Heinrich von Treitschke, Place of Warfare in the State (1897–1898)and
Henri Massis and Alfred de Tarde, The Young People of Today (1912)
As the nineteenth century came to a close, competitive nationalism in preparation for war gripped much of Europe. Against this backdrop, people from all walks of life, including the intellectual elite, embraced war as a necessary, even desirable, reality in the modern age. The two documents here give voice to this pro-war spirit on the eve of World War I. The first is an excerpt from a series of lectures by German historian Heinrich von Treitschke (1834–1896), who taught a popular course on politics at the University of Berlin. The course lectures were compiled after his death from the notebooks of his students and published in two volumes. Entrenched in a climate of military buildup and competition for empire, Treitschke devoted much of his teaching to supporting his nation. The second document comes from an opinion poll conducted among male students at various elite educational institutions in Paris. It was first published in a Paris newspaper in 1912. Although purported to be an objective survey, the poll was shaped by the authors’ own views of the characteristics separating modern students from the preceding generation, notably their exaltation of war as the most noble of human virtues.
From German Emperor et al., Germany’s War Mania (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company Publishers, 1915), 221–22, 224, 226–27; and John W. Boyer and Jan Goldstein, eds., Readings in Western Civilization, Volume 9: Twentieth-Century Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 26–27.
Place of Warfare in the State
One must certainly, when considering war, remember that it does not always appear as a judgment of God; there are also temporary results, but the life of a people is reckoned by centuries. The decisive verdict can only be obtained by the review of great epochs. A State like Prussia, which was freer and more rational than the French, might owing to momentary exhaustion be brought near annihilation, but it would then call to mind its inner life, and would thus regain its superiority. One must say with the greatest determination: War is for an afflicted people the only remedy. When the State exclaims: My very existence is at stake! then social self-seeking must disappear and all party hatred be silent. The individual must forget his own ego and feel himself a member of the whole, he must recognize how negligible is his life compared with the good of the whole. Therein lies the greatness of war that the little man completely vanishes before the great thought of the State. The sacrifice of nationalities for one another is nowhere invested with such beauty as in war. At such a time the corn is separated from the chaff. . . .
It is indeed political idealism which fosters war, whereas materialism rejects it. What a perversion of morality to want to banish heroism from human life. The heroes of a people are the personalities who fill the youthful souls with delight and enthusiasm; and amongst authors, we as boys and youths admire most those whose words sound like a flourish of trumpets. He who cannot take pleasure therein, is too cowardly to take up arms himself for his fatherland. All appeal to Christianity in this matter is perverted. The Bible states expressly that the man in authority shall wield the sword; it states likewise that: “Greater love hath no man than this that he giveth his life for his friend.” Those who preach the nonsense about everlasting peace do not understand the life of the Aryan race, the Aryans are before all brave. They have always been men enough to protect by the sword what they had won by the intellect. . . . Thus to a noble nation, heroism and the maintenance of physical strength and of moral courage are essential.
To the historian who lives in the realms of the Will, it is quite clear that the furtherance of an everlasting peace is fundamentally reactionary. He sees that to banish war from history would be to banish all progress and becoming. It is only the periods of exhaustion, weariness and mental stagnation that have dallied with the dream of everlasting peace. . . .
War and conquest are therefore the most important State builders. The rule of the founding of States by the Sword is preponderant; and we observe here in modern history the unceasing impetus towards a great national empire-building from a little centre, which at first arises merely from the bare instinct of force, but by degrees, becoming conscious, it finds in the recognition of a common nationality the requisite unifying force. Thus England’s Unity began with Wessex. This united Anglo-Saxon kingdom then conquered Scotland and Ireland and endowed them with Anglo-Saxon culture. The development of France was similar. Here from Isle de France, in a similar manner, the microcosm of the ethno-graphical conditions of Gaul, arose the unity of the land. In Spain from Castile; and in Russia from the realm of Rurik grew by degrees the great Muscovite Empire. . . .
