Books: L’Annado de la Paou

THE RECONSTRUCTION OF EUROPE—Guglielmo Ferrero—Putnam ($3.50).

The situation which has existed in Europe since July, 1940 . . . is the same as that of 1806-1814. . . . This is the second great instance of a revolutionary state which has conquered the European Continent with crushing rapidity. Today Hitler is in the same position that Napoleon was at the beginning of the nineteenth century. . . . The study of 1814 may help us to understand the situation in 1941 and to discover the way out.

So says Italy’s No.1 Historian, exiled Guglielmo Ferrero, who wrote this new history of the Congress of Vienna.

Like Hitler, Napoleon created “a great panic” in Europe, started “intercontinental terrors” all over the globe. The way to check this panic, Historian Ferrero believes, was discovered by French Foreign Minister Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, and “the way out” was achieved with the sometimes reluctant help of Tsar Alexander I of Russia and Louis XVIII of France.

This book is therefore a sensational re-evaluation of the great Talleyrand, whose name is almost a synonym for villainy, as the “most constructive force” of the 19th Century.

Ferrero’s chief talent as a historian has always been to make the dullest periods of history as fresh as a newspaper. The Reconstruction of Europe is in part a lively resuscitation of the Congress of Vienna from corridors, back rooms and boudoirs. The Austrian secret police dogged everybody at the Congress where Emperor Francis I played host, and their reports, meticulously preserved by the Habsburgs whose motto was never to throw a piece of paper away, have a narrative verve and unvarnished realism which are a Ferrero specialty.

Sample report, dated Nov. 21, 1814: “At the ball given by the Count Francis Pallfy, Alexander (I of Russia), who deeply admires the beauty of Countess Szechenyi-Guilford, said to her: ‘Your husband is absent. It would be very pleasant to take his place temporarily.’ The Countess replied: ‘Does Your Majesty take me for a province?’ ”

Fear. Ferrero is also a master at recreating historical mood. His opening chapters, describing the sudden appearance and spread of fear in Napoleonic times, recall the whispered fears that weigh on people today.

The “great panic” began on July 14, 1789. It lasted 22 years. In Paris, the mob had captured the Bastille. But in the countryside, “at first there was a sort of general shudder of fear. The long-established royal authority . . . seemed shaken; and . . . it was the only form of authority [the peasants] could understand.” Suddenly there was a rumor: “Here are the brigands! They’re coming to burn our forests and cut our wheat! On guard and arms!” All over France the peasants armed themselves and started beating the countryside for brigands who were never found. In the Midi they still talk about I’annado de la paou—the year of the great fear. “One would say that this memory has obliterated all others.”

Not only the peasants were afraid. “The nobility began to flee the country before a danger, not yet present, which their very flight would create.” The frightened King tried to flee to Germany. The frightened Revolution imprisoned him, and “without an army, without an administration, without police, without laws, without a Treasury . . . was forced to make war on three frontiers.” Terrified next by its own Terror, the Revolution gave itself up to Napoleon—a form of 19th-Century appeasement. But Napoleon too was a product of fear.

“It was not ambition which led Napoleon to mutilate, dismember, absorb, fetter, and violate so many states: it was fear, the anxiety to reduce the losers to absolute impotence; but the result was always the opposite: the more Napoleon maltreated his victims, the more he feared them.”

Talleyrand. The man who ended the terror, says Ferrero, was Talleyrand. His life reflected the chaos of the time. An unwilling youth, he had been forced into the Church. He retaliated by practising such public debauchery that when his dying father begged Louis XVI to give Talleyrand a bishopric, his mother begged the King “not to disgrace the Church with such a bishop.” One month after becoming bishop of Autun, Talleyrand left the Church, joined the Revolution, initiated a bill to strip the Church of all its property in France. Says Ferrero: “The rebellious prisoner had taken advantage of an earthquake to flee over the ruins of his prison.”

Later, as French Foreign Minister, the defrocked bishop had thought long & hard about the universal panic, had found a simple explanation: “The abuse of force terrifies the one who commits it more than the victim. . . . Only a government with . . . no fear will be able to see through the illusion of force . . . and to understand that . . . force will injure its possessor more than its victim. . . .

“Thus,” says Ferrero, “in a generation which believed only in the physics of force, [Talleyrand] rediscovered its inner significance. Alone in his era, he began to understand the paradoxical drama of the Revolution, with its sterile victories and wars that would never end because they had transgressed the limits beyond which force ceases to be effectual and destroys itself.”

Talleyrand’s prescription for the fear disease was almost too simple: the restoration of legitimate governments in Europe, both monarchies and republics, “whose existence, form, and mode of action,” he wrote, “have been strengthened and sanctioned over a long period of years, I might even say over a period of centuries.” In France this meant the Bourbons. And having come to this conclusion, Talleyrand deserted Napoleon, risked his life to urge Tsar Alexander I to restore the French monarchy.

Thanks to Talleyrand’s principles, says Ferrero, “in 24 hours a definitive peace was made, a peace for which the Revolution had spent twenty years of fruitless search; and in 24 hours the deadly circle of fear creating abuse of force, which in turn augments the fear, was broken.”

So right was Talleyrand, Ferrero believes, that his principles could even be carried out by Alexander I and Louis XVIII — a parricide and a fuddyduddy.

Most of The Reconstruction of Europe describes how Talleyrand asserted his principles at Vienna, overcoming the intrigues, rivalries, greeds, hates and incurable frivolity of the rescued old regime. He was able to produce a peace which for much of Europe lasted 100 years, so that generations could grow up believing that war was the abnormal, not the normal, state of man.

The Author. For the study of history Guglielmo Ferrero had a good training —he began as a criminologist. His first book, The Delinquent Woman, was written in collaboration with Father-in-law Cesare Lombroso, author of the theory that criminals are distinct biologic types with crime written all over their eyes, ears, chins and crania. This theory, now unfashionable, caused acute embarrassment to men with recessive chins and adhesive ear lobes, used to send Novelist Leo Tolstoy (then in his primitive Christian period) into literary tantrums. Historian Ferrero has set off a number of tantrums himself.

Historians are for the most part orderly people who do not like to have their well made-up minds unmade about such matters as the real character of Julius Caesar. Ferrero was upsetting. Moreover, he was not dull. Beginning with his five-volume The Grandeur and Decadence of Rome, he made the past vivid for people who had never voluntarily read history in their lives.

Wailed one of his French critics: “He compared the shepherds of primitive Latium to the shepherds of Texas; the ancient Romans to the Boers; the Roman electoral body to the cosmopolitan demagogy of the United States; Rome itself to London, Paris, New York, Berlin, Milan; and Lucullus to Napoleon. He talks about capitalism, parliamentarism, imperialism, feminism . . . clubs, meetings, high life. . . . Cato is a landlord; M. Aemilius Scaurus a self-made man; Caesar a socialist leader, a Tammany boss. . . .”

A firm believer in democracy, Ferrero has been living since 1930 in voluntary exile in Geneva, where he teaches history. Since the Italian Government has banned, confiscated or destroyed all his works in Italy, he now writes in French, is working on a sequel to The Reconstruction of Europe, tentatively called Pouvoir (Power). “In this book,” says Ferrero, “I will show the development of the history of the western world from 1814 to 1914, and how that development ended in the present crisis.”

Ferrero, a tall, thin, professorial man with a white, Trotskyesque goatee, is now 70, has a daughter in the U.S. But he refuses to leave Europe. He feels that somebody must remain there to bolster the courage of Europeans who think as he does.