This Day in European History (30 Years War Ends With ‘Peace of Exhaustion’)

October 24, 1648—It took delegates at Munster five hours from when they were told to arrive to sign a pair of peace treaties before the deed, the Peace of Westphalia, was done. But delay, disorder, disharmony and death had been the order of the day in Central Europe for over a generation. Not for nothing did the conflict now concluded become known as the Thirty Years War, though that is something of a misnomer.

Six months of negotiations had elapsed just to decide where the delegates would sit. The key to Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand III’s resolution accepting a settlement had been lost, requiring a further delay. Then it took forever to decide in which order the treaties would be signed.

Many contemporaries decided that a more appropriate phrase for the cessation of hostilities was “the Peace of Exhaustion.” No wonder: Just when the conflict had assumed one form, it became infinitely more complicated—and bloodier.

It began in May 1618 with the “Defenestration of Prague,” as three Catholic representatives of the Holy Roman Emperor were, quite literally, thrown 70 feet out the window of the royal castle by Protestant nobles. Nobody was hurt, largely because a dung heap cushioned their fall.

But what started as something akin to Bohemian opera bouffe became a war involving every important player on the Continent, and what began with adversaries divided neatly along religious lines turned into decisions driven by realpolitik rather than spiritual issues.

Like the Hundred Years War between England and France, this conflict did not run uninterrupted. Rather, it was marked by four different phases, with different primary rivals: 1) Bohemian (1618-1625), 2) Danish (1625-29), 3) Swedish 1630-35), and 4) Swedish-French (1635-48).

The group producing the Peace of Westphalia-- the first modern diplomatic congress, a forerunner of such later momentous assemblages as the Congress of Vienna and the Paris peace conference that concluded WWI—did not try to square the circle. It tried to square 190 of them—the number of secular princes of Europe affected by negotiations. 

At the end of it all, there were some definitive outcomes that affected subsequent European history:

*State sovereignty was enshrined as the guiding principle of the modern nation-state;

*The Protestant Netherlands threw off the yoke of Catholic Spain, further hastening the latter's decline as an imperial power;

*Sweden gained control of the Baltic;

*German princes were allowed to determine the religion of their own lands;

*Following from the last result, the Holy Roman Empire was given a sharp jolt toward irrelevance; and 

*France became the main power on the European continent--and an increasing object of concern across the English Channel, by Great Britain.

The resulting state of affairs accomplished one hope of the Vatican (which, under Pope Paul V, contributed 625,000 florins between 1618 and 1620 to the cause of the Holy Roman Emperor)—it halted and reversed the momentum of Protestantism in Central and Eastern Europe. But, by putting the question of a state's religion in the hands of its rulers, it left Protestantism a permanent fixture in the European landscape. 

Moreover, the multiple agreements succeeded in fulfilling the aim of France’s decidedly unsentimental Cardinal Richelieu several years before: “We want to kiss his [the pope’s] ring but bind his feet.”  (To that end, he had allied with the most brilliant commander of the Protestant forces in the war, Sweden’s King Gustavus Adolphus.)

One of the best histories of this conflict, C.V. Wedgwood’s The Thirty Years War, simply threw up its hands at the prospect of estimating casualties. But guesses run from five to ten million people, including up to one-quarter of the population of Central Europe.

Relatively speaking, battlefield casualties were not that enormous. But the war placed ferocious pressures on the civilian population of the continent. None of the powers was strong enough to strike a knockout blow, so they all staggered around, faced with the unenviable task of supplying, paying and feeding armies in the field.

Individual soldiers that filled out the regiments were often mercenaries with few ties to the lands they fought for. Armies were expected to be funded not by the government but by whatever they could steal or extort from occupied territories. These foraging armies turned large stretches of Germany into a virtual desert, ruining crops and livestock, leaving civilians prey to famine and disease.

It also left their descendants haunted by disaster. In a searching article in the journal Germany History, “The Myth of the All-Destructive War: Afterthoughts on German Suffering, 1618–1648,” David Lederer of the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, recalls an official 1962 questionnaire distributed in rural Hesse asking participants to rank seven great catastrophes in German history. The Thirty Years War topped them all—even the still-fresh-in-memory German defeat in WWII.

It’s hard for Americans to imagine the wound left on the consciousness of continental Europe, particularly Germany, by the Thirty Years War. But playwright Bertolt Brecht was acutely aware of it when he chose to set his bitter 1939 satire on the lengths required to survive war, Mother Courage and Her Children, in the first decade of the psychologically not-so-distant conflict, in Germany, Poland, and other parts of Central Europe—a region about to be devastated by even more hardship and brutality.

