ABSTRACT
The greatness of the Great War – the vastness of its grandeur and misery – testified to the democratisation of human societies under the aegis of modern states that had inspired and troubled the world since the American and French revolutions. The Great War of 1914–1918 caused two young men of aristocratic lineage, Winston Churchill and Charles De Gaulle, to consider the consequences of an Old World politics that increasingly resembled the politics of the New World. The war had seen the rise of a new sort of aristocracy or oligarchy on putatively democratic foundations in Russia; soon, Europe would see structurally similar if ideologically opposite regimes in Italy and Germany. In eliminating martial virtue at the highest ranks, this “massification” and bureaucratisation of warfare represented only one aspect of a pervasive collectivisation of human life; simultaneously, all other aspects of life fuel and fire warfare.
