Book IV EKPYROSIS

Chapter XVIII – De Bello Gallico 479 Book IV EKPYROSIS 480 Chapter XVIII – De Bello Gallico Chapter XVIII - De Bello Gallico 481 DE BELLO GALLICO War is the orgasm of universal life which fructifies and moves chaos, the prelude for all creations, and which like Christ the Saviour triumphs beyond death through death itself. P.J. Proudhon, French theorizer (1846) If there is ever another war in Europe, it will come out of some damned silly thing in the Balkans. Otto von Bismarck, German practitioner, probably apocryphal (1877) Beyond the mistakes of individuals, the outbreak of the Great War may be seen as a result of the self-aggravating interplay of three processes: the ruin of the balance of powers, i.e., the replacement of the concert-of-powers by two antagonistic alliance systems, the rise of liberalism and nationalism, and rapid industrialization, which, for purposes of war, made available railways, telegraphs, and improved gun technology. The improvement of agriculture also allowed to feed more conscripts. We recall that the last two major reorganizations of the continent's political order had occurred at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which, ending the Thirty-Years War together with most of the former imperial prerogatives, augured in the eventual collapse of the Holy Roman Empire, and within the structure formalized at the Congress of Vienna, which administered the receivership of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. Both designs accelerated the demise of feudalism, even if monarchical decorum was often maintained, and the rise of the bourgeoisie; the replacement of the divine authority of the kings with the cooperative structures of the modern nation-state. The French Revolution had evidenced that monarchs were expendable, tyrants even more so, and that the future belonged to more liberal interpretations of statehood. It had been the clandestine intent of the Congress of Vienna not to allow any real change in the continent's political order, which continued to be an expression of the status quo ante: characterized by a territorial balance between France and the German states, the taking out of the equation of the Low Countries by obliging them to perpetual neutrality, the reining in of Russia by giving her a common border with Prussia, and the forced retention of the maritime hegemony of Great Britain. In more than one respect it remained the same order of things which had existed since the realm of Charlemagne had been divided between his heirs, but a new moneyed aristocracy had taken a place in the 482 Chapter XVIII - De Bello Gallico governance of the state beside the old nobility. The latter's ancient privileges, however, were increasingly challenged by the bourgeoisie, which longed to turn economical success into political power. The war kindled, in a way, by the old system - the majority of the European nations were still monarchies and their politicians, diplomats and generals still predominantly of noble descent - was to sweep away the remnants of traditional monarchy. All post-1918 governments had to acknowledge the bankruptcy of the old order - tyrannical and less tyrannical kings and emperors were deposed, sometimes shot, revolutions failed or succeeded, and the German, Austrian and Russian monarchies vanished like the smile of the Cheshire Cat. In the middle of the nineteenth century, a new philosophy began to jeopardize the freshly won powers of the bourgeoisie. In the aftermath of the uprisings of 1848/49, all states - with the reactionary monarchies of Austria and Russia in the lead - had created clandestine police forces to control and, if necessary, suppress unwelcome political activity. Initially, the suspects deemed worthy of such extracurricular attention had been liberals and nationalists, the movements of the bourgeoisie. The constantly growing industrial proletariat, however, had lacked hitherto a theory of political participation, but, thirty-one years after the Congress of Vienna, the two German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels founded a third, potentially more serious threat to noble and bourgeois privileges, influenced by Hegel's vision of history as the development of man. A pamphlet they published in 1848 opened with the alarming news that "A spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of Communism!" and ended with the rallying cry "Workers of the World - Unite!" (1) It was the Communist Manifesto, here introduced by Konrad Heiden: To understand the enormous effect of this Communist Manifesto, it must be realized that ever since Hegel the entire West had been permeated by a belief in the necessary and meaningful course of history. The world proletariat,1 instructed by Marx and Engels in the spirit of Hegel, fights for its interests in the conviction that it is thus accomplishing the work of the world spirit. And there was something in it; for the Marxist proletariat was the heir and successor of the European national and democratic