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.]

Notes on Charles Péguy by Mathew W. Maguire

 

Born into a provincial family of modest means *, Charles Péguy became an internationally famous intellectual in the years before the Great War; he was killed in that war at the age of forty-one. As a poet, journalist, and philosopher, for generations his writing prompted fascination, awe, fury, scorn, searching criticism, laughter, wonder, little imitation, and no indifference. Among Péguy’s most abiding  enquiries was the question of what it means to be modern . . .

The literary critic, Walter Benjamin, for example,, wrote enthusiastically and at length about Péguy, finding in his work a ‘friendly togetherness’ and a continual dialogue, a sense of touch absent in Proust. Benjamin also claimed admiringly of Péguy’s  politics and life that the phrase ‘the enemy of the laws, indeed, but the friend of the powers that be’ is one that ‘applies least of all the Péguy.’

Benjamin’s friend, the great scholar of Judaism Gershom Scholem, also wrote in high praise of Péguy, defender of the unique and mystical character of Judaism. Near the end of his life, Scholem said that Péguy ‘has incisively understood  the Jewish condition to an extent that has been rarely achieved, and has never been surpassed by non-Jews.’

For the twentieth-century Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, Péguy transcended the characteristically modern tendency to assume a disjunction between the aesthetic and the ethical. The theologian Henri de Lubac wrote that Péguy ‘will save us from Nietzsche,’ because he responded to similar questions and dilemmas in decisively different ways. Following the same path, for the philosopher Charles Taylor, Péguy is a ‘paradigm example of a modern who has found his own path, a new path’, to faith.’

In political life, Péguy long enjoyed a similarly varied and enthusiastic readership. Charles de Gaulle –the single most influential person in 20^th century French politics – acknowledged, ‘No writer marked me as much’ as Péguy. Yet a quite different political figure – the Sengalese intellectual and optician Leopold Senghor – also took inspiration from Péguy for the Negritude literary movement, with its emancipatory hope of bringing together traditional African cultures and modern ones.

Immediately after WWII, Hannah Arendt clarified her disagreements with  Péguy, but she counted him unhesitatingly among the champions of ‘freedom for the people and reason for the mind’ In the same postwar moment, the literary critic Rachel Bespaloff  wrote that  Péguy transformed the language that would later be used by fascists by directing it toward entirely different ends; he ‘had a mind whose rue significance is just beginning to be recognized.’ In a very different way, within the pages of Difference and Repetition, Gilles Deleuze finds in Péguy  an indispensable thinker about time, who evokes the possibilities of repetition other than an assimilable concretion of similitudes and iteration of identity.’

[‘Anxiety’ is for Péguy a human experience, uniquely inflected in Judaism but not a uniquely Jewish one. Man as such is a  ‘Puits d'inquiétude’  (a well of anxiety) as he puts it in one of his most famous lines of verse,  and Jewish anxiety is ‘grafted’ into Christianity  by Jesus.]

                                   _____________________

Péguy is a practitioner of distinctive thinking, and hence he does not fit neatly into our historiographical models. He is not easily collapsed into the standard model of late modern history or the technocratic historicism that accompanies it.

The appeal of shared conceptual preoccupations is not to be foresworn. But it is also not to be taken as self-evidently ‘serious’ in relation to all other forms of knowledge, including consciously embodied ones –particularly in history. Conceived somewhat  differently, it is a good thing that many contemporary histories are suspicious of heroic, promethean subjectivity. But calcified into an ideological commitment to affirm its opposite, this suspicion itself  becomes implausible, and can only sustain itself  by tendentious and preemptory readings, ones determined not to see that distinct and consequential evens of thought and action indeed happen within complex and unique historical moments. This  in turn discloses a striking professional contradiction:  from their graduate student days forward, historians are often evaluated supremely on the basis of their ability to do individually distinctive  and original work, and yet the principle underwriting a great deal of that individually distinctive and original history-writing assumes either that individual singularity and originality do not exist, or that they are historically insignificant.

In Péguy’s days, whatever possibilities scholars like Emile Durkheim saw in primitive  religion, the organic, messy contingency of narrative history, with room for meaningful agency and free will, was for many sociologists no less suspect than mysticism or universal love. For example, the sociologist Francis Simland  took  the pages of Le Revue de synthese historique in 1903 to criticize the practice of history for its failure to consign events and personal agency to is own disciplinary past. For Simland, historians should seek regularities and ‘if possible,  laws’ along with the the other positive sciences.’ Durkheim and other sociologists agreed.

