Democrats and progressives—you should pardon the redundancy—are fond of citing the fall of Germany’s Weimar Republic in support of their democracy-in-danger narrative. Trump = Hitler, MAGA = the Nazi Party, Biden = the elderly, failing president, etc. No, wait, Biden’s no Hindenburg. Why, Karine Jean-Pierre can hardly keep up with the guy! But you get the idea, and it’s an idea that flatters those who style themselves dauntless defenders of “our democracy.” They get to pose as fighters against fascism without breaking a nail on a bombing raid over Germany or becoming nauseous during a trip by landing craft to Omaha Beach.
But when I survey the current, debased state of American politics, another historical precedent comes to mind: the Republic of Pals, as the French Third Republic was derisively nicknamed.
The story of the Third Republic has a little something for every type of pessimist. It was during the Republic’s early years that the seeds of European fascism were sown. Long before Dr. Goebbels cooked up the Night of Broken Glass, the Dreyfus Affair (1894-1906) touched off a horrific outburst of antisemitism in what was supposedly the world’s most liberal, civilized nation. Indeed, what’s happening right now in the Middle East may be traced back to the Dreyfus Affair, for the founding father of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, personally witnessed the military degradation of Commandant Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer of the French Army, after the latter’s conviction on trumped-up charges of espionage and treason.
It was a barbaric spectacle. On the morning of January 5, 1895, five thousand troops paraded at the École Militaire in Paris to witness the ceremony. As the drums rolled and a crowd of 20,000 looked on, the buttons were plucked from Dreyfus’s tunic, the red stripes were torn from his trousers, the epaulets were ripped from his shoulders, and his officer’s sword was broken in two. He was then paraded around the barracks square while the crowd howled for his death and the extirpation of the Jews. But since the death penalty had been abolished some time before, Dreyfus’s sentence was life imprisonment on Devil’s Island, a penal colony off the coast of French Guiana in South America. Herzl later remarked that what he’d seen that day was the thing that convinced him of the need for a Jewish state, and though he need not be taken literally—much else influenced him—the Dreyfus Affair certainly played a role in his thinking.
Aside from manifesting a virulent strain of antisemitism in French society, the Dreyfus Affair deepened the nation’s political divisions. In general, the broad Right—monarchists, Bonapartists, aristocrats, the officer corps of the Army, the Catholic Church—stood against Dreyfus and reviled the Jews as alien interlopers, actual or potential traitors, spreaders of corruption. These groups, which overlapped at many points, also hated and reviled the Republic itself. The broad Left—supporters of republicanism, socialists, bourgeois intellectuals like Émile Zola and Anatole France—stood for the innocence of Dreyfus, believing him to be the victim of a gross miscarriage of justice. In the end they prevailed, but the wounds opened in the body politic by the Dreyfus Affair never closed.
That the Third Republic was a bourgeois regime was another fatal flaw. First and foremost, the government represented the wealthy and well-to-do middle class. Effectively, it excluded the working class from participation in politics, while doing nothing to advance its economic interests. In every labor dispute, the government sided with the business owner against the workers—sometimes to the point of calling out troops to break up strikes. Taxation fell disproportionately on the working class and for decades the government refused to set up a system of social security like the one next door in Germany that Bismarck had instituted.
Over time, the working class’s situation improved somewhat, but by then its estrangement from the Republic was profound. It’s true that during the Great War, a national truce of sorts prevailed, with all classes and factions united in the defense of the national soil. But this Union Sacrée disappeared once the guns ceased fire, nor did it reappear 1939-40, when it was so badly needed.
The constitution of the Third Republic and its political culture only exacerbated the divisions, hatreds, and resentments that crisscrossed French society. As originally promulgated in 1875, it provided for a two-house legislature (Senate and Chamber of Deputies), and a President of the Republic chosen by both houses of the legislature and serving a seven-year term. A governing Council of Ministers, responsible to the Chamber, was to be appointed by the President. The monarchist faction thought that such a constitution could easily be adapted for a constitutional monarchy, but all it produced was deadlock, with republicans controlling the Chamber and monarchists controlling the Senate. Only in 1880 was the crisis resolved, with the President reduced to a figurehead and all real power concentrated in the legislature.
