Carl Schmitt - Theory of the Partisan: Intermediate Commentary on the Concept of the Political

The Theory of the Partisan

T HE T HEORY OF THE P ARTISAN

An Interjection to the Concept of the Political

_________

B Y

C A R L S C H M I T T

Translated by C. J. Miller

Antelope Hill Publishing

Copyright 2020 by Antelope Hill Publishing

First printing 2020

All rights reserved.

Originally published in German, 1962.

Translated into English by C. J. Miller, 2020.

Cover art by Anita Hudojnik

The publisher can be contacted at

Antelopehillpublishing.com

The translator can be contacted at

cjmiller@hotmail.ca

C O N T E N TS

Introduction

Development of the Theory

Aspects and Concepts of the Final Stage

The present treatise on the theory of the partisan originates from two lectures I gave in the spring of 1962, on 15 March in Pamplona, at the invitation of the Estudio General de Navarra, and on 17 March in the University of Zaragoza, in the context of the events of the Ctedra Palafox, at the invitation of its director, Professor Luis Garca Arias. The lecture was printed in the Ctedra's publications at the end of 1962.

The subtitle An Interjection to the Concept of the Political explains the concrete moment of the publication. The publisher is currently making the text of my writing from 1932 accessible again. In the last decades various corollaries on the subject have emerged. The present treatise is not such a corollary, but an independen t work, albeit only sketchy, whose subject inevitably leads to the problem of the distinction between friend and enemy. Thus I would like to present this elaboration of my lectures of the spring of 1962 in the unassuming form of an interjection and in this way