“On… ne… passe… pas!"

In the face of successive German offensives during the Great War, the French shouted “No one passes”. Years later, this slogan would turn into the “They Shall Not Pass” of the Republican militias as they defended Madrid from the Francoist assault.

The shadow of the world war marked the decades between the two conflicts. The Germans did not overrun French defences, but the cost was brutal: ten million soldiers died at the front. Another six million civilians died and there were twenty million wounded, many scarred for life. The bloodshed decimated a generation of Young Europeans and redefined the relative value of human life.

European culture, politics, economics, and leisure were impregnated with the sensation that everything was ephemeral and extraordinary, and an exaggerated vitalism fueled the search for new emotions. There were some who, as Stefan Zweig wrote, lamented the end of “the orderly world of well-defined strata and serene transitions”, and others who rejoiced in the destruction of the old order and the birth of a new era in the history of humanity. Vertigo and fear, anxiety and melancholy were conjoined in a state of mind that historian Charles Maier called “social anxiety”.

World War I redrew the map of Europe. The Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires disappeared, replaced by a dozen new countries, and six more had their borders redrawn. Both the form and context of politics changed. The citizenry that had been mobilized for war wanted to influence public affairs. Some countries became democratic, granting the vote to women, and moving towards a welfare state. In others, this political participation was channeled into populist movements or limited by authoritarian regimes.

At the same time, the example of the Russian Revolution encouraged the drive towards insurrection of part of the labour movement, as well as the visceral reaction of the conservatives who fought against it. Revolutionary violence and reactionary violence both became integral parts of political struggle.

World War I demanded a degree of state intervention in the economy  beyond anything ever seen. During the war, and into the postwar, the principles behind classical liberal orthodoxy: belief in progress, balanced budgets, and the solid value of money, were rendered obsolete. Just as the global economy appeared to recover its stability, a new global crisis broke out in 1929, one that contributed to erode the faith in democratic institutions even more.

MML