It is hard to top another—nonfiction—assessment of the war’s toll written at the same time as Brecht’s, Wedgwood’s somber conclusion to her striking historical account:

“The war solved no problem. Its effects, both immediate and indirect, were either negative or disastrous. Morally subversive, economically destructive, socially degrading, confused in its causes, devious in its course, futile in its results, it is the outstanding example in European history of meaningless conflict.”

(The image accompanying this post is Peace of Westphalia: The Swearing of the Oath of Ratification of the Treaty of Munster, a 1648 oil painting by Gerard ter Borch. It is part of German History in Documents and Images, or GHDI, a comprehensive collection of original historical materials documenting German history from the beginning of the early modern period to the present.)

This Day in European History (Austrian Bank Starts Panic)

May 11, 1931--Instead of achieving its intended effect of propping up the Austrian bank Creditanstalt, a capital infusion led by the Austrian government only ignited a continent-wide financial panic that destabilized European countries already staggering under massive war debt.

Americans are likely to think of the global recession of 2007-09 as unprecedented, but that only illustrates our mass ignorance of 20th-century history. The Creditanstalt crisis occurred a year and a half after the Great Crash on Wall Street, and to some degree even worsened the already grave economic situation in the U.S.

But the fact is that the Great Depression cut across the world, and the impact it made on other countries might have been even more devastating than what happened in the United States. Particularly in Central Europe, the mass upheaval it created damaged young and fragile democracies, making possible the rise of Adolf Hitler.

Creditanstalt began to appear more often in op-ed columns and on blogs last year, such as this analysis by Gregory White in June, as the implications of national financial crises began to be considered. It all made for chilling reading.

World War I might be said to have created three sets of victims. The first, of course, were those who died in the conflict; the second, the veterans wounded physically or mentally during the fighting; and the third, the larger public, which paid dearly for years afterward for the financially ruinous war.

By 1931, a number of countries were buckling under their war debt. Almost in tandem, the gold standard that held sway before the war came under unrelenting pressure. Though bankers felt the necessity of maintaining gold as a standard, more and more people began to move their deposits out.

In the spring of 1931, losses at Creditanstalt were so steep that, under Austrian law, the bank could have been compelled simply to shut down. A financial support operation backed by the Austrian government, the National Bank and the House of Rothschild was designed to stem the losses.

From this point on, a series of cascading events put the Central European economy into a tailspin:

* By early June, credit for all of Austria was exhausted, leading the Austrian National Bank to pledge more.

* The Austrian National Bank got a new round of credit, but the Austrian government had to go hat in hand for a two-to-three-year loan.

* France, under new Prime Minister Pierre Laval (later executed for collaborating with the Nazis) demanded that Austria give up its customs union with Germany. The Austrian leadership’s refusal to do so led to its fall.

* The bankruptcy revealed at Creditan-Anstalt led to a run on German banks, too; a 25 percent depreciation in the British sterling; several other national central bank runs, including the Bank of France, the National Bank of Belgium, the Bank of France, the Netherlands Bank and the Swiss National Bank.

* That, in turn, brought an increase in interest rates in the U.S. from 1.5 to 3.5 percent.

A little more than a month after the beginning of panic in Austria, President Herbert Hoover had grown sufficiently concerned that he urged a one-year moratorium on all intergovernmental debts, and just about every economy in the West had signed on.

But the initial confidence soon withered. So many speculators were demanding gold that, by mid-December, only the U.S. and France maintained the gold standard. Within a few more years, even that would change.

Things became so bad in Germany’s Weimar Republic that citizens began to take more seriously the ravings of a far-right lunatic, Adolf Hitler.

This Day in European History (Birth of Robespierre)

May 6, 1758—Son and grandson of attorneys, an opponent of capital punishment early in his public career, lawyer and politician Maximilien Robespierre, born on this date in Arras, France, led the call for summary, sanguinary justice for enemies of his country’s revolution, before meeting a similar fate himself.

Robespierre was reputed to be of Irish descent. Who’d have thought it? Can anyone tell me when he ever cracked a joke? It seems that some ancestor fled the Emerald Isle during the Reformation, when the island became caught in the sectarian violence fomented by England’s Tudor Dynasty. Whatever these Celtic elements were leeched, they must have been leeched out of the family DNA a long time before he came on the scene.

