Reparations by A. J. P. Taylor

By 1921 much of the peace-treaty was being enforced. It was reasonable to assume that it would gradually lose its contentious character. Men cannot go on wrangling over a settled question year after year, however embittered they may feel at first. The French forgot Waterloo; they even tended to forget Alsace and Lorraine, despite repeated resolves not to do so. The Germans, too, might have been expected to forget,  or at any rate to acquiesce, after a time. The problem of German power would remain; but it would not be aggravated by an acute determination to destroy the settlement of 1919 at the first opportunity. The reverse happened: resentment against the treaty increased with every year. For one part of the treaty remain unsettled; and disputes over this put the rest of the treaty in constant question. The unsettled issue was the payment of reparations- a striking example of good intentions, or to be correct, good ingenuity, gone wrong.

In 1919 the French wished to lay down uncompromisingly the principle that Germany must pay the full bill for war damage – an indeterminate liability that would swell in the future with every step of German economic recovery. The Americans, more sensibly, proposed to state a fixed sum. Lloyd George appreciated that, in the heated atmosphere of 1919, this sum, too, would be far beyond German capacity. He hoped  that in time men (himself included) would come to their senses: the Allies would make a reasonable demand, the Germans would make a reasonable offer,, and the two figures would more or less coincide. He therefore swung around behind the French, though exactly for the opposite reason: they wanted to make the bill fantastically large, he wanted to scale it down. The Americans gave way. The peace treaty merely stated the principle of reparations: their amount was to be settled at some time into future.

Lloyd George had meant to make reconciliation with Germany easier; he made it almost impossible. For the divergence between the British and French views which had been covered over in 1919  rose again to the surface as soon as they tried to fix a figure: the French still trying to push it up, the British impatiently scaling it down. Nor did the Germans show any  willingness to co-operate. Far from attempting to estimate their capacity to pay, they deliberately kept their economic affairs in confusion, well knowing that, if they once got things straight, the bill for reparations would follow. In 1920 there were angry meetings between the Allies, then conference with the Germans; more conferences in 1921; still more in 1922. In 1923 the French tried to enforce payment by occupying the Ruhr. The Germans first answered with passive resistance; then surrendered at discretion, under the catastrophe of inflation. The French, almost as exhausted as the Germans, agreed to a compromise: the Dawes plan, drafted – largely at British prompting – under an American chairman. Though this temporary settlement was resented by both French and Germans, reparations were in  fact paid for the next five years. Then there was another conference – more wrangling, more accusations, more demands, and more evasions. The Young plan, again under an American chairman, emerged. It had hardly begun to operate before the great depression struck Europe. The Germans claimed they could not go on paying In 1931 the Hoover moratorium suspended reparations for twelve months. In 1932 a last conference at Lausanne wiped the slate clean. Agreement was at last reached; but it has taken thirteen years, years of mounting suspicion and grievance on all sides. At the end the French felt swindled; and the German felt robbed. Reparations had kept the passions of war alive.


Reparations would, no doubt, have been a grievance in any case. It was the uncertainty and argument over them which made the grievance chronic. In 1919 many people believed that payment of reparations would reduce Germany to a state of Asiatic poverty. J. M. Keynes held this view, as did all Germans and probably many Frenchmen did also, though without regretting the consequence. During the second World  war an ingenious young Frenchman, Etienne Mantoux, demonstrated that the Germans could have paid reparations, without impoverishment, if they had wished to do so; and Hitler gave a practical demonstration of this when he extracted vast sums from the Vichy government of France. The question only has an academic interest. No doubt the apprehensions of Keynes and the Germans were grotesquely exaggerated. No doubt that the impoverishment of Germany was caused by war, not by reparations. No doubt the Germans could have paid reparations, if they had regarded them an obligation of honor, honestly incurred. In actual fact, as everyone now knows, Germany was a net gainer by the financial transactions of the nineteen-twenties: she borrowed far more from private American investors ( and failed to pay back) than she paid in reparations. This was of course little consolation to the German taxpayer, who was not at all the same person as the German borrower. For that matter, reparations gave little consolation to the taxpayers of allied countries, who immediately saw the proceeds transferred to the United States in repayment of war debts. Setting one thing against another, the only economic effect of reparations was to give employment to a large number of bookkeepers. But the economic facts about reparations are of little importance. Reparations counted as a symbol. They created resentment, suspicion, and international hostility. More than anything else, they cleared the way for the second World war.

Reparations fixed the French in an attitude of sullen, but rather hopeless resistance. They had, after all, a not unjustified claim. Northeast France had been devastated during the war; and, whatever the rights and wrongs of war guilt, it was reasonable that the Germans should help restore the damage. But the French soon cheated on reparations, as everyone else did. Some Frenchmen wanted to ruin Germany forever. Others hoped that reparations would not be paid, so that the armies of occupation should stay in the Rhineland. French taxpayers had been told that Germany would pay for the war; and were indignant against the Germans when their own taxers went up. In the end, the French cheated in their turn; they got virtually nothing except the moral blame for having demanded reparations at all. As the French saw it, they had made a series of concessions over reparations to please the Germans. Finally they had they had to abandon all claim to reparations. The Germans emerged more dissatisfied than ever. The French concluded from this experience that concessions in other fields – over disarmament or frontiers – would be equally futile. They also concluded, though less consciously, that concessions would be made. The French were distinguished, in the years before the second World war, by lack of faith in their leaders and in themselves. This despairing cynicism had a long and complicated origin which has often been dissected by historians. But the record of reparations was its immediate, practical cause. Here the French had certainly lost; and their leaders had as certainly displayed a singular incapacity, or at least a singular failure, to fulfil their promises. Reparations did almost as much to damage to democracy in France as in Germany itself.

