raise the living standard of the metropolitan proletariat;34 on the military level, the Jeune École strategists were persuaded that the revolutionary threat could be actively used as a weapon in war. Revolts happened when there was economic misery that state apparatuses were incapable of repressing. As a consequence, their political and military strategy consisted in eliminating misery in the metropolis as far as possible, thanks to colonial expansion, and attacking the trade and social cohesion of the enemy. In a word, the aim of their military strategy was to avoid revolution in France and trigger this in the enemy country.
The Prince de Joinville had already pinpointed two strategic targets in a naval war against England: British trade, and the ‘confidence’ of the British people.35 This programme took a more radical turn under the Jeune École. One of the collaborators of minister Aube, Gabriel Charmes, spelled out that ‘it is clear that the bombardment of fortresses will in future be only an accessory operation … It will be undefended coastlines and open cities that are attacked above all.’36 If the first phase of the nineteenth-century naval revolution had abolished the classic separation between land and sea, the second and political phase was to abolish the distinction between military and civilian objectives. This put an end to the firm precept expressed first by the French strategist Antoine-Henri Jomini and then reaffirmed by the American Alfred Thayer Mahan: ‘The organized forces of the enemy are always the principal objective.’37 For the republican strategists of the Jeune École, the armed forces were precisely no longer the principal objective. Since the nation was one, the army being the nation in arms and the citizen being the soldier, it was the whole enemy nation that found itself in the firing line.
These strategists naturally feared that the adversary would employ the same means, and had no illusions as to the possibilities of defence: it was impossible to foresee where the enemy would strike, thus impossible to defend coastlines effectively, unless naval forces were deployed entirely for this purpose, rather than in defence of the colonies and trade routes. Clausewitz’s fundamental principle, that defence is more economical than attack, thus underwent a complete reversal.38 First naval and then air, bombardment was thus more akin to techniques generally described as ‘terrorist’: whereas classic war involved a dialectic of attack and defence, we could say that a terrorist strategy consists in completely abandoning defence in favour of pure attack. The relationship between the terms is reversed, and attack becomes both easy and economical, while defence against terrorism is expensive and immensely complicated.39 It was also for this reason that it was often in the interest of the weaker side to opt for a terrorist tactic, as France prepared to do in the eventuality of a naval war against the United Kingdom. From now on, the side that struck first acquired a considerable advantage over its adversary. With steamships and the possibilities of coastal bombardment, speed became a still more determining factor in war. In all these characteristics, French naval strategy in the late nineteenth century prefigured the air strategy to come: it was necessary to strike quickly, to strike strongly, and to strike a nation and no longer just an army. The adversary had other means of defence than to deploy the same strategy.
Was this the subject of Wells’s meditations in July 1909? It is certain, in any case, that at the start of the twentieth century British public opinion began to perceive that the country’s island position was in danger. As early as 1903, Erskine Childers’s spy novel The Riddle of the Sands, depicting secret preparations for a German landing on the English shore, enjoyed great success. The Royal Navy remained more powerful by far than other naval forces, and as long as the threat came only from the sea, all that was needed was a certain vigilance. But Blériot’s flight shattered this certainty. From 25 July 1909, the situation had definitely changed. Maritime supremacy, however useful it remained, no longer had any great value in protecting the metropolis. British exceptionality had had its day. What was to be done?
To confront this new geopolitical configuration, the British Empire decided to take the initiative. Since 1887, representatives of the colonies and ‘dominions’ had met at regular intervals in ‘colonial conferences’, renamed ‘imperial conferences’ in 1907. But from 1911, a common foreign policy under British tutelage was established: the Empire was transformed into a Commonwealth. The same year, the United States signed treaties of arbitration with both Great Britain and France. Great Britain, a centre now on the decline, and the United States, en route to becoming the new hegemon, renounced war as a means of resolving conflicts. The two great ‘Lockean’ powers thus removed themselves from the ‘anarchy’ of international relations.40 We could say that the centre of the world was globalized.
At the same time, this hegemonic centre expanded in Europe, since France, formerly the main contender on the Continent but singularly weakened by the lost war with the new German contender in 1870–71, was now assimilated into the Lockean centre. In 1912, a Franco-British naval agreement, bearing initially on a colonial dispute in Syria but rapidly extended to North Africa, sealed the new alliance between the British hegemon and its ancient rival. A new world configuration thus saw the light. In Europe, Germany acceded to the rank of principal Hobbesian contender, and the lines of the Great War were mapped out. On the world level, the globalization of the hegemonic power paved the way for the most striking development in the twentieth century’s history of violence: the collapse of the separation between the European centre and the colonized periphery. The coming conflict would not be simply a European Great War, but the First World War.
The news brutally interrupted the lethargy of the three holiday-makers. They found it exceptionally hard to make sense of the notice written in Italian and published in a local newspaper, the Sentinella Bresciana: an aviation rally very close by, on the other side of the lake. The world’s most famous airmen were to come and exhibit their flying machines. Franz’s excitement was contagious. The three friends, who were staying on the Austrian side, decided to travel by boat to Desenzano and then take the train to Brescia, on the Italian side of the frontier. Arriving in the afternoon, they spent the night at a shabby hotel. On the morning of 11 September 1909, they finally reached the airfield.
Less than a year after finding work as a jurist with the Bohemian Institute for Workplace Insurance, Franz Kafka was not yet entitled to a paid holiday. He had to convince a doctor friend to supply him with a medical certificate to travel to Riva, on Lake Garda, in the company of his best friend, Max Brod, and his brother Otto. A few weeks before, at the end of July, Max had written a piece on Blériot’s flight across the Channel. As for Kafka, he had recently complained of the difficulties he had in writing and his doubt about his vocation as a writer. This led Max Brod to issue a challenge: each of the three would write a report on the Brescia rally, and they would then choose the best.1
This rally was a world event of great importance. The town’s hotels were full up, and curious spectators arrived from Rome, Naples, and even abroad. King Victor Emmanuel III was in attendance, and the high aristocracy gathered around his majesty. A number of eminent representatives of the world of culture were likewise present: Gabriele D’Annunzio – nicknamed simply Il Poeta – and the demigod of music, Giacomo Puccini. They had all come to witness the spectacle given by the best aviators of the day: Louis Blériot, Glenn Curtis, Henri Rougier, and Alfred Leblanc, along with a number of Italians, including Guido Moncher, originally from Trentino and thus a subject of the Habsburg emperor, like Kafka and his Prague friends. Moncher, however, ‘wore Italian colours, trusting more in them than in our own’.2
Kafka saw the representatives of official culture as rather pathetic figures: D’Annunzio, ‘short and weakly, dances attendance before the most important men on the committee’, while Puccini showed ‘a nose that one might well call a drinker’s’. As for the aviators, Rougier was ‘a little man with a strange nose’ who had difficulty in calming his nerves; Curtiss tried
