to the Study of World History, Number 98

GREENWOOD PRESS Westport, Connecticut • London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wesseling, H.L. [Vele ideeën over Frankrijk. English] Certain ideas of France : essays on French history and civilization / H.L. Wesseling ; foreword by Eugen Weber. p. cm.—(Contributions to the study of world history, ISSN: 0885–9159 ; no. 98) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–313–32341–0 (alk. paper) 1. France—Civilization—20th century. I. Title. II. Series. DC33.7.W5713 2002 944.081—dc21 2001058343 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright © 2002 by H.L. Wesseling All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2001058343 ISBN: 0–313–32341–0 ISSN: 0885–9159 First published in 2002 Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.greenwood.com Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Copyright Acknowledgments The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge permission for use of the following material: Excerpts from H.L. Wesseling, “The Paris of Emile Zola,” European Review 7(2) 1999. Reprinted by permission of Cambridge University Press. Excerpts from H.L. Wesseling, “Pierre de Coubertin: Sport and Ideology in the Third Republic 1870–1914,” European Review 8(2) 2000. Reprinted by permission of Cambridge University Press. Excerpts from H.L. Wesseling, “Commotion at the Sorbonne: The Debate on the French University, 1910–1914,” European Review 9(1) 2001. Reprinted by permission of Cambridge University Press. Excerpts from H.L. Wesseling, “Fernand Braudel: Historian of the longue durée,” Itinerario 5(2) 1981. Reprinted by permission of Itinerario. European Journal of Overseas History. Excerpts from H.L. Wesseling, “Gabriel Hanotaux: An Historian in Politics,” Itinerario 25(1) 2001. Reprinted by permission of Itinerario. European Journal of Overseas History. Excerpts from H.L. Wesseling, “The Annales School and the Writing of Contemporary History,” Review 1 (1978). Reprinted by permission of Review. Every reasonable effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright materials in this book, but in some instances this has proven impossible. The author and publisher will be glad to receive information leading to more complete acknowledgments in subsequent printings of the book and in the meantime extend their apologies for any omissions.

Toute ma vie, je me suis fait une certaine idée de la France. Charles de Gaulle

Contents

Foreword by Eugen Weber

xi

Preface

xv Part I.

Culture and Society

1.

Ary Scheffer and His Time

2.

The Paris of Émile Zola

17

3.

Pierre de Coubertin: Sport and Ideology in the Third Republic, 1870–1914

31

Commotion at the Sorbonne: The Debate on the French University, 1910–1914

39

4.

3

Part II. Intellectuals and Politics 5.

Reluctant Crusaders: French Intellectuals and the Dreyfus Affair

51

6.

Robert Brasillach and the Temptation of Fascism

67

7.

An Intellectual in Politics: Raymond Aron, 1905–1983

75

x

Contents

Part III.

Politics and Diplomacy

8.

Constants in French Foreign Policy

9.

Was de Gaulle Right?

10. Charles de Gaulle and Charles Péguy: A Certain Idea of France

91 107 117

Part IV. History and Historians 11. Gabriel Hanotaux: An Historian in Politics

131

12. The Annales School and the Writing of Contemporary History: The First Fifty Years

153

13. Fernand Braudel: Historian of the “Longue Durée”

167

Notes

183

Index

199

Foreword EUGEN WEBER

France mère des arts, des armes et des lois—mother of arts, of arms, of laws—that’s how the great country has long been regarded and selfregarded, at least since the sixteenth century of Joachim du Bellay. Ever since then many have entertained and many voiced certain ideas of France, for no country has so much craved and attracted so much attention nor more fully deserved Tocqueville’s judgment: “the most brilliant and dangerous of European nations, and the best suited to become in turn an object of admiration, hatred, pity, terror, but never indifference.”1 The Almighty in his infinite wisdom did not see fit to create the French in the image of others. This has attracted comment, and the commentators operate in antiphony. “They order,” said Tristram Shandy’s father, “this matter better in France,” and, in fact, almost every matter on Sterne’s sentimental journey through a welcoming land. Gibbon notes the “irregular and lively spirit of the nation,” only to criticize the territory whose air, said Hazzlitt, chased off the blue devils. Wordsworth remembered France standing on the top of golden hours (and human nature being born again); Mark Twain found it all orderly and beautiful, everything charming to the eye; Oliver Goldsmith praised

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Foreword

Gallic affability: “They please, are pleased, they give to get esteem // Till, seeming blest, they grow to what they seem”; but he concluded that “their civility to strangers is not half as great as their admiration of themselves.” Or, as John Gunther put it 200 years later, “the most civilized country in the world, France doesn’t care who knows it.” Often criticized by their French neighbors for insolent pride and perverse rejection of French wisdom, the island race and its transatlantic offspring returned the compliment. That may be why Horace Walpole expressed dislike of the French “for their unfounded airs of superiority,” although Leigh Hunt excused their vanity, which “at least, includes the wish to please.” Not always. Fielding’s Tom Jones depicts them as “a nasty people.” Henry Adams esteems the French as “of all the people in the world, the most gratuitously wicked.” Adams found them a tonic. “They almost do me good. I feel it a gain to have an object of dislike.” Not so D.H. Lawrence, who described Paris as a nasty city and who, when he returned to France (as we all return), went himself one better: “I would have loved it—without the French.” Hemingway’s moveable feast was, to Virginia Woolf, a “hostile, brilliant, alien city”; to Adam Gopnik a “scowling universe relieved by pastry”; its residents (Art Linkletter dixit) best dubbed “Parasites.” We should perhaps leave the last word on that to Ernst Lubitsch (director, among other fairy fluff, of So This is Paris, 1926): “I’ve been to Paris France and I’ve been to Paris Paramount. Paris Paramount is better.” Matthew Arnold chose to denigrate France as “famed in all arts, in none supreme,” Charles Morgan to praise it as an idea necessary to civilization. Where Rudyard Kipling (who crossed it in a chauffeured automobile before the traffic-jam age) found the land “beloved of every soul that loves its fellow kind,” others saw only a society blistered by prickliness. That had been Tocqueville’s view. His writings reveal a country “permanently” engaged in war, a society riven and ruled by hatred, a people more consistent in their hatreds than in their affections. James Agate, the film critic, could not account for the meanness of the French. He should have read Voltaire’s words to Boswell: every man must be either an anvil or an hammer: “he is a beater, or he must be beaten.” Many who took Voltaire’s advice chose to be hammers. Hence the singer Sophie Arnould’s answer to her sans-culotte interrogators: “The Rights of Man, I know all about them.” So, not many Rights, especially not for women, in the land of the Rights of Man. And little friendship also—as impossible to find, thought Lady Mary

Foreword

xiii

Wortley Montagu, as orange trees in Scotland. No friends for France either, thought General de Gaulle, only interests. Short on friendship, long on hatreds—of neighbors, masters, strangers, foes—the French have enjoyed long training in asperity, and observers let them know it. Complaining (complained Napoleon) “of everything and always”; or exploding—letting the lower forms of passion “constantly bubble up,” observed Thomas de Quincey, “from the shallow superficial character of their feelings.” Yet, as Henry Miller hesitantly argued, likeable often just because of their weaknesses, “which are always thoroughly human, even if despicable.” The French, most agreed, were erratic, brilliant, and enjoyed all the gifts except that of running their country properly. Never, Thomas Jefferson opined, “was there a country where the practice of governing too much has taken deeper root and done more mischief.” Never was there a country, either, whose 265 kinds of native cheese called for a stronger hand at the helm. And yet the Irishman Thomas Moore’s Fudge Family in Paris (1818) had lightheartedly preceded Charles de Gaulle: “who can help loving the land that has taught us 685 ways to dress eggs?” Who indeed? Which may be why many talk about hating the French, except for most of those they have encountered, and why Chesterton was right to ridicule those who “hate the horrid French who never will be English.” Nor American, or European, or anything but themselves. That is something H.L. Wesseling understands very well. Diplomatic historian, cultural historian, political historian, colonial historian, he has labored in all these fields and has taught and written about them for two score years. History for him means inquiry, just as it meant to Herodotus. Like Herodotus, Wesseling has explored faraway lands (many of his works focus on Europe’s overseas expansion), and others closer by, notably France, to whose ventures and adventures at home and overseas he has dedicated several books and many years of study. The thirteen chapters that follow distill some of this rich experience. They represent, as the title promises, Wesseling’s ideas on France, events, and above all on personalities who had their own ideas of France and left their marks on it. He writes about culture, society, and their visible spoors; about intellectuals (a difficult race) and politics (a difficult pursuit); about diplomacy, and about two highly undiplomatic Charleses: Péguy and de Gaulle, whose insistence that France cannot be France sans glory goes back to Montaigne, who

xiv

Foreword

(also) proclaimed French gloire one of the ornaments of the world. The book ends with meditations about history and some of the men who did it, either in unexpected fashion or, like Fernand Braudel, supremely well. And everything Wesseling writes, all that he writes about, offers reflections on the times, the spirit and preoccupations of the times and their material and moral conditions. Like detectives, and like those juges d’instruction we call investigating magistrates, historians collect evidence, analyze it and establish connections that lead to the truth or, at least, get close to the truth. Wesseling’s history is about revealing connections. It is also about the rewards of curiosity, which, as Holmes once said to Watson (in A Case of Identity), will sooner or later expose “the queer things going on, strange coincidences, plannings, cross-purposes, wonderful chains of events, working through generations and leading to the most outré results.” That’s history for you.

Preface

The title of this book is, of course, inspired by the famous opening words of General de Gaulle’s Memoirs of the Second World War: “Toute ma vie je me suis fait une certaine idée de la France” (“All my life I have thought of France in a certain way”). De Gaulle’s idea of France will not be shared by everyone, neither among the French nor among the non-French. But many historians, social scientists and other students of France, as well as simple visitors and tourists, will have developed and cherish their own particular idea of this country, which Tocqueville has said is “the most brilliant and dangerous of European nations, and the best suited to become in turn an object of admiration, hatred, pity, terror, but never indifference.” Tocqueville not only wrote brilliantly about France but also about America, and his book Democracy in America is still considered the most important and perceptive work ever written on that other great but very different country. So the Americans owe a lot to the French, but on the other hand, one should also admit that America has given much in return. American scholars such as Gordon Wright, Eugen Weber, Stanley Hoffmann, Robert Paxton, Ezra Suleiman and Robert Darnton, to mention just a few, have greatly contributed to our understanding of French history and society.

xvi

Preface

Like the Americans and the British, or “les Anglo-Saxons,” as General de Gaulle liked to call them, the Dutch also have a special relationship with France and the French, and there have always been historians in that country who have written about French history and civilization. Since I published my first book on French history in 1969 (translated into English and published by Greenwood some thirty years later with the title Soldier and Warrior: French Attitudes toward the Army and War on the Eve of the First World War [2000]), I have belonged to that small group of historians. My interests lie not only in France but also in the former French colonial empire, which takes a central place in my book Divide and Rule: The Partition of Africa, 1880-1914 (1996). From time to time I have reported on other French topics that interest me. A number of these chapters have been published in English, and a selection of them is collected in this volume. They have one thing in common: they all deal with contemporary, that is to say nineteenth- and twentieth-century, French history. But apart from that they are rather varied. First of all, they deal with a great variety of subjects such as culture, society, politics and diplomacy, while one section is devoted entirely to French historians. The chapters are also different in character. Some of them resemble essays, while others are more traditional historical articles and therefore carry a weightier scholarly apparatus. Some have been solicited by journals or editors of collective volumes, while others have been written spontaneously. They all deal with things that struck me as original, surprising or “typically French.” The justification for bringing them together in this book is that in one way or another they all illustrate some aspect of French history and therefore may appeal to those interested in the multifaceted history of that remarkable nation, France.

PART I

Culture and Society

CHAPTER 1

Ary Scheffer and His Time

Ary Scheffer (1795–1858) was one of the most famous painters of his day. Born in Holland, he moved to Paris to become the court painter of King Louis-Philippe. He was an extremely fashionable painter of portraits with an important clientele. He also played a role in the French intellectual and political movements of the period, particularly those in Paris. Ary Scheffer was born on 2 February 1795 in the Dutch town of Dordrecht. Both his parents were painters. After the death of his father in 1809 when he was fourteen years old, he went to France, first to Lille and then to Paris. The whole Scheffer family, including Ary’s mother and two younger brothers, was to move there. One of the brothers, Arnold, later became an influential journalist and writer. The other brother, Henry, was also a painter, but was always to remain in Ary’s shadow. Ary was sixteen years old when he came to Paris in 1811. Born during the French Revolution, he arrived in the Paris of Emperor Napoleon. But Napoleon’s days were numbered. After the first Restoration, the Hundred Days and Waterloo, the Bourbons were reinstated, this time for good. Scheffer and his brothers, who were liberals,

4

Culture and Society

felt uneasy under this reactionary regime. After all, the Bourbons had, according to Chateaubriand’s famous saying, “learned nothing and forgotten nothing.” The Scheffers joined the liberal opposition, where Arnold played an important role. He brought Ary up to date on the modern political ideas and movements of his time and put him in touch with important politicians. Arnold Scheffer was an exceptional man. In 1815, when he was only nineteen years old, he became editor of the prominent newspaper, the Constitutionnel. He wrote a number of influential political articles of a strong liberal and nationalistic character, which brought him into conflict with the law on more than one occasion. He was convicted and punished by having his naturalization proceedings stopped, but Arnold persisted and appealed on the grounds that he was a Frenchman because, at the time of his birth, Holland had been a part of France. He wrote many historical works, such as a Résumé de l’Europe germanique and a Résumé de l’histoire de la Hollande, and similar works on Flanders and Bavaria, among others. He was secretary to La Fayette, the leader of the Republican political group. La Fayette made a great impression on Ary Scheffer, who became a regular visitor to his salon in the Château de la Grange. The Scheffers joined the Charbonnerie, a secret society inspired by the Italian Carbonari movement, which fought for the ideals of freedom and the sovereignty of the people. They sympathized with the struggles for freedom of the Greeks, Poles, Italians and others. In short, the brothers were hotheaded, driven, romantic liberals and international nationalists, as were to be found all over Europe during this period. Ary Scheffer was eventually to subscribe to another, milder form of liberalism connected to the house of Orléans, with which he had a special relationship. He had become drawing teacher in 1822 to the children of Philippe, the Duke of Orléans. This connection was not only good for his career and for attracting more clients but was also the beginning of a long-lasting and profound friendship. In 1830 the July Revolution broke out. It brought about the fall of the existing regime and introduced a constitutional monarchy. Ary Scheffer was actively involved in these events. Together with Adolphe Thiers, the famous historian and statesman, he rode from Paris to the castle in Neuilly, where Philippe of Orléans had his summer residence, to ask him if he would accept the crown. This he did, and under the name Louis-Philippe he became the next (and last) king of France. His regime was termed the “July monarchy” after the month in which it originated.

Ary Scheffer and His Time

5

Scheffer’s most successful period took place during the July monarchy. He accepted a number of commissions from the state as well as the church, the old aristocracy and the new bourgeoisie. After roving around and often changing addresses (he lived for some time, very appropriately, in the Rue Batave, which no longer exists) he finally settled at number 7 Rue Chaptal, which after a number of changes has now become number 16. Nowadays, this house is known as the Musée de la Vie Romantique. He lived there with his mother and, until 1839, his brother and assistant Henry. There, he received a wide circle of acquaintances, including intellectual, political and artistic celebrities and composers and poets, but also leading intellectuals and politicians. The house was a cultural and intellectual center of note. The July monarchy, born of revolution, was also to end its days in revolution—the February Revolution, which took place in 1848. Ary Scheffer, who was fifty-three years old at the time, was also involved in those events, but in a different way from his earlier involvement in 1830. In February 1848, at the personal request of the queen, he escorted the royal family on their flight from the Tuileries. He was captain of the national guard and, during his watch in the Tuileries, she had asked him to help get her and her family out of the city. In June he fought in the army of Cavaignac, the general who put down the Paris workers’ social revolution in a barbarous manner. Scheffer was personally involved in the struggle in the Faubourg St. Martin; in these battles alone, one hundred rebels were killed. He was promoted to commander in the Légion d’Honneur, an honor he refused, as he was too shocked by the savagery being committed by both parties. His brothers-in-arms invited him to dinner and sang a song that ended with the words: A sa santé, vidons nos verres, Notre chaleur lui prouvera Que pour lui nos voeux sont sincères! Je crois qu’il NOUS reconnaîtra! Let us empty our glasses for his health Our warmth will prove to him That for him, our good wishes are sincere! I believe he will recognize US!1

6

Culture and Society

Scheffer played no role in the Second Republic that followed, nor did he maintain links with the Second Empire of Napoleon III, which replaced the Republic four years later. His success as a painter was undiminished; commissions for the celebrated portrait and historical painter continued to stream in. He eventually married in his fifty-fifth year, in 1850. He had remained single until then, although his daughter Cornelia was born in 1830, an event that he managed to conceal from his mother for a long time. This could be considered a remarkable achievement, since he lived with his mother until her death in 1839. It seems, however, that he need not have worried about disclosing the truth because when shortly before her death his mother learned of the existence of the child, it was accepted into the family at the Rue Chaptal. It is unclear why Scheffer remained single for so long. True, he had, according to his biographer, no “romantic beauty” and was “a little cold,” but he must have had something, because “he knew how to win the respect and friendship of important people and distinguished ladies.”2 In any case, he continued to remain a bachelor even after his mother’s death. For about ten years, from 1839 to 1850, the celebrated painter and eligible bachelor lived without mother or wife in the Rue Chaptal. Eventually, though, he married the widow of a general, Françoise Marin, in 1850. The marriage was short-lived and unhappy; his wife died in 1856, and Scheffer himself died two years later at the age of sixty-three. One of the many people who came to visit Scheffer during his successful years was Ernest Renan (1823–1896), one of the most important figures in French intellectual life in the second half of the nineteenth century. Renan came from Brittany, was brought up in a Catholic seminary and became a famous Hebraist. In 1863 he published the first part of his Vie de Jésus, a rationalistic and historical account of the life of Jesus, whom he described as a remarkable man but not the son of God. Many people were shocked by this, yet Renan remained a well-respected man. Renan married Cornélie Scheffer—not Ary’s illegitimate daughter of the same name, but his brother Henry’s daughter, also named after their beloved mother. Ary Scheffer was strongly in favor of this marriage. On one occasion when out riding with his niece he said, “Dear child, you ought to marry the most intelligent man among our acquaintances.”3 Renan was in turn a great admirer of the master.

Ary Scheffer and His Time

7

The marriage of Ernest Renan and Cornélie Scheffer produced three children—a son named after his uncle Ary, a daughter called Ernestine after her father, and another daughter, Noémie. This last child married Jean Psichari, a renowned scholar and writer of his day. As his name suggests, Psichari was of Greek origin, even though he had been born in Odessa. He made his name not only as a professor in classical Greek at the Sorbonne, but also as a propagandist for New Greek, a language in which he himself published literary works. This must have pleased Ary Scheffer who, as a good liberal, had sympathised with the Greek struggle for freedom. Jean Psichari, however influential he may have been, would never be as famous as his son became. Although almost entirely forgotten today, Ernest Psichari, named after his grandfather, was one of the great literary figures of his time. He belonged to the small but influential group of intellectuals who, after the Dreyfus years, rejected the pacifist, anticlerical ideals of their intellectual environment and turned to the new doctrine of church and fatherland. He was a son of the dreyfusard Jean Psichari, but became a professional soldier in the colonial army, and although a grandson of the agnostic Ernest Renan, converted to Roman Catholicism and even became a member of the Third Order of Saint Francis. He published famous novels such as L’Appel des armes and Le Voyage du Centurion about military and religious life. He suited the action to the word in the opening weeks of the First World War by being killed near Rossignol on 22 August 1914. His sisters outlived him and his brother, who died in 1917, for a considerable length of time. Henriette, who has written extensively about her brother Ernest and his circle, died as recently as 1972, and Corrie (also named after Cornelia) survived right up until 1982. Until her death, she lived in the family home in the Rue Chaptal, which a few years later—thus very recently—became a museum. The three families, Scheffer-Renan-Psichari, spanned the entire French cultural history of the nineteenth century. Ary Scheffer and his brothers rose in the world during the Restoration and scored their triumphs under the July monarchy. Ernest Renan became known during the liberal years of the Second Empire and became famous at the beginning of the Third Republic. The Psicharis witnessed the glory years of the Third Republic, the fin de siècle and the period immediately following it, a time of revival and revision. All things considered, it is a very interesting family history, in which France and the Netherlands come together at various moments.

8

Culture and Society

ARY SCHEFFER’S PARIS Up till now we have been discussing Ary Scheffer’s life and its most important events. Now we must turn to the France of his time. In doing this we must realize that, in practice, it was Paris and not France that was the significant frame of reference for Scheffer. There were, and still are, huge differences between Paris and the rest of France. No city in France came close to Paris in size or had a comparable social structure. Moreover, political and cultural life were centered on Paris. It was the city of the court, the government and parliament, and also of influential newspapers and grandes écoles, of museums and academies, of salons and magazines. But that was not all. The economic heart of France was increasingly shifting to Paris. Industry became more important, railway lines were constructed that, without exception, led to Paris, and the stock exchange and banks appeared in the city. Scheffer lived in the Rue Chaptal, a street built in 1825 on land owned by the Chaptal family. It was adjacent to the area known as La Nouvelle Athènes, an authentic artists’ quarter at the foot of the butte Montmartre. It is an area that forms the northwest part of the Ninth Arrondissement, between the Rue de Châteaudun and the grand boulevards, to the east of the Gare de l’Est. It was still a fairly rural area, of which there were many in the Paris of that time. In those days, sheep and cows still grazed on the banks of the Seine. When Scheffer came to live in the area, the district was in full bloom. One out of three houses was inhabited by artists. Horace Vernet lived there, as did Fromentin, Gustave Moreau and Delacroix. Others followed. It was, as a writer on Scheffer said, “une sorte de république de l’art.”4 The July monarchy hardly changed Paris. True, it gave instructions to build city walls once again. The new walls, constructed between 1841 and 1845, had a total length of thirty-six kilometers and surrounded a number of adjoining municipalities such as Auteuil, Passy and Montmartre, which today form part of Paris. Consequently, the Louis-Philippe wall roughly corresponds to the contemporary boundary of Paris. The Right Bank was much more heavily populated than the Left Bank; five hundred thousand compared to two hundred thousand inhabitants. In total, then, around seven hundred thousand people lived there. This figure was to increase in a few years to more than a million. The social strata all had their own districts: the old aristocracy lived on the left bank in the Faubourg St. Germain, the new Napoleonic

Ary Scheffer and His Time

9

aristocracy on the right bank in the Faubourg St. Honoré with the upper middle class close by in the area of the Chaussée d’Antin. The lower middle class, manual workers, artisans, commerçants and others lived in the Marais, a district abandoned by the aristocracy, and in the Faubourg St. Denis. The Paris of Scheffer was the Paris before Hausmann, the prefect of Napoleon III, who was to modernize the city so completely. The city was primitive. It was still to a great extent a city of the Middle Ages, with narrow streets and no modern amenities. Gas light hardly existed. There was no running water. Water carriers, often from Auvergne, brought water to the different stories. Even in the royal palace, the Tuileries, there was no running water to each floor. Light and air could barely penetrate the houses. The city was dirty and unhealthy. The 1832 cholera epidemic ravaged it and claimed twenty thousand lives. The rich lived behind high walls and locked gates. They never ventured into the streets, but travelled in their coaches from one hôtel to the other. The streets were, as Stendhal once remarked, mainly used as sewers. When it rained, there were huge quantities of mud. The Place de la Concorde was a mud pool in winter and a desert in summer. Paris before Hausmann resembled the capital city of a developing country. But whatever Paris lacked, and whatever was wrong with it, one thing is certain: it was in every respect the heart of France. Almost all decisions, certainly the most important ones, were made in Paris. Paris was the undisputed center of government and politics, and it is to government and politics that we now must turn. ARY SCHEFFER’S FRANCE As we have already seen, Ary Scheffer witnessed many changes of regime. He arrived in France during the empire of Napoleon and began his career at the time of the Restoration. His heyday came under the constitutional monarchy of Louis-Philippe. But he also witnessed the short-lived Second Republic and died not long after Napoleon III, the nephew of Napoleon I, had established his Second Empire. All this points to one thing, namely, that since 1789, the French had been feverishly searching for a form of government that would suit them. This they did on two occasions. The first was between 1789 and 1814, when they rapidly went through the development from absolute

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monarchy to constitutional monarchy, from there to the republic and then, after a few years, back again to a form of monarchy, this time in the form of Napoleon’s empire. All these upheavals took place over a period of twenty-five years. Curiously, the whole process was to take place all over again, after the Hundred Days, but at a slower pace. On that second occasion the French took more than twice as long to complete the process—fiftyfive years, to be precise. Events ran as follows: first there was the Restoration from 1815 to 1830, in other words, a return to absolute monarchy; then from 1830 to 1848 the constitutional monarchy of Louis-Philippe; next, the country once again became a republic, the Second, from 1848 to 1852; and finally, there was the Second Empire from 1852 until 1870. After that, a republic was once again established that still remains, even though after 1870 it was exposed to doubts and attacks for many years, even for decades. These doubts were finally overcome and never resulted in violence, partly because at the last moment, General Boulanger recoiled from such measures. France has remained a republic since then because, as the saying goes, it is the system that least divides the French. All these changes of regime in less than half a century illustrate the great political and social tensions that existed in post-Napoleonic France. The differences between revolutionaries and reactionaries were huge; most of the liberals were positioned between the two. Louis XVIII, the brother of the beheaded Louis XVI, reigned in the same manner as his older brother and his predecessors of the Ancien Régime. Since 1815 there had been, it is true, a Chamber of Deputies, but only about one hundred thousand rich landowners had voting rights. The chamber was no more progressive than the king. On the contrary, it was, to use a well-known expression, “plus royaliste que le roi.” The next king, Charles X, the youngest brother of the beheaded Louis XVI and the restored Louis XVIII, was even more reactionary than his predecessors. His coronation in Reims was a demonstrative reminder of the Ancien Régime; his government seemed like a revival of it. The church and the aristocracy, those pillars of the Ancien Régime, were rehabilitated. Aristocrats were awarded compensation for their confiscated possessions, and the Catholic church regained much of its former power. In 1830, resistance to this tendency arose in the chamber, where, in the meantime, bankers and other representatives of the bourgeoisie had taken their seats. The king then dissolved the chamber and called

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new elections. However, the newly elected chamber proved to be equally opposed to the royal politics. Charles X then reacted on 26 July 1830 with the so-called Four Ordinances, also called the July Ordinances. Accordingly, the newly elected chamber was once again dissolved, rich citizens were deprived of their voting rights and censorship was imposed. Furthermore, new elections were once again called, this time on the basis of these new, restrictive conditions. The reaction to this semi–coup d’Etat was immediate; the uprising began the following day. In Paris barricades were raised. The army had only limited means at its disposal. Some of the troops deserted, others were driven back. Many were killed during the fighting—eighteen hundred rebels, as opposed to two hundred soldiers. Charles X, who didn’t want to lose his head at the guillotine like his oldest brother, abdicated and escaped to England. France was faced once more with a choice—republic or monarchy. It became a monarchy, but this time a constitutional one. The former hero of the American and French revolutions, General La Fayette, embraced the Duke of Orléans on the balcony of the town hall in Paris. The Chamber of Deputies offered him the throne on condition that he would faithfully administer the constitution of 1814. The duke had no objection to this. Philippe of Orléans, who from then on would be called LouisPhilippe I, originated from the house of Orléans, a branch of the Bourbons that reached back to Philippe of Orléans, the oldest brother of Louis XIV. The future king was the oldest son of Louis-Philippe of Orléans, cousin of Louis XVI, who had played such a strange role during the French Revolution. Even though he had been the richest landowner in France, he had wanted to be called “Citoyen Égalité,” or “Philippe Égalité” and even though he had been the king’s cousin, he had not only taken his seat in the Convention, but had also voted there for the death of Louis XVI. He himself, though, was shortly to lose his own head at the guillotine. His son, the later Louis-Philippe, like his father before him, belonged to the Jacobines and served in the republican armies. Later on, however, he got into trouble with the republic and went into exile. Still later, he was reconciled with the Bourbons and under Louis XVIII, he regained not only his title, but also his very considerable possessions. Louis-Philippe incarnated and symbolized the civic virtues of his regime. He was a good husband and father, and thus thoroughly lived up to his name of “Citizen King.” He was, in appearance and behavior,

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a real bourgeois. He wore dark suits—which, ever since, have remained the costume of the fashionable citizen—as well as a hat, and he always carried an umbrella. He was married to Marie-Amélie, the solemn daughter of the King of Naples, with whom he had eight children who all very properly went to the Lycée Henri IV. He liked to read the Times and was interested in everything English. Like his most important ministers, Thiers and Guizot, he saw in England, once contemptuously called by Napoleon a “nation of shop-keepers,” the best example of modern society: based on industry and free enterprise and focused on a gradual growth of prosperity and development. In this sense, he was a Whig, a conservative liberal. The renowned motto of his regime, “Enrichissez-vous” was, indeed, not as cynical as it sounds. The phrase is from the famous prime minister François Guizot who, in 1841, said to the people of his constituency: “Enrich yourself through your work and your savings.”5 Thus it was an incentive to those who were pressing for the vote to work so hard that one day they would earn enough to be entitled to vote. Louis-Philippe’s character was different from those of his predecessors. They had held firmly to the fleur-de-lis flag of the Bourbons. He accepted the tricolore of the Revolution. He called himself not “King of France,” but “King of the French.” His regime was thus more liberal than that of his predecessor, but in a constitutional sense differed little from it. There were certainly some important innovations: the sovereignty of the people was laid down, as was the separation of church and state, and the freedom of education and the press. Hereditary membership of the Chambre des Pairs, a sort of French House of Lords, was abolished—something of a head start over the English—and voting rights were extended. From then on, there were roughly two hundred and fifty thousand people with voting rights, as opposed to the previous number of one hundred thousand, still a small number for a country that had spawned the French Revolution. In any case, it was much smaller than in England, where after the Reform Bill of 1832, one in every twenty-five inhabitants had voting rights. In France the figure was a mere one in every one hundred and seventy.6 Only one in forty taxpayers enjoyed the vote. Passive voting rights were even more limited; there were only 56,000 men who earned enough to be eligible for election.7 The July monarchy was a compromise. It meant different things to different people. For the progressives, later to be called “le parti du mouvement,” it was just the beginning. They saw the revolution as a

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liberal one that had to be followed by a national and a social one. They had chosen Louis-Philippe even though he was a Bourbon. For the others, who would be called “le parti de l’ordre,” the July revolution was nothing of the sort—it was a reaction against the attempted coup d’Etat of Charles X. They had chosen Louis-Philippe precisely because he was a Bourbon. For them, 1830 was the completion of the French Revolution, the end rather than the beginning of a process.8 The reign of Louis-Philippe lasted for eighteen years, as long as Napoleon’s Second Empire, longer than the Restoration (which lasted for fifteen years), and much longer than the Second Republic, which held out for only four years. In this sense, it might be called a stable regime, but that would be a misrepresentation of the facts. The regime was and remained threatened by various political opponents. The two most important of these were the legitimist supporters of the Bourbons, who particularly depended on the church and the old aristocracy and who had many adherents in the countryside. The other group comprised the republicans, who were especially prevalent among city dwellers, particularly among intellectuals, professional people, journalists, students, employees, and the many others who didn’t recognize themselves in the system. We must therefore picture the regime as a system that was under continuous pressure and exposed to many dangers. The Duchess of Berry, the legitimist pretender, and the later Napoleon III, leader of the Bonapartistes, both attempted coups d’Etat with, however, little success. Much more dangerous and threatening were the social uprisings, for example that of 1832 by the Lyons textile workers, the “canuts.” This was violently suppressed. The army restored order, leaving six hundred of the workers dead. Uprisings and assaults occurred regularly. In 1831 the archbishop’s palace in Paris was plundered. In 1832 and 1834 barricades were raised. These uprisings were also savagely put down. All in all, it was an extremely violent period. As far as politics are concerned, the July monarchy can be divided into roughly two periods—the thirties and the forties. The thirties was a time that saw very many changes of government, while the forties, in contrast, proved to be a period of ministerial stability. Even though Louis-Philippe’s regime was not reactionary, as those of his predecessors had been, it was not particularly liberal either. The king had little sympathy for ministerial responsibility; only in the early years might the regime have been called liberal. Policies acquired a conservative character. The banker Casimir-Périer organized affairs in a somewhat

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liberal manner, but he died early in 1832. From then on the regime became inflexible and a period of instability began. There were ten cabinets over a period of eight years. After 1840 there was only one ministry left. This was officially under the chairmanship of Marshal Soult, but in practice it was led by Guizot, who thereby became the most important politician of the July monarchy. François Guizot was an historian. He had a strict Protestant upbringing in Geneva after his father was guillotined. In Paris he began as a tutor, but in 1812 he was appointed to the Sorbonne. He was a prominent and serious historian. His lectures at the Sorbonne appeared in the form of a large synopsis in six parts called Cours d’histoire moderne in which two sections were devoted to Europe and four to France. Politically, he belonged to the so-called doctrinaires, moderate liberals who in principle were in favor of total liberty. In practice, however, they wanted the introduction of this liberty to depend on time and circumstances. In the thirties, Guizot was appointed a minister on more than one occasion and an ambassador for some time. He came into his own in 1840 after Louis-Philippe had dissolved the cabinet of Adolphe Thiers, also a political historian. From 1840 to 1848 he managed French home and foreign affairs. As far as home affairs were concerned he was rather conservative; in foreign affairs he was extremely pacifistic, very much in the spirit of the king himself. Public opinion, on the other hand, which was still strongly under the influence of the nationalism of Napoleon’s glory years, had little sympathy with this attitude, a fact that added to the unpopularity of the regime. The liberals reproached him for his lack of support for the rebels in Italy and Poland. Louis-Philippe did support the Belgian rebels, but he was wise enough to refuse the crown that was offered to his eldest son, so Leopold of Saxe-Coburg became king of Belgium. Incidentally, Leopold was married to a daughter of Louis-Philippe. Ary Scheffer accompanied the French troops in Belgium as a painter-commentator. The French were fighting there against the Dutch and recaptured the citadel of Antwerp from them. Officially, Scheffer was a member of the état-major, but in fact he went with them mainly to sketch the hostilities. For someone of Dutch origins, this must have been a paradoxical situation, to say the least. Guizot’s government had a large majority in the chamber. The legal country, “le pays légal,” as it was known, consisted only of the very limited number of people who were entitled to vote, so the Chambre des Députés could hardly be called truly representative of the people.

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Moreover, more than one-third of the chamber was made up of civil servants who were dependent on the government in all kinds of ways. According to Tocqueville, the government strongly resembled a limited company, with the personal profit of the shareholders as its sole aim. This mentality would cause the regime to flounder. The ruling class lost faith in itself. Furthermore, a whole succession of financial scandals undermined its authority. The economic crises and the crop failures of 1846 worsened the situation and the mood in the country. Social misery was rife. The weakened position of the king, who was now almost seventy-five years old, was another contributory factor. The year 1847 saw the appearance of the Reform Movement, which carried on campaigns outside the chamber through banquets, a typically French mode of action. The activities were to be concluded with a huge banquet in Paris. The government forbade this, but the agitation continued anyway. The military guard then shot at the demonstrators—and the fat was in the fire. The barricades were raised that very night. The uprising was a fact, and thus the July monarchy foundered in the February revolution of 1848. SCHEFFER AND HIS TIME Today there is some discussion concerning the nature of the July monarchy. The classic characterization is that of a bourgeois capitalist regime. This is the traditional picture. We find it expounded in literature by the liberal Stendhal, as well as by the royalist Balzac. In politics, it is the view offered by the liberal Tocqueville, as well as by the socialist Karl Marx. According to this interpretation, the 1830 revolution completed the revolution of 1789 and finally brought the power of the aristocracy to an end in favor of the bourgeoisie. In historiography, too, it is usually depicted thus. Yet over the last few years different writers have portrayed events in a more nuanced manner, for example by demonstrating that the ruling élite (supporters of the House of Orléans) consisted mainly of conservative landowners and therefore could hardly be differentiated from the old aristocracy. The roles of banks, trade and industry were very limited during the July monarchy. Clearly, a dynamic bourgeoisie was lacking. Yet despite this, the France of Louis-Philippe differed in some respects from that of the Ancien Régime and the Restoration. An economic transformation had begun, although because of various factors (for example, the loss of overseas markets to England) it proceeded

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more slowly than elsewhere. Population growth also lagged behind that of England. The population of Britain increased by 100 percent between 1800 and 1850; that of France by a mere 30 percent. The French home market remained fragmented. Railways and waterways were only slowly being constructed. The road system was based on military priorities—the connection of Paris to the borders—and not on economic objectives. Industrial investments were very limited because holders of capital preferred to invest in the security of land rather than in the risks of industry. Yet changes occurred in all these areas. Thus it is possible to speak of the July monarchy as a transition period, but that would be a truism. All times are transition periods, some more so than others. The French Revolution, for example, had been just such a period; it bridged the transition from the Ancien Régime to political liberalism, although not without setbacks. The Third Republic, particularly the first phase of it (1870–1914), was also to be a transition period. It created modern France: the unitary state with compulsory military service, compulsory education, roads, railways, industry and national market. The period in between, 1815–1870, experienced different revolutionary breaks (1830 and 1848) and different regimes (the Restoration, the July monarchy, the Second Republic, the Second Empire) but, in fact, not much changed. In a political sense, we can talk of a hesitant and weak liberalism; in an economic and social sense, of a stagnant economy and a Malthusian society. No spectacular changes took place in other countries either during these years. In England there was a gradual but slow modernization of the economy. In the political sphere, democratization developed only very slowly after the Great Reform Bill of 1832. Not until the second Reform Bill of 1867 did further democratization occur. In Germany and Italy, ardent liberal and national movements arose, but these too were temporary and came to nothing. As the well-known historian A.J.P. Taylor remarked with reference to the events of 1848 in Germany, “German history reached its turning point—and failed to turn.”9 In a way, this is also true of Ary Scheffer’s France, the France between Napoleon and the Third Republic.

CHAPTER 2

The Paris of Émile Zola

The greatest French poet of the nineteenth century was, in the wellknown phrase of André Gide, “Victor Hugo, hélas!” One would not say so readily of Émile Zola that he was the greatest French novelist of the nineteenth century, not even with the added “alas!” After L’Assommoir of 1877, Zola enjoyed an unmistakable success. Certainly, it was partly a succès de scandale, but he also received a wider public acclaim. Zola was and is one of the best selling and most read French writers, in translation as well. But what was lacking was the succès d’estime. It is strange to think that the writer whose name is inextricably linked with the invention of the word “intellectual” found so little acknowledgement and regard precisely among the intellectuals. Yet it cannot be said that regard was completely lacking. For example, the same André Gide called Zola one of the greatest French novelists.1 Even if Zola’s place in literary history is debated, it is certain that he occupied an important place in the French cultural history of the nineteenth century and even in French history in general. There is no history of the Third Republic in which Zola’s name does not appear, something which cannot be said for any other French writer. Of course, this is primarily because of his political actions in the Dreyfus

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affair, and not because of his literary work. Yet this work is itself of interest, especially from the perspective of the history of culture. His books often deal with social problems and present a literary picture of the period concerned. His ideas are characteristic of the nineteenth century. His work, which was widely read, influenced a broad crosssection of the public both at home and abroad. In this essay, one aspect of this work will be discussed, namely, Zola’s Paris—the Paris of the Second Empire, which is described in the great series of novels, the Rougon-Macquart. It will deal with the enormous changes that occurred in Paris during those years—it was the heyday of Haussmann— as well as with the image of these changes Zola presents in his novels, and especially in L’Oeuvre, the novel in which the capital city plays such an important role. Before going into this, something should first be said about Zola and his life’s work, the Rougon-Macquart. ÉMILE ZOLA, 1840–1902 Émile Zola was born in Paris on 2 April 1840, the son of François Zola, an engineer from Venice. In 1843 the family moved to Aix-enProvence, where the father was commissioned to design a waterway that would become well known as the “canal Zola.” The father died early in 1847, and left the family in difficult financial circumstances. From 1855, the Zolas lived once again in Paris, where Émile attended the Lycée Saint-Louis. After failing his final examination, he gave up his studies and began the life of a jack-of-all-trades. He lived at various shabby addresses, mostly in mansardes, which—apart from their seedy aspect—had the advantage of commanding a good view of the city. He led a real vie de Bohême, visited many studios and was friendly with painters like Cézanne, Manet and Pissarro and with writers such as Taine and Littré. In the meantime, Zola had himself become a writer, first of poetry and short stories, then of reviews and literary criticism and finally and above all, of novels. In 1867 his first well-known book Thérèse Raquin appeared. In 1868 his great project began; the idea and design for a huge series of novels, the Rougon-Macquart. The first volume, La Fortune des Rougon, began to appear as a serial in 1870. L’Oeuvre is the fourteenth part of this series, which finally contained twenty volumes. Literature turned Zola into a well-known personality. He could live well from his pen. He became a knight and later an officer in the Legion of Honor, and was a candidate for the Académie Française. The

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Dreyfus affair, however, made him a very controversial figure. With his famous open letter to the President of the Republic, which appeared on 13 January 1898 in Clemenceau’s L’Aurore under the title “J’accuse,” the Dreyfus case was thrown open to the public and became “L’Affaire.” Zola was prosecuted and sentenced to one year in prison. To prevent this he went abroad for a while. He was expelled from the Legion of Honor and would never again be a candidate for the Académie Française, which was predominantly anti-dreyfusard. Maurice Barrès called him a “Vénétien déraciné.”2 But the dreyfusards won the case, and Zola became world-famous as a warrior for truth and justice, the great example of the engaged intellectual. He died shortly afterwards, in 1902, at the age of sixty-two. In 1908 his ashes were moved to the Panthéon. THE ROUGON-MACQUART Without a doubt, the Rougon-Macquart, Zola’s principal work, is a work of great ambition. In it, Zola wanted to describe the history and the development of a family. The interaction between heredity and environment is the central theme: “le jeu de la race modifiée par les milieux.”3 Zola wanted to work in a purely naturalistic way and adopt an exclusively physiological approach, so he studied books on biology and heredity in depth. We shall not go into that part of his work, but discuss another aspect of it, namely, the description of the Second Empire and, in particular, of Paris at that time. As Zola explained in his Différences entre Balzac et moi, it was not his intention in the Rougon-Macquart to sketch a picture of the society of the day. He was merely interested in one family from that period.4 Yet, of course, the Rougon-Macquart can also be read as a description of social and political phenomena. La Fortune des Rougon is, in a sense, a historical novel that describes the coup of Napoleon III and its consequences. Le Débâcle, about the defeat of the French armies at Sedan in the war of 1870, describes the end of the Emperor’s regime. La Terre outlines the lives of the farmers, and Germinal those of the workers. La Curée takes place in the financial circles of the Second Empire, while Son Excellence Eugène Rougon concerns the world of politics. Thus the series offers, at the same time, a kind of social history, a sketch of manners of the Second Empire. In this evocation of the Second Empire, Paris plays an important role. Of the twenty novels that make up the Rougon-Macquart, ten

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take place in the metropolis. In all these novels, the descriptions of the city are crucial. Le Ventre de Paris offers, for example, a detailed description of Les Halles. L’Argent does the same for the neighborhood of the stock exchange. Two novels pay particular attention to the description of Paris, Une Page d’Amour and L’Oeuvre. Une Page d’Amour is very deliberately constructed so that a lot of attention can be given to the description of Paris; according to some critics— including Flaubert—even too much attention.5 The book consists of five parts, each containing five chapters. The last chapter of each part presents a picture of Paris as seen from the Trocadéro. Twenty percent of the novel is thus devoted to this subject. As Kranowski has remarked, these descriptions are characterised by maritime metaphors, variations on the well-known theme of “a sea of roof-tops.” Words like sea, ocean, lake, river, wave and bank frequently appear.6 Thus it is a way of painting with words. Yet Zola’s ambition was still something else, something higher. He wanted, as he said, to make Paris a person, to bring the city to life. In the poor years of his youth he had lived in many attics. From these attics he saw Paris spread out below him. Gazing out of these attic windows, wrote Zola, Paris became for him a confidante, someone to whom one’s sadness and joy are entrusted: “Oh yes! already at the age of twenty I had dreamed of writing a novel in which Paris, with its ocean of roofs, would be a character, somewhat like the chorus in classical tragedies.”7 This idea recurs in L’Oeuvre, and it is possible to say that in this work Paris is indeed more than a series of pictures in words. The city is an interlocutor; it appears as a person. However, before seeing what picture Zola gives of Paris under the Second Empire, it is necessary to outline briefly the great changes that occurred in Paris during these same years. PARIS UNDER THE SECOND EMPIRE During the Second Empire the population of Paris increased sharply from about 1.3 million in 1852 to almost 2 million in 1870. In 1866 only one-third of Parisians were born in Paris; two-thirds of the population consisted of immigrants from outside Paris, attracted by the opportunity of work, social advancement or higher wages. During these years, Paris also underwent a huge physical transformation. Since the French Revolution of 1789 the city had, in fact, hardly changed. After the great works that were realized under the Second Empire, the city would remain essentially the same until the time of de Gaulle and

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Pompidou, a leap from the eighteenth to the twentieth century over a period of ten years. Napoleon III’s motives for radically reforming the city are not completely clear. As far as we know, they were of different kinds. Firstly, there was the prestige motive: to turn Paris into a modern world-city, the counterpart of London. Like London, where he had spent many years in exile, Paris should also become a true capital, a city that would be worthy of an Empire. Then, there was the law and order motive. Paris had always been a revolutionary city. Furthermore, Napoleon’s regime was threatened. Huge reconstructions would make it possible to bring artillery, and especially cavalry, into the city and, if necessary, to use them against rebellion and riots. There were also social and economic motives: the Second Empire was a time of aggressive liberalism and capitalism. Because of this, the city took on a new and important role. In the modern vision, the city was no longer merely—and even primarily—a collection of houses, a place to live in, but also and above all a center of business and traffic. Circulation was the heart of modern urbanization. Railway stations, market places and warehouses became the pivots of the city of the future.8 Furthermore, renovation of the city was necessary for reasons of space and health. Without the new tall houses of four and more stories, the city could never have housed the growing population. The new houses offered light and air and sometimes sanitation. Besides, renovation of the city was an important source of employment for workers and a means of enriching the bourgeoisie, whom Napoleon wanted to ally with his regime. Thus there were many advantages, but there was also the problem that the public debt of the city of Paris increased to astronomical proportions.9 The entire operation was set up by the government under the auspices of Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann, prefect of the the department of the Seine from 1853 to 1870 and the uncrowned king of Paris during these years. It was, however, implemented entirely by private enterprises. Even the road-building was parcelled out to private companies, although the state helped, of course, by compulsory dispossessions and legislation. As from 1 January 1860 the area of the city was virtually doubled. Many villages and small communities, such as Passy, Vaugirard, Batignolles, lost their status as villages and were incorporated into the city. The city grew from twelve to its present-day twenty arrondissements.10 In 1863—the year of the Salon des refusés, with which L’Oeuvre opens—Haussmann began his great reconstructions.

