Can We Imagine The Future? by Fredric Jameson

The common sense position on the anticipatory nature of Science Fiction as a genre is what we would call a representational one. These narratives are evidently for the most part not modernizing, not reflexive and self-undermining and deconstructing affairs. They go about their business with the full baggage and paraphernalia of a conventional realism, with this one difference: that the full ‘presence’ –the settings and actions to be ‘rendered’ are the merely possible and conceivable ones of the near or far future. Whence the canonical defense of the genre: in a moment in which technological change has reached a dizzying tempo, in which so-called ‘future shock’ is a daily experience, such narratives have the social function of accustoming their readers to rapid innovation, of preparing our consciousness and our habits  for the otherwise demoralizing impact of change itself. They train our organisms to expect the unexpected and thereby insulate us, in much the same way that, for Walter Benjamin, the big-city modernism of Baudelaire provided an elaborate shock-absorbing mechanism for the otherwise bewildered visitor to the new world of the great nineteenth-century industrial city.

If I cannot accept this account of SF, it is at least in part because it seems to me that, for all kinds of reasons, we  no longer entertain such visions of wonder-working, properly ‘science-fictional’ futures of technological automation.. These visions are now historical and dated –streamlined cities of the future on peeling murals –while our lived experience of our greatest metropolises is one of urban decay and blight. That particular Utopian future has in other words turned out to have been merely the future of one moment of what is now our own past. Yet, even if this is the case, it might  at best signal a transformation in the historical function of present day SF.

In reality, the relationship of this form of representation, this specific apparatus, to its ostensible content- the future- has always been more complex than this. For the apparent realism, or representationality, of SF has concealed another, far more complex temporal structure: not to give us ‘images’ of the future – whatever such images might mean for the reader who will necessarily predecease their ‘materialization’ –but rather to de-familiarize and restructure our experience of our own present, and to do so in specific ways distinct from other forms of de-familiarization. From the great intergalactic empires of Asimov, or the devastated and sterile Earth of  the post-catastrophic novels of John Wyndham, all the way back in time to the neater future of the organ banks and space miners of a Larry Niven, or the concepts, autofabs, or psycho-suitcases of the universe of Philip K. Dick, all such apparently full representations function in a process of distraction and displacement, repression and lateral perceptual renewal, which has its analogy in other forms of contemporary culture. Proust was only the most monumental ‘high’ literary expression of this discovery: that the present – in this society- and in the physical and psychic disassociation of the human subjects  who inhabit it – is inaccessible directly, is numb, habituated, empty of affect.. Elaborate strategies of indirection are therefore necessary if we are somehow to break through our monadic insulation and to ‘experience’, for some first and real time, this ‘present’, which is after all what we have. In Proust, the retrospective fiction of memory and rewriting after the fact is mobilized in order for the intensity of a now merely remembered present to be experienced in some time-release and utterly unexpected posthumous actuality.

Elsewhere, with reference to another sub-genre or mass cultural form, the detective story, I have tried to show that at its most original ,in writers like Raymond Chandler, the ostensible plots of this peculiar form  have an analogous function. What interested Chandler was the here and now of the daily life of the now historical Los Angeles: the stucco dwellings, cracked sidewalks, tarnished sunlight, and roadsters in which the curiously isolated yet typical specimens of the unimaginable Southern California social flora and fauna ride in the monadic half-light of their dashboards. Chandler’s problem was that his readers – ourselves- desperately needed not to see the reality: humankind, as T. S. Eliot’s magical bird sang, is able to bear very little of the unmediated, unfiltered experience of the daily life of capitalism. So, by a dialectical slight-of-hand, Chandler formally mobilized an ‘entertainment’ genre to distract us in a very special sense: not from the real life of private and public worries in general, but very precisely from our own defense mechanisms against reality. The excitement of the mystery-story plot is, then, a blind, fixing our attention on its own ostensible but in reality trivial puzzles and suspense in such away that the intolerable space of Southern California can enter the eye laterally, with its intensity undiminished.

It is an analogous strategy of indirection that SF now brings to bear on the ultimate object and ground of all human life, History itself. How to fix this intolerable present of history with the naked eye? We have seen that in a moment of the emergence of capitalism the present could be intensified, and prepared for individual perception, by the construction of a historical past from which as a process it could be felt to issue slowly forth, like the growth of an organism. But today the past is dead, transformed into a packet of well-worn and thumbed glossy images. As for the future, which may still be alive in some small heroic collectivities on the Earth’s surface, it is for us either irrelevant or unthinkable. Let the Wagnerian and Spenglerian world-dissolutions of J. G.  Ballard stand as  exemplary illustrations of the ways in which the imagination of a dying class –in this case the cancelled future of a vanished colonial and imperial destiny –seeks to intoxicate itself with images of death that range from the destruction of the world by fire, water and ice to lengthening sleep or the berserk orgies of high-rise buildings or superhighways reverting to barbarism.

