When Emmanuel Macron cited Marc Bloch’s almost forgotten study of France’s defeat in 1940 in an interview in May of this year, he intended to challenge the West’s complacency in the face of mounting danger. With Vladimir Putin in the ascendant in Ukraine and Donald Trump edging towards the White House, the need for Europe to be able to defend itself – one of Macron’s long-standing themes – is urgently topical.
Macron is right to compare Europe’s situation with that in the late Thirties; it once again faces an existential threat. European civilisation was saved through Britain rearming in the years before the Second World War and declining to surrender or negotiate a shameful peace; America’s industrial might and its infantry’s heroism at Omaha Beach; and Russia’s sacrifice of over 25 million of its population in resisting the Nazi invasion. Eighty years on, Britain is shrinking its already depleted armed services and America has offshored much of its manufacturing base, while Putin’s willingness to send so many of his forces to their deaths is central to the Russian strategy in Ukraine. Except in countries directly bordering Russia, it is doubtful whether the will to defend itself survives in Europe. And if it does, it may be too late.
In the summer of 1940, following the German invasion of France, which he witnessed from the front lines as a serving officer in the French army, Bloch wrote L’Etrange Defaite (Strange Defeat), published posthumously in 1946. Born to an Alsatian Jewish family in 1886, Bloch was the founder of the Annales school of history, according to which it is the collective mindset of societies that shapes their response to events.
A lifelong liberal and passionate French patriot, he fought in the First World War, receiving the Croix de Guerre and admission to the Legion of Honour. Rejoining the army in 1939 and entering the Resistance in 1943, he was captured by the Gestapo, interrogated and shot in a field along with 27 others on 16 June 1944. Before he was killed he was tortured by thugs working for the infamous “Butcher of Lyon”, Klaus Barbie. Despite his ribs and wrists being broken and suffering from pneumonia induced by cold water torture, Bloch identified only fellow resisters who had already been captured or were safely out of the Gestapo’s reach. His beloved wife, Simonne, died a few weeks after he was murdered.
Analysing the causes of France’s collapse, Bloch summed them up as coming from a failure in the French mind: an inability, or refusal, to grasp how the nature of war had changed since 1914. Much of the responsibility for defeat lay with the incompetence of the country’s military high command. Another major culprit was a self-serving political class. National defence had become a plaything in the rivalries of politicians who cared more for their own careers than for the nation. (Macron’s citation of Bloch illustrates this tendency.) The largest factor in France’s downfall was what Bloch called “the ideology of international pacifism”. Through the media and the education system, a generation was taught that patriotism was the principal cause of war. The modes of warfare fomented and waged by rising authoritarian powers were not understood, or ignored.
Bloch found this willed ignorance in all sections of French society, but particularly the middle classes:
If our officers failed to master the methods of warfare imposed upon them by the contemporary world, that was because, in the contemporary world, our middle classes, from which they were drawn, had been willing to keep their eyes lazily shut to the facts. If we turn back on ourselves we shall be lost. Salvation can be ours only if we set our brains to work with a will, in order that we may know more fully and get our imaginations moving to a quicker tempo.
Many of the sources of France’s defeat Bloch identified can be detected in Western countries at present, though not quite in the forms he observed. Progressive thinkers who denounce patriotism as part of their condemnation of Western civilisation are not exactly pacifists; they are happy to condone or celebrate the most extreme violence when it is perpetrated by the West’s enemies. Terrorist attacks on civilians are expressions of anti-colonial resistance; torture, rape and murder of women and children is overlooked, or tacitly approved as collective punishment for racist oppression. Any use of military force by Western countries is invariably censured and opposed.
The neglect of new forms of warfare that Bloch identified in French elite thinking is replicated throughout the West. There is much talk of cyber-war and drones, but their implications have yet to be fully absorbed. Cyber-attacks can happen at any time, blurring conventional distinctions between war and peace; artificial intelligence has opened up new possibilities of disruption. Drones are asymmetric weapons – in other words, they tilt the balance in favour of the militarily weaker side. Manufactured at low cost in Iran, drones have been used by the Houthis as missiles to attack Western shipping. A Yemeni tribe has disrupted a trade route supposedly policed by the world’s greatest maritime power and its allies.
The weaponisation of natural resources is insufficiently recognised. As I noted in these pages shortly after Ukraine was invaded (“The Western mind no longer understands Putin”, 2 March 2024), Russia is the world’s largest wheat exporter and a key supplier of Europe’s energy. Ultimately, what is unfolding in Ukraine is a resource war, which Putin is winning. India, Brazil, South Africa and Saudi Arabia have repeatedly refused to endorse the West’s goal of returning to the pre-invasion borders. If Putin succeeds in imposing a partition of the country in which he retains eastern Ukraine, a rich site of strategic minerals, Russia will emerge stronger.
As in Bloch’s time, France’s leaders are ignoring the facts. Macron’s vision of European “strategic autonomy” is like the Maginot Line, an illusion. With a still diminishing industrial base, Europe is no match for a command economy of the kind Putin has built.
Even if the will to defend itself could be summoned, the timeline is too short. Rearming would take at least a decade. If Marine Le Pen enters the Élysée Palace after the next presidential election in 2027, France will make peace with Russia just three years from now. With its business model founded on Russian energy and Chinese trade, Germany may well do the same sooner. Europe’s two major powers are set on a path to appeasement.
Imperilled nations on Russia’s borders – Poland, Finland, the Baltic States – can mobilise large land armies, buy weaponry off the shelf wherever available and deter Russian aggression. Critically dependent on the American security guarantee, Europe is not a serious military power and never will be. The EU resembles the Holy Roman Empire in its decline more than an emerging super-state. A story has it that when Joseph Stalin was asked if the Vatican could assist in the struggle against Nazism, he replied by asking, “How many divisions has the Pope?” A similar question could be asked today: how many divisions has Ursula von der Leyen?
Liberals like to explain the march of the far right in June’s European Parliament elections as the result of Kremlin-inspired influence operations. But while such operations are real enough, they pale into insignificance compared with the influence of progressive ideology. If Europe’s centre parties had listened to voters and responded to their anxieties about mass immigration, the spread of radical Islamism and green policies that worsen the cost-of-living crisis for working people, the right would not have anything like its expanding constituency in many countries, nor would European youth be leading its advance.
Macron would not have gained less than half of Le Pen’s National Rally’s (RN) share of the vote in the June election, or dissolved the National Assembly to fight a snap election at the end of the month. By allying himself with Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s far-left La France Insoumise, the French president succeeded in blocking the formation of an RN government. But France has been left in a dangerous political deadlock. The far right has reached into the heart of politics, and the cordon sanitaire excluding it from any prospect of power has been decisively breached. Without a vital centre that could prevent a slide into civil conflict, France is a divided nation.
The collective mindset Marc Bloch found in the societies he studied has broken down. The liberalism he gave up his life to defend has all but disappeared. A hyper-liberal progressive creed dismisses European civilisation as a monument to white supremacy, and the radical right is filling the cultural and political void. If the continent was ever governed by liberal values, it is no longer. Economically dependent on autocratic states, morally disarmed and seemingly possessed by a death wish, Europe is drifting towards a defeat stranger than any Bloch could have imagined.
[See also: The West’s useful idiots]
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This article appears in the 25 Jul 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Summer Special 2024