A concise biography of the world’s prototypical dictator, the first to embody Rousseau’s general will. Skillful at artillery and cartography, favoring speed and attack borne of interior lines, Bonaparte rode his 1796 Italian campaign to power, thereby ending France’s revolutionary era and creating the first 20th-century authoritarian government, replete with repressive state machinery and cultural propaganda. As a military leader, he squandered men and horses – though soldiers were permitted to pillage – while as head of state he roused nationalist resentment against France. Military failure in Spain and Russia, the British blockade, and resurgent German nationalism (newly shorn of the Holy Roman Empire), caused his downfall. Ironically, this period created, via the Congress of Vienna, an absolutist coda which survived until 1914. The short form diminished the tendency to glorify a monstrous figure.
France
11. Wright, France in Modern Times (29 Sep 2012)
Surveys the leading events and historiography of France from the mid 18th century. Far more than England or Germany, French society and government passed through radically distinct phases, and yet inevitably retained pronounced features of previous periods. As such, the royalist-republican duality reconstitutes itself in clashes such as the catholic-statist Dreyfus affair. Although it is not his intention, the author regrettably avoids taking sides: the narrative is strictly chronological. Also, there’s no mention of the things which are distinctly French, or the dichotomy of Descartes and Pascal (reason or revelation).
2. LaCouture, DeGaule: Ruler (19 Jan 2014)
A biography of 20th-century France’s leading figure, authoritatively narrated by the foreign editor of
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Le Monde
in the classical mode of synthesizing primary sources and interviews. This second volume ranges from de Gaulle’s efforts from August 1944 to restore France’s international status to his passing in 1970. The protagonist excelled in affairs of state, wherein the government must be preeminent (e.g., relations to the big 3, Algeria, the formation of Europe); whereas his endeavors to guide domestic politics without participating in them (styming communists in postwar elections, the 1962 constitution, the tumult of 1968-69) expose the authoritarian, arbitrary mnature of ‘Gaullism’ and the general’s egomania. De Gaulle was a warrior who parlayed close study of history into statesmanship, but he could not surmount politics as the French state is democratic. He also was a fine writer, thereby providing rich material for this study, which evinces a finely balanced dialectic treatment of core episodes while deftly using synthesis to energize the narrative. (Is it possible for an American to write in this style? It requires adjustment merely to read it.) However, the nuance of such an approach sometimes leaves one grasping for the author’s principal conclusions of the man.
3. Downing, Military Revolution and Political Change (18 Jan 2015)
The endurance of medieval forms of constitutional government and the revolution of early modern warfare, which required state centralization of resources, accounted for the democratic trajectory of western and central European countries. After reviewing forms of late medieval government and warfare, the author uses a comparative framework to evaluate Prussia and France as absolutist cases and England, Sweden, and the Netherlands as republican exemplars. The work is a useful riposte to class and economic determinism, but lacks truly original expression, the text being heavily footnoted with citations of generally accepted historiography. It is also written as if for a graduate seminar: impossible not to learn, but better off with Fukuyama.
3. Hazareesingh, How the French Think (27 Feb 2016)
Surveys elite and popular ideas in France since the revolution, in an effort to characterize predominant modes of Gallic thinking. The author begins with the rationalist, deductive thought of Rene Descartes, which spilled from science into the social sciences and the humanities: Cartesian thinking remains the feature of the French worldview. Other conceptual treatments include utopianism, left-right artefacts, and metropolitan-regional oppositions. The final third of the book focuses on postwar notables such as Camus and Sartre, the communist left, and the postmoderns — de Gaulle merits comparatively little notice. Surprisingly, the left-liberal author concludes postmodernism (and implicitly communism) has proven a dead end, and even blames the mindset for spurring contemporary pessimism. Well written and honest, if bien pensant.
5. Fenby, The General (13 Mar 2020)
A biography of a 20th century’s great, emphasizing his distinctive approach to military and political leadership. Charles de Gaulle was a ‘lifelong teacher’ of men, dating to his days as a World War I prisoner war. He saw military organization as the model for the mass-production economy and also government management of society. Great leaders surpass hierarchy to act independently, accordingly they must be distant, reserved. De Gaulle evinced autocracy but was to work through referenda; notwithstanding Roosevelt’s views he was a committed democrat, using established institutions. He held out French rationalism as the native counter to fascism.
de Gaulle had broken with Petain well before the treason of 1940, yet was strongly opposed by such London Frenchmen as Raymond Aron and Jean Monnet. His popular appeal via radio outlasted Hitler and Roosevelt. Free French (yet less than 20,000) had scored several tactical successes in Africa, thereby winning Churchill’s grudging support, and established its elan. By 1941, he had prevailed over admiral Emile Muselier and opposition leader Jean Moulin. He then relocated the Free French to Algiers to reestablish himself of on French soil, and in 1943 was recognized as supremo by Eisenhower.