In his essay ‘Historical Method and Social Science’ Simland instructs historians  that, along with sociologists, we are  to ‘clear or minds of these metaphysical relics’ that led them to assume  there are material facts but not social facts. The realm of the objective is that which is ‘independent of our individual spontaneity’ and thus social life can be considered objectively. All sciences are abstractions, but Similand believes that ‘fortunate abstractions’ are those that lead to the establishing of regularities and ultimate laws of natural science or social life. The notion of individual agency as a cause of change was naïve, and itself a late historical product of ‘social development’: the historian should be willing to apply an assertive skepticism (it seems almost an assumption of error) to the testimony of individuals in history trying to explain the reason for their own actions. That is to introduce ‘explanation by final causes,’ which is an illusion not acceptable in the ‘positive sciences’ . . .

Others would make even more expansive claims, as a ‘scientific’ ethos spread in the humanities themselves.

 Throughout higher education and educated commentary, the prestige of natural and social science, and the imitative forms in the humanities, had undergone a meteoric ascent between 1870 and 1900. Altering Péguy’s  term slightly, one could speak of an intellectual coalition –less united than Péguy’s term ‘party,’ more cohesive than a tendency – that had achieved great prominence at the start of the new century.

For all their differences, the member of this coalition conceived time in unwavering linear terms., and history as material, moral, social, and above all scientific progress along that temporal line. It inclined strongly to reject both religious revelation and ‘high’ metaphysics as incredible artifacts of a more primitive past (‘really’ belonging to earlier points along that temporal line),and believed that accompanied by a scholarly affect of of meticulous bourgeois sobriety – adopted by trained specialists engaged in the Cartesian crowd-sourcing of knowledge – a generally positivist notion of science would lead humanity forward. Freedom was not to be found in an affirmation of free will (now understood to be not only inflected or constrained but severely restrained or even determined entirely by either material or social laws); rather it was to be found through a cumulative critique and repudiation of the past and its ‘illusions’ in favor of brain studies and neurology, social fact, mathematically driven economics, history, and literature as scientific disciplines, an so on.

By pursuing these ends, both national and global society would embark upon a course of perpetual reformation, more just, more rational, and faithful to fact. New laws of nature and society- variously of history, technology and money- would be the fundaments of novel and uncompromisingly modern order of things. In particular, with rare exceptions, the thought and culture of all ages prior to the late eighteenth century now serve primarily as raw materials for academic industries of scholarship and science, rather than seeking out the work of a more distant history as a dialogical partner in understanding. In Renan’s radical forms of a ‘future science’, if  human beings must eventually become raw materials in turn- for a science that conquers human nature as the last frontier in the conquest of nature- so be it.

Beyond their stated intellectual ambitions, the members of this broad coalition held very considerable influence over academic appointments, as well as ambitious reforms of French education, from primary school through university. This was especially true of Durkheim and his students. Alongside changes in higher education, reforms in 1902 created a sequence for secondary education. . . .

 

What was clear to Henri Bergson, however, is that the proposed solution on offer from many of contemporaries did not hold: the collapse of conscious experience into material or sociological suppositions no longer appears as a bold extension of scientific reasoning but as the latest error in a long historical procession of errors designed to give human beings power rather than truth.

Péguy started to attend Bergson’s lectures in the late 1890s, and was quickly a fascinated student, with evident sympathy for Bergson’s conceiving human being as something other than a material, positive, socially, or physically quantifiable thing. Bergson’s psychology appears first in Péguy as a critical foil for Zola’s psychological associationism, in which ideas are connected to one another in a rote, mechanical fashion reminiscent of positivist psychology. According to Péguy, this positivist psychology is not a natural ally of justice and universal rights: it left Zola’s novels with a complacent anti-Dreyfusard readership dramatically at odds with the political allies he acquired as a result of J’accuse: ‘The circle of those who fought with Zola in the Dreyfus affair had few men in common with the circle of those who usually read Zola.’

Another of Péguy’s  early citations of Bergson also enlists Bergsian philosophy in political arguments. Here observations ‘not unknown to Bergson are made in support of an account of time, memory and history that emphasizes the accumulation of impressions and the living, morphologically vivid, and mobile presence of events in memory. Péguy argues from these remarks that a ‘true internationalism’ should ‘enlarge upon nationalism and the history that sustains it, rather than aspiring to an internationalism that rejects national and local attachments. ’In these early articles, Péguy expressed one of his most sustained convictions: victories for universal justice are only possible if substantial portions of different pasts are received and reconfigured with a living, integrative  openness.