I don’t know why the 12-man Committee of Public Safety that became Robespierre’s ultimate power vehicle isn’t as much a term of opprobrium in France as the House Un-American Activities Committee here in the U.S. The latter example of Cold War paranoia was, of course, a misnomer; by inquiring into people’s political beliefs, it was the committee, not those it publicly pummeled, that was un-American.

Likewise, Robespierre’s committee of 12 made French citizens very, very unsafe, with thousands guillotined and 200,000 arrested in a mere nine months. Talk all you want of “Amerika,” of McCarthyism, of Guantanomo Bay—all horrible, mind you—but for systematic abuse of the legal process in a concentrated period, we can no more compete with the French than we can with the quality of their cheese or wineries.

Robespierre has fascinated me ever since I read one of his most significant addresses, on “Terror and Virtue,” for my college Contemporary Civilization class. The central paragraph is this:

“If the spring of popular government in time of peace is virtue, the springs of popular government in revolution are at once virtue and terror: virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue; it is not so much a special principle as it is a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our country's most urgent needs.”

It all sounds so reasonable—and all the more chilling for that. There’s not even a hint of irony in the notion that “terror” can be allied to something good.

More recently, as I pondered the phrase “virtue and terror,” another phrase twinning two different concepts came to mind, one that gave hope to the best impulses of abolitionist Americans during the antebellum era: “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!” Millions of American schoolchildren once knew this phrase from Daniel Webster by heart, and a smaller group, for several generations, thrilled to the oration from which it came—the senator’s “Second Reply to Hayne,” in 1830. It’s useful to compare these two lawyer-politicians with an uncanny ability to persuade their countrymen, Robespierre and Webster, the Frenchman’s junior by nearly a quarter century.

Let’s stipulate this right now: the comparison is not as one-sided as one might at first suspect. Human nature is messier than we’d like it to be, and virtue (we’re going to re-appropriate Robespierre’s favorite word for our own purposes) rarely resides all on one side or with one individual. So it was here.

1) Poverty and corruption – Both lawyers grew up poor. Webster’s struggle to live it down led him into chronic indebtedness to public officials that would now be considered at best conflict of interest and at worst downright bribery, including a baldfaced reminder to Nicholas Biddle, the head of the Second National Bank of the United States, that his retainer by the bank had not yet been renewed, and that it should be. In contrast, from an early age Robespierre was known as “the Incorruptible.” It was one of the major sources of his reputation. (Characteristically, it was also something of which he couldn’t stop boasting.)

2) Personal habits – Webster had such an unquenchable appetite for food and drink that they might well have contributed to his death. In the home of a cabinetmaker who admired him, Robespierre lived quietly and simply for the last three years of his life.

3) Appearance and style – Webster sounded as grand as he looked, with a basso profundo voice coming out of a large, barrel-chested frame, particularly in his younger years, before his appetite made him more rotund. Like the American Calvinist preacher Jonathan Edwards, the impact of Robespierre’s quiet, even sweet tone was inversely proportional to the hysteria it created. A lingering pause, to allow the effect of what he said sink into listeners’ minds, was about the only flourish he permitted himself. That is, unless you don’t count his apparel, because surprisingly enough, the arch-revolutionary, according to historian Robert Darnton’s The Kiss of Lamourette, “always dressed in the uniform of the Old Regime: culottes, waistcoast, and a powdered wig.”

4) Facing the mob – “Hold on to the Constitution,” Webster warned, “for if the American Constitution should fail, there will be anarchy throughout the world.” That fear led the rising young politician to become a Federalist, then a Whig. Robespierre, on the other hand, held no such fear; he guided what others viewed as the rabble. Nobody could get past his left flank in political combat.

5) Dealing with war – Like other New England Federalists, Webster opposed the War of 1812, rightly fearing its devastating impact on New England shipping. In his brief period as Secretary of State under Presidents William Henry Harrison and John Tyler, he negotiated the Webster-Ashburton Treaty settling a dispute with Great Britain over the Canadian-American border. The final act of his career involved an attempt to stave off civil war between the North and South, which he regarded as a mortal threat to the Union. Robespierre urged his country on to war in order to save the gains of the French Revolution, one of the first modern efforts to mobilize (and put at risk) an entire nation behind a war effort. France would remain at arms against its neighbors, whether under the banner of the Revolution or of Napoleon, for the next 20 years. In the end, it lost.

6) Compromise – Webster saw his quest for the Presidency end when his support for the Compromise of 1850 undercut support in his traditional base in the Northern anti-slavery movement. However odious he regarded the omnibus bill’s provision for a fugitive slave law, he thought it was a last chance to preserve the Union. The decade won by passage of the bill was turbulent, but during that period another four free states—and no slave states—were admitted to the Union, providing a larger force to withstand the South during the war. Robespierre could brook no compromise. Again, the hallmark of his “Terror and Virtue” formulation was its inability to bend and adapt. In foisting on his country Rousseau’s theories of nature and government, Robespierre did incalculable damage.