Ballard’s work- so rich and corrupt – testifies powerfully to the contradictions of a properly representational attempt to grasp the future directly. I would argue, however, that the most characteristic SF does not seriously attempt to imagine the ‘real’ future of or social system. Rather, its multiple mock futures serves the quite different function of transforming our own present into the determinate past of something yet to come. It is this present moment –unavailable to us for contemplation in its own right because the sheer quantitative immensity of objects and individual lives it comprises is un-totalized and hence unimaginable, and also because it is occluded by the density of or private fantasies as well as of the proliferating stereotypes of a media culture that penetrates every remote zone of our existence –that upon our return from the imaginary constructs of SF has offered to us in the form of some future world’s remote past, as if posthumous and as though collectively remembered. Nor is this only an exercise in historical melancholy: there is, indeed, something also at least vaguely comforting and  reassuring in the renewed sense that the great supermarkets and shopping centers, the garish fast-food stores and ever more swiftly remodeled shops and store-front businesses of the near future of Chandler’s now historic Los Angeles, the burnt-out-center cities of small Midwestern towns, nay even the Pentagon itself and the vast underground networks of rocket-launching pads in the picture postcard isolation of once characteristic North American natural’ splendor, along with the already cracked and crumbling futuristic architecture of the newly built atomic power plants – that all these things are not seized, immobile forever, in some ‘end of history’ but move steadily in time towards some unimaginable yet inevitable ‘real’ future. SF thus enacts and enables a structurally unique ‘method’ for apprehending the present's history, and this is so irrespective of the pessimism or optimism of the imaginary future world which is the pretext for that de-familiarization. The present is in fact not less a past if its destination prove to be the technological marvels of Verne or, on the contrary, the shabby and maimed automata of P. K. Dick’s near future.

We must therefore now return to the relationship of SF and future history and reverse the stereotypical description of this genre: what is indeed authentic about it, as a mode of narrative and a form of knowledge is not at all it its capacity to keep the future alive, even in imagination. On the contrary, its deepest vocation is over and over again to demonstrate and to dramatize our incapacity to imagine the future, to body forth, through apparently full representations which prove on closer inspection to be structurally and constitutively impoverished, the atrophy in our time of what Marcuse has called the utopian imagination, the imagination of otherness and radical difference; to succeed by failure, and to serve as unwitting and even unwilling vehicles for a meditation, which, setting forth for the unknown, finds itself irrevocably mired in the all-to-familiar, and thereby becomes unexpectedly transformed into a contemplation of our own absolute limits. .  .

What has been said about SF in general, the related proposition on the nature and the political function of the utopian genre will come as no particular surprise: namely, that its deepest vocation is to bring home, in local and determinate ways and with the fullness of concrete detail, our constitutional inability to imagine Utopia itself; and this, not owing to any individual failure of imagination but as the result of the systematic, cultural and ideological closure of which we are all in one way or the other prisoners. This proposition, however, now needs to be demonstrated in a more concrete analytical way, with reference to the texts themselves.

 

 

Introduction to The Eastern Front 1914-1917 by Norman Stone

 

Winston Churchill wrote a book about the eastern front in the First World War. He dedicated it to the Tsarist army and titled it ‘The Unknown War’. His book is a brilliant piece of narrative, bringing out the drama of this front to  the full. Bur events on the front are still ‘unknown’, for this part of the First World War received much less coverage in English or French than even the Balkan and Mesopotamian fronts. It did receive coverage in German, but very often these works present a purely German view of the Russo-German war, and the bias has been transferred to well known English works, such as those of Liddell Hart. Churchill’s own book was based on a very narrow range of sources, most of them German, even though  his ‘feel’ for the subject allowed him to make much more of these sources than a lesser writer would have done. There has been little in western languages since then, although Soviet and émigré writers produced a substantial number of studies of the front that might have permitted more authoritative western-language presentation of the battles of this front. There is no official Soviet history of the army’s performance in the First World War; and until there is, much that happened must remain clear. None the less, it is possible arrive at a basic narrative of events, and to make some effort at explaining them, especially when comparison can be made of the various Russian, German and Austro-Hungarian sources.