Reparations had also a critical influence on the relations between France and Great Britain. In the last days of the war, the British – both politicians a and public – had shared the French enthusiasm for reparations. It was a British statesman of high competence, not a Frenchman, who proposed to squeeze the German orange till the pips squeaked; and even Lloyd George had been more clamorous for reparations than he subsequently like to imagine. Soon however the British changed round. They began to denounce the folly of reparations once they had themselves carried off the German merchant navy. Perhaps they were influenced by the writings of Keynes. Their more practical motive was to restore the economic life of Europe so as to promote the recovery of their own export industries. They listened readily to the German stories of the endless woes which would follow the payment of reparations; and, once they had condemned reparations, they soon condemned other clauses of the peace treaty. Reparations were wicked. Therefore the disarmament of Germany was wicked; the frontier with Poland was wicked, the new national states were wicked. And not only wicked: they were a justified German grievance, and the Germans would be neither content nor prosperous until they were undone. The British grew indignant at French logic, at French anxiety about German recovery, and particularly indignant at French insistence that treaties should be honored once they had been signed. French claims to reparations were pernicious and dangerous nonsense; therefore their claim for security s pernicious and dangerous nonsense also. The British had some plausible ground for complaint. In 1931 they were forced off the gold-standard. The French, who had claimed to be ruined by the war, had a stable currency and the largest gold-reserve in Europe. It was a bad beginning for the years of danger. The disagreements over reparations in the years after the first World war made it almost impossible for the British and French to agree over security  in the years before the second.

The most catastrophic effect of reparations was on the Germans themselves.  Of course they would have been aggrieved in any case. They had not only lost the war. They had lost territory; they had been compelled to disarm; they had been saddled with a war-guilt which they did not feel. But these were intellectual grievances: things to grumble over in the evenings, not the cause of suffering in everyday life. Reparations hit every German, or seemed to, at each moment of his existence. It would be useless to discuss whether reparations in fact impoverished Germany; and it was equally useless to argue the point in 1919. No German was likely to accept the proposition that Norman Angell had advanced in The Great Illusion that the payment of the indemnity by the French in 1871 benefited France and injured Germany. The common sense of mankind says that a man is the poorer for paying out money; and what is true for an individual appears to be true for a nation. Germany was paying reparations; and therefore was the poorer for it. By an easy transition reparations became the sole cause of German poverty. The businessman in difficulties; the underpaid schoolteacher; the unemployed worker all blamed their troubles on reparations. The cry of a hungry  child was a cry against reparations. Old men stumbled into the grave because of reparations. The great inflation of 1923 was attributed to reparations; so was the great depression of 1929. These views were not just held merely by the German man-in-the-street. They were held  just as strongly by the most distinguished financial and political experts. The campaign against ‘the slave-treaty’ hardly needed the promptings of extremist agitators. Every touch of economic hardship stirred the Germans to shake off ‘the shackles of Versailles’.

Once men reject a treaty, they cannot be expected to remember precisely which clause they reject. The Germans began with the more or less rational belief that they were being ruined by reparations. They soon proceeded to the less rational belief that they were being ruined by the treaty as a whole. Finally, retracing their steps, they concluded that they were being ruined by clauses of the treaty which had nothing to do with reparations. German disarmament, for instance, may have been humiliating; it may have exposed Germany to invasion by Poland or France. But economically it was to the good so far as it had any effect at all [with remarkable, though not unique ingenuity, however, the German generals managed to make disarmament more expensive than armament had been. It cost the German taxpayers less to maintain the great army and navy of 1914 than to maintain a small army and no navy after 1919]. This is not what the ordinary German felt. He assumed that, since reparations made him poorer, disarmament did also. It was the same with the territorial clauses of the treaty. There were defects, of course, in the settlement. The eastern front put too many Germans in Poland- though it also put too many Poles in Germany. It could have been improved by some redrawing and by an exchange of populations – an expedient not contemplated in those civilized days. But an impartial judge, if such existed, would have found little fault with the territorial settlement once the principle of national states was accepted. The so-called Polish corridor was inhabited predominantly by Poles; and the arrangement of free railway-communication with East Prussia were adequate. Danzig would actually have been better off economically if it had been included in Poland.  As to the former German colonies – also a fertile cause of grievance – they had always been an expense, not a source of profit.

All this was lost sight of, thanks to the link between reparations and the rest of the treaty. The German believed he was ill-dressed, hungry, or out-of-work, because  Danzig was a Free City, because the corridor cut off East Prussia from the Reich; or because Germany had no colonies. Even the highly intelligent banker Schacht attributed Germany’s financial difficulties to the loss of her colonies – a view which he continued to hold, sincerely no doubt, even after the second World war. The Germans were not being self-centered or uniquely stupid in holding such views. This outlook was shared by enlightened liberal Englishmen such as Keynes; by nearly all the leaders of the British Labor party, and by all Americans who thought about European affairs. Yet it is difficult to see why the loss of colonies and land in Europe should have crippled Germany economically. After the second World war Germany had much greater territorial losses, yet became more prosperous than at any time in her history. There could be no clearer demonstration that the economic difficulties of Germany between the wars were due to defects in her domestic policies, not to unjust frontiers. The demonstration has been in vain; every textbook continues to attribute Germany’s difficulties to the treaty of Versailles. The myth went further, and still does. First, the economic problems of Germany were blamed on the treaty. Then it was observed that these problems continued. From this it was held to follow that nothing was done to conciliate Germany and to modify the system set up in 1919. ‘Appeasement’ was supposed to have been attempted only in 1938; and by that time it was too late.

This was far from the truth. Even reparations were constantly revised, and always downward; though no doubt the revision dragged out tiresomely long. In other ways appeasement was attempted sooner, and with success. . .

 

 [And so on - the issue of disarmament proved as difficult to resolve as that of reparations - perhaps the most complex historical narrative I have ever encountered,  diplomatic fiascos lasting decades, only really comparable to what’s going on today]

Rearmament

The first World war shattered all the Great Powers involved, with the exception of the United States, who took virtually no part in it; maybe they were all foolish to go on trying to be Great Powers afterwards. Total war is probably beyond the strength of any Great Power. Now even preparations for such a war threaten to ruin the Great Powers who attempt them. Nor is this new. In the eighteenth century Frederick the Great led Prussia to the point of collapse in the effort to be a Great Power. The Napoleonic wars brought France down from her high estate in Europe, and she never recovered her former greatness. This is an odd, inescapable dilemma. Though the object of being a Great Power is to be able to fight a great war, the only way of remaining a Great Power is not to fight one, or to fight it on a limited scale. This was the secret of Great Britain’s greatness so long as she stuck to naval warfare and did not try to become a military power on a continental pattern. Hitler did not need instruction from a historian in order to appreciate this. The inability of Germany to fight a long war was a constant theme of his; and so was the danger which threatened Germany if the other Great Powers combined against her. In talking like this, Hitler was more sensible than the German generals who imagined all would be well if they got Germany back to the position she occupied before Ludendorff’s offense in March 1918. Hitler did not draw the moral that it was silly for Germany to be a Great Power. Instead he proposed to dodge the problem by ingenuity, much as the British had once done. Where they relied on sea power, he relied on guile. Far from wanting war, a general war was the last thing he wanted. He wanted the fruits of total victory without total war; and thanks to the stupidity of others he nearly got them. Other Powers thought that they were faced with the choice between total war and surrender. At first they chose surrender; then they chose total war, to Hitler’s ultimate ruin.