Governments were thus at the mercy of the Chamber and the Senate, which could overthrow them on a whim. The resulting instability was somewhat ameliorated by the fact that though governments came and went, much the same people served as government ministers in successive cabinets. But the legislature’s backroom dealmaking, logrolling, financial shenanigans and periodic scandals did nothing to help its image or to raise the prestige of the political class.
The France that emerged from the inferno of the Grear War was a much-diminished nation. Proportionately, France suffered higher casualties—killed, wounded, missing in action—than any other belligerent. A total of 1,315,000 Frenchmen died or went missing on the battlefield, representing twenty-seven percent of all men aged between eighteen and twenty-seven. Of the 4,200,000 war wounded, nearly a million and a half were permanently maimed. Thanks to the war, from 1915 to 1919 there were 1,400,000 fewer births than would otherwise have taken place—this in a country whose birthrate was already in decline before 1914. And of course, much of the fighting had taken place on French soil, inflicting terrible damage on the nation’s physical fabric. Though on the face of things France was now Europe’s predominant power, the country’s long-term prospects were bleak.
As with the Weimar Republic in Germany, there was for France an interval in the Twenties of prosperity and hopefulness. An economic recovery was complemented by the Pact of Locarno (1925), a broad-based diplomatic settlement that was widely seen as a guarantee of lasting peace. But the horizon was already clotted with storm clouds. In Italy, Benito Mussolini’s Fascist regime was well established. And in 1929 came the Wall Street stock market crash, herald of the Great Depression.
The Depression was a catastrophe for Germany, whose economy went into a tailspin that destroyed what faith remained in the Weimar Republic and facilitated Hitler’s rise to power. His appointment as German chancellor on January 30, 1933, spelled the end of liberal democracy in Germany and may also be taken as the death knell of the Third Republic.
Though the economic downturn inflicted less damage on France than it did on the United States, Britain and Germany, the situation was bad enough. Prosperity evaporated, unemployment soared, the government proved unable to cope with the crisis, totalitarian ideas gained ground on both the Left and the Right. An apotheosis of sorts was reached on the night of February 6, 1934, when the broad Right, by then deeply infected with fascism, massed on the streets of Paris, determined to sweep away the government and bring down the Republic. There followed the worst political violence seen in the capital since the Commune (1871), and though the Right’s attempt to seize power failed, the radical polarization of French politics was out in the open.
The foregoing account is of course a sketch, touching on the high points of a complex, fascinating, and depressing story. But the themes of class division, political instability and polarization, loss of faith in government and other institutions, collapse of national morale and national resolve are there—and to a greater or lesser extent they’re applicable to present-day America.
Analogies are suspect because they can so easily be pushed too far, as when progressives denounce Trump as the American Hitler and MAGA as a reincarnation of the Nazi Party. It seems right, however, to characterize them as the bearers of populist authoritarianism, inimical to liberal principles. Similarly, though postmodern progressivism is not Bolshevism, it seems right to characterize it as a form of illiberal elitism, opposed at many points to the norms of the American constitutional order, including its conception of civil rights and liberties. Nor are America’s class divisions as deep as those that plagued the Third Republic: Primarily they represent the obsession of small but vocal minorities with concepts of class, race, ethnicity and gender. Still, the ideas embodied in their chatter are troubling—as the current upsurge of antisemitism in America attests.
The collapse of national morale and will, on the other hand, is a problem just as urgent and dangerous for America as it was for the Third Republic. In May 1940, France was decisively defeated by Nazi Germany in just ten days, and though purely military factors played a role in the catastrophe, its fundamental causes were paralysis of will, the virus of defeatism, and simple despair. From the cowardly and disgraceful abandonment of Afghanistan by the Biden Administration to the vile rants of the national conservatives against Ukraine, America exhibits the same symptoms today.
