The Embrace of Unreason Read online

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2014 by Frederick Brown

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  An earlier version of chapter four was first published as “The Battle for Joan” in The Hudson Review, Vol. LXV, No. 3 (Autumn 2012).

  All images are reprinted courtesy of Getty Images with the exception of images on this page and this page from a private collection.

  Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress.

  ISBN 978-0-307-59515-7

  ISBN 978-0-385-35163-8 (eBook)

  Cover image: Soviet pavilion at World’s Fair, Paris, France, 1937.

  Hulton Archive/Getty Images

  Cover design by Carol Devine Carson

  v3.1

  To Ruth Lurie Kozodoy and Paul Dolan

  And in memory of my dear friend Joseph Frank

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER 1

  The Coming of War

  CHAPTER 2

  The Making of a Xenophobe

  CHAPTER 3

  The Nightingale of the Carnage

  CHAPTER 4

  The Battle for Joan

  CHAPTER 5

  Royalism’s Deaf Troubadour

  CHAPTER 6

  Spy Mania and Postwar Revenge

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER 7

  Scars of the Trenches

  CHAPTER 8

  The Rapture of the Deep

  CHAPTER 9

  The Stavisky Affair

  CHAPTER 10

  The Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture

  CHAPTER 11

  Totalitarian Pavilions

  CHAPTER 12

  The Hero of Verdun

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Principals

  Chronology

  Index

  Prologue

  Until recent times, the French political imagination was disposed to associate its dogmas and enthusiasms with the symbol of the tree. In 1792, revolutionaries at war with monarchical Europe planted “arbres de la liberté” in towns and villages throughout the country, taking their cue from the American patriots who had rallied for independence at a famous elm near the Boston Common. Among the hundreds that dotted Paris (mostly poplars, which grew quickly and had the further advantage of deriving etymologically from the Latin populus), one was planted within view of the royal palace in a ceremony over which the king himself presided, under duress. It was cut down several years later, not long after Louis XVI had been guillotined, despite the chief judge’s pronouncement at Louis’s trial that “the tree of liberty grows only when watered by the blood of tyrants.” Otherwise, cutting down a liberty tree under the new dispensation was tantamount to profaning the host under the old regime and punished accordingly. When a villager felled one in the Vaucluse, sixty-three neighbors who concealed his identity paid the forfeit, exemplifying Robespierre’s notorious oxymoron, “the despotism of liberty.” They were killed, their houses were burned, and their fields were salted.

  As the Revolution understood freedom to be a universal birthright, liberty trees did not require native soil. They grew in land conquered by the Republic beyond the Rhine and, abroad, in the Caribbean colonies, where their proximity to slave markets before the abolition of slavery, in 1794, was noted by one derisive observer.1

  Far from preserving the original character of trees planted under revolutionary auspices, Napoleon, who came out of the Revolution, allowed them to survive as “arbres Napoléon” while discouraging ceremonies that glorified the advent of liberty. They numbered at least sixty thousand when Louis XVIII mounted the throne of a restored monarchy. Seen thenceforth as culpable mementos of a hiatus in the the Bourbon succession, liberty trees were harvested for firewood or furniture.

  With the overthrow of Louis-Philippe in 1848 and the establishment of the Second Republic, maypoles reappeared in plantings that surpassed the exuberance of eighteenth-century celebrations. “The plantings had multiplied a hundredfold,” wrote a chronicler. “They were to be seen at all the markets, squares, quays, gardens, intersections, and even in the courtyards of public institutions, at the Prefecture of Police, at the Opéra, etc. Patriotic songs, religious ceremonies, speeches, music, the national guard, acclamations, flowers, ribbons, the discharge of weapons, the curious crowd made for a lively spectacle.” As Louis XVI had been pressed into service in the early 1790s, so now Victor Hugo, deputy mayor of the 9th arrondissement, presided over the planting of a poplar on the Place des Vosges, where he resided. Priests were invited to water saplings with their silver aspergillums.

