The biography of Josef Fouché by Stefan Zweig that is noted below is one of the most compelling books I have ever read.  It is a model of biography – there is hardly one citation, much less a footnote.  It reads like a play that is a page turner.  And the characters are hugely larger than life – apart from the subject you have Robespierre, Talleyrand, and Napoleon.  A squad that would make a bloody taipan blanch.

The book reminds me so much of the biography of Disraeli by André Maurois.  Like Zweig, Maurois believed that biography is an art form.  ‘The search for historical truth is the work of the scholar; the search for the expression of personality is rather the work of the artist.’  Thank heaven for both of them.

If you read the note below, you will find this extract, which is just one of so many that leads to a sense of déjà vu that runs through the whole book and brings to mind the current travails, if not collapse, of the United States.

By the inexorable law of gravity, each execution dragged others in its train.  Those who had begun the game with no more than ferocious mouthings, now tried to surpass one another in bloody deeds.  Not from frenzied passion and still less from stern resolution were so many victims sacrificed.  Irresolution, rather, was at work; the irresolution of politicians who lacked courage to withstand the mob.  In the last analysis, cowardice was to blame.  For, alas, history is not only (as we are so often told) the history of human courage, but also the history of human faintheartedness; and politics is not (as politicians would fain have us believe) the guidance of public opinion, but a servile bowing of the knee by the so-called leaders before the demons they have themselves created.

Elsewhere, this author says Fouché had ‘a contempt for mankind’ and that the most characteristic part of his make-up was his ‘effrontery’.

He is indifferent to what his former associates may think of him or say about him; he cares not a jot for public opinion.  His only concern is to be on the winning side.  In the suddenness of his changes of front, in the infinite modifications of role, he displays an impudence which stuns us, as it were, and arouses involuntary admiration.  [Richard III?] ……He does not steadfastly pursue an idea, but marches with the times, and the swifter their march, the more quickly must he walk to keep up with them.

Compare the breathtaking effrontery of Vance in Munich or Trump on extinguishing territories he has no time for or need of.

Robespierre’s tenacity of purpose was his finest quality, but also his greatest weakness.  For, intoxicated by the sense of his own incorruptibility and clad as he was in an armour of stubborn dogmatism, he considered that divergences of opinion were treasonable, and with the cold cruelty of a grand inquisitor [compare El Greco and Dostoevsky] he was ready to regard as heretics all those who differed from him and send them to a heretic’s doom……The lack of communicable warmth, of contagious humanity, deprived his actions of procreative energy.  His strength lay exclusively in his stubbornness; his power in his unyielding severity.  His dictatorship had become for him the entire substance and all-engrossing form of his life.  Unless he could stamp his own ego on the revolution, that ego would be shattered.

The ego of Trump or Vance may not allow for such conviction, but Elon Musk is in a different category – invincibly heartless and showing a contempt for mankind.  This portrait savors more of Lenin – and the mass murderer who followed him.

Ironically enough, when Napoleon took over by an armed coup, Fouché, as Minister for Police, put out a lying statement that Napoleon ‘had narrowly missed becoming the victim of an assassin’s blow.  But the genius of the Republic saved the General.’  Well, at least the French were past thanking God for saving their savior.

It is worth reading the book again and again for the comparisons of Fouché and Talleyrand.  (You will get a similar picture in Duff Cooper’s Talleyrand, but without the brushwork.)

Both are sober-minded realists, lucid thinkers, cynics, and whole-hearted disciples of Machiavelli.  They were both schooled in the church and subsequently annealed in the fires of the revolution; they are characterized by the same cold-blooded unscrupulousness in matters of money and honour; and both of them serve with the same conscienceless disloyalty……and just because they are of the same spiritual caliber and because kindred diplomatic roles are assigned to them, they hate one another with the clear-sighted coolness and pertinacity of rivals who know one another through and through.  Both of them are of a perfectly amoral type, and this accounts for their lightness of character, whereas the differences between them depend upon differences in origin…..Talleyrand finds the game of diplomacy an agreeable and stimulating past-time; but he detests work….he will not weary himself with the labour of investigation, being satisfied with the intuition which enables him at lightning speed to effect a comprehensive survey of the most involved situations…..His specialties are bold changes of front, swift flashes of insight, supple expedients in moments of danger; and he contemptuously leaves to others the detail work, the grunting and sweating under heavy loads, the heat and burden of the day……No playwright could have invented two such perfect counterparts…as history has staged for us in the slothful and brilliant extemporizer Talleyrand and the argus-eyed unsleeping calculator Fouché – has staged beside Napoleon, besides the all round genius who combines the talents of both, wide range of view and insight into details near at had , aquiline passion and ant-like industry, world-knowledge and world-vision.

