Introduction
The reader who opens this slender book may be surprised to find so much high-caliber historical scholarship,
political science, and practical good sense concentrated between its covers. The discovery may also make one
wonder how many such treasures we have lost. For de Gaulle’s study of the First World War has been hidden from
our view for most of the twentieth century. Buried by an avalanche of political and civilizational catastrophes,
which kept de Gaulle and his potential readers focused on more urgent business, The Enemy’s House
Divided has been unknown in the English-speaking world, for all practical purposes, until the appearance of
this translation. Lest the occasion be missed, I have supplied a longer-than-usual introduction, to help the
reader get acquainted with the book, to give it a fighting chance to become well-known, and to establish its
place more swiftly among the classics of our political and philosophic tradition.
The Enemy’s House Divided seeks to identify the internecine causes of the collapse of the German war
effort in 1918 and of the subsequent dissolution of the German Empire. The German people had shown astonishing
energy and discipline on all fronts. Through four years of gruesome warfare and starvation, they held themselves
together and responded with amazing vigor in every adversity. To all appearances, the Wilhelmine Empire was a
prodigiously effective political entity, capable of concerted action on the grandest scale. Then, in 1918, after
sustaining every previous strain, all the ligaments gave way. To explain this sudden collapse of morale and
social discipline, de Gaulle concentrates upon the principal men in authority, whose duty it had been to honor
and strengthen those ties. According to his account, they had not passively suffered these moral bonds to be
destroyed. To the contrary, they had themselves—on and by their own initiatives—severed the crucial ligaments.
They seemed to have taken this course with their eyes open. And because their attitude manifestly defied common
sense, de Gaulle invites us to wonder why these redoubtable men undertook such dubious initiatives.
De Gaulle argues that their refusal of duty resulted from their convictions. Contingency,
accident, and force play the dominant part in war, according to de Gaulle; but this particular fiasco was rather
an outcome of reflection, character, and choice. He introduces us brusquely to the debate about responsibility
that had galvanized “all thinking Germany” during the decades before the war. De Gaulle contends that the younger
generation of German military officers had already taken sides in this great prewar
querelle de l’homme,
or argument over humanity.
1 Thus his work on the German
debacle was not simply a professional historian’s assessment of recent military events.
The Enemy’s House
Divided dwells on the philosophical initiative that decisively influenced German military and political
conduct. According to de Gaulle, the Great War—like some massive shift of the earth’s tectonic plates—triggered
the dynamite of Nietzsche’s radical teaching. It magnified the impact of his powerfully persuasive writing and
brought the moral consequences of his thought to light in the actions of the German officers. De Gaulle conceived
his first book—and with it, introduced his statesmanship to the world—as a deliberate and studied response to
Nietzsche’s catastrophic philosophical initiative.
In due course we shall clarify these claims and make good on them. The part that de Gaulle’s first book was
intended to play in the quarrel will become evident as we review how it came to be written, beginning when the
young Captain de Gaulle, seriously wounded and unconscious, was taken captive and transported to a hospital
behind the German lines.
Prisoner of War
The Enemy’s House Divided was the harvest of de Gaulle’s internment in Germany during the Great War.
Captured in March 1916, he was a prisoner until his final escape in November 1918. Between escape attempts, he
worked over German news reports, piecing together what was happening on the battlefields and studying the German
political and military leaders. Only later—some six years after the war ended—did these efforts yield the book we
have, de Gaulle’s analysis of the capital errors that led the Germans to disaster. In the words of his biographer
Jean Lacouture, “There in five chapters, was the slowly matured fruit of his thirty-two months of captivity. It
was the whole secret mechanism of Germany, brusquely revealed.”
2
In prison, de Gaulle was preoccupied with problems of morale. He
was himself endangered by
the corrosive melancholy of his grand, stymied ambition. Unable to fight on the battlefield, he was thrown back
upon the captive warrior’s feud—with the mirror and his combative passions. He sought ways to prevent confinement
and enforced inactivity from souring his ardor.
3 Drawing upon “the great
library of his memory,” he returned to the philosophical moralists he had read and sharpened his own moral
insights by writing aperçus in the tradition of Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, Chamfort, Balzac, and Flaubert.
4 One year into his imprisonment he wrote his mother about the quotidian
successes his comrades shared with him:
The winter has definitely ended. Apart from frequent snow flurries, the temperature has become clement. You often
ask if I go for walks. Indeed, for at least two hours a day inside the fort. What is most comforting in our
situation is the excellent camaraderie that prevails among us, which prevents us from ever being alone in a moral
sense.
5
In prison, spirited men, desperate for action, left “alone in a moral sense,” will turn almost inexorably against
themselves. It is evident that de Gaulle’s efforts to combat this tendency did not dispel his own melancholia. At
best, they just kept it at bay. He admitted as much in writing to his mother: “Once again, do not concern
yourself at all with my health, which is quite good. For the rest, my situation is of no interest, since I am
good for nothing.”
6 It was almost unbearable, when his country was fighting for its life, to be
immobilized; and de Gaulle was twenty-seven, full of energy and courage. Even the exaltation of victory in 1918
was shadowed by his heartsickness, over an occasion that could not be retrieved:
Without doubt today the crowning of so much effort is quite close. Once more, after a long road through the
night, after a long series of blasted hopes, of numberless illusions shattered, of lethargies furiously
conquered, success has smiled on the stronger will! In the immense joy I share with you over these events, it is
true that for me there is mingled—more bitterly than ever—the indescribable regret of not having played a better
part. It seems to me that this regret will never leave me for the rest of my life.
7
Although chance had dealt him a paltry part in the French war effort, de Gaulle managed to dominate his regret
throughout his imprisonment. He kept it from degrading his character. In the suffocating, constricted
role that fell to him, he found duties of considerable scope. Indeed, as we shall see, the very
meagerness of his part became a subject of inquiry; in it he discovered stores of strength and inspiration
hitherto untapped.
De Gaulle’s moral and intellectual strengths had already been recognized, most memorably in a now-famous epitaph.
When it appeared that de Gaulle had been killed (rather than merely wounded) in the Battle of Verdun—at
Douaumont—Colonel Philippe Pétain had been obliged, as his commanding officer, to submit an obituary report:
Captain de Gaulle, commanding the company, reputed for his high intellectual and moral quality, while his
battalion, undergoing a frightful bombardment, was decimated and while the enemies were pressing the company on
all sides, led his men in a furious assault and fierce hand-to-hand fighting, the only solution he considered
compatible with his sentiment of military honor. Fell in the fray. A peerless officer in all respects.
8
Yet, disposed as he was to a certain moral seriousness, perhaps de Gaulle had not coordinated his faculties in
quite this way before his capture. He took the restraints imposed by the prisoner-of-war camp as a goad to
reflection and moral action. The Enemy’s House Divided amply testifies to the fecundity of the peculiar
moral experiences he went through in this desert. De Gaulle sought to locate the moral center of prison life and
to work outward from it in defining his duties. As one traces the course of his reflections, from his prison
notebooks to the book he finally wrote, one is struck by the gradual concentration of his thought on this
problem: “What is most comforting in our situation is the excellent camaraderie that prevails among us, which
prevents us from ever being alone in a moral sense.” De Gaulle proved uncommonly intrepid in finding—along paths
visible only to his pioneering faculties—ways to prevent his comrades from becoming morally isolated. Two modes
of activity that had previously been fairly distinct—the intellectual and the moral—here became more tightly
interwoven.
This convergence may become evident if we reflect on a vivid prison portrait that Jean Pouget has drawn, based
upon interviews with de Gaulle’s fellow prisoners. Let us dwell awhile on this portrait, as if we were standing
before it in a museum; I shall point to other exhibits from time to time, to highlight what Pouget’s
word-painting reveals.
The Germans had sent Captain de Gaulle eastward from the first
prison depot in Osnabrück. It
appears that while en route, his guards caught him contriving an escape by boat on the Danube. For at the end of
April 1916 he was in a remote camp “for retaliation,” at Sczuczyn in Lithuania—an old wooden factory converted
into a temporary prison.
9 There we take up Pouget’s account:
Life at Sczuczyn flowed on like Time—useless, dreary, monotonous. To avoid wasting either, Charles de Gaulle tied
himself to a kind of timetable and definite tasks. There were few things to do. Readings were scarce, beyond
novels and books of leisure with stained pages, which were passed around from hand to hand. But outside the camp,
in the world of free men, the war, on which the fate of the prisoners depended, continued.
10
De Gaulle took it upon himself to reduce their sense of isolation by enabling the men in his camp to follow the
course of the war. Opening a window to actual events in the world was a task of considerable difficulty. The
Germans intended to keep the prison sealed off from the Allied armies. However, security proved to be lax:
Through some German soldiers of Alsatian origin, Roederer managed to obtain, from the guardrooms, some local
newspapers and old publications that had been confiscated from the Russian dispositions. After the various
physical occupations of rising, Captain de Gaulle gathered all the press documents and, installed on his bed,
undertook to pluck them bare. The newspapers were not always the latest but each of them contained a scrap of
news, or at least conveyed a confirmation, a subject for reflection. De Gaulle methodically analyzed the
information, classified it, and worked out his syntheses.
