A Thomist looks at a Divisive Invasion

a book review by V. Bradley Lewis

Yves R. Simon. The Ethiopian Campaign and French Political Thought. Anthony O. Simon, editor. Robert Royal, translator. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009.  Pp. 131 + xxiii. paper: $25.00.

In October 1935, the Italian army invaded Ethiopia (then called Abyssinia) and by the following May had control of the country, which now linked and thus unified Italy’s other African possessions.  The occupation of Ethiopia, part of Mussolini’s ambition to recreate the Roman Empire, was the immediate political background and context for Yves Simon’s newly translated volume, The Ethiopian Campaign and French Political Thought. 

But as the second part of the title indicates, there was also an intellectual context that was distinctively French: the Dreyfus Affair and more generally the inclinations of the French intellectual right in the years before World War II.  Here we see not only a reaction to Mussolini’s brutal attack on Ethiopia (one that eventually involved the use of poison gas), which also helped set the stage for the later boldness of Hitler, but the seeds of the Vichy regime. 

The book is remarkable not only as a historical document, but as an example of the concrete application of Simon’s Thomistic political philosophy to the extraordinary political events of his time, and, beyond that, is also a kind of testament to the public vocation of the philosopher.

The immediate impetus for the book was the publication of a “Manifesto of French Intellectuals for the Defense of the West” published in Le Temps on 4 October 1935.  The manifesto (helpfully included with several related documents as an appendix in this edition), which was eventually endorsed by over 1,000 signatories, including nearly half the members of the Académie française, was written to oppose sanctions against Italy by the League of Nations. 

It identified the Italian cause with the defense of the West and infamously dismissed Ethiopia, a League member, as “an amalgam of uncivilized tribes.” 

Simon was convinced that the Italian invasion was unjust and that the League of Nations should take action against it, but also took the tone and substance of the Manifesto as indicative of a certain attitude among French political thinkers, one entirely too hospitable to fascism. Among the signatories were Charles Maurras, the main thinker of Action Française, and a number of prominent Catholics. Simon also took the events of autumn 1935 as comparable to those of the Dreyfus Affair, noting that similar political passions had been unleashed.

Simon justifies his own intervention as one appropriate particularly to a philosopher: he does not offer any expertise on the facts, but is concerned with the disposition of French political opinion.

If it is true that certain basic choices, involving the values without which life is not worth living, are implied in the positions taken by French political thought with respect to the Italo-Ethiopian conflict, it is not without interest to isolate the philosophical meaning of such choices; if it is true that the division dominant in France with respect to the Italian effort represents the conflict of large ideas incarnated in grand historical forces, it is not idle to undertake the philosophical elucidation of these ideas. (p. 3)

It seems significant that Simon felt the need to justify a philosopher’s descent into the cave.  This short volume was, of course, followed by his lengthier and better known The Road to Vichy (published originally as La grand crise de la République Française in 1941).   In that book too (the relevant pages are reprinted as another appendix) Simon compared the controversy over Ethiopia to the Dreyfus Affair. 

In both cases immediate and concrete political disputes took on a larger–indeed, a spiritual–significance that transcended their intrinsic characters (1-2). The former revealed important aspects of the French right, but “[t]he fate of Europe was sealed during 1935 and 1936” (90) by France’s failure to defend collective security, oppose fascism, and affirm its alliance with England, which supported the League’s sanctions. 

Such was the delicacy of the balance in those years that had there been “ ‘one hundred politicians of integrity in France,’ [the] country might have escaped the devastation to come,” James McAdams reports Simon to have said to his son (and the book’s editor), Anthony Simon, in his Preface to the new translation (xv).