The March of Folly

by Barbara Tuchman

  The advice appealed to the King as he grew more autocratic after shedding the early tutelage of Cardinal Mazarin. The greater his autocracy, the more the existence of a dissident sect appeared to him an unacceptable rift in submission to the royal will. “One law, one King, one God” was his concept of the state, and after twenty-five years at its head, his political arteries had hardened and his capacity for tolerating differences atrophied. He had acquired the disease of divine mission so often disastrous to rulers, convincing himself that it was the Almighty’s will “that I should be His instrument in bringing back to His ways all those who are subject to me.” In addition, he had political motives. Given the Catholic leanings of James II in England, Louis believed that the balance of Europe was swinging back to Catholic supremacy and that he could assist it by a dramatic gesture against the Protestants. Further, because of quarrels with the Pope over other issues, he wished to show himself the champion of orthodoxy, reaffirming the ancient French title of “Most Christian King.”

  Persecution began in 1681 before the actual Revocation. Protestant services were banned, schools and churches closed, Catholic baptism enforced, children separated from their families at age seven to be brought up as Catholics, professions and occupations gradually restricted until prohibited, Huguenot officials ordered to resign, clerical conversion squads organized and monetary bounty offered to each convert. Decree followed decree separating and uprooting the Huguenots from their own community and from national life.

  Persecution engenders its own brutality, and resort to violent measures was soon adopted, of which the most atrocious—and effective—were the dragonnades, or billeting of dragoons on Huguenot families with encouragement to behave as viciously as they wished. Notoriously rough and undisciplined, the enlisted troops of the dragoons spread carnage, beating and robbing the householders, raping the women, smashing and wrecking and leaving filth while the authorities offered exemption from the horror of billeting as inducement to convert. Mass conversions under these circumstances could hardly be regarded as genuine and caused resentment among Catholics because they involved the Church in perjury and sacrilege. Unwilling communicants were sometimes driven to Mass, among them resisters who spat and trampled on the Eucharist and were burned at the stake for profaning the sacrament.

  Emigration of the Huguenots began in defiance of edicts forbidding them to leave under penalty, if caught, of sentence to the galleys. Their pastors on the other hand, if they refused to abjure, were forced into exile for fear they would preach in secret, encouraging converts to relapse. Obdurate pastors who continued to hold services were broken on the wheel, creating martyrs and stimulating the resistance of their following.

  When mass conversions were reported to the King, as many as 60,000 in one region in three days, he took the decision to revoke the Edict of Nantes on the ground that it was no longer needed because there were no more Huguenots. Some doubts of the advisability of the policy by this time were rising. At a Council held on the eve of the Revocation, the Dauphin, probably expressing concerns privately conveyed to him, cautioned that revoking the Edict might cause revolts and mass emigration harmful to French commerce, but he seems to have raised the only contrary voice, doubtless because he was safe from reprisal. A week later, on 18 October 1685, Revocation was formally decreed and the act hailed as “the miracle of our times.”

  “Never had there been such a triumph of joy,” wrote the caustic Saint-Simon, who held his fire until after the King was dead, “never such a profusion of praise.… All the King heard was praise.”

  The ill effects were soon felt. Huguenot textile workers, paper makers and other artisans, whose techniques had been a monopoly of France, took their skills abroad to England and the German states; bankers and merchants took their capital; printers, bookmakers, ship-builders, lawyers, doctors and many pastors escaped. Within four years, 8000–9000 men of the Navy, and 10,000–12,000 of the Army, plus 500–600 officers, made their way to the Netherlands to add their strength to the forces of Louis’ enemy William III, soon a double enemy when he became King of England three years later in place of the ousted James II. The silk industry of Tours and Lyons is said to have been ruined and some important towns like Reims and Rouen to have lost half their workers.

