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The Crisis of ‘Imperial Societies’ 1

Christophe Charle

Foreword

In order to explain the link between the theme of my paper and the work of Pierre Bourdieu

which in the focus of this book, I would like to recall some aspects of his own intellectual

project which present some convergences with mine, both as regards themes and concepts, and

also method of analysis.

When Bourdieu decided to turn his intellectual activity from philosophy to sociology it was

due to his Algerian fieldwork experience. In his books Algérie 60 (1977) and Sociologie de

l’Algérie (1958), he described the transformations of the colonial system in a revolutionary era

and the effects of the war (1954-1962) on the traditional Algerian way of life. That is exactly

what I call here an imperial society founded on a twin domination: political (and economic) but

symbolic and cultural too.

Later in his academic life, Pierre Bourdieu came back to these themes when he tried to found an

European intellectual network to create a critical counterpoint to neoliberal symbolic and

economic domination. He defined this new domination as an ‘impérialisme de l’universel’, i.e.,

the international domination by the USA which is presented as a rational and universal one and

which therefore cannot be contested without risk of being charged with being ‘irrational’ or

‘backward’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1999: 41-58). This position was similar to what French

1 I have limited my references to the minimum since the complete bibliography may be found in Charle (2001). Printed version in R. Lardinois & M. Thapan (eds), Reading Bourdieu in a Dual Context Essays from India and France, London, Delhi: Routledge, 2006:56-76.

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governments had claimed at the turn of the nineteenth century when they justified their conquests

as bringing ‘liberty’ and ‘enlightenment’ to other peoples, which some liberal élites in Italy,

Spain or Germany had accepted as the truth. During the whole of the nineteenth century, the

United Kingdom too had tried to develop its imperial domination thanks to the spread of free

trade. Imperial domination had been presented as the only rational way of entering into and

maintaining relations between countries. However, in fact it was the best manner for a country

with imperial designs to develop its own national interests.

A final, more personal, point. I finished the book which is summed up in my contribution in

the Fall of 2000. Pierre Bourdieu, very kindly, found the time to read the manuscript. Perhaps he

found it interesting since not only the theme but also the method present strong links with his

own approach. In a way, ‘imperial societies’, as I conceived them, mobilize the relational way of

thinking about social links. This is central to Bourdieu’s work, as is the notion of ‘habitus’,

transposed at a national level, and also the concept of symbolic violence. These concepts make it

possible to understand why so many people accepted with relative passivity and sometimes even

with enthusiasm the terrible wars of the twentieth century.

Introduction

My aim in this essay is to explain my project, including part of the hypothesis and the

concepts that underlie my book which bears the same title as this paper (Charle 2001: 11).

What I want to understand is a classic historiographical question, one that has already been

addressed by a huge bibliography that includes such important and diverse works as Lenin's

Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Eric J. Hobsbawm's The Age of Empire (1987)

and The Age of Extremes (1994), Arno Mayer's The Persistence of the Old Regime (1981) and

the like. This question concerns not only the ‘origins of the First World War’ or the ‘Age of

Catastrophes’, nor simply ‘The Thirty Years War’ of the twentieth century’ (to use an

expression coined by Général de Gaulle and quoted by Arno Mayer), or even the ‘Age of

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Totalitarianism’. It is by far a more naive and simple question, not blurred by retrospective

problematics linked to ideological preferences. My question was originally raised by Romain

Rolland, the first intellectual who refused to accept the collective hysteria at the beginning of

the crisis that beset ‘imperial’ societies. Rolland says:

Ainsi, les trois plus grands peuples d’Occident, les gardiens de la civilisation, s’acharnent

à leur ruine et appellent à la rescousse, les Cosaques, les Turcs, les Japonais, les

Cinghalais, les Soudanais, les Sénégalais, les Marocains, les Egyptiens, les Sikhs et les

Cipayes, les barbares du pôle et ceux de l’équateur, les âmes et les peaux de toutes les

couleurs (Rolland 1915: 12).

