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  tends to be the case 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, Sieyes, 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.

When Joseph moves that the Oratorians to express their support for the Third Estate, he is sent back to Nantes. He then becomes political, discards his cassock, and, after marrying the daughter of a wealthy merchant, ‘an ugly girl but handsomely dowered’, he is elected to the revolutionary National Convention in 1792 as the Chairman of the Friends of the Constitution at Nantes.

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.’

Fouché starts up the ladder. He had aligned with the moderates known as the Gironde on the issue of death for the king, but sensing the shift in the breeze, he stabbed them in the back with the words la mort when it came his turn to cast his vote. He acquires huge power as Representative on Mission, a kind of Roman proconsul. He has what we would call a communist social program, especially toward the Church. He issues an utterly chilling instruction: ‘Everything is permissible to those who are working for the revolution; the only danger for the republican is to lag behind the laws of the Republic: one who outstrips them, gets ahead of them; one who seemingly overshoots the aim, has often not yet reached the goal. While there is still anyone unhappy with the world, there are still some steps to take in the racecourse of liberty.’

The ci devant tonsured Oratorian declares war on the Church ‘to substitute the worship of the Republic and of morality for that of ancient superstitions.’ He abolishes celibacy and orders priests to marry or adopt a child within one month. In Moulins, he rides through the town at the head of a procession hammer in hand smashing crosses, crucifixes and other images, the ‘shameful’ tokens of fanaticism. This is the phase of dechristianization, far, far more brutal than the Reformation in England.

But we also speak of the Terror, when an anxious France was guillotining its enemies within, and Robespierre would implement the Law of Suspects. It is the black night of the revolution and it 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.

With those words, 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.

And the Terror was in turn at its worst for those parts of France that had sought to rebel in bloc, like the great city of Lyon, the second of France. The revolt in the west in the Vendee was seen to be Catholic and Royalist; in Lyon, it was a revolt by class and money. The reprisals for each had a manic cruelty and intensity unmatched until the times of Stalin and Hitler. In the Vendee, a man named Carrier was responsible for the infamy of the noyades, when batches of priests were manacled, and placed on barges that were towed in the Loire and then sunk. Fouché executed revolutionary justice at Lyon where the guillotine was thought to be too cumbersome. 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. When the guillotine is again put to work, ‘a couple of women who have pleaded too ardently for the release of their husbands from the bloody assize are by his [Fouché’s] orders bound and placed close to the guillotine.’ Fouché declares: ‘We do not hesitate to declare that we are shedding much unclean blood, but we do so for humane reasons, and because it is our duty.’ Zweig concludes: ‘Sixteen hundred executions within a few weeks show that, for once, Joseph Fouché is speaking the truth.’ That may be so, but the invocation of humanity for this butchery defies all language.

I am relying on a translation (by Eden and Cedar Paul in the 1930 Viking Edition), but Zweig attributes to Fouché what he calls ‘a flamboyant proclamation’;

The representatives of the people will remain inexorable in the fulfilment of the mission that has been entrusted to them. The people has put into their hands the thunderbolts of vengeance, and they will not lay them down until all its enemies have been shattered. They will have courage enough and be energetic enough to make their way through holocausts of conspirators and to march over ruins to ensure the happiness of the nation and effect the regeneration of the world.

There, surely, you have a preview of all the madness and cant that will underlie the evil that befalls mankind in the next century.

Fouché and his accomplice get news that the wind may have changed in Paris and the other is sent back to cover their backs. Fouché now has to deal with Robespierre, ‘that tiger of a man, balancing adroitly as usual between savagery and clemency, swinging like a pendulum now to the Right and now to the Left’, who was unhappy with Fouché for having displaced his own henchman (the crippled lawyer Couthon who had no stomach for the task). Robespierre is the cold lawyer from Arras that we associate with the height of the Terror – and with its end. Zweig says that Robespierre was ‘wrapped in his virtue as if it were a toga’. That about sums it up, but Zweig has a most remarkable passage that includes:

Robespierre’s tenacity of purpose was his finest quality, but it was 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, he was ready to regard as heretics all 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 the all-engrossing form of his life. Unless he could stamp his own ego on the revolution, that ego would be shattered.

That judgment may be too severe for Robespierre, but it looks dead right for Lenin – especially the last, about the insatiable need to stamp his own ego on the revolution. There is the key to the agony of all the Russias.