This is not guesswork. It is demonstrated beyond peradventure by the record of German armament before the second World war and even during it. It would have been obvious long ago if men had not been blinded by two mistakes. Before the war they listened to what Hitler said instead of looking at what he did. After the war they wanted to pin on him the guilt for everything which happened, regardless of the evidence.  The record, however, is there for anyone that wishes to use it: until the spring of 1936 German rearmament was largely a myth. This does not mean merely that the preliminary stages of rearmament were not producing increase strength, as always happens. Even the preliminary stages were not being undertaken at all seriously. Hitler  cheated foreign powers and the German people in exactly the opposite sense from that which is usually supposed. He, or rather Goering, announced: ‘Guns before butter’. In fact, he put butter before guns.

In 1936, according to Churchill, two independent estimates placed German rearmament expenditure at an annual rate of 12 thousand million marks. The actual rate was under 5 thousand million. Hitler himself asserted that the Nazi government had spent 90 thousand million marks on armaments before the outbreak of war. In fact the German government expenditure, war and non-war, did not amount to much more than this between 1933 and 1938. Rearmament cost about forty thousand million marks in the six fiscal years ending 31  Mach 1939, and about 50 thousand millions up to the out break of war.

Why was German rearmament on such a limited scale? For one thing, Hitler was anxious not to weaken his popularity by reducing the standard of civilian life in Germany. The most rearmament did was to prevent its rising faster than it otherwise would have done. Even so the Germans were better off than they had ever been before. Then the Nazi system was inefficient, corrupt and muddle. More important, Hitler would not increase taxes but was terrified of inflation. Even the overthrown of Schacht did not really shake the financial limitations, though it was supposed to do so. Most important of all, Hitler did not make large war preparations simply because his concept of warfare did not require them. Rather he planned to solve Germany’s living space problem in piecemeal fashion – by a series of small wars. One even suspects Hitler hoped to get by without any war at all. The one thing he did not plan for was the great war often attributed to him.

Pretending to prepare for a great war and not in fact doing it was an essential part of Hitler’s strategy; and those who sounded the alarm against him, such as Churchill, unwittingly did his work for him. This device was new and took everyone in. Previously governments spent more on armaments than they admitted, as most do to the present day. This was sometimes to deceive their own people, sometimes to deceive a potential enemy. In 1909, for instance, the German government were accused by many British people of secretly accelerating naval building without the approval of the Reichstag. This accusation was probably untrue. But it left a permanent legacy of suspicion that the German would d it again; and this suspicion was strengthened by the evasions of the disarmament imposed by the treaty of Versailles, which successive German governments practiced, though to little advantage, after 1919. Hitler encouraged this suspicion and exploited it. There is a very good illustration. On 28 November 1934 Baldwin denied Churchill’s statement tat German air strength was equal to that of Great Britain’s. Baldwin’s figures were right; Churchill’s were wrong. On 24 March 1935 Sir John Simon and Anthony Eden visited Hitler. He told them that the German air force was already equal to that of Great Britain, if not indeed superior. He was at one believed, and has been believed ever since. Baldwin was discredited. Panic was created. How was it possible that a statesman could exaggerate his armaments instead of concealing them? Yet this is what Hitler had done.

German rearmament was largely a myth until the spring of 1936. Ten Hitler put some reality in it. His motive was principally fear of the Red Army, and of course Great Britain and France had begun to rearm also. Hitler raced along with the others, and not much faster.  In October 1936 he told Goering to prepare the German army for war within four years, though he did not lay down any detailed requirements. In 1938-39, the last peacetime year, Germany spent about 15% of her gross national product. The British proportion was almost exactly the same. German expenditure on armaments was actually cut down after Munich and remained at this lower level, so that British production of airplanes, for example, was way ahead of the German by 1940. When the wat broke out in 1939, Germany had 1450 modern fighter planes and 800 bombers’ Great Britain and France had 950 fighters and 1300 bombers. The Germans had 3500 tanks, Great Britain and France had 3850. In each case Allied intelligence estimated German strength at more than twice the true figure. As usual, Hitler was thought to have planned and prepared for a great war. In fact, he had not.

It may be objected that these figures are irrelevant. Whatever the deficiencies of German armaments on paper, Hitler won a war against two European Great Powers when the test came.  However, though Hitler won, he won by mistake – a mistake he shared. Of course the Germans were confident that they could defeat Poland if they were left undisturbed in the west. Here Hitler’s judgment that the French could do nothing proved more accurate than the apprehensions of the German generals. But he had no idea that he could knock France out of the war when he invaded Belgium and Holland on 10 May 1940. This was a defensive move: to secure the Ruhr from Allied invasion. The conquest of France was an unforeseen bonus. Even after this Hitler did not prepare for a great war. He imagined he could defeat Soviet Russia without serious effort as he had defeated France. German production of armaments was not reduced merely during the winter of 1940-41; it was reduced still more in the autumn of 1941 when the war against Russia had already begun. No serious change took place after the initial setback in Russia nor even after the catastrophe at Stalingrad. Germany remained with ‘a peace-like war economy” Only British bombing attacks on German cities stimulated Hitler and the Germans to take war seriously. German war production reached its height just when Allied bombing did: in July 1944. From the first to last, ingenuity, not military strength, was Hitler’s secret of success. He was done for when military strength became decisive, as he had always know he would be.