In spite of his obsolete rhetoric, the cosmopolitan intellectual who refused to be mobilized

in what he considered to be a European civil war reminds us of the heart of the enigma of the

crisis that was initiated in August 1914 and that lasted till 1945, perhaps even later, if we look at

the difficulties in dealing with their recent past evinced by of France, the UK and Germany in the

1950s and 1960s. This enigma is not the war, or the apparent futility of its origin, or even the

classic question of who bears primary responsibility for it. The enigma is this: Why did these

‘three keepers of civilization’, as Romain Rolland calls them, rush into total war and return to the

barbarian practices that the nineteenth century, in its secular effort, wanted to banish? Why could

this first confrontation not be ended properly, and why did it lead to a second and more total one?

And why was this second round linked to regressive regimes such as those of the Nazis and of

Vichy? Why did it lead to a decline of the first industrial power – the UK? It is all of these

questions that I sum up in the expression ‘ the crisis of imperial societies’.

I shall address here four major points. The first is to explain what I mean by ‘imperial

societies’. The second is to determine the origins of imperial societies. In the third section, I ask:

Why are these societies what we might call ‘enemy-sisters’? And finally, I specify: which

crisis?

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Imperial Societies

All of the authors I mentioned at the beginning while introducing my problem also employ

concepts like ‘empire’ or ‘imperialism’. They affirm, in spite of their divergences (be they

Marxists, Leninists or Liberals), that all European countries implied in the conflict and more

generally in the crisis of the Age of Extremes shared the same will for power and domination that

pushed the international crisis of the summer of 1914 to those very extremes. My first

hypothesis, which is expressed by the new meaning I give to the expression ‘imperial society’, is

that the usual point of view is too global and misses the specificity of some of the participants in

the confrontation. Terms as equivocal as ‘empire’ and ‘imperialism’, for example, hide the deep

differences between the types of societies and types of imperialisms involved in the struggle in

1914. More importantly, these common words simplify the social and cultural basis of a war

without precedent. Other confrontations of empires did not lead to these extremes. The new

specificity of three of these empires – France, the UK and Germany – is that they happened to be,

concurrently – and for the first time in their history – mature and full established nations. It is

because these three nation-empires chose to enter into a conflict, which, at the beginning,

concerned only two old, classic empires, Russia and Austria, that the conflict led to extremes.

Only these imperial societies, these nation-empires, could really impose a total and long-lasting

mobilization of all of their inner material, social and cultural forces on their own populations.

And because they could succeed in this huge effort (a surprise to even their own governments),

the war became a total war, and their allies, the old empires, collapsed in this new type of war.

I call these three central nations ‘imperial societies’. Only France, the UK and Germany

really suit this concept, and I will explain why shortly. With somewhat equivalent demographic,

economic and financial capacities, they were among the four or five most powerful nations in the

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first half of the century. (This was not true previous to that period and was not true henceforth,

either.) Furthermore, they also dominated the diplomatic and cultural scenes.

More important than this more or less equivalent potential (a key factor in the balance and

competition between them, but also an element contributing to the impossibility of a true,

decisive and quick victory), these societies were imperial because they exercised a twin

domination: first, a territorial one, like classic empires, over colonies and/or over portions of

their national territory occupied by minorities of another national origin. But they also exercised

a cultural domination, because their national culture had universalist ambitions and their idiom

was used widely beyond their national limits – and this is not true of other empires. During the

sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Spain occupied a somewhat similar position in the world, but

lost it definitively when it was defeated by the United States in 1898 and lost its last colonies. At

the same time, Latin America was pulled into France’s cultural orbit from the second half of the

nineteenth century, right up until the Second World War (Rolland 2000). Recently unified, Italy

also aspired to recover the cultural hegemony it had enjoyed during the Renaissance and

cultivated the myth of a new imperial domination along the lines of the Roman Empire.

