A new book is available on Amazon Kindle.  The blurb and Epilogue follow.  The latter raises issues of moment.  A revise catalogue follows.

Listening to Historians: What is truth?

To write history is to tell a story.  The better the story, the better the history.  There are two parts to telling a story – stating what happened; and choosing how you will describe those events.  If you tell the story well, the reader will hardly notice the distinction.

The rise of the professional historian has moved the focus to what happened from how those events are described – the focus is on evidence, rather than style.  The writers, or historians, have brought this change on.  The readers do not like it.  They like their stories to be well told.  They want to listen to the stories.  For that they want to read good writing.

This book is loaded with good writing – not by me, but by some of the best writers in the West.  There is a good spread in time and place – five British (Gibbon, Carlyle, Macaulay, Maitland, and Namier), three French (Michelet, Taine, and Bloch), two Germans (Ranke and Mommsen), one Dutchman (Geyl), one Greek (Thucydides), one Italian (Tacitus), these last two being ancient, and one Swiss (Burkhardt).

The book concludes by considering truth in history and meaning in art.

Historians are fond of talking about what history is.  They might better ask why people read it.  Do people read history so that they might know more or be better informed about the past?  Do they read it to gain insight into and some connexion with other people?  Or do they read it just for pleasure?  Do they read to listen?

The book is 55,000 words and is fully annotated.

Epilogue

In 1940, the Dutch historian Pieter Geyl had to face the war in Holland.  He was put off his normal work.  He turned to read about Napoleon and he wrote an essay on him.  When the Dutch capitulated, Geyl got back his manuscript endorsed with a message to ‘tell the printer to be quick.’  He had not referred to Hitler in the paper, but the parallels were obvious.  Geyl was arrested by the Germans and spent time in Buchenwald.  He gave lectures on Napoleon there and the comparison with the Fuhrer amused his hearers.

Curiously, Hitler may have been good for the reputation of Napoleon.  Napoleon had his critics but, apart from Stalin, no one could compete with Hitler for evil.  But where does that leave Napoleon?  Geyl was able to make an informed comparison in his Preface to his book Napoleon: For and Against.  ‘The French police were hated and feared in the occupied and annexed territories, but when one reads about their conduct with a mind full our present experiences [October 1944, before liberation], one cannot help feeling astonished at the restraints and resistances they still met with in the stubborn notions of law and in the mild manners of a humane age….And yet methods of compulsion and atrocities are inseparable from the character of the dictator and conqueror, and we shall see that Napoleon incurred bitter reproaches, at home and abroad, for some of his acts.’

Well, that is one reason that we read history – to understand the world and be able to take part in the conversation of mankind.  Geyl touches on the other reason – we read history for pleasure.

In two ways I have myself been constantly fascinated while I was engaged…First by the inexhaustible interest of the figure of Napoleon….And in the second place I have, I may almost say continuously, enjoyed the spectacle presented by French historiography.  What life and energy, what creative power, what ingenuity, imagination, and daring, what sharply contrasted minds and personalities!  And all the time the historical presentation turns out to be closely connected with French political and cultural life as a whole.

So what did the Dutch historian think of the Corsican adventurer?

He was a dictator who attempted to break with new legislation what resistance was left in the old society; who intensified his power in the State by means of centralised administration; who suppressed not only all organised influence or control and expression of opinion, but free thought itself; who hated the intellect, and who entered upon a struggle with the Church which he had first attempted to enslave; and who thought that with censorship, police and propaganda, he would be able to fashion the mind to his wish.  He was a conqueror with whom it was impossible to live; who could not help turning an ally into a vassal, or at least interpreting the relationship to his own exclusive advantage; who decorated his lust of conquest with the fine-sounding phrases of progress and civilisation; and who at last in the name of all Europe, which was to look to him for order and peace, presumed to brand England as the universal disturber and enemy.

More shortly:

What was Napoleon?  The destroyer, the despiser of men, the foreigner, the Corsican, especially scornful of Frenchmen, careless of French blood, devourer of generations of young men, suppressor of all free opinion, demanding of writers a toll of flattering unction as the price of permission to publish – in a word, the tyrant.

