Reconstruction and national life

Foreword

Reconstruction is not, to an American, a word of the happiest associations. To even a superficial student of American history it means one episode and one only, an episode to which no southerner can yet refer without heightened color, no northerner without discomfort. But we do not recall such a memory to promote pessimism — only to remind ourselves that it was reconstruction of the South by the North that failed and that proved more destructive than the war itself. The reconstruction that succeeded was undertaken by the South and was carried through in spite of all handicaps. And the reminder may help us to estimate the permanent and the passing, the fundamental and the external in the Europe of 19 19. For it may be that some of us watch too exclusively the labors of the Congress at Paris and ignore the pathetic and powerful struggles of the people of Europe for security, freedom and self-realization.

The problem of reconstruction may be approached from two angles. One phase of it is necessarily somewhat formal and external. Wounds have to be healed, vi FOREWORD

deformities have to be removed, frontiers have to be redrawn along national lines, rival claims have to be considered where nationality is mixed or doubtful, new states that were formerly parts of the German, Austro-Hungarian or Russian Empires have to be delimited and recognized, and form must be given to the League of Nations. The other phase is even more complex and fundamental. It involves the renewal of normal lines of life and progress by all the nations involved in the war, the picking up of strained and broken threads, the reconsideration by each people of its own problems after the tremendous crisis that is now past.

The formal, diplomatic phase is the one that primarily concerns the Peace Congress at Versailles. Its difficulties are in theory not particularly formidable, for the most part, for the settlement must proceed on principles universally admitted. The practical difficulties, on the other hand, are enormous, and can be removed only by a minute knowledge of the facts and by infinite tact. But however carefully we may endeavor to follow and understand this external side of reconstruction we are in the main powerless to aid or hinder. All we can do is to clarify the issues in our minds and try to grasp the most essential facts.

The more subtle and far-reaching phase of recon-

FOREWORD Vli

struction is that implied in self-determination, the problem imposed on each people of facing its own issues, reconsidering its own aims and lines of advance. In this we cannot always give mutual aid in a direct and material way, but we can aid in sympathy and understanding. And if this kind of aid, intangible, spiritual, immensely powerful, is to be rendered intelligently we must above all things try to know the character and the problems of the peoples with whom we are to be associated in our League of Nations. For whatever form the League may take and however that League may be modified in the years to come it will stand or fall not mainly through formal merits or formal weaknesses but through the degree to which it succeeds in " organizing the friendship of the world."

It is this latter phase of reconstruction that I have had chiefly in mind in the chapters that follow. They rest on the conviction that important as the formal work of the Peace Congress may be there is a more fundamental and permanent work of reconstruction that must fall on each nation, not a reconstruction that will be built on the deceptively tangible foundation of maps and treaties but a reconstruction built on the hopes, the convictions, the struggles, the dreams of the peoples. The basis of such reconstruction is not to be found in documents or institutions, for it is a living

Vlll FOREWORD

and dynamic basis, and the structure will not be one that may be completed in a year ; its foundations have been shaping for centuries, and none of us will live to see the work receive its final touch. But in the meantime we may aid in the building by knowledge, sympathy and good-will. And our first step must be the study of the foundations on which the anxious and wearied peoples of Europe are to build, the solid and yet ever changing foundations of human life in its struggle toward a social ideal.

Of the need for such a study we are earnestly convinced. For the isolation of the United States is broken, and apparently broken forever. The Atlantic has been bridged, or rather it has become to America what the Channel has been to England for a thousand years. It still separates us from Europe, but we no longer have the illusion that the troubles of Europe are the troubles of another planet. It was always an illusion. There was never a time when the affairs of peoples so closely akin to us in blood, in traditions and in thought did not matter to us. Not only has the stream of immigration never stopped, not only have all of us friends or relatives who were born in Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Russia and the remotest corners of the older world, but our reading and thinking of every day brings us into touch with the lands and

FOREWORD IX

peoples across the sea. We were all really aware of this before the war. But the old condescension of Europe toward America had been replaced by a more arrogant condescension of America toward Europe, and we assumed an attitude of lofty remoteness, an attitude born of conviction both of security and of superiority. That attitude, we may hope, is gone forever. And now it is necessary to turn with frank inquiry and with sympathy to the effort to understand our overseas kindred whose tragedies we have in some measure made our own. It is not enough to have American representatives in the Peace Congress or to send Commissions. Each of us must try to clear away the fog of ignorance and prejudice that blinds our eyes, and to understand the problems that Europe has been facing in past years and is facing still. For we at last see that those problems are our own, and that in the burden of their solution we must bear our share.

