Gregor Dallas Frontiers

The significance of Poland's air disaster, 10 April 2010

Gregor Dallas — 2010-06-12T09:58:28Z

Three book projects plus the difficulties that afflict most authors in this horribly anti-intellectual age explain my absence from this diary for more than a year. In that period I've managed to do several things, including changing my literary agent for a second time.

It is said you pick your agent like choosing a wife. Personally, I find picking an agent infinitely easier , though it is not a road strewn with flowers. There are actually too many agents around; they are nearly all the same and virtually all of them are looking for an identical author. Moreover, they all seem to be guided by the same boring creed, commercial marketing.

You remember your neighbours' children, Jimmy, Johnny and Janie? Well, they grew up, got their university degrees in English Lit ten years ago, and then they followed this up with MAs in marketing; now they are all forcing their semi-educated, uninteresting ideas down the throats of the rest of us.

‘What's the market for this book?' they ask. The current financial crisis is proving to the world that ‘market equilibrium' is a false prophet. The market in prime mortgages in 2006 did not prove a good thing for the world; probably the only beneficial thing about the current economic depression is that we have been forced out of yesterday's market equilibrium. This has not happened yet in books. The market for books in 2010 is still deluged with the equivalent of junk bonds.

But ne'er mind. ‘What's the market for this book?' and buck the rest, proclaim our brave marketeers. They never ask how important is the book, what the book has got to contribute to our knowledge. We publish well over 110,000 books a year in Britain, one book every quarter of an hour. Ninety-nine per cent of these books are totally useless, and they are badly written, too, because editors don't hold the top jobs anymore. Yes, we live in the book trade's equivalent of the banking crisis: we are governed by ignorant, cowardly people and the situation cannot possibly survive.

Fifteen years ago the author the agents cast their sights upon was The Woman Historian — preferably blonde — who would replace Antonia Fraser; better still she would be a female version of Simon Schama. This dream historian was never found. Now the focus has narrowed: she must come from Oxford, she must be no more than thirty — thirty-five at a pinch — and be willing to describe in detail her tiresome sex life, preferably in Paris (sex in London, though not New York, is apparently less marketable). Even be photographed nude.

It doesn't place authors like me in a terribly sanguine position. Male, I have strode upon this planet on crutches for more than half a century and I have devoted all my written work to the Continent of Europe — which has actually been quite an interesting place in the last 300 years, my period.

‘Books on Europe are no longer marketable in England, Gregor,' Mr Nasty tells me with a smirk on his ugly pimpled face. Last month's televised electoral debates in the UK, must have spent all of ten minutes on Europe. I heard Hervé Maritain — the French UMP spokesman for Defence and a man close to Sarkozy — say at a dinner the other night, ‘I can't honestly see what British foreign policy is.' Actually, none of us can.

I don't know what agents and publishers talk about over coffee in such exciting venues as the London Book Fair. Certainly not their neighbours in Europe. Anyway, foreigners couldn't fly in that week in April because of the volcanic ash. I wonder if any of them had the time, beyond the contracts with a dozen Little Miss Oxfords, for translation rights. It would never, apparently, occur to most agents working in provincial Albion that a book about France just might have a potential market in France. Metrostop Paris has so far been marketed in bankrupt Greece and distant Russia (see below). But France hasn't even been attempted. That has left me open, in France, to one of the worst abuses in literature, plagiarism.

It has become a business, you know, though not one that publishers boast about. French publishers scan foreign books for possible bestsellers, not to translate them but to plagiarize them: they employ ghost-writers to do an intelligent job of hiding the plagiarism and then get a celebrity to sign it. They know that they will probably not be prosecuted. For the last nine months the French have been pushing a plagiarized version of my Metrostop Paris in all their supermarkets — and making a packet — because provincial Albion can't be bothered about Europe. The lawyers defend the corporations, not authors. So, actually, do the agents.

Exceptions to the rule do exist. I suppose, after all, the search for the right agent is a little like marriage. You have to be persistent. Exceptional agents, like exceptional women, turn up where least expected.

* * *

Well, on it goes. That private little item was not what broke me out of my silence. It was that plane crash in April. You may remember it. It may well prove to be the most significant accident to occur in Europe since the Second World War. The reason is cold geopolitics.

The basic geopolitical fact in Europe today revolves around two trouble spots: the south-east corner where the Balkans border on Russian and Carpathian territories; and the north-east, the old eastern territories of historic Poland. They have both been the source of grand folkloric legend; and have also, for centuries, indeed even millennia, been the most appalling killing fields of Europe.

The south-east problem is essentially due to the colonizing efforts of the Russians as they replaced the the Ottoman Turks in the mid-nineteenth century. It was exasperated by Stalin's mass national purges in the twentieth century. In the summer of 1944, for example, the entire population of Crimean Tatars, the former masters of the region, were deported to Central Asia; almost half died of hunger and disease; their surviving descendants returned with the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s and became a further sore in an already troubled region — hardly the sort of history to promote a feeling of good neighbours.

The problem in the north-east of Europe went back to the eighteenth-century advance of Russia again, this time at the expense of the huge Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth which had spread across the Ukraine almost to the Black Sea and the Crimea. The complete partition of this area between Russia, Austria and Prussia (the ‘alliance of the Three Black Eagles') in the second half of the eighteenth century put in motion — because it involved the entire centre of Europe — the forces that eventually emerged in the two twentieth-century world wars; and it is one of the long-term factors behind those two trouble spots we still see hampering Europe today. Of the three black eagles (Poland's eagle was white), it was the Russian that played the major role in the partitions of Poland.

So two trouble spots; two areas of centuries-long slaughter. They both involve Russia. Which is where that terrible air crash comes in.

The plane was carrying the President of Poland, Lech Kaczynski, along with many members of the Polish government, parliament and a host of dignitaries to an important war commemoration, that of the Katyn massacre of around 25,000 Polish officers that started exactly seventy years earlier, on 10 April 1940. It was a commemoration that had the potential of changing the face of Europe.

* * *

Katyn was not the largest of the Second World War atrocities — in Kurapaty, a wooded spot north of Minsk, less than two hundred miles from Katyn — a common grave containing a quarter of a million dead was uncovered by an archaeologist in 1988. Mass graves, in these northern forests, spread like the fields of mushrooms in the thick fog and lost natural clearings. Often, as in the case of Kurapaty, no one knows for certain who was responsible for the slaughter. Many of the local inhabitants, hiding like Indians among the trees, were witnesses; but now they are all dead, too. The forests of Belarus, Lithuania and north-west Russia are haunted by a diabolic silence today — the hush of death, mass crime, undiscerning ignorance and lies.

But that is not actually the case of Katyn. We at last know for sure who the murderers were. Of course, during the Communist occupation public debate on who killed Poland's elite officers was punishable by imprisonment and even death. The Nazis had claimed, in a well-made propaganda film of 1943, that it was the Communists who committed the foul deed; the Communists countered, in a film of typical Soviet pomp and punctilio, that it was the Nazis. It was the Nazis, in fact, who were telling the truth. For Poles the lie was more painful than the crime.

People naturally talked. After the war it became especially an affair of women, for so many of the men were dead.

Eventually, in a collapsing Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, according to the dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, lost control of the Politburo. In 1990 he was forced to admit that it was Stalin, back in March 1940, who had ordered the NKVD, predecessor of the KGB, to execute every one of the Polish officers who had been taken prisoner in the Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939. But the last Soviet government never came clear. And the succeeding Russian governments tried to hush up the matter again. Under the presidency of Vladimir Putin, a KGB man, Katyn in the years 2000 became classified information once more. But the truth had made the tour of the world. One of the main heralds of truth was the graphic, harrowing film of 2007, Katyn. Andrzej Wajda, its director now in his eighties, had realized his ambition of a lifetime. But his film, too, had its difficulties getting around the world, in Russia because of censorship, in the rest of the world because of indifference.

Newly independent Poland of course remained deeply suspicious of Russia. She did not seem to have changed her wicked ways much since she was the principal partitioning power in the eighteenth century; Katyn was at the heart of the matter. And it remained at the heart of Europe's north-eastern problem.

That was on the minds of everybody on board Kaczynski's aircraft, when it took off from Warsaw shortly after 7.30 am, Saturday, 10 April 2010. The plane was a three-engined Tupolev Tu-154, manufactured thirty years ago, though it had recently undergone a complete refit. Their destination at Smolensk was already shrouded in that thick, sinister fog which is typical of the region. Traffic controllers were diverting planes to Vitebsk, Minsk and Moscow.

* * *

Vitebsk and Minsk are just across the western border of contemporary Russia in the strangest of all Europe's nation states, Belarus.

In truth, ‘Belarus' is not a nation state at all. It describes itself as a presidential republic. It is very poor, it is made up of warring ethnic groups and it has one of the highest crime rates in Europe; one drives across it at one's own risk. It has been ruled since 1994 by the iron hand of Alexander Lukashenko, which is virtually all that holds Belarus together. An imposing statue of Lenin stands outside the House of Government at Minsk, a square white monstrosity that makes the Soviet architecture of Moscow look pretty.

Few Westerners could spell Belarus, pronounce its name or tell you where it is. It was the Supreme Soviet of the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic that decreed in 1992 the new name of the in-dependent republic by altering slightly the consonants and vowels of the initial Russian name of the place; ‘Byelorussia' became ‘Belarus'. But the historical origins of the term go back to medieval German and Latin. The legend is that ‘White Russians' got their name because of the colour of their cloaks; it seems more likely that it was to distinguish free ‘White' Slavs from the ‘Black' Slavs that came under the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.

Frontiers in those fog-bound northern latitudes have, for a millennium, carried hidden, mystic meanings. Even the recent ambiguities of the political status of ‘Belarus' are enough to shiver a non-Slavic soul and send it to seek warmer climes. The parliament of Belarus declared its sovereignty in July 1990 and its independence was announced in August 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed. But Lukashenko has been following policies more Soviet than the old Soviet Union. He has been so ingratiating towards the new masters of the Kremlin that there has been open speculation that the two countries might once again merge into one.

The framework for this new state was published in a report in December 2007. On 27 May 2008 Lukashenko named Vladimir Putin, as he stepped down from the presidency of Russia, the ‘prime minister' of the this strange new political unit; there was even talk of him becoming its president, but this did not happen. One can imagine the dismay in Poland, under Lech Kaczynski's Law and Justice Party, at the prospect of having a Soviet-style country united with Russia right on their frontiers.

These developments came at just about the moment, in late August 2008, when Russia invaded Georgia on her southern frontier — see Diary, 26 September 2008 — and Poland signed a treaty with the United States to set up ten interceptor missiles in a disused military base near the Baltic. Kaczynski had said at the time, ‘Our neighbours should now understand that our nation will never give in, nor allow itself to be intimidated.'

The Russians responded by announcing plans to install Isklander-M missiles in the western enclave of Kaliningrad, the former Prussian city-port of Koenigsburg, bordering on Lithuania and Poland, now both members of NATO. For as Russia's deputy chief of staff, General Anatoly Nogovitsyn put it, Poland ‘could not go unpunished.'

Thus some uncomfortable links were being forged between the two major trouble spots of Europe. Poland was in the thick of it — as she always had been. It must have been a matter on the minds of more than a few of the important passengers aboard that Tupolev 154 on the morning of 10 April, as they crossed the forests of Belarus. Soviet-style Belarus was not a hospitable place for Poles, and they would not have wanted to be seen landing there. The destination was Smolensk and Katyn, not Belarus.

* * *

More than political frontiers were involved here.