My first aim, in writing this book, has therefore been are relatively straight-forward one: to fill the gap in the military history of the First World War. It has often been said that Germany could have won the war, if she had pursued the full-scale offense against Russian in 1915, as Lundendorff wanted, instead of the partial schemes that Falkenhayn preferred. But I do not believe that Lundendorff’s bold schemes for eliminating Russia in 1915 would have worked; indeed, the effects of various episodes in Ludendorff’s personal Drang nacht Osten- Tannenberg, the winter Battle in Masuria, Kovno-seem to me to have been over-rated. On the contrary, it was Falkenhayn’s policy of limit, attrition that probably offered the Germans a better way forward, if he had been allowed to stick to it. Lundendorff would merely have led them into yet more square miles of marsh and steppe, for it was not at all as easy to overthrow the Russian army as Ludendoff maintained. Deaths, for instance,  formed a higher percentage of German casualties in the east than in the west until the end of 1916; and until the turn of 1916-17, the Russian army had even captured a greater number of German prisoners (and of course a very much greater number of prisoners altogether in the view of the Austro-Hungarian army’s weakness) than the British and French combined. The idea that Germany had limitless possibilities in the east was a legend, however powerful its influence on Nazi thinking there after.

At the same time, there was an equally powerful legend on the allies’ side: that Russia, had she received the proper help from her western allies, could have contributed decisively to the overthrown of the German Empire quite early in the war. Lloyd George wrote forcefully in maintenance of this view: ‘ half the shells and one-fifth the guns . . . wasted’ in the great western offenses could, he alleged, have contributed decisively to Russia’s performance. I am not so sure. In 1915, the Russian army certainly suffered material shortages, but the allies could hardly make them up, because they had material shortages themselves; and in any case, to assume that guns and shells would have made any greater difference to the east than they did to the west was to mistake the importance of mere quantity. My study of the engagements of 1915 showed that shell-shortage was very often used an excuse for blundering and disorganization that were much more important, in causing Russia’s defeats in that year, than the mere shortage of material. In any case, by 1916, the Russian’s own output of war-goods had reached generally satisfactory dimensions. On 1^st January 1917, Russian superiority on the eastern front was in some ways comparable with the western superiority  eighteen months later in France. It would have take much more than the dispatch of guns and shell to the eastern front to cause the defeat of Germany there.

This was a discovery that came as a surprise to me, since I hd always assumed, following Golovin and others, that the Russian army had lost battles because of crippling material shortages; and I had gone on, as other writers have done, to assume that this was an inevitable consequence of the economic backwardness of the Tsarist State. But when I consulted the figures for Russia’s output of war-goods, I soon found that the shortages had been exaggerated, and sometimes invented after the event.

It is not really accurate to say, for instance, that the Russian army was not ready for war, and that it plunged in before it was ready, in order to save the French. At the time, the commanders asserted they were ready even four days before the army crossed the German border. But what they understood as readiness, was of course woefully at odds with war-time reality, they had no idea what to expect. But ‘unreadiness’ was discovered in subsequent battles, and was at bottom a hard-luck story. In 1914-1915, lack of war-goods was not a comment on Russia’s economic backwardness, but rather the slowness with which her regime reacted to the needs of war. The politicians and the generals used shell-shortage as a ‘political football against the government and the war ministry, and their tales of shell-shortage were therefore treated with skepticism; the artillerymen wrote off the infantrymen as stupid and alarmist; and, when the government decided to do anything, it turned too foreign producers who failed to deliver on time.

Once the government made up its quarrel with the industrialists, the country proved able to produce war-goods in fair quantity. By 1916, it could produce aircraft, guns, gasmasks, hand grenades, wireless sets and the rest- if not in immense quantities, as in the  Second World War, at least in quantities sufficient to win the  war in the east if other things had been equal, By September 1916, for instance, Russia could produce 4,500,000 shells per month .This compares with German output of seven million, Austro-Hungarian one million, and since the bulk of this production went elsewhere- to the western or Italian fronts, there was not much truth in the assertion that Russia lost the war because of crippling material weaknesses.

It was the country’s inability to make use of it economic weight that began to interest me, rather than the backwardness of which many writers had spoken. I began to examine the army’s structure, and again discovered some surprises. The army, as it grew before 1914, split, roughly between the patrician wing, of which the Grand Duke Nicholas, Inspector General of the Cavalry, and commander-in chief in wartime, was the head, and a praetorian one, dominated by the war minister Sukhomlinov. I had always read accounts that made out Sukhomlinov to be a bungling, corrupt; he was detested by ‘liberal’ Russia on both counts, and was imprisoned after the March Revolution. But, much to my surprise, the evidence as I saw it showed that Sukhomlinov, and not his enemies, was the real reformer. His enemies ,though eventually coming to power in the war-years, were much less ‘technocratic’ in their approach than they claimed to be. The resisted essential reforms before 1914, and their old-fashioned attitudes did much to reduce the army’s effectiveness in the war- years. No system of tactics emerged to combat the shell- shortage of 1915; and the disasters of that year also owed much to the commanders’ wholly mistaken belief in fortresses. Moreover, the division of the army between patricians and praetorians even effected strategy, for  it added a dimension to the usual rivalries and battles of competence that prevented the emergence of coherent plans, with corresponding movement of reserves. The structure of the army, as shown in tactics, conscription, transport organization,  relationship of infantry to artillery, and the rest, all of which I have tried to investigate, displayed the country’s great weak point was not, properly speaking, economic, but more administrative. I have tried to account for this, as far as evidence allows, at least in the armed forces’ case.

