The Century 1914

On the book The Century 1914 by Dominique Venner (Pygmalion, 2006). The author answers the questions of the journalist Pauline Lecomte.

In publishing The Age of 1914 , Dominique Venner offered an impressive historical synthesis which is a culmination of all his works, and proposed a new interpretation of the European history in the twentieth century. To summarize this book is impossible. Everyone will make their own interpretations. It provides a detailed analysis of the great revolutionary movements and major conflicts of the twentieth century. It contains a broad meditations on history, politics and great actors. It also contains projections for the future. What is immediately striking is the description of the old European social order, the modern times order and its development before 1914. Thast was the order that the Great War destroyed. On its ruins, Dominique Venner shows that four major ideological systems arose, embodied by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, Lenin, Mussolini and Hitler. The author takes these ideologies seriously. For him, they are overlaid with classic conflict of powers, and exacerbated the struggles that have taken place during a large part of the century. The American democratic order emerged victorious. And with what consequences, and for how long? These are the questions to which Dominique Venner offers answers. It also examines the principles that will enable European nations to be reborn. We will try to find out more with him.

Pauline Lecomte: A note of your Prologue attracts attention. You write that France and Europe, contrary to what is claimed, have not entered into the era of the end of ideology. To the contrary, they are experiencing ideological saturation. What do you mean?

Dominique Venner: We do not perceive this ideological saturation because one ideology reigns supreme. It has become the norm. It is not discussed and is not even seen for what it is. This is a consequence of the new "Thirty Years War" (1914-1945) that ended with the victory of two major foreign and hostile to Europe powers, the United States and the USSR. Consequently, Europe has ceased to exist. Bleeding, traumatized, guilt-ridden, meaningless, doubting herself, she lost faith in her values to the point of forgetting them altogether. She became a part of the two victorious ideological systems, divided between the supporters of the Soviet communism and the American democratism. This lasted until the implosion of the USSR in 1991. From that time, only one model has emerged, Americanism, crowned by its victories, its economic efficiency, its technical and military superiority. Various chauvinistic bursts against it have not changed anything. The American liberal ideology, its economics, hypocritical moralism, its globalism and its interpretation of history have established themselves as the standard, single-mindedly.

PL: But could the debate on the French decline and reforms result in a rejection of the dominant ideology?

DV : There is no debate. Everyone is saying the same thing, left and right. Everyone suggests technical or economic, or institutional remedies for what is a huge crisis of civilization, a metaphysical crisis, existential.

DV: It is a direct consequence of the new Thirty Years War which began in 1914 and ended in 1945 with a series of disasters and the death of the old European order, that was still alive on the eve of 1914.

PL: You dedicated the first chapter of your book to the description of this European world before 1914. That world comprised, you say, both the traditional and very modern features. Does it not mean that at the time the alliance was possible in Europe between seemingly contradictory worlds of tradition and modernity?

DV: We usually forget that before 1914, except for France where the republican system was not working very well, all the major European powers were monarchies supported by active and progressive nobility. The performance of the German Reich, that was a worry for England was even one of the causes of the war.

DV: Without idealizing it, we see that the purpose of the nobility was not only its perpetuation, but also related to merit, implying a constant renewal, to also the transmission of a service ethic and asceticism. The function of the nobility, when it is worthy of the name, is to control and protect, but also to offer the whole society a living model of higher humanity, in the manner of Homer's heroes in ancient Greece. In Prussia, the secret of this superiority was based on training of the successive generations who had internalized an ethic of duty, which was ingrained in the subconscious. In 1914 and until the end of the war, with few exceptions, the German bourgeoisie acquired the values of the Prussian nobility and the authoritarian state, where a strong power, independent of special interests and classes, was dedicated to the common good. Through the voice of Thomas Mann, Max Weber, Oswald Spengler, the theologian Ernst Troeltsch or historian Friedrich Meinecke, we understand that the German intellectuals asserted until 1918 that freedom is conceived not only in serving the duty, but that also service and human dignity are not mutually exclusive.

PL: You say that the European order was destroyed by the war of 1914. But that order did not prevent the outbreak of the war. Isn’t then that order to blame for the war?