When we come to the question in the title of this book – what is truth? – it helps to distinguish that question from others.  Libel lawyers learn that the questions are easy – it is the answers that are hard.  What do the words complained of mean?  In that meaning would they make others think less of the person being talked about?  If so, in that meaning, are they true?

So, take a newspaper that says a politician who charges people a lot to dine with him is a politician for sale.  What does that mean?  Does it mean that he is on the take – that he takes bribes?  Or does it mean that he is just as greedy and venal as the rest?  (If you asked whether it meant that he was ‘corrupt’, would you advance the discussion one iota?)  Then the question is: would a publication with that meaning make others think less of the politician?  Plainly the answer is yes on the first, but the issue is doubtful on the second.  It then merges with the third question.  In that meaning, are the words true?  You can imagine the expensive games that lawyers play around that sort of question.

We might see a similar kind of division of questions when we look at either the evidence of history or its written statement.  What does an inscription or primary source mean?  What does the historian mean if they find an artful epigram in which to couch their views?  In that meaning, what consequences do the words carry?  And in that meaning, how might we seek to verify the proposition?  The analogy is very far from complete, but it may help us in looking at what we get and learn from our fourteen master historians.

People in physics say that they investigate events, not facts, but there is no point getting hung up on words.  One of Pirandello’s characters said that a fact is like a sack – it doesn’t stand up until you put something in it.  As one historian of the Middle Ages said: ‘The history we read, though based on facts, is strictly speaking not factual at all, but a series of accepted judgments.’  There is a lot to be said for that view.

But at least in the empirical tradition, people make history, not the reverse.  Karl Marx said: ‘History does nothing, it possesses no immense wealth, fights no battles.  It is rather man, real living man who does everything, who possesses and fights.’  That goes for all abstractions, and there was no such thing as the French Revolution.

The fourteen writers we have looked at still speak to us now.  That is why they have the standing that they have.  They have survived.  And they still give us pleasure.  They do so for people all around the world.   At least when they are in narrative mode, each of our historians is best taken read out loud – the way that some used to create their work.  This is important.  A lot of us read history to listen.

For the most part, it requires art to impart insight.  You need to be very careful when people like Ranke say that ‘We on our side have a different concept of history: naked truth, without embellishment, through an investigation of the individual fact, the rest left to God, but no poeticising, no fantasizing.’  We are getting this in translation (a process that is very tricky with Kant), but individual facts, naked and unlyrical, will soon put people to sleep, and convey no message at all.  And there is not much dispute left now about bare facts.  We should not think that Ranke was saying that there is no art in writing history, a proposition that he sought to contradict with nearly his whole life.  The truth, whatever that is, about bare facts is not likely to lead to insight or to promote understanding.  That is why some people read history for pleasure, and then read novels or go to the theatre to find out what is really going on in the world.

If, then, history involves art – even if it must be scientific as well – we may need to look at the tricky question of the role of meaning in art.

If you had asked El Greco what he meant by Christ Cleansing the Temple, or Michelangelo what he meant by the Pieta, or Beethoven what he meant by the Moonlight Sonata, your best response may have been one of hurt puzzlement.  Even if you had asked Milton what he meant by the phrase ‘darkness visible’, your best result may have been uncomprehending pity.  The premise of any response would have most likely been ‘If I could have expressed what I wanted to express in words, and dull prose at that, I may as well have done so, and not sweated over dredging up what I happen to see as a work of art.’

Why should a picture or a tune or a poem mean anything, much less have something to say?  Can you undo the Pieta, or, may God be unwilling, deconstruct it?  No, of course not.  We are talking about the workings of our imaginations, and the effect on our emotions.  Intellect, logic and meaning may have little to do with it.  If you treat art as using your imagination to give a lyrical reflection on our condition, then it may, like faith, hardly be susceptible to intellectual analysis.  (Some say the same about love.)  Even when it comes to thinking, Einstein said that he rarely thought in words – and if it was good enough for Einstein in physics, it was good enough for El Greco, Michelangelo, Beethoven and Milton in art.

