Guglielmo Ferrero, a liberal
Italian journalist and historian who lived from 1871 to 1942, considers here
the question of how conscription—and the concomitant expansion of state power
over the individual—came to Europe in the course of the Wars of the French
Revolution and Napoleon. The book from which this extract is taken, Problems
of Peace: From the Holy Alliance to the League of Nations (G.P Putnam’s Sons, 1919) was provoked by the catastrophe of the Great War and the manifold quesitons of reconstruction raised by the Paris Peace Conference. Ferrero styled it a message from a European writer to Americans, in which he
undertook to explain the causes and consequences of Europe’s maladies to the
newly empowered United States. While there is some special pleading of Italy’s
position in the book’s closing, the body of the work, detailing the transformation
of European politics over the long nineteenth century (1789-1914), contains
many brilliant analyses, of which the following is an example. Here he takes up
the grim question of how it was that the French Revolution, “meant to free the
world,” brought with it the new servitude of conscription, and how France’s
enemies, especially the great courts of Austria and Prussia, imitated France
even as they feared her, becoming the French Revolution's "best scholars and its most implacable enemies." (3368 words)
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The question whether the French Revolution gave liberty to
the world has been bitterly debated for more than a hundred years. Some say it
did, others that it did not. In order to decide the point it would be necessary
to know what each side means by liberty. But at any rate there is no doubt
whatever that one of the first gifts generously bestowed by that Revolution on
the peoples was that of compulsory military service.
This point is of such capital importance that we must stop
to consider it for a moment. It must at once be admitted that any military
system must be based on one of two contrary principles—the professional
principle, whereby war is regarded as one among other arts practised by
mankind, a pursuit voluntarily chosen as a means of livelihood by any one who
feels he has a vocation for it, or the political principle, which regards the
bearing of arms as a civic duty incumbent on all male persons whatever their
profession, their social position, or their education. Each of these principles
has its good and its bad side. The professional principle is best for those
States which require only a small army but which must have it of the best
quality, because men who have the vocation of arms are few. The political
principle, on the other hand, is well suited to States which need a larger
force of less high quality and not trained above the average. But it is clear
that, of the two, the professional principle is the more in conformity with
human nature and military science, while the political principle is not and
cannot be more than a desperate expedient for increasing numbers. There is no
art which, if it is to be thoroughly known and skilfully exercised, does not
require aptitude, close study, and long practice and, if this is so, how can it
reasonably be argued that we can all of us become improvised warriors in a few
months ? For war is one of the most difficult of all arts, requiring as it
does, not only much knowledge but a stern apprenticeship in such very arduous
virtues as obedience, courage, and patience. This is why all nations have
abhorred conscription as the most detestable of servitudes, and why it has
always been difficult to induce them to submit to it. In the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries war was the chief occupation of the Courts of Europe, and
yet none (though all were absolute monarchies) had the courage or the power to
impose on all its own subjects the obligation to serve in its armies. The
soldiers who served under their banners were not all volunteers, and they did
not scruple to enlist soldiers by force when they could. But this was the
exception, not the rule, and the men taken were of the humblest class, picked
up here and there, over a long period of time. These forced soldiers in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were not citizens fulfilling a civic duty
equally obligatory on all, but men compelled by their own exceptional ill luck
to adopt the profession of arms. In any case, if volunteers were not numerous
these impressed soldiers were even less so ; consequently, armies were small
and the wars whereby the Courts strove to realize their territorial ambitions
were limited not only by their poverty but by the difficulty, not a small one,
of finding soldiers.
How was it then that the French Revolution, which was to
free the world, brought with it this new servitude side by side with the
Declaration of the Rights of Man? The governments of Europe during the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were at the same time both strong and
weak. They were strong because they were legitimate, because they possessed a
title to authority which all men recognized as genuine. These titles varied
from State to State and were sometimes even contradictory. . . . But logical or
illogical, just or unjust, decrepit or still vigorous and fresh, all these
sovereignties appeared legitimate, not because all men venerated them as such
in their hearts, but because everybody respected, or said they respected, them,
and because no one dared to interfere. All being supported by many interests,
all maintained themselves intact in the respect of the peoples, precisely
because there were so many of them, and because there was none among them so
strong as to be able to overthrow and destroy all the rest. But these
governments, so strong in the possession of their authority, were extremely
weak in exercising it. Instead of being gathered up in a few vigorous, well
co-ordinated and subordinated organs of government, authority was scattered
among a great number of different centres, ill co-ordinated and subordinated,
each jealous of its own rights and privileges.