To this effort toward the understanding of the living basis of Europe's problem of reconstruction I have contributed only an introductory survey, hardly more indeed than the statement and illustration of a point of view. To this end the scope of the book has been limited, except for the first chapter, to the study of four peoples, the French, the German, the Russian, and the British. A bibliography has seemed hardly

X FOREWORD

necessary, but the student will find it advisable to have within reach any good history of modern Europe, such as Hayes, Political and Social History of Modem Europe (Macmillan, 19 17), or Schapiro, Modern and Contemporary European History (Houghton Mifflin, 19 18). And he will find constant stimulus and help in Arnold Toynbee's two books, Nationality and the War and The New Europe (Dent, London, and E. P. Dutton, New York, 191 5-6).

G F. L.

Grinnell, Iowa, March 10, 19 19.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

Foreword v

I The Problem: Europe's Unsettled Questions i

II Revolution and Readjustment in France

The French Revolution began, our historians tell us, with the meeting of the States General x in May, 1789, or with the storming of the Bastille by the Paris mob in the following July, or with the abolition of feudal privileges in August. And it is commonly considered to have closed with the beginning of Napoleon's mastery in 1799 or perhaps with the final collapse of his power in 181 5. These dates have the advantage of definiteness and convenience. But we must not let them obscure the real facts. Dates are landmarks, quite indispensable for clear historical thinking; but when we use them to mark off periods they are never more than approximate, and to allow them to dominate our minds is much worse than to ignore them entirely. The events of 1789 were of great importance and are

1 States General is the name given to the body which was the French equivalent of the English Parliament. It represented three classes or estates — the first estate, the clergy, the second, the nobles, and the third, the Commons or towns-people. The States General met first in 1302, seven years after the birth of the English Parliament in 1295. But it had a less happy history, and its last meeting before 1789 was in 1614. From 1614 to 1789 the king was an autocrat.

worth remembering with all possible exactness. They represent the visible end of the old Bourbon regime. But in its real significance to France and to Europe the Revolution is as difficult to date exactly as, say, the Renaissance, or what we call the Middle Ages, or the Reformation. It began long before 1789 and ended < — it may be — about a century later. Indeed some have suggested not inaptly that it ended with the Marne and Verdun. And we shall even see reasons for believing that it is still in process, that France's problem of reconstruction is really best understood as a phase of the Revolution. For the Revolution represented not merely a political change from absolutism to democracy but a changed way of looking at life, a social and spiritual movement, vague perhaps as to exact dates but by no means vague in its essential character or in its results.

The fact remains that conventional dates have their value in giving us a kind of skeletal structure, and there are a few that we shall assume in our discussion. Let us fix in our minds the publication of Rousseau's Social Contract in 1761 and his Emile in 1762, the meeting of the States General in 1789, the proclamation of the first French Republic in 1792, the attainment of supreme power by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1 799- 1 804, his fall and the restoration of the Bourbons in 181 5, the expulsion of Charles X and the experiment of an elective king, Louis Philippe, in 1830, his removal and the proclamation of the Second Republic in 1848, the Second Empire — that of Napoleon III — from 1852 and 1870, and the beginning of the Third Republic in September, 1870, after the defeat at Sedan. Beneath the surface, beneath these securely dated political facts and giving them meaning, was the spirit of the Revolution, the spirit that moved France from the mid-eighteenth century to the present day. It is only by understanding this spirit, the motive force that gave the Revolution its power to destroy and rebuild, that we can see the meaning and drift of the gropings, the discouragements, the mighty enthusiasms, the failures and the successes of a great people in a great era.

What then was in the minds of the representatives of the French towns as they took their seats in the great hall at Versailles on the fifth of May, 1789? What questions and what ideals were stirring them, what education had equipped them for the task that lay before them, what leaders and forces had molded them? Only in small degree can we answer this, but we can very easily see the essential facts that they faced and the most controlling ideals that ruled them. The most obvious of the facts was the appalling political crisis that had caused the government, sorely against its wish, to call them together ; the most obvious of the ideals was that voiced by Jean Jacques Rousseau ; and the minds of the Deputies, as of most thinking Frenchmen, moved along channels largely made for them by Montesquieu, the Encyclopaedists and Voltaire.

