Chapter I: The Modern Perfecting of Political Passions

We are to consider those passions termed political, owing to which men rise up against other men, the chief of which are racial passions, class passions and national passions. Those persons who are most determined to believe in the inevitable progress of the human species, especially in its indispensable movement towards more peace and love, cannot deny that during the past century these passions have attained--and day by day increasingly so--in several most important directions, a degree of perfection hitherto unknown in history.

In the first place they affect a large number of men they never before affected. When, for example, we study the civil wars which convulsed France in the sixteenth century, and even those at the end of the eighteenth century, we are struck by the small number of persons whose minds were really disturbed by these events. While history, up to the nineteenth century, is filled with long European wars which left the great majority of people completely indifferent, apart from the material losses they themselves suffered,[1] it may be said that to-day there is scarcely a mind in Europe which is not affected--or thinks itself affected--by a racial or class or national passion, and most often by all three. The same progress seems to have taken place in the New World, while immense bodies of men in the Far East, who seemed to be free from these impulses, are awakening to social hatred, the party system, and the national spirit insofar as it implies the will to humiliate other men. To-day political passions have attained a _universality_ never before known.

They have also attained _coherence_. Thanks to the progress of communication and, still more, to the group spirit, it is clear that the holders of the same political hatred now form a compact impassioned mass, every individual of which feels himself in touch with the infinite numbers of others, whereas a century ago such people were comparatively out of touch with each other and hated in a ‘scattered’ way. This is singularly striking with respect to the working classes who, even in the middle of the nineteenth century, felt only a scattered hostility for the opposing class, attempted only dispersed efforts at war (such as striking in one town, or one union), whereas to-day they form a closely-woven fabric of hatred from one end of Europe to the other. It may be asserted that these coherences will tend to develop still further, for the will to group is one of the most profound characteristics of the modern world, which even in the most unexpected domains (for instance, the domain of thought) is more and more becoming the world of leagues, of ‘unions’ and of ‘groups’. Is it necessary to say that the passion of the individual is strengthened by feeling itself in proximity to these thousands of similar passions? Let me add that the individual bestows a mystic personality on the association of which he feels himself a member, and gives it a religious adoration, which is simply the deification of his own passion, and no small stimulus to its intensity.

The coherence just described might be called a surface coherence, but there is added to it a coherence of essence. For the very reason that the holders of the same political passion form a more compact, impassioned group, they also form a more _homogeneous_, impassioned group, in which individual ways of feeling disappear and the zeal of each member more and more takes on the colour of the others. In France, for instance, one cannot but be struck by the fact that the enemies of the democratic system (I am speaking of the mass, not the highest points) display a passion which has little variety, shows very slight differences in different persons. How little this mass of hatred is weakened by personal and original manners of hating--one might almost say that this passion itself is obedient to ‘democratic levelling down’! How much more uniformity is shown now than a hundred years ago by the emotions known as anti-Semitism, anti-Clericalism and Socialism, in spite of the immense number of varieties in the last-named! And do not those who are subject to these emotions now all tend _to say the same thing_? Political passions, as passions, seem to have attained the habit of discipline; they seem to obey a word of command even in the manner they are felt. It is easy to see what increase of strength they acquire thereby.

With some of these passions the increase in homogeneousness is accompanied by an increased _precision_. For instance, we all know that a hundred years ago Socialism was a strong but vague passion with the great mass of its supporters. But to-day Socialism has more closely defined the object it wishes to attain, has determined the exact point where it means to strike its adversary and the movement it intends to create in order to succeed. The same progress may be observed in the anti-democratic movement. And we all know that hatred becomes stronger by becoming more precise.

There is another sort of perfecting of political passions. Throughout history until our own days I see these passions acting intermittently, blazing up and then subsiding. I see that the undoubtedly terrible and numerous explosions of class and race hatred were followed by long periods of calm, or at least of somnolence. Wars between nations lasted for years, but not hatred--even if we may say that it existed. To-day we have only to look every morning at any daily paper and we shall see that political hatreds do not cease for a single day. At best some of them are silent a moment for the benefit of one among them which suddenly claims all the subject’s strength. This is the period of ‘national unions’, which do not in the very least herald in the reign of love, but merely of a general hatred which for the moment dominates partial hatreds. To-day political passions have acquired _continuity_, which is so rare a quality in all feelings.