The eighteenth-century partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth brought almost all of what was to become Belarus into the Russian Empire. Both Poles and Russians called the area the ‘Borders'. It was a land where myths were made, a country of knights and heroes. The birch, willow and oak forests, separated by green meadows and heathland, the network of ponds and canals formed a stage for poets; Jozef Pilsudsi, independent Poland's first president after the First World War, waxed lyrical when talking and writing about the ‘Borders'. Lech Kaczynski carried in him the poetry of the ‘Borders', and it piqued him that this land was now the home of the most Soviet-inspired regime in all of Europe, including Russia.

But there was even more than poetry involved here. Belarus was a home to the Jews.

When Russia expanded westwards into the European Continent as a result of the Partitions, a large number of Jews came under the rule of the Tsar. The Empress Elizabeth had tried to expel them if they did not convert to Russian orthodoxy. But the task proved impossible because of their numbers and because, with a growing commercial sector, Jews in fact proved rather useful.

Catherine the Great found a promising alternative, the Jewish Pale, in 1791. This was just as the French Revolution accorded Jews citizenship, and just before the Second and Third Partitions of 1793 and 1795 destroyed the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Jews could not live outside the Pale unless they had authorization, usually in the form of a passport; nor could they live in agricultural communities within the Pale; nor in major towns such as Yalta, Sevastopol and Kiev. So they moved to small, provincial settlements that they often created out of nothing, the shtetl. The eastern frontier of the Pale fluctuated over time but corresponded roughly to the territories annexed in the Partitions; the western frontier of the Pale was Russia's border with the rest of Europe.

By the late nineteenth century five million Jews, or forty per cent of the world's Jews, lived in the Russian Pale, many of them concentrated in what is today Belarus. One of the greatest tragedies of modern history is that this kernel of Judaism has been wiped off the face of the earth.

That is also a fact that would have been on the minds of several passengers aboard the Tupolev 154 on the morning of 10 April as they crossed Belarus for Smolensk.

* * *

Judaism was itself a source of great literature and poetry in the ‘Borders': the Hassidic spirit haunted the small towns and villages of Belarus, the Ukraine and the eastern and central parts of Poland with its earnestness of prayer, its mirth in the face of hardship, its children's Yiddish chatter in the snowy streets and the merry squeal of the ever-present village fiddle.

‘Let my name be recalled with laughter, or not at all,' wrote Sholem Aleichem in his will of 1916, though his short life of 56 years had been hardly full of smiles; we remember him for his vivid word portraits of the nineteenth-century shtetl which were the inspiration for Fiddler on the Roof.

When Marc Chagall was born in 1887, Vitebsk — the ‘Russian Toledo' — housed 66,000 Jews who lived in a city built of wood with a thriving culture that derived from the religious teachings of the Kabbalah. It was a place of prayer, of song and, of course, poverty. The main trades in the city were clothing, furniture and agricultural tools; Chagall's father was a herring merchant. Chagall invented a dream world out of the landscape of Vitebsk that accompanied him around a world of exile to which he had fled after the pogroms and the terrors inflicted by the Russian Bolsheviks: gigantic fiddlers danced on the roofs of miniature dolls' houses, animal phantoms, fish and human hybrids flew in the night sky, the livestock had transparent wombs in which their unborn offspring slept upside down and in the distance more wooden houses, covered in snow, belched out white smoke into the ghost-infested heavens.

Vitebsk was one of the towns, just across the frontier in Belarus, to which traffic controllers re-directed the Tupolev 154 on the morning of 10 April. Vitebsk is less than eighty miles — less than 130 kilometres — from fog-bound Smolensk. But Chagall's Vitebsk no longer exists. Chagall's Vitebsk was burnt to a cinder seventy years ago.

* * *

The Bolshevik coup d'etat of 1917 and the horrors of a war that lasted into the 1920s that followed it — the Russian attempt to recuperate Polish territories, led by Stalin's South-Western army in a march of terror from the Ukraine, being the most notable episode — was marked by pogroms and other military excesses. At least 31,000 Jews were killed in the Ukraine alone.

Swirling winds of human violence, sometimes an eddy, sometimes a cyclone, were always present in the northern forests and meadows during the first half of the twentieth century. Russians and Germans — the Black Eagles of Prussia, Austria and Russia — wreaked death upon one another. The Jews were always their victims, but they were not the only ones. The German invasion in 1941 of the Pale (it had been formally abolished by the Provisional Russian Government of 1917) led to the final annihilation of the Jews. The sight of these killings by special murder squads, the Einsatz-gruppen, was so revolting that not even Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, responsible for them, could stand for more than a few minutes inspecting the performance.

The Einsatzgruppen were temporary formations that would follow in the wake of the German armies, execute their grisly duties, and then break up. Many ended up in psychiatric wards. They were not necessarily Germans. A large proportion was recruited from prisoners taken from the defeated armies. The rule, when one fell foul either of the Soviet or the German armies, was kill or be killed.

So ethnic relations, already envenomed by mass murders dating from the beginning of the century, descended one notch below hell in Hitler's Europe, and continued going down after the war with the calls for justice, revenge and retribution.

It seemed to go on forever. The German case against John Demjanjuk, born a Ukrainian, now aged ninety, began in Munich in November 2009. Demjanjuk was captured from the Soviet army in 1941 and allegedly recruited into the Einsatzgruppe at Chelmno, where they put Jews to death by diesel exhaust. He later — again allegedly — became a prison guard, the famous ‘Ivan the Terrible' at the extermination camp of Sobibor. He today faces charges of being accessory to 27,900 counts of murder.

If Poland's tragedy was to be victim of both Nazi and Soviet excesses she also faces the ignominy of the charge of being the murderer of Jews as well.

When the Soviet Army invaded eastern Poland on 28 September 1939 many Jews publicly wel-comed them as liberators from the Nazis; some of them received administrative jobs in return for their allegiance; one imagines how feelings ran when it was learnt that the deportation of Poles was overseen by Polish Jews.

The Germans invaded Russia on 22 June 1941. Within a week they had taken over the Russian occupied zone of Poland. SS-Obersturmführer Hermann Schaper's Einsatzgruppe B moved in within another week and began murdering Jews.

Massacres are recorded between July and September 1941 in shtetls such as Lomza, Tykocin, Rutki, Zambrow, Jedwabne, Piatnica and Wizna. What created such a storm, then and after the war, was the extent to which Polish Gentile mobs, intent on revenge for the Soviet deportations, participated in the mass murder of Jews.

Poles were supposed to be saving Jews, not murdering them. The row broke out at the sixtieth an-niversary of these events, 2001. This was another item that must have been on the minds of the passengers aboard the fatal flight of Saturday, 10 April 2010.

* * *

What happened on 10 July 1941 at Jedwabne? The question has torn apart Polish politics, it has divided American and British academics and it has even figured in the campaign of the recent British elections.

Around 40 Jewish men were shot in a barn that day, and 250 men, women and children were later in the day burnt alive in the same dismal place. Professor Jan T. Gross, a Polish-American, argued that only Poles committed the murders; no Germans, Gross claims, were present. Gross based his analysis largely on a 1945 deposition made in Communist Warsaw by Shmuel Wasserstein, who went into hiding about three kilometres from Jedwabne on the day of the massacre and was not, fortunately for him, an eye-witness.

A Polish State Commission which made a series of reports between 2002 and 2004 confirmed Polish participation in the massacre, but also demonstrated the presence of 68 Gestapo and numerous other German policeman.

Gross did not consult any German archives, and particularly the Zentralen Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen, which investigated the war crimes of Hermann Schaper committed in the summer of 1941. Moreover, the massacres conducted by Einsatzgruppe B in dozens of other settlements in Eastern Poland that summer are strikingly similar. Indeed, historians will note the parallels with the famous massacre of Oradour-sur-Glane in southern France in July 1944 — and there were French participants, the Malgré Nous, in that sad affair.

Jedwabne has become an emotional affair in contemporary Polish politics. Professor Gross has written that Polish ‘historiography of the war could not grapple with fundamental subjects' and has gone on to suggest that the whole Polish nation was guilty of anti-semitism (Istvan Deak, Jan T. Gross and Tony Judt, The Politics of Retribution in Europe, 2000). His colleague, Professor Tony Judt, considers that Holocaust recognition and the national admission of guilt in the murder of Jews should be the ‘entry ticket' into the European Union for all the guilty nations, which would seem to include most of them (see my ‘Tony Judt: historian of the post-war age' in Reflections, on this site).

In 2001 President Aleksander Kwasniewski, officially apologized to the Jews for the crime of Jedwabne on behalf of Poland. Kwasniewski was a former Communist, and most people thought the Communists, as anti-semitic as their comrades in Russia, owed the Jews an apology. But many considered that the apology for Jedwabne was inappropriate for the entire nation, which had suffered a higher loss of life, per capita, than any other belligerent in the Second World War.

Among the loudest protesters against the apology was Michal Kaminski, chairman of the European Conservatives and Reformists Group in the European Parliament, created by the British Conservatives after they had pulled out of the centrist conservative grouping, the European People's Party, last year. The British Labour Party made a fuss, during the recent provincial election in the UK, saying that this proved the anti-semitic sentiments of the British Conservatives.

All this Anglo-English debate demonstrated was how little either side understood the situation in Poland.

One quality that the late President stamped on his Law and Justice Party was its pronounced philo-semitism. There were not any anti-semites aboard that plane to Smolensk. One country where Lech Kaczynski was deeply mourned was Israel. ‘The President and his wife were great friends of Israel,' a former ambassador to Poland, David Peleg, was quoted as saying shortly after the accident.

As Mayor of Warsaw, where Kaczynski gained much of his popularity, he donated the land and the money towards the creation of a Museum of the History of Polish Jews, which will be opening in two years time, the first Jewish museum of Poland. He was the first Polish president to attend a service at a Polish synagogue, and the first to celebrate Chanukkah at the presidential palace. Among the measures he took to wipe out Communist censorship and continuing Communist influence in the public sector was to restore citizenship to 15,000 Jews who had been exiled in 1968 dur-ing one of many anti-semitic frenzies that had swept post-war Communist Poland.

Lech Kaczynski was a gatherer, an assembler of the different elements that made up these northern lands. He was a master of their different patterns — and he knew how to use them to his own political benefit. But he could be unpredictable and even nervous in his actions. He had a fear of flying. ‘The President,' reported Radoslaw Sikorski, the Foreign Minister, ‘was anxious, a nervous flyer, and he also liked to talk to his mother before and after takeoff and landing. I knew that, because I had flown with him myself many times.' If he had a destination in mind, he would, as President and Commander-in-Chief, insist on going there whatever the traffic controllers said. When he visited Georgia during the brief war of August 2008, he had ordered the presidential plane to Tbilisi without the clearance of traffic control. The pilot had refused, flying the plane instead across the border to Azerbaijan, and was promptly dismissed from the air force; the Minister of Defence subsequently awarded the defiant pilot a medal.