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Everywhere, demolitions and clearances were undertaken with gay abandon. The city resembled the aftermath of an earthquake. Its layout was totally changed. The basis for the new plan was the large cross that Saccard, a character from La Curée, sees from the Butte Montmartre: “Regarde là-bas, du côté des Halles, on a coupé Paris en quatre. . . . Oui, la grande croisée de Paris, comme ils disent.”11 That cross was formed by two large arteries, as the well-known metaphor has it. One—the west-east axle—linked the Place d’Etoile with the Place de la Nation via the Champs-Elysées, the Rue de Rivoli and the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. The other—the north-south axle— ran from the Gare du Nord to the Observatoire via the boulevards de Strasbourg, de Sébastopol, du Palais and Saint-Michel. Paris became a city of forthright, broad, straight roads which, according to the Goncourts, brought to mind “quelque Babylone américaine de l’avenir.”12 A number of “squares”—often actually round or polygonal—formed as many centers of radial roads: the Etoile, of course, with its twelve roads, but also the Place de la République, the Place de la Nation and the Place de l’Opéra. Many new buildings sprang up, stations such as the Gare du Nord and Les Halles, well-known from Le Ventre de Paris, close to the crossing of both main axles, but also exhibition areas, exchanges, schools and mairies, and so forth. Further, of course, there were large department stores, well-known from Au Bonheur des Dames, hospitals, prisons, theaters and the like. Moreover, there were the large parks, such as Montsouris, ButtesChaumont, and Parc Monceau. And there was the city under the city: sewers, gas and water supplies. The old Paris had disappeared, inspiring the melancholic lines from Baudelaire, Le vieux Paris n’est plus, la forme d’une ville Change plus vite, hélas! que le coeur d’un mortel. Old Paris no longer exists; alas!, the shape of a town changes more quickly than the heart of a mortal.13

The huge city renovation had, naturally, consequences in all areas— social, aesthetic, and the traffic situation. Opinion on this has always been divided, as much during the period itself as afterwards. There was an unexpected social consequence: the renovation led to a form of social segregation. In the old Paris, rich and poor had lived together.

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Then, there had been no better and worse areas, just bad and less bad houses (and bad stories!). In the new Paris, house rents in the center and in the new districts to the west rose to incredible heights. Because of this, the workers were driven to the outskirts, next to the suburbs. There were now two cities, “deux Paris”: one, the established and even rich Paris (center and west), and around that a periphery of poor arrondissements in the north, east and south (the tenth up to and including the fifteenth and the ninteenth and twentieth). The rich Paris became, as it were, encircled by the poor. Zola was closely involved in these events. When he was eighteen, in 1858, he returned to Paris. Initially, the Zola family lived at 63, Rue Monsieur-le-Prince, moved a year later to the Rue Saint-Jacques, and from there set up house in the Rue Saint-Victor. After 1861 Zola lived, alone or with his family, at numerous other addresses on the left bank, always in poor circumstances. From 1867 he lived in the Quartier des Batignolles, the new district on the right bank. He moved several times, but always within this area. Of course, he was also away from Paris from time to time. He did not witness, for example, the siege of 1870—he was in Marseilles at the time, and later in Bordeaux—just as he was not present at the bloody suppression of the Commune uprising in May 1871 during the “semaine sanglante.” Zola then left the city for the suburb of Bennecourt. Yet for most of the time he lived in Paris, the city he knew and admired and of which he presents a picture in the Rougon-Macquart and especially in L’Oeuvre. PARIS IN L’OEUVRE L’Oeuvre is, as previously mentioned, the fourteenth part of the Rougon-Macquart. The main characters are the painter Claude Lantier and the writer Pierre Sandoz. Claude Lantier is the son of Gervaise Macquart (from L’Assommoir) and grandson of Antoine Macquart, whose history is described in La Fortune des Rougon, the first volume of the series. We have already met Claude in Le Ventre de Paris, but apart from that there are hardly any links with the other volumes. L’Oeuvre is the novel in which the art world of Paris is painted on the basis of a dramatic contrast between the successful writer Sandoz and his childhood friend, the brilliant but ultimately failed painter Lantier. The novel, which ends with the suicide of Lantier, was to contain strong autobiographical elements, in which Zola, naturally, would himself become a model for the writer Sandoz. In the painter Lantier,

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it is thought that elements of Cézanne, Zola’s childhood friend, as well as Manet, are brought together, as are other painters Zola had known. The novel describes in detail their artistic ideas and ambitions, their activities and material circumstances. There are thus different possible readings of L’Oeuvre: an autobiographical story, a “roman à clef,” an artist’s novel and a novel of manners. Our only concern here is with L’Oeuvre as a novel about Paris. For this book is, according to Kranowski, the book in which Zola is most successful in his aspiration to make Paris itself the main character of a novel; to bring Paris to life.14 What is the Paris that Zola deals with in this book, and how did he come by his material? In short—how did he work? Let us begin with this last point. Zola prepared his work thoroughly beforehand. For L’Oeuvre he compiled different dossiers, which have been kept. In the Bibliothèque Nationale we find the Paris file with notes for Quai de Bourbon, Les quais, and La Cité, le coeur de Paris. Rue Vieille-du-Temple. Rue du Cherche-Midi. Montmartre. Le Pavillon de la Concorde. Paris qui s’allume.15 These notes are the result of various long walks Zola took along the Seine in April/May 1885 from the Ile Saint-Louis to the Pont des Saints-Pères (now called the Pont du Carrousel) and in different districts on the Left Bank and in Montmartre.16 The novel was written between 12 May 1885 and 22 February 1886 and appeared in serial form from December 1885 until March 1886. The first edition in book form appeared in 1886, but of course the novel dealt with another period. According to some critics, the chronology of the novel is unclear. The writer Ludovic Halévy reproached Zola that his chronology was difficult to come to grips with. The critic was wrong. In a letter to Halévy, Zola pointed out that the dates are quite easy to reconstruct. After all, a fixed date is the episode of the Salon des refusés, which is described in one of the first chapters. The Salon des refusés occurred in 1863. From this it can be concluded that the book begins in July 1862. The date of the ending can also be quite easily established. The son, Jacques-Louis, was born in February 1864 and died when he was twelve years old in 1876. The novel ends shortly thereafter, in the winter of 1876.17 Although thorough, Zola’s method of working is, historically speaking, rather surprising and not without dangers. Indeed, he uses his observations from his walks of 1885 as the basis for a book that begins in 1862 and ends in 1876. Taking into account that it was in these same years that Paris was altered so radically by Haussmann, the danger of anachronism lurks. His use of a map from 1860 is not sufficient to skirt round this danger.

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The critic Gustave Geffroy, in an article in La Justice on 12 May 1886, raised just that point. He spoke of anachronisms in a factual sense (with respect to dates and places) as well as in the sense of content. Zola is said to have paid no attention to the huge changes that had taken place since 1870.18 The first reproach, which Geffroy did not specify further, seems of little importance. Maybe a bridge that did not yet exist was named somewhere; the present day’s reader would not be worried by this. The second reproach—the lack of attention paid to the political and social changes—is more significant. In a sociohistorical sense, L’Oeuvre is not a realistic novel in spite of all the attention given to description and observation. The action of the novel takes place between 1862 and 1876, one of the most dramatic periods of modern French history. Between 1870 and 1876 only, the following events (to name but a few) occurred: the FrancoPrussian war, the fall of the Empire, the siege of Paris and the starvation, the Commune uprising and the establishment of the Republic. All this was enacted primarily, sometimes even exclusively, in Paris. Yet we read scarcely anything about it in L’Oeuvre. These artists seem to have lived in a vacuum. Between 1862 and 1870 the great transformation of Paris took place; the Salon des refusés occurred chronologically at more or less the same time as Haussmann’s reconstructions. We read little about this either. There are some indications as to these events. New districts are named. There is talk of building activities and the nouveaux riches. There is Irma Bécot, typical of the grande cocotte of this period, who realizes her dream, a house in the Avenue de Villiers.19 Dinner table talk concerns “the great works that upset Paris . . . the prices of the plots of land.”20 This is really not a great deal, and there is certainly not a social history of Paris to be found here. As far as these topics are concerned, some other volumes are more interesting: La Curée, for example, about land speculation; Le Ventre de Paris about Les Halles, or Au Bonheur des Dames on the subject of the grands magasins. In spite of the considerable timespan that the story encompasses— 15 years—there is no mention of developments and changes in a social sense. The time perspective is individual. The chronology comes straight from events in the domain of personal life: the development of Lantier’s marriage, Sandoz’s career, the birth and growth of Lantier’s child, and so forth. In fact, it seems here as if Zola had something of a problem; there is a conflict between the general plan of a family history and the subtitle, Histoire naturelle et sociale d’une famille

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sous le Second Empire, which limits this history to the Second Empire. After all, only half of L’Oeuvre takes place under the Second Empire. It appears as though Zola needed, on the one hand, the development of a generation—and thus a definite timespan—to illustrate his ideas about heredity. On the other hand, if he had wanted to live up to his subtitle, he had only eighteen years at his disposal, 1852–1870. It appears as though he doesn’t resolve this in L’Oeuvre, or, more aptly, he wasn’t too bothered about it. L’Oeuvre is primarily a work about an individual, Claude Lantier, and his artistic splendeur et misère, a life history placed in the artistic environment of, first and foremost, the Second Empire, and in which the city of Paris is present in the background. Nevertheless it is possible to speak of a picture of Paris in L’Oeuvre. The action of the novel takes place almost entirely in Paris, apart from two episodes in Bennecourt. The latter take up about thirty pages out of a total of 350 pages, thus not even ten percent. For the rest, the action is situated in Paris and quite detailed attention is paid to a description of the city. In total, about twenty-five pages of the book are devoted to this. That is quite something, but even so, it is only seven percent of the text and thus very much less than in Une Page d’Amour. We also find in L’Oeuvre all sorts of general characterizations of “the Paris of Zola” that is dealt with in different studies.21 The city is called “fantastique”22 but also “tragique”23 and even “maudit.”24 With awe “la vie énorme de Paris”25 and the “activité géante”26 of the city are pointed out. But there is also the theme of anxiety: “Paris trop étroit.”27 And there is the unhealthiness of the city; the child cannot endure the city, and dies. These are well-known, somewhat romantic themes in the subject of the “city” and there is, in this respect, a lot about Paris to be found in the Rougon-Macquart. But which Paris is actually being dealt with? After all, there is more than one Paris. The Paris of the poor is not the same as that of the rich, the Paris of the middle classes is not that of the artists, and the Paris of the Champs Elysées is not that of the tenements of Belleville and Ménilmontant. In a social sense we can say that the action of the book takes place in the world of artists. Thus it is not about the Paris of the workers, of the market traders, of the financiers, of the politicians, as is the case in other volumes. With the artists we are, from a social perspective, in a relatively comfortable world. To be sure, it is not the world of riches, but neither is it the world of misère. La vie de Bohême is comparatively carefree. However, we can also study the Paris of L’Oeuvre

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in a purely topographical sense. We read, for example, that Claude Lantier first lives on the “Ile” and later moves to the Batignolles district. We also find descriptions of the rambles the artists went on through the city. Their favorite walk is from the Invalides to the Seine, from the Quai d’Orsay up to the Concorde, then over the Seine to the Madeleine, via the Rue Tronchet to the Place du Havre, then through the Rue d’Amsterdam to the Place de Clichy, to end finally in Café Baudequin on the Boulevard des Batignolles.28 Yet we can press the analysis further. It is possible, by counting all the place indications, to arrive at a topographical reconstruction of the Paris of L’Oeuvre. We then find three kinds of place indications: mentions of streets, bridges, squares and the like; names of buildings such as the Gare de Lyon, the École des Beaux Arts, the Louvre, and names of districts and quarters such as Batignolles, Montmartre, and the Quartier Latin. The first category is by far the most mentioned. There are in total 111 different names of streets, squares, and so forth, mentioned in the book, to which a total of 228 references are made. The Quai de Bourbon, the Rue Tourlaque and the addresses of Claude Lantier are the most frequently named streets. The second category (buildings and the like) comprises 124 indications of a total of 45 different buildings, parks and other objects. The third category (districts and quarters) occurs least frequently. There are 43 such place indications, in which a total of nine districts or quarters are mentioned. With twenty-five mentions, the references to the Ile de la Cité and Montmartre make up more than half of these. When we count everything up, we see that a total of 165 different place indications appear, and that a place indication is given 395 times, in one way or another (that is, over a total of 350 pages, more than once per page). On the basis of these indications, it is possible to establish in which part of Paris and in which arrondissements the action of the book takes place, and thus to reconstruct the topography of L’Oeuvre by arrondissement. The greatest number of references relate to the fourth (83), followed by the first (67), the eighth (49), the sixth (44) and the eighteenth (41). Because in this way many double counts appear (“the Café Baudequin, on the Boulevard des Batignolles” and so forth) this count is not accurate. We can make this procedure somewhat more precise by eliminating these double counts and limiting ourselves to the first category, street names, the most exact category and the one that appears most frequently. The result of this is pictured in Figure 2.1. Here we see that the first impression is confirmed. The first and the fourth arrondissements clearly stand out again, followed by the sixth,

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Figure 2.1 Map Showing the Frequency of Typographical Indications of Category 1 (streets, bridges, etc.), Collected by Arrondissement

eighth and eighteenth. Zola’s Paris is the Paris of the Right Bank; it follows the axle Champs Elysées—Rue de Rivoli. In other words, it is the Paris of the rich. The Paris of the poor, which (as we saw earlier) surrounds it, plays no role. The eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth and the nineteenth and twentieth arrondissements don’t appear in L’Oeuvre. L’Oeuvre holds a special place in the Rougon-Macquart. It is a novel with a strong autobiographical strain, a novel “in which my memories and my heart have overflowed.”29 Zola’s theory of heredity is exemplified by the fate of Claude Lantier: the son of Gervaise Macquart is doomed to fail. But for the rest, it is a novel about artists, about artistic ideals and problems of creativity. It is not a social novel, and it is only possible to speak of realism in a limited sense. Social transformations and political events play no role. The timespan is individual rather than social. Claude Lantier’s history makes it necessary to deal with a period of fifteen years. The result of this is that the time span of the Second Empire is abandoned. But this happens in a sneaky way, so to speak. A blanket of silence covers the events of 1870. Because the action of the book takes place in an isolated world of artists, one is not really struck by this.

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Paris in L’Oeuvre is present in different ways: as decor, but also as a witness and as an accomplice; as an object of admiration and a source of artistic inspiration; as the center of life, action and career, but also as a place of restlessness, nervousness and downfall. The Paris of L’Oeuvre is a Paris of artists and, in spite of the aspect of the vie de Bohême, it is financially a rather carefree and aisé Paris. The problems are those of the spirit and are, in a certain sense, luxury problems. The Paris of L’Oeuvre is the Paris of the “better areas,” a new social reality that originated under the Second Empire and that is described in the Rougon-Macquart.

CHAPTER 3

Pierre de Coubertin: Sport and Ideology in the Third Republic, 1870–1914

One of the paradoxes of the history of sport is that the greatest sports events of our time have originated in one of the less sporting nations. For it is England and Germany that are, apart from the legendary Scandinavian athletes, by tradition and achievement the most important sporting nations in Europe. Nevertheless, Europe’s most famous sporting events, the Champions League, formerly known as the European Cup, the Tour de France and the Olympic Games are all French “inventions.” The European Cup and the Tour de France can be regarded as strokes of genius by profit-seeking directors of sports magazines like L’Équipe and L’Auto. But for the Olympic Games such a motive is absent. Moreover, an explanation for the birth of the Olympic Games is somewhat paradoxical, as the project of Pierre de Coubertin did not arise as much from pride over French sporting achievements as from his annoyance about the lack thereof. SPORT IN FRANCE Although the word originated in France, “sport” in the modern sense of the word—an organized trial of strength with a record or

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championship as the goal—is in France only a late, imported phenomenon. Until the end of the nineteenth century most Frenchmen would have agreed with Oscar Wilde, who said that his favorite form of outdoor sports was playing dominoes on the terrace of a café. Of course various forms of physical education (for example mountain climbing) existed, and there were regional ball games and trials of strength and skill at fairs, but none of this can really be called sport. The roots of modern sport lie not in France, but in England and Germany. One can distinguish typical English and German types of sport and indicate these symbolically by the concept “Rugby School” and “Turnvater Jahn.” Considerable differences exist between the German and English “models.” German sport (primarily gymnastics) originated in the organization of physical exercises that arose during the Napoleonic wars. These so-called “Turnvereine” of “Vater Jahn” had a strong nationalistic element. English sports, on the other hand, came into being in the elite atmosphere of illustrious public schools like Eton and Rugby. It was not so much physical exercise that was of central importance, but the elements of game and competition. Their background lies more in the imperial than in the romantic-nationalistic realm of ideas. In the growth of modern sport in France, both of these types were influential. Following the French defeat in the war with Prussia in 1870, the new leaders made it their task to reinstate France to its former grandeur. It would again have to successfully rival the great powers, Germany and Britain. Naturally much was thought and written about the causes of the French defeat and the German and British positions of strength. A famous statement in this context was that the Battle of Sedan—France’s biggest defeat in the 1870 war—had been won by the Prussian educator. Conversely, others willingly recalled Wellington’s remark that the Battle of Waterloo had been won on the playing fields of Eton. The contrast between the English and the German orientation can be found in most writers of the time. In his La Réforme intellectuelle et morale de la France of 1871, Ernest Renan emphasized the significance of Prussian science and technology.1 Taine in 1872 published his Notes sur l’Angleterre, in which he highly recommended the English elitist society and its roots in English upbringing.2 The German views on sports initially best matched the revenge ideas in France in the years after 1870. Before long, gymnastic and shooting clubs came into being. Their strikingly patriotic nature is apparent in

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names like “La Française,” “La Jeunesse Patriote” and so forth. Because of their patriotic appeal the clubs found considerable support among circles of immigrants from Alsace-Lorraine. The same ideas existed under the Republican leaders, who wanted to create a new, patriotic and republican France through education. Premilitary and basic gymnastics were to have a role in this. Physical education in French schools, once stimulated by Robespierre but later practically forgotten, thus received a new élan. Great ministers of education and reformers like Paul Bert and Jules Ferry called physical exercise a patriotic duty and dreamed of a unity of teachers, officers and sportsmen that would restore France to its former greatness. The German conception of sport and gymnastics thus quickly became the official model, while the English ideas on sport remained insignificant. They were even looked upon with some suspicion. The physical nature and the antiutilitarian character of the English way of practicing sports were, to begin with, unfamiliar to the serious and strongly competitive Napoleonic education system. But also the whole atmosphere of sportsmanship, fair play, amateurism and so forth spoke of an aristocratic mentality little appreciated in French Republican circles. The English forms of sport therefore found supporters almost solely in upper-class circles, as is evident from the expensive neighborhoods where sports clubs like the Racing Club de Paris and others were located.3 PIERRE DE COUBERTIN Pierre de Coubertin was a very clear exponent of those circles. The distinctiveness of his person lies not so much in his ideas, which for the most part were those of his environment, as in the energy with which he pursued their realization. For this reason the success of the Olympic Games is mainly considered to be the personal success of Coubertin. This, however, is only partially true. The Olympic Games— after Coubertin’s call for them during a congress he organized in the Parisian Sorbonne in 1894—were held in Athens in 1896 for the first time. They were initially not a success because public opinion was not greatly interested. Moreover the set-up was quite modest. The programme mainly concentrated on athletics, gymnastics, fencing, shooting, rowing, swimming and cycling. The number of contestants in 1896 was 285, from thirteen countries. Four years later in Paris there were more than a thousand contestants from twenty countries, while in the last games prior to the First World War in London and

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in Stockholm, the number had grown to between 2,000 and 2,500, from around twenty-five countries. The breakthrough was to come only after the First World War, and the great success after the Second. It could be asked, however, to what extent the aristocratic and internationalist Coubertin would have recognized himself in the nationalistic and rather vulgar pursuit of records of the modern mass games. Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who was born in 1868 in Paris, came from a wealthy catholic and royalist family. He was aligned to many great noble lineages. His aristocratic descent can be clearly recognized in Coubertin’s world of thought, but he did not feel at home in the frustrated group of nobles that, filled with repugnance, had turned their back on society and passed their days in idleness, dreaming of a restoration that would never be. He displayed instead an affinity with social catholicism and the thought of other aristocrats like de Mun, de La Tour du Pin, and later Lyautey. They were moved by the needs of the working classes and exhibited a somewhat paternalistic social affection that resulted from a feeling of noblesse oblige. Thus it was characteristic of Coubertin that he did not pursue the classic career of the military academy of Saint-Cyr, but chose a modern study at the École des Sciences Politiques in Paris. Coubertin had read Thomas Hughes’ famous book about Rugby, Tom Brown’s School Days, at school in a French translation, and read it again at a later age with more attention.4 He was also much impressed by Taine’s Notes sur l’Angleterre, and therefore he travelled to England to study the English educational system, which he considered to be the basis of Britain’s greatness. The leading example was, of course, Rugby School. Its Master, Dr. Arnold, was said to be the theoretician of the education of the English gentleman. Coubertin particularly appreciated English education because it combined democratic ideals with the conviction of a natural inequality among people. Such an antiegalitarian view was highly characteristic of the fin de siècle. It was not only to be found in Dr. Arnold, but also in Taine and his ideas on inequality, Nietzsche’s Übermensch and in the culte du moi of the then-famous French writer Maurice Barrès, who was Coubertin’s contemporary. The principle of elitism was also the most important ideological component of Coubertin’s sporting ideals, and a typical social-darwinistic conception of struggle and selection is evident from his views on the importance of records and the craving for achievement. This is not to say that there are no contradictions among his beliefs, since on the other hand he stressed amateurism and dis-

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interested participation. Aristocracies by birth and by merit apparently contended for mastery.5 The cultivation of the elite was, of course, not an end in itself, but also had a patriotic significance. In this respect too the English example imposed itself, since the new French colonial empire needed, as did the British Empire, a well-schooled and self-conscious ruling elite. Seen in this way, it is not without symbolic significance that the house of Coubertin’s place of birth in the Rue Oudinot was located exactly opposite the entrance of the Ministry of the Colonies. In a way, the colonies and the sports fields fulfilled the same function. They both provided a training ground for action, initiative, and energy, and offered a chance of escape from modern society. The practice of sports was indeed a form of escapism, as was a colonial career. It was a flight from the industrializing society, which according to Coubertin was mainly threatened by easy-goingness, specialization and ideals of equality. His efforts to promote sport resulted from a concern about this situation and can be considered an attempt to put French youth back on the right track. They were thus a form of patriotism. Coubertin was surely not a nationalist pur sang. On the contrary, he had the internationalistic tendency of his environment and collided several times with passionate nationalists like Pascal Grousset and his National League for Physical Education, which was also backed by Clemenceau, as well as with the organization of sports in school directed toward military training. Still Coubertin does in a way adhere to a form of nationalism, namely that typical fin de siècle nationalism that was in France so strongly mixed with feelings of decadence. This nationalism is not characterized by proclaiming a nation’s greatness, but by the impetus—coming after a sad reflexion on France’s decline— to restore its past glory. SPORT AND SOCIETY Before the First World War, sports in France had never become a mass movement. They took place almost exclusively at colleges and universities among a top layer of around five percent of the population. This social restriction was not only the result of the aristocratic associations that promoted such activities as horseback riding and fencing, but also the high costs of a horse or an automobile. The most democratic and most “French” instrument of sport, therefore, was the bicycle, although initially it also was not cheap. Another factor, of

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course, was that workers had very little leisure time because of long working hours and the lack of time off. No wonder then that active participation in sports remained a very limited affair. The same was true for passive recreation, up to a certain point. That sports were promoted by cunning entrepreneurs to keep the workers happy and undeveloped, as has sometimes been remarked, could certainly not yet be perceived in those early years. The only really popular spectator sport was boxing, especially after the successes of the great idol Georges Carpentier who, with the pilot Louis Blériot, were the first real modern French sporting heroes. That the workers had not yet begun to actively participate in sports can thus be understood fairly easily. Yet the relatively quick rise in the popularity of sports among the top layers of society is less easy to explain. It should probably be seen as a form of escapism. It was one of the ways in which, in times of relative stability, the excess energy of an unemployed rich upper-class youth could unwind. The American historian Eugen Weber has mentioned in this regard that the aging of the population—a result of better medical facilities in combination with declining opportunities and economic stagnation, resulting in low prices—provided fewer incentives for wealthy youths to actively search for a career in society.6 One can also point to the spread of higher education in the years following 1900, which resulted in the youth becoming a social group of its own with its own value system, in which sports played an important role. That within these limits one can talk of a certain triumph of sport, however, is not only attributable to social and economic but also to political factors. When after 1905 and especially after 1911 the threat of war manifested itself more and more clearly, the military significance of sports also began to become apparent. After all, on the one hand, the practice of sports could be a good preparation for action in wartime, and on the other hand one could also contemplate war as a form of sport, but then for real. In surveys of the youth, held with increasing frequency in the years after 1911, such noises could be regularly heard. A new youth, so one was told, was spirited, healthy, patriotic, energetic and ready to deal with future dangers. It was also argued in many writings that sports above all had accomplished these wholesome developments. Sport had fostered patriotism and self-confidence, team spirit and a sense of sacrifice, cool-headedness and endurance, solidarity and discipline—in short, a complete litany of virtues and qualities that could also be of importance in times of war.7 Many contributors went even further: they glorified sport not just because it taught these

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military values, but also because it kept the youth in bellicose spirits. In the struggle for life, that was seen as the condition for victory and even survival. This does not mean that Coubertin betrayed his pacifist ideals to such an extent that he himself became a propagandist for war and militarism. But in his Essais de psychologie sportive of 1913 it does appear that he was neither deaf to the opinions of the time nor blind to the significance that sport could have in this respect. It is a remarkable development that in these years both orientations seen in French sports after 1870, the German and the English, came to a kind of synthesis. The patriotic and the elite ideals were combined in the new nationalism. It is not less remarkable that the hour of triumph for the sporting ideals of Coubertin came only when propaganda for sports was almost completely absorbed within a bellicose and militaristic atmosphere.

CHAPTER 4

Commotion at the Sorbonne: The Debate on the French University, 1910–1914

Even now, more than thirty years later, we all remember the student movements of the 1960s and particularly the crisis at the university and elsewhere in Paris, known as “the events of 1968.” Much less well known is the fact that more than half a century earlier there had also been a crisis at the Paris university, albeit of a more limited scope and nature. In the summer of 1910 a series of articles was published in the weekly journal L’Opinion that contained severe criticisms of the University of Paris, better known as the Sorbonne. These articles were signed by Agathon, which apparently was a pseudonym, as Agathon was the name of a young and combative pupil of Socrates. The secrecy of the authorship was kept for quite a long time and since the author appeared to be very well informed, he was at first suspected of being a professor. Meanwhile the articles provoked extensive and animated discussions. Agathon obtained support from various directions, especially from the students, while on the other hand celebrities like the historians Aulard and Lavisse came to the defense of the Sorbonne. The famous critic Émile Faguet, who at first had been suspected of being the author, also came to the rescue. The rector of the

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Sorbonne responded to the criticisms on the occasion of the opening of the academic year, and they were also discussed in the French Chamber. The publication in 1911 of both the articles and the reactions to them in a book with the title L’Esprit de la Nouvelle Sorbonne further stimulated the discussion.1 The French Upper House, the Senate, even set up a Committee to investigate the complaints. In the meantime the mystery of the pseudonym had been solved: not one but two writers, Henri Massis and Alfred de Tarde, were hiding behind the name of Agathon. The latter was a young lawyer who later— again in collaboration with Massis—was to publish a similar piece, an inquiry among the youth, called Les jeunes gens d’aujourd’hui.2 Henri Massis was a student of literature who had already published a novel. Later in life he was to play an active role in the extreme right wing of French political and literary life. This attack on the university did not come out of the blue. Many of the ideas it ventilated had been formulated earlier. In 1906–1907, the famous poet and essayist Charles Péguy had made a serious attack on the Sorbonne, while the historian Ferdinand Lot had criticized higher education in the Cahiers de la Quinzaine, of which Péguy was the editor.3 As an antidote to the Sorbonne education, the extreme rightist, monarchistic movement of the Action Française had established a scholarly institute of its own in Paris. Thus the attack by Agathon linked on to an already existing tradition, but the discussion became more intense and more wide-ranging because of it. The press was divided in its opinion on the attack on the Sorbonne, but influential journals like Le Temps and Le Journal des Débats supported Agathon. One of the severest attacks in this series, René Benjamin’s La Farce de la Sorbonne, was published in 1911.4 The title of this book is clear enough, as is the motto borrowed from Victor Hugo: “Cet asinarium de Paris” (That donkey-shed of Paris). As the movement progressed it was also rapidly watered down. The Académie Française promoted the foundation of a League for the French Civilization, to which Massis and Tarde were also invited. Although its official aim was the defence of the French language and culture, the League rapidly became an extreme rightist movement that was closely affiliated with the Action Française. In 1912–1913 the attention shifted from typical university problems to the general youth problem. This broadening of the field was not illogical. In fact, the attack on the Sorbonne was aimed not only at the educational system, it was also directed to what was beyond it: French science and society.

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FRENCH EDUCATION AND ITS CRITICS The standards of university education in France had greatly deteriorated during the nineteenth century. Following the abolishment of the twenty-two existing but very run-down universities by the French Revolution, higher education was entrusted to independent faculties that provided a kind of mixture of higher and secondary education.5 The conditions in these faculties were distressingly poor, both qualitatively and quantitatively. During the Second Empire attempts were made to improve the situation, for example by the establishment of the École Pratique des Hautes Etudes where, by means of practical exercises, seminars, and so forth, a new type of academic education was practiced. But the major impulse toward innovation did not come until after the Franco-German war of 1870. The defeated French began to see in Germany a great example for education and science. Surprisingly, imitation of and orientation toward the arch-enemy thus became a patriotic obligation.6 During the nineties a powerful wave of reformation and modernization was sweeping through the education system. The faculties were united into universities, secondary education was modified and various types of the baccalauréat (final school examination) were created. The famous École Normale Supérieure, officially a training college for teachers but in actual practice a very selective institution of higher education, became part of the Sorbonne. There were also many changes in content. The new spirit was one of a strictly scientific approach. The literary and the newly expanding social sciences had to be grafted onto the model of the true, that is, the natural sciences. Classrooms for French literature were rebaptized with blissful satisfaction as “laboratories for French philology.” Germany was also used as the example for the study of history. Charles Seignobos, director of the National Archives, and the Sorbonne professor of history Charles-Victor Langlois were the French celebrities at that time. Together they published the bible of the study of positivistic history, the Introduction aux études historiques, in 1898.7 Others who deserve to be mentioned are Gustave Lanson, for the study of literature, and of course Emile Durkheim, the founder of sociology. It is not surprising that only some facets of the new “scientific” approach were received with enthusiasm by the students. Methodology was the device but, unfortunately, in practice this often meant simply bibliography. Many letters from readers contained complaints about this preference for dictating the titles of books. The director

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of the “Literary Laboratory,” Lanson, who was able to practice this activity for two hours at a stretch, probably bore the palm. In the protests against these extreme forms of “scientification,” another, rather modern tendency can be noticed, namely resistance against the encroachment of specialization, which was beginning ever earlier. There is a striking similarity between this complaint about the exclusive and altogether much too early preparation for a profession and the reproach from the 1960s about university education leading toward a form of professional deformation. Education, so run the complaint, was no longer a harmonic unity; it had been split up and was incoherent. What was missing were general disciplines like philosophy, rhetoric and history. The heart of the matter was that education was considered too utilitaristic and only inspired by considerations of benefit and profit, not education or cultivation. Similar thoughts were also voiced in the criticism of scientific method. CRITICIZING SCIENCE The attacks on the Sorbonne were directed at a certain type of education, its dullness, dryness and aridity, at certain professors in particular and the faculty of literature as a whole. But behind this almost inevitable kind of criticism a much more fundamental type of critique was hidden, namely criticism of the dominant attitude toward science. This type of criticism was expressed by ridiculing exaggerated scientific attitudes, the mania for index cards and card systems, methodology and bibliography and terms like “workers of science” and “laboratory of literary studies.” These terms were clearly supposed to refer to the natural sciences and suggested that the other sciences had to direct themselves toward them. In this process an important role was awarded to history. History would provide the material for philology, sociology and philosophy and would represent for these studies the equivalent of what the laboratory was—and is—for physics. As a result of this, many a discipline was replaced by its history: literature became the history of literature, philosophy became the history of philosophy, and so forth. In return, historians also played their new role with great energy. Following up on their scientific passions, they abandoned themselves wholeheartedly to source publications and detail studies, showing a virginal shyness at every attempt at good writing, which was considered to be a literary excess. According to Faguet, the specter of Michelet was terrorizing their spirits.8 Sociology was the

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other dominating power, second only to history. Durkheim and his “sociology of totems” were greatly respected, even though the students did occasionally make fun of them. Also, social prospects for sociologists were not bad. “No sooner is one a doctor than one becomes a professor,” it was said. Whenever there was no chair available, it was just a matter of creating one. Present-day sociologists will probably be surprised to read this. Criticism of the academic practice was not only directed towards its excesses, but was concerned with the fundamentals and the significance of science proper. The many rather inconsiderate attacks on science did not happen unexpectedly. On the contrary, they were part of a movement that already existed. Worship of science and belief in its unlimited possibilities for the future had been characteristic of the ideology of the founders of the Third Republic. Taine and Renan had been the prophets of the so-called scientism, the unlimited belief in reason and science which is so clearly voiced in the title of Renan’s book L’Avenir de la science.9 At the Sorbonne this belief was still very much alive. It was rationalistic and “scientistic” and according to its opponents it was preaching a kind of vulgar materialism. By stating that intelligence is a soft matter, which lives at a temperature of 39 degrees Celsius, a biologist like Dantec did indeed provide certain grounds for this reproach. Already toward the end of the nineteenth century a movement had developed that adopted a critical attitude towards the possibilities of science and expressed it in various ways. In the literary field Paul Bourget, Maurice Barrès and Fernand Brunetière should be mentioned. In 1889 Bourget published his novel Le Disciple, in which the evil consequences of rationalism were depicted in a gloomy manner. The novel became a best-seller and Bourget remained a popular writer for a considerable time. Maurice Barrès’ work was even more successful. In his novel Les Déracinés—dedicated to Bourget—he also severely attacked modern education and the glorification of science, which had caused the neglect of more profound aspects of human life. Around the turn of the century Barrès attracted a lot of attention with his Roman de l’énergie nationale, of which Les Déracinés was the first volume, and according to several witnesses from those and later days, he had a great influence on the youth of the period. Whereas Barrès and Bourget mainly dealt with a certain “sensibilité,” a spiritual climate, Fernand Brunetière criticized the entire way of thinking. He proclaimed nothing less than the bankruptcy of science and argued

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in a large series of papers that the positive sciences were unable to solve the truly important questions of life. More important than all this, however, was the work of Henri Bergson. Whereas other writers had put limits on the possibilities of scientific research or had criticized exaggerated forms of “scientism,” Bergson did much more: he offered an alternative. Against determinism he placed free will, and against reason and intellect—or rather over them—he placed intuition as the highest form of knowing. Bergsonism was not so much antiintellectualism or antirationalism, it was rather a kind of suprarationalism that transcended these contradictions. The road towards official recognition was very difficult, as the Sorbonne considered him a dangerous antagonist (in 1911 it would accuse him of being responsible for a large part of the crisis). In the meantime Bergson had already been accorded another and even more important mark of honor. In 1900 he became professor at the Collège de France, France’s most prestigious institute of higher education, where his Friday lectures were to become one of the major spiritual and social events of that time. The presence of elegant ladies turned the hall into one of the finest places in Paris, and some of them even participated in the preceding lecture—or ordered their coachmen to do so—in order to make sure of a seat for Bergson’s presentation. Not only elegant ladies but also a large group of youthful intellectuals faithfully and enthusiastically followed Bergson’s classes, which they experienced as a form of spiritual liberation. Many of these young people were to become writers and publicists in the near future. One of the best known was Charles Péguy, who had already become a fierce fighter against the Sorbonne and its teaching ideals during the years 1906–1907, thus long before Agathon. For him the Sorbonne represented the symbol of a philosophy of life, a glorification of profit and intellect, which he considered to be the ultimate disease of his time and the cause of the decline of true culture. His biweekly Cahiers de la Quinzaine were his main weapon in the battle against the Sorbonne and against what he called the “intellectual party.” Such criticism, however, goes beyond the debate on science and its limits, as it is based on a more general criticism of society. CRITICIZING SOCIETY The question at the center of the Agathon considerations was whether the Sorbonne’s educational system suited the characteristics of the French people. It is obvious where this question came from, as

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the new education system and the new science were inspired by the German model. Thus it is not surprising that the university was seen as a bastion of German influence, and it is even less surprising that resistance against it was building up in those days of resurging nationalism. But criticism of the nonnational character of the university involved more than just a reproach of an increasing Germanization of science. In the Dreyfus era the Sorbonne had become the symbol of the leftist and antimilitaristic forces. This is logical, since the university is the temple of reason and intellect, not blind, nationalistic passion. The atmosphere at the Sorbonne was characterized by an inclination toward cosmopolitanism, internationalism and pacifism, which produced the complaint that the Sorbonne had become a bastion of leftist politics. Massis blamed the professors for claiming not only the monopoly of science, but also of truth and justice during the Dreyfus affair. Instead of representing an independent institution, the university had thus been degraded to becoming a tool in the hands of leftist, anticlerical, radical politics. It should be remarked that some of these critics, like Massis and Lasserre, belonged to the extreme right wing of French politics. What we are seeing here, however, is not really a political but an ethical conflict, that is to say, a debate about what is important in life. In essence the protest movement was arguing that it is not reason and intellect that constitute the highest values in life, but life and will. This could already be noticed from Péguy’s resistance against excessive, life-suffocating historization, as well as from a similar warning against paralyzing historicism by a peaceful scientist, the philosopher Frédéric Rauh.10 It is also noticeable from the protests against the incorporation of the École Normale Supérieure into the Sorbonne, which was considered a false egalitarianism by equalizing an élite that would become indispensable in the future. These signals are in fact not disconnected from the international political context. The increasingly deteriorating international situation had already in 1905—the year of the first Morocco crisis—resulted in a reconsideration of the future of international relations. From this year onward, in limited circles, it is possible to notice the ever-growing notion of living in a “pre-war” period. The second Morocco crisis of 1911 stimulated and diffused these feelings more widely. It certainly is no coincidence that shortly thereafter the interest in the youth was expressed in various inquiries like the second one by Agathon. The emphasis on the national identity—as is evident from Agathon’s query, “Is this education system suitable for our people?”—also formed part

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of a general reconsideration of the French national character. Similar feelings were expressed in the accentuation of the differences between Germany and France: German science against French intuition, German mass mentality against French individualism, the German soldier against the French warrior. The main theme is the same in both Agathon inquiries, and deals with the awakening of a new generation. Massis summarizes its characteristics in one term, “realism,” and opposes it to the “dilettantism” of the former generation. Doubt and skepticism are confronted with security and clear norms. Virility, sportsmanship, action and energy now oppose intellectualism and rationalism. Individualism and the cult of the individual have been replaced by communal sense and servitude towards the country. According to the novelist Henry Bordeaux, it all came down to what he called a “simplification of life.” It is clear that these were not quite the virtues one encountered in the “new” youth, but rather those one wished them to opt for. It is also clear that this no longer really concerned university problems only, for it permeated every aspect of life. CONCLUSION The student protest of 1910 was mainly—almost exclusively—a paper war. Strikes, sit-ins, occupations or other types of demonstrations so well-known in later years did not occur. Moreover, this paper war was delivered through the regular press organs. No student or underground press existed in those days, which contrasts with later student movements. It also illustrates the fact that students were more integrated into everyday society. Notwithstanding their spectacular increase after 1895, they were numerically by no means such an important a group as at the present time. Moreover—although, as always, there were complaints about the teachers—there were then no typical student material needs that would stir large crowds. This makes it difficult to say much about the number of dissatisfied people, even though it is clear from the start that there was no such thing as a mass movement then. Also in those days a large tacit majority existed. It can be concluded, however, that the action mainly took place among the students in the faculty of letters. This can be understood from the type of complaints and from the fact that because of the character of their study, they were confronted more than others with such ideological questions.

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Another question that is difficult to answer is whether the actions were successful. As we have seen, the complaints attracted considerable attention, even from such important bodies as the Senate and the Académie Française. But what was the final result of all this? In the field of education it was very limited. The League for French Culture did not accomplish much, even though it contained as many as three committees: an honorary, an executive and an action committee. Massis and Tarde withdrew from it quite early on. At the university the need for a more general education met with some temporary response. This response came mainly from individual lecturers who began to pay more attention to the issue, but on the whole it was not much. Even though there were several links between these actions and the problems that were felt more widely—like the differences between the natural sciences and the humanities, and the proper study of history, it cannot be said that success was achieved in this respect. Only later on would these reflections result in important changes. But these actions did prosper as far as social and political ideas were concerned, although it is not easy to define exactly what ideology was expressed. Massis himself complained that there was no clarity, no program. It was a movement of unease and discord and in that sense a rightist movement. Since the left wing was in power, the right wing represented the opposition. It was also mainly right-wing papers that opted for Agathon. But here right wing should not be understood in the sense of party politics. Hardly any followers of the Action Française were to be found among the French students, and Maurras did not appeal to them. A certain antiparliamentarism did exist, however. Aversion to the parliament, which was seen as a powerless and corrupt chatting-board, was actually rather fashionable. But the students certainly were republicans. They were in favour of the republic, but specifically of Péguy’s “République morale.” Péguy’s ideas, his patriotic, social and religious mysticism, his idealism and aversion to compromise represented an image of moral purity that appealed to many youngsters. His dislike of “politics” which he saw as a dilution of “mysticism” could indeed be the device of every youth movement. The student actions of Agathon and others showed a number of typically modern features. The most important of these was that these students did not, as their nineteenth-century predecessors had done, stand for the political ideas of liberalism and nationalism, but were preoccupied by their own problems. But—and this is no less typical of modern students’ actions—departing from their own concrete problems,

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they arrived at a more general problem: how to change the society? Even then, albeit from a different angle, the theory could be heard that society ought to be changed to create a different human being than the one presented by the masters. In order to change the university, society had to be changed, but to change society it was probably necessary to start changing the university first. Here this inextricable knot became clear for the first time. This is possibly why the students of those earlier years had more right than those of May 1968 to raise the famous slogan of that year: “This is the beginning. . . . We will continue our battle.”

