The Great War

1914–1918

Marc Ferro

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780415267359
• eBook ISBN: 9781134499205
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

A landmark history of the war that firmly places the First World War in the context of imperialism and gives due weight to the role of non-Europeans in the conflict.

Part I

1
WAR, THE LIBERATOR

DOI: 10.4324/9780203016763-2

In the two generations before the war, to an extent greater than ever before, distances had shrunk and the world in effect had become smaller. Since 1840 commerce had grown apace and the growth of empires had strengthened the mutual ties which bound east and west. European society did not understand the process but soon felt its effects. Other changes were also becoming apparent. For example, the recognized, traditional authorities of monarch, priest, law, family, boss or officer now had added to them new, uncontrolled and anonymous masters, those forces responsible for the brutal depression of European agriculture and the ruin of the European countryside, and for the vagaries of the business cycle. It was these same hidden powers which made and unmade fashions and manipulated public opinion. In this strange, changing world traditional patterns of life no longer had any meaning. Skills were developed and made redundant in the space of a generation. Patents and inventions were created, had a brief flowering, and were superseded by the next technical advance. Some business enterprises grew and prospered, others went to the wall. Everything was done in the name of law, progress or liberty.

There was one clear link between the traditional pattern of oppression and this new form: the growing army of bureaucrats. It provided for the new secular states the strong support which the Church had given to the old system; it protected the holders of property from the poor. Sometimes, indeed, it acted together with the clergy, a development regarded with little affection by the masses. In Germany in 1870 there were 825 inhabitants to every bureaucrat: in 1905, there were 216. Everywhere, as in Chekhov’s Russia, the bureaucrats waxed and multiplied. Just before the war one in eleven French electors was a functionary of the state. The link with the old oppressors was reinforced by the fact that the top rank of this new class was composed almost entirely of nobles in Germany, and even in the French republic, the praefectoral corps included eighty-eight former peers; a similar proportion occurred among the councillors of state and ambassadors of the republic.

This had a twofold effect. On the one hand, the old ruling class, thus metamorphosed, managed to maintain itself in power. More and more citizens lower down the social scale were employed by the state, each with his small share of authority. Still others, their futures assured by a pension, swelled the ranks of the conservatives, particularly in the large and growing cities. On the other hand discontent grew among all those whose future was uncertain, those groups which had no part in managing collective affairs. These were particularly numerous in those same cities where they congregated following the depression in agriculture. They counted as inferiors in the cities; they gathered in the suburban belts of Paris or Milan, Berlin or St Petersburg.

The mass of twentieth-century men were outside public affairs. They were prisoners in a universe whose mechanism was a mystery, despite the schools’ propagation of science and progress. Democratization of institutions in the previous years had been largely illusory and reform did little to alter this. Reform did result in an overall improvement in living conditions, of material objects, education, and sanitation. Reform also occupied and stimulated the educated classes, as well as enriching them and strengthening their grip on society. But in itself reform did not enable the lower classes to take control of their own affairs. The cheering that greeted the newly elected zemstvo members in Russia meant much the same as the hoch or hurrah to representatives of the people further west: it marked the end of the electors’ political activity for years to come, until the next election.

Town and country were now in the same situation. Previously towns had been ‘free’ and the country ‘imprisoned’. In the early twentieth century the townsman no longer took any real part in the affairs of state, province, or community. He had rejoined the peasant in a common impotence. But a peasant could at least spend his time as he liked, a remnant of liberty that left him more initiative than the worker; although when economic crisis struck the countryside had a diminishing area of autonomy and increasingly depended on the town, where decisions were made. There the countryman could see, disguised as senior bureaucrat and acting in the name of the law, the face, at once loved, feared and hated, of his old master. Here was a tyranny harder to bear than that of previous times – the good old days. Some of its victims, recognizing the evil for what it was, sought escape. Among intellectuals there were some who sought help in religion, a movement seen in some countries as the century opened – the names Péguy, Solovev, Bergson showing the rebirth of mysticism. As Georges Sorel wrote, in L’Evolution créatrice (1907), ‘men rejoice at the idea of an omnipotent deity’.