Well – they don’t write books like that anymore.  And don’t worry – Zweig traces Napoleon’s addiction to la guerre éternelle to his succumbing to his own ‘great man’ theory – a failure sadly picked up by certain recent British historians who should know better. 

Millions upon millions of people died for that ego of Napoleon.  The German people do not succumb to Romance in the face of such carnage.  You will never see a tourist site in Berlin of Hitler’s tomb.  And when lecturing the Germans and other Europeans upon history, Mr Vance may have forgotten that he had compared his current leader – he is flexible – to Adolf Hitler.  Not many people who are being bayoneted or raped pause to inquire of the ideological drivers of their assailant.

Somehow, I find some comfort in these reflections when I look at the ratbag motley in Washington that is dragging down the U S.  The proper word for these populists is vulgar, a word lovingly bestowed on us by the Romans. 

For that I will be accused of snobbery – or, worse, that weasel term elitism.  Well, critics of the populists of last century were not so dismissed.  Perhaps I may be allowed to cite views I expressed on these elsewhere.

The Germans cannot be heard to say that they had not been warned precisely of the terrors and moral horrors that would come with Hitler.  They cannot be heard to say that they did not know he was intent on annihilating both the Russians and the Jews.  It was all there in chapter and verse in Mein Kampf.  But, while Hitler was getting results, decent Germans, or enough of them, were prepared to look the other way.  For whatever reason, the Germans did not take Mein Kampf seriously.  For probably similar reasons, Europe chose not to take Keynes seriously, although the forecasts of both Keynes and Hitler were all ruinously fulfilled.

The failure of decent, sane people in Europe to respond to dictators like Mussolini, Hitler or Franco in a way that we would regard now as sensible or responsible is uncomfortably reflected in the fact that the pope, a guardian of the religion of the West, found a way to come to terms and live with each of those dictators through deals called Concordats.  Each dictator – and only Franco had any sort of religion and anything but contempt for Christ – regarded his deal with the pope as an essential plank in his political platform.

The failure of educated Germans to deal with Hitler led to a kind of national nervous breakdown that was summed up by Sebastian Haffner, who was a law student in Berlin when the Brownshirts evicted the Jews from the law library, in the terms that we have seen.

What might be described as the failure of the better people of Italy has been described by a biographer of Mussolini in terms that could be transposed word for word to the Germans and Hitler.

‘Mussolini still needed their [the moderates’] help, for most of the liberal parliamentarians would look to them for a lead.  He also took careful note that chaos had been caused in Russia when representatives of the old order were defenestrated en masse during the revolution: fascism could hardly have survived if the police, the magistrates, the army leaders and the civil service had not continued to work just as before, and the complicity of these older politicians was eagerly sought and helped to preserve the important illusion that nothing had changed.

The liberals failed to use the leverage afforded by his need for their approbation.  Most of them saw some good in fascism as a way of defending social order and thought Italians too intelligent and civilised to permit the establishment of a complete dictatorship.  Above all, there was the very persuasive argument that the only alternative was to return to the anarchy and parliamentary stalemate they remembered…. Mussolini had convincingly proved that he was the most effective politician of them all: he alone could have asked parliament for full powers and been given what he asked; he alone provided a defence against, and an alternative to, socialism.  And of course, the old parliamentarians still hoped to capture and absorb him into their own system in the long run; their optimism was encouraged by the fact that his fascist collaborators were so second-rate.’ 