* * *

Three times the Tupolev 154 roared around in a circle a few hundred metres above the former military base at Smolensk North Airport. The spring conditions outside were rapidly deteriorating. Visibility dropped from 500 to 200 metres. Ground control, speaking in Russian, suggested that they divert the plane; the airport was not equipped with the most modern instrument landing systems. Not all the crew understood Russian, but the pilot, Arkadiusz Protiuk, spoke it fluently. A Russian Ilyushin Il-76 had a few minutes before attempted to land but had given up and had instead headed for Moscow's Vnukovo's Airport. Ground control recommended the same to the Tupolev, or to try Minsk just as it began its descent. But the plane kept on advancing, with autopilot and auto-throttle on. Inside the cockpit the TAWS, or terrain awareness and warning system, sounded the alert that the aircraft was less than a hundred metres from the ground. Twelve or thirteen seconds later the autopilot and auto-throttle were switched off in an apparent attempt to pull the aircraft up to try another landing. But it was too late. Five or four seconds afterwards the plane reverberated as it touched a tree. One of the crew let out a prolonged swearword in Polish, ‘FUCK!' Two hundred and sixty metres further on part of the left wing of the plane was sheared off by a thirty to forty centimetre birch tree, the aircraft then went into a spin, landed on its back and, within five seconds, it and its 96 occupants were consumed in a fireball that lit up Smolensk's gloomy morning atmosphere.

Investigators subsequently discovered that the door between the passenger cabin and the cockpit was open and that two men outside the crew were in the cockpit at the time of the accident. One of them was the Polish Air Force Commander, Lieutenant Andrzej Blasik. The other man has not yet been identified, but his voice has been picked up on the voice recorder. Within a few hours of the terrible news the whole world was speculating that the presidential party had, like at Tbilisi, intervened in the decision to land. Why else would the pilot and crew, with such important passengers aboard, so blatantly ignore the traffic controllers? But then why would the President risk the lives of all those on board to fly into fog-bound instead of the airports of neighbouring Belarus?

Investigators have formally stated that Lech Kaczynski was not in the cockpit. Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the President's twin brother, running as Law and Justice's candidate for the Presidency later this month, told Spain's EFE news agency in May, ‘Accusations against the President are groundless.' There was no parallel at all with the Tbilisi incident, he continued, where ‘there was no risk in landing, other planes had already landed,' while in Smolensk ‘very risky decisions were made, according to the media.'

The question is likely to remain open for eternity: So who made the decisions?

* * *

It was the week after Easter. Britain was undergoing the most uninspiring electoral campaign with the most uninspiring leaders dominating it, their speeches centred around the budget, bankers, health and education. Paris was enjoying an early warm spell in spring as a Greek crisis developed in the euro-zone. My own small Anglican Church had its Annual General Meeting; during the shortened service that preceded it, there was no mention in the prayers of intercession of Poland's disas-ter. Over the church lunch I failed to spark much interest in it either. About half the people hadn't even heard of it; they got more excited about the poor quality of St. George's coffee. Outside Paris seemed no different from a normal Sunday: the streets of the sixteenth arrondissement were just as empty, joggers and cyclists were rather more numerous than usual, the number of tourists from Japan and America was picking up in the cafés of the Champs, but I doubt that I would have found a single person among them, or among native Parisians, much concerned about the Polish air crash; the weather was too nice.

It reminded me of a wet Christmas in Paris nearly thirty years ago when Poland was living through another trauma: Solidarnosc had just been outlawed, their leaders were gaoled, tanks patrolled the streets of every major Polish city, people were killed, a national curfew was imposed, the airports were closed and most major roads were restricted; but in Paris all was silent, the Christmas lights glowed and flickered, though nobody seemed present to admire them, traffic on the streets was sparse, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing made the sort of Olympian address at the New Year (‘la fin d'une année, s'elle emporte des joies et des peines, des amours et des regrets, des souvenirs qui pâlissent…, nous rappelle le marche du temps') which lost him the presidential election five months later, and nobody seemed much concerned about the drama in Poland just a thousand miles away; the weather was too cold.

That vague awareness of something going on just across the horizon, yet the stubborn refusal to know more about it is a phenomenon peculiar to Europe. It has always existed. We experienced it throughout the Cold War when a Communist world cohabited with a free Western Europe; most of us in the West knew nothing at all of daily life behind the Iron Curtain, yet it was no more than a day's drive from us. It was a phenomenon of the Second World War. Paris was liberated in the summer of 1944; Warsaw was demolished and its population slaughtered district by district and building by building. The First World War ended on Armistice Day, 11 November 1918, for the countries of Western Europe; but the war marched east and was still being fought in parts of Eastern Europe in 1920; in the new Soviet Union it never really ended and Russia and her satellites truth-fully experienced continuous war until 1945 and even beyond.

Just beyond the horizon, just the other side of the hill, just the other side of the forest, the western tip of Europe's peninsular protected herself, while the eastern base was always more exposed to violence; even the Romans maintained a distinction between western ‘civilization' and the eastern ‘barbarians'. It would appear to be a permanent feature, like the hills of European geography.

Poland, which did not then exist as a political state, had known throughout the whole nineteenth century the frenzy of national rebellion and the pogroms against the Jews; Western Europe looked on quizzically, baffled. The sentiment was captured in Chopin's 6th Polonaise, the ‘Héroïque', or even more succinctly in his brief Étude Révolutionnaire, both composed in France but with his spirit on the other side of Germany. That all went back to the injury inflicted by the Partitions of the eighteenth century that had transformed the largest state of Europe outside Russia into nothing.

Vaguely aware, in Paris, that something important was happening on the other side of Europe that warm Sunday after Easter, I wandered down the Champs Elysées, across the Place de la Concorde and then up the rue Cambon, which is a little way along the rue de Rivoli. The wide open square at the top of the rue Cambon is dominated by the cupola and peristyle, with six corinthian columns, of a seventeenth-century church, the Église Notre-Dame de l'Assomption. I had just entered a different world.

The pavement and steps were strewn with flowers and candles, people I didn't know came up and shook my hand, some were embracing, there were people in tears. A mass was taking place that was so fully attended that you couldn't even get to the doorway; there had been continuous masses, I was told, since early morning.

This was Poland's church in Paris. It was a small version of what was going on on the other side of Germany.

* * *

The whole of Warsaw has been rebuilt in exquisite detail; but there are scars which remain. Painful memories, for instance, accompany the breezes in the leafy streets of Zoliborz, the northern suburb where Lech Kaczynski and his twin brother were born shortly after the war.

After the Polish armies had turned back the Soviet invasion in 1920 and won independence for their nation, a large number of the new Polish officer corps came to settle here, in Zoliborz, with their families. But Polish independence was short-lived. German outrages were committed in Zoliborz as elsewhere in Warsaw, and Poland, from the instant of Hitler's invasion. But it was the capture of the Polish officers and their secret mass murder in the forests of Katyn that created psychological havoc among the people of Zoliborz; not a family was untouched. Four years later, in July 1944, the citizens of Warsaw had watched the tattered remnants of Hitler's armies retreat through their streets on foot, on bicycles and on stolen peasant carts. They were directed by the German police through the suburb of Zoliborz. Jan Nowak, who spent 1944 commuting between the London Provisional Government and the Polish Underground State in Warsaw (not a simple task) described this nomadic mob passing through Zoliborz: ‘their uniforms were unbuttoned, their rifles and helmets hung limply, their faces were dirty and sweaty… A heavenly sight!' What the residents of Zoliborz did not see was the column of fresh, clean and orderly SS troops marching eastwards down Jerusalem Avenue through the centre of the town. They were setting up their headquarters for the destruction of Warsaw.

But most women in Zoliborz knew by 1944 that it had not been the Germans who had murdered their husbands and sons.

What was so poignant about last Easter's air crash is that not only did it raise the old phantoms of Katyn after seventy years (the murders were at Easter); it hit the same community in Warsaw. Poland had lost its President, the chiefs of staff of the three armed services, parliament's president, party leaders and many other political figures besides; many of the relatives of the officers shot in 1940 were on board that plane, too. At the Church of the Child Jesus, on Czarniecki Street in Zoliborz there was a moving mass held on 11 April in memory of those who had died in the accident the day before; most of those who attended had personal ties with the victims. A two-minute silent vigil was held throughout the district at midday. The priest of the parish, a close friend of the President, had been killed.

* * *

The most touching images of that Sunday, I think, were when Lech Kaczynski's coffin was brought to the airport of Warsaw in a military transport plane. It was drizzling. A red carpet had been laid out, the coffin was carried to a stand on the tarmac, a prayer was read followed by a sequence of shots that moved the world to tears when the daughter and the twin brother paid their respects to the dead President. It lasted all of thirty seconds.

Marta Kaczynska had scandalized her Conservative, Catholic family two years earlier by divorcing her husband and marrying her lover and father of her child, a former Communist informer. No one could possibly imagine what was in the mind of that twenty-nine-year-old woman as she swiftly advanced to the coffin in the rain on that Sunday after Easter. She was tall and almost unhealthily thin. She had lost both her parents the day before. She stooped and then collapsed on the coffin for a few moments, recovered herself, stood up and walked briskly away. Her uncle, the President's twin brother, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, a squat man of sixty, was immediately behind her. He, too, bent down in prayer and then left.

In Poland, national tragedies dissolve themselves in prayer. There is no doubt that this accident is the greatest felt national tragedy to hit Poland since the Second World War. British commentators have attempted to draw a parallel with the death of Princess Diana. In terms of national emotions, there is something to be made of that. But this goes so much deeper. It touches the very kernel of the nation's history and, beyond that, all of Europe's history. ‘I have horrible, horrible news,' said Radaslaw Sikorski, the Foreign Minister, when he called Jaroslaw Kaczynski within minutes of the crash that Saturday morning.

A photographer caught the face of Marta Kaczynska as she stood up and crossed the path of her grief-stricken uncle. All of Poland's history is etched — consciously or not — in that young face: the loss of patrimony, the trauma of identity, the breached barrier of security, the dissolution of hope, the slaughter of those loved and familiar, and the dawn of annihilation.

* * *

After the death and the funeral of Lech Kaczynski one observed a notable change in the relationship between Poland and Russia: ‘The two countries have never been so close,' it was said in the high corridors of power.

Alexander Tsipko, commentator on the Russian television channel, Vesti 24, spoke of a new ‘feeling of unity among the Slav people.' ‘We are watching,' he said, ‘the rehabilitation of the spiritual and moral attitudes' between the two countries. All that talk of a Russian plot to murder the Polish President and his entourage never got off the ground; nobody, save a few nationalist fanatics, believed it. The Polish Prime Minister, Donald Tusk is head of the liberal Civic Platform party which defeated the Kaczynkis' Law and Justice party at the 2007 legislative elections. He is Koshubian which, as he explained to the Israeli paper Haaretz in December 2008, ‘like the Jews, are people who were born and live in border areas and were suspected by the Nazis and the Communists of being disloyal.' He is a strong supporter of political and economic integration of the European Union and backed the Lisbon Treaty, in contrast to Lech Kaczynski. Officially missiles will still be facing each other between the Polish Baltic and the isolated Russian pocket of Kaliningrad; but talks at summit level in the last weeks suggest a thaw.

Above all, there are gestures made in both Warsaw and Moscow that show the world has changed since Saturday morning, 10 April. Most symbolic of these is the showing of Andrzej Wajda's Katyn on a major Russian television channel. For the first time millions of Russians have watched in graphic detail how soldiers of the Soviet security army fired German bullets at the base of each Po-lish officers' skull at Easter in 1940.

Stalin can no longer be portrayed as the hero of 1945. If this is what really happened to the Poles, many Russians will now ask, then what happened to our own fathers and grandfathers? They will find the answer in the wild, cold mushroom fields of the north.