 

Introduction to the Mind of Stendhal by Clifton Fadiman

 

To begin with, that was not his name, Stendhal being merely the most publicly acknowledged of the 171 pseudonyms he used for purposes of largely unnecessary deception.

This odd creature – he was christened Marie-Henri Beyle – led two simultaneous lives: one chronological, one posthumous. The seeming paradox is characteristic of him in general.

Stendhal’s chronological existence extended from 1783, when he was born in Grenoble, to 1842, when he died in Paris. We know a great deal about him, for he set down his thoughts and actions in exhaustive detail, scribbling on his fingernails when paper was unavailable. The record is interesting but hardly spectacular: Hollywood will never base a film on his life.

His outward career may be described as a succession of almosts. A fairly good mathematician, he almost entered the Ecole Polytechnique but found the preparation for the entrance examination too troublesome. Through his influential cousin Pierre Daru ( whose wife he seduced, almost) he obtained a commission in Napoleon’s army. During the second Italian campaign he almost saw combat. Back in Paris, living on money from his hated father, he almost wrote several plays. In Marseilles he almost became a businessman. During the Russian campaign, serving as a non –combatant officer, he almost succeeded in mildly distinguishing himself.

From 1814 to 1821 he lived in his beloved Italy but did not quite manage to succeed even as an expatriate. Suspected of liberal tendencies by the Austrian police, he decamped to Paris. In 1830 he was appointed French consul at Civita-Vecchia. This minor post he almost contrived to fill adequately, except during his many periods of leave. (Stendal was a great success at wrangling vacations.) In 1841 he returned to Paris on legitimate sick leave and on March 22, 1842 died of a stroke.

During his lifetime he almost gained a high reputation as a wit, lover, and writer. But not quite. His writing career was managed with almost infallible negligence. He never published anything under his own name; much of his work remained in manuscript at his death; some of it is still unpublished. His many books, articles, compilations netting him hardly a pittance. Today his fame rests largely on his novels, but his first one, Armance, did not appear until he was forty-four; The Red and the Black until he was forty-seven; and The Charterhouse of Parma (written in fifty-three days and it shows it) until three years before his death.

Stendhal was a smallest, fattish man, fond of dandical costume, conversation, ladies, and almost-ladies. He pursued his many love affairs as if never quite certain whether he were Casanova making conquests or a psychologist making notes. As Casanova he was not always successful. His diaries record his fiascos with the same detail that others devote to an account of their triumphs. He admired and visited England and in the course of several decades of assiduous study almost succeeded in mastering the language to the degree that a second-year American high school student masters French.

At first glance, then, a rather undistinguished figure, a rather undistinguished life.

But this figure was merely the one presented to the world. This life was merely his chronological life. His real life was posthumous, and a complete triumph. By posthumous I do not mean merely that since his death his reputation has steadily grown, so that today his is one of the half-dozen greatest names in the development of the European novel. I mean that in a real sense he himself live posthumously, that is, in the future. The greater part of his imaginative life was enacted in front of an audience he was never to encounter, those ‘happy few’ of the coming generations for whom he wrote and thought.

The life for which he was unfitted – that of a would-be popular playwright, soldier, businessman, civil servant- he loved unsuccessfully. The life for which he was fitted – that spent grasping the history of his time in terms of the perspective of the future – he lived successfully. Thus Stendhal is something of an oddity. Perhaps part of his fascination for us springs from the fact that he was odd without being minor.

We usually think of a contemplative as one who spends his life in a meditation upon God, Stendhal spent is life, an active and worldly one, in meditation upon men.  He was that rare bird, a lay contemplative. In a period during which all men seemed to be scrabbling for ‘careers’ – that is, money- Stendhal too went through the motions of scrabbing, though he never sought a job if a sinecure was available. Essentially, however, he remained that oddity, an unfixed man, attached only to his own thought. ‘I am but a passenger on this boat,’ he loved to say; and, as his epitaph, suggested Visse, amo, scrisse.[ I have seen, I love, I have written.]

As a young man of twenty-eight he chose nosce te ipsum[ know thy self] as his device; and to know himself was his profession. His whole life resembled one of those Grand Tours taken by the young English milords to acquaint them with human nature. To be ‘an observer of the human heart’ and to portray it was his overarching ambition. One way to portray it, he thought, was through ‘egotism provided it be sincere.’ This is one of the basic principles of Beyist philosophy, if we understand by egotism what is today called introspection. The medium of his egotism was his books. In a sense all of them, even the novels, are part of an interminable, formless diary. Everything he wrote contributed to his self-analysis; he remained throughout his life, as someone has remarked about Henry James, on very good terms with himself. Had he had any religion , his work might have been entitled Spiritual Exercises.

Contemplation plus self-contemplation sum up Stendhal’s real life. Emerson put it this way: ‘Living is what a man thinks about all day.’ Stendhal neither worked nor idled. He thought all day.

He thought almost for thought’s sake. It was for him a metaphysical necessity: ‘If am not clear, my whole universe crumbles into nothingness.’ He believed that the mind could be formed and developed by study and will power. At times he sounds almost  like Dale Carnegie with genius: ‘The Abbe Helie has swift and complete transitions. That’s very good and should be imitated.’ As one would expect, he thought there was a ‘logic of happiness,’ and tried all his life to refine his formulas.

But this was only one side of Stendhal, the part he called ‘logique,’ a word he was fond of intoning with a kind of ecclesiastical preciseness. Stendhal was bipolar: part of him went back to Descartes and the rationality of the Eighteenth Century; part of him had an affinity with the romanticism of the early part of his own century. The interplay of forces between these poles created the tension that made Stendhal an artist as well as an observer; and it is this same interplay that he transfers to the hero of The Red and the Black, who is both an icy intellectual and a furious romantic. In Stendhal the bipolarity extended into almost every field. For example, he thought of himself as a champion of the democratic age to come; yet the whole bias of his temperament is aristocratic: He championed the spontaneity of Shakespeare against the frigidity of Racine; but his psychology, when it is not dazzlingly modern, is far more Racinian than Shakespearean. He combined a passion for exact analysis with a delight in the unexpected – l'imprévu is one of his favorite words.

