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G U G L I E L M O F E R R E R O ' S POUVOIR*

The Italian Guglielmo Ferrero, scholar, historian, philos- opher, author and teacher wrote and published his books, essays and reviews over a period of five decades. He belonged to the generation of 1870 along wi th the French poet Paul Val6ry and the French writer and Prime Minister L6on Blum. One of his early books, Young Europe (1897), a report on Germany, England Russia and the Scandinavian States in- spired the young James Joyce. His last book, written in Geneva and published in New York in 1941 makes references to the fact that:

Angleterre... s'est r6veill6e, cette fois sous une phiie de bombes, tomb6e subitement sur elle de tousles coins du ciel/

The Pouvoir is the third volume of a trilogy. The first volume was The Gamble (whose original French title was Aventure, Bonaparte en Italie, 1796-97), the second was The Reconstruc- tion Of Europe. Talleyrand and the Congress of Vienna 1814- 1815, It is a

historical and philosophical trilogy which will thoroughly ex- amine the problem of the origin, development and nature of the revolutionary state 2,

* Sponsored by the British Council, the author read this paper at the Vth International Congress of the British Comparative Society in 1989 at Leicester.

1Pouvoir. Les ponies invisibles de la citO (Paris, 1945), p. 117. 2 The Reconstruction of Europe. Talleyrand and the Congress of Vienna

1814-1815. Translated by T. R. Jaeckel (New York: 1941), p. ix.

18 Neohelicon XVIII[1 Akad~miai Kiad6 Budapest Yohn Benjamins B. V., Amsterdam

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as Ferrero says in the Preface to the American edition of The Reconstruction of Europe. I believe this trilogy in itself is the sequel to three earlier books, written between 1920 and 1926. Those are: The Ruin of the Ancient Civilization, Words to the Deaf and Between Past and Future. And yet, in a certain sense, Pouvoir is the sequel to Between the Old World and the New, written and published before the Great War. I t is, by intention, a Platonic dialogue and deals with the author 's experience in Nor th and South America. He was invited to the United States by Theodore Roosevelt. I t is, in reality, a very personal account, sometimes very interesting, sometimes pedestrian. Ferrero was a great artist as an author of history, but not in his dialogue and novel. Pouvoir more than once refers to Between the Old World and the New. With this Ferrero creates his own personal tradition.

Pouvoir is an unusual, strange, irregular work. I t is an auto- biography, a diary, a history, and a philosophical essay, and above all, a great, multi-voiced dramat ic monologue. As a history, Pouvoir speaks of European history f rom 1789 to 1914. As a philosophical essaY it offers an analysis o f legitimacy.

In Pouvoir Ferrero tells us that after a long and uniquet period of intellectual wandering he suddenly perceived a central principle which made all things clear.

Aux premiers jours de novembre 1918, une singuli~re affection stomaeale m'obligea h garder le lit [ . . . ] La guerre mondiale finissait, et les trSnes de l'Europe tombaient l'un apr~s l'autre, avec un 6pouvantable fracas [ . . . ] Un jour, en lisant les M~moires de Talleyrand, je tombai sur sept pages du second volume, (pages 155 h 162) qui m'apprirent qu'il existait au monde des principes de 16gitimit6. La r6v61ation 6tait d6cisive. Depuis ce jour, je commen~ais h voir clair dans l'histoire du monde et dans ma destin6e. 3

This was an intellectual and historical revelation, not reli- gious and sentimental. The self is the avocation, or the self

3Pouvoir, p. 15.

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is the loyalty to the avocation. The only real legitimacy in our time is legitimacy which stands on the r ightof opposition and universal suffrage.

In 1918, at the time of revelation, Ferrero was 47 years old. During his long and unquiet period he became one of the most popular historians of world. "No work since Mommsen has aroused such world-wide interest as Ferrero's Greatness and Decline of Rome", said Gooch in 1913. 4 Ferrero's reputation was almost fabulous, the Grandezza e decadenza di Roma was translated into English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Swedish and Hungarian. This 6 volume historical masterpiece became a best-seller.

Ferrero's literary ability was of a high order. Greatness and decline of Rome was a vivid, colourful and powerful narration, a political, social, and cultural history of a few decades. Through a number of characters, well-known politicians and unknown people, he illustrates the connection between economic phe- nomena and political evolution. Whith great ambition and suc- cess he visualised the past, and his readers, at least in Hungary, met in his pages their own and very actual problems: the con- nection between the world market and the local market, finance capital and industrial capital; the conflict between great in- dustry and agriculture, industrialisation and the migration of the workers, the role of intellectuals in the class struggle, the role of personality in the historical process. 5

The Greatness and Decline of Rome was an anti-Caesarian work, and a Hungarian critic compared Ferrero's Caesar to G. 13. Shaw's play Caesar and Cleopatra.

