Jacques Bainville

Jacques Pierre Bainville (9 February 1879 in Vincennes, Val-de-Marne – 9 February 1936 in Paris) was a French historian and journalist. A geopolitical theorist preoccupied by Franco-German relations, he was a leading figure in the monarchist Action Française. His writings displayed his hatred of disorder, romanticism, liberalism, democracy, internationalism, the French Revolution and especially Germany.

1900s

 * Monarchist or collectivist, Germany will not change its nature.
 * Statement (22 January 1906), Journal, I, 1901–1918 (1949), quoted in William R. Keylor, Jacques Bainville and the Renaissance of Royalist History in Twentieth-Century France (1979), p. 78

1910s

 * Nothing is more false than the axiom that governments are belligerent and peoples are pacific.
 * Action Française (3 July 1913), quoted in William R. Keylor, Jacques Bainville and the Renaissance of Royalist History in Twentieth-Century France (1979), p. 65


 * For six years I have been writing...that the division of Europe into two camps armed to the teeth, one of which, the Triple Alliance, constantly resorts to intimidation, is bound to lead to the greatest European war since the revolutionary period. Well here it is.
 * Statement upon the outbreak of the First World War (August 1914), quoted in William R. Keylor, Jacques Bainville and the Renaissance of Royalist History in Twentieth-Century France (1979), p. 81


 * You will understand and know the German Republic better when it elects Hindenburg president.
 * Remark (25 November 1918), quoted in William R. Keylor, Jacques Bainville and the Renaissance of Royalist History in Twentieth-Century France (1979), p. 133


 * Having erased Sedan, we now must erase Waterloo. France cannot be a great continental power unless she is a Rheinish power... French political wisdom has never consisted in immoderate acquisitions. In the days of France's European hegemony, she always preferred influence and infiltration to indigestion.
 * Action Française (1 December 1918), quoted in William R. Keylor, Jacques Bainville and the Renaissance of Royalist History in Twentieth-Century France (1979), p. 129


 * If Germany were to become Bolshevik we would be absolutely delighted. We wish it with all our heart. France has never been secure except when anarchy ruled in Germany... From a Bolshevished Germany, we would no longer have to fear what we underwent in 1870 and 1914.
 * Action Française (1–11 December 1918), quoted in William R. Keylor, Jacques Bainville and the Renaissance of Royalist History in Twentieth-Century France (1979), p. 131


 * Our vision of European affairs has been warped by our obsession with Bolshevism. Under the cover of this grande peur, Germany has reorganized herself. She has used the specter of Bolshevism to divert attention from her own affairs while at the same time ridding herself of this poison.
 * Action Française (31 January 1919), quoted in William R. Keylor, Jacques Bainville and the Renaissance of Royalist History in Twentieth-Century France (1979), p. 132


 * [Now is the perfect opportunity to revive] the wise and prudent policy constantly followed by the French monarchy, which consisted in putting the German colossus to sleep, dividing it, enfeebling it, profiting from its religious quarrels, its territorial divisions, the rivalry among its princes, its lack of money, its backward civilization.
 * Statement (17 March 1919), Journal, II, 1919–1926 (1949), quoted in William R. Keylor, Jacques Bainville and the Renaissance of Royalist History in Twentieth-Century France (1979), p. 134


 * A Peace Treaty too Lenient for the Harshness it Contains [Une Paix trop douce pour ce qu'elle a de dur].
 * Title of an article in Action Française on the Treaty of Versailles (8 May 1919), quoted in William R. Keylor, Jacques Bainville and the Renaissance of Royalist History in Twentieth-Century France (1979), p. 137


 * May 7, 1919 has not erased the date of January 18, 1871.
 * 'German Unity Consecrated at Versailles', Action Française (9 May 1919), quoted in William R. Keylor, Jacques Bainville and the Renaissance of Royalist History in Twentieth-Century France (1979), pp. 137-138


 * The Rhineland liberated from Prussia or eternal war. The choice is ours.
 * Action Française (4 September 1919), quoted in William R. Keylor, Jacques Bainville and the Renaissance of Royalist History in Twentieth-Century France (1979), p. 129

1920s

 * In countries where, as in France, there is still an agricultural population and a majority of propriétaires, one need not fear social subversion.
 * La Liberté (17 December 1926), quoted in William R. Keylor, Jacques Bainville and the Renaissance of Royalist History in Twentieth-Century France (1979), p. 184