But some people were not so fortunate: their desire to escape was exploited by the press, and between the years 1880 and 1913 every country saw a significant emergence of ‘non-political’ newspapers – the Daily Mail in England, Tägliche Rundschau in Germany, Le Petit Parisien in France, Novoe Vremya in Russia. However, religion, drink, card-playing or reading titbits was not everybody’s answer, and beyond such solutions they had two choices – flight or revolt, revolution or emigration. From the Urals to the Abruzzi and Land’s End discontent, poverty, racial or political persecution drove thirty million Europeans over the Atlantic. There they discovered that if they were ready for any effort, they could break away from their past and go forward to a new life. British, Germans and Scandinavians set the example; Slavs and Italians followed. Not many returned – it would have been a sign of failure, a confession of bankruptcy.

The revolutionary way was chosen by other men, also optimists, but having a different perspective. Some of them, resenting all forms of oppression, sought anarchy, the abolition of all authority; others dreamt of a world without fear, where men could safely build their own futures. Socialism or communism was advocated, rigorous explanations offered of the way capitalist economies functioned. Marxists were sure they had discovered the ‘laws’, convinced that their way alone had a scientific value.

The revolutionaries were a minority in this sleeping world; they hoped to awaken the working classes and the oppressed in general. But none of them, except the anarchists, appreciated that in establishing trade unions and political parties, in founding the International, they were perpetuating the governing–governed relationship in a different form. Besides, even in the revolutionary groups and parties, the relationship kept its class character. The anarchist, Kropotkin, was a prince and was treated as such; Lenin, son of a high civil servant, had very respectful treatment from the Tsarist police. Of 110 social democrat deputies in the Reichstag, only two were former workers, and even this symbolic representation was lacking in the French Chamber in 1914 – a step back from February 1848. There was not a single workman among the leaders of Russian social democracy. It was a command-structure: sympathizers obeyed members, members militants, militants their ‘leaders’. In 1902 Lenin, appreciating that the revolutionary movement was bankrupt, decided to set up his future party on army lines, with a highly centralized staff – and, for revolution to succeed, workers must be used as troops. They might be educated, lucid, politically free; just the same they were to go on obeying the men who did their thinking for them. The success of What is to be done? shows an outlook and a style; leaders of other political groups, particularly social democrats, were indignant, but in Russia, as elsewhere, they too manipulated militants and electors just as staffs manipulated troops or churches their faithful; and they did not even have the excuse of wanting to carry out a total proletarian revolution.

Above all, leaders of the extremist parties did not see that if their support grew it was because society was in the process of transformation, of evolving, into a new and different form – which lessened the chances of a real revolutionary situation. Between 1890 and 1914 it was not England, France or Germany, the first countries to undergo capitalist development, that saw rising possibilities of violent social upheaval, but Russia. Her economic backwardness was reflected in the political sphere by the weakness of her middle class, incapable of neutralizing the activities of the lower classes who wanted a total transformation of society. Italy too was a strong possibility in 1914; but here the American mirage was more powerful than elsewhere, and deprived the revolutionary movement of its future soldiers, the most dynamic, active and enterprising elements; and there was a link between the two, emigration and revolution. The choice once made had to be adhered to, and there was no one more conformist, in the United States as elsewhere, than new immigrants who, with the exception of anarchists, regarded any criticism of their adopted country as sacrilege. For them America was liberty, justice, virtue; everything predisposed the newest elements of American society to become conservatives and rabid patriots. It was in America that anarchists were first executed in 1886. By a similar process any criticism became sacrilege, after 1917, in the motherland of revolution. Soviet Russia forbade emigration, seeing in it a sign of dissatisfaction.