James Joyce also read this book. He liked it and perceived one of its salient characters, the refusal of German science. In pre- war Europe everything was German. Great industry and the state welfare, army organisation and the socialism, zionism and psychoanalysis, art history and philology either had a

4 Gooch, History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century (London- - New York: 1913), p. 470.

n L'Europa Giovane (Milano: 1897), p. 115.

18"

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German model or were German inventions. Personalities as different as the French sociologist Emile Durkheim, the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce or the Hungarian philosopher George Luk~ics were students of the Germans. Ferrero was one of the very few European who did not follow the German school: He wrote in 1897: "All' iniziativa futura della Germa- nia insomma, io non credo."

Yet, I believe to-day, there existed no a real gap between Mommsen and Ferrero, masters of the style. Both of them hated the modern Caesars. Both of them believed in human and liberal values. Their strategies were different. Mommsen praised Julius Caesar versus the 19th century Caesars, and Ferrero ridiculed Julius Caesar. But when he experienced Mus- solini, he modified his opinion. The first pages of Pouvoir speak about this. The Hungarian poet and journalist Endre Ady, in the first decade of this century, esteemed Mommsen and Ferrero as liberal thinkers.

The revelation of Talleyrand on the matter of legitimacy had immediate consequences. Shortly after the Great War Ferrero wrote and published The Ruin of the Ancient Civilisa- tion. It was a surprisingly new Ferrero. It was a dry, laconic work. The field of research became very narrow, the period of time very long. Analysis replaced narration. Nowhere you could find descriptions, or vivid pictures. After Talleyrand's lesson Ferrero found that the deeper reason for the fall of Rome lay in constitutional problems. The last part of the short book compares the 3rd century crisis to the than actual, post- war crisis. Despite his new style, Ferrero remained a very exciting writer.

After the war not only did Ferrero's stylistic manner and narrative technique change but his position and his situation changed fundamentally as well. After 1918 he remained a liber- al, a successor of the French Enlightenment and Benjamin Constant, in an Europe more and more anti-liberal and anti- democratic. He was attacked as early as 1919 by the Italian fascists and communists.

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1924 was a decisive year in the life o f Fer re ro . A f t e r the m u r d e r o f the I t a l i an depu ty M a t t e o t t i , he courageous ly and o p e n l y a t t acked Mussol in i . (I t was on ly 7 years t ha t Musso l in i gave h im a p a s s p o r t u n d e r a grea t in t e rna t iona l pressure . Then he became a p rofessor a t Geneva Univers i ty . ) The same year he pub l i shed in Par is Discours aux Sourds which was t rans- l a ted into Engl ish unde r the t i t le Words to the Deaf. I t is an i rony o f fate tha t this b o o k and Bre ton ' s Surrealist Manifesto

were publ i shed in the same year by the same publ isher . T h e Discours aux Sourds speaks o f the cha ins o f revolut ions .

Ce sera un joli easse-tSte pour les historiens et les philosophes futurs de comprendre comment la guerre pour la libert6 a pu inculer ~ l'Europe et peut-Stre un peu aussi ~t l'Am6rique la rnaladie de la dietature. C'est pourtant un fait 6vident~ La dicta- ture aujourd'hui n'est plus mSme une doctrine politique, elle est pour eertains esprits une foi religieuse. Les premiers h la propager parmi les masses furent les socialistes, apr~s que les Russes, du haut du Kremlin, eurent proclam6 la dictature du prol6tariat. Depuis einq ans, par le monde entier, des millions de prol6taires rSvent et sont dans l'attente d'un dictateur rouge, qui ram6nera sur la terre la justice et la paix. Mais il y a quelques temps que les prol6taires ne sont plus les seuls ~ r6ver leur dictateur. Depuis que Mussolini a conquis Rome ~t la tSte de ses 'chemises noires', les riches, les bourgeois, les classes eultiv6es, elles aussi, rSvent d'un dictateur blanc, dont la main de fer imposera aux peuples in- quites rordre et l'ob6issance. ~

The p o s t w a r p e r i o d is charac ter i sed by wai t ing for a red or whi te d ic ta to r . The d i c t a to r sh ip is no longer a po l i t i ca l doc - t r ine, bu t a re l ig ious belief.