DV: Indeed, on the eve of 1914, the European system was in crisis. But it is not the order that caused the war, but rather the oblivion and denial of the order. Since the end of the first Thirty Years War in 1648, the so-called European concert between states was based on the awareness of belonging to the same family of nations between the wars which were to remain limited and subject to "the rights of nations". The Concert of Europe was based on the civilizational values common to all the ruling elites. However, since the late nineteenth century, the common consciousness was transformed by the democratization of public life, which became the main cause of hatred between nations and resulted in the embarrassment of 1914. Thereafter, the industrialization of war multiplied in unimaginable proportions the murderous and destructive weaponry. This morbid process of changing passions and technology was a product of not the European civilization but of its corruption. In their time, the greatest minds, such as Taine, Renan, Nietzsche, Unamuno, Ortega y Gasset, Spengler, Toynbee, Max Weber were worried about the drift that led to the disaster.

PL: After 1918, were there not attempts at revitalization of the European order?

DV: It was, indeed, the essence of all the ideas of the "third way" between capitalism and communism, present in some resistance movements. It was also the original meaning of Italian Fascism and German National Socialism - putting aside the specifically Nazi doctrine of racial Darwinism, which was something of its own self. These two great movements however, remained dependent on previous democratic excesses. They were wildly aggressive in their nationalism. They were not at all European. However, they were based originally on healthy aspirations of the younger “trenches” generation: the desire to start a new aristocracy of merit and socialism freed from the class struggle and egalitarianism. The active part of this generation was composed of young men who believed in the expeditious and unlimited power of the will. In Germany, after the failure of the old elites in 1918, the revival was underway till 1933 driven by the new elite emerging out of plain citizenry and the military. Their cyclopean efforts and strategy as brutal as they were clumsy, failed as well, and the failure was much more definitive than the previous one. In the aftermath of two world wars, only ruins of the ancient civilization remained in Europe and a huge mess, while domination without distinctions by the foreign powers and ideologies was imposed; the pseudo-European Union is the product of that.

DV: Even when they are perfectly utopian, ideologies determine the behavior of men and communities once they seize their mind and imagination, that is to say their "representations" of reality.

DV: Unlike other mammals, humans need to give meaning to their lives. They need meaning as much as bread. Men exist only in their "representations": religious, moral or ideological, often unaware of them, yet they shape their existence and goals. These "representations", which could also be called prejudices, themselves change in different cultures, beliefs and ages, only the need for them is universal. The intensity of the need to form "representations" varies, of course, depending on the individual. While, for example, all European from the thirteenth century, lord or shepherd, was satisfied with a basic belief in a tutelary God, the clergy were exploring theology on which they based the purpose and justification of their lives. It may be objected that many frauds and cynics entered into professions without any "representation" just to listen to their appetites, their thirst for power or misanthropy. Maybe so, but to make the absolute selfishness an exclusive vision of life, is still in itself a "representation."

DV: For the most part, these are the same that were imported by the victors of 1945, a mix of anti-fascism and Americanism without the national qualities of Americans, but with the added bonus of a compassionate neurosis. Everyone or almost everyone is impregnated with it, starting with the former leftists. It should be noted that the attractive ideal of individual freedom and openness to the world of liberalism, mask more or less the predatory oligarchic power associated with the media. We also know that any market power turns people into slaves and consumers of the goods, but these are truths to keep to ourselves. In the manner of a huge clear-cutting bulldozer, the system leaves Europe with empty shell of States having abdicated much of their sovereignty to the global power of financial predators. There is no question that the nations themselves lost the treasures of which they were once the guardians, and lost the power to protect their own nationals; they are now exposed to the crazy ukases of the Eurocrats for which they did not ask, to the invasions of exotic manufactured products, not to mention other, more serious, consequences of invasions. Gradually a landscape of torn societies emerges, in which the common rules of civility are largely abolished, where fathers are not quite fathers and women are always something more than women, where youth is made incapable of any exercise of will, -- selfish and capricious beings. The general breakdown of the system is temporarily forestalled with antidepressants and the common efforts of the psychologist, the judge and the police.