There followed a duel between Fouché and Robespierre. Fouché ‘had never asked Robespierre’s advice; had never bowed the knee before the sometime friend.’ Robespierre turned on Fouché in the Convention: ‘Tell us, then, who commissioned you to announce to the people that God does not exist, you, who are so devoted to that doctrine?’   Fouché is just one target in a speech that ends in a hurricane of applause. Fouché goes quiet, he goes underground, a he performs the then equivalent of working the phones – and then he surfaces – as the next elected President of the Jacobins Club! This is the rank and file of the ‘party’.

The response had to be nasty, and the next time Robespierre is brutal, with the by then standard allegation of conspiracy. ‘I was at one time in fairly close touch with him because I believed him to be a patriot. If I denounced him here, it was not so much because of his past crimes because he had gone into hiding to commit others, and because I believed him to be the ringleader of the conspiracy which we have to thwart.’ This was vintage Robespierre paranoia and the stakes were terminal. Fouché is expelled from the Jacobins. ‘Now Joseph Fouché is marked for the guillotine as a tree is marked for the axe…..Fifty or sixty deputies who, like Fouché, no longer dare to sleep in their own quarters, bite their lips when Robespierre walks past them; and many are furtively clenching their fists at the very time when they are hailing his speeches with acclamations.’

Robespierre is circling in his sky-blue suit and white silk stockings, and the very air is thick with fear. He gives a three hour harangue, but then declines to give names. ‘Et Fouché?’ gets no answer. Fouché furiously works the numbers: ‘I hear there is a list, and your name is on it.’ ‘Cowardice shrinks and dwindles, and is replaced by desperate courage.’ God rolls the dice, the bunnies become wolves, and Robespierre and his lieutenants are submitted to the blade that they had brought down on so many others.

Here Zweig permits himself a general political observation. He condemns those who overthrew Robespierre for their ‘cowardly and lying attitude’ who ‘to gain their own ends have betrayed the proletarian revolution.’ That is an assessment made in 1929 that many French historians would embrace, and Fouché had tried to get on a populist horse. This time he picked badly, and the new regime had different views about the Terror – and Lyon. Fouché ‘like many animals shams dead that he may not be killed.’ He goes underground for three years living on the breadline. No one mentions his name. As to the proletariat – what a dire and debasing word! – there is not much use crying over spilt milk. Those who are crying wanted the French terrorists to do what Lenin had tried to do, and transfer all power from the king to all those at the bottom inside one generation. It cannot be done. It took the English, who are geniuses at this, seven centuries.

Fouché lies low and poor. The carpet-baggers of the new shop-soiled regime, the Directory then the Consulate, need someone who can work in darkness, a cold-blooded spy, a collector of information on others, a man to hold chits IOU’s and grudges, and someone who can oil the wheels of power and money. Who else? ‘Joseph Fouché has become the ideal man for these sordid negotiations. Poverty has made a clean sweep of his republican convictions, he has hung up his contempt for money to dry in the chimney, and he is so hungry that he can be bought cheaply.’ Is it not remarkable how deathless are all these political insights?

The dark and dangerous mitrailleur of Lyons is back in town – as minister of State, the Minister of Police to the mighty and all-conquering Republic of France! Well, our man ‘has no use for sentimentality, and can whenever he likes, forget his past with formidable speed’. The Jacobins are a shadow of themselves, but they are also beside themselves at this heartless enforcer of tranquillity – who calmly says that there must be an end to inflammatory speeches! In France? In Paris? In 1799?

They have learned little during these years. They threaten the Directory, the Ministers of State, and the constitution with quotations from Plutarch. They behave as rabidly as if Danton and Marat were still alive; as if still, in those brave days of the revolution, they could with the sound of the tocsin summon hundreds of thousands from the faubourgs.

But our man has got his sense of scent back. He knows the public mood. The former president just closes down the Jacobins Club – the next day. People are sick of strife. They want their peace and their money.

Then some people higher up start to fear the information that he gets – on everyone. Knowledge means power, and Fouché has more knowledge than anyone – more even than Napoleon. And people start to notice that his eyes look upwards as well as downwards. Talleyrand, who also stands up to Napoleon and lives to talk about it, and who is another consummate and totally conscienceless puppeteer, says: ‘The Minister of Police is a man who minds his own business – and goes on to mind other people’s.’