(Fulfilling these two ambitions would be fascism’s program.) Yet, at the turn of the century, this

unfinished nation was unable to really imitate the three imperial societies, as we can see by

Italy’s failure to colonize East Africa, and by the difficulties it experienced in choosing a camp in

1914 and mobilizing its population thereafter.

The third characteristic unique to imperial societies (compared to other empires or weaker

and divided nations, such as Spain or Italy), is that the large majority of the metropolitan

population shared a national ideal based on a common culture and language transmitted, for the

first time, by a universal school system. This is not true of the three other European empires:

Austria, Turkey and Russia. They were composed of various populations, speaking different

languages and with very low or uneven literacy levels and diverging national aspirations. This

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explains, in part, why these empires could not resist being pulled into the centrifugal force

inherent in the shock of the world wars. With a low level of literacy (and cultural consciousness)

in the south, Italy was also strongly destabilized by this traumatic experience. Even if acute

internal schisms appeared after 1916, owing to the sacrifices asked of their populations (and

particularly their working classes or their younger generations subjected to overwork or heavy

casualties), the three imperial societies resisted and were able to use the war and its memory as a

new weapon in the ‘nationalization of the masses’, to invoke George Mosse’s famous phrase

(1975).

The origins of the strong rivalry among the imperial societies points to their fourth

specificity. They justified their colonial enterprises or their will for international domination by

an obligation to civilize ‘primitive’ peoples or to export their values, represented as superior, to

other cultures. This cultural imperialism (masked in early modern times by religious conversion)

is a new phenomenon. Previous imperialisms were primarily political and/or economic regimes

of domination but preserved the primary cultural features of their dominated or exploited peoples.

The cultural and economic influence of these three imperial societies also appears in their

informal empire, which includes their language, their way of life, and the artistic, scientific, and

technical inventions that influenced large parts of Europe and of the civilized world. Examples

of this influence include British sports, French fashion, luxury products and literature, or German

music, science and technology. In each case, this multiple domination resulted in a national

superiority complex, more acute than the more general European superiority complex apparent at

the beginning of the twentieth century. This feeling of superiority was not limited to the

governments, the ruling classes or the privileged strata who were the principal beneficiaries of

this multidimensional domination. It also influenced – more generally – the whole society, since

the complex appeared in common representations (racism, xenophobia, and stereotypes of

neighboring or rival countries). Moreover, the complex provided social opportunities for middle

classes that their peers in non-imperial societies lacked. For example, there was the possibility of

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emigration to colonies or countries influenced by their culture, which gave them a chance for

social mobility or facilitated adaptation to a foreign environment, providing them with the

distinctive resource of having mastered a dominant language spoken by world and European

élites, as well as with the cultural and political prestige of being a member of a chosen nation.

(As we learn from contemporary school texts or popular literature, England, France and Germany

shared this belief in several ways.)

Obviously, there are also significant historical differences between these three imperial

societies. The United Kingdom and France had built their empires before 1900. After this date,

they were challenged by competition from recently formed nations like Germany and Italy, as

well as from non-European countries like the United States and Japan. Germany, the ‘delayed

nation’, occupies an intermediate position between the older imperial societies and eastern

empires. Over a period of thirty years, imperial Germany had succeeded in accumulating the

economic, cultural and political resources necessary to the constitution of a similar empire, one

more or less equivalent to those of older nations. Furthermore, Germany laid the foundations for

social institutions that aimed to integrate the popular classes into dominant bourgeois society, and

in so doing, became a model for other industrial nations. In spite of its failures (such as the lack

of political reforms and a real parliament) and mistakes (like the arrogance of its martial caste),

the German governing class followed this route to supremacy stubbornly before and after World

War I. The ruling class, though, oscillated between two imperial options: an overseas empire

before 1914, created by colonial conquests in Africa and in the Pacific, penetration into the

Ottoman Empire and the protection of German-speaking emigrants in the USA and Brazil ; or a

European one, made possible by the extension of the German zone of influence in central and

eastern Europe and based on German language, the cultural and scientific prestige of German

universities, the political domination of western Poland and industrial exports in backward

countries.