Does that not seem to be word for word a correct rendition of how decent Germans probably reacted to Hitler?  Still today you will find Christian apologists for Franco, and not just in Spain, who say that his fascism was preferable to republican socialism.  Mussolini had the other advantage that for reasons we now regard as obvious, no one outside Italy could take Mussolini seriously.  As his biographer reminds us, Mussolini was, rather like Berlusconi, seen as an ‘absurd little man’, a ‘second-rate cinema actor and someone who could not continue in power for long’, a ‘César de carnaval’, a ‘braggart and an actor’, and possibly ‘slightly off his head.’  Churchill always took Hitler seriously; he could never do that with that Italian buffoon.  The Fuhrer would betray his nation and kill himself and his mistress; the Italians would revolt from and then murder their Duce and his mistress, and hang them upside down in public.  (The Italians have never had any idea of political stability or succession.)

Once war was declared, the German people felt an overwhelming need to support their fighting men and their Fatherland.

For whatever reason, the middle classes and those above them in Germany, Italy or Spain, and the popes, did not realise that they had a tiger by the tail with Hitler, Mussolini, or Franco until it was far, far too late.

Well, that brings me back to the book of Stefan Zweig.  The U S never adopted the Westminster system after 1776, and many of the problems it faces now can be traced to that decision.  (The other big difference is slavery.)  Those of us who still affect to follow it are struggling with a descent into mediocrity, but we have nothing like the problems that Americans have with medicare, guns, ideology, race, and corrupted religion – and now a full-on assault on the rule of law. 

And I have never heard of a dying man walking into a hospital and saying: ‘In the name of God, don’t give me one of your best surgeons – the elite – any mediocre guy will do.  I supported the Red Guards when they took over maternity wards, and I think the press has been most unkind to them since.’

These are very troubled times and we need the insights of great minds like Stefan Zweig to see through the fire, the smoke, and the mist.

One thing is clear.  If Americans believe that Trump, Musk, Vance and others are in there for ordinary Americans, they believe in Santa Claus and fairies at the bottom of the garden.  They will get the government they asked for and deserve.  That is no comfort for people in Gaza or the Ukraine, or those who once looked up to the United States before it fell.

THE PORTRAIT OF A POLITICIAN

Joseph Fouché

Viking Press, 1930; translated by Eden and Cedar Paul.  Rebound in quarter in burgundy quarter leather with blue labels and boards

This is the life of Fouché, a terrorist in the Revolution, who survived Robespierre and then Napoleon – a cold blooded killer who became the ultimate survivor.

Some politicians get by with luck and grit, and not a lot more.  Perhaps that is all that it takes for most of them – as it tends to be for the rest of us.  One such politician was Joseph Fouché who was active during the French Revolution and who, as the Duke of Otranto, was Minister of Police for the Emperor Napoleon. 

Fouché was the ultimate survivor.  The Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, who was an immensely popular novelist in the 1930’s, called Fouché ‘the most perfect Machiavel of modern times’ – ‘a leader of every party in turn and unique in surviving the destruction of them all.’.  Here was a ‘man of the same skin and hair who was in 1790 a priestly schoolmaster, and by 1792 already a plunderer of the Church; was in 1793 a communist, five years later a multimillionaire and ten years after that the Duke of Otranto.’  Fouché therefore was not just a survivor – he was a winner.

In introducing his book about ‘this thoroughly amoral personality’, Joseph Fouché, The Portrait of a Politician, Stefan Zweig said this:

Alike in 1914 and 1918 [the book was written in 1929] we learned to our cost that the issues of the war and the peace, issues of far-reaching historical significance, were not the outcome of a high sense of intelligence and exceptional responsibility, but were determined by obscure individuals of questionable character and endowed with little understanding.  Again and again since then it has become apparent that in the equivocal and often rascally game of politics, to which with touching faith the nations continue to entrust their children and their future, the winners are not men of wide moral grasp and firm conviction, but those professional gamesters whom we style diplomatists – glib talkers with light fingers and a cold heart.

Those observations have the timelessness of truth. 

Joseph Fouché was born in the seaport town of Nantes to a seafaring mercantile family.  The great places were reserved for the nobility, so Joseph went into the Church.  He went to the Oratorians who were in charge of Catholic education after the expulsion of the Jesuits.  He becomes a tonsured teacher, not a priest.  ‘Not even to God, let alone to men, will Joseph Fouché give a pledge of lifelong fidelity.’  Three of the most powerful French political thinkers then – Talleyrand, Sieyès, and Fouché – come from an institution that the Revolution will be bent on destroying, the Church. 