Let us consider a moment the impulse which causes partial hatreds to abdicate in favour of another, more general hatred, which derives a new religion of itself and hence a new strength, from the feeling of its generality. Perhaps it has not been sufficiently observed that this sort of impulse is one of the essential characteristics of the nineteenth century. Twice during the nineteenth century, in Germany and in Italy, the age-old hatreds of petty States disappeared in favour of a great national passion. In the same period (more precisely, at the end of the eighteenth century) in France, the mutual hatred of the Court nobles and the country nobles was extinguished in the greater hatred of both parties for all who were not nobles; the hatred between the military and legal nobles disappeared in the same impulse; the hatred between the upper and lower ranks of the clergy vanished in their common hatred of laicality; the hatred between clergy and nobility expired to the profit of their mutual hatred for the commons. And in our times the hatred between the three orders has melted into one hatred, that of the possessing classes for the working class. The condensation of political passions into a small number of very simple hatreds, springing from the deepest roots of the human heart, is a conquest of modern times.[2]

I also believe that I see a great progress in political passions to-day in their relation to other passions in the same person. Political passions undoubtedly occupied more of the attention of a bourgeois of ancient France than is usually supposed, but less than the love of money and pleasure, family feeling and the calls of vanity; while the least we can say of his modern equivalent is that when political passions take possession of him, they do so to the same extent as the other passions. Compare, for instance, the tiny place occupied by political passions in the French bourgeois as he appears in the Fabliaux, in medieval drama, the novels of Scarron, Furetière and Charles Sorel,[3] with the same bourgeois as drawn by Balzac, Stendhal, Anatole France, Abel Hermant and Paul Bourget. (Of course, I am not speaking of times of crisis, like the Ligue and the Fronde, when political passions occupied the whole individual as soon as they touched him at all.) The truth is that to-day political passions are invading most of the other passions in the bourgeoisie, and weakening the latter to their own profit. Everyone knows that in our own days family rivalries, commercial enmities, ambitions and the competition for public honours are all tainted with political passion. An apostle of the modern mind clamours for ‘politics first’. He might have observed that nowadays it is politics everywhere, politics always and nothing but politics.[4] We have only to open our eyes to see when an increase of power is acquired by political passion when combined with other passions, so numerous, so constant and so strong themselves. Coming to the man of the people, we can measure the increase of his political passions in relation to his other passions in modern times by considering, as Stendhal puts it, how long his whole passion was limited to wishing (_a_) Not to be killed, (_b_) For a good warm coat. And then we may recollect that when a little less misery permitted him a few general ideas, how long it was before his vague desire for social changes were transformed into a passion, i.e. showing the two essential characteristics of passion: The fixed idea, and the need to put it into action.[5] I think it may be said that political passions in all classes to-day have attained a degree of _preponderance over all other passions_ in those affected such as hitherto had been unknown.

The reader will already have perceived an all-important factor in the impulses I have been describing. Political passions rendered universal, coherent, homogeneous, permanent, preponderant--everyone can recognize there to a great extent the work of the cheap daily political newspaper. One cannot help reflecting and wondering whether it may not be that inter-human wars are only just beginning, when one thinks of this instrument for developing their own passions which men have just invented, or at least brought to a degree of power never seen before, to which they abandon themselves with all the expansion of their hearts every morning as soon as they are awake.

I have now showed what might be called the perfecting of political passions on the surface, in their more or less exterior aspects. But they have also become strangely perfected in depth and inner strength.

In the first place they have made an immense advance in consciousness of themselves. Here again, largely owing to the influence of the newspaper, it is clear that the mind affected by political hatred to-day becomes conscious of its own passion, formulates it, sees it, with an accuracy unknown to the same sort of mind fifty years ago. There is no need to say how much the passion is intensified by this. And while I am on this subject I should like to point to two passions, which have certainly not come to birth in our times but have attained consciousness of themselves, self-assertion, a pride in themselves.

The first is what I shall call a certain _Jewish nationalism_. In the past, when the Jews were accused in various countries of forming an inferior race, or at any rate a peculiar people not to be assimilated, they replied by denying their peculiarity, by trying to get rid of all appearance of peculiarity, and by refusing to admit the reality of race. But in the last few years we see some of them labouring to assert this peculiarity, to define its characteristics--or what they think such--taking a pride in it, and condemning every effort at assimilation with their opponents (see the works of Israel Zangwill, of André Spire, and the _Revue Juive_). Here I am not trying to discover whether the impulse of these Jews is or is not nobler than the efforts of so many others to have their origin pardoned them; I am simply pointing out to those interested in the progress of peace in the world that our age has added one more arrogance to those which set men against each other, at least to the extent that it is conscious and proud of itself.[6]