  Those thousands of well-watered saplings were given no nourishment once the Second Republic was overthrown by the future Napoleon III, in 1851. They withered during the Second Empire, but their right-wing analogue sprang to life several decades later, after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 to 1871, not in a material sense but as a trope signifying national and racial authenticity. Of paramount importance was the publication in 1897 of Les Déracinés (The Uprooted), a novel that follows seven young Lorrainers torn from their cultural roots and sent into the world as existential waifs by a teacher of philosophy pledged to Kantian universals. “Alas, Lorraine undertook a great enterprise,” wrote Maurice Barrès, who had made his name not only as a novelist but as a politician militantly championing the would-be dictator General Georges Boulanger. “She deported a certain number of her sons from Neufchâteau, from Nomeny, from Custines, from Varennes, so that they might rise to a superior ideal. The thought was that by elevating the seven young Lorrainers from their native grounds to France, and even to humanity, they would be brought closer to reason. . . . Did those who directed this emigration realize that they had charge of souls? Did they perceive the dangerous gravity of their act? They couldn’t ‘replant’ the uprooted in congenial earth. Not knowing whether they wanted to make them citizens of humanity or Frenchmen of France, they evicted them from sturdy, age-old homes and let the denless cubs fend for themselves. From their natural order, humble perhaps but social, they blundered into anarchy, into mortal disorder.” The soul, which thrived on necessity rather than freedom and owed its consecration to forebears buried in the soil of one’s homeland, could not be transplanted. It was rooted rather than intellectual, organic rather than abstract, collective rather than individual. It was the pith that showed intelligence to be “a very small thing on the surface of ourselves.” It was to Frenchmen what derelict country churches were in the secular, bourgeois state to la France profonde.

  Its virtue lent itself to many of the evils of the twentieth century. In novels, essays, and articles, the prolific Barrès did much to shape opinion during the Dreyfus Affair and the war of 1914–1918, expounding the view as eloquently as any of his ideological confrères that diasporic Jews with shallow roots were susceptible of treason, glorifying the brotherhood of men in trenches, consecrating the blood they shed on fields shorn of trees, and generally reviling the Enlightenment. These were not his pieties alone. They became the accepted wisdom of the Right and echoed across the decades, from war to war. In the seventeenth century, Blaise Pascal had observed ironically, “What is truth on one side of the Pyrenees is error on the other.” But in 1940 Ma
rshal Pétain, justifying his pact with Hitler and the invention of a satellite state in the face of de Gaulle’s exhortations from England to resist, assured his compatriots without a trace of irony that the soil on which he stood like a deeply rooted tree vouched for his authority: “The earth does not lie; it will be your refuge.”

  Suffice it to say that unreason had its apostles on the Far Left as well as the Far Right after the catastrophe of World War I, in every intellectual community that regarded “salvation” as the supreme goal of the human community. That will be the subject of other chapters.

  1Slavery was restored in 1802 by the Consulate, under Napoleon.

  · PART ONE ·

  CHAPTER 1

  The Coming of  War

  Nothing collapses more quickly than civilization during crises like this one [the Revolution of June 1848]; lost in three weeks is the accomplishment of centuries. Civilization, life itself, is something learned and invented. Bear this truth well in mind: Inventas aut qui vitam excoluere per artes. After several years of peace men forget it all too easily. They come to believe that culture is innate, that it is identical with nature. But savagery is always lurking two steps away, and it regains a foothold as soon as one stumbles.

