Barbara Tuchman — Justin Reads

History is a study of patterns. Good historians don’t simply chronicle the past; they study the echoes of events and their resonance in other eras before and after. Such is the central mission of The March of Folly, in which Barbara Tuchman parses Western history in search of a recurring theme, which she calls folly. Simply defined, folly is an action undertaken by a government in which it pursues actions contrary to its own interests. Folly must be recognizable at the time, have no conceivable benefit and great costs.

Tuchman opens her book with a few quick snapshots of folly—the Spanish loss of Iberia to the Moors, the acquiescence of Montezuma and the Aztecs to Cortes, the German attacking of American ships in World War 1, the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in World War 2—which she uses to lay out her premise and familiarize the reader. The bulk of the text, however, is dedicated to four distinct events: The fall of Troy, the loss of half of Christendom to the Renaissance popes, the British stoking of the American Revolution, and the America debacle in Vietnam.

Troy is an interesting choice of antecedent, given that it is more myth than history. Tuchman makes no effort to parse truth from fiction, freely recounting the actions of gods in her summary. She instead uses Troy to demonstrate how deeply folly is imbedded in the human psyche, and pulls out key components than will resonate in future eras (for instance, the ignored warning of poor Cassandra).

The other three sections follow a similar pattern, providing details descriptions of the prevailing attitudes and responses to events and explaining how they went contrary to the government’s interests. A certain level of knowledge is assumed, and key events (The 95 Theses and Diet of Worms, the Boston Massacre, the Tet Offensive) are spoken of without much description. Clearly Tuchman’s target audience had a certain level of historical fluency (I’m pleased to note there wasn’t very much I needed to look up). The history presented is very much a history of policy, examining the undergirding structures that addressed—or, often, exacerbated—major events.

Tuchman’s writing is solid, academic without being too dry. She sometimes goes a little overboard with subordinate clauses, making sentences into grammatical Matryoshka dolls, but overall she is very readable considering the heft of the subject matter. I wouldn’t rate March of Folly quite as high as The Guns of August, which remains a seminal book on the history of World War One. But it’s well-written and compellingly argued, and worth checking out for those interested in how human folly shapes history.

I checked out The Guns of August expecting a history of World War I, but the book actually views the ocnflict throug ha much narrower lens. First, it provides a brief outline of the geopolitical history of Europe leading up to the war. Next, it gives a detailed accounting of the political maneuvering of the variosu combatants, as a cavalcade of treaties and alliances nudged them—sometimes willingly, sometimes not—into armed conflict. Lastly, it provided a detailed military history of the war’s first thirty days or so—the titual Guns of August, so obvious in retrospect—leading up to the Battle of the Marne, where the Allies denied Germany a desicive victory over France, and the war descended into the four stagnant years of trench warfare for which it is most notorious.

In its focus on negotiations, planning, and other minutae of governanc,e it reminded of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, a book far large and scope but with a similar emphasis on the tiny, almost clerical decisions on which nations turn and tumble. This wash of detail can get a little overwhelming at times, but is carried along smoothly enough by Tuchman’s deft prose. Likewise, the battles are described using the common convention of military history, in which the movement of each formation is discussed. There is an audience for this sort of thing, and while I’m not exactly part of it, I’m interested enough in the subject matter to play along and enjoy it for what it is (though I’ll never truly be able to read those maps of battle maneuvers with anything like fluency).

The book was good overall, though its strongest passage was probably its first, where Tuchman uses the event of King Edward’s funeral as a fitting prelude to the carnage that would follow a few short years in his wake. She makes no claim to greater causality, but rather seizes on the event as a rich symbol for what was lost in those final years of European peace, and a meditation on how long and bloody the road to regaining it would ultimately be.