In Discours aux Sourds Fer re ro affirms his definit ive judge- men t on the Russ i an Revo lu t ion :

Quatre ans de guerre et quatre ans de r6volution ont d6truit l'0euvre de plusieurs g6n6rations. Plusieurs g6n6rations seront necessaires pour la r66difier. Le reste est illusion et chim6re, r

6 Discours aux Sourds. Editions du Sagittaire (Simon Kra: Paris, 1924). pp. 147-148.

r Discours aux Sourds, p. 26.

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Discours was the first draft of Pouvoir. The postwar crisis of democracy gave a new impetus to

Ferrero. He was one of the very rare man who were capable of developing until old age. First of all, he was an independent observer, with a great gift for seeing. He had another great gift, for changing, for developping without self-negation. The writer of Between the Old World and the New was no prophet of progress. The author of Pouvoir in 1942 was no man of Apo- calypse. He knew neither blind devotion nor panic. By taining he was not a historian (he studied law and psychology), but by vocation and profession he was a historian. In a letter, wri t ten in the days of Dunkirk, Ferrero says that L6on Blum and others did not understand the nature of revolutionary states) Forty years later, the French political thinker Raymond Aron, a reader o f Ferrero, repeats tha same judgement. The very honest Blum, who studied and developed before 1914, misunderstood both Hitlerism and Communism? Pouvoir was an attempt to understand the nature of the revolutionary state.

As I said, Ferrero was 47 years old in 1918; he was young enough to develop, to understand and perceive new situations and new crisis, and old enough not to experience the tragic feelings of a younger generation summarized by the French poet Paul Eluard: "ils t 'ont laiss6 au bord d 'un gouffre".

'The man of 1914', to borrow and generalize title of a recent book, attacked from left and right the heritage of the Enlight- enment. Eric Svarny quotes f rom T. S. Eliot's first major writing on cultural politics:

Hulme "appears as the forerunner of a new attitude of mind, which could be the twentieth century mind, if the twentieth cen- tury is to have a mind of its own. Hulme is a classical, reaction-

8 Guylielmo Ferrero, Histoire et Politique au XX e sidcle (Gen~ve: 1966), p. 135.

9 Raymond Aron, Le Spectateur enyayd. Entretiens avec J.-L. Missika et D. Wolton (Paris: 1981), p. 62.

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ary and revolutionary; he is the antipode of the 6clectie, tolerant and democratic mind of the end of the last century, m0

One of Eliot's masters was the French Charles Maurras and Ferrero rejects the latter's thesis in the Pouvoir.

A Commentary, Eliot's essay quoted above, Surrealist Mani- festo and Discours aux Sourds came out in the same year in which Lenin died and Matteotti was killed. Until his death, Ferrero was eclectic, tolerant and democratic.

Val6ry's essay La crise de l'esprit with its famous first sen- tence ("nous autres, civilisations, nous savons maintenant que nous sommes mortelles"), Oswald Spengler's Der Untergang des Abendlandes, The Waste Land, and The Ruin of the Ancient Civilisation came out at the same time. The historical back- ground is common: the tragedy of World War I and the crisis afterward. There are also common notes in the feelings and the analysis. But there are fundamental differences between the authors. Ferrero was not a Cartesian as Val6ry was, nor a conservative like Eliot, or, in an other way, Sprengler. Ferrero was acutely conscious of the dangers inherent of the 20th century. But he had a firm belief that the world's problems could be solved.

He recognizes and reaffarms the limits of man. Every progress, every achievement is partial, but not relative, says the author of Pouvoir. In recognition of his limits lies power of man. Ferrero was moderate, and this quality distinguishes him from his contemporaries both before and after 1914. He was a student and follower of Montesquieu. The title Grandeur et ddcadence de Rome dearly refers to the Considerations sur la causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur d~cadence.

In European political thought f rom Jean Bodin on, a great tradition says that between despotism and anarchy there is no third way. This was also, more or less, view of philosophers o f the French Enlightenment. The great exception, or if you

~o Erik Svarny, 'The Men of 1914'. 1". S. Eliot and Early Modernism (Philadelphia: 1988), p. 18.

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wish, the dissident, was Montesquieu. It is a commonplace in the world of modern scholarship to say, as does among others Sabine, that Montesquieu misunderstood English polit- ical institutions. But this was a very creative misunderstandig. Montesquieu recognized the possibility of a third way between despotism and anarchy. In the historical situation of 1937, Sabine considers important to say that Montesquieu was a lover of liberty.