But when Napoleon becomes Consul for Life, his family, the biggest weakness of the loyal Corsican, urge him to fire Fouché. Napoleon shifts him sideways, but ‘seldom in the course of history has a minister been dismissed with more honourable and more lucrative tokens of respect than Joseph Fouché.’ It was ever thus.

Fouché goes into retirement again, the polite and thrifty squire with his wife and children who gives a homely entertainment now and then. The neighbours see a good husband and a kind father. But the old campaigner feels the itch. ‘Power is like the Medusa’s head. Whoever has looked on her countenance can no longer turn his face away, but remains for always under her spell. Whoever has once enjoyed the intoxication of holding sway over his fellows can never thenceforward renounce it altogether. Flutter the pages of history in search for examples of the voluntary renouncement of power….Sulla and Charles V are the most famous among the exceptions.’

Napoleon senses the itchiness of Fouché but he does not want to take him back; ‘the argus-eyed unsleeping calculator’ is too dangerous. But then Napoleon errs – he has the Duke of Enghien kidnapped over the border and returned to France to be shot – he passes his grave on the way to his ‘trial.’ This leads Fouché (some say Talleyrand) to make the famous remark: ‘It was worse than a crime it was a blunder.’ Napoleon needs someone to hold the stirrup again, and on his ascension to the purple – he allows the pope to watch him crown himself – Son Excellence Monsieur le Senateur Fouché is appointed Minister by Sa Majeste l’Empereur Napoleon. He will become the Duke of Otranto and while the rest degenerate into ‘flatterers and lickspittles’, the Minister of Police stiffens his back, and minds his own business and that of everyone else.

Fouché is a millionaire many times over, but he lives a frugal almost Spartan life. His image is part of his terrifying power. He and the Emperor are at arms’ length. ‘Filled with secret antipathy, each of them makes use of the other, and they are bound together solely by the attraction between hostile poles.’

The stakes have gone up now. At Marengo in 1800, Napoleon won with thirty thousand men; five years later, he has three hundred thousand behind him; five years later, he is raising a levy of a million soldiers. He will leave five million in their graves. And now Fouché must deal with the political genius of Talleyrand, another of the world’s very greatest survivors. ‘Both of them are of a perfectly amoral type, and this accounts for their likeness in character.’ For a long time tout Paris gazes in a kind of trance at the duel between Fouché and Talleyrand, and, as it happens, both survive Napoleon.

Fouché was either working for Napoleon or plotting against him, or both, even during the Hundred Days leading to Waterloo. In fact, Fouché served as Minister of Police to Talleyrand as Prime Minister after 1815 for Louis XVIII. Since he had voted for the death of that king’s brother, Louis XVI, this might be seen as the masterpiece of his slipperiness or negotiability. He then proceeded to orchestrate a new terror, the White Terror, against the enemies of the Bourbons. This revolted even Talleyrand, and Fouché was shifted again, this time for the last time. He died in his bed in Trieste in 1820.

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? And he also leaves us with the same old problem – glib talkers with light fingers and a cold heart.

Geoffrey Gibson

9 October 2014.

In Victorian England – in 1876 to be more precise – there were shell-bursts of moral outrage against atrocities allegedly committed by a Muslim power. The Ottoman Empire was governed from the Porte, called the Sublime Porte then, and Istanbul now. The Ottoman Empire was the seat of the Islamic Caliphate, so that outrages alleged against it were outrages alleged against the Caliphate. The Ottoman Empire (or Turkey, or the Caliphate, if you prefer) was experiencing revolts on a number of fronts. It then controlled a lot of territory west of Constantinople, that is, in Europe, that was peopled by Slavs. The resulting religious and ethnic tensions have plagued the world ever since. They were central to events leading to the Great War and they are still generating war crimes and genocide up to the turn of the millennium. By and large, the government of Benjamin Disraeli had sought to stay on terms with Turkey as a check on the capacity of Russia to move so as to block trade routes to India and the Pacific. The exercise was tricky because there was no attractive option – there was no nation in the Balkans that the English could decently associate with.

Then news started to reach England of an uprising against the Turks in what we call Bulgaria, and of the most savage reprisals by the Turks. Some historians say that the Turks were more tolerant of other faiths than the Jews or Christians, but the belief east of Vienna back then was that the Turks treated infidels like dogs. Reports reached England of the massacre of 12,000 Bulgarians by the Turks and of outrages against women.