PL: According to you, this system has reached the end of its course and already hit the wall of reality.

DV: The collapse of the myth of Progress, the key of the whole system, is the first reality caused by the menace of the Progress itself with its myth of unlimited economic growth, the threats to nature and to life, the threat of biological manipulation. Universalism is the second pillar of the ideological system. Now, however, the reality of the clash of civilizations undermined that pillar. This reality is reflected in the scale of the entire planet, but also on our soil due to massive immigration. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the world has entered a totally new era, unstable, dangerous and unpredictable, but, paradoxically, which can give a chance to the Europeans.

PL: Can we draw an analogy between what Europe has lived through since 1945 and what Asia, especially China, had lived through for a long century after the Opium Wars and until recently?

DV: Despite all the differences, a mental detour to China is indeed interesting to apprehend the distances and understand the lot of Europe since the Second World War. China possessed a many thousand years of history and was a civilization that could compete well with that of Europe. She also knew historical ruptures, suffered invasions, yet she had triumphed, still able to reinvent itself. As you said, everything changed for her starting with the Opium Wars with one extreme episode in 1860, the conquest of Beijing and the sack of the Summer Palace by a Franco-British expeditionary force . China was then forced to open its ports to trade and the influence of the West without being able to oppose it. The trauma was immense. For the first time in its long history, China doubted itself and its civilization. The new generations were convinced that the tradition was the cause of the decline. To modernize and regain power, China had to get rid of ancestral values and adopt those of the West, including communism. This was the origin of the chain to the bloody revolutions in the delusions of Maoism. Afterwards, under Deng Xiaoping, shaken by the fall of the USSR, and also influenced by the example of Japan and even Singapore, China - that is to say its hierarchs - has chosen to follow her own way. It took the American West input of liberal economics, but retained an effective authoritarian political system and in doing so, on the spiritual plane, China went back to the roots of Confucianism. Proportionally, since World War II, Europeans, without knowing it, had an experience similar to that trauma China endured in the late nineteenth century. We have lost faith in our values , which we do not even recognize anymore. We imitate the American model, even when we criticize it, having no freedom to imagine a truly European future.

NRH [sic! A-x]: Do you think that the example of China and all other re-awakened identities will in the future encourage the Europeans?

DV: For Europeans, the combination of modernity and tradition as observed in Asia is a troubling mystery. With the premonitions of the end of history, the culture of progress, the contempt for the past and given our lack of long memory, we are helpless before the great global movement back toward identity. We take it even as regress: -- what a ridiculous idea, isn’t it, to appeal to Confucius, Moses or Mohammed! In our error, we seek technical (political, economic, organizational) solutions for a crisis of civilization that is spiritual. It is therefore difficult to understand that a Muslim computer scientist is more powerful for he feeds on the Koran; that the State of Israel is based on the Torah; that the modernization of India is inseparable from return to Hinduism. This is the reality. Technical modernity cannot happen other than by people who vigorously assume their identities going back to their sources. Outside of Europe, the page has been turned on the quest for modernity in imitation of the Americanized West and on the rejection of tradition.

DV: In the immediate future, as we are victims of our lack of identity memory, we stay at the early stage of the quest for efficiency: our decline is analyzed as a technical, or political, or structural failure. But it will come to an end. Faced with major events to come, we will have no choice but to call on our spiritual energy. The one from which the vital impulse of our civilization arose several thousand years ago, and continued to lead us for better parts of our history. To become impregnated with the thought of Homer for Europeans, Confucius for Chinese Muhammad for Muslims is to be reborn on the models that fueled the most authentic part of these respective cultures. It's not going in reverse, it is the reactualization of the living principles of the ideal of our life. We must liberate our founding poetry from the libraries which locked them up and sterilized our wisdom culture!

PL: In your mention of prophets, sages and poets of the founders of the great traditions of identity, you are quoting among others Confucius, Mohammed, Moses or Homer, but not Jesus. Why?

DV: Because of His claim of divinity, and His universality, Jesus is apart and on another level entirely. He himself says that His kingdom is not of this world.