In country from 1944, after the war he blocked the Communist from the ‘three great levers’: foreign affairs, military, interior (police) – each of which had been conceded in Eastern Europe. Though the logical executive, he disavowed a political party a la Bolingbroke, seeking to become a ‘national arbiter’ above the fray, and so left politics. His strategy for return was to take the electoral route while allowing the establishment to envision his leading a coup, thereby ‘frightening [the [populace] into acquiesce’. By the time of the Algerian crisis, he was seen as the only rampart between communism and fascism; in the 1958 elections 344 of 475 incumbent deputies lost their seats.
Under de Gaulle, centralized authority expanded: power lay not in the legislature but unelected civil servants or state-run corporations. He himself was Olympian in hauteur, ‘crab like’ in duplicity. France depended on his status, justified in settling the Algerian civil war and German rapprochement. But the OAS affair forced him to abandon the presidential for the partisan – the beginning of the end of the regime, evidenced by poor elections result of 1962. By 1965 he could no longer claim to represent the general will. He blundered in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war; in 1968 he could still outwit politicians but not the new generation of students; only the disconnect between students and unions prevented a disgraceful exit.
De Gaulle poses a problem for historians who deny individual greatness – he twice saved France from cataclysm (surrender, civil war), twice showed himself a natural autocrat in service of popular nationhood and rule. Fenby suggests the authoritarian start of the Fifth Republic could not be sustained, yet the country’s movement toward parliamentarism is better observed in the European Union. Genuinely rooted in the country’s claims to greatness, Gaullism is merely a political behavior (not unlike Peronism). The author writes crisply yet fails to elaborate what is the France his subject saved.
16. Himmelfarb, Roads to Modernity (23 Oct 2016)
British thinkers following in the footsteps of Locke and Hume — Berkeley, Hutcheson, Gibbon, Smith joined by Burke and Wesley — were the Enlightenment’s first and foremost cohort, seeking to elaborate social compassion, benevolence, and sympathy. Where the French philosophes concentrated on the ‘ideology of reason’, born of universally applying the systems of Newton and Descartes to society’s structure and pursuits, and the American Founding Fathers on equitable political liberty, the British sought new precepts for a gentler, more virtuous society. These moral philosophers ‘posited a moral sentiment in man as the basis of the social virtues’. Himmelfarb places a major emphasis on Methodism (as an offshoot of the Anglican Church) and Dissent. Burke’s role was to take the British approach further, ‘by making the “sentiments, manners, and moral opinions” of men the basis of society itself, and, ultimately, of the polity as well’.
On universalism vs the polity
Elite insistence on Kantian universal polities (e.g., European Union, United Nations) is undermining the actual practice of republican government.
What was once understood to be the precondition of democracy or of a representative republic—the act of forming a distinct community capable of drawing from itself its own reasons for action—has become the main obstacle to what is now for us the only defensible objective of collective action: the formation of a universal society of the human species, where we will all be the “same” and separated by no borders.
We live under the authority of an idea of justice that can be summed up as follows: it is unjust to form and defend a common good that is our own.
Pierre Manet states a (unspecified) case for the French Third Republic:
The Third Republic had its faults and even its vices, but for my part I admire the way it knew how at once to impose its regime and to embed it in the continuity of France’s history, and in particular its was of conceiving the teaching of the French language and French history, so that every little French boy or girl would feel part of a long series of centuries and would be inspired to admire works produced by a world very different from his or her own and people very different from those who were familiar.
We prefer to flatten the child’s soul and to crush his or her nose into the wall of the present by making past centuries appear before our ephemeral certainties to be judged. But we will not accomplish the necessary political “reform” by invoking the glories of France against the miseries of the present. If we do not know how to link the elements of our threatened heritage with a common action to be undertaken today, then we will remain in the domain of nostalgia that may be sincere but is certainly sterile. If the two parts of our people—the ruling class and the “populist,” or simply demoralized people—manage to leave behind the mutual disdain into which they have settled, they will doubtless discover that they are both suffering, if not in the same way, from the weakening of the representative Republic and the emptying out of the nation’s interior life.