Volumes have been written about the contradictions in Stendhal’s personality, contradictions which, instead of tearing him apart, generated his whole intellectual life and career. What I here stress is the essential, underlying contradiction, that between what was present-minded in Stendhal, his unusual capacity to enjoy, analyze, and enjoy through analysis his day-today experience; and what was future-minded, his equally unusual capacity to think of himself constantly a citizen of a culture still in time’s womb.

The interesting thing about Stendhal is not that he has been re-discovered by every generation since his death, but that he foresaw that discovery with absolute clairvoyance. He seems to have felt, and not out of the simple vanity that afflicts many unsuccessful scribblers, that he was a writer with a brilliant future. In the 1830s he was already a great novelist, but there were few to recognize the fact. ‘ I shall be understood about 1880,’ he remarked casually, and that turned out to be true. Again he said, ‘I have drawn a lottery ticket whose winning number is: to be read in 1935’; and that has also turned out to be true. This prescience derived not from his espagnolisme, his passionate temperament, but from his logique. He based his claim to the attention of the future not on his sense of the absolute value of his work (as Shakespeare does or Horace), but on his clear insight into the form that future would take, a form for which he knew his special genius had a lively affinity.

Again and again, notably in his diaries, he makes statements about society which he prophesies will be commonplaces ‘in the days to come when my babblings may perhaps be heard.’ His sense of the future was sharpened by his effortless ability to see through his own time. In a way his ‘century in which everything can be bought’ bored him, so that almost in self-defense his active intelligence went to work on the less transparent problems of the future. Like Julien Sorel, he felt deeply at odds with his period. As early as 1803 we find him saying, ‘In the present order of society lofty souls must nearly always be unhappy.’ As a vey young man he had already marked out for himself his non-contemporary role: ‘I must go entirely out of my century and consider myself to be beneath the eyes of the great men of the century of Louis XIV. I must always work for the twentieth century.’

One must however distinguish his outsiderism from the Weltschmerz of Werther and other romantic heroes. It sprang not from a deficiency but from an excess of mind. There is no self-pity in Stendhal. Though he rejected most of the dominant moral and political doctrines of his time, he did not feel aggrieved, much less revengeful. ‘I do not believe that society owes me anything in the least.’ Stendhal would be as scornful of our Welfare State as he was of the bourgeois monarchy of Louis-Philippe. All he really wanted from his time was the leisure and opportunity to study it, and these were granted to him.

His study was unsystematic, for Stendhal’s scholarship was slipshod, and though he possessed a high energy his organizational  abilities were limited. But he had a certain power of divination, difficult to explain; and, by actually rubbing elbows with a great variety of men and women he derived insights often denied to the most profound student of history. Thus in 1826 he was able to quite casually to set  a date for the Italian struggle for unification. He chose 1845, which is near enough. His clairvoyance extended even to relatively trivial matters: ‘What,’ he once speculated, ‘will become of the capital invested in the railroads if a carriage is invented that can run on ordinary roads?’ He doesn’t hedge on his prophesies: in 1813, when Chateaubriand was a much the rage as Faulkner is today, he remarked bluntly, ‘In 1913 people will not longer be concerned with his writings.” Like most of his predictions, that one came true right on time.

Like Tocqueville, he is a Great Ancestor; that is, we are continually tracing back to him the origin, or at least the first energetic formulation, of many of our commonly received ideas and art forms. The psychological novel, for example, can claim a number of rather misty grandfathers, Diderot and Sterne and Richardson among them; but its father, as we shall see when we discuss The Red and the Black, would appear to be Stendhal.

Stendhal’s heroes anticipate Nietzsche’s superman. They anticipate Dostoevsky’s too, even though their struggle is with men, whereas Myshkins and Raskolnikovs engage God.

The idea of therapy by confession is as old a recorded history, but it is developed consciously in Stendhal’s half-absurd, half-brilliant On Love.

In his novels Stendhal lays down the main lines of at least a dozen motifs which have engrossed novelists since his day: the revolt from the village, the struggle against the father, the sense of social inferiority, the position of the intellectual, the declassed man, the realistic description of war, emotional ambivalence, the non-party revolutionary.

His formula – ‘A novel is a mirror carried along a road’- contains the seed of Zola and the naturalistic school. It would be difficult to believe that Flaubert and Proust did not learn from him. Just because he constantly wrote against the grain of the novels of his time, he engendered a thousand novels of a future time. Novels of physical description, costume fiction, the triumphant romances of Scott – these dominated his era. He was bored with them, not necessarily because they were bad ( some were first-rate of their kind) but because he felt in his bones that they had no future. And so it was not until he was forty-four that he started his first novel Armance, anticipating by thirty years the victory ( Flaubert’s’ Madame Bovary) of psychological realism.

A whole book could easily be written about any one of a dozen aspects of Stendhal’s mind, so rich it is, so various, so free. For three reasons I have chosen to stress mainly its future-ranging character. First, it happens to interest me. Second, it is what gives Stendhal his extraordinary  contemporaneity: he is not merely a live classic but, if one ignores the trivial fact that he is dead, a classic of our own day. Third, it is singled out again and again by Stendhal’s peers, by men with minds proportioned to Stendhal’s own mind. It was Nietzsche who called him  ‘that remarkable anticipatory and forerunning man who with Napoleonic tempo traversed his Europe, in fact several centuries of the European soul, as a  . . .discoverer thereof.’ His own contemporary Balzac was one of the few who understood at once what Stendhal was up to  and distinguished him from his rivals as ‘one of the most eminent masters of the literature of ideas.’ And it was Paul Valery who summed it up: ‘We should never be finished with Stendhal. I can think of no greater praise than that.’

Bantam Books 1958
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifton_Fadiman

Clausewitz's Philosophical Roots by Richard Ned Lebow

Clausewitz learned the the fundamentals of grammar, arithmetic and Latin in a provincial municipal school and was later exposed to a more sophisticated curriculum during his three years as a student at the Allgemeine Kriegsschule. In France and Berlin, he read a diverse selection of authors, including Ancillon, Fichte, Gentz, Herder, Kant, Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Johannes von Muller and Rousseau. But above all, Clausewitz read history to augment his personal experience and to discover the underlying dynamics of war.