Yet, even as he contemplated his utopian city and found in Bergson a critique of mechanical, materialist accounts of human motivation and experience, Péguy has concluded that there were decidedly  practical barriers to the universal emancipation of human beings, perhaps above all the press.. Like many of his contemporaries – real and fictional- he looked to the press as an agent of political and cultural transformation in service of truth. The journal he and his friends would found would start with the premise that ‘the bourgeois spirit is in the midst of destroying everything in France: honesty, the family, France itself. Now there are workers and poor people who are more bourgeois than certain rich people. The press contributes, more than any other power, to the progress of the bourgeois spirit.

The false universality Péguy perceived in the embourgeoisement of society would be a perpetual spur for his thinking. This perception also implied a practical question: How did the press find itself as the principle advocate of a global embourgeoisement, opposed to the universal emancipation of a humanist socialism? The root was the relationship of media to their readers: “At present all newspapers live by their readers, and are slaves to their readers.” Socialism would flourish in a regime of lucidity and honesty; embourgeoisement thrived in a regime of sensationalism and flattery.”

To prevent this ‘enslavement’ to a portion of the reading public, Péguy intended to start a journal by voluntary contributions, one that would allow it to challenge its readers with articles that did not confirm what they had already believed or wanted to hear. Nor would it address the diversions and sundry entertainments of modern life: as Péguy sharply put it : “In the place where newspapers insert racing tips [e.g. for gambling] it would be written: ‘we do not give tips on racing, because those who lose money they are imbeciles, and those who win are thieves.’

It is hard not to smile at Péguy’s tone; so accustomed are we to the ubiquity of entertainment and the ingratiating tone of marketing as the signal tone of efficacy and practical success that the scolding of readers in search of racing tips can seem quaintly severe, much like the monitors of the Lycee Lakanal allowing student bathing only once a month, or perhaps an earnest 19^th century Kantian’s disdain for the blandishments of hypothetical maxims. But there was in this commitment of Péguy’s something that would shape his life, and inspire others.

The daily newspaper is not for Péguy, as it was for Hegel, the daily prayer of the realist; rather, Péguy claims it is ‘the beginning of decreation.’ It gives people ‘ready-made thought’ and with it a ‘ready-made soul’ or a ‘habituated soul’ shaped by both immediacy and seductive topicality of what it reads, and by the selective account of reality within it. Like modern history and modern sociology, journalism works towards a ‘second creation’ that will vindicate a certain construal of the world, even though the world of one’s own stubbornly complex and multidimensional experience does not. For these purposes, media and scholarship describe a constantly renewing cascade of events and experiences from the same metaphysical vantage point- while assuming that metaphysics itself is not ‘relevant’ or otherwise suitable for discussion.

Péguy was convinced that an indispensable claim of metaphysically modern persons was to deny that modernity had a metaphysics: that is, assumptions and convictions in relation to ultimate questions about the nature of being, knowledge, history, goodness, justice, beauty and truth that are not demonstratively certain. Whatever the answer, the responses to these questions transcend the findings of ‘physics’ in the Greek sense and exceed what can be known by inquiry into nature by science. In Péguy’s words, the ‘great cry of the modern world’ is that metaphysics can be dispensed with entirely. ‘What one opposes is metaphysics; what one defends is never metaphysics.’

Once a metaphysics ( including ‘metaphysics’ of modernity) has taken hold of a certain preponderance of influential persons and respected institutions it begins to claim  that its own metaphysical assumptions stand beyond serious question – they become the assumed template for all respectable opinion, with the same claim to consensual assent as replicated scientific findings. It is this which makes them so ‘unbearable.’

Péguy believed that a broad swath of professors in the new research universities, above all the professors associated with the New Sorbonne- including social scientists like Durkheim and Mauss, as ell as historians like Ernst Lavisse, Gustave Lanson, Charles Seignobos, and others – constituted a kind of party, the ‘parti intellectuel’ . They shared what he called the ‘superstition of the modern intellectual party . . . after so many others, before so many others. [That is] that they have said the last word about the history of humanity, that they have put the final period upon the history of human thought which  comes back essentially to this proposition: that man, that humanity can know, achieve, seize or embrace an integral knowledge with an exhaustive grasp of the entire event of reality, of man and of creation.’