DV: I do not propose any recipe. I propose to reflect on ourselves with a truly fresh look. Facing the collapse of all political and religious foundations, I propose to return to our authentic sources, those of the Homeric poems, the foundation of the Greek world, and unparalleled expression of all Indo-European heritage [1]. The solutions will then come by themselves. In a terrible spiritual crisis, first spiritual answers must be provided. Men exist only in what distinguishes them: clan, lineage, history, culture, tradition. There is no universal answer to the questions of existence and behavior. Each civilization has its truth and its gods, all respectable so long as they do not threaten us. Each civilization brings his answers, without which people, men or women, deprived of identity and models, rush into bottomless trouble. Like plants, men cannot live without roots. It is up to everyone to find his own.

[1] Subject widely developed in "History and tradition of the Europeans. 30,000 years of identity" (Le Rocher, 2002, new edition completed 2004).

Well he does say this:

We also know that any market power turns people into slaves and consumers of the goods, but these are truths to keep to ourselves. In the manner of a huge clear-cutting bulldozer, the system leaves Europe with empty shell of States having abdicated much of their sovereignty to the global power of financial predators.

Maybe he's not against all trade, but he's really got something against modern capitalism or hypercapitalism. I can understand the argument that speculators and predators have too much power in today's world, but when people go on about the evils of the market too much I do start to wonder or worry.

Venner's admiration for the old Middle European aristocracy is of a piece with his unease with markets. One of the big sellers of 1915 was Haendler und Helden, or Merchants and Heroes. The British and French were supposed to be mere tradesmen, and the noble Germans heroes who disdained mere commerce.

Heroism, duty, service, are admirable qualities, but one has to find a way to fit them into the world we live in -- commercial, democratic, or whatever you want to call it. Otherwise, people looking for glory can do real damage.

With respect to Venner, he doesn't quite get that aristocracy wasn't about duty or service alone. There were other qualities that distinguished the aristocracy or nobility from the dutiful servant or peasant classes, and those qualities -- the drive for distinction and glory, say -- didn't always have wholesome or constructive results.

This is what Francis Fukuyama, and before him, Leo Strauss and Nietzsche, were going on about: the role of "thymos," that is, spiritedness or ambition, in a commercial, democratic order that expects such forces to be narrowly channeled into money-making activity and middle class life.

It's also the problem William James was getting it back then when he tried to find "the moral equivalent of war," something that could satisfy the desire for service and self-sacrifice apart from wars that might be senseless or destructive.

One can't blame all of what happened on the old nobility, of course -- the professional politicians and businessmen were pushing in the same direction -- but the nobility were the people who saw the greatest change in their fortunes in the era Venner is talking about and perhaps the people who were positioned to serve as a break on destructive tendencies that they didn't resist.

he's really got something against modern capitalism or hypercapitalism

In the current toxic environment, yes, perhaps. It is still more accurate to say that he's got something for spirituality, aristocracy, service. There is a patient: overweight, diabetic, blind, who eats nothing but copious amounts of pasta and naps the rest of the time. The doctor says,-- Keep that truth to yourself: you are killing yourself surer than if you let a bulldozer run over you. The patient responds -- You've really got something against spaghetti!

Heroism, duty, service, are admirable qualities, but one has to find a way to fit them into the world we live in -- commercial, democratic...

Man lives for heroic service; that is our purpose. Yes, the world has got to change; that is what the article is about. The virtues do not have to change, and they cannot. A nation without virtue has no identity and soon experiences a death. If I lived in France today, I would not worry so much that a drive for distinction might turn out unwholesome.

Back to America, it is not true that we are intrinsically hypercapitalistic. We are also a soldier nation, a frontier nation, a nation of farmers, of pilgrims and of preachers. This is why we seem to be surviving better than Europe; at least Venner counts us among victors. Hypercapitalism is the caricature of ourselves that we let the world develop. Venner, by the way, understood that: he knew, I think, that American digests commercialism in ways Europe cannot.

What Venner said is reminiscent of what Francis Fukuyama was saying 20 years ago. I'd have to go back and look through it again. My recollection, though, is that Europe adopted American's democratic, commercial, technological form of society, but there were key differences.