This Day in European History (Goya and the Peninsular War)

May 3, 1808—French invading troops under the direction of Napoleon Bonaparte summarily executed 5,000 civilians in Madrid in reprisal for a sniper attack. Though he stayed quiet for several years about the atrocity, painter Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes eventually created The Third of May 1808, part of a series of paintings and prints that masterfully evoked the nightmarish chaos of modern war.

Though starting out as a portrait painter of the aristocracy and the Spanish royal family, Goya had in the last 15 years turned to increasingly dark, phantasmagoric imagery. Some of this might have stemmed from the deafness he experienced following an illness in 1793, and the alterations of tranquility and hyperactivity that followed it; but some resulted from the convulsions experienced by the Spanish society and government in the first decade of the nineteenth century. The painter was about to discover how very dangerous it could be to live in a time of revolution, when constantly shifting loyalties meant artists were forever endangered.

The worst occurred after Spain’s Charles IV abdicated the throne in March 1808. With his empire now swelling to 130 departments in several countries, and with Austria, Prussia and Russia being elbowed aside by his armies, Napoleon was the master of the continent. As such, he felt that good government started at home, which is why he installed his little brother Jerome as the King of Westphalia and his sister Caroline as queen of Naples. Now he proposed to do the same with his oldest brother. He felt he was in a prime position to do so because he had moved more than 100,000 of his troops through the country on the pretext that they were only there to support the invasion of neighboring Portugal.

Joseph Bonaparte had served in the wars under his brother, and had even undertaken delicate diplomatic missions on his behalf to the U.S., Austria, Britain and the Vatican. Desiring to reward sister Caroline and her husband, his general Murat, Napoleon decided that Naples was just the thing for them. This meant he had to shuffle Joseph someplace else. With the abdication of Charles, Napoleon thought Spain might make a nice consolation prize. His ever-amenable older brother went along.

Joseph’s would-be subjects wouldn’t, though. The populace went after the French troops in ways that surprised their emperor and general. The resulting Peninsular War became the rallying point for opponents of the French empire, and was where Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, first made his fame as Napoleon’s most dangerous military foe.

During the six years before the war ended, Goya’s position was uneasy, shifting under the pressure of events. In October 1808, he had recorded the “glorious deeds” of the citizens of Saragossa against the French army. Late the next year, however, with Joseph Napoleon occupying the throne for what seemed like the foreseeable future, he had taken up a commission from the city of Madrid to paint the Spanish monarch, and executed some other members of the French regime as well. By 1812, with the French temporarily expelled from French but threatening to come back (which they did that December), Goya left his prints and paintings to his son Javier, just in case Napoleon returned.

Cut to 1814. A new ruler was on the throne of Spain, Ferdinand VII. The new regime was asking questions about what its principal citizens had done during the recent unpleasantness with the little fellow from France. Goya fell under their eye. To placate them, the painter received permissions to paint two large canvases, The Second of May 1808 and The Third of May 1808, both now hanging in Madrid’s Prado.

The second of these is particularly vivid, as he showed captured Spanish guerrillas on Principe Pio hill, on what was then the outskirts of Madrid. One man, in a white shirt, has his arms thrust upward, eyes wide open in terror; his comrades can hardly bear to look at him, for they know that they will die soon, too. The inhumanity of the French executioners is heightened by the fact that we can’t see their faces at all, in contrast to the anguish so evident on those of their victims.

Equally remarkable were 82 prints called the Disasters of War series, created from 1810 to 1820. They remained unpublished in his own country until 1863. After that, Edouard Manet lavished high praise on them, and Goya’s fame rose.

By 1824, Goya had grown so tired of repression in his native Spain that he left for France (now safely without the Bonapartes), on the grounds of medical health. He remained there until his death four years later.

This Day in European History (Gestapo Arrests 'White Rose' Dissidents)

February 18, 1943 – The members of the “White Rose” anti-Nazi group, centered in the University of Munich, were apprehended and arrested by the Gestapo.

Since 1942, as the speed of atrocities had quickened and Germany had gotten bogged down in Stalingrad, these nonviolent activists, consisting mostly of medical students, had surreptitiously printed and distributed pamphlets calling for an end to Hitler’s regime, and even scrawled large graffiti all over Munich: “Down with Hitler! . . . Hitler the Mass Murderer!” and “Freiheit! . . . Freiheit! . . . Freedom! . . . Freedom!”