Wajda, whose own father was among the murdered officers, spoke, in an interview made just after the film was shot in 2007, of how difficult a film it was to make. Until 1989 it of course could not be made in Poland, and it could not be made abroad ‘because no-one was interested in Katyn.' But even after 1989 he had difficulty ‘confronting the subject on the screen.' It could not be about his father because he did not know the story of his father. He had to deal with an intense emotion, but it would be a film of the ‘Polish School', of cruel reality, and perhaps the last film of its kind, a sort of ‘farewell'. ‘I am now an old man,' he said; ‘most of the filmmakers I knew are all dead.' It would have to be a story of women; there were hardly any men or boys in it. Indeed, the invented characters in the film are various incarnations of his mother, her clinging hope that his father is ali-ve, the final realization that he has been murdered — by the Soviets. The final scenes come from his recovered diary that goes up to the day of his murder, 10 April 1940. The murder of the thousands of officers is depicted in brutal, coloured detail, as they repeat fragments of the Lord's Prayer.

It is, Wajda says, a story of the crime; but it is also the story of the lie. All of Eastern Europe was, in one way or another, pulled into that lie. Indeed, the Western world was, too — especially its academics.

That terrible accident by Katyn on the seventieth anniversary of the murder of Wajda's father, 10 April 2010, may well prove to be the end of the lie.

Reviews of At the Heart of a Tiger

2010-03-30T17:22:42Z

“The author has a way with words and is good at evoking place and atmosphere. This is history written in the grand narrative mode and enlivened by the techniques of the novelist and travel writer… Many will read Dallas's book with enjoyment.”

- James F. MacMillan, Times Literary Supplement

“I have learnt a good deal from this book, whose cognitive scope extends from the dawn of the Revolution to the Fall of Pétain and Laval, and will keep it by me. Like Braudel, Dallas is at his best when describing events in the context of their settings. His earlier work deals with the peasantry of the Loire (Clemenceau's native land); to accompany him there, or to the northern mines of Zola's Germinal, or to the forest that now covers the destroyed villages near Verdun, is a treat.”

- Gillian Tindall, Financial Times

“In old age [Clemenceau] retired to the Vendée, to grow flowers by the sea, and write books about Demosthenes and Claude Monet, one of this closests friends. The account of his last years reads like a chapter from Colette. Gregor Dallas has written a remarkable book, full of sounds, sights and aroma of France he clearly adores. In as much as Clemenceau more than any other man represented the spirit of that most French regimes, the Third Republic, this story of his life and times is a record not only of a hero, but of the country he inhabited and the society in which he moved. It is wonderfully detailed and unfailingly acute; a book about a politician which is far more than a book about politics… Dallas sometimes assumes knowledge that many readers will lack. They should not deterred. They will acquire knowledge as they read and find infinite delight on the journey.”

- Allan Massie, Daily Telegraph

“Dallas gives us the impression of a man [Clemenceau] colliding with the various worlds he inhabited and drawn to politics by necessity. And Dallas is generous in describing those worlds, breaking his story with long descriptions of the scenes Clemenceau was to enter. He does this often and they combine very well with the shorter introductions Dallas gives us to Clemenceau's immediate environment. So we get a quick glance at Nadar's amazing balloon flights during the German siege of Paris in 1870 and a long description of the New York Clemenceau found in the 1860s. We meet Gambetta, and get a much more detailed picture of the industrial and agricultural regions that the Paris Assemblies hardly touched. It is a centrifugal way of writing and admirably suits Clemenceau, whose centre was private and contemplative, and who left few personal documents. This is an interesting and convincing study of a man who searched for political decency in a world where we can now see there was little.”

- Francis Hodgson, The Guardian

“Gregor Dallas has written a splendid biography of the man which recreates the feeling of the time with originality and is sure to become a standard work. He presents Clemenceau's long career with a blend of precision and colour. Anybody requiring a short description of the complex Dreyfus affair could do not better than start here…”

- David Bell, Yorkshire Post

“The circumstances sound freshly familiar: fortifications around a seat of government, defending 'the people' not against a foreign power but against another branch of domestic government; a mini-civil war… Elements of the recent ill-fated Moscow rebellion, you say. But they are also pieces of the vivid picture Gregor Dallas paints of the Paris Commune of March 1871 in his biography of French statesman and man of his times Georges Clemenceau. [Dallas's] words come to life in part because solid research allows him to paint captivating pictures of the Montmartre barricades or the battle of Neuilly… Dallas recounts the emergence of modern France through an emblematic personality… Anyone with an interest in European history, France, Paris – or getting some perspective on the democratization efforts of our day – will profit from this read.”

- Howard La Franchi, Christian Science Monitor [Boston]

“A remarkable book, dashing, vivid, carrying along the reader at breakneck speed.”

- Charles Chenevix Trench, Irish Independent

“Dallas's affection for Clemenceau has inspired a gripping and often moving portrait in the heroic manner.”

- Robert Tombs, Observer

“This is a vast, worthwhile ragbag of a book about a vast, worthwhile ragbag of a life.” - Frank Johnson, Sunday Telegraph

“This is not a academic-style book”[sic] - Dr D.R. Watson [British] Historical Association

Paddy Ashdown, MP, leader of the Liberal Democrats, recommended the book as a good summertime read. See interview in The Times, 17 April 1993.

Reviews of 1815

Gregor Dallas — 2010-03-30T17:22:41Z

“This diplomatic history de luxe. It shows the vital basics of Europe before and after Waterloo. At the same time it builds upon the basics an extraordinarily vivid world of real diplomats, real dialogues, real diaries, with their real wives and women. We see the actual roads leading to and from Waterloo, with their potholes, tollgates and robbers, real and symbolic. Gregor Dallas's intimate knowledge of France means that the excitement rises rather than falls when the story moves from London to Paris, to Vienna. As for the great ‘pro-Europeans' of 1815 – Castlereagh, Wellington, Metternich, Talleyrand – they trod a road that we can see, since their time, uncoiling from Paris to Brussels via Waterloo and today doubling back to Brussels. The book is a splendid tour de force in every sense.”

- Elizabeth Longford, author of Wellington

“Gregor Dallas rightly believes that good history should also be good narrative. This is a story of the year 1814-1815, when Napoleon was defeated and exiled twice, and the destiny of Europe was reshaped at the Congress of Vienna. It is no narrow diplomatic or military history, but an attempt to convey the atmosphere of the time. It is entertaining and irreverent… Some of the descriptive set pieces are magnificent. It would be difficult to find as good account of the sheer brutality of Waterloo where 40,000 men and 100,000 horses lost their lives. The atmosphere in Paris – facing foreign invasion twice in just over a year – is particularly evocative… This book is proof that any history – even diplomatic history – can be enjoyable and entertaining as well as instructive. Those dry-as-dust studies of the Congress of Vienna will never be the same again.”

- Marianne Elliott, Sunday Times

“ Gregor Dallas's 1815: The Roads to Waterloo is a delight to read because it is engagingly well written and so informative… Dallas reminds one of that now, alas, largely forgotten but most amiable of historians, Philipp Guedalla. When Guedalla wrote The Second Empire, you knew exactly what it was like to attend of the great festivities of Louis Napoléon's decaying regime… Dallas displays a similar kind of flair for places, times and personalities. He selects as the ‘thread” of his story the alook and lonely Castlereagh – a strange man, inhabited like Goethe's Faust ‘by two souls': he cut his throat in 1822 – in his long journey to the Congress of Vienna, vainly ‘in search of a European centre', picking up on local colour as well as the history of recen events as he goes… Much of 1815 revolves around the Congress, where the statesmen danced and philandered and hammered out the shape of Europe for the next hundred years. All the wheeling and dealing is described with compelling lucidity and liveliness… A pleasurable and scholarly read.”

- Alistair Horne, Literary Review

“Gregor Dallas's fine new study, 1815: The Roads to Waterloo [is] a minutely detailed narrative of the year between Napoléon's first abdication in 1814 and his final defeat at Waterloo the following June… The great strength of Dallas's narrative is its concern, not just with maps and treaties, but with the detailed reconstruction of the social and cultural world of European élites in 1815. He has an almost omnivirous appetite for detail – from the problems caused by the Prussian Chancellor's speaking-trumpet to the upholstery of the salons of the Tuileries… The cumulative effect of all this pointilliste detail is powerful, conveying a vivid sense of the intellectual and imaginative world within which post-Napoleonic Europe was defined.”

- John Adamson, Sunday Telegraph

“The Talleyrand that figures in 1815: The Roads to Waterloo, Gregor Dallas's well-researched and richly textured account of the Vienna settlement, is a man of greater consistency than that of his received reputation… Dallas firmly rejects any idea that the settlement constituted (in the title of Henry Kissinger's book on the same theme) ‘a world restored'. The monarchs of Europe are acquitted of turning the clock back to some pre-1789 idyll…”

- Hew Strachan, Times Literary Supplement

“The present mood of insolent nationalism is only one Conservative tradition. As Gregor Dallas points out in this sparkling account of London, Paris and Vienna, Lord Castlereagh was… a convinced European…. Waterloo was equally a British and a European victory… The constant interlocking of nationalities gives 1815 its particular character. Through skilled use of contemporary newspapers, as well as published diaries and letters, in French, English and German, Dallas describes the networks of allied statesmen and officers who directed the course of events… Dallas is a sure guide to the European maze….”

- Philip Mansel, Spectator

“I greatly enjoyed Gregor Dallas's 1815: The Roads to Waterloo, which is history as it should be written: scholarship married to a narrative skill”.

- Bryan Forbes, “Books of the Year”, Daily Telegraph

“A kaleidoscope book”

- Christopher Tugendhat, Country Life

“A broad colourful, engaging panorama of a crucial moment in the shaping of modern Europe, tracing the fall of Napoleon and the wily manoeuvres of the victors… A gripping and highly original work of popular history…”

- Kirkus Reviews

“Dallas re-creates the look of the cities (London, Paris and Vienna) in which the horse trading of the diplomats of 1814-15 took its course. Using a naturalistic approach, Dallas evokes that year's feel… Dallas's capacious and vivacious narrative could well service most libraries as their one-source work on Waterloo.”

- Gilbert Taylor, Booklist

“Dallas acknowledges his debt to the modern French historians, notably Fernand Braudel, who conceptualized three levels of history: the short-term history of events; the cycles that replace each other; and the lasting structures, like capitalism, embedded in history. In this book, Dallas writes about all three and gives special emphasis to the places where history happened. He believes that history is not an abstraction – alhouthg abstract lines of development can be discerned – but is expressed in the particular. This viewpoint gives his book a liveliness and a vivid coloring that so many history books lack…[1815] is a splendid work of popular history that brings to life a period.”

- Anthony Day, Los Angeles Times

“ This is the best kind of history as story-telling: substantial, elegant, discriminating, and witty.”

- Eugen Weber, The Key Reporter (Phi Beta Kappa)

“La vision de l'Europe à travers Castlereagh et aussi Wellington, Metternich ou Talleyrand est passionnante et riche d'enseignements pour tous ceux qui, aujourd'hui, veulent à leur tour construire une nouvelle Europe… Un ouvrage savant mais si agréable à lire.”

- Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, former French President (in a letter to the author)

Reviews of 1918

2010-03-30T17:22:39Z

“Gregor Dallas's enthralling and sweeping book examines and explains just how [the] Armistice came about, and what its consequences were. Dallas is interested in how wars end: this volume is the second in a trilogy which probes the closing of the Napoleonic wars, and the First and Second World Wars. It is not an untilled field: John Terraine, John Toland and Stanley Weintraub have all written excellent studies of the same subject, but Dallas finds much that is new and presents his copious material in greater depth, and with sharper élan, than ever before. A British historian with American roots, long resident in France, he is well placed to view the end of the war from a global perspective. His seamless narrative glides easily from the trenches to the conference halls where the painful decisions that ended Europe's agony were made. Dallas is particularly good at delineating the characters of the main players in the drama.”