For Péguy, late modern history observes the past but will not take the risk of entering into its organic complexity, in part because it presents to human beings their own limits, their own mortality, and their own perpetual incompleteness. Representation confines the real into manipulable, inorganic space: the map is preferred to the territory. Taken to its extreme end, it finally ceases to be ‘objective’; rather, it is ‘not subjective or objective’, it is simply removed from the reality of what it claims to address. History consists essentially in passing along-side the event. Memory consists essentially in being inside the event, in above all not leaving it, remaining there, and in ascending back from within.  The turn towards memory requires participation and vulnerability, and so it is not for those who wish to remain merely secure. ‘To de Péguy scend into one’s self, that is the great  terror of man.’ Memory, in ’s formulation, enters into the past and understands its unique questions and tensions as ones that demand a human response that includes risk, and a patient discernment. It is a multidimensional, exacting, carefully critical  receptivity on the part of the author who recounts and investigates past events.

Yet for  ‘Péguy events’ are not simply historical or present ‘happenings’. Events were the unpredictable, startling transformative developments that altered the horizons of possibility for a person, a people, or history itself – in is in this way that the contemporary philosopher Alain Badiou  thinks of events, with Péguy as forerunner. Nassim Taleb’s ‘Black Swan’ also has some of the connotations Péguy  places on the event that inspires or constitutes transformative happenings in the history of a culture or civilization, including the ultimate meaning and purpose of politics , science, metaphysics, and revelation.

With the turn toward an ‘objective’ understanding of human being, the perpetually  unpredictable quality of the transformative event was no longer a respectable entrant into thought. For Péguy, the event eludes all predictive, putatively ‘scientific’ or ‘realistic’ or comprehensively  ‘contextual’ models of human behavior. It has myriad elations to its own past, but it comes as a shock. ‘What is always most unforeseen, is always the event. (For Péguy , The Christian Incarnation, the French Revolution, and the Dreyfus affair all stand as events.) These transformative discoveries are generally not only unforeseen but unwanted a well: they ‘have almost never been desired by contemporaries.’

The leaders of the intellectual party believed that with modern metaphysics they had found  clear, foreseeable patterns and meanings. They tended  very strongly that human beings can anticipate a final historical judgment –towards universal freedom or equality, or the conquest of nature affected by human beings for themselves. It was and idea for  appears with much greater power in the modern period than in any of its predecessors. It was no longer an eschatological judgment but drawn from history itself, a ‘laicization’ of divine judgment. The future verdict of history is passionately sought, for it has become a substitute for he judgment of God or gods. But for Péguy, this hope of validation from history is founded on the ‘illusion of perspective.’

Many of his contemporaries imagined future persons and generations smiling attentively upon their epoch, or their own lives, or perhaps simply their opinions, and sanctioning their most important decisions in an ongoing future that intimates eternity without taking leave of history. But Péguy observes tartly that futures ( for him there was no singular ‘future’) will have their own constantly changing priorities, as well as their own futures, the futures will doubtless have their own flaws that make their judgments partial and flawed like the judgments of one’s own time: posterity, he says, ‘will have other fish to fry.’ It is also impossible to predict those futures merely by extending the predilections of the present, which is what people living in anticipation of future vindication want and expect, assuming that  ‘posterity’ is like themselves . . .but later.
Yet if one actually believes that the judgment of one’s life will come from posterity’s approval, then one’s expectations of history’s ‘direction’ take on a heretofore inconceivable strength. They become the subject of an almost religious awe and concomitant obedience in return for a purely temporal salvation, bestowed on the elect that were ‘faithful’ to the future (with the definite article) before it had fully realized itself. It is a futile if poignant hope: for Péguy the notion of a single ‘tribunal of history’ or ‘judgement of posterity is quite touching. But the illusion of an extended and continuous vindication in time never becomes real.

 

Above all, modern metaphysics – along with the intellectual party- deployed a ubiquitous if subtle evasion when it wanted,  in Péguy’s formulation, to present its metaphysics as a secure body of knowledge. It aspired to create methods and systems, but these inevitably relied upon an ‘as if’ (Péguy made this claim before the publication of Hans Valhinger’s famous book on the subject). For Péguy the ‘as if’ involved a series of assumptions that animate the discipline or resolve the enquiry that are themselves uncertain, and require some metaphysical decision that is masked as a procedural necessity or a dictate of disinterested reason. For example,, a modern discipline operates on the assumption that human beings are fundamentally motivated by rational self-interest, that religion is supremely or exclusively a social act, that human experience can be satisfactorily quantified, and so on. No  argument  is made; the discipline functions on the grounds that it acts as if these claims were true.

