Mythmaking and the Atomic Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

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The Enola Gay (/ɪˈnoʊlə/) is a Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber, named after Enola Gay Tibbets, the mother of the pilot, Colonel Paul Tibbets. On 6 August 1945, piloted by Tibbets and Robert A. Lewis during the final stages of World War II, it became the first aircraft to drop an atomic bomb in warfare. The bomb, code-named "Little Boy", was targeted at the city of Hiroshima, Japan, and caused the destruction of about three quarters of the city.

Crew of the Enola Gay. The Enola Gay was a Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber, named after Enola Gay Tibbets, the mother of the pilot, Colonel Paul Tibbets. On 6 August 1945, piloted by Tibbets and Robert A. Lewis during the final stages of World War II, it became the first aircraft to drop an atomic bomb in warfare. The bomb, code-named "Little Boy", was targeted at the city of Hiroshima, Japan, and caused the destruction of about three-quarters of the city and the instant death of about 134,000 people.


Myth: The war in the Far East only ended in the summer of 1945, when the US president and his advisors felt that, to force the fanatical Japanese to surrender unconditionally, they had no other option than to destroy not one but two cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with atom bombs. This decision saved the lives of countless Americans and Japanese who would have perished if the war had continued and required an invasion of Japan.


Reality: Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed to prevent the Soviets from making a contribution to the victory against Japan, which would have forced Washington to allow Moscow to participate in the postwar occupation and reconstruction of the country. It was also the intention to intimidate the Soviet leadership and thus to wrest concessions from it with respect to the postwar arrangements in Germany and Eastern Europe. Finally, it was not the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but the Soviet entry into the war against Japan, which caused Tokyo to surrender.

With the German capitulation in early May 1945, the war in Europe was over. The victors, the Big Three,[1] now faced the complex and delicate problem of the postwar reorganization of Europe. The United States had entered the war rather late, namely in December 1941. And the Americans only started to make a major contribution to the victory against Germany with the landings in Normandy in June 1944, that is, less than one year before the end of the hostilities in Europe. When the war against Germany came to an end, however, Uncle Sam occupied a seat at the table of the victors, ready and eager to look after his interests, to achieve what one might call the American war aims. (It is a myth that the presumably deeply isolationist Americans just wanted to withdraw from Europe: the country’s political, military, and economic leaders had urgent reasons for maintaining a presence on the old continent.) The other big victorious powers, Britain and the Soviet Union, also looked to pursue their interests. It was clear that it would be impossible for one of the three to “have it all”, that compromises would have to be reached. From the American point of view, the British expectations did not present much of a problem, but Soviet aspirations were a concern. What, then, were the war aims of the Soviet Union?

As the country that had made the biggest contribution by far to the common victory over Nazi Germany and suffered enormous casualties in the process, the Soviet Union had two major objectives. First, hefty reparation payments from Germany as compensation for the huge destruction wrought by Nazi aggression, a demand similar to the French and Belgian demands for reparations payments from the Reich after World War I. Second, security against potential future threats emanating from Germany. These security concerns also involved Eastern Europe, especially Poland, a potential springboard for German aggression against the USSR. Moscow wanted to ensure that in Germany, Poland, and other Eastern European countries, no regimes hostile to the Soviet Union would ever come to power again. The Soviets also expected the Western allies to certify their recuperation of territories lost by revolutionary Russia during the Revolution and the Civil War, such as “Eastern Poland”, and to recognize the metamorphosis of the three Baltic states from independent countries to autonomous republics within the Soviet Union.  Finally, now that the nightmare of the war was over, the Soviets expected that they would be able to go back to work on the construction of a socialist society. It is well known that the Soviet supremo, Stalin, was a firm believer in the idea that it was possible and even necessary to create “socialism in one country”, hence the hostility between him and Trotsky, an apostle of worldwide revolution. Less well known is the fact that, as the war came to an end, Stalin did not plan to install communist regimes in Germany or in any of the Eastern European countries liberated by the Red Army, and that he also discouraged communist parties in France, Italy, and elsewhere in Western Europe, liberated by the Americans and their allies, from trying to come to power. He had already formally stopped promoting worldwide revolution in 1943, when he dissolved the Comintern, the communist international organization created for that purpose by Lenin in 1919. This policy was resented by many communists outside of the Soviet Union, but it pleased Moscow’s Western allies, especially the US and Britain. Stalin was eager to maintain good relations with them, because he needed their goodwill and cooperation to achieve the objectives, described above, aimed at providing the Soviet Union with reparations, security, and the opportunity to resume work on the construction of a socialist society. His American and British partners had never indicated to Stalin that they found these expectations unreasonable. To the contrary, the legitimacy of these Soviet war aims had been recognized repeatedly, either explicitly or implicitly, in Tehran, Yalta, and elsewhere.

The Americans and their British, Canadian, and other partners had liberated most of Western Europe by the end of 1944. And they had made sure that in Italy, France, and elsewhere, regimes were established that were congenial to them, if not always to the population at large. This usually meant that the local communists were sidelined entirely; if that proved impossible, for example in France, they were denied a share of power commensurate with the important role they had played in the resistance or the considerable popular support they enjoyed. And even though the inter-allied agreements had stipulated that the “big three” would collaborate closely in the administration and reconstruction of liberated countries, the Americans and British prevented their Soviet ally from providing any input into the affairs of Italy, for example, the first country to be liberated, already in 1943. In that country, the Americans and British sidelined the communists, who were very popular because of their role in the resistance, in favour of former fascists such as Badoglio, without allowing the Soviets any input. This modus operandi was to set a fateful precedent. Stalin had no choice but to accept that arrangement, but, as US historian Gabriel Kolko has observed, “the Russians accepted the [Italian] ‘formula’ without much enthusiasm, but carefully noted the arrangement for future reference and as a precedent”.[2] (The Soviets were unquestionably entitled to a voice in the affairs of Italy, since Italian troops had participated in Operation Barbarossa.)

In Western Europe, in 1943-1944, the American and British liberators had acted ad libitum, ignoring not only the wishes of a large part of the local population but also the interests of their Soviet ally, and Stalin had accepted that arrangement. In 1945, on the other hand, the shoe was on the other foot: the Soviets clearly enjoyed the advantage in an Eastern Europe liberated by the Red Army. Even so, the Western Allies could hope that they might be able to provide a measure of input into the reorganization of this part of Europe as well. Everything was still possible over there. The Soviets had obviously favoured the local communists but had not yet created any faits accomplis. And the Western Allies were well aware that Stalin craved their goodwill and cooperation and would therefore be willing to make concessions. The political and military leaders in Washington and London also expected that Stalin would be indulgent because, if not, he had reason to fear the consequences. The Soviet leader was keenly aware that it was already an enormous achievement for his country to have emerged victoriously from a life-and-death struggle with the Nazi behemoth. But he also knew that many US and British leaders, exemplified by Patton and Churchill, hated the Soviet Union and were even considering waging war against it as soon as the common German enemy was defeated, preferably in a march on Moscow side-by-side with the remainder of the Nazi host; that plan called Operation Unthinkable, had been hatched by Churchill. Stalin had reason to try to avoid such a scenario.

The aspirations of the Soviets with respect to reparations and security, described above, were not unreasonable, and the US and British leaders had recognized their legitimacy, explicitly or implicitly, during a meeting of the Big Three in Yalta in February 1945. But Washington and London were far from enchanted by the prospect of seeing the Soviet Union receiving its due after having made such outstanding efforts and sacrifices on behalf of the common anti-Nazi cause. The Americans, in particular, had their own ideas with respect to postwar Germany and Eastern as well as Western Europe, to be examined in the next chapter. Reparations, for example, would enable the Soviets to resume work, possibly successfully, on the project of a communist society, a counter system to the international capitalist system of which the USA had become the great champion.

Essentially, in Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, Uncle Sam wanted governments, democratic or not, that would pursue a liberal economic policy, involving an “open door” for American products and investment capital. Roosevelt had displayed a measure of empathy vis-à-vis the Soviets, but after his death on April 12, 1945, his successor, Harry Truman, had little or no sympathy or understanding for the Soviet point of view. He and his advisors loathed the idea that the Soviet Union might receive major reparations from Germany, since this was likely to disqualify Germany as a potentially lucrative market for American products and investment capital. And they also found it abominable that the Soviets were certain to use that German capital to build a socialist system, an undesirable form of competition for capitalism.

The Soviet aspirations were reasonable, and the Soviet leaders, including Stalin, who is usually wrongly depicted as making all the decisions by himself, were certainly willing to make major concessions. It was possible to talk with them, but such a dialogue also required patience and understanding of the Soviet viewpoint and had to be carried out in the knowledge that the Soviet Union was not prepared to leave the conference table empty-handed. Truman, however, had no desire to engage in such a dialogue. (That Stalin was interested in dialogue and could be most reasonable was to be reflected in his approach to the postwar arrangements regarding Finland and Austria; the Red Army would in due course pull out of these countries without leaving behind any communist regimes.)

Truman and his advisors hoped that it would prove possible to force the Soviets to abstain from German reparations and withdraw not only from the eastern reaches of German territory but also from Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe, so that the Americans and their British partners could operate there as they had already done in Western Europe. Truman even hoped that it might be possible to cause the Soviets to put an end to their communist experiment, which remained a source of inspiration for “reds” and other radicals and revolutionaries everywhere on earth, even in the United States itself.

In the early spring of 1945, Churchill had flogged the idea of having US and British troops march to Moscow together with the remaining Nazi forces. But that plan, called Operation Unthinkable, had to be abandoned. mainly because of the same stiff kind of opposition displayed by soldiers and civilians that had led to the aborting of the armed intervention in the Russian Civil War. Like Patton, who had looked forward to playing a major role in “Barbarossa Bis”, Truman must have been disappointed. But on April 25, 1945, only days before the German capitulation, the president received electrifying news. He was briefed about the top-secret Manhattan Project, or S-1, the code name for the construction of the atom bomb. That new and powerful weapon, on which the Americans had been working for years, was almost ready and, if tested successfully, would soon be available for use. Truman and his advisors thus fell under the spell of what the renowned American historian William Appleman Williams has called a “vision of omnipotence”. They convinced themselves that the new weapon would enable them to force their will on the Soviet Union. The atomic bomb was “a hammer”, as Truman himself put it, that he would wave over the heads of “those boys in the Kremlin”.[3]

A devout anti-communist, Missourian Harry Truman came to believe the A-Bomb would allow the US to impose its terms on the USSR.

Thanks to the bomb, it would now be possible to force Moscow to withdraw the Red Army from Germany and to deny Stalin a say in its postwar affairs. It now also seemed a feasible proposition to install pro-Western and even anti-communist regimes in Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, and to prevent Stalin from exerting any influence there. It even became thinkable that the Soviet Union itself might be opened up to American investment capital as well as American political and economic influence, and that this communist heretic might thus be returned to the bosom of the universal capitalist church. “There is evidence”, writes the German historian Jost Dülffer, that Truman believed that the monopoly of the nuclear bomb would be “a passepartout for the implementation of the United States’ ideas for a new world order”.[4] Indeed, with the nuclear pistol on his hip, the American president did not feel that he had to treat “the boys in the Kremlin”, who did not have such a super-weapon, as his equals. “The American leaders waxed self-righteous and excoriated Russia”, writes Gabriel Kolko, “[and] they refused to negotiate in any serious way simply because as self-confident master of economic and military powers the United States felt it could ultimately define the world order”.[5]

Possession of a mighty new weapon also opened up all sorts of possibilities with respect to the ongoing war in the Far East and the postwar arrangements to be made for that part of the world, of great importance to the leaders of the US, as we have seen when dealing with Pearl Harbor. Nevertheless, playing that powerful trump card would only be possible after the bomb had been successfully tested and was available to be used. Truman needed to bide his time. He therefore did not heed Churchill’s advice to discuss the fate of Germany and Eastern Europe with Stalin as soon as possible, “before the armies of democracy melted”, that is, before the American troops were to pull out of Europe. Eventually, Truman did agree to a summit meeting of the Big Three in Berlin, but not before the summer, when the bomb was supposed to be ready.

The meeting of the Big Three took place, not in bombed-out Berlin but in nearby Potsdam, from July 17 to August 2, 1945. It was there that Truman received the long-awaited message that the atomic bomb had been tested successfully on July 16 in New Mexico. The American president now felt strong enough to make his move. He no longer bothered to present proposals to Stalin but made all sorts of non-negotiable demands; at the same time, he rejected out of hand all proposals emanating from the Soviet side, for example proposals concerning German reparation payments. But Stalin did not capitulate, not even when Truman attempted to intimidate him by whispering into his ear that America had acquired an incredibly powerful new weapon. The Soviet leader, who had certainly been informed already about the Manhattan Project by his spies, listened in stony silence. Truman concluded that only an actual demonstration of the atomic bomb could persuade the Soviets to give way. Consequently, no general agreement on important issues could be achieved at Potsdam.[6]

In the meantime, the Japanese battled on in the Far East, even though their situation was totally hopeless. They were in fact prepared to surrender, but not unconditionally as the Americans demanded. To the Japanese mind, an unconditional capitulation conjured up the supreme humiliation, namely, that Emperor Hirohito might be forced to step down and possibly be accused of war crimes. American leaders were aware of this, and some of them, for example Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, believed, as historian Gar Alperovitz writes, “that a statement reassuring the Japanese that unconditional surrender did not mean dethronement of the Emperor would probably bring an end to the war”.[7]

The demand for an unconditional surrender was actually far from sacrosanct: in General Eisenhower’s HQ in Reims on May 7, a German condition had been accepted, namely their request for the cease-fire to be implemented only after a delay of no less than 45 hours, long enough to permit a large number of their troops to slip away from the eastern front in order to end up not in Soviet but in American or British captivity; even at this late stage, many of these units would be kept ready – in uniform, armed, and under the command of their own officers – for possible use against the Red Army, as Churchill was to admit after the war.[8] It was therefore quite possible to bring about a Japanese capitulation in spite of the demand for immunity for Hirohito. Furthermore, Tokyo’s condition was far from essential: after an unconditional surrender was finally wrested from the Japanese, the Americans never bothered to lay charges against Hirohito, and it was thanks to Washington that he was able to remain emperor for many more decades.

Why did the Japanese think that they could still afford the luxury of attaching a condition to their offer of surrender? The reason was that in China the main force of their army remained intact. They thought that they could use this army to defend Japan itself and thus exact a high price from the Americans for their admittedly inevitable final victory. This scheme would only work, however, if the Soviet Union did not get involved in the war in the Far East, thus pinning the Japanese forces down on the Chinese mainland. Soviet neutrality, in other words, allowed Tokyo a small measure of hope, not hope for a victory of course, but hope that Washington might accept the condition about their emperor. To a certain extent, the war with Japan dragged on because the USSR was not yet involved in it. But Stalin had already promised in 1943 to declare war on Japan within three months after the capitulation of Germany, and he had reiterated this commitment as recently as July 17, 1945, in Potsdam. Consequently, Washington counted on a Soviet attack on Japan in early August. The Americans thus knew only too well that the situation of the Japanese was hopeless. “Fini Japs when that comes about”, Truman wrote in his diary, referring to the expected Soviet intervention in the war in the Far East.[9]

In addition, the American navy assured Washington that it was able to prevent the Japanese from transferring their army from China to defend the homeland against an American invasion. Finally, it was questionable whether an American invasion of Japan would be necessary at all, since the mighty US Navy could also simply blockade that island nation and thus confront it with a choice between capitulating or starving to death.

In order to finish the war against Japan without having to make more sacrifices, Truman thus had a range of attractive options. He could accept the trivial Japanese condition, immunity for their emperor; he could also wait until the Red Army attacked the Japanese in China, thus forcing Tokyo into accepting an unconditional surrender after all; and he could have instituted a naval blockade that would have forced Tokyo to sue for peace sooner or later. But Truman and his advisors chose none of these options. Instead, they decided to knock Japan out with the atomic bomb.

This fateful decision, which was to cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, mostly civilians, offered the Americans considerable advantages. First, the bomb might still force Tokyo to surrender before the Soviets got involved in the war in Asia. In this case it would not be necessary to allow Moscow a say in the coming decisions about postwar Japan, about the territories that had been occupied by Japan (such as Korea and Manchuria), and about the Far East and the Pacific region in general. The United States would then enjoy total hegemony over that part of the world, something that was Washington’s true, albeit unspoken, war aim in the conflict with Japan, as we have seen in the previous chapter. It is for this reason that the option of a blockade was also rejected: in this case, the Japanese would have capitulated only many months after the entry into the war of the Soviet Union.

A Soviet intervention in the war in the Far East threatened to achieve for the Soviets the same advantage that the Americans’ own relatively late intervention in the war in Europe had produced for themselves, namely, a place at the round table of the victors who would force their will on the defeated enemy, decide on borders, determine postwar socio-economic and political structures, and thereby achieve enormous benefits and prestige. Washington absolutely did not want the Soviet Union to enjoy this kind of input. The Americans had eliminated their great imperialist competitor in that part of the world and did not relish the idea of being saddled with a new potential rival, a rival, moreover, whose detested communist ideology was already becoming dangerously influential in many Asiatic countries, including China. By making use of the atom bomb, US leaders hoped to finish off the Japanese quickly and start to rearrange the Far East without a potentially pesky Soviet partner.

The atom bomb seemed to offer the American leaders an additional important advantage. Truman’s experience in Potsdam had persuaded him that only an actual demonstration of this new weapon would make Stalin pliable. Using the atom bomb to obliterate a Japanese city seemed to be the perfect stratagem to intimidate the Soviets and coerce them to make major concessions with respect to postwar arrangements in Germany, Poland, and elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe. Truman’s secretary of state, James F. Byrnes, reportedly declared later that the atom bomb had been used because such a demonstration of power was likely to make the Soviets more accommodating in Europe.

Tokyo was already largely devastated by intense firebombing, so that ruled it out as a possible "demonstration site" for a nuclear device.

To make the desired terrifying impression on the Soviets – and the rest of the world -, the bomb obviously had to be dropped on a big city. It is probably for this reason that Truman turned down a proposal, made by some of the scientists involved in the Manhattan Project, to demonstrate the power of the bomb by dropping it on some uninhabited Pacific island: there would not have been sufficient death and destruction. It would also have been extremely embarrassing if the weapon had failed to work its deadly magic; but if the unannounced atomic bombing of a Japanese city backfired, no one would have known and no one would have been embarrassed. A big Japanese city had to be selected, but the capital, Tokyo, did not qualify, since it was already flattened by previous conventional bombing raids, so that additional damage was unlikely to loom sufficiently impressive. In fact, very few cities qualified as the required “virgin” target. Why? In early August 1945, only ten cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants remained relatively unscathed by bombing raids, and quite a few of those were beyond the range of the bombers  (which on account of non-existent Japanese air defences, the latter had already started to obliterate towns with a population of less than 30,000.) But Hiroshima and Nagasaki were unlucky enough to qualify.[10]

The atom bomb was ready just in time to be put to use before the USSR had a chance to become involved in the Far East. Hiroshima was obliterated on August 6, 1945, but the Japanese leaders did not react immediately with an unconditional capitulation. The reason was that the damage was great, but not greater than that caused by earlier bombing raids on Tokyo, where an attack by thousands of bombers on March 9 and 10, 1945, had caused more destruction and killed more people than at the “virgin” target of Hiroshima. This ruined Truman’s delicate scenario, at least partly. Tokyo had not yet surrendered when on August 8, 1945 — exactly three months after the German capitulation in Berlin — the USSR declared war on Japan, and the next day the Red Army attacked the Japanese troops stationed in northern China. Truman and his advisors now wanted to end the war as quickly as possible in order to limit the “damage” (from their perspective) done by the Soviet intervention.


Hiroshima semi-blinded survivor showing scars from the atomic blast. Hiroshima had been largely pulverised, but the Japanese had not run to the negotiation table and Truman was in a hurry.

Already on August 10, 1945, just one day after the Soviet Union’s entry into the war in the Far East, a second bomb was dropped, this time on the city of Nagasaki. About this bombardment, in which many Japanese Catholics perished, a former American army chaplain later stated: “That’s one of the reasons I think they dropped the second bomb. To hurry it up. To make them surrender before Russians came”.[11](The chaplain may or may not have been aware that among the 75,000 human beings who were “instantaneously incinerated, carbonized and evaporated” in Nagasaki were many Japanese Catholics as well an unknown number of inmates of a camp for allied POWs, whose presence had been reported to the air command, to no avail.)[12]

Japan capitulated not because of the atom bombs but because of the Soviet entry into the conflict. After the obliteration of most of the country’s big cities, the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no matter how horrible, made little or no difference from a strategic viewpoint. The Soviet declaration of war, on the other hand, was a fatal blow, because it eliminated Tokyo’s very last hope for attaching some minor conditions to the inevitable capitulation. Moreover, even after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese leaders knew that it would take many months before American troops might land in Japan, but the Red Army was making such rapid progress that it was estimated to cross into Japan’s own territory within ten days. Because of the Russian involvement, in other words, Tokyo ran out of time and of options other than unconditional surrender. Japan capitulated because of the Soviet declaration of war, not because of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even without the atomic bombs, the Soviet entry into the war would have triggered a surrender.[13] But the Japanese leaders took their time. Their formal capitulation occurred on August 14, 1945.

To the great chagrin of Truman and his advisors, the Red Army was able to make considerable progress during those final days of the war. The Soviets even began to drive the Japanese out of their Korean colony, and did so in collaboration with a Korean liberation movement led by Kim Il-sung, which proved to be immensely popular and therefore poised to come to power after the liberation of the entire country from Japan’s nasty colonial yoke. But the prospect of an independent, socialist Korea did not fit into American plans for the postwar Far East. Washington therefore quickly sent troops to occupy the south of the peninsula, and the Soviets agreed to a division of the country that was supposed to be only temporary but has lasted until the present.[14]

It looked as if the Americans would be stuck with a Soviet partner in the Far East after all, but Truman made sure that this was not the case. He acted as if the earlier cooperation of the three great powers in Europe had not set a precedent by rejecting Stalin’s request for a Soviet occupation zone in the defeated Land of the Rising Sun on August 15, 1945. And when on September 2, 1945, General MacArthur officially accepted the Japanese surrender on the American battleship Missouri in the Bay of Tokyo, representatives of the Soviet Union, and of other allies in the Far East, including Great Britain and the Netherlands, were allowed to be present only as insignificant extras. Japan was not carved up into occupation zones, like Germany. America’s defeated rival was to be occupied in its entirety by the Americans only, and as American viceroy in Tokyo, General MacArthur would ensure that, regardless of contributions made to the common victory, no other power would have a say in the affairs of postwar Japan.

The American conquerors recreated the Land of the Rising Sun according to their ideas and to their advantage. In September 1951, a satisfied America would sign a peace treaty with Japan. The USSR, however, whose interests had never been taken into account, did not co-sign this treaty. The Soviets did pull out of the parts of China and Korea they had liberated, but they refused to evacuate Japanese territories such as Sakhalin and the Kurils, which had been occupied by the Red Army during the last days of the war. They would be mercilessly criticized for this in the United States afterward, as if the attitude of the American government itself had nothing to do with this issue.

American leaders believed that after the Japanese rape of China and its humiliation of traditional colonial powers such as Great Britain, France, and the Netherlands, and after their own victory over Japan, only the elimination of the USSR from the Far East — seemingly a mere formality — was required in order to realize their dream of absolute hegemony in that part of the world. Their disappointment and chagrin were all the greater when, after the war, China was “lost” to Mao’s Communists. To make things worse, the northern half of Korea, a former Japanese colony the US had hoped to reduce to vassalage together with Japan itself, opted for an idiosyncratic path to socialism, and in Vietnam a popular independence movement under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh likewise turned out to have plans that proved to be incompatible with the grand Asian ambitions of the United States. No wonder, then, that it would come to war in Korea and Vietnam, and almost to an armed conflict with “Red China”.

To force Japan to its knees, it was not necessary to use the atom bomb. As a thorough American study of the war in the air, the US Strategic Bombing Survey, was to acknowledge categorically, “Japan would certainly have surrendered prior to 31 December 1945, even if the atom bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated”.[15]Several American military leaders have publicly acknowledged this, including Henry “Hap ” Arnold, Chester Nimitz, William “Bull ” Halsey, Curtis LeMay, and a future president, Dwight Eisenhower. Truman, however, wanted to use the bomb for a number of reasons, and not just to get the Japanese to surrender. He expected that dropping the atom bomb would keep the Soviets out of the Far East and terrorize that country’s leaders, so that Washington could impose its will on the Kremlin with respect to European affairs. And so, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were pulverized.  Many American historians realize this only too well. Sean Dennis Cashman writes:

With the passing of time, many historians have concluded that the bomb was used as much for political reasons . . . Vannevar Bush [the head of the US Office of Scientific Research and Development] stated that the bomb “was also delivered on time, so that there was no necessity for any concessions to Russia at the end of the war”. Secretary of State James F. Byrnes [Truman’s secretary of state] never denied a statement attributed to him that the bomb had been used to demonstrate American power to the Soviet Union in order to make [the Soviets] more manageable in Europe.[16]

Truman himself, however, hypocritically declared at the time that the purpose of the two nuclear bombardments had been “to bring the boys home”, that is, to quickly finish the war without any further major loss of life on the American side. This explanation was uncritically broadcast in the American media and thus was born a myth eagerly propagated by them and by mainstream historians in the US and in the Western World in general, and of course by Hollywood.

The myth that two Japanese cities were nuked to force Tokyo to surrender, thus shortening the war and saving lives, was “made in USA”, but it was to be eagerly espoused in Japan, whose post-war leaders, vassals of the US, found it extremely useful for a number of reasons, as War Wilson has pointed out in his excellent article on the Bomb. First, the emperor and his ministers, who were in many ways responsible for a war that had caused so much misery for the Japanese people, found it extremely convenient to blame their defeat, as Wilson puts it, on “an amazing scientific breakthrough that no one could have predicted”. The blinding light of the atomic blasts made it impossible, so to speak, to see their “mistakes and misjudgments”. The Japanese people had been lied to about how bad the situation really was, and how the misery had dragged on so long just to save the emperor, but the Bomb provided the perfect excuse for having lost the war. No need to apportion blame; no court of inquiry need be held. Japan’s leaders were able to claim they had done their best. So, at the most general level the Bomb served to deflect blame from Japan’s leaders.