- Nigel Jones, BBC History

“For a historian interested primarily in the impact of epoch-shaping events in localities and individuals, Gregor Dallas chooses a dauntingly broad canvas: how, over the chaotic 18-month period of 1918 to mid-1919, was the Great War won and so-called peace lost? He has travelled over this terrain before in 1815: Roads to Waterloo, which described how Europe's old order was re-imposed at the Congress of Vienna after the failure of Napoleon's Hundred Days. Now he shows how that ‘Concert of Europe' ended amid the ‘shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells'… Dallas doesn't write with the benefit of the hindsight. His perspective is, if you wish, that of survivor of the Big Push – two years on into a hell which looks as if it will never end… Here we have, in microscopic detail, an impressionistic study of a dying European ruling caste, unable to comprehend how such a catastrophe could have happened, and incapable of planning a future in which it didn't recur… The diplomatic manoeuvrings surrounding what the historian Golo Mann called ‘this sad, dirty illusion of victory' are described from the viewpoints of participants in London, Paris, Berlin, Moscow and, of vital importance for the future of the old continent, Washington… Dallas is a visual historian particularly effective in recreating the physical environment: the Western Front like a Paul Nash painting, with yellow and red biplanes circling above an ochre and black lunar landscape; the grey boulevards of Paris, their funereal hue accentuated by the universal black mourning of widows; baroque Berlin, and its wintry avenues of lindens suddenly and surprisingly sprouting red, white and black imperial standards as the pinched shabby Berliners welcomed back their veterans, not as the defeated, but as conquering heroes… As Marshal Foch said: ‘This is not a peace treaty, it is an armistice for 20 years.' Adolf Hitler plays no part in this book, but his presence is all-pervasive. In his next work Dallas will fast-forward to 1945 and we will see the sorry cycle completed.”

- John Crossland, The Independent on Sunday

“It seems obvious at first that the year 1918 marked, in Gregor Dallas's words, ‘a great turning point of history' [actually the words of the editor in the blurb]. But Dallas, perhaps unconsciously, shows this claim to be doubtful, for his book illuminates not just peacemaking at the end of the first world war… but the bleak continuity of the 20th century as well…”

- Max Egremont, Financial Times

“Dallas's idea is imaginative and widly ambitious. He portays Europe in collapse and realignment by concentrating on this single year in Berlin, Paris, London, Washington and Moscow. A series of vivid snapshots of scenes and moments is cross-cut with microscopic examination of personalities, motives and manoeuvres by participants int the peace process. Behind these flitting, plotting figures are ‘vast tracts of chaos… spreading amid the ruin of four empires'. Ordered anarchy goes to work. With the German government collapsing in a heap, employers and unions collaborate to run the economy, while General Groener, later instigator of the right-wing Free Corps, co-operates with Soldiers' Councils to repatriate four million men. In 1918 everything changed and nothing changed. Millions died of ‘flu. The Austrian empire vanished and became a jigsaw puzzle. In Russia a Red Tsar replaced a White one. Germany shook, re-assembled, pretended it had never been beaten, and eventually sprouted Hitler… The German Lieutenant Rudolf Binding wrote: ‘This generation has no future, and deserves none.' An anonymous woman writer told us: ‘They will kill war. They will no longer bear children for the horrors of slaughter'. But here we are, still confronting history. I look forward to Dallas's promised study of the year 1945.”

- J.B. Pick, The Scotsman

“Dallas has made a specialty of writing books that deal with the final year of major conflicts. 1815 was his previous title and his next title is 1945. 1918 deals with the final year of war and peace in Europe, chronicling the transition. In the west, everything is celebration, but in eastern Europe, new conflicts break out in Poland and Moscow is desolated. Germany is in the midst of revolution. This is primarily diplomatic history and Dallas is very good at creating the details of a situation, such as the peace talks in Versailles where the Polish Prime Minister Paderewski insists on arriving late when everyone is seated as though he is still giving a concert…”

- David Seymour, Military Illustrated

“It is the first great merit of Gregor Dallas's book that he never forgets that for the men of 1918 the future was unknown territory… It is beautifully written, admirably researched, utterly riveting. It does not set out to pass judgement. On the contrary, it shows men – politicians, soldiers, civil servants – moving through a fog of uncertainty towards a settlement. It shows them engaged in the unavoidable balancing of interests, and in the attempt to reconcile what was desirable with what was possible. Dallas convinces us that he is writing history as Ranke said it should be written – as it actually was…”

- Allan Massie, Daily Telegraph

“It's quite unlike any history book I know. Like a film, it moves from sweeping wide-angle shots of the battlefields of northern France, rooted in a geographer's grasp of the north European plain, to detailed snapshots of what life was really like in war-torn Paris or revolutionary Berlin, zooming in on characters like Lenin or J.M. Keynes… Few British historians, trained to peer at historical events through the narrow prism of the archives, are able to achieve this enviable breadth of vision… This brilliant, ambitious book fizzes with insights, colour and energy. As a way of writing history it succeeds triumphantly. Like all the best history books it changes the way you see things. 1918 will never seem the same again.”

- Jane Ridley, The Spectator

“It is one of the many merits of Gregor Dallas's book that it shows a perfect understanding of this tragic event. Unlike many who write about the First World War, even now, he is quite clear in regarding it as a war which the German state and regime were responsible. He has no doubt that the war occurred because Germany wanted it to occur, and that if Germany had won in the West a truly Carthaginian peace would have been imposed, as it was upon the defeated Russians in March 1918… Dallas gives a fairly detailed account of the 1919 peace conference and of other developments in Europe during that year – and beyond. He writes vividly, rather in the style of Barbara Tuchman… The two individuals on the victorious side who come worst out the story are Woodrow Wilson and J.M. Keynes. Dallas is rightly dismissive of Keynes' caricature of Clemenceau, though perhaps too ready to endorse his view of Lloyd George as a wizard without politicial beliefs. Certainly the authors' critique of Keynes himself, and of his balefully influential tract, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, would alone be reason enough for reading the book.”

- John Grigg, The Oldie

“In this major contribution to our understanding of the cataclysmic effects of the First World War, Gregor Dallas describes the closing stages of the fighting on the Western Front, the chaos and disintegration which ensued across central and eastern Europe and the struggles of the victors (ultimately unsuccessful) to convert the Armistice into a lasting worldwide peace. Drawing on an enormous range of first-hand sources – memoirs, diaries, letters, official documents and newspapers – he manages to convey both the broad sweep of history and the personal experiences of many hundreds of individuals, unknown and famous alike with a sensitivity and imaginative power that justify the comparison with Tolstoy implied in his sub-tile. His skilful interweaving of narrative and analysis with evocative detail carries the reader almost effortlessly along from the opening scene, when the Mercedes with the imperial German eagle emblazoned on its door and a white flag tied to its running board crossed the French lines near La Capelle on the foggy night of 7 November 1918, to the moment in June 1922 when the visionary German economist Walther Rathenau was gunned down in the streets of Berlin… Dallas for the most parts avoids drawing lessons from the events he describes so vividly. He writes with objectivity and detachment, allowing actions, decisions and their consequences to speak for themselves. The effect is as if history were being played out before one's eyes…”

- David Goodhall, The Tablet

“Gregor Dallas… has written a masterpiece of popular narrative about the way the war became the peace, thus turning itself into history… Dallas may appear to be writing old-fashioned history of the kind poo-poohed by professionals, but he has read deeply in German and French, and he is au fait with the scandals of 1919 as well as the pantomimes that graced the London stage. One may trust him on such apparently small matters as the early symptoms that preceded the lethal flu of that year. As his narrative gathers pace, crosscutting adroitly from the front to the rear, incorporating diplomatic manoeuvrings with accounts of the last battles, his large-scale ambition becomes apparent. Here is a man who by his own account dislikes the ‘New History' of ponderous expertise but who is happy to make use of the fictional techniques employed by contemporary modernist writers and even filmmakers in the cause of getting us to understand the enormity and enduring significance of those days.”

- Nicolas Fraser, Harper's

“A sweeping, swirling history of the end of WW1 and the ensuing struggle for peace… Dallas is uniquely fit for this daunting task: he knows the languages, has explored the trenches, and has read the relevant published and archival documents. Consistent with his belief that history is local, he focuses on the geography of the north of Western Europe, reminding us that ‘it is one large open plain. Europe's history is constructed on that fact.' He begins his story as the war is ending, the US – despite its peculiar, disobliging insistence on keeping its forces independent – has finally arrived and, despite some initial failures, has provided the decisive boost in manpower and morale. Dallas crisply describes the military manoeuvres that forced the German capitulation – and does not neglect the sanguinary details: ‘Horrors that would have been incredible to anyone before 1914 were the daily dose for soldiers on the front in 1918.' He deftly shifts venues – London, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Washington – letting us know what is happening and sketching portraits of many of the principal players, pointing his finger to events of significance not just in the geopolitical struggle but in the smaller, human ones as well. Thus we watch the young poet Wilfred Owen fall during the final days; we see Lincoln Steffens interview Lenin. Still, it's the leaders whose stories grip us, Woodrow Wilson's myopic insistence on placing his League of Nations at the top of the armistice agenda, Lloyd George's physical agitation before he rose to speak, Clemenceau's determination to remain at work after surviving the assassin's bullet and – most amazing – the Germans' refusal to acknowledge that they had even lost the war. Popular history at its best: a narrative with attitude – thoroughly researched, gracefully written.”

- Kirkus Reviews

“Dallas is becoming the modern-day historian of peace talks. His 1815: Roads to Waterloo (1996) chronicled the establishment of peace after Napoleon, as this volume does after ‘the war to end all wars' and which is next volume promises to do after World War II. Dallas's forte is detail – every paragraph is crammed with biographical, historical, cultural and physical details. Yet he has a remarkable facility to summarize, say, strategic or tactical philosophies in pithy phrases. What sets the peace of World War I apart from the past was, in Dallas's view, that for the first time in history, nations were in the public glare, unlike the situation in previous eras when nations were able to convene in isolation from outside influences…”

- Allen Weakland, Booklist

“Mr. Dallas writes history in the grand narrative style… Personalities, vignettes, and opinions abound.”

- The Dallas Morning News

“Tells the story of the war's end in rich anecdotal detail. All the fascinating figures – Woodrow Wilson, J.M. Keynes, Herbert Hoover, Walther Rathenau – are here, along with the high politics of the making of peace at Versailles, and the low politics of the making of revolution in Berlin and Moscow.”

- National Review

“A fine volume.”