Yet for months, despite the most strenuous efforts, the Gestapo couldn’t locate the source of this insurrectionary activity, even though it correctly guessed that the group had access to a duplicating machine as well as large quantities of paper, envelopes and postage.

On this date, however, two members of the group, brother and sister Hans and Sophie Scholl—two former members of the Hitler Youth—were discovered. Four days later, the siblings, along with best friend Christoph Probst, were executed after a farce of a trial. Later, three other group members met the same fate.

Today, a square in the University of Munich is named after Hans and Sophie Scholl. A documentary on the group was released in the 1980s, and more recently the film Sophie Scholl: The Final Days earned a much-deserved Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. (The interrogation scenes were based on actual Gestapo records that became available only after reunification.) The group has taken its place of honor among those who set the face against Nazism, including the Jesuit Alfred Delp, the Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and the leader in the plot to kill Hitler, Count Claus von Stauffenberg (the subject of the upcoming Tom Cruise film that has caused such controversy).

Two of the finest foreign language films—two of the finest films, period—of recent years dealt with Germany’s experiences with 20th-century totalitarian regimes and the resistance formed against it: Sophie Scholl and The Lives of Others, last year’s Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Film, on East Germany under Communism.

Why aren’t more such thoughtful, serious movies made? More to the point, why aren’t they made in Hollywood? Part of the problem might stem from the attitudes of Hollywood’s finest stars.

In a New Yorker profile last year, Julie Christie remarked, “I’m not sure I can bear to see a film they gave the Oscar to, that tells you what awful people Communists are.”

Having just watched her Oscar-winning performance in the 1965 film Darling, I know how superb an actress Christie is, and I’m waiting patiently to see how, four decades later, she has transformed herself into an Alzheimer’s patient in Away From Her.

But comments like these are simply fatuous—particularly from one such as Christie, who chose to appear in tripe like the Brad Pitt film Troy but somehow thinks it beneath her to watch a film that might say something essential about her times.

You have to wonder why she said this. Is it because there are already too many films on this subject? But by the same reasoning, why have another film about Alzheimer’s after the similarly themed Judi Dench film Iris?

This leads logically to the conclusion that the actress might be suffering from either an intellectual or moral deficit. But none of the interviews that Christie has given over the years, nor her longtime anti-nuclear and peace activism, can lead one to believe that she is anything but intelligent.

That leaves us with a moral deficit. How sad that a woman who came to personify all the allure of London in the 1960s possesses such a terrible blind spot. Clearly, she wasn’t paying attention to the part of the script in Doctor Zhivago where her character Lara's friend Pasha (Tom Courtenay), an idealistic revolutionary turned remorseless Communist functionary, says: “History has no room for personal feelings.”

But Christie is hardly unusual in the filmmaking community in her moral failure. Oliver Stone made an admiring documentary about Fidel Castro, Commandante, and has stated that he admires him “because he’s a fighter.” A few years ago, The Motorcycle Diaries related the evolution of Che Guevara’s political thought while on a journey, with no attention, except for a caption at the end, about his career with Castro. (This is a little bit like making a film about Josef Goebbels at the University of Heidelberg and his activities as poet, playwright and novelist without getting into that unfortunate association with Adolf Hitler.) The Robert Redford movie Havana also presented a highly romanticized, Casablanca-influenced version of the commandante’s rise to power.

In fact, the first film I can recall that took Castro to task was Before Night Falls, in which the Cuban dictator was criticized for his cruel anti-gay regime. Yet even before that, Castro had appropriated private property, interfered with religious institutions, refused to allow free and open elections, as well as jailed and, when the need arose, executed political opponents.

Why has the film community so rarely, if ever, covered this? It can’t have anything to do with lack of witnesses – my own elementary and second schools were filled with the children of refugees from his tyranny, and I’m sure there are hundreds of similar schools across the country.

The fact is that nearly 20 years after the end of the Iron Curtain (and more than 60 years after the so-called “Thousand-Year Reich” met its inglorious Gotterdammerung), the world needs to know all the history it can about totalitarian regimes of all kinds.

In his great elegy, “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” W.H. Auden urged his fellow poets, “In the prison of his days,/Teach the free man how to praise.” That same responsibility – to tell the truth about totalitarianism, no matter what the cost, as the White Rose group did —falls to artists of all kinds, including Ms. Christie—and especially so in this land where today, we celebrate the two men who gave us a new republic and “a new birth of freedom.”