Some crusading editors whipped up a campaign against the Turks – and Disraeli. Then the pious Christian W E Gladstone unleashed himself. This was at a time when the rivalry of Disraeli and Gladstone was already nation-gripping and when politicians were not tied to slogans or labels – it was not enough back then to intone some curse like ‘genocide’ as would be done now. This was a time when oratory was a bigger spectator sport than football.

Let the Turks now carry away their abuses in the only possible manner, namely by carrying off themselves. Their Zaptiehs and their Mudits, their Bimbashis and their Yuzbashis, their Kaimakams, and their Pashas, one and all, bag and baggage, shall I hope clear out from the province they have desolated and profaned. This thorough riddance, this most blessed deliverance, is the only reparation we can make to the memory of those heaps on heaps of dead; to the violated purity alike of matron, maiden, and of child….

The prospect of what we call ‘bashing’ Asian infidels was enough to unhinge the very deliberate Gladstone and send him clean over the top:

There is not a cannibal in the South Sea Islands whose indignation would not arise and overboil at the recital of that which has been done, which has too late been examined, but which remains unavenged: which has left behind all the foul and all the fierce passions that produced it, and which may spring up again in another murderous harvest from the soil, soaked and reeking with blood, and in the air tainted with every imaginable deed of crime and shame….

Would Gladstone or his target audience have got so incandescent if the victims had been Muslims or Jews – did I mention that the victims of these atrocities were Christians?

Disraeli was, as ever, urbane. He said privately that Gladstone’s pious sonorities had a ‘Christian’ aim and were fired in the belief that ‘for ethnological reasons, the Turks as a race should be expelled from Europe.’ Disraeli did, however, permit himself a mild racist jab in saying drily to the Commons that he doubted whether ‘torture had been practised on a great scale among an oriental people who generally terminate their connection with culprits in a more expeditious manner.’ It was, though, a mistake for him to dismiss the claims as ‘coffee-house babble.’ The claims were confirmed, but after a little while, the politicians, the newspapers and their readers found other things to talk about, and a hideous tragedy survives in some history books today only as a footnote on the political styles of Gladstone and Disraeli.

Well, at least they had style then. There is no political style now. The most recent calls to avenge atrocities committed by Muslims have been at best uninspiring. It was, I suppose, inevitable that the West might be called on to help meet the present threat since other interventions by the West are in very large part responsible for the appearance of this threat and the complete want of resistance of Iraq to it. It does look to all the world as if the West is being called on to offer its blood to police a sectarian dispute in another religion, and where the main beneficiaries of the intervention will be Russia, Iran, and Syria. But if it is the case that the West now faces an actual threat coming out Iraq that was not there before 2003, when will we see those responsible for that development brought to answer? Do you remember the purity of the bullshit? About Iraq being a ‘beacon of democracy’? Instead, it is the gateway to Hell. It was, I suppose, only a matter of time before some drone called up not a beacon of democracy but a light on the hill. In the name of God, do they never learn?

We are after all offered only three assurances on this outing. The Americans had to do something. We do not know how it may end, but no one can see a good end. And we do know that it will take a long, long time.

The views of Edith Durham on the Balkans, which she travelled extensively, are better thought of in some places than others, but the following observation made in 1905 does sound just right: ‘When a Muslim kills a Muslim it does not count; when a Christian kills a Muslim, it is a righteous act; when a Christian kills a Christian it is an error of judgment better not talked about; it is only when a Muslim kills a Christian that we arrive at a full-blown atrocity.’

There was no such thing as the French Revolution. Rather, this is a term that we apply to a series of events that saw the French monarchy overthrown, the aristocracy abolished, and the Catholic Church nationalised. Over a period of about six years, three bloody popular insurrections formed a kind of spine of this revolution. They were crowned with a period of cruel and arbitrary terror. The policy of the Terror was to terrify enemies of the state into submission or death. Its principal instrument of the terrorists was a public decapitation after a mockery of a trial. There followed some years of reaction before the general unease and fear of anarchy gave way to the inevitable strong ruler. Unfortunately, at least for Europe, that man was a Corsican of military genius whose wars of aggression would cost Europe many millions of lives before his final defeat at Waterloo in 1815, about a quarter of a century after the start of ‘the Revolution.’

Most histories of the French Revolution stop with the end of the Terror or with the rise of Napoleon, but if the issue is when, after the initial explosion of 1789, did France achieve a settled constitution, the answer is about a hundred years. People forget the frightful bloody convulsions and violent insurrections that France had to endure the century after the fall of the Bastille.