Let us now turn to the origins and historical dynamics of imperial societies.

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Origins of Imperial Societies

History explains the specific dynamics inherent in the three imperial societies that led to their

confrontation. The three old empires that collapsed during the Era of Catastrophe were the

products of territorial accumulation by a dynasty over a long period: the Ottoman Empire, the

Russian empire and the Habsburg empire had emerged gradually from their origins in the

fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The three imperial societies resulted from different constitutive

processes. The common matrix (with variations) of the United Kingdom and France was that of a

small nation-state becoming a greater nation by absorbing peripheral regions, claiming its place

in the sun with the traditional empires of the early modern period. They forged their mutual

identity in their bilateral conflict for European and worldwide hegemony during the eighteenth

and nineteenth centuries (Brewer 1989; Colley 1992). German imperial society, on the contrary,

originated in the shrinking and collapse of a former empire (the Holy German Empire destroyed

by French national imperialism under Napoleon), then progressively mutated into a new national

monarchy. This new monarchy was influenced – positively or negatively – by both the French

monarchy (unification through wars and annexations, revolutionary attempts) and by the British

one, preserving some polycentrism and regional autonomies for recently unified territories as

well as some traditional institutions. But it continued to aspire to imperial grandeur (that of its

past and that of its western challengers), as the pan-German movement or the desire to maintain

an ethnic link with German expatriates demonstrates.

These converging processes of emergence explain both why the three states and their

national communities were articulated in a similar way, and why this similarity led to

competition and antagonism. Unlike in traditional empires, where identity stemmed from feudal

links with the monarch or dominant power or religion and thus allowed for the preservation of

some heterogeneity or inner diversity among the composing elements, national identity in each of

these three nations was shaped through conflicts with the neighbor nation. Struggles between

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these nations lasted from the Middle Ages until the end of the nineteenth century (cf. Fashoda in

1898 – tension over the control of Central Africa) between France and England, and from the end

of the eighteenth through the twentieth century between France and Germany. The epic length of

these conflicts forced these nations to foster greater internal unification in order to accomplish

three objectives: to balance political forces competing for state power; to extract the growing

financial resources necessary for warfare; and to diminish any potential centrifugal forces aligned

with enemies or advocating civil war. Unlike empires that exploited larger and larger territories

and various colonized peoples, the two older nations were obliged to ask their own native

populations for relatively greater sacrifices (human or financial), resulting in, for example, the

mutual exhaustion of France and England after the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars.

This recurrent pattern of war obliged the different regimes to permanently mobilize resources and

populations to this end. Defense was designated a vital priority. It was no longer the specific

province of specialized minorities, but everybody’s business, and armies became a reduced image

of the whole society. These paroxysmal phases of conflict left sites of memory and

commemoration (such as heroes, national memorials, generations marked by a conflict, and

transmitting the memory of war). They also resulted in reflexes of national union around an

event, models of collective mobilization, stereotypes of the enemy (which helped to foster

internal unification), as well as institutional and cultural inventions that developed the capacity

for national mobilization in similar circumstances, like drafts, paramilitary forces, a national

history disseminated by the school system, a national religion, and political reforms after national

crises (Nora 1984-92; Samuel 1989; François and Schulze 2001-2002). These national crises

often entailed mobilizing against internecine division by extending new rights in order to gain the

loyalties of peripheral regions (as in the case of Scotland) or of less privileged peoples. For

example, after 1870, France imitated Prussian schools and military politics, Germany inaugurated

both a new social policy and a moral and religious intervention of the state in schools, and

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England instituted the progressive extension of the franchise to working classes, social measures

after the relative failure of the Boer War, and the cult of empire and monarchy.