11
De Gaulle seems to have performed this office in all the camps to which the Germans transferred him. His
companion Remy Roure has described him later at Ingolstadt:
… often alone, deep in the study of German dailies, noting down his impressions, searching relentlessly in the
victory bulletins of the enemy for the barely discernible signs of a turn of the tide, studying the characters of
the military and civilian leaders with minute care, looking for weaknesses in their armor.
12
The disproportion between the poverty of de Gaulle’s resources of information in prison and what he was able to
do with them is quite striking.
Because the Free French represented a great cause, after 18
June 1940, but had almost no resources, such poverty of means was to be a constant theme of his
War
Memoirs.13 Throughout the Second World War, de Gaulle’s capacity to identify the
minimal, irreducible strengths on which he could build served him well. But in addition to making him more
inventive with very limited means, the prison camp experience crystallized de Gaulle’s thinking about the moral
dimension of
renseignements, or military intelligence. As de Gaulle began to understand, for men of
action, knowledge is the nucleus of a moral relation, a bond of interdependence. Without means of communicating
intelligence, there could be no responsibility or accountability for action. The violation by the German High
Command of this essential condition of executive responsibility became a major theme in the first chapter of
The Enemy’s House Divided.14
When we left Pouget’s account of the Sczuczyn camp, de Gaulle was methodically analyzing the news sources and
working out his syntheses:
His solitary reading went on for an hour or two; everyone in the hayloft respected his meditation. Then, his work
complete, he raised his head. That was the signal. All the officers in the barrack-room gathered around him to
hear the news of the day. It was not a discussion—de Gaulle never took part in discussions—it was an exposition.
From the communiqués of the German High Command, which were always much more accurate than the French
communiqués, he deduced the intentions of the opposed leaders, toted up the results obtained, gave a measured
critique of the doctrines of war. …
15
Under the severe constraints imposed by prison camp, de Gaulle tested what he could accomplish, even with very
limited information, through the adroit coordination of analysis and intuition, esprit géométrique
(geometric spirit) and esprit de finesse (spirit of finesse). In Pouget’s account of his effort to
distinguish serious initiatives from mere feints—conjecturing, probing, comparing accounts—we see de Gaulle
submitting to the necessities he later discussed in his essay on “the philosophy of action,” The Edge of the
Sword. These are the necessities imposed by an enemy’s capacity for choice:
The action of war in essence assumes the character of contingency. The result that it pursues is relative to the
enemy, who is preeminently variable. The enemy can present himself in an infinite number of ways; he disposes of
means whose exact force one does not know; he can pursue his intentions along many different paths.
16
Because of these contingent options, intelligence and analysis alone can seldom adequately anticipate the enemy.
Hence, de Gaulle warned against the tendency, especially strong in French strategic thinking, “to abstract
systematically from all the variable things, and above all, the enemy.”
17 Restrained from such
overreaching, reason can play a critical role:
But if intelligence does not suffice for action, it goes without saying that it plays a part in it. Elaborating
in advance the data for the assessment, intelligence clarifies them, makes them precise and reduces the scope for
error. The enemy, to be sure, is contingent, variable. No study, no reasoning can disclose with certainty what he
is, what he will be, what he is doing and what he is going to do. Nevertheless, intelligence, sensibly sought,
ingeniously exploited, can limit the problem to which hypothesis opens pathways. Thus, judgment possesses, in
some measure, the solid and defined material that it requires.
18
For many readers, viewing
The Enemy’s House Divided in retrospect, what will seem most noteworthy is its
initial precept: “that in war—save for some essential principles—there is no universal system, but only
circumstances and personalities.”
19 For this clearly points
ahead to de Gaulle’s teaching in
The Edge of the Sword. And several entries in his prison notebooks,
under the heading “Undertake the philosophy of action,” prove that de Gaulle was at work on this treatise well
before he wrote a line of
The Enemy’s House Divided.20
One can surely find a wealth of anticipations in this first book, since de Gaulle impressed his forceful
character on all his actions and writings. However, much is to be gained from resisting this temptation. While de
Gaulle began The Edge of the Sword in 1916, he chose to postpone its completion until 1932. He chose to
crystallize The Enemy’s House Divided beforehand. If we try to understand his first book first, we shall
be in a better position to understand his subsequent actions and writings as de Gaulle himself conceived them.
I believe de Gaulle intended his account of the German debacle to be both initial and fundamental.
The
Enemy’s House Divided was more than incidentally his debut as an author. It is the proper introduction to de
Gaulle’s statesmanship; it forms the foundation of his political science and of his
philosophy of action.
According to the precept we have just quoted from The Edge of the Sword, the primary contingency, the
wellspring of contingency, is the enemy. In The Enemy’s House Divided, the imperative to make the most
of what one knows about an enemy is followed out to the limits of de Gaulle’s ability. This is the most sustained
of de Gaulle’s studies of an enemy.
It is also the only work he devoted exclusively to France’s traditional German enemy. The Enemy’s House
Divided thus has a certain priority for students of de Gaulle. It is the foundation for everything he wrote
in the 1920s and 1930s, in the shadow of German resurgence, and for much of what he said and did after the Nazi
victory in June of 1940.
Nor was this just a book about Germany. The Great War of 1914–1918 was the seminal catastrophe of the century,
precipitating many subsequent calamities. It has long been a commonplace (endorsed by both Churchill and de
Gaulle) that the Second World War was a continuation and consequence of the First. Moreover, as de Gaulle unfolds
it, the German debacle of 1918 was the greatest moral disaster ever to befall a modern, civilized political
community, before the fall of France in 1940. The Enemy’s House Divided is a diagnosis of the profound
crisis of civilization that unfolded in Germany during World War I. According to de Gaulle, the German military
leaders brought that crisis to a head by embracing a radical critique of civilization, a critique of the science
and morality by which civilized men had heretofore been guided. As we shall see, he argued that the essential
causes of the German defeat were moral: the question the debacle raised was primarily a “moral question.” This
became a prominent theme of his subsequent thought and action. In 1940, De Gaulle understood the fall of France,
above all, as a moral catastrophe for the French. The insights and precepts formulated in his later
works thus lead us back to de Gaulle’s first book, because they are deeply rooted in it.
De Gaulle’s Practiced Reserve
To clarify the book’s foundational character, let us return to Pouget’s passing remark about de Gaulle’s style in
these prison camp discourses: “It was not a discussion—de Gaulle never took part in discussions—it was an
exposition.” No doubt this describes his customary distance from his fellow officers. The reader may be jarred by
the harsh contrast
between de Gaulle’s appreciative remark about camaraderie, in his
letter to his mother, and the impression of remoteness from his comrades conveyed by his manner. Some comrade!
Does this reserve signal the pseudo-aristocratic disdain that Nietzsche encouraged in his readers?—the
hauteur of Zarathustra’s dictum, “Wherever the masses have gone to drink, the fountains are
poisoned”?
21 Upon inspection, the evidence supports a subtle (but in practice decisive)
moral distinction: de Gaulle’s reserve is a sublimation, rather than a denial, of comradely fellow feeling.
An entry from his prison notebook may serve to elucidate this distinction:
The best method of succeeding in action is to know how to dominate oneself perpetually; or better, this is an
indispensable condition.
But dominating oneself ought to have become a sort of habit, a moral reflex, acquired by a constant gymnastic of
the will, notably in small things: dress, conversation, conduct of thought, studious and diligent method in all
things, notably in work.
One must speak little, one absolutely must. The advantage of being a brilliant talker is not worth a hundredth
part that of being retired within oneself, even from the viewpoint of one’s general influence. Reflection ought
to be concentrated within the man of worth. He does not betray himself outwardly.
And in action, one must say nothing. The chief is he who does not speak.
22
This 1916 notebook entry leads, by one path, to de Gaulle’s treatise on the philosophy of action. He elaborated
upon these thoughts in the central chapter of The Edge of the Sword, “On Prestige.” By a rather
different path, it leads to the climactic final chapter of The Enemy’s House Divided. By tracing both
paths in turn, we may reach a clearer view of the nexus between de Gaulle’s first book and his later writings and
statesmanship.
Paradoxically, these notes on self-control should be understood as social psychology first and only then as
ethics for the individual actor. De Gaulle’s man of action, like Aristotle’s, is preeminently a social or
political animal.
23 Although the focus of the passage is the individual “man of character,”
who is primarily responsible for initiating action, clearly the action de Gaulle has in view is concerted effort
requiring the collaboration of many actors. What he says about individual discipline has a social setting in
view. It is apt advice for every member of a paramedic unit, an ambulance squad, or a hospital emergency-room
team. The “gymnastic”
he recommends is obviously deduced from the extraordinary strains
that make cooperative work difficult in times of crisis. The moral reflexes to be developed prepare one to work
with others under conditions of severe stress, emotional exhaustion, and excitability. Hence the need to
discipline all those features of one’s appearance that may communicate or suggest extreme emotional states.
Because a media anchorman who breaks down on camera may encourage a panic or a stampede, we insist that he take
pains to appear reassuringly well groomed, calm, moderate, understated, and unflappable. These practices must be
secured so firmly in habit or moral reflex that the gravest news is unable to dislodge them.
While the purpose of de Gaulle’s moral gymnastic is emphatically public and social, it is training in mastery
over the motions of one’s own body and soul. One must undergo an ascetic regimen to strengthen self-command. That
regimen should fortify one’s capacity to reflect and choose deliberately in emergencies when most will lose their
heads, besieged by violent emotions and unfamiliar, seemingly irresistible impulses. Character, as de Gaulle
understands it, is a kind of capital. It is a fund of poise and self-command laid up against misfortune. The “man
of character” prepares himself to withstand impulse and excitability in the face of accident and force.