Those who welcomed what was called the Arab Spring also forgot this in their naive enthusiasm for what looked to be breakthroughs for liberty and equality. They forgot that the English had gone through their revolutions in the seventeenth century and then patiently worked their way toward democracy and the Welfare State in the twentieth century. They forgot that the frightful violence of the civil war in the American Revolution obscures our view of the one original sin of the Declaration of Independence – that all men are equal. That sin would only be in part expiated by a further civil war eighty years later, and the United States is still coming to grips with the enduring inequality and race hate left by slavery. They forgot that the Russian Revolution happened in 1917, and that after about eighty years of murderous misery under Communism, the Russians are still trying to find their way out of a moral and political black hole under a former Secret Police agent who feels fondly about the worst butcher that the world has ever known.

The French national day is 14 July. It was that day in 1789 that saw the bloody insurrection that we see as the beginning of ‘the Revolution.’ That was the day that the Bastille fell after a siege. During that siege, the mob got hold of a beautiful young woman falsely thought to be the daughter of the Governor. They wanted to burn her in his sight. She lay ‘swooned’ on a paillasse until rescued by ‘a Patriot.’ Her father was not so lucky. He died crying out ‘O friends kill me fast.’ His head was hacked off and it was one of a number paraded through streets on a pike. Some were lynched. ‘A la Lanterne’ rallied the vengeful for months, and years. The mob got a taste for blood on the first day and it could become a mad dog again at any time later.

In 1793, people swapped models of the guillotine for replicas of the cross to wear on their apparel. The ghoulish delight of the crowds at the killings was brilliantly caught by Dickens in the knitting of Madame Defarges. People said that ‘looking through the window’ and ‘sneezing into the sack’ was the perfect cure for headaches, but it was very dangerous to show grief for a victim. The crowds liked to sing while the killings went on. The ca ira chorused with aristocrats going to the lamp-post; the Carmagnole recited that the Queen had wanted to slit the throat of all Paris, but her blow had missed – its chorus concluded asking people to dance and listen to the sound of cannon. The mass killings in civil war actions in the Vendee and at Lyons would now attract convictions for war crimes, as when priests were tied on barges that were then sunk, or prisoners were mowed down by shrapnel fired from cannons to the gratification of partial observers.

There was another revolution in 1830 after the restored monarchy had thought that it had had some success over the water. Shortly afterwards there was a popular uprising and that effete fop, King Charles X, was thrown out. (He had been born in 1757, and was the brother of the king executed in 1792.) But 1830 would stand for something. The insurrectionaries used barricades. It was a way of conducting guerrilla warfare in a city of narrow streets. The locals could shower government troops with missiles, and then fall back and re-form. The ‘Three Glorious Days’ were a throw-back to the glory days – the great journées of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine in 1795. The barricade was becoming a distinctive Parisian mode of political action.

1848 saw the barricades go up again and another king get sent off, but what became known as ‘the Days of June’ saw a form of class war of hideous brutality. The blood-letting upon 20,000 or so was bestial. Thousands were killed in the fighting or shot out of hand. Thousands were sent to Algeria. An artist saw ‘defenders shot down, hurled out of windows, the ground strewn with corpses, the earth red with blood.’ Flaubert said that the National Guard ‘were avenging themselves for the journals, the clubs, the doctrines, for everything that had provoked them beyond measure for the last three months; and despite their victory, equality (as if for the punishment of its defenders and mockery of its enemies) was triumphantly revealed – an equality of brute beasts on the same level of blood-stained depravity; for the fanaticism of vested interests was on a level with the madness of the needy, the aristocracy exhibited the fury of the basest mob, and the cotton night-cap was no less hideous than the bonnet rouge. The public mind became disordered as after a great natural catastrophe, and men of intelligence were idiots for the rest of their lives.’

In 1870, Napoleon III, another useless ruler, picked a fight with Germany and lost, and the French suffered a blow to their pride that would reverberate through the next century. The Germans occupied parts of France and bombarded Paris. An armistice was negotiated to allow the French to call an election. The peace party negotiated a humiliating peace in which the French had to give up Alsace and Lorraine. This was a wound that the French still show. There was another insurrection in Paris. The insurgents elected a ‘Commune’ in honour of the glory days of the Jacobins. Victor Hugo described its leader as ‘a sort of baleful apparition in whom seemed to be incarnated all the hatred born of every misery.’ That is a picture of today’s terrorist. They were massacred. About 20,000 communards were killed. In any civilised state, most of them would be said to have been murdered.