20. Horne, Belle France (24 October 2021)
A swift, Whiggish survey of French history from the Middle Ages, learned but not especially pointed save perhaps for relaying French attitudes in native English. 1214’s battle of Bouvines, which won Anjou (the seat of Angevin England) for the Bourbons (and coincidentally prompted John to concede Magna Carta and shifted the balance of continental power from the Holy Roman Empire), commenced the building of the hexagon and national memory. The reign of Louis IX (St. Louis, d.1270), successor to Bouvines’ victor Philip August, extended the country by incorporating Languedoc, Provence, Normandy, Anjou, Maine, and Poitou, raising French populace (in 1330) to 22 million (with 300,000 in Paris) versus 2 million in England (40,000 in London). France passed into absolutism in 1483 upon Louis XI’s death, albeit the country staggered through a succession of wars and civil wars most every century, often devastating the metropole. Henri of Navarre’s (Henri IV) 1580 siege of Paris was such an event, killing an estimated 20 percent of residents. Rebuilding the city and proving an adept diplomat while the Duc de Sully tended to administration, he won the trust of both Catholics and Huguenots. Cardinal Richelieu, on the other hand, outshone Louis XIII; he saw France as caught between Spain, Austria, and Protestant Germany; and that necessity drives events more than volition. In the 17th century France produced such great intellectuals as Descartes, Corneille (who advocated freedom of will against tragic classicism), and Montaigne (a social critic); the author laments recent times have been more fallow. In 1643, France defeated imperial Spain at Rocroi, marking the beginning of the Habsburgs’ long fall, yet immediately after the Peace of Westphalia (1648) there was a contest for control of the regency. The Fronde facilitated Louis XIV’s absolutism and the irrelevance of Parlement. Colbert’s reforms produced prosperity for the Sun King, but the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685) drove out some 400,000 of 18 million citizens (Europe’s largest populace by some 10 million, save Russia). Bourgeois disdain for effete aristocrats dates to this era. The Revolution’s greatest casualty was the Catholic Church. Napoleonic roads were built for the military, bypassing the provinces; from 1803 every Parisian workman had to carry a passbook, favoring employers. Taken together, the author seems to suggest the provincial working class remained apart. Nationalism came in only in the mid 19th century. Pax Britannica was good for France, which built its second overseas empire while also industrializing. Cohesion floundered in the Prussian War, the Paris Commune (fatalities of 20,000 – 25,000 exceeded the Terror), and the Dreyfus affair. French mutinies during World War I was not realized by the Germans until Petain remedied affairs; the French disliked Woodrow Wilson. The 1938 Matignon agreement, a labor victory at the expense of readying for war, marked the climax of the left’s interwar successes. Horne laments the impossibility of relaying the nature of World War II occupation, fairly abjuring the historian’s role. Sartre was guilty of Socrates’ crime (i.e., corrupting the youth): Camus pointed up existentialism justifies totalitarian systems which oppose individual responsibility. The French were more concerned with the Hungarian invasion than Dien Bien Phu or Suez; the Algeria crisis ended with the remarkable absorption of 1 million pied noirs. De Gaulle is treated respectfully. Mitterand, who broke the Communists, rebuilt the economy (flagging since Trentes Glorieuses), and drove European integration, has been De Gaulle’s only real successor.
14. Spencer, Battle for Europe (19 Jun 2020)
A brisk monograph treating John Churchill’s (later Duke of Marlborough) daring 1704 German campaign, culminating in the defeat of Louis XIV and Marshal Tallard at Blenheim, effectively ending French designs on the Holy Roman Empire for most of the 18th century. The predatory Louis, unbeaten for 40 years, had unwittingly forged William of Orange’s Grand Alliance by promising James II restoration to the English crown. Yet the Dutch primarily wanted security, the British parliament seethed of the Glorious Revolution’s partisan aftermath, and imperial commander Prince Lewis of Baden was innately conservative. Escaping capture in 1702, Marlborough, seen as the scheming son of a penurious royalist, and his great ally Eugene of Savoy, another aggrieved aristocrat, seized on Count Wratislaw’s suggestion to relieve Vienna by marching up the Danube. Well financed, the Allies paid for supplies while campaigning, the French relied on confiscation; but Marlborough terrorized the Bavarian countryside to punish Maximillian Emmanuel. The allies won at Schellenberg in July, placing themselves between the French and Vienna. In the August battle, Spencer asserts Tallard ought to have defended the Nebel river with cavalry as Marlborough’s infantry sought to gain a foothold. Yet the French horse almost simultaneously lost a skirmish, shockingly and in view of the garrisoned town, just before the main battle. For this reason, the author asserts Tallard should not have given battle but retreated. In the successful assault, fought over 3 fronts, the Allies suffered 12,500 casualties including 300 of the 700 British officers; the French lost all but 250 of 4,500 officers and some 40,000 troops. The shock of the result was French surrender and the capture of Tallard. Bavaria was knocked from the war, which despite the French being driven from the Low Countries after Ramillies in 1706, persisted until 1714. Spencer asks why Blenheim isn’t remembered with same warmth of Agincourt, answering that partisan opposition to Marlborough’s character, as well as that of Swift and Macaulay, has diminished the affair. Accessible and well illustrated.