 * When Frenchmen were in good health, when their intelligence was sound and vigorous, the idea of tradition was no less foreign to them than was the idea of revolution. The notion of returning to the chansons de geste and Saint Louis's oak tree would have seemed as ridiculous to them as wearing their fathers' breeches and hats out of filial piety.
 * Jaco et Lori (1927), pp. 200-201, quoted in William R. Keylor, Jacques Bainville and the Renaissance of Royalist History in Twentieth-Century France (1979), p. 119, n. 76


 * In order to avoid being unsettled by Bolshevism and its substitutes, one must be conscious of the superiority of Western civilization.
 * Couleurs du Temps (1928), p. 44, quoted in William R. Keylor, Jacques Bainville and the Renaissance of Royalist History in Twentieth-Century France (1979), p. 165


 * One of the greatest mistakes that the Western world has committed, is to imagine that the colored peoples, in acceding to its type of civilization, would be drawing nearer to it.
 * Couleurs du Temps (1928), p. 57, quoted in William R. Keylor, Jacques Bainville and the Renaissance of Royalist History in Twentieth-Century France (1979), p. 160


 * Do people really think that everything will be finished when we evacuate the Rhineland? On the contrary, it is certain that everything will begin, that the territorial demands will follow.
 * Action Française (23 August 1929), quoted in William R. Keylor, Jacques Bainville and the Renaissance of Royalist History in Twentieth-Century France (1979), p. 267

1930s

 * [The significance of the Nazi gains in the 1930 election lay] neither in Hitler nor in his one-hundred-seven deputies [but rather in] the facility with which the German people follow those who recommend violence.
 * Action Française (16 September 1930), quoted in William R. Keylor, Jacques Bainville and the Renaissance of Royalist History in Twentieth-Century France (1979), p. 269


 * Human history is a record of struggles between those who save and those who spend, between producers and consumers. These struggles have sometimes assumed the character of civil wars. It is the case of one tribe wanting to appropriate the more fertile soil and wealth of another tribe, or else within the same tribe, the have-nots wanting to expropriate the haves.
 * Paraboles hyperboliques (1931), p. 95, quoted in William R. Keylor, Jacques Bainville and the Renaissance of Royalist History in Twentieth-Century France (1979), p. 182


 * When one has millions and millions of yellow and black subjects what a strange idea it is to proclaim the principle of popular self-determination.
 * L'Angleterre et l'Empire Britannique (1938), p. 127, quoted in William R. Keylor, Jacques Bainville and the Renaissance of Royalist History in Twentieth-Century France (1979), p. 160

Dictators (1937)

 * Dictatorships are like a good many other things in this world. They can be the best, or the worst, form of government. There are some excellent dictatorships, and there are some hateful ones.
 * p. 7


 * It is no mere caprice that has led us to connect a disordered currency with the emergence of despotic forms of government. The one precedes, and often begets, the other, because, for the vast majority of people, it is the most obvious symptom of national disintegration. This, again, is one reason why dictatorships are not all assignable to a common cause. A dictatorship may be a defensive reaction against anarchy and ruin, and against the effects of democracy carried to its ultimate conclusion, that is to say, to socialism and communism. On the other hand, it offers to a democracy fired with equalitarian and anti-capitalist zeal, the means of overthrowing the forces arrayed against it, and of enthroning itself in their place.
 * p. 10


 * Where do we find the first example of the modern dictator? In England. And what is England? The "Mother of Parliaments". The country which adopted for itself, and distributed in facsimile throughout the world, the form of parliamentary government. Cromwell makes us wonder whether a dictator is not a necessary concomitant of revolutions, of the rise of democracies and of the establishment of the parliamentary system.
 * p. 57


 * The more one studies, with the attention and sympathy one owes to noble undertakings, the rise of the Italian Dictator, the more we must hope that this great wave of national enthusiasm will not blind him, in the end, to those perils to which a revolution is particularly exposed, and Fascism is, first and foremost, a revolution. Those who want France to follow suit, will do well to think twice about it. The ‘Corporative Economy’ devised by Mussolini would be regarded as monstrous by our middle class and our traders, big and small. Before we think about copying a thing, we ought to know exactly what it is we are going to copy. The Gallic cock is not designed by nature to suck the dugs of the Roman wolf.
 * p. 225


 * The real Hitler did not exist before those years of hardship in Vienna, where he simultaneously discovered the dangers of Marxism and of Jewish World-Ascendancy. His real birth as a man of action dates from the day on which he discovered ethnology. It is in this department that a Frenchman is bound to find Mein Kampf singularly inadequate, singularly elementary. If we had to judge these fighting books by the same canons as we judge works of the mind, it is certain that the National Socialist Bible would not bear a moment's examination. The most puerile absurdities mingle with the most dubious scientific hypotheses, all couched in language whose pedantry, though it take one's breath away, probably contributed in large measure to the book's success with German readers.
 * pp. 245-246


