The European Union is trying to take revenge on peace by using war. Discussed, contested, often rejected, Europe had one merit: to neutralize conflicts. That was its raison d'etre. Since the invasion of Ukraine, she adopts a martial posture: the refuge has turned into a barracks. Planes, tanks, missiles: the lexical field has been renewed.
Emmanuel Macron repeated it in Munich: Europeans should expect a long conflict. War implies, in any imagination, a general in chief, a staff, senior officers, at least soldiers, in short an army to contest, to support, to engage in. What Europe is not, or almost, equipped with. If war breaks out, it's not Europe that will do it, but France. Is she ready to be a warring power again?
Since the middle of the 19th century, France has started its wars badly, even if it means ending them well. In 1870, a generation was impatient to show Prussia that she had lost none of her splendor since the battle of Jena (1806). The rout and the humiliation were all the more traumatic because no one doubted France, that is to say its talent, its determination, its unity, in short its ability to win a battle.
As for the defeat of 1940, there is no need to return here to the thousand times quoted essay by Marc Bloch, The Strange Defeat, in which the historian describes a country abandoned by its leaders, and not only military ones. In the case of the War of 1870, as in that of the Second World War, no one was surprised by the outcome of the conflict. The analyzes are teleological: everything would have indicated, from the first minute, the catastrophe to come.
The same is not true for the First World War. Inhuman, bloody, abominable, adjectives abound to sum up a trauma from which the 20th century has never recovered. Jules Ferry's nephew, Abel Ferry, Secretary of State, deputy, but also a fighter (he died at the front) between 1914 and 1918, kept a diary where he transcribed almost day by day what he saw in the presidency of the Council, in the Assembly, in meetings attended by ministers, generals, etc.
These "Secret Notebooks" are an exceptional document, a kind of history of the First World War by the bureaucracy. The portrait he draws is appalling. A President of the Republic, Poincaré, intelligent, strong-willed, but reduced to impotence by the Constitution of the Third Republic, spineless, calculating, mean-spirited ministers, a dangerous military high command, Joffre at the head, who tries by all means to free themselves from civil power. "The Council complains that in Alsace we accumulate faults on errors. The general staff appoints sub-prefects, judges, notaries, without having the right to do so, which means that their actions will be void, and without consulting the government. To neutralize the dictatorial drift of the generals, Ferry tried to pass a law at the end of which Parliament would exercise formal control over the General Staff. Extravagantly, many deputies refuse because they fear bearing the responsibility for the defeat.
As for the deleterious logistics and the disorganization of the front, they are the daily life of a government overwhelmed by the incompetence of soldiers who had planned or predicted nothing, not even the war, the trenches. Technical difficulties are one thing, the state of mind is another. No one in France was prepared for war, which is all the more extraordinary since the children had been brought up for twenty years in the cult of revenge against Prussia, lulled by the memory of Alsace. and Lorraine.
If Emmanuel Macron believes in the possibility of war, as he says, then consequences must be drawn. Besides, how can you blame him? His job is to consider all the possibilities; but a society does not apprehend a military phenomenon overnight. It is easier to say something stupid in the Assembly than to fire a shot. These remarks appear extravagant insofar as kyiv seems very far from Paris, but the unpreparedness is sometimes worse than the paranoia. It is not so simple, even for the best of ministers, to make decisions that commit life, to surrender to the realm of action, to be subject in equal measure to triumph and disaster, to abandon the relativity of words for the absolute of facts.
This is all the more true for a country where the most widely shared conviction is decline. Abel Ferry writes: “The generation of men aged fifty to sixty, who will have governed France during this war [the First World War], had its childhood crossed by the war of 1870 and the Treaty of Frankfurt. Everyone, both the sons of the bourgeois [...] and the sons of the people, remained a sort of shyness, fear of action and distrust of France. »
Book Reference:
Abel Ferry, Secret Notebooks 1914-1918, Paris, Grasset, 2005. New edition. Preface by Nicolas Offenstadt, notes revised by André Loez
* Born in 1990, Arthur Chevallier is a historian and editor at Passés Composites. He curated the exhibition "Napoleon" (2021), produced by the Grand Palais and La Villette. He has written several books devoted to the political and cultural posterity of Napoleon Bonaparte and the First Empire, Napoleon told by those who knew him (Grasset, 2014), Napoleon without Bonaparte (Cerf, 2018), Napoleon and Bonapartism (Que do I know?, 2021), or Napoleon's Women (Grasset, 2022).
