5) During the 19th Century, it was commonplace for conservative and reactionary opponents of the French Revolution like Joseph de Maistre to ‘blame’ the Enlightenment for its ‘excesses’, particularly the Great Terror that occurred under Maximilian Robespierre in 1792-94. Certainly the Catholic Church was extremely hostile to the Revolution because it lost a great deal of power and property in France after 1789, and it continued to fight the same battles against its liberal and radical enemies until well into the 20th Century. For their part, the Enlightenment philosophers like Voltaire had been especially critical of the Church and had called for it to be separated from the state and education system, as well as religious freedom for all. Supporters of monarchy and aristocracy also had good reasons to hate the Revolution such as Klemens von Metternich, the Austrian foreign minister, since they also lost power as a result and feared that there were be similar events in the future—and they were right. In politics, government, land reform, relations between the Church and state, and guarantees of basic human rights it did represent the highest Enlightenment ideals, and even in its more violent and terroristic under the Jacobins, it also drew on more radical or revolutionary Enlightenment thought, like that of Jean Jacques Rousseau and his demand for an all-powerful Legislator to destroy the old regime, or even Voltaire’s demand to ‘crush the infamous thing’—referring to the Catholic Church.
One major goal of the Enlightenment had indeed been to reduce or eliminate the control of government and political power by kings and nobles and to replace it with some type of parliamentary or democratic system. Either the government would be a republic or a constitutional monarchy, but the ancient traditions of absolute power based on birth and hereditary privileges would be abolished, and everyone in society would have equal rights and equal citizenship (Hunt 15). To this extent, Enlightenment ideas were put into practice, at least during the early phases of the French Revolution in 1789-91, and by later revolutions in the 19th and 20th Centuries. This was also what the Restoration regimes put in place in France and other countries after 1815 were designed to prevent, but in the end they were also swept away by later revolutions.
Perhaps the most important achievements of the French Revolution that did reflect Enlightenment ideas were the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen and the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. These documents swept away the traditional privileges and powers of the clergy and nobility and declared that everyone in France was now a citizen and would be treated equally under the law. Jews, Protestants and non-believers were granted equal rights for the first time, and the clergy were required to take on oath of loyalty to the state rather than the Vatican (Hunt 16). At the same time, the lands of the Church and nobility were confiscated and redistributed, particularly to the small farmers and peasants, and this was particularly galling to the Church because it had been the largest landholder in the country. It also created a larger class of rural smallholders which remained very important in the country’s economy well into the 20th Century. Another Enlightenment idea that was put into practice was the abolition of all forms of slavery and involuntary servitude, at least for a time, and this led to a slave rebellion in Haiti and the establishment of the first independent black nation in the world. Indeed, a number of humanitarian projects based on Enlightenment ideals were proposed or attempted at this time, ranging from equal rights and educational opportunities for women to more humane treatment for the mentally ill and abolishing the ‘cruel and unusual’ methods of capital punishment in favor of the guillotine (Ishay 377). In fact, there were proposals to end the death penalty completely, but obviously this did not occur during the French Revolution.
In the early, more moderate phase of the French Revolution, King Louis XVI was allowed to remain in office as a figurehead or constitutional monarch, similar to the role played by his peers in Great Britain. He resisted this limitation on his absolute powers, however, and also contacted foreign kings to inspire them to launch a counter-revolutionary war against the Revolution. As a result, he and Queen Marie Antoinette were tried and executed for treason, and this opened the door to the Jacobin phase of the Revolution and the Great Terror. In some respects, this two-year period represented the more radical type of Enlightenment ideas since it attempted to abolish Christianity completely and replace it with the Cult of the Supreme being, and even renamed the months of the calendar to reflect more secular and revolutionary values. Once the war with the other European powers began, its most historically controversial move was to put to death thousands of nobles, clergy and other opponents of the Revolution, and therefore it was frequently described by its opponents as a new type of tyranny or dictatorship. On the other hand, revolutionary terror and using extreme violence to destroy the Old Regime has always had its admirers as well, such as Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Theoretically at least, the Jacobin government was radically democratic, since it was supported by the lower classes and granted universal suffrage to all males for the first time, although this was never put into practice in France at that time.
12) No one in Nazi Germany who was subjected constantly to the propaganda machine of Dr. Josef Goebbels could have doubted that the regime was extremely hostile to Jews and others it regarded as Untermenschen or ‘sub-humans’. No one who listened to the speeches of Hitler or the other leading Nazis could possibly have been unaware of their views on these subjects, which were also spelled up in great detail in Mein Kampf. They often used words like annihilate’ and ‘exterminate’ when referring to Jews, both in public and in private conversations. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen is also correct that the Nazis did not invent any of these racist and anti-Semitic ideas, which had been commonplace since the 19th Century. In Austria before World War I, for example, Hitler was a great admirer of the anti-Semitic Christian Social Party, and borrowed many of their ideas and slogans for his own Nazi movement (Schorske 157). There was a great deal of anti-Semitism in the era of Bismarck and the Kaiser and during the First World War, although obviously those earlier governments were not carrying out actual genocide or running a system of death camps and concentration camps. That was a radical break with the continuity of the past and had to wait for Hitler and the Nazis to actually put into practice.