Second, the Bomb earned Japan international sympathy. Like Germany, Japan had waged a war of aggression and committed all sorts of war crimes. Both countries looked for ways to improve their image, seeking to exchange the mantle of perpetrator. for that of victim. In that context, post-war (West-)Germany invented the myth of the Red Army, depicted as a latter-day horde of racially inferior Mongols, storming towards Berlin, raping blond Frauleins and pillaging peaceful gingerbread towns en route to Berlin. Hiroshima and Nagasaki similarly permitted Japan to pose as “a victimized nation, one that had been unfairly bombed with a cruel and horrifying instrument of war”.

Third, echoing the American notion that the Bomb had ended the war was certain to please Japan’s post-war American overlords. The latter would protect Japan’s upper class against the demands for radical societal change emanating from radical elements, including communists, whose gospel “resonated among Japan’s poor, threatening plutocratic rule”.[17] But for quite some time, the elite worried that the Americans might abolish the institution of the emperor and put many top government officials, bankers, and industrialists on trial for war crimes. It was therefore deemed useful to please the Americans and, as a Japanese historian has put, “if they wanted to believe that the Bomb won the war, why disappoint them?” Japanese acceptance of their Hiroshima myth gratified the Americans because it served to spread the word in Japan, elsewhere in Asia, and around the world, that the US was militarily all-powerful yet peace-loving, and willing to use its monopoly of the atom bomb only when absolutely necessary. Ward Wilson continues and concludes as follows:

If, on the other hand, the Soviet entry into the war was what caused Japan to surrender, then the Soviets could claim that they were able to do in four days what the United States was unable to do in four years, and the perception of Soviet military power and Soviet diplomatic influence would be enhanced. And once the Cold War was underway, asserting that the Soviet entry had been the decisive factor would have been tantamount to giving aid and comfort to the enemy.[18]

Over the years, the myth that the “nuking” of two Japanese cities was justified, has lost much of its appeal on both sides of the Pacific. In 1945, an overwhelming 85% of Americans saw it that way, but that share declined to 63% in 1991 and 29% 2015; of the Japanese population, only 29% approved in 1991, and in 2015 merely 14%.[19] The myth obviously needed a boost, and it was duly provided by one of Truman’s successors, President Barack Obama.

Obama visited Hiroshima in May 2016. In a public address he coolly described the pulverization of the city by means of the atom bomb in 1945 as “death falling from the sky” as if it had been a hailstorm or some other natural phenomenon his country had nothing to do with, and he neglected to utter a single word of regret, let alone an apology, on behalf of Uncle Sam. In an enthusiastic report about this presidential performance, the New York Times, one of America’s leading newspapers, wrote that “many historians believe the bombings on Hiroshima and then Nagasaki, which together took the lives of more than 200,000 people, saved lives on balance, since an invasion of the islands would have led to far greater bloodshed”.[20] That numerous facts contradict this “belief”, and that numerous historians believe the exact opposite was not mentioned at all. This is how myths, even ailing myths, are kept alive.

SOURCES.

  • Alperovitz, Gar. Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam. The Use of the Atomic Bomb and the American Confrontation with Soviet Power, new edition, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1985 (original edition 1965).
  • Cashman, Sean Dennis. Roosevelt, and World War II, New York and London, 1989.
  • Cummings, Bruce. The Korean War: A History, New York, 2011.
  • Dülffer, Jost. Jalta, 4. Februar 1945: Der Zweite Weltkrieg und die Entstehung der bipolaren Welt, Munich, 1998.
  • Gowans, Stephen. Patriots, Traitors and Empires: The Story of Korea’s Struggle for Freedom, Montreal, 2018.
  • Harris, Gardiner. “At Hiroshima Memorial, Obama Says Nuclear Arms Require ‘Moral Revolution’”, The New York Times, May 27, 2016
  • Hasegawa, Tsuyoshi. Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan, Cambridge, MA, 2005.
  • Kohls, Gary G. “Whitewashing Hiroshima: The Uncritical Glorification of American Militarism,” http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig5/kohls1.html
  • Kolko, Gabriel. The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1943-1945, New York, 1968.
  • Kolko, Gabriel. Main Currents in Modern American History, New York, 1976.
  • Pauwels, Jacques R. The Myth of the Good War: America in the Second World War,revised edition, Toronto, 2015.
  • Stokes, Bruce. “70 years after Hiroshima, opinions have shifted on use of atomic bomb”, Factank, August 4, 2015, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/08/04/70-years-after-hiroshima-opinions-have-shifted-on-use-of-atomic-bomb.
  • Terkel, Studs. “The Good War”: An Oral History of World War Two, New York, 1984.
  • Williams, William Appleman. The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, revised edition, New York, 1962.
  • Wilson, Ward. “The Bomb Didn’t Beat Japan … Stalin Did. Have 70 years of nuclear policy been based on a lie?”, F[oreign]P[olicy], May 30, 2013, https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/30/the-bomb-didnt-beat-japan-stalin-did.

Notes.

  • [1] France was to join this trio later, thus making it the Big Four.
  • [2] Kolko (1968), pp. 50-51.
  • [3] Williams, p. 250.
  • [4] Dülffer, p. 155.
  • [5] Kolko (1976), p. 355.
  • [6] Alperovitz, p. 223.
  • [7] Alperovitz, p.156.
  • [8] Pauwels, pp. 178-79.
  • [9] Quoted in Alperovitz, p. 24.
  • [10] Wilson.
  • [11] Quoted in Terkel, p. 535.
  • [12] Kohls.
  • [14] For a myth-free history of the tragedy if the division of Korea, see the books by Cummings and by Gowans.
  • [15] Quotation in Horowitz, p. 53.
  • [16] Cashman, p. 369.
  • [17] American historian Sarah C. Paine as quoted in Gowans, p. 106.
  • [18] Wilson
  • [19] Stokes.
  • [20] Harris.

This essay is adapted from Jacques Pauwels forthcoming book on The Great Myths of Modern History. Jacques R. Pauwels is the author of The Great Class War: 1914-1918.


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The French Revolution: A First Step Towards Democracy

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.




by Jacques R. Pauwels


This chapter is based on the author’s book on the French Revolution, Le Paris des sans-culottes. Guide du Paris révolutionnaire (1789-1799).

Myth: The French Revolution amounted to a senseless bloodbath during which thousands of innocent people were massacred by a Parisian mob, led by Jacobin scoundrels such as Robespierre. Fortunately, a great leader eventually appeared on the scene, like a deus ex machina, to restore order at home and, via an amazing string of victories in foreign wars, bring glory to France: Napoleon Bonaparte. For that achievement, France will forever remain grateful, even though things finished badly for Napoleon on account of a setback in Russia and a heroic last stand at Waterloo.

Reality: Despite the bloodletting that accompanied it, which was actually due more to counterrevolutionary “white” terror than to the revolutionary terror, the French Revolution constituted a first step in the direction of the political and social emancipation of the great majority of the people, in other words, of democracy, not only in France but in all of Europe and the entire world. This fact was most dramatically exemplified by Robespierre’s abolition of slavery. As for Napoleon, in many ways he was a product of the Revolution, but he was certainly not a democrat; he restored slavery, and his quest for national and personal glory cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.


Initial phase of the Revolution: Opening session of the General Assembly, 5 May 1789 shows the inauguration of the Estates-General in Versailles. The Estates General, comprising both nobles and commoners, had not been convened since 1614. The suggestion to summon the Estates-General came from high-ranking nobles, church dignitaries and high bureaucrats, the Assembly of Notables, convened by the King as a consultative body to resolve a serious fiscal and political crisis. (Click image for best appreciation).

Another view of the assembled Etats-Generaux. Consistent with the Ancien Regime's social order, the seating arrangement privileged the nobility and church, at the expense of the commoners, the Third Estate, who represented the vast majority of France. The Estates-General would eventually morph into the revolutionary National Assembly.


These changes occurred in France itself, but not its major transatlantic colony, founded in the early 17th century and known as Nouvelle-France, “New France”, namely the present-day Canadian province of Quebec. That territory was lost to the motherland during the Seven-Years’ War of 1756-1763. When, a few decades later, the Revolution called an entirely new France into being, nothing changed in Quebec. Change was unwanted there, especially since the British conquerors had turned over the colony’s administration to the Catholic Church, which anathemized the Revolution as the handiwork of Satan. In other words, when in Europe Old France became a New France, the overseas New France became an Old France. To modern Frenchmen, visiting Quebec is like a voyage back in time, as they are greeted by blue-and-white flags proudly displaying no less than four fleurs-de-lis, separated by a large cross. Within its mighty walls, Old Quebec City certainly radiates charm and comfort. But what was life really like in France before the “Great Revolution” that broke out in 1789?

About the political and social system of Ancien-Régime France, one thing is certain: it was not a democracy. Ordinary people, the demos (to use Greek terminology), or plebs, as the Romans used to say, had no power (Greek, kratos) whatsoever. Power was monopolized by a small minority of noblemen (a.k.a. aristocrats)1 as well as bishops and cardinals, the so-called “princes” of the Church. 

Together, this patriciate of secular and ecclesiastical seigneurs represented no more than about five percent of the population. The system may therefore be described as an oligarchy, that is, an arrangement in which power (archè) is in the hands of “few people” (oligoi), or even an autocracy (autos, “self”, plus kratos), power enjoyed by a single person. Indeed, in France, the monarch, the primus inter pares of the nobility, had managed, at the expense of the rest of the noblemen, to concentrate most power into his own hands. The French monarchy had thus become an absolute monarchy. 2 It is in this context that the “Sun-King” Louis XIV had been able to pompously proclaim that the state belonged to him and to him alone, that his person was in fact the state: lÉtat, c’est moi! And on the eve of the Revolution, his successor, Louis XVI, still felt entitled to state that “this is the law because it is what I want”. In Ancien-Régime France, the monarch held an enormous amount of power, the seigneurs of the nobility and the church shared some of it, but the “little people” of the demos, the plebeians, enjoyed no power whatsoever.

While the French monarchy traditionally spent colossal sums of money on the construction of palaces such as Versailles and on grandiose “places royales”, that is, city squares featuring statues of sovereigns, such as the vast open space that is known today as Place de la Concorde, and also on endless wars, it never achieved anything worthwhile for the benefit of ordinary people.

The French were subjects of their king. They had all sorts of obligations to the monarchical state, such as payment of taxes and military service, but they hardly had any rights. They could be incarcerated for an indefinite period of time or even executed, simply because the king gave orders to that effect. 

In the Ancien Régime, moreover, the principle of the equality of people was unheard of. Non-Catholics, for example, enjoyed even fewer rights than the Catholic majority. And different laws applied to the noble minority and the non-noble majority. Aristocrats condemned to death were decapitated, which happened to be the most humane form of execution at the time, while all others were either hanged or, worse, broken on the wheel, a bestial form of execution used in Paris for the last time only in the middle of the supposedly “enlightened” 18th century, in 1757.

The Ancien Régime was a society officially divided into classes, or rather, “estates”, three in number. The nobility and the clergy constituted the first two estates, while the rest of the rural as well as urban population – representing about ninety percent of France’s total population! — was lumped together into the “third estate”. The first and second estates were very much representative of the social upper class which was rich, powerful, and privileged in many ways. This class was mostly satisfied with the state of political and social affairs and felt that major changes were unnecessary and undesirable. (But they did wish for some reforms, as we will see later.) 

On the other hand, one could not expect that ordinary people would resign themselves forever to a state of affairs that was unpleasant for most. In addition to the peasants in the countryside, the malcontents included urban folks such as the bourgeoisie, a term whose literal meaning is inhabitant of a town, bourg in French. The term bourgeoisie is often translated as “middle class”, but it is important to realize that there were two levels within that class. First, there was the upper level of the bourgeoisie, the “upper-middle” class (grande bourgeoisie, haute bourgeoisie), consisting of well-to-do people such as merchants, bankers, high-ranking government officials, and members of a well-paid liberal profession. Second, the bourgeoisie featured a large lower level, known as the petite bourgeoisie or “petty bourgeoisie”; its members were far less prosperous folks, though not paupers, for example shopkeepers and above all artisans, that is, craftsmen; they usually owned some property in the form of a house, a workshop, or at least the (sometimes valuable) tools of their trade. Finally, the urban plebs also included many folks who were very genuinely poor, and often extremely poor, such as wage-earning workers, unemployed, prostitutes, beggars, and other “proletarians”, that is, “people who own nothing but their offspring”. 3

The Third Estate thus amounted to a heterogeneous combination of what one might today call the “middle class” and the “lower class”. The upper-middle class – the members of the haute bourgeoisie, but not of the petite bourgeoisie – were rich, sometimes very rich, even richer than many aristocrats, and in this sense they, like the aristocrats, were “patricians”, to use an ancient Roman term for folks on the higher levels of the power pyramid. But they did not have any political power and did not enjoy the kind of social prestige radiated by the nobility; so they felt that it was time for change. 

As for the peasants in the countryside and the petits bourgeois and other plebeians in the cities, their existence was precarious, as they confronted misery and hardships even when they were not totally poor, for example during the frequently occurring famines and times of high bread prices, which were typically blamed on taxes and on conspiracies of landowning noblemen and bourgeois merchants. This rising discontent triggered demonstrations and riots, and in 1789 these folks were to supply the shock troops that would storm the Bastille and achieve other impressive revolutionary deeds.

The Revolution that exploded in 1789 clearly reflected the great and traumatic class contradictions that characterized the Ancien Régime. The majority of the people, the peasants in the countryside and, in the city, the patrician haute bourgeoisie as well as the plebeians, above all the Parisian artisans who would be known as the “sans-culottes”, rose up against the upper class, the elite or “establishment”, consisting of the nobility and the high ranks of the clergy, lined up behind the king. Members of the bourgeoisie took over the leadership of the revolutionary movement, but the sans-culottes performed most if not all the revolutionary heavy lifting. In the countryside, the peasants made a significant contribution to the revolutionary cause by attacking the noble seigneurs in their castles. After the cancellation of the onerous feudal obligations the peasants had resented so much, however, tranquillity returned to the countryside. Henceforth, revolutionary action would take place mostly, though not exclusively, in Paris.

The French Revolution was obviously a domestic conflict within France, in which the lower classes, meaning the overwhelming majority of the population, put an end to the power and privileges of a tiny minority. Thus originated a process of democratization that, over the course of the following couple of centuries and until the present day, has known dramatic ups and downs, zigzags, and reversals, and is still far from completed.

The Revolution brought considerable change to the lives of the French, and this change amounted to a major improvement. The Revolution initiated the emancipation of the middle class and even of the lower classes. In 1789, the women and men of France ceased to be the “subjects” of a king. Instead, they became “citizens”, endowed with legally defined duties but also rights, of a state they could identify with, of a “nation”. And this state was no longer closely tied to a specific religion, as in the Ancien Régime, but was separated from the Church, and it enshrined the modern, sensible, and, indeed, democratic principle of freedom of conscience. The French also acquired the right to exert, via elections, a certain amount of political influence, that is, to provide some input into the management of the state. Moreover, the citizens of France were henceforth equal before the law, regardless of their social status or religious beliefs. Jews and Protestants thus ceased to be second-class citizens. (But more, much more, could have been done for women.) The considerable merits of the French Revolution also included measures that were inspired by the Enlightenment, such as the abolition of torture and, last but not least, the creation of a modern, “indivisible” and highly centralized French state.

This is only a very brief sketch of the major achievements of the years 1789-1791, which happened to be the first phase of the French Revolution. These achievements were important, but they certainly did not produce a democratic Utopia. They only amounted to the very first stage of the democratization process, that is, the long road, far from rectilinear, but winding and featuring ups and downs, towards a perfect democracy that remains a bright but distant star even today.

The achievements of the French Revolution in its early stage triggered great enthusiasm also outside of France, especially among the bourgeoisie, for example in England, where the poet William Wordsworth was to articulate that feeling of excitement and hope with immortal lines: 

Europe at that time was thrilled with joy
France standing at the top of golden hours,
And human nature seeming born again . . .
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very Heaven! 4

This progress towards democracy was achieved at the expense of the king, the nobility, and the Church, whose collective membership constituted a microscopic demographic minority that detested the idea, and a fortiori the reality, of democracy. Why? Because democracy meant “power by and for the people”, it signified a system that would necessarily put an end to their privileges and power.

On the other hand, the incipient democratization favoured the bourgeoisie, especially the haute bourgeoisie, the upper-middle class. In the Ancien Régime, this class, consisting of merchants, bankers, high-ranking government officials, lawyers, and such, had been prospering economically but not politically. It was determined to use the state power it had achieved thanks to the revolution to further its class interests, just as, in the Ancien Régime, the monarch, the nobility and the clergy had used their power in the state for their own benefit, for example by exempting themselves from most forms of taxation. As they ensconced themselves on the commanding heights of the state, the upper-middle class burghers were able to craft laws and regulations that they, as merchants, bankers, entrepreneurs, high-ranking officials, etc., found advantageous. These measures included the abolition of domestic tolls on the transportation and sale of goods – such as the infamous customs wall surrounding Paris – as well as the introduction of a new, uniform system of weights and measures; and also the Law of Le Chapelier, which prohibited the formation of trade unions and other organizations of wage earners and artisans.

After two years of revolution, in 1791, the haute bourgeoisie had realized its major objectives. Royal absolutism, with its privileges for the nobility and the clergy, had given way to a constitutional, parliamentary monarchy in which prosperous burghers held power. Thanks to the introduction of limitations on the right to vote, in the form of a census suffrage (or censitary suffrage), which gave the vote only to those who paid a relatively high amount of taxes, ordinary folks remained politically powerless. Only the well-to-do, the “people with property” (gens de bien) could vote and qualify for membership in the popular assemblies, first the Constitutional Assembly (Assemblée constituante) and then the Legislative Assembly (Assemblée legislative), while the “people without property” (gens de rien) – or with only minimal property, such as the majority of the sans-culottes – were rigorously excluded. 

In the fall of 1791, this compromise, essentially a constitutional monarchy of the kind that still exists today in quite a few European countries, seemed to be firmly in place and was in fact enshrined in a formal constitution. And powerful symbols were created for it: the tricolor flag, a combination of the white and blue of the monarchy and the red and blue of the coat of arms of Paris.

The revolutionary issue remained far from settled for two main reasons: first, relentless pressure for more far-reaching revolutionary changes, emanating from the Parisian populace, the sans-culottes, and second, the compromise of a constitutional, parliamentary monarchy was also threatened by counterrevolutionary pressure at home and abroad. The Parisian plebeians longed for a more radical revolutionary outcome, while the counterrevolutionaries wanted to undo the revolution, wishing for a retour en arrière to the Ancien Régime.

The Parisian sans-culottes constituted the shock troops that had achieved the great revolutionary deeds, including the storming of the Bastille. It was thanks to them that the upper-middle class had been able to come to power. But the well-to-do burghers despised and feared the lower-class denizens of the capital as a restless and dangerous “populace” or “mob”, as unsympathetic historians call them. The objectives of this populace included all sorts of desiderata deemed unacceptable to the “moderate” revolutionaries of the bourgeoisie, for example, the introduction of what will later be widely considered to be the sine qua non of democracy: universal suffrage. This democratic system seemed likely to enable the rise to positions of power not of solid burghers but of representatives of the popular masses, that is, the kind of folks who could not be counted on to display much respect for private property, cornerstone of the liberal gospel preached by Adam Smith. It was indeed at that time that the French bourgeoisie was embracing liberal ideas because they reflected and promoted the interests of their class.

The plebeian revolutionaries also expected the embryonic democratic state to somehow arrange for higher wages and lower prices, especially a lower price of bread, the primordial food of the French at the time. But that too was not to the taste of the bourgeoisie, because such measures amounted to state intervention in economic life and therefore violated the liberal dogma of laissez faire, the idea that “markets” and “enterprise” should be “free”. It was clear, moreover, that the bourgeoisie would be saddled with a share of the costs of “statist” measures. Conversely, the numerous Parisian wage-earners were antagonized by a number of measures taken by the new bourgeois authorities, for example the notorious Le Chapelier law, which outlawed workers’ associations and strikes.

The plebeians were excluded from the successive assemblies of “representatives of the people”, but they put considerable pressure on these bodies via boisterous demonstrations in the streets and squares of the capital. This frequently involved eruptions of violence. On July 17, 1791, for instance, tens of thousands of sans-culottes gathered on the huge open space known as Champ de Mars to express their discontentment about unemployment, high prices, and low wages.

Leaders of the Gironde taken to the gallows. The disgraced Girondins promoted war as a maneuver to stunt the revolutionary process at the level that benefited their merchant/haute bourgeois interests. They failed, and paid a high price, but their class would eventually emerge victorious to the detriment of most ordinary citizens and real democracy. They would be pleased with today's global capitalism.


To eliminate this pesky pressure from the popular masses, a stratagem was found in the spring of 1792 by a group of grand-bourgeois politicians, i.e. men of upper-middle class background, mostly rich merchants from Bordeaux; these men were known as the Girondins, because that is what the inhabitants of that city, located on the shores of the Gironde river, are traditionally called. The remedy they conjured up was war. Indeed, war was eminently useful for the purpose of redirecting the energy of the sans-culottes towards less risky objectives than the additional, more radical revolutionary objectives unwanted and even feared by the bourgeoisie. War also implied the removal of most of the revolutionary hotheads from the revolutionary crucible, Paris. An international war, a conflict against foreign or “external” enemies, was to put an end to the national war, which the revolution happened to be, the conflict between domestic or “internal” enemies, class enemies, within France. The Girondins hoped to halt the revolutionary process, prevent the revolution from intensifying, from becoming more radical, which is what the sans-culottes aspired to do. The “men from Bordeaux” wanted to prevent the revolutionary Pandora’s Box from yielding what the bourgeoisie viewed as a surfeit of democracy. They preferred conflict against foreign foes to conflict against domestic enemies, international war to class war.

The Girondins hoped not only that war would neutralize the overly radical revolutionaries but also provide an opportunity to settle accounts with all those who did not fully support the new revolutionary France, to stigmatize them as traitors to the fatherland, and to treat them accordingly; the number of these counterrevolutionaries, who longed for a return to the Ancien Régime, included the king himself. 

Like countless other revolutionaries, the Girondins also believed that revolutionary France had a universal mission, in other words, was predestined to recreate the rest of the world in its own image, and was entitled to use violence, if necessary, to achieve this noble objective. It was believed that France’s revolutionary troops would be welcomed abroad by the popular masses as liberators. 

Finally, it was expected that war would yield conquests and therefore bring in revenue, because the Girondins and bourgeois revolutionaries in general wanted to repay the huge national debt that was the legacy of the absolute monarchy. The reason why did they not simply repudiate that debt is that the creditors were essentially the kind of merchants, bankers, and other well-to-do burghers exemplified by the Girondins, from whom the royal government had borrowed the money.

The intrigues of counter-revolutionaries at home and abroad eventually involved the king, who hoped a war with Austria, and a revolutionary defeat,  would restore his authority. Charged with treason, Louis XVI was executed on January 21, 1793, at the Place de la Révolution (today rechristened Place de la Concorde).

The Revolution, which had started in France as a domestic class conflict, also started to morph into an international war because of the reaction of Europe’s crowned heads to developments within France. These sovereigns were far from enchanted by the anti-absolutist and anti-aristocratic precedent being created. They considered it a nefarious example that might be emulated by their own subjects. And the prelates of the Christian churches – Catholic and non-Catholic – associated with the absolutist monarchies supported the Pope’s condemnation of the anticlerical Revolution as well as his appeal for a counterrevolutionary crusade against France. 

Support for an international armed intervention aimed at the restauration of the Ancien Régime in France also came from the émigrés, the numerous French aristocrats who had fled to England or elsewhere, and even, albeit secretly, from Louis XVI himself. That became obvious when he attempted to flee the country and, a little later, when incriminating correspondence with foreign monarchs was discovered in his apartments.

When war broke out in 1792, countless volunteers stepped forward to defend the fatherland as well as the Revolution. They came from all over France, but prominent among them were the Parisian sans-culottes. Against all expectations, this motley crew managed to defeat an Austrian army that had marched into France. It is in this context that a new national anthem originated, namely as a song sung by a battalion of patriots from Marseille: the “Marseillaise”. 

Assault on the Tuileries, and massacre of the Swiss Guards, perceived by many as foreign mercenaries. They were.

But the war dragged on, involved some nasty defeats, and provoked more and more misery among the “little people”. A new invasion of the country, combined with counterrevolutionary uprisings in the provinces, especially the Vendée, triggered a kind of panic in Paris, to become known as la Terreur, the Terror. The revolutionary pressure thus increased, which was reflected in some particularly dramatic and bloody events. The first of those was the storming, on August 10, 1792, of the Tuileries Palace, the residence of the king, who was now not incorrectly viewed as the figurehead of the counterrevolution. The second event of this nature took place from 2 to 5 September and was to go down in history as the “September Massacres”: the slaughter of hundreds of real as well as perceived counterrevolutionaries held in Parisian prisons.

While the Revolution became more and more radical, it also became more democratic in many ways. In the Legislative Assembly, which had replaced the Constituent Assembly in September 1791, the bourgeois delegates deemed it necessary to make major concessions to a Parisian “populace” they loathed and feared — but needed in the struggle against foreign as well as domestic counterrevolutionaries. The monarchy was replaced by a democratic state system, the republic, and the king was formally accused of treason, brought to trial, found guilty, and executed. The Legislative Assembly itself had to give way to the National Convention, a meeting of people’s representatives elected via a (quasi-) universal, rather than censitary, suffrage, albeit reserved for men only.

Robespierre and the Jacobins sought to internalize, rather than externalize, the revolution. Contrary to the Girondins, the Jacobins were willing not only to collaborate with the sans-culottes in the implacable struggle against the counterrevolution but also to take unprecedented, radical revolutionary measures for the benefit of these sans-culottes and of French plebeians in general.