A totalitarian Europe, between the two wars, repeats the old conception which claimed: there is no third way between despotism and anarchy. Pouvoir analyses the great fear of dictators which also destroys international order. According to Ferrero, Bonaparte's first Consulate was the first modern totalitarian state. A little later this was also the opinion of the Dutch historian, P. Geyl. Between the two wars, a few studies hold in high esteem Talleyrand in contrast with Napoleon. The authors of these studies were not French scholars, as Geyl observed. 11 The title of Ferrero's book was very characteristic: The Reconstruction o f Europe. About twenty years later, Henry Kissinger wrote of it: "A well-written account of the Congress of Vienna. It is based almost entirely on Talleyrand's Mkmoires, which are taken at face value. The approach is somewhat too moralizing and the relationship tothemodern period drawn too patly. Through it all, Talleyrand appears as of superhuman quality. ''12

This is a severe criticism. However, if you read Kissinger's A Worm Restored after Ferrero's Reconstruction o f Europe, you will see that Kissinger more than once closely follows Ferrero. In any case, the liberal historians of 19th century attacked the Congress of Vienna. The liberal Ferrero after the conse- quences of the Congress of Versailles, praised the achievements of the Congress of Vienna.

11 Pieter Geyl, "The French Historians and Talleyrand." In Debates with Historians (Cleveland--New York: 1958), pp. 227-230.

12 Henry A. Kissinger, A Worm Restored. Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812-22 (London: 1957), p. 341.

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In his preface to the American edition of The Reconstruction o f Europe, in April, in 1941, Ferrero speaks of America's role in the future reconstruction of world. Here he refers again to Between the Old World and the New, to the account of his visit to the United States in 1909:

I was impressed [...] by the enormous effort the United States was putting forth to "translate quantity into quality"....1~

In Ferrero's knowledge and sensibility, in his nerves, America is always present. It seems to me almost ridiculous today to insist on the existence of America in Ferrero's mind. You could quote Tocqueville and a few other names, such as Paul Val6ry. About 1910 Val6ry realized that the European type of history was coming to its end. However, two world wars proved that the continental policy makers, soldiers, journalists, historians and philosophers either ignored or did not count on the United States.

Ferrero recognized very early the force of United States, including its creative force, cultural and moral. He criticized it sharply, but sympathetically. Thanks to his own experience, he never believed the myth of uncultivated America.

There was another myth, between the two world wars. Democracy gives civil liberty, but cannot produce. Totali- tarian states can produce but do not give civil liberty. There- fore you must choose liberty and production. I do not ex- aggerate. A committed antitotalitarian personality, the Swiss philosopher Denis de Rougemont, after the fall of Paris, es- caped to New York. And to his great surprise and joy, he saw the great American highways. We ignored this in Europe, he not- ed in his diary. Hitler and Mussolini boasted of their highways. The American highways surpassed those of Europe, observed the elated Denis de Rougemont. 14 Ferrero by personal ex- perience realized that democracy could unite production and

13 The Reconstruction of Europe, p. xiii. 14 Journal des deux mondes (Paris: 1948), pp. 92-93.

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freedom. He did not have to choose between production and liberty. He had another problem-overproduction. He feared that the progress industrial civilisation was too rapid. He was not an enemy of industrial progress. He was the enemy of a certain tempo. And in this case he was a forerunner of the Club of Rome, and perhaps, also of the Greens.

There was another myth in Europe, the power of Socialist International. And it was followed by a great disillusion. In 1914, the Second International, thought to be unvanquishable, was unable to prevent the outbreak of the Great War. Ferrero never believed in this myth, and Young Europe expressed his doubts concerning German socialism, though The Greatness and Decline of Rome was influenced by Marx. It is very interest- ing that Ferrero, the historian of the Roman Civil Wars ceased, after 1918, to deal with social and economic problems. In any case, he states in Pouvoir that Marxists misunderstood the 19th century. He proposes to the socialist parties to abolish the revolutionary class-struggle theory from their programme.

Isaiah Berlin wrote: "Montesquieu advocated constitu- tionalism, the preservation of civil liberties, the abolution of slavery, gradualism, moderation, peace, internationalism, social and economic progress with due respect to national and local tradition. He believed in justice and role of law; defended free- dom of opinion and association; put his faith in the balance of power and the division of authority as a weapon against despotic rule by individuals or groupes or majorities...-15

I believe it is impossible to characterize Ferrero better than in these words . . .

1~ "Montesquieu." In Against the Current. Essays in the History of Ideas (London: 1970), p. 130.