Less religion in Europe. Less rising to the military challenges of the Cold War. Less economic competitiveness, and that wasn't replaced by a more active political life, but by a welfare state administered from above by unelected Eurocrats. So Europe was closer to the passive, timid, apolitical, risk-averse, consumerist "Last Man" that Nietzsche and Fukuyama feared.

On the other hand, that model really isn't "hypercapitalist" or "turbocapitalist" either. "Hyperconsumerist," maybe, in some countries. But France, say, isn't likely to make much trouble for China's rising economic and industrial might. Also, nowadays people like Venner who express some admiration for the ideologies of the 1930s have to diverge somewhere to avoid being accused of actually being fascist, so what he said may or may not be exactly what he really thought.

What Venner said is reminiscent of what Francis Fukuyama was saying 20 years ago

Except Fukuyama -- correct me if I am wrong on that -- largely celebrated the "end of history" while for Venner, and, I think, for any right-thinking person the "democratic, commercial, technological form of society" is a dying society, coasting on its past cultural treasure toward oblivion.

"Ideologies of the 30's" were diverse, ranging from the wisdom of Franco, -- who, I would argue, was the only wholly successful national leader of the 20th century,-- to maniacality of Hitler. Venner is correct in seeing them as an attempt to restore the aristocratic idea. No leader ever emerges by saying "I will plunge my country and all Europe along with it into war and misery, kill innocent people by the million, and then kill myself chased into a bunker", --nor by believing so even inwardly. A good historian understands the reasoning and the motivation of the historical forces behind the propaganda and a caricature. We need more like him.

I'd have to read his book again (for the first time), but as I recall, Fukuyama wasn't all celebration. There was some uncertainty about whether the culture of "the last man" could perpetuate itself. Also a feeling that Europe was further along that road than the US.

"Ideologies of the 30's" were diverse, ranging from the wisdom of Franco, -- who, I would argue, was the only wholly successful national leader of the 20th century ...

That whole Spanish tragedy looks like a great bloody detour to get where the country would have gotten anyway if its leaders had had enough sense not to destroy the country.

I don't know what the answers are, but sometimes the solutions that get proposed don't seem likely to solve anything. Young Venner fighting to keep Algeria French when De Gaulle had already had enough of the war -- was that really a wise course? What brings me back to Fukuyama -- and behind him Strauss -- is Venner's celebration of what they called "spiritedness." You might call it the fighting spirit. It's what he admired in the old Central European nobility.

Venner was fortunate in being young enough not to have to make the tough decisions Frenchmen had to make in 1940. And he was fortunate enough that the Cold War gave a more or less acceptable form to his likes and dislikes, strivings and aversions. With the end of the Cold War, he still had that fighting spirit but apparently wasn't sure what to direct it against or what to put in service of, what the goal was or what the hope of success was. In that he wasn't so very different from many other people.

France has something over five million Muslims, I'm not sure of the exact figure. If Algeria were part of France that number would be forty million, probably a much bigger headache for France. Plus, the OAS did what they could through terror to make a peaceful solution with a continued French presence in the country impossible. That was another example of "spiritedness" overcoming sense.

The young Venner wanted to see a Leninism of the nationalist right. You can google his "For a Positive Critique" and see. I have to wonder what the point of that would be. All the talk of mobilizing society for some great national goal: freedom is better than all that organizing and conspiring and struggling and obeying.

If there is an actual enemy and war is necessary, fine, but the young Venner's desire for combat, glory, duty, service led him to go looking for fighting organizations or forming them, when what was necessary was living together peacefully in society.

Thank you for pointing this work to me.