The other impulse I am thinking of is ‘_bourgeoisism_’, by which I mean the passion of the bourgeois class in asserting itself against the class by which it is threatened. It may be said that until our own times, ‘class hatred’, as a conscious hatred proud of itself, was chiefly the hatred of the labourer for the bourgeois. The reciprocal hatred was much less clearly confessed. Ashamed of an egotism they thought peculiar to their own caste, the bourgeois temporized with this egotism, would not admit even to themselves that it existed, tried to convince themselves and others that it was a form of interest in the common good.[7] The bourgeois replied to the dogma of the class war by denying that there really are any classes, thereby showing that while they felt an inalterable opposition to the adverse party, they were unwilling to admit that they felt it. To-day we have only to think of Italian ‘Fascism’, of a certain ‘Eloge du Bourgeois Français’, and numerous other manifestations of the same kind,[8] and we shall see that the bourgeoisie are becoming fully conscious of their specific egotisms, are proclaiming and venerating them as such and as though these egotisms were bound up with the supreme interests of the human race, that they are proud of this veneration and of setting up these egotisms against those which are trying to destroy the bourgeoisie. In our time there has been created the ‘mysticism’ of bourgeois passion in its opposition to the passions of the other class.[9] Here again our age enters in the balance-sheet of humanity the arrival of yet one more passion at full possession of itself.

The progress of political passions in depth during the past century seems to me most remarkable in the case of national passions.

First of all, owing to the fact that they are experienced to-day by large masses of men, these passions have become _far more purely passionate_. When the national feeling was practically confined to Kings or their Ministers, it consisted chiefly in attachment to some _interest_ (desire for territorial expansion, search for commercial advantages and profitable alliances), whereas to-day when this national feeling is continually experienced by common minds, it consists chiefly in the exercise of _pride_. Everyone will agree that nationalist passion in the modern citizen is far less founded on a comprehensive knowledge of the national interests (he has an imperfect perception of these interests, he lacks the information necessary and does not try to acquire it, for he is indifferent to questions of foreign policy) than on the pride he feels in his nation, on his will to feel himself one with the nation, to react to the honours and insults he thinks are bestowed on it. No doubt he wants his nation to acquire territories, to be prosperous and to have powerful allies; but he wants all this far less on account of the material results which will accrue to the nation (how much is he conscious of these results?) than on account of the glory, the prestige which the nation will acquire. By becoming popular, national feeling has become national pride, national susceptibility.[10] To measure how much more purely passionate it has become, how much more perfectly irrational (and therefore stronger) one has only to think of Jingoism, the form of patriotism specially invented by democracies. If, in accordance with current opinion, you think that pride is a weaker passion than self-interest, you may be convinced to the contrary by observing how commonly men let themselves be killed on account of a wound to their pride, and how infrequently for some infraction of their interests.

The susceptibility developed by national sentiment as it has become popular makes the possibility of wars far greater to-day than in the past. Obviously, with the peoples and with the aptitude of these new ‘sovereigns’ to rise up in a rage as soon as they think they are insulted, peace runs an additional danger which did not exist when it depended only upon Kings and their Ministers, who were far more purely practical persons, fully self-controlled, and quite willing to put up with insults when they did not think themselves the stronger party.[11] And, in fact, how many times during the last hundred years has the world almost flamed up in war solely because some nation thought its honour had been wounded?[12] To this must be added the fact that this national susceptibility provides the leaders of nations with a new and most effective method of starting the wars they need, whether it is employed at home or abroad. They have not failed to see this, which is amply proved by the example of Bismarck and the means by which he provoked war with Austria and with France. From this point of view it seems to me quite correct to say with the French monarchists that ‘democracy is war’, provided that by democracy is meant the attainment of national susceptibility by the masses, and provided that it is recognized that no change in the system of government would destroy this phenomenon.[13]

Another considerable deepening of national passions comes from the fact that the nations are now conscious of themselves not only as regards their material existence, their military power, their territorial possessions, and their economic wealth, but as regards their _moral_ existence. With a hitherto unknown consciousness (prodigiously fanned by authors) every nation now hugs itself and sets itself up against all other nations as superior in language, art, literature, philosophy, civilization, ‘culture’. Patriotism to-day is the assertion of one form of mind against other forms of mind.[14] We know how much this passion increases its inner strength in this way and that the wars it determines are fiercer than those waged by the Kings, who merely desired the same piece of territory. The prophecy of the old Saxon bard is completely fulfilled: ‘In those days countries will be something they have not yet become--they will be persons. They will feel hatred, and these hatreds will cause wars more terrible than any that have yet been seen.’[15]