But while we may argue about the meaning of a work of art, there may be little doubt about its effect.  When the Spanish made a film about El Greco, they naturally spent some time on his immortal portrait by that artist of the Grand Inquisitor.  It may just be the most intriguing portrait ever painted.  If you had to choose one epithet, it might be ‘shifty’.  In the movie, the subject says that he wants the artist to do it again.  The cardinal was very unamused.  We can certainly see why.  Whatever the painting may be said to mean, it was anything but flattering of its subject.  If you ever met that person, you be looking at your back for a long time afterwards.

Well, vast industries and empires right across the globe are built on the express repudiation of our premise.  They proceed on the footing that we can analyse art intellectually and make it the subject of meaningful discussion and assessment and judgment.

The best example is Shakespeare.  He wrote plays for a living.  He was a professional entertainer and playwright.  He wrote plays to entertain people and to get paid for it; or, as I heard an American student at Oxford say, he did it for the mortgage.  He was a high-end showman who developed a very profitable business from the shows he put on.  But it may safely be said that many more people now get paid to analyse and discuss his plays than to perform them, and for people many of whom hardly ever get to see him in production.

So, we may have to take with a grain of salt the suggestion that the intellectual analysis of art is moonshine.  But we should at least be wary of those who claim to have the answer on art.  They are likely to be as deluded as those who claim to have the answer on God, or sex.  If you hear someone claiming to be able to show that in some verifiable manner Anton Rubinstein playing the Moonlight Sonata is better than Elvis Presley singing Blue Suede Shoes, then you may be sure that you are getting moonshine.

You can, I think, see examples of darkness visible, the title of a book by William Golding, in some of the better known paintings by Turner at the National Gallery, but that is not the point.  We engage with Milton to listen to the music, and not to analyse verbal detail.  We do not assess the symmetry of the Pieta, or Tyger, tyger, burning bright, by the rules of double-entry accounting, just as we do not ask why Jussi Bjorling is singing None shall sleep (Nessun dorma) in Italian in the court of a murderously deranged Asian princess.  You might fairly be asked to leave the room if you engaged in either such process.  After all, some of us might be interested if not charmed by a paradox.

So, art and meaning are uncomfortable terms in bed together.  But if in your conversation, you contented yourself with the truth and nothing more, you would not be the best companion for a long haul flight.  It would be like reading a telephone book.  (In a queue in the West End, I once heard a lady say that she could listen to Maggie Smith read a phone book, but I think that we can regard that inclination as exceptional.)

This is a little like the quandary of philosophy.  If you want to be safe and sound, you stay with the a priori ( with maths or straight deductions from given premises); but if you want to say something new, and try to add to the knowledge of the world, then the best you can hope for is probability – and you might be proved to be dead wrong.

The narrator of the novels of Victor Hugo appears to confuse himself with God, someone said.  (A lot of women may have said the same about the author.)  In Les Misérables, the author allowed himself this reflection: ‘The clash of passions and of ignorances is different from the shock of progress.  Rise, if you will, but to grow.  Show me to which side you are going.  There is no insurrection but forward.  Every other rising is evil; every violent step backwards is an emeute [riot]; to retreat is an act of violence against the human race.  Insurrection is the Truth’s access of fury; the paving stones which insurrection tears up, throw off the spark of right.  These stones leave to the emeute only their mud.  Danton against Louis XVI is insurrection, Hébert against Danton is emeute.’

Well, Tolstoy’s War and Peace shows us that good story-tellers make lousy political thinkers – in which of his categories would Hugo have put the execution of Danton by Robespierre?

But Hugo has a point of substance.  Presumably this great writer was saying something that he thought would convey sense – and good sense – to his readers.  If so, his readers may not think in the same way that Anglo-Saxons tend to think.  Somerset Maugham said that the style of Gustave Flaubert was rhetorical.  He also said: ‘The French language tends to rhetoric, as the English to imagery – thereby marking a profound difference between the two peoples…’  In all the histories we have been looking at, there is no shortage of rhetoric – but the point is that the rhetoric that had a different meaning for those involved.

Victor Hugo then spoke of ‘truth’.  Tolstoy said that his hero was truth.  What is truth?  We go to great writers – and each of Hugo and Tolstoy was a great writer – for insight, understanding, or enlightenment.  If we want mere facts, we can go to the registry of births, deaths, and marriages, the colonial version of Somerset House.  For present purposes, I regard each of the fourteen historians we have looked at as a great writer.