PART II

Intellectuals and Politics

CHAPTER 5

Reluctant Crusaders: French Intellectuals and the Dreyfus Affair

The history of the “engagement” of intellectuals is far older than the word itself. The term “engagement”—which we translate as “commitment”—stems from the thirties. It came into current usage during the debate about “littérature engagée” that followed the Second World War, with which the names of Sartre and Camus are closely connected.1 The list of committed intellectuals has been growing ever since and has been enriched by such illustrious names as Bertrand Russell, Noam Chomsky, Solzhenitsyn and Theodorakis, to mention just a few. Petitions, open letters, manifestoes, and more recently, sitins, marches and demonstrations have become frequent. Often the expressions of commitment have little to do with the intellectual qua intellectual. Instead, they are expressions of general political or humanitarian protest—involving such issues as the wars in Algeria and Vietnam, the Hungarian uprising, the Prague Spring, the debates over the atom bomb, and decolonization and disarmament—in which intellectuals differed from “ordinary” demonstrators only in their greater visibility and prestige. “Engagement” also represents what could be called a kind of corporate commitment: writers stand up for dissident writers, historians for persecuted historians, physicists for oppressed

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physicists, and so forth. Finally, there is commitment in the sense of personal “engagement” in an ideology of movement. That, of course, was the classic commitment of the thirties, the time of “fellow travellers” and of “Gods that failed,” of the “tentation fasciste” and the Trahison des clercs (Treason of the Intellectuals). But if the term engagement stems from the thirties, the question it raises—that of the intellectuals’ relationship to politics—is older by far. One could take Plato’s guardians and his philosopher-king as a first example. Using a stricter definition, however, we find that the first committed intellectuals were the eighteenth-century French “philosophes,” those social critics avant la lettre like Rousseau and Montesquieu, and especially Voltaire and Diderot.2 An old Jacobin ditty testifies that even then the intellectuals’ pretensions in the social and political field caused antiintellectual reactions: Je suis tombé à terre, Le nez dans le ruisseau; C’est la faute à Voltaire, C’est la faute à Rousseau! I fell to the ground With my nose in the gutter; I blame Voltaire, I blame Rousseau!3

An unbroken line of committed writers can be traced from Voltaire and Diderot via Chateaubriand and Victor Hugo, Taine and Renan, Zola and Péguy, Gide and Mauriac, to Sartre and Camus. Nevertheless, the list of names reveals a certain transformation. The older form of commitment was the individual enterprise. But with the Dreyfus affair, there emerged for the first time a group of individuals committed collectively to a public position.4 In the Dreyfus affair, moreover, we can observe the commitment of intellectuals in its purest form: engagement signalled a defense of intellectual values and of science and truth in general. It was at the time of the Dreyfus affair that the word “intellectual” came into usage in its modern sense. THE BIRTH OF THE INTELLECTUAL The meaning of the term “intellectual” differs from time to time and from place to place. Therefore anyone who, like Edward Shils in

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the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, has to give it a general definition cannot but end up with a certain vagueness.5 One of the first extensive studies of the intellectual is A. Cartault’s L’Intellectuel: Etude psychologique et morale, published in 1914. Cartault contrasts the intellectual to the thinker—the “penseur.” From the intellectual, one cannot expect deep insights or profound wisdom, but rather new ideas and reforms. The intellectual is not a thinker but a seeker: “Everything that is understandable falls within his domain.”6 He sees intelligence as the highest good and strives to develop it as fully as possible. He seeks the truth, disinterestedly, through a strict application of scientific methods. Beyond this general description, however, Cartault sees differences loom not only between Latin, Germanic, and Slavonic minds, but also between men of different builds; in his opinion, height plays an important role in thinking. Weighing the pros and cons like a real intellectual, Cartault considers the possibility that small men have small thoughts: “They say that small men have small thoughts. This is not absolutely true for there are some who have great thoughts but it has been veryfied by many cases.” He also notes the vogue of the word “intellectual,” a word whose meaning was still ambiguous, as it was often used ironically, but often, too, with a certain pride.7 It is a matter of fact that “intellectual” had only recently come into use as a noun, and the ambiguity noted by Cartault concerning its meaning was typical of those early years. Precisely when it was first used as a noun is not entirely clear. Brombert first finds this usage in an article of 1882 by Brunetière and then in 1888 in Maurice Barrès’s Sous l’Oeil des barbares.8 Reinach observed that the word had been in use for some time in small literary publications by younger writers who used it to express a certain feeling of superiority. Anatole France, who signed the manifesto of the intellectuals, actually protested against the use of the word, considering it bad French.9 And it is true that the term found little favor at first. More cumbersome definitions were usually preferred: “les ouvriers de la pensée,” “hommes de pur labeur intellectuel,” and so forth.10 As William Johnston pointed out, it was the novelist and essayist Henri Bérenger who contributed most to the popularization of the word in the early 1890s. However, the term was not used widely until the winter of 1897–1898 when a group of intellectuals took sides in the Dreyfus affair.11 Émile Zola’s famous open letter, which occupied the entire front page of L’Aurore on Thursday, 13 January 1898, opened a new phase not only in the Dreyfus affair but in intellectual history in general. On the next day, Friday, 14 January, a short announcement on the same

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page bore the heading “A Protest.” It read: “The undersigned, protesting against the violence of juridical procedures during the trial of 1894 and against the mysteries that have surrounded the Esterhazy affair, persist in asking for a revision.” These lines caused no less commotion than Zola’s J’Accuse!, and contributed largely to the escalation of the affair, which would split French intellectuals into two camps. According to Barrès, Clemenceau was the first to label the protest as “the manifesto of the intellectuals.”12 Whatever the case, the designation holds when we examine the names of those who were first to sign. There were 104 of them, with important names like Anatole France and Émile Zola heading the list, followed by the names of other leading figures in the spheres of education, science, and letters. A second protest appeared in L’Aurore the next day, its wording slightly more circumstantial, its essence the same. Thereafter, L’Aurore published daily lists of persons who signed one or even both of the protests. This continued until 8 February 1898, when an editorial announced that no further lists would be published. By then more than 3,000 people had signed them, of whom some 2,500 were French citizens. A good many of the signers are well-known to us today: Proust, Péguy, Benda, and Léon Blum, who were young men at the time; both Halévys (Daniel and Elie); many professors of the Sorbonne and mandarins of the Rue d’Ulm like Charles Andler and Lucien Herr. All this we know, but a detailed examination of the lists provides a more complete picture of this first battalion of protesting intellectuals. First, it is clear that the protest was, above all, a Parisian affair. There were relatively few signers from the provinces. The data in Table 5.1 do not tell us much about the age structure of the group, though it is clear that the 316 students must have belonged to the younger generation. The list does give us some idea as to the social composition of the professions. In one-third of the cases (no. 16) information is lacking. Among the remaining 1,746 signatories, 260 cannot be described as intellectuals, at least in the narrow sense of the term (nos. 6, 7, 8, 15). The majority, however, belonged to typically intellectual professions: journalists, artists, doctors, architects, professors, students and so forth. Though quite a few described themselves as writers (journalists, editors, hommes de lettres, etc.), there were no famous authors among them, except for Zola and France. The most famous authors tend to be found in the opposite camp.

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Table 5.1 1. Journalists 2. Lawyers 3. Doctors 4. Architects 5. Artists 6. Administrative professions 7. Military 8. Business world 9. Engineers 10. Clergy 11. Teachers (licenciés, agrégés) 12. Teachers (others) 13. Students 14. University professors 15. Various 16. No mention Total

307 84 77 15 139 49 18 112 27 7 317 4 316 93 81 826 2,572

It may be worth noting that many high school teachers signed the manifesto, in spite of the fear of reprisals. One teacher confided to Clemenceau that he feared the Minister of Education, Rambaud, would transfer him from his present post “to rot at the far end of Brittany.”13 Nonetheless, the main center of action was really in the academic institutions—the Sorbonne, the École Pratique des Hautes Etudes, the École des Chartes, the Collège de France and the “grandes écoles,” including the famous École Normale Supérieure in the Rue d’Ulm. At the École Polytechnique, a major institution for training officers, and at the conservative École des Sciences Politiques, there were understandably only a few participants.14 However, the center of the dreyfusards was not at the Sorbonne, but on the Rue d’Ulm. Then, as today, the École Normale Supérieure was where the intellectual and literary elites were formed. It was also the headquarters of what Péguy, himself a normalien, would call the “intellectual party.”15 Péguy, who had been a very active dreyfusard, chose to use the term “intellectual party” in a disparaging sense to indicate that his former friends, from whom he had become estranged, had betrayed their ethical ideas and turned into politicians.16 It is true that the intellectuals did form a party in one sense, having not only a

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headquarters in the École Normale but also a party secretary, Lucien Herr, and ideologists like Charles Andler and Gabriel Monod. The source of their ideology can be traced to the philosopher Charles Renouvier and his journal, La Critique Philosophique, which was founded in 1872. Renouvier and his review were widely read in France by influential philosophy teachers and helped to shape the philosophical basis of radical political ideology.17 After the Boulanger crisis in the late 1880’s, however, university socialism became popular and, with Andler and Herr, it gained a solid foothold in the École Normale. Lucien Herr was one of the most influential, though least colorful, among French intellectuals of his time. He published little, but derived his great influence mainly from his post as librarian of the École Normale. Despite its unpretentiousness, this position was a key one in the educational system and brought Herr into contact with many students. He is said to have converted one student, Jaurès, to socialism in the course of a night’s conversation.18 Charles Andler, who taught German at the Sorbonne and the École Normale, made his reputation chiefly through studies of German socialism and was to gain particular public notice by leading a student trip to Germany in 1908.19 Great influence was also exercised by Gabriel Monod, who was elected to the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, one of the sections of the Institut de France, in 1898, the very year when the Dreyfus affair was coming to a boil. Monod, founder—editor of the Revue Historique, taught history at the Rue d’Ulm and was a very important man in the French historical and educational establishment. As editor-in-chief of his journal, he controlled important publication channels. More crucial still, as chairman of the Examination Committee for the agrégation, which led to the major teaching appointments, he controlled many career possibilities. Because of his great influence in the community, Monod was the target of rightist politicians and writers like Charles Maurras, who during these years wore out his pen inveighing against the man whom he labelled “a German sentry in the university.”20 What Monod described as scientific history was, according to Maurras, simply history influenced by Germany, copied from Germany and, consequently, pro-German. It is clear enough that Monod, who had studied in Germany, was strongly influenced by the German historical-scientific method, like many of his colleagues, but the real charge against him was that he was pro-German. This belief that the university was being “Germanized” would later become an

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important issue during the university troubles of 1910–1914 and one of the main themes of the Action Française. When we look at historians involved in the Dreyfus affair, Monod is clearly the most important among them. There were other historians who became well-known at a later date such as Charles-Victor Langlois and Charles Seignobos, the authors of the Introduction aux études historiques, a book that was completed at the time of the Dreyfus affair but only became famous later. Ernest Lavisse, director of the École Normale Supérieure and perhaps the most influential among historians of the day, remained silent. Léon Blum says that Lavisse was only “un dreyfusard de foi intérieure.”21 Moreover, two politically powerful historians belonged to the opposite camp. It has already been pointed out that dreyfusard teachers were afraid of Alfred Rambaud, a normalien who had been a professor of contemporary history at the Sorbonne and was at this time minister of education. Charles Hanotaux, former lecturer at the École des Hautes Etudes and later an author of important works on colonial history, was then minister of foreign affairs. He, too, was definitely no supporter of his former colleagues—witness his warning to Paléologue, then a high official at the Quai d’Orsay: “don’t trust these people! . . . I have come to detest . . . these intellectuals.”22 It is not unwarranted to pay some special attention to the position of historians in relation to the Dreyfus affair. This was a time when history enjoyed a social prestige unequalled before or since. After the war of 1870, historical science, inspired by the German example, had gained respect in France. Cartault, in his study on intellectuals, lavished praise on history: “It explains to us who we are . . . It demolishes legends . . . It enlarges our horizon,” and so forth.23 This will seem strange to the present generation of historians, trained in an atmosphere of crisis and of doubts about the validity of historical “science.” More interesting still, the general study of history was not recommended so much for its capacity to broaden the mind, but rather for its objectivity and scientific character—in short, for precisely the method so much in question today. This respect for the objective and scientific quality of the historical method was so strong that all literature departments converted to its use, leading to a virtual dominion of history in the arts. Historians, on their part, devoted themselves with fervor to methodology and bibliography. Julien Benda, whom we may certainly call a critical intellect, tells in his memoirs how, as a student, he was fascinated by the historical method. According to

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Benda, who does not appear to have changed his mind, this was the only true scientific education, to be ranked alongside mathematics.24 As a matter of fact, some historians played a role in the Dreyfus affair purely as professional technicians. Some archivist-paleographers of the École des Chartes—the director, Paul Meyer and the professors Giry, Havet and Molinier—served as experts in several trials, providing testimony as to the authenticity or falseness of crucial pieces of evidence such as the bordereau and the faux-Henry. Their testimony was devastating for the prosecution.25 FORMS OF COMMITMENT The initial political commitment of intellectuals expressed itself in several ways: testimony at trials, manifestos, open letters, lists of signatures and, later, participation in demonstrations and street fights. When, in February 1898, the Dreyfus affair was at its boiling point, Zola was facing the judges, and the streets were dominated by riots, a number of intellectuals proceeded to form a Ligue pour la Défense des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen. The Ligue was the joint initiative of Ludovic Trarieux, former minister and senator of a rather conservative liberal bent, and Yves Guyot, another former minister, publicist and economist, who was strongly oriented toward the English and inspired by the Personal Rights Association he had encountered in England.26 At the first meeting held to discuss the founding of the Ligue the only members present besides the founders, Trarieux and Guyot, were Scheurer-Kestner and Joseph Reinach, both wellknown dreyfusards; this was a predominantly political quartet. But several months later, when the official foundation of the Ligue took place, it happened that most of those who joined were intellectuals. The first list of Ligue sympathizers contains, besides four senators and one industrialist, the names of thirty-five intellectuals, most of them university professors. Among these intellectuals were the well-known alumni of the January manifestos, Émile Duclaux, Gabriel Monod, Paul Desjardins, Gabriel Séailles, Lucien Herr, and Jean Psichari. The same preponderance of intellectuals was evident in the composition of the Ligue’s first central committee which consisted of thirteen university teachers, seven politicians, five “men of letters” and three “various.”27 This makeup was in accordance with the purposes of the Ligue, which concerned itself not so much with judicial matters such as the defense of Dreyfus or with matters of politics such as legisla-

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tive reform, but rather with restoration of respect for the law and human rights. The Ligue fought against arbitrariness and intolerance, and supported the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Consequently, the movement was at first more apolitical than radicalprogressive. Its radicalization was to come later and coincided with the radicalization of the Republic itself.28 MOTIVES The transition from the shelter of the study to the arena of politics and publicity was not an easy change to make for many of these intellectuals. Practically all of these men declared that they had not sought publicity, were not interested in politics, and had been forced into the political forum by circumstance. Theirs was, so to speak, a commitment in spite of themselves. On the other hand, however, one cannot help but recognize an element of pride in their public statements. Jean Psichari—professor of Greek at the Sorbonne and father of the writer Ernest Psichari who became well-known a decade later— declared that the intellectuals were the glory of France (Le Temps, February 3, 1898). Barrès was to reproach him for this; as a “métèque” (an alien) Psichari had no business intervening in French politics.29 In much the same spirit as Psichari, however, Lucien Herr argued that intellectuals were not so much uprooted, as Barrès had put it in his famous novel, but disinterested. When Brunetière attacked the intellectuals, he was in turn chastised by Herr: “At the moment the intellectuals embody the true traditions of the French conscience and the French spirit.”30 Thus in spite of hesitation, opposition and some uneasiness, these men felt a certain pride and sense of vocation about being intellectuals. That many intellectuals hesitated before taking a stand, however, becomes apparent when we consider the testimonials of support for Zola given by a number of prominent men during the author’s trial in 1898. Typically, their positions were apolitical. What they said over and over again was that they were men of learning and science, reluctant to play a political role—they were just ordinary patriotic citizens who were not at all opposed to the army and who would defend their country with passion and pride if necessary. But because of the many strange intrigues surrounding Dreyfus, they were forced to doubt the fairness and justice of his trial. Precisely because they were conscientious scholars, they had to protest against this violation of the truth. In the

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words of Gabriel Séailles, professor at the Sorbonne: “Our teaching would lose all authority if we were not ready to confirm it by our deeds.”31 The best example of the development of such a dreyfusard-malgrélui is the case of Émile Duclaux, a famous physicist and one of the leaders of the intellectuals’ manifesto. During the winter of 1897– 1898, Duclaux became more and more concerned about the events surrounding the trial of Dreyfus. His worrying even kept him awake at night. In January 1898, Scheurer-Kestner asked him to give his opinion, as a man of science, about the charges against Dreyfus. Duclaux then composed a letter in which he explained what he, a “savant,” thought. He wrote that if scientists were to proceed in the same way as the Dreyfus case was being handled, they would not make much progress and, at best, would find truth only by chance. “We [scientists] have quite different rules, that derive from Bacon and Descartes. . . . We keep our peace and maintain our calm, believing nothing until we have proof; and, even after that, we are constantly open to a process of revision and criticism.”32 Duclaux was well aware that he made an important decision when he took his step from the laboratory into public life. Later on, he wrote about the experience. “I still see myself walking in the afternoon in the Rue d’Assas holding my letter to Scheurer-Kestner in my hand. All the time I walked I was saying to myself: ‘My friend, you have come to a turning-point in your life. Once accomplished, this errand, to which no one is forcing you and which you are free to interrupt, may take you very far.’”33 Hesitation and doubts of this sort are, of course, quite typical of intellectuals as far as their sociopolitical activities and opinions are concerned. It is therefore all the more striking to notice how sharply the intellectuals of that day reacted to forms of commitment which, to us today, seem rather timid. ANTIINTELLECTUAL INTELLECTUALS Clemenceau may have been the first to label the protest in L’Aurore as the manifesto of the intellectuals, but it is certain that by the following day, 15 January 1898, the term “intellectuals” was already used to designate the signers, and quite definitely in a pejorative sense. In his diary on 15 January, Paléologue noted a “boutade” (witticism) by Ferdinand Brunetière, the influential essayist and editor of the Revue des Deux Mondes, against the pretensions of intellectuals, as he called them—that is, people who live in libraries and laboratories and who

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pass judgment, as if they were superhuman, on all kinds of matters outside their realm. According to Brunetière, the intellectual’s claim to authority was suspect and his powers overrated. In the life of the community, the more important qualities were willpower, steadfast character, experience and sound judgment. There was no reason why an intellectual’s training should give him a superior claim on any of these things. Brunetière would expound and develop these ideas further in a well-known article published in his own review. There was no reason whatever, he argued, to attach special significance to the opinions of intellectuals in matters of politics, law or morals. An excellent paleographer, an erudite philologist and an expert in Greek metrics have their merits, of course, but only in their own fields. In the life of the community they are no more valuable than a businessman, a soldier or a farmer. Therefore, their pretensions are unacceptable. In a democracy no single form of aristocracy is acceptable, certainly not intellectual aristocracy, which of all kinds is the most difficult to prove.34 Along with Brunetière, Barrès fought the intellectuals from the very first. Already in an article published in Le Journal of 1 February 1898, he called them “these gangs of demi-intellectuals, . . . these self-claimed intellectuals, . . . these so-called geniuses, these poor and poisoned minds.”35 Barrès focused his criticism on three faults of the intellectuals. First, he attacked their pretensions to elitism. According to Barrès, the masses were always instinctively right.36 Second, he found fault with the intellectuals’ individualism and lack of social sense, a criticism that Brunetière also levelled against them. But Barrès criticized the intellectuals most for their desire to base society on reason and logic instead of historical growth. In Scènes et doctrines du nationalisme, a collection of articles and speeches from the years 1897–1902, we find Barrès’s definition of the intellectual as “the individual who persuades himself that society should be based on logic and does not understand that in actual fact it is based on necessities that are more important and often very different from individual reasoning.”37 Caste-consciousness, vanity, pedantry, meddlesomeness, individualism, false pretensions, an overrating of reason and of oneself would all be associated with the word “intellectual” for a long time. Thus, the origin of the concept of the intellectual is closely linked with antiintellectualism. As Victor Brombert rightly has it, “the word ‘intellectual’ carries from the moment of its birth the stigma of derision, contempt, suspicion, and even hatred.”38

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In the meantime, the antiintellectual activities of these very committed intellectuals were not limited to incidental jeers. About a year after the formation of the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme, an alternative version was created to oppose it: the Ligue de la Patrie Française. This, interestingly enough, was also the work of intellectuals—three university professors, Dausset, Syveton, and Vaugeois. However, the nationalist founders of the new Ligue eagerly sought contact with various literary bigwigs. And indeed, most of the well-known authors of the day were not dreyfusards, but rather in the opposite camp: Barrès, Bourget, Brunetière, Coppée, Faguet, Lemaître and de Vogüé, to name only the most well-known. In short, the literary establishment stood against the university establishment, the Académie against the Sorbonne, the Revue des Deux Mondes against the Revue Blanche and the Revue Historique. The Ligue de la Patrie Française was founded on 15 January 1899 and placed under the chairmanship of Jules Lemaître, himself a member of the Académie. Its ruling committee of twenty-five consisted of eleven university men, seven men of letters, three politicians, two artists, an army officer and a member without any known profession. The day-to-day administration was left to three well-known writers, Barrès, Coppée and Lemaître, five university professors and one deputy.39 So the university was quantitatively well represented but qualitatively only in a secondary position compared to the representation of writers—the exact opposite of the situation in the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme. The Ligue de la Patrie Française was very successful. At the start, and without much organization to mobilize its membership, the Ligue accepted 1,000 new members per day, with the result that it counted over 10,000 new members within a week. The reasons for such swift success are difficult to define. As far as one can tell, they seem to rest in the widespread feeling that enough was enough—that after a year of bitter contention, the time for rest and reconciliation had come. The Dreyfus affair was now to be left to the courts and, therefore, this Ligue affirmed no positive political character. Its main stated aim was the reconciliation of radicals and moderates.40 But the founders were also determined to show that there was no necessary division between men of science and learning and the French military. As Barrès put it, it was essential that no one could say any longer that intellect and intellectuals stood only on one side.41 These rather general motives were complicated by the great diversity of political ideas and temperaments among the leaders. Brunetière, for instance, was strongly

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opposed to nationalism and antisemitism. We are no Ligue des Patriotes, he said. The chauvinism of Déroulède and his pugnacious followers repelled him. Barrès, on the other hand, declared that he was only interested in the propagation of nationalist doctrine.42 Defined by so much variety and contradiction, the Ligue de la Patrie Française could not exert much influence. It would soon be surpassed by the Action Française, founded shortly afterwards and much more radical. INTELLECTUALS AND COMMITMENT: A BALANCE The birth of intellectuals as a distinct group is closely related to the idea of engagement, although the latter term is of a later date. The word intellectual was used disparagingly by intellectuals to describe people of their own kind who had set themselves up as defenders of justice and truth, and had intervened in the political discussions of the day. The reason why these critics labelled their targets intellectuals was precisely because of their political commitment. Seen in this light, intellectuals and political commitment are inseparable. An uninvolved intellectual is a contradiction in terms because an intellectual defines himself as such precisely in terms of his political commitment.43 Thus the French concept of intellectuals and their role is determined to a large extent by the history of the word “intellectual.” The concept is inseparably connected with the idea of social, political and moral crisis or, to cite Brombert once again, “It implies the notion of a permanent state of crisis.”44 Given the situation of crisis, the intellectual considers it his duty to intervene. The intellectual’s sense of responsibility has always been present, but has been asserted most emphatically at certain historical moments: at the time of the Dreyfus affair, during the thirties and during the Second World War. The remarkable thing about the problem of commitment during the time of Dreyfus was that the side opposing the intellectuals was more ready to challenge their claim to intervene qua intellectuals than the actual object of their commitment. It is true that intellectuals often maintained that they really had not sought political involvement, but only wanted to do their duty as intellectuals. They were very reluctant crusaders who constantly stressed their lack of interest in politics and their disinterested search for the truth. It was as if their commitment arose from a refusal to become committed. The most striking example of this paradox can be found in Julien Benda, that intellectual

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pur sang, who would later in his famous book La Trahison des clercs denounce the commitment of intellectuals as treason but who, during the Dreyfus affair, had joined the camp of protesters.45 According to Benda, the only proper concern of intellectuals was the defense of reason and of truth. Any other commitment was a betrayal of their vocation as intellectuals.46 Hence, Benda’s initial attitude was one of uncommitment and restraint. He argued that we live in an unjust world, and have to accept it. Nevertheless, the Dreyfus affair continued to bother him. One day he wrote an article about it and suddenly found himself totally involved. The interesting aspect of this was that Benda, even then, was hardly interested in the ideals of the dreyfusards or in the symbolic significance of the Dreyfus case. The rights of man, the ideas of the revolution, the question of when an individual may be sacrificed in the interest of the state were matters of no interest to him. What concerned him was that legal procedures had been violated and the truth obscured. The rest was of no importance. At least, that is what he claimed. He explained with a certain regret that, in a way, it was a pity that Dreyfus was innocent. To rehabilitate an innocent person was beautiful, of course, but it would have been even more beautiful to rehabilitate a guilty one on the sole ground that there was not enough evidence against him and that legal procedures had been violated. Not only would this have been a higher form of justice, but also an ideal occasion for political action by intellectuals. As Benda would have it, the intellectual should emerge from his study just long enough to straighten things out and then go back to polishing his spectacles. This is, of course, a very idiosyncratic and essentially romantic vision of the intellectual in politics. It is also the most explicit formulation of the position of those who became committed unwillingly: an experience that can be called the purest form of intellectual commitment. In this sense, the commitment of the intellectuals involved in the Dreyfus affair was of exemplary character, and one can only repeat the words of Benda: “Pour le clerc, l’affaire Dreyfus est le palladium de l’histoire.”47 The question remains, why exactly did this first political involvement of intellectuals occur in the Dreyfus affair? Why at that time, that place, and for that particular cause? The answers to these questions are not simple, but something can be said about all three of them. First, it should be pointed out that intellectuals in France enjoyed and still enjoy particular prestige. Because of this, their opinions carry a certain weight. This particular type of reverence is absent in other countries.

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“We British don’t take our intellectuals so seriously,” commented Denis Brogan, and the same is true for other people.48 In France, the man or woman of letters, the writing intellectual, is the one most appreciated. In this connection Ernst Curtius called literature the French national religion, and Albert Thibaudet spoke of the mysticism of the book.49 The rituals of the Académie Française, the state funerals for writers, the interment in the Panthéon—all these illustrate the social prestige of writers and the way in which the state honors this prestige. Already in the eighteenth century, French writers behaved with a certain authority, as if they represented the national conscience. In the following century this elite group was enlarged by new members, notably university professors, who had gained particular prominence during the latter part of the century. After some unsuccessful attempts at revision of the universities, higher education was reformed during the Third Republic, partly following German examples. Slowly some of the prestige of the German “Herr Professor” was reflected on his French colleagues. But there was an important difference between the writers and the professors. The latter, less confined to individual work than the authors, constantly met each other and their students in the lecture halls, classrooms, and laboratories at the Sorbonne and the École Normale, and so were able to exert a direct influence on the intellectuals of the future. In the 1890s, the universities enjoyed spectacular growth. Because of this, teachers and students formed a quantitatively large group. Moreover, they developed a special kind of group feeling and a common “ideology.” The center for their activities was the École Normale Supérieure where, during the late 1890s rationalist, radical and socialist ideas had taken hold. The enormous prestige of this educational institution contributed, of course, to the importance that was accorded to such ideas. Finally, the Dreyfus affair offered every opportunity to demonstrate opposition to the nationalistic, militaristic and antisemitic mentality of the military and the conservatives in power. Besides, given the nature of the case, the intellectuals could take up positions not only as representatives of a rival ideology, but also as “impartial” defenders— devoid of ideology—of justice, science and objectivity. But for these special opportunities provided to them by the Dreyfus affair, many intellectuals might have remained suspended somewhere between the separate worlds of science and political power.

CHAPTER 6

Robert Brasillach and the Temptation of Fascism

A great deal has been written about intellectuals and fascism. George Orwell dealt with that problem in 1943 in an essay about Yeats, whom he portrayed as someone who had arrived at fascism by the aristocratic path. To this he added that such reactionary tendencies could be found among the best writers of his time and concluded: “The relationship between fascism and the literary intelligentsia badly needs investigation.”1 We have had to wait a rather long time for these investigations. In 1966 a book appeared by George Harrison titled The Reactionaries, in which he dealt with some of these authors, in addition to Yeats: Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, T.S. Eliot and D.H. Lawrence (the last two were among Orwell’s favorite writers).2 In the Netherlands, Huib Drion gave some attention to this problem in 1967 with his lecture, “Intellectuals and Democracy”3 but not until 1971 did an extensive study appear, namely Alastair Hamilton’s The Appeal of Fascism.4 It is indeed an extensive but also rather disappointing study because it is in fact more an inventory of fascist writers than an analysis of their work or of the problem of writers and fascism. Somewhat later, in 1972, a Finnish dissertation appeared, Drieu La Rochelle, Céline, Brasillach et la tentation fasciste.5 For the history of this “temptation,”

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the appeal and seductiveness of fascism, the memoirs of Brasillach are an important source. These pre-war recollections throw light on Brasillach as well as on French fascism and its attraction for a number of writers and intellectuals. THE LIFE OF BRASILLACH Robert Brasillach was shot to death on 6 February 1945 in Fort Montrouge near Paris. That date is not without symbolic significance, for 6 February 1934 is a special day in French history, particularly in the history of French fascism. It is the day when fascism did not come to power, a kind of negative “Machtübernahme,” a failed March to Rome. But in the recording of both left-wing and right-wing history it nevertheless occupies a special place; for the Left as the day that a fascist coup was prevented, for the Right as the day of a spontaneous fascist eruption. However that may be, in spite of great unrest and fiery demonstrations by the Croix de Feu, Camelots du Roi, Jeunesse Patriote and similar uniformed formations, and in spite of strong police action that resulted in fifteen deaths and 1,500 people wounded, fascism did not gain power. That too is not without symbolism because the history of French fascism is the history of its failure.6 For Brasillach, as well as for many other young people, 6 February 1934 was a day of awakening, of political orientation. In 1934 Brasillach was 25 years old. He was born in 1909 in Perpignan in the south of France, the son of an army officer who shortly after the birth of his son was sent to Morocco, where he was killed in action in 1914. The family then moved to Sens, not far from Paris. It was in Paris that Brasillach, after leaving school, followed the “classes préparatoires” of the well-known Lycée Louis-le-Grand in preparation for the entrance exam to the École Normale Supérieure, one of France’s most prestigious institutions of education. Brasillach’s memoirs start with the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. He gives a fascinating account of life at that establishment and at the École Normale Supérieure—the friendships, the youth and carefree spirit of those years. At the École Normale he came into contact with Henri Massis and became a contributor to the Revue Universelle in 1930 and thereafter, in 1931, editor of the literary supplement of Charles Maurras’ magazine Action Française. From that time on, editing literary journals remained his typical field of activity. These literary publications, which in the 1930s appeared by the dozen, were mostly of

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a somewhat rightist orientation. In this regard his role at Je Suis Partout, the only really successful fascist magazine, is especially important.7 The name indicates its wide international orientation and that was, and is, indeed remarkable in France. It was founded in 1930 as an extremely right-wing journal, the organ of the Maurrassians, but after 1934 it gradually became more fascist in character. The most important people supporting it were Pierre Gaxotte, Thierry Maulnier, Robert Brasillach and Lucien Rebatet. In passing one cannot refrain from remarking that the careers of Gaxotte and Maulnier took a somewhat different course than that of Brasillach because they were not executed but were made members of the Académie Française and became honored columnists of the Figaro. Brasillach was increasingly considered the leader of the editorial staff or rather of the collective, since when the publisher wanted to stop the magazine because it was becoming too expensive, the editorial board did what many journalists like to do even today: they themselves took over the publication, even at half salary. Brasillach was very happy with this team, which he liked to indicate, “pour épater le bourgeois” [to shock the bourgeois], as a “gang” and as the first Soviet of the French press, and of which he praises the determination and true comradeship. In these years Brasillach’s literary productivity was quantitatively and qualitatively impressive. Quantitatively, because he produced a large oeuvre of novels, essays, poems, chronicles, translations and lectures besides his many contributions to all those magazines, but also qualitatively because the work was of a high caliber. Hamilton calls him “a good critic, an excellent poet and a translator of genius,”8 and indeed his works dealing with Corneille and Virgil were highly appreciated. Besides several novels that are still quite readable today, he published a Histoire du cinéma with his friend and brother-in-law, Maurice Bardèche, a film buff like himself, and Lucien Rebatet. What will interest the historians most, however, are the chronicles Histoire de la Guerre d’Espagne, Lettre à un soldat de la classe 60, and naturally Notre avant-guerre. The names of Massis and Maurras have been mentioned and with that, the character of his work is somewhat outlined. Brasillach was indeed strongly influenced by Maurras, the wellknown right-wing ideologist, to whom he always remained faithful. Yet the relationship was problematic and it is not surprising that Maurras broke with Brasillach in 1942, for Brasillach had become a fascist. That led to a certain tension between the fascist international ideological interests and the French national interest, which for

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Maurras was and remained the only thing that counted—“la seule France.” Although the influence of Maurras on Brasillach is indeed generally regarded as considerable, I tend to call Brasillach’s nationalism Barrésian rather than Maurrassian, because Barrès shows more of that typical fascist “sensibilité” than Maurras. And naturally the name of Péguy has to be mentioned as the most widely read author by young people of the 1930s, as well as Georges Sorel, whose ideas about the importance of images and myths in politics can also be found in Brasillach. Brasillach’s Avant-guerre ended with the war in 1939. In 1940 he was taken prisoner of war but in 1941 he was freed at the request of the Vichy régime. He returned to his work at Je Suis Partout, which was published in occupied territory, and he collaborated heavily with the occupying forces. But he broke with the équipe in 1943 because ultimately French interests were more important for Brasillach than the fascist ideology, and he refused to fight to the death alongside fascism. For this reason he did not leave for Germany in 1944 with other collaborators like Doriot and Déat, Céline and Rebatet, Pétain and Laval, nor did he participate with them in the ghostly Götterdämmerung of the French exiled government in Sigmaringen. He remained in France, just like the other well-known writer and collaborator Drieu La Rochelle who did what he had been planning to do since he was six years old, commit suicide. Brasillach contemplated no such escape; he went into hiding for a while, to await more settled times. But when news reached him that his mother had been arrested, he turned himself in to the authorities. Then followed the Brasillach trial, about which several books have appeared.9 It is fascinating reading, especially because of Brasillach’s answers and the pleas by his lawyer Isorni and not the least, of course, because of many spectacular and painful revelations. It transpired, for instance, that the president of the court had expressed most antidemocratic views as late as 1942 in no other than Brasillach’s magazine Je Suis Partout. In addition, the public prosecutor had worked for Vichy and among other things demanded death sentences for members of the resistance! In view of this, it is not surprising to learn there was a rumor that when an official pardon was requested from de Gaulle, the papers of Brasillach’s dossier were found to have been tampered with. However that may be, Brasillach was sentenced to death and executed. Upon hearing the verdict a voice in the court audience called out, “It is a shame.” Brasillach called back, “It is an honor.” An answer worthy of Cyrano and d’Artagnan.

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THE BRASILLACH CASE To understand the problem, riddle or even the case of Brasillach, one has to take into account the climate of his time. The thirties were marked by several crises. In the first place, of course, was the economic crisis, which had started in 1929 and incidentally took place later in France than elsewhere. Also, because of the particularities of the French economy, it developed to a lesser extent. Nevertheless the economic crisis, precisely because of its worldwide character, did play an important part and helped shape the background of the political crisis, the much discussed “crisis of democracy.” Thus a mentality grew, especially among the young intellectuals, that was marked by strong doubts about the existing order of values, a spirit of nonconformism and a search for new, preferably radical solutions. In this connection the political scientist and historian Jean Touchard developed the concept of a distinct time-spirit, which he named the “esprit des années ’30.”10 These ideas of renewal were especially introduced by dozens of magazines and small publications whose existence was usually as short as their circulation was limited. In his dissertation, a student of Jean Touchard, Jean-Louis Loubet del Bayle, made an inventory, classification and interpretation of this group under the title Les Non-conformistes des années ’30.11 Of course, not all of these noncomformists became fascists. On the contrary, there were “personalists” among them like Denis de Rougemont, “centrists,” antifascists, groups like Ordre Nouveau (centered, among others, around Daniel-Rops) and the well-known, still existing journal Esprit of Mounier. But although most of the nonconformists were not fascist, the French intellectual fascists often came from this atmosphere of nonconformism. This brings us to a question that deserves fuller discussion than can be given here: the question of whether such a thing as French fascism ever existed, and what exactly it would have consisted of. There were many rightist movements in France in those years, but they were not necessarily fascist. There were important differences between fascism and the Action Française, between Vichyists and avowed collaborators. If one limits oneself to the political formations of the real fascists, it is apparent that we are concerned with insignificant and short-lived movements. The Faisceau of Valois, the Solidarité Française of Coty and the Francisme of Marcel Bucard were all short-lived minigroups that have left few traces.12 The only really French and somewhat successful organization was the Parti Populaire Français of

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Doriot, which had much support from the workers of the Paris banlieue. But that success too was of very short duration and mostly based on the personal popularity of this ex-communist mayor.13 But if fascism in France was insignificant as a political formation, it was important as an atmosphere and a mood. For a long time fascism colored French nationalism and it has even had a lasting influence on it. For many it was precisely this “sensibilité,”—this fascist atmosphere—that was appealing, and not the political doctrine. That was certainly the case for Brasillach. The attraction for him was not in the fascist doctrine. He had little interest in the social-economic ideas of fascism, and the corporate state did not attract him. He was more interested in the political aspects. Doubtless Brasillach was fascinated by the thought that fascism could be victorious over an outdated contradiction between Left and Right, between nationalism and socialism. This appears from the fact that he equally appreciated Jeanne d’Arc and the uprising of the Paris Commune in 1871. But fascism for Brasillach was first and foremost something else, namely a cultural phenomenon. He appreciated fascism on esthetic grounds, as a revolt of the senses against reason. For Brasillach, fascism was poetry—the poetry, as he himself said, of his own time. “Fascism was poetry and indeed the very poetry of the twentieth century (with communism no doubt).” He proceeded to evoke that poetry in a long series of images and memories: “the youth camps, the glories of the past, the marches, the cathedrals of light, the heroes beaten up in combat, the friendship between the young of all nations, José ANTONIO, le fascisme immense et rouge.”14 This last, the immense and red fascism, will also give the psychoanalysts something to think about! But Brasillach’s appreciation was not only of an esthetic nature; it was also, if one may say so, of an ethical nature. What Brasillach ultimately appreciated the most about fascism was the claim that it would create a new type of man, the homo fascista, in whom decadence would be conquered, alienation abolished, the contradiction between body and soul combined in a higher synthesis; a man of discipline and authority, averse to individualism and materialism—the total man. In short, fascism as a cultural revolution. Noteworthy in this respect is the fact that the idea of youth occupies such a central place in his work. He appreciated the youthful character of fascism and praised the fascist dictators because they paid so much attention to youth. Paradoxically, in this way we find him appreciating so old fashioned and petit-bourgeois a movement as fascism, precisely because of its “antibourgeois” character. That is, with

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Brasillach and perhaps with all the fascist writers, a puzzling point. One can establish what they found attractive in fascism, but not why they saw all these attractions in fascism—which was, after all, not so beautiful—while closing their eyes to its uglier sides. What could possibly have been the charm of this massive and vulgar movement for these highly sophisticated and individualistic writers? In order to answer this question we have to turn back to “the spirit of the 1930s.” There were several intellectuals in that decade who could not fit in with the existing order and searched for new ways. That, of course, has happened throughout history. But in those years they found fascism on their path and could not simply pass it by. In that sense Brasillach is justified in calling fascism his “mal-du-siècle.”15 Certainly not all of these intellectuals ended up with fascism. Their fates were quite different, depending on their further developments, and they had also come along different routes. Yet one can discern two main courses. The first was the route of those whose preoccupations were mainly of a political or social character. They saw in the persistence of the economic crisis and the poor functioning of the parliamentary institutions signs of an irreversible crisis in capitalism and the outdatedness of parliamentary democracy. Some found their new gods in communism, others in fascism: “Gods that failed,” mostly. Next to this was another group, the existential seekers and doubters. They suspected behind these crises a more fundamental, cultural crisis: the struggle for a new type of man. Their route to fascism was often full of hesitation and detours. But once having arrived there, their convictions were much more intransigent, radical and quite often incurable. To this group belonged Brasillach, whose stubborn persistence is perhaps his most puzzling characteristic. For quite a number of other intellectuals, fascism had a certain temptation, too. And, to continue this manner of speaking for a moment, some of them fell for this temptation. But what was much rarer and, from an intellectual point of view, much more incomprehensible, was the stubborn persistence in the evil. That is why, indeed, there is a “Brasillach riddle.” Whence this unwillingness to open one’s mind to new information, this inability to reexamine ideas, to reevaluate convictions in the light of new knowledge? It seems to be connected with a certain ethic, a stance in life in which not insight but fidelity is the highest value: fidelity to one’s conviction, which also means fidelity to the group, the “gang,” the circle of friends. This is, in a certain sense, typical of the boarding-school ethic or youth ethic, which fits in with the

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glorification of youth-for-youth’s sake that emanates from his entire work. Thus the case of Brasillach is at the same time ideal-typical and sui-generis: ideal-typical because it throws light on the motives of a group of intellectuals in the thirties tempted by fascism, and sui-generis because the motives of Brasillach in his choice of fascism and faithfullness to it cannot be generalized. The problem, “writers and fascism” cannot be solved through an analysis of the Brasillach case, but that analysis can undoubtedly throw some light on the problem.

CHAPTER 7

An Intellectual in Politics: Raymond Aron, 1905–1983

The first time I met Raymond Aron was in 1971 at the Collège de France, where he had been a professor since 1969. That year his lecture course was on Clausewitz. As I myself had written extensively on the French “Clausewitzians,” as Aron referred to them, I attended these lectures with great interest. After one of the lectures we had a lengthy discussion touching on the Collège de France. “You see,” he said, “the Collège is in fact a very disappointing place. The people barely understand what I am talking about. With the exception of a few devoted followers, the audience here consists primarily of “dames du quartier” and a number of people who seek to spend a few hours in a dry and warm place.” I did not ask him why he had worked so hard to become a professor there (it takes many applications and much lobbying to get a chair at the Collège). But the answer would have been simple: a professorship at the Collège de France is simply the highest position that can be obtained in the French academic world. Naturally such an answer raises yet other questions, namely, why does one need to achieve the highest position when it brings so little satisfaction, and why should the highest position in the French academic world be so frustrating?