Even so, virtually only members of the well-to-do bourgeoisie continued to be elected, because ordinary folks did not benefit from the free time and independent income indispensable for an involvement in parliamentary activities. The Girondins could thus remain in power, but they were rapidly losing prestige and popularity in the eyes of the Parisian “populace”. Their fate contrasted starkly with the rising popular appeal of their radical competitors, folks of mostly lower-middle class, petty-bourgeois background, the Jacobins. Led by personalities such as Maximilien Robespierre. the Jacobins had been opposed to the war. The Girondin argument that French troops would be welcomed abroad as liberators had been rebuffed by Robespierre with the argument that “nobody likes armed missionaries”. He and his companions felt that it was necessary to concentrate on, and indeed intensify, the Revolution within the country instead of exporting it; they sought to internalize, rather than externalize, the revolution. Contrary to the Girondins, the Jacobins were willing not only to collaborate with the sans-culottes in the implacable struggle against the counterrevolution, but also to take unprecedented, radical revolutionary measures for the benefit of these sans-culottes and of French plebeians in general.

It is thanks to the support of the sans-culottes that, in the spring of 1793, Robespierre and the most radical Jacobins, a faction came to power that was known as the Montagnards because in the assembly they occupied the highest rows of benches, the “mountain”. The Convention thus moved from a Girondin to a Jacobin phase. And indeed, under the direction of Robespierre and his collaborators within the Committee of Public Safety (Comité de salut public), the government’s principal executive organ, set up by the Convention in April 1793, numerous radical measures were introduced that heralded a considerable progress in the direction of democracy. For the benefit of the peasants, their feudal obligations to the aristocrats were entirely and definitively abolished; it was no longer necessary to purchase these obligations back from the lords as compensation for the latter's loss of “property”, as had been the case under the previous reform. And via the introduction of price controls, the government attempted to lower the price of bread, a measure that was crucially important for the Parisian sans-culottes and urban plebeians in general; however, such measures violated laissez-faire principles that remained dear to the hearts of the Jacobins, so that their implementation left a lot to be desired.

More important is the fact that a new constitution was promulgated, the Constitution of [the Republican] Year One, or Constitution of 1793. Contrary to its liberal predecessor of 1791, this new code focused much more on equality than on liberty, even though freedoms such as those of the press and of religion were enshrined. It provided for a system of universal suffrage for men and even for certain social-economic rights such as the right to work, to education (at state expense), and to public support for the needy. The state thus clearly assumed an active role in the social-economic life of the nation, which contravened the liberal principles of the Girondins, representatives of the upper-middle class, and even the lower-middle class Jacobins, but suited the Parisian sans-culottes. On the other hand, the new constitution also enshrined the right to hold property and upheld the Le Chapelier law. This reflected the interests and liberal principles that the petty-bourgeois Jacobins shared with the grand-bourgeois Girondins.

The Jacobins’ commitment to democracy was limited in other ways. They remained attached to the age-old patriarchal system and therefore undertook nothing for the emancipation of women, who were not given the right to vote. It was even under the regime of Robespierre that a famous feminist, Olympe de Gouges, author of a Declaration of the Rights of Women (1791), was condemned to death and guillotined in November 1793. However, it is not clear if this was done because of her feminism or because of her support for the Girondins.


Maximilien Robespierre, justly called the Incorruptible. The idealist leader of the Jacobins. Despite some shortcomings, a pivotal figure in the complex revolutionary process. His fall allowed the grand bourgeois to conquer power, which they have retained ever since.

Africa remembers: Several nations in Africa have issued stamps honoring Robespierre. They are grateful for the French revolutionary's support in the elimination of slavery.

In spite of these shortcomings, it may be said that during the French Revolution, the march towards democracy culminated during its most popular – in the sense of “of the people” – phase, its most radical and egalitarian phase, in other words, under the auspices of Robespierre, in 1793-1794.

The Jacobin Convention’s greatest achievement by far in the service of democracy, however, was undoubtedly its abolition of slavery on February 2, 1794. The Girondins opposed this initiative because many of them owed their fortune to the slave trade, and the bourgeoisie in general considered slaves to be a legitimate and therefore sacrosanct form of property. Under the auspices of Robespierre, France became the first country in which an institution that had oppressed and exploited human beings for thousands of years was abolished.

In its early, moderate phase, the Revolution had transformed the French from subjects into citizens; in its radical phase, the Revolution transformed slaves into free women and men. Did this not amount to a giant step forward for democracy, for the emancipation of oppressed, exploited, abused, poor, hungry people? “A historic liberation for humanity” is how, in a book entitled Big History. From the Big Bang to the Present, Cynthia Stokes Brown describes the abolition of slavery in England, the US, and elsewhere, but without mentioning Robespierre and the French Revolution. 5 The majority of other historians similarly fail to pay much attention to this great achievement of the French Revolution in its most radical phase, an achievement to be credited to the most ardent revolutionaries, the Jacobins, and to the most radical faction of these zealots, the Montagnards, of whom Robespierre was the figurehead.

By intensifying and radicalizing the Revolution, by forcing France, so to speak, to make further progress on the road to democracy, Robespierre and his Jacobin companions brought upon themselves the hatred not only of the counterrevolutionaries in France and abroad but also of the majority of the upper-middle class revolutionaries. The latter had been satisfied with the formula of a parliamentary monarchy, enshrined in the Constitution of 1791; as far as they were concerned, the objectives of 1789 had been achieved, the revolutionary process had gone far enough and now needed to come to a halt.

The motto of the French Revolution was “liberty, equality, fraternity”, and in 1791 the haute bourgeoisie felt that the French had achieved sufficient liberty and that their liberty was threatened by the kind of price controls and other forms of state intervention in the economy wanted by the plebeians and introduced by the Jacobins. As for equality, the well-to-do burghers were very pleased that they were no longer, as in the Ancien Régime, unequal, that is, inferior, to the nobles they had simultaneously hated and admired; but they did not want to become the equals of the Parisian sans-culottes and other plebeians, folks they despised and feared and with whom they felt no solidarity whatsoever. Consequently, they wanted to limit equality to a purely formal equality before the law, and they were not at all prepared to consider any initiatives aimed at achieving the ideal of social equality.

We can thus understand that it was not the counterrevolutionaries who, in July 1794, the month of Thermidor according to the revolutionary calendar, arranged for the fall of Robespierre, but the bourgeois elements who longed for a retour en arrière. They wanted to return, not to the pre-1789 Ancien Régime, but to the moderate revolutionary phase of 1791, featuring a republic instead of a constitutional monarch. (After the experiences with Louis XVI, no revolutionary wanted anything more to do with kings.)

The “Thermidorian” reaction – or just “Thermidor” – thus gave birth to a republic custom-made for the haute bourgeoisie; it has been aptly described as a “bourgeois republic” or a “republic of property-owners” (république des propriétaires). The right to vote was restricted to citizens owning a considerable amount of property. And, in the name of laissez faire, the new upper-middle class regime stubbornly refused to undertake anything at all for the benefit of the “little people”, even though plebeians in Paris and all over France suffered from rapidly increasing poverty and misery. Unrest and rebellion resurfaced among the sans-culottes and the Jacobin fire threatened to flare up again. Moreover, the fall of Robespierre and the Jacobins, the great champions not only of the radical Revolution but of the Revolution tout court, had emboldened all counterrevolutionary and antirepublican forces. The latter were now aggressively and openly agitating in favor of a constitutional monarchy or, better still, a full-fledged restoration of the Ancien Régime.

The Thermidorians thus found themselves tacking precariously between a Jacobin Scylla and a counterrevolutionary Charybdis. It is under those difficult circumstances that a new constitution was concocted in 1795. It provided for an extremely undemocratic governmental system, headed by a committee of “directors”, and was therefore called the Directoire or “directorship”. When it turned out that this formula failed to eliminate the twin menace to bourgeois rule, however, it was decided to stop trying to save the appearance of revolutionary democracy. Via a coup d’état orchestrated in the month of November – “Brumaire” according to the republican calendar – of 1799, a military dictatorship was established with Napoleon Bonaparte at its head, a popular general who could be expected to rule on behalf, and for the benefit, of the upper-middle class. In order to create the illusion that the new regime was inspired by the republican traditions of Ancient Rome, Bonaparte received the title of First Consul, but in 1804 he was to put an end to this charade by crowning himself emperor.

Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) on engraving from 1873. Emperor of France. Handpicked by the haute bourgeoisie to rule the nation by flattening the revolutionary process at home, while substituting war lust and chauvinism. He also kept the ancien regime royalists at bay.

With the coup d’état of Brumaire, France’s well-to-do bourgeoisie transferred political power to Bonaparte in order not to have to lose it to the royalists or surrender it to the Jacobins. Bonaparte became the supreme ruler of France, but in reality he was in the service of the gentlemen of the country’s upper-middle class, above all big businessmen, bankers, and high-ranking government officials. 

Financially, he and the entire French state found themselves to be dependent on a private institution that was – and remains today – the property of the wealthy elite of the country, even though that fact was semantically obfuscated by giving it a name that created the impression that it was a state institution, namely the French “national bank”, the Banque de France. Charging relatively high interest rates, the bankers of this institution provided the emperor with the funds he needed to govern France, to arm the country, to wage wars – and to enjoy being emperor. As expected, he would indeed rule on their behalf and to the advantage of their class, that is, all owners of land and other forms of capital, the property-owners in general.

In 1802, Bonaparte demonstrated his respect for private property, cornerstone of the liberal ideology dear to bourgeois hearts, in spectacular fashion by reintroducing slavery. Translating words into action, he sent an army to Santo Domingo to put down a slave uprising on that Caribbean island, then a French colony. But the former slaves resisted bravely and ultimately effectively: the expedition failed, and thus was born the world’s very first state founded by former slaves who had liberated themselves: Haiti. (That development was not welcomed in the US, where slavery was to survive much longer, because the success of the former slaves in Haiti was perceived to constitute a bad example, and the island nation would pay a painful price for that original sin.)

Napoleon was also handpicked on account of his excellent antiroyalist credentials. In 1795, while still merely an artillery officer in Paris, he had bloodily dispersed a crowd of royalist demonstrators “with a volley of grape shot”, as he laconically reported to his relieved and impressed superiors. First as consul and then as emperor, he used, vis-à-vis royalists and counterrevolutionaries in general, not only the “stick” of repression but also the “carrot” of concessions and conciliation. During his reign, for example, the emigrated aristocrats, who had already been allowed to come back to France after Thermidor, could share in the benefits that were showered on property-owners in general. Many of them returned to their castles to lord it once again, in collaboration with parish priests and other notables, over the denizens of their bailiwick of rural France. They were thus integrated into the Bonapartist system.

Napoleon also reached a modus vivendi with the counterrevolutionary institution par excellence, the Catholic Church, by signing a concordat with the Pope. Catholicism did not regain its former status of state religion, but it was recognized as the religion of the majority of the French population and therefore showered with generous financial state support.

To exorcize the Jacobin menace – that is, the threat of revolutionary radicalization and democratization – Napoleon relied mainly on the instrument pioneered by the Girondins and also used most diligently by the Directoire, namely warfare. Indeed, when we think of Bonaparte’s regime, what comes to mind are not, as in the case of the years 1789 to 1794, revolutionary events in the centre of the great city in the centre of France, but rather, an interminable series of wars fought far away from Paris and far beyond the borders of France, and this is not a coincidence. Wars happened to be extremely functional for the primordial objective of the bourgeois reaction to Robespierre’s experiments with revolutionary radicalism: safeguarding the achievements of the bourgeois revolution of 1791, while preventing a return to the Ancien Régime as well as a remake of 1793.

Robespierre and the Montagnards wanted not only to protect the Revolution, but also to intensify it, radicalize it. And that implied “internalizing” the Revolution in France, and above all in the capital, Paris, heart of France and cradle of the Revolution. It was not a coincidence that the decapitations that are so closely associated with the radical Revolution took place in the middle of a square in the middle of the city situated, at least figuratively speaking, in the middle of the country. 

In order to concentrate their energies, and those of the sans-culottes and all the true revolutionaries on the “internalization” of the Revolution, Robespierre and his Jacobin companions – contrary to the Girondins – opposed international wars as a waste of revolutionary energy and a threat to the Revolution. Conversely, the interminable series of wars waged afterwards – first under the auspices of the Directoire, then under those of Bonaparte – signified an “externalization” of the Revolution, an exportation of the bourgeois revolution that had culminated in 1791. Those wars served to prevent an “internalization” or “radicalization” of the Revolution, as had happened in 1793.

It was to put an end to the Revolution in France itself, then, that Napoleon abducted it from its Parisian cradle and exported it to the rest of Europe. In order to prevent the mighty revolutionary current from excavating and deepening its own channel – Paris and the rest of France – first the Thermidorians and later Napoleon caused its troubled waters to overflow the borders of France, inundate all of Europe, thus becoming vast, but shallow and calm.

Napoleon in Berlin. Branderburg Gate can be seen in the background.

The wars caused the restless revolutionaries, the sans-culottes, to disappear from the revolutionary crucible that was Paris. They were stuffed into uniforms and shipped off to the four corners of Europe, from Cadiz to Moscow, and many of them would never come back. Moreover, war helped to put an end to the social problems that had plagued the country and, in the capital, had served as catalyst of the Revolution. The problem of unemployment, for example, was largely solved by the introduction of military service, initially voluntary but soon enough compulsory. 

War also provided a kind of “Keynesian” stimulus to the national economy: military expenditures enhanced the demand for products such as cannon, uniforms, and ships, thus boosting employment. And successful wars, followed by the occupation and looting of foreign countries, fattened the treasury of the French state. With this lucre, Napoleon could reimburse the Banque de France for its “services”, which helped to further enrich the already well-to-do bourgeoisie. It also made it possible to bankroll his military projects, sanitize the state finances, and, last but not least, throw a few crumbs to the “little” Frenchmen, especially in the capital. These crumbs included subsidized and therefore lower prices of bread and other essential foodstuffs, which served to still not only the physiological but also the revolutionary appetite of the “populace”. The social problems of Paris and of France in general were thus resolved by warfare and at the expense of foreigners. (Nearly one century later, “imperialist” warfare and conquests would similarly enrich the upper-middle class and appease the plebs at the expense of foreigners, mostly in the colonies, as we will see in a later chapter.)

From the perspective of the bourgeoisie, the wars were also a godsend because they allowed all sorts of businessmen, especially good friends of the regime, to rake in gargantuan profits. Wars were good, even excellent, for business. Fortunes were amassed via contracts to supply equipment to the army, and after the fall of Robespierre, such contracts were strictly reserved for privately owned firms, big firms, of course, owned by well-to-do burghers, not small enterprises run by petty-bourgeois artisans. As long as Napoleon’s wars were successful, they not only yielded high profits, but also made foreign raw materials and markets available for the benefit of the rapidly developing French industry. And this would allow industrialists (and bankers) to play an increasingly important role within the ranks of the country’s bourgeoisie. In France, under Napoleon, industrial (and financial) capitalism, typical of the 19th century, would progressively eclipse the mercantile capitalism of the preceding centuries.

It ought to be mentioned at this stage that the accumulation of commercial capital in France had largely been possible thanks to the slave trade, while the accumulation of industrial and financial capital had been enabled by the quasi-uninterrupted series of wars – essentially wars of rapine — waged first by the Directoire and then by Napoleon. In this sense, Balzac was certainly right when he made his famous remark that “behind every great fortune, there lurks a great crime”.

Let us return to the anti-Jacobin, anti-radical, and ultimately antidemocratic function of the wars waged under the auspices of the Thermidorians and above all Bonaparte. Officially, these wars purported to share with the rest of Europe the benefits of the Revolution, that is, the bourgeois Revolution of 1789-1791. With this noble idea in mind, the sans-culottes went to war enthusiastically, but they were to find out soon enough that Robespierre was right when he predicted that “armed missionaries” would not be welcomed with open arms in foreign countries. Among the sans-culottes who stayed at home, however, the news of great victories generated a patriotic pride that compensated for the waning revolutionary enthusiasm. With a little help from the god of war, Mars, the revolutionary energy of the sans-culottes and of the French people in general was thus diverted into other channels, flowing into directions that loomed less threatening to the bourgeoisie. We are dealing here with a displacement process: the French people, including the Parisian sans-culottes, gradually lost their enthusiasm for the revolution, that is, the class struggle within the country, the struggle for the ideals of liberty, equality, and solidarity between Frenchmen and neighbouring people. The French increasingly worshipped the golden calf of French chauvinism, aspiring to increase the size and the international glory of the “great nation” and, with it, the glory of its supremo, Bonaparte.

Thus we can also understand the ambiguous reaction of the European peoples to the contemporary wars and conquests of France. Certain folks – more particularly, the local Ancien-Régime elites of nobility and clergy, plus most of the peasants – repudiated the Revolution in toto, while others – above all the local counterparts of the Jacobins, such as the Dutch “Patriots” – welcomed the revolution virtually unconditionally. But many found themselves torn between admiration for the ideas and achievements of the French Revolution and rejection of French militarism, unbridled chauvinism, and naked imperialism – also in the field of language, because French was the idiom of the Revolution while other languages were deemed to be counterrevolutionary. Numerous non-French simultaneously harboured admiration and repulsion towards the French Revolution.

In some cases, initial enthusiasm gave way, sooner or later, to disillusion. Countless Brits, for example, moved from positive feelings towards the Revolution in France, a “moderate” revolution that had given birth to a constitutional monarchy à l’anglaise, to an aversion with respect to the alleged excesses of Robespierre and his radical republican cronies. A century and a half later, George Orwell could state that, “to the average Englishman, the French Revolution means no more than a pyramid of severed heads”. The same thing could be claimed about nearly all non-Frenchmen of his time, and even today this would be an accurate description of the view of most people in France and elsewhere.

Napoleon’s supposedly glorious career came to an end on the battlefield of Waterloo. The victors were the international champions of the counterrevolution, the crowned heads of Russia, Austria, Great Britain, etc. Everywhere, they set the clocks back to the time of the good old days – for themselves, that is – of the Ancien Régime. And it was under their auspices that the history of the French Revolution began to be written. However, revolutions soon erupted again, spectacularly so in 1848, the so-called “crazy year”. In Central and Eastern Europe, the revolutionary movements were crushed via armed interventions – that is, wars — by Russia and Austria. But the revolution that broke out in Paris was successful and, like France’s earlier “Great Revolution”, generated remarkable progress in the direction of democracy. The republic replaced the monarchy again, slavery was definitively abolished, and universal suffrage was introduced. 

Reluctantly, the upper-middle class, which had once again been able to come to power thanks to revolutionary action by the plebs, gave its blessing to this new wave of democratization. However, the well-to-do burghers had enough when the Parisian populace demanded certain social measures, e.g. unemployment relief, that violated laissez-faire principles. Demonstrations were smothered in blood, and power was again transferred to a Bonaparte, Louis-Napoleon, a nephew of the “great” Napoleon, who, in 1850, was put on the throne to reign as Emperor Napoleon III. The revolutionary tide was thus made to turn once more, which ended the progress towards democracy that had been achieved thanks to the 1848 Revolution.

Fear of revolutionary encores, likely to be spearheaded by the “dangerous classes”, that is, the lower class, caused the bourgeoisie to cease being a revolutionary class itself. Indeed, the “heroic era” of the bourgeoisie came to an inglorious end as the well-to-do burghers joined the nobility and the clergy in the counterrevolutionary camp. In Germany, Austria, and elsewhere, wherever the bourgeoisie had participated in aborted revolutions in 1848, the upper-middle class in its virtual entirety as well as a major share of the lower-middle class morphed into counterrevolutionaries. Thus we can understand that contemporary historians, overwhelmingly personalities of solid bourgeois background, started to depict France’s Great Revolution in a negative light. But they did so less from the 24-carat counterrevolutionary perspective of the nobility and the clergy, who condemned the Revolution in toto, than from a (grand-)bourgeois viewpoint. And this implied thumbs up for the revolutionary developments up to and including 1791 and after 1794, and also for Napoleon, but thumbs down for the radical, especially Jacobin revolutionary phase of 1792-1794.

In this context, the myth was born that, in spite of some excesses due to mob action, the Revolution had been on the right track and produced excellent results from 1789 to 1791, that is, under the auspices of the (haute) bourgeoisie; it had unfortunately – and tragically — “derailed” with the advent to power of the much too radical Jacobins, but returned to the correct “straight and narrow” path thanks to Thermidor and especially Napoleon, the grand champion of the cause of the bourgeoisie. 

It became de rigueur to demonize Robespierre (and other Jacobins and radical revolutionaries in general) and to deify Bonaparte. In the course of the 19th century, most French cities erected statues to honour the Corsican and named public squares and avenues after him; his name was also given to countless cafés and restaurants of the kind where well-to-do burghers can sit down at a table of their own – temporary private property, so to speak – and feel comfortable. 

Conversely, Robespierre fell into public disgrace, he became the victim of a damnatio memoriae. No statues or other monuments honour him, and no squares or streets bear his name, although there exist a few exceptions to this general rule. For example, a small bust adorns a Robespierre Square in the Parisian suburb of Saint-Denis, and in Paris a subway station was named after the man who was known as the “incorruptible”. And after years of all kinds of opposition and difficulties, a modest museum devoted to Robespierre will hopefully be opened soon in the northern French town of his birth, Arras.

The creation – and perpetuation — of the twin myth of the wonderful Napoleon and the awful Robespierre is owed above all to the writers and teachers of history. Robespierre and the radical, Jacobin phase of the French Revolution could hardly be publicly repudiated for their contribution to the process of democratization, epitomized by the abolition of slavery. This significant contribution to the cause of democracy, for which Robespierre really deserved a statue in the middle of Place de la Concorde, was systematically and thoroughly obfuscated, so that even today, only relatively few French, and even fewer non-French women and men are aware of these merits of the lawyer from Arras. On the other hand, virtually all people who know of Robespierre are convinced that he was a bloodthirsty monster. Why is that so? Because whenever the French Revolution is discussed, the majority of historians traditionally focus on the Terror, on the fact that, at the time of the “terror regime”, blood was spilled abundantly, and the accusing finger is pointed at Robespierre and his Jacobin confederates – and also to their Jacobin “ideology”. Let us take a closer look at the Terror, taking on the role of devil’s advocate on behalf of Robespierre.

Above all, the Terror must be understood in its historical context. In Ancien-Régime France, and in feudal Europe in general, terror and violence had already been used since time immemorial to achieve political objectives, more specifically, to maintain control over the denizens perched on the lower rungs of the societal ladder. Extremely functional in this sense were not only the bestial public executions, complete with endless tortures, but also the burning at the stake of witches, the bloody repression of heresies such as that of the Albigensians, and massacres like the infamous St. Bartholomew's Day in Paris in 1572. 

In comparison with these “hot” or “savage” forms of terror, the “cold”, “disciplined” terror of the French Revolution may be described as rather humane. Torture, which was in fact formally abolished by the Revolution, was not involved anymore, and thanks to the guillotine, those condemned to death could “benefit” from a supposedly instant and painless death. Moreover, this type of execution, a decapitation, had earlier been a privilege reserved for the nobility, because ordinary folks were dispatched in other, much more horrible ways, such as (slow) hanging and quartering. On the other hand, during the Revolution, occasional lynchings of real or suspected counterrevolutionaries and of course the September massacres of 1792 echoed the “hot” terror of the Ancien Régime and reflected the brutalisation of the common people, provoked by the barbarous pre-revolutionary repressive practices. Gracchus Babeuf, an even more radical revolutionary than Robespierre, who would fall victim to the Thermidorian repression, aptly remarked in this context that 

with their quarterings, tortures, breaking of bodies on the wheel, burnings at the stake, the whip, the gallows, the never-ending executions, our masters taught us these awful manners! Now they harvest what they themselves have sown. 6

The terror associated with Robespierre and his radical companions was unquestionably far less cruel and much more humane than the “hot” terror, not only of the Ancien Régime but also of the Revolution itself, and that was not fortuitous. With their “cold” terror, which was admittedly bloody, but disciplined, they wanted to prevent a repeat of the “hot”, bloody, and even bestial terror unleashed by the populace against the real or perceived enemies of the Revolution during the September massacres. “Let us be terrible so the people don’t have to be so”, was how things were clarified by one of Robespierre’s close associates, Danton.

Reflecting on the French Revolution, approximately one century after the fact, Mark Twain made the following insightful remark about “France and the French before the ever memorable and blessed Revolution, which swept a thousand years of . . . villainy away in one swift tidal wave of blood”:

There were two ‘reigns of Terror’ if we would but remember it and consider it: the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the ‘horrors’ of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak, whereas what is the horror of swift death by the ax [sic, meaning the guillotine] compared with life-long death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break . . . all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror – that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves. 7

Second, a factor ought to be taken into account that is emphasized by the aforementioned American historian, Arno Mayer, in his book The Furies, which focuses on the bloodbaths of the French Revolution and of the Russian Revolution as well. One has to understand, he explains, that revolutionary terror is not unleashed because of a revolutionary ideology or of the bloodthirst of revolutionaries but emerges in specific historical circumstances and above all, when a revolution finds itself under great pressure from domestic and/or foreign enemies. Among the beleaguered revolutionaries, such a situation produces the (not unjustified) feeling that compromises are no longer possible, that either they themselves will perish, and the Revolution with them, or their enemies must be annihilated, and the counterrevolution with them. In other words, the Revolution ends up being convinced that it must kill in order to survive.

This certainly applies to the “hot” as well as “cold” terror witnessed by revolutionary France, especially in 1792-1793. At that time, the Revolution was threatened by foreign as well as domestic counterrevolutionaries. During the summer of 1792, things went from bad to worse in the war that had been unleashed so optimistically by the Girondins. Austrian troops penetrated into the country, and at the same time royalist uprisings erupted in the Vendée region. That sparked a kind of panic among the revolutionaries in the capital. 