We, on the other hand, are finding out to-day what opportunities we have neglected. The results of the last half century are frightful: during that period England has conquered the world. The Continent had no time in consequence of its continual restlessness to cast its eyes over the seas, where England was grasping everything for herself. Germany had to miss and sleep through that just because she was much too busy with her neighbours and with her own home struggles. Beyond a doubt a great colonial development is a great blessing to a nation. And that is the short sightedness of our opponents of colonial development, that they cannot see this. The whole position of Germany depends partly upon this factor—how many millions of men in the future will speak the German language. . . .
Consequently, that colonization which retains a homogeneous nationality has become, for the future of the world, a factor of enormous significance. On it will depend the extent to which each nation will share in the domination of the world by the white races. It is quite thinkable that it might come to pass that a country possessing no colonies might cease to be numbered amongst the Great Powers in Europe, however powerful it might once have been. For this reason we dare not drift into that condition of torpor which is the result of a continental policy, and the issue of our next successful war must, if possible, be the acquisition of a colony of some sort.
The Young People of Today
Consider something even more significant. Students of advanced rhetoric in Paris, that is, the most cultivated elite among young people, declare that they find in warfare an aesthetic ideal of energy and strength. They believe that “France needs heroism in order to live.” “Such is the faith,” comments Monsieur Tourolle, “which consumes modern youth.”
How many times in the last two years have we heard this repeated: “Better war than this eternal waiting!” There is no bitterness in this avowal, but rather a secret hope. . . .
War! The word has taken on a sudden glamour. It is a youthful word, wholly new, adorned with that seduction which the eternal bellicose instinct has revived in the hearts of men. These young men impute to it all the beauty with which they are in love and of which they have been deprived by ordinary life. Above all, war, in their eyes, is the occasion for the most noble of human virtues, those which they exalt above all others: energy, mastery, and sacrifice for a cause which transcends ourselves. With William James, they believe that life “would become odious if it offered neither risks nor rewards for the courageous man.”
A professor of philosophy at the Lycée Henri IV confided to us: “I once spoke about war to my pupils. I explained to them that there were unjust wars, undertaken out of anger, and that it was necessary to justify the bellicose sentiment. Well, the class obviously did not follow me; they rejected that distinction.”
Read this passage from a letter written to us by a young student of rhetoric, Alsatian in origin. “The existence that we lead does not satisfy us completely because, even if we possess all the elements of a good life, we cannot organize them in a practical, immediate deed that would take us, body and soul, and hurl us outside of ourselves. One event only will permit that deed—war; and hence we desire it. It is in the life of the camps, it is around the fire that we will experience the supreme expansion of those French powers that are within us. Our intellect will no longer be troubled in the face of the unknowable, since it will be able to concentrate itself entirely on a present duty from which uncertainty and hesitation are excluded.”
Above all, perhaps, how can one ignore the success that accounts of our colonialists have had among the young intellectuals under consideration here? The expeditions of Moll, Lenfant, and Baratier arouse their enthusiasm; they search in their own unperilous existences for a moral equivalent to these bold destinies; they attempt to transpose this intrepid valor into their inner lives.
Some go further: their studies completed, they satisfy their taste for action in colonial adventures. It is not enough for them to learn history: they are making it. A young student from the Normale, Monsieur Klipfell, who received his teaching degree in literature in July of 1912, requested to be assigned to active service in Morocco, as a member of the Expeditionary Corps. We can cite many a similar example. One thinks of Jacques Violet, a twenty-year-old officer, who died so gloriously at Ksar-Teuchan, in Adrar: he was killed at the head of his men, at the moment of victory, in a grove of palm trees; among his belongings, they found a pair of white gloves and a copy of Servitude and Military Grandeur; it was thus that he went into combat.
Need we recall the adventures of the colonial military artillery lieutenant Ernest Psichari, the grandson of Renan, who abandoned his studies at the Sorbonne, along with the thesis he had begun on the bankruptcy of idealism, in order to lead a French operation in the African bush. “Africa,” he wrote, “is one of the last places where our finest sentiments can still be affirmed, where the last robust consciences have hope of finding an outlet for their activity.” He adds: “From extreme barbarism we passed into a condition of extreme civilization. . . . But who knows whether, by one of the reversals common in human history, we will not return to the point from which we began? The moment will come when benevolence ceases to be fruitful and becomes enfeebling and cowardly.”
For such young men, fired by patriotic faith and the cult of military virtues, only the occasion for heroism is lacking.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS