M. Jaurès and his integral Socialists may, of course, be trusted to find their place among the “pacifists.” The late Herr Bebel led the German Social Democrats back to an acceptance of the national idea; but not so M. Jaurès. A strategist at once bold and astute, who has never known the responsibilities of office, to whom la patrie is only a gunmaker’s advertisement, he will almost certainly co-operate with the reorganised bloc.
It is for the prophets to tell us what the elections will bring forth. For us, plain onlookers, the life of the most interesting and logical nation in Europe has come to a crisis, the solution of which may notably react not only upon civilisation and humanity—those great abstractions—but upon ourselves, and the little parts we play in each.
THE SOLDIER-PRIESTS OF FRANCE
It makes me a little proud to remember that I was one of the few writers in these countries to announce and celebrate the birth of la nouvelle France long before the coming of the war. For many years the Republic has been in ill repute in the Catholic world. Men thought of her as the home of Renan and scepticism, of Gambetta and anti-clericalism, of Combes—the unspeakable Combes—and persecution, of Anatole France and refined sensualism, of a score of lesser writers and plain pornography. That interpretation of her life was never true although it had elements of truth in it. Even in the old France there were two strains: there was Rabelais as well as Pascal, Montaigne as well as Bossuet, Voltaire as well as St. Francis de Sales. There is, indeed, lodged in the very mind and temper of France a seed of perilous adventure. Her courage is a constant temptation to dally with the blasphemous and the foul: her lucidity—for vague and furtive innuendoes are like a toothache to French style—doubles the offence when she lapses.
But on the other hand there was something peculiarly obnoxious in the circumstance that these attacks on France proceeded in great part from German sources. That there were many splendid Catholics in Germany was of course true. They were strong enough in numbers and organisation to have done something finer than throw themselves into the arms of Prussianism. The failure of the Centre Party in that regard will lie as a heavy cloud on its future. But that German Catholics should have lent themselves, as they did, to a systematic denigration of France in foreign periodicals was contemptible. The truth is that every German in the modern period has become infected with the superstition that he belongs to the chosen race. Matthew Arnold—who, for the rest, did not himself believe very luminously in God—started in these countries the notion that the war of 1870 was, as he called it, the judgment of Judæa on Greece. That a Protestant God should have thus judged a country whose old title was that of “eldest daughter of the Church,” was an interpretation of events peculiarly agreeable to militant Protestants both in England and Germany. But that Catholics should have assimilated such a view was remarkable. It is true that French policy played disastrously into the hands of Bismarck. Gambetta’s error of anti-clericalism led from disintegration to disintegration. Bismarck has left on record statements of his reasons for embarking on the Kulturkampf, which for frigid wickedness of purpose cannot be equalled in political literature.
“The laurels of Sadowa and Sedan do not satisfy my ambitions, I have a more glorious mission, that of making myself master of Catholicism.”
“The enemy of Germany is Pontifical Rome. That is the danger which menaces the relations of Germany and France. If France identifies herself with Rome she constitutes herself by that fact alone the sworn enemy of Germany.”
France made her mistakes, but before the war she had begun to correct and cancel them. The gradual return to fair play from the midnight bigotry of Combes to the policy of appeasement of M. Briand, and the execution of that policy by M. Poincaré was very marked in all its stages. And in the measure in which that correction of old mistakes and tyrannies is made, not only in France but under every other Allied Flag, will the coming victory repay the blood that is buying it. But that German Catholics should have held up their country before the world as a shining model, and France as an abandoned and degenerate nation, is a thing intelligible only to those who know the vanity and self-exaltation of the modern German. While they were thus fabling, who really spoke for Germany in the ear of the world? These are the Germans. Schopenhauer with his scientific pessimism, truer indeed and nobler than any light philosophy of pleasure, but profoundly anti-Christian. Treitschke, who taught that the State is above all moral laws. A line of theologians from Strauss to Harnack and his contemporaries, who claimed to have shredded into mere rags of myth the historical beginning of the Christian faith and fold. Nietzsche, who “transcended morality” for the individual as Treitschke had done for the State, and preached pride, pleasure and domination as the cardinal virtues. Nietzsche who wrote—
“They have said to you: Happy are the peaceful! but I say to you: Happy are the warriors, for they shall be called not the sons of Jehovah, but the sons of Odin, who is greater than Jehovah!”