It is in this context that the Tuileries Palace was stormed by a mob consisting not only of Parisian sans-culottes but also contingents of volunteers that had arrived from cities such as Marseille; that the king’s Swiss Guards were massacred; and that the September Massacres took place. The situation improved remarkably after the French victory at Valmy on September 20, followed by other military successes, for example the “liberation” of the Austrian Netherlands, modern Belgium. That signified the end of the “hot” terror, whereas the “cold” terror had not started yet, even though executions were carried out, for example the high-profile dispatch of Louis XVI, found guilty – not without reason – of treason, after a proper trial.

In the spring of 1793, the counterrevolutionary spectre raised its fearsome head again at home as well as abroad. Insurrections in the Vendée, in Toulon, and elsewhere went hand in hand with military fiascos in the foreign wars; and Paris, the cradle of the Revolution, witnessed the spectacular assassination of a very popular revolutionary leader, Jean-Paul Marat. In the eyes of his traumatized revolutionary companions, this demonstrated that the Revolution was in mortal danger and could only be saved by drastic, merciless action against its domestic and foreign enemies. It was in those extremely critical circumstances that the Jacobin policy of repression, la Terreur, was launched.

It also deserves to be pointed out that ruthless measures did in fact contribute to save the Revolution. One of the draconian measures that were taken was the so-called “levée en masse”, that is, the induction into the army of massive numbers of men for the purpose of defending the fatherland. This made it possible to reverse the military tide in favour of the Revolution via victories against the domestic counterrevolution in the Vendée, in December 1793, and against the armies of the foreign counterrevolution in the battle of Fleurus, in June 1794.

The revolutionary terror, orchestrated by Robespierre and the Jacobins, was unquestionably horrible, but it should not be overlooked that the counterrevolution also made use of coercion, violence, and indeed terror to achieve its objectives. The counterrevolutionary terror revealed itself to be even more horrible than the revolutionary Terreur. Such, at least, is the opinion of Arno Mayer, the already mentioned expert in the field of the “furies”, that is, the violence used by all sides in the course of the French and Russian revolutions. He underscores the fact that, in both cases, the spilling of blood was not only the work of the Revolution, but also, and even more so, the work of the counterrevolution. “The furies of revolution”, explains Mayer, “are fueled primarily by the inevitable and unexceptional resistance of the forces and ideas opposed to it, at home and abroad”. 8

Thermidor, for example, unleashed a “white terror”, an intrinsically “wild” or “hot” terror, in the style of the Ancien Régime. However, as conventional historiography generally reflects a critical and even hostile view of revolutions, it tends to pay little or no attention to counterrevolutionary excesses or at least to minimize their importance. Moreover, counterrevolutionary terror usually rages in the countryside and in provincial cities, so that, from a historiographical perspective, this “white terror” and its excesses are less “visible” and far less noticeable than the spectacular decapitations by means of the guillotine, the fearsome but photogenic “revolutionary razor” set up in the middle of a great square in the middle of the nation’s capital.

It should not be forgotten that it was at least thanks to the Terror that not just the radical Revolution of the Jacobins, but the entire Revolution, including its moderate, bourgeois incarnation, was saved from the claws of the domestic and foreign counterrevolution. Moreover, even though the Terreur was directed primarily against the “right-wing” enemies of the moderate as well as radical Revolution, in short, the counterrevolution, it also took on the “left-wing” opposition that existed within the revolutionaries’ own ranks. This was illustrated by the execution of Jacques Hébert, the head of a group of revolutionaries who were more radical than Robespierre and the Montagnard wing of the Jacobins; Hébert and his followers criticized Robespierre’s policy as overly moderate and pushed for even more radical reforms in favour of the sans-culottes. Robespierre’s guillotine took care of them just as efficiently as it took care of the counterrevolutionaries. With the weapon of the Terror, then, the radical revolution, essentially a petit-bourgeois phenomenon, also relieved the intrinsically grand-bourgeois revolution of the menace of an even more radical revolution. Despite this service, bourgeois historians have never expressed any gratitude to Robespierre and the Jacobins.

Finally, it is also instructive to compare the bloodbaths under Robespierre with the violence under the post-Thermidorian regimes, and more in particular under Napoleon. Of the terror blamed on Robespierre, linked with the radicalization and “internalization”, that is, the increasing democratization, of the French Revolution, it is estimated that it cost the lives of a total of 50,000 persons maximum, amounting to approximately 0.2 % of the country’s population at the time. (And these were certainly not all innocent victims, as is too often suggested, but bona fide enemies of the Revolution.) That is in fact very few, at least in comparison to the number of victims of the wars that accompanied the “externalization” of the Revolution and simultaneous suspension of the revolutionary democratization process, a suspension that, as we have seen, favoured the bourgeoisie and Napoleon’s antidemocratic, even dictatorial regime.



The Battle of Waterloo alone, the final stunt in the supposedly glorious career of Napoleon, caused the death or mutilation of 45,000 to 50,000 men; if we include that battle’s preliminary “skirmishes” at Ligny and Quatre Bras, we arrive at a total of between 80,000 and 90,000 dead and injured. The Battle of Leipzig, likewise lost by Napoleon, but in 1813, and today nearly forgotten, was responsible for 140,000 victims. And after his disastrous campaign in Russia, Bonaparte left behind many hundreds of thousands of dead and mutilated bodies. But nobody ever talks about a Napoleonic “terror”, and today Paris features countless monuments and sites that immortalize the supposedly heroic and brilliant achievements of the Corsican. 

Also, should a comparison of the bloodbaths under Robespierre and Napoleon not take into account the undisputable fact that the guillotine brought a quick and painless death in comparison with death on the battlefield, where only the lucky ones were hit by a bullet in the chest and the wounded, usually horribly mutilated, were sometimes devoured by the wolves while still alive? By replacing permanent revolution in France, and especially in Paris, with permanent war all over Europe, remarked Marx and Engels, the Thermidorians and their successors “perfected” the Terror, in other words, made it far worse, caused much more blood to flow than was spilled under Robespierre’s Terreur.

Democracy – government not only by but also for the people – was the Revolution’s objective or, more accurately, the direction in which the Revolution was moving, And, as the Revolution became more radical, it produced more and more democracy. War, on the other hand, served the interests of the counterrevolution, it functioned to arrest and even reverse the progress towards democracy. And war was used by the bourgeoisie, a class that was not counterrevolutionary but opposed to revolutionary radicalism,  to stop the revolutionary clock at a moment in time that was favorable to its class. Tragically, terror was an instrument used by all these actors to realize their objectives: terror may be used to advance democratization, but also to counter it.

The notion, widespread today, that Robespierre was a bloodthirsty monster and Napoleon a wonderful hero, does not reflect the historical reality; it is only a myth. Moreover, it is an extremely antidemocratic myth, because it demonizes the Revolution that created and favoured democracy in the sense that it launched the democratization process. Conversely, this myth glorifies war, the instrument par excellence of the counterrevolution, the archenemy of democratization. It is a nefarious myth because, on the one hand, it creates fear and repudiation of revolution among the popular masses, the “99 percent” who, today more than ever before, would benefit from the kind of democratization that achieves progress not exclusively but mainly via revolution, as we were able to learn from this brief survey of the history of the French Revolution. Conversely, this myth justifies and glorifies the wars that have too often functioned as counterrevolutionary and antidemocratic stratagems.

Historians such as François Furet in France, Ernst Nolte in Germany, and Simon Schama in Britain, like to bemoan the French Revolution on account of the violence and bloodshed associated with it, and they compare it unfavorably with the American Revolution, in their eyes a much more civilized historical phenomenon – sometimes eulogized as “a revolution without a revolution”! – and with the supposedly peaceful “evolution” towards modernity and democracy followed by Britain. Thanks to those historical developments, it is claimed, these two countries also managed to have the caterpillar of their Ancien Régime morph into the butterfly of a modern state, a supposedly democratic state that, like France, carries liberty, equality and justice in its banner.

As the great Italian historian Domenico Losurdo has explained in a brilliant opus, 9 the developments in the US and in Britain may only be described as peaceful if one ignores some primordial historical facts. Britain’s highly touted “evolution” towards democracy and other forms of “modernity” took centuries to come to fruition, because it started long before the French Revolution and obtained major successes, such as the introduction of universal suffrage, much later than France, namely only after the First World War — and, it deserves to be pointed out, after the Russian Revolution, without which universal suffrage would not have been introduced, as we will see in another chapter. This evolution was an extremely protracted affair, and the main reason for that was systematic and stubborn resistance, involving frequent use of violence unleashed from “above”, that is, from the British counterparts of the French counterrevolutionaries who, it must be added, have not yet been entirely vanquished. What comes to mind in this context are the civil wars of Cromwell’s time, massacres, similar to those in the Vendée, of Catholic “rebels” in the Irish and Scottish periphery, and of course the decapitation of a king, Charles I, in the centre of a square in the centre of the capital, not Paris, but London — and in the old-fashioned and inhumane way, with an axe.

As for the American Revolution, it was not a real revolution but essentially a rebellion, a revolt against the authorities in London by the colonial elite, an “English” patriciate of owners of plantations and plenty of slaves as well as wealthy merchants, (including slave traders), in other words, the US counterparts of France’s landowning aristocracy and haute bourgeoisie. 10 And this revolt received the indispensable armed support from the plebeian colonists, a kind of American version of the French sans-culottes. 

This pseudo-revolution not only involved a full-fledged war against the British — in other words, the type of bloodshed for which historians generally do not show “red cards” — but also major massacres and mass deportations, whose victims were not only the numerous American colonists known as “Loyalists” because they remained loyal to the British Crown, but also the native population, the “Indians”. 11 Traditionally, massacres whose victims were Indians are also whitewashed by American historians, who prefer to euphemize them as “Indian Wars”. As mentioned, historians generally find wars to be legitimate and justifiable, and most of them tend to overlook crimes committed against dark-skinned folks.

In addition, by maintaining slavery — one of world history’s most spectacular forms of coercion and violence, in other words: terror – the American so-called revolution remained an unfinished symphony. A second revolutionary convulsion was required to finally bring about the formal abolition of slavery in the so-called “land of the free”, but crude and systematic discriminations victimizing Afro-Americans would continue to exist for a very long time. This second phase, known as the War of Secession or the American Civil War, lasted from 1861 to 1865. It amounted to a gigantic bloodbath, a Moloch more deadly for the country than the Second World War was to be. Yet in their zeal to present US history as peaceful in comparison to the French experience, historiographical illusionists such as Furet and Nolte ignore this terrible conflict and they pay little or no attention to the fate of the Indians and blacks. It is only in this questionable fashion that the myth of the dichotomy between a peaceful and sensible British and American evolution and a bloody, senseless French revolution can be kept alive.

While we are comparing the French Revolution to the American Revolution and the British “evolution”, it should also be noted that the French revolutionaries pursued equality for all Frenchmen and that they realized this objective, at least in the sense of formal equality before the law. Of the American and British cases, the same can only be said if one ignores entire historical chapters. In its original phase, the American Revolution achieved absolutely nothing positive for the Afro-Americans, who remained slaves, arguably under worse conditions than before. And the American Revolution was also a catastrophe for the indigenous population, the Indians; in the new state, they enjoyed no rights whatsoever but became the victims of a veritable genocide. According to a slogan that was to become popular in the new republic, “the only good Indian is a dead Indian”; and truly genocidal action followed these cynical words. This genocide provoked the admiration of Hitler and inspired his murderous plans with respect to Jews and other supposed “sub-humans” (Untermenschen). 12

To make it possible to favourably compare the historical developments in the US with the French Revolution, a supposedly gratuitously bloody affair, historians such as Furet have to avert their gaze from the millions — indeed: millions ! – of Indians who, in the course of the 18th and 19th centuries, were massacred by the Americans. As excuse for such negationism, one might perhaps cite the fact that, from a historiographic point of view, these bloodbaths were far less visible than the executions that took place in the public squares of major cities. Indeed, like the Thermidorian “white terror”, the massacres of Indians took place far from the urban centres, in isolated “rural” settings, namely the American version of the French countryside, the Far West. Did it come to the attention of a single denizen of New York or Boston, in December 1890, that a few thousand “Injuns”, including women and children and old folks, were massacred at Wounded Knee, a lost corner of faraway Dakota? Of this “Wild West”, as the Far West was also known, it may indeed be said that it was “wild”, not because it was inhabited by “savages”, because the Indians were not savages at all, but because it was the scene where the supposedly civilized American settlers unleashed against the indigenous population a truly “wild” terror, a terror that made the revolutionary as well as counterrevolutionary terror in France look like the work of clumsy amateurs.

The result of the French Revolution was an inclusive society, a homogeneous “nation” in which denizens previously treated as outsiders, Protestants and Jews, were henceforth members — citoyens, “citizens”— enjoying the same rights as Catholics. On the other hand, the result of the American Revolution was a “Herrenvolk 13 democracy”, that is, a society in which the advantages of liberty and equality were reserved for only a part of the population, the white citizens, while the two other parts, the Afro-Americans and the Native American, were denied the rights associated with citizenship. 14

The French Revolution integrated the minority that had been marginalized in the Ancien Régime; the American Revolution extegrated Blacks and Indians who, together, formed the majority of the population on the territory of the so-called “land of the free”. A similar phenomenon occurred in Britain, where the passage from the absolute monarchy to democracy and modernity was generally achieved to the benefit of the English population and to the detriment, not of all, but of a majority of the predominantly Catholic Irishmen and Scots, who were either massacred by the thousands in battles — or rather, butcheries — such as those of Drogheda and Culloden, or driven off their land to make room for English landlords and their sheep. 15

Executions, massacres, deportations, civil and international wars were thus not only a hallmark of the French Revolution, but also of more or less contemporary historical developments in the US and Britain. According to Arno Mayer, violence and bloodshed are inevitable whenever human history experiences a “new beginning”, revolutionary or not. The reason: the privileged of the old system always react with violence and bloodshed to any attempt to dislodge them from their towers of power and privilege. 

In revolutionary circumstances, violence and terror also flare up because of numerous other factors that Mayer also mentions, for example the desire to take revenge for earlier injustices and — indeed ! — vulgar sadistic impulses on the side of the revolutionaries as well as counterrevolutionaries, because on both sides, the occasion makes not only the thief but also the sadist, the rapist, etc. 

When one wants to evaluate a “rapid historical acceleration” of a turbulent, revolutionary nature, one will not get very far if one focuses mostly on the bloodshed that it involved — which is not to say that it is unimportant — but one must above all examine the results of these revolutions. (And it must be taken into account that not all movements that are called revolutionary are genuine revolutions.)

Of the French Revolution, it can be said that it constituted a major step forward for France, for Europe, and indeed for humanity, a liberating step away from the obscurity of the Ancien Régime and feudalism in general, and towards a bright, albeit distant, destination, democracy. After the Revolution, and because of the Revolution, France was a very different country in comparison to the France of the Ancien Régime. It was henceforth a “nation”, a homogeneous state, highly centralized, and in many ways “modern”; and its inhabitants were no longer subjects of some monarch, but proud citizens with – at least in principle – the same rights and duties. The Church had lost its privileges and was henceforth separated from the state, something which most of us today deem to be a good thing. The nobility, which had previously dominated the social scene, had received a blow from which it was never to fully recover. Every French person was now entitled to be addressed as madame, “lady”, or monsieur, “sir”. And bread, even white bread, previously an unattainable luxury, was henceforth available to all thanks to prices that were kept low, if necessary by state subsidies, with a tip of the hat to revolutionary radicalism and regrets to laissez faire.

The idea that the French Revolution was a bloody, senseless affair, to be blamed on Robespierre and a misguided egalitarian ideology, Jacobinism, and, conversely, that Napoleon brought order, good government, and glory to France, is a myth that violates the historical reality. Napoleon was a vainglorious dictator, and he would have been hanged if the criteria of the Nuremberg Trials had been applied to his case. He certainly does not deserve the honour that continues to be bestowed on him in the guise of statues and names of avenues and squares. As for the French Revolution, it certainly did not yield a democratic Utopia, but it opened a Pandora’ Box from which the democratization process escaped, never to be locked away again. That is an achievement for which we should be grateful to the French revolutionaries, especially wrongly demonized radicals like Robespierre.

Historian The Great Class War: 1914-1918. Other titles by him promotion@formac.ca for details.


Notes
1 We will not distinguish here between the terms “nobility” and “aristocracy”, as some authors do, but consider them as synonyms and use them accordingly.
 2 The emergence of royal absolutism, not only in France but in all of Europe, is described in detail in a magnificent book by Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State. London and New York, 1979 (first edition: 1974).
3  “Offspring” is the meaning of the Latin term proles.
4 Quoted in J. D. Bernal, Science in History. Volume 4 The Social Sciences: Conclusion, third edition, Harmondsworth, 1965 (original edition: 1954), p. 1059.
 5 Cynthia Stokes Brown. Big History: Van de oerknal tot vandaag, Berchem, EPO, 2009, p. 218.

 6 Quoted in Clarence J. Munford, “Les Libertés de 1789 in the Caribbean [sic] — Slave Revolution in St. Domingue”, in: Manfred Kossok and Editha Kross (eds), 1789 — Weltwirkung einer grossen Revolution, Berlin, 1989, vol. 2, p. 538.
 7 Quoted in Herbert Aptheker, The Nature of Democracy Freedom and Revolution, New York, 1981, pp. 112-13.
 8 Arno Mayer, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions. Princeton and Oxford, 2000, pp. 4, 23.
 9 Domenico Losurdo, Le révisionnisme en histoire: Problèmes et mythes, Paris, 2006.
10 “The American revolution”, writes Samir Amin in Le centenaire de la Révolution d’octobre 1917 (Paris, 2017), p. 44, “was merely a war of independence devoid of social importance . . . Its objectives were above all a continued westward expansion and the preservation of slavery”.
11 Domenico Losurdo Le révisionnisme en histoire. Problèmes et mythes, Paris, 2006, pp. 59-63.
12 See for example Domenico Losurdo, Il linguaggio dell’Impero: Lessico dell’ideologia americana, Bari and Rome, 2007,p. 99, about Nazi policy in Eastern Europe: “Germany is destined to penetrate Eastern Europe as a kind of Far West and to treat the ‘natives’ there like the Indians, never losing sight of the American model, whose ‘fabulous inner force’ was praised by the Führer.”

13 Terminology introduced by Domenico Losurdo and inspired by the German term Herrenvolk, that is, “people of lords,” the binary opposite, in the Nazi view, of Untermenschen, ‘under-men,” such as Jews, Slavs, Roma, etc.
14 Domenico Losurdo Il linguaggio dell’Impero: Lessico dell’ideologia americana, Bari and Rome, 2007,  p. 269.
15 Domenico Losurdo, Le révisionnisme en histoire. Problèmes et mythes, Paris, 2006, pp. 55-59.


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Democracy: Rise and Decline since 1945

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by Jacques Pauwels



Democracy’s post-1945 Worldwide Rise and Decline


Reality: The victory of the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany signified a major step forward for the cause of democracy. It improved the lives of ordinary people in Eastern Europe, enabled the advent of the welfare state in Western Europe, and made possible the independence of colonies of supposedly democratic countries such as France, which opposed independence movements by means of ruthless warfare. Conversely, the fall of the Soviet Union proved to be a major setback for democracy: not only in Eastern Europe, where the nobility, the church, and a capitalist “profitariat” exulted while the proletariat paid the price with the loss of jobs and social services, but also to the West of the fallen Berlin Wall and, above all, in the Third World, where neo-colonialism could henceforth run rampant, with the great exception of China.

Walls that forcibly segregate people should not exist. It is therefore impossible not to applaud the fall of the most famous specimen of this kind of architecture, the Berlin Wall, in November 1989 or, for that matter, the fall of other walls that today, more than thirty years later, are still standing or are being erected, not only between Mexico and El Norte.

But one should ask whether the downfall of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, inaugurated by the fall of the Berlin Wall, has really been a triumph for democracy. If we undertake this task, we should keep in mind that democracy has not only a political but also a social face: it is a system in which the demos, the great mass of ordinary people, may not only provide some input, e.g. via elections, but also receive some benefits, typically in the shape of social services. A democracy ought to be of service, first and foremost, to the weak, the poor, the underprivileged, in other words, the lower class, and not only to the upper class, whose members already enjoy wealth, power, and plenty of privileges. A system that fails this simple test is not a democracy, even if features seemingly impressive bells and whistles such as the all-too-often meaningless ritual of “free elections”. So with respect to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent so-called revolutions – in reality counterrevolutions – that led to the downfall of the Soviet “evil empire’, let us follow Sherlock Holmes’ advice and ask the crucial question, cui bono?, “who profited from this?”

Major beneficiaries of the changes in Eastern Europe were certainly the landowning upper class that had ruled that part of Europe before 1914 and in some cases even until 1945: the nobility and its close ally, the Church, Catholic in most Eastern European countries but Orthodox in Russia. On account of the 1917 October Revolution in Russia and revolutionary changes introduced by the Soviets in Eastern Europe in 1944/45, the nobility and the church lost their vast landed properties (and castles, palaces, etc.) together with their previously preponderant political power. In the years following the fall of the Berlin Wall, however, not only the noble families of the former German and Austro-Hungarian Empires, but also, and especially, the Catholic Church, were able to recuperate their landed property in Eastern Europe, socialized in 1945. The Catholic Church thus became once again the biggest landowner in Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Croatia, etc. To this landlord, the Eastern European plebeians — e.g., Polish tenant farmers and Slovenian stall-keepers on the little market square behind the Cathedral of Ljubljana — now have to pay much higher rents than in the supposedly “bad old days” before 1990. Many former aristocratic landowners, such as the dynasty of the Schwarzenbergs, are back in possession of chateaux and vast domains in Eastern Europe and once again enjoy great influence and political power, just like in the supposedly “good old days” before 1918 and/or 1945.

Not a word was ever said or written about these things in our mainstream media, however; to the contrary, we are persuaded to believe that Karol Józef Wojtyla, Pope John-Paul II, collaborated with the archconservative American President Ronald Reagan and the CIA against the Soviets only in order to restore democracy in Eastern Europe. That the head of the Catholic Church, an eminently undemocratic institution in which the Pope has everything to say, and millions of ordinary priests and believers nothing at all, might be an apostle of the democratic gospel, is an absurd notion. If the Pope really wanted to go to bat for democracy, he could have gone to work in the Catholic Church itself. (He could and should also have done something about the pedophile problem within the Church, of which he was aware, but he did nothing at all, de facto aiding and abetting criminals.) 

That John-Paul II really wanted nothing to do with genuine democracy appears all too clearly from the fact that he condemned “liberation theology” and fought tooth and nail against the courageous champions of this theology — generally ordinary priests and nuns — who promoted democratic change in Latin America, democratic change that was much more needed there than in Eastern Europe. Indeed, in most of Latin America, the population has never benefited from inexpensive housing, free education, medical care, or the many other social services that were taken for granted in communist Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. Of course, in Latin America the Catholic Church had always been a large landowner, whose privileges and wealth — fruits of the bloody conquest of the land by the Spanish conquistadors and the forced conversion to Catholicism of its people — might have been erased by a genuine democratization to the advantage of peasants and other “little people”. It is undoubtedly for this reason that the Pope worked hard for change in Eastern Europe but opposed it in Latin America. [His rude and condescending imprecations against the Sandinistas are still fresh in the memory of many Nicaraguans.—Ed)

In any event, in the predominantly Catholic countries of Eastern Europe, and especially in Poland, the Catholic Church was able to recuperate much of its former wealth and influence, the latter for example in the field of education. But does this amount to a triumph for democracy? Consider this: democracy means equal rights for all citizens, but in Poland the separation of Church and state, one of the great achievements of the French Revolution, providing equal rights to all citizens regardless of their faith, which was a reality under communism, now exists only on paper, but not in practice; people who do not happen to be Catholic cannot feel at home there. Poland has in some ways returned to the very undemocratic era before the French Revolution when, in just about every country, a specific ‘state religion’ was imposed on all citizens and there was no question of religious freedom or tolerance.

In Russia, the Orthodox Church had lost virtually all its former wealth and influence as a result of the 1917 revolution. But it managed to recuperate a great deal of riches and influence after the likes of Gorbachev and Yeltsin dismantled the communist system, fruit of an October Revolution that had also separated church and state. In the Russian heartland of the former Soviet Union, the Orthodox Church has made a comeback almost as spectacular as the one achieved by the Catholic Church in Poland. It has repossessed virtually the entire gigantic portfolio of real estate it owned before 1917, and the state has generously financed the restoration of old (and the construction of new) churches at the expense of all taxpayers, Christian or not. The Orthodox Church is once again big, rich, and powerful, and closely associated with the state, exactly as in the pre-revolutionary, quasi-feudal tsarist era. With respect to religion, Russia, like Poland, has made a great leap backward to the Ancien Régime.

For aristocrats and prelates, the “few” who had constituted the elites in Eastern (and much of Central) Europe in the mythical “good old days”, the fall of the Berlin Wall had been wonderful. But the demise of communism behind the Iron Curtain also proved to be wonderful, arguably even more so, for the international elites of business, the big banks and corporations. These are generally American, Western-European, or Japanese multinationals, and being a multinational means doing business in all countries and paying taxes in none. (Except in tax havens such as the Cayman Islands, where the tax rate is minimal). 

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the multinationals triumphantly entered Eastern Europe to sell their hamburgers, cola, cigarettes, drugs, weapons, and other merchandise; to take over state enterprises for a song; to grab raw materials; to hire highly qualified workers and staff, educated at state expense, at low wages; and also, of course, to “hire” and generously remunerate politicians to look after their interests. (In Russia this looked possible under Yeltsin, darling of the West, but Putin subsequently blocked the West’s planned economic conquest of Russia in favour of homegrown capitalists, and for this he has never been forgiven.)

The fall of the Berlin Wall permitted capitalism to march triumphantly into Eastern Europe. And we have been asked by our politicians and media to believe that capitalism was automatically accompanied on that grand entry by democracy. Automatically, since capitalism, usually euphemized as “free markets”, is often mentioned in one breath with democracy, implying that the two are joined at the hip like some kind of Siamese twins. The myth thus created holds that democracy could blossom in Eastern Europe because of the arrival of capitalism while, conversely, dictatorship disappeared because of the departure of the communist variation of socialism. The reality is totally different. For one thing, democracy did exist in Eastern Europe before the fall of the Berlin Wall, though admittedly not Western-style liberal democracy. To understand that, we must look back to the end of World War II and investigate the implications, for democracy, of the defeat of Nazi Germany which, as we have seen in this book, was above all a victory of the Soviet Union.