 * Perhaps in a sense the man [Adolf Hitler] will always elude us, but this much is certain: it is on him that all the hopes of the Germany that was vanquished in 1918 are centred. Our socialists are all at sea about him. Every step forward that he took, they said his fall was imminent. He mirrors too faithfully certain aspects of his country, for that fall, even if it occurs, to be of much account. But the important thing is to know him, not to suffer ourselves to be misled by his rudimentary and inchoate ideas. Beneath a very elementary philosopher, there leaps to the eye a politician who knows what he wants and whose position makes him, however vehemently he may declare and believe himself the contrary, France's most formidable antagonist.
 * p. 258

Quotes about Bainville

 * Poincaré has the highest esteem for you. Probably he envies you your right as a newspaperman to tell the French truths that he has not been able to tell them in the place he has occupied.
 * Maurice Donnay to Jacques Bainville, quoted in Stanton B. Leeds, These Rule France (1940), p. 176


 * Bainville predicted everything that has been happening, I wanted to believe that he was having a nightmare, that he was wrong... But here we are.
 * Robert Kemp writing in September 1939 upon the outbreak of the Second World War, quoted in William R. Keylor, Jacques Bainville and the Renaissance of Royalist History in Twentieth-Century France (1979), p. 272


 * Bainville transformed history from a conjectural science into an exact science.
 * François Mauriac, quoted in William R. Keylor, Jacques Bainville and the Renaissance of Royalist History in Twentieth-Century France (1979), p. 194


 * That fine spirit, that sad and dear Cassandra, did not have to consult the gods to see clearly but depended solely on his knowledge of history.
 * François Mauriac, quoted in William R. Keylor, Jacques Bainville and the Renaissance of Royalist History in Twentieth-Century France (1979), p. 224


 * [O]f far greater influence on public opinion was the appearance of Bainville's Histoire de deux peuples, which, like all Bainville's books, was distributed through very large printings and contributed, almost more than any other work, to the undermining of the revolutionary-democratic-socialist viewpoint and to the strengthening of the conviction that the dismemberment and impotence of Germany were indispensable to France's peace and greatness.
 * Ernst Nolte, Three Faces of Fascism: Action Française, Italian Fascism, National Socialism (1965; 1969), p. 106


 * Jacques Bainville, born 1879, met Maurras after his first journey to Germany, and willingly accepted the solutions of the older man for the alarming problem of Germany's superior power. After that, Germany never let him go. (In contrast to Maurras, he was acquainted with Germany by thorough observation and wide knowledge of its literature.) Narrower than Maurras intellectually but broader in understanding, he went beyond the "sectlike character" of the Action Française without ever abandoning it, for, in his own lofty words, he owed Maurras "tout, sauf le jour." However, the renown of his clear and apparently moderate spirit outshone that of the master's; he died in 1936, just after being appointed to Poincaré's chair in the Académie Française.
 * Ernst Nolte, Three Faces of Fascism: Action Française, Italian Fascism, National Socialism (1965; 1969), pp. 589-590


 * Like Maurras he sees clearly but unlike Maurras and Daudet, he does not provoke controversy. This is an advantage, and a king has the same advantage, as the English know. He is above party. In the world of thought Bainville is above dispute. You will see, he will become a criterion.
 * Raymond Poincaré, quoted in Stanton B. Leeds, These Rule France (1940), p. 176


 * Unique in its crystalline irrefutability, Bainville's luminous column guides me unerringly across the desert of foreign policy.
 * Marcel Proust (1920), quoted in William R. Keylor, Jacques Bainville and the Renaissance of Royalist History in Twentieth-Century France (1979), p. 126


 * He had, by 1900, formed most of the main ideas that were to dominate his writings: hatred of disorder, romanticism, liberalism, democracy, internationalism, the French Revolution, and Germany.
 * Edward R. Tannenbaum, 'Jacques Bainville', The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 22, No. 4 (December 1950), p. 340


 * Bainville has dated Michelet and Aulard.
 * Albert Thibaudet, quoted in Stanton B. Leeds, These Rule France (1940), p. 176


 * The more I got to know [Bainville]...the more I felt myself conquered. That perfect and sober courtesy, the remarkable freedom of his thought, the elegant way in which he concealed the enormity of the labor that he accomplished each day, the charming absence of illusions and the taste for the true value of works and men, rendered him ever more desirable to see and converse with.
 * Paul Valéry, quoted in William R. Keylor, Jacques Bainville and the Renaissance of Royalist History in Twentieth-Century France (1979), p. 194