For Péguy, ‘the real absolutely can in no way welcome or accept this as if ‘that represents the forgetting of ‘organic memory’. The ‘as if’ becomes a ‘perpetual miracle’ and ‘monstrous’. It allows a science of human being to exempt itself from reality. For Péguy, human sciences aspire to by-pass lived human experience. Actual experience, he wrote, ‘as it is, as it comes from the womb of nature, earthly experience . . . not at all sanitized . . .one would almost dare say anarchist,’ is set aside for ‘experience as it ought to be . . .washed experience, shaved, clad, dressed, sanitized, presentable. This experience is ‘the sole object of truly scientific knowledge,’ but it can never be more than an incomplete and abstract rendering of reality.’

                 ---------------------------------------------------------

 

*[Péguy  had very modest origins. His father died before his son’s first birthday. He was raised by two women- his mother and grandmother- who earned their living by mending chairs. Both worked harrowing hours: his mother for sixteen hours a day beginning at four in the morning. His grandmother worked alongside her and told  Péguy old peasant stories, folktales among them, including tales of the damned. The vivacity of her telling gave him a lasting memory memory of what she said. Péguy was struck by the fact that he had learned his mother tongue from a peasant grandmother who could neither read nor write. He later wrote of how a past of ‘unlettered souls’ in a culture were like a ‘reserve’, an ‘immense ocean, and a ‘secret treasure.’]

 

The Mani Olive Harvest by Patrick Leigh Fermor

 

‘Where are you off to? Sit down.’ One of the two cheerful old men, who were smoking crosslegged under the branches, patted the ground beside him. Silvery vistas of gnarled and half-hollow olive trees opened fanwise all round them and there was a cicada grinding and scraping on every branch. A donkey under a wooden saddle grazed a little way off, trailing his long rope through the stubble. A wide hat with green muslin sewn to the brim lay beside one of the old men, and a rusty tin smoke-gun, fitted with primitive bellows that beekeepers fuel with dried dung. He was on his way to his beehives: one of those rows of faded blue wooden cubes that one sees high up in the heather in the summer months.

Patrick Leigh Fermor in Flomochori on the Mani peninsula in the 1950s.

When I was beside them on the ground and about to light a Papastratos No. 1, the mule owner said: ‘Put it back, boy. Try one of ours from Kalamata.’ I took a Karelia from his packet. He lit it with flint and steel and a long yellow wick and I lay back in an aromatic cloud. It was a baking day with long needles of sunlight piercing the brittle shade of the leaves. The Deep Mani! It had never seemed hotter.

The beekeeper took a pitcher of water out of a little cave among the roots and passed it. I took a long pull of water from the cool and clammy vessel. ‘There’s nothing worse than thirst,’ he said, putting it back. ‘I’ll never forget when we were fighting the Turks on the river Sangarios, the day we captured the mountain of Çatal Dag – you remember, Petro?’ Petro nodded. ‘The confusion was terrible! Our chaps here, the Turks there, dust and smoke everywhere. Dead men, dead horses, wounded men, everyone covered with dust; caps, helmets, fezes – all lost, everything all over the place and upside down! It was a hot August, just like today. And thirst, po, po, po! Never ask! One of our boys who had lost touch with his company, suddenly spied a spring up the mountainside. He ran and flung himself down and started to drink. Then another one arrived and lay down beside him. They made room for each and went on drinking. When they had drunk their fill they sat up and looked at each other with a sigh of contentment. Suddenly our boy realised that the other was a Turk! Panayia mou! A young infantryman, just like him! And, at the same moment, the other realised he was sitting beside a Greek!’ He paused. ‘Just think! A Romios and a Turk, side by side! And the battle still going on all round them. Cannons! Horses! Flags! Shouting! Sabres! Bayonets! Bugles!’

‘Yes, but what did they do?’ The tension was intolerable. Barba Stavro’s eyes were twinkling in their lined sockets.

‘The whistle of bullets – we still had the old-fashioned single-shot Gra rifles then – orders and counter-orders shouted in both languages ... mortars, shells, explosions! Wounded and dying all over the place.’ He clicked his tongue. ‘War is a terrible thing!’

‘But what did they do, Uncle Stavro? You are torturing us!’

‘Especially with modern weapons, amán! amán!’ He was gazing into the distance, pensively twisting his white moustache with his forefinger. ‘They say the atom bomb – my granddaughter read me all about it, from the Kathimerini – the last atom bomb, I mean, that they exploded at – what’s the place called? Bikini? – in the Pacific Ocean.’

I seized him by the knees. ‘Yes, but what did they do?’