This book proved difficult to conclude. The fighting stopped in January 1917, except for a few episodes; yet it was in 1917 that all the problems I had seen came to a head. To narrate the year 1917 would have made this book intolerably long, and I should have gone far beyond my strategic brief. What particularly interested me was why the country, the  war-economy of which was successful as never before, should have gone through vast social change even though, with the German army at the gates, there was ostensibly every argument for retaining an unbroken front at home, at least for the duration. My last chapter is an effort to explain this.

I have seen the First World War, not as the vast run-down of most accounts, but as a crisis of growth: a modernization crisis in thin disguise. It was much more successful than is generally allowed. It failed, I think, against the bottle-neck of peasant agriculture. Inflation had accompanied the country’s economic growth in the First World War; and it was inflation that, in the end, caused Russia’s  food-suppliers to withhold their produce at a critical time. A book that began with the battle fields thus ends with a discussion of war-economy, inflation, revolution in the towns and countryside. This was the pattern of the First World War itself, and I have tried to record its course in eastern Europe as bets I can.

Jesus College, Cambridge
4^th October 1974

Charity Refused by Malcolm Gaskill

 

A few weeks ago,​ a man appeared in my front garden as I was trimming the hedge. Slight in stature, in his early twenties with short dark hair, he was wearing a huge hold-all as though it were a rucksack. His unsmiling face radiated intensity as he began his spiel: name, from the North, recent discharge from the army, trying to get back on his feet. He even gave his service number, as if old habits die hard, or to prove bona fides. I guessed he was selling cleaning products; young men had been before and we’d bought their expensive dusters. Today I told him thanks but no thanks – and as the words left my mouth a change came about: I regretted refusing to help him (yet felt committed) and his eyes burned back. ‘But your neighbours bought something,’ he protested, pointing over the hedge, shifting from foot to foot. I faced him down, and he swept off to the next house, muttering. I went inside, not wanting to overhear him be refused again or, worse, be treated with the kindness I’d denied him.

 

Later I saw his visit to the village had been noticed on Nextdoor, a website and app that allows people to share local information. Founded in San Francisco in 2008, Nextdoor’s popularity in the US and UK has surged during lockdown. According to the published stats, 139 of my fellow villagers use it, out of a population of less than seven hundred – about one in five adults. Members ask to be recommended handymen and gardeners, plumbers and electricians, piano tuners and driving instructors; someone who can put up a TV aerial or take down a shed or sharpen a pair of shears. They post computer queries and compare broadband speeds. Recently a man was trying to find a ‘wart healer’; others seek holistic therapies – or just a friendly chiropodist. People offer free help, and donate everything from unwanted furniture and toys to pallets, bubble wrap and packing crates. They also share sightings of rare birds, toads and friendly creatures – ‘Hedgehog action!’ is a popular thread – and photos of wildflowers, weeds and giant vegetables. There is a steady traffic in cats, lost, found and enlarged (from dining at other people’s houses). Some members, often new to the area or the country, are looking for friendship: they are, in an old-fashioned yet newfangled way, simply introducing themselves to their neighbours. And the responses of generous spirits are touching. People like to be first to lean over the cyber-fence with local news, but they’re also gentle and they care. Through all the uncertainty about Covid restrictions and the logistics of vaccination, the pooled information has been comforting and helpful, especially to those living alone.

 

Nextdoor’s user-generated bulletins have a darker side, however. Warnings about loitering youths, drug dealers, noisy motorcyclists, vandals, car eggers, scammers and rogue traders – anyone who might harm the community – pop up regularly. The good citizen who posted about my caller claimed that when she declined his wares he simply asked for money. ‘My gut feeling was this isn’t right,’ she confessed, adding: ‘People canvassing in an area that isn’t their home or where they live makes me wonder about their motives.’ Someone else suggested that he was a ‘Nottingham knocker’, an affiliate of some ‘unauthorised society ... scouting to see who is in, and what their homes etc look like’.

 

Vigilance is doubtless salutary, especially in causing vulnerable people to be wary. Even so I bridled at the curtain-twitching, and googled ‘Nottingham knockers’ only to find they are indeed a thing: typically ex-offenders ostensibly on rehabilitation schemes, who may legitimately sell door-to-door but can also be – I read in the Nottingham Post from September 2020 – joint-casing burglars or their abetters. Some, it’s alleged, even sniff banknotes they receive for hints of mustiness – a sign that more might be stashed under a customer’s bed. I spoke to a friend in Yorkshire, who said they too get these knockers. Does he buy their stuff? Sure, he replied, with charitable ease: they’re just young lads trying to get by, and if there is a scam the proper money isn’t going into their pockets. His partner also buys lace from an elderly woman calling herself ‘the Gypsy lady’, who drops by at regular intervals with a bundle and an unhappy story.