Moreover the authority of the State was not merely scattered
through a multitude of organs, it was also limited in every direction by
acquired privilege, by tradition, by local autonomies and customs, and
therefore it was forced to take a slow, difficult, and devious way among all
these obstacles and impediments, like a river at the bottom of a narrow gorge
twisted and obstructed at every turn by enormous boulders. Who, for instance,
would believe that in 1806, when Revolution and War had already half uprooted
the old order with its pedantic respect for legality, in the night of October 11th-12th
on the eve of the Battle of Jena, the Prussian army encamped in the woods
suffered severely from the cold because, not being in enemy territory, it had
not the right to requisition even what was necessary for its support; that the
horses went without fodder, though there were ample supplies in Jena afterwards
taken by the French, because Wolfgang von Goethe, the Grand Ducal Commissariat
Officer, did not inform the generals in time that they had his permission to
take what was necessary ! . . .
But the eighteenth century was weary of obeying these
governments which it still revered, for they were weak, incapable, and often
unjust and oppressive, not because they were tyrannous in intention but because
they were impotent. This is the contradiction in the work of that century,
frivolous and tragic, trifling and powerful, little and great, which, when it
felt that old age was creeping upon it determined to have its youth again even
at the cost of selling its soul to the Devil. More than two hundred years
previously, human reason, deserting the mediaeval schools, had ventured forth
into the infinite, seeking truth no longer in the pages of a few books but in
the affairs of real life. The art of war had been reborn in Europe and had
emerged with the learning of the ancients from the oblivion of the Middle Ages.
The principles of strategy and tactics were re-discovered in Greek and Latin
books, and men worked out their application to the use of firearms then
recently invented. Among the greater and lesser European dynasties had arisen a
struggle to aggrandize themselves either by force of aims or by treaties, not
in Europe only but also in Asia and Africa, and in America, the newly
discovered continent. The wars of Religion which sprang from the Reformation,
had supervened, and were often mixed up with wars of dynastic predominance and
colonial conquest. Thus for two centuries what we now call militarism had been
making great strides in Europe. Diplomatic skill, valour in war, success in
negotiation and in fighting, were passports to the favour of the great
Territorial aggrandizements and were valued almost in proportion to the efforts
and the sacrifices they had cost. But armies required money, and war not money
only but promptitude, vigour, and elasticity of organization in the belligerent
States. Hence, in the eighteenth century, the dispersion of authority, the
scrupulous respect for vested rights and for tradition characteristic of the
old regime became specially obnoxious to the Courts engaged in these wars and
conflicts, when they found that they were thereby weakened and embarrassed.
This was the cause of the intellectual ferment and the mania for action and for
novelty which agitated the upper classes of the greater European States at this
time, driving them to seek sources of riches, beauty, and truth which had
hitherto been unknown. In France, the human mind made a heroic effort to remove
the source of authority from parchments, from historic rights, from the
inscrutable depths of divinity, into the sphere of human beings who were
recognized as having the right to sit in judgment on governments and therefore
to accept a good government as a legitimate government. Germany, chained to the
earth by the institutions of the Empire, took refuge in a paradise of the
imagination, tried by means of romanticism to bring about a revolution in the
realm of beauty by overthrowing classical models, and began to be fevered with
that philosophic delirium which, growing with the disorder of the times,
infected the whole of Europe in the ensuing century. England emulated the
mythical achievement of Prometheus by creating docile, powerful, and unwearied
slaves of iron animated by fire, by whose aid she might conquer the riches of
the world. Every now and then Europe was startled by some portent which broke
the ordinary course of human history. Now it was Frederick the Great who
renewed the art of war; now Joseph the Second who desired to reform his empire
from top to bottom; now the first partition of Poland. For the first time,
three States came to an agreement to fall upon a weaker neighbour for no other
reason than that they coveted her fertile lands, thus cancelling all the
principles of international law as then acknowledged and putting in their place
the right of force. There was immense fear and indignation in Europe at this
event, but no less was the envy of all the States who might have wished, but
could not or did not dare, to follow this disastrous precedent.