Habituated to self-mastery, in emergencies he can bring his full faculties to bear and use his professional
knowledge and experience effectively in concert with his collaborators.
The meticulous attention to small matters that de Gaulle advised would be ridiculous if it were mere façade:
The systematic reserve practiced by the chieftain makes an impression only if it is perceived as the shield of
his decision and ardor. Everyone knows of impassive people who are thought to be sphinxes, for awhile, but soon
prove to be imbeciles.
24
How does one know that it is necessary to prepare in this fashion for the stress of military and political
responsibility? In The Edge of the Sword, de Gaulle suggests the necessity by an example:
Hoche, who became general-in-chief at twenty-four in an age of rhetoric, quickly learned to be silent. “Matured
before his time by habituation to command,” a biographer says, “his impetuous fury gave way to a cold dignity and
his brilliant words to a laconic language.”
25
This appeal to Hoche’s example is suggestive, but also somewhat opaque. We infer that he swiftly learned the dire
consequences of breaking his
silence; but we need a more articulate accident report to
conceive these hardships clearly ourselves, so that we can let such realities work upon us inwardly.
26
The Enemy’s House Divided supplies such a disaster report. In the crisis of military defeat in 1918, the
German High Command, the Kaiser, the opinion leaders in the news media, and the political leaders in Parliament
all lost their heads and failed to control their tongues, according to de Gaulle. They managed to turn a
manageable reverse into a catastrophe that destroyed Germany’s governing institutions. He cites the just reproach
of a socialist editorial: “Each man should measure his words [before speaking], in high places as well as low, on
the throne as well as in the workshop.” This was meant for the Kaiser, but de Gaulle shows amply that it applied
across the board.
27
The distinction we have drawn between dutiful reserve and self-centered disdain is one that de Gaulle’s comrades
in prison, many senior to him and superior in rank, were quite capable of making. They surely understood his
morning labors as a valuable contribution to their morale and as comradely service. They took his reserve in
stride as the outward sign of studious concentration on their behalf and as the protective shield enveloping his
decision and ardor. Hence they did not stint in their appreciation. As Pouget suggests, they thoroughly enjoyed
giving him his due:
Following one of these expositions, in which the young captain had demonstrated a brilliant talent for strategy,
Tardiù decided to give him the rank and title of “Commandant.” For some days he was called by that name, but (the
same causes generating the same effects) almost every day he received an additional promotion. After “Marshal of
France” they called him “Constable” and the title remained his, both for lack of a higher rank and because it fit
the natural majesty of his bearing as well as his knowledge.
28
In reflecting on de Gaulle’s reserve, we may have seemed to digress, but our path now offers us a clear view of
an essential feature of
The Enemy’s House Divided. For it is in one respect de Gaulle’s most reserved
writing. It is the only book in which his own prestige as the proponent of a controversial reform, or as the
embodiment of a great cause, was not at stake. In its studied silence about de Gaulle, it bears a unique relation
to his own “ardor and decision.” Here, long before the creation of the historic figure “de Gaulle,” he had made a
most thoroughgoing effort
to efface himself. The silence of the book envelops and
safeguards the austere ardor of an author-spectator who bears witness to tragedy, to the ghastly national
humiliation of an enemy.
A spectacle of self-inflicted moral degradation is disclosed by de Gaulle’s history. The pathos of his own
stymied ambition, his thwarted love of grandeur, has been consigned to the background, along with his joy in
France’s splendid victory. It is as though he had written to assuage Max Weber’s suffering, by telling us what
Weber found so hard to bear in the spectacle of his country’s political collapse in 1918.
29 By clarifying this harrowing drama, de Gaulle has made it possible for us,
merely by contemplating the German tragedy, to purge ourselves of petty emotions, and to revive our ardor for
great things. Just as the effects of his own sound and fury worked on Hoche, to purge him of his youthful
follies, such disasters work upon the public-spirited reader; they are an indispensable touchstone for de
Gaulle’s man of character. They may purify his will for its gymnastic disciplines. By bringing before him the
moral disasters that are truly to be feared, such sights keep his eyes on the prize through the long repetitions
required for thorough and conscientious preparation. Reinvigorating a noble pathos, they may save his daily
regimen in small matters from becoming a heartless routine. Perhaps that is why Marshal Pétain recommended this
book to all young French officers.
30 It brings home to us the
greatest evils we can bring upon ourselves by our own actions. There is a place for tragedy in de Gaulle’s
precept, “To prepare for war is to prepare captains.”
31
Yet de Gaulle’s most reserved writing is in another respect his most outspoken about the moral dimension of
political action. Perhaps the spectator-historian could reflect on the moral dimension of political and military
life with a directness denied the historic figure de Gaulle.
The Enemy’s House Divided initiates the
reader—and perhaps especially the German reader—into the moral world of self-government and brings the moral
principles of constitutional politics to center stage. In this tragedy, impersonal moral-constitutional
principles become actors, like the Euminides in Aeschylus, avenging themselves when they are violated; these
principles bring ruin upon the German people as punishment for the hubris of their chieftains. Perhaps no writing
by de Gaulle so sharply awakens curiosity about the moral dimension of his thought. Certainly none is harder to
square with the view that his political science was Machiavellian.
32
In September 1916, the Germans dissolved the Sczuczyn camp. But
de Gaulle repeated the
pattern of morale-building reportage and strategic analysis at his next abode, in Fort IX at Ingolstadt in
Bavaria. There, according to Lieutenant Borgnis Despordes,
Captain de Gaulle occupied himself in organizing the camp; he gave a series of lectures on the war. The authority
with which he spoke struck us. He also took charge of editing communiqués that were then posted on the cell
doors, since the news most often came to us in truncated form.
33
By the end of 1916, Lacouture reports,
He judged that his documentation was sufficient to propound to his companions—many of whom, higher in rank than
he was, could only be astounded by this audacity—a vast canvas of the course the war was taking. These
expositions, spread over six months from December 1916 to June 1917, have come down to us, perhaps reworked
later, in the form of four chapters. Two are grouped under the global title, “On the war,” the other two entitled
“On the supreme direction of the war.”
34
Thus, for nearly three years in German war prisons, de Gaulle kept up a vigorous program of study and reflection
directed consciously toward moral objectives. On the one hand, through these duties he made his distinctive
contribution to morale and camaraderie, keeping his fellow officers abreast of the course of the war and
continuing their mental preparation for future action. On the other hand, this work was conceived by de Gaulle as
a gymnastic of the will, strengthening his own domination over himself, developing moral reflexes that he would
need to keep his poise in positions of responsibility. He seized upon imprisonment as an occasion for deepening
his understanding of the prison unit as a moral community. He sought out duties that united science and morals,
bringing his rare gifts of intellect to bear on moral questions and rescuing himself and his fellow prisoners
from moral isolation.
As the culmination of his imprisonment,
The Enemy’s House Divided reflects his austere concentration
upon problems of morale. Its stunning synthesis of scholarship and morals grew from the regimen he imposed on
himself during these bitter months of enforced inaction. He emerged from prison confirmed in his determination to
shore up these mutually supporting pillars of French civilization—indeed of civilization
tout court—and
to unify them in his own person. We may therefore conclude
our commentary on the Sczuczyn
scene with a statement of his underlying principle. Although these are not de Gaulle’s words, they do justice to
his principle:
By civilization, we understand the conscious culture of humanity, i.e. of that which makes a human being a human
being, i.e. the conscious culture of reason. Human reason is active, above all, in two ways: as regulating human
conduct, and as attempting to understand whatever can be understood by man; as practical reason, and as
theoretical reason. The pillars of civilization are therefore morals and science, and both united. For science
without morals degenerates into cynicism, and thus destroys the basis of the scientific effort itself; and morals
without science degenerates into superstition, and thus is apt to become fanatic cruelty.
35
In retrospect, one can see that
The Enemy’s House Divided grew naturally out of de Gaulle’s prison
lecturing, and so Pouget’s vignette is a good portal through which to enter his war study. Throughout the writing
of the book, the steady exercise of his faculties on German materials, which Pouget describes so vividly,
unquestionably undergirded his efforts. Pouget also enables us to appreciate how de Gaulle’s writing affected his
fellow officers, winning their esteem and trust. The book continued to win men over to de Gaulle thereafter, one
by one. Catroux, the first of the imperial proconsuls to join de Gaulle after June 1940, seems to have formed his
estimate in this way.
36 And we have the eloquent testimony of Gaulmier, who discovered de Gaulle’s
writings in a garrison library in the French Levant:
I shall never forget that light-hearted intoxication, that enchantment of discovering so many solid and
convincing pages; no one at Aleppo had ever opened the pages or looked under the green and maroon covers of the
sad Berger-Levrault editions. There, where I sought only an expert on modern war, I encountered a thinker, a
vigorous writer, a philosopher. There, where I only looked for reasons to hope, I found the certainty that we
would be victorious.
37
De Gaulle’s first book was thus firmly grounded in his wartime experience and reflection. Yet, it would be a
mistake to place
The Enemy’s House Divided in “the collection of great books written in prison camps
during the war,” as Fritz Stern has done.