 

So I went back to feeling that the law-and-order posts mainly feed prejudices and spread fear: homegrown anxiety straight from the sociology of moral panics and folk devils. In recent years, Nextdoor has been criticised as a platform for discrimination by race and class, and for the dissemination of conspiracy theories. At the very least, it encourages a depressingly paranoid outlook on life. As Hugo Rifkind has observed, ‘“Hey, look out your window, most things are fine!” is a message that almost nobody ever sends or sees.’ It also sharpens the atavistic urge to shame, as well as a taste for outrage. There’s not much tonal restraint. The other day a man posted: ‘To the bottom-feeding scum who have taken to dumping their building waste on the edge of the wood at the bridle-path between Whittlesford and Little Shelford: you disgust me.’ Accompanying photos of a carpet-fitter’s discarded offcuts and gripper rods spoke for themselves. Fly-tippers are despicable, but righteous anger is no less scary for being righteous; historically, it’s frequently been dangerous. And the spleen gets aimed even at invisible enemies. Recently a pensioner in our village was seized by the notion that books were being stolen from the mini-library housed in an old telephone box. The thieves were denounced and we were reassured that the police had been notified.

 

Nextdoor works like a neighbourhood watch scheme, but laced with all the toxic gossip once exchanged at the village pump, or by the fireside as women span and their menfolk brooded, puffing on clay pipes. A technological innovation has exposed – and, since the pandemic, encouraged – old habits of mind, specifically those related to the regulation of communal life. Local custom was once a touchstone of order; prior to the advent of policing it was more important than written law. Rumours about fornicating maidservants, cuckolded husbands, drunks, scolds and ‘sowers of discord’ could develop into campaigns against misfits who threatened communal harmony and security.

 

In Faith, Hope and Charity: English Neighbourhoods, 1500-1640 (Cambridge, 2020), Andy Wood paints an essentially rosy picture of the dynamic bonds between pre-modern neighbours – a fond desire to help, to share food and fuel, and enjoy one another’s company in the alehouse. But he also exposes the flipside of this culture, where the definition of parochial inclusion depended on exclusion. Belonging required others not to belong, and sharing pet-hates unified more people than merry discourse about what everyone loved. Indeed, the expression of ideals – from the pulpit, say – most often took the form of a chiding reminder, a restatement of values observed mostly in the breach. Once admonished, one could project failings onto others. The word ‘toward’, used to describe conformist conduct, was once paired with ‘froward’, which meant against the grain or literally ‘untoward’. And, like Nextdoor’s reports and reprimands, counter-measures – for instance, composing satirical ballads about profiteers – served a purpose. But much of it was just hateful scapegoating and ostracism, spilling over into abuse, humiliation and violence.

 

Elizabeth Busher, a 17th-century Somerset woman reported to magistrates as ‘a continual disturber of her neighbours’ quietness’, represents for Wood ‘the antithesis of the values of neighbourliness, charity and common interest that many Tudor and Stuart people saw as the basis for the endurance of a Christian commonwealth’. She was also accused of witchcraft, and of causing ‘the untimely deaths of men, women and children which she hath hated, threatened and handled’. Busher, a single mother of several illegitimate children, was poor and apparently homeless, living in the woods and other ‘obscure places’, and so beyond the pale of village respectability. She must have scavenged and scrounged – the same pleading for alms door-to-door that triggered so many other English witchcraft accusations. Again and again, the needy mumbled imprecations as doors slammed in their faces. Indoors, meanwhile, guilt began eating away at the stingy householder’s self-justification, which, if followed by misfortune, might be expiated by the conviction that he or she was the victim of magical vengeance. Even today, my Yorkshire friend’s robustly rational partner admits that her kindness towards their travelling visitor is tinged with superstition.

 

I’m struck by the timeless nature of this unease, and the similarities between what historians of witchcraft call the ‘charity refused’ scenario and my encounter with the young man from the North, with his fierce eyes and his demand to be heard. In a sense, the impossibility of a viable curse in modern times only underscores that what really mattered about those doorstep confrontations in pre-modern communities – and what endures for us – were the attendant feelings: hope, yearning, intolerance, fear, denial, frustration, indignation, fury, alienation, remorse. Emotion turned a vague supernatural threat – the global demonic conspiracy of witches – into something specific and personal, an in-your-face curdling of a good relationship, devoutly desired yet difficult to attain. Another time, then, I might try to summon more empathy and compassion. I’ll keep an eye on my Nextdoor email alerts, which are bound to report any sightings of strangers drifting into the village.