In 1949 an English Shakespeare scholar, John Danby, published a remarkable book, Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature, A Study of King Lear. Its first sentence reads: ‘We go to great writers for the truth.’  Well, we may be a bit more comfortable with ‘insight’ or ‘understanding’ than the nervous-making ‘truth’, but the author later says:

‘It is only dramatically that the manner of living thought can be adequately expressed.  A discursive philosopher is tied to the script of his single part.’

This is an invaluable insight.  On one view it could obliterate the whole of literary criticism in one hit.  Later, Mr. Danby referred to the well-known aphorism of Thomas Hobbes that the life of man is ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’.  That is not so much an ineluctable proposition of philosophy as a working hypothesis toward a philosophy of life, but where do you think you might better seek enlightenment on the nature of life – The Leviathan by Hobbes or King Lear by Shakespeare?

Later still in his book, but before Hannah Arendt had described Eichmann as ‘terribly and terrifyingly normal’, Mr. Danby described the evil daughters in King Lear as ‘eminently normal’ and ‘eminently respectable’.  The point is that there is something of Regan and Eichmann in us all, and people who cannot bring themselves to accept that simple truth are frequently the cause of the whole bloody problem.

Those who are squeamish about facing up to evil in the world could do worse than to start by confronting it in King Lear.  Au fond, it is useless to ask what this play means. It makes as much sense as asking what is the meaning of the works of art referred to above – or to inquire after the meaning of God.  It is as useless to ask what Shakespeare intended when he wrote this play as it is to ask what a parliament intended when it passed a statute.

We are left with the ‘thing itself’; the rest is moonshine.  If Shakespeare had tried to convey his meaning prosaically, he would most certainly have failed, and he would not have left us with the drama that may fairly claim to be our Everest.  This play on its own could have been the warrant for that wonderful remark of Emerson: ‘When I read Shakespeare, I actually shade my eyes.’

So, if we want to understand, if we want insight into what we are, we turn to the dramatists, like Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Racine or Ibsen.  There is something to be said for a kind of poetic or imaginative truth, the sense of insight that we get from high art, the insight that cannot be expressed in mere words, the emotional click and then affirmation that we get on looking at the Goya painting of a military execution (The Third of May, 1808).  This was the painting that Sir Lewis Namier referred to when he was speaking of the juggernauts of history, ‘revolting to human feelings in their blindness, supremely humorous in their stupidity’.  The great historian looks to have been uncomfortable there in trying to spell out his vision – there is nothing humorous about war crimes.  But at a time when religion is dying, we might look more to our writers to be our seers and prophets than to our priests and rabbis..

George Orwell admired D H Lawrence for ‘the extraordinary power of knowing imaginatively something that he could not have known by imagination.’  This is itself a large insight, and not just for history as art.  A big job for those who tell our story is to show what happens when the slight veneer of civilisation is ripped off us.  Many fail to see the horror not because they are blind, but because they do not have the insight or imagination or the nerve to see it for what it is.

Speaking of the night we know as Crystal Night, Ian Kershaw, the biographer of Hitler, said: ‘This night of horror, a retreat in a modern state to the savagery associated with bygone ages, laid bare to the world the barbarism of the Nazi regime.’  Shortly afterwards, Hitler gave a solemn prophesy of ‘the annihilation (Vernichtung) of the Jewish race in Europe.’  But the savagery of neither the pogrom nor the prophecy of the Fuhrer was enough to generate insight into the horror of the barbarism to come.  We – the Germans – did not have the imagination or nerve to see it (even if Keynes had foreseen it all at Versailles).  Mussolini was a Cesar de carnaval, a braggart and an actor, a dangerous ‘rascal’ and possibly ‘slightly off his head’, but the insight of the Italian people into this grotesque buffoon did not extend to seeing him hanged upside down beside his lifeless mistress – until that is how they wanted to see him.

Very rarely, we get artists who give us a history that is more like an epic poem than a mere record of fact.  In this book, we have been looking at great historians who all wrote with imagination – even if they would have been coy or indignant at the suggestion.  They wrote so that we could listen to them.  They wrote with a sense of theatre.  In the trenchant words of Mr Danby, great historians give dramatic expression to living thought.