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A SUCCESSFUL CAREER In his memoirs Raymond Aron touched briefly upon these issues. Why have I been so ambitious, he asked himself. The answer is that it was a kind of revenge, an attempt to compensate for his father’s failed career. The latter had found himself stuck in the wheels of the French educational machinery, and his academic career had been unsuccessful. Later, after 1929, things would also become worse for the family financially after some unfortunate speculations on the stock market. Raymond Aron thus wanted to succeed, to provide some sort of rehabilitation for his family. This explanation is as open-hearted as it is convincing, but it does not explain why his two intelligent brothers reacted so differently to the situation. That is the eternal problem of such psychological explanations. Being a professor meant a lot to Raymond Aron. Trained as a normalien and destined for the world of education, the university was for him the natural career and a professorship the natural ambition. That it was not everything to him was because of the war. After five years in London, close to the center of power and with world politics staring him in the face, a purely academic career, a chair in philosophy, was no longer solely beatific. Furthermore, such a career presupposes a period of time in the provinces. In Aron’s case this would have been Bordeaux, where a professorship was in the offing in 1945. Professors who teach in the provinces are not also compelled to live in the area, and indeed some spend only one day a week there—and that for only half the year—yet it does mean leaving Paris to a certain extent, and that was something he did not want to do. He turned instead to journalism and in 1947 became a commentator for Le Figaro. In 1948 a new opportunity for a professorship presented itself, this time at the Sorbonne, but Aron was found to be too “journalistic” and was passed over in favor of Georges Gurvich. In 1955 he finally succeeded in obtaining a professorship, though by a narrow margin. The objections of a great number of colleagues were not of a scholarly or ideological nature on this occasion, but personal. Aron had not spent the customary few years in the province. He was what in the civil service would have been called a parachutist, someone who makes his way directly into a good office. Yet he was appointed, and the philosopher and political commentator became a professor of sociology while lecturing on international relations. That also is possible in France. But the Sorbonne had already reached an unsettled state. Those were the years of rapid growth. Education was primarily attended to

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by assistants and there was little personal contact with students. A new institution was on the rise. The “VIe Section” of the École Pratique des Hautes Etudes was on its way to becoming the elite institution for history and social sciences. Aron was appointed there, at first as “professeur cumulant,” thereby retaining his chair at the Sorbonne. After 1968 and the dissolution of the Sorbonne he gave up that chair, but soon became professor at the Collège de France and even a Membre de l’Institut, the Panthéon of the living. He had reached the summit. In his Mémoires Aron reflects on the French educational system. When he became a professor in 1955, he had already given many lectures at universities in England and the United States. He was perplexed by their differences from those in France: the poverty of the French universities, the total lack of facilities, the different student attitudes. He found the French students reticent, unapproachable, uninterested. These observations are absolutely correct. Everyone who knows something about French as well as American universities is struck by these differences. Yet there is another important difference as well—the attitude of the professors. The Anglo-Saxon professors and lecturers take their teaching most seriously, while the French complete their compulsory hours and offer no more than that. In England and the United States being a professor is a profession; in France it is a title. It is also striking that Aron found it not unthinkable to accept a chair in Bordeaux while spending only twenty-five days a year there, although in fact he didn’t do this. He did, however, combine two chairs in Paris while at the same time being a visiting lecturer at the École des Sciences Politiques and the École Nationale d’Administration, as well as a political commentator and editor of Le Figaro, advisor to a publishing house, and so forth. Neither did he find it odd that the highest position in the French educational system is a function in which one no longer has students or pupils. Indeed he asked himself if the students, uninterested as they are, studied only to get a diploma, but he didn’t ask if the professors, absent as they often are, lecture only for the purpose of having a title. Thus in different ways, his conceptions and career are typically French, although in some very different aspects, they are very unusual. Aron’s own education was typically French: “classes préparatoires” at the Lycée Condorcet to prepare for the École Normale Supérieure, the breeding ground for France’s literary and philosophical intellect— Sartre and Nizan were his classmates there. Then the agrégation, which

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gives access to the elite of the teaching profession; next a training period in Germany, already for half a century the great model— Durkheim, Bloch, Bouglé, Sartre and others either preceded or followed him there—and finally his doctoral degree, in 1938. His university career after the war is also typically French, until he reaches the top in 1969. At first glance this career is only exceptional in its complete success: scientific fame, international prestige, honorary doctorates, awards, invitations and decorations—they are too numerous to be mentioned. But it must be pointed out that in France itself, in the intellectual environment of Paris, Aron remained a marginal figure for a long time. Though not exactly a prophet, he was still not honored in his own country. This lack of official recognition was because of his journalistic and political activities and tells much about the intellectual climate in post-war France, characterized by Stalinism, communism and “gauchism,” with Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and, later, Foucault and Althusser as its heroes. It was only Solzhenitsyn that gave the French intellectuals a tour around the Goulag Archipelago, accomplishing what Prague 1948, Budapest 1956, and Prague 1968 had failed to do: open eyes to the reality of Stalinism. Then it was the Nouveaux philosophes that settled with Marx and Lenin, after which the distant Afghanistan and—to the French—the very familiar Poland, struck belief in the Left its final blow. In the entirely different intellectual and political climate of the 1970s, the rehabilitation of Raymond Aron was logical, and when in the course of a few years Sartre, Althusser and the others faded away, Raymond Aron swiftly became not only the “dernier des justes” but also the last of the intellectual giants, a living legend. Aron’s ascent began with a television series made in 1980 by Jean-Louis Missika and Dominique Wolton, which appeared as a book with the title Le Spectateur engagé.1 His assumption was completed in 1983 with his Mémoires. Although his books never acquired more than a modest succès d’estime, the Mémoires 2 became an untempered best-seller. This was not an inconsiderable achievement for a book of almost 800 pages containing not a single revelation, whose subtitle, Cinquante ans de réflexion politique, reveals that it is above all a work of reflection. Shortly afterwards Aron was adjudged the Erasmus Prize, which he was never to receive. He died a few days before the presentation on the steps of the court of justice of Paris, where he had been a witness for Robert de Jouvenel. The latter had instituted legal proceedings

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against Zeev Sternhell, who in his last book Ni droite ni gauche had accused Jouvenel of fascist sympathies. Aron was not blind to the dubiousness of Jouvenel’s opinions, but he found that the accusations testified to a lack of judgement. Thus he witnessed in favor of Jouvenel. A very Aronian deed and a very Parisian death. A REMARKABLE POSITION There is little unusual about Aron’s career, with its combination of political, intellectual and journalistic activities, except perhaps that its success was as tardy as it was complete. It is the typical life of the true, though exceptionally successful, Parisian intellectual and “homme de lettres.” The particularity lies in the political and ideological positions Aron had taken in. Aron chose Le Figaro over Le Monde. At vital moments he was a Gaullist, while always remaining critical of the general and his diplomacy. Overall he was pro-Atlantic, even proAmerican. He was friends with Henry Kissinger and was admired by Richard Nixon. He was above all antitotalitarian, which thus meant anti-Stalinist and anticommunist. In that sense Aron was—at the time—a very un-French intellectual. In the language of the day he belonged to the “Right,” or as Le Nouvel Observateur put it, he was “not one of us.” He was at best liberal, in the most favorable case a nonconformist, a true bourgeois, though an intelligent one with sometimes unorthodox views (he was, after all, one of the first to pronounce himself in favor of Algerian independence). As a commentator in Le Figaro he had considerable influence, more than those in the more prestigious Le Monde, because Le Figaro was until 1981 the journal of the government and Le Monde of the opposition. And as we all know one reads a newspaper not to form an opinion, but to find arguments in favor of the opinion one already has. But because of his completely independent position, Aron, while admired, listened to and feared, remained an outsider, for the political establishment of the Republic, as well. “Il n’a jamais été gaulliste,” said de Gaulle. He was even more of an outsider within the intellectual establishment of the rive gauche, for the average French intellectual was in those days antiAmerican, anti-de Gaulle, a Stalinist and member of—or at the least in sympathy with—the Communist Party. Sartre was the typical French intellectual, not Aron. Aron deviated from the standard type in other respects as well. He remained loyal to the Cartesian analytical tradition at a time when

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many French intellectuals were enchanted by the obscure, German, dialectic usage of language. He spoke his languages well, not only German, but—in contrast to most Frenchmen of his generation— English as well. He had seen much of the world, knew England and America particularly well, and felt at home in both countries. Finally, he had made a serious study of economics, which was very unusual for a French intellectual. For all these reasons, Raymond Aron was politically and ideologically as difficult to place as he was scientifically. Educated in philosophy and history, self-taught in economics, he became a professor of sociology. In that function he gave, it seems by preference, lectures on issues like international relations, American foreign policy and Clausewitz. Surprising subjects for a sociologist! Yet one can in a sense call his work sociological in the same way that Montesquieu, Tocqueville and Marx were sociologists, or rather socialpolitical thinkers. Max Weber also belonged to that category. With him Aron shared a strong epistemological interest as well. But Aron was never a sociologist in the more usual sense, in the tradition of Durkheim or in the way of the post-war empirical researchers. He spoke of himself as being allergic to the sociology of Durkheim. Aron’s thinking was always primarily analytical. He aimed to understand and explain more than to judge and adjudge. Since this thinking is borne by fundamental values, the quest for freedom and the search for truth, one can still speak of engagement. Aron was not a “clerc” in the Benda-like sense of the term—that is, an intellectual who only makes a choice when a moral problem is an intellectual problem as well. He always analyzed, but never hesitated to take sides. In the first instance he was often just an observer, but through the formulation and publication of the results of his observations, he took part in the action. In some cases, for that matter, he explicitly chose a role as polemicist: Algeria, Israel, May 1968 and the election program of the Left in 1973. These activities had a distinct influence on French politics. A VOLUMINOUS OEUVRE How important or unimportant Raymond Aron’s intervention in the political arena may have been, there is no doubt that he preferred to be and must be judged primarily as an intellectual, a writer and an analyzer. He spent his life reading and writing, pondering and speaking. He spoke with inconceivable ease, as his examiners at “Normale

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Sup” already noticed, and he wrote with tremendous speed, as his fellow journalists ascertained with envy. In addition he was accustomed to taping his lectures and having them typed out, after which they appeared in print as Cours de la Sorbonne or otherwise. These “spoken books,” for example one with the curious title Dix-huit leçons sur la société industrielle, were surprisingly good. The output of working this way for half a century is an immense oeuvre, even by French standards. Apart from the journalistic contributions to La France libre (five years), after that to Combat, his weekly column in Le Figaro and later in L’Express (for more than thirty years), there are some fifty books and a countless number of learned articles and studies. They cover practically all the different “sciences humaines”: philosophy and philosophy of history; the history of ideas, starting with his first publications on German sociologists and philosopher-historians, followed by vaster works on social thinkers (Montesquieu, Marx, Clausewitz and others); sociological studies like that on the industrial society; political theories like the Essai sur les libertés; works on the theory of international relations, with Paix et guerre entre les nations undoubtedly the principle work; commentaries on the international situation, especially, of course, on the Cold War, and on French policy during and after the Second World War; analyses of contemporary ideologies (Marxism, existentialism and the like), among which is the famous L’Opium des intellectuels; political pamphlets, some of notable length when concerned with Algeria, Israel or May 1968; and finally the impressive and comprehensive Mémoires. What catches the eye in surveying this body of work, besides its size and scope, is that it consists largely of commentaries and analyses, of contemplation. His earlier works are introductions to the German philosophy of history and sociology, the lectures at the Sorbonne contain discussions of the key figures of social thought, the classes at the Collège de France are analyses of Marx, Sartre and Clausewitz. He was also planning to write an elaborate book on Marx. To a certain extent Aron’s work was secondary, second-hand. He did not develop an independent philosophy as did Sartre, or sociological theory as did Max Weber, or political theory as did Montesquieu, persons he admired and with whom he was sometimes compared. The only sphere in which he seriously attempted such a thing was in international relations. In that sense Paix et guerre entre les nations is possibly his most important work. But however ambitious, bold and original, Paix et guerre is not a true theory, but a summa, a summarizing survey of

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international relations and the place of peace and war therein. In France, where in this field—if it actually is a field—nothing had yet been done, it was received with awe and in the United States with surprise. It did not have much influence, and Aron himself was doubtful about its significance. MASTERLY MEMOIRS While Paix et guerre may to some extent be a failed principal work, the Mémoires are definitely a masterpiece. The word Mémoires, by the way, is somewhat deceptive. Memoirs, Denkwürdigkeiten, are written by people who have done something, most often politicians, and who want to explain—usually to justify—why they have done it. With Aron this is hardly the case. Of course he discusses the moments in which he chose a position, in journalism, the university and politics, but these are exceptions. Neither are the memoirs personal recollections or revelations. He is completely silent about his private life and background, and one must not expect him to reminiscence about his encounters with the great of this world. He mentions them once or twice, but regards these conversations—except those with Kissinger and de Gaulle—as completely irrelevant. While noting, not without satisfaction, the many honors he has received, he writes much more extensively about critiques of and reactions to his work. The disturbed friendship and continuing dialogue with Sartre are leitmotivs, but his descriptions of the “rive gauche” environment hardly play a part. There is no question of an evocation of the intellectual climate of Paris. The book is an intellectual autobiography, a reflection and commentary on his own work that is almost as detached and analytical as his writings on other authors. He divides his life into five periods: his learning years, up to the Second World War; his political involvement during and after the war; his return to university, 1955–1969; his years as a “mandarin,” up to his embolism in 1977; and the “borrowed time” afterwards till 1982. Attention is virtually always paid to what he thought, not what he did. It therefore consists mostly of considerations on the books and articles he wrote, the purposes thereof, the thoughts he developed in them, the reactions they provoked and his own opinion of them in retrospect. Thus, this fine and wise book is more a book of reflection than of remembrance, more a striking of the balance of an oeuvre than of his life, although this distinction is in Aron’s case somewhat artificial. The result Aron comes to is not unfavorable. He ascertains with un-

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derstandable satisfaction, but without complacency, that in general he still stands behind the choices he has made and that he usually agrees in retrospect with the analyses he made. In the reflection on his work and choices, he does, of course, make a comparison with the analyses and insights of others. Aron looks back not only at himself but also at his colleagues, his friends and his generation. That look is always detached and, as far as possible, fair. There is no question of a règlement de comptes, but that there is some bitterness about the lack of appreciation and a grudge about insinuations and distortions is as undeniable as it is understandable. The greatness, the originality of Sartre is denied nowhere, but neither does Aron fail to remind the reader of the nonsense he often talked and the coarseness and sometimes cowardice with which Sartre treated him. The communists are opposed, but accepted. On the other hand, those who just hang on, equivocate, or extenuate their own behavior are mercilessly slaughtered. The most effective method of doing this is at the same time the most simple and, to a certain extent, the most honest: to quote what the average French intellectual before Solzhenitsyn tended to write about Stalin, Russia, communism, not forgetting “American imperialism.” But when, as sometimes happens, he adds that he does so not to make these people look ridiculous but only to sketch the spirit of the time, one may ask oneself if he is not being a little hypocritical. “Memorialists” are in a way always moralists. Memoirs are a form of reckoning, an examination of one’s self. With Aron, the analysis remains of more importance than the value judgement, even when writing about himself. Why did I do something this way, is the first question; was it right or wrong, is the second. When he makes value judgements about himself and others, they are based on what Weber called “Verantwortungsethik,” in contrast to “Gesinnungsethik.” They are not about right or wrong in the abstract sense, but about the weighing of the pros and cons in a given situation. The question that Aron, when writing about others, asks himself, is: What would I have done in his or her place? The question he asks when writing about himself in his memoirs, is: Was I right or wrong to do this? However, he is not very interested in these questions, because after all, in the first case the question is usually not interesting and in the second it is most often pointless. Yet there lies something objectionable in a teacher who avoids these questions—and thus also, to a certain extent, in an educator. Students do not appreciate the avoidance of such questions altogether. Moreover his dealings have a touch of inconsistency.

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Some issues are morally judged (Vichy, Hiroshima), whereas others are not, or are judged with hesitation (Algeria, Vietnam). Aron on this point sometimes sells himself short in his Mémoires. When the welldisposed and admiring television interviewers Missika and Wolton asked him if he condemned the torture carried out during the Algerian war, he pointed out in his answer that he condemned the war itself and thus also the torturing, but that he had never met anyone who was in favor of torture and that this was therefore not an issue. In his Mémoires he dismisses this and another similar matter, the napalm bombing of Vietnam, with a reference to Hegel: “I am not a ‘schöne Seele [a refined soul].’” This answer seems all too brief. Moral problems, although on a limited scale, presented themselves in his own life as well. Aron attempts to account as honestly as possible for his behavior and his motives, but he is not always convincing. An example is his policy as editor of La France Libre toward Vichy and the persecution of the Jews. In Le Spectateur engagé, the interviewers point to the fact that his journal did not pay any attention to this subject. Aron, the critique possibly taking him by surprise, admits his fault in this case: “I should have spoken.” He gives as explanation his being Jewish: an extra carefulness, a “précaution émotionelle,” a “convention de silence,” a “surcompensation du Juif.”3 It is an attitude he regrets and dismisses when looking back. In the Mémoires this issue is treated too, but little is left of the self-criticism.4 Another unconvincing issue is the explanation of his attitude during the crises, first at Le Figaro after the take-over by Hersant, later at L’Express after the dismissal of Todd and Revel by the newspaper’s owner Jimmy Goldsmith. In the first case he remained where he was until he could no longer do so. In the second he remained even when in fact he should no longer have done so. This attitude is understandable and, in a way, also justifiable. What is unsatisfactory is that in the explanation he gives of his position, possible self-interest—the loss of income and even more of an authoritative platform, not unimportant for an aging mandarin—is not mentioned at all. Memoirs are not written to elaborate upon one’s own shortcomings, but neither is it a disgrace to admit at times to a measure of inattentiveness or selfishness. A MAN OF SIGNIFICANCE Raymond Aron was at the same time special and normal, typically French and very un-French, sui generis and possessed of the characteristics of French society and education. Exceptional in intellect and

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ambition, driven by a highly personal, obsessive desire for intellectual recognition, he was also a typical product of the extremely competitive French system of the “grandes écoles,” which is so successful in the selection of talent and the formation of intellect. Intellectual sharpness and an astonishing verbal ability are nurtured by this system, yet a remarkable talent for aimless analysis and verbal rhetoric are also nurtured by it—but Aron fell never victim to the latter. His—in part sought after, in part unintentional—long-term residence in German and English societies had a positive influence on this. Yet no foreign experiences ever affected his attitude, that of a typical French intellectual. In what other country can one picture a tutorial seminar in sociology about Thucydides in which a student gives a brilliant discourse on the subject, and the professor is so impressed that the following week he gives a lecture on Thucydides himself, simply in order not to be second to the student in brilliancy, and moreover finds this memorable enough to mention in his memoirs twenty years later? Was Raymond Aron really right to make his memoirs a reflection on his work rather than a memory of his life? Apparently he was. Aron was more a man of comment than of action, more of a spectator than an actor. Confronted with politics in 1933, driven away by politics in 1940, fascinated by politics in London and familiar with the politics of the Fourth and Fifth Republics, he nevertheless always remained an outsider. Aron did not become a French Kissinger. Had he wanted to be a Kissinger? Probably so, he thought. Did he think of himself as suitable? Not really, he wrote. But he did not have to make the choice. To be Kissinger or Aron would have been a difficult choice, but to remain Raymond Aron rather than become the “Kissinger of France” was no problem. The thought of becoming an American did not come to mind even in 1940–1945. It was unthinkable for Raymond Aron to be anything other than a Frenchman. Will Raymond Aron’s place in history, then, be defined only by his scholarly work? I believe not. Much of it will sink into oblivion. The works of his youth on the philosophy of history will keep their place in the historiography on this subject. These studies are dated, but remain worth reading. Paix et guerre and especially Clausewitz will retain some value for students of international relations. The serious researcher will consult them. L’Opium des intellectuels has lost its meaning as a polemic, but deserves a place next to Benda’s La Trahison des clercs as a classic work on French intellectuals. The Mémoires themselves are a monument. The rest, I am afraid, will soon be forgotten.

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Sometimes it seems Aron himself thought the same, without fearing it. It is a modest yield for such a great oeuvre, for so much ambition and intellect. But the true significance of Raymond Aron lies elsewhere, in the combination of thinking and acting, in his double role as spectator and player, analyst and moralist. In that sense Raymond Aron was a typical French phenomenon, an intellectual as can exist only in France. But that does not make it easy to determine his place in the French intellectual world. Aron himself distinguishes two types of intellectuals, “le conseiller du Prince” and “le confident de la Providence.” The former accepts the world as it is with all its insecurities, whereas the latter professes to know the “flow of history,” and believes in a system (in this case communism). For the former one can think of Kissinger, for the latter of Sartre. But French history of course, knows another type of intellectual as well. There was Julien Benda, who argued against the political engagement of the intellectual and then there was Alain, who was against politics itself. Aron resembles neither. He accepts politics, including Realpolitik. He is not guided by emotions, but wants to give as cool and clear an analysis as possible. That explains his reputation as icy, cold, “glacé.” But as with Benda, who considered himself to be a completely rational individual, there actually lies something romantic in the role of the cool intellectual Aron allocates to himself. It is a kind of variation on the “lone cowboy”; the lonely intellectual completely independent of everything and everyone, who with only mind and word as his weapons gives analyses, makes recommendations, and when necessary does not refrain from giving harsh advice to the politicians. But in between thinking and acting lies a world of difference, as there does between Aron and Kissinger. As he wrote in Le Spectateur engagé, “I could accept and understand the bombing of Vietnam, but to order it and then sleep peacefully, that I could never have done.” This otherwise quite understandable reservation shows Aron’s intellectual views to be not only romantic, but also somewhat gratuit. “Professional second-hand dealers in ideas,” Hayek once characterized the intellectuals.5 That sounds rather unfriendly, but in culture we cannot function adequately without second-hand dealers. Aron was not a bold, creative and original thinker. He was, from his thèse up to his Clausewitz, a translator of ideas, in particular German ones (Kant, Weber, Marx, Dilthey), a commentator and interpreter of these and other “heroes of the mind.” That was an exceptionally important role,

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because he gathered together and brought up to date a certain European heritage. In France—and maybe only there—this was also an influential function, because the French take their intellectuals so seriously. That is why in French society the attitude of intellectuals is deemed to be so important. With the exception of Raymond Aron, the French in the past few years have not had many intellectuals to be proud of, not during the Second World War and not in the years afterwards. Raymond Aron proved that even without believing in too much, one can remain loyal to certain values of freedom, reasonableness and humanity. He proved that coolness of analysis and realism in judgement do not have to result in heartlessness or cynicism. For future generations his books may be of less importance than those of other philosophers of our century, but for his contemporaries he was a rather lonely beacon of light in dark and confusing years. That is no mean achievement when making up the balance.

PART III

Politics and Diplomacy

CHAPTER 8

Constants in French Foreign Policy

THE PROBLEM No Foreign Office, however small it may be, would think today that it could function without a bureau for research and planning. This is a rather odd belief because if indeed one can study foreign policy, it is hardly possible to plan it. Foreign policy has always been a domain in which chance, blunders and misunderstandings have had great roles and in which a great many forces are at work—action, reaction and interaction—all of which make the situation change from day to day and make the importance of great plans and “grand designs” very relative. It is preeminently the area of opportunism and inventiveness, of decisiveness and swiftness in action. Foreign policy is thus a matter of the short term, and its history should be measured by the day and the hour, not by years or decades. This is a view that will be accepted by many diplomatic historians. The well-known English historian A.J.P. Taylor has propounded this vision in many of his works.1 The opposite of Taylor’s approach to foreign policy is to be found in an article that the famous French diplomat Jules Cambon wrote for Foreign Affairs in 1930. In this he argued that the foreign policy of a country is not determined by short-term decisions, but by

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permanent factors. Changes in ideology or regime are of little importance: “The geographical position of a nation, indeed, is the principle factor conditioning its foreign policy, the principle reason why it must have a foreign policy at all.”2 In current historical jargon one would call Taylor’s approach an event-oriented form of history (“histoire événementielle”) and Cambon’s a structural one (“histoire structurelle”).3 Whatever the merits of these concepts, the use of this type of analysis is that it offers some valuable tools for the study of continuity and change. Indeed every historical phenomenon can be analyzed at different time levels and the value of an analysis is often dependent on what time level one chooses. Some developments are only understandable when one walks through history on tiptoe, while for others one has to cross the centuries with seven-mile boots. Thus to understand French foreign policy one should certainly study it in the perspective of long-term developments and pay attention to France’s geographical position and the historical process of the formation of the French nation state. It is also true that one should not neglect the fast and multiple changes of leaders, regimes, and ideologies and the impact they have had on the style and formulation of French diplomacy. In this paper, however, I will propose a different way of looking at French foreign policy, namely, from the perspective of the middle term. As I have called them “constants,” I should now first of all explain what I mean by this term, because they are not the same as Cambon’s constants of geography but rather what might be called “semiconstants.” WHAT ARE CONSTANTS? Although there is certainly something in A.J.P. Taylor’s remarks about the role of chance and accident in foreign policy, in France the need for planning and logic is clearly present. “C’est pas logique” is a severe reproach in a country where even a waiter I once met declared himself to be a Cartesian. The stressing of logical analysis and systematic action is certainly one of the traditions, if not the secrets, of the Quai d’Orsay. This need for logical analysis leads to the testing of the goals of policy against wider conceptions of France’s role in the world. It is these conceptions I have in mind when I talk about constants. They are greatly determined and directed by a sense of history. The historical orientation has always been one of the distinguishing features of French culture and thus of French politics. Historical education (about France!) plays a great role. Monuments and buildings keep

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a historical consciousness alive, the press devotes much attention to history, and widely popular historical writing makes its contribution to maintaining a living historical awareness. More important than this general public attitude is, however, the training and schooling of the political elite. The important role of the schools in French political and public life is generally recognized, and, of course, this is particularly true for the famous “grandes écoles” like the Polytechnique, the Mines and the Ponts et Chaussées, which are explicitly intended to produce a carefully selected and trained cadre.4 Since the Second World War, the École Nationale d’Administration (ENA), founded in 1945, has been added for the political and administrative posts. During the Third Republic the ENA was not yet in existence, but in fact the École des Sciences Politiques acted as a breeding ground for the French diplomatic corps, particularly after the introduction in 1907 of the examination system for the foreign service. The fact that of the 285 persons appointed to the service between 1901 and 1935, 250 (nearly 90 percent) were ex-students of “Sciences Po” is eloquent enough.5 In this context it is important that these schools have not only a strong esprit de corps, but also their own style and tradition of outlook or, one might say, ideology. The education at Sciences Po traditionally has a strongly politico-historical character. Therefore, in looking for the influence of tradition on French foreign policy, it is no use thinking of a secret file in the Quai d’Orsay containing historical lessons or traditional directives. Rather, one should consider an internal tradition, connected to less clearly articulated ideas found in broad public opinion. Here history is a clear operational factor because it exercises definite influence on the forming and formulation of policy. In the French educational system history and geography have always gone harmoniously together, and therefore one should not be surprised that French historians and political scientists have always had a sharp eye for the importance of geographical factors. In domestic policy a well-known French school of electoral geography goes back to André Siegfried who, in a famous book, demonstrated the longterm aspects of voting behavior.6 In foreign policy the school of Renouvin and Duroselle pays considerable attention to the role of the “forces profondes” like geography, demography and ideologies.7 The conceptions I am talking about concern these “forces profondes.” The first and most obvious is geography. The geographical position of France has often been analyzed. The classic formulation is that France is an “amphibious nation,” that is, a country that faces two

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ways, to the sea and to the land, and therefore a country with a double vocation, a continental as well as a maritime one. France, so the argument goes, is moreover an isthmus, that is, a corridor, a link between the Mediterranean and the North European, or, one might say, the Atlantic worlds. Finally, it is a country with imperfect natural boundaries, naturally open to the north and the northeast.8 Obviously the significance of these geographical factors, important as they are, has changed in the course of history. Their influence is to a large measure dependent on technical, industrial, economic and demographic developments. Therefore, in an attempt to consider the foreign policy of a country over a long time frame—the “geographical time,” to use the phrase coined by Braudel—is not the most suitable. Rather we should look to the middle range of technical and economic developments that define the character of an era. Looking then for the beginning of the modern period, we arrive approximately at 1870, the year that opened the industrial era in Europe. A similar distinction can also be made regarding the objectives of French foreign policy, the second domain in which there are other constant conceptions. Here too, relying again on Cambon, it is possible to distinguish a permanent target, namely the concern with security, which has been a traditional objective of the French state ever since its origins. The conflict between France and the House of Hapsburg in the sixteenth century provides the first example, with which historical consideration of French foreign policy is generally begun. But here too, I would argue that the conditions are more important than rather abstract objectives. At a certain level of abstraction objectives are naturally always the same—security, influence, power and wealth—the question is just how they were concretely elaborated. As for the first objective, what gives a certain unity to a period is that the search for security takes a concrete form in the sense of protection against a definite threat. If a point of departure is sought in this perspective, we come back once again to the year 1870. That year saw the completion of the unification of Germany, which meant a decisive change for Europe and above all for France. As a consequence of this arose “the German question,” which became and has remained the problem at the heart of French policy, even if much has changed since then in global politics. Thus ever since, a certain constant vision in French foreign policy can be recognized, which I will analyze in this chapter.

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This rather long introduction hopefully makes clear why I think one can speak of “constants” in French foreign policy and what I mean by this term. Constants are, on the one hand, the forces that over a long time have influenced policy and delineated its borders and, on the other, the objectives that are pursued with a certain permanence. The awareness of this results in a certain vision or conception that is shared by the political elite and forms the background of a durable policy, although its concrete manifestations change greatly with changing circumstances. In the case of France the unity can be found in the constant existence of a problem at the heart of its foreign policy, namely the German question, that is, German military, economic and political power. This danger originated in the convergence of an economic development, the Second Industrial Revolution, and a political one, the unification of Germany in 1870. Naturally, the German question has manifested itself since then with varying degrees of intensity. Thus different periods can be distinguished: German hegemony from 1870 to 1914, the First World War and the artificial French hegemony after the Peace of Versailles, then the German conquest and occupation of France between 1940 and 1945, followed by the postwar years with a new sort of French hegemony for some time. This period came to an end with the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification in 1989 and 1990, respectively. French diplomacy can above all be understood as a reaction to this problem, a reaction that has taken different forms depending on the ways in which the German danger manifested itself, but which can be reduced to two principles related to France’s “amphibious” nature: the concern for security, above all through alliances on the continent and, next to that, the concern for an overseas role. The first goal has been to ward off the German danger. However, when the French had to resign themselves to being dominated or even to subjection, they sought an overseas role, either as a next best policy and possibly as a contribution to an eventual improvement of their continental position, or as the only outlet. The latter policy can be seen during the Second World War; the first, a combination of balanceof-power politics and overseas expansion, as an instrument to counterbalance the weight of Germany, can be seen from the 1880s on and again under president de Gaulle and his successors. It is time, therefore, to examine this foreign policy somewhat more closely.

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CONTINENTAL OR OVERSEAS ROLE? The Third Republic was born amid great crisis. The unparalleled defeat at Sedan in 1870 led to the fall of the Empire and the setting up of the Republic. But only after the bloody days of the Commune uprising and the humiliating Treaty of Frankfurt, with the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, could deliberation over the future form of government be carried on. Until 1879, that form itself was an uncertain question, a matter of debate between various monarchists and the eventually triumphant republicans. It is not surprising that there was little scope for foreign adventures in that first decade. This, however, was to change in the 1880s. Bismarck, striving for the consolidation of the new order of 1870, had every interest in detaching the French from their fixation with the “blue line of the Vosges.” He thus pointed the way to overseas expansion. Jules Ferry, premier in 1880–1881 and again in 1883–1885, was the man under whose direction the new orientation was begun. With the annexation of Tunisia and later of Tonkin there began for France an unprecedented period of expansion, which in the subsequent decade was primarily directed towards black Africa. But this policy certainly did not meet with everyone’s approval. In particular the strongly patriotic left opposed it. Paul Déroulède, the nationalist poet, exclaimed that he had been offered twenty servants in compensation for the loss of two children. And Georges Clemenceau, the incarnation of the idea of revenge, accused Ferry— “the Tonkinese”—of high treason: “As for me,” he summarized his view, “my patriotism is in France.”9 It was above all the center, the liberals—the “modérés” or “opportunistes,” as they were called—who were in favor of colonial expansion. They argued that in order to count in the modern world, one must understand the signs of the times, and the signs were for worldwide expansion. “Glittering without acting, without participating in world affairs, means that we will descend from the first rank to the third and then to the fourth,” according to Ferry.10 Their policy turned out to be dominant. Thus in the years after Ferry between 1885 and 1895, when the partition of Africa was very largely effected, France played its part cheerfully in the international bun-fight that arose over the cutting up of the “magnificent African cake,” as King Leopold II of the Belgians pithily described it. However, this does not mean that the priority of the continental question was abandoned. Indeed, precisely in the 1890s when the strong hand of the Iron Chancellor was gone and the new German

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leaders had abandoned the Russian alliance—warp and woof of Bismarck’s diplomatic fabric—opportunities were opened up for French diplomacy, which were grasped in 1894 with the FrancoRussian alliance. This agreement between Europe’s most autocratic monarchy and its only liberal Republic remained the most important diplomatic fact up until 1914. At the same time it was the basis for further French international activity. This was important because, increasingly, the Germans too became competitors in the international race for colonies. Thus, in the new century, the enemy was met not only behind the mists of the Vosges but also in the sun-drenched deserts and tropical forests of Africa. The old ideological dilemma, revenge or colonies, faded in the light of these new realities. The Morocco crises of 1905 and 1911, which brought France and Germany into confrontation, demonstrated this in a clear fashion. Thus there developed a sort of ideological consensus with regard to foreign and colonial policy. But this consensus was not based on a widespread appreciation for Africa or on a fervent passion for colonies. On the contrary, the French parliamentarian and later prime minister Gaston Doumergue typified the French attitude to colonial matters correctly as a “benevolent indifference.”11 It was based on a nationalist public opinion that saw national greatness in terms of colonial possessions and for which the abandonment of areas the French flag flew over would be an inconceivable affront. However, French policy was not so much based on this kind of emotion and sentiment— although they naturally had to be taken into account, but rather on a certain conception of France’s role in the world which was held by a limited but influential circle. For all that the era of empire building was full of quirks and chances, there was, as Shakespeare might have put it, a method in this madness. To understand that method it is necessary to look at the ideas of the above-mentioned group. This group was known as the “colonial party” and its representatives in the House as the “Colonial Group of the Chamber,” set up by 28 deputies in 1892. The group grew fast and at its zenith in 1902 numbered 200 members. Naturally it was not a genuine party in the modern sense: there were many purely nominal members, and their opinions were very divided. But because they constituted the only group in the House to voice an opinion about foreign policy and because ministerial politics were badly organized and coordinated, they had great influence. What, then, was the vision of this influential group with regard to French foreign policy? The group can be described as guardians of the

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idea, introduced by Ferry among others, that France’s future after 1870 must above all be sought overseas. The corollary of this was an acceptance, at any rate for the present, of the new order shaped by Bismarck in Europe. The consequent activities in Africa naturally brought the risk of conflicts and tensions with England. The Fashoda incident of 1898 showed this very clearly. The conclusion drawn from this was that it was necessary to arrive at a colonial arrangement with England. The Morocco-Egypt agreement—core of the 1904 Entente Cordiale and accomplished by foreign minister Théophile Delcassé— solved this matter. Delcassé’s relationship with the group was, by the way, not one of servile dependence. Delcassé was preeminently a realistic and pragmatic statesman who wanted to maintain as much room for maneuver as possible. Nevertheless, his vision displayed a clear affinity with the group’s vision. Delcassé too was a genuine imperialist who believed that France’s future lay overseas. Essentially, he saw France as a Mediterranean power. Within the group he was thus an adherent of the dominant “African school,” which considered African possessions to be primary and Asian colonies at best secondary. The French efforts must be directed towards an Empire on both sides of the Mediterranean, with black Africa as a hinterland and the Levant as a sphere of influence. All this, however, assumed a very discrete policy towards Germany. It was Delcassé’s relinquishing of this most fundamental and traditional conviction of French colonialists, as expressed in his tough attitude during the time of the Morocco crisis in 1905, that led to his breaking with the group and subsequently to his fall.12 In the following period the role of the group was not so apparent or influential. Most of its goals had either been achieved or abandoned. Moreover the question, all-divisive in these years, of “laïcité,”—the conflict between Church and State—split the colonial group as well. But during the First World War a clear influence can again be recognized, particularly in the formulation of France’s overseas war aims. On the most important point, the partition of the disintegrating Ottoman Empire, they did not get their way. This was due to the strong position of the British armies there and to the return to power of Clemenceau in November 1917. Clemenceau had not forgotten his old enmity toward the colonials and was once more obsessed with his old purpose, the Eastern borders, which at that time meant the Western Front. As against this, the colonialists had a virtually free hand in the formulation of French demands in Africa.

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With the Peace of Versailles, there came a temporary end to the German question with the—also temporary—construction of a French hegemony in Europe. The settlement then produced appeared for some time to have created the instruments to solve the problem. Moreover, the new facts of the post-Versailles era—the League of Nations and collective security on the one hand and the weakening of the international influence of Russia and the introduction of ideology into foreign policy on the other—made the traditional striving for alliances in French diplomacy problematic. How temporary this all was became clear in the 1930s. These problems do not have to be dealt with here. What is relevant is that in 1940 a new period of German hegemony began, this time in the very radical form of domination and occupation. The German question manifested itself again and this time, so it seemed, in a decisive and definite form. This was the opinion of many in Europe after July 1940. It was in any case the view of the Vichy governments, which ruled the “Etat Français” set up by Pétain, between 1940 and 1944. It is thus important to see what the consequences of this conviction were for Vichy’s view of the French role in this new world. VICHY The policy of Vichy was one based on collaboration, that is, on cooperation with the Germans. The American historian Robert Paxton has argued this convincingly in his well-known book.13 However it was Vichy’s purpose to serve French interests, as they saw them, as well as possible. From this stemmed the efforts of Vichy to take the most favored position in Hitler’s Europe. In a world in which German domination on the continent and the destruction of the British Empire in Asia seemed the most striking features, the available sphere of operations for France was all too clear. Compensation for defeat would once again have to be sought through colonial expansion. It is striking to see how the lines of reasoning about the colonies of the 1880s returned, be it in a sharpened, anti-English manner. This came about not only because a confrontation with England appeared less of a real danger now that the British Empire seemed to be on its last legs, but also because the traditional latent anglophobia was stirred up by the British destruction of the French battle fleet at Mers-el-Kebir on 4 July 1940. This return of imperialist desires, this “repli impérial,” now took the form of concrete political initiatives, but the idea itself was not

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new. It was already advocated directly after the treaty of Munich in 1938. The nationalist radical, and later press chief of Vichy, Pierre Dominique, wrote as early as October 1938: “once and for all, let us look to the sea and turn our back on the continent.” That amphibious creature, France, was again allotted to this element, and a writer of congenial spirit explicitly referred in this connection to the controversy between Ferry and Clemenceau about “revanche” as opposed to colonization.14 The old colonial dreams of Ferry, Etienne and Delcassé can be seen returning in 1940 in the daydreams or, rather, nightmares of Vichy. Already by 10 July 1940, not a month after the cease-fire, there was, it should be noted, a French proposal to the Germans that the French armies in the middle East should attack the oil fields in Iraq. The installations of the Iraqi Petroleum Company should be occupied so that they could be put to work not for the Anglo-Saxon trusts—or multinationals, as one would say today—but for the welfare of Europe instead.15 These are familiar noises. But ambitions were not limited only to the Middle East, the classical area of Franco-British rivalry. The ideas of the colonial group can also be clearly seen to have returned in various visions of France as the link between Europe and Africa. Here we see the same concept as that of Delcassé—of France as a Mediterranean power with an African hinterland. Darlan, premier of Vichy for a long time, reproached the Third Republic for yielding in the face of British jealousy and rivalry and for failing in the development of its colonial empire. Now all the opportunities lay in that direction. An England weakened by a quick compromise peace could not hinder France again. Paxton sums up Darlan’s ideas as follows: “Darlan’s program, then, was a revival of France through maritime and colonial resources, alongside a great continental Germany.”16 Even including the thought of revival, this statement, word for word and point for point, was also the conception of the colonial ideologists of the Third Republic. In the thoughts of the leader of the Free French, the empire played an important role as well. De Gaulle held it important above all for the creation of self-confidence and a global orientation. Thus it was an inescapable condition for the restoration of national “grandeur” and of France’s global importance. But—and this was of course the essential difference from the defeatists of Vichy—de Gaulle entirely rejected their acceptance of German hegemony in Europe. To him, the overseas role was not an end in itself but a means, a condition for

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an influential position in continental Europe: “Secular destiny of France!”17 POST-WAR SITUATION De Gaulle’s prognosis was right, but the new France in post-war Europe was not going to play the role he had predicted for it. As elsewhere, in France 1945 meant a restoration of the political system rather than the renewal advocated by de Gaulle. The return to the party politics of the Third Republic and the economic perils were not a suitable basis for an influential foreign policy. The diplomatic position of post-war France was complicated indeed. A member of the Great Four by the grace of the Great Three, defeated in 1940 but thrust forward as fellow-victor and fellow-occupier in 1945, the Fourth Republic experienced an après-guerre that knew neither clear concentration on internal reconstruction, as after 1870, nor the equally understandable effort in the direction of the political consolidation of victory, as after 1918. Moreover, French diplomacy could not escape entanglement in the paradoxes of the postwar world. The Cold War and the consequent American military and nuclear presence in Europe on the one hand, and the global movement for decolonization on the other, both shaped the new framework of world politics, into which the traditional political schemes had to be fitted. The Russian alliance was prevented by the Cold War and the colonial independence movements clashed with French aspirations in the Mediterranean. Like England, floating between its Commonwealth ties, its “special relationship” with the United States and its continental commitment; like Holland, hesitating between its traditional belief in neutrality and the newly discovered credo of Atlantic solidarity; in fact like every other European country, France was confronted with the fact that world politics and European politics were never to coincide again, as they had done for so many centuries. Because of the involvement of the Soviet Union and the United States in the German question, because of their overwhelming power and sharp antagonism, there was not much room for French initiatives, let alone French hegemony as there had been after 1918. For some time world politics made European politics seem obsolete and thus, in the 1950s, the drama of Franco-German antagonism seemed to have found its natural end with the exit of its two protagonists. The German question was answered. The constants that had

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dominated French politics for eighty years seemed to be of only historical significance. This, however, was not to be the case. The constants were obscured by the new situation but they had not disappeared. This becomes clear when one looks at French diplomacy after 1950. It was France that took the initiative toward European unity, and it was the only nation in a position to do so. It would be unfair to deny all idealism in this move. Robert Schuman was no less upright in his desire to remove the matters of conflict than Briand had been thirty years earlier. But there was another side to it as well. The European concept in France was based not only on hope but also on fear. European integration was not only a reconciliation but also an exorcism of Germany. The crisis over the European Defence Community and its final rejection by the French parliament in 1954 illustrated this fear of Germany.18 Finally, another course was chosen, the one that was inaugurated by the Treaty of Rome in 1957. This coincided with developments in international and internal politics. The Fifth Republic, created in 1958, produced an unmistakable increase in internal stability, in economic growth and in the continuity of foreign policy, and thus laid the basis for a stronger French deployment in the 1960s. The unravelling of the drama of decolonization and the thaw in the Cold War opened new opportunities for French diplomacy. Thus the 1960s witnessed a powerful French influence on European politics even if, because of the radically changed power relations in the world, it presented a very different picture from that of the 1920s and 1930s. Although it is no longer determining world politics, the balance of power on the old continent is still an important issue, and fundamental to it is the Franco-German relationship or, seen from the French standpoint, the German question. In this perspective a certain parallel can even be drawn with the interwar period; for during that period we saw a period of strong French influence, if not hegemony. And this hegemony too could be called artificial because it was not based on economic and political realities but on the consequences of an earlier conflict. For a while it looked as if the position of Germany had been permanently weakened, first of all by the division of the former Reich into two states and also by the Germans’ guilt complex over the Nazi period and its atrocities. Neither, however, were to last forever. The past that appeared to have irredeemably mortgaged German policy and had consequently made German cooperation with and obedience to France the moral alibi for German foreign policy, was inevitably losing its significance. Through the gradual erosion of the past and the

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succession of generations, German diplomacy regained its freedom. The moral catharsis of Germany, brought about by the Willy Brandt administration, has been a strong catalyst in this inevitable process. A new generation born after the war and thus unconnected with the Nazi era was to take over the German leadership. This was to be expected. However, it was completely unexpected that the division of Germany would come to an end at the same time. The combination of these two factors reopened the German question in a sudden, dramatic way, so much so that in 1999 a book appeared with the alarming title: De la prochaine guerre avec l’Allemagne, by Philippe Delmas, a former aide to the French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas. To understand this process we have first to go back to the Brandt era. In retrospect the above-mentioned aspects of Brandt’s Ostpolitik are unmistakable, but at the time they were noticed by only a few observers, who were particularly to be found in France. De Gaulle’s confidant Christian Fouchet, for example, labeled the Ostpolitik a “genuine Bismarckian policy.”19 And, as Henry Kissinger tells us, president Pompidou (as well as himself) was worried whether this might not be the first step to an uncertain and possibly dangerous future.20 In general, however, it was only in 1979 that observers rather suddenly became conscious that an important and perhaps definite shift had occurred in Germany’s position. As Fritz Stern has pointed out in an article in Foreign Affairs, the striking phenomenon of 1979 was the sudden realization that the Federal Republic has come to play a much more important role, not just within the alliance, but on the world stage generally.21 The year 1968 was a turning point. Germany’s economic power, which had developed over time, became manifest while at the same time France’s structural weaknesses were demonstrated by the events of “Mai ’68.” From that time onward, first under president Pompidou who as a former banker understood more about economics than general de Gaulle had done, French policy was geared to controlling Germany’s economic power. This implied an austere economic policy, which—apart from the first two years of euphoria after the election of president Mitterrand—was also to be continued under the Left. The franc fort was the symbol of this economic policy. The policy of the franc fort implied, however, that France had to follow the German D-Mark and thus became dependent on the policy of the German Bundesbank. To get a grip on that policy in one way or another became the main aim of French European policy. The Treaty of Maastricht, which brought about the Euro and the European Central

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Bank and made an end to the reign of the D-Mark, was therefore a triumph for France. In the meantime, however, a completely unexpected and astonishing series of events had taken place: the fall of the Wall, the unification of Germany, the dissolution of the Soviet Empire and the end of the Cold War. Thus the Maastricht Treaty became effective in a completely different European and world order. French leaders who were confronted with German unification were of course very worried by it. But rather soon they realized they had to accept the situation and put their hope in the saying that this time the German leaders did not want to create a German Europe but a European Germany. In short, what one can see after 1945 is basically the same as what was seen from 1870 to 1945. These seventy-five years were dominated by Franco-German rivalry and wars. The years after World War II were characterized by Franco-German cooperation and “friendship.” But one should not forget that since World War II Franco-German friendship has always been in the first place an instrument of French diplomacy. In this respect there was no difference between the leaders of the Fourth and Fifth Republics nor between de Gaulle and his successors. What changed was the situation. In fact, this changed several times. First there was the change between the Fourth and the Fifth Republic. The Fifth Republic got more room to maneuver than the Fourth because of the thaw in the Cold War. It was also internally stronger. Then there was the change after de Gaulle’s departure. The successors of de Gaulle were confronted with a more powerful and self-conscious Germany. Therefore, the means of French diplomacy changed with the different situations, but fundamentally the aims have remained the same. The reconciliation with Germany during the Schuman era was one specific form of controlling Germany, the Adenauer-de Gaulle friendship treaty another. For de Gaulle, Franco-German friendship meant cooperation on France’s terms. His anti-British charades notwithstanding, he was always aware that sooner or later he might need Britain to counterbalance Germany.22 In this respect it was perhaps more than just a boutade when de Gaulle answered Henry Kissinger’s question about how he thought he could keep Germany from dominating Europe with the biting remark: “Par la guerre.”23 His successors have been looking for different instruments. Pompidou, in the classic traditions of French diplomacy, tried to outbid Germany in good relations with Russia while at the same time

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reenacting the Entente Cordiale by opening the Common Market to Britain. Giscard’s diplomacy was basically the same, only more so, because in the meantime Germany’s influence had grown. Thus, when Schmidt was known to plan a visit to Brezhnev, Giscard, even in the midst of the Afghan crisis, flew to Warsaw to see the Russian leader first. French concern over the growing power of Germany was also clearly present at Giscard’s press conference of 19 February 1979, which coincided largely with the debates about the elections for the European Parliament. This campaign offered the rather bewildering spectacle of the right-wing Gaullist politician Alexandre Sanguinetti fraternally united with the extreme left guru Jean-Paul Sartre in their common fear of a German-American Europe under a new Iron Chancellor. The shadow of this specter was to be seen hanging over Giscard when he recalled at that conference that, to avoid being submitted to “hegemony,” France’s economic power should become comparable with that of Germany. In the same breath he urged Britain to strive after the same goal. Moreover, he announced a new initiative for European-African-Arabic cooperation thus reaccentuating his already active African policy.24 Mitterrand and Kohl developed a new “special relationship” because they were both seriously concerned about the future of Europe and saw parallel interests. Germany wanted political and defence cooperation with France, France wanted economic and monetary cooperation with Germany. The Economic and Monetary Union and the European Political Union were the results of these two concerns. After 1989 the center of gravity of Europe has again moved to the East and accordingly the capital of Germany has moved from Bonn to Berlin. The future enlargement of the European Union will undoubtedly increase the political weight of Germany. The German question has taken on a different form and we should be grateful for that. But it will be a long time before France becomes accustomed to it.