‘Who? Ah yes, our chap and the Turk ... I’m glad you asked ...’ There was a long pause. ‘Well,’ he said, taking pity on us at last, ‘they did exactly what you or I would have done. They jumped up and ran away from each other as fast as they could!’

We all laughed. In Albania, in 1941, I asked an old friend what the retreat in Asia Minor had been like, and without hesitation, he said: ‘Like the retreat of the Grande Armée from Moscow, but with sand instead of snow.’ One catches the atmosphere in a flash. It is from the uncomfortable, the haphazard, the comic, that one learns what things were really like.

I wish Anna Comnena had possessed a single spark of these old men’s spirit. But Byzantine chroniclers lacked this blessing: hieratic formality and a slowly fossilising language stifled it; it was beneath their dignity. If Barba Stavro and Barba Petro had been there in 1259, when the Byzantines beat the Frankish army at the Battle of Pelagonia, it would be more than just a date. They would tell us about a Burgundian baron’s charger casting a shoe, or a squabble between two Thracian archers over a plate of beans, and all would be different. Xenophon had the life-giving gift; so did Makriyannis. These old Maniots idling the morning away with me under the hot leaves had it to a supreme degree. The bell round its neck clanked every time the donkey moved to a new patch of stubble, while we were marching in imagination with the Peloponnese Division all over Asia Minor.

These marvellous old men abound, but they will be getting scarce soon. I mean the ones who, in about 1912, received ten years of wars as a coming-of-age present: unambiguous, self-reliant, upright, humorous and philosophical men; weathered by a thousand hardships, and often illiterate, they are equipped with an intelligence that leaves their native simplicity intact. It was in Crete that I first came across these indestructible old men, with their white moustaches and their clear eyes; and, later on, all over rustic Greece and the islands. They gave one a hint of what Kolokotrones must have been like. Nestor, perhaps.

Until that morning, the Asia Minor campaign, which had ended thirty years earlier, had always seemed as remote as the Anabasis. Now, it might have ended last week. Their reciprocal memories egged each other on: the laundry lost in the Meander river ... the deaf lance-corporal in Ortaca ... Trouble with the town commandant of Süsürlük ... Leave overstayed in Smyrna ... The over-zealous sergeant-major at Ushak and the confusion caused by his orders, given in mangled Katharévousa.

The tale of a calf ‘acquired’ by a hungry platoon before the battle of Afion-Kara Hissar reminded me of another I had heard a couple of weeks before in the Outer Mani; it had been told me by the hero of the anecdote, who had been on sentry duty at night in a trench as a newly arrived recruit in the Halka Bunar line, in front of Smyrna. I repeated the story: how, all of a sudden, through the darkness, he had heard steps drawing closer from the direction of the Turkish front line. Perhaps it was the spearhead of a night attack! (No password! It couldn’t be one of our night patrols. No answer to my challenge; so I fired. Down went the enemy!) Alerted, the whole front stood to arms, fire broke out all along the line and continued till daybreak, when the raider turned out to be a donkey which had strayed between the two armies. (‘I know the man who told you this!’ Petro said. ‘I’m from the Outer Mani too.’) ‘Ever afterwards,’ the storyteller had concluded, ‘the whole regiment used to tease me about being the heroic donkey-slayer.’ I didn’t tell the story very well, but they laughed politely; and as I finished, the donkey grazing nearby let out a series of desolate brays. Barba Stavro put a finger to his lips: ‘Quieter, Mihali,’ he said. ‘He heard you.’

After a moment, Barba Petro went on. ‘Some people think trees can understand what we say. They like company. At least they like being close to human beings.’ It was an interesting idea. I suggested that it might limit conversation: one didn’t want to corrupt our benefactors. ‘They don’t really hear us, of course,’ he went on. ‘It’s because the trees near to a house always do best. It’s probably all the dirty water the women throw out of the doors, and the mules and donkeys tied up under the branches. Chickens, ducks, pigs, it all helps ... And another thing: the trees talk as well as listen!’ He laughed. ‘Do you know what an olive tree says to its master, to help him get a good crop? No? Well, first it says: “When you plough me, you caress me.” Later on in the year it says: ‘When you manure me, you ask me a favour.” But at harvest time it says: “When you prune me, you command me!”’