Every member of the States General knew that the actual government of France was a ghastly failure. They knew that the previous century had seen the development of an absolute monarchy which had at least had the merit of brilliant success. Under Henry IV, under the ministers of Louis XIII — Richelieu and Mazarin — and under Louis XIV and his advisers, notably Jean Baptiste Colbert, France had become the first state of Europe, first in military power, in industry, in commerce, in literature, and in military and aesthetic leadership. Freedom was indeed sadly curtailed, and there were many abuses. But if France was governed by an autocracy it was at least an efficient one, and if the merchants, the craftsmen, the professional men, even the land-holding aristocrats, were allowed no share in legislation or administration they at least waxed prosperous and grew in mental keenness, in breadth of vision, in spiritual courage and initiative. Then came the later days of Louis XIV, when the giants were dead and when defeat and disaster humbled the pride of France. Then came year after year of futile government when a people intelligent and quick beyond most others, a people trained to know efficient leadership when they saw it, learned to despise their rulers and to chafe at neglected abuses. When at last national bankruptcy threatened, and the government of Louis XVI was forced to summon the States General, every man who came to Versailles knew the record, knew the story of the great days of Henry IV, Richelieu and Colbert, of the evil days of Louis XV and Louis XVI. The monarchy was weighed in the balance and found wanting. The glitter of the court of Louis XIV had concealed the false principles on which it was based. Now the glitter was gone, and the rotten foundations stood out in melancholy clearness. 1

Moreover, they all knew that while the political machinery had been groaning and creaking toward dismal collapse the people, powerless in government, had shown no signs of decadence or apathy. Keen thinkers and prophetic geniuses had entered eagerly on the inquiry into natural laws, the basis of government, the principles of economics, the foundations of religion, all the phenomena of nature and society. Everywhere

1 The student who wishes to have a brief first-hand statement of the abuses and tyrannies that were to be swept away in the Revolution may find it in the Protest of the Cour des Aides presented to the king in 1775, fourteen years before the meeting of the States General. It is published in English in the University of Pennsylvania Translations and Reprints (Longmans, Green and Company).

men were investigating and discussing the reason of things. Every thinking man in France knew of the work of Diderot and his companions of the Encyclopaedia. Every man who could read, i. e., the great mass of those who guided public opinion in the towns, had read the tracts of Voltaire, the Social Contract and the Entile of Rousseau. Every man who stood in outward deference before the king in May, 1789, had learned to ask the question "why?", had laughed, albeit grimly, at the literary cartoons of the great mocker, and had meditated wistfully on the potent dreams of a " return to nature."

Voltaire (1694-1778) was the first literary figure of his age. And he was far from being merely a high priest of the learned and cultivated classes. His biting humor, his penetrating and cutting criticisms, his indiscriminate attacks on church, government, and conventions of all kinds, his wit and his incomparable lucidity, gave him fame and a power to which there is no modern parallel. The general tendency of European thought in his day was toward what has been called rationalism, the fearless application of human reason to all fields of thought and belief. Religious skepticism was a fashion among polite circles in France as it was in England and Germany. But Voltaire made rationalism and skepticism popular, and his pen threatened to destroy whatever it touched. Often he was unfair. Often he was superficial. But he was never dull and he was always destructive. Yet he was neither a democrat nor an atheist. He despised the dreams and the inarticulate aspirations of the people as much as he despised royalty and aristocracy. He built a church ("Erected to God by Voltaire") and avowed that without belief in God morality and society itself would perish. One of his most characteristic and famous aphorisms was that if there were no God it would be necessary to invent Him. He attacked the State because it was futile, tyrannical and inefficient, not because he wished the rule of a democracy. And he attacked the Church because it was irreligious, artificial and immoral, because in the name of truth it tried to chain men's souls with superstition and dogmatism, not because he was an enemy of religion. But whatever were his personal beliefs his influence was purely destructive. Wherever his writings were read the monarchy and the church were stripped of their sacredness and held up to ridicule.