CHAPTER 9

Was de Gaulle Right?

On 20 September 1988 the British prime minister of the time, Margaret Thatcher, gave a speech that was to become known as the Bruges speech. This title was bestowed because the speech was given in the city of Bruges, the seat of the College of Europe, one of the ideological bulwarks of European federalism. Further, Bruges lies in Belgium, the country whose capital, Brussels, has become the symbol of European regulatory zeal and lust for power. These were precisely the phenomena against which Mrs. Thatcher aimed her arrows. In her well-known, uncommonly clear and vigorous tone, she disposed of the dreams and illusions of further unification. The Europe of Margaret Thatcher, as she said, looked very different from that of Jean Monnet and Jacques Delors. It was a Europe based on the cooperation of sovereign states, not on supranational bodies. To quote her words, “My first guiding principle is this: willing and active cooperation between independent sovereign states is the best way to build a successful European Community. To try to suppress nationhood and concentrate power at the center of a European conglomerate would be highly damaging and would jeopardise the objectives we seek to achieve. Europe will be stronger precisely because it has France as

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France, Spain as Spain, Britain as Britain, each with its own customs, traditions and identity. It would be folly to try to fit them into some sort of identikit European personality.” No less clear was the following passage: “Some of the Founding Fathers of the Community thought that the United States of America might be its model, but the whole history of America is quite different from Europe. People went there to get away from the intolerance and constraints of life in Europe. They sought liberty and opportunity and their strong sense of purpose has, over two centuries, helped to create a new unity and pride in being American, just as our pride lies in being British or Belgian or Dutch or German.” Finally, in the last paragraph of this section of her speech, Margaret Thatcher argued that Europe should indeed cooperate more closely, but, as she said, “it must be in a way which preserves the different traditions, parliamentary powers and sense of national pride in one’s own country, for these have been the source of Europe’s vitality through the centuries.”1 DE GAULLE AND THATCHER The speech was a clear provocation because of the place where it was given, because of its unusually, strident tone and clear language, and above all because of its content. Away with the dream of a United Europe, was her message in a nutshell. Naturally, this idea was by no means new. After all, we all know that a quarter of a century earlier another leading European politician had enunciated similar and equally strong views on Europe, namely general de Gaulle. If one compares what they said, one is struck by numerous remarkable similarities. The “identikit European personality” of which Mrs. Thatcher spoke conjures up memories of de Gaulle’s famous reference to the use of Volapük. So let’s listen once again to what President de Gaulle had to say on this subject, for example in his famous television interview with Michel Droit in 1965: “Naturally, we can get up and dance on our chairs and shout ‘Europe! Europe! Europe!’ but this leads to nothing and means nothing. This is why I say yet again: we must take things as they are. Well, how are they? There is a country called France, this cannot be disputed, it exists. There is a country called Germany, it cannot be disputed, it exists. There is a country called Italy, a country called Belgium, a country called Holland, a country called Luxembourg and, rather further away, there is a country called Britain and a country called Spain. They are countries. They have their history, they have their language, they have their way of life.”2

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We had heard the same idea, couched in perhaps even more Thatcherite terms, at a press conference he gave three years earlier in the Elysée: “I do not believe that Europe can be a living reality if it does not contain France with its French, Germany with its Germans, Italy with its Italians and so forth. Dante, Goethe, Chateaubriand belong to Europe as a whole precisely because they were first and foremost Italian, German and French. They would not have meant so much to Europe if they had been people without a fatherland and had thought and written in some kind of ‘integrated’ Esperanto or Volapük.”3 Time goes on and Mrs. Thatcher’s identikit personality has assumed the role of de Gaulle’s Volapük, but the idea is the same: no boring European uniformity. Margaret Thatcher’s passage about the difference between Europe and the United States could also have been lifted straight from the writings or speeches of the general. For example, de Gaulle writes in his Mémoires d’espoir, “What a superficial vision underlies the comparison, often made by naive people, between what Europe should do and what the United States has done whereas the United States were created out of nothing in a completely new territory, by successive waves of uprooted colonists.”4 Clearly, therefore, the Europe of Mrs. Thatcher is the Europe of de Gaulle. Mrs. Thatcher called her Europe “a family of nations,” whereas de Gaulle called his “L’Europe des États.” The words differ, but the meaning is the same. THE IRONY OF HISTORY? There is something ironic about the fact that the so often antiFrench–sounding Mrs. Thatcher should propagate the views of the very French president who wished to exclude Britain from the European Community and actually succeeded in doing so for a time. It is also somewhat ironic that some other British prime ministers are—or were compelled to be—more Gaullist about Europe than some later French presidents. But de Gaulle would not have been surprised by this. It was he, after all, who emphasized that the British—that “great and proud people,” as he called them—thought about it just as he did. There also is a special irony in this from a Dutch perspective. After all, the Dutch have always prided themselves—and still do—on their pro-European attitude. But at the same time the Dutch also wanted Britain to join the European Economic Community (EEC). Didn’t they know, unlike de Gaulle, how the British thought about Europe? Of course they did! But why then were they so keen to see Britain

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join the EEC if they knew that Britain would obstruct the formation of the kind of Europe the Dutch advocated? Logically, this was indeed a problem, and French diplomacy seldom missed an opportunity to point out this lack of Cartesianism to the Dutch. For their part, the Dutch pointed out that if the French merely wished to have a Europe à l’anglaise, and hence not a federal Europe, it was equally illogical of them to wish to exclude Britain. What it was all about, however, was not intellectual but political logic. In essence, it was about something very simple: the difference between large and small countries. A small country like the Netherlands has an interest in a Europe with federal institutions, in procedures laid down by law and in more or less equal rights for all members. In short, it has an interest in the Europe of the Treaty of Rome and what has followed it. This offers a certain protection against the traditional power politics of the large countries, which explains the Dutch preference for a Europe of this kind. But if a Europe of this kind could not be achieved, then it was in any event better to have a Europe with the Atlantic-oriented, pro-American, maritime and free trade–minded British than a Europe in which one was subjected to the dominance of two great continental powers, France and Germany. This was why Holland wanted Britain’s accession. We now know that de Gaulle was right on both counts. The British have proved to be the most obstinate opponents of the federal Europe of which, of all people, a Frenchman, Jacques Delors, has become the symbol. Furthermore, the end of the Cold War has reduced Britain’s importance as a stepping-stone to America. It is also evident that the tide has turned, because the Europe of the federalists has not materialized and will not materialize, in any event for the time being. The Europe of today is the “Europe of states.” The former German chancellor Helmut Schmidt wrote some time ago in an article in Die Zeit: “It is time that we at last admit that Charles de Gaulle was right when he talked about an Europe des patries.” In fact, de Gaulle categorically denied that he had ever used these words—he called it a Europe des États, which is indeed more correct—but this shade of meaning is relatively unimportant in this connection. After all, the message is clear: the nation-state is the core of Europe’s political system and will also be that of its future organization. Once again, one can quote General de Gaulle in this connection. He wrote in his Mémoires d’espoir, “To what depths of illusion or prejudice must one not sink in order to believe that the nations of Europe, which have been forged by great

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toil and affliction over the centuries, each with its own geography, history, language, traditions and institutions, could cease to be themselves in order to form a single nation.”5 REALISTS AND UTOPIANS This is what one could term—and what its proponents themselves like to describe as—the realistic position. It is, they say, based on the realities of history and geography. If this is indeed true, the alternative of the federalists must be a form of utopianism. But how realistic is this position in fact? Is it true that nation-states have always existed and will always continue to exist? Little can be said about the future, but rather more can be said about the past; maybe the past may shed some light on the future. This is why it is a good idea to start any discussion of this subject with a truly realistic and historical observation; however old some of the states of Europe may be and however durable they may seem—albeit not all of them—they are the product of history, not nature. Some of them came into being a century ago and others several centuries ago. But however old or young they may be, none of them has “always” been around. It is a good thing to realize this, because the present states have something so familiar about them that we have almost started taking them for granted. This is very understandable. After all, the nation-state is a typically European phenomenon, one that was developed in Europe and exported to the rest of the world for better or worse. The well-known English Africanist Basil Davidson, for example, blames much if not all of the present misery in Africa on the export of this phenomenon from Europe to Africa and therefore speaks of The Curse of the NationState.6 We in Europe also have some experience of this curse. Until 1945 war was an endemic feature of European history. Since the creation of modern states, in other words since the sixteenth century, there have always been wars. At school we used to learn about the Eighty Years War, the Seven Years War, the War of the Spanish Succession, the War of the Austrian Succession and so forth. But these wars between states became really dramatic only when the states became nation-states. This was a phenomenon of the nineteenth, not the sixteenth century. There were two variants. Sometimes the states already existed and their inhabitants were then forged into one nation. In other cases, new states were the products of nationalism. The former are described as

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state nations, the latter as culture nations. Examples of the former are France, Spain, Great Britain and the Netherlands. These states had existed for a long time, but the realization that the inhabitants were French, Spanish, British and Dutch rather than Bretons and Provençaux, Catalans and Castilians, Scots and English, Dutch and Frisians did not really dawn until the nineteenth century. The dawning of this realization was partly spontaneous and partly—but often to a very significant extent—prompted by the authorities. This was done in numerous ways, for example by language and educational policy as well as by conscription and compulsory schooling. The best known examples of the other, reverse process are Germany and Italy. There, national sentiment did exist, but there was no state to represent the nation. This did not come until 1870, in other words not very much more than a century ago. However different these processes may have been, they both concerned essentially the same phenomenon: a particular form of social organization, the national one, was chosen in preference to all other forms of social organization. Naturally, the Germans and the French also remained Berliners and Parisians, Prussians and Bretons. But it meant that in the future they were first and foremost French or German. The new concept of nationhood supplanted the old identity. IMAGINED COMMUNITIES In the light of this history, it is not surprising that we have come to take nation-states for granted and regard them as something natural. But they are not. The nations are creations of the mind, “imagined communities,” to use the apposite term coined by Benedict Anderson.7 They are, so to speak, constructed. Historians are at present preoccupied with the question of precisely how this process worked. The American historian of France, Eugen Weber, has shown how the peasantry in France, the majority of whom spoke no French at all prior to 1870, were converted into one French people. Peasants into Frenchmen is the striking title of his book on this subject.8 A similar study by Linda Colley on a similar process in Great Britain is subtitled Forging the Nation.9 These words clearly show that it was a process imposed from above. The nation-state did not occur spontaneously, but was the product of a political will. So much is written about this subject nowadays that it sometimes looks like we are talking about a new discovery. But this is not the case. The French writer

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and thinker Ernest Renan already pointed out a century ago that the nation is a product of the will. What makes a nation a nation, he said in a famous speech, is the will to be a nation.10 The consequences of this idea are great. It means, after all, that the nations will exist only as long as the people want them to do so. Whether they want this is partly a question of ideas, partly a question of interests. The Victorians were highly enthusiastic about the nationstate partly because they were strongly indoctrinated with nationalist ideas and partly because the state had started doing more and more for its inhabitants. The situation is now different in two respects. The objections to nationalism were convincingly demonstrated by the two world wars. But the last of these occurred more than half a century ago. This form of nationalism would therefore appear to be behind us for ever. The danger of war in Western Europe seems to have been averted for good. This does indeed seem to be the case, but is it realistic to assume this as a definite fact? It is not without reason that the former French president, François Mitterrand, a truly realistic politician with a well-developed sense of history, pointed out in a speech to the European parliament that nothing should be taken for granted in politics. Nationalism and war are not phenomena that one can simply assume to have vanished for good from our continent. It was the danger of war that lay at the root of European cooperation after the Second World War. This too is often forgotten, since the European Union (EU) is regarded and presented above all as an economic success story. Initially, however, it was concerned with reconciliation and not with rewards. It is good to remember this occasionally. The reconciliation was a success. This was the great achievement of early Europeans like Schuman and Monnet and, later of de Gaulle and Adenauer. One may object to French feelings of superiority and the sometimes arrogant way in which Germany behaves, but without French-German cooperation nothing at all would have happened. For a small country like the Netherlands, this form of power politics poses a number of specific problems. No one can deny the new position the united Germany occupies in Europe. Each country is therefore considering how it should respond. In the Netherlands, many opinions and reports are being published on this subject and they all say the same thing: seek to establish links with Germany. Even in a country like France, many people are saying the same thing, albeit for a different reason. For them, Franco-German cooperation means that Germany will do nothing without France. This is also in Germany’s

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interest, as Helmut Schmidt tried to make clear to his fellow countrymen in his article in Die Zeit. He knows the historical alternative, namely, that France becomes the leader of an anti-German alliance with Britain or even Russia. It follows that an orientation toward Germany means very different things to different countries. For the Netherlands it means that it must gear its policies to Germany, and for France it means that Germany must ask France’s approval. Once again, it comes down to the difference between small and large countries and the inequality of treatment and influence this difference entails. It is a familiar problem. Europe’s whole history is the history of great powers and the balance of power. For those who find this hard to accept, there are only two conceivable solutions: the first is to dispense with powers altogether, and the second is to ensure that all powers are of equal size. The former idea is that of the radical federalists: no nation-states, only Europe. The latter has been proposed by a variety of writers, and later received rather unexpected support from none other than the brewing magnate Freddy Heineken. He outlined his own utopia of a United States of Europe and called it a “Eurotopia.”11 It is indeed a utopia in the true sense of the word, because he does not say how this idea could be realized. Anyone who gives any thought to this issue soon comes across a paradox: if the large states were prepared to divide themselves up into small states, there would be no problem in the first place. Despite being large states, they would evidently be unconcerned with power and could therefore continue to exist unchanged. Nonetheless, this utopia is not entirely unrealistic because it links up with an existing trend toward federalization and regionalization. In Eastern Europe, this process is so intense that it has lead to the disintegration of states: Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union are examples of this. And in Western Europe, for example in Spain and Belgium, there is strong internal federalization. This has always been the case in a country like Germany. In France it takes the form of a strong process of regionalization. In this way too, therefore, the nation-state is losing some of its functions and hence its significance. This is another difference with the situation in the nineteenth century. Not only does nationalistic ideology have much less sway over people than it did then, but the citizen’s vested interest in the state has also decreased. Regional and supranational bodies have already

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assumed many of the functions of the state. The distinction between realism and utopianism is therefore too simplistic. It would be just as wrong to respond to the excesses of the welfare state by reintroducing a capitalisme sauvage and throwing overboard all social achievements as to respond to the rediscovery of the durability of the nation-state by adopting an “everything is illusion” policy and propagating a copy of the Europe after the Congress of Vienna as the sole alternative to a federal Europe. The post–Cold War Europe cannot be a replica of Metternich’s European Concert. This would not be realistic because the forces of the historical process are working in the opposite direction. After all, whenever any part of its sovereignty is transferred to a regional or, above all, to a supranational body, the state loses part of its power and the function of the nation-state diminishes. This process is irreversible. All of this concerns just one side of the issue, the side of vested interest. The other side is that of will. An often-heard objection to the possibility of a European policy is that Europe does not exist because no European identity exists. This too is realistic and hence correct, but once again, the argument loses some of its force when examined in the light of history. If the European nations, as we are coming to realize more and more, are the products of will and imagination— “imagined communities,” to use the term again—it would not be impossible to want and conceive another community, a European one. Just as the French have partly conceived and constructed their “Frenchness,” the Europeans could conceive a “Europeanness” provided that they at least have the will to do so. The European “government,” Brussels, can encourage this process in the same way national governments did in the nineteenth century. The entire creation of Europe shortly after the war was closely bound up with interests and dangers (for example the Cold War and the need for economic reconstruction), but if there had been no will, nothing would have happened. In other words, in the light of all the Euroscepticism that exists, it would be unwise to give up every form of utopianism in the sense of working to achieve further progress towards European unification. This would not only be defeatist, it would also not be realistic.

CHAPTER 10

Charles de Gaulle and Charles Péguy: A Certain Idea of France

The combination of Charles de Gaulle and Charles Péguy is one to which the famous French saying bien étonnés de se trouver ensemble seems highly appropriate. Because one would not know what resemblance might exist between Péguy, the poet and essayist, socialist and dreyfusard, former student of the École Normale and, especially, son of the people, and the aristocratic elderly statesman and soldier, de Gaulle. The combination, however, is less peculiar than it may appear at first sight. First of all Péguy was not only a poet but a soldier, and, as one of his admirers remarked, “more than anything else he was that.”1 For his part, de Gaulle was not only a soldier but a poet, at least in the sense in which some Dutch politician put it long ago when he said, “there are army-reformers, but also army poets.”2 Indeed, one who believes in the famous saying “le style c’est l’homme” will not hesitate for long, as the resemblance between Péguy’s Cahiers and de Gaulle’s writings is striking.3 But there is more, because this similarity can also be found in the way both men thought, in the “certaine idée de la France” about which general de Gaulle speaks in that first, famous sentence of his Mémoires: “Toute ma vie, je me suis fait une

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certaine idée de la France” (“All my life I have thought of France in a certain way”).4 This similarity will be further elaborated in this essay. The idea of comparing de Gaulle and Péguy is not new. In his Le Gaullisme, passionnante aventure Edmond Michelet wrote that Péguy’s work is forever connected to the Gaullistic message. He stated explicitly: “the certain idea of France of de Gaulle is exactly that of Péguy.”5 One could also formulate it differently: Péguy’s certaine idée is, avant la lettre, that of de Gaulle. In his Mon Lieutenant Charles Péguy Victor Boudon also points at the similarity between the two and quotes Michelet’s words approvingly.6 Alexander Werth, in his biography of de Gaulle, writes, “Curiously, de Gaulle’s ‘certain idea’ of France is more reminiscent of Péguy than of any other writer.”7 Raoul Girardet, finally, in his reflections on French nationalism between 1870 and 1914, also pays attention to de Gaulle and quotes the following lines from his Mémoires: “Petit Lillois de Paris, rien ne me frappait davantage que les symboles de nos gloires: nuit descendant sur Notre-Dame, majesté du soir à Versailles, Arc de Triomphe dans le soleil, drapeaux conquis frissonnant à la voûte des Invalides.” Girardet points out that the image of France evoked here can be found in similar wordings of Jules Michelet, Déroulède, Barrès and Péguy.8 The similarity is indeed striking. In his Le Peuple (1846), Jules Michelet gives an explanation of patriotism wherein he argues that it is the duty of the father to teach his son love for the fatherland. He then describes how he should show him Notre Dame, the Louvre, the Tuileries, the Arc de Triomphe: “From a roof or a terrace he shows him the people, the army that passes by, the chinking bayonets, the tricolor.”9 In his Notre Patrie from 1905, Péguy also writes about the monuments of Paris and sums them up: “the four great divine monuments of the glory of Paris: the Arc de Triomphe . . . , the Invalides . . . , the Panthéon . . . , and the Notre-Dame.”10 Here the “idée de la France” is evoked, brought to the mind as images, but elsewhere it also is described and analyzed. In de Gaulle’s works it is almost omnipresent. Of special importance, however, are the historical and philosophical deliberations in Le Fil de l’épée (1932) and La France et son armée (1938) and especially the Mémoires, in which this idea is so clearly formulated on even the first page. It says, in fact, that France can only be itself in the first rank, that the French people must be strong and aim at the highest possible goal. “In short,” as de Gaulle concludes: “to my mind, France cannot be France without greatness.”11

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It is clear that this conviction, which is at the root of de Gaulle’s political philosophy, derives from a specific historical vision. Every political thought is after all, as René Rémond has formulated it, “the transformation into political action of a certain historical meditation.”12 Thus the “certaine idée” of France is preceded by a “certain meditation” on the history of France. In de Gaulle’s case this is so strongly the case that one writer has said that he was “in the spell of history.”13 If one looks more clearly at his reflections on history, three central ideas can be distinguished. First of all, the idea that French history forms a unity; second, that this history demonstrates French greatness; and third, that French history is basically a military history, proving how closely the destiny of France is connected to the destiny of its army. The unity of French history—evoked by the images of Notre-Dame, Versailles, the Arc de Triomphe and so forth, and representing just as many phases of that history—is also to be found in one of the first speeches de Gaulle delivered as the leader of the Free French on 2 July 1940 on the English radio. He reminded the defeated people of France of their glorious history by mentioning the following names: “Jeanne d’Arc, Richelieu, Louis XIV, Carnot, Napoléon, Gambetta, Poincaré, Clemenceau, le Maréchal Foch.”14 We notice how in this way it is possible to mention the different phases of kingdom and revolution, empire and republic in one breath. At first sight this idea of unity seems only too obvious, but it is of essential importance. The theory of the existence of two Frances and thus of the rupture in French history had after all been an important theme with both rightand left-wing historians and politicians. On the one hand there would be the France of catholicism and monarchy, of throne and altar, in short, of the Ancien Régime, on the other hand the France of the Enlightenment and the Revolution, and thus of the Republic. The Dutch historian Pieter Geyl distinguished this vision when he wrote that de Gaulle did not see France in the way that “Charles Maurras of the Action Française, or as a left-wing man would see it, i.e., as the personification of certain thoughts, such as the monarchy or the revolution, but in the way it has been shaped by thousand years of history, ‘France as it is.’”15 Indeed de Gaulle appeals to some kind of France behind France, the “true” France, but this France is also definitely the incarnation of certain thoughts, namely those of French grandeur and the glory of the French army.

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Girardet calls this, in his previously mentioned book on French nationalism, the two most important elements of unity and continuity in French nationalism. The glorification of the army is as much an asset to the Left—where it is seen as an instrument of the French mission, namely to bring freedom—as it is to the Right, where it represents the maintainer of order and power. Also, behind the different forms of nationalism, the same almost identical conceptions of French greatness can be perceived, in which pride in a glorious past and the conviction of an everlasting vocation go hand in hand.16 De Gaulle’s writings are strongly imbued with these ideas. Already in the fifth line of his Mémoires de guerre, “une destinée éminente et exceptionnelle” is introduced, and a little further down follows the invocation of the Providence that would have predestined France to “des succès inachevés ou des malheurs exemplaires.”17 From his early childhood on, this belief was imparted to him by his father, whom he describes as a man of culture and tradition, deeply convinced of the dignity of France: “Il m’en a découvert l’Histoire.” And he writes “l’Histoire” with a capital.18 Also, that other element, the glorification of the army, is abundantly present in de Gaulle’s publications. In his Mémoires de guerre it is called “one of the greatest things of the world” and “the instrument of future great actions.”19 In Vers l’armée de métier he speaks of “the enormous capital of martial capacities”20 and in La France et son armée of “a great martial value.”21 Coming from a military man, and especially a professional one, this glorification is, of course, not very surprising. But it would be a mistake to consider it only as the reflection of a caste mentality or of professional deformation or blunt militarism. It is clear that in de Gaulle’s case it is the result of two firm convictions. The first one is that the army is the mirror of a country and a people; that it is “the most complete expression of the spirit of a society.”22 He elaborated this idea in La France et son armée, a history of the army as the history of France, in which he wrote that he wanted to demonstrate how from one century to another, the soul and the destiny of a people is reflected in the mirror of its army.23 The other conviction is that the military element is the “foundation” of everything else; that French cultural history is built on French military history, and that France’s fame, honor, glory and culture are based on France’s military power. This conviction can also be found in many works, for example in La France et son armée, where even in the first sentence he wrote, “France was made by sabre slashes,”24 while Vers l’armée

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de métier ends with the following sentence: “For the sword is the axis of the world and greatness is indivisible.”25 It was the absolute conviction of de Gaulle that these are not just wisdoms from the past, but that they also are of crucial importance for current politics. States and nations are not accidental, but unavoidable, necessary and eternal phenomena.26 These three themes can be considered the central ideas of de Gaulle’s “idée de la France.” To what extent, then, can they be set into a larger framework, and to what extent can they be explained in the context of a certain political and spiritual climate? To answer these questions it is necessary to look at the formative years of the general. De Gaulle was born in 1890, which means that the first decade of his life coincided with the nineties of the last century, during which the Dreyfus affair was such an important event. His second decade ran from 1900 till 1910, when the nationalistic revival in France began. Some memories of those early years can be found in the Mémoires. De Gaulle describes his joyful memories of various national heydays of these times: parades at Longchamp, the official visit of the Tsar, the Great Fair and the first aviation successes. But he also commemorates his dismay about the national humiliations and crises: Fashoda, the Dreyfus affair and the social and religious discords and fights. These are, however, very early memories. He was only eight years old when Zola wrote his J’accuse and the Dreyfus affair broke out in all its virulence, in that same year captain Marchand had to surrender to Kitchener at Fashoda. Although certain psychological theories proclaim that spirit and character are fully shaped before the age of four, it seems more appropriate to focus on the second period and point out that de Gaulle was fifteen years old when the German emperor landed at Tangier, and twenty-one when the Panther anchored at the roadstead of Agadir. These two events accentuated French-German antagonism and had a great impact on the young, nationalistic generation, of which de Gaulle, according to Girardet, was such a striking representative.27 Therefore, it is necessary to contemplate this nationalistic revival and its spiritual background at greater length. De Gaulle himself has ascertained and described this turn of the tide in La France et son armée, where he speaks of a “change in the public spirit.” As examples of this he mentions among others the election of Poincaré as president, Briand’s proposal for three years of national service law, the diplomatic successes of Delcassé and ambassadors like Paléologue and the Cambons (Jules and Paul), the political evolution

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of the socialists Viviani and Millerand and the like.28 But next to these political changes, he also indicates other, more spiritual ones: the rise of the philosophers Boutroux and Bergson and the influence of writers like Barrès and Péguy.29 Of course the nationalistic revival was most obvious at the military and political level, and was influenced most clearly by political and military factors. But it is also true that these can only be understood against the background of the changes in the spiritual and cultural climates. These appear from some of the names mentioned by de Gaulle, such as Barrès, Boutroux and Bergson. The impression that Bergson made in those days on many of his contemporaries but also on students and younger people like de Gaulle deserve special attention. Bergson’s name is after all closely connected with the criticism of rationalism and “scientism,” the belief in the unlimited possibilities of science, which had been major and important themes of the previous republican credo. This criticism had already started in the nineties with Boutroux and Blondel and was continued by Brunetière, among others, but it reached its culmination with Bergson. Indeed he did more than his predecessors, since he not only criticized rationalism, but presented alternatives: the intuitive method and the concept of élan vital. These theories were eagerly received. Also, thanks to the elegance of his argumentation, Bergson’s influence was important to an extent that was absolutely unusual for philosophers.30 Remarkably enough, his ideas also had an influence in military circles. In the writings of Foch and Joffre they are clearly present. As another example, General Gamelin, at an early age, wrote a booklet on the philosophical aspects of the military art and later on declared himself a convinced admirer of Bergson.31 De Gaulle also cites Bergson at length in his Le Fil de l’épée to prove that in its deepest sense warfare escapes human intelligence. Of course intelligence should be understood here in a Bergsonian way, that is, as logical reasoning, discursive logic.32 Among Bergson’s students were many well-known writers: the philosopher Jacques Maritain, the essayist and Action Française-ideologue Henri Massis and the writer-soldier Ernest Psichari, a famous glorifier of war whom de Gaulle admired and approvingly quoted.33 The most important of the disciples, however, was undoubtedly Charles Péguy. And although other roots can be distinguished in de Gaulle’s intellectual pedigree—Charles Maurras34 for instance and Georges Bernanos perhaps even more—it was mainly Péguy who inspired them.

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One could deduce this influence from de Gaulle’s writings, but since Alain Peyrefitte’s publication of his conversations with de Gaulle in the three volumes of his C’était de Gaulle, we also have a direct source for this. In 1964 de Gaulle spoke with him about Péguy and said, “No other writer has influenced me so much.”35 Before taking a closer look at the nature of this influence, something should be said about Péguy’s life and work. The career of Charles Péguy, who was born in 1873 in Orléans, was remarkable in many ways. As his father died only a few months after his birth, he was raised by his mother who—it is a classical story— earned a living by working hard. Thus he grew up surrounded by poverty, but a dignified poverty, “pauvreté” as he called it, in order to distinguish it from “misère.” “Misère” he would see later among the factory workers in Paris. This discovery turned him into a socialist. In 1892, after a brilliant school education, he failed the entrance examinations for the École Normale Supérieure—which is not so classical—and enrolled into the army as a “volontaire d’un an” in order to become a reserve officer. For Péguy this year in the barracks was of great importance. The Tharaud brothers, longtime friends and faithful executors of his spiritual heritage, paid attention to this in one of their books about Péguy. He very much enjoyed his life in the army, they wrote, because for him it was the realization of group and community ideals that he had always pursued, which were characterized by a spirit of obedience and power. He loved the comradeship and equality that prevailed in the barracks and especially the discipline, which absolved him from his greatest concern: freedom. He thus had very good memories of his military service and was delighted to be called up for retraining every two years, periods that he considered to be his only real holidays and during which he truly came to rest.36 In 1894 he again took the exam for “Normale Sup,” this time with success, so that he was admitted to this famous school where he would stay until 1897. In 1900 he started what may well be called his lifework, namely the publication of the Cahiers de la Quinzaine. By means of these biweekly booklets, to which many well-known writers of the time contributed—such as the brothers Tharaud, Romain Rolland, Julien Benda, Daniel Halévy—he very clearly and specifically took sides in the great conflicts and problems of those years, especially the Dreyfus affair, in which he fiercely contested the army command. Notwithstanding the victory of his party, the dreyfusards, Péguy was disappointed about the outcome. He felt himself betrayed by his

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former supporters, the radicals, and specifically by prime minister Combes and his anticlerical politics. Then, in 1905, the Tangier crisis marked a new turning point, which to Péguy clearly illustrated the German danger. He dedicated a Cahier to this event, the well-known pamphlet Notre Patrie. From this moment on his life was entirely dedicated to the cause of army and nation. In his writings he attempted to prepare his compatriots for the coming conflict. When war broke out in 1914, Péguy enthusiastically joined his army unit. He was killed in one of the first weeks of the war, in many ways too soon, but also literally several hours too early, as a state official would decide later. He figured out that Péguy perished just before the official beginning of the Battle of the Marne and thus could not be decorated with the Legion of Honor.37 His death, however, did not mark the end of his influence. On the contrary, the life and work of Péguy, whose exemplary character was confirmed by his death, were to become for many a symbol of French ideals. His writings were reprinted quite often and it is remarkable to see that precisely during the crisis years—1918, 1939 and 1945—many books on Péguy appeared. Daniel-Rops was probably not alone when he declared that during the dark years of the Second World War he read Péguy’s work over and over again.38 Rops had indeed been an important propagator of Péguy’s ideas in the thirties when he set up a series called Chefs de file, in which he included works of Péguy. He also published a similar series, Présences, which allowed him to circulate de Gaulle’s writings among a larger audience than those limited to military publishers. This combination was not accidental, as the resemblance between de Gaulle’s message and Péguy’s was already noticed by de Gaulle himself, among others. He included in his La France et son armée (which appeared in the above-mentioned series), a phrase of Péguy’s as a device: “Mother see here your sons who have fought so hard.” Péguy is also mentioned and cited in other works of de Gaulle. But this is only the surface of an influence that becomes much clearer when one looks at the central ideas of the general: the unity of French history, the indissoluble ties between army and people and the unique character of French grandeur. The concept of the unity of French history, in other words the synthesis of republic and monarchy, was one of Péguy’s major contributions to French nationalism. The significance of this appears when one remembers that precisely in the years in which Péguy was writing, the decade before the First World War, the idea of the two Frances—the

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great rupture in French history—was a topical theme of the right-wing nationalists. It was indeed in those years that the Action Française developed and gained influence rapidly and that its leaders, acclaimed writers like Maurras and Bainville, argued that the republic was not capable of caring and loving the army and thus not capable of “great politics.” According to this reasoning, royalism was therefore the necessary result of a “nationalisme intégral.” Their historians tried to demonstrate this to French history. For Péguy this thought was as senseless as it was reprehensible. Apart from his aversion to the abstract and the constructed elements of the Maurrassian doctrine, Maurras’ lack of feeling for “le peuple,” he did not share this vision of French history. For Péguy forms of government are of no real importance. To him French history is the history of the French people, regardless of their the leaders. To him successes are successes of the French people, but defeats are defeats of bad governments, for which the people have no responsibility.39 The fact that it was Péguy who came up with this synthesis is certainly surprising, as during the Dreyfus affair, when the two conceptions of France and French history were fiercely opposed, Péguy had in fact clearly chosen for the left-wing, antimilitaristic and antinationalistic side. He himself tried to make this dreyfusard-nationalist contradiction disappear by making it part of a higher synthesis of heroism. In various Cahiers, particularly in Notre jeunesse and L’Argent suite, he accounted for this past. Here his argumentation is that there was no fundamental contradiction, since the affaire and the war could be reduced to the same denominator. They represented the great ordeals that a people must endure. In the Dreyfus affair, according to Péguy, there were no pacifists, because everyone was at war: “Tout le monde était à la guerre, tout le monde faisait la guerre.”40 But even though the battle was fierce, it was always generous and never dishonorable, because both parties represented something of the true France. Just as Péguy integrates the antithesis dreyfusard-nationalist into a higher synthesis of heroism, he also dissolves the contradiction between republic and monarchy into the synthesis of the one, true France. This concept is most clearly formulated in the famous sentence after which an anthology has been named: “La république une et indivisible, c’est notre royaume de France.”41 But, as Hegel has argued, every synthesis represents the beginning of a new series of theses and antitheses. This is true in Péguy’s case, because he also distinguishes a cleavage in French history, that is, between the ancient and genuine

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France and the ultimate “monde moderne.” Again, it is in Notre Jeunesse that he explains this idea when he argues that the real contradiction is not between Revolution and Ancien Régime, as is claimed by others, because the Ancien Régime belongs to ancienne France in the same way that the Revolution explicitly belongs to it. No, the rupture did not occur in 1789, but much later, namely around 1880.42 The true contradiction is between ancient France, pagan as well as christian, traditional as well as revolutionary, royalist and republican, and the deplorable “monde moderne.” For Péguy the “monde moderne” represents a perverted world, a world of banks and machines, a world of that despicable thing called money, “l’argent” (after which, not accidentally, two Cahiers were named). A world with a damaged countryside, diminishing craftsmanship, vanishing artisans and peasant classes, a world of urbanization, factories and the like.43 All this is clearly nostalgic, but first and foremost it is conservative, because here one finds the resistance against the industrial society that is at the basis of so many reactionary ideologies.44 Also in de Gaulle’s writings, especially the early ones, much of this atmosphere can be found: a similar aversion to a society that is based on technology and money.45 In this respect attention may be drawn to de Gaulle’s first radio speeches dating from 1940, in which he argued that the French were only defeated by “the German mechanical force.”46 It is striking how much de Gaulle’s explanation of this defeat resembles the French interpretations of the Défaite of 1870, such as can be found in the literature of the years 1870 and 1880.47 These are some remarks about the general interpretation of French history. But also in other respects there are similarities, for example in the esteem for the army and the conviction of the French mission. Péguy’s love for the army has already been mentioned. Military fame and glory are frequently occurring themes in his work and his dreams.48 We have already pointed out his preference for the soldierly world and its camaraderie. His interest in the military was unmistakably demonstrated in his pronouncement on military history as “la seule qui m’intéresse au fond.”49 For Péguy the entire history of France is not only imbued with this military element, but is nothing but the development of the French military instinct.50 For him the soldier represents the genuine, ancient France. Here again, his aversion of the “monde moderne” shows when he depicts the soldier as the only one who has not been affected, “the only one who has remained the same.”51

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But there is more, because this predilection comes from a historical vision that is very similar to de Gaulle’s pronouncements on the sword being the pivot of the world, and on France being created by sabre cuts. It is the theory of the “réalité militaire,” the military power as the basis of all other powers. This opinion has been set down by Péguy in Notre Patrie, with a reference to the landing of the German emperor in Tangier. In a Cahier of 1909 he returned to the subject when he explained how fundamentally important military power is as a basis, a “soubassement” for the spiritual and moral realities.52 Also in L’Argent in 1913 he referred to this and argued that it is the soldier who decides on the extent of the state’s territory, or the region in which a certain language is spoken, or where a specific spirit, race and customs exist. According to Péguy, the soldier not only determines the size of the physical territory, but the spiritual and intellectual territory as well. And, he continued, it is the French soldier—and the French cannon—who created the territory where French is spoken. Also, it is to the soldier’s merit that French is spoken from Dakar to Bizerta and from Brest to Longwy, from Maubeuge to Liège and from Mulhouse to Colmar. And, he said, it is also thanks to that soldier that French is spoken in Paris.53 The conclusion of his reflections is that the soldier is the instrument for the achievement of the French mission and thus for the realization of French grandeur.54 For both de Gaulle and Péguy, the mission of France is to be an example for other peoples. Predestination for greatness in good and evil is the central thought of the “idée de la France” in the Mémoires as well as the conclusion of La France et son armée, with its final lines of acclamation and encouragement to the French people, whom de Gaulle called a great people, made to be an example for others.55 That this is also exactly Péguy’s conviction is proved by his complete oeuvre and from what has been written about him. It is also clear that this has explicitly been experienced as his message. Daniel Halévy even declared that no Frenchman, not even Victor Hugo or Michelet, ever believed as strongly in France’s mission as did Péguy.56 The Tharauds argued that for Péguy France was a sort of patron, a witness and a martyr for freedom.57 Whereas de Gaulle speaks of France as being predestined by Providence, in Péguy’s case one can point to his belief in the “vocation providentielle de la France.”58 This vocation is at the same time supernatural and supermundane, even literally as far as the latter is concerned as in 1910 Péguy praised the French pilots for proving that the earth was too small for the French mission

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and that thus the airspace ought also to be included.59 The following lines of the poem Le mystère des Saints Innocents, dating from 1912, clearly illustrate this supernatural element: C’est embêtant, dit Dieu, quand il n’y aura plus ces Français, il y a des choses que je fais, il n’y aura plus personne pour les comprendre. It is annoying, says God, when those French aren’t there anymore, There are things that I do But there won’t be anybody to understand them.60

As one can see, it is no exaggeration to state that French nationalism cannot be understood only in a rational way, and that it requires a certain feeling for mysticism to be able to understand its more exuberant manifestations. Also, the knowledge of those irrational backgrounds is important and probably even useful for a true understanding of French nationalism. All this explains why for many Frenchmen de Gaulle and Gaullism represented much more than sheer statesman’s stratagem and power politics; namely, the “rigueur morale” that originates from his “idée de la France.” Moreover, in this way it may become easier to understand the kind of fascination for the French statesman who for the first time seemed to be able to reconcile the republic with the grandeur.

PART IV

History and Historians

CHAPTER 11

Gabriel Hanotaux: An Historian in Politics

The 1944–1945 Yearbook of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in Amsterdam includes a commemorative article written by Johan Huizinga, the great Dutch historian, in honor of his French colleague Gabriel Hanotaux, who was a foreign member of the Academy from 1913 to 1944. Hanotaux was born on 19 November 1853 and died on 11 April 1944, a few months after his ninetieth birthday. In his commemoration, Huizinga briefly sketched the life, work and achievements of Hanotaux who was, at that time, a well-known French historian and politician. Huizinga was very impressed, as becomes apparent from his words: “Truly, it is almost unbelievable what this representative of all that is noble and pure in the French has created.”1 He concluded his commemoration with a brief consideration of what he called his “temporary personal relationship with Hanotaux.”2 This relationship stemmed from an attempt undertaken in the twenties to have Huizinga’s Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen (Waning of the Middle Ages) translated into French and published. Huizinga relates the following about this undertaking: In 1921, our fellow member Van Eysinga had aroused the interest of Hanotaux, whom he had met at meetings of the League of Nations, in

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a French edition of my Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen and he had given me an opportunity to speak to him about it. This resulted in my being kindly received amidst a wealth of books at 4, Avenue Hoche. Taking his time, as if he had nothing else to do, Hanotaux discussed the matter with me. You should do the translation yourself, he said, and when I said I did not have the capacity to do so, he advised me to seek the help of a Frenchman who could correct my work. I was not altogether pleased with this idea. My critic was indeed an extremely erudite Frenchman, but the Middle Ages proved a completely alien and disagreeable topic to him. I proceeded industriously and visited my French advisor every week to discuss a piece. Once, after we had worked very hard on a particular passage—my representation of which did not please him—and after a great deal of correction and discussion he complained gruffly: “well, it is in French now, but I don’t understand it.” The translation neared completion and I sent it to Hanotaux piece by piece. And this is the point I’d like to make: this man, in spite of his overwhelming workload, personally corrected and condensed my imperfect manuscript several times, and then took the trouble of getting a publisher to accept the manuscript. In the end, this failed: not until much later was a French edition of my work published via a different route, with quite a lot of my own translation showing in the text. But to be sure, my illustrious promoter had not been lacking in his benevolence and kind care and trouble taken.3

This is a very noble but a somewhat naive representation of the matter. Readers of Huizinga’s Briefwisseling (Correspondence), published some time ago, get a very different impression of Hanotaux’s behavior. They can see how Hanotaux, from the very beginning to the last, made the most peculiar proposals to his Dutch colleague and sent him on a wild goose chase time and again. “You have to translate it into French yourself,” was his first demand. Huizinga did it. “You have to make it two hundred pages shorter,” was his second. And Huizinga did it. Not only that, he even wrote to Hanotaux saying, “the book is no doubt the better for it.”4 And so on and so forth. The book has to be shorter still, the French is not good enough, the publisher, Champion, has no money and Hanotaux has no time. Finally, Champion asked Huizinga to make sure that a potential French translation would also be sold in the Netherlands. When Huizinga pointed out that this was impossible, Champion demanded that Huizinga pay half the printing costs. This was more than even Huizinga could take. “To buy the honor of seeing my work published in French” is the final straw.5 The edition was never published and in 1927, after six years of agony, Hanotaux finally returned the manuscript to Huizinga.

