La paix et la guerre

Peace and War

Charles Richet

The study that follows was published for the first time in the Revue philosophique, thirtieth year, number 2, February 1905.

We must thank M. Th. Ribot, director of the Revue philosophique; I wish to personally thank M. Felix Alcan, publisher of this Review, for the perfect good grace with which he authorized us to take this article and make a cahier of it.

Without modifying anything at all in the content of his article, an article of philosophy and history prior to recent polemics, our collaborator M. Charles Richet was so kind as to reread this article on our proofs, so as to make of this cahier a definitive edition.

The manager, Charles Peguy

PEACE AND WAR

I

Facts progress so rapidly in the social domain that they often outpace the preoccupations of philosophers. Thus the pacifist movement, which in recent years has grown so greatly, and will soon grow still more, has scarcely been encouraged by philosophy. It is the politicians and the philanthropists who have taken the initiative and who pursue its development.

Without underestimating what thinkers like Leibniz and Kant, to speak only of the greatest, have said in favor of perpetual peace, it must be admitted that in general psychology has taken too little interest in this question. Is it indifference or skepticism? It matters little, after all. Progress comes from all sides, and the interest is mediocre in knowing who its artisans have been.

But today the question of peace and war, in human societies, arises with such force that it appears as the gravest of social problems, and it is fitting to examine what scientific foundations an opinion may be established upon.

One will not expect here that we treat the question without partiality. For a long time our conviction has been formed. On many occasions and in many places we have defended the cause of peace. However, here we shall invoke in its support neither sentimental reasons, nor motives of a social or political order. It will simply be a matter of knowing whether perpetual peace is possible, whether it is desirable, according to the psychological constitution of man and of human societies.

Whatever theory of morality one adopts, it is certain that no system can be conceived that does not take account of the happiness of the greatest number. A morality according to which men would be, in the majority, unhappy, constitutes an absurdity so evident that any demonstration of the inverse proposition seems truly unnecessary.

As for progress, more or less parallel to morality, one may define it: the improvement of material conditions among men; in other words, fewer miseries, fewer diseases, fewer tears. Now, since vices — what we commonly call vices: gambling, debauchery, drunkenness, theft, lying, laziness — bring miseries, diseases and tears, it follows that the improvement of material conditions is correlative with individual moral progress.

Therefore a society is making progress when the lot of each of its members is less cruel today than yesterday and will be less cruel still tomorrow.

Let us imagine a society in which each individual would be happy, and such that, through the ever-progressive conquests of science, this happiness and well-being are destined to increase with each generation: we shall thus have defined a society that is making progress.

Let us suppose the contrary: a society where men are from day to day more miserable, suffering more from hunger and cold, decimated by diseases, incapable of penetrating into a deeper knowledge of the universe. This society will be in decline.

The necessary conclusion is that one must tend toward the formation of this happy society. Such must be the program of every citizen, the hope of every government.

III

Up to this point there is no disagreement, and there cannot be any, since these truths are self-evident. There is no theorist who would claim this strange ideal of the unhappiness of the greatest number. Where uncertainty begins is when it comes to specifying what is happy or unhappy for men.

At first glance one understands immediately that the state of war is not well suited to develop earthly happiness.

Massacres on the battlefield, with thousands of human lives mowed down in their flower, atrocious sufferings of the dying, amputations, disarticulations, mutilations. Mourning in families, irreparable: fathers weeping for their sons; wives, for their husbands. Ferocious epidemics accompanying armies: typhus, plague, cholera, dysentery, which claim more victims than the grapeshot and bombardments. Cities taken by assault, or enduring long sieges, prisoners dragged along the roads, or languishing in foul casemates; villages burned, harvests ravaged, bridges destroyed; squandering in a few hours of forces accumulated at great expense, pillage, looting, theft and rape; unspeakable sufferings from hunger, cold, heat, fatigue. Anguish of the combatants, death rattles of the dying, groans of the wounded, anxieties of two nations whose every son is at each minute exposed to a terrible death; in a word, an immense cry of despair, rising toward the heavens. Such is the balance sheet of the sufferings of war during war.

The evil is no less during peace. Taxes each day heavier; the protectionist regime, an immediate consequence of war, making life more costly, therefore more miserable; threatening bankruptcy; entire populations, like Alsace-Lorraine, like Finland, like Poland, like Armenia, enduring the law of a detested conqueror; compulsory military service, perhaps the cruelest of all the sufferings of war, tearing the young, able-bodied and industrious men from the plough, from the workshop, to condemn them to two or three years of servitude; all the intellectual and material forces of a great people diverted from the conquest of truth. Such is the balance sheet of war during peace. It is no less odious.

But one may claim that this is a superficial judgment, so that, to be fair, one would have to set against all these evils of war, which no one thinks of denying, the goods that may result from it.

Beside the pain of the vanquished one must set the joy of the conqueror.

That is something, assuredly, but it is little. The triumph of victory, however intense it may be, does not suffice to compensate for the cruelty of defeat. Taking a battle where the victory was not for a moment uncertain, I imagine that all the pride of the victors of Austerlitz could not have erased the despair of the vanquished.