  Exaggeration, beginning with Saint-Simon’s virulent censure claiming “depopulation” of the realm by as much as a quarter, was inevitable as it usually is when disadvantages are discovered after the event. The total number of émigrés is now estimated rather elastically at anywhere from 100,000 to 250,000. Whatever their number, their value to France’s opponents was immediately recognized by Protestant states. Holland granted them rights of citizenship at once and exemption from taxes for three years. Frederick William, Elector of Brandenburg (the future Prussia), issued a decree within a week of the Revocation inviting the Huguenots into his territory where their industrial enterprise contributed greatly to the rise of Berlin.

  Recent studies have concluded that the economic damage done to France by the Huguenot emigration has been overrated, it being only one element in the larger damage caused by the wars. Of the political damage, however, there is no question. The flood of anti-French pamphlets and satires issued by Huguenot printers and their friends in all the cities where they settled aroused antagonism to France to new heat. The Protestant coalition against France was strengthened when Brandenburg entered into alliance with Holland, and the smaller German principalities joined. In France itself the Protestant faith was reinvigorated by persecution and the feud with Catholics revived. A prolonged revolt of the Camisard Huguenots in the Cévennes, a mountainous region of the south, brought on a cruel war of repression, weakening the state. Here and among other Huguenot communities which remained in France, a receptive base was created for the Revolution to come.

  More profound was the discredit left upon the concept of absolute monarchy. By the dissenters’ rejection of the King’s right to impose religious unity, the divine right of royal authority everywhere was laid open to question and stimulus given to the constitutional challenge that the next century held in store. When Louis XIV, outliving son and grandson, died in 1715 after a reign of 72 years, he bequeathed, not the national unity that had been his objective, but an enlivened and embittered dissent, not national aggrandizement in wealth and power, but a weakened, disordered and impoverished state. Never had so self-centered a ruler so effectively despoiled self-interest.

  The feasible alternative would have been to leave the Huguenots alone or at most satisfy the cry against them by civil decrees rather than by force and atrocity. Although ministers, clergy and people thoroughly approved of the persecution, none of the reasons for it was exigent. The peculiarity of the whole affair was its needlessness, and this underlines two characteristics of folly: it often does not spring from a great design, and its consequences are frequently a surprise. The folly lies in persisting thereafter. With acute if unwitting significance, a French historian wrote of the Revocation that “Great designs are rare in politics; the King proceeded empirically and sometimes impulsively.” His point is reinforced from an unexpected source in a perceptive comment by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who cautioned, “In analyzing history do not be too profound, for often the causes are quite superficial.” This is a factor usually overlooked by political scientists who, in discussing the nature of power, always treat it, even when negatively, with immense respect. They fail to see it as sometimes a matter of ordinary men walking into water over their heads, acting unwisely or foolishly or perversely as people in ordinary circumstances frequently do. The trappings and impact of power deceive us, endowing the possessors with a quality larger than life. Shorn of his tremendous curled peruke, high heels and ermine, the Sun King was a man subject to misjudgment, error and impulse—like you and me.

  The last French Bourbon to reign, Charles X, brother of the guillotined Louis XVI and of his brief successor, Louis XVIII, displayed a recurring type of folly best described as the Humpty-Dumpty ty
pe: that is to say, the effort to reinstate a fallen and shattered structure, turning back history. In the process, called reaction or counterrevolution, the reactionary right is bent on restoring the privileges and property of the old regime and somehow retrieving a strength it did not have before.

  When Charles X at age 67 ascended the throne in 1824, France had passed through 35 years of the most radical changes in history up to that point, from complete revolution to Napoleonic empire to Waterloo and restoration of the Bourbons. Since it was then impossible to cancel all the rights and liberties and legal reforms incorporated in government since the Revolution, Louis XVIII accepted a constitution, though he could never accustom himself to the idea of a constitutional monarchy, and it was beyond the comprehension of his brother Charles. Having seen the process at work during exile in England, Charles said he would sooner earn his living as a woodcutter than be King of England. Not surprisingly, he was the hope of the émigrés who had returned with the Bourbons and who wanted the old regime put back together again, complete with rank, titles and especially their confiscated property.