The elite of the eighteenth century longed, in a word, for
governments stronger, more alert, and more intelligent than those by which
Europe was then ruled, even if they should possess fewer antique parchment
credentials, if only they were ready to provide capacity and energy in the
place of the legitimacy which seemed to have no life left in it. For this
reason, encouraged by sovereigns and powerful personages, they were ready to
assail the existing order, or at least such parts of that order as seemed most
out of date and most insensible to the aspirations of the day. There is,
however, nothing on earth, which is at the same time more stable and more
fragile than a legal principle. It will resist for centuries all the criticisms
of reason, all the protests of sentiment, and all the assaults of opposed
interests, only to fall in a few weeks when overwhelmed by a war, or a
revolution. On this occasion also, the earthquake of the Revolution overthrew
in a few years what the criticism of philosophers and the reforms of princes
had barely shaken. After hesitating between several aims, the Revolution, attacked
on all sides and on the point of being overwhelmed by numbers, had recourse to
the political principle of military service. Owing to the desperate necessity
of finding soldiers, soldiers, and yet more soldiers, it assembled its youthful
levies under officers and non-commissioned officers, who had served the Monarchy,
inflamed them with a passion of patriotism and revolutionary ardour, squandered
their blood without stinting, unreservedly adopted the principle, never fully
accepted by the eighteenth century, that war annuls all rights which are in
force in time of peace, and conquered a Europe which depended on little armies
recruited on the professional principle.
But for success in war, valorous and well-led armies are not
enough. Resolute and energetic governments are also necessary; and so the Revolution
had to set about creating in France a powerful State, based on the ruins of the
ancient principles of legitimacy and its own dreams of happiness and freedom.
The Church and the Nobility, the two powers which under the ancien regime had overpowered the
Monarchy they pretended to serve, were humiliated. Authority was concentrated
in the State which received well-defined powers and was administered by a
capable staff recruited according to merit. Wide roads of common law convenient
to all were driven through the tangled thickets of privilege and vested rights which
had burdened so much of the old France. The medley of the ancient laws was
codified and made simple. In short, there was improvised a simpler and stronger
government, more efficient, and more in harmony with the dictates of reason,
which plunged boldly with fresh forces into the struggle for territorial
expansion, making a free and ever more audacious use of the sovereign right of
force which, to the great scandal of all Europe, Russia, Prussia, and Austria
had, for the first time, applied to Poland.
The Revolution did not, however, succeed in finding or
applying any new principle of legitimacy. For a time, some attempt was made to
rediscover the mystic source of lawful authority in the will of the people; but
as no one knew exactly where this will was to be found or how it was to be
expressed or recognized, it was finally confounded and identified with the
genius, the energy, the fortunes; and the victories of a single man. The
Republic was, practically without intermission, governed by a dictatorship
until an ex-captain of artillery, born of a needy family of the minor nobility
of Corsica, ascended the throne of France because he had proved that he knew
how to rule and make war, and became the first champion of the new Divine Right
of intelligence which was apparently imposing itself upon Europe.
Thus the French Revolution became at once the terror and the
model of European monarchies, by which it was the more hated the more they were
obliged to learn from it. Among all the rest, the two great Germanic monarchies,
Austria and Prussia, were its best scholars and its most implacable enemies.
This contradiction contains one of the two most profound and terrible secrets
of the history of Europe in the nineteenth century. Taught by their imitation
and by their defeats, Austria and Prussia sought to strengthen themselves as
France had done by taking advantage of the upheaval which had weakened in every
mind the sentiments of legality and tradition, and the respect for treaties and
for the established order. In 1793 and 1795, while at war with France, Austria
and Prussia, profiting by the difficulties with which their adversary was
struggling, agreed with Russia to seize the Polish territories which had
escaped the first partition. Austria began to introduce conscription, though to
a less degree than in France, and, in 1797, under the Treaty of Campo Formio,
she came to an understanding with the French Republic to which she surrendered
Belgium, Lombardy, and the eastern bank of the Rhine, receiving in exchange the
territories of the Venetian Republic. The young Republic, the daughter of the
Revolution, and the Holy Roman Empire agreed to tear up parchments and scraps
of paper in order to aggrandize themselves at the expense of old and legitimate
governments, among which was no other than the Republic of Venice, the most
brilliant jewel among Medieval and Renaissance States, a miracle of
well-preserved beauty. Henceforth, no legitimate government which could not
defend itself was recognized as possessing any rights at all. As Napoleon said
to Martens, International Law was the same thing as the law of the stronger.