Throughout this peninsula the olive tree reigns unchallenged. All life revolves round them. They are treated with respect and love: the respect that is accorded to sovereigns and the love that is bestowed on one’s family. Each tree has its personality: every branch and knot and hole is familiar, and to damage one is an unlucky, almost a wicked act; when a plan for the building of a new road or the widening of an old one condemns thousands of them to death, the grief is deep and general. On the eve of such a slaughter I came on a woman wandering among her olives. She had come to say goodbye. ‘They won’t be here tomorrow,’ she said, laying her hand on the rough bark, dry-eyed, but only just. ‘Twenty of them are coming down. I’ve known them since I was a little girl. They were my dowry.’ Next day the destruction began, and on the day after, kilometres of trees lay uprooted to make way for another broad band of asphalt to tear its way through those once silent groves.

I asked my companions how the olives were gathered: did they beat them from the branches with long reeds or poles, as I had seen it done in Crete? They were horrified. Beat them down? Only from the lopped branches on the ground. On the tree itself they were all picked by hand, to avoid bruising the twigs and the shoots: a long task. ‘In some of our Outer Mani villages,’ Barba Petro said, ‘they have started using an instrument like the comb people have for carding wool after the sheep-shearing – it’s just a bit of wood with some nails through it, really, and a handle. It does the work in half the time. You just comb the branches.’

‘Is that so?’ Barba Stavro was as impressed as though he were learned of the discovery of steam power for the first time. When they had discussed it in detail, he turned to me and said: ‘You must come back when they are gathering them. It’s a fine sight.’

Ihave​ seen it now. After the first brief rains a note of preparation runs through the Mani; the whole atmosphere begins to change. The blacksmiths hammer away at the great containers which have replaced the old amphorae, and in the olive presses you hear the first trial thumps of the engines which now do the work of the blindfold circling mules. Spraying has delivered the crop from the onslaught of the dacus fly. But the autumn sky has returned to its summer emptiness: ‘Will God rain on us?’ the question goes up. The clouds which at last assemble along the crests of the Taygetus resemble the sails of a relieving fleet after a long siege. At last the first drops fall on the dust like dark scattered stars that soon join and overflow in puddles. By the time it ends, young grass has sprung up in a haze between the tree trunks; sea-squills expand their dark spikes, cyclamen are sprouting among the rocks; and the branches, which have steadily been losing their angular distortion, droop in semicircular arcs under the weight of their berries, like the trees on a willow pattern plate. All has been washed clean and all that the dust and the distance veiled through the hot months leaps forward in glittering detail. Now and then a light wind travels through those thousands of trunks and lifts the pointed leaves so that the silver undersides flicker and flash in the thin November sunlight as though a shoal of millions and millions of fish, prompted by a subconscious mass decision, were changing direction. The ripple dies down and all is still again.

A few mornings later there are sudden voices among the trees after a whole year of silence and the olive groves fill up with figures and animals. Great rectangles of sacking, helped out by a bright blanket here and there, are spread out under each tree in turn like rafts of colour. Ladders ascend into the boughs, the figures group and regroup, men shout from the branches and the women, standing about or sitting in a ring below, beat the lopped and fallen twigs with sticks. The unflagging swish! swish! swish! is the predominant sound all through the harvest. The olives that patter on the cloth like rain are piled in pyramids; children who are too young to be left alone in the empty village chase each other between the trees; dogs bark, mules nibble the new grass and white goats tear the leaves from the stripped twigs that cover the ground.

The women wear their oldest clothes. They are patched again and again, and except for dark pleats and folds that retain their earliest colours, have been faded by the sun and bleached by a hundred washings to pale harmonious hues. Similar groups are assembled in the great level groves; they are scattered on the ascending ledges of terrace that climb until the last trees disperse among the high rocks like puffs of gunfire. The groups, the colours, especially those on the ledges of the perpendicular mountainside, compose themselves like the biblical scenes frescoed on church walls; almost – with the seated and standing figures, the waiting animals and the criss-cross of ladders – into crucifixions infinitely reproduced, except that all is cheerful here. Then men plying their small curved saws at the top of the ladders engage the women beside and beneath them in banter; flocks of girls perch invisibly in cages of leaves. Their songs drift charmingly along the groves. Loaded with bursting sacks and goaded by the cheerful blasphemies of their drivers, strings of mules labour through the dappled light and shade down the lanes to the olive presses; the throb of their engines has suddenly become the heartbeat of all the villages.

Everything gathers here. Animals stamp and neigh and collide and rear, swift hands disentangle them; strong backs are bent double under the sacks. Greetings are shouted and gossip has to be exchanged in voices of thunder to overcome the din of the engine and the roar of the great turning stones. Each peasant watches his cataract of olives poured into the wooden jaws; and when at last the pale jade-green jet of the first oil gushes from the spout below, he dips into it a piece of bread and munches it, feeling the happiest of mortals.