Carlyle, for example, wanted to breathe life into the past – he wanted to ‘blow his living breath between dead lips’.  This ‘Rembrandt of letters’, with his Ezekiel Vision, a man that belonged ‘to the company of escaped Puritans,’ understood profoundly that our little life is rounded with a sleep – like that other great Romantic, General George Patton, he thought that once we dispensed with time, the dead were with us.  Carlyle was then able to indulge what Chesterton finely called ‘his sense of the sarcasm of eternity.’  Like Dickens, he was intent on articulating a sense of the grotesque.  At times the work of Carlyle, the misplaced Hebrew prophet, looks like a dream or hallucination.  Perhaps he may come back into vogue as a kind of secular seer now that God is on the outer.

An Israeli scholar wrote a book called English Historians on the French Revolution.  It is heavy going, but you come up with insights.  The words ‘darkness’ and ‘chaos’ pervade the account of Carlyle, and the more he thought that he did not understand, the hungrier he got for ‘truth and fact.’  ‘Facts, facts, not theory’, ‘facts more and more, theory less and less.’  The author makes a most illuminating remark about readers of Carlyle’s book.  ‘Tired of being told what to think about the Revolution, people were glad to glimpse a painting of it.’  He quotes John Stuart Mill: ‘This is not so much a history as an epic poem; and notwithstanding this, or even in consequence of this, the truest of histories.’  All these labels have their uses and abuses.  Perhaps one problem with a lot of history is that it has an inarticulate premise: ‘Your silly author thinks that he understands all this.’

A sense of darkness and chaos, and a sense of the grotesque, and a power of imagination, are essential in trying to follow events in France after 1789 or in Germany after 1933.  It is a power that was most fully realised in King Lear, which is a study of the grotesque.

KENT: Is this the promised end?

EDGAR: Or image of that horror?

The French author Guy de Maupassant said this: ‘I have seen war.  I have seen men revert to brutes, maddened and killing for pleasure, or through terror, bravado, and ostentation.  At a time when right existed no longer, when the law was a dead letter, when all notion of fair play had disappeared, I saw innocent people encountered along the road shot because their fear made them suspects.  I saw dogs chained at their master’s door killed by men trying out new revolvers, and cows lying in fields riddled with bullets for no reason – for the sake of shooting, for a laugh.’

The only thing standing between us and the apes may be cutlery – or this level of art – or perhaps the Coen brothers.  Dickens dedicated Tale of Two Cities to Carlyle.  You can see the connection throughout the whole book.  This is how Dickens prefigures the outpouring of the mob of Saint-Antoine during the satanic period known as the Terror.  A wine cask has spilled on to the street.  ‘The wine was red wine and had stained the ground of the narrow street….It had stained many hands, too, and the forehead of the woman who nursed her baby, was stained with the stain of the old rag she wound about her head again.  Those who had been greedy with the staves of the cask, had acquired a tigerish smear about the mouth; and one tall joker…scrawled upon a wall with his finger dipped in muddy wine-lees – BLOOD.’  It may remind you of the hellish September Massacres in Paris, when Carlyle said that the berserk killers took refreshment from wine from to time to time before laying into the next batch of screaming victims with their bloodied sabres.

At times, the painting or war by Tolstoy in War and Peace has an El Greco lightning-strike scale of illumination.  While Moscow was waiting for the French, the population descended to animal lawlessness with scenes like those in Paris at the height of the Terror.  In one of them, Tolstoy reflects unmistakably on the Passion.  The Governor of Moscow, Count Rastoptchin, hands one suspected traitor over the mob.  ‘You shall deal with him as you think fit!  I hand him over to you!’  The resulting massacre is bestial, and resembles in part the September Massacres in Paris twenty or so years before.  As the Governor goes home in his carriage, an asylum spills out its lunatics:

Tottering on his long, thin legs, in his fluttering dressing-gown, this madman ran at headlong speed, with his eyes fixed on Rastoptchin, shouting something to him in a husky voice, and making signs to him to stop.  The gloomy and triumphant face of the madman was thin and yellow, with irregular clumps of beard growing on it.  The black agate-like pupils of his eyes moved restlessly, showing the saffron-yellow whites above.  ‘Stay!  Stop, I tell you!’ he shouted shrilly, and again breathlessly fell to shouting something with emphatic gestures and intonations. 