Ambition and suspicion were now sufficient motives for war; the international
order ceased to be stable, and, as no State was safe, all had to arm
themselves. There was terror at the French victories and at the ever imminent
danger of war. An even greater terror of the catastrophe which had destroyed
the French nobility and the Monarchy was inspired in Austria, Prussia, and the
lesser German States, where the aristocracy, the clergy, the army, and the
official class rallied to the support of legitimate monarchy against the
upstart power of France and the dragon of Revolution. They made a willing
sacrifice of vested right, tradition, and all privileges which limited or
hindered, even to their advantage, the authority of the King. At Vienna,
centralized absolutism, which had been fighting tenaciously for two hundred
years against the spirit of autonomy, rapidly prevailed. Resistance weakened;
the provincial Diets gave up contending for their constitutional rights.
Germany began to awaken from her long sleep, her philosophic delirium increased
as the old world fell to pieces around her; behind Kant stood Fichte and
Schelling. Even the lesser Princes felt and admitted that the day was at hand
when they would have to be merged and disappear in a higher and more powerful
unity. In all the monarchical States, the authority of the Court increased
because the Court, following the example set in France, now watched over and directed
everything. But the more the legitimate monarchies, as their power grew,
imitated Napoleon, the more they hated the usurper and the more they longed to
overthrow him. Hence one war sprang from another in a concatenation which
seemed as if it would never end, and, with each new war, there crumbled away
some new part of the ancient order under which Europe had lived. In 1801, the
Treaty of Luneville surrendered the whole of the left bank of the Rhine to the
French Republic. In the following year the stronger States of Germany—Prussia
and Austria among them—compensated themselves for this loss by agreeing to the
immediate annexation of a great number of the smaller States, for the most part
Free Cities and ecclesiastical Principalities. In 1804, while the war against
France and the Third Coalition were being prepared, Napoleon crowned himself Emperor,
and Francis I. at once followed suit by proclaiming himself Emperor of Austria
"with all due regard to the independent States." This double status
did not last long, for in 1806, after the Battle of Austerlitz, the
discomfiture of the Third Coalition, and the Peace of Presburg, Napoleon united
Western and Southern Germany, including Bavaria, in the Confederation of the
Rhine which was placed under his protection, and, on August 6th, Francis I.
declared that the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation was dissolved. Destiny
was fulfilled. Henceforth the German people was freed from the system of little
Kingdoms, respected but impotent, under which it had become feeble. The little
German principalities which had escaped from the ruin of 1802 were now
incorporated in a few more powerful States. Germany had taken another step
towards her unification, and in her midst there arose the new Empire of
Austria, imitating but hating the French Empire.
It is very frequently said that the Empire of Austria is a
relic of the Middle Ages, a feudal State, and a living anachronism. This is
only partly true. The Austrian Empire would be younger by a few months than the
Empire of the Napoleonidæ, if the latter had not been shattered by Fate in its
earliest years. She also is a daughter, albeit a bastard daughter, of the
French Revolution, one of the States which, like Prussia, profited by the
ideas, the innovations, and the institutions that the Revolution and the Empire
created or experimented with, not in order to alter the principles of
government or to liberate the world, but to aggrandize themselves, to increase
their military power, and to free themselves from many of the impediments from
which, under the ancien regime, owing
to the dispersion and the limitation of its authority, the State suffered.
After her defeat at Jena, Prussia followed this path even
more ardently than Austria. The State was modernized by the addition of all the
institutions and all the principles of the Revolution which could reinforce the
authority of the monarch, the government, and the nobility. The principle of
compulsory military service for all citizens was definitely adopted, and
applied more resolutely and coherently than in all other countries, not excepting
France. . . .
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This photograph of Ferrero is courtesy of Wikipedia Commons
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This photograph of Ferrero is courtesy of Wikipedia Commons