Clausewitz lived through a particularly turbulent era of German and European history that encompassed the French Revolution, the French and Napoleonic Wars, the industrial revolution, the rise of nationalism and the counter-Enlightenment. The latter is a catchall term for a variety of movements and tendencies, including conservatism, critical philosophy, historicism, idealism, nationalism,  revivalism and holism, that developed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in large part in reaction to the Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment put faith in the power of reason to unlock the secrets of the universe and to deduce from first principles laws and institutions that would allow human beings to achieve their potential in just, ordered and secure societies. Counter-Enlightenment thinkers considered these expectations naïve and dangerous; they saw the world as complex, contradictory, composed of unique social entities and in a state of constant flux. They rejected the Enlightenment conception of a human being as a tabula rasa, and the mere sum of internal and external forces, as well as its emphasis on body over soul, reason over imagination and thought over the senses. They insisted on a holistic understanding that built on these dichotomies, and one, moreover, that recognized individuals and social groups as the source of action motivated by their search for expression and authenticity.

The counter-Enlightenment began in France and gained a wide audience through the writings of Rousseau. It found German spokesman in the 1770s, among them Hamann, Herder, the young Goethe, and Lavater and Moser, the dramatists of Sturm and Drang, and the Schiller of his early plays. The French Revolution of 1789, and Napoleon’s subsequent occupation of many German territories, provoked a widespread reaction to French cultural and political imperialism and to the Enlightenment more generally. In literature this found expression in the early Romanticism ( Fruhromantik) of Novalis ( Friedrich Hardenberg), the Schlegel brothers and Christian Friedrich Tieck, in religion with Friedrich Schliermacher, and in the philosophy of Johann Gottleib Fichte and, later, Georg F. W. Hegel. Clausewitz knew their writings intimately, wrote a letter to Fichte and was personally acquainted with Schlegel, Tieck and Novalis. On more than one occasion he played cards with Hegel at the home of August Heinrich von Fallersleben.

Clausewitz is often described as someone who wholeheartedly embraced the counter-Enlightenment. There are indeed many aspects of his thought that reflect and build upon counter-Enlightenment assumptions, but he owes and equal debt to the Enlightenment. Like Kant, from whom he borrowed heavily, Clausewitz straddled the Enlightenment and the German reaction to it. His life-long ambition to develop a theory of war through the application of reason to history and psychology was a quintessential Enlightenment project. His recognition that such a theory could never reduce war to a science nor guide a commander in an inherently complex and unpredictable world reflected counter-Enlightenment views, as did his emphasis on emotive forces and personality and the ability of genius to make its own rules. But, in a deeper sense, Clausewitz remained faithful to the Enlightenment. He appropriated many concepts from philosophers of the “German Movement,’ but stripped tem of their metaphysical content. He borrowed their tools of inquiry to subject was to a logical analysis, and looked beyond pure reason to a psychology of human beings to find underlying causes for their behavior.

The same duality marked Clausewitz’s political thinking; his un-reflexive nationalism and visceral hatred of France coexisted with his belief that education, economic development and good government could bring about a better world. Clausewitz’s political beliefs evolved more rapidly than his philosophical ones, and he made little effort to reconcile their contradictions. His thoughts about war were more extensive and productive. One of the remarkable features of On War is its largely successful synthesis of assumptions and methods from opposing schools of thought. In this sense too, Clausewitz follows in the footsteps of Thucydides.

Scharnhorst exercised the most direct and decisive influence of Clausewitz’s thinking and writing. He was among the leading Aufklarers [ proponents of the Enlightenment] in the Prussian service. He was born in 1765 to a retired Hanoverian non-commissioned officer and the heiress of a wealthy farmer. He entered the Hanoverian army in 1779, and later taught in a regimental school that he established. In 1782, he founded and edited the first of a series of military periodicals and wrote two widely read ‘how to’ books for officers before leaving his desk job to fight against revolutionary France. In 1801, he entered the Prussian service, and in 1806, he penned a long essay that summarized and extended his thoughts on the study of war.

Scharnhorst’s writings excelled in its detailed reconstruction of historical engagement. He believed that combat experience aside, case studies were the next best way to capture the reality of war. Scharnhorst used his cases to infer ‘correct concepts’ that could order warfare and identify its principle components in a useful way for practitioners. His two books drew extensively on his wartime experience and historical research, but he never succeeded in developing  a general theory of war. His case studies provided good evidence for his critique of mathematical systems to guide the conduct of war developed by Bulow, Dumas, Muller and Jomini.

Peter Paret observes that no military theorist of his time was as conscious as Scharnhorst of the distinction between theory and reality. His lectures at the Allgemaine Kriegsschule paid lip service to the conventional wisdom that good theory and good preparation could eliminate uncertainty and chance, but he did not for a moment believe it. In good sophistic tradition, the examples he used to pepper his lectures encouraged perceptive students to conclude that theory might be more effectively used to recognize and exploit departures from the expected. Clausewitz would develop this concept further, making surprise and chance central, positive features of his theory of war, in contrast to many earlier writers on the subject, who treated the unforeseen as an inconvenience, if the addressed it at all. Scharnhorst taught his students that geometry and trigonometry were useful for sharpening the mind, but that any theoretical understanding of warfare had to be based on history. Good history required access to reliable primary sources. This was another lesson the young Clausewitz assimilated, and many of his early writings were historical case studies. Scharnhorst also open his students’ eyes to the broader political, social and intellectual forces that influenced warfare we and determined its nature in any historical epoch. He taught Clausewitz that the distinguishing feature of the French revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars was the ability, first of France, and then the other European states, to extract greater resources and demand greater sacrifices from their populations. Survival in the modern age demands efficiency in exploiting the physical and social resources at the disposal of the state, and this requires a governing elite open to talent and merit independent of class or religious background.