Since 1947, the French army fought to defend overseas territories, was victorious in the field, and forced into successive capitulations by the group of political and economic forces that constitute the régime. It was necessary to wait until the month of April 1961, fourteen years, for a tiny number of cadres to discern their true enemies. An enemy who was not so much in the field, under the guise of a Viet or of a fellagha, but rather in France itself, in the boards of directors, the banks, the editorial offices, the assemblies, and the ministerial offices. This hostile sentiment was against a mythical decadent Metropolitan France rather than the reality of the régime. This limited realisation was short-lived.
[...]
France and Europe must accomplish their nationalist revolution in order to survive. Superficial changes will not strike what is evil. Nothing will be done until the germs of the régime are extirpated to the last root. For this, it is necessary to destroy its political organisation, overthrow its idols and its dogmas, eliminate its official and secret masters, show the people how much it had been deceived, exploited, soiled. Then, reconstruction. Not on paper constructions, but on a young and revolutionary élite, imbued with a new conception of the world. Can the action that must impose this revolution be conceived without the direction of a revolutionary doctrine? Certainly not. How can you oppose an adversary that is armed with a well-tested dialectic, rich with long experience, powerfully organised, without ideology, without method?
[...]
The editor of France-Observateur, the functionary of the SFIO, the communist, all have the same ideology in common: Marxism. Their doctrinal reference is therefore the same, their conception of the world is similar. The words they use have the same meaning. They belong to the same family. Despite their profound divisions in action, they all concurrently impose the same ideology.
[...]
The ethic of honour is opposed to the slave morality of liberal or Marxist materialism. It affirms that life is a battle. It exalts the value of sacrifice. It believes in the power of the will over events. It bases the relationship between men of the same community on loyalty and solidarity. It confers on work an importance independent of profit. It recovers the sense of the true dignity of mankind, not granted but conquered by permanent effort. It develops in the European man the consciousness of his responsibilities in relation to the humanity of which he is the natural organiser.

I find nothing to disagree with. To offer Lenin as an example of a successful revolutionary is not reflecting poorly on Venner. I think, his big thought, that a national revolution could succeed, possibly starting with France and OAS in the early 1960, possibly enveloping the rest of Europe, and no longer can succeed due to the immersion into the universal leftwing intellectual environment today, -- is correct and goes a long way in explaining his despair. Why was all that desperate struggle necessary? Why, look at France today: a nation of tired cheeseaters incapable to support their 30 hour workweek, wine lunches and two-month vacations other than at the cost of erasing their national and religious identity. What kind of "freedom" or "living together peacefully" is that? Glory, duty, service have consequences both in their presence and in their absence. Now we have absence, and nations die.

"National revolutions" are unstable. You organize, train, prepare, exhort, and then what? You have to do something with all the energies that have been aroused. So either you direct them against an external or internal enemy in war or persecution, or you let those passions die down and become a country like others, devoted to peaceful commerce or industry or administration.

You need some enemy to set such a "national revolution" into motion. That might be a foreign invader or an internal totalitarian enemy or a state of chaos. To look for some "Leninist" revolution of the right in a peaceful and wealthy country is just to stir up unnecessary trouble.

If Venner's complaint was that France or Europe was too fat, lazy, cowardly, and comfortable, I'd say, just wait. Such a condition probably isn't likely to last too long. Better do what you can to keep things from falling apart totally than to push the country into the abyss.

how to include the things he claimed he believed in -- duty, honor, service -- without tearing the world apart

From the article:

Indeed, on the eve of 1914, the European system was in crisis. But it is not the order that caused the war, but rather the oblivion and denial of the order. Since the end of the first Thirty Years War in 1648, the so-called European concert between states was based on the awareness of belonging to the same family of nations between the wars which were to remain limited and subject to "the rights of nations". The Concert of Europe was based on the civilizational values common to all the ruling elites.

When you have a civilization: a culmination of national cultures, you have both peace and strength. Undermine the civilization by devaluing nations, mocking religion, tearing down culture, and you get the animal farms of today, -- and indeed, nobody want to go back to civilization anymore.

You need some enemy to set such a "national revolution" into motion.

We don't need an enemy, we have one. Who do you think invents the 50% taxation levels, state as a surrogate parent, homosexuality as model behavior, IRS/NSA in every Internet router, third world labor force here feeding government employees so that they can retire at 50, and third world thug armies at their homes, under our no-fly-zone umbrella?

Is it Venner's fault that a government that works in the national interest has become a revolutionary idea?

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