He reached the carriage and ran alongside it.

‘Three times they slew me; three times I rose again from the dead.  They stoned me, they crucified me  …  I shall rise again  …  I shall rise again  … I shall rise again.  My body they tore to pieces.  The Kingdom of Heaven will be overthrown  …  Three times I will overthrow it, and three times I will set it up again’, he screamed, his voice growing shriller and shriller.  Count Rastoptchin suddenly turned white, as he had turned white when the crowd fell upon [the victim of the mob].  He turned away.  ‘Go, go on, faster!’ he cried in a trembling voice to his coachman.

The beginning of that picture is pure El Greco; the whole is unmistakably Russian and equally unmistakably universal.  It might test your faith to have to believe that it was all composed by a man born of woman.  What does mere history have to offer against art like that?

There, as it seems to me, is where you get truth brought to you by imagination.  France and Moscow after it had become a wilderness of tigers, like the whirlpool of evil and pain and death painted in Titus Andronicus, but Dickens clearly shared the view of Carlyle that there was more to it in France ‘than cheap bread and a Habeas-corpus act.  Here too was an Idea….It was a struggle, though a blind and at last an insane one, for the infinite, divine nature of Right, of Freedom, Country.’

In The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, Kurtz confronts his own hell ‘with that wide and immense stare embracing, condemning, and loathing all the universe.’  All that he can offer is ‘the whispered cry, The horror!  The horror!’  Here, as it seems to me, is where a great story-teller decently accepts the limits of language, and the story is no less effective because of that acknowledgement; rather, it is better for accepting that mystery is the other face of magic, and that mere words may be little more than mere signposts.

In truth, France went back to the Dark Ages from time to time for decades after 1789 – as Germany would do after 1933.  What did this mean, the Dark Ages?  This period of darkness over the earth was described in the great epic poem, Beowulf, written in about the seventh century.

All were endangered; young and old

Were hunted down by that dark death shadow

Who lurked and swooped in the long nights

On the misty moors; nobody knows

Where these reevers from hell roam on their errands.

…….

Sometimes at pagan shrines they vowed

Offering to idols, swore oaths

That the killer of souls might come to their aid

And save the people.  That was their way

Their heathenish hope; deep in their hearts,

They remembered hell…….

…………Cursed is he

Who in time of trouble has to thrust his soul

In the fire’s embrace, forfeiting help;

He has nowhere to turn…….

So that troubled time continued, woe

That never stopped, steady affliction……

There was panic after dark, people endured

Raids in the night, riven by the terror.

That is almost a photographic picture of Dresden under the Gestapo or under the RAF.  Here is a picture of Spain under Napoleon as seen by Goya.  (Geats were a Nordic tribe in this epic.):

A Geat woman sang out in grief;

With hair bound up, she unburdened herself

Of her worst fears, a wild litany

Of nightmare and lament: her nation invaded,

Enemies on the rampage, bodies in piles,

Slavery and abasement.  Heaven swallowed the smoke.

What was it in their or our psyche that prompted one writer to see the hair of a woman ‘wound’ and the other writer to see the hair of his woman ‘bound’?  Can the prosaic record of history ever stand up against the image of a world ‘where these reevers from hell roam on their errands’ or where a woman ‘unburdened herself of her worst fears, a wild litany of nightmare and lament’?

Or is it only in very big Russian novels that the hero says: ‘I want to be there when everyone suddenly finds out what it was all for?’  Or do we just accept that we are mortal and on notice?

The oldest hath borne most: we that are young

Shall never see so much, nor live so long.

That brings us back to where we started in the Prologue.  ‘Historians are fond of talking about what history is.  They might better ask why people read it.  Do people read history so that they might know more or be better informed about the past?  Do they read it to gain insight into and some connexion with other people?  Or do they read it just for pleasure?  Do they read to listen?’

 

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.