French journalist, historian and academician (1879–1936)
Jacques Pierre Bainville (9 February 1879 in Vincennes, Val-de-Marne – 9 February 1936 in Paris) was a French historian and journalist. A geopolitical theorist preoccupied by Franco-German relations, he was a leading figure in the monarchist Action Française. His writings displayed his hatred of disorder, romanticism, liberalism, democracy, internationalism, the French Revolution and especially Germany. TOC
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The more one studies, with the attention and sympathy one owes to noble undertakings, the rise of the Italian Dictator, the more we must hope that this great wave of national enthusiasm will not blind him, in the end, to those perils to which a revolution is particularly exposed, and Fascism is, first and foremost, a revolution. Those who want France to follow suit, will do well to think twice about it. The ‘Corporative Economy’ devised by Mussolini would be regarded as monstrous by our middle class and our traders, big and small. Before we think about copying a thing, we ought to know exactly what it is we are going to copy. The Gallic cock is not designed by nature to suck the dugs of the Roman wolf.
[Now is the perfect opportunity to revive] the wise and prudent policy constantly followed by the French monarchy, which consisted in putting the German colossus to sleep, dividing it, enfeebling it, profiting from its religious quarrels, its territorial divisions, the rivalry among its princes, its lack of money, its backward civilization.
The real Hitler did not exist before those years of hardship in Vienna, where he simultaneously discovered the dangers of Marxism and of Jewish World-Ascendancy. His real birth as a man of action dates from the day on which he discovered ethnology. It is in this department that a Frenchman is bound to find Mein Kampf singularly inadequate, singularly elementary. If we had to judge these fighting books by the same canons as we judge works of the mind, it is certain that the National Socialist Bible would not bear a moment's examination. The most puerile absurdities mingle with the most dubious scientific hypotheses, all couched in language whose pedantry, though it take one's breath away, probably contributed in large measure to the book's success with German readers.
When Frenchmen were in good health, when their intelligence was sound and vigorous, the idea of tradition was no less foreign to them than was the idea of revolution. The notion of returning to the chansons de geste and Saint Louis's oak tree would have seemed as ridiculous to them as wearing their fathers' breeches and hats out of filial piety.
Human history is a record of struggles between those who save and those who spend, between producers and consumers. These struggles have sometimes assumed the character of civil wars. It is the case of one tribe wanting to appropriate the more fertile soil and wealth of another tribe, or else within the same tribe, the have-nots wanting to expropriate the haves.