38 Nor is Lacouture’s judgment
wholly accurate: “There in five chapters, was the slowly matured fruit
of his thirty-two
months of captivity.” In large measure, de Gaulle based his study upon information he garnered after 1918, from
the memoirs of “the principal personalities” on the German side. We would do better to assume that the book we
have was conceived and written later than his imprisonment.
39 It does reveal “the whole
secret mechanism of Germany,” as Lacouture has said. However, De Gaulle was able to piece that puzzle together
only by analyzing what the main antagonists divulged in their memoirs. None of the German memoirs was published
prior to 1919; most of de Gaulle’s “documentation” was not available before 1920, and in some cases not until two
or three years later.
40
The Authors of Catastrophe Write Their Memoirs
The most reliable report on the research and writing of the book is provided by de Gaulle’s brother-in-law,
Jacques Vendroux:
Two months before his marriage, Captain de Gaulle was appointed as professor at St.-Cyr. … At the end of 1922, he
was inducted at the École de Guerre.
The Enemy’s House Divided is in part the fruit of his course at
St.-Cyr. Its composition was facilitated both by his extraordinary capacity for work and the possibilities for
documentation which the library and archives of the institution offered him. He devoted the vacation in the
summer of 1923 almost entirely to the preparation of this first work.
41
Access to an abundance of up-to-date documents from the library at St.-Cyr opened new vistas to de Gaulle’s
pioneering intellect, and disclosed new dimensions of the war drama for his consideration. The intrepidity,
intellectual stamina, and moral imagination he had deployed on tiny scraps of information, at Sczuczyn and the
other prisoner of war camps, he now trained upon authoritative intelligence sources and massive amounts of
primary material.
The Enemy’s House Divided may be the most penetrating study ever written on the memoirs of the statesmen
and generals who ruled Germany during World War I.
42 We should also underscore
the special importance of these particular materials for comprehending de Gaulle’s writings. Long before he set
his pen to paper to write his own
Mémoires de guerre, de Gaulle had published a book on how to read
works of this genre.
And what a reader he had become! Let us imagine a scene as instructive as Pouget’s, from St.-Cyr rather than
Sczuczyn, describing a seminar
given by de Gaulle on the political history of the Great
War.
43 Suppose that the most promising scholars are enrolled among the French
officers in this class. We may also assume that he had their full attention: the young officers at St.-Cyr called
de Gaulle “
le double-maître,” “twice the master-teacher.” Each has been assigned to report on one of
these German memoirs. For several nights before each class convenes, the same scene is repeated. Bent over his
desk, in uniform, a young man looks up for a moment from a page of Ludendorff, Bauer, Erzberger, or
Bethman-Hollweg. He knows that in writing his own book, de Gaulle had undertaken to pluck these documents bare.
The student has been told, however, that this is not the moment to study de Gaulle’s findings: “Try, instead, to
imitate Descartes’s qualities of judgment and suspicion.”
44 So he must not trust his
memoirist further than he can throw him. Returning to the text, he methodically analyzes the information,
classifies it, works out his syntheses. Tiring, he stands, paces, gazes out the window. Perhaps he pictures de
Gaulle alone at work on the documents, immersed in the German war memoirs: searching relentlessly in the
recriminations for barely discernible signs of what must have occurred at a crucial turning point; weighing the
characters of the military and civilian leaders with minute care; looking for weaknesses in their armor; deducing
from their passionate self-justifications an action taken, a fact that must be suppressed, a responsibility that
could not be borne. Refreshed by this image of mental vigor, the student returns to his desk, composes his
report, gives his measured critique of the memoir for which he was responsible, and makes his own judgments
plain.
Next day in class, following the report, de Gaulle is silent. He has warned them against reading The Enemy’s
House Divided as yet; his own findings must not abort the development of their judgment and intuition. The
book was to be held in reserve. Each young officer must reflect first on all the reports; together they will
present the massive puzzle almost in its entirety. Only later, after the seminar has concluded, do these
initiates permit themselves to read The Enemy’s House Divided from cover to cover, to discover what de
Gaulle had seen in each document, and in them all together. Only then are they able to form an estimate of how
those thirty-two months of captivity, when he was reduced to the barest resources, had honed and refined de
Gaulle’s extraordinary faculties; of what he had become capable of accomplishing when adequate documentation was
available for his scrutiny.
But de Gaulle’s reliance on these memoirs also reminds us that
The Enemy’s House
Divided was a response to the circumstances of the postwar period, and not confined to the war itself. Many
of these publications were attempts to influence public opinion and political debate in the Germany of the
nascent Weimar Republic. In retrospect, it seems clear that they succeeded. As Daniel Mahoney observes:
By the middle of 1917 Germany had for all intents and purposes been transformed into a military dictatorship led
by Ludendorff. This regime lacked the moral and political confidence that belongs to legitimate civilian
authority. It precipitously collapsed in the fall of 1918 after a series of military reversals and the impact of
American intervention in the war began making itself felt. Lacking the elementary self-knowledge and refusing to
accept their political responsibility, Ludendorff and the other military subverters of the German order blamed
anyone and anything but their own insubordination for the German tragedy: hence, the subsequent claims of the
famous “stab in the back” by anti-German democrats.
45
De Gaulle’s inquiry was thus based on newly issued tracts that were shaping the postwar political debate in
Germany over the defeat of 1918, the collapse of German institutions, and the terms of the Versailles Treaty.
Although with few exceptions each memoirist merely blamed someone else who held authority, the effect of this
storm of recriminations was to teach the public that they all eschewed responsibility. This was not quite the
principle of the Dolchstoss or “stab in the back” propaganda. Blaming each other, none of the memoirists
argued that someone who held no position of authority and command was responsible for the defeat. But they
thoroughly plowed the ground to receive this principle.
That de Gaulle originally conceived Chapter 5 as a contribution to this debate is clear from the earliest extant
version of the chapter.
46 According to his Polish
translator, Capt. Medvecki, de Gaulle lectured on the topic “Defeat, a moral question” on at least two occasions
during his postwar tour of duty in Poland:
At Rembertov, fifty kilometers from Warsaw, the French officers had the benefit of a vast camp. … From time to
time, Commandant de Gaulle set aside the themes of combat properly so-called and gave a conference on more
general subjects. The finest of these, entitled “Defeat, a moral question,” was truly a great class. It had to be
mimeographed because all the student officers wanted a copy of it. Better yet, it reverberated all the way to
Warsaw, and we were obliged to go there together, to present it again before an audience of generals and
colonels, French as well as Polish. …
47
I do not know whether mimeograph copies of this 1919 lecture remain. However, de Gaulle’s papers included an
article by this title that he had never published; it was made public in 1973, after his death. The French
editors deem it to have been written in 1927 or 1928, but internal evidence places it in 1919 or 1920, when de
Gaulle was in Poland. Its first sentence reads, “It is a commonplace to say that the war just ended
[aujourd’hui terminée]—or that appears to have ended—was a war between peoples, and not merely a war
between armies” (93). This locates us shortly after the war. Its peroration forcefully addresses the “stab in the
back,” the nascent Dolchstoss theme, in reply to very recent statements reported in German newspapers:
When an army turns tail, or when it capitulates, it ill becomes it to boast of its troop strength, its artillery,
the means of war that remain to it and which it delivers up to the enemy. It would be quite astonishing to behold
it counting the advantages of the position which it has abandoned; it would be odious to hear it say with pride,
“We are capitulating with our forces intact.” And yet Germany is not afraid to adopt such terms. We have heard
her glorying in having accepted the supreme humiliation, since her military resources were still very powerful.
Yes, it is true! Germany had under arms, on the day of the armistice, 4 million men! Yes, her losses,
proportionally to her population, were inferior to ours! Yes, her cannons still numbered in the thousands, and
her machine-guns were beyond number. Yes, her troops were in enemy territory. Yes, her factories remained intact
and her fields fertile. However, she surrendered. She preferred to throw down her weapons, give away her
provisions, and submit to the hard law of the conqueror. She refused to make further sacrifices, hoping to end
her suffering. That is and has always been the very essence of defeat. All the armaments [
moyens] that
remained at the disposition of Hindenburg on the day of the rout of the German people are nothing more than our
trophies today. And in the future [they will be] the very symbol of our enemy’s disaster.
48
“Defeat, A Moral Question,” was the basis for Chapter 5 as it appeared in the book. The body of this 1920 lecture
contains the entire chapter almost verbatim. The transposed passages appear in the book version with only minor
stylistic improvements, editing, and footnotes. Neither the opening, nor the peroration just cited, appears in
Chapter 5.
I suspect de Gaulle withheld the lecture “Defeat, A Moral Question” from publication because it was inadequate to
its task. In the book, de Gaulle took as his starting point what he had earlier advanced as the conclusion of the
lecture: the Germans’ inability or unwillingness to comprehend their defeat as a moral question. Assuming this
same recalcitrance or political immaturity in his German readers, de Gaulle framed his study as a primer in moral
responsibility. He simultaneously widened the scope of his inquiry. Losing the war did not make the 1918
Revolution inevitable, according to de Gaulle. Defeat and revolution were separable “questions.” The Enemy’s
House Divided attempts to demonstrate that both are “moral questions,” but distinct and substantially
different moral questions. To understand how they became confounded, (and how that confusion could have been
prevented), we must study how the German authorities discharged their military and political duties, during the
war and its political aftermath. In the book, de Gaulle reframed his 1920 lecture as “The Debacle of the German
People,” making it the denouement of a long tragedy with four previous “acts.” Here he no longer exclaims or
protests. Instead, his exposition compels us to study the German defeat and the revolutionary sequel as distinct
questions, and to do so in methodical detail. Each of the four preceding chapters of The Enemy’s House
Divided deals with a major turning point in the war; each shows the violation of a moral constitutional
principle to be a cause of both the defeat and the final debacle. His statesmanlike understanding of political
history exhibits the denouement as the result of moral causes and hence of remediable mistakes. In addition, by
supplying an adequate education in constitutional principles, it leaves no reader the excuse of ignorance or
dogma: there was nothing necessary or inevitable about the 1918 Revolution.