Hitler’s attack against the Soviet Union, fruit of the October Revolution, had been a counterrevolutionary and also an antidemocratic project. Had it been successful, it would unquestionably have signified an unprecedented calamity for millions of people and therefore for the cause of democracy. (Even though it failed, it still managed to kill, or ruin the lives of, many millions of people.) Conversely, the victory of the Soviet Union constituted a victory for the revolution and unquestionably also for democracy, at least in the sense that it saved millions of people from death or slavery.

Did the victory of the Soviet Union also contribute in other, more positive ways to the progress of democracy? The answer depends on the type of democracy one has in mind. One such type is the West’s liberal democracy, focused on political procedures such as theoretically free elections based on universal suffrage and involving not one but two or more political parties. (Why the existence of two parties, as in the US, is deemed to be so infinitely superior to the one-party system, remains a mystery.) In the Western world, this home-grown liberal democracy is widely believed to be the one and only type of democracy, but alternative types do in fact exist. In the 1960s, the Canadian political scientist C. B. Macpherson, a highly regarded expert in the field, thus identified two major types of democracy other than the liberal variety, He drew attention to a type that appealed to the former colonies, then called “developing countries”, a democracy that differed from the liberal type dear to the hearts of the former colonial masters in that its sine qua non was emancipation from oppressive foreign rule. 

Macpherson also acknowledged the existence and merits of a communist variety of democracy, one that focused on providing social services for the ordinary folks who have historically constituted the demographic majority in European countries. This kind of democracy did not exist in Eastern Europe before the end of the Second World War, except perhaps in Czechoslovakia, and it was this variety that emerged there in 1945 when, under the auspices of the Soviet liberators, revolutionary changes took place and “people’s republics” were created.

From a Western, liberal point of view, these socialist systems left a lot to be desired, but with respect to social services they were indeed democracies, as Macpherson was to recognize. The traditional “feudal” elite, the monarchs, aristocratic and clerical large landowners, especially the Catholic Church, as well as the capitalists, the bourgeois industrialists and bankers, and also the military big shots who had ruled some of these countries before the arrival of the Red Army, lost their power, wealth, and privileges. But these losers of the postwar transfiguration constituted a demographic minority. The majority of the population, on the other hand, henceforth enjoyed benefits such as full employment, decent housing, and health care, made possible by the deliberate, planned industrialization of Eastern-European countries that “had been essentially semi-colonial producers of raw materials” endowed with very little industry. Health care, for example, was viewed as “basic human right” rather than a commodity for sale in the “free market”, as was pointed out in a 1986 study published in the American Journal of Public Health; its authors concluded that, in terms of “infant and child death rates, life expectancy, the availability of doctors and nurses, nutrition, literacy and other educational factors”, “the quality of life was higher in socialist nations”. 

When the Berlin Wall came down, and capitalism moved into Eastern Europe, it did encounter democracy there, socially focused democracy, favouring “the many”. But that kind of democracy was unwanted and ruthlessly liquidated by the capitalists, who happen to represent “the few” of the Western world. For them and, as we have already seen, for the “few” of Eastern Europe’s former upper class, the crumbling of the Berlin Wall revealed itself to be wonderful. But it was a catastrophe for the East’s “many”, the demos that is supposed to be the main beneficiary of the blessings of democracy.

In Russia, the revolutionary changes inaugurated in 1917 had brought enormous improvements in the lives of the bulk of a formerly extremely poor and backward population. By the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Soviet population had achieved a rather decent level of general prosperity, higher than that of many folks in the First World and much higher than that of most people in the Third World, of which we tend to forget is also capitalist. And the majority of Soviet citizens did not long for the demise of the Soviet Union, which was partly due to the gigantic cost of an armament race the Soviets had neither wanted nor initiated and ultimately could not afford, but also, and perhaps primarily, to disunity and conflict within the leadership of the Communist party. To the contrary: in a 1991 referendum, no less than three quarters of them voted to preserve the Soviet state, and they did so for the simple reason that this was to their advantage.

Conversely, the demise of the Soviet Union, prepared by Gorbachev and achieved by Yeltsin, turned out to be a catastrophe for the majority of the Soviet population. The kind of widespread, desperate poverty that was so typical of Russia before the October Revolution was able to make a comeback there in the 1990s, after capitalism was restored under Yeltsin’s auspices, nota bene in most undemocratic fashion, by turning tanks and guns onto the parliament. The latter orchestrated what may well have been the biggest swindle in world history: the privatization of the enormous collective wealth, built up between 1917 and 1990, via superhuman efforts and untold sacrifices, by the « blood, seat and tears” of millions of ordinary Soviet citizens. That crime allowed economic as well as political power to be grabbed by a kind of mafia, a “profitariat” consisting of super-wealthy profiteers known as “oligarchs”.


Despite Putin's popularity, which is nonetheless finally suffering erosion as a result of badly controlled capitalist dynamics in some key areas of the economy, the old Russian Communist Party has been growing, especially in the more economically depressed regions far from Moscow. Marx, Lenin and Stalin remain powerful revolutionary symbols.


Balzac’s remark that “behind every great fortune there hides a crime” comes to mind again: The great crime that hides behind the fortunes of the Russian oligarchs is the privatization of the wealth of the Soviet Union under the auspices of Yeltsin, and ordinary Soviet citizens were the victims of that crime. It is not surprising that even now, a majority of Russians regrets the disappearance of the Soviet Union and expresses admiration for Lenin and Stalin, and contempt for Gorbachev. 

A majority of the denizens of former Eastern-European “satellites” of the Soviet Union likewise experienced hard times after the fall of the Berlin Wall. These countries were de-industrialized as privatization caused western corporations and banks to move in and apply “shock therapy”, which involved massive layoffs of workers in the name of efficiency and competitiveness. A previously unknown curse, unemployment, appeared on the scene precisely when social services, previously taken for granted, were discarded because they do not fit into the neoliberal mould. In former East Bloc countries such as Romania and East Germany, many if not most people are nostalgic for the not-so-bad times before the fall of the Berlin Wall; opinion polls have consistently demonstrated that significant percentages, if not outright majorities, of the population in the former Soviet Union and its satellites, consider that life was better under communism, a fact some Western commentators bewail and seek to explain by the racist argument that Eastern Europeans are not intelligent enough to know what’s good for them and/or have a penchant for dictatorial rule. 

A major determinant of this nostalgia is the fact that vital social services such as housing, medical care, and education, including higher education, are no longer very inexpensive or even totally free of charge, as they used to be. Most participants in the demonstrations that brought the Berlin Wall down in 1989 never dreamt that the end of communism would also mean the disappearance of these social benefits; having swallowed the propaganda disseminated by Radio Free Europe, they believed that capitalism would only bring its (mostly illusory) advantages and none of its (many real) disadvantages. As Diana Johnstone writes, they laboured under the illusion that there was to be “a happy merger of the best of both systems, the personal freedom enjoyed in the West and social benefits enjoyed in the East, in a new, improved, peaceful Germany”. Women also lost many of the considerable gains they had achieved under communism, for example, with respect to employment opportunities, economic independence, and affordable childcare. Women are even alleged to have had better sex under socialism. 

Today, there is no future in Eastern Europe for young people, so they leave their homeland to try their luck in Germany, Britain, and elsewhere in the West. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Bulgaria’s population, for example, has dropped from 8.9 million to 6.9 million, a loss of “an extraordinary 22.5 per cent”. These Eastern Europeans vote against the new system “with their feet”, as the western media used to crow triumphantly whenever dissidents defected from communist countries at the time of the Cold War. The situation under communism was not a Utopia; far from it, and thousands of people left, which was not easy but possible, looking for a better life elsewhere, But the situation after the fall of communism certainly turned out to be a dystopia, and millions have sought salvation in emigration.

The fall of the Berlin Wall and the arrival of capitalism in Eastern Europe thus led to the ruthless liquidation of democratic gains achieved as a result of revolutionary changes brought about under the socialist auspices of the Soviets in 1945. Was that loss of socially focused democracy perhaps compensated by the arrival of politically focused, Western-style liberal democracy? Not at all.

Russia never experienced the dawn of genuine political democracy; not under Yeltsin, and not under Putin. As for the former Soviet “satellites”, increasing numbers of people there have been traumatized by the loss of social benefits and other services that they took for granted under communism. Persuaded by politicians and media pundits to blame their troubles on scapegoats such as ethnic minorities and refugees, they have increasingly supported extreme-right parties that advocate authoritarian, jingoist, xenophobic, racist, and sometimes openly neo-fascist or even neo-Nazi policies. An obvious reason why they have not turned to communist or other left-wing parties, is that these parties have rather undemocratically been outlawed in most Eastern European countries, while fascist parties, including openly neo-Nazi movements, have been allowed to operate freely. In fact, too many of the leaders of parties and even governments in the post-communist states are no champions of democracy at all, but glorify the undemocratic and sometimes openly fascist elements that ruled their countries in the 1930s and/or collaborated with the Nazis during the war and committed monstrous crimes in the process. Monuments honouring former fascists and collaborators, including known war criminals, have been erected, while those paying homage to the Red Army have been demolished. In Ukraine, for example, the neo-Nazis now arrogantly trek through the streets with torch parades, swastika flags, and SS symbols. In much of Eastern Europe, democracy is not flourishing at all, it has lost a lot of ground, and the situation is becoming even worse.

Let us now turn our gaze from East to West and examine how Western Europe and the Western world in general fared as a result of the collapse of the Berlin Wall. This will again require a flashback to the end of World War II, a time when the old continent emerged from a long and dark night of economic depression, fascist oppression, and war.

In Europe’s western reaches too, the Soviet Union provided inspiration and encouragement to ordinary people who had suffered from oppression by the Nazis, other fascist dictatorships, or authoritarian, right-wing, philofascist collaborator regimes such as that of Marshal Pétain. Even though they were liberated by the Americans and their British, Canadian, and other Western allies, in 1945 Frenchmen and other Western Europeans were very much aware that Nazi Germany had been defeated above all by the efforts and sacrifices of the Soviet people. There would have been no landings in Normandy had the Nazis not been trounced at Stalingrad. 

The prestige of the Soviet slayer of the mighty Nazi dragon was sky-high, and its achievement sparked an enormous amount of interest in, and enthusiasm for, the socialist counter-system of capitalism, of which Nazism, like fascism in general, had been a particularly nasty embodiment. Furthermore, it has to be taken into account that communists had played a leading role in the antifascist resistance movements in Italy, France, and elsewhere, and these movements had adopted programs, exemplified by the “charter” of the French resistance, that called for radical political and social-economic changes, such as the socialization of banks and corporations.

The situation was again as at the end of World War I, when the spectre of revolution was haunting Europe, including that continent’s Western reaches. We have seen that the upper class responded then with the quick introduction of democratic reforms of a political as well as social nature, purporting to take the wind out of the billowing revolutionary sails. (The introduction of “welfare programs” and political reforms are “instruments of manipulation” that “act as an anesthetic”, as Paulo Freire emphasized.) At the end of the Second World War, the upper class applied the same tried and tested remedy, it introduced democratic reforms that it really abhorred but effectively served to placate the restless plebeians. The welfare state may have been more than that, but it purported to serve first and foremost as “a prophylactic against political upheaval”, against revolutionary change. 

The example was given by Britain, where an eminently conservative politician, Lord Beveridge, godfathered a remarkable package of democratizing political and primarily social reforms that became collectively known as the “welfare state”. Churchill, traditionally lionized as a great champion of democracy but in reality a hard-core antidemocrat, opposed Beveridge’s program. One might say that, unlike Beveridge, he belonged to that diehard faction of the British upper class that refused to pay what they viewed as a “ ‘ransom’ the working classes [were] exact[ing] from their rulers”. However, the working-class voters handed Churchill a humiliating defeat in the general elections of July 1945. And so it was left to a Labour government, consisting of reformist, that is, counterrevolutionary, socialists, to implement admittedly remarkable democratic reforms whose latent function, however, was counterrevolutionary.

A major dose of political and social democracy was also administered in France. Italy, and other Western countries as antidotes to revolution or at least more radical changes. As Luciano Canfora has emphasized, many aspects of these reforms were directly inspired by Soviet practices as well as ideas, including the Soviet constitution of 1936 with its emphasis on the right to work and social assistance when needed. Throughout the Cold War, in the face of competition from the communist countries with their policies of full employment and elaborate systems of social services, the elites of the Western world would continue to deem it wise to maintain a system of high employment and pamper plebeians with generous social services. To many ordinary people in Western Europe, it seemed like an aquarian age of democracy and prosperity had dawned and would last forever. Naively, they hoped that their good fortune would be shared some day by their counterparts behind the Iron Curtain.

However, the welfare state restricted, not drastically but certainly to some extent, the capitalists’ possibilities for profit maximization, and intellectuals and politicians devoted to laissez-faire purity, eventually to become known as “neoliberalism”, condemned the “welfarist” scheme from the very start as a nefarious state intervention in the presumably spontaneous and beneficial operation of the “free market”. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent demise of the Soviet Union, then, relieved the upper class of the Western world of the need to treat the plebeians with kid gloves, to pamper them, so to speak, with an unprecedentedly high degree of political and especially social democracy.

There was no longer a counter system for capitalism to compete with, it became possible to dismantle the welfare state and thus to roll back the considerable progress achieved by the cause of democracy in the aftermath of World War II, and to do so with impunity. In the years after 1945, writes the Belgian historian Jan Dumolyn,

the elite had made major concessions to the working population out of fear of communism, . . . in order to keep people quiet, and to counter the appeal of socialism behind the Iron Curtain. It is therefore not a coincidence that the social services began to be rolled back after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The threat was gone. It was no longer necessary to appease the working population.

The fall of the Berlin Wall thus happened to be the prelude not only to the disappearance of Soviet and Eastern European Communism with its socially oriented form of democracy, but also to the ruination of the welfare state, that is, the highest level of social democracy Western Europe had ever experienced.

Like their counterparts on the other side, ordinary people living to the West of the Iron Curtain, wage-earning folks who erroneously delude themselves to be “middle-class”, representing the majority of the population, were thus also losers in the drama of the end of communism. They lost not only the elaborate social services introduced in the aftermath of World War II, but also the high level of employment and wages as well as favourable working conditions that had kept them contented during the Cold War. All these things were proclaimed to be “unaffordable”, and they were told to settle for less money, fewer benefits, and later retirement. But even when they agree to have their wages lowered and their benefits “clawed back” in the name of “austerity”, they often see their jobs disappear in the direction of the low-wage countries of Eastern Europe and the even lower-wage Third World.

The moral of this part of our story is that the fall of the Berlin wall not only did not inaugurate a golden age of democracy to the East of that construction project, it even ended the golden age democracy had enjoyed since 1945 to the West of it. 

Let us consider the case of Germany, the country that stretches to both sides of the former Mauer. After the Wall’s collapse, the big West German corporations and banks, which had collaborated very profitably between 1933 and 1945 with a Nazi regime they had helped to come to power, were allowed to plunder East Germany economically. As for the West German workers, their wages had been lowered by the Nazis, but were increased considerably after 1945 in the context of the emergence of the German edition of the welfare state, the Sozialstaat. However, German wages have declined consistently since 1989, as job opportunities migrated to areas further east and keen competition for the remaining jobs arrived in the form of migrants from Eastern Europe as well as refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, etc. (Not charity, but putting downward pressure on wages, seems to be the real reason why Chancellor Angela Merkel opened Germany’s gates to refugees.) These newcomers are blamed by many journalists and politicians for all the problems; and this conveniently serves to divert attention from the real causes of the problems and simultaneously provides grist for the mill of all sorts of neo-fascist and other extreme-right political movements. In Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands and elsewhere in Western Europe, competition from Eastern European migrants and refugees for the shrinking supply of jobs has likewise exerted downward pressure on wage levels and enhanced the appeal of right-wing, xenophobic, racist, and quasi-fascist political parties.

In Western Europe in general, the coming down of the Berlin Wall raised the curtain for a great leap backward to the conditions of the unbridled capitalism of the 19th century, with plenty of unemployment, underpaid precarious employment, and little or no social services.  “Capitalism with a human face”, which had emerged, Aphrodite-like, from the foam of two post-world-war waves of political and social democratization, regressed to its nasty primordial persona, to what Michael Parenti has called “capitalism in your face”. This has been a catastrophe for ordinary people, for wage-earners, for the demos, and therefore amounts to a major setback for the cause of democracy.

How about the US? In the aftermath of World War II, no comprehensive system of social services was introduced there, certainly nothing comparable to the European welfare state. The reason is that the economic boom caused by the advent of war had put an end to the Great Depression with its unemployment, and that wartime labour shortages, combined with trade union activism, including countless strikes, had blessed wage-earners – the white ones, that is - with a considerably higher income and an unprecedentedly high standard of living. Consequently, at war’s end, no widespread popular demand arose for radical change that might have motivated the elite to introduce democratic reforms of a social nature. America’s white workers were doing well enough, or so it seemed, without the extra benefit of “welfarism”. And not a finger was lifted to improve the lot of America’s real proletarians, the Afro-Americans, who continued to be the object of Jim-Crow segregation and discrimination as well as frequent lynchings, primarily, but not exclusively in the southern states. In that respect, things would finally change in the 1960s, under the auspices of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, because of two factors.

First, within the Afro-American community, a revolutionary spectre raised its head, namely in the shape of radical Black activists like Malcolm X and Angela Davis, an avowed communist, and the Black Panthers. Second, in the context of the Cold War, the US was competing with the Soviet Union, not only in front of domestic but also of international audiences, especially in the many newly independent former colonies. But the American system of racial segregation contrasted most unfavourably with the situation in the Soviet Union, a multi-ethnic country that did not discriminate on the basis of skin colour and whose constitution specifically barred racial discrimination. (“Here, I am not a Negro but a human being for the first time in my life . . . I walk in full human dignity”, declared a famous African American, the singer Paul Robeson, during a visit to Russia.) And while Washington proved to be a devoted friend of the South African Apartheid regime, for example supplying it with weapons and helping it to locate and arrest Nelson Mandela, Moscow was considered by that regime to be its greatest international foe.

It was in the hope of minimizing the embarrassment thus caused internationally, especially in the newly independent – and mostly non-aligned – nations of Asia and Africa, that Washington finally started to treat its own Black people as humans and as citizens. With the demise of the Soviet Union, however, this factor ceased to play a role. And this explains why, since then, hardly any further progress has been achieved in the direction of the emancipation of African Americans, not even during the eight years of Obama’s presidency, marked by much anti-Black police violence, which actually triggered the advent of the Black Lives Matter movement. Afro-Americans, then, are also present in the huge crowd of people who failed to benefit from the fall of the Berlin Wall and suffered from its consequences.

The answer to the question, raised earlier, if and how the Soviet victory against Nazism contributed to the progress of democracy depends not only on which type of democracy but also on which country and which class of people one has in mind. The citizens of Western European countries such as France, the Netherlands, and Belgium – democracies, but also imperialist countries with overseas possession – had democratic needs and wants that were quite different from those of the coloured folks living in their colonies. The latter were unquestionably oppressed and exploited and rigorously excluded from the benefits of the democracy prevailing in the motherland; and the type of democratic progress they were dreaming of was the end of colonial oppression and exploitation, to be made possible by independence. But that kind of progress was not to be found on the list of desiderata of democrats in the metropoles, and even less so on that of the European settlers who prospered in the colonies such as Algeria thanks to land and labour expropriated from “natives”.

Viewed from the perspective of the denizens of the colonies, the Soviets had rendered a herculean service to their kind of democracy by their role in the Second World War. They had successfully resisted what was essentially a monstrous imperialist attempt to seize and colonize most of Eastern Europe, directly inspired by the American conquest of the “Wild West” and the British takeover of India; and this project purported to exterminate or enslave the Slavic, Jewish, and Roma inhabitants, theoretically for the benefit of German settlers but in reality mostly to the advantage of German corporations and banks. One of the great theoreticians of the anti-colonial liberation movement, Franz Fanon, even wrote that “Nazism turned all of Europe into a real colony”. It is hardly surprising that the victory of the Soviet Union galvanized the millions of people in the colonies whose idea of democracy similarly involved resistance to imperialist colonialism and settlerism. The Soviet Union also served as a “role model” to what used to be called “underdeveloped” countries because of the success of its industrialization drive, a herculean effort that had transformed a fledgling socialist country into a military powerhouse capable of defeating one of the most awesome capitalist empires and to emerge from the terrible ordeal of war as one of the world’s two superpowers.

In the years after 1945, the cause of democracy achieved significant progress in the Third World, because in countless colonies the dream of independence became a reality. The achievement of independence, sine qua non of democracy, amounted to an overthrow of the established political and social-economic colonial order, in other words, a revolution. If the revolutionary transformations from colony to independent state frequently – though not always - involved violence, it was for the same reason that other revolutions, including the French and Russian revolutions: because violence was hardwired in the pre-revolutionary reality, the colonial reality in the case of the Third World. 

Independence and the resulting opportunity to construct – with varying degrees of success - a homemade post-colonial democracy, became possible thanks to the determination, efforts, and sacrifices of the colonial people themselves, of course, and especially their female as well as male freedom fighters. But it also made a huge difference that the freedom movements received inspiration, guidance, and spiritual as well as material support from the state that was the child of revolution and embodied revolution, the anti-imperialist Soviet Union, vilified in the West as an un- and antidemocratic “evil empire”. Conversely, stubborn opposition to independence for the colonies, and therefore to the dawn of democracy for its millions of denizens, was put up by the presumably perfectly democratic Western powers that happened to be the colonial masters. 

In any event, it was via revolution that colonies of Western powers were able to achieve independence and thus open the gate leading to democracy, not a variety of democracy ready-made in the West and imposed by outsiders, but a democratic system of the people’s own choice and made-to-measure, so to speak. (And the kind of freedom they also ardently desired was the kind that goes so well with democracy, as mentioned in the introduction to this book, namely the freedom from oppression and exploitation.) 

Not surprisingly, it was mostly via warfare that independence was opposed during many decennia, by colonial powers such as France, Britain, and the Netherlands, without exceptions self-proclaimed dcmocracies but in reality pseudomocracies,. France thus waged war against revolutionary movements for independence in Madagascar, Indochina, and Algeria, Britain in Malaya (later to become Malaysia) and Kenya, and the Netherlands in Indonesia. But the champion of counterrevolutionary and therefore antidemocratic action in the Third World, including warfare, was unquestionably the United States, whose claims to be the world’s great champion of democracy never succeeded in hiding its neo-colonial ambitions. But the US was also the world’s greediest and indeed neediest imperialist power, whose economy wanted access to the Global South’s precious raw materials - at the lowest possible prices, of course: as Gabriel Kolko has emphasized, after 1945 “the very health of [the US] economy depended on crucial supplies from the Third World”.

Between 1945 and 1967, i.e. during the era of decolonization, not a single year went by without an American military intervention in the Third World. The most infamous of these conflicts was the “American War”, as the Vietnamese call the conflict known elsewhere as the “Vietnam War”. The murderous wars against Third-World movements of liberation cost the lives of millions of people, including women, children, and other non-combatants – although it must be acknowledged that countless women fought bravely in the ranks of freedom fighters such as the Vietcong.

Speaking of Vietnam, the American intervention in that country was a counterrevolutionary and intrinsically antidemocratic aggression, which cost the lives of two to three million Vietnamese. It is noteworthy that it was supported by US allies who were also supposed to be devotees of the democratic cause, such as West Germany, but opposed by the presumably undemocratic Soviet “satellites”, including East Germany. But this is not an anomaly from the perspective of the paradigm reflected in this book: as we have seen earlier, West Germany was far less democratic, and the “eastern bloc”-countries considerably more democratic, than we have been led to believe.

War was the major, but not the only weapon used in the imperialist Western world’s fight against independence and democracy in the Global South. In countless colonies that did manage to gain their independence, the Western powers made use of assassination of individuals (e.g. Lumumba) and large-scale massacres (as in Indonesia in 1965), bribery, sanctions, destabilization, coups d’état, false flag operations, etc. to ensure that socialist experiments were avoided or caused to fail and that regimes were set up that served the interests of the former colonial masters. This permitted the achievement of neo-colonial objectives, above all control over natural resources such as petroleum, rubber, gold, and diamonds. These “unconventional means” of warfare offered the considerable advantage of “plausible deniability”, that is, the possibility deny responsibility. (Incidentally, such measures, which have also been used domestically, were labelled “state crimes against democracy” – SCADs - in a US science journal in 2010.)

However, it was not easy to pursue neo-colonial projects as long as the Soviet Union existed, because Moscow, having backed the revolutionary freedom fighters in the colonies from the start, followed up by providing considerable support for the newly independent former colonies, especially — but not exclusively — when they opted for a Soviet model of development, and also when, in terms of international politics in the Cold War era, chose to walk the path of “non-alignment”. It is obvious, for example, that Uncle Sam would have smashed the revolution in Cuba if this would not have involved the risk of a conflict with the Soviet Union. 

In this respect too, the demise of the Soviet Union brought about a huge change. It provided the Western powers, and above all their hegemon, the US, with virtually unlimited freedom to impose their will on recalcitrant Third-World countries. Conversely, as the Egyptian-French economist, political scientist, and world-systems analyst Samir Amin has put it, from the perspective of “the peoples of Asia and Africa and their leaders”, the disappearance of the Soviet Union caused them to lose “a margin of autonomy” they had acquired because the Soviets had used “all their political and military power to force imperialism to step back in the Third World.” 