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Five years later, a French edition was published after all, but in a different translation and by a different publisher. Huizinga again approached Hanotaux to write a foreword to this edition. The latter complied but wrote in an accompanying note that he really had not had time because he was due to leave for Morocco. He apologized for it being a chaotic text and suggested that it might need to be improved when the proofs came in. Or perhaps it might not. It was left up to Huizinga to decide what to do with the text. The book did indeed appear with the foreword as written by Hanotaux. It is a curious, rhetorical and chaotic text that can only have deterred its readers. The book was no success and in 1936, the disappointed publisher Payot wrote that he had only sold twenty-nine copies of Herfsttij in the previous year, and therefore wanted to offer the book at half price. In order to stimulate sales, he said he would put a paper band around the book with the text, “This book teaches us that in times of great trouble, we should not despair of human nature. Gabriel Hanotaux of the Académie Française.”6 Few will have seen this to be the main message of Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen, but by doing this, Huizinga— or rather his publisher—may have profited to some degree from Hanotaux’s fame and rhetoric. Within the scope of this contribution, it is not necessary to go into great detail regarding these matters. I have done that elsewhere.7 However, the episode is of some importance because it provides us with a first impression of the historian this article deals with: Gabriel Hanotaux. Hanotaux is someone who made a great career for himself both in politics and in history and whom may therefore be regarded as the epitome of an historian in politics. Before going into the relationship between politics and history, I will first sketch a picture of the life and work of this French historian. This is not a difficult task because Hanotaux himself described all this extensively in his autobiographical Mon Temps and various publications about his political activities.8 However, it is not easy to do this concisely, because this man, although he had suffered from weak health since childhood, grew extremely old, and his historical oeuvre is exceptionally extensive even for a member of the Académie Française— which Hanotaux was, among many other things. HIS LIFE Albert Auguste Gabriel Hanotaux came from a rural, fairly wealthy family from Northern France. He was born in Beaurevoir, a small town

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near Saint Quentin in the Aisne department in Northern France, on the border of Flanders and Picardy, on 19 November 1853. Grandfather Hanotaux was a farmer, a cultivateur. His son, Gabriel’s father, became a notary’s clerk and later a notary. Even though it sounds like a sophisticated position, this notary was not well-to-do. He had a modest rural practice—these are bought in France—first in Beaurevoir and later in Saint Quentin. The family on his mother’s side was more well-to-do. It was, as Hanotaux puts it, “a decent family from the old bourgeoisie of Picardy.”9 There were three children, Gabriel, an elder brother and a younger sister. Father Hanotaux passed away in November 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War, not in military action but as a result of a combination of ailments caused by a fall from his horse and traveling in a draughty diligence. Shortly after, in May 1871, the family moved to Paris because of the boys’ studies there. In Paris, after the shock of the war, they suffered the horrors of the Commune uprising. Both events would have a lasting influence on Hanotaux’s political ideas.10 Hanotaux studied law and obtained his licence, but the topic failed to captivate his interest. His “boundless interest and aptitude,” to quote Huizinga once again,11 fixed on many other subjects—on literature and philosophy, languages and the arts and much more. He enrolled in the medical faculty and later in the academy of arts, but his heart was in history more than anything else. He first studied that subject at the École des Hautes Etudes and later at the prestigious École des Chartes. His first publication appeared in 1877 in the Revue Historique. It dealt with the question, “Did the Venetians betray Christianity in 1202?” [“Les Vénitiens ont-ils trahi la Chrétienté en 1202?”].12 His thesis for the École des Chartes dealt with “The governors of the province. Origins and initial progress of their institution, 1550–1631.” [“Les intendants de province. Origines et premiers progrès de leur institution, 1550–1631”]. It appeared in print in 1884.13 Shortly afterwards, in 1886, a collection of essays was published titled Etudes historiques sur le XVIe et le XVIIe siècle en France.14 In spite of the fact that he had been trained as a medievalist, he was primarily interested in “le grand siècle,” particularly in Richelieu, to whom he would devote an enormous work, which would appear in installments at long intervals. The research he needed to conduct for this work brought him to the archives of the Quai d’Orsay. There he was noticed by the then minister, Waddington, who first offered him a diplomatic post, which Hanotaux refused on grounds of his weak health, and then a job in the archives, which he accepted.

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This is how Hanotaux’s official career started, and soon after, his political career as well. Hanotaux adhered to republican principles. Initially he was quite radical in this, but he soon became more moderate. He admired Gambetta and wrote for Gambetta’s paper La République Française. It did not take long for him to become “chef adjoint de cabinet” of the great tribune during Gambetta’s brief grand ministère and after that, he became chef de cabinet under one of Gambetta’s successors, Jules Ferry. He also became involved as an advisor on the Eastern Question and spent a year as counselor of the embassy in Constantinople. In 1886 he won a seat in parliament but lost it three years later because of the position he took in the Boulanger affair. He then continued his career at the Foreign Office, where he rose to be director of consular and commercial affairs. In 1894 at the age of forty-one—and much too soon, as will become clear—he had his finest hour. Charles Dupuy formed his second cabinet. He could not find a minister of Foreign Affairs. Eligible candidates such as Paul Cambon and Théophile Delcassé had refused or were unacceptable to others. Finally Hanotaux was appointed, and he accepted the offer after some hesitation. Thus Hanotaux took over one of the most important and prestigious ministerial posts and became the superior officer of his former superiors. However, he did not have the backing of a political party and was the only minister without a seat in parliament. His relations with the president, the prime minister and the minister of the Colonies, Delcassé, were poor. This made his position in the cabinet weak from the very start. The Dupuy cabinet served from 30 May 1894 until 26 January 1895. In the next cabinet, that of Alexandre Ribot, which ruled from 26 January until 1 November 1895, Hanotaux remained at the foreign office. In the following cabinet of Léon Bourgeois, Hanotaux did not hold an office. During this period the Quai d’Orsay was led, somewhat surprisingly, by Marcellin Berthelot, a chemist. But this would not be for long. On 28 April 1896, Hanotaux returned to lead French diplomacy in the Méline cabinet, until this cabinet, too, fell on 28 June 1898. The Quai d’Orsay came under the control of Hanotaux’s rival Théophile Delcassé, who would leave his stamp on French foreign policy. For Hanotaux, this meant the end of his political career, even though his candidacy for a Senate seat in 1904 shows that he had not given up all his political ambitions. However, this campaign also proved fruitless. Hanotaux was defeated quite dramatically. His political years were over now. At forty-one he had become a minister, and at forty-five he was an ex-minister forever. It is customary in

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France that one continues to be addressed with the title “Monsieur le Ministre.” As Hanotaux lived until 90, he would profit from this for a long time. Thus this historian in politics became an ex-politician in history for the rest of his life. In this capacity, Hanotaux produced an extensive oeuvre. However, Hanotaux owes his place in the history books not primarily to his historical oeuvre, but to his political work and particularly his role in European and colonial policy. Moreover, this chapter is about the ideas and deeds of an historian in politics and not about the historical oeuvre of an ex-politician. That is why it will mainly investigate Hanotaux’s politics and political ideas. POLITICAL PRINCIPLES Hanotaux’s foreign policy was based on several simple principles: those of the policy of equilibrium and of the European concert. In his opinion, it was France’s task to ensure that the European equilibrium not be disturbed. “The policy of equilibrium is the essence of French policy,” he wrote, and “France is first and foremost a power of equilibrium.”15 That was the main achievement of Richelieu and later of Talleyrand. Hanotaux did not believe in unsolvable problems or everlasting antagonisms. The world of politics consists of sovereign states with contradictory interests. All states will protect their own interests. They will seek support from each other in an attempt to strengthen their position. This is how alliances and coalitions are formed. However, interests change and therefore combinations and alliances are not permanent but changeable. The important thing is that they solve their differences in a peaceful manner. That is the function of diplomacy. Hanotaux was firmly convinced of the power of diplomacy and often took occasion to quote Richelieu’s phrase, “Negotiate, always negotiate.”16 The best result of diplomacy was the policy of the European concert, the same policy that had controlled the division of Africa. This had therefore been conducted in a fairly peaceful manner: “The European concert presided over the process of colonial expansion. . . . It was a period of mutual cautiousness.”17 This is how international politics had to be conducted, in the overseas countries but also in Europe itself. According to Hanotaux, in the European system of states, France takes a special place because of its location. It is the link between the North and the South: “Nothing gets done in Europe without her. . . . To travel one has to pass through her. She holds in her lap the com-

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bined aspirations of the North and the South.”18 Moreover, France is the oldest nation-state of Europe. That too gives the country a special place in European history. “She has the historical mission to restrain and drive back the ‘German invasions’ and those invasions that were the result of the German invasions.”19 In the days of Richelieu, France discovered its true mission: to provide European politics with leadership. It was confronted with the choice to either take up the idea of the crusade again and start a definitive attack on the Islam—which Richelieu’s advisor père Joseph wanted—or to fight the Austrian House. The latter became Richelieu’s policy and that was how it should have been, because the raison d’Etat required it.20 Because of this, France obtained the role of leader in Europe, which it deserved and would retain for a long time. After 1870, however, it seemed that that role had been played out. Some even advocated that the era of the Latin peoples, and therefore the era of France, was over and that now the era of the Anglo-Saxons, Germans and Slavs had arrived. Hanotaux disagreed. France had to regain its old place. There was still a major task for the Latin peoples. Let the Anglo-Saxons take care of North America, said Hanotaux, the Germans of Central Europe, the Slavs of Siberia. The Latin peoples have Africa and South America as their domain. They will have to cooperate and be aware that this is the era of large empires. Colonization is therefore a historical need now more than ever. This brings us to a central point in Hanotaux’s political thinking and acting: the importance of colonization. Hanotaux’s colonial ideas originated from his romantic notion of nationalism and his strong belief in the French—and Latin—mission. Hanotaux, like many of his countrymen, was a nationalist, but he was a nationalist of a special kind in the France of his time. French nationalism post-1870 was controlled by ideas of decadence and mortal fear. Hanotaux did not want any part in this. His philosophy was not that of Maurras but that of Bergson, his thesis not that of decadence but that of the “élan vital.” He called colonization an example of Bergson’s “évolution créatrice.”21 According to Hanotaux, the overseas areas were therefore of crucial importance. They offered the opportunity to establish La Paix latine and to propagate L’Énergie française—titles of two of his books. Social-Darwinist concepts played an important role in this, as they did with most of his contemporaries. He took the notion of mother country quite literally and spoke of the colonies as if he was speaking about children. One should not ask how much they brought in. That was a

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base question: “Does one ask a mother how much her children bring in?”22 Thus to Hanotaux, colonial expansion was an emotional rather than a rational necessity. Material interests came second, even though he did acknowledge the importance of the colonies as providers of troops. When the Belgian king Leopold II once asked him what France was looking for in Africa, Hanotaux simply replied, “Soldiers, Your Majesty!”23 Hanotaux was not the only one to hold these opinions. He belonged to the so-called colonial school in French foreign policy, the school of his admired teachers Gambetta and Ferry. They had advocated that France had a dual role to play, a continental one but also a colonial one, and that the latter would have to take priority for practical reasons now that the existing equilibrium—or rather the German dominance—could not be altered. It was the school of “la plus grande France,” which distinguished itself from the fixation on the “ligne bleue des Vosges” of the Clemenceau school. Colonial policy always held a high priority for Hanotaux. Apart from that, there was the European stage. In a sense this even came first because here France’s own safety was at stake. In practice these areas could not be completely separated, however. All great powers had overseas interests in addition to their European interests. These came together in diplomacy. According to Hanotaux’s policy of equilibrium, one could therefore cooperate with each and every country as the occasion arose. The French colonial empire also had to be an “élément d’équilibre planétaire.”24 Even Germany was not merely an enemy to Hanotaux. Naturally, lasting peace and friendship were not possible as long as the AlsaceLorraine issue had not been resolved, but that did not rule out practical cooperation in certain areas. As much as possible, Hanotaux tried to prevent any difficulties and confrontations with Germany. For instance, he operated extremely carefully during the Dreyfus affair, which could easily have damaged relations with Germany because of the accusations of espionage. He even presented the German ambassador, Münster, with the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor, which he himself would also receive later on. This would have been unthinkable ten years earlier. No single French cabinet, however, and therefore no minister of Foreign Affairs, could afford to be called “the friend of Germany,” not even Hanotaux. Public opinion simply did not allow it. France only had one friend: Russia. This brings us to the other great power with which France was particularly involved. Hanotaux har-

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bored a certain distrust of Russia. “Beware of Russia, they will ditch you,” he had written as a young civil servant, albeit under a pseudonym.25 However, as a civil servant he had also cooperated in the establishment of the Franco-Russian alliance and certainly acknowledged its importance. The Franco-Russian alliance was not a goal in itself for Hanotaux. The point was to use it to one’s own advantage and to avoid being used by the ally. The latter risk was not an imaginary one, because international relations in those days were dominated by the Eastern Question and Russia wanted France to do its dirty work to put pressure on Turkey and England. Hanotaux did not much fancy the idea. He was a proponent of the status quo policy with respect to the Balkans and of the maintenance of the Ottoman Empire. For his part, he would have liked to have more support from Russia on the Egyptian question, but this did not happen either. His attitude towards Russia was skeptical rather than ecstatic, according to Iiams’ summary.26 Thus, the practical value of the alliance was not substantial. The collaboration with the tsar, who in the eyes of the progressives was the symbol of the reaction, was a painful issue for the republicans, to which group Hanotaux belonged, but the emotional value of the franco-russe still remained considerable. To the French, it was the symbol of restoration. It meant the end of the diplomatic isolation that had arisen after 1870. France found an ally in Russia—a potentially important one, too—against Germany. That is why Hanotaux granted the Russian ambassador special privileges as “l’ambassadeur de l’alliance.”27 That is also why the visit president Félix Faure paid to St Petersburg in 1897 had such significance and received so much attention from the press. Finally, it was also the reason why, at the time of the visit paid by Nicholas II to Paris in the previous year, Hanotaux went so far as to have a performance of Hamlet dropped from the program. He did not find it suitable to have a play performed before the tsar in which a monarch was killed and which, on top of that, had been written by an Englishman.28 In view of the many anarchistic attacks in those days, this is not as peculiar as it may seem now. The main danger, in the eyes of Hanotaux, was the third great power that France had to deal with: England. The arrogant attitude of the English, their boundless striving for expansion, the casualness with which they imposed their will on others and backed out of diplomatic give and take all bothered Hanotaux a great deal, and not just Hanotaux. After all, he was in the government in the second half of the nineties, the years that started with the Jameson raid and ended

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with Fashoda and the Boer War. The French were certainly not the only ones to be indignant about British policy. The Russians were caught up with the English in the “great game” over Afghanistan, and they encountered the English as their opponents in Turkey and the Far East. The German emperor sent the renowned Kruger telegram to the president of Transvaal to express his disgust with British policy. The shared aversion to England was so considerable that some even dreamed of a merger of the German-Austrian-Italian Triple Alliance with the Franco-Russian Alliance in order to form a “continental alliance” that could take action against England. One for all and all against one, to give a variation on the slogan of The Three Musketeers. But it never got that far. The mutual disagreements were too great. Hanotaux was against any form of making disagreements absolute. In his view, “arrangements raisonnables” were also possible between the French and English. No door should be closed definitely, no hand tied forever, was his diplomatic principle. “The point is that no door should be closed to us, and our hands should not be tied by any impeding formulations.”29 It is as if General de Gaulle were explaining his policy of independence. POLITICAL PRACTICE Guided by these principles, Hanotaux led French foreign policy for about four years. During this period, he paid a great deal of attention to the consolidation of the Franco-Russian alliance and to other diplomatic issues such as the Eastern Question, but colonial matters in particular required his attention. No wonder! After all, the nineties were the heyday of the partition of Africa, in which France played a very active role under the guidance of Hanotaux. Some from within the colonial school were looking for a French colonial future in Africa exclusively. In their eyes Asia was merely something to exchange. Lâchons l’Asie, prenons l’Afrique (Let go of Asia, take Africa) was the title of a well-known book.30 Hanotaux, however, was aware that the Far East could also prove of significant interest to France. France had to be a “global player,” to put it in today’s terms, or, in the words of Hanotaux himself, a “puissance planétaire.”31 He therefore pursued an active policy with respect to China and Indochina. He did, however, feel that for France, Africa was the most important overseas continent. He regarded France as a Mediterranean power that had been established both on the northern and the southern banks of the Mediterranean Sea. The core of the French colonial

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empire was therefore in North Africa, in the Mahgrib countries. These North African possessions had to have a hinterland in black Africa, which in concrete terms meant in West Africa. That is why he ascribed such great importance to a demarcation of the West African spheres of influence. That was not a simple matter, because negotiations would have to be held with both Germany and England. Negotiations with the latter were the most important and they succeeded. The FrancoBritish negotiations on the issue were concluded on 14 June 1898. This was just in the nick of time, because the Anglo-French crisis over the Egyptian Sudan was about to come to a head. Hanotaux knew this, which explains his haste. This crisis, the well-known Fashoda crisis, arose as a result of the Egyptian question, which was extremely important to Hanotaux for various reasons. Those reasons were partly practical ones. Hanotaux, as has been said, saw a global role for France. In respect to the French role in the Far East, the Suez Canal was of eminent strategic importance. Moreover, Egypt was the most powerful force in the Arab world. Even more important, however, was the emotional significance: “Egypt is for France a colony of the spirit and the heart, a country of intellectual brotherhood and voluntary cooperation.”32 For Hanotaux, Egypt was the country of Napoleon, Champollion and Lesseps: all Frenchmen. Egypt was therefore a French domain and had to remain one. France could not resign itself to the British Alleingang of 1882, which had resulted in the British occupation of that country. The reopening of the Egyptian question for him, as for many of his predecessors and his successor, was a diplomatic priority. But how to achieve this goal? How could one force England to retake its place at the conference table and reconsider its position in Egypt? Diplomatic pressure with support from other powers was one thing, but France itself also had to make a gesture. The only possibility the French could envision was to obtain a position of power in the Upper Nile area in the Sudan, to try and put pressure on England. Thus new plans were made time and again to undertake “something.” The last and best known plan in this respect was the Marchand mission. The plan for the Marchand mission—which would ultimately lead to the great French fiasco of Fashoda—did not, incidentally, come from Hanotaux. It had been set up during the brief ministership of Berthelot at the Quai d’Orsay, from November 1895 until April 1896. Nor was Hanotaux responsible for the policy pursued during the crisis. This policy was determined after his retirement from office on 16 June 1898 and thus became the responsibility of his rival and successor,

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Théophile Delcassé. Delcassé had been minister of the Colonies in the period 1894–1895. He was a typical exponent of the parti colonial. Even though Hanotaux belonged to the same school, he was still the natural opponent of the minister of the Colonies because as the chief of French diplomacy he had to assess the colonial interests within the larger whole of French diplomacy. Hanotaux was therefore more cautious than Delcassé, but he still made the Fashoda policy his own and was thus responsible for it. In 1895, Marchand approached the colonial and the foreign offices. The first was inclined to agree with Marchand’s proposal as did Hanotaux, but he was not given the time to decide because on 28 October 1895, the Ribot cabinet fell and Hanotaux tendered his resignation. This was a great disappointment to Marchand. The cabinet falls, he wrote in his diary, and we have to start all over again. “Like Sisyphus, I start again.”33 But this Sisyphus, at least, found some support. It is true that Hanotaux did not return in the next cabinet, in which two professors became responsible for overseas affairs. In addition to the chemist Berthelot at Foreign Affairs, there was now the Egyptologist Guieysse at Colonies. The civil servants stayed, however, and they were the advocates of the plan. First the Egyptologist was won over, and next, pressure was put on the chemist. The mission was presented to him as a simple, nonpolitical exploratory expedition, “a kind of anonymous visit . . . without a flag and without a mandate.”34 On 30 November 1895, having been minister for less than a month, Berthelot gave his approval. After that it took quite some time before Marchand was given his instructions. These did not come until 24 February 1896. They came from the Colonial Office. Berthelot received only a copy. It was no longer “an anonymous exploratory expedition.” Marchand’s journey was now presented as a raid on Fashoda, by analogy with the infamous performance of Dr. Jameson in South Africa. He had to ensure “alliances sérieuses” and “titres indiscutables.”35 The government considered his project of the highest importance, but the mission was not to be too expensive, of course. One reason for this was that substantial credits would draw attention to and jeopardize the secret nature of the journey. Thus for a long time, the departure hinged on the problem of funding. Finally, things speeded up. The prime minister, Bourgeois, became personally interested in the project and gave his fiat, but he was soon to resign. On 23 April 1896, his cabinet fell. On 29 April, the Méline ministry came into force and Hanotaux returned to Foreign Affairs.

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The new cabinet had to study Marchand’s instructions again and approve them. This happened on 23 June 1896. They were adjusted in minor points, but the main idea—a raid on Fashoda—was retained. Hanotaux did not really have a clear idea of what the mission could achieve. He only had the feeling that “something” had to be done, that France should publicly take action and that negotiations would then naturally follow. While Chautemps, minister of the Colonies, had said that the point was to be able to say that captain Marchand “had pissed in the Nile above Khartoum,”36 he himself had a different opinion. He regarded the expedition as a warning, as becomes clear from his words to Marchand: “Go to Fashoda, France will shoot her pistol.”37 On 25 June 1896 Marchand left for Africa. On 8 December, his credits were approved by 477 to 18 votes. Even some of the socialists voted in his favor. “Our vote is not a political but a national one,” said Jean Jaurès.38 As we know, Marchand’s adventure ended in a fiasco. This was not Marchand’s fault but the result of politics at large. After great efforts, Marchand arrived in Fashoda and raised the French flag, but the English refused to accept or even talk about the French presence there. The French had to pack up and go. The French government did not have a choice. The dominance of the Anglo-Egyptian troops in the Sudan and the superiority of the British fleet left them no other possibilities. On 3 November 1898, the French government told Marchand to leave. Thus the Marchand mission turned into the largest French humiliation since 1870. No doubt the colonials were primarily responsible for the Fashoda fiasco. There is some truth in president Félix Faure’s complaint that they had let themselves get carried away like fools in Africa by “those irresponsible men they call colonials.”39 But Hanotaux had made this policy his own. That was a major mistake. There were two fundamental errors at the basis of this: first, the assumption that the other powers would support France, and second that England would not go that far.40 The first was a miscalculation. Germany had nothing to gain from solving the Egyptian question, but rather wanted it left open. Russia was only interested in Turkey and the Far East and not in Egypt. Italy was interested in friendship with England and, after the defeat at Adowa, in avoiding adventures. The second assumption, the one about England, was also a major mistake. England saw the Nile as a matter of vital importance. The British prime minister, Lord Salisbury, was a man of cold assessments and long-term policy. He did not let himself get carried away by jingoistic emotions and was well aware of the

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importance of a good relationship with France. But even he, when the chips were down, did not save the French. Thus the crisis turned into a major humiliation for France and a low point in Franco-British relations. In the meantime, Hanotaux had already left the Quai d’Orsay. On 16 June 1898 the Méline cabinet fell. This brought an end to Hanotaux’s political career. His ambitions had not disappeared altogether, as becomes clear from his interest in a seat in the Senate as mentioned, but it was not to be. Delcassé firmly nestled himself in at Foreign Affairs after Hanotaux’s departure. He would stay there for no less than seven years, a record period for the Third Republic. Under his guidance, French diplomacy took a different course, from a reopening of the Egyptian question to a quid pro quo policy. This policy would ultimately result in the well-known Morocco-Egypt deal of 1904, which was the core of the French-British Entente Cordiale. England thus changed from an opponent into a friend and ally of France and would remain that in 1914 and after. The climate of domestic politics also changed as a result of the Dreyfus affair. Hanotaux’s attitude as a minister during the Dreyfus crisis was somewhat peculiar. He was afraid that the minister of war had made a grave mistake and he therefore spoke very critically about his actions. However, in the spirit of Richelieu, the raison d’État prevailed with Hanotaux. He supported the government standpoint that the Dreyfus affair was closed. This caused his increased alienation from the left wing. After the victory of the dreyfusards, the radical cabinets of Waldeck-Rousseau and Combes came into office, with no room for Hanotaux even if he had wanted to join. After that it was too late. He regularly published articles on foreign policy in journals such as the Revue Hebdomadaire and the Revue des Deux Mondes, but he did not have much influence. Hanotaux did get some government assignments, however. He was involved in the foundation of the League of Nations and he was invited to attend the canonization of Joan of Arc in Saint Peter cathedral. He deserved to be selected for this honor because he wrote a book about this saint. HISTORIAN This brings us to Hanotaux’s work as an historian, although the question remains as to whether this book can be regarded as part of historiography in the regular sense of the word. In his commemoration, Huizinga noted in respect of Hanotaux’s Jeanne d’Arc, “Her

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person had interested and inspired him from his childhood. Even though already at an early stage he had lost the faith that he had been raised with as a child, he was never completely removed from deep religious moods, and in his late years, he would return to them.”41 The book reads more like a religious tract than a historical work. For one thing, Hanotaux wrote that the events were so exceptional that they were beyond human comprehension: “They are overwhelming to human intelligence.”42 Other explanations had to be looked for. And Hanotaux did, because he argued that with the Maid of Orléans “the human and the divine are reconciled in a mysterious collaboration, to work towards a joint cause, the salvation of France.”43 Her work remained unfinished, however, and that is why her instruction is still meaningful: “We are only on the threshold of a period in which we will see her mission fulfilled forever.”44 Hanotaux was not the only one to admire Joan of Arc. Charles Péguy’s Mystère de la charité de Jeanne d’Arc had been published a year earlier. This cult was part of the nationalistic and Catholic revival in the France of those days.45 The book Jeanne d’Arc is only one, fairly unusual, example of Hanotaux’s work. The rest of his substantial oeuvre is indeed of a decidedly patriotic but also more rational nature. It consists of dozens of books, hundreds of speeches and articles and a number of multivolume series, which he set up and edited. The work can be divided into two main genres: academic studies and popularizations. The first genre belongs to his early career, the time of the young historian, the true academic. His reputation as an academic is mainly based on his work from that period, after the École des Chartes and before his political career. His main work, no doubt, is the thorough, even monumental study on Richelieu, Histoire du Cardinal de Richelieu. The first part appeared in 1893 and covered the period of 1585–1614. This part deals with Richelieu’s young years, his family, his student years and his first performance as a bishop. It also offers a brilliant portrayal of France the way it was in 1614—a “tableau de la France” in the tradition of Michelet. The administration, public institutions, finances, economy and culture are all dealt with. It would later be reprinted as a separate volume titled Tableau de la France en 1614.46 The second volume appeared three years later in 1896, during Hanotaux’s ministership, and covered the period until 1624. It gave him a seat in the Académie Française in 1897. However, the proper story was yet to begin, because Richelieu only came into power in 1624. That story never came into being—or so it seemed for a long time—because even after his political career ended, Hanotaux did not succeed in

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writing this part. The Richelieu biography was not continued until 1933, when volume 3 appeared. Similar to the subsequent volumes, it was the result of Hanotaux’s cooperation with the Duke de la Force, also “de l’Académie Française.” The work was completed no earlier than in 1947, when the sixth and last volume appeared, still in both their names, even though in the meantime Hanotaux had passed away. This biography, which contains 2,983 pages, may therefore rightly be called his life’s work, and even a little more than that. The study on Richelieu was an inheritance from an earlier phase in his life. In the meantime, Hanotaux’s work had changed in nature. He had to make a living from his writing. This not only explains his immense productivity but also his tendency to actualize and popularize. His political interest and experience also contributed to the latter. He had started as a traditional historian, but lost interest in the purely scientific approach of history after his years in politics. He regarded the historical profession more and more as a moral vocation. The work of a historian, according to him, was of crucial importance to his country. Whether things would go well or go wrong in the future depended on the way in which one presented matters from the past.47 An historian has to lead his people on the road from past to future. Nationalism thus not only permeated his political but also his historical work. “To connect the past with the present, that was the task to which my position and my time had summoned me,” he wrote in Mon Temps.48 Apart from Jeanne d’Arc, most of his work from before and during the First World War dealt with current politics: international and colonial issues in general and the Balkans and Africa in particular. These are writings with a high level of topicality and a clear political tenor. Etudes diplomatiques. La politique de l’équilibre, 1907–1911, for instance, is an indictment of Delcassé’s entente policy. This policy tied the hands of France and therefore impeded the policy of equilibrium Hanotaux wanted to pursue. Le Partage de l’Afrique. Fachoda, on the other hand, is an indictment of England. Finally, La Démocratie et le travail is an indictment of socialism. In these writings, Hanotaux showed himself the ex-politician who commented and gave his view on topical issues by way of historical-political analyses. He also was and remained in these writings the propagandist of “la plus grande France,” in other words, of colonial policy. His main achievement was a very extensive work about the establishment of the Third Republic in the period 1870–1878, which appeared between 1903 and 1908 in four volumes and was titled Histoire

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de la France contemporaine. This was an early example of contemporary historiography in the literal sense of the word. During the First World War, he wrote advisory pieces for Foch and Pétain, which would later be published as Le Traité de Versailles. As early as during the war, he also began to write a Histoire illustrée de la guerre de 1914, which was to appear in seventeen volumes. This was a passionate account of the war and the ultimate French triumph. In the meantime Hanotaux had become radically anti-German and would remain so. He saw hope for the world only in the total demise of that country, that is, in the termination of Bismarck’s Reich. Hanotaux was an exception in that he paid so much attention to contemporary history in a time when professional historians kept far from anything contemporary. In another way he was also ahead of his time, namely in his attention to integral history. In spite of his political preoccupations, in his historical work Hanotaux displayed an interest in social, economic and cultural history, and in material culture, science, art and technology—in brief, in all human activities. This broad interest became manifest in the various substantive series he was to set up and edit in the twenties and thirties. To start with, there is the Histoire de la nation française, which appeared in fifteen beautifully rendered volumes between 1920 and 1929. This work started in the well-known French historical tradition, with two volumes about “géographie humaine.” In the remaining thirteen volumes all aspects of French history are covered: political, diplomatic, military, social and economic history, but also the arts, languages and literature and the sciences. This work, once completed, was immediately followed by a Histoire des colonies françaises et de l’expansion de la France dans le monde, which he edited together with A. Martineau. It appeared between 1929 and 1933 in six equally beautiful volumes. This series was then followed by a Histoire de la nation égyptienne, also in six volumes. This testimony of his early love for Egypt kept him occupied from 1935 until 1940. In addition, during these years various collections appeared containing colonial propaganda and history, essays about history and historiography and the autobiographical work Mon Temps. Hanotaux’s energy and productivity remained intact until an advanced age, as did his political activities and interests. He lived to see the rise of Hitler and was understandably extremely concerned about this. He now put his hopes on a federal Europe and moral leadership provided by the pope. The new German invasion, the third one in Hanotaux’s experience, brought an end to these kinds of ideas.

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BALANCE As we have seen, in his commemoration Huizinga was full of praise for Hanotaux as a person, a politician and an historian. He called him “a representative of all that is noble and pure in the French,” praised his “great merits and remarkable successes” in the realm of politics and commended his “boundless interest and talent” in the academic field.49 Half a century later, it seems that there are arguments with respect to all these areas to help us arrive at a more balanced judgment. Let us start with the first attributes, nobility and purity. In Hanotaux’s personal life, this was barely noticeable. Hanotaux was a Picardier and the son of a notary, but his way of life revealed little of the respectability of his father’s profession or of the proverbial repose and serenity of the Picardiers. On the contrary, he was a man of many affairs and liaisons, of flirtations and scandals. He adored his mother, who had become a widow early in life and had raised him by herself. He remained to live with her, but also had a great many loose and more permanent relationships with several ladies. According to him the two were interconnected: “They say that sons who are raised by their mothers retain a kind of tenderness in their regard of women. There is some truth in that. But where will you find a woman like your mother?”50 He for one zealously tried to find one. To start with there were his permanent mistresses. The first one was Géronime Negadelle, with whom he begot two children. After some time, he had had enough of her. She remained his “maîtresse en titre” for the time being, but Hanotaux also looked for other forms of distraction. She was later succeeded in this role by a young actress, Valentine Verlain. This happened in the best tradition of French politics, during his office as a minister. Hanotaux did not get married until long after that, in 1913, to Marie de la Crompe de la Boissière. His Valentine took the opportunity to publish her personal memories of her ex-lover in a booklet titled La Faux du ministère. This was probably financed and written by Hanotaux’s enemies at the Action Française.51 His lifestyle was indeed very different from Huizinga’s way of life. Hanotaux apparently did not share Huizinga’s preference for chastity and asceticism, but this is of little importance to his work as a politician. The emotional, imbalanced and sometimes depressed character of Hanotaux was important, however. When still a young civil servant,

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he once had a dream in which he found a solution to all the problems in Europe. That solution consisted of the powers jointly dividing the British Empire. Not only did he take this dream seriously, but worse, he worked it out in detail after he woke up into a serious plan that he wanted to submit to the French president.52 An assessment of Hanotaux as a politician can also not be very positive. What he lacked was steadfastness and realism, character and a discerning judgment. He was too tolerant toward his civil servants and too often let them have their way. Langer and Iiams regard him, together with Delcassé, as the most important minister of foreign affairs of the Third Republic.53 And maybe he was. The expansion of the French colonial empire and the establishment of the FrancoRussian alliance are to his credit, but the anti-British policy he pursued in the case of Egypt and Fashoda was a fiasco. It was based on the wrong assumptions about both his hoped-for allies and his opponent, England. Moreover, he was not prepared to pay a price for potential support. This was because he did not want to choose. Like so many of his colleagues, he was a colonialist and a nationalist, but did not manage to combine these two ambitions. Ferry did, and Delcassé as well. Ferry chose to cooperate with Germany in colonial issues against England. Delcassé would later opt for friendship with England against Germany at the expense of the French ambitions regarding Egypt. Hanotaux tried to combine both strategies, but to no avail. He did not understand that it was beyond France’s power to get both Alsace-Lorraine out of Germany’s hands and England out of Egypt. In this overestimation of France’s possibilities lay the main flaw of his policy. Ultimately, in spite of his indisputable intelligence and erudition, his zealousness and knowledge of dossiers, he was little suited to the office of minister of foreign affairs. Finally, Hanotaux’s historical oeuvre is no doubt impressive. His first work about Richelieu was also his best. After that he became a professional writer for whom quantity was more important than quality. His entire body of work, however, gives testimony to his inexorable energy and vitality. He derived his work from an interesting moral view on the task of the historian. He was interested in all aspects of history and did not hesitate to write about his own time. In these respects he was ahead of his time. He wrote colorful, albeit rather rhetorical and repetitive, prose. His interpretation of French history in the Histoire de la nation française is extremely ideological, but remains impressive.

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HISTORIAN IN POLITICS Hanotaux, it will be clear, was a typical example of the species of historians who go into politics. Maurice Barrès said about him, “Hanotaux accepts his position of historian and politician.”54 Hanotaux agreed with this and wanted it that way. It was his deep conviction that history and politics are closely related: “history is the very basis of politics.”55 The influence of his historical education on his practical policies is clearly visible. Hanotaux approached politics with explicit historical insights. He liked grand designs and broad visions. In this respect he was not exceptional, however. The historical arguments and insights he based his actions on were so common that they are found in the thinking of many other politicians and diplomats. Most French politicians and diplomats have a thorough knowledge of history. In his concrete foreign policy he did not differ too much from other French ministers or diplomats who have not been trained as historians. Was his historical education useful in his work as a diplomat? That remains to be seen. Of course, one cannot pursue foreign policy without any knowledge of history and geography, of the morals, customs and culture of other peoples and of the historical ambitions of great powers. Some historians greatly emphasize this to stress the importance of their trade. Others, however, emphasize the failure of most intellectuals—and therefore of most historians—in politics. The truth may well lie in the middle. Historical knowledge is indispensable in international politics. Yet many good politicians have that knowledge even though they have not been trained as historians. Churchill and de Gaulle are good examples. In other words, this knowledge is a necessary but not sufficient precondition for successful diplomacy. Judgment and an eye for power relations, courage and a sense of timing are at least as important. Hanotaux had these characteristics to an insufficient extent, and his historical knowledge could not compensate for that lack. Sometimes it even seems as if his historical knowledge was a disadvantage rather than an advantage. He almost thought too much as an historian, too much in terms of continuity and historical parallels, to be able to operate with a clear vision. He was so enthralled by Richelieu that he sometimes forgot that times had changed in spite of all continuity. In this respect, he somewhat resembles General de Gaulle, whose deep awareness of the gravity of history has to be admired, but who also sometimes failed to see new opportunities and challenges because he became too lost in that awareness.

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APPENDIX Hanotaux’s Main Publications Etudes historiques sur le XVIe et le XVIIe siècle en France (1886) Histoire du Cardinal de Richelieu (6 vols; 1893–1947) L’Affaire de Madagascar (1896) La Paix latine (1903) Histoire de la France contemporaine (4 vols; 1903–1908) Le Partage de l’Afrique. Fachoda (1909) La Démocratie et le travail (1910) Jeanne d’Arc (1911) Etudes diplomatiques. La politique de l’équilibre, 1907–1911 (1912) La Guerre des Balkans et l’Europe (1914) Histoire illustrée de la guerre de 1914 (17 vols; 1915–1926) Le Traité de Versailles (1919) Histoire de la nation française (15 vols; 1920–1929) Sur les chemins de l’histoire (2 vols; 1924) L’Empire colonial français (1929) Histoire des colonies françaises et de l’expansion de la France dans le monde (6 vols; 1929–1933) Mon Temps (2 vols; 1933–1938) Pour l’Empire colonial français (1933) Histoire de la nation égyptienne (6 vols; 1935–1940) Posthumous Carnets (1907–1926) de G. Hanotaux (edited by G. Dethan; Paris 1982)

CHAPTER 12

The Annales School and the Writing of Contemporary History: The First Fifty Years

The French journal Annales is often considered the most original and most important historical journal of the twentieth century. Its founding fathers, Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre as well as their successor Fernand Braudel, belong to the pantheon of the great historians of their time. When founding their journal in 1929, Bloch and Febvre were very much concerned with the problems of their own times. They also wanted to contribute by their work to the solution of these problems. Thus one would expect that the new journal would pay much attention to contemporary history. And it did, at least in the first ten years, before the Second World War. But later on this changed, and much more emphasis was put on early modern than on contemporary history. This is true not only for the journal but also for what is called the “Annales School.” The impact of the Annales on modern history has been very great, but not on contemporary history. There are two ways to measure this: the amount of work the Annales historians have done in the field of contemporary history, and the degree of influence they have had on contemporary historians in general. In both respects, the answer seems to be the same: very little. Contemporary history and Annales history seem to be separated, as if by an

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ocean. A simple comparison of an issue of the Annales with an issue of, for example, the Journal of Contemporary History will make this clear. In the Journal of Contemporary History, one will find articles dealing with the Czech crisis of 1938, British strategy in Palestine, N.A.T.O. and the M.L.F., the political ideas of Maurice Barrès and so on. In the Annales, one would typically find articles on Portuguese mysticism in the eighteenth century, the feast in the Provence of the seventeenth century, birth control in sixteenth-century Florence and housing conditions in Normandy between 1200 and 1800. This phenomenon is striking for two reasons. First, it is amazing that contemporary historians have learned nothing from Annales but still stick to political and military history and thus to old fashioned “event” history. Are they then like the Bourbons, who had learned nothing and forgotten nothing? Secondly, the discovery of a general lack of interest with the Annales historians in contemporary history is also surprising. The founders themselves have argued that the “spirit of Annales” was marked by social engagement and concern for the “problems that trouble contemporary man.”1 “Let us explain the world to the world—through history,” were the terse words of Lucien Febvre.2 “Let us understand the present through the past,” was the equally sober formulation of Marc Bloch.3 These are mottoes that sufficiently illustrate the founders’ striving for social relevance. Thus the problem is an intriguing one, and it is worthwhile to probe into the matter somewhat more deeply. In considering the contribution of the Annales to contemporary history, we must distinguish between the Annales as a group, a school and an institution, and Annales as a journal. As a school of thought, there is a clear continuity. In the work of Bloch, Febvre, Braudel, Goubert, Le Roy Ladurie, Mandrou and Le Goff (and many other well-known names could be mentioned), the main emphasis has always been on the Middle Ages and early modern times. This is also true of the theses of their pupils and of the great research projects of the Centre de Recherches Historiques, which is closely connected with the Annales School. From the 1920s till the 1970s, the continuity is remarkable. In the case of Annales as a journal, the situation is different. This becomes apparent if one categorizes the subject matter of the articles in Annales according to the period they deal with and then considers the results over a longer stretch of time. In doing this, we have very appropriately—and like a veritable Annales historian—chosen for the “longue durée,” that is, the first half of the century. Moreover, and

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still in the spirit of the Annales, we have tried to analyze the material in a quantitative (serial) way, albeit without the use of a computer. The results of this method are found in Figures 12.1 and 12.2. Of course these figures should be handled with care. Several problems arise, such as the great growth in volume of the journal and the changing proportion of articles as against smaller contributions. From Figure 12.1 Percentages of the Total Number of Pages of the Articles Published in the Annales (1929–1984), Devoted to Various Periods

Figure 12.2 “Modern History” and “Contemporary History (post-1815)” in Annales, 1929–1979 (page volume of chronologically defined articles)

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the 1950s on, there was also an increasing participation by the other social sciences, which often dealt with contemporary subject matter. To distinguish these articles from “history proper” would lead us into a particularly complicated and scholastic discussion. Hence we have included them all (in so far as they are chronologically defined) in “contemporary history.” Thus the tables in these figures do what tables often seem to do: they stress the obvious, because even a superficial comparison of the first ten years of Annales with the 1960s shows a marked change in character. The Annales have become more theoretical, more abstract, more scientific if you will, and less engaged and interested in current affairs. There was no aversion to political history and the history of ideas and ideologies under Bloch and Febvre, insofar as contemporary history was concerned.4 But after the 1950s, the aversion to these subjects seems to be total. How is this shift of focus to be explained? Possibly the answer is that from the 1950s on, theories about structural history, the primacy of the “longue dureé” and the equation of politics with events—and thus with superficiality—have in many circles been raised to a kind of dogma. After the Bible, inevitably follows exegesis. After Braudel’s famous book on La Méditerranée, the scholasticism of structural history inevitably followed. Apart from this, and looking at the Annales as a whole, a strong predilection for the more distant past has been characteristic of the group from its very beginning. Why this group unanimously came to a standstill at the magic barrier of 1789 is a question we will deal with later. Before that, there is the question of the extent to which contemporary historians have been influenced by the Annales revolution. Again the answer is simple, because there is hardly any need to demonstrate at length that contemporary history, particularly twentieth-century history, was hardly influenced at all by Annales, either in subject matter or in method. Everyone knows that in contemporary history, the great discussions are about war and diplomacy, revolutions and ideologies. These are the topics that occupy the prominent historians that study that period. The contents of special journals such as the Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte and the Journal of Contemporary History give ample evidence of this. The first of these two journals has, of course, its own history and character, which is why we would do better to turn to the Journal of Contemporary History for a comparison. One glance at the latter’s table of contents shows that over 78 percent of the contributions deal with political history in the wide sense of the word (Items

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1–4 of Table 12.1). Two other journals that are also devoted mainly to contemporary history, the International Review of Social History and the Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, illustrate more or less the same phenomenon (see Table 12.1). The difference between these journals and the Annales is demonstrated in Figure 12.3 which shows their lack of interest in political history. It would lead us too far astray to dwell on the history of contemporary history and the theoretical discussions that have accompanied it. The term, incidentally, is ambiguous. It can refer to various things, namely contemporary history in the literal sense of the term, thus the history of our own time; or, in its French form of “histoire contemporaine,” to history since the French Revolution; or, in the English version, to history since about 1900 or even after 1945. The idea that an historian should concern himself with his own time goes back to Thucydides and has been a generally accepted view (and practice) for a long time. The German eighteenth-century philosopher Lessing wrote that the best historian was the one who described the history of his own country and his own times.5 It was only with the so-called scientific history of the late nineteenth century that contemporary history, on the charge of being unscientific, was expelled from the domain of history. Thus, the Annales and the contemporary historians shared the same foe. The positivist historians, so scorned by Lucien Febvre, were the same as those who argued that the recent past was unfinished and therefore unfit for historical scrutiny. Pierre Nora has suggested some possible causes for this development. He quoted, in this context, a report of 1867 by three young French historians who argued that the history of a period can only be written when that period is completely closed. They concluded, “The domain of history is the past. The present belongs to politics and the future to God.”6 Of course, this statement not only reflects a certain view of contemporary history, but also of history in general. Its distinctive features are the equation of politics and history, and especially the linear vision of time. Time is not conceptual but real, not a tool for historical analysis but an entity in its own right. Thus contemporary history was expelled by the positivist historians. The irony of fate was that the favorite form of history of the positivists, that is, political history, was in turn also dismissed by her younger sisters, social and economic history. And so contemporary history, already exiled, became an orphan as well. In spite of this difficult childhood, however, the orphan developed into an amazingly vital adult. This was not because of historiographical, but political and social

Table 12.1 Showing the Distribution of Subjects in Four Historical Journals VJHZ

IRSH

RHMC

JCH

1953–76

1956–76

1954–76

1966–76

Subject Matter

number

International Relations Military History Political History Ideas & Ideologies Social History Economic History Historiography Biography Totals

%

number

%

number

%

number

%

58 32 111 58 46 15 40 7

15.8 8.4 30.2 15.8 12.5 4.1 10.9 1.9

20 — 31 83 110 10 14 11

7.2 — 11.1 29.7 39.5 3.6 5.0 3.9

53 34 63 111 153 64 35 1

10.3 6.6 12.3 21.6 29.7 12.5 6.8 0.2

124 26 117 88 47 19 32 —

27.4 5.7 25.8 19.4 10.4 4.2 7.1 —

367

100.0

279

100.0

514

100.0

453

100.0

Explanation of Abbreviations: VJHZ IRSH RHMC JCH

Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte International Review of Social History Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine Journal of Contemporary History