De Gaulle understood the culminating chapter of
The Enemy’s House Divided as a contribution to the
postwar debate. Because the debate was wide-ranging and his contribution multifaceted, we confine ourselves to
only one aspect here. De Gaulle attempted to make clear to French, English, and American readers the precariously
lopsided character of that debate: in Germany great attention was centered on the end of the war, whereas the
victors were exclusively preoccupied with its beginning. This disproportion reflected the Allies’ failure to
consider (much less to
engage) the moral question of utmost urgency on the German side, on
which de Gaulle concentrated. That question concerned responsibility—to the German nation—for the defeat of the
Central Powers and for the destruction of the Wilhelmine Empire, along with the dismemberment of its ally the
Austro-Hungarian Empire.
49 Later, this public
abdication on the part of the victors bore strange fruit, insofar as it left the field free for Ludendorff and
Adolf Hitler to monopolize “defeat as a moral question” in Germany. Just as
The Enemy’s House Divided
appeared in the bookshops, in 1924, these two were exploiting the issue in a Bavarian courtroom, following the
failure of their Beer Hall Putsch.
50
Perhaps the first reason for the neglect of de Gaulle’s history by historians lies in his implied repudiation of
the premise of almost all historical writing on the Allied side in the two decades after the war. Not only does
he resist the impulse to deploy his scholarship to allocate blame for the outbreak of the war; he does not even
acknowledge the raging historiographic controversy on this topic. Perhaps de Gaulle (like Max Weber) thought it
was an exercise in futility.
51 De Gaulle contributed to the
postwar political debate (once again, like Weber) by focusing exclusively upon what the Germans themselves had
done to Germany, above all upon those who held offices of trust and authority in the Imperial government and the
military. In reading the highly charged memoir literature, he was fully cognizant that these authors wrote to
shape the present and future. By promoting the
Dolchstoss legend, which helped to bring down the Weimar
regime and aided Hitler in his rise to power, some of these memoirs helped to perpetuate the original catastrophe
of the war, bringing Germany to a new height of fury and depth of national degradation.
Decades later, when he came to write his own memoirs, de Gaulle had long understood that writing could be
consequential political action. His memoirs were guided negatively by the loathsome qualities and deadly
consequences of the worst of these postwar German memoirs and positively by his resolve to shape the present and
future through a more responsible politics of memory.
52 Similarly, his actions after
June 1940 reflect his resolve that France should be rescued from the moral degradation of the Vichy debacle. In
this they were shaped and informed by his understanding of the 1918 German debacle. In both respects, the
experience of writing
The Enemy’s House Divided had been formative and foundational.
His prison notebooks suggest that by 1916 de Gaulle was a keen reader
of military and
political memoirs, indeed a discerning aficionado of this genre.
53 In the postwar German
memoirs he found the ordinary vices that one expects from honor-lovers desperate to justify their actions: all
the petty injustices of wounded egotism, spiritedness, vanity, and pride. However, in
The Enemy’s House
Divided, he argued that something far more original and ominous was at work, both in the actions and in the
retrospective self-justifications of these authors.
A Postwar Postmortem on the Philosophy of the Future
The Enemy’s House Divided is a sustained critique of the principled irresponsibility that de Gaulle
found in the actions of the German generals and politicians, and later in their public recollections. According
to de Gaulle, the disintegration of Germany during the war reflected an ongoing philosophical argument about
responsibility. The war memoirs continued to prosecute that quarrel; he found them consistent with the philosophy
that the leading figures had embraced before the war began, and which guided their actions at its essential
turning points. Through de Gaulle’s account, the German military and political leaders come to light as perhaps
the first governors of a modern civilized nation to repudiate their moral and constitutional responsibility on
principle. In doing so, they destroyed their own regime and Germany’s governing institutions.
In this respect, the book does not fit on the continuum we have traced from his prison studies. It develops a
philosophical and moral theme that we could not have anticipated from his wartime notebooks and lectures.
Moreover, by obtruding it upon our attention in his Foreword, de Gaulle fairly compelled his readers to judge the
book by this point of departure. He deliberately gave his study the form of a reflection on the influence of
Nietzsche’s philosophy.
54 Rey-Herme puts this point
most forcefully:
Even if these studies are technical on their face, they are all curiously surrounded by a properly political
perspective since they evoke the relations between the allies, the relations between military and civil power,
including parliamentary intrigues and backstairs maneuvering. This captain intends to study a military situation
with all the intellectual and human faces that it presents. Moreover, the conclusion that he draws in his
Foreword is pregnant with significance. If the military leaders, despite their eminent qualities and their
remarkable
efforts, led the German people to disaster, “It is perhaps due to the influence
of Nietzsche’s theories of the elite and the superman.”
Thus from the first pages Charles de Gaulle wrote, it is the philosophical aspect of the conduct of beings that
represents the final explanation. He inaugurates his work by asserting that behind the failures of Ludendorff and
Hindenburg stand Nietzsche and Zarathustra. This theme is repeated like a leitmotif throughout the development
[of the work].
55
In many quarters, de Gaulle has been interpreted as a Nietzschean of some sort. Because that claim has wide
influence, Rey-Herme’s claims to the contrary deserve close scrutiny. Rey-Herme contends that
The Enemy’s
House Divided is a philosophically fundamental book for understanding de Gaulle. It reveals the extent to
which de Gaulle’s statesmanship was a deliberate and carefully premeditated response to Nietzsche’s influence
over men of action and over educated opinion. The foundation of de Gaulle’s understanding of military and
political action was his sustained reflection on the significance of Nietzsche’s philosophic influence for
political life, for serious citizenship and statesmanship. His first book indicates that from the outset, de
Gaulle joined
la querelle de l’homme (the argument or strife over humanity) as an agon with Nietzsche
and the Nietzscheans.
56 Insofar as Nietzsche’s philosophy of action is the great alternative to
which de Gaulle opposed his own thought, it is the touchstone of de Gaulle’s thought. Nietzsche had observed that
one must be judicious in choosing one’s enemies; Stendhal that one should enter society with a duel. In that
spirit, de Gaulle singled out Nietzsche from the outset.
The Enemy’s House Divided was de Gaulle’s duel
with Nietzsche.
57
Or perhaps one should say that it was only the beginning. For this duel was to go on; it was mirrored in de
Gaulle’s other works. The stylistic qualities of his later writings may be the result of de Gaulle’s quest for an
art of rhetoric equal to the challenge posed by Nietzsche’s powerfully persuasive, formative writings. In this
respect, The Enemy’s House Divided might provide the fundamental political analysis on which all the
writings of de Gaulle’s maturity draw. Coming before his more rhetorical speeches and writings, this first book
may be better suited to teach us about the presuppositions of the art of rhetoric that guided them. It may reveal
more clearly the moral and philosophical foundation on which de Gaulle based not only his statesmanship, but also
the epic accounts of his statesmanship that he left for posterity.
According to Rey-Herme, in
The Enemy’s House Divided de Gaulle undertook to show that Nietzsche’s
thinking divided and brought down the Wilhelmine regime from within.
58 By embracing the suggestions
of a philosophic assassin, the German rulers committed political and military suicide. This previously
unthinkable Nietzschean
Dolchstoss was self-inflicted. In this respect, de Gaulle’s first book was his
most “philosophical.” It was more explicitly and directly engaged with the influence of a philosopher on the life
“of a great and valiant people” than any of his later writings. It displays a philosophic doctrine as the cause
of military defeat, the destruction of a regime, and the moral disintegration of a nation.
Let us survey the book in the light of Rey-Herme’s thesis.
In his Foreword, de Gaulle says that he will investigate five essential turning points in the German conduct of
the war that he believes were crucial to Germany’s defeat. Each illustrates a lack of self-restraint, indeed a
defiance of the limits laid down by experience, common sense, and law. De Gaulle tentatively attributes this
defiance to the influence of Nietzsche’s philosophy (presumably in the 1890s, in the years when the 1914
generation of German leaders was coming to maturity and forming its outlook):
The German military leaders, whose task it was to guide and coordinate such immense efforts, gave proof of an
audacity, of a spirit of enterprise, of a will to succeed, of a vigor in handling resources, whose reverberations
have not been stilled by their ultimate defeat. Perhaps this study—or, more precisely, the disclosure of the
events that are its object—may make evident the defects common to these eminent men: the characteristic taste for
immoderate undertakings; the passion to expand their personal power at any cost; the contempt for the limits
marked out by human experience, common sense, and the law.