  —SAINTE-BEUVE, quoted by George Eliot in

  Impressions of Theophrastus Such

  Word that Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir to the Hapsburg throne, had been shot dead in Sarajevo by a nineteen-year-old Serb named Gavrilo Princip made front-page news in Paris on June 28, 1914. People were shocked. But to Frenchmen, who regarded Serbia, if they claimed to know anything about her, as the primitive underbelly of Europe, where peasants dug houses under hillsides, where pigs driven by swineherds armed to the teeth outnumbered people, and where Tumult was a house god, the assassination seemed very much in character. They would have readily agreed with Edmund Spencer, who toured European Turkey in 1850, that “the Servian [sic] is both by principle and inclination a man of war.” Was Serbia not constantly breathing fire at the two empires—Ottoman Turkey to the south and Austria-Hungary to the north—that still held fragments of the peninsula in their dying grasp? Had she not just fought two Balkan wars and won them both? Could she ever forget the Greater Serbia she once was or stop aspiring to be the prow of an independent South Slav confederation?

  Still vivid in European memory were the gruesome circumstances under which King Alexander of the Obrenovic´ dynasty, a feckless monarch given by turns to cringing and terrorizing, had been overthrown eleven years earlier. On June 11, 1903, in the dead of night, some twenty or thirty military officers, one of whom, “Apis,” was to play a prominent role in the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, had surrounded the royal residence with artillery and a regiment of troops. Henchmen doing palace duty let them in, and the slaughter began. Dozens of guards died. Queen Draga and Alexander were flushed out of a hidden alcove in their bedchamber and killed three times over. The conspirators riddled them with bullets, disemboweled them with swords, and threw them out the window. A similar fate awaited cabinet officers, including the prime minister. Belgrade rejoiced. Newspapers compared Alexander to Nero. Flags flew, fanfares blared, people paraded in the rain, and measures were taken to summon home from Geneva Peter Karageorgevic´, scion of the Obrenovic´’s rival clan, who became King Peter.

  An American journalist, possibly drawing on the evolutionary theories of Lamarck, proposed in the New York Times that as the character of races showed most clearly during “moments of excitement,” when inborn nature rose to the surface, defenestration had to be a racial characteristic of Slavs. The reason for this, he continued, should be sought in the ancestral habits of “Russians, Poles, Servians, Sorbs, Polabians, Croats, Cassubes, Wends, Lusatians,” and other “forest-dwelling tribes.”

  French correspondents may not have been quite so baldly racial in their accounts, but almost all laid emphasis on the outlandishness of the assassination, implying that Serbia cut an archaic or Asian figure in the community of civilized European nations. “The assassination of King Alexander of Serbia, following a military conspiracy, is one of those tragic events the shame of which one hoped would not visit our modern age,” declared Le Petit Parisien. “The horror of it surpasses that of an isolated murder. And one would have thought that we in Europe were unlikely ever again to witness a military coup d’état of the kind that once took place in ancient Rome, when emperors were proclaimed over the corpses of their predecessors.” Le Matin referred to the extinction of the Obrenovic´ dynasty as one of the most frightful tragedies yet recorded in the history of mankind. Characteristic of revolution in Balkan countries, it observed, was their particular “savagery” and “barbarity.” Le Gaulois noted that although five hundred years under Turkey’s yoke could not but leave its mark, it was still surprising to learn that the barbaric traditions honored by the Ottomans had been applied with such exuberance “in a Christian country.” Free within her own cramped borders since 1878, when the European powers pronounced it independent in the Treaty of Berlin, Orthodox Serbia hardly impinged on French consciousness (except, in certain quarters, as a virgin ripe for industrial development). One journalist assigned to the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs heard a high official maintain, after Alexander’s assassination, that no more attention need be given to the tragic event than to items from the police blotter reported under the rubric of faits divers. It was irrelevant to France. “The Serbs change government in their own idiosyncratic ways,” the official declared. “That’s their business, not ours. Once the new regime has constituted itself, it will seek recognition from the Powers, and obtain it. I say again, we have no reason to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries. Others may; let them speak, or get involved.”