In pre-war Europe social tensions had been slowly weakening for many years. The unemployed found work, and the security of the individual appeared certain. This was so in France, where there was never much emigration, and where the chances of social revolution declined after the experience of the Commune. England was the same, since the failure of Chartism. Early in the twentieth century there were increasingly powerful strikes, but few violent demonstrations; from then on it was mainly Irish and Scots who crossed the seas. The only open revolt in England was that of the suffragettes. In Germany, early in this century, men supposed that if social transformation came, it would do so peacefully, controlled by the social democrat command that would soon have a Reichstag majority. Emigration to America also dwindled once men could benefit from German prosperity. 1837 in England, 1871 in France and 1910 in Germany marked the zenith of these three countries’ chances of effective transformation of the social structure – all dates that shadow, though at some distance, the period of maximum economic development. It seems that the earlier industrial development comes, the less the chance of social revolution, the more aggressive imperialism becomes, and the more internal social antagonism abates. As a counter-proof, social tensions were strong in Russia and Italy, both last in the race to industrialize and both barely enriched by imperialism. Increasing departures for Siberia or America and increasing signs of revolt in both town and village show how men were refusing to submit. Here was the land of anarchism, of Bakunin and Malatesta. It was here, too, that opposition to the war touched society as a whole. Even before they had created communism and fascism, these two countries left their mark on the early twentieth century, the Russians by signing the peace of Brest-Litovsk, the Italians by crying ‘farewell to arms’ at Caporetto. It was only later that the two peoples were unanimous in fighting – when they saw the homeland in danger, invaded by foreign enemies: then war meant something. There was no equivocation for the British, French or Germans: for them, the war was waged to protect the national interest.

But there was more to it. The workers of 1914, going off to war, had found a substitute for revolutionary hopes. The most miserable, least conscious of them emerged from their social ghetto, reintegrated owing to the war, demobilized as far as revolution was concerned. Their very existence would be changed, as they had always secretly hoped. Conditions had been improving throughout Europe for them, but only slowly and not at equal speed for all classes. The business world in France underwent a virtual resurrection between 1900 and 1914 – the Belle époque. The real wages of workers almost doubled, for the most part, between 1900 and the war. At the same time, while the number of users of pawn-shops fell, the number of registered pledges had never been so high as on the eve of war. The diffusion of the press, the development of education, the growth of advertising created new material needs: for more varied food, a town suit, better crockery, or a bicycle. They opened up the possibility of a richer and more interesting, more worthwhile existence; to rise on the social ladder seemed an inalienable right. Already the Paris worker of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine or Belleville crossed the Bastille canal on Sundays; on the Grands Boulevards, respectably dressed, he would go to a café-concert, then the Opéra-Comique. From the Porte Saint-Martin to the Bourse was now no further than from the Bourse to the rue de la Paix, where financial speculators rubbed shoulders with the old notables. At all levels men were anxious to climb, and this was equally true in Berlin or London. Young men went off adventurously, glad to change their lives, to travel. They were successfully answering the call of duty, and were sure they would soon be back as victors.

Far from being an ordeal, the war liberated men’s energies. It was enthusiastically received by most men of military age: in England, and later in the United States, where there was no conscription, there were a million volunteers. The behaviour of reservists going to the front is evidence enough: French, Germans, British – all on their mettle. The Russians, being older, were rather less spirited, the Italians were slower off the mark; their dreams were different – hopes of revolution, visions of America. But even in Russia there were few absentees on call-up; and in France, where the military authorities counted on 5–13 per cent refusal to attend, there was only 1·5 per cent. The international spirit is said to have gone bankrupt, socialists to have failed to stop the war, to have betrayed their oath. Contemporaries were struck by this. But men were sure this was false: in answering their country’s call they carried out a patriotic and revolutionary duty. They felt their country had been wantonly attacked, that in going to war revolutionary-minded soldiers and their brothers-in-arms would be creating eternal peace. The utopian ideal of fighting a ‘war to end war’ inspired French soldiers. Pacifism and internationalism were fused with individualism and patriotism, a decidedly exceptional occurrence to be explained only by the peculiar nature of the war which, for all combatants, was a just one, a war for national defence – and in any case, one that was inevitable.

2
PATRIOTIC WAR

DOI: 10.4324/9780203016763-3

The French genius, a historian might morosely conclude, is not so much for arms as for civil war. Save for 1914, France had never known a long and truly patriotic war. She of all nations might most glorify arms, but history, recent and distant, shows that she fought no war that was not, sooner or later, cross-bred with civil war. 1939–45 is an obvious case in point, as are the Revolution and the Empire, Joan of Arc and the Burgundians, Henri IV, the League and the Richelieu epoch. Even in 1870 there was a group that, openly or secretly, wanted the government to be defeated. This was not true of 1914–18: then there was no ‘Foreigner Party’.