Perhaps reading this will cause the reader to reflect that the German leaders, far from combatting these excesses
in themselves, or at least concealing them as defects, considered them instead as forces, and erected them into a
system; and that this error bore down with a crushing weight at the decisive moments of the war. One may perhaps
find in their conduct the imprint of Nietzsche’s theories of the elite and the Overman, adopted by the military
generation that was to conduct the recent hostilities and which had come to maturity and definitively fixed its
philosophy around the turn of the century.
The Overman—with his exceptional character, his will to power, his taste for risk, his contempt for others who
want to see him as Zarathustra—appeared to these impassioned men of ambition as the ideal that they should
attain. They voluntarily resolved to be part of that formidable Nietzschean elite who are convinced that, in
pursuing their own glory, they are serving the general interest; who exercise compulsion on “the mass of slaves,”
holding them in contempt; and who do not hesitate in the face of human suffering, except to hail it as necessary
and desirable.
59
If Nietzsche’s doctrine was at work, it was not so much as a theoretical tenet, therefore, but rather as what de
Gaulle called a philosophy of action. Put somewhat differently, Nietzsche’s thought does not always act on men as
an intellectual doctrine that informs their reasoning; often its influence is more intimate and insinuating,
forming their characters or personalities “from within.” It would make itself evident in “how one becomes what
one is,” in one’s willing and one’s way of fighting.
60 De Gaulle obviously saw
Nietzsche’s influence as an alternative “gymnastic of the will,” rather than as a cosmology or philosophy of
history. It is a teaching that became embodied, through an obscure but nonetheless intelligible process of
incorporation, in the habits of will of the German leaders, and hence in their actions. Its product is not a
system or method but a self, a type of warrior.
61 Nietzsche’s thought would
therefore have to be discerned in the development of each man’s morality, or (as Nietzsche put it) in the
genealogy of the relations of rule between his drives.
62
So the tentative, suggestive phrasing of the Foreword we have just quoted is apt. De Gaulle is directing the
reader’s attention toward events in the soul that must be very difficult to corroborate. In making his subject
Nietzsche’s influence, as the fountainhead of German morale, he asks us to consider the German commanders as they
understood themselves.
The Enemy’s House Divided inducts us into the German Army as its officers saw it,
from within, illuminated by the sources of morale or strength of character they had adopted, from Nietzsche, as
their own. Somehow, these secret mechanisms or dynamics in the soul are to be exhibited in de Gaulle’s
history.
63
One may well wonder whether a sober and matter-of-fact history can bear this weight. Such
a history might be hard pressed to demonstrate de Gaulle’s leading argument, that Nietzsche’s thought, and the
style of action he inspired, was what divided the German enemy’s house and brought it down in World War I.
However that may be, de Gaulle not only claimed to have understood how Nietzsche’s thought shaped the course of
the war at its decisive turning points; in the Foreword he somewhat tentatively promises that these five episodes
will justify this conclusion, enabling us to corroborate it.
This inducement is powerfully reinforced, when de Gaulle takes up Nietzsche’s influence again in Chapter 1; and
the hesitancy of his Foreword seems to be replaced by categorical certainty in that chapter. It focuses on
General von Kluck’s refusal to obey orders from the Supreme Command in August–September 1914, a decision that led
swiftly to the German defeat at the Marne. De Gaulle claims that Kluck was following a pattern established under
Moltke the elder in the campaigns of 1866 and 1870. As Supreme Commander, Moltke was meticulous at the stage of
preparation but extraordinarily self-effacing when it came to execution. At that stage, he issued a few broad
directives but left subordinates largely unsupervised, neglecting to secure the communication links that a closer
supervision and a more comprehensive responsibility for execution would have required. De Gaulle argues that
Moltke’s system afforded very great opportunities for self-assertion. Under the impact of Nietzsche’s influence,
the next generation of German commanders took these opportunities to an extreme. De Gaulle exhibits the faults of
this system in 1866 and 1870, arguing that the German military historians, instead of subjecting the flaws to
thorough criticism, allowed the pattern to be admired and emulated. The French under Joffre at the Marne
exploited precisely these flaws.
64
The fundamental “division” examined in this opening chapter bears crucially on the political debate over the
responsibility for Germany’s fate during the war. For de Gaulle demonstrates that from the outset the German
command structure was a house divided against itself. Indeed, it had been divided, since before the founding of
the Wilhelmine Empire, by the founder of the modern Prussian military system, the elder Moltke, whose victories
in 1866 and 1870 made possible Bismarck’s unification of Germany. Contrary to Allied war propaganda, the
Wilhelmine Empire was not a coherent aristocratic regime, nor was its predominantly Prussian military system a
cohesive moral-political formation
united by a common military culture and authoritatively
governed by its High Command. Already in 1866 and 1870, in the very battles that created the Wilhelmine Empire,
it was evident that Moltke’s great victories owed far too much to the incompetence and lethargy of the enemy. The
duty of German military historians was to warn that the system would produce catastrophe as soon as it was tested
against a resourceful opponent. Rather than prepare through a comprehensive critique of their system’s
weaknesses, the men responsible for training German commanders joined unthinkingly in the celebratory mood and
institutionalized its imbecilities for six decades (1866–1914).
In the meantime, the impact of Nietzsche’s thought completely transformed the moral and intellectual milieu. The
essential division laid open to our view in this first chapter is between the two essentially antithetical
regimes or military cultures that shaped the minds and souls of German officers after 1870. The Junker ethos of
the old Prussian officer class, which Hindenburg exemplifies for de Gaulle, increasingly became an empty shell or
facade, while the younger generation adopted a Nietzschean morality or “gymnastic of the will.” De Gaulle draws
this distinction explicitly:
Marshal Hindenburg did not belong to the unbridled generation, that victorious Prussia molded on the morrow of
1870, and of which Ludendorff is the prototype. The marshal had received his intellectual formation, consolidated
his philosophy, and completed his military apprenticeship, before 1866. A more fervent cult of duty, a greater
moderation of judgment, a moral sense better developed, an almost religious taste for “service,” also
distinguished Hindenburg, in our opinion, from the younger, more supercilious, more subjective Prussians who
surrounded him in the General Headquarters, and who were also more abreast of the times.
65
Thus, what other historians have characterized as “the problem of German militarism” was not a single problem at
all, according to de Gaulle.
66 By 1914, German militarism
was an unstable compound of two antithetical moralities of self-discipline and self-assertion, as well as of
collective discipline and corporate assertion in war. There was no agreement or unity of principle in the
Prussian-German officer class. France’s salvation at the first Battle of the Marne in 1914 revealed this
essential incoherence, in the form of Kluck’s insubordination.
Moltke’s system thus predated the influence of Nietzsche’s thought
within Wilhelmine
military circles, but its structure permitted Nietzscheans to thrive and develop throughout the army and to rise
to the highest levels of command. To uninformed outsiders, the military system might appear to be an impressively
organized regime. De Gaulle portrays it to the contrary, as a house deeply divided against itself, in which a
traditional ethos of duty to fatherland, empire, throne and pulpit was at war with a revolutionary Nietzschean
moral doctrine of liberated will:
It was from Nietzsche that the leaders, like all thinking Germany, had drawn their philosophy. Enthusiastically
adopting the cult of the Overman, each was thus naturally disposed to consider himself the center of the world.
Each inclined, on the one hand, to develop his character to an extreme and put it to the test with a constancy
and audacity that have not been sufficiently noted. But on the other hand, each leaned toward exaggerated
independence and was determined to act on his own in all situations.
Militarily, their leaders had been formed by studying Moltke’s campaigns, and it is understood that they treated
them as models. The “manner” of the old marshal appeared to them as the ideal, not only in consideration of his
success, but precisely because it encouraged such distorted initiative in subordinates and because it consecrated
unlimited independence.
The commanders of the army of 1914 dreamed of following the example of Frederick-Karl before Königgrätz or on the
eve of Gravelotte. They were all disposed and resolved in advance to form their own personal conception of the
situation and to act accordingly, regardless of what the higher command might prescribe.
67
Following the manner or fashion that Moltke crystallized, and giving that manner the added intensity and
revolutionary scope of Nietzsche’s radical teaching, the German officers squandered their own prodigious
accomplishments. According to de Gaulle, they did so not by inadvertence but, as it were, on principle, following
the Nietzschean doctrine of the self they aspired to embody.
68
By the middle of the first chapter, therefore, it has become evident that de Gaulle is not at all in doubt that
Nietzsche exercised the decisive formative influence on the German commanders. The several “
peut-être”
of the Foreword have been replaced by unqualified conclusions. Thus far, the reader has every reason to assume
that de Gaulle will develop the
Nietzschean theme methodically, as Rey-Herme has suggested,
throughout the remainder of the book.
What then do we find if we examine precisely how the themes of the foreword are developed in the later chapters?
Chapter 2 follows Admiral von Tirpitz’s struggle against Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg from before the war through
the fateful decision for unlimited submarine warfare, which brought the United States into the war. This is the
first chapter on the insubordination of the German military to civilian authority. It sets the stage for the
later, far graver conspiracy that finally brought down the chancellor, and transformed the empire into a de facto
military dictatorship (the subject of de Gaulle’s Chapter 4). This chapter is a subtle account of Tirpitz’s
brutally single-minded effort to compel Bethmann’s resignation, a campaign the chancellor was able to repulse so
long as Wilhelm II retained his authority. Without removing Bethmann, Tirpitz did manage to circumvent his
authority, to exploit the weakness of his character, and to paralyze him for future action. Faced with a fait
accompli on the unlimited submarine war, Bethmann acceded, against his better judgment, and then found his
position increasingly compromised and untenable. De Gaulle does not speak of Nietzsche in this chapter. He
describes Tirpitz as a man of wide culture, differing in this respect from most of the “old Prussians.”