Enemy Sisters

In 1914, observers identified these three national and imperial societies with the other empires

because of the large territories they had conquered in Africa or Asia. But Lenin’s and Hobson’s

theses notwithstanding, this new imperialism had varying and often divergent origins that could

not be reduced to economic interests. First, these overseas conquests were the continuation of the

traditional mutual rivalries (France/UK in Egypt, France/Germany in Morocco, Germany/UK

with the fleet policy of William II) and not a new version of traditional empires. This point is

underscored by the debates held in each nation over the ends of colonialism. Polemicists hostile

to colonialism accused pro-imperialists of weakening the nation, wasting military resources that

could be more useful against its European rival, or overlooking internal problems for the sake of

foolish and costly adventures. Pro-imperialists had to respond on the same grounds; for them,

imperialism was a national enterprise, protecting markets (and thereby the national economy and

employment in national industries), offering opportunities for expatriation of ambitious

individuals, creating wealth profiting the whole community, and developing the influence of

national culture (called ‘civilization’) abroad. Discourses of national greatness were thus

transmuted into an imperial discourse. In France, colonies would supply the demographic pool

lacking in the metropolitan territory for a national conscription against a prolific Germany. In the

UK, national industry, at the end of nineteenth century, would obtain protected markets without

requiring a completely protectionist policy. In Germany, the construction of the fleet and the

colonial policy were new attempts to rejuvenate the national unity forged during the wars of

unification, since German workers, German peasants and German élites could, according to the

official propaganda, find benefits in this Weltpolitik: jobs, economic prosperity, new careers

(Korinman 1999; Girault 1988: 111-27, especially 120-21).

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In addition to these debates over imperialism, there was a more discreet one about

international preeminence on cultural grounds, a dispute that did not exist in classic empires. At

the end of the nineteenth century, this cultural conflict appeared in the scientific arena. Struggles

included the battle to obtain archeological sites in Greece and the Near East, the linguistic war at

scientific conferences over the issue which of the three dominant languages would be the most

used by ‘small’ nations? (Gran-Aymerich 1988: chapter 6), and the race for scientific legitimacy

that transformed the first Nobel prizes into chauvinistic contests. Art was also enlisted in this

cultural war, evident in the campaigns to protect national artistic masterpieces and in the capital

cities’ museum policies (Rasmussen 1996; Crawford 1988). In literature, both classic and

contemporary writers were engaged in the national competition for international preeminence

(Charle 1998: 177-199; Casanova 1999). It was also a period when universities in each country

strove to attract foreign students; they wished to advertise their international reputations and their

ability to disseminate their national culture in other countries. France was the first to have a

systematic policy with the Ecole française d’Athènes' foundation in 1846, a weapon against

British and German influence in the new kingdom of Greece. Britain and Germany followed its

example after 1870 (Monnier 1996; Gaehtgens 1992; Valenti 1999; Singaravélou 1999; Réunion

des Musées Nationaux 1993).

These examples show that the notion of imperial society is a tool that allows us to explain

the global problem at stake in the crisis that begins in 1914. It gives a specific worldview to the

separate groups composing each nation, distinct from both non-imperial societies and classical

empires, and differing from each other in each of the three national situations. It may be

comparable to an invisible frontier in the American meaning of the term: a possible solution to

internal contradictions or problems, problems that were unsolvable in other nations because they

lacked this twin imperial domination. For France, imperial society offered the hope of

compensating demographic decline and the relative weakness of industrial growth, and thus of

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continuing to be a great power taken into consideration by larger or stronger countries. For Great

Britain, imperial society maintained the illusion of relative independence from Europe and the

possibility for social mobility outside the motherland without changing social rules or the class

structures. Obviously, this benefited the dominant classes more, but the middle classes, workers,

and peasants did derive some indirect gains.

