The afterword explains why Louis Bieral’s life matters. He had an almost unique set of experiences. He illustrates the importance of violence to the operation of nineteenth-century American society. He also suggests the difficulty of establishing the rule of law, replacing the veneration of physical might with the celebration of persuasion.

In this chapter I trace the problem of killing in Christian thought. I then raise the question of whether any intentional killing can be justified; in the remainder of the book I argue that the answer to this question is “no”.

This chapter argues that Déat and his allies rallied to a politics of collaboration not because of a prior affinity with fascism, but through the vector of pacifism and appeasement. After his marginalization by the Popular Front, Déat re-emerged as a leader of the pacifist camp as the political field became polarized around the question of war. Déat adopted an anti-anti-fascist stance, downplaying his prior opposition to fascism as he forged new alliances with pacifists on both the left and right. It was through the politics of appeasement that Déat and his pacifist allies found themselves favorably disposed to Franco-German collaboration and an authoritarian “national revolution” after France’s defeat. In Vichy, Déat sought unsuccessfully to position himself as a leader of the “national revolution.” This was not a simple continuation of his past neo-socialist commitments but represented an adaptation to the unique conjuncture of Vichy in 1940.

Part III covers the period from the end of the Popular Front in 1938 through the German occupation of France. The Popular Front had led to the marginalization and disarticulation of neo-socialism as a distinct position in the political field. Déat and the neo-socialists became unmoored from the left and thus “available” for political conversion in the years immediately following the dissolution of the Popular Front. The vector through which this happened was the reclassification of the political field around the question of war and peace. As a leading pacifist, Déat took up an anti-anti-fascist position and rallied to the politics of collaboration after the 1940 armistice. Initially seeking his place within Vichy’s “national revolution,” his failure to impose himself there led him to occupied Paris, where he came to adopt an increasingly radicalized form of collaborationist fascism modeled on Nazism through his leadership of the Rassemblement National Populaire (RNP).

Essays of the ‘age of catastrophe’ encompassing the two World Wars have been judged aesthetic failures because, in their argumentative force and dogmatism, they break with a fundamental commitment of the essayistic: to provide an open, even democratic relational space between reader and writer. This has hindered our ability to recognise them as important objects of historic memory. Assuming that the rhetorical power of the essay may just as often be used to defend truth and justice as to agitate for and justify violent conflict, this chapter will examine the essayistic mode of political essays by Rudyard Kipling and Vernon Lee. It will argue that political essays often display the same longing for connection and attachment that has long been deemed the cornerstone of the literary essay.

Martin Luther King Jr. argues that means and ends must be commensurable. If one wants to bring about a more equitable society, one must do so by equitable means. This means-ends principle is reiterated in the writings of Gandhi and King, but it has often been treated as something mysterious. A pragmatic case can be made for it if we pay attention to the dynamics of communication. Gandhi and King argue for an approach to social conflict that combines compassion for the needs of their opponents with a resolute opposition to the injustices these opponents perpetrate. Respect and respectability without challenge and protest will not contribute to the development of a more equitable society. But neither will challenge and protest without respect and respectability. By attending to how nonviolent direct actionists combine these two pressures, I develop an alternative to the dominant perspectives in communication ethics, but one that shares their concerns for morality, effectiveness, and nonviolence.

This chapter reviews the ideas and reception of Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of the Peace. It focuses on a single, as yet untold, aspect: how Economic Consequences fits into the context of debates about the construction of the memory of the Great War. It asks: ‘What role did Keynes and The Economic Consequences of the Peace play in the formation of the “futility myth” which dominates British popular perception of the First World War to this day?’

This chapter shows the significant role played by religious politics in the German Revolution of 1918. It examines first how the secularist subculture within German socialism contributed to the formation of wartime opposition that led to the 1917 split of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). It then follows the actions of secularists during the revolution itself, beginning with the attempts of one of Germany’s most prominent secularists, Adolph Hoffmann, to force through a radical program of secularization upon assuming a key position in the revolutionary government of 1918. It traces the politics of secularism in the writing of the Weimar Constitution before taking up the relationship of secularism to the “pure” council movement, which emerged in the years from 1919 to 1922 as an alternative both to parliamentary democracy and to Bolshevik party rule.

This considers the impact of systemic critiques of war, developed in the period of the American and French Revolutions, upon the work of two novelists. Samuel Jackson Pratts Emma Corbett, written during – and in opposition to – the American War of Independence, describes a young Engish heroines growing awareness of the role of property relations in supporting martial ideals and causing wars, and her conversion to a form of pacifism. Charlotte Smiths The Old Manor House, written in the early years of the French Revolution, describes a British soldier fighting in the American War of Independence, who comes to question the purpose and causes of the war, including the chivalric values of the ruling class. Both novels show how war exposes the selfish foundations of ordinary social life. While Jackson Pratts heroine escapes compromise through death, Smiths hero inherits the estate of the woman whose aristocratic values he despises.

This considers the role of Thomas Clarkson as peace campaigner. Clarkson played a leading role in the campaign to abolish the slave trade in the 1780s. Much of his thinking about peace was influenced by the prospects of colonial development. His Portrait of Quakerism (1806), a pioneering explanation of pacific Quaker principles, was followed by his Memoirs of William Penn (1813), the pacifist founder of Pennsylvania, which recommends setting up seminaries to teach the children of the rich, and offers Penn as a model of peaceful colonial relations. As a member of the Africa Institution and the Sierra Leone Company, Clarkson was personally involved in plans for peaceful colonizing. This interest is reflected in The Herald of Peace, the journal of the Peace Society Clarkson helped to establish, in which the example of Penn is often cited. The peace campaign was rooted in the goal of spreading Christianity and European influence globally.

This chapter examines the ways in which pre-war drama explored growing fears over major international conflict. Works considered include Du Maurier’s An Englishman’s Home (1909), Zangwill’s The War God (1911) and a number of less well-known plays and comic skits. The chapter contextualises these works in relation to the fraught geopolitical landscape in which they were produced and the wider cultural phenomenon of ‘invasion fiction’. Both critical and public reactions to these productions are also examined. The chapter concludes by exploring how the pre-war plays established the play-book for propagandistic war-time drama as theatre mobilised for the war effort.