  In the National Assembly they were represented by the Ultras of the right, who, together with a splinter group of extreme Ultras, formed the strongest party. This had been accomplished by restricting the franchise to the wealthiest class by the interesting method of reducing the taxes of known opponents so they could not meet the tax qualification of 300 francs required for voters. Government office was similarly restricted. Ultras held all the ministerial posts, including a religious extremist as Minister of Justice whose political ideas, it was said, were formed by regular reading of the Apocalypse. His colleagues imposed strict laws of censorship and elastic laws of search and arrest and, as their primary achievement, created a fund to compensate approximately 70,000 émigrés or their heirs at an annual rate of 1377 francs. This was too little to satisfy them but enough to outrage the bourgeois whose taxes were paying for it.

  The beneficiaries of the Revolution and of Napoleon’s court were not prepared to make way for the émigrés and clergy of the old regime, and discontent was rising although still subdued. Surrounded by his Ultras, the King could probably have more or less comfortably completed his reign if he had not by aggravated unwisdom brought about its downfall. Charles was determined to rule and, while lightly endowed for the task intellectually, was rich in the Bourbon capacity to learn nothing and forget nothing. When opposition in the Assembly grew troublesome, he took the advice of his ministers to dissolve the session and, by bribes, threats and other pressures, to manipulate an acceptable election. Instead, the royalists lost by almost two to one. Refusing to acquiesce in the result like some helpless King of England, Charles decreed another dissolution and under a new and narrower franchise and sterner censorship, another election.

  The opposition press called for resistance. While the King went hunting, not expecting overt conflict and having summoned no military support, the people of Paris, as so many times before and since, put up barricades and enthusiastically engaged in three days of street fighting known to the French as les trois glorieuses. Opposition deputies organized a provisional government. Charles abdicated and fled to the despised haven of limited monarchy across the Channel. No great tragedy, the episode was historically significant only in moving France a step forward from counter-revolution to the “bourgeois” monarchy of Louis-Philippe. More significant in the history of folly, it illustrates the futility of the recurrent attempt, not confined to Bourbons, to reconstruct a broken egg.

  Throughout history cases of military folly have been innumerable, but they are outside the scope of this inquiry. Two of the most eventful, however, both involving war with the United States, represent policy decisions at the government level. They were the German decision to resume unrestricted submarine warfare in 1916 and the Japanese decision to attack Pearl Harbor in 1941. In both cases, contrary voices warned against the course taken, urgently and despairingly in Germany, discreetly but with profound doubt in Japan, unsuccessfully in both. The folly in both cases belongs to the category of self-imprisonment in the “we-have-no-alternative” argument and in the most frequent and fatal of self-delusions—underestimation of the opponent.

  “Unrestricted” submarine warfare meant the sinking without warning of merchant ships found in a declared blockade zone, whether belligerent or neutral, armed or unarmed. Sternly protested by the United States on the dearly held principle of the neutral’s right to freedom of the seas, the practice had been halted in 1915 after the frenzy over the Lusitania, less because of American outrage and threat to break relations, and the antagonizing of other neutrals, than because Germany did not have enough U-boats on hand to give assurance of decisive effect if she forced the issue.

  By this time, indeed by the end of 1914 after the failure of the opening offensive to knock out either Russia or France, Germany’s rulers recognized that they could not win the war against the three combined Allies if they held together, but rather, as the Chief of Staff told the Chancellor, that “It was more likely that we ourselves should become exhausted.”

  Political action to gain a separate peace with Russia was required, but this failed as did numerous other feelers and overtures made to or by Germany with regard to Belgium, France and even Britain during the next two years. All failed for the same reason—that Germany’s terms in each case were punitive, as if by a victor, providing for the other party to leave the war while yielding annexations and indemnities. It was always the stick, never the carrot, and none of Germany’s opponents was tempted to betray its allies on that basis.