69 He does not tell us whether that culture included Nietzsche or to what
extent Nietzsche’s influence shaped Tirpitz’s thinking and character. His only allusion to the Nietzschean theme
of the Foreword is relegated to a footnote.
70
Chapter 3 is a study of the relations between the Austro-Hungarian and German empires and the causes of the
German failure to establish a unified military command. Here again, as in Chapter 1, de Gaulle shows that Allied
assumptions about German thoroughness and system were unfounded. Instead of taking the direct route (which was to
court the Habsburg emperor Franz Joseph and assure his goodwill), the German rulers threw away their early
opportunities.
71 Falkenhayn similarly discarded every chance for a good working
relationship with the Austrian commander in chief, General Conrad von Hötzendorf, largely because Falkenhayn
staked his future on victory on the stalemated Western front, while Conrad wanted action in the East.
72 The Germans evidently did not appreciate the necessity for command unity,
and this crippling disagreement was not set aside until Hindenburg took Falkenhayn’s place as head of the General
Staff, in late 1916. Chapter 1 exhibits individualistic
Nietzschean commanders, at
loggerheads with their military superiors and impatient of the discipline imposed by the high command. In
contrast, Chapter 3 displays German overbearing conduct toward an ally who had to be treated as equal and
independent. In Chapter 2, De Gaulle had underscored the difference between Hindenburg and Ludendorff, between
the old Prussian ethos of service and duty and the regime of unbridled self-assertion. One might see that
contrast faintly in Chapter 3, in the difference between Emperor Franz Joseph and Wilhelm II, between the
Habsburg ethos of duty and the rule of subjective will to power.
73 But this is a subdued echo,
rather than a trumpeted development, of the Foreword’s philosophic theme. Again there is no discussion of
Nietzsche in the chapter, nor of his influence upon its protagonists.
Chapter 4 describes the overthrow of Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg in midsummer 1917 by the German high command in
collusion with some parliamentary politicians—chiefly the Catholic Centrist deputy Matthias Erzberger. Both
Erzberger and Ludendorff felt capable of assuming responsibility for the entire empire and its institutions.
Erzberger saw himself as Bethmann’s replacement and so failed to consider the real danger of a military regime
ruling through a puppet chancellor. De Gaulle’s account in this chapter of how Ludendorff outmaneuvered and then
discarded Erzberger sets the stage for the next. The military dictatorship of Ludendorff and Hindenburg could
rule only on condition that the dictators won an overwhelming military victory. They therefore discarded a
promising opportunity for a negotiated peace on very good terms for Germany.
74
In Chapter 5, de Gaulle applies a pattern familiar to military historians: the phases through which a military
unit passes as its morale breaks down in the stress of battle. But he applies this commonly observed sequence in
an uncommon—indeed, shockingly unconventional—fashion, to explain the moral collapse of the entire German nation
in the late summer of 1918. In an age of total mobilization for war it is possible for an entire civilized nation
to experience the panic disintegration of a fighting team. De Gaulle is not uncritical of the part played by
parliamentary party politicians and German journalists in this debacle. However, he follows the hierarchy of
official responsibility, laying primary responsibility on the highest political and military authorities,
beginning at the top with the Kaiser and the Supreme Command. By subverting the constitutional authority of their
own government (through the kinds of actions described in Chapters 2 and 4), Germany’s leaders crippled her
for action. They insured that in the nation’s hour of greatest need, the German people
would be without the capacity to act as an organized political community.
Ludendorff is the protagonist in de Gaulle’s fourth and fifth chapters. Although he does not comment directly on
Ludendorff’s writings on the total mobilization of the nation for war, de Gaulle subjects Ludendorff’s thinking
to a devastating trial by fire in Chapter 5. He develops the analogy just described, which begins from the most
elementary moral knowledge a commander must have. According to de Gaulle, Ludendorff apparently never learned
what common sense and experience have taught about the stages through which a battalion or division passes as its
morale weakens and finally dissolves. We may infer that Ludendorff did not understand the moral implications of
his own theory of total mobilization and, indeed, could not do so because he was not morally competent in what
every battlefield commander has to know.
Surveying the book with an eye to Rey-Herme’s thesis, how does his thesis stand up? We see that de Gaulle’s claim
about Nietzsche’s influence, first advanced in the Foreword in a rather tentative or conditional formulation, was
strengthened, for a brief moment in Chapter 1, into an unqualified assertion. Yet when we subject later chapters
to scrutiny, seeking further elaboration of Rey-Herme’s challenging assertion, they prove strangely
disappointing. The theme suddenly vanishes after Chapter 1, and for the duration. Nietzsche’s name drops from the
narrative; there is no further allusion to his thought.
This is a perplexing and wholly unheralded reversal. De Gaulle does not obtrude it; indeed, his misdirection
disguises it. Yet once noticed, it cries out for explanation. Can it be that de Gaulle has (already!) abandoned
the argument he so confidently put forward as the great philosophical theme of his book?
Before we pursue these questions, let us consider how the argument of The Enemy’s House Divided conceals
them from view. Rey-Herme has overstated his thesis, but he is following an impression conveyed by de Gaulle’s
book. To put the point sharply: de Gaulle creates the illusion that his critique of Nietzsche (and his claim
regarding Nietzsche’s prodigious influence) is further developed in Chapters 2–5. To see how, let us return to
his Foreword.
De Gaulle’s assertion about Nietzsche’s influence is part of a larger argument. He seeks to enable the reader to
judge the defects of “the philosophy of war” (or more comprehensively, the philosophy of action) that guided the
German commanders and statesmen. These defects are shown in two ways. First, by their fruits: German errors led
to defeat. But in practice it is never clear that a doctrine led to defeat, unless one has a standard—an
alternative doctrine—by which to identify and judge mistakes. So the second way puts the burden of these
consequences squarely on the German leaders and their philosophy of war. It requires that de Gaulle clarify the
true principles, or adumbrate the superior philosophy of action, by which one should be guided. He does so in
this passage:
Perhaps, finally, in meditating upon these events, one may wish to measure with what dignity we should clothe
that superior philosophy of war which animated these leaders and which could at one time render futile the
harshest efforts of a great people and at another constitute the most universal and surest guarantee of the
destinies of the fatherland.
75
That is, a nation must not take its bearings by a philosophy of war that once provided the most universal and
surest guarantee of the destinies of the fatherland, if the next time round it can render futile the harshest
sacrifices of its people. De Gaulle’s irony reminds us that we require principles to be immutable. The immutable
principles, according to de Gaulle, correspond in some fashion to “the classical rules of order”:
This study will have attained its object if it helps in its modest way to induce our military leaders of
tomorrow, following the example of their victorious models in the recent war, to shape their minds and mold their
characters according to the rules of classical order. It is from those rules that they may draw that sense of
balance, of what is possible, of measure, which alone renders the works of energy durable and fecund.
76
The principles of greatest concern to de Gaulle are few and immutable. Yet they are not simply self-evident or
accessible to everyone. One must train one’s mind and character by “the classical rules of order,” if one is to
draw from them the sense of proportion that makes action productive in particular circumstances. Those who adopt
Nietzsche’s gymnastic of the will, by contrast, train themselves to ignore or override these classical rules of
order. De Gaulle uses the debacles of the German war effort from 1914 through 1918 to dramatize the consequence
of Nietzsche’s teaching, pointing out how it overpowered “that sense of balance, of what is possible, of measure,
which alone renders the works
of energy durable and fecund.” The German commanders and
soldiers exerted themselves with extraordinary energy and industry, but their works were sterile and short-lived.
De Gaulle’s formulation is quite precise; his argument turns on an acquired virtue. The quality of mind that
alone renders the works of energy lasting and fertile is a “sense of balance, of what is possible, of measure.”
Because Nietzsche’s doctrine is hostile to the classical rules of order, his influence might lead a man—who would
otherwise be capable of moderation and practical wisdom—to scorn these virtues. Still, Nietzsche’s influence is
by no means a necessary condition or cause. It will be quite enough that you are by nature a bully, a berserker,
or an imbecile; you have all that it takes, without Nietzsche, to make a mess of things. Nor will the classical
rules of order make you adroit and prudent.
As de Gaulle’s political history unfolds, therefore, we should not be surprised that he becomes less concerned
about the source of unmeasured and imbalanced choices. It suffices to show that Admiral Tirpitz, General
Ludendorff, and Reichstag Deputy Erzberger lacked a “sense of balance, of what is possible, of measure”; that
their actions violated immutable principles; and that, as a consequence, their works were transient and futile.
The rules of classical order shape the mind and form character toward self-mastery and devotion to the duties of
a defined office. Hence the melancholy aspect of every social order governed by such rules:
In the classical French garden, no tree seeks to stifle the others by overshadowing them; the plants accommodate
themselves to being geometrically arranged; the pond does not aspire to be a waterfall; the statues do not vie to
obtrude themselves upon the admiring spectator. A noble melancholy comes over us, from time to time. Perhaps it
comes from our feeling that each element, in isolation, might have been more radiantly brilliant. But that would
be to the detriment of the whole; and the observer takes delight in the rule that impresses on the garden its
magnificent harmony.