This is not to say that the Land of E Pluribus Unum is likely to meet an end like that of the French Third Republic. But an America diminished, isolationist, unwilling to lead or deter, would be a less secure nation, a poorer nation—economically, psychologically, morally—a shell of its former self. There are, alas, people in America who are working hard to make that dismal vision a reality. They think that by sweeping away all ideas of American exceptionalism, American self-confidence, American patriotism, they can clear the ground for their own illiberal projects.
That can’t be allowed to happen.
The analogy of 1930s France has long occurred to me as a far better comparison for the post-Cold War US than Weimar Germany. Everything from gerontocratic leadership (and Trump will soon have to be included in that category) to the rise of an anti-patriotic right at the far end of the political spectrum, then onward to corrupt institutions populated by time-servers, careerists and ideologues simultaneously.
https://www.honestlypod.com/podcast/episode/25de33b7/alexei-navalny-died-for-the-truth-tucker-carlson-fell-for-the-lie
I suppose I had that impression put on me by my late father's personal library, which included the two great contemporary histories by William Shirer, the well-known Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and the lesser-known Collapse of the Third Republic -- Shirer being an eyewitness to both. Shirer was, among other things, an heir to the historiography ("Strange Defeat") started by Marc Bloch at the time that asked "why the French collapse in 1940?" (Bloch, who was Jewish and a member of the French Resistance, was executed by the Germans in 1944.)
Some corrections to the excellent narratives, just a few nits to pick. The idea of a restored Jewish homeland was not new in modern times. It can be traced to various figures of the era of revolutions as disparate as John Adams and Napoleon. The earliest Jewish thinkers to grasp both the positives of a restored nation and the urgent negatives that were starting to appear in latter 19th-century Europe were around 1860 or so -- the German socialist Moses Hess (formerly pals with Marx and Engels), the Anglo-Italian philanthropist Moses Montefiore, the Russian journalist Leon Pinsker, and the Russian ethnolinguist Eliezer ben Yehudah (Perlman). By the time Herzl had appeared on the scene in the 1890s, decisive practical steps were already being taken. What Herzl added was the search for Great Power acquiescence, if not approval or support, as no such project could get far without it. This search in turn inspired other, later figures like Weizmann and Ben Gurion, to thread the needle among the powers of the two world wars to achieving a state. That state was not the original goal, BTW, but only the late result of practical necessity.
The Catholic church in France was less political than you might think from accounts of the Dreyfus Affair. It was the Catholic *laity* who were (or at least many of them) aggressively anti-Dreyfusard. The Dreyfusards did include a wide range of middle class and moderate left defenders of the Republic, and even some conservative figures here and there, because they intuitively sensed the Dreyfus Affair was really a proxy for the contested legitimacy of the Republic. Foreshadowing the destructive role the far left would later play in European politics, however, it was not out in front defending the republic. On the contrary, it was consciously and publicly alienated enough from the Republic to simply sit on the sidelines. The analogy with the Communists of the Weimar Republic and the role they played in bringing it down is manifest.
https://kavanna.blogspot.com/2008/04/century-later-dreyfus-case.html
The far right was evolving at this time, not just in France. It was leaving behind the older focus on monarchism, aristocracy, and established Church. By the end of the nineteenth century, it was moving into a modern kind of far right: chauvinist, populist, borderline-racist, a configuration that put it at odds with more traditionalist notions. Again, the foreshadowing of the 1930s is manifest: the German Nazis and the Italian fascists leaving behind premodern political forms in favor of forms radically modern and "mass" yet radically anti-democratic.
Excellent. It seems that after every major war America has to decide what it wants to be. Civil war, WWI, WWII. After the cold war it hasent yet decided. It can be the defender and purveyor of woke totalitarianism globally- in imperialist so to speak. It can continue its cold war role of defender of freedom and prosperity or it can withdraw from the world. The first and last will lead to the end of freedom and prosperity- even in America.