Short Cuts

London Review of Books

Vol. 43 No. 17 · 9 September 2021

Total War 1797-1814 by David A. Bell

 

Impressive as the Austerlitz campaign had been, Napoleon’s most spectacularly crushing victory came a year later, against a different enemy.  His defeat of Prussia in 1806 not only eerily foreshadowed the total wars of the twentieth century but also helped bring them about, by lighting the torch of German resentment that would take 140 years to burn out. The philosopher Hegel, who saw the events at rather too close a remove, considered them the hinge on which the history of the world had turned. ‘The connecting bonds of the world are dissolved and have collapsed like images in a dream,’ he wrote even before the end of the campaign. He called Napoleon, whom he saw riding near his home in Jena, nothing less than ‘the world soul . . .who, sitting astride his horse, reaches across the world and dominates it.’

Prussia had not fought France for more than a decade. Its young, insecure King Friedrich Wilhelm III had distressing personal memories of Valmy* and had preferred to turn his attention to the east. Since the final partition of Poland in 1795, its richest territories had lain, half digested, in the maw of the Prussian state (nearly 90% of present day Poland belonged to it). So the Prussians initially had no particular desire to challenge Napoleon. They even entered into a brief alliance with him, prompting an abortive declaration of war against them by Britain. But in the summer of 1806, anxieties about Napoleon’s activities on their western borders led the king to switch sides and enter into a new, ‘Fourth Coalition,’ which also included Russia and Britain.

It was a disastrous mistake. The Prussian army still lived, too far to an extent, on the legend of Frederick the Great. Indeed, too many of its generals had personal memories of his days of glory, fifty years before (the historian Gordon once quipped: ‘it seemed literally true that in Prussia, old soldiers never died).’ The ponderous old Duke of Brunswick who had lost the battle of Valmy, remained the kingdom’s highest commander .Friedrich Wilhelm’ army of 235,000 was large and relatively well trained- but only by the standards of the Old Regime. Composed in large part of unwilling peasants, mercenaries, and former prisoners of war, held together by traditionally savage Prussian discipline, it continued to use its conventional order of battle, despite the new tactics Napoleon had perfected.

In late August, not waiting for Russian reinforcements, the Prussians gave Napoleon an ultimatum to withdraw his army beyond the Rhine or fight. In response, Napoleon took part of the Grande Armee, already in Germany, and formed it into a powerful square of 180,000 men – the so-called bataillion carre – which allowed him to concentrate a huge force quickly on a decisive point. On October 14, it engaged the Prussians in the twin  battles of Jena and Auerstadt. Like so many battles, they began with a comedy of error. As dawn broke, Napoleon, commanding a concentrated detachment of 46,000 on strategic heights near Jena (where Hegel had glimpsed him the day before), found himself facing some 38,000 Prussians under the sixty-year-old Prince of Hohenlohe. Taking them for Brunswick’s main force, he quickly summoned reinforcements and by noon had 96,000 men available. Hohenlohe stood no chance against such numbers and compounded his defeat by stubbornly keeping 20,000 infantry standing exposed, in the line, as if they were fighting the Seven Years’ War, under merciless fire from French skirmishers hiding behind garden walls. By the end of the day, the French had killed 10,000 of his men and wounded another 15,000. Meanwhile, nearby, Brunswick ha been engaged in a characteristic maneuver –withdrawal- but blundered into a French corps under Marshal Loid Davout. In a desperate, brilliant action, Devout beat the larger Prussian force. Brunswick himself fell mortally wounded, and the battles left the Prussian military shattered beyond repair.

But the French triumph did not end there, for Napoleon’s forces relentlessly pursued the Prussians. On October 16, Erfurt fell to Marshal Murat, with 6,000 men taken prisoner; the next day, Halle surrendered to Marshal Bernadotte. One by one, the remaining Prussian fortresses passed into French hands, often without offering even token resistance: Hamelin, Plassenburg, Stertin, Spandau, Magdeburg. In early November Napoleon marched triumphantly into Berlin, displaying prisoners from Friedrich Wilhelm’s Noble Guard. The king himself had fled to East Prussia. Of the 170,000 soldiers that he had sent against Napoleon at the end of the summer, he had loss no less than 96%: 25,000 dead or wounded and 140,000 prisoners.. Napoleon, meanwhile, issued a bulletin declaring that the defeat of Rossbach- France’s epic loss to Frederick the Great in 1757- had been ‘expunged’. He also paid a visit to Frederick himself, in his tomb at Potsdam. “He stopped at the entrance to the grave, meditative attitude,’ his aide Segur recalled. ‘He remained there nearly ten minutes, motionless and silent.’ Then he left, although not without helping himself to Fredericks sword, sash, and Black Eagle decoration, for display in Paris. As the future military strategist Clausewitz, and eyewitness to the campaign, would later wrote, the Prussian army had been ruined ‘more completely than any army has ever been ruined on the battlefield.

