The Ethiopian Campaign and French Political Thought

Foreword

ix f or e wor d There are at least two features of Yves Simon’s The Ethiopian Campaign and French Political Thought that may initially strike the reader as curious. The first is that Simon does not begin this short but trenchant and thought-provoking study with an examination of Benito Mussolini’s attempt in October 1935 to restore Italy’s national pride by declaring war on Ethiopia. Instead, he starts with the incendiary cause célèbre of late-nineteenth-century French politics, the socalled Dreyfus Affair. What does an innocent French army captain’s conviction for treason in 1894 have to do with a military campaign that took place in 1935? The second mystery has to do with Simon himself. Why should a thinker who is now regarded as among the preeminent Thomistic philosophers and political theorists of the twentieth century have devoted one of his earliest books, following two philosophical treatises on metaphysics and moral knowledge, to a specific event in international politics? The answer to both questions can be found in Simon’s upbringing and intellectual milieu. Simon was born into a wealthy industrial family that combined a deep Catholic faith with strong republican convictions. As a youth, Simon was also influenced by the horror of war. One of his brothers was killed when his plane was shot down over Germany in 1917. Yet it was not this loss in itself that shaped his thinking about later events, including Mussolini’s Ethiopian adventure . Like other members of his family, Simon was a patriot and considered it an honor to fight and die for France. Indeed , the only thing that kept him from enlisting was the fact that he had been severely handicapped by tuberculosis as a youth. Rather, his family’s political and religious sentiments and an early fascination with the anarchistic populism of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon led him to distrust the intentions of all politicians and their allies. In Simon’s eyes, the unfounded accusations against a Jewish military officer, Alfred Dreyfus , proved that these suspicions were warranted. Furthermore , the French government’s subsequent efforts to cover up the scandal and downplay its anti-Semitic and hypernationalistic roots demonstrated that France’s commitment to republican values was tenuous at best. Under these circumstances , one could never take the protection of personal liberties and human dignity for granted. Simon’s engagement in these issues was by no means atypical. In the aftermath of World War I, an entire generation of French intellectuals had arisen that was characterized by the desire to combine the hard facts of politics with the pursuit of the highest human ideals. Today, this disposition might be attributed to the so-called “public intellectual,” but Simon’s generation was much more than that. For the sophisticated man or woman of ideas in the 1920s and 1930s, a thorough immersion in the political and social questions x | Foreword of the day was a way of life. Educated Parisians read five or six newspapers a day—Le Figaro, the ultranationalist Action française, the liberal Catholic 7 � “Sept”, and many others. Parisians could be counted upon to comment authoritatively on an array of opinions surrounding pressing domestic and international issues. And they did so with gusto. The quintessential expression of this culture was the tradition of the French salon, regular gatherings at which eminent thinkers and celebrities opened their homes to lectures and debates about contemporary politics, philosophy, theology, and the arts. Of those meetings associated with religious themes, one well-known group was hosted by the Orthodox philosopher and historian, Nicholas Berdyayev, one of many Russian intellectuals who fled to Paris after the Revolution of 1917. The playwright Gabriel Marcel headed a similar group of Christian existentialists. The salon that Simon frequented most often was run by the great Catholic intellectuals Jacques and Raïssa Maritain. Known as the “Cercles d’Études Thomistes” (Thomistic Study Circles), these meetings at the Maritain home in Meudon, 10 Rue de Pac in the Paris suburbs, were recognized for both the varied professions of their participants and their philosophical and political diversity. At any session, one could encounter such prominent figures as the novelist, and later Nobel laureate, François Mauriac, artists such as Marc Chagall and Julien Green, and journalists and publishers such as Emmanuel Mounier, the founder of the influential quarterly Esprit. The meetings in Meudon were notable for bringing to light the...