Joseph became friendly with a young lawyer named Robespierre.  There was even talk that he might marry Robespierre’s sister, and when the young Maximilien was elected to the Estates General at Versailles, it was Joseph who lent him the money for a new suit of clothes. 

Fouché is always cool and under control.  He has no vices and he is a loyal husband, but he will be an ‘inexorable puritan’ and invincibly cold blooded, at his best working in the shadows as an unseen second to the limelighters.  He prefers the reality of power to its insignia, but with ‘his resolute freedom from convictions’, he is quite capable of repudiating a leader who has gone too far.  ‘He knows that a revolution never bestows its fruits on those who begin it, but only on those who bring it to an end and are therefore in a position to seize the booty.’

The çi devant Oratorian declares war on the Church ‘to substitute the worship of the Republic and of morality for that of ancient superstitions.’  This is the phase of dechristianization, far, far more brutal than the Reformation in England.

But we also speak of the Terror that leads Stefan Zweig to this most remarkable judgment, which still speaks so clearly to us at a time of a collapse in public life.

By the inexorable law of gravity, each execution dragged others in its train.  Those who had begun the game with no more than ferocious mouthings, now tried to surpass one another in bloody deeds.  Not from frenzied passion and still less from stern resolution were so many victims sacrificed.  Irresolution, rather, was at work; the irresolution of politicians who lacked courage to withstand the mob.  In the last analysis, cowardice was to blame.  For, alas, history is not only (as we are so often told) the history of human courage, but also the history of human faintheartedness; and politics is not (as politicians would fain have us believe) the guidance of public opinion, but a servile bowing of the knee by the so-called leaders before the demons they have themselves created……the moderates know that at this juncture, moderation needs a thousand times as much courage as ostensible resolution.

With those words, which reek of Thucydides, Stefan Zweig justified not only this whole book, but his whole life.  The words ‘the irresolution of politicians who lacked courage to withstand the mob’ should be put up in neon lights in every parliamentary and government office, and in the booth of every shock jock, poll taker, and sound-bite grabber, and that of any other predatory bludger, urger, or racecourse tout.

The depravity is described by Zweig in these terms:

Early that morning sixty young fellows are taken out of prison and fettered together in couples.  Since, as Fouché puts it, the guillotine works ‘too slowly’, they are taken to the plain of Brotteaux, on the other side of the Rhone.  Two parallel trenches, hastily dug to receive their corpses, show the victims what is to be their fate, and the cannon ranged ten paces away indicate the manner of their execution.  The defenceless creatures are huddled and bound together into a screaming, trembling, raging, and vainly resisting mass of human despair.  A word of command and the guns loaded with slugs are ‘fired into the brown’.  The range is murderously close and yet the first volley does not finish them off.  Some have only had an arm or leg blown away; others have had their bellies torn open but are still alive; a few, as luck would have it, are uninjured.  But while blood is making runnels of itself down into the trenches, at a second order, cavalrymen armed with sabres and pistols fling themselves on those who are yet alive, slashing into and firing into this helpless heard, of groaning, twitching and yelling fellow mortals until the last raucous voice is hushed.  As a reward for their ghastly work, the butchers are then allowed to strip clothing and shoes from the sixty warm bodies before these are cast naked into the fosses which await them.

All this was done in front of a crowd of appreciative onlookers.  The next batch was enlarged to two hundred ‘head of cattle marched to the slaughter’ and this time the avengers of the nation dispensed with the graves.  The corpses were thrown into the Rhone as a lesson to the folks downstream. 

There, surely, you have a preview of all the madness and cant that will underlie the evil that befalls mankind in the next century.  And you don’t hear much about it on Bastille Day.

It is hard to imagine our story, for that in part is what it is, being told better than Stefan Zweig tells it in this wonderful book.  The author moves so easily from one graceful insight to the next, and like a true champion he makes it all look so easy and so natural. 

And as our author leaves his subject, he leaves us with the question that Shakespeare leaves to us with various bastards, in the proper sense of that word, and Richard III and Falstaff – why are we so taken with the life and character of such an absolute villain? 

He also leaves us with the same old problem – ‘glib talkers with light fingers and a cold heart.’