Despite the epochal defeat, the conflict dragged on for another eight months. The Russians had not yet come to terms, and in February 1807, Napoleon fought the remaining Prussians in a ghastly battle of Eylau in Poland, under blinding, stinging snow, without a significant result. But in June, Napoleon crushed the Russians at the battle of Friedland and a month later met Tsar Alexander on a raft in the middle of the Nieman River near Tilsit, at the Russian frontier. In keeping with his monarchical pretensions, Napoleon called the young Russian monarch his ‘brother,’ pledged to treat him as an equal, and seduced him into an alliance. He forced Friedrich Wilhelm to wait on the shore like a naughty child, and the subsequent treaty reduced Prussia to the status of a second-rate power. It lost fully half of its territory and subjects (from 10 million to 4.6) was forced to pay massive reparations, saw its army reduced to a token force of 42,000, and as a result of all this, suffered economic collapse.

In modern European history, only one campaign compares with Napoleon’s defeat of Prussia for its sheer, overwhelming speed and force: Hitler’s conquest of France in the spring of 1940, Both took less than six weeks (Napoleon’s, at thirty-three days, was faster, despite his lack of tanks). Both destroyed the adversaries’ morale, as well as their physical ability to resist. Both ended with an entire army taken prisoner. At  the cessation of hostilities, both losing powers had territory amputated as revenge for an earlier defeat –Hitler famously forcing the French to sign the armistice in the same railroad car where the Germans had surrendered at the end of WWI. Even Napoleon’s visit to Fredrick ‘s tomb foreshadowed the visit that a pensive, silent Hitler would pay in 1940 to the Invalids, and the tomb of Napoleon himself. In other words, 1806 was a blitzkrieg. And just like the blitzkrieg of 1940, it left Great Britain alone in the fight:
 

Another year! Another deadly blow!

Another mighty Empire overthrown!

And we are left, or shall be left, alone;

The last that  dare to struggle with the Foe.

Thus wrote William Wordsworth in November 1806.

The keenest observer of the campaign, however, was Clausewitz. This product of minor Prussian nobility, then just twenty-six, had already spent half his life in uniform. He was a serious, hardworking man dedicated to the Prussian army, so its massive failure struck him hard both personally (he spent two years as a prisoner in France) and philosophically. And over the next few years, shock congealed into furor, as he watched King Fredrick Wilhelm meekly follow Napoleon’s dictates Finally, in 1812, Clausewitz committed the ultimate apostasy for an officer, abandoning his country in wartime and pledging himself to the Russians, who were now at war with France again. In a passionate justification of his act, which amounted to a military profession of faith, he bitterly denounced not only his own ‘dishonored’ government but also, the style of war at which it had once excelled:

Formerly . . . war was waged in a way that a pair of duelists carried on their pedantic struggle. One battled with moderation and consideration according to the conventional proprieties . . .War was caused by nothing more than diplomatic caprice, and the spirit of the thing could hardly prevail over the goal of military honor . . .There is no more talk of this sort of war, and one would have to be blind not to be able to perceive the difference with our wars, that is to say the wars that our age and conditions require . . .The war of the present time is war of all against all. It is not a King that wars on a king, not an army which wars on an army ,but a people which wars on another, and the king and the army are contained in the people.

War will only lose this character with much difficulty, and, in truth, the return of that old, bloody, yet often boring chess game of soldiers fighting is not to be desired.

The passage brilliantly encapsulated the changes that had taken  place in war since 1793, while foreshadowing Clausewitz’s great work On War. He now saw the old aristocratic conventions as mere frippery and artifice that distorted the true, natural course of war. That true and natural course involved the commitment of every possible resource and all possible violence of the sort France had inflicted on his fatherland. No wonder that he quotes Thomas Hobbes’s famous phrase. It felt like war of all against all, indeed . . .

During what Germans later called this (1814) ‘war of liberation’, an enthusiasm  for war as a redemptive, regenerative experience, previously only found in the writings of a few intellectuals, such as Humboldt and Gentz, came to pervade German elite culture. Many of the best-known literary figures of te day – Ernst Moritz Arndt, Heinrich von Kleist, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Theodor Korner – praised the ongoing struggle as a joyous test of German spirit, through which a divided and lethargic nation would awaken and grow in health and strength. They compared the event to an earlier such awakening – the revolt of the German tribes against the Romans, led by Rome’s supposedly Arminius (Hermann). Kleist made Hermann the subject of a play that he hoped would spur his fellow countrymen to national unity and the extermination of the enemy: ‘For the whole world will only achieve peace from this wolf’s brood when the robber nest is completely destroyed and nothing but a black flag waves from its desolate heap of ruins.” Arndt, a prolific poet, historian, and former cleric ,sounded the same theme of national awakening:

What is the German’s Fatherland? . . .
As far as the German tongue sounds
And God in Heaven sings songs
That is what it should be!