There were of course opponents of war, but they did not advocate the enemy cause: they were rather pacifists, enemies of all governments if not of all wars. Jaurès for instance condemned only ‘imperialist’ wars, but felt national defence was legitimate; most people felt the same, even in Russia, where hatred of the autocracy was virtually universal. There was no element of ‘defeatism’, which, in 1914–18, meant not that discouraging pessimism that weakens national morale and thus leads to defeat, but rather an active will that the country should be defeated and thereby regenerated. In France, and later on in Italy, some clericals, detesting the régime and its secular tendency, hoped that ‘divine retribution’ would fall on their ‘errant fatherland’. But there were not many such. On the other hand, extreme socialists such as Lenin felt in 1914 that nothing would be more calamitous for proletarian revolution than a military victory of the Tsar’s or the Kaiser’s armies; they must therefore work for their own country’s defeat. This stand was universally disliked, and they had to give it up for an international, pacifist one that meant changing European war into civil war. The fragile barrier of the International collapsed on the first sound of the trumpet – in Russia, France and throughout Europe. Frenchmen and Germans alike saw the war as a clear struggle for right, as self-evidently justified as a crusade, defence of family, or faith, or class. No argument could overcome this collective instinct. The two coalitions’ world-wide conflict had its origins, of course, in imperialist rivalry. But the particular conflicts of one nation with another obeyed other imperatives, a tradition that had its roots in the depths of collective consciousness. Each people felt its very existence threatened by the hereditary enemy. The war thus became for all a kind of fatal rite, and hence its deadly character, a feature that reference to imperialism alone does not explain.

The peoples derived these passions from a long history. But patriotic unity was of more recent origin. For half a century increasing geographical concentration of industry, of capitalist development, had created general economic conditions that the pre-industrial era had not known. The laws of 1846 affected the whole of British agriculture, the agreements of 1860 the whole of French industry. In the preceding three decades French economic growth had been badly affected by the European agricultural crisis, caused in part by imports from the newly exploited overseas countries, Canada or Australia. In Europe each people felt victimized, surrounded by enemies who were after its goods, its growth, even its existence. Patriotism was one way in which society reacted to the world’s economic unification. Nationality movements were one variant of this tendency, and not exclusively linked to racial or religious persecution. The connection is still more apparent when patriotism is associated with the revival of regionalism. In Russia economic development resulted in colonists’ penetration throughout the Empire, whose presence, as a foreign body, was all the more noteworthy beyond old Russia as the resources of the Ukraine, or the Trans-Siberian, were exploited. They increased in number – populating and administering peripheral areas they had once merely supervised. Their presence, and the russification policy associated with it, were taken as a hostile act and national movements grew up in vigorous reaction to it: not only among peoples such as Balts or Finns who had never felt Russian, but also among Ukrainians, Little Russians, Mordvinians, Mari and others.

Between forcing Ukrainians to talk Russian and forbidding French schoolchildren to talk dialects there was only a difference of degree, as was the case between the russification of St Petersburg bureaucrats and the centralization of those in Berlin or Paris. The Provençal or Breton revival – the first Inter-Celtic ‘conference was held in 1877 – the survival of ‘the southern question’ and still more the Sicilian problem in Italy all showed the same tendency: patriotism, but patriotism dissociated from the present. Yet national unity was more strengthened than disrupted by these functionaries from Paris or Berlin or St Petersburg; centralization meant also attack on feudal survivals, defence against the foreigner. The means at their disposal were greater than before, and this led men to suppose that institutions were being democratized. The state became more powerful, but people in 1914 felt that they were now irreversibly free, that democracy could be guaranteed by legal modification and improvement of the social and political order. Men did not appreciate that the ruling classes had merely perfected their religion. The original catechism was now supplemented by another, taught in schools and repeated in the press; for thirty years the rise of education, the rebirth of sport, the dominance of the press produced increasing national faith.

After 1880 education, already widely extended in England and Germany, made great strides in France and Russia. Knowl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Translator’s Note
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Part IV
• Select Bibliography
• Index