Marcel Deat and the Art of Peace
Why die for Danzig?
An absolutely meaningless phrase in 2026 given that Danzig is now called Gdansk, and that it is a relatively unimportant port city on Poland’s Baltic Coast.
But in 1939 it was the rallying cry of those citizens of the western democracies of France and Britain who simply could not understand why their countries were getting involved in a war to protect far away Poland from Nazi invasion.
Marcel Deat was the man who coined the phrase. Deat was a socialist leader in France whose political ideology was shaped by his service in World War I. He had witnessed the horrors of war and declared all war to be evil and wrong in his work Cadavres et Maximes, Philosophies d’un Revenant. And it would take a hard hearted sociopath indeed to disagree with him. The horrors of war should never be repeated. I think we can all agree on that.
The problem came when, as so many idealists do, Deat found reality to not be as simple as his ideology, and rejected reality as a result.
Germany was invading Poland. A war was starting, whether he wanted it to or not.
Deat’s desire for peace was taken so far, that when France fell to Germany, he became a staunch supporter of Philippe Petain’s collaborationist government. Peace was of utmost importance, and could only be achieved by surrender. Give Hitler what he wants, and the war will end. Deat went so far as to found a French based unit of the Waffen-SS, Legion des Volontaires Francais.
It’s a familiar sentiment. Today we see an American public that is so averse to war, that it would rather support a theocratic regime than go to war. The thought is a good one: war is bad.
But peace can be worse. If World War II started in 1935 over the reoccupation of the Saarland, or in 1936 over the Rhineland, or 1937 over the Austria, or 1938 over the Sudetenland, or 1939 over Czechoslovakia, how many lives could have been saved?
But in the mindless pursuit of peace, the people created a war more terrible than any other. The deaths of 55 million people stained the hands of those who let the war happen because they didn’t understand that some things are worth fighting for, worth dying for, and most importantly, worth killing for.
Don’t be like Marcel Deat. A lot of people ended up dying, because he didn’t want to die for Danzig.