It should be all of Germany!

This  poem, one of the most popular of the period, practically became a national anthem, six decades before the actual achievement of German unity.

These writers also had a very clear idea of what shape the war should take. It should be a ‘people’s war’ involving the entire population. Yet just in the  case of the Girondins and the sans-cullottes,  their fantasy of total engagement involved anything autonomous, mechanized destruction on a mass scale. To the contrary, it involved a return to the elemental forms of combat, in which individual strength, virtue, and passion would decide the outcome- ‘To arms, To arms! Kleist wrote in verses meant to be sng –rather horrifyingly- to Beethoven’s melody for ‘Ode to Joy. ‘With a club and a staff . . .Strike him dead! The world’s court of judgment won’t ask you for reasons!’

In an irony the French would not have appreciated, yet German’s saw two recent events in particular as exemplars of such noble and primitive war: the Vendee and Spain. Clausewitz cited both to prove that if an entire population rose up, the worse tyranny could not prevail against it. Even though  the ’tiger’ of the French Republic had passed through the Vendee ‘with the sword of devastation, with murder and flame,’ it had not subdued it. The survivors of Turreau’s columns might not have given such a sanguine account of their sanguinary experience, but by 1812, a new legend of the Vendee had arisen, in which the destruction figured less prominently than the rebels tenacious heroism. After the start of the Spanish guerilla war, with its obvious resemblances to the Vendee, the Germans integrated it into their story as well. Kleist wrote anode to Palafox, the hero of Saragossa, and adapted a Spanish national ‘catechism’ to the German context. Carl Schmitt would later write: ‘The spark that flew north from Spain in 1808 found theoretical form in Berlin.’

A peoples’ war also involved intense hatred of the enemy, and the intellectuals surpassed even the Jacobins of the Year II in their lust to stimulate it. Arndt in particular provided, in his prolific xenophobic  invective, an unsavory foretaste of some of Germany’s worst subsequent history. Justas Barere had insisted that French infants suck in Anglophobia with their mother’s milk, Arndt demanded that German children learn hatred of the French in the cradle. He called France ‘an empty, hollow, doll-like formless, contentless Nothing, lacking strength, meaning and character.’ Identifying Germanys present enemies and future victims,  he said they were ‘refined, bad Jews’, ‘’A Jew people.’ Just as revoltingly, in 1813, he published at tract with the charming title On National Hatred, because he thought the overall phenomena deserved encouragement. ‘Since He is the God of love, so hated pleases him too,’  This former cleric wrote with an impressive lack of logic. “All nature lives and creates solely through eternal war and struggle . . . God created . . . enmity between the nations.’ And therefore: ‘I want hate against the French, not just for this war, but for along time, forever .  .  . This hatred glows as thee religion of the German people, as a holy mania in every heart.’ Here were the logical consequences of Humboldt’s dispassionate reflections on language and organic growth, placed in the context of real warfare. Arndt expressed it with egregious vulgarity ,but overall, he was not untypical (Incidentally, the north German university attended by this paragon of learning and toleration was renamed for him the year Hitler took power and still bears his name today.)

In early 1813, Prussia’s rulers began to take measures to translate this bellicose rhetoric into action . . .but despite all tye talk of Spain and the Vendee, the Prussian territory in fact saw very little partisan activity in the summer of 1813 – the war remained a duel of uniformed armies. The patriotic enthusiasm did prompt more than twenty thousand men to volunteer for the Home Army, but they still amounted to only 12 percent of the total Prussian forces. As for the widespread German nationalism supposedly born in 1813, there is little evidence that it spread far beyond the literati. Friedrich Wilhelm himself acknowledged the multinational character of Prussia by issuing his March edict not to ‘Germans’ but to Prussians, Silesians, Pomeranians and Lithuanians.” Heinrich Heine later quipped: ‘We are told to be patriots, and we became patriotic, because we always to what our princes tell us.’






[*The Battle of Valmy, also known as the Cannonade of Valmy, was the first major victory by the army of France during the Revolutionary Wars that followed the French Revolution. The battle took place on 20 September 1792 as Prussian troops commanded by the Duke of Brunswick attempted to march on Paris. Generals François Kellermann and Charles Dumouriez stopped the advance near the northern village of Valmy in Champagne-Ardenne.

 

In this early part of the Revolutionary Wars—known as the War of the First Coalition—the new French government was in almost every way unproven, and thus the small, localized victory at Valmy became a huge psychological victory for the Revolution at large. The outcome was thoroughly unexpected by contemporary observers—a vindication for the French revolutionaries and a stunning defeat for the vaunted Prussian army. The victory emboldened the newly assembled National Convention to formally declare the end of monarchy in France and to establish the French Republic. Valmy permitted the development of the Revolution and all its resultant ripple effects, and for that it is regarded by historians as one of the most significant battles in history.]