This not only meant that the former colonies were no longer permitted to imitate the Soviet example and take the socialist road of development, which quite a few of them had originally intended, and some even started, to do: henceforth it was also strictly verboten to steer an independent, “nationalist” economic course, even on a capitalist basis, with for example the exclusion of Western export products and investment capital and/or the use of resources such as petroleum for the benefit of their own people instead of the profit of American and other foreign investors. The latter was/is the great sin committed by the likes of Saddam Hussein, Bashar al-Assad, Nicolás Maduro, and Evo Morales. Similarly, non-alignment was henceforth anathema: Third World countries were strong-armed, via political, economic, and sometimes military pressure, to line up behind Uncle Sam against whichever unhappy land or people he designated as enemy du jour. (Indonesia, once a leader of non-aligned nations and host of their famous 1955 Bandung Conference, thus exchanged neutrality to the status of American vassal.)

With the pesky Soviets out of the way, “regime changes” and other neo-colonial objectives could be achieved much more easily, by means of the traditional antidote to revolution and democracy, wars, as well as carefully engineered and generously financed fake revolutions – “colour revolutions” - masquerading as the real thing. Wars of the hot variety, involving bombings and invasion have been waged against Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria. (Already earlier, in the 1990s, warfare had been used to eliminate the last socialist state, Yugoslavia.) And the victims of cold wars, i.e. economic warfare, involving crippling sanctions, have been Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, and North Korea. 

That all these wars have an outspoken undemocratic character, appears from the fact that they have cost the lives of millions of mostly poor people, including countless women and children. And the comprador regimes installed by the victors —for example in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya — have all turned out to be hopelessly undemocratic kakistocracies, unpopular, corrupt, and sometimes utterly incapable of governing a country. The worst example is provided by Libya, a land that, under Colonel Kaddafi, was the only welfare state in Africa, but fell victim to an imperialist mugging orchestrated under the auspices of the Obama administration and implemented with the assistance of NATO, a force, purportedly devoted to mutual defence, of supposedly 24-carat democratic countries.

These neocolonial military and economic wars, made possible, or at least facilitated, by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the demise of the Soviet Union, are imperialist wars, which means they have been fought on behalf of big corporations and banks. And they have indeed been extremely profitable for capitalist enterprises, based in the US and other Western metropoles, exemplified by oil trusts, producers of sophisticated and super-expensive weaponry, subcontractors of the military, etc. Modern warfare may be viewed as a kind of economic activity that involves hefty profits, but also extremely high costs. However, in contrast to the privatized profits, these costs have been socialized, that is, they are the responsibility of the state and therefore of the ordinary citizens. The latter are thus saddled with an increasingly important share of the taxes raised to finance them, since in recent decades the revenue from corporate taxes has dwindled to ridiculously low levels. The neo-colonial wars may thus be said to perversely redistribute wealth from the poor to the rich. Did this not constitute an additional major setback for the cause of democracy in the presumably democratic Western heartland?

Infinitely worse, however, from a democratic perspective, is the fact that these wars and sanctions have caused death and misery for many millions of denizens of poor Third World countries. But for those who are focused on serving the interests of the mostly Western “1 percent” rather than the mostly Third-World “99 percent”, such a price is worth paying, as Madeline Albright, secretary of state in the Clinton administration, infamously declared in 1996 while talking about the crippling sanctions that were imposed on Iraq before open warfare downgraded the country to US vassalage. 

Finally, the neocolonial wars that came to pass following the fall of the Berlin Wall have undemocratically consolidated not only the riches, but also the power, of those who were already rich and powerful. These conflicts provided a pretext for limiting the freedom of ordinary people in the name of national security and patriotism. President George W. Bush achieved that with his repressive Patriot Act; and the internet and especially the social media have been used increasingly to spy on (and thus to intimidate) the polloi. Thanks to the fall of the Berlin wall, then, the “1 percent” is now richer and more powerful than ever before, and the “99 percent”, poorer and more powerless than ever before.

The Second World War ended with a victory for democracy, and in the aftermath of that Armageddon, democracy was able to make a big leap forward. But it is a myth that the Cold War, a conflict against the Soviet Union, was a war for democracy. And the notion that the Soviet Union’s defeat, symbolized by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, signified a triumph for democracy, is likewise a myth. Those who are in favour of democracy, in favour of the emancipation of “ordinary” people in Eastern as well as Western Europe and throughout the world, have no reason to celebrate this historical happening.

The single and very important exception to the general rule that the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disappearance of communism in the Soviet Union had consequences that were detrimental to the cause of democracy throughout the world, in general, and boosted neocolonialism, in particular, is provided by the rise of China. In 1989, a “colour revolution” there, in reality a counterrevolution, failed to undo what, in the aftermath of World War II, the US leaders had called the “loss” of China to Mao, as if China was ever theirs to own. Progress for the cause of democracy, in the sense of the dawn of economic and political independence as well as an incipient improvement of the life expectancy and the standard of living of the population, was kickstarted there by – what else? – a revolution, in many ways similar to the revolutions in France and Russia in 1789 and 1917. A popularly supported communist movement, led by Mao, defeated the counterrevolutionary forces of Chiang Kai-shek, supported by the US, and established the People’s Republic of China in 1949. In their own enigmatic but also pragmatic way, Mao’s successors have continued to walk the path of socialist revolution. However, while doing so, they have also permitted the existence of a private sector within a predominantly socialist, state-owned economy, much as European welfare states, unquestionably capitalist entities, had made some room for socialist enterprise in the form of state-owned firms, known in monarchies such as Canada as “crown corporations”. Not surprisingly, while some deem capitalist countries with a modicum of socialist activity to be socialist, some now similarly consider China, a socialist country with some capitalist features, to be “capitalist”. But his reflects a binary, black-and-white kind of thinking that does not do justice to the complexity of reality. This reality is conjured up much more effectively by the ancient Chinese symbol of Yin and Yang: it suggests that there is always some white in the black and vice versa, and that the dividing line between the two is far from straight and precise. 

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Yin and yang

 Western-style democracy, with presumably free elections, certainly does not exist in China. A small elite of businesswomen and -men has been able to become fabulously rich and allowed by the communist authorities to do so, but not to come to power, either directly or indirectly. The communist party remains in total control. And it has seen to it that the standard of living has improved tremendously for hundreds of millions of Chinese who, not so long ago, lived in hopeless misery. These people do not enjoy the hypothetical luxury of being able to chose one of two candidates for the presidency, as in the US, but they benefit not only from increasing prosperity but also freedom, and the purchasing power needed to enjoy it, as reflected by the countless Chinese who have recently been flocking to tourist destinations all over the world. 

Thanks to a revolution that was inspired by the Russian precedent of 1917 and orchestrated by Mao, China has managed to morph from a huge but impotent “semi-colony” of the West into an economically strong superpower, where poverty is close to being totally eliminated, a development described by economist Alan Freeman as “one of the most extraordinary historic achievements that humanity has ever seen”. In other words, China has made enormous progress towards democracy, not Western-style liberal democracy but the kind of socially focused democracy that is much more important to denizens of the Third World, which is what most Chinese were when, under Mao’s leadership, they went to work on a revolution by means of which they were to achieve their own emancipation.

Andre Vltchek, the recently deceased American journalist and political commentator born in the Soviet-Union, made this insightful comment about democracy in China:

In China, democracy is not about sticking pieces of paper into a [ballot] box. It is . . . about making lives of its men, women, and children better and better, year after year. It is a fresh, optimistic, constantly improving, and evolving system. Ask people in the Chinese cities and the countryside, and they will tell you. The vast majority of them are happy; they are hopeful and optimistic.

Making the vast majority of the population, the “99 percent”, “happy, hopeful, and optimistic”, is that not what democracy is supposed to be all about?

The example and the achievements of the Soviet Union advanced the cause of democracy for many decades following 1945, but the demise of the Soviet Union proved to be a catastrophe for democracy. Let us hope that the success of China will make it possible for democracy to halt the decline it has been experiencing and make progress again throughout the world.


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OPERATION BARBAROSSA: MYTHS AND REALITY

Please make sure these dispatches reach as many readers as possible. Share with kin, friends and workmates and ask them to do likewise.



by Jacques R. Pauwels




Eighty years ago, June 22, 1941: Hitler launches Operation Barbarossa, the attack against the Soviet Union…

Jacques R. Pauwels, author of Big Business and Hitler (Toronto, James Lorimer, 2015), The Myth of the Good War: America in the Second World War (second edition, Toronto, James Lorimer, 2017), and The Great Myths of Modern History (forthcoming).

War against the Soviet Union was what Hitler had wanted from the beginning. He had already made this very clear in the pages of Mein Kampf, written in the mid-1920s. As a German historian, Rolf-Dieter Müller, has convincingly demonstrated in a well-documented study, it was a war against the Soviet Union, and not against Poland, France, or Britain, that Hitler was planning to unleash in 1939. On August 11 of that year, Hitler explained to Carl J. Burckhardt, an official of the League of Nations, that “everything he undertook was directed against Russia”, and that “if the West [i.e., the French and the British] is too stupid and too blind to comprehend this, he would be forced to reach an understanding with the Russians, turn and defeat the West, and then turn back with all his strength to strike a blow against the Soviet Union”. This is in fact what happened. The West did turn out to be “too stupid and blind”, as Hitler saw it, to give him “a free hand” in the east, so he did make a deal with Moscow — the infamous “Hitler-Stalin Pact” — and then unleashed war against Poland, France, and Britain. But his ultimate objective remained the same: to attack and destroy the Soviet Union as soon as possible.

Hitler and the German army commanders were convinced they had learned an important lesson from World War I. In 1918, in the final stages of World War I, mobile warfare resumed after years of stalemate in the trenches. That is when the Allies, whose unlimited access to colonial resources, including petroleum, had allowed them to construct and use thousands of tanks, trucks, and airplanes and thus “float to victory on a wave of oil”, as one of their leaders put it. Germany, on the other hand, had been prevented by a Royal Navy blockade from importing these vital raw materials, had therefore not provided its army with similar modern equipment and weapons, and thus went down to defeat.

Hitler and his generals knew that it would be impossible to win a new modern war without motorized equipment, but Germany had a highly developed industry, quite capable to produce huge numbers of tanks, airplanes, and trucks to transport the infantry. But fighting and winning a new modern war would also require sufficient stocks of strategic raw materials, especially petroleum and rubber, which Germany lacked. It was decided to tackle this crucial problem in two ways. First, by importing plenty of petroleum and rubber, creating huge stockpiles for use whenever the dogs of war would be unleashed and further imports were likely to be prevented by a new British blockade. Most of this came from the world’s greatest exporter of oil at the time, the US. Second, it was decided to start producing synthetic petroleum and rubber from coal, a raw material abundantly available in Germany. 

These preparations were supposed to enable Germany to win the coming war. It was still considered vital to keep the war as short as possible, since the stockpiles of fuel were likely to dwindle fast, the potential for wartime imports (from friendly countries such as Romania) was limited, and synthetic rubber and oil could not be expected to be available in sufficient quantities. To win a new edition of the “Great War”, Germany would therefore have to win it fast, very fast. This is how the Blitzkrieg concept was born, that is, the idea of warfare (Krieg) fast as lightning (Blitz). The Blitzkrieg approach called for synchronised attacks by waves of tanks and airplanes to pierce the enemy’s defensive lines, behind which enemy troops could be expected to be massed; deep penetration into hostile territory; rapid movement of infantry units not on foot or by train, as in the Great War, but in trucks; and the German spearheads swinging back to bottle up and liquidate entire enemy armies in gigantic “encirclement battles”. Blitzkrieg meant motorized war, making full use of the massive numbers of tanks, trucks, and planes cranked out by German industry, but also burning gargantuan amounts of imported and stockpiled petroleum and rubber.


In 1939 and 1940, the Blitzkrieg duly worked its magic, as the combination of excellent equipment and plentiful fuel permitted the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe to overwhelm the Polish, Dutch, Belgian, and French defences in a matter of weeks; Blitzkriege, “lightning-fast wars”, were invariably followed by Blitzsiege, “lightning-fast victories”. By the summer of 1940, Germany looked invincible and predestined to rule the European continent indefinitely. As for Britain, the German high command had never been asked to prepare plans to invade that country. Why not? Hitler had always yearned for a continental war against the Soviets and counted on British political leaders such as Chamberlain, known to be virulently anti-Soviet, to watch approvingly from the sidelines. London’s infamous policy of “appeasement” confirmed this expectation, until Chamberlain, under pressure from public opinion, felt compelled to side with Poland in its conflict with Hitler over Gdansk. Under these circumstances, Hitler decided to postpone his planned eastern war so he could deal with Poland and the Western powers first. That is why he proposed a deal to the Soviets, whose offers to establish a common anti-Hitler front had repeatedly been rebuffed by London and Paris. The infamous “Pact”, which they concluded with Hitler in August 1939, offered them extra space and time to prepare for a Nazi attack they knew to be merely postponed until a later date.

Morning of the great day: crossing into the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941.

Britain had gone to war, but very reluctantly. After his conquest of Poland and France (and the British army’s evacuation from Dunkirk), Hitler had reason to believe that the decision-makers in London would “see the light”, exit the war, and allow him to rule the European continent so that he could finally march eastward and crush the Soviet Union, while he would let Britain retain its overseas Empire. In London, however, the anti-Soviet (and filofascist) appeasers were replaced by Churchill, who, while also very anti-Soviet, was not willing to let Hitler control Europe; the new PM feared that after a victory against the Soviet Union, Hitler would be enticed – and very much enabled – to turn against Britain. Britain thus refused to be “reasonable”, as Hitler saw it, but could not hope to win the war on its own and had to fear that the German dictator might soon turn his attention to Gibraltar, Egypt, and/or other jewels in the crown of the British Empire.

The Reich’s triumphs were spectacular enough, but they depleted its fuel stockpiles while not yielding new sources of strategic raw materials, other than some minor oil wells in Poland. Under the terms of the 1939 Pact, however, Germany was supplied with petroleum by the Soviet Union. But how much? An awful lot, according to the conventional anti-Soviet or anti-Russian view, so much, according to one claim, that it was a precondition for the defeat of France in the spring of 1940. Despite these claims, according to Brock Millman’s thorough study, merely four percent of all German oil imports at that time originated in the Soviet Union. The reality is that, in 1940 and 1941, Germany relied mostly on petroleum imported from two countries. First, Romania, originally neutral but a formal ally of Hitler’s starting in November 1940. And second, the still-neutral US, whose oil barons exported huge amounts of “black gold”, mostly via other neutral countries such as Franco’s Spain; they would continue to do so until the US entered the war in December 1941, following the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor. The Soviet deliveries of petroleum were of course useful to the Reich, but most troubling for Hitler was the fact that Germany had to reciprocate by supplying high-quality industrial products and state-of-the-art military technology, which was used by the Soviets to modernize their army and upgrade their defenses against a Nazi attack they were expecting sooner or later.


Despite its high level of mechanization, the German army still used more than 700,000 horses and draft animals for reconnaissance and artillery battalions. Barbarossa proved extremely brutal on both humans and animals. The use of animals on the front and rear was still common among most WW2 combatants.

Another headache for Hitler was the fact that the terms of his Pact with the Soviets had made it possible for the latter to occupy eastern Poland, former Russian territory annexed by Poland during the Russian Civil War. They did so on September 17, 1939, when the Polish government fled to neutral Romania, thus abandoning the country and turning it into a “terra nullins”. The Soviet move was therefore in accordance with international law; as Churchill acknowledged, it did not amount to an act of war, did not turn the Soviet Union into an ally of Nazi Germany but allowed it to remain neutral, and for that reason it did not trigger a declaration of war by the Western powers, allies of Poland. Finally, if the Red Army had not occupied Eastern Poland, the Germans would have done so. This situation bothered Hitler. The Soviet border, and the country’s defences, had thus shifted a few hundred kilometres to the west, providing the Red Army with the defensive advantage of what is called a “glacis” in military jargon, a territorial “breathing space”; conversely, for the German military, the planned march to Moscow had thus become much longer.

The German dictator had a problem: the Soviets had gained valuable space, time was on their side, and their defences were getting stronger by the day. After the defeat of France, Hitler felt that he could not wait much longer before undertaking the mission he believed to be entrusted to him by providence, namely the annihilation of “Russia ruled by the Jews”. He had wanted to attack the Soviet Union in 1939, but had turned against the Western powers only, as German historian Rolf-Dieter Müller has put it, “in order to enjoy security in the rear when he would finally be ready to settle accounts with the Soviet Union”. Müller concludes that by 1940 nothing had changed as far as Hitler was concerned: “The real enemy was the one in the east”.

Already in the fall of that year, after a failed attempt to have Churchill become “sensible” by means of bombing raids and a threatened invasion, he instructed his generals to forget Albion and plan for a great “Eastern War" (Ostkrieg) in the spring of 1941. A formal order to this effect was issued on December 18, 1940. The project was code-named Operation Barbarossa (Unternehmen Barbarossa), after a famous German emperor and crusader. The choice of name reflected Hitler’s view of this coming conflict: it was to be a kind of holy war against the Soviet variety of communism, despised as a Jewish stratagem aimed at the overthrow of the natural superiority of the “Aryan” race. Such was the essence of Judeo-Bolshevism, a theory espoused not only by Hitler but also by countless influential political, economic, and intellectual leaders in Germany and throughout the Western world. One of them was Henry Ford, whose German branch plant was cranking out much of the equipment used by the German armed forces at the time, accumulating huge profits in the process.

Hitler felt that he could turn his gaze eastward without worrying too much about the British, who were still licking their wounds after a Houdini-like escape from Dunkirk. For two reasons, he was confident that their account could wait to be settled until after the completion of his primordial project, the Ostkrieg. First, that undertaking was to be yet another lightning-fast war, expected to last no more than two months; we will return to that issue very shortly. Second, unlike the previous German victories, a triumph against the Soviet Union was guaranteed to provide Germany with the virtually limitless resources of that huge country, including Ukrainian wheat to provide Germany’s population with plenty of food; minerals such as coal, from which synthetic oil and rubber could be produced; and — last, but certainly not least — the rich Caucasian oil fields, where the gas-guzzling Panzers and Stukas would be able to fill their tanks to the brim at any time. Steeled with these assets, it would be a sinecure for Hitler to deal with Britain.

Defeat of the Soviet Union would indeed have provided a “final solution” for Germany’s predicament, being an industrial superpower devoid of territorial possessions to provide strategic raw material. Possessing a huge “complementary territory” in the east, similar to America’s “Wild West” and Britain’s Indian colony, was certain to finally turn Germany into a genuine world power, invulnerable within a European “fortress” stretching from the Atlantic to the Urals. The Reich would possess limitless resources and would therefore be capable of winning even long, drawn-out wars against any antagonist — including the US — in one of the future “wars of the continents” conjured up in Hitler’s feverish imagination.

Hitler and his generals were confident that their planned Blitzkrieg against the Soviet Union would be as successful as their earlier lightning wars against Poland and France had been. They considered the Soviet Union to be a “giant with feet of clay”, whose army, presumably decapitated by Stalin’s purges of the late 1930s, was “not more than a joke”, as Hitler himself put it on one occasion. In order to fight and win the decisive battles, they allowed for a campaign of six to eight weeks, possibly to be followed by some mopping-up operations, during which the remnants of the Soviet host would “be chased across the country like a bunch of beaten Cossacks”. In any event, Hitler felt supremely confident, and on the eve of the attack, he “fancied himself to be on the verge of the greatest triumph of his life”.

In Washington and London, the military experts likewise believed that the Soviet Union would not be able to put up significant resistance to the Nazi juggernaut, whose military exploits of 1939–1940 had earned it a reputation of invincibility. The British secret services were convinced that the Soviet Union would be “liquidated within eight to ten weeks”, and the chief of the Imperial General Staff averred that the Wehrmacht would slice through the Red Army “like a warm knife through butter” and that the Soviet forces would be rounded up “like cattle”. According to expert opinion in Washington, Hitler would “crush Russia [sic] like an egg”.

Barbarossa started on June 22, 1941, in the early hours of the morning. The Soviet Union’s border was crossed by “the largest invasion force in the history of warfare” (Wikipedia), consisting of three million German soldiers and almost 700,000 troops contributed by allies of Nazi Germany, equipped with 600,000 motor vehicles, 3,648 tanks, more than 2,700 planes, and just over 7,000 pieces of artillery. At first, everything went according to plan. Huge holes were punched in the Soviet defences, impressive territorial gains were made rapidly, and hundreds of thousands of Red Army soldiers were killed, wounded, or taken prisoner in a number of spectacular “encirclement battles”. The road to Moscow seemed to lay open.

Wehrmacht units enter a village in flames, shielded by light armor. Many villages and towns had been set ablaze by the retreating Soviets as part of their scorched earth policy.


In the early days of the war, the Luftwaffe had no trouble destroying hundreds of Soviet aircraft on the ground, caught in the surprise attack.

About the opening stages of Operation Barbarossa, a few tenacious myths need to be dispelled. First, it is not true that the German attack purported to pre-empt an offensive planned by the Soviets themselves. This notion was originally propagated by the Nazi regime, recycled post-1945 for anti-Soviet propaganda purposes, and revived from time to time now that the Cold War turns out not to be over after all. A German historian, Bianka Pietrow-Ennker, has convincingly demolished this “thesis of a preventive war” (Präventivkriegsthese). An attack on Germany would have been suicidal for the Soviets, since it was certain to trigger a declaration of war by Japan, Germany’s ally, forcing the Red Army to do battle against powerful enemies on two fronts.

Second, it is untrue that the Soviet leaders, usually referred to as “Stalin”, did not expect a German attack. They did, and had been preparing furiously for it, but they did not know when to expect it and always kept hoping that the attack would come later, rather than sooner, since preparations for a coming attack are never totally finished. Signals were received that the curtain would rise when it did, namely on June 22; however, similar signals had come in earlier but had proved to be false; there was no reason to think that this time it was different, and it was felt necessary not to provoke Hitler with troop movements along the border, since in the summer of 1914 the hasty mobilization of the Russian army in similar tense circumstances had triggered a German declaration of war.  

In the months and especially weeks prior to June 1941, Goebbels’ propaganda machine and the Nazi secret service had been working hard, and successfully, to befuddle Moscow with conflicting and consuming signals, mainly the idea that their troop concentrations along the Soviet border, impossible to dissimulate, were intended to deceive the British, against whom a major operation was supposedly being planned. Conversely, the British were working hard to bring about a conflict between Germany and the Soviet Union, as this would obviously be in their interest. In these circumstances, trying to trick Moscow into making a misstep that could trigger hostilities was part of that strategy of deceit, which deserves a major study. In any event, the Soviet leaders knew the attack was coming and had been preparing for it, but they found it impossible to correctly interpret a kaleidoscope of signals and were tragically fooled into refusing to believe that the German attack was imminent until the bombs started to rain down on them in the early hours of June 22.

The early battles yielded a huge number of Soviet prisoners.

A third myth concerns the purge of a considerable number of commanders of the Red Army, including Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky. In the so-called “show trials” of 1937, these men were presumably falsely accused of treasonous activities, tortured so that they confessed, and executed or imprisoned, thus ridding Stalin of potential rivals but also eliminating countless capable and experienced high-ranking officers; this “decapitation” of the Red Army supposedly helps to explain its poor performance in the early stages of Barbarossa. While this loss undoubtedly exacted a toll, an ultimately more important consideration is the fact that it is now certain that a heterogeneous “bloc of oppositionists” did exist within the Soviet Union and that Tukhachevsky and the other defendants did in fact belong to it and were deeply involved in its treasonous activities, included contacts with German and Japanese agents. Their ultimate goal was to sabotage the Soviet defensive efforts when Germany and/or Japan would attack, and the traitors would be rewarded by being allowed to come to power in what was to remain of the Soviet Union or a Russian successor-state. Joseph Davies, the US ambassador to the Soviet Union at the time of the trials, believed the accused to be guilty.

In other words, Tukhachevsky and company would have done what a cabal of French generals and politicians with fascist sympathies are now known to have orchestrated in the spring of 1940: they deliberately opted for defeat at the hands of an “external enemy”, Nazi Germany, to be able to defeat the “internal enemy”, in the case of France the socialists, communists, and other leftist forces who had earlier formed the “Popular Front” government. France’s defeat made it possible for these French “Tukhachevskies” to install a fascist regime under Marshal Pétain, as French historian Annie Lacroix-Riz has convincingly demonstrated in two of her studies. The existence and collaboration of such a “fifth column” helps to explain Nazi Germany’s unexpectedly easy victory over France and, conversely, what in France itself is referred to as the country’s “strange defeat” in 1940. If Tukhachevsky’s “fifth column” in the Soviet Union had not been eliminated, the Red Army would undoubtedly have done much worse in June 1941 than it actually did, and it would probably have experienced a “strange defeat” similar to that of the French army one year earlier.


In the days and weeks following June 22, the German army advanced rapidly in three major directions, namely to Leningrad in the north, Kiev in the south, and Moscow in the centre, seemingly confirming the reputation of invincibility it had acquired in 1939 and 1940. It soon became evident, however, that the Blitzkrieg in the east would not be the cakewalk that had been expected. Facing the most powerful military machine on earth, the Red Army was predictably taking a major beating but, as propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels confided to his diary as early as July 2, also put up a tough resistance and hit back very hard on numerous occasions.


General Franz Halder, in many ways the “godfather” of Operation Barbarossa’s plan of attack, acknowledged that Soviet resistance was much stronger than anything the Germans had faced in Western Europe. Wehrmacht reports cited “hard”, “tough”, even “wild” resistance, causing heavy losses in men and equipment on the German side. More often than expected, Soviet forces managed to launch counterattacks that involved heavy losses but did slow down the German advance. Some Soviet units went into hiding in the vast Pripet Marshes and elsewhere, organized deadly partisan warfare (for which thorough preparations had been made during the time gained thanks to the 1939 Pact), and threatened the long and vulnerable German lines of communication. It also turned out that the Red Army was much better equipped than expected. German generals were “amazed”, writes a German historian, by the quality of Soviet weapons such as the Katyusha rocket launcher (a.k.a. “Stalin Organ”) and the T-34 tank. Hitler was furious that his secret services had not been aware of the existence of some of this weaponry.