These are private and local scenes, cut off from the outside world. Everyone who doesn’t belong here has fled long ago, at the same time as the swallows. (Not quite everyone, or these lines would not be being written.) One morning there is a confetti of snow on the high peaks of the Taygetus; in a day or two they are an unbroken white, a dazzling background to the oranges with which the village trees are now heavy. The harvesting goes on through the winter solstice until the cut twigs and branches cover the ground and choke the lanes. The aromatic smell of bonfires drifts through the clipped and lightened branches; plumes of pale smoke ascend into the bright air. At night the stars sparkle like icicle splinters. Then the cypresses shudder in anticipation, and the wind comes and drenching rain. Tremendous waves roar up the inlets like an invasion to boom and echo in the caves with which the whole coast is undermined. The waves soar along the cliffs, opening in fans that cover the headlands and offshore islands with canopies of water and foam, to collapse and fall back with a gasp of pebbles. The onslaught reverberates through towers and archways and rooms like the sound of a battle offstage. Nowhere does one feel more cogently the succession of the seasons and the tilt of the earth’s axis. By now every house has its new oil stored in giant containers; the household is safe for another year. The windowpanes are streaming. The stripped trees stretch their roots through the soaking dark red soil; their torpid subterranean energy will cover the branches again by Easter with millions of pale, minute and star-like flowers.

But a shadow falls over these scenes, a small one during that summer day years ago while Stavro and Petro were talking; longer now. For the flight from the Mani continues, and each year the population that gathered the olives grows less. Sometimes, to replace them, troops of women come down from Western Thessaly, strange and fascinating costumes appear in the lanes, the Karagouni accent is heard, even a phrase or two of Koutzovlach. But they are no solution. The great flocks have already vanished from the high summer pastures of the Taygetus. In the north, the brushwood folds of the Sarakatzans, their customs and costumes, and their conical wigwams – those last surviving symbols, perhaps, of the most ancient Greek way of life in the country – have vanished from the Zagora ranges and the Agrapha, and the bells of their flocks sound fainter and fainter every year. Are the olives of the Mani to follow? Some pessimists think so: ‘Where are the hands to harvest them?’ they ask. Where indeed? Ask in Kalamata and Athens, ask in Essen and Düsseldorf, in Duisburg and Cologne and Friedrichshafen, in Melbourne and Adelaide and Sydney; ask in Toronto and Montreal ...

Will the day come when the best oil on the planet ceases to flow; when the silver cord is loosed, as in the last chapter of Ecclesiastes, and the grinders cease because they are few and the doors shall be shut in the streets?

The best oil on the planet. Stavros and Petro had no doubts about it. We all agreed that Greek olives were the best. I said, ‘What about Amphissa?’ They turned on me with pitying tones. No, no. The Mani was the place. But where in the Mani? ‘Here!’ Stavro said. His forefinger, which was as hard as a goat’s horn and nearly as wrinkled, gave the ground a gnomic tap. Then he gathered his beekeeping gear and got up, stretching himself and yawning. ‘We’ll go home and try some. And swallow an ouzo or two to revive us after our labours.’ We all laughed; we were streaming with sweat, but not from toil. We had lain there talking for more than three hours. Petro collected his mule, which had wandered away some distance.

‘Stavro,’ he said as we set off. ‘Deep Mani olives are good. I’m not saying they’re not. But the best are the ones in the Outer Mani. The whole world knows it. It’s not just because I come from those parts – far from it. But it’s everybody’s opinion.’

‘So be it,’ Stavro said. He gave me a secret dig with his elbow and the ghost of a wink. I asked Petro where the best in the Outer Mani come from. ‘From Liasínova,’ he answered without hesitation. There was a scarcely audible chuckle from Barba Stavro. I asked Petro where he came from. ‘Me? You mean where do I come from?’ Then, in airy tones of slight surprise at the unexpected coincidence, he said: ‘From there. From Liasínova, that’s to say.’

It was a splendid illustration of local prejudice. But now, after many years and mature consideration, I think there was a lot in what he said. Certainly, the best olives in Greece come from the Outer Mani; and definitely from the region of Liasínova. But from Liasínova itself? I think a truly impartial and objective opinion might place the actual pinpoint of unsurpassable excellence a little further down the coast – only three or four kilometres away. More towards Kardamyli, perhaps.

London Review of Books 

Vol. 43 No. 15 · 29 July 2021