  By the end of 1916 both sides were approaching exhaustion in resources as well as military ideas, spending literally millions of lives at Verdun and the Somme for gains or losses measured in yards. Germany was living on a diet of potatoes and conscripting fifteen-year-olds for the Army. The Allies were holding on meagerly with no means of victory in sight unless the great fresh untapped strength of America were added to their side.

  During these two years, while Kiel’s shipyards were furiously turning out submarines toward a goal of 200, the Supreme High Command battled in high-level conferences over renewal of the torpedo campaign against the strongly negative advice of civilian ministers. To resume unrestricted sinkings, the civilians insisted, would, in the words of Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg, “inevitably cause America to join our enemies.” The High Command did not deny but discounted this possibility. Because it was plain that Germany could not win the war on land alone, their object had become to defeat Britain, already staggering under shortages, by cutting off her supplies by sea before the United States could mobilize, train and transport troops to Europe in any number sufficient to affect the outcome. They claimed this could be accomplished within three or four months. Admirals unrolled charts and graphs proving how many tons the U-boats could send to the bottom in a given time until they should have Britain “gasping in the reeds like a fish.”

  The contrary voices, beginning with the Chancellor’s, countered that American belligerency would give the Allies enormous financial aid and a lift in morale encouraging them to hold out until aid in troops should arrive, besides giving them use of all the German tonnage interned in American ports and very likely bringing in other neutrals as well. Vice-Chancellor Karl Helfferich believed that releasing the U-boats would “lead to ruin.” Foreign Office officials directly concerned with American affairs were equally opposed. Two leading bankers returned from a mission to the United States to warn against underestimating the potential energies of the American people, who, they said, if aroused and convinced of a good cause, could mobilize forces and resources on an unimagined scale.

  Of all the dissuaders, the most urgent was the German Ambassador to Washington, Count von Bernstorff, whose non-Prussian birth and upbringing spared him many of the delusions of his peers. Well acquainted with America, Bernstorff repeatedly warned his government that American belligerency was certain to follow the U-boats and would lose Germany the
war. As the military’s insistence grew intense, he was straining in every message home to swerve his country from the course he believed would be fatal. He had become convinced that the only way to avert that outcome would be to stop the war itself through mediation for a compromise peace which President Wilson was preparing to offer. Bethmann too was anxious for it on the theory that if the Allies rejected such a peace, as expected, while Germany accepted, she could then be justified in resuming unrestricted submarine warfare without provoking American belligerency.

  The war party clamoring for the U-boats included the Junkers and court circle, the expansionist war-aims associations, the right-wing parties and a majority of the public, which had been taught to pin its faith on the submarine as the means to break England’s food blockade of Germany and vanquish the enemy. A few despised voices of Social Democrats in the Reichstag shouted, “The people don’t want submarine warfare but bread and peace!” but little attention was paid to them because German citizens, no matter how hungry, remained obedient. Kaiser Wilhelm II, assailed by uncertainties but unwilling to appear any less bold than his commanders, added his voice to theirs.

  Wilson’s offer of December 1916 to bring together the belligerents for negotiation of a “peace without victory” was rejected by both sides. Neither was prepared to accept a settlement without some gain to justify its suffering and sacrifice in lives, and to pay for the war. Germany was not fighting for the status quo but for German hegemony of Europe and a greater empire overseas. She wanted not a mediated but a dictated peace and had no wish, as the Foreign Minister, Arthur Zimmermann, wrote to Bernstorff, “to risk being cheated of what we hope to gain from the war” by a neutral mediator. Any settlement requiring renunciations and indemnities by Germany—the only settlement the Allies would accept—would mean the end of the Hohenzollerns and the governing class. They also had to make someone pay for the war or go bankrupt. A peace without victory would not only terminate dreams of mastery but require enormous taxes to pay for years of fighting that had grown profitless. It would mean revolution. To the throne, the military caste, the landowners, industrialists and barons of business, only a war of gain offered any hope of their survival in power.