It was worse than sickening. Emile Zola – no reactionary – said: ‘The slaughter was atrocious. Our soldiers…meted out implacable justice in the streets. Any man caught with a weapon in his hand was shot. So corpses lay scattered everywhere, thrown into corners, decomposing with astonishing rapidity, which was doubtless due to the drunken state of these men when they were hit. For six days Paris has been nothing but a huge cemetery.’ You can gauge the inhumanity of the Commune from the fact that the Bolsheviks called themselves ‘Communists’ in its honour.

The upheavals of 1830, 1848, and 1870 subsequent to what we call the revolution are very different. They are like after-shocks to an earthquake, and, after Marx sticks his nose in, they become the tremors leading to the Russian revolution. They are hardly national. They are played out in Paris. There are shocks after the after-shocks. The peasants – the majority of the people – are not on side. To the contrary, they stand four-square with government forces to rid the nation of ‘Reds’ in the last two revolutions. There is precious little moral high ground to be seen anywhere. Rather, we see a squalid scrabble for the prizes that had been made possible by the first great national uprising. In short, to use a word that French historians love as much as the word ‘masses’, the nineteenth century is incurably bourgeois, or middle class, and it is somehow irremediably tacky for just that reason. And all that tackiness was sadly on display in the Dreyfus affair.

During the era of these revolutions, insurrections, and outbreaks of barbarism, all of which showed a complete breakdown or failure of civilisation, France decided to extend the benefits of French civilization and government to those less civilised or less well governed. King Charles X invaded Algeria in 1830 and France then effectively annexed it. The results have been a disaster for Algeria, France, and the world, and they are described in the book The French Intifada by Andrew Hussey.

Mr Hussey is the Dean of the University of London Institute in Paris, and has written extensively on France. He describes the civil war or Intifada between Muslims and the rest of France as seen on TV in the riots of 2005 in what are called the banlieues. France is home to the largest Muslim population in Europe, including more than five million from North Africa, the Middle East, and the ‘Black Atlantic.’ Their main quarter in Paris starts around the Gare du Nord, as even tourists feel. Mr Hussey describes a desolate world devoid of hope or dignity, but full of hate for France, the West and the Jews. He looks at the current intifada after looking at France in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. The story is familiar but the results are disquieting – even for those on the other side of the world.

The idea was to civilise Algeria. One problem was that there was no such thing. The nation is some kind of European invention – we are used to that problem now, and ISIL is making plain its consequences. Another problem was that the French were not invited, and they have been hated since. But the French thought, or at least some did, that superior races have the right if not the duty to civilize inferior races. Ernest Renan said that ‘Islam is the complete negation of Europe – Islam is contempt for science, the suppression of civil society; it is the shocking simplicity of the Semitic mind.’ That last outburst would be at best unfortunate now, but something very like it underlay the invasion and occupation – and the conversion of a mosque at the heart of Algiers into a cathedral, with the cross in place of the crescent. Then the French allowed the locals the right to be governed by Islamic law – unless they wanted to be granted French nationality – while seeing this land as part of France, and transporting felons and encouraging migration.

From time to time there would be shocking acts of slaughter – ‘genocide’ is not out of place to describe the process by which France forged a ‘nation’ which, in the words of Mr Hussey was ‘defined and united in its antagonism towards France and in its collective hatred of Jews and contempt for Muslims.’ It is a familiar dichotomy – hatred of Jews and contempt for Muslims.

Shortly after VE day, de Gaulle said that an insurrection was ‘snuffed out’. The French said that 6000 Muslims were slaughtered – Radio Cairo put the figure at 45, 000. Mr Hussey says that the extreme violence, and almost competitive cruelty, ‘could not simply be explained by politics alone.’ The liberation army, the FLN, sought independence by ‘unlimited revolution’ – terrorism. Where did they get their inspiration from? Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam: ‘For every nine of us killed, we will kill one – in the end you will leave.’ You see, at least for this purpose they put less a value on human life; a ratio of 9:1 was acceptable provided that they triumphed in the end. And they and history knew that they would. In the meantime they would kill in the most impressively grisly manner in order to stamp the terror of their mission on their enemy and the world. In other words, this conflict resembled that in Gaza now.