Imperial Germany, on the other hand, was an incomplete imperial society, and the historical

gap explains why Germany played a central role at the beginning of the 1914 crisis. It also

explains why the Weimar Republic, frustrated by its unequal status, ended in a new regime whose

program was clearly to succeed in what the Kaiser’s regime had failed to achieve in the first

place. Instead of accepting the status of an ordinary nation, a large fraction of Germans,

destabilized by the economic crisis, preferred to believe those who promised to build again a new

empire, even if it meant eliminating all the elements accused of bearing responsibility for the

previous disaster (Jews, Marxists and so on).

At this point, it is necessary to dispel a possible misunderstanding concerning the use of

this concept. One common fault of macro-historical comparisons is to create large classifications

that overlook specificities that need to be explained. Thus, in this case, French or even foreign

historians of France might be surprised that I include France in this group of societies. After all,

France was marked by the political struggles of the nineteenth century and by a triple aspiration

to secularization, democracy and even the elimination of aristocracy, while Britain and Germany

remained, on the eve of World War I, stratified, aristocratic societies with strong links between

Church and State. Is this specificity not more important to an understanding of the social

dynamics of France than the common features I mentioned earlier? I am certainly aware of this

difference, having written elsewhere (Charle 1994) about some of the specificities of French

society (élites, intellectuals, the university, and so on). Nevertheless, this comparative endeavor

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has the great virtue of forcing us to displace our usual gallocentric viewpoint and of highlighting

what the historical vulgate neglects or understates. For example:

The French Republic, where political rights for women were concerned, was conservative

when compared to the British monarchy where certain categories of women had achieved some

type of franchise;

French democracy was corrupted by lobbies as influential as some of the minorities that

dominated the German empire;

Secularization did not prevent the erection of strong social, regional and sexist barriers,

incompatible in principle with this notion; and

Human rights were completely overlooked in the colonies and very restricted for immigrants,

who suffered owing to a backward social policy.

Another response to the specificities of French society and political situation is to note that

in a European context dominated by monarchies and empires, where France’s principal rivals

were globally more powerful, the Third Republic élites were forced to imitate some of the

policies and strategies of their aristocratic neighbors.

Among imperial societies, France was the product of a defeat that dissolved the universalist

pride inherited from the French Revolution (a pride briefly restored by the imperial and national

diplomacy of Napoleon III) and that brought deep disillusion as new nations emerged. Obsessed

by this defeat, republican governments employed a double strategy inspired by the rival powers:

they attempted to integrate heterogeneous populations using the school system and conscription

(similar to efforts in Prussia and imperial Germany), and they founded a financial and overseas

empire competitive with the UK’s. This strategy was combined with the traditional monarchic

international policy of the Ancien Regime, based on a new alliance aimed at isolating the

dominant European power, Germany. Even the anticlerical politics leading to the separation of

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church and state was a paradoxical contribution to national unity since it weakened the sway of

the French Catholic Church, linked to the Papacy's influences.

This analysis shows that the notion of imperial society must not be taken as an ‘essence’ or

a stable framework. It is instead a complex of different and moving forces, changing in each

context, but always in interaction with the forces present in other imperial societies. It may be

compared to a field in Bourdieu’s sense of the term. This double dimension (internal and

external, material and cultural) is specific and gives it a greater analytical interest than the more

one-dimensional (and restrictive) concepts like aristocratic society, industrial society, imperialist

society, balance of power, and so on, concepts often used to analyze the European context of

1914. These terms reduce reality to a particular group’s viewpoint (diplomats, businessmen,

politicians) – making it unrepresentative -- or to that of a tiny minority of decision-makers. For

example, two of these societies, France and Germany, were also agrarian societies, and their rural

forces played an important role in social conflicts. Britain, unquestionably industrial, was perhaps

also just as much a service society, and British historians have recently insisted on the weight of

the City and related forces to explain some of Britain’s strategic economic choices (Cain and

Hopkins 1993a; 1993b; Cassis 1994; Schneer 1999). All of these groups were influenced by the

imperial dimension in combination with national achievement.

Which Crisis?