It is impossible to over-stress the novelty of this form of patriotism in history. It is obviously bound up with the adoption of this passion by the masses of the populace, and seems to have been inaugurated in 1813 by Germany, who is apparently the real teacher of humanity in the matter of democratic patriotism, if by this word is meant the determination of a nation to oppose others in the name of its most fundamental characteristics.[16] (The France of the Revolution and the Empire never dreamed of setting itself up against other nations in the name of its language or of its literature.) This form of patriotism was so little known to preceding ages that there are countless examples of nations adopting the cultures of other nations, even of those with whom they were at war, and in addition reverencing the culture adopted. Shall I refer to the profound respect of Rome for the genius of Greece, though Rome had felt it necessary to crush Greece politically? To the respect of the conquerors of Rome, such as Ataulf and Theodoric, for Roman genius? And, nearer to ourselves, shall I mention Louis XIV annexing Alsace and not for one moment thinking of forbidding the German language?[17] In the past, nations displayed their sympathy for the culture of other nations with whom they were at war, or invited them to adopt their own. The Duke of Alba took measures to protect the learned men in the towns of Holland, against which he was directing his army; in the eighteenth century, the small German States, allied with Frederick the Great against the French, adopted more freely than ever French ideas, French fashions, French[18] literature; in the midst of the struggle with England, the Convention sent a deputation there to urge the English to adopt the French metric system.[19] The notion that political warfare involves a war of cultures is entirely an invention of modern times, and confers upon them a conspicuous place in the moral history of humanity.

Another strengthening of national passions comes from the determination of the peoples to be conscious of _their past_, more precisely to be conscious of their ambitions as going back to their ancestors, and to vibrate with ‘centuries-old’ aspirations, with attachments to ‘historical’ rights. This Romantic patriotism is also a characteristic of patriotism as practised by popular minds (by ‘popular’ I here mean all minds governed by the imagination, that is, in the first place, society people and men of letters). I have an idea that when Hugues de Lionne desired for the nation the conquest of Flanders or when Sieyès wanted the Low Countries, they did not think they felt the soul of ancient Gauls reviving in them, any more than Bismarck thought (I am not talking of what he said) of reviving the Teutonic Knights when he coveted the Danish Duchies.[20]

Those who wish to estimate the increase of violence given to national passion by this solemnizing of its desires have only to observe what has happened to this feeling among the Germans, with their claim to be carrying on the spirit of the Holy Roman Empire, and among the Italians since they have set up their aspirations as the revival of those of the Roman Empire.[21] There once again the leaders of the State find in popular sentimentality a new and excellent instrument for carrying out their practical designs, an instrument they well know how to use. To mention only one recent example--think of the result the Italian government was able to obtain from the amazing aptitude of its compatriots to wake up one fine morning and discover that the claim to Fiume was a ‘centuries-old’ claim.

Speaking generally, it may be said that national passions, owing to the fact that they are now exerted by plebeian minds, assume the character of _mysticism_, of a religious adoration almost unknown in these passions in the practical minds of the great nobles. It is unnecessary to add that this makes these passions deeper and stronger. Here once more this plebeian form of patriotism is adopted by all who practise this passion, even when they are the noisiest champions of the aristocracy of the mind. M. Maurras talks of the ‘goddess France’, just as Victor Hugo does. Let me add that this mystical adoration of the nation is not only to be explained by the nature of those who adore, but also by the changes which have taken place in the adored object. There is first of all the spectacle of the military force and organization of modern States, which is something far more imposing than of old. And when these States are seen to make war for an indefinite period after they have no more men, and go on subsisting for long years after they have no more money, it is easy to understand why a man who has some tincture of religion in his mind may be led to believe that these States are of an essence different from that of ordinary natural beings.

I shall point out another great increase of power in national sentiment which has occurred in the last half-century. I mean that several very powerful political passions, which were originally independent of nationalist feeling, have now become incorporated with it. These passions are: (_a_) The movement against the Jews; (_b_) the movement of the possessing classes against the proletariat; (_c_) the movement of the champions of authority against the democrats. To-day each one of these passions is identified with national feeling and declares that its adversary implies the negation of nationalism. I may add that when a person is affected by one of these passions he is generally affected by all three; consequently nationalist passion is usually swelled by the addition of all three. Moreover this increase is reciprocal, and it may be said that to-day capitalism, anti-semitism and the party of authority have all received new strength from their union with nationalism. (For additional proof of the strength of these unions, see Note C at the end of this book.)