Clausewitz’s early writings reveal the influence of Scharnorst, but also his ability to transcend the conceptual limitations of his mentor. These works span the years 1803-06, and consist of notes and essays on politics and strategic principles, treatments of the Thirty Years War, the Russo-Turkish War of 1736-39, a longer study of Gustavus Adolphus and a review article of one of Heinrich von Bulow’s many books on the theory of war. Clausewitz reveals an early fascination with power, and qualified acceptance of the rights of states to extend their sway as far as they can. He also emphasizes the interest, indeed the responsibility, of other states to oppose such aggrandizement – especially in the case of France – when it threatens their interest or existence. This principle was so obvious to him that he found it strange that not all statesmen conceived of foreign relations in terms of power. He nevertheless recognized real world constraints on the exercise of power, some of them impose by domestic considerations, and others the result of deliberate and wise moderation by many leaders.

Clausewitz ‘s fascination with power may have come from his reading of Machiavelli or Fredrick the Great, but it was positively Newtonian in conception. He conceived of power in terms of the latter’s Third Law: a body in motion would stay in motion until acted upon by an equal and opposite force. States could be expected to expand their power until checked by an equal and opposite political-military force. This was a law of politics, but, unlike the law of physics, it was tempered in reality by other influences that kept states from expanding as far as their power might allow, and others from checking them as their interests dictated. Paret speculates that it was a short step from Clausewitz’s formulation of power to the conception of war he developed in his mature years: that war in theory led to the extreme through a process of interactive escalation, but was constrained in practice by numerous sources of ‘friction.’ This concept too was borrowed from Newtonian physics.

 

Clausewitz’s early writings alternated between case studies and more theoretical writings, and the two were related. His case studies were theoretically informed, more so than those of his mentor, Scharnhorst. He wrote military history to explore the possibilities and limits of theory, and then refined his nascent concepts in follow-up case studies. It is apparent in retrospect that Clausewitz was trying to discover which aspects of warfare were amenable to theoretical description and which were not, and what else he would need to know to construct a universally valid theory. ‘While history may yield no formulae,’ he concluded, ‘it does provide an exercise for judgment, here as everywhere else.’ There is no evidence that Clausewitz began his research program with this insight in his mind; it seems to have developed in the course of his reading and writing.  It may even represent an unconscious effort to reconcile two distinct and otherwise antagonistic aspects of his intellect: a pragmatic bent that focused his attention on concrete issues and problems, and a desire to step back and understand issues and problems as specific instances of broader classes of phenomena.

Clausewitz’s case studies addressed campaigns, not engagements, and were more analytical than descriptive. His study of Gustavus Adolphus’s campaigns of 1630-32 was the most concrete expression of this approach. He sought to analyze the underlying causes of Swedish strategy during one phase of the Thirty Years War. He ignored the order of battle (the forces a the disposal of the two sides), and gave short shrift to individual engagements, including the Swedish victory at Breitenfeld and the battle of Lutzen in which Gustavus Adolphus lost his life. Clausewitz made clear at the outset his intention to focus on the more important ‘subjective forces,’ which include the commander’s personality, goals, abilities and his own comprehension of them. He produced what can only be escribed as a psychological study of Gustavus Adolphus, and, to a lesser extent, of his Catholic opponents; he treats the war as a clash of wills, made notable by the energy and courage of the adversaries. He concluded that the Thirty Years War lasted so long because the emotions of leaders and peoples had become so deeply engaged that nobody could accept a peace that was in everybody’s interest.

Clausewitz described Gustavus Adolphus as a man of ‘genius,’ a concept he picked up from Kant and would develop further in On War. William Tell, Wallenstein, William of Orange, Fredrick the Great, and above al, Napoleon, qualified as geniuses because they grasped new military possibilities  and changed the nature of warfare by successfully implementing them. Geniuses periodically transformed warfare, and most other social activities, and make a mockery of attempts to create static theoretical systems. The concept of genius was Clausewitz’s first step towards a systematic understanding of change. It was based on his recognition, developed more extensively in On War, that change could be both dramatic and gradual. Gradual change, in the form of improvements in armaments, logistics and tactics, was an ongoing process, the pace of which varied as a function of political organization, technology and battlefield incentives. Dramatic changes were unpredictable in timing and nature, and transformed warfare – and how people thought about warfare – in more fundamental ways. They were somewhat akin to what Thomas Kuhn would later call paradigm shifts.

Clausewitz used the findings of his psychological case studies of Gustavus Adolphus and Fredrick the Great to attack existing military theory, especially the work o Heinrich  Dietrich von Bulow. Bulow maintained that the outcome of military campaigns was determined primarily by the angle formed by two lines drawn between the perimeters of the base of operations and the objective. Victory was assured if commanders situated their base close enough to their objective  and extended their perimeters far enough to that the imaginary lines converged on the objective at an angle of a least 90 degrees. Clausewitz marshalled examples of defeat under these conditions, and of victory in cases where the angle had been less than that prescribed. He attributed both outcomes to the skill of generals ,the élan of their forces and simple good luck.

Bulow’s system reflected an eighteenth-century preference for wars of maneuver over combat, and was ridiculed by Clausewitz who insisted that war is about fighting. Strategy, he wrote, is ‘nothing without battle, for battle is the raw material with which it works, the means it employs.’ The ultimate goal of war was political: ‘to destroy one’s opponent, to terminate his political existence, or to impose conditions on him during peace negotiations.’ Either way, the immediate purpose of war become the destruction of the adversary’s military capability ‘which can be achieved by occupying his territory, depriving him of military supplies, or by destroying his army.’ Clausewitz introduced a further distinction between strategy and tactics: ‘Tactics constitute the theory of the use of armed forces in battle, strategy forms the theory of using battles for the purposes of war.” The distinction between strategy and tactics would become essential components in his later theory of war.

Bulow and Jomini built their systems around the order of battle and relative positioning of deployed forces because they were amenable to quantitative measurement. They considered quantification an essential step in transforming strategy into military science. Clausewitz insisted that science requires propositions that can be validated empirically, and was struck by how uninterested the leading military theorists of his day were in using historical, or any other kind of, evidence for this purpose. Like Scharnhorst, Clausewitz thought the study of strategy should begin with history, not with mathematics. It had to be rooted in psychology because the motives and means of war were determined by political considerations, and ultimately by intelligence, imagination And emotions. The study of strategy had ‘to move away from the tendency to rationalize to the neglected riches of the emotions and the imagination.’ It had to find a systematic way of bringing these more tangible but critical considerations into the picture, while at the same time recognizing that chance, by its very nature, would always defy conceptualization and confound prediction.  .  .  .