The greatest cause of concern, as far as the Germans were concerned, was the fact that the bulk of the Red Army managed to withdraw in relatively good order and eluded destruction in a huge encirclement battle, in the kind of repeat of Cannae or Sedan that Hitler and his generals had dreamed of. The Red Army commanders appear to have carefully observed and analyzed the German blitzkrieg successes of 1939 and 1940 and to have learned useful lessons. They must have noticed that in May 1940 the French had massed the bulk of their forces right at the border, behind the Maginot Line, as well as in Belgium, thus making it possible for the German war machine to encircle them. The Soviets did leave some troops at the border, of course, and these troops predictably suffered major losses during the opening stages of Barbarossa. But — contrary to what is claimed by some historians – the bulk of the Red Army was held back in the rear, avoiding entrapment. It was this “defence in depth” – facilitated by the 1939 acquisition of a “glacis”, a territorial “breathing space”, namely “Eastern Poland” – that frustrated the German ambition to destroy the Red Army in its entirety. As Marshal Zhukov was to write in his memoirs, “the Soviet Union would have been smashed if we had organized all our forces at the border”.

As early as the middle of July, as Hitler’s war in the east started to lose its Blitz-qualities, countless Germans, military as well as civilians, of low as well as high rank, lost their belief in a quick victory. Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Wehrmacht’s secret service, the Abwehr, thus confided on July 17 to a colleague on the front, General von Bock, that he saw “nothing but black”. On the home front, many German civilians also started to feel that the war in the east was not going well. In Dresden, Victor Klemperer, a Jewish linguist who kept a diary, wrote on July 13 that “we [the Germans] suffer immense losses, we have underestimated the Russians”.

Around the same time, Hitler himself abandoned his dream of a quick and easy victory and scaled down his expectations; he now expressed the hope that his troops might reach the Volga by October and capture the oil fields of the Caucasus a month or so later. By the end of August, at a time when Barbarossa should have been winding down, a memorandum of the Wehrmacht’s High Command (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, OKW) acknowledged that it might no longer be possible to win the war in 1941.

The Soviet Union produced an astonishing amount of high-quality weapons, including tanks, airplanes, machine guns, assault rifles, and artillery pieces. Their design frequently outperformed allied and even German blueprints. Photo: A tank crew tests a tank that just rolled off the production line.

A major problem was the fact that, when Barbarossa started on June 22, the available supplies of tires, spare parts, and above all fuel were good enough for only about two months. This had been deemed sufficient because it was expected that between six to eight weeks the Soviet Union would be on its knees and its unlimited resources — industrial and agricultural products as well as raw materials — would then be available to the Reich. But by late August the German spearheads were nowhere near those distant regions of the Soviet Union where petroleum, that most precious of all indispensibilia of modern warfare, was to be had. If the tanks managed to keep on rolling, though increasingly slowly, into the seemingly endless Russian and Ukrainian expanses, it was to a large extent by means of fuel and rubber imported, via Spain and occupied France, from the US.

The flames of optimism flared up again in September, when German troops achieved a major success by capturing Kiev and, farther north, made progress in the direction of Moscow. Hitler believed, or at least pretended to believe, that the end was now near for the Soviets. In a public speech in the Berlin Sportpalast on October 3, he declared that the eastern war was virtually over. The Wehrmacht was ordered to deliver the coup de grâce by launching Operation Typhoon (Unternehmen Taifun), an offensive aimed at taking Moscow. The odds for success looked increasingly slim, however, as the Soviets were busily bringing in reserve units from the Far East. (They had been informed by their master spy in Tokyo, Richard Sorge, that the Japanese, whose army was stationed in northern China, were no longer considering attacking the Soviets’ vulnerable borders in Vladivostok area.) To make things worse, the Germans no longer enjoyed superiority in the air, particularly over Moscow. Also, sufficient supplies of ammunition and food could not be brought up from the rear to the front since the long supply lines were severely hampered by partisan activity. Finally, it was getting chilly in the Soviet Union, though probably no colder than usual at that time of the year. The German high command, confident that their eastern Blitzkrieg would be over by the end of the summer, had failed to supply the troops with the equipment necessary to fight in the rain, mud, snow, and freezing temperatures of a Russian fall and winter.

At the Berlin Sportpalast, a favorite venue for Nazi rallies, Hitler on October 3, 1941 declared that the eastern war was virtually over. The speech motif was "Total war is a shorter war"


Taking Moscow loomed as an extremely important objective in the minds of Hitler and his generals. It was believed, though probably wrongly, that the fall of its capital would “decapitate” the Soviet Union and thus bring about its collapse. It also seemed important to avoid a repeat of the scenario of the summer of 1914, when the seemingly unstoppable German advance into France had been halted in extremis on the eastern outskirts of Paris, during the Battle of the Marne. This disaster — from the German perspective — had robbed Germany of nearly certain victory in the opening stages of the Great War and had forced it into a lengthy struggle that, lacking sufficient resources and blockaded by the British navy, it was doomed to lose. This time, in a new Great War fought against a new archenemy, there was to be no new “miracle of the Marne”, that is, no faltering just outside the foe’s capital. It was imperative that Germany not find itself resourceless and blockaded in a long, drawn-out conflict it was doomed to lose. Unlike Paris, Moscow would fall, history would not repeat itself, and Germany would end up being victorious — or so they hoped in Hitler’s headquarters. 

The Wehrmacht continued to advance, albeit very slowly, and by mid-November some units found themselves on the outskirts of Moscow, presumably even within sight of the towers of the Kremlin, but the troops were now totally exhausted and running out of supplies. Their commanders knew that it was simply impossible to take the Soviet capital, tantalizingly close as the city may have been, and that even doing so would not bring them victory. On December 3, a number of units abandoned the offensive on their own initiative. Within days, however, the entire German army in front of Moscow was simply forced on the defensive. Indeed, on December 5, at three in the morning, in cold and snowy conditions, the Red Army suddenly launched a major, well-prepared counterattack. The Wehrmacht’s lines were pierced in many places, and the Germans were thrown back between 100 and 280 kilometres with heavy losses of men and equipment; it was only with great difficulty that a catastrophic encirclement could be avoided. On December 8, Hitler ordered his army to abandon the offensive and to move into defensive positions. (As the Wehrmacht did actually make it to the western suburbs of Moscow in late 1941, it can be argued that they would almost certainly have taken the city, and perhaps won the war, had it not been for the concessions made by Hitler in the Pact of 1939, which resulted in the Soviet border being moved hundreds of kilometers to the west.)

In any event, it was in front of Moscow, in early December 1941, that Hitler’s Blitzkrieg against the Soviet Union ground to a halt. Thus ended not the war, of course, but the lightning-fast kind of war that was supposed to be the key to a German victory, the type of warfare that was to have enabled Hitler to realize his grand ambition, the destruction of the Soviet Union. More importantly, such a victory would also have provided Nazi Germany with sufficient petroleum and other resources to make it a virtually invulnerable behemoth. In the new “Battle of the Marne” just to the west of Moscow, Nazi Germany suffered the defeat that made victory impossible, not only victory against the Soviet Union itself, but also victory against Great Britain and victory in the war in general. It ought to be noted that the United States was not yet involved in the war.


"In any event, it was in front of Moscow, in early December 1941, that Hitler’s Blitzkrieg against the Soviet Union ground to a halt. Thus ended not the war, of course, but the lightning-fast kind of war that was supposed to be the key to a German victory, the type of warfare that was to have enabled Hitler to realize his grand ambition, the destruction of the Soviet Union..."

Hitler and his generals had believed, not without reason, that to win a new edition of the Great War, Germany had to win it lightning-fast. But on December 5, 1941, it became evident to everyone present in Hitler’s headquarters that a lightning-fast triumph over the Soviet Union would not be forthcoming, and that Germany was doomed to lose the war, if not sooner, then later. According to General Alfred Jodl, chief of the operations staff of the OKW, Hitler realized on that very day that he could no longer win the war. And so it can be argued that the success of the Red Army in front of Moscow was unquestionably the “major break” [Zäsur] of the entire world war”, as Gerd R. Ueberschär, a German expert on the war against the Soviet Union, has put it. In other words, the tide of World War II turned on December 5, 1941. As real tides turn not suddenly but rather gradually and imperceptibly, the tide of the war turned not on a single day, but over a period of at least four months that elapsed between the summer of 1941 and early December of that same year.

The tide of the war in the east had been shifting extremely slowly, but it did not do so imperceptibly. Already in July 1941, less than one month after Operation Barbarossa got underway, well-informed observers had started to doubt that a German victory, not only in the Soviet Union but in the war in general, still belonged to the realm of possibilities. In that month, generals of Marshal Pétain’s French collaborator regime, meeting in Vichy, discussed confidential reports received from German colleagues about the situation on the eastern front. They learned that the advance into the Soviet Union was not going as well as expected and came to the conclusion that “Germany would not win the war but had already lost it”. From that moment on, a growing number of members of the French military, political, and economic elite discreetly prepared to leave the doomed ship Vichy; they hoped that their country would be liberated by the Americans, with whom contacts were established via sympathetic intermediaries such as the Vatican and Franco. Historian Annie Lacroix-Riz has described this development in detail.

In September, when the Blitzkrieg in the east was supposed to have been over, a correspondent of the New York Times based in Stockholm became convinced that the situation on the eastern front was such that Germany “might well collapse dramatically”. He had just returned from a visit to the Reich, where he had witnessed the arrival of trainloads of injured soldiers. And the always well-informed Vatican, initially very enthusiastic about Hitler’s “crusade” against the Soviet homeland of “godless” Bolshevism, became very concerned about the situation in the east in late summer 1941; by mid-October, it came to the conclusion that Germany would lose the war. (Clearly, the German bishops had not been informed of the bad tidings, since a couple of months later on December 10 they publicly declared to be “observing the struggle against Bolshevism with satisfaction”.) Likewise in mid-October, the Swiss secret services reported that “the Germans can no longer win the war”.

By late November, a defeatism of sorts had started to infect the higher ranks of the Wehrmacht and of the Nazi Party. Even as they were urging their troops forward towards Moscow, some generals opined that it would be preferable to make peace overtures and wind down the war without achieving the great victory that had seemed so certain at the start of Operation Barbarossa. And shortly before the end of November, armament Minister Fritz Todt asked Hitler to search for a diplomatic way out of the war, since purely militarily as well as industrially, it was as good as lost.

When the Red Army launched its devastating counteroffensive on December 5, Hitler himself realized that he would lose the war. But he was not prepared to let the German public know that. The nasty tidings from the front near Moscow were presented to the public as a temporary setback, blamed on the supposedly unexpectedly early arrival of winter and/or on the incompetence or cowardice of certain commanders. (It was only a good year later, after the catastrophic defeat in the Battle of Stalingrad during the winter of 1942-43, that the German public, and the entire world, would realize that Germany was doomed; which is why even today many historians believe that the tide turned at Stalingrad.) But it proved impossible to keep the catastrophic implications of the debacle in front of Moscow a total secret. For example, on December 19, 1941, the German Consul in the Swiss city of Basel reported to his superiors in Berlin that the (openly pro-Nazi) head of a mission of the Swiss Red Cross, sent to the front in the Soviet Union to assist the wounded only on the German side, which contravened Red Cross rules, had returned to Switzerland with the news, most surprising to the Consul, that “he no longer believed that Germany could win the war”.

In his headquarters deep in an East-Prussian forest, Hitler was still ruminating the catastrophic tiding when he received another surprise. On the other side of the globe, the Japanese had attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941. The existing agreements between Berlin and Tokyo were defensive in nature and would have required the Reich to rally to the side of Japan if the latter had been attacked by the US, but that was not the case. Hitler had no such obligation to assist Japan, as has been claimed, or at least insinuated, in histories and documentaries about that dramatic event. Neither had the Japanese leaders felt compelled to declare war on Hitler’s enemies when he attacked Poland, France, and the Soviet Union. On each of these occasions, Hitler had not even bothered to inform Tokyo of his plans, no doubt out of fear of spies. The Japanese similarly neglected to let Hitler know of their plans to go to war against Uncle Sam.

Nevertheless, on December 11, 1941, the German dictator did declare war on the United States. This seemingly irrational decision can only be understood in light of the German predicament in the Soviet Union. Hitler almost certainly speculated that this entirely gratuitous gesture of solidarity would induce his Far Eastern ally to reciprocate with a declaration of war on the enemy of Germany, the Soviet Union, and this would have forced the Soviets into the extremely perilous predicament of a two-front war. (The bulk of the Japanese army was still stationed in northern China and would therefore have been able to immediately attack the Soviet Union in the Vladivostok area.)

Hitler appears to have believed that he could exorcize the spectre of defeat in the Soviet Union, and in the war in general, by summoning a sort of Japanese deus ex machina to the Soviet Union’s vulnerable Siberian frontier. According to the German historian Hans W. Gatzke, the Führer was indeed convinced that “if Germany failed to join Japan [in the war against the United States], it would . . . end all hope for Japanese help against the Soviet Union”. But Japan did not take Hitler’s bait. Tokyo, too, despised the Soviet state, but the Land of the Rising Sun, now at war against the US, could afford the luxury of a two-front war as little as the Soviets. Tokyo preferred to put all of its money on a “southern” strategy, hoping to win the big prize of Southeast Asia – including petroleum-rich Indonesia and rubber-rich Indochina – rather than embark on a venture in the inhospitable reaches of Siberia. Only at the very end of the war, after the surrender of Nazi Germany, would it come to hostilities between the Soviet Union and Japan.

D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Americans land on Omaha Beach, Normandy. Despite having the bulk of their troops on the Eastern Front, the Germans gave them a rough welcome. If it hadn't been for the Soviets, the invasion of Fortress Europe might have been impossible.

And so, through Hitler’s own fault, the camp of Germany’s enemies now included not only Great Britain and the Soviet Union, but also the mighty USA, whose troops could be expected to appear on Germany’s shores, or at least on the shores of German-occupied Europe, in the foreseeable future. The Americans would indeed land troops in France, but only in 1944, and in the Western world this unquestionably important event is still all too often glorified as the turning point of World War II. It is worth asking, however, whether the Americans would ever have landed in Normandy or, for that matter, ever have declared war on Nazi Germany, if Hitler had not declared war on them on December 11, 1941. And one should ask if Hitler would ever have made the desperate, even suicidal decision to declare war on the US if he had not found himself in a hopeless situation in the Soviet Union. The involvement of the US in the war against Germany, then, which for many reasons was not in the cards before December 1941, and for which Washington had not made any preparations, was also a consequence of the German setback in front of Moscow.

Nazi Germany was doomed, but the war was still to be a long one. Hitler ignored the advice of his generals, who strongly recommended trying to find a diplomatic exit and decided to battle on in the slim hope of somehow pulling victory out of a hat. The Russian counter-offensive would run out of steam in early January 1942, the Wehrmacht would survive the winter of 1941-42 and, in the spring of 1942, Hitler would scrape together all available forces for an offensive – code-named “Operation Blue” (Unternehmen Blau) – in the direction of the oil fields of the Caucasus. Hitler himself acknowledged that “if he did not get the oil of Maikop and Grozny, he would have to end this war”. But by then the element of surprise had been lost, and the Soviets disposed of huge masses of men, oil, and other resources, as well as excellent equipment, much of it produced in factories that had been established behind the Urals between 1939 and 1941. The Wehrmacht, on the other hand, could not compensate for the huge losses it had suffered in 1941. Between June 22, 1941, and January 31, 1942, the Germans had lost 6,000 airplanes and more than 3,200 tanks and similar vehicles. No less than 918,000 men had been killed, wounded, or gone missing in action, amounting to 28.7 per cent of the average strength of the army, or 3.2 million men. In the Soviet Union, Germany would lose no less than 10 million of its total 13.5 million men killed, wounded, or taken prisoner during the entire war, and the Red Army would end up claiming credit for 90 per cent of all Germans killed in the Second World War.

The forces available for a push toward the oil fields of the Caucasus were limited and, as it turned out, insufficient to achieve the objective. Under those circumstances, it is quite remarkable that in 1942 the Germans managed to make it as far as they did. The beast had been mortally wounded, but it would take a long time before it breathed its last, and it would remain powerful and dangerous until the end, as the Americans were to find out in the winter of 1944-1945 at the Battle of the Bulge. But when the Germans’ offensive inevitably petered out, namely in September 1942, their weakly held supply lines were stretched along many hundreds of kilometres, presenting a perfect target for a Soviet counterattack. When that attack came, it caused an entire German army to be bottled up and, after a titanic battle, to be destroyed at Stalingrad. After this great victory of the Red Army, the ineluctability of German defeat in World War II was obvious for all to see. The failure of the eastern Blitzkrieg in the second half of 1941, culminating in defeat in front of Moscow in early December of that year, had been the precondition for the admittedly more spectacular German Götterdämmerung at Stalingrad.

There are even more reasons to proclaim December 1941 as the turning point of the war. The Soviet counter-offensive destroyed the reputation of invincibility in which the Wehrmacht had basked ever since its success against Poland in 1939, thus boosting the morale of Germany’s enemies everywhere. In France, for example, the Resistance became bigger, bolder, and much more active. Conversely, the fiasco of the Blitzkrieg demoralized the Finns and other German allies. And neutral countries that had sympathized with Nazi Germany now became benevolent towards the “Anglo-Americans”. Franco, for example, sought to ingratiate them by averting his gaze as downed allied airmen, assisted by the French Resistance, technically violated Spanish neutrality by crossing the country from France to Portugal on their way back to Britain. Portugal, also officially neutral but on friendly terms with Britain, even allowed the British and Americans to use an air base on the Azores, which was to prove extremely useful in the Battle of the Atlantic.

Most importantly, the Battle of Moscow also ensured that the bulk of Germany’s armed forces would be tied to an eastern front of approximately 4,000 kilometres for an indefinite period of time and thus require the bulk of available strategic resources, above all petroleum. This all but eliminated the possibility of new German operations against the British. It made it impossible to supply Rommel in North Africa with sufficient men and materiel, and this ultimately led to his defeat in the Battle of El Alamein in the fall of 1942.

The tide of the war turned in the Soviet Union in 1941. Had the Soviets not been able to stop the Nazi juggernaut, Germany would almost certainly have won the war, because it would have gained control of the petroleum fields of the Caucasus, the rich agricultural lands of Ukraine, and many other vitally important resources. Such a triumph would have transformed Hitler’s Reich into an inexpungable superpower, capable of waging even long-term wars against anyone, including an Anglo-American alliance. Without the Soviet achievement in 1941, the liberation of Europe, including the liberation of Western Europe by the Americans, British, Canadians, etc., would never have taken place. During the landings in Normandy in June 1944, the western allies had a tough time, even though they faced only a fraction of the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe was impotent because of lack of fuel. But without the successes of the Red Army, first in front of Moscow and later at Stalingrad, the entire Wehrmacht would have been available in Normandy, the Luftwaffe would have had plenty of Caucasian fuel, and the landings would simply not have been feasible. Had the Red Army not prevented the success of Operation Barbarossa, Nazi Germany would have established its hegemony over Europe and would very likely have maintained it until the present time. Today, on the continent, the second language would not be English, but German, and in Paris the fashionistas might well promenade up and down the Champs Elysees in lederhosen.

In 1943, after victories in Stalingrad in the spring and Kursk in the summer, it was obvious that, slowly but surely, the Red Army was on its way to Berlin. That is when the Americans and British, who had been sitting on the sidelines as a titanic war raged along the eastern front, decided it was high time to open a “second front” in France, so the Soviets would not defeat Nazi Germany and liberate all of Europe on their own – and reap the benefits of that achievement. While it must be acknowledged that, in the final year of the war, following the Normandy landings, the Americans and the other western allies did make a significant contribution to the victory over Nazi Germany, that triumph was due in the very first place to the herculean efforts and huge sacrifices made by the Russian and other peoples of the Soviet Union during four long years, starting on that fateful 22nd of June, 1941.

Let us briefly examine two myths about the historical fact that the Soviet Union was the first country to defend successfully against a Blitzkrieg-style attack launched against it by Hitler – and ultimately to vanquish Nazi Germany.

Soviet soldiers examine a pile of German helmets, flags, and other military artifacts accumulated in various encounters.

First, the fable that the Nazi invaders of the Soviet Union were defeated by “General Winter”. The Germans were defeated by the Red Army, with the support of the majority of the many peoples that made up the Soviet nation, except, of course, a not inconsiderable number of collaborators. Of the latter, every country facing the Reich unfortunately had its fair share. The Germans wrongly believed that the Soviet Union would be full of them, so that they would be welcomed with open arms as liberators, but the opposite proved to be the case: they faced widespread resistance, including armed resistance by partisans, and it is fair to say that without such popular support, the Soviet Union would not have survived the Nazi onslaught. This factor, combined with the tough resistance put up by the Red Army, caused Barbarossa to progress much more slowly than expected and failed to finish by the end of the summer, as Hitler and his generals had expected. This means that, by September 1941 at the latest, the Blitzkrieg strategy that was supposed to be the key to a German victory had failed. It took a few more months, until December 5, in early winter, for this failure to be certified, so to speak, by the start of the Soviet counter-offensive in front of Moscow; but as far as Germany was concerned, the fatal damage had already been done in the summer.

The myth crediting “General Winter” was originally concocted by the Nazis to rationalize their defeat in the Battle of Moscow, signifying the fiasco of Operation Barbarossa. Nazi spin doctors presented the nasty tidings to the public in Germany and in occupied Europe as a temporary setback, to be blamed on the supposedly unexpectedly early arrival of winter. After 1945, in the context of the Cold War, this myth was kept alive as part of the effort to minimize the Soviet contribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany. Finally, following the demise of the Soviet Union, the notion has been kept alive in the West because of its usefulness for anti-Russian purposes.

Harsh German reprisals never stamped out the activity of partisans throughout the USSR. Men, women and even children participated in a general people's war against the invaders.

According to a second tenacious myth, the Soviets only managed to survive the Nazi onslaught thanks to massive material support provided by Uncle Sam in the context of the famous Lend-Lease program of aid to America’s allies. A number of facts demonstrate that this story, while woven around some historical facts, as myths usually are, also fails to do justice to the historical reality.

First of all, Uncle Sam was not an ally of the Soviet Union at the time of the Red Army counterattack in front of Moscow, in early December 1941, which confirmed the failure of a Blitzkrieg-strategy that was to have been the key to a German victory. The US was still a neutral country, and its upper class sympathized with the Nazis and with fascism in general and despised the Soviets and communism as a rule. In fact, a considerable number of rich, powerful, and very influential Americans – industrialists, bankers, members of Congress. generals, religious leaders, etc. – eagerly anticipated the defeat of the homeland of anti-capitalist and “godless” Bolshevism. It was only when, on December 11, 1941, a few days after Pearl Harbor, Hitler gratuitously declared war on the US, that Uncle Sam found himself to be an enemy of Nazi Germany and therefore an ally not only of the British but also of the Soviets, and that the flames of American anti-Sovietism were not quite extinguished, but temporarily dimmed.

Second, as for American aid to the Soviet Union, there was none at all in 1941, the year that ended with a reversal of the tide of war. Moscow asked the US to supply equipment from the very start of Barbarossa but failed to receive a positive response. After all, in the US too, it was expected that the Soviet Union was going to collapse soon. The American ambassador in Moscow even warned emphatically against sending aid, arguing that in view of the impending Soviet defeat, these supplies would fall into German hands.

The situation changed in the late fall of 1941, when it became increasingly clear that the Red Army would not be “crushed like an egg”. In fact, the Soviets’ tough resistance demonstrated that they were likely to be a very useful continental ally to the British, with whom American businessmen and bankers were engaging in extremely profitable Lend-Lease business. Extending Lend-Lease aid to the Soviets – which meant sales, not a free gift, of equipment – now promised to generate even more profits. The New York Stock Exchange started to reflect this fact of life: the quotations rose as the Nazi advance into Russia slowed down. It was in this context that a Lend-Lease agreement was signed by Washington and Moscow in November 1941, but it would take many more months before deliveries were to start trickling in. A German historian, Bernd Martin, has emphasized that throughout 1941 American aid to the Soviet Union remained purely “fictitious”. American material assistance thus became meaningful only in 1942 or arguably even 1943, that is, long after the Soviets had singlehandedly ruined Nazi Germany’s prospects for victory – while using their own weapons and equipment. According to British historian Adam Tooze, “the Soviet miracle owed nothing to western assistance [and] the effects of Lend-Lease had no influence on the balance of forces on the Eastern Front before 1943”.

Third, American aid would never represent more than 4 to 5 per cent of total Soviet wartime industrial production, although it must be admitted that even such a slim margin might prove crucial in a crisis situation.

Fourth, the Soviets themselves cranked out all of the light as well as heavy high-quality weapons that made their success against the Wehrmacht possible. 

Fifth, and probably most importantly, the much-publicized Lend-Lease aid to the USSR was to a large extent neutralized, and possibly even dwarfed, by the massive and very important aid provided to Nazi Germany not by the American state but by US corporations. But this US assistance to Hitler was unofficial, the public was unaware of it, and it has remained off the radar screens of most historians until the present day. Not surprisingly, the few historians who have drawn attention to it have been ignored by their mainstream colleagues and by the media. This story is too long and complex to be dealt with here, but it is essential to know that branch plants of US corporations such as Ford, GM, IBM, ITT, and Singer remained active in Germany before and even after Pearl Harbor; they cranked out trucks, airplanes, communications equipment, machine guns, and plenty of other martial equipment for use by the Nazi armed forces, and made a lot of money in the process.

In 1941, moreover, American oil firms and trusts were still delivering huge amounts of petroleum to Nazi Germany via neutral states such as Spain. The American share of Germany’s oil imports was in fact increasing rapidly; in the case of vitally important oil for engine lubrication, for example, from 44 per cent in July to no less than 94 per cent in September. The tens of thousands of Nazi planes, tanks, trucks, and other war machines involved in the invasion of the Soviet Union, many of them produced by US firms, were largely dependent on fuel supplied by American oil trusts. In view of the depletion of the stockpiles of petroleum products at that time, it is fair to say that the German Panzers would probably never have made it all the way to the outskirts of Moscow without fuel supplied by American oil trusts, as has been argued by the German historian Tobias Jersak. In light of this, the notion that US aid helped the Soviet Union to survive Barbarossa comes close to being laughable.