Rousseau (1712-1778) was of another type. If he helped to destroy the institutions and ideas of his time it was only as one destroys darkness by lighting a lamp. He was the apostle of a new idea, the idea of a return to nature. Voltaire had attacked the existing government as a modern cartoonist does, by criticizing and ridiculing specific acts and methods of tyranny and abuse. Rousseau concerned himself not at all with details, but struck at the root of the whole system by declaring that men were by nature free. " Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains," is the first sentence of the Social Contract. Long ago, he said, men were absolutely free ; there was no law ; each did what was right in his own eyes. But they tired of this life of confusion and conflict and agreed to form a society. They devised different forms of government, giving up for the moment their right to do as they pleased for the sake of the benefits of cooperation and peace. So far this was good. But the governments managed to make the people forget their ancient liberty, and the people — not realizing that their right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness was inalienable — became slaves. All because they had forgotten that the powers of the government were based on a social contract and on nothing else. If one party to a contract breaks it the contract becomes void. " You are in chains," cried Rousseau. " But the chains are of your own making; your liberty is inalienable; your rulers rule only because your fathers delegated the right to sovereignty, and if they abuse their delegated power they cease to deserve it. Reclaim your liberty! Your chains are chains of straw, and if you will they will vanish at a breath."

Not that Rousseau wished to return to the anarchical state of nature. Like the English thinkers, John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, he simply used the familiar " state of nature " hypothesis as an historical startingpoint, a false one as far as historical accuracy was concerned, but convenient for purposes of argument. He had no quarrel with the social contract by which he assumes men to have escaped from anarchy. But he asserted that the purpose of the contract had not been attained because the general will of the people had been supplanted by an artificial and unjustified rule of the few. Society must go through a regeneration in order to realize the purpose for which it came into being. The problem was first to break the meaningless and baseless tyranny of the existing State, and then " to find a form of association which shall defend and protect, with the entire common force, the person and the goods of each associate, and by which, each uniting himself to all, may nevertheless obey only himself, and remain as free as before." 1 So that he was not in any sense an anarchist ; nor was he in the present sense of the term a socialist ; he was rather stating the problem and ideal of popular sovereignty.

Rousseau's details of application were of little or no

value. The magic of his gospel was in his statement

of an ideal of ordered liberty. And he carefully

guarded himself against the charge of lawlessness.

1 Social Contract, bk. I, ch. 6.

Law is to him as fundamental as liberty; both are " natural " and neither is complete unless it is correlated with the other. Indeed through law liberty itself must be made compulsory. Thus he asserted a paradox which puts in a nutshell one of the most vital problems of the present hour. " In order that the social pact may not be a vain formula, it tacitly includes the covenant, which alone can confer binding force on the others, that whoever shall refuse to obey the general will shall be constrained to do so by the whole body, which means nothing else than that he will be forced to be free." x It is a dictum that might have been aptly used as a preamble to the constitution of the League of Nations.

As man is born free so he is born good. And just as he is everywhere in chains so he is everywhere brutalized by the warping and smothering network of convention that we call civilization. The program of political emancipation was set forth in the Social Contract, the program of intellectual and spiritual emancipation in the Emile. The book is the imaginary biography of a boy educated in a natural way. Instead of being repressed, molded, fed with information that he loathed, drilled in habits that had no meaning, trained not to be a man but to be a doll destined to play with

1 See the whole discussion of this in the Social Contract, bk. I, chs. 7 and 8.

REVOLUTION AND READJUSTMENT 2J

other dolls in an artificial world, Emile is tended as a precious plant is tended by a skilled gardener. To cultivate a perfect rose one does not try to add to it the qualities of a tulip or a lily, nor does one use the brush to give a better color. What is needed is adequate soil, water and sunlight, protection against enemies and accidents, such additional nutriment about the roots as a healthy rose craves, and nature will do the rest. The seed is as God made it. The environment that will give the best growth is to be dictated not by the gardener but by the needs of the plant. His office is to search for laws over which he has no control, which he may not defy or neglect without harm, and which it is his sole business to ascertain and obey. Absolutely the same principle is observed with Emile. If in the course of his growth the boy should demand Latin, Greek or Mathematics to satisfy his curiosity then Latin, Greek or Mathematics become living and needed things to him, but not otherwise should he be required to learn them. Let him grow in his own way. Give him food, air, and sunlight; allow him the full and free exercise of his normal activities; protect him against danger; let his growth be the progressive satisfaction of his own craving; and if the result should make him unfit for membership in society so much the worse for society. If Emile does not become an accomplished Parisian then change Paris; do not force a child of God to become an artificial manikin. These then were the things that were uppermost in the minds of the men who began and carried through the demolition and attempted rebuilding of the French state in and after 1789 — on the one hand the futility and evils of the traditional system of government, on the other hand the growing spirit of scientific investigation, the impatient ridicule of shams and outworn conventions, the gospel of nature.