  Eleven years later, the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand at Sarajevo inspired something of the same indifference. Strictly speaking, it too was an internal affair, as Austria had arbitrarily annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina, with her large Serb population, in 1908. To be sure, there were strong grounds for believing that the plot had been hatched in Belgrade by Unification or Death, a clandestine organization of fanatical patriots also known as the Black Hand, which reached into court circles. Certainly, Vienna believed it. And lurking behind that belief was the suspicion that Russia, the guardian spirit of Balkan Pan-Slavism, had had foreknowledge of the event. But most French—indeed, most Europeans—assumed that even if Austria took drastic measures, she would quickly crush Serbia’s ill-equipped army in a war confined to that cramped corner of the continent. So it was that Winston Churchill could write, in The World Crisis, that an exceptional tranquillity prevailed in Europe during the spring and summer of 1914, when he attended to England’s relentless naval competition with Germany as first lord of the Admiralty. “There had been a score of opportunities had anyone wished to make war. Germany seemed, with us, to be set on peace.”

  In July 1914, Paris was more deserted than tranquil. Sun scorched the city, heat waves rose from its streets, and a steamy mist veiled the sky. Working-class crowds found refreshment on Sundays in the guinguettes of the valley of the Marne. All who could afford it flocked to the seacoast after Bastille Day, or to spas such as Aix-les-Bains, where, according to Le Figaro, everything augured well: “Never has the season been more elegant, more attractive, more carefree. Never have nobler, more radiant guests graced the flower-lined walks and shady groves, the fragrant terraces, the sparkling salons of the Grand Cercle and the Villa des Fleurs. One can easily believe that the very heart of high society is present here.” On the front page of its July 15 issue, Le Figaro promised readers acquainted with Marcel Proust a long excerpt from the second volume of “that great and beautiful book,” Du Côté de chez Swann.

  The grand monde at Aix-les-Bains did not include France’s president and premier. On July 16, Raymond Poincaré and Premier René Viviani (who was also minister of foreign affairs) boarded the battleship Le France at Dunkirk for a state visit to Russia. They pondered Austria’s intentions with “a
shade of anxiety,” according to Poincaré, but otherwise enjoyed the leisurely, four-day cruise. And such anxiety as they felt may have been dispelled once Le France anchored at Kronstadt. Guns boomed an imperial salute, bands played “La Marseillaise,” pleasure craft swarmed around the French squadron, and Czar Nicholas welcomed his ally aboard the yacht Alexandria before depositing Poincaré and his entourage at the vast palace complex of Peterhof. A banquet held for them there on July 20 quite outshone Aix-les-Bains. France’s ambassador, Maurice Paléologue, remembered gorgeous uniforms and finery, in the midst of which Poincaré’s plain black frock coat looked like a republican smudge. While fountains played outside, precious jewels of every description made “a blaze of fire and flame” inside the Empress Elizabeth room. Politics waited until the following day, when, still at Peterhof, the czar and the president reviewed seriatim questions of moment on Europe’s diplomatic agenda. It was agreed that the Great Powers should meet sometime that year to set matters right in the Balkans.

  On July 21, diplomats attended a banquet at the Winter Palace. President Poincaré exchanged pleasantries with the German ambassador, Count Friedrich von Pourtalès, who spoke of plans to visit his French relatives at Castellane. In conversation with Sir George Buchanan, Poincaré pressed the need for transforming Britain’s entente with France and Russia into a tighter military alliance. He chatted up Baron Motono of Japan and the Marquis de Carlotti of Italy. Alone among members of the diplomatic corps unresponsive to the president’s salutations was Austria’s ambassador, Count Frigyes Szapáry. Poincaré asked him about Serbia only to be told, cryptically, that the judicial inquiry into the circumstances of Ferdinand’s assassination was “under way.” Their brief encounter ended with Poincaré hoping that punishment of the assassins would not be inflicted upon an entire nation and Szapáry uttering (in Poincaré’s recollection) “commonplace assurances as to the inoffensive character of Austrian policy.” Poincaré’s memoirs make no mention of striking workers staging a huge demonstration on the streets of St. Petersburg.