Reactionaries at Play:
The Nobs Did It
27 July 2015
Increasingly, we see the two world wars of the first half of the Twentieth Century as parts of a whole, as detached installments of a single horror. As our distance from the conflicts increases, we recognize with ever-greater clarity the extent to which the Great War (1914-1918) left unfinished business, or even created new business, for Bellona and her minions to sort out in World War II. Everybody knows that perceived inequities in the Treaty of Versailles, which transformed an armistice into a defeat for Germany, rankled badly enough for Nazi thugs to work massive discontent to their advantage. Someday, these wars will be given a collective name, and be thereafter known as one thing.
But first, we have to understand why they happened.
Each one begins, I think, with that mystery: why? Why did the “July crisis” result in declarations of war between countries ruled by cousins? Why did France fall? As I have nothing to do but let such questions tumble in my unoccupied brain, it does not altogether surprise me that not only have I arrived at what feel like answers to these questions, but that they are the same answer.
Before proceeding further, I want to thank Zhou Enlai, Chairman Mao’s Number Two, who famously observed (or did he?) that, even in 1972, it was too soon to assess the impact of the French Revolution.
The French Revolution is understood to have put an end to aristocratic privilege in the West. A class of hereditary nobles that had hitherto been subject to laws very different from, and in most cases much lighter than, those imposed on ordinary people, lost its claim to special treatment. By and large, this is indeed what happened. But there was an exception, an area of public life from which the aristocracy did not fade: the military. Europe’s aristocracy was composed, of course, of the descendants of medieval warriors, but it is easy to overlook that, while many of those descendants became pampered hedonists who couldn’t be bothered to defend anything beyond their own personal honor, the armed forces of Europe were always overseen by members of the nobility. Monarchs exerted increasing control over military affairs, but they never displaced the men who had been brought up to fight on horseback. A compromise was worked out (in most jurisdictions): only competent aristocrats were allowed to make important decisions, and talented yeoman were inducted into the nobility from time to time. This arrangement survived the trauma of 1789, even in France. An “officer,” if not a bluebood, was expected to be a “gentleman” — that is, a man with an unearned income that allowed him to hone his martial skills. The cadets in officer-training schools usually came from propertied families. In the United States, the service academies admitted only those young men recommended by Senators; in an ostensibly classless society, it would be difficult to mirror the mechanics of Old-World military privilege more effectively.
From the first sound of the tocsin that preceded the guns of August, 1914, it has been asked why the cousins who sat on the thrones of Europe did not prevent the war. The question itself is telling. Russia aside, each of the Great War’s belligerents was a democracy of some kind. Notwithstanding the crowned heads, all had elected assemblies headed by powerful ministers. It was not up to the kings to say “no” to war. Curiously, however, the ministers don’t seem to have been any more in favor of hostilities. The standard way to resolve this puzzle is to point to mounting anxieties over arms buildups that, in the flashpoint of Serbian responsibility for the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife (or at least its complacency), pushed somebody or other into making a bad judgment. Some like to blame Kaiser Wilhelm II, a very childish man, for handing Austria a “blank check” (unconditional support for any campaign against Serbia), while others go after the weak Tsar, Nikolai II, who consented to the mobilization (or “semi-mobilization” — you can no more be “semi-mobilized” than you can be “semi-pregnant”) that did indeed trigger the German declaration of war. Round and round go the explanations and the accusations. Reading The Sleepwalkers, Christopher Clark’s terrific study of the run-up to the war, I found it impossible not to blame the Serbians, who, in Clark’s telling, seemed to be perfectly aware of playing with dynamite.
When the dust settled after the Great War, the kings were mostly swept away, and the titles of their aristocratic subjects were just as empty. This is a major motif in the anthem of loss that commemorates the way of life that failed to survive the war — a life that was gracious and leisured for those who could afford it, but also glamorized by titled ladies in large hats. Princesses and countesses were received at courts — there were still courts. Courts had marginal political power, but they were the clubhouses of the military leadership: the real men at any courtly function were wearing uniforms. Why, then, would these brilliant assemblages have committed suicide or fratricide by going to war against each another?
As to suicide, no one could be sure that that was would happen; and, of all people, aristocratic generals would be the last to foresee such an outcome.
As to fratricide, to ask the question is to misunderstand the aristocratic mind. From the beginning, aristocrats were the fighting class. That is what they did. As usual, my mind runs blank on specific examples, but there are plenty of stories about two knights, brought up from birth in the deepest friendship but consigned by indelible allegiances to opposed liege lords, who dutifully hacked away at one another in battle, as brutally as possible but with tears streaming down their cheeks. To the aristocratic mind, such stories have a happy ending.
In any case, the fight would not be gratuitous. It would, if successful, undermine those democratic regimes, putting an end to the deplorable influence of the shopkeepers of the third estate. It was even conceivable — just — that an even earlier dream of the aristocracy might be achieved: the unwinding of royal authority and centralized government. Once again, aristocrats might be the only truly free men on earth. Free, even, of the nationalities that they bore under protest. Kings and ministers were bound to their sovereignties, to the conceptual boundaries that demarcated the different countries of Europe. But an aristocrat was the lord of his acres, and his acres weren’t going anywhere.
There was no need for a plot, no need for conscious decisions. There was no need for collective action of any kind. All the noble generals had to do was frighten kings and ministers with tall tales about the other armies and what they might do. Their implicit message was : Rest assured, Sire, that I shall make it clear that I told you so. And this is exactly what they all did, those chiefs of staff, quite as if reading from a common script. There was no script, but there was a shared spirit, and it was this spirit that drove the nations of Europe into a war that, individualists that they were, the aristocrats were wrong about: it couldn’t be won by anybody.
Why, in June of 1940, did the French leadership, a cohort of politicians and industrialists, decide that France could only lose to a German offensive? I claim no great powers of discernment in presenting my answer, for it is a quotation from a book.
As for Reynaud [the French prime minister], he had called into his government Ybarnegaray and Marin, two reactionaries whose only surface virtue was a blustering show of war spirit. Raised to power by Socialist votes, Reynaud had turned toward men whom he trusted because they were of his own Rightist background — Pétain, Mandel, Ybarnegaray, Marin. All his Rightest friends except Mandel joined in smothering him. They felt that making war against Hitler he was betraying his own class.
This is AJ Liebling, whose report on the Fall of France appeared in the first two August, 1940 issues of The New Yorker. Liebling’s essential claim — that war with Hitler would be a betrayal of the soul of France — resonated deeply with me because of other things that I had read, especially Frederick Brown’s Fighting for the Soul of France, a history of the Third Republic through the Dreyfus case. I saw, beyond Liebling’s conclusions, that men like Pétain decided that it would be a good thing to let Hitler destroy, not France, but the Third Republic, a regime deeply hated by conservative Catholics, particularly those from titled families. As it happens, Liebling’s report is collected in an anthology of New Yorker writing from the Forties that also includes Janet Flanner’s profile of Marshal Pétain.
Now he was to have the undisputed, and for once undivided, glory of governing what was left of his beloved country, of leading her back, in a bitter penitence for her democracy and her defeat, to a restoration of the autocracy of her great seventeenth-century past, in which he thought her future still lay.
Sometimes, figuring things out is simply a matter of reading the right things at the right time. No effort required: understanding clicks into view.
Whatever they come to be called, the two world wars were wars launched against the political influence of ordinary people.