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Figure 12.3 Percentages of the Total Number of Pages of the Papers Published in the Annales (1929–1984), According to the Various Disciplines

circumstances. The great troubles of the second and third decades of the twentieth century—war, revolution, depression, fascism, dictatorship—simply demanded an answer from the historians. These problems, as we have seen, also inspired the founders of Annales. Thus it

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happened that in the same year of 1929 when Bloch and Febvre founded the Annales, the English historian R.W. Seton-Watson, with his “Plea for the Study of Contemporary History,” provided the first impulse toward the rehabilitation of contemporary history.7 However, although born from the same situation, the two trends soon went separate paths, apparently never to be reconciled again. The Annales extended the field of modern history, even of history itself, subjected it to theoretical discussions, introduced methodological innovations and began reshaping it in close contact with the other social sciences. Meanwhile, contemporary history remained a captive of the study of political movements, ideologies, events and crises. Thus, as it were, two historical cultures developed: one was contemporary history, mainly descriptive and oriented towards “événements,” living by the year and by the day, strongly preoccupied with politics and ideologies and revolving around such axes as the world wars, revolutions, fascism, and so forth. The other was a new historiography with a broader orientation and in-depth analyses, and an eye for the constants of environment and climate, large geographical units, economic cycles, social structures and an inclination toward the long term. The outcome of these developments was surprising in several ways. On one hand, the traditional character of contemporary history was sharply illustrated by the Annales revolution so that, paradoxically, the most modern history turned into the most archaic one. On the other hand, the Annales historians continued working—all the more so as they introduced methodological innovations—on the same period favored by the positivist historians, namely, the Ancien Régime. Precisely because of the development of contemporary history as a separate and important field of studies, it became increasingly clear how the Annales historians attuned their theoretical concepts of a continuous, semipermanent history more and more to one specific period, the premodern one. After this attempt at an analysis, we must now look for an explanation. Two questions are raised: Why has Annales not entered into the domain of contemporary history? Why have contemporary historians learned so little from Annales? The fact that Annales has had so little concern for contemporary history has been noted by others. The explanation given by some of them—that this is merely accidental, an outcome of the personal interests of the great masters8—does not seem satisfactory, especially not for Annales as a journal because there we have seen in any case a

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certain shift of focus. An explanation of this kind seems more applicable to Annales as a school. In this context one may point to institutional factors such as the founding of the VIe Section in 1947, with its expanding institutes and strictly controlled funds, and also to such social factors in French academic life as the patronal tradition (the system of “le patron et son cercle”).9 The problem put forward by Groh and Iggers is much more fundamental, namely that the Annales conception of a semipermanent history (“histoire immobile”) is itself very much tailored to preindustrial society; not suitable for the explication of social change and not very workable with respect to the technical-industrial age.10 If this is true, it might also lead us to an answer to the second question, namely why contemporary history has taken over so little of the Annales approach. This, however, forces us to a prior question: what is to be understood in this context by the Annales approach? This is by no means a simple question, first, because Annales has always remained a group rather than a school, with marked individual differences, secondly, because there are differences between the various periods of Annales, and finally, because differing points of view are to be noted in different writings. But in this context, what matters is not so much the history of ideas of Annales but the social history of their ideas; in other words, not what various Annales historians have stated at one time or another, but what has trickled through and became established among historians in general as the “message” of Annales. This set of ideas boils down to certain notions, often implicit rather than explicit, about “structures,” “conjonctures,” “événements” and their hierarchization, and about the primacy of the “longue durée” and the insignificance of politics and “events.” These views are bound to create problems for contemporary historians, not because contemporary history would by definition be political or “event history,” nor, for that matter, because political history itself would be condemned to dealing with events only.11 The point is rather that, in contemporary history, taken from now on in its Anglo-Saxon sense, the “political” and the “event” have taken on a fundamentally different meaning. Here we are faced with an important epistemological problem, namely that there is no immanent knowledge of the past. The various interpretations of historians cannot be held up directly against the past to find out which description best renders reality. In other words, it is not the past itself that determines the relative importance of events, but the historian who decides which of the myriad events are to be

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selected and elevated to the status of a historical fact. In this process of selection the historian is guided by certain criteria. The most important of these can be defined simply as: What has decisively influenced the fate of mankind? With this criterion in mind, the Annales view is acceptable both from a scholarly and from a humanistic point of view because it focuses on all mankind instead of only a small upper layer, and it states that the constant factors of geography and climate, and the slow roll of the economic tides have been the primary element in determining their lives. The appropriate frame for an analysis of this kind is indeed a geographical and not a political one, as was so beautifully demonstrated in Fernand Braudel’s most famous book, La Méditerranée. The central theme of history is man’s submission to nature and his struggle to master it. This was the theme of Fernand Braudel’s second masterpiece, Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme. Here indeed, social history is total history. But how does this criterion apply to contemporary history? As a point of departure, let us take a famous sentence from Braudel’s La Méditerranée. About political and military events he wrote, “Events are dust. They traverse history as flashes of light. Scarcely are they born when they return to darkness, often to oblivion.”12 If—albeit with some hesitation—one could accept this vision in the context of the history of the sixteenth century, it would be difficult to generalize from it and accept that in the twentieth century as well, “events” such as war and revolution, diplomacy and dictatorship were merely ripples on the surface that did not essentially influence peoples’ lives and never touched the slow undercurrent of the “longue durée.” On the contrary, it seems that these once superficial events have undergone a qualitative change now that they have a direct impact on the lives of millions. Problems arise from man’s mastery over nature rather than from his submission to it. The potentialities of power over man as well as nature have become so great that the most vital problem is no longer the striving to increase power, but how, and by whom, it is to be exercized. Here, in short, not social but political history, that is, the history of power, is total history. If this hypothesis is true, then the Annales conception leads to major problems not only in its explanation of social change, as Groh and Iggers have stated, but also in its interpretation of the contemporary world. Such authors as the English historian Geoffrey Barraclough and the Dutch historian Jan Romein have labelled the years 1880–1900 as a “watershed” or “breukvlak” (break of continuity) in history and

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have maintained that, with them, a new age has opened up.13 One might describe this as not only the technical-industrial age but also the age of mass politics. For the point is that the industrial revolution has led not only to a mastery over nature, and thus to a liberation of mankind, but also to a concentration of power and thus to a new submission. While, previously, the will to power had been restricted by limitations to the possibilities of excercizing it, now, through the technical revolution, these limitations have practically vanished. In this way the industrial revolution has led to a political revolution, that is, a revolution in the very nature of politics. This process gives contemporary history its unique character.14 The distinguishing mark of the history of the Western world from the “long 16e siècle” on has been, first, the separation of a “public domain” from the original blend of politics, economy, culture, and so on: “der Staat als Kunstwerk,” in Burckhardt’s famous words. And then, in the late nineteenth century, the reunion of the two domains, state and society, but in a new hierarchy: the state had won out over society. Politics was no longer one modest sector of public life; it had come to imply the domination of the whole society. Therefore, political history can no longer be an appendix in the book of structural history. On the contrary, the dialectical relationship between state and society has become the main theme of a structural contemporary history. Looking at the development of Annales and of contemporary history as outlined here, we reach a somewhat paradoxical conclusion. The positivist historians of the late nineteenth century, fascinated by the growth of the power and the machinery of the state, reduced history to a tale of politics and diplomacy. For the history they studied, that of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, this was an anachronism. And they did not study the history of their own times. The achievement of the Annales revolution was their exposure of this anachronism and their introduction of the history of man instead of that of the state. But, though revolutionaries in this respect, they were conservatives in another, because they, too, hardly crossed the threshold of the nineteenth century, and hence developed a historical culture that has its own chronological limitations. The paradox is that the positivist historians were instinctively right in their discovery of “politique d’abord,” but they made the mistake of projecting this discovery back onto earlier ages. The Annales historians were right to dismiss this anachronism, but were in danger of falling into a new one when they

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proclaimed the validity of their concepts for contemporary history as well. The moral of this story can be short. The Annales history of the contemporary age remains yet to be written, but when it is written, it will not be Annales history as we know it.

CHAPTER 13

Fernand Braudel: Historian of the “Longue Durée”

INTRODUCTION Twice, I have witnessed an apotheosis of Fernand Braudel: the first time at the opening of the Fernand Braudel Center in Binghamton, New York in 1977; the second in 1978 when he became an honorary citizen of the city of Prato in Tuscany, Italy. If this were an oration, these two occasions could justifiably be used for an elegant dissertation on their respective symbolic significance as illustrations of Braudel’s two major interests, the Mediterranean world and capitalism, and of his fame in the old world and the new. This does not lie within the scope of the present article, however. It suffices to simply note that Fernand Braudel—former president of the VIe Section of the École Pratique des Hautes Etudes, professor emeritus of the Collège de France and, until his death, director of the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, with honorary degrees from Oxford, Cambridge, São Paulo, Florence, Leiden, Brussels, Cologne, Warsaw, Geneva and a dozen other universities, member or corresponding member of numerous academies, Commander of the Legion of Honor, honorary citizen of Prato—was the most famous historian of his time and the most influential of his generation.

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How did this happen? That question is not easily answered. If the answer is to be comprehensive, we may not limit ourselves to Braudel, the man, and his work but must also take into account the development of the historical profession in general and the emergence of the French historical school in particular. We should also delve deeply into the collapse of historical studies in Germany in the 1930s, into French cultural policies and into the organization of research and education. According to Immanuel Wallerstein, the founder of the Fernand Braudel Center, a study of Braudel’s work should even begin with the Seven Years’ War and the emergence of British hegemony in the eighteenth century.1 This is perhaps going a bit too far back. In this more modestly conceived contribution we will limit ourselves to Braudel’s lifetime, roughly the twentieth century. As far as possible we shall follow the course of his life. However, we shall interrupt this mainly biographical sketch from time to time to consider certain aspects of his work in more detail. Finally, we will attempt to evaluate Braudel’s significance as an historian. FROM LORRAINE TO ALGERIA Fernand Paul Braudel was born on 24 August 1902 in Luméville, a village town in the département of the Meuse, in eastern France. With a little bit of imagination, therefore, Braudel could be called a native of Lorraine. At least he himself liked to do so, just as he was not averse to calling himself an historian of peasant stock. In any case there is no doubt that Braudel spent much of his early youth in one of the rural districts of eastern France and that he considered this formative period to be highly significant as far as his work was concerned.2 One must, of course, regard such influences with care. Lucien Febvre, Braudel’s highly esteemed teacher, also considered himself an historian of rural origins. Yet it was not Febvre but Braudel’s other famous predecessor, Marc Bloch, a typical city dweller, who was to become the founder of agrarian history. As a matter of fact in Braudel’s major work, La Méditerranée, only a few pages are devoted to the agrarian sector, the very sector on which 80 percent of the Mediterranean population depended for their livelihood. On the other hand there are two major themes in Braudel’s work that can be related to his youth in the country: his interest in what he has called “material civilization,” that is, the economy of repetition and regularity, and his preference for the almost immobile long-term history. After all, in the French

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countryside life during the first decade of the twentieth century varied very little from that seen 100 or even 1,000 years ago, and the repetition and regularity of farm life formed a daily illustration of the immobility of history and the permanence of its hard core of material production and consumption. Braudel’s father, incidentally, was a teacher and was later to become principal of a school in Mériel, a village in the then thinly populated outskirts of Paris. It was in Paris that Braudel was to attend the Lycée Voltaire from 1913 to 1920 and subsequently register as a student of history at the Sorbonne. In his autobiography, Braudel is fairly short about his three years as a student at the Sorbonne. He was not really stimulated by the lectures. Of the instructors, only Henri Hauser, professor of economic history, is mentioned with respect. After graduating in 1924, Braudel received an appointment as a history teacher at a school in Algeria, which at that time was a French colony or, to be more precise, a French province. This sojourn in Algeria was to become a highly significant period not only as far as Braudel’s personal history was concerned but also because of its influence on Braudel’s approach to history. From Algeria, he saw the Mediterranean upside down as it were; not from top to bottom but from bottom to top. As a result of this different point of view, Braudel gained a new insight into the Mediterranean world; not as a sideshow in the great theater of European history but as a world in its own right. That is why he liked to call the Mediterranean by the German word “Welttheater” or “Weltwirtschaft,” or, in French, an “économie-monde.” All of this, however, was not to develop until later. In these early years Braudel was too busy with his work and his studies to spend much time thinking about such things or about the colonial society of which he was a part. PREPARATION FOR THE MÉDITERRANÉE His studies were mainly devoted, of course, to the preparation of his doctoral thesis, the famous French thèse, which as Braudel wrote, “was in those days an obligatory step on the way to advanced teaching status.” Living in Algeria, interested in the sixteenth century and reasonably fluent in Spanish, it is not surprising that his thoughts turned to Philip II’s policies concerning the Mediterranean. This was also the subject accepted in 1926 as a suitable topic for his thesis at the Sorbonne as well as being the main theme of his first articles,

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published in 1928 (“Les Espagnols et l’Afrique du Nord, 1429– 1577,” Revue Africaine, 1928–1929). The year 1927 marks the beginning of an extensive series of long trips to various archives. He travelled to Simancas and Madrid, of course, but later also to Venice and Ragusa, Florence and Palermo, Genoa and Marseilles. In each of these places Braudel spent the long summer vacations—the blessing of the French educational system—carefully and patiently collecting and copying the extensive material he was to need for his major work. This was to continue for another ten years—until 1938—because Braudel was never in a hurry, as we shall see. In the meantime, in 1932, Braudel returned to Paris where he taught at two prestigious lycées, first Condorcet and later Henri IV. In 1933 he married Paule Pradel, who had been one of his students in Algeria. In 1935 a second overseas appointment took him to São Paulo where the new university was being established with considerable French support, as is apparent from the names of other visiting professors such as Lucien Febvre and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Braudel was to remain there until 1937, although he again spent his long vacations—now the winter months—delving into European archives. In 1937 Braudel was appointed to the IVe Section of the École Pratique des Hautes Etudes (the section called “Sciences Philologiques et Historiques”) and that meant taking the boat back to Paris. Travelling on the same boat was Lucien Febvre, then 59 years old, professor at the Collège de France and a man of considerable reputation and importance. This meeting was the beginning of Braudel’s life-long ties with Lucien Febvre and the Annales school. Because this relationship was to have such an important influence on his further life, we must now stop to consider the Annales school. THE ANNALES SCHOOL The success and influence of Braudel coincided to a large extent with the triumphs of the Annales school after 1950. Braudel and the Annales became almost one and the same. And yet he was not the founder of the Annales nor was he involved in the early publications. The latter were produced by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre. Febvre (1878–1956) and Bloch (1886–1944) were both appointed in 1919 to the new French university in Strasbourg as professor of modern history and reader in medieval history, respectively. This marked the beginning of a life-long friendship or, more accurately, comradeship,

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which was interrupted during the war by a serious conflict of opinion over the question of whether the Annales should continue to appear under the conditions of the German occupation. Both Bloch and Febvre were to return to Paris, Febvre first in 1933 to the Collège de France and Bloch in 1936 to the Sorbonne. It was, however, during their Strasbourg years that they founded the journal that was to become the instrument (and later mainly the symbol) of the renewal of the study of history in France.3 Obviously it is not possible to discuss the entire history of this school of thought here, and we will confine ourselves therefore to a brief summary of what the Annales historians wanted to achieve. Bloch and Febvre were opposed to history as it was taught at the French universities, a traditional, predominantly narrative type of history that mainly concentrated on French political events. They wanted to enliven history by choosing the contemporary as the starting point, make it more scientific by paying more attention to problems and hypotheses, broaden its scope by looking beyond France and give it more depth by studying not only the political but also—and especially—the social, economic and psychological aspects. History had to move out of its isolation by consulting with other disciplines such as sociology and economy, using their methods and techniques to become the principle science of mankind. This in short was the program or, rather, the “message” of the Annales. After the war, the Annales were to triumph, thus ending their fight for a “new history,” faute de combattants. In the thirties, however, the Annales were not yet a part of the establishment. They were a Gideon’s tribe that operated within the fringe of the academic community, combative, noisy, aggressive, sometimes unreasonable but always lively and brilliant. These were the years of Lucien Febvre’s Combats and Marc Bloch’s Apologie for history, that is, to say for their form of history.4 This is the world that Braudel entered through Febvre, a world in which he was to feel very much at ease. Returning to his native country in 1937 after his appointment to the IVe Section and placed under the jealous supervision of Lucien Febvre, Braudel landed literally and figuratively in a safe harbor and started to work on the actual writing of his thesis. That was in the summer of 1939; what unfortunate timing! After the “drôle de guerre” and the battle of France, Fernand Braudel was sent to Germany in 1940 as a prisoner of war, and he was to remain there—first in Mainz and later in Lübeck—until the

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liberation. It was during this internment that his major manuscript took form, the manuscript that earned him his doctor’s title in 1947. It was published as a book in 1949 and still forms the basis of Braudel’s scholarly reputation: La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II.5 BRAUDEL’S MASTERPIECE: LA MÉDITERRANÉE The Latin saying that books have their history (“Habent sua fata libelli”) can justifiably be applied to Braudel’s book as well because it is an exceptional book with an exceptional history. First of all came the very long period of preparation, the adventurous trips, the pioneer’s work in numerous archives and the primitive microfilm experiments with a converted movie camera; then the history of its creation under the somber conditions of war and captivity; and finally, the fact that the book was written entirely from memory—he had no notes whatsoever—in exercise books that were sent one after the other from the POW camp to Lucien Febvre in France. The book itself is also exceptional because of its considerable length (over 1,200 pages), its profound erudition, the variety of its source material, its lively style and the personal tone that is immediately apparent in the first sentence: “J’ai passionnément aimé la Méditerranée.” After all, how many theses begin with a declaration of love, even if it is directed toward a sea? But the truly exceptional aspect of this book lies in its original approach—a new approach to time and space. And yet it all started in such an ordinary way! Braudel’s original plan was to write a thesis in the traditional manner of the Sorbonne about Philip II’s policies concerning the Mediterranean. But already while in Algeria he had come to believe that the change in Spanish politics around 1580 from a Mediterranean to an Atlantic orientation could not be explained satisfactorily by the traditional answer, a change in Philip’s policy. What bothered Braudel in particular was the discrepancy between the triviality of the cause and the enormity of the results. He began therefore to see this change as the result of a long-term process, namely, the Ottoman expansion, which drove the Christians out of the eastern basin of the sea and forced them onto the ocean. As a result, the centuries-old Greek-Roman and later Christian domination of the Mediterranean Sea was broken. This consideration led Braudel to approach the Mediterranean world as a unit, a world with its own past and its own history. A letter from Lucien Febvre turned

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the scales. “Philip II and the Mediterranean is a fine subject,” he wrote, “but The Mediterranean and Philip II would be an even finer subject.”6 That is what it was to be; not Philip II but the old internal sea became the principal character in Braudel’s exposé. His choice of a geographic instead of a political entity (like Spain or the Hapsburg Empire) as the spatial framework for his book marks the first new element of Braudel’s approach. The other even more important innovation was his treatment of time. The initial problem here was one of organization or, if one prefers, composition. In the course of time Braudel had collected an enormous amount of data, which had to be compiled and organized. But there was such a wide variety of information! Some of his material related to aspects of life that can hardly be dated since they apply at all times: the changing of the seasons, the dangers of the sea and the uncertainty of the harvest. Other data, such as the development of trade and transportation and of wages and prices could indeed be dated, but they covered a much longer period than the reign of Philip II. Finally, other events could be dated to the very day, for instance, the activities of Philip II and his officials. How then should this large quantity of such varied data be organized and assigned a place in a well-organized exposition? Traditionally, historians have had two ways of tackling this problem: the diachronic and the synchronic. The first and most common is the arrangement of data in chronological order. The second and less common more or less disregards the course of time and instead considers a period as a unit, organizing the data according to the diverse aspects of human activity. Neither method was satisfactory in this case, neither the diachronic because of the large quantity of material that could not be dated nor the synchronic because it could not do justice to the dynamics of the Mediterranean economy and the development of Spanish power. What now? Braudel’s solution was as simple as it was ingenious. He arranged the developments and events according to their duration: long-term, mediumterm and short-term or, as he also described it, geographic, social and individual time. Everything fell in its place, or as he wrote to his wife: “Tout est simple maintenant.”7 Thus the Méditerranée acquired the form of a triptych. The first panel provides, in the tradition of the French “géographie humaine,” a picture of man in his natural environment. Braudel describes the countryside, the mountains, deserts and plains, the coastal regions, seas and islands. He shows the influence of the climate and the seasons,

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the problems of the shipping industry, the development of routes overland and overseas and the role of the cities. The central panel depicts the economic conditions in detail; first, from the standpoint of the structural factors (distance, distribution of the population, etc.) and then in terms of the more conjunctural aspects such as trade and transportation, gold and silver, wages and prices. This is followed in a somewhat random order by several chapters on the political, social, cultural and military organizations. Finally, the third panel represents what Braudel himself calls traditional history, and another Annales historian, François Simiand, termed “event” history. In six chapters the political, diplomatic and military events of the years 1550–1598 are treated in chronological order: wars, battles, negotiations, treaties and peace. Braudel’s innovation was brilliant. Of course it can be criticized in many respects. For example, it is not clearly evident why a certain aspect is discussed in part one rather than in part two. More fundamentally, the continuity within the three parts is in some cases rather weak (several chapters are in fact no more than a collection of sketches). Even more fundamentally, it is not easy to perceive how the various parts are interrelated. How does the geography explain the economy, the economy the politics, and so forth? This, however, does not change the fact that this solution made it possible for Braudel to present his myriad original, intelligent, new and interesting facts and ideas in an elegant and convincing fashion. Braudel’s approach was so successful that in France (and later also elsewhere) a veritable scholastics was developed about “longue” and “courte durée,” about structure, “conjoncture” and events and their interrelated hierarchy. We shall not dwell on this. Here we are more concerned with the fact that Braudel’s own interest began to shift from what was still the center panel in La Méditerranée, the “histoire lentement rhytmée,” to the “longue durée” or, as it was to be called later, structural history. Braudel was to find this term “structural history” very useful during the crisis of structuralism that was to plague French historians in the sixties. But this was all yet to come in 1947, the year when Braudel received his doctorate. IN POWER When Braudel defended his thesis, he was forty-five years old—not exactly a young doctor, even by French standards. Until that time, he

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had been forced to remain on the fringe of the academic community. This was now to change very quickly. In 1947–1948 Lucien Febvre, then already seventy years old, founded the VIe Section of the École Pratique des Hautes Etudes, the section for social and economic sciences. As a result the Annales group acquired an institutional base and this, even more than the publication of the journal, appears to have been the key to their success. Because Braudel devoted a large proportion of the next twenty years of his life to the development of what was to be called in short the “VIe Section,” first together with Lucien Febvre and alone after the latter’s death in 1956, we should pause briefly to consider this institution. The École Pratique des Hautes Etudes is an educational institution that was founded in 1868 for the purpose of teaching students how to conduct scientific research. Instruction is therefore not given in the form of lectures as at the Sorbonne, but—as the name implies—as practical exercises. The VIe Section, a late addition to the Ecole, was quickly to become the most famous and largest department. Today it publishes dozens of journals and scientific series, organizes hundreds of seminars and has numerous research facilities at its disposal. With more than 1,000 people on the staff, it is by far the largest institution in the field of the social sciences in France. History has always played the leading role in this school, as is apparent from the number of historians among the instructors and the fact that the director of the VIe Section has often been an historian: first Febvre, then Braudel, followed by Jacques Le Goff, François Furet and Jacques Revel. From 1956 until 1970, Braudel led the VIe Section with an enlightened spirit but an iron hand. At the same time he edited the Annales, officially as one of several editors but in fact alone. Moreover he was— again initially together with Lucien Febvre—director of the Centre de Recherches Historiques, which was founded in 1949. In addition in 1963 he created the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, the institute responsible for the coordination and stimulation of research in the social sciences. Finally, but in fact first, from 1949 to 1972 he was a professor at the Collège de France, again as Febvre’s successor. For a number of years Braudel was also chairman of the committee for the “agrégation,” the committee that regulates appointments for the secondary schools. It was in short a life in which many enemies can be made, and in this respect Braudel succeeded royally. On the other hand, he also had many friends in France and abroad, especially among his students, to whom he was always available—a generosity as rare

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as it is great. In any case it is clear that Braudel’s position was not in complete accordance with the ideals of “May 1968.” Although Braudel was closer to being one of the grandfathers than one of the more harried fathers, those days of student rioting in May played a role in his decision to retire as editor of the Annales in 1969 and as director of the VIe Section in 1970. BRAUDEL’S POLICY Not only did Braudel have considerable power and influence, he also used them. He supported a deliberate policy because, although he preached a pluralistic “let-1000-flowers-blossom” philosophy that accords every type of history its right to exist, he was in actual practice both the universal heir and the executor of Lucien Febvre. Braudel was to manage the inheritance of the Annales carefully. Under the motto “A journal is not a mailbox,” this journal focussed in particular on that aspect of history Braudel considered to be the most important, that is the social and especially the economic history of the world between 1400 and 1800, with a preference for long-term developments and a special interest in the world of the Mediterranean. This same preference can also be seen in the publications of the VIe Section that appeared during Braudel’s reign. And publish the historians did! In 1952 he started with no less than three series at one time, and the titles of these series clearly illustrate what Braudel was interested in: (1) Affaires et gens d’affaires, containing 36 volumes; (2) Monnaie-Prix-Conjoncture, with 11 volumes; and (3) Ports-RoutesTrafics, with 28 volumes. Of these volumes 20, 6 and 17, respectively, were devoted to the regions around the Mediterranean Sea. These 75 books were relatively independent, individual publications, but when viewed as a whole, it becomes obvious what this collection represents no more and no less than the most precise reconstruction possible of the transition from a Mediterranean to an Atlantic world economy, complete with exact figures for prices, transportation, contracts and so forth. This was the theme that continued to fascinate Braudel and finally became his personal form of world history. In this respect Braudel differed from his teachers as well as his students (with the possible exception of Marc Bloch and Pierre Chaunu) since he was no longer satisfied with anything less than world history. Fortunately! World history was also the subject of a new publication in three volumes, which Braudel started to work on in 1950 but did not com-

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plete until 1979: Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme, 15e– 18e siècle. The first volume appeared in 1967, but apart from this there was silence—for thirty years! How can this “Great Silence” be explained? Did he fear publication, fear failure? Possibly, but he predominantly displayed courage (which as we know is the victory over fear)—the courage to attack a vast subject, the courage to keep studying, to keep thinking and finally to keep writing and rewriting until he sensed that the text had found its own rhythm. Only with such selfassurance and, literally, a contempt for death is it possible for a writer not only to postpone the completion of a book until seventy-seven years of age but also—and even more astoundingly—to announce at the same time the subject of the next book! Thus for thirty years Braudel remained as it were a “homo unius libri.” He published only a number of articles, a genre that did not really suit him, about the theory of history—a subject he did not particularly like. But he had to publish these articles, because it was essential at that time to defend history against the attack of the structuralists. BRAUDEL AND STRUCTURALISM As a professor of the Collège de France, Braudel was not just an instructor but also a prominent intellectual. In France this means someone who must have and must offer opinions on a multitude of subjects. In addition, as director of the VIe Section, he had to defend the inheritance of Bloch and Febvre. Their ideal (and that of Braudel) was to bring all the social sciences together, in fact to have them all unite into one universal social science. But then, of course, a historical social science! This approach was therefore characterized by openmindedness as well as ambition. All sciences relating to mankind were welcome in the VIe Section, but they had to recognize and accept the historical approach. For the established sciences such as sociology and economy, this was no problem. They nestled themselves in the VIe Section and then, being fully aware of their social relevance, plunged into the contemporary, totally disregarding everyone else. But for the new disciplines such as comparative linguistics and anthropology, this requirement was not acceptable. They rejected history (not for the first time, either!) as unscientific, alleging that they represented the true science of mankind. Their weapon was structuralism, which can be characterized as the peeling away—layer by layer—of social reality to

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reveal its hard, immutable core. Braudel’s reaction was characteristic: one could call it a flight forward. Instead of rejecting the word “structure,” as Lucien Febvre had done, he captured it.8 His preference for the “longue durée,” the sluggish undercurrent of history, was quite useful at this point. That part of history called “l’histoire quasiimmobile” in the Méditerranée, the domain of “geographic time,” now became the “structure” of the historian. For Braudel this structure is the indestructible, almost immobile basis of history, the world of the infinitely slow change. But take note of the words “quasi” and “almost,” because there is always change. Braudel as an historian does not recognize a timeless structure. Thus Braudel, theoretician through necessity but historian through and through, protected what he had inherited from the fathers of the Annales: a history open to all of the sciences of mankind, attentive to the general and repetitive but averse to an ahistoric “sociologism” or a timeless “structuralism.” The high point of this discussion came around 1960. During the second half of the decade the debate began to die down and by 1970 the subject could be considered closed. Braudel’s articles, somewhat to his own surprise, were collected and published under the title Ecrits sur l’histoire.9 These articles were (and are) the object of intensive study and solemn citation. DIGNITAS WITHOUT OTIUM The end of the debate between Braudel and the structuralists, between the “longue” and the “trop longue durée,” coincided more or less with the May days of 1968. The events of this period, known in France as “les événements,” forcefully restored belief in the significance of the previously scorned “événement” and at the same time drew attention to the role of immaterial factors. After Braudel’s departure, the Annales began to focus more on mentality rather than material civilization, sought the advice of the anthropologist rather than the economist and finally even gave some thought to political history.10 For Braudel himself the 1970s were definitely not, as they have been called, the years of “great listlessness.” On one hand he traveled a great deal since in this period he received numerous awards within the academic world. Braudel’s fame was also to make the transition from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, namely after the English translation of La Méditerranée, which appeared in 1972 and culminated in the founding of the Fernand Braudel Center in Binghamton. On the other

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hand he worked hard reconsidering, rewriting and finally completing his second major work, Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme. Here again he had to deal with the same problem of an endless collection of material, the necessity of continuous reorganization and, in particular, ceaseless rewriting. This subject, too, was without end because the research was not based on a clear-cut question and therefore there was no real answer. This time Braudel wanted nothing more or less than to give a description and analysis of four centuries of world history from the economic perspective. Many were afraid that this book would be Braudel’s “Unfinished,” but in November 1979, it finally came out. The old master surprised friend and foe alike with this new, colossal publication (three volumes of 1,750 pages altogether).11 He immediately announced a new one, a book on France also based on his lectures given at the Collège de France. This, however, was indeed to become his Unvollendete because Fernand Braudel died before it was finished, on 28 November 1985. MATERIAL CIVILIZATION AND THE HISTORY OF FRANCE Civilisation matérielle is, like La Méditerranée, a book that witnesses the unlimited curiosity, the sharpness of observation and the preference for living, concrete reality that are so characteristic of Braudel’s work. In this book, too, we are confronted with an enormous amount of data, this time on the world economy, which are arranged according to a certain scheme. And again—how could it be otherwise!—this scheme has the form of a triptych. Braudel describes the economy as a building with three floors. The ground floor is material civilization. There we find the economy of routine and repetition, the life of age-old practices and customs, of experience and imitation. Of course it is not only stagnation and standstill that dominate here. There also is change and innovation, like technological progress, and the growth of commerce and the cities. But first and foremost it is a world of subjugation and dependency. In this world, man is not the triumphant master over nature, but nature’s almost impotent subordinate. Most people led this type of life during the centuries that Braudel dealt with. Above this level we find the first floor, which Braudel simply called “economic life.” Here we have left the world of repetition and routine and entered the world of trade and transport, markets and cities,

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fairs and Bourses. Here we find calculation and planning, money and credit, profits and ruses. Finally, there is the upper layer: capitalism. For Braudel capitalism is not, as it is normally seen, a certain period in history. For him capitalism is a limited but almost universal sector of the economy. It is the terrain of rationality, the world of information, calculation, speculation and manipulation. For Braudel, Jacques Coeur of Bourges, the Fuggers of Augsburg and the directors of the Dutch East India Company were just as consumate capitalists as John D. Rockefeller and the Board of General Motors. Thus capitalism is for him not a stage in history but a level in the economy. It is in a way typical of Braudel that the main importance of this book, too, does not lie in his theorizing about the structure of the economy. Many historians and economists have their doubts about this. The true importance of the book is in the richness of its findings and observations, its intelligent way of dealing with a detail that is trivial at first sight and Braudel’s ability to distill interesting information from a neglected source. As was mentioned before, Braudel’s history of France was not completed. This work, with the title of L’Identité de la France, was—somewhat surprisingly—not planned in three but in four volumes: Space and History; Men and Things; State, Culture, Society and France outside France. Maybe it is no coincidence that of these books only the first two volumes have been completed, albeit in a provisional form, because these books are about the subjects in which Braudel was particularly interested: geography, demography and economics. To say that the various volumes deal with various themes is not entirely accurate. Rather, they are about various approaches to the history of France, based on various disciplines: geography, demography, sociology and so forth. This way of working is based on Braudel’s deepest conviction, namely that history is the synthesis of all the social sciences. CONCLUSION What kind of historian was Fernand Braudel? Like every historian Braudel was three things at once: researcher, writer and thinker. But of course, he was not all three in equal measure. Above all Braudel was a researcher. He was erudite out of total conviction and in the best sense of the word. He was an historian with an infinite curiosity and an insatiable hunger. J.H. Hexter therefore compared Braudel very aptly with Rabelais, and Keith Thomas justifiably called him the “Historian of Everything.”12 Braudel was interested in all aspects of human

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activity, and he exactly fitted Marc Bloch’s description of the true historian who is like the giant in the fairy tale: whenever he smells human flesh, he heads for it immediately. In the second instance, Braudel was a writer. He knew all too well how important this is in France where, in his own words, “literature reigns.”13 His reflections on the success of Bloch and Febvre therefore deliberately end with the question “Is history perhaps, though aspiring to be a science, a matter of writing, of literary style?”14 Braudel himself was a great writer with a personal tone. He invites the reader to join in as a spectator and a thinker. He has a marvelous way of alternating between description and reflection. But he certainly did not write easily; he was not a natural writer like his predecessor Lucien Febvre or his successor Le Roy Ladurie. For Braudel, writing was the test of the whole. This explains his perfectionism. This explains why every page was rewritten dozens of times and why the manuscript of Civilisation matérielle was retyped a dozen times. This explains why every page was read aloud to his wife—to check rhythm and style. Finally Braudel is, of course, also a thinker—about history as well as the writing of history. Up to a certain point, one can therefore call him the theoretician of the new history. Braudel certainly did not dislike quantitative history. He was always interested in graphs and tables. He calculated whenever he could or should (and sometimes when he could not!). He was also not afraid of the computer. He was interested in new methods and techniques and stimulated teamwork and projects. But in actual practice the team Braudel consisted of only two people, the Braudels themselves. Their only technical implements besides pencil and paper were a reader and a filing system. Braudel was not averse to theory, although he wrote about it only under pressure. His theory, however, is a theory based on the practical, one which—with the exception of several fairly loose questions and hypotheses—he did not develop until he was in the process of compiling and contemplating his material. The three layers of time of the Méditerranée, the three levels of the Civilisation matérielle and the various approaches in his L’Identité de la France originated in this way—not as a direct result of his philosophy of history, but instead out of his practical experience of writing about history. This in no way changes the fact that Braudel’s plea for an integrated history—and especially his views on the simultaneity of the “durées” and the primacy of the long term—have had such a widespread influence that it can be stated that every historian today contains not only a portion of Ranke but also a bit of Braudel.

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It has often been said that Braudel’s work forms the realization of the Annales program. This is only partially true. A certain tension was inherent in the Annales from the very beginning, a dualism between the horizontal and the vertical approach, between synthesis and analysis, between “histoire globale” and “histoire problème.” Marc Bloch was the master of the latter; Braudel, following his instinct, chose the former, the “histoire globale.” Instead of questions and the formation of theories, he preferred evocation and representation. With good reason his Méditerranée has often been compared with a painting or with a symphony. Thus as far as the renewal of the historical method in the stricter sense is concerned, his work may be of lesser lasting significance than that of some other Annales historians. But this was never Braudel’s prime ambition. For him, the greatness of the historian lies elsewhere. “The power the historian has,” he once said, “is to make the dead live.” Who can deny that in this respect, too, Braudel has been a powerful historian?

Notes

FOREWORD 1. Alexis de Tocqueville, L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution, 2nd ed. (Paris 1856).

CHAPTER 1: ARY SCHEFFER AND HIS TIME 1. Marthe Kolb, Ary Scheffer et son temps, 1795–1858 (Paris 1937), p. 238. 2. Ibid. p. 69 3. Ibid. p. 259 4. Anne-Marie de Brem, L’Atelier d’Ary Scheffer (Paris 1991), p. 20. 5. A. Jardin and A.J. Tudesq, La France des notables: L’évolution générale, 1815–1848 (“Nouvelle Histoire de la France Contemporaine”; Paris 1973), p. 161. 6. Roger Magraw, France 1815–1914: The Bourgeois Century (Oxford 1983), p. 68. 7. Jardin and Tudesq, France, p. 257. 8. Ibid. p. 125. 9. A.J.P. Taylor, The Course of German History (London 1945), p. 68.

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CHAPTER 2: THE PARIS OF ÉMILE ZOLA 1. See A. Lanoux, Bonjour Monsieur Zola (Paris 1968), p. 11. 2. See H.L. Wesseling, Chapter 5 in this book, pp. 51–65. 3. Quoted in J.P. de Beaumarchais et al., eds., Dictionnaire des littératures de langue française (Paris 1984), p. 2525. 4. Ibid. 5. See N. Kranowski, Paris dans les romans d’Émile Zola (Paris 1968), p. 49. 6. Ibid. p. 50. 7. Quoted in ibid. p. 49. 8. See Histoire de la France urbaine IV: La ville de l’âge industriel (Paris 1983), pp. 97–119. 9. See L. Girard, Nouvelle histoire de Paris: La Deuxième République et le Second Empire, 1848–1870 (Paris 1969), p. 93. 10. See G. Pradalié, Le Second Empire (Paris 1969), p. 69 ff. 11. É. Zola, La Curée (Paris 1893), p. 97. 12. Quoted in Pradalié, Second Empire, p. 73. 13. Quoted in A. Plessis, De la Fête impériale au Mur des Fédéres 1852– 1871 (Paris 1973), p. 164. 14. Kranowski, Paris, p. 59. 15. See É. Zola, L’Oeuvre in: Les Rougon-Macquart (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade; Paris 1966), vol. 4 p. 1339. 16. Ibid. p. 1377. 17. See ibid. p. 1390. 18. See ibid. p. 1391. 19. Ibid. p. 250. 20. Ibid. p. 177. 21. See for example Kranowski, Paris dans les romans d’Émile Zola and S. Max, Les Métamorphoses de la grande ville dans les “Rougon-Macquart” (Paris 1966). 22. Zola, L’Oeuvre, p. 12. 23. Ibid. p. 13 and p. 26. 24. Ibid. p. 345. 25. Ibid. p. 212. 26. Ibid. p. 211. 27. Ibid. p. 73. 28. See Kranowski, Paris dans les romans d’Émile Zola, p. 56. 29. Zola quoted in Beaumarchais, Dictionnaire, p. 2543.

CHAPTER 3: PIERRE DE COUBERTIN: SPORT AND IDEOLOGY IN THE THIRD REPUBLIC, 1870–1914 1. E. Renan, La Réforme intellectuelle et morale de la France (Paris 1871).

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2. H. Taine, Notes sur l’Angleterre (Paris 1872). 3. E. Weber, “Gymnastics and Sports in Fin-de-siècle France. Opium of the Classes?” American Historical Review 76 (1971), pp. 70–98. 4. See Ian Buruma, Voltaire’s Coconuts or Anglomania in Europe (London 1999), p. 157. 5. M.T. Eyquem, Pierre de Coubertin: L’Épopée olympique (Paris 1966) and E. Weber, “Pierre de Coubertin and the Introduction of Organized Sport in France,” Journal of Comtemporary History 5 (1970), pp. 3–26. 6. Weber, “Gymnastics,” p. 96. 7. See H.L. Wesseling, Soldier and Warrior. French Attitudes toward the Army and War on the Eve of the First World War (Westport, Conn. and London 2000).

CHAPTER 4: COMMOTION AT THE SORBONNE: THE DEBATE ON THE FRENCH UNIVERSITY, 1910–1914 1. Agathon, L’Esprit de la nouvelle Sorbonne (Paris 1911). See also P.H. Stock, “Students versus the University in pre-World War Paris,” French Historical Studies 7 (1971), pp. 93–110. 2. Agathon, Les jeunes gens d’aujourd’hui (Paris 1913). On this generation see also P. Bénéton, “La génération de 1912–1914: Image, mythe et réalité,” Revue Française de Science Politique 21 (1971), pp. 981–1009 and P.F. Lachance, “The Consciousness of the Generation of 1890 at Maturity: an Alternative Reading of the Image of French Youth in 1912–1914,” European Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies 2 (1978), pp. 67–81. 3. See C. Péguy, Situations (Paris 1906–1907) and Victor-Marie, comte Hugo (Paris 1910); F. Lot, “De la situation faite à l’enseignement supérieur en France,” Cahiers de la Quinzaine, ser. 7, nos. 9 and 11 (Paris 1906); also F. Lot, “Où en est la Faculté des Lettres de Paris?” La Grande Revue (1912), pp. 23 and ff. 4. R. Benjamin, La Farce de la Sorbonne (Paris 1911); also P. Lasserre, La Doctrine officielle de l’université (Paris 1913). 5. See A. Prost, L’Enseignement en France, 1800–1967 (Paris 1968). 6. See C. Digeon, La Crise allemande de la pensée française, 1870–1914 (Paris 1959), pp. 370 and ff. 7. C. Seignobos and C.-V. Langlois, Introduction aux études historiques (Paris 1898). 8. E. Faguet, “L’Esprit de la nouvelle Sorbonne,” Revue des Deux Mondes 81 (1911), pp. 517–533. 9. E. Renan, L’Avenir de la science. Pensées de 1848 (Paris 1890). 10. F. Rauh, Etudes de morale (Paris 1911).

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CHAPTER 5: RELUCTANT CRUSADERS: FRENCH INTELLECTUALS AND THE DREYFUS AFFAIR 1. The Grand Larousse de la Langue Française (Paris 1972) dates the first use of the word “engagement” in this sense at about 1945. Compare Herbert Lüthy in George B. Huszar, ed., The Intellectuals: A Controversial Portrait (Chicago 1960), who also makes a comparison between the Résistance and the Dreyfus affair. See also Louis Bodin, Les Intellectuels (Paris 1964), p. 19. 2. D.W. Brogan, writing about English intellectuals, goes back to the seventeenth century and mentions Locke, Harrington, and Milton, with successors such as Bentham and Mill (D.W. Brogan, “The Intellectual in Britain” in H.M. MacDonald, ed., The Intellectual in Politics (Austin 1966). Also compare Huszar, Intellectuals, p. 9. In England the word “intellectual” had already existed as a noun since the seventeenth century. Compare Bodin, Intellectuels, p. 6. 3. Quoted by Huszar, Intellectuals, p. 499. Also compare Victor Brombert, The Intellectual Hero: Studies in the French Novel, 1880–1935 (Philadelphia and New York 1961), p. 35. 4. Compare René Rémond, “Les Intellectuels et la politique,” Revue Française de Science Politique 9 (1959), p. 869; F.B. Bon and M.A. Burnier, Les Nouveaux Intellectuels (Paris 1966), pp. 19–20. The same symptoms are visible at this time in England with the Fabians and the Boer War; and in the Netherlands, for instance, in a discussion about the Russian coronation feasts in the journal De Kroniek, edited by P.L. Tak. Compare Brogan, in MacDonald, Intellectuals, p. 68; W. Thijs, De Kroniek van P.L. Tak (Ghent 1955), p. 160. 5. E. Shils, in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences 7 (New York 1968), under the word “Intellectuals”: “Intellectuals are the aggregate of persons in any society who employ in their communication and expression, with relatively higher frequency than other members of their society, symbols of general scope and abstract reference, concerning man, society, nature and cosmos” (p. 399). 6. A. Cartault, L’Intellectuel: Etude psychologique et morale (Paris 1914), p. 44. 7. Ibid., pp. 43 and 99. 8. Brombert, Hero, p. 24. But according to Reinach, Guy de Maupassant used the word as a noun as early as 1879. See Joseph Reinach, Histoire de l’affaire Dreyfus: Tome 3: La Crise (Paris 1903), p. 246. 9. Reinach, Histoire, p. 246. 10. Brombert, Hero, p. 23. 11. William M. Johnston, “The Origin of the Term “Intellectuals” in French Novels and Essays of the 1890’s,” Journal of European Studies 4 (1974), pp. 43–56. See also Reinach, Histoire, p. 246 and Brombert, Hero, p. 23.