revolution. Economics became destiny. (2) The powers-that-be soon realized that the threat of socialism was a potentially greater peril than those that emanated from liberalism or nationalism, and decided to employ the latter two, the lesser evils, perhaps, to fight the former. The bourgeoisie was to be mobilized against the socialist danger, but, for this purpose, nationalism had to be turned from an originally liberal, anti-monarchical and anti-clerical, leftist issue, to an instrument of reactionary conservatism, the weapon of a crusade of the Right. Thus by the concerted powers of nobility, clergy and imperialistic historians, nationalism was slowly canalized into a patronage of the existing system, robbed of its political roots, and translated into the sort of "patriotism" that equated the interests of the people with those of its rulers. Konrad Heiden observed that one of the expressions of this instrumentalized "patriotism" was the formulation of national security issues. In the seventeenth century Armand Duplessis, Cardinal de Richelieu, established a basic principle of French foreign policy: the security of France demands that Germany must never be united. From then on, the dream of German unity became a vain struggle against superior French strength, against French conquest, even against the French language, which at times forced the German language out of educated German society. France oppressed Germany out of a panic fear, resulting from the Spanish-Habsburg embrace in the sixteenth century. At the beginning of that century a Spanish king became German Emperor; the ruling houses of Spain and Austria (Habsburg) fused and Spain, vanguard of the Roman Catholic Church in defending its tottering rule over the souls of Europe, used her increasing power to crush rising Protestantism in Germany as well as in encircled France. In Germany the attempt succeeded only partially, but for a hundred years France, torn by her own religious parties and powerful nobles, was strangled by the Spanish-Habsburg ring. Spain interfered in France's 1 From Latin "proles", children - the class of people that could give the state nothing but their children. Chapter XVIII - De Bello Gallico 483 internal affairs, dictated French policies, maintained parties in France; and France remained Catholic. If France was not utterly defeated, it was because of two factors which came to her aid: first, the rising British sea-power, which distracted and paralyzed Spain; second, the Protestant German princes, who were continuously rising up against the Catholic, Habsburg-Spanish Emperor, thus immobilizing at least one of his arms. It is understandable that France should henceforth have placed her hope in this strife between German Emperor and German princes, and viewed it as the immutable aim of her foreign policy. For two centuries she did her best to tear Germany apart. The split of European civilization into two enraged religious parties gave France an advantage which her own strength would not have given her. At the end of the sixteenth century, she settled her own religious conflicts, while Germany was torn by religious wars, culminating in the most terrible conflict of modern times. For thirty years (1618-1648) the soldiers of Europe staged on German soil the most frightful slaughter in modern history and the German nation nearly bled to death. For thirty years Swedes from the Arctic regions and Spaniards from the south streamed into Germany to fight battles and massacre the population; German cities, situated but half an hour's journey from one another, but worlds apart by reason of religion, fought on opposing sides. Provinces were turned into deserts, covered with heaps of ashes; cities vanished forever from the face of the earth; men died by murder, fire, starvation, and plague; cannibalism was not unknown. When the thirty years' butchery was over, the number of Germans had fallen from about twelve to four million. No other modern people have ever experienced anything of the sort. A generation later the war broke out anew at the western borders of the country: France tried to snatch the left bank of the Rhine from Germany, and when this failed, Louvois, the French Minister of War, gave orders to create an artificial desert in the border province of the Palatinate: "Brulez le Palatinat"2 was his order, and the ruins of Heidelberg Castle remain a monument to this policy. A century and a half later the armies of Napoleon, Emperor of the French, marched across Europe, and Germany was more torn than ever. (3) Overcoming French domination proved no simple recipe for the success of German nationalism, for in the 'liberation wars' of 1813 and 1814 against foreign oppression, the German bourgeoisie found itself unwillingly bound to the princes, for there was no way to get rid of Napoleon and the French without at the same time involuntarily re-establishing aristocratic rule - for German nationalism, the wars of liberation were a lose-lose scenario.

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