I must now return to the term ‘crisis’. It does not simply refer to an historical fact already

analyzed by a huge bibliography. What we have here is the fact that these three countries

declined and came under the influence of two new superpowers, losing not only their colonial but

also their cultural empires that were the foundations of their specific national pride. What is

unique to the crisis of imperial societies is that, unlike other nations shaken by war and social

upheavals, in this case either élites or large segments of each society refused to accept the

diagnosis of definitive decline. In fact, they tried to preserve or restore the former situation. In

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their refusal to adapt, groups not only invoked general causes (such as mistakes by or short-

sightedness of the élites, economic difficulties, struggles with social and radical movements, or

panic in the middle class) but also middle-range or short-range changes, initiated by four years of

total war. These changes were numerous and included a crisis in urban structures, tensions

between city and country, changes in familial structures induced by mobilization and

exceptionally high mortality rates for young men, changing relations between the sexes due to

war losses and mobilization of women for wartime jobs, new tensions between generations (those

touched and those untouched by war), necessary reforms in education after a new life experience

incompatible with traditions, the decline of economic power and of the state’s legitimacy and

authority due to obvious policy or management errors during the military crisis, or deep anxiety

about the future after such a traumatic experience. All of these mutations contributed to a

pessimistic mood among ruling élites (enhanced by the victory of communism in Russia, which

represented a possible future for other countries if they failed to restore the old order) and to the

extension of a new radical sentiment among middle and popular classes, urban or rural. This

pessimistic stance explains why minorities who sought a reformist solution to all of the problems

found themselves in a difficult situation, like the Labour party in Britain, enlightened élites

asking for reforms or reformist socialists in France, or the Social Democrats in Germany.

A simple revival or restoration was not possible because of the multiplicity of the social

and cultural changes that followed war. Moreover, these changes were not entirely compatible,

nor could they converge to build a coherent new order. On the contrary, in the two most shaken

societies, France and Germany, they contributed to the generation of a brutal, voluntary and

regressive reaction, relatively quickly in Germany with extreme right movements and Nazism, a

little later in France with rightist or fascist leagues followed by the Vichy new order. Though

specific and born in different contexts (social crisis on one side, military crisis on the other), both

regimes shared the desire to purge from their societies those novelties linked with the previous

national crisis: minorities, the extreme left, emancipated women, and so on (Burleigh and

Wippermann 1991).

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To understand the violence and multidimensional character of the crisis, it is necessary to

recall an historical fact, often forgotten because of the division of labor between historians of

domestic politics and foreign affairs and specialists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the

process of building the three imperial societies took three quarters of a century in France and a

half-century in the UK and Germany, while the central crisis lasted only twenty years. This

temporal difference is one of the key reasons why the crisis could not be overcome smoothly. At

the height of the crisis, the three societies were being ruled by generations who were adults or

who had come of age during either the society’s highest point or its last phase of emergence. For

these leaders or central groups of imperial societies, it was quite impossible to accept the new,

inverted society born from war’s upheavals, a society where outsiders or dominated groups

obtained new rights or powers or even, as in the new Bolshevik society and its European

imitations, claimed to be the new rulers.

Among élites and intellectuals there were, truly, many Cassandras or think tanks proposing

decisive adaptations of imperial societies; they were partially inspired from an American model

that seemed to be the future of modern Europe. But these innovators and reformists, opposed to

mainstream opinion, remained an isolated and contested minority. Faced with the reactionary

attitude of older élites, encouraged by their objective decline, a larger part of the popular classes

adopted a new subversive attitude linked to the want, deprivation and suffering they experienced

during World War I. Many people were mobilized on the front or in civil activities linked to

national defense on the basis of ‘sacred union’. After this drama, a simple return to normalcy or

a program of limited change was unthinkable. Political and economic leaders of the three nations

were very conscious of and anxious about this new situation.