- Washington Times

Reviews of Poisoned Peace: 1945

2010-03-30T17:22:29Z

“In his Poisoned Peace: 1945 – The War That Never Ended, Gregor Dallas has chosen to focus his study not upon the course but on the consequences of the war and has done so to an extent I have not seen elsewhere. The work therefore has, to my eye, a great attraction. It opens new vistas of consideration, it arranges facts, often well-known ones, in new relationships and it offers opportunities to revise previously entrenched ideas… [Dallas's conclusions] are challenging and well argued. And what is perhaps most interesting about them is that they emerge from a view from the other end of the telescope, a view in other words primed with hindsight, that faculty historians are too often told they must not employ, but which, of course, is the very essence of history. Poisoned Peace is the product of a large, industrious and well-ordered mind. Dallas writes great sweeps of history, synthesising complex details, to reach meaningful interpretations…”

- Noble Frankland, The Spectator

“The consequences of the war, Dallas rightly argues are shaping our lives still… His approach is thematic, eclectic and discursive, his book divided into sections headed Armies, Seasons, People and Europe. It reads like a conversation with a sympathetic guide who has a sure eye for paradox, the unexpected detail and the almost forgotten. Although much of his ground is well trodden – the fall of Berlin, for instance – he populates it with incidentals that usefully illustrate his themes. Prominent among these is the role of national myth in selecting what we think is history. For instance, last year there were Europe-wide and transatlantic 60th anniversary celebrations of D-Day and the liberation of Paris. Who, Dallas asks, between June and August 2004 “heard a word mentioned in our media that, during the same months, the city of Warsaw was being wiped off the map?”… Related to this is another of Dallas's big themes, his assertion that ‘everything happened' during the weekend of August 19 and 20, 1944: “it was one of those great usung events of history. Army movements right across Europe were determined that weekend: there was a sea-change in the relationship between the Allies… It was more important that D-Day.” Specifically he lists the battle to close the Falaise Gap in Normandy, the insurrection in Paris; the arrival of de Gaulle in France, the cutting of communications wih Warsaw, Stalin's denunciation of the Poles as “power-seeking criminals” and his invasion of Romania and the American decision to split the Allied Forces by driving south and east, leaving the British the grim slog north through the Low Countries to the Ruhr… You don't have to go all the way with Dallas to accept that the shape and political culture of Europe for the next half century was determined by where the armies ended up, or that the legacy of this victorious confusion was the potent and divisive idea of Europe – the EU. He makes these points well, but there's much else that's rewarding in this good, fat book… The two-part German war of the 20th century left a very long tail, and we haven't reached the end of it yet. Dallas convincingly demonstrates that where we are can be understood only by reference to where we were. He is wisely silent on where next.”

- Alan Judd, Daily Telegraph

“The Second World War didn't end in 1945 : there wasn't a formal peace settlement until the Soviet Union itself was nearly at an end, in 1990; and the division of Europe into the two blocs of the Cold War meant the continuation of the Hot war by other means. In the course of pursuing this insight, Gregor Dallas puts together vignettes and narrative which are often vivid, horrifying and fascinating… His description of the betrayal of the Polish rising is suffused with indignation and pity. His take on Charles de Gaulle, the stiff, driven genius who stamped his own ‘idea of France' upon his post-war country, is acute and rounded. Above all, his storyteller's gift keeps us reading where other historians demanded greater stamina and more internal prompting to keep going through a book of more than 700 pages. Dallas has a journalist's eye for detail, and for the great quote.”

- John Lloyd, Glasgow Herald

“Absorbing and… vivid. Most persuasive and intriguing is the geopolitical thread running through the argument.”

- Brendan Simms, Sunday Times

“Gregor Dallas's talent for engaging readers by telling history on several levels is highlighted in Poisoned Peace.”

- Soldier [Journal of British armed forces]

Reviews of The Imperfect Peasant Economy

2010-03-30T17:19:53Z

“Gregor Dallas's first book tries to explain how and why a peasant economy maintained itself in France not merely up to the Great War but until the 1950s. He is properly contemptuous of Marxists and economists whose teological preoccupations lead them to regard the survival of the peasantry as symptoms of backwardness, feudalism and inefficiency… Time and again Dallas is concerned to make the point that peasants used the market but did not depend upon it. Their behaviour cannot be explained by reference to any vulgar model of profit maximization. They opted in and out of the commercial economy from a base of security on the land… Millions of peasants in France and elsewhere in Europe) preferred to remain in the countryside wedded to a traditional way of life which young but perceptive historians like Gregor Dallas find pleasing to contemplate and explain.”

- P.K. O'Brien, Times Literary Supplement

“Un livre riche, et qui invite à certaines relectures – ainsi par exemple à propos du Second Empire… Il constitue à n'en pas douter une pièce importante à verser à ce dossier du rapport entre économie paysanne et économie de marché.”

- Jean Vassort, Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilations

Impossible Love: Abelard and Heloise

Gregor Dallas — 2010-02-06T16:28:58Z


Medieval painting of Abelard & Heloise

In all of Western literature it is said there are but seven essential tales, seven essential plots. Seven: that's a nice medieval number. For those whose lives spanned the eleventh and the twelfth centuries there were seven cardinal virtues and seven deadly sins, God made the world in seven days — and there were the seven ages of man.

The seven basic plots are actually a modern invention. But they have their place in my medieval tale. There is the story of the fatal flaw, for example, Achilles — which usually turns into tragedy, but it can be a source of comedy, too. There is the story of the Wandering Jew, the persecuted traveller who will never return home. Or there is the Cinderella story, that is, the story of unrecognized virtue that is finally noticed — now, that's a story we all want to believe in. As a matter of fact, you will find elements of these three stories in the one I am going to tell.

But what we are concerned most with here is love, the story of a passion between a man and a woman. Now I would say there are only two kinds of love story, happy and unhappy: either the boy gets the girl, or he loses her. Curiously we seem to prefer the unhappy ones, perhaps because they help us come to terms with our own unhappinesses.

Abelard and Heloise: not a modern love story?


Three at a cocktail before the talk

The story of Abelard and Heloise is an unhappy story, probably one of the unhappiest ever told, I would further call their love the Impossible Love; you know — all you lovers — that is the love that is, despite the desire, just impossible to pull off. What is so enticing about the Impossible Love of Abelard and Heloise is that it has got a little twist in it. That's what I want to bring to your attention, that little twist in their Impossible Love.

Now some people have said that this is not a modern story, not one that directly concerns us contemporary folk. Mark Twain was one of the first to say this. In his Innocents Abroad, one of his early works and one of his worst books, he argues that the public ‘have been wasting a good deal of marketable sentiment very unnecessarily' on this story. Abelard was an ‘unmanly' miscreant who debauched a ‘confiding, innocent girl' in the home of her uncle who revenged himself by hiring a bunch of ‘ruffians' to inflict on him a ‘terrible and nameless mutilation'. Abelard then had her shut up in a monastery and had no more to do with her until she wrote tenderly to him; then he addressed her from ‘the North Pole of his frozen heart as the “Spouse of Christ”.' The only person Twain felt sorrow for was Fulbert, whose trust was abused. The rest is not worth weeping about, or spending ‘money on immortal flowers, or even a ‘bunch of radishes'. One should dismiss Mark Twain's ‘Abelard and Heloise' as a piece of youthful exuberance — so you are probably now going to read it!

The other account claiming that this is not a modern story comes, surprisingly, from Michael Clanchy, whose biography of Abelard is quite the finest that has ever been written. Clanchy, in the Penguin edition of the letters — which I also highly recommend — claims that the ‘agonized sexual morality of Abelard and Heloise becomes difficult for a new generation to understand, as contraception is routine and abortion is argued to be a woman's right.' Today, Clanchy says, Abelard and Heloise are seen as ‘ludicrous figures who could not get a grip on their lives.'

I think both Twain and Clanchy have got this utterly wrong. The story, I believe, has something to say to all you lovers, and especially those of you — perhaps the majority of you — who have lived the Impossible Love, the love that cannot be fulfilled.

Abelard, the scholastic


Heather introduces Gregor

It looks as if it is the classic love match that goes wrong: the moment of ecstasy, then the wretched descent. ‘Of all the wretched women,' Heloise wrote to Abelard in her fluent Latin one decade after their catastrophe, ‘I am the most wretched, and amongst the unhappy I am the unhappiest.' Abelard expresses almost exactly the same remorse: ‘All the grief and indignation,' he says, ‘the blushes for shame, the agony of despair, the agony I suffered I cannot put into words. I judged myself the unhappiest of men.'

Follow that plot, you Impossible Lovers, and I think you will soon understand what I am talking about. The story slips down the descent familiar to all of you who are unhappy. It's like a runaway train, isn't it? Once boarded, you cannot get off. First, there is the forbidden love, the excitement. Then the tearing separation. Then the critical turning point, what Aristotle — an important figure, though dead 1400 years before Abelard— called in Greek the ‘peripeteia'. It is that turning point, the peripeteia which makes the story one of high tragedy, or banality that will transform it into dust, or even a comedy. Finally, there is the moral conclusion: a redemption of some sorts, or a condemnation, or a terrible descent into the void — into hopeless nothingness.

Peter Abelard, Magister Petrus, ‘Master Peter' was one of the greatest philosophers, the greatest scholars, the greatest teachers of logic of the Middle Ages. Pace Mark Twain, he was also a very funny man — he was known as joculator — who could tear a rival to pieces in ‘disputation'. ‘Logic has made me hated in the world,' he writes in his Confession of Faith, the last piece he ever wrote — and it was written to Heloise.

‘What king or philosopher could match your fame?' wrote Heloise. ‘What district, town or village did not long to see you? When you appeared in public, who — I ask — did not hurry to catch a glimpse of you, or crane her neck and strain her eyes to follow your departure? Every wife, every young girl desired you in absence and was on fire in your presence; queens and great ladies envied me my joys and my bed.'


Photo of Heather again

It would be wrong to say that Abelard was the founder of medieval scholasticism, but virtually every work of scholasticism that followed Abelard's life on earth used him as a reference. Medieval scholasticism? Do not think, like Twain, that this was the wind ‘from the North Pole of a frozen heart.' Medieval scholasticism introduced the idea of the individual into history, it liberated one from the dogmatism of an earlier Christian Church, it forced one to think, to question everything and not blindly accept the teachings of the Church Fathers; it was a precursor to Protestantism, to a critical reading of the texts. Logic could explain both God and the Trinity, argued Abelard. Indeed, without logic there could be no faith; blind faith was not faith at all: first explain with reason and, once you have explained, then you can develop your faith.

More interesting for our tale is what he had to say about sin. It was actually William of Champeaux — his teacher and one of his most insufferable rivals — who introduced the idea that sin was something subjective. Sin is nothing because it is not God's creation; ‘solely the intention, and the will which stems from it is evil, said just William. Or as another of Abelard's rivals put it, ‘God does not assess the magnitude of a sin by the magnitude of the things done, but its magnitude relates to the intention of the doer.' Abelard introduced, with his typical provocation, the idea of the ‘just executioner' who commits no sin by killing, because he spreads justice through the world.

Abelard's three loves


Gregor starts speaking

So where does that put love, especially forbidden love?

We have no portrait of Abelard, so we do not know how he looked, but we know the girls liked him — though he remained chaste till he met Heloise when he was 39. Most say he was a big man, though some have claimed he was small, a David taking on Goliath. ‘Abelard' was not his surname; there were no surnames in those days — one was usually named after the place one came from. ‘Abelard' seems to have been a nickname he picked up in his childhood; it means ‘licker of fat' — one imagines him fat, a sort of jovial Friar Tuck.

He was born in the little town of Le Pallet, less than ten miles south-east of Nantes around the year 1077 to a family of petty knights; his father may well have participated in a lost battle against the Normans in 1064 where, as the Bayeux tapestry shows, Harold, the future King of England, was knighted by William the Conqueror two years before he was killed at Hastings. The 1100s was the age when knights came into full flower.

But Peter Abelard had three loves in his life.

His first was his love of letters. ‘Because I was the eldest son and therefore most dear to my father' he tells us in his dramatic Historia calamitatum, ‘The Story of My Calamities', ‘he saw to it that I was brought up very carefully… (But) I was seduced by so great a love of (letters) that I abdicated entirely from the court of Mars so that I be educated in the bosom of Minerva. I therefore made over to my brothers the pomp of military glory, along with the inheritance and the privileges of my primogenitors.' Abelard wrote like that, in a sometimes passionate prose full of references, not to the saints but to the heroes and the great authors of classical, pagan Latin.