Nazi-like ideologies of ‘scientific racism’ and biological anti-Semitism already existed in the eugenics movement and writers like Houston Stuart Chamberlain, however, and Hitler was very familiar with all of it. In France after the Dreyfus Affair in 1895, there were also anti-Semitic mass movements calling openly for the Jews to be exterminated, which led Theodore Herzl and other Zionists to conclude that the Jews were not safe ion Europe and needed their own homeland long before Hitler ever came to power (Burns 54). Older documents like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, composed by the secret police in Tsarist Russia and widely reprinted by Nazi sympathizers like Henry Ford were already in existence before the Nazis came to power. They did not create the ideas that the Jews were part of some evil world conspiracy or that they caused wars and revolutions in order to profit from them or that they were the enemies of Western Christian civilization, but rather they borrowed the. When the Nazis passed the sterilization law of 1933 and the Nuremberg laws of 1935, that stripped Jews and other ‘non-Aryans’ of the citizenship, none of this was kept secret, from the German people either. Just the opposite, these policies were widely publicized, just as the attacks on Jewish businesses in synagogues during Kristalnacht in 1938 were carried out in full public view. It also would have been very difficult to miss all the signs and regulations proclaiming that Jews were barred from certain public places and professions, or when they were all forced the wear yellow stars when they appeared in public. Soldiers returning from Poland and Russia also told stories of mass shootings and atrocities in those campaigns, while Germans on the home front could easily observe how prisoners from concentration camps were being used as slave labor and receiving very brutal treatment. To that extent, then, those Germans who claimed that they knew nothing of what was really going on were either lying or they did not want to know. Possibly they were even lying to themselves as well, but the evidence that the regime was pursuing extremely harsh racist and anti-Semitic policies was all around for anyone who cared to look and listen.
Even so, in 1945, when the Allied troops liberated the concentration camps in Germany they often heard all the local civilians claim that the did not know what had been going on, and many of them appeared to have been genuinely shocked and stunned by what they saw when they were forced to tour them. Under the circumstances, the Allies were quite understandably skeptical of Germans who made such statements, but it does seem apparent from the pictures and films taken from that time that large numbers of ordinary Germans really did not know just how brutal the regime truly was. They could hardly deny knowledge that these camps existed, though, since the regime itself had publicized that ever since Dachau opened in 1933. All of this is a very complicated question since there is really no way to measure public opinion in Nazi Germany, and in a police state like that it would have been dangerous in any case to reveal opinions that were hostile to the regime, even to friends and relatives. There is no question that the Nazi regime had widespread popular support, particularly in its early years when it received the credit for ending the Great Depression and unemployment and later when it conquered Poland and France in a series of rapid Blitzkrieg campaigns. Similarly, it lost support after the defeats on the Eastern Front and the constant bombing attacks on the cities, so the early enthusiasm that many—perhaps even most—Germans had once felt was largely dissipated by 1945. For many years, though, the Germans were in active or passive support of this regime, and inclined to ignore or look away from its crimes and atrocities, when they were not actively participating in them. They may not have known all the details about the gas chambers and the death camps in the East like Auschwitz, but there was enough publicly available information to give them a good idea about the true nature of the regime and its policies.
A very small minority of Germans were involved in any type of real resistance activity. That much is clear from the record, and only an even smaller group took any private or public action to assist the Jews. Hundreds of thousands were complicit in these crimes and atrocities and millions were directly aware of them, while very few took any real action to prevent them. To be sure, any attempt to resist the Nazi regime required real heroism, even a willingness to risk one’s life, but it was done in other countries. In Denmark, for example, the government and civilian population resisted the deportation of the Jews to death camps in 1943 and the Nazis backed down. Even fascist allies of the Nazis like Finland, Italy and Hungary also opposed the deportation of their Jewish citizens, and this did not occur until the Germans occupied these countries directly. All the governments in those countries definitely knew what was really going on, even if the Jews and the general public did not have the same detailed information. Somehow the resistance groups in occupied countries like Denmark were also able to make the public aware of the Holocaust and the result was general non-cooperation, even by the local police and bureaucrats that the Nazis used in so many countries to assist them in carrying out the Holocaust. In Germany itself, there was public resistance against the extermination of the handicapped and mentally ill, particularly by church leaders, but there was no such action on behalf of the Jews. Resistance was possible to these genocidal actions, even by those who might otherwise have sympathized with fascism or Nazism, and when it occurred lives were saved and even the perpetrators sometimes tended to just slink away rather than continue with their work of extermination.
WORKS CITED
Burns, Michael. France and the Dreyfus Affair: A Documentary History. Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999.
Coffin, Judith and Robert Stacey. Western Civilizations, 16th Edition. NY: Norton, 2008.
Hunt, Linda, “The Paradoxical Origins of Human Rights” in J.N. Wasserstrom (Ed). Human Rights and Revolutions, 2nd Edition. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007: 3-20.
Ishay, M. The History of Human Rights: From Ancient Times to the Globalization Era. University of California Press, 2008.
Schorske, Carl E. Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture. NY: Vintage Books, 1981
Wiesner-Hanks, Merry. Discovering the Western Past: A Look at the Evidence, Volume II. Wadsworth Publishing, 2007.