In this extremely tense situation, which led to a lack of agreement even about the rules of

the social game, the crisis of imperial societies became a multidimensional phenomenon. In each

case, the crisis was resolved in different ways, depending upon the élites’ capacity to adapt, and

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upon the degree of opposition. In the UK a provisional compromise was forged, but only at the

cost of a reluctance to battle authoritarian regimes and a relative failure to prevent a new total

war. Moreover, this solution did not keep dominated groups from being the primary victims of

an aging economy’s hardships. In the other two societies, we see a double failure, internal and

external, both intimately related. This does not mean, even in the German case (where the

situation was the most desperate because of the defeat and the loss of an imperial society’s main

attributes) that nothing other than the Nazi seizure of power could have succeeded. At the same

time, my interpretation, even if it seeks social bases for other changes, does not exclude the

specific effects of other factors, such as political choices, cultural and educative national features,

the influence of external models and so on.

To be more concrete, it would be necessary at this point to discuss one of the historical

situations in more depth, to demonstrate how I try to mobilize these different terms. It would also

be necessary to develop another concept, what I call national habitus, an identity principle

specific to each imperial society, constructed by the societies through an interactive and mutual

process of rivalry parallel to the history of their relations. This national habitus means that each

population in general believed not only in defending itself against foreign aggression but at the

same time associated this patriotic defense with a specific social ideal judged superior to that of

its enemy. In France, it was equality against aristocratic nations. In the UK, liberty against

militarist and protectionist powers’ will of domination; in Germany, it was Kultur and social

protection of the state against Russian barbarism, or against the anarchic individualism of France

or England. Even if these stereotypes were products of propaganda, the success of the

mobilization efforts in August 1914 (a success that was not certain even for the élites of each

country) indicates that the national habitus that had been gradually disseminated at the end of

nineteenth century was now an efficient guideline in a crisis situation. It was one of the

mediations that explains why the mass majority of the populations in 1914 supported

mobilizations for an accessory cause (the ‘Great Illusion’ of Jean Renoir's film), sincerely

18

believing – and this without strong short-term preparations – that their country was right, and that

the ‘enemy’ was a true menace to their identity and way of life.

The true paradox at the beginning of the crisis is that each nation, even countries who were

eventually in an aggressive position, in its large majority had the impression to act in legitimate

defense and to struggle for its survival and identity. It would be necessary to analyze how this

representation was produced, diffused and accepted in depth in each imperial society, largely

before the opening of the dramatic sequence of July 1914. It is too simple to identify this

phenomenon with ‘the spread of nationalism’, social darwinism, or militarism (or ‘war culture’),

neither is it possible to equate it to a ‘natural’ reflex. It was both a social, a political and a cultural

construct but one which succeeded thanks to social and cultural transformations independent of

the will of élites or organized groups. I define this through the notion of national habitus. Since

the historiography of each nation has been influenced for a long time by this self-representation

(be it in a positive or negative stance), the true difficulty of my enterprise is to change our own

national viewpoint which remains influenced, willy-nilly, by the historiography which formed us

in each national context. So the general methodological conclusion, I would suggest, at the end of

this provisory sketch, is to form groups of historians of different national origins to study these

phenomena and to try and put into question this inherited national bias by a collective self

analysis. Hopefully this would lead to an European historical viewpoint – a perspective that

eludes us till today.2

2Even an unorthodox attempt like Niall Ferguson’s book, The Pity of War (1999), remains deeply embedded in the confrontation of national viewpoints. Criticizing the responsibilities of his own country, UK, the author is led to adopt arguments borrowed from the other national historiographies which already used these critical arguments after 1918 (cf. this rather optimistic sentence: “if a war had been fought, but without Britain and America, the victorious Germans might have created a version of the European Union, eight decades ahead of schedule”, p. 458!). It is only through an analysis in terms of “field” in Bourdieu’s definition of the word that it is possible to escape these pitfalls and adopt a “transnational” prospect both freed from nationalist or marxist limitations.

19

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