As the English found in America, as the French found in Spain, and as the Americans found in Vietnam, guerilla warfare against an invader or occupier brings out the worst on both sides – atrocities and slaughters. Goya caught a lot of it. In one or other of the North African theatres, a schoolteacher was raped outside the class and then beheaded in front of it – throat-slitting was the preferred mode of killing; a town was sacked and its inhabitants butchered – the marauders then got children to help carry away the booty and then butchered them. The French used electricity in torture that the Americans used in Iraq – especially on genitals; they dropped people out of helicopters – before an audience – a technique that Americans used in Vietnam.

It is idle to ask who is the more barbaric. Mr Hussey describes the rape and murder as psychotic, as would most people reading this – compared to the Tricoteuses, the ladies knitting while they counted off the heads that filled the basket with blood and gore beneath the guillotine? Or to the French people in Algiers who referred to Crevettes a la Bigeard – the bloated and wrecked bodies of FLN prisoners dropped by General Bigeard from a helicopter above the harbour with their feet in concrete in front of the ‘glacial horror’ of the locals, Muslim or European?

The horror and pain was such that the French had to leave, betraying their supporters. When independence came, some the French Algerians engaged in delusion.

In the first instance, the hope was that Algeria would become a beacon of freedom in the post-colonial world, especially in Africa. For this reason, several thousand French Algerians with left-wing beliefs opted to stay on, with the dream of building a new Socialist republic, free of the baggage of European history and ideology. The optimism radiated across the Mediterranean and over the next few years other Europeans….flocked to the new Socialist paradise.

These were the pieds noirs. They were suicidally deluded in their belief in a beacon of freedom. They would not be alone. The civil war was worse than what had gone before. ‘The FLN government had ossified into a decadent and pampered elite which let its own people starve; the liberators of the Algerians had become their jailers.’ This appears to be inevitable in Africa – but, it did take the French a century to get over their revolution.

The new terrorism was more frightful. And it now reached France. Some terrorists wanted to hijack a plane and drive it into the Eiffel Tower. Then Palestinians brought their cause and grievances to the area, and the hatred of the Jews was given a new focus – Israel.

It was different with the colony in Morocco, but the result was the same. When the French fled, they left unworkable structures, because the protectorate had been a French overlay. They never annexed Tunisia, but are seen to be responsible for it, and they are hated there, too. The French had supported the dictator, and one minister contemplated helping him, but the Tunisians soon despaired of getting anything from their revolution. Spain is involved because it has had sites in North Africa and some of the madder Islamists dream of returning it to Islam.

The following passage shows how all our nightmares are coming together.

It was the French and Moroccan secret services who revealed that the terrorist cell, operating out of Fez, was made up of North African immigrants to France. The Moroccan authorities then insisted on treating the affair as a criminal case, while the French police pursued the line that a significant number of would-be terrorists had been trained in Pakistan and Afghanistan. To follow this lead meant an investigation into the mosques of La Corneuve and Saint-Denis where the ideology of jihad had been promulgated in response to the Gulf War, Palestine-Israel and Algeria. It was the French intifada in its purest form.

Mr Hussey concludes by looking at Muslims in French jail. That population is thought to be about 70% Muslim. Now here is the bad news. They get worse inside. If you kill them, it is even worse. You make them martyrs.

We cannot see anything remotely resembling a solution. Generations of hate – centuries of hate – have been generated and inherited in the Muslim world by aggressive or arrogant or merely stupid incursions into their realm by the West. The most consequential was the creation of Israel which is helping to fuel anti-Semitism in the West.

What troubled me most while reading this book was the reflection on the hatred being generated in and out of Gaza, the hatred of the Jews and the contempt for the Muslims or Arabs, and the role played by the Gulf Wars in producing ISIL, the latest Muslim revolt brought to you by courtesy of the West, in ‘nations’ that only existed in the minds of duplicitous Europeans.

You can expect to hear a lot about barbarism and genocide as if this were something new, but if the West does have to go in again to deal with an Arab or Muslim revolt might we at least have the courtesy to acknowledge that we made it possible if not necessary? And that we can give no warranty that we will not make it worse?

As for Gaza, if the security of Israel ultimately depends on the goodwill of those who made it – the West – how long might this go on if Israel keeps up its policy of settlements and denying a state to the Palestinians? Might that reservoir of goodwill be drained in, say, a generation? If so, the showdown might literally be nuclear, in which case I trust that I will by then be enjoying a rest like no rest that I have ever known before.