77
De Gaulle said consistently that the moral and philosophical perspective he spoke for, and from which his books
are written, was “classical” in character. Here he makes an analogy to “the classical French garden,” and some
observers have assumed that by classical he meant French. But to understand de Gaulle’s classicism as exclusively
French is to contract his horizon. It is also to forget what the classics of antiquity taught the
French before their revolution. To be sure, for de Gaulle, France under the old regime was a
great and memorable example of “the rules of classical order” in action:
The policy of seventeenth-century France was formed by circumstances. It fought shy of abstractions, preferring
facts to fancies, usefulness to sublimity, and opportunity to glory. For each particular problem it sought the
practical rather than the ideal solution. Though unscrupulous as to the means employed, it showed its greatness
by keeping a nice proportion between the end in view and the resources of the state. What was true of policy was
true of its instrument, the army. Its recruitment and its organization were based not on law but on experiment.
Its discipline and its code of honour were based on fact rather than theory. Strategy and tactics took as their
guide common sense, experience, and a wise opportunism, unhampered by formulae.
78
De Gaulle was justly proud of Louvois. However, he regarded the policy of the ancien régime as a rediscovery of
the
phronesis of Odysseus and of Aristotle’s serious citizen, the
spoudaios politikos.79 The classical measure appears in de Gaulle as the standard for man as man,
and France in the ancien régime has the glory of measuring up by that standard. To convey his classicism, de
Gaulle refers, in one passage of
The Edge of the Sword, to “the highest philosophical and religious
ideals” for clarification.
80 In another, the term is
illustrated by a page from Homer.
81 And in the most famous
passage of his
War Memoirs, he brings us into this perspective by sharing with us “a certain idea of
France” that has been before his eyes throughout his life.
82 In every case the classical
perspective is what Aristotle spoke of, in his
Politics, as a political-moral opinion, meaning that it
concerned the whole and put the citizen in an emotional and intellectual rapport with the whole. De Gaulle
invokes a “classical” perspective in order to conjure up
l’ensemble, or the whole, in its proper
rapport with the citizen as a constituent part of the whole.
83
De Gaulle has several ways of acknowledging the inherently problematic, challengeable status of this classical
perspective. In the beginning of
The Enemy’s House Divided, he broaches the most comprehensive challenge
to “the classical,” Nietzsche’s philosophical challenge. But one might say that every one of the leading German
“personalities” poses his own peculiar challenge to “the classical.” By repudiating the constraints of
l’ensemble, by asserting himself in his own cause, each of the partisans
whom de
Gaulle notices in this first book defies the classical standard in his own, uniquely perverse way.
As a practical matter, that challenge must be met by authoritative action. In addition to shaping the
individual’s ethos from within, the rule must impress its magnificent harmony on the garden by imposing a
discipline from without. Men of war are not statues; they vie to obtrude themselves and must be restrained. In
politics, the “plants” do not accommodate themselves to being geometrically arranged; every puddle wants to be a
waterfall. So the appropriate principles must be upheld by vigorous action. Their authority must be asserted by
men like de Gaulle, whose character has been formed by the rules of classical order.
It fell to Bethmann-Hollweg to assert the appropriate principles, to sustain their authority and his own
authority as chancellor of the German Empire, at the climactic turning point in July 1917. In the passage of
The Enemy’s House Divided that I believe he always remembered best, de Gaulle explained why the
chancellor was unequal to the challenge:
Perhaps, had he suddenly exploited this political turmoil for his own benefit, Bethmann-Hollweg could have
succeeded in retaining power, by placing himself resolutely on the ground of peace without conquests and of the
democratic transformation of the empire; dismissing from the government the likes of Helfferich, Stein, and
Capelle; grouping behind him the majority of the Left and Center in the Reichstag; and appealing to public
opinion against the pan-Germanists. But for that he would have had to talk frankly and firmly to the Kaiser,
break Ludendorff, silence Tirpitz and Reventlow, form a parliamentary ministry, order the submarines to return to
their ports, proclaim before the world that he was ready, without conditions, to evacuate Belgium and Northern
France. From the bottom of his soul, the chancellor wished to see Germany follow this path; but he lacked the
energy to open it for her. Not with impunity had he bowed his convictions and his conscience, on terrible
occasions, before the will of the warriors, accepting the invasion of Belgium, tolerating “unrestricted warfare,”
and allowing the drowning of civilian passengers. A character abased, a heart made vile, refused to serve with
courage a mind that remained lucid.
84
In this portrait, we may discern de Gaulle’s best answer to critics who notice the contradiction between his
claims about Nietzsche’s influence in the Foreword and Chapter 1, and his deliberate neglect of those claims in
the last four chapters. The statesman’s lucidity of mind can be sustained in action only if he can summon a heart
that has not been made vile and a character that has not bowed and abased itself. These are the indispensable
moral elements of civil courage in action; for in these deciding moments, prudence must command more than cunning
and violence.
As we have seen, theoretical consistency and professional probity would require that de Gaulle provide a more
sustained account of Nietzsche’s influence. The terms of his duel, however, demand that the essential defect of
Nietzsche’s thought not only be disclosed but also be redressed. In the Foreword and Chapter 1, de Gaulle has
sufficiently revealed Nietzsche’s devaluation of the classical concern for measure in the character and
self-restraint in the heart of the statesman. According to de Gaulle, Nietzsche teaches us to despise these
concerns as merely moral and “human, all too human.” Justly, and by example, de Gaulle goes forward in Chapters
2–5 to teach serious citizens—and the political historian—to forgo that Nietzschean imperative in favor of
classical prudence.
Coda
I have encouraged the reader to look forward to de Gaulle’s book through the eyes of his fellow prisoners of war
and to view his later career from the perspective of this first writing. For too long, The Enemy’s House
Divided has been eclipsed by the brilliance of de Gaulle’s great public actions and his later reflections
upon them. The reversal proposed is more than chronological, however. Looking backward, we are tempted to view de
Gaulle’s career as an ascent from obscurity to a lofty public prominence. Yet he may have seen that motion in
some measure as a descent. For although de Gaulle had grand practical goals, he differed from many captains and
statesmen in his ultimate measure, assigning a relatively low rank to the man of action:
To one of his ministers of the Fifth Republic, who asked him to rank the categories of men—and women—in the order
of his admiration, he could reply: “First, great writers; next, great thinkers; third, great statesmen; and
fourth, great generals.” The minister, it need hardly be said, was astonished, but also deeply impressed.
85
Here is the standard of an intrepid thinker and imaginative writer who knew that his highest faculties could not
be fulfilled in action but whose duty required that he devote his life almost exclusively to action. It reminds
us that the closing remarks of his Foreword may apply even (or perhaps most stringently) to de Gaulle the thinker
and writer.
86 If the classical French garden imposes its magnificent harmony upon the
general, the statesman, the thinker, and the writer by ranking them as de Gaulle’s standard ranks them, why would
the author of this remarkable book submit to labor so long and so arduously in the two lower ranks? Understanding
human excellence in these terms, why did de Gaulle choose so single-mindedly to protect the French political
community and its moral life, as a statesman? However one answers these questions, de Gaulle’s choice challenges
the thinker and writer to become truly comprehensive—by doing justice to what is humanly great and memorable in
the life of action.
According to de Gaulle, nations do not die. Yet without perishing, they may so demoralize and dishonor themselves
as to become incapable of repenting their downward course. The Germans were soon to travel about as far down this
path, from dishonor to unrepentant self-assertion, as it is possible to go. This is a moral suicide from which
timely national action (and only such deliberately shared action) can save a people; or so de Gaulle sought to
prove by his later actions. Here he prepared himself and the reader for such actions by thinking and writing on a
nation’s mortification. The Enemy’s House Divided is an inquest. I can think of no better way to sum it
up than to borrow the words of another tragedian, which, though applied in another context entirely, are no less
true here:
This is the story of the Wilhelmine Empire’s suicide, of the events that led up to it and followed it and of the
place in which it happened. There are the action, the people, and the place; all of which are interrelated but in
their totality incommunicable in isolation from the moral continuum of human affairs. … There was no inquest, no
trial in the judicial sense. Since then people have said there was a trial of sorts going on.
87
The Enemy’s House Divided
![](data:image/svg+xml,<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="1920" height="1080"><rect fill-opacity="0"/></svg>)
) at Gitschin and
neglecting communications with his commanders, Moltke encouraged them in “an exaggerated independence.” His false
hypothesis is shown in Figure 2a. Moltke believed the Austrian forces were east of the Elbe River, between
Josephstadt and Königgrätz; they were actually ten kilometers west. Moltke’s conception for the battle is shown
in Figure 2b: the First Army and the Elbe Army were to circle to the south of Benedek and attack him from the
south and southeast. But had Frederick-Karl obeyed Moltke’s orders to March south along the Bistritz River, his
army would have been exposed to a mortal threat from Benedek’s entire army, as shown in Figure 2b. Had the
Austrian commander seized the opportunity exhibited in the figure, he could have destroyed the Prussian First
Army. Alerted to Benedek’s actual position, Frederick-Karl ignored Moltke’s command, and marched straight toward
Benedek, asking the Crown Prince of Prussia to attack from the north. As shown in Figure 2c, the Prussian armies
converged on the Austrian position from three sides, winning a victory that gave Prussia immense prestige and
hegemony among the German states.
