Kindle Notes & Highlights
For Schmitt in 1946, Tocqueville was a great historian because he “did not, like Hegel and Ranke, seat himself next to God Almighty in the royal box in the theater of the world” but rather took his place among the ranks of the losing side.3 In
Of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, Burckhardt wrote, “A novel element has arisen in politics, an additional level, of which earlier victors knew nothing or at least made no conscious use. One seeks to humiliate the vanquished enemy as much as possible in his own eyes so that he henceforth lacks any confidence whatsoever.”11
The deep and widespread depression caused by lost wars in the age of nationalism is as obvious as the joyous public celebrations of victorious ones. It is all the more surprising, then, how briefly the losing nation’s depression tends to last before turning into a unique type of euphoria.
the elation are the end of the mortal threat that oppressed the nation, the sense of triumph at having survived, and the humiliation of the former rulers, who will henceforth be held solely responsible for defeat.
The old regime is accused of everything from materialism and corruption to laziness and selfishness and is blamed for the fact that, “believing in nothing more than money and pleasure, [the nation] lost sight of higher values.”
The French bon mot “Praised be our defeats … they freed us from Napoleon” was resoundingly seconded in Germany in 1918 with regard to Wilhelm II, often by the very individuals who had been the loudest to exult at the beginning of the war.
the American South, too, foreign observers were surprised at the swift unanimity with which former slave owners condemned the old system as amoral and welcomed defeat as deliverance.
Cite?
South after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox was that the Southern states would resume their former place in the Union as equal partners. In France after Sedan, many believed that peace would be concluded with Bismarck without their country’s having to give up an inch of territory. In Germany after November 11, 1918, the empire was expected to return to the relations and borders of August 1, 1914.
every major war is ultimately decided by a technological innovation that the losing side either does not possess or, misjudging its effectiveness, fails to utilize.
Surely not every one
Given that wars between “military” and “bourgeois” nations often begin with glorious victories for the former, only to be decided after a prolonged battle of attrition by the material and economic superiority of the latter, the losing side’s resentment at being cheated of ultimate triumph is not completely incomprehensible.38
In the myth of the “Lost Cause,” the post-1865 American South celebrated its demise as both a heroic and a sacral event: “The war has purified and elevated our natures, taught us to respect ourselves, and has won for us the respect of foreign nations,” wrote one prominent Southern commentator.
If the victors’ triumph is seen as illegitimate profiteering and thus can stake no claim to glory or honor, defeat is not an outcome that must be acknowledged and accepted but an injustice to be rectified.
That same summer, a group of Jewish former members of the Polish resistance, under the leadership of Abba Kovner, planned to poison the water supplies of several German cities until six million Germans had been killed.
military conflict between sovereign states, the motivations for revenge—restitution for an injustice, punishment for acts of violence—were codified into laws of “legitimate” warfare.54 At the same time, war itself was rationalized, refined, made to obey rules,
It is astonishing how easily the goals and agendas for which nations go to war are forgotten. In the post-1865 American South, no serious resistance was mounted to the abolition of slavery. No one in post-1871 France voiced any further desire to advance the Franco-German border to the Rhine or expressed any yearning for continental hegemony. Likewise, post-1918 Germany abandoned its “Weltmacht” aspirations and dismissed the construction of a naval fleet to rival England’s as an unfortunate idiosyncrasy of Emperor Wilhelm II’s.
What the American South had to offer the world, along with its embracing the end of slavery, was the warning that the political equality of blacks must be resisted at all costs. “When [the South] defended Slavery by her arms,” wrote one Southerner following the war, “she was single-handed, and encountered the antipathies of the whole world; now, when she asserts the ultimate supremacy of the white man, she has not lost her cause, but merely developed its higher significance, and in the new contest, she stands with a firm political alliance in the North … and with the sympathies of all generous
...more
The South lost 20 percent of its white adult male population—an extraordinarily exact parallel to German casualties during World War II.1
a fifth of Mississippi’s first postwar state budget was devoted to the production of prosthetic limbs for those maimed in the fighting.
The South suffered a bout of collective panic after the bloody slave rebellion led by Nat Turner in 1831, and within a year open debates on the morality of slavery had become taboo. The South’s suppression of all discussion put an end to its traditional role as the national seat of enlightenment.
In the 1820s the slave states contained a great many more antislavery societies than the free
Within a decade, however, all that had changed. Justifying slavery as its “peculiar institution,” the South began its counterreformation against the antislavery agitation emerging in the North.
Mary Boykin Chestnut, for instance, wrote in her diary in 1861: “They say our crowning misdemeanor is to hold in slavery still those Africans they brought over here from Africa, or sold to us when they found to own them did not pay. They gradually slid them off down here, giving themselves years to get rid of them in a remunerative way.”23
Southerners may indeed have donned knightly garb with ridiculous frequency (contemporary accounts describe the South as a “fairyland where young men saw themselves as knights going to a tournament and girls were Queens of Love and Beauty rewarding them”);
Although perhaps more subtle than the identification with chivalry, the South’s preoccupation with images of defeat and demise was no less significant. How else can one account for the immediate emergence of the Lost Cause as the South’s central myth after the collapse of the Confederacy?
The cult of chivalry was concentrated in the Cotton Belt, the territories in the Deep South colonized after 1800 (Alabama and Mississippi), while the elegiac set the tone in the Old South (Virginia and the Carolinas).
The slave economy was like a reservation, allowed to exist only in a restricted and perpetually shrinking area, outside which the capital invested in slaves was no longer legal tender.