Hitler had code-named his attack on the Soviet Union after a medieval German emperor and crusader, Frederick I, known as Barbarossa, “Redbeard”. And he had opted to launch the attack on June 22, that is, the day after the summer solstice. Symbolically, these were two poor choices, conjuring up failure, defeat, and death. The Third Crusade, the one Barbarossa embarked upon, was far from successful and the emperor perished ingloriously while leading it, drowning while taking a bath in a river in Anatolia; and his body received a rather strange burial, with the skeleton, heart, and other parts ending up in different burial places in Outremer, the Middle-Eastern land of the crusaders’ enemies. As for June 22, that is the day when the sun’s annual trajectory, having reached a high point the previous day, the day of the summer solstice, takes a downward turn. Prior to the start of Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s sun had been rising steadily, and in the spring of 1941, after new victories in the Balkan, it had in fact reached what he believed was yet to come: its zenith; however, starting on June 22, it started to decline, slowly and almost invisibly at first, but perceptibly so after only a few months if not weeks. Hitler’s sun was to set slowly, but inexorably, and total darkness was to set in during the spring of 1945. To avoid being taken prisoner, Hitler committed suicide, and he ordered his body to be burned. However, the lack of fuel that would have been plentiful had Operation Barbarossa been successful, caused that job to be botched, and his corpse did not fare any better than that of Barbarossa. The charred remains were scraped together by the Soviets and shipped to Moscow. There, in the middle of the capital of the land of his archenemies, the Jerusalem of communism, he had looked forward to celebrating the success of Operation Barbarossa by overseeing a parade of German soldiers goose-stepping on Red Square. But as a result of the failure of his crusade, the few bits and pieces that were left of him, fragments of his jawbone and skull, ended up occupying a shoebox on a shelf in a Moscow archive.     


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Napoleon Between War and Revolution

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Robespierre's execution (depicted as sitting in wagon holding a handkerchief to his face), 28 July 1794. The fall of Robespierre and fellow Jacobins ushered the Thermidorean reaction, which would open the road to the Directory and eventually Napoleon.



The French Revolution was not a simple historic event but a long and complex process in which a number of different stadia may be identified. Some of these stadia were even counterrevolutionary in nature, for example the “aristocratic revolt” at the very start. Two phases, however, were unquestionably revolutionary.

The first stage was “1789”, the moderate revolution. It put an end to the “Ancien Régime” with its royal absolutism and feudalism, the power monopoly of the monarch and privileges of the nobility and the Church. The important achievements of “1789” also included the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, the equality of all Frenchmen before the law, the separation of Church and state, a parliamentary system based on a limited franchise, and, last but not least, the creation of an “indivisible”, centralized, and modern French state. These achievements, amounting to a major step forward in the history of France, were enshrined in a new constitution that was officially promulgated in 1791.

Girondists being taken to execution: As members of the budding bourgeoisie they had some setbacks in the turbulent revolutionary struggle, but their class interests eventually prevailed.

France’s pre-1789 Ancien Régime had been intimately associated with the absolute monarchy. Under the revolutionary system of “1789”, on the other hand, the king was supposed to find a comfortable role within a constitutional and parliamentary monarchy. But that did not work out because of intrigues by Louis XVI, and thus arose a radically new type of French state in 1792, a republic. “1789” was made possible by the violent interventions of the Parisian “mob”, the so-called “sans-culottes”, but its outcome was essentially the handiwork of a moderate class of people, virtually exclusively members of the haute bourgeoisie, the upper-middle class. On the ruins of the Ancien Régime, which had served the interests of the nobility and the Church, these gentlemen erected a state that was supposed to be in the service of the well-to-do burghers. Politically, these solid gentlemen initially found a home in the “club” or embryonic political party of the Feuillants, subsequently in that of the Girondins. The latter name reflected the place of origin of its leading element, a contingent of members of the bourgeoisie of Bordeaux, the great harbour on the banks of the Gironde estuary, whose wealth was based not only on trade in wine but also, and primarily, in slaves. In Paris, the den of the revolutionary lions, the sans-culottes, and more respectable but still radical revolutionaries known as the Jacobins, these provincial gentlemen never felt at home.

The second revolutionary stage was “1793”. That was the “popular”, radical, egalitarian revolution, with social rights (including the right to work) and relatively thorough social-economic reforms, reflected in a constitution promulgated in the revolutionary year I (1793), which never went into effect. In that stage, incorporated by the famous Maximilien Robespierre, the revolution was socially oriented and prepared to regulate the national economy, thus limiting individual freedom to some extent, “pour le bonheur commun”, that is, for the benefit of the entire nation. Since the right to own property was maintained, one can describe “1793” in contemporary terminology as “social democratic”, rather than truly “socialist”.

“1793” was the work of Robespierre and the Jacobins, especially the most ardent Jacobins, a group known as the Montagne, the “mountain”, because they occupied the highest rows of seats in the legislature. They were radical revolutionaries, predominantly of petit-bourgeois or lower-middle class background, whose principles were just as liberal as those of the haute bourgeoisie. But they also sought to satisfy the elementary needs of the Parisian plebeians, especially the artisans who constituted a majority among the sans-culottes. The sans-culottes were ordinary folks who wore long pants instead of the knickers (culottes) complemented by silk stockings typical of aristocrats and prosperous burghers. They were the storm troops of the revolution: the storming of the Bastille was one of their achievements. Robespierre and his radical Jacobins needed them as allies in their struggle against the Girondins, the bourgeoisie’s moderate revolutionaries, but also against the aristocratic and ecclesiastical counterrevolutionaries.

The radical revolution was in many ways a Parisian phenomenon, a revolution made in, by, and for Paris. Unsurprisingly, the opposition emanated mainly from outside of Paris, more specifically, from the bourgeoisie in Bordeaux and other provincial cities, exemplified by the Girondins, and from the peasants in the countryside. With “1793”, the revolution became a kind of conflict between Paris and the rest of France.

The counterrevolution – embodied by the aristocrats who had fled the country, the émigrés, priests, and seditious peasants in the Vendée and elsewhere in the provinces – was hostile to “1789” as well as “1793” and wanted nothing less than a return to the Ancien Régime; in the Vendée, the rebels fought for king and Church. As for the wealthy bourgeoisie, it was against “1793” but in favour of “1789”. In contrast to the Parisian sans-culottes, that class had nothing to gain but a lot to lose from radical revolutionary progress in the direction indicated by the Montagnards and their constitution of 1793, promoting egalitarianism and statism, that is, state intervention in the economy. But the bourgeoisie also opposed a return to the Ancien Régime, which would have put the state back in the service of the nobility and the Church. “1789”, on the other hand, resulted in a French state in the service of the bourgeoisie.

A retour en arrière to the moderate bourgeois revolution of 1789 – but with a republic instead of a constitutional monarchy – was the objective and in many ways also the result of the “Thermidor”, the 1794 coup d’état that put an end to the revolutionary government – and the life – of Robespierre. The “Thermidorian reaction” produced the constitution of the year III which, as the French historian Charles Morazé has written, “secured private property and liberal thought and abolished anything that seemed to push the bourgeois revolution in the direction of socialism”. The Thermidorian updating of “1789” produced a state that has correctly been described as a “bourgeois republic” (république bourgeoise) or a “republic of the property owners” (république des propriétaires).

Thus originated the Directoire, an extremely authoritarian regime, camouflaged by a thin layer of democratic varnish in the shape of legislatures whose members were elected on the basis of a very limited franchise. The Directoire found it excruciatingly difficult to survive while steering between, on the right, a royalist Scylla yearning for a return to the Ancien Régime and, on the left, a Charybdis of Jacobins and sans-culottes eager to re-radicalize the revolution. Various royalist and (neo-)Jacobin rebellions erupted, and each time the Directoire had to be saved by the intervention of the army. One of these uprisings was smothered in blood by an ambitious and popular general called Napoleon Bonaparte.

Napoleon was expected to put the French state at the disposal of the haute bourgeoisie, and that is exactly what he did.

The problems were finally solved by means of a coup d’état that took place on 18 Brumaire of the year VIII, November 9, 1799. To avoid losing its power to the royalists or the Jacobins, France’s well-to-do bourgeoisie turned its power over to Napoleon, a military dictator who was both reliable and popular. The Corsican was expected to put the French state at the disposal of the haute bourgeoisie, and that is exactly what he did. His primordial task was the elimination of the twin threat that had bedeviled the bourgeoisie. The royalist and therefore counterrevolutionary danger was neutralized by means of the “stick” of repression but even more so by the “carrot” of reconciliation. Napoleon allowed the emigrated aristocrats to return to France, to recuperate their property, and to enjoy the privileges showered by his regime not only on the wealthy burghers but on all property owners. He also reconciled France with the Church by signing a concordat with the Pope.

To get rid of the (neo-)Jacobin threat and to prevent a new radicalization of the revolution, Napoleon relied mostly on an instrument which had already been used by the Girondins and the Directoire, namely warfare. Indeed, when we recall Napoleon’s dictatorship, we do not think so much of revolutionary events in the capital, as in the years 1789 to 1794, but of an endless series of wars fought far from Paris and in many cases far beyond the borders of France. That is not a coincidence, because the so-called “revolutionary wars” were functional for the primordial objective of the champions of the moderate revolution, including Bonaparte and his sponsors: consolidating the achievements of “1789” and preventing both a return to the Ancien Régime and a repeat of “1793”.

With their policy of terror, known as la Terreur – the Terror -, Robespierre and the Montagnards had sought not only to protect but also to radicalize the revolution. That meant that they “internalized” the revolution within France, first and foremost in the heart of France, the capital, Paris. It is not a coincidence that the guillotine, the “revolutionary razor”, symbol of the radical revolution, was set up in the middle of Place de la Concorde, that is, in the middle of the square in the middle of the city in the middle of the country. To concentrate their own energy and the energy of the sans-culottes on the internalization of the revolution, Robespierre and his Jacobin comrades – in contrast to the Girondins – opposed international wars, which they considered to be a waste of revolutionary energy and a threat to the revolution. Conversely, the endless series of wars that were fought afterwards, first under the auspices of the Directoire and then Bonaparte, amounted to an externalization of the revolution, an exportation of the bourgeois revolution of 1789. Domestically, they simultaneously served to prevent a further internalization or radicalization of the revolution à la 1793.

War, international conflict, served to liquidate the revolution, domestic conflict, class conflict. This was done in two ways. First, war caused the most ardent revolutionaries to disappear from the cradle of the revolution, Paris. Initially as volunteers, but all too soon as draftees, countless young sans-culottes vanished from the capital to fight in foreign lands, all too often never to return. As a result, in Paris only a comparative handful of male fighters remained to carry out major revolutionary actions such as the storming of the Bastille, too few to repeat the successes of the sans-culottes between 1789 and 1793; this was clearly demonstrated by the failure of the Jacobin insurrections under the Directoire. Bonaparte perpetuated the system of compulsory military service and perpetual war. “It was he”, wrote the historian Henri Guillemin, “who shipped the potentially dangerous young plebeians far away from Paris and even all the way to Moscow – to the great relief of the well-to-do burghers [gens de bien]”.

Second, the news of great victories generated patriotic pride among the sans-culottes who had stayed at home, a pride that was to compensate for the dwindling revolutionary enthusiasm. With a little help from the god of war, Mars, the revolutionary energy of the sans-culottes and the French people in general could thus be directed into other channels, less radical in revolutionary terms. This reflected a displacement process whereby the French people, including the Parisian sans-culottes, gradually lost its enthusiasm for the revolution and the ideals of liberty, equality, and solidarity not only among Frenchmen but with other nations; instead, the French increasingly worshipped the golden calf of French chauvinism, territorial expansion to their country’s supposedly “natural” borders such as the Rhine, and the international glory of the “great nation” and – after 18 Brumaire – of its great leader, soon to be emperor: Bonaparte.

Napoleon I, emperor of the French, by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1806)

Thus we can also understand the ambivalent reaction of foreigners to the French wars and conquests of that era. While some – e.g. the Ancien Régime elites and the peasants – rejected the French Revolution in toto and others – above all local Jacobins such as the Dutch “patriots” – warmly welcomed it, many people wavered between admiration for the ideas and achievements of the French Revolution and revulsion for the militarism, the boundless chauvinism, and the ruthless imperialism of France after Thermidor, during the Directoire, and under Napoleon.

Many non-French struggled with simultaneous admiration and aversion for the French Revolution. In others, initial enthusiasm gave way sooner or later to disillusion. The British, for example, welcomed “1789” because they interpreted the moderate revolution as the importation into France of the kind of constitutional and parliamentary monarchy they themselves had adopted a century earlier at the time of their so-called Glorious Revolution. William Wordsworth evoked that feeling with the following lines:

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!

After “1793” and the Terror associated with it, however, most British observed the events on the other side of the Channel with revulsion. Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France – published in November 1790 – became the counterrevolutionary Bible not only in England but all over the world. In the mid-20th century, George Orwell was to write that “to the average Englishman, the French Revolution means no more than a pyramid of severed heads”. The same thing could be said about virtually all non-French (and many French) to this day.

It was to put an end to the revolution in France itself, then, that Napoleon abducted it from Paris and exported it to the rest of Europe. In order to prevent the mighty revolutionary current from excavating and deepening its own channel – Paris and the rest of France – first the Thermidorians and later Napoleon caused its troubled waters to overflow the borders of France, inundate all of Europe, thus becoming vast, but shallow and calm.

To take the revolution away from its Parisian cradle, to put an end to what was in many ways a project of the petit-bourgeois Jacobins and sans-culottes of the capital, and conversely, to consolidate the moderate revolution dear to bourgeois hearts, Napoleon Bonaparte was the perfect choice, even symbolically. He was born in Ajaccio, the French provincial city that happened to be the farthest from Paris. Moreover, he was “a child of the Corsican gentry [gentilhommerie corse], that is, the scion of a family that could be equally described as being haut-bourgeoise but with aristocratic pretensions, or else as lesser nobility but with a bourgeois lifestyle. In many ways, the Bonapartes belonged to the haute bourgeoisie, the class that, in all of France, had managed to achieve its ambitions thanks to “1789”, and later, in the face of threats from the left as well as the right, attempted to consolidate this triumph via a military dictatorship. Napoleon embodied the provincial haute bourgeoisie which, following the example of the Girondins, wanted a moderate revolution, crystallized in a state, democratic if possible but authoritarian if necessary, that would permit itself to maximize its wealth and power. The experiences of the Directoire had revealed the shortcomings in this respect of a republic with relatively democratic institutions, and it was for that reason that the bourgeoisie finally sought salvation in a dictatorship.

The military dictatorship that replaced the post-Thermidorian “bourgeois republic” appeared on the scene like a deus ex machina in Saint-Cloud, a village just outside Paris, on “18 Brumaire of the year VIII”, that is, 9 November 1799. This decisive political step in the liquidation of the revolution was simultaneously a geographic step away from Paris, away from the hotbed of the revolution, away from the lions’ den of revolutionary Jacobins and sans-culottes. In addition, the transfer to Saint-Cloud was a small but symbolically significant step in the direction of the far less revolutionary, if not counterrevolutionary countryside. Saint-Cloud happens to be on the way from Paris to Versailles, the residence of the absolutist monarchs of the pre-revolutionary era. The fact that a coup d’état yielding an authoritarian regime took place there was the topographic reflection of the historic fact that France, after the democratic experiment of the revolution, found itself back on the road towards a new absolutist system similar to the one of which Versailles had been the “sun”. But this time the destination was an absolutist system presided over by a Bonaparte rather than a Bourbon and – much more importantly – an absolutist system in the service of the bourgeoisie rather than the nobility.

The coup d’état of Saint-Cloud on a British caricature by James Gillray.

With respect to the revolution, Bonaparte’s dictatorship was ambivalent. With his advent to power, the revolution was ended, even liquidated, at least in the sense that there would be no more egalitarian experiments (as in “1793”) and no more efforts to maintain a republican-democratic façade (as in “1789”). On the other hand, the essential achievements of “1789” were maintained and even enshrined.

So, was Napoleon a revolutionary or not? He was for the revolution in the sense that he was against the royalist counterrevolution, and since two negatives cancel each other, a counter-counterrevolutionary is automatically a revolutionary, n’est-ce pas? But one can also say that Napoleon was simultaneously against the revolution: he favoured the moderate, bourgeois revolution of 1789, associated with the Feuillants, Girondins, and Thermidorians, but was against the radical revolution of 1793, handiwork of the Jacobins and sans-culottes. In her book La Révolution, une exception française?, the French historian Annie Jourdan quotes a contemporary German commentator who realized that Bonaparte “was never anything other than the personification of one of the different stages of the revolution”, as he wrote in 1815. That stage was the bourgeois, moderate revolution, “1789”, the revolution Napoleon was not only to consolidate within France but also to export to the rest of Europe.

Napoleon eliminated the royalist as well as Jacobin threats, but he rendered another important service to the bourgeoisie. He arranged for the right to own property, cornerstone of the liberal ideology so dear to bourgeois hearts, to be legally enshrined. And he showed his devotion to this principle by reintroducing slavery, still widely regarded as a legitimate form of property. France had actually been the first country to abolish slavery, namely at the time of the radical revolution, under Robespierre’s auspices. He had done so despite the opposition of his antagonists, the Girondins, supposedly moderate gentlemen, precursors of Bonaparte as champions of the cause of the bourgeoisie and of its liberal ideology, glorifying liberty – but not for slaves.

“In Napoleon”, wrote the historian Georges Dupeux, “the bourgeoisie found a protector as well as a master”. The Corsican was unquestionably a protector and even a great champion of the cause of the well-to-do burghers, but he was never their master. In reality, from the beginning to the end of his “dictatorial” career he was a subordinate of the nation’s captains of industry and finance, the same gentlemen who already controlled France at the time of the Directoire, the “république des propriétaires”, and who had entrusted him with the management of the country on their behalf.

Financially, not only Napoleon but the entire French state were made dependent on an institution that was − and has remained until the present time − the property of the country’s elite, even though that reality was obfuscated by the application of a label that created the impression that it was a state enterprise, the Banque de France, the national bank. Its bankers raised money from the moneyed bourgeoisie and made it available, at relatively high interest rates, to Napoleon, who used it to govern and arm France, to wage endless war, and of course to play emperor with lots of pomp and circumstance.

Napoleon was nothing other than the figurehead of a regime, a dictatorship of the haute bourgeoisie, a regime that knew how to dissimulate itself behind a lavish choreography in the style of ancient Rome, conjuring up first, rather modestly, a consulate and subsequently a boastful empire.

Let us return to the role of the endless series of wars waged by Napoleon, military adventures undertaken for the glory of the “grande nation” and its ruler. We already know that these conflicts served first and foremost to liquidate the radical revolution in France itself. But they also enabled the bourgeoisie to accumulate capital as never before. Supplying the army with weapons, uniforms, food, etc., huge profits were realized by industrialists, merchants, and bankers. The wars were great for business, and the victories yielded territories that contained valuable raw materials or could serve as markets for the finished products of France’s industry. This benefited the French economy in general, but primarily its industry, whose development was thus accelerated considerably. Consequently, industrialists (and their partners in banking) were able to play an increasingly important role within the bourgeoisie.

Under Napoleon, industrial capitalism, poised to become typical of the 19th century, started to overtake commercial capitalism, economic trendsetter during the previous two centuries. It is worth noting that the accumulation of commercial capital in France had been possible above all thanks to the slave trade, while the accumulation of industrial capital had a lot to do with the virtually uninterrupted string of wars fought first by the Directoire and then by Napoleon. In this sense, Balzac was right when he wrote that “behind every great fortune with no apparent source there lies a forgotten crime”.

Napoleon’s wars stimulated the development of the industrial system of production. Simultaneously, they sounded the death knell for the ancient, small-scale, artisanal system in which craftsmen laboured in the traditional, unmechanized manner. Via warfare, the Bonapartist bourgeoisie not only made the sans-culottes – predominantly artisans, shopkeepers, etc. – disappear physically from Paris, it also caused them to vanish from the social-economic landscape. In the drama of the revolution, the sans-culottes had played a major role. Because of the wars that liquidated the (radical) revolution, they, the storm troops of revolutionary radicalism, exited the stage of history.

Thanks to Napoleon, France’s bourgeoisie thus managed to rid itself of its class enemy. But that turned out to be a Pyrrhic victory. Why? The economic future belonged not to the workshops and the craftsmen who laboured “independently”, owned some property, if only their tools, and were therefore petit-bourgeois, but to the factories, their owners, the industrialists, but also their labourers, the wage-earning and typically very poorly paid factory workers. This “proletariat” was to reveal itself to the bourgeoisie as a much more dangerous class enemy than the sans-culottes and other craftsmen had ever been. Moreover, the proletarians aimed to bring about a much more radical revolution than Robespierre’s “1793”. But this was to be a concern for the bourgeois regimes that were to succeed that of the supposedly “great” Napoleon, including that of his nephew, Napoleon III, denigrated by Victor Hugo as “Napoleon le Petit”.

There are many people inside and outside of France, including politicians and historians, who despise and denounce Robespierre, the Jacobins, and the sans-culottes because of the bloodshed associated with their radical, “popular” revolution of 1793. The same folks often display a great deal of admiration for Napoleon, restorer of “law and order” and saviour of the moderate, bourgeois revolution of 1789. They condemn the internalization of the French Revolution because it was accompanied by the Terror, which in France, especially in Paris, made many thousands of victims, and for this they blame the Jacobin “ideology” and/or the presumably innate bloodthirstiness of the “populace”. They appear not to realize – or do not want to realize – that the externalization of the revolution by the Thermidorians and by Napoleon, accompanied by international wars that dragged on for almost twenty years, cost the lives of many millions of people throughout Europe, including countless Frenchmen. Those wars amounted to a much greater and bloodier form of terror than the Terreur orchestrated by Robespierre had ever been.

That terror-regime is estimated to have cost the lives of approximately 50,000 people, representing more or less 0.2 percent of France’s population. Is that a lot or a little, asks the historian Michel Vovelle, who cites these figures in one of his books. In comparison with the number of victims of the wars fought for the temporary territorial expansion of the grande nation and for the glory of Bonaparte, it is very little. The Battle of Waterloo alone, the final battle of Napoleon’s presumably glorious career, including its prelude, the mere “skirmishes” of Ligny and Quatre Bras, caused between 80,000 and 90,000 casualties. Worst of all, many hundreds of thousands of men never returned from his disastrous campaigns in Russia. Terrible, n’est-ce pas? But nobody ever seems to talk about a Bonapartist “terror”, and Paris and the rest of France are full of monuments, streets and squares that commemorate the presumably heroic and glorious deeds of the most famous of all Corsicans.

Antoine Wiertz, “Une scène de l’enfer”, Wiertz Museum, Brussels.


 

By substituting permanent warfare for permanent revolution within France, and above all in Paris, noted Marx and Engels, the Thermidorians and their successors “perfected” the strategy of terror, in other words, caused much more blood to flow than at the time of Robespierre’s policy of terror. In any event, the exportation or externalization, by means of war, of the Thermidorian, (haut) bourgeois revolution, update of “1789”, claimed many more victims than the Jacobin attempt to radicalize or internalize the revolution within France by means of la Terreur.

Like our politicians and media, most historians still consider warfare to be a perfectly legitimate state activity and a source of glory and pride for the victors and, even for our inevitably “heroic” losers. Conversely, the tens or hundreds of thousands, and even millions of victims of warfare – now mainly carried out as bombings from the air and therefore really one-sided massacres, rather than wars – never receive the same attention and sympathy as the far less numerous victims of “terror”, a form of violence that is not sponsored, at least not overtly, by a state and is therefore branded as illegitimate.

The present “war on terror” comes to mind. As far as the never-ceasing-to-wage-war superpower is concerned, this is a form of permanent and ubiquitous warfare that stimulates unthinking, flag-waving chauvinism among ordinary Americans – the American “sans-culottes”! – while providing the poorest among them with jobs in the Marines. To the great advantage of American industry, this perpetual warfare gives US corporations access to important raw materials such as petroleum, and for weapons manufacturers and many other firms, especially those with friends in the halls of power in Washington, it functions as a cornucopia of sky-high profits. The similarities to Napoleon’s wars are obvious. How do the French say it again? “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”.

With Napoleon Bonaparte, the revolution ended where it was supposed to end, at least as far as the French bourgeoisie was concerned. With his arrival on the scene, the bourgeoisie triumphed. It is not a coincidence that in French cities members of the social elite, known as les notables, meaning businessmen, bankers, lawyers and other representatives of the haute bourgeoisie, like to congregate in cafés and restaurants that are named after Bonaparte, as the brilliant sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has observed.

The haute bourgeoisie has always remained grateful to Napoleon for the eminent services he rendered to their class. The most prominent of these services was the liquidation of the radical revolution, of “1793”, which threatened the considerable advantages the bourgeoisie had acquired, thanks to “1789”, at the expense of the nobility and the Church. Conversely, the bourgeoisie’s hatred of Robespierre, figurehead of “1793”, explains the almost total absence of statues and other monuments, names of streets and squares, that honour his memory – even though his abolition of slavery amounted to one of the greatest achievements in the history of democracy worldwide.

Napoleon is also venerated beyond the borders of France, in Belgium, Italy, Germany, etc., mostly by the well-to-do bourgeoisie. The reason for this is undoubtedly that all those countries were still feudal, quasi-medieval societies, where his conquests made it possible to liquidate their own Ancien Régimes and introduce the moderate revolution, wellspring, as it had already been in France, of considerable improvements for the entire population (except nobility and clergy, of course) but also of special privileges for the bourgeoisie. That probably also explains why, in Waterloo today, not Wellington but Napoleon is the undisputed star of the tourist show, so that tourists who do not know better might get the impression that it was he who won the battle!

Statue of Napoleon in Waterloo (Photo: J. Pauwels).


Jacques Pauwels’ latest book is Le Paris des san-sculottes: Guide du Paris révolutionnaire 1789-1799 (Éditions Delga, Paris, March 2021; English edition forthcoming). Jacques R. Pauwels is the author of The Great Class War: 1914-1918.




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ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS
 

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