A Botched Civilization, Part 1 of 2

I believe a slightly different version of this was given in a speech somewhere, probably in 2011.

A Botched Civilization

The First World War was a defining moment for the civilization of Europe.  The first war and its inevitable successor have been called Europe's civil war, and there is truth in this characterization.  Divided by language, religion, and culture, the nations of Europe were united in a common civilization.  But if the two conflicts were part of a European civil war, they were also the beginning of the end of Europe and Christendom, whose memory is now preserved only in libraries, museums, and some churches.

It is not ironic, then, but tragically fitting that the Great War was a writer's war, particularly a poet's war.  It was the first modern war in which large numbers of writers actually fought in the ranks.  This was particularly true in Britain, where the memory of the war was most enduringly engraved on the national consciousness by memoirs written by poets.  For the Germans, the defining work was a novel: All Quiet on the Western Front, written by private Erich Maria Remarque, a twice-wounded veteran whose book bore witness to the collapse of the European moral order.  A different lesson was learned by Ernst Jünger, who captured the amoral violence of the war in The Storm of Steel.  Nonetheless, Jünger came out of the conflict convinced that war was the only experience that could morally elevate a degenerate society.  The Second World War would teach him a deeper and more tragic wisdom, but Jünger was not the only German  who regarded war as an antidote to the bitterness of German defeat.

The Great War was also a writer's graveyard: Britain lost Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, and Edward Thomas, as well as  the promising young composer George Butterworth.  Germany lost fewer poets, but the brilliant young classicist Tycho von Wilamowitz fell at Ivangorod.  France lost even more heavily.  The talented young novelist Alain-Fournier was killed in 1914.  The influential poet Guillaume Apollinaire was wounded and died after the war of the Spanish influenza. One might also mention Augustin Cochin, perhaps the finest scholar who has worked on the French Revolution:  Cochin was killed at the age of 40.

France's gravest loss, however, was Charles Péguy, one of the greatest poets and most incisive thinkers of the 20th century.  Péguy was born to a poor family and brought up in Orléans, and he never lost the peasant qualities of his ancestors.  Reared and educated as a Catholic, he was an avowed socialist for much of his life and did not return to the Church or even mention the name of God until he was in his 30's.  His conversion was brilliantly declared to the world in one of the most profound poems of the 20th century, Le Mystère de la Charité de Jeanne d'Arc, a series of mystical reflections on the significance of St. Joan.  

In his very influential journal, Cahiers de Quinzaine, Péguy poured out a stream of coruscating polemics, championing those who work and produce and create against the class of bureaucrats, government contractors, and rentiers that merely consumes value produced by workers.  Convinced that the German Kaiser was bent on war, he declared that it was France’s destiny to defend her free and spiritual civilization against an amoral and regimented nation, and he warned his fellow-countrymen not to think that a mobilization for war was a good reason to sacrifice their freedom or to emulate the Prussian system.  He was one of the last truly sane men of the 20th century.

Péguy’s growing conservatism and his declaration of Catholic faith attracted the attention but not the support of the leaders of the French intellectual right, Maurice Barrès and Charles Maurras.  Maurras, the leader of the political movement Action Française, was more of a nationalist than a conservative Catholic, and his loyalty to the traditions of the church did not entail either religious faith or even obedience to the Holy See.  Like most nationalists Maurras spoke only of restoring what he called the true France, even if it meant killing the ordinary people who were false-French, the citizens, as he put it, of the Anti-France that adhered to the principles of the French Revolution.  

Maurras’ analysis although violently overstated, does contain a large grain of truth.  Like the Anti-America that celebrates only the enemies of its traditions and the Anti-Serbia that publicly confesses to every crime alleged by Serbia's enemies, Anti-France has done its best to destroy the traditions and historical memory of the French nation and of the Christian West.  This is usually done in the name of the globalist Marxist ideology that came to power in Russia near the end of the Great War that generated the Russian Revolution.  

Lenin and Trotsky and their allies transformed Russia from an authentic nation with its own traditions into an ideological project, a leap into a future that acknowledged neither nationality nor religion nor cultural tradition.  It is not quite accurate to describe this global cultural revolution as multi-cultural, because while non-Western and non-Christian cultures are all honored, the traditions of the West are uniformly condemned as feudal or bourgeois, corrupted by racism and religious bigotry.  Hence the EU's refusal even to acknowledge the contribution made by Christianity to the development of Europe.

This multi-cultural hatred of the West was, of course, anticipated in the Communist Manifesto; indeed, it can be traced back through the Enlightenment all the way to Michel de Montaigne in his "Essay on the Cannibals."  However, Western self-hatred reached a new level of coherence in France after WW I.  France was on the winning side of the war, true, but too much of the war had been fought on French territory.  France has recovered materially, but never spiritually from that holocaust.  Into the moral and spiritual ruins of post-war France, strange monsters came out of the shadows and became the dominant force in the culture of the grande nation. 

When Paul Claudel, Catholic poet, patriot, and diplomat, spoke of preserving the religious and cultural traditions of the West, a coalition of Communists and surrealists denounced him for defending a civilization which the surrealists derided as inferior to all the cultures of the world, high and low. If the classical ideal celebrated form and balance, they declared, "For us there can be no talk of balance or great art. The idea of the beautiful has long gone to roost. Only the moral idea remains incontestable - for example the knowledge that one cannot be French ambassador and a poet at the same time."

If the West was falling apart, so much the better:  "We profoundly hope that revolutions, wars, colonial insurrections, will annihilate this Western civilization whose vermin you defend even in the Orient."

Seven years later, Paris surrealist gurus issued their encyclical on the colonial question to date, "Murderous Humanitarianism" (1932),  signed by (among others) André Breton, Paul Éluard, Benjamin Péret, and Yves Tanguy.   This  Surrealists' manifesto condemns not only colonialism, capitalism, and the clergy, but also the Third World's liberal middle classes who collaborated with colonialist/capitalist regimes.  Western “humanism,” they declare, so far from being humane, was built on slavery, colonialism and genocide, and they proclaimed the multi-cultural political that we are living through today:

"We surrealists pronounced ourselves in favor of changing the imperialist war, in its chronic and colonial form, into a civil war. Thus we placed our energies at the  disposal of the revolution, of the proletariat and its struggles, and defined our attitude towards the colonial problem, and hence towards the color question."

  So, one direct result of the War was to unleash the forces of Marxist-Multiculturalism that has made war not only on the free market and private property but on every defining aspect of European civilization, including even the idea of European nations like France.

On a simpler level, the Great War served to drive a wedge between the men who had done the fighting and the politicians who had brought it on and the staff officers who directed operations from the rear. This dichotomy was the common theme of much of the writing during and after the war, and it helps to explain why so many English writers turned sharply to the Left.  

The class tensions of the pre-war period turned into a generalized hatred for the entire establishment with its hypocritical traditions and murderous patriotism.  In 1933 the Oxford Union sponsored a debate in which the resolution was moved and passed by 275 votes to 153 that this house will under no circumstances fight for its King and country.  Opening the argument, the socialist Kenelm Digby declared, provocatively that "It is no mere coincidence that the only country fighting for the cause of peace, Soviet Russia, is the country that has rid itself of the war-mongering clique."  If patriotism was the disease, then international socialism was the cure.