Defeated nations waste little time, after recovering from their initial shock, in finding scapegoats. The previous regime is held responsible both for leading the nation into the fateful misadventure of war and for directing it down a dead-end path long before the commencement of hostilities. Similarly, the policies and goals for which the old regime led the nation into war are often abandoned with few second thoughts.
Southerners talked not of “defeat” but of “whipping.” The axiom “We wore ourselves out whipping the enemy,” for example, expressed their belief in their own military superiority.
Northern religious leaders took considerable pleasure in reciting to the South its litany of sins, encouraging it to repent and sending missionaries across the Mason-Dixon Line. In response, the three main Southern churches did everything in their power to repel these spiritual advances, casting themselves as the last defenders of the Southern soul in the face of persistent Northern efforts to corrupt it.
is now honoring manual labor with us as he has never done before with any other nation. It is the high-born, the cultivated, the intelligent, the brave, the generous, who are now constrained to work with their own hands. Labor is thus associated in our mind with all that is honorable in birth, refined in manners, bright in intellect, manly in character and magnanimous in soul.
Of the 250,000 immigrants who entered the United States in the two years following the war, a grand total of 3,000 settled in the South.
Their contradictory aspirations suggest why the lush rhetoric of the New South was so radically divorced from its impoverished reality. The greatest obstacle to an economic boom turned out to be what has been described as a continuation of slavery by other means: the policies of racism, segregation, repression, and discrimination that continued well into the twentieth century. These policies were as integral a part of the New South program as the ideas of modernization and industrialization. Moreover, in contrast to such rhetorical chimeras, racist policies were a reality that scuttled all
...more
contrasting it with a satanic fall from grace. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the genial but weak-willed planter is the Southerner St. Clare, whereas the evil slave master is the transplanted Yankee Legree. Historian W. R. Taylor describes the villainous Legree as an “anti-planter” and his mansion, which perverts the principles of the “good” plantation, as an “anti-home”: “What we are given in a few pages is an evocative vision of the home become a factory, where everything, finally, is weighed in the balance scale of Legree’s cotton house. Southerners, who almost universally objected to these scenes,
...more
Victory, like revolution, can devour its children,
The idealists who realize too late that violence can never achieve their goals are among history’s most common losers in victory.
Three decades of stagnation and decline had psychologically attuned it to the possibility of defeat and had produced a fully developed lost-cause mythology that needed only a lost war to become operational.
In an essay entitled “A Southern Critique of the Gilded Age,” Woodward himself cites three examples of this very phenomenon. Herman Melville, Henry Adams, and Henry James were all among the losers in the victors’ camp. In the prevailing climate after 1865, they all felt, in Adams’s words, as lost as “the Indians or the buffalo who had been decimated by our ancestors.”
Prussia had been considered less a state, to say nothing of a nation, than a gigantic factory whose capacity for producing hommes machines may have been impressive but whose utter lack of soul and inability to bring forth hommes libres was thoroughly alienating.
Prussia’s ignoble collapse and capitulation to Napoleon I in 1806—after a single lost battle—had shown how unreliable that factory could be and how inferior it was to the vital power of France.
the most peaceable nation on earth, a “people of dreamers” (Flaubert), the “country of the soul” (Edgar Quinet), the land of poets and thinkers, a tender, almost maidenly figure that was not only an alter ego but a potential lover—Renan referred to Germany as “my mistress”—in need of France’s chivalric protection.
This conception gained in popularity the more Prussia strove for hegemony over other German territories and became (in France’s eyes) a “carnivorous force” bent on devouring the smaller states.41
Germany had not yet been perceived as the world’s most dangerous barbarian, as it would be in 1914. Rather it was seen as a country that, having suffered two centuries of French hegemony and humiliation, had simply achieved a well-deserved revanche in the spirit of fair play.
French should appeal to the world not as a nation of defiled innocence, he argued, but rather as a nation that had fallen from the heights of power and therefore was well suited, indeed obliged, to warn the states now scaling those heights of the inevitable consequences. “Every nation that adopts military glory and power as its motto, as we once did, will make the mistakes we made.”52 Warning the victors of the perils of triumph was nothing new; it had often seemed, as in the American South, an effective means of transforming defeat into moral superiority.
In both qualitative and quantitative terms, seventeenth-century France was the leading dueling nation in Europe. Roughly ten thousand duelists were killed between 1589 and 1610 alone.
The French were ever at the ready to take up arms over “a somewhat too direct stare, a thoughtless brush of contact, a word spoken too loudly,” or (in one case) even “a glass of lemonade,”
Every duel represented not just a contest of individual wills but a defiance of the royal prohibition on dueling
In 1879, the truly republican Third Republic, no longer dominated by the monarchists, further developed the cult of the wound by transferring the metaphor from the heroes of the nation to the nation itself. The wound the nation was duty-bound to avenge was the loss of Alsace and Lorraine, which had been ripped from the national body, and the task and obligation facing France was to not let that wound heal. The nation, according to the revolutionary Louis-Auguste Blanqui, was to preserve its wound “intact and permanently …
Before 1789, Alsace had been merely a conquered territory, without a deeper connection to the nation.
a martyr-hero (Roland). It is not surprising, then, that this epic, “whose existence only a few scholars even knew of before 1870,” as one historian writes, “was transformed within a few years from a minor part of the collective unconscious to a national myth.”83 Its significance in the interpretation of defeat would ultimately become as great as that of the legend of Joan of Arc.
The kindling of interest in sports was a Europe-wide phenomenon, but only in France did it lead to the development of a subgenre, technological sports, which immediately took hold of the popular imagination. The new enthusiasm for bicycle races and automobile and airplane competitions may well have been an artful metaphoric corrective to the slow pace of industrialization