Clausewitz began from the assumption that social and physical phenomena were fundamentally different. The theory of physics was possible because objects are acted upon. Social actors, by contrast, are independent agents with free will, subjective understandings and independent goals, who act upon each other and their environment. Their behavior varied within and across cultures and over time; human nature might be universal but its expression was constantly in flux, Generalizations about war were also of limited utility because the outcomes of battles and campaigns were significantly influenced by ‘the courage of the commander, his self-confidence, and the effect of moral qualities. These critical but intangible qualities, and the ever-present role of chance, made a mockery of attempt to treat political or military behavior as a predictable, mechanistic exercise.


In keeping with the counter-Enlightenment emphasis on holism, Clausewitz maintained that free will was responsible for a second important distinction between the study of the physical and social worlds. In physics, he noted, it is possible to isolate and study part of the system and ignore the rest. But human action is an expression of the whole person, and is almost certain to be influenced by aspects of life different from the domain under study. Modern war is an expression of the entire society, an activity which reflects its values, and calls for contributions of one kind of another from most of its members. Unlike mathematics, it  cannot be studied apart from these disparate but critical influences. Even if generalizations were possible, they would be short-lived because of the constant evolution of warfare. So-called ‘laws’ that appear to account for eighteenth-century warfare were inapplicable to the Napoleonic period. It would be just as mistaken, Clausewitz insisted, to generalize on the basis of the Napoleonic experience because the future would assuredly different. History was the key to knowledge, but understanding of the past could not be used to predict the future. Change would come gradually, or dramatically, when men of genius exploited new possibilities.

Clausewitz was equally hostile to the opposite view, expressed most forcefully by Georg Heinrich von Berenhorst, that modern warfare  was beyond the realm of rational analysis because it was a manifestation of unknown and uncontrollable spiritual qualities that found expression through will and emotion, Clausewitz sought a middle ground, and gradually came to understand war as something which straddled science and art.

‘Rather than comparing it to art, we could more accurately compare it to commerce . . . and it is still closer to politics, which in turn may be considered as a kind of commerce on a larger scale. Politics, moreover, is the womb in which war develops – where its outlines already exist in their hidden rudimentary form, like the characteristics of living creatures in their embryos.’

Within these limits theory was possible, but not the kind of predictive theory sought by so many of Clausewitz’s contemporaries. The proper goal of social theory was to structure reality and make it more comprehensible by describing the relationship between the parts and the whole. Theory could provide the starting point for working through a problem and standards for evaluation. Theory in art, architecture or medicine – the models Clausewitz had in mind- helped to conceptualize problems, but offered little guidance in practice. An architect would learn a lot from studying the form and function of existing structure, but such knowledge would not enable him to design his own buildings. According to Clausewitz, ‘Theory is meant to educate the mind of the future commander, or, more accurately, to guide him in his self-education, not to accompany him to the battlefield, just as a wise teacher guides and stimulates a young man’s intellectual development but is careful  not to lead him by hand for the rest of his life.

From Galileo, Descartes and Newton, Enlightenment philosophers like Hume borrowed the concept of general laws that could explain concrete instances. The cause of an event was neither its purpose nor its original cause, but its immediate or ‘efficient’ cause- the event prior in time that was responsible for bringing it about. This conception encouraged quantification and the belief that everything could be described by general laws and efficient causes. To impose limits on this process would defy reason. The new physics, accordingly, encouraged the belief that everything as knowable and could be reduced to a set of mathematical laws. If al phenomena were material, there was no room for the independent mind and no foundation for ethics. The mind was either a machine or a ghost. German idealism was a reaction against both the skepticism and materialism of the Enlightenment, and an effort to reassert the centrality of human beings in the overall scheme of things. Kant’s transcendentalism sought to show that there is more to human beings that can be discovered by observation and introspection. To understand what we must be like to have the experiences we have, we must work back from experience to the structure and overall unity of the subject. The world of the subject is distinct from the external world, and motivated by will. Human beings are free  in the most radical sense; they are self-determining, not as natural beings, but through their pure, moral wills.

Radical freedom could only be achieved at the expense of man’s unity with nature. Kant introduced a division between man and nature, different from, but at least as great, as the dualism brought about by the Enlightenment from which he thought to escape. His successors, the generation of the 1790s, sought desperately to overcome this dualism while preserving the radical freedom and the potential they perceived it had to ring about spiritual transformation. They were reacting, as writers and philosophers almost always do, to external developments, and most specifically, the French Revolution. They hoped that Germany could be the midwife of a spiritual revolution that would succeed where the political revolution had failed. The revolution would pave the way for the reintegration of man and nature, and encourage the kind of creative expressiveness that had not been witnessed since fifth-century Athens. The Greeks, Schiller wrote, ‘are what we were, they are what we shall become again. Various systems towards this end were developed by Fichte, Schlegel, Schleiermacher, Schelling and Hegel.

Clausewitz was familiar with this literature, and shared the political-ethical ideals that motivated its authors. He was particularly drawn to Johann Gottlieb Fichte, because of his belief that citizens had responsibilities to society and the state which they had to fulfill in accord with their own understanding and ability. Clausewitz wrote a warm and complimentary letter to Fichte in response to an essay he published on Machiavelli in 1807. Clausewitz was not a philosopher, and made no systematic effort  to address or resolve the dualism introduced by Kant. On War can nevertheless be read as an attempt to show how this might be done in a practical, limited way in one important social domain. Its underlying conception is very close to Fichte’s ‘philosophy of striving, which assumes a self-positing and absolute ego that creates all nature, but has no physical form. The finite ego strives to attain an idea or a goal by shaping nature in accord with its rational demands. It must strive endlessly to control nature, a goal it approximates but never achieves because of the resistance nature offers. Dualism is nevertheless partially resolved because the subject gains limited control over nature. For Clausewitz, the soldier-statesman strives to impose his will on nature by making war a rational expression of his goals. But nature, in the form of ‘friction,’ resists that control, and does so in proportion to the degree that rational control is sought. The best a soldier-statesman can do is to approximate effective control, and, by doing so, create a synthesis in the form of a self-willed, enlightened but uneasy accommodation with nature.

pages 176-186