I cannot drop the subject of the modern perfecting of political passions without mentioning one more characteristic: In all nations the number of persons who feel a direct interest in belonging to a powerful nation is incomparably greater now than in the past. In all the great States to-day I observe that not only the world of industry and big business but a considerable number of small tradesmen, small bourgeois, doctors, lawyers, and even writers and artists, and working men too, feel that for the sake of the prosperity of their own occupations it is essential for them to belong to a powerful group which can make itself feared. Those who are in a position to give an opinion on this sort of change agree that the feeling did not exist, at least in the same clearly defined way as to-day, thirty years ago among the small tradesmen of France, for instance. It seems an even newer thing among the men who belong to the so-called liberal professions; it is certainly something new to hear artists constantly girding at the government of their country because it ‘does not give the nation enough prestige to impose their art on foreigners’. The feeling that from a professional point of view they have an interest in belonging to a powerful nation is also very recent among the working classes. The party of ‘Nationalist Socialists’, which seems to exist everywhere except in France, is a quite modern political development. Among the masters of industry the new development is, not that they feel how much it is to their interest that their nation should be powerful, but that the feeling is to-day transformed into action, into formal pressure on their governments.[22] This extension of patriotism based on interest certainly does not prevent this sort of patriotism (as I said above) from being much less wide-spread than the patriotism[23] based on pride; nevertheless it brings another increase of strength to nationalist passions.

I shall now point out a last important perfecting of all political passions to-day, whether of race, class, party or nation. When I observe these passions in the past, I see them consisting in purely passionate impulses, natural explosions of instinct, devoid of all extension of themselves in ideas and systems--at least among the majority. The revolt of the workers in the fifteenth century against the possessing classes was apparently not accompanied by any sort of teaching about the origin of property or the nature of capital. Those who massacred the Ghettos seem to have had no views on the philosophical values of their action. And when the troops of Charles V attacked the defenders of Mezières, it does not appear that the assault was enlivened by a theory about the predestination of the Germanic race and the moral baseness of the Latin world. To-day I notice that every political passion is furnished with a whole network of strongly woven doctrines, the sole object of which is to show the supreme value of its action from every point of view, while the result is a redoubling of its strength as a passion. We must look at the system of ideology of German nationalism known as ‘Pangermanism’ and at the similar ideology of the French Monarchists, if we wish to realize the point of perfection to which our age has carried these systems, with what tenacity each passion has built up in every direction the theories apt to satisfy it, with what precision these theories have been adapted to this satisfaction, with what opulence of research, what labour, what profound investigation they have been carried on in all directions. Our age is indeed the age of the _intellectual organization of political hatreds_. It will be one of its chief claims to notice in the moral history of humanity.

Ever since these systems have been in existence, they have consisted in establishing for each passion that it is the agent of good in the world and that its enemy is the genius of evil. But to-day these passions desire to establish this not only politically, but morally, intellectually and aesthetically. Anti-semitism, Pangermanism, French Monarchism, Socialism are not only political manifestations; they defend a particular form of morality, of intelligence, of sensibility, of literature, of philosophy and of artistic conceptions. Our age has introduced two novelties into the theorizing of political passions, by which they have been remarkably intensified. The first is that everyone to-day claims that his movement is in line with ‘the development of evolution’ and ‘the profound unrolling of history’. All these passions of to-day, whether they derive from Marx, from M. Maurras or from Houston Chamberlain, have discovered a ‘historical law’, according to which their movement is merely carrying out the spirit of history and must therefore necessarily triumph, while the opposing party is running counter to this spirit and can enjoy only a transitory triumph. That is merely the old desire to have Fate on one’s side, but it is put forth in a scientific shape. And this brings us to the second novelty: To-day all political ideologies claim to be founded on science, to be the result of a ‘precise observation of facts’. We all know what self-assurance, what rigidity, what inhumanity (comparatively new traits in the history of political passions, of which modern French monarchism is a good example) are given to these passions to-day by this claim.

To summarize: To-day political passions show a degree of universality, of coherence, of homogeneousness, of precision, of continuity, of preponderance, in relation to other passions, unknown until our times. They have become conscious of themselves to an extent never seen before. Some of them, hitherto scarcely avowed, have awakened to consciousness and have joined the old passions. Others have become more purely passionate than ever, possess men’s hearts in moral regions they never before reached, and have acquired a mystic character which had disappeared for centuries. All are furnished with an apparatus of ideology whereby, in the name of science, they proclaim the supreme value of their action and its historical necessity. On the surface and in the depths, in spatial values and in inner strength, political passions have to-day reached a point of perfection never before known in history. The present age is essentially the age of politics.