Now what was the outcome? The idealists of 1789-1793 dreamed of a golden age; the great sweeping of old abuses into a scrap heap by the successive assemblies of those years was to be the prelude to a glorious and permanent reconstruction. But the hope faded as the years went by, bringing reforms, victories, the re-vitalizing of national life and great glory — but no golden age. Napoleon appeared, was acclaimed as leader, and fell before the armies of Europe after exhausting France in fruitless wars. The Bourbon kings were restored — with a constitution, it is true, and a representative assembly — but were discarded again in 1830 to make way for a " citizen king," Louis Philippe. The experiment of an elective monarchy was a mere makeshift and it lasted a short eighteen years; the republic of 1848, the next experiment, found no leaders, was torn by party conflicts, and died with small protest or mourning when Louis Napoleon consummated the coup d'etat that made him Emperor; and when the Empire fell before the Prussians in 1870 France turned to a republic again with little enthusiasm, little conviction that she had yet found the road to liberty, equality and fraternity — the road seen with such radiant clearness in 1789 and lost so soon.

The political history of modern France is then a melancholy story — a story, on the surface, of failure and disillusionment and little else. And yet it is not without inspiration. For it is the story of a failure far from ignoble, of a people who had seen a glorious vision and were content with no compromise. They accepted this or that temporary solution to their problem — Napoleon, Louis XVIII, Louis Philippe, Napoleon III, this or some other republican form — only because human strength becomes exhausted, because weariness and discouragement made necessary a pause in the climbing, because under stress of effort and bewilderment ideals grow clouded and the crying need is for rest and peace. But that which unsympathetic onlookers called the revolutionary fever, the burning desire for perfection, aroused the French people again and again to new effort. Until of recent years they have come to see that salvation is not through constitutions, and that the road to perfection may be found by a way other than the constant destruction and anxious rebuilding of governmental forms.

Now let us approach the matter from another angle. We have been considering the spirit and aims of the Revolution, and have seen the failure of France to carry out the high program of 1789. The reaction of 181 5, the upheavals of 1830 and 1848, the restoration of the Empire in 1852 all seem singularly futile, barren of actual result, no matter how clearly they may illustrate the persistence of the revolutionary spirit. The creation of the Third Republic was not futile, but in some respects it was more discouraging than the failure of 1848, for it was based on compromise; the republic stood not because it satisfied France but because nothing better seemed to be available.

All this is true, but it is not the whole truth. The Revolution failed to realize its dream, but it did not wholly fail. Indeed the use of the word dream is a little deceptive in that it implies an ideal based on no thought of practical problems and of past experience. As a matter of fact revolution and reconstruction went hand in hand from the beginning, were indeed different aspects of the same thing. And the men of 1789 — idealists though they might be — were by no means blind visionaries.

Revolution, to us, has perhaps too overwhelming an association. We think of it as the casting of old things overboard, the turning of a fresh page, the wiping of the slate, the setting forth on an unknown sea, the breaking of a shell which lies thereafter shattered and discarded by the new life that issues forth. All of these metaphors are used so easily that to some extent they control our thinking. But as a matter of fact a political revolution is seldom a complete overthrow and a completely new start. Its analogy in the life of an individual is perhaps what evangelical Christians call " conversion " — a change undeniably of high and far-reaching consequence, but a change which leaves intact one's tastes, one's intellectual gifts and equipment, one's temperament, many of one's habits. It gives all of them a new meaning and a new direction, no doubt, but it does not blot them out. Similarly when we approach the France of 1815 or even more the France of 1870 we must not exaggerate the effects of the whirlwind that had swept her political world, the rapid changes that made her seem to her more sluggish or cautious neighbors a very symbol and type of political instability. The truth was that in 1870 as in 181 5 the changes wrought were less impressive than the solidity of that which remained standing after the storm.

For the old system was far from completely destroyed in 1789, and much of the reconstructive work undertaken at each phase of the revolution remained untouched during the political changes that followed.

So that in considering even the political side of modern France we must not think of an edifice wrecked again and again to be painfully built again after each convulsion — the present one dating from 1870. The form seen by the world was broken, indeed; but the reality was left largely intact. If we keep our architectural figure of speech we might even think of Directors, Consuls, Emperors, Kings and Presidents as successive decorative appendages, not as integral parts of the structures of which they were the most visible features. Such a conception would not be quite accurate, indeed, but it would be much safer than to fix our attention solely on names, titles and political forms.