This was written more than ten years after his second love affair, with Heloise, who was the greatest Latin prose writer of her age, a classicist by training; she was superior as a Latinist even to her lover, Abelard, and texts such as these show the influence of Heloise — which is now thought to have been immense.

His third love was Christian theology; and in that Heloise was not innocent either.

Mature love: Heloise was neither so young nor so beautiful


Jemma Birrell

Abelard's passion for letters finally got him to Paris, the Cloister School of Notre Dame, a scholarly place — not unlike our seats of learning today — seething with envy and violence. ‘It was not my custom to benefit by practice' — by which Abelard meant rote learning — ‘I relied on my own intelligence.' He infuriated the old scholar, Anselm of Laon, by preparing a lively inquiry into the obscure prophecies of Ezekiel in a single day. The students were stupefied and flocked to his course, abandoning poor old Anselm; his reputation was based on repeating before his audience a mass of documents that made him so boring — he was useless when ‘put to question', the ‘fire he had kindled filled his house with smoke but did not light it up.' Abelard was all flame, passionate lightning. Anselm became wildly jealous: ‘envy seeks the heights, the winds sweep the summit.' And it is just there, at Master Peter's summit… that this love affair begun.

It was the beginning and the end. ‘Success always puffs up fools with pride,' wrote Abelard in Historia calamitatum, ‘and worldly security weakens the spirit's resolution and easily destroys it through carnal temptations.' Abelard was not a man to fool around with the prostitutes and his intensive studies prevented him from frequenting the ‘society of gentlewomen'. But his eyes began to wander. They fell upon the niece of one of the canons of the Cathedral, a vengeful, money-grubbing old man who went by the appetising name of Fulbert. Abelard, world famous now, was thirty-eight, middle-aged for the time, who had not yet tasted the flesh of a woman. ‘There was at the time a young girl (some translations read adolescent girl) named Heloise…'

Adolescent. Now, the seven ages of man began with ‘infancy', ‘boyhood' (or ‘girlhood'), then advanced through ‘adolescence', ‘youth' and ‘manhood' (or ‘womanhood'). Abelard described Heloise as ‘adolescent', but Heloise also described Abelard as ‘adolescent' — ‘For what perfection of mind or body did not adorn your adolescence?' (1) ‘Adolescence', like sin in the Middle Ages, was plainly a state of mind, driven by animus. (2) Moreover, Heloise's learning ‘had made her renowned in the whole kingdom,' which would have been extraordinary for a teenager, especially a woman teenager. (3) Correspondence shows that she must have been older than Peter the Venerable, who was born in 1092 or 1094. The love affair and the dramatic events that followed occurred in 1117 or 1118. So she was not that young. Perhaps in her late twenties.

Abelard also tells us that Heloise ‘looks did not rank lowest.' So that she was not that beautiful either. It was that glorious Latin she wrote that inspired Abelard — there is a strong spiritual element there right from the start which is the key to the story. At any rate, it did not take long to develop; Abelard was ‘all on fire for this girl' and ‘decided that she was the one to bring to my bed.'

Jocund intercourse: the forgery theory and a recent discovery


Gregor speaks to the crowd

Abelard actually paid Fulbert for the privilege of offering daily tutorials in the uncle's house, for Fulbert ‘dearly loved money'.

Thus were they united in the privacy of the girl's chamber. With their books open before them Abelard's hands ‘strayed oftener to her bosom than to the pages; love drew our eyes to look on each other more than reading kept them on our texts.' They made love in every manner imaginable. Their previous inexperience only added to their fire.

Perhaps it was the lack of experience which made them so incautious. Abelard spent his nights in sleepless love-making and his considerable talents during his days went into composing love letters, poetry and songs, not the preparation of his courses.

Because of her fame as a great Latin stylist, Abelard expressed an interest on their very first encounter, in ‘jocund intercourse' — which is not at all what you think. He wanted a correspondence for ‘many things can be put in writing more audaciously than they can be said.' They became pen-friends or, rather, pen-lovers.

The argument about forgeries goes back centuries! But also decades. An American Roman Catholic priest and scholar, J.T. Muckle, concluded that the first surviving letters of Heloise to Abelard must be forgeries because Heloise ‘would not have desired to leave such a character sketch of herself' to posterity — it was all too disgusting. This forgery theory, based on disgust, won a widespread following in America in the 1960s and 70s. But in the last twenty years or so scholarly thinking has done a complete U-turn.

There are thousands and thousands of medieval manuscripts that have never properly been read. Reading medieval Latin in script is a painful task; I have had friends who would labour away for weeks on just one page. We say that the songs, the poems and the early letters of Abelard and Heloise have been lost, but, who knows, perhaps they have simply never been read?

In the 1470s a Cistercian monk, Johannes de Vepria, copied — for teaching purposes — what he called ‘flowers' of good Latin style, from an early manuscript, since lost. It was a correspondence between a man and a woman, signalled in de Vepria's manuscript as ‘V' for Vir (‘Man') and ‘M' for Mulier (‘Woman'). There were 113 letters here. The man was a master of a school in Paris and the woman was also well versed in philosophy. Every letter was headed by different, elaborate salutations, and there follows these ‘flowers' of a prose composed by a man and a woman in passionate love.

In 1974, when these letters were first published, questions were asked: could this possibly be Abelard and Heloise? By the time the letters were re-issued in 1999 there seemed little doubt: the style of Latin fitted, the vocabulary was the same, quotations were used that re-appeared in the authenticated letters. In the last ten years there has been almost unanimous agreement: these are the lost first letters of Abelard and Heloise, written in ‘jocund intercourse' at the moment of their first encounter.

Lovers' voices


The crowd's view of Gregor

Here is the echo of lovers' voices, written down in Paris before the cathedral of Notre Dame was built. Here are lovers' voices of 900 years ago:

Woman: To her beloved, special from experience of the reality itself; the being which she is. (You know, ‘Abelard darling.')

Just as fire cannot be extinguished or suppressed by any material, unless water, by nature its powerful remedy, so my love cannot be cured by any means — only by you can it be healed. My mind is bothered by not knowing through what gift I can enrich you. Glory of young men, companion of poets, how handsome you are in appearance yet more distinguished in feeling. Your presence is my joy, your absence my sorrow; in either case, I love you. Farewell.

Man: To his jewel, more pleasing and more splendid than the present light, that man who without you is shrouded in dense shadow: what else except that you glory unfailingly in your natural brilliance. (‘Darling Heloise,')

Scientists often say that the moon does not shine without the sun, and that when deprived of this light, it is robbed of all benefit of heat and brightness and presents to humans a dark and ashen sphere. Surely the similarity of this phenomenon to you and me is very plain to see: for you are my sun, since you always illumine me with the most delightful brightness of your face and make me shine. I have no light that does not come from you and without you I am dull, dark, weak and dead. But to tell the truth, what you do for me is even greater than what the sun does for the sphere of the moon. For the moon becomes more obscure the closer it gets to the sun, whereas the nearer I am brought to you and the closer I get, the more on fire I become (Remember the ‘all on fire' of Abelard's Historia Calamitatum?) So much do I burn for you , that, just as you yourself have often noted, when I am next to you I become completely on fire and am burned right down to the marrow.

…

Envious time looms over our love, and yet you delay as if we were at leisure. Farewell.

Truly, Abelard was ‘all on fire for this girl'.

I have said, he was not preparing his lectures during the day; he wrote songs. The songs mentioned Heloise by name and were sung throughout the kingdom, by love-sick youth for years afterwards; the sonnets were recited in every lonesome parlour: Heloise, Heloise, Heloise. Not a soul in Paris was unaware of the affair, with the exception of the green-eyed, money-grubbing Fulbert. Until, that is, he surprised them one bright morn in bed with one another, ‘like Mars and Venus' clasped naked together. Then Heloise discovered she was pregnant. Their love became Impossible.

An impossible love: a love of our times


Aerial view of the crowd.

It became impossible for several reasons, several of which one may say were historical, and do not apply to our times — our times of contraception, abortion, free love and non-commital. But stretch your minds a little; throw your imaginations into these ancient words; you'll find here reasons and emotions you yourselves recognize.

Their love became Impossible on the first count because a good old fashioned, medieval blood feud developed between Abelard and Fulbert. In this classical age of knights, monks, troubadours and damsels, the state did not command a monopoly on violence and punishment: as in many parts of the world today, the family was a jealous guardian of its rights and authority. It could, if necessary, resort to feud and private war.

There are no surviving lawbooks in northern France that lay down the rules for sexual deviance; but The Laws of Henry I of England has a chapter on the rules for conducting feuds. A man, says the book, is entitled to use force if he finds, within closed doors, another man under the same bedcover with his wife, daughter, sister or mother. But he has a right of retaliation only if he has warned the fornicator three times, and he has to have seen the couple's genitalia actually joined in sexual intercourse. If one can prove persistent offence, then the aggrieved man has the right of castration.

Castration was not an uncommon punishment in the 1100s.

So one can understand why Abelard, with his pregnant lover, disguised as a nun, decided to make a quick getaway to independent Brittany where she was placed under the care of Abelard's sister, Denise. A son was born who was oddly christened Astrolabe. To this day no one has been able to explain it; it possibly could be translated as ‘the love of the stars, or of Heaven' — which has some relation to the letter I have just read to you.


The book Metrostop on the knees of one of the participants

Abelard was not running away. He had to return to his duties in Paris and to the fury of Fulbert, ‘almost out of his mind'. Heloise was being protected, but she and her son could now also be considered a hostage of Abelard's knightly family: if anything happened to Abelard, something could — by right of blood feud — happen to Heloise. Abelard now had a bargain in his hand with which he could negotiate with Fulbert.

Abelard recounts that a waiting game developed with Fulbert and then, eventually, ‘at last I had a meeting with the man and I vehemently accused myself of the highest treason.' Fulbert was possibly linked with the Montmorency family, one of the most powerful of the kingdom. (1) Abelard had ‘corrupted' (that is, ‘broken into') a virgin, (2) he had betrayed Fulbert's hospitality, (3) he had then abducted his niece — which was tantamount to rape — and (4) was now using her as a hostage. But he had the girl.

He began ‘supplicating' Fulbert, meaning that he must have got down on his hands and knees. And then he made his bid: ‘I offered to make him satisfaction by joining to me in matrimony her whom I had corrupted.' Heloise wrote that this ‘raised me and all my kin up to your level.' She could only have meant at a spiritual level, for Abelard was certainly not at the level of a Montmorency. But they exchanged ‘pledges of good faith and kisses of peace.' For Abelard, it was like Judas kissing Christ — Abelard often compared himself to Christ — claiming that Fulbert had done this ‘the more easily to betray me.'

The refusal and the tragedy


Three Shakespeare tumbleweeds

Now in this age of knights, monks, troubadours and damsels two other critical things were occurring. The authority of the Bishop of Rome, the Pope, was beginning to exercise itself; up until the eleventh century all bishops were ‘papa', or pope. Secondly, the principle of the celibacy of the clergy, which included clerics like Abelard, was beginning to be exercised. Clerics could still marry; but marriage would destroy your career. It was not then just marriage that was agreed upon with the seal of a kiss, but — to save Abelard's brilliant career — a secret marriage.

So Heloise could return to Paris. But we are now at the peripeteia of the story, the turning point that will determine all that follows. She first refused the marriage and, when at dawn she was forced into marriage, she denied the secret marriage had taken place.