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12. Maurice Barrès, Scènes et doctrines du nationalisme (2 vols.; Paris 1925), 1, p. 46. 13. Compare Reinach, Histoire, p. 247. 14. For instance, Grimaux, doctor and teacher at Polytechnique, was one of these few who testified during the Zola trial; compare Louis Leblois, L’Affaire Dreyfus (Paris 1929), pp. 669–672. 15. Lüthy calls the manifesto “essentially a manifesto of the École Normale Supérieure, that official nursery of the enlightened, republican French spirit,” quoted by Huszar, Intellectuals, p. 444. Also compare Léon Blum, Souvenirs sur l’Affaire (Paris 1935), p. 100. 16. Compare, for instance, “De la situation faite au parti intellectuel dans le monde moderne” (1906) in Charles Péguy, Oeuvres en Prose, 1898–1908 (Paris 1959). 17. Compare Thibaudet, “Pour l’histoire du parti intellectuel,” La Nouvelle Revue Française 39 (1932), p. 268. 18. Ibid. For greater detail about this, compare Andler, Vie de Lucien Herr (Paris 1932); Hubert Bourgin, L’École Normale et la politique: De Jaurès à Léon Blum (Paris 1938); and Robert J. Smith, “L’Atmosphère politique à l’École Normale Supérieure à la fin du 19e siècle,” Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine 20 (1973), pp. 248–268. 19. Compare Eugen Weber, L’Action Française (Paris 1964), pp. 70–71. 20. C. Maurras, Quand les Français ne s’aimaient pas: Chronique d’une renaissance, 1895–1905 (Paris 1905), ch. 7, “Sentinelle allemande dans l’université” (articles from the years 1897–1905 about and against Monod). 21. Léon Blum, Souvenirs sur l’Affaire (Paris 1935), p. 100. 22. M. Paléologue, Journal de l’Affaire Dreyfus, 1894–1899 (Paris 1955), p. 92. 23. Cartault, L’Intellectuel, p. 183. 24. Julien Benda, La Jeunesse d’un clerc (Paris 1968), p. 115. 25. Reinach also mentions a protest by a number of archivist-paleographers in an open letter in L’Eclair, February 21, 1898 (compare Reinach, Histoire, p. 416). Paléologue (Journal, p. 224) tells us that the military tribunal in Rennes was very critical of these paleographers: “car il voit en eux surtout des “Intellectuels,” les pédants présomptueux qui se croient les aristocrats de l’esprit et qui ont tous perdu, plus ou moins, la mentalité nationale.” 26. Reinach, Histoire, p. 547. More detailed about this Ligue: J. Charlot and M. Charlot, “Un Rassemblement d’intellectuels. La Ligue des droits de l’homme,” Revue Française de Science Politique 9 (1959), pp. 995–1027. 27. Charlot, “Rassemblement,” p. 996. According to Reinach (Histoire, p. 547) only the four persons mentioned above were present at the first two meetings of the Ligue on 24 and 25 January 1898. Pierre Miquel, L’Affaire Dreyfus (Paris 1985), p. 50. Miquel dates the first meeting on February 20 and mentions the names of eight more founders: L. Havet, P. Meyer, P.

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Viollet, E. Duclaux, Jean Psichari, Arthur Ranc, and E. Grimaux—most of them clearly intellectuals. 28. Charlot, Rassemblement, pp. 997–998. 29. Barrès, Scènes, p. 59. 30. Paléologue, Journal, p. 91. 31. Louis Leblois, L’Affaire Dreyfus (Paris 1929), p. 556. 32. Ibid. p. 668. 33. D. Halévy, Apologie pour notre passé (Paris 1910), p. 40. Also an excellent description of a similar kind of development by Albert Réville, Les Etapes d’un intellectuel: A propos de l’Affaire Dreyfus (Paris 1898). 34. F. Brunetière, “Après le procès,” Revue des Deux Mondes 146 (1898), pp. 428–447. 35. Quoted by L. Bodin and J. Touchard, “Les Intellectuels dans la société française contemporaine,” Revue Française de Science Politique 9 (1959), p. 838. Also compare Barrès about the intellectuals: “Quoi qu’il en soit du mot, rien n’est pire que la chose” (in Scènes, p. 49). Barrès was very proud of his well-known boutade: “L’intelligence, quelle petite chose à la surface de nousmêmes” (Mes Cahiers, 1, p. 73). 36. C. Delhorbe, L’Affaire Dreyfus et les écrivains français (Neuchâtel and Paris 1932), p. 175, about Barrès: “Son postulat, c’est toujours que la foule a raison.” Compare Barrès’ remark about Zola: “Émile Zola pense tout naturellement en Vénitien déraciné” (Scènes, p. 44). There is also a very strong attack on intellectuals in a letter by Émile Gebhart in Maurice Barrès, Mes Cahiers, 1898–1902, (Paris 1930), vol. 2, pp. 4–5. 37. Barrès, Scènes, p. 48. A humorous critique of Barrès and Brunetière by Pierre Quillard, “Le Manifeste électoral de M. Fernand Brunetière,” La Revue Blanche 15 (1898): “[Barrès] montre si évidemment qu’un philosophe kantien finit toujours par toucher des chèques dans les couloirs de la Chambre” (p. 481). 38. Brombert, Hero, p. 31. On the antiintellectualism of the socialists (Kautsky, Lafargue, Lagardelle, etc.): Brombert, Hero, p. 28; Huszar, Intellectuals, pp. 322 ff. 39. This information by Barrès, Scènes, p. 76. Compare Halévy, Apologie, p. 56: “si l’intelligence raisonneuse des professeurs était avec les dreyfusards, l’intelligence plus délicate des lettrés ne les suivait pas.” More detailed on the position of the writers: Delhorbe, L’Affaire. 40. Halévy, Apologie, pp. 57–60. 41. Barrès, Scènes, p. 69. 42. Ibid. p. 71. Also compare Delhorbe, Ecrivains, p. 209. 43. Compare Johnston, Intellectuals, p. 45: “Bérenger had shown uncanny foresight in describing intellectuals as educated men who intervene abruptly in politics.” 44. Brombert, Hero, p. 32. Compare Bon and Burnier, Intellectuels, p. 19:

Notes

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“L’intellectuel est celui qui rend compte de la société de façon critique: une contestation permanente, un miroir féroce qui incite—qui aide?—à la transformer.” 45. Compare Julien Benda, La Trahison des clercs. The first edition was in 1927. In a new preface in 1946, he again opposed the idea of commitment very strongly, and singled out Jean-Paul Sartre (ed. 1946, p. 65). 46. Benda, Jeunesse, p. 114. 47. Ibid. p. 117. 48. MacDonald, Intellectuals, p. 63. Also compare Rémond, Intellectuels, p. 861, about the situation in Germany and in the United States. 49. Quoted by Rémond, Intellectuels, p. 862.

CHAPTER 6: ROBERT BRASILLACH AND THE TEMPTATION OF FASCISM 1. George Orwell, Selected Essays (4 vols; Harmondsworth 1970), 3, p. 317. 2. George Harrison, The Reactionaries (London 1966). See also G.L. Mosse, Germans and Jews: The Right, the Left and the Search for a Third Force in pre-Nazi-Germany (New York 1970). It contains an extended version of his Fascism and the Intellectuals of 1968. 3. H. Drion, Intellectuelen en democratie (Leiden 1967). 4. Alastair Hamilton, The Appeal of Fascism: A Study of Intellectuals and Fascism, 1919–1945 (London 1971). 5. Tarmo Kunnas, Drieu La Rochelle, Céline, Brasillach et la tentation fasciste (Paris 1972). 6. M. Chavardès, Le 6 février 1934: La République en danger (Paris 1966). 7. See Pierre-Marie Dioudonnat, Je Suis Partout, 1930–1944: Les maurrassiens devant la tentation fasciste (Paris 1973). 8. Hamilton, Appeal, p. 210. 9. See C. Ambroise-Colin, Un procès de l’épuration: Robert Brasillach (Paris 1971); J. Isorni, Le procès de Robert Brasillach (19 janvier 1945) (Paris 1946); Alice Kaplan, The Collaborator. The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach (Chicago 2000). 10. Jean Touchard. “L’esprit des années trente,” in Tendances politiques dans la vie française depuis 1789 (Paris 1960). 11. Jean-Louis Loubet del Bayle, Les Non-conformistes des années 30: Une tentative de renouvellement de la pensée politique française (Paris 1969). 12. See J. Plumyène and R. Lasierra, Les fascismes français, 1923–1963 (Paris 1963). 13. See Dieter Wolf, Die Doriot-Bewegung: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des französischen Faschismus (Stuttgart 1967).

190

Notes

14. Robert Brasillach, “Lettre à un soldat de la classe 60,” in Robert Brasillach, Ecrit à Fresnes (Paris 1967), p. 140. 15. Ibid. p. 141.

CHAPTER 7: AN INTELLECTUAL IN POLITICS: RAYMOND ARON, 1905–1983 1. J.-L. Missika and D. Wolton, Le Spectateur engagé (Paris 1980). 2. R. Aron, Mémoires: Cinquante ans de réflexion politique (Paris 1983). 3. Missika and Wolton, Spectateur, pp. 97 and 101. 4. Aron, Mémoires, pp. 175–176. 5. F.A. Hayek, cited in G.B. de Huszar, ed., The Intellectuals. A Controversial Portrait (Chicago 1960), p. 371.

CHAPTER 8: CONSTANTS IN FRENCH FOREIGN POLICY 1. A.J.P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War, 6th ed. (Harmondsworth 1969), pp. 10 ff. 2. Jules Cambon, “The Permanent Basis of French Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs 8 (1930), pp. 173–185. 3. See Chapter 13 in this book, hereafter pp. 167–182. 4. For details on this, see Ezra N. Suleiman, Politics, Power and Bureaucracy in France: The Administrative Elite (Princeton 1974). 5. Ibid. p. 48. The École des Sciences Politiques was nationalized in 1945. 6. André Siegfried, Tableau politique de la France de l’Ouest (Paris 1937). 7. See Pierre Renouvin and Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, Introduction à l’histoire des relations internationales (Paris 1973). 8. See Raoul Girardet, “L’Influence de la tradition sur la politique étrangère de la France,” in La Politique étrangère et ses fondements (Paris 1954), pp. 143–165. 9. Quoted by Raoul Girardet, Le Nationalisme français, 1871–1914 (Paris 1966), p. 108. 10. Ibid. p. 106. 11. Quoted by Henri Brunschwig, “Vigné d’Octon et l’anticolonialisme sous la IIIe République (1871–1914),” Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines 16 (1974), p. 295. 12. See C.M. Andrew, Théophile Delcassé and the Making of the Entente Cordiale: A Reappraisal of French Foreign Policy (London 1968). 13. Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940– 1944 (London 1972). 14. Ibid. pp. 57–58. 15. Ibid. p. 59.

Notes

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16. Ibid. p. 114. 17. Charles de Gaulle, Mémoires de guerre, vol. 3, Le Salut 1944–1946 (Paris 1959), p. 223. 18. See Edward Fursdon, The European Defence Community: A History (London 1980). 19. Assemblée Nationale, Journal Officiel, June 20, 1973. 20. Henry Kissinger, White House Years (Boston and Toronto 1979), p. 422. 21. Fritz Stern, “Germany in a Semi-Gaullist Europe,” Foreign Affairs 58 (Spring 1980), p. 874. 22. See for example Kissinger, White House Years, p. 87. 23. Ibid. p. 110. 24. See Le Monde of 17 February 1979, p. 6.

CHAPTER 9: WAS DE GAULLE RIGHT? 1. Transcript of Address by the Prime Minister Mrs. Thatcher, to the College of Europe, Bruges, Belgium, 20 September 1988. 2. Charles de Gaulle, Discours et messages, vol. 4, Pour l’effort, Août 1962– Décembre 1965 (Paris 1970) p. 426. 3. Charles de Gaulle, Discours et messages, vol. 3, Avec le renouveau, Mai 1958—Juillet 1962 (Paris 1970), p. 407. 4. Charles de Gaulle, Mémoires d’espoir, vol. 4, Le renouveau, 1958–1962 (Paris 1970), p. 201. 5. Ibid. p. 200. 6. Basil Davidson, The Black Man’s Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State (London 1992). 7. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London 1983). 8. Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford 1976). 9. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (London 1992). 10. Ernest Renan, Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? (Paris 1882). 11. Pamphlet, The United States of Europe (A Eurotopia?) (Amsterdam 1992).

CHAPTER 10: CHARLES DE GAULLE AND CHARLES PÉGUY: A CERTAIN IDEA OF FRANCE 1. H. Massis, Evocations (Paris 1931), p. 271. See also M. Reclus, Le Péguy que j’ai connu (Paris 1951), p. 115: “Soldat dans l’âme, troupier de vocation, fantassin d’élection.” 2. P.J. Troelstra, Gedenkschriften, vol. 3 (4 vols; Amsterdam 1927–1931), p. 58.

192

Notes

3. See also E. Michelet, Le gaullisme, passionnante aventure (Paris 1962), p. 21. 4. C. de Gaulle, Mémoires de guerre, vol. 1, L’Appel, p. 5 (references are made to the publication in Livres de poche) (3 vols; Paris 1954–1959). 5. Michelet, Gaullisme, p. 20. 6. V. Boudon, Mon Lieutenant Charles Péguy (Paris 1964), p. 11. 7. A. Werth, De Gaulle, rev. paperback ed. (Harmondsworth 1967), p. 69. 8. R. Girardet, ed., Le Nationalisme français, 1871–1914 (Paris 1966), p. 24. 9. J. Michelet, Le Peuple (Paris 1846), p. 302. 10. C. Péguy, Notre Patrie, 6th ed. (Paris [1905] 1924), pp. 38–39. 11. De Gaulle, Mémoires, 1, p. 5. 12. R. Rémond, La Droite en France, 3rd ed. (2 vols; Paris 1968), 1, p. 23. 13. B.W. Schaper, Politiek in de ban der geschiedenis (Assen 1960), p. 16 ff. 14. C. de Gaulle, Discours et messages (Paris 1946), p. 13. 15. P. Geyl, “Twee boeken over de Gaulle,” Vrij Nederland 13 March 1965. 16. Girardet, Nationalisme, p. 24. 17. De Gaulle, Mémoires, 1, p. 5. 18. Ibid. p. 5. 19. Ibid. pp. 6–7. 20. C. de Gaulle, Vers l’armée de métier (London [1934] n.d.), p. 55. 21. C. de Gaulle, La France et son armée (Paris 1938), p. 207. 22. De Gaulle, Armée, p. 107. 23. De Gaulle, Mémoires, 1, p. 31. 24. De Gaulle, France, p. 1. 25. De Gaulle, Armée, p. 107. See also Le Fil de l’épée (Paris 1962), p. 10: “Quelque direction que prenne le monde, il ne se passera pas des armes.” And C. de Gaulle, Trois études (Paris 1945), p. 176: “Comme toujours, c’est du creuset des batailles que sortira l’ordre nouveau et il sera finalement rendu à chaque nation suivant les oeuvres de ses armes.” 26. De Gaulle, Fil, p. 102. 27. Girardet, Nationalisme, p. 24. 28. De Gaulle, France, p. 228. 29. Ibid. 30. More detailed in H.L. Wesseling, Soldier and Warrior. French Attitudes toward the Army and War on the Eve of the First World War (Westport, Conn. and London 2000), pp. 40–51. 31. See also the title of the third chapter of J. de Pierrefeu’s Plutarque a menti (Paris 1923): “Joffre et Cie ou le complot d’un état-major

Notes

193

bergsonien.” On Gamelin: P.-M. de la Gorce, La République et son armée (Paris 1963), pp. 374 ff. 32. De Gaulle, Fil, pp. 16, 22. For Bergson’s influence on de Gaulle, see also C.L. Sulzberger in the New York Times, 4 February 1963; Werth, De Gaulle, p. 69, note 1. 33. De Gaulle, Fil, p. 8. See also Michelet, Gaullisme, p. 28: “admirateur de Psichari.” 34. On Maurras’ influence: Werth, De Gaulle, pp. 65, 69, and more detailed: R. Girardet, “L’Héritage de l’Action Française,” Revue Française de Science Politique 7 (1957), pp. 765–792. 35. Alain Peyrefitte, C’était de Gaulle (3 vols.; Paris 1997), 2, p. 188. 36. J. Tharaud and J. Tharaud, Notre cher Péguy (3 vols.; Paris 1926) 1, p. 24. 37. Boudon, Péguy, p. 159. 38. Daniel-Rops, Psichari, rev. ed. (Paris 1953), p. 3: “C’était Péguy et Psichari que je relisais dans ces heures nocturnes où la guerre se mettait en marche.” See also: Michelet, Gaullisme, p. 21. 39. C. Péguy, Par ce demi-clair matin, 4th ed. (Paris 1952), p. 80. 40. C. Péguy, “L’Argent suite” (1913), in Oeuvres en prose 1909–1914 (Paris 1957), p. 1170. See also C. Péguy, Notre jeunesse (Paris 1910), p. 204. 41. Péguy, “Argent suite,” p. 1195. 42. Péguy, Jeunesse, pp. 30 ff. Also: R. Johannet, Itinéraires d’intellectuels (Paris 1921), p. 48 on Péguy: “le sentiment moteur, central . . . paraît être l’horreur du monde moderne.” 43. D. Halévy, Péguy et les Cahiers de la Quinzaine (Paris 1918), p. 129. Also see Péguy, “Argent suite,” pp. 1047 ff. and A. Rousseaux, Le Prophète Péguy (2 vols; Neuchâtel 1946), 2, pp. 230 ff. 44. Also see J.W. Oerlemans, Autoriteit en vrijheid 1800–1914: Een cultuurhistorisch onderzoek naar de weerstanden tegen de industriële maatschappij (Assen 1966). 45. De Gaulle, Fil, p. 106. Financial disinterestedness is, of course, a traditional military value. See for example: Wesseling, Soldier and Warrior, pp. 127–133. 46. De Gaulle, Discours, pp. 13, 17, 26. On de Gaulle’s appreciation for technique, see: Vers l’armée de métier, p. 56. 47. Also see C. Digeon, La Crise allemande de la pensée française, 1870– 1914 (Paris 1959), pp. 57–66. 48. Also see Reclus, Péguy, p. 115 and F. Challaye, Péguy socialiste (Paris 1954), p. 297. 49. C. Péguy, A nos amis, à nos abonnés (Paris 1909), p. 32. 50. Péguy, Matin, p. 77. 51. Massis, Evocations, p. 279. 52. Péguy, Amis, p. 54.

194

Notes

53. Péguy, “Argent suite,” pp. 1167–1168. 54. Also see Girardet, Nationalisme, p. 23. 55. De Gaulle, France, p. 277. Also see J. Schomerus, “De Gaulle’s Europa-Konzeption,” Europa Archiv 18 (1963), p. 326. 56. Halévy, Péguy, p. 125. 57. Tharaud, Péguy, 2, p. 188. 58. D. Halévy, Quelques nouveaux maîtres (Paris 1914), p. 143. 59. C. Péguy, Victor-Marie, comte Hugo (Paris 1910), p. 264. 60. C. Péguy, Le Mystère des Saints Innocents (Paris 1912), p. 120.

CHAPTER 11: GABRIEL HANOTAUX: AN HISTORIAN IN POLITICS 1. J. Huizinga, “Herdenking van Gabriel Hanotaux, 1853–1944,” Verzamelde Werken (9 vols.; Haarlem 1948–1953), 6, p. 561. 2. Ibid. p. 562. 3. Ibid. 4. J. Huizinga, Briefwisseling (3 vols.; Amsterdam 1988–1991), 1, p. 365. 5. Ibid. 2, p. 61. 6. Ibid. 3, p. 155. 7. H.L. Wesseling, “Huizinga intiem,” in H.L. Wesseling, Onder historici: Opstellen over geschiedenis en geschiedschrijving (Amsterdam 1995), pp. 79– 100. 8. G. Hanotaux, Mon Temps (2 vols.; Paris 1933–1938). 9. Hanotaux, Mon Temps, 1, p. 24. 10. T.M. Iiams Jr., Dreyfus, Diplomatists and the Dual Alliance: Gabriel Hanotaux at the Quai d’Orsay, 1894–1898 (Geneva and Paris 1962), p. 20. 11. Huizinga, “Hanotaux,” p. 559. 12. G. Hanotaux, “Les Vénitiens ont-ils trahi la Chrétienté en 1202?” Revue Historique 4 (1877), pp. 74 ff. Reprinted in G. Hanotaux, Sur les chemins de l’histoire (2 vols.; Paris 1924). 13. G. Hanotaux, Les Intendants de province: Origines et premiers progrès de leur institution, 1550–1631 (Paris 1884). 14. G. Hanotaux, Etudes historiques sur le XVIe et le XVIIe siècle en France (Paris 1886). 15. G. Hanotaux, Histoire du Cardinal de Richelieu (6 vols.; Paris 1893– 1947), 2, p. 487 and Hanotaux, Chemins, 2, p. 309. 16. P. Grupp, Theorie der Kolonialexpansion und Methoden der imperialistischen Aussenpolitik bei Gabriel Hanotaux (Bern and Frankfurt 1972), p. 68. 17. G. Hanotaux, Etudes diplomatiques: La politique de l’équilibre, 1907– 1911 (Paris 1912), p. 173.

Notes

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18. Hanotaux, Richelieu, 1, p. 538. 19. Hanotaux, Chemins, 2, p. 309. 20. G. Hanotaux, La Paix latine (Paris 1903), pp. 6–7. 21. G. Hanotaux, Pour l’Empire colonial français (Paris 1933), p. 5. 22. G. Hanotaux, L’Affaire de Madagascar (Paris 1896), p. 272. 23. G. Hanotaux, Le Traité de Versailles (Paris 1919), p. 4. 24. Grupp, Hanotaux, p. 42. 25. Ibid. p. 75. 26. Iiams, Dreyfus, p. 27. 27. Hanotaux, Mon temps, 1, p. 194. 28. C.M. Andrew and A.S. Kanya-Forstner, “Gabriel Hanotaux, the Colonial Party and the Fashoda strategy,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 3 (1974), p. 81. 29. Grupp, Hanotaux, p. 72. 30. O. Reclus, Lâchons l’Asie, prenons l’Afrique (Paris 1904). 31. G. Hanotaux, Pour l’Empire colonial français (Paris 1929) p. 36. 32. Ibid. p. 40. 33. Cited in H.L. Wesseling, Divide and Rule: The Partition of Africa, 1880–1914 (Westport, Conn. and London 1996), p. 248. 34. Ibid. p. 304. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid. p. 303. 37. Ibid. p. 304. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid. p. 321. 40. P. Guillen, L’Expansion, 1881–1898 (Paris 1984), pp. 461–462. 41. Huizinga, “Hanotaux,” p. 561. Huizinga wrote in his “Bernard Shaw’s saint,” which was a reaction to Shaw’s play about the maid of Orléans, that with his book Hanotaux “had wanted to build a bridge between rationalists and catholics. . . .” See Huizinga, Verzamelde Werken, 3, p. 539. 42. G. Hanotaux, Jeanne d’Arc (Paris 1911), p. 38. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid. p. 421. 45. C. Péguy, Le Mystère de la charité de Jeanne d’Arc (Paris 1910). 46. G. Hanotaux, Tableau de la France en 1614 (Paris 1898). 47. V.S. Vetter, “Gabriel Hanotaux, 1853–1944,” in W.S. Halperin, ed., Essays in Modern European Historiography (Chicago and London 1970), p. 97. 48. Hanotaux, Mon Temps, 2, p. 15. 49. Huizinga, “Hanotaux,” pp. 562, 561 and 560, resp. 50. Hanotaux, Mon Temps, 1, p. 62. 51. Iiams, Dreyfus, pp. 20–21. 52. Andrew and Kanya-Forstner, “Hanotaux,” p. 60.

196

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53. W. Langer, The Diplomacy of Imperialism, 1890–1902 (New York 1951), p. 796 and Iiams, Dreyfus, p. 152. Guillen is much more critical, in Expansion, pp. 461–462. 54. Hanotaux, Mon Temps, 2, p. 2. 55. Ibid.

CHAPTER 12: THE ANNALES SCHOOL AND THE WRITING OF CONTEMPORARY HISTORY: THE FIRST FIFTY YEARS 1. Lucien Febvre, Combats pour l’histoire (Paris 1953), p. 42. 2. Ibid. p. 40. 3. Marc Bloch, Apologie pour l’histoire ou Métier d’historien, 2nd ed. (Paris 1966), p. 11. 4. Febvre indeed reproached the authors of an Histoire de Russie for not paying enough attention to postrevolutionary Russia. Moreover, when founding the Annales, Bloch and Febvre wanted to invite “men involved in the workings of contemporary affairs,” such as Albert Thomas, to cooperate with them. See Febvre, Combats, p. 352. 5. On Lessing, see F.W. Pick, “Contemporary History: Method and Men,” History 36 (1946) pp. 26–55. 6. See Pierre Nora, “Pour une histoire contemporaine,” in Mélanges en l’honneur de Fernand Braudel (2 vols.; Toulouse 1973), 1, p. 420. 7. R.W. Seton-Watson, “A Plea for the Study of Contemporary History,” History 14 (1929), pp. 1–18. 8. For this explanation, see G.G. Iggers, “Die ‘Annales’ und ihre Kritiker. Probleme moderner französischer Sozialgeschichte,” Historische Zeitschrift, 219 (1974), p. 603. 9. See T.N. Clark, Prophets and Patrons: The French University and the Emergence of the Social Sciences (Cambridge, Mass. 1973). 10. Iggers, Annales; D. Groh, “Strukturgeschichte als ‘totale’ Geschichte?” Viertelsjahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 58 (1971), pp. 289– 322. 11. See J. Julliard, “La Politique,” in J. Le Goff and Pierre Nora, eds., Faire de l’histoire (3 vols.; Paris 1974), 2, p. 231. 12. F. Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II, 2nd ed. (2 vols.; Paris 1966), 1, pp. 11 and 223. 13. Geoffrey Barraclough, An Introduction to Contemporary History (London 1967); J. Romein, Op het breukvlak van twee eeuwen (Leiden 1967). 14. See H.L. Wesseling, “Les Transformations du ‘World System’ à la fin du l9e siècle et l’empire colonial néerlandais,” Europa 1 (1977), pp. 37–49; and “European Expansion. Some Reflections on a Colloquium and a Theme,” in H.L. Wesseling, ed., Expansion and Reaction. Essays on European Expansion and Reactions in Asia and Africa by F. Braudel, H. Brunschwig,

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S.N. Eisenstadt, J.C. Heesterman, J.-L. Miège, R. Robinson, I. Schöffer, H.L. Wesseling, and E. Zürcher (The Hague 1977), pp. 1–14.

CHAPTER 13: FERNAND BRAUDEL: HISTORIAN OF THE “LONGUE DURÉE” 1. I. Wallerstein, “Annales as resistance,” Review 1 (1978), pp. 3–5. 2. F. Braudel, “Personal testimony,” Journal of Modern History 44 (1972), p. 448. 3. See for the history of the Annales: H.L. Wesseling and J.L. Oosterhoff, “De Annales, geschiedenis en inhoudsanalyse” in: H.L. Wesseling, Vele ideeën over Frankrijk: Opstellen over geschiedenis en cultuur (Amsterdam 1987), pp. 254–281. 4. L. Febvre, Combats pour l’histoire (Paris 1965); M. Bloch, Apologie pour l’histoire (Paris 1949). 5. F. Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II, (1st ed. Paris 1949; 2nd rev. ed. Paris 1966; 3rd ed. Paris 1976). 6. Braudel, “Personal testimony,” p. 542. 7. See L’Histoire, No. 207 (February 1997). 8. F. Braudel, “Lucien Febvre et l’histoire,” Annales 12 (1957), p. 180. 9. F. Braudel, Ecrits sur l’histoire (Paris 1969). 10. Also see H.L. Wesseling, “De Annales-school in de jaren zeventig: een herinnering” in Wesseling, Vele ideeën over Frankrijk, pp. 282–292. 11. F. Braudel, Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme, XVe– XVIIIe siècle (3 vols.; Paris 1979). First version: Civilisation matérielle et capitalisme, XVe-XVIIIe siècle (Paris 1967). 12. J. Hexter, “Fernand Braudel and the Monde Braudellien,” Journal of Modern History 44 (1972), pp. 480–539; and K. Thomas, “Historian of Everything,” New York Review of Books, 13 December 1973. 13. F. Braudel, “Preface” in T. Stoianovich, French Historical Method: The Annales Paradigm (Ithaca and London 1976), p. 12. 14. Braudel, “Personal testimony,” p. 464.

Index

absolute monarchy, 10 Académie Française, 47, 65, 146 Action Française, 40, 47, 57, 71, 119, 122, 125 Adenauer, Konrad, 104, 113 Agathon, 39–40, 44, 46 Althusser, Louis, 78 amateurism, 34 Ancien Régime, 10, 15–16, 126 Anderson, Benedict, 112 Andler, Charles, 54, 56 Annales, 176, 178; analysis of material of, 155–156, 159–160; approach of, 162; contemporary history and, 154, 158, 161, 164 Annales school, 153–166, 170–172 antiintellectual intellectuals, 60–63 anti-Semitism, 63 Aron, Raymond, 75–87; career success of, 76–79; as “homme de lettres,” 79–80; as man of

significance, 84–87; Mémoires of, 82–84; work of, 80–82 Aulard, A., 39 Balzac, Honoré de, 15 Barraclough, Geoffrey, 163 Barrès, Maurice, 19, 34, 43, 53– 54, 59, 61–62, 118, 122, 150, 154 Battle of Sedan, 32 Battle of Waterloo, 3, 32 Baudelaire, Charles, 22 Beauvoir, Simone de, 78 Benda, Julien, 54, 57–58, 63–64, 123 Benjamin, René, 40 Bérenger, Henri, 53 Bergson, Henri, 44, 122 Bernanos, Georges, 122 Bert, Paul, 33 Berthelot, Marcellin, 135

200

Index

Bismarck, Otto von, 96–98, 147 Blériot, Louis, 36 Bloch, Marc, 78, 153–154, 157, 161, 168, 170–171, 176–77, 181 Blondel, Maurice, 122 Blum, Léon, 54, 57 Bordeaux, Henry, 46 Boudon, Victor, 118 Boulanger, General Georges, 10 Bourbons, 3–4 Bourgeois, Léon, 135 Bourget, Paul, 43, 62 Brandt administration, 103 Brasillach, Robert, 68–69; fascism case of, 71–74; life of, 68–70 Braudel, Fernand, 94, 153, 157, 163, 167–182; Annales school, 170–172; biographical history of, 168–169; Civilisation matérielle, 179–180; history of France, 179–180; La Méditerranée, 169–174; overview of work, 180–182; policy of, 176–177; structuralism and, 177–178; success of, 174– 176 Briand, Aristide, 102, 121 Brogan, D.W., 65 Brombert, Victor, 53, 61, 63 Bruges speech, 107–108 Brunetière, Fernand, 43, 53, 59– 62, 122 Bucard, Marcel, 71 Burckhardt, J.C., 164

Chamber of Deputies, 10 Champions League, 31 Charbonnerie, 4 Charles X, 10–11, 13 Chateaubriand, François-René de, 4, 52 Chaunu, Pierre, 176 Chomsky, Noam, 51 Civilisation matérielle (Braudel), 179–180 Clausewitz, Karl von , 75, 79, 81 Clemenceau, Georges, 35, 54–55, 60, 96, 98, 100, 138 Cold War, 101–102, 104, 110 Colley, Linda, 112 colonial expansion, 96 colonial party, 97 colonialism, 100 commitment, 51; forms of, 58–59; intellectuals and, 63–65 Commune uprising, 96 constitutional monarchy, 4, 9–10 Constitutionnel, 4 contemporary history, “événements” of, 161 continuity, 120 Coppée, François, 62 Coubertin, Pierre de, 31–37 culture and society: de Coubertin, 31–37; French University (1910-1914), 39–48; Scheffer and his time, 3–16; sport and, 35–37; Zola’s Paris, 17–29 Curse of the Nation-State, 111 Curtius, Ernst, 65

Cambon, Jules, 91–92, 94, 121 Cambon, Paul, 121, 135 Camus, Albert, 51–52 capitalism, 167 Carpentier, Georges, 36 Cartault, A., 53, 57 Céline, L.F., 70 Cézanne, Paul, 18, 24

Daniel-Rops, Henry, 124 Darlan, Jean, 100 Dausset, Jean, 62 Davidson, Basil, 111 Déat, Marcel, 70 Delacroix, Eugène, 8 Delcassé, Théophile, 98, 100, 121, 135, 142, 144, 149

Index Delmas, Philippe, 103 Delors, Jacques, 107, 110 Déroulède, Paul, 96, 118 Desjardins, Paul, 58 Diderot, Denis, 52 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 86 doctrinaires, 14 Dominique, Pierre, 100 Doumergue, Gaston, 97 Dreyfus affair, 7, 17, 19, 45, 121, 123, 125, 138, 144, intellectuals and, 52–55, 57. See also Zola, Émile Drieu La Rochelle, Pierre, 70 Drion, Huib, 67 Droit, Michel, 108 Duchess of Berry, 13 Duclaux, Émile, 58, 60 Dumas, Roland, 103 Dupuy, Charles, 135 Durkheim, Émile, 41, 43, 78–79 Duroselle, Jean-Baptiste, 93 École Nationale d’Administration (ENA), 93 École des Sciences Politiques, 93 education, 77; criticizing science, 42–44; critics of, 41–42 egalitarianism, 45 Egypt, 141 élan vital, 122 Eliot, T.S., 67 elitism, 34–35, 61 engagement (commitment), 51; personal engagement, 52 England, 139–140 European Community, 107 European Cup, 31 European Economic Community (EEC), 109–110 European federalism, 107 European unification, 115 European Union (EU), 113 European unity, 102

201 “Eurotopia” (Heineken), 114 Faguet, Émile, 39, 42, 62 fascism, 68; Brasillach case, 71–74; “esprit des années ’30,” 71, 73; intellectuals and, 67 Fashoda incident (1898), 98, 142– 143, 149 Faure, Félix, 143 February Revolution (1848), 5, 15 Febvre, Lucien, 153–154, 157– 158, 161, 168, 170–172, 175– 178, 181 federalists, 114 Ferry, Jules, 33, 96, 98, 100, 135, 138, 149 Fifth Republic, 102, 104 fin de siècle, 7 Flaubert, Gustave, 20 Foch, Ferdinand, 122 “forces profondes,” 93 foreign policy, 91–92; constraints of, 92–95; continental vs. overseas role, 96–99; post-war situation, 101–105; Vichy government, 99–101 foreign service, 93 Foucault, Michel, 78 Fouchet, Christian, 103 Four Ordinances, 11 Fourth Republic, 101, 104 franc fort, 103 France, Anatole, 53–54 France: certaine idée de, 117–129; Civilisation matérielle and, 179– 180; geographical position/ factors of, 93–94; mission and predestination of, 127–128; political/social tensions of (1815–1870), 10; of Scheffer, 9–16; sport in, 31–33; unity of history, 119, 124 Franco-British relations, 143–144 Franco-German relations, 102, 104

202 Franco-Russian alliance, 97, 139– 140 free enterprise, 12 Free French, 100 French Revolution, 3, 11–13, 16, 20, 41 Fromentin, E., 8 Furet, François, 175 Gambetta, Léon, 135, 138 Gamelin, General M.G., 122 Gaulle, Charles de, 70, 79, 82, 100–128, 140; biography of, 121; on France’s mission, 127; glorification of the army, 120; historical vision of France, 119; “idée de la France,” 121; on military power, 127; political philosophy, 119; Thatcher and, 108–109 Gaxotte, Pierre, 69 Geffroy, Gustave, 25 Germany, 138, 140; German question, 94–95, 99, 101, 103; socialism, 56; unification of, 104 Geyl, Pieter, 119 Gide, André, 17, 52 Girardet, Raoul, 118, 120 “grandes écoles,” 85, 93 Grousset, Pascal, 35 Guizot, François, 12, 14 Gurvich, Georges, 76 Guyot, Yves, 58 Halévy, Daniel, 54, 123, 127 Halévy, Elie, 54 Halévy, Ludovic, 24 Hamilton, Alastair, 67, 69 Hanotaux, Gabriel, 57; 131–150; foreign policy of, 140–144; historian in politics, 150; life of, 133–136, 148–149; main publications of, 151; political practice, 140–144; political

Index principles, 136–140; work as historian, 144–147 Harrison, George, 67 Hauser, Henri, 169 Haussmann, G.-E., 9, 18, 21, 24– 25 Havet, L., 58 Hayek, F.A., 86 Hegel, G., 84, 125 Heineken, Freddy, 114 Herr, Lucien, 54, 56, 58–59 Hexter, J.H., 180 “histoire événementielle,” 92 “histoire immobile,” 162 “histoire structurelle,” 92 historical journals, distribution of subjects, 157–160 history and historians: Annales school, 153–165; Braudel, Fernand, 167–182; “événements,” 161; Hanotaux, Gabriel, 131–150; military history, 120 Hughes, Thomas, 34 Hugo, Victor, 40, 52, 127 Huizinga, Johan, 131, 144, 148 Hundred Days, 3, 10 “idée de la France,” 118, 128 “identikit European personality,” 108–109 imperialism, 99 intellectuals and politics: antiintellectuals and, 60–63; Aron (1905–1983) and, 75–87; birth of, 52–58, 63; Brasillach and fascism, 67–74; commitment and, 63–65; Dreyfus affair, 51–65; engagement of, 51, 63; fascism and, 67; intellectual party, 55; motives of, 59–60; politics and, 52; socialism, 56; “penseur,” 53 Italian Carbonari movement, 4

Index Jacobines, 11 Jaurès, Jean, 143 Joan of Arc, 144–145 Joffre, Joseph, 122 Johnston, William, 53 Journal of Contemporary History, 154 Jouvenel, Robert de, 78–79 July Monarchy, 4–5, 7, 12–13, 16; Paris and, 8 July Ordinances, 11 July Revolution (1830), 4 Kant, I., 86 Kissinger, Henry, 79, 82, 86, 103– 104 Kohl, Helmut, 106 Kranowski, N., 20, 24 La Fayette, Marquis de, 3, 11 La Méditerranée (Braudel), 163, 168, 172–174 “laïcité,” 98 Langlois, Charles-Victor, 41, 57 Lanson, Gustave, 41–42 Lasserre, P., 45 Lavisse, Ernest, 39, 57 Lawrence, D.H., 67 Le Goff, Jacques, 154, 175 Le Roy Ladurie, E., 154, 181 League for French Civilization, 40, 47 League of Nations, 99 Lemaître, Jules, 62 Lenin, V., 78 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 170 Lewis, Wyndham, 67 liberalism movement, 4 Ligue de la Patrie Française, 62 “littérature engagée,” 51 Littré, M., 18 L’Oeuvre (Zola), 18; Paris in, 23– 29 Lot, Ferdinand, 40

203 Loubet del Bayle, Jean-Louis, 71 Louis-Philippe, 3, 4–5, 9–13 Louis XIV, 11 Louis XVI, 10 Louis XVIII, 10–11 Malthusian society, 16 Manet, E., 18, 24 Marchand mission, 141–143 Maritain, Jacques, 122 Martineau, A., 147 Marx, Karl, 15, 78–79, 81, 86 Massis, Henri, 40, 45–47, 68, 122 Maulnier, Thierry, 69 Mauriac, F., 52 Maurras, Charles, 47, 56, 68–70, 119, 122, 125 Mediterranean world, 167 Mémoires (Aron), 82–84 Meyer, Paul, 58 Michelet, Edmond, 118 Michelet, Jules, 42, 118 military history, 120 Millerand, Alexandre, 122 Missika, Jean-Louis, 78, 84 Mitterrand, François, 103, 105, 113 “monde moderne,” 126 Monnet, Jean, 107, 113 Monod, Gabriel, 56–58 Montesquieu, 52, 79, 81 Moreau, Gustave, 8 Morocco crisis, 45, 98 Musée de la Vie Romantique, 5 Napoleon, 3, 9 Napoleon III, 9, 13, 21 nation-state, 111–112, 114 nationalism, 63, 70, 111, 113, 118, 120, 122, 124, 128 nationhood, 112 Nietzsche, F.W., 34 Nixon, Richard, 79 Nora, Pierre, 158

204 Olympic Games, 31 Orwell, George, 67 Ostpolitik, 103 Paris: July monarchy and, 8; in L’Oeuvre, 23–29; in RougonMacquart, 19–20; of Scheffer, 8–9; Second Empire and, 20–23 patriotism, 118 Paxton, Robert O., 99–100 Péguy, Charles, 40, 44–45, 47, 52, 54–55, 70, 117–128; on France’s mission, 127; life and work of, 123–125; on military power, 127; on “monde moderne,” 126 Périer, Casimir, 13 personal engagement, 52 Pétain, H., 70, 99 Peyreffite, Alain, 123 Philippe of Orléans (Duke of Orleans), 4, 11 Pissarro, C., 18 Poincaré, R., 121 political commitment, 58–59 political elite, 93 political liberalism, 16 politics and diplomacy: French foreign policy, 91–105; de Gaulle, 107–115, 117–128; intellectuals and, 52. See also foreign policy Pompidou, Georges, 103–104 Pound, Erza, 67 Proust, Marcel, 54 Psichari, Ernest, 7, 59, 122 Psichari, Jean, 7, 58–59 Racing Club of Paris, 33 Rambaud, Alfred, 55, 57 Rauh, Frédéric, 45 Rebatet, Lucien, 69–70 Reform Movement, 15 Reinach, Joseph, 53, 58

Index Rémond, René, 119 Renan, Ernest, 6–7, 32, 43, 52, 113 Renouvier, Charles, 56 Renouvin, Pierre, 93 republic, 10 “République morale,” 47 Restoration (1815–1830), 10, 13, 15 revanche, 100 Revel, Jacques, 175 Ribot, Alexandre, 135 Richelieu, 136–137, 145–146, 150 rightist movement, 40 Robespierre, M., 33 Rolland, Romain, 123 Romein, Jan, 163 Rougemont, Denis de, 71 Rougon-Macquart (Zola), 18–20 Rousseau, J.-J., 52 Russell, Bertrand, 51 Russia, 138–139 Sanguinetti, Alexandre, 105 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 51–52, 77–78, 81–83, 86, 105 Scheffer, Arnold, 3–4 Scheffer, Ary, 3, 14; during July monarchy, 5; family and early history, 3–4; February Revolution (1848), 5; France of, 9–15; later years and death of, 6; liberalism of, 4; Paris of, 8–9 Scheffer, Cornélie, 6–7 Scheffer, Henry, 3, 5–6 Scheurer-Kestner, A., 58, 60 Schmidt, Helmut, 105, 110, 114 Schuman, Robert, 102, 104, 113 science, Germanization of, 45 scientism, 43–44 Séailles, Gabriel, 58, 60 Second Empire (1852–1870), 6–7, 9–10, 13; education in, 41; Paris and, 20–23; Paris in, 20–23; in Rougon-Macquart, 19

Index Second Republic, 6, 9, 13 Seignobos, Charles, 41, 57 Seton-Watson, R.W., 161 Shils, Edward, 52 Siegfried, André, 93 Simiand, François, 174 social Darwinism, 34 socialism, 56 sociology, 42–43 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 51, 78, 83 Sorbonne, 39; criticizing science, 42–44 Sorel, Georges, 70 Soult, Marshal Nicholas, 14 sport, 31–33; Coubertin’s influence on, 33–35; English model, 32; German sport, 32–33; and society, 35–37 sports clubs, 33 Stendhal, 9, 15 Stern, Fritz, 103 Sternhell, Zeev, 79 structuralism, 177–178 Suez Canal, 141 Taine, H., 18, 32, 34, 43 Talleyrand, 136 Tarde, Alfred de, 40 Taylor, A.J.P., 16, 91–92 Tharaud brothers, 123 Thatcher, Margaret, 107–109 Thibaudet, Albert, 65 Thiers, Adolphe, 4, 12, 14 Third Republic, 7, 16–17, 43, 93, 96, 101, 146–147

205 Thomas, Keith, 180 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 15, 79 Touchard, Jean, 71 Tour de France, 31 Trarieux, Ludovic, 58 Treaty of Frankfurt, 96 Treaty of Maastricht, 103–104 Treaty of Rome (1957), 102, 110 unity, 119–120 unity of history, 124 university socialism, 56 utopianism, 114–115 Vernet, Horace, 8 Vichy governments, 99 Vichy policy, 99–101 Vogüé, E.-M. de, 62 Volapük, 108–109 Voltaire, 52 voting rights, 12 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 168 Weber, Eugen, 36, 112 Weber, Max, 79, 83, 86 Werth, Alexander, 118 Wilde, Oscar, 32 Wolton, Dominique, 78, 84 Yeats, W.B., 67 Zola, Émile, 52, 121; background of, 18–19; Dreyfus affair, 18–19, 53–54, 58–59; L’Oeuvre, 23–29; Rougon-Macquart, 19–20

About the Author H.L. WESSELING is Professor of General History at the University of Leiden and Rector of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study at Wassenaar. Among Professor Wesseling’s many earlier publications are Divide and Rule: The Partition of Africa, 1880–1914 (Praeger, 1996), which has been translated into six languages, and Imperialism and Colonialism (Greenwood Press, 1997).