Was Heloise thus responsible for the tragedy that followed? She always expressed this in the form of a paradox, which is probably what most women feel when faced with that Impossible Love, even today. ‘Why was I ever born to be the cause of such a crime?' she asks. ‘Even if my conscience is clear through innocence, for no consent of mine makes me guilty of this crime, too many sins preceded it to allow me to be wholly free from guilt.' She constantly repeated this contradiction within her to Abelard: ‘Although I am very guilty, I am very innocent, as you know.' She thus goes in two directions: innocence and guilt. Her life follows two orders: dependence and independence. ‘If my mind is not with you it is nowhere,' she tells Abelard fifteen years after their separation; ‘truly without you it can be nothing at all.' This scandalized Abelard, and it is worth pondering why.


Metrostop on display

It is said that the marriage was effectively a divorce. Heloise's explanation of her refusal and subsequent denials of the marriage contain the most famous, and for some the most scandalous, passages in the whole correspondence. ‘I wanted simply you, nothing of yours. I looked for no marriage bond, no marriage portion, and it was not my own pleasures and wishes I sought to gratify, as you well know, but yours.' She pursues this line of logic: ‘The name of wife may seem more sacred and more binding, but sweetness to me will always be the word mistress, or, if you will permit me, that of concubine or whore.' Some of you may recall a dialogue, in Lawrence's Women in Love, when Ursula lays down to Rupert Birkin the merits of being a lover rather than a wife. Love springs eternal or, at least, tries to. Heloise's logic is impeccable. She drives herself to a singular conclusion: ‘God is my witness that if Augustus, Emperor of the whole world, thought fit to honour me with marriage and conferred all the earth on me to possess for ever, it would be dearer and more honourable for me not to be called his Empress but your whore.' That last word was ‘scortum' in Latin, which means ‘skin' or ‘rent-boy', a prostitute of either sex: it was presumably meant to make Abelard sit up in his seat, as it did for generations of readers thereafter.

After the marriage, Abelard took Heloise away to the Sisters of Argenteuil, where she had been educated as a child. She wore the garments of a novice. And there they made love — one would have thought as man and wife. But it was not so. First, the place — a convent — forbade it. Second, they made love during Lent, during feast days and on Sundays, which the Church forbade. Third, they made love in the most secret corners of the convent, even in the refectory, beside and on the dining tables, reserved for prayer: it was an affront to God. Heloise explained the paradox of the situation: ‘While we enjoyed the pleasures of an uneasy love and abandoned ourselves to fornication we were spared God's severity. But when we amended our unlawful conduct by what was lawful… then the law laid his hand heavily upon us, and would not permit a chaste union.' Heloise was proven right, it would have been better to have remained Abelard's whore.

What condemned them was Fulbert's tragic error of judgement. He thought Abelard had removed his niece to the convent in order to rid himself of the young nuisance to his career whereas, in fact, the exact opposite was the case. At night he sent his armed servants into Abelard's chamber: they severed his testicles.

Castration


Gregor speaking

That is itself an important point: the testicles. A carving on a column capital of the fourteenth-century Conciergerie — right by where the castration took place — depicts an unhappy Heloise lying on Abelard's left shoulder, holding in her left hand a huge, erect phallus and scrotum. But if the soldiers had cut all that equipment off, they would probably have killed him; and that was not the purpose. Abelard claims he had felt nothing since he was asleep when the wound was inflicted. This could be true.

Castration was a professional technique; it's the way you turn a bull into a bullock, as farmers will know. Abelard's own servant participated. The servant could well have given Abelard a sleeping potion before he opened the door and let Fulbert's soldiers in.

One must listen to Abelard. He says that the greater pain was the humiliation he felt at being henceforth a eunuch, the unclean beast in Jewish law unacceptable in the temple. And there was the huge crowd that gathered outside his house, screaming for vengeance. Two of the participants, one of them Abelard's servant, were caught as they tried to escape and were, on the spot castrated and blinded with red-hot tongs. Neither Abelard nor Heloise showed any sympathy for them. Abelard pursued Fulbert in court for what he considered too severe a punishment. But vengeance was not his game. He took monastic vows and pursued his passion for teaching.

The descent, and the realization


David Delannet

The love story at this point enters its final moral phase — the redemption or the descent into the void, depending on the way you interpret the existing texts and on your beliefs. Heloise took on the veil just days before Abelard entered the monastery; we do not know the period of time that had elapsed after the castration, nor do we know exactly how Heloise was persuaded into holy orders. Abelard simply states that Heloise took the veil ‘in obedience to my wishes' and that she accepted this with ‘tears and sobs'. Heloise pointedly remarks that ‘it was your command, not love of God, which made me take the veil.' We are left to our own suppositions as to what happened. In our spiritless world, the sympathy leans towards Heloise and her remaining life of silent suffering. Abelard has not generally galvanized our affections; as with Mark Twain, he appears too cold, too logical, too academic by far.

We know a lot about Heloise's subsequent frustration and suffering. For almost fifteen years she heard not a word from the only love of her life. Then one of the nuns brought her a copy of the Historia calamitatum; she recognized immediately its author and wrote a letter to him. By that time she was prioress of her order which, having been expelled from Paris, had moved to a monastery, the Paraclete, that had been established by Abelard in the wilderness of Champagne. Heloise complained about his silence: ‘Why, after our entry into religion which was your decision alone, have I been so neglected and forgotten by you?' she demanded. He could have saved her. Praised for her piety by others, she was actually a hypocrite; she tried to please Abelard more than God and she was coninually haunted by memeories of their love, their pleasures. ‘Wherever I turn they are always there before my eyes,' she told him. Even during Mass ‘lewd visions of those pleasures take a hold upon my unhappy soul.' Even in her sleep ‘my thoughts are betrayed in a movement of my body.' In contrast ‘a single wound of the body freed you from these torments and healed many wounds in your soul.'


Heather

Abelard actually suffered terribly in those subsequent years. He wrote some of his greatest spiritual and philosophical works which, as Heloise later pointed out, owed a great deal to her knowledge of classical literature and philosophy. ‘Remember, I beseech you, what I have done and pay attention to how much you owe me,' she states as she concludes her first letter after fifteen years of absence. ‘Ponder your own lack of justice, if when I deserve more you pay out less — or rather nothing at all… Ponder, I beseech you, what you owe me. Pay attention to what I claim.' She sounds almost like a money-lender.

And let's not forget what Abelard went through. Three years after the castration and their separation Abelard was condemned for heresy, at the Council of Soissons, for what he had to say about the Trinity in his Theologia. He could have been burnt at the stake. He was forced, in public, to burn his own works — which, so shortly after the castration, must have been a pretty nasty experience. Two years after that he went back to Brittany to become abbot of St. Gildas-de-Rhuys; all the monks turned against him and tried to murder him on several occasions. Abelard was not a man with what we would call a ‘team spirit'; he always took the difficult route, played the individualist, and was never a diplomat. In 1140 Abelard was accused of heresy at the Council of Sens by Saint Bernard of Clairvaux. Later that same year, 1140, Pope Innocent II sentenced Peter Abelard to perpetual silence as a heretic.


Signing with a girl

Abelard took up the protection of Peter the Venerable at the monastery of Cluny. Shortly before he died, in 1142, he wrote his Confession of Faith; it is his last letter, addressed to Heloise. He repeats, in the form of a credo his Christian faith, but ends with the classic hero of Heloise, Ulysses, sailing between Scylla and Charybdis: ‘The storm may rage but I am unshaken, though the winds may blow they leave me unmoved; for the rock of my foundation stands firm.' ‘The rock of my foundation stands firm' — those are the last written words of Peter Abelard.

But it is in the history, not the mythology, of the Classical Age where we find the clinch, the twist, of this love story.

The twist


Signing with the boy

At the moment that Heloise took the veil — which some would say was a form of castration for her — Abelard tells us in his Historia calamitatum that she cried out in public a passage from Lucan where Cornelia, Pompey's husband, blames herself for Pompey's defeat at the Battle of Pharsalia: ‘O greatest of husbands, I am unworthy of your bed! Did Fortune have power over one as great as you? Why did I so wrongly marry you and bring you to disaster? Now accept the penalty which I am willing to pay.'

Quite how the ceremonial proceedings continued after such an outburst is not explained. Perhaps it never happened. But an exchange between Abelard and Heloise on this well-known text does seem possible; it fits the circumstance. Perhaps it was exchanged in one of Abelard's ‘tutorial' sessions, in bed, in Fulbert's house. At any rate, here one is back to Heloise's paradox and her acceptance of guilt for Abelard's humiliation. There is also in here Heloise's claim of debt, her sacrifice for him, Abelard. Cornelia faints on the sight of Pompey returning from a lost battle. Did Heloise faint on the sight of Abelard castrated? Did she want to die, like Cornelia?

Fifteen years later Abelard returns to this same point. ‘My love, my love, you fool, you fool, you have forgotten the essential part of the story!': when Cornelia faints and weeps, Pompey rebukes her, he has lost his fortune but ‘I am still alive.'

Was it his fortune she was weeping for? But ‘I am still alive!'

‘I am still alive': Abelard had survived every misfortune. He was alive by faith. That was what turned — it was Abelard who turned — the Impossible Love of Abelard and Heloise into an Eternal Love, the love of a millennium, a love of hope, of faith, a love of life.

ABC's 'Artworks': Metrostop Paris

George — 2009-07-19T08:39:18Z

This lively interview was made by Rhiannon Brown, for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's (ABC's) programme Artworks, of Gregor Dallas, author of Metrostop Paris. It was broadcast on ABC on 10 August 2008.

The programme concentrates on two Metrostops in the book. Metrostop Châtelet-Les Halles is the site of the huge nineteenth-century iron-and-glass food pavilions that were eventually pulled down in the early 1970s. Dallas describes what was there — through the eyes of Emile Zola's nineteenth-century novel, The Belly of Paris — and what he finds there now. We get a sniff of the restaurants and shops on the old, north side of Rue Rambuteau, the first modern boulevard built in Paris. In the Café de Flore, by Metrostop Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Dallas describes the post-war philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre and the rise of French bebop. Why are Parisians such aficionados of jazz? The answer is here.

Dallas on the economy

George — 2009-07-18T12:41:59Z

Gregor Dallas is interviewed on 'Face Off', France 24, 27 October 2008 on the European economy at the moment of crisis.

For two more recent appearances on France 24, see the following links:

'Face Off' — On the Labour leadership crisis, 8 June 2009.
'The Debate' — On the police and race relations in France and in Britain, 1 July 2009.

John Aubrey, Brief Lives

Gregor Dallas — 2009-07-14T10:51:35Z

John Aubrey, antiquarian, was born in 1626 in Wiltshire. He lived through the Civil War while an undergraduate at Oxford. At the Restoration of Charles II he was still a young man. He died in 1697, during the reign of William and Mary. Patrick Garland's adaptation for the theatre was drawn from Aubrey's masterpiece, the Book of Lives, a collection of scholarly information, scandalous gossip and tales about people he knew or heard about during a lifetime spent living in the houses and lodges of his friends. Here we see Gregor Dallas performing the part of Aubrey in the last year of his life. The play was performed at St George's Anglican Church on 25 & 26 April 2009.

The two extracts here show Aubrey — a precursor of the romantic historian — insisting on the importance of detail in the history that he writes. He rages against those 'orators and magpies that ruin lives and histories.' Their books are worthless because they are based on nothing but generalities. Aubrey, devoted to a 'minuteness' for which he is so criticized by the dons of Oxford, is determined tell you 'the truth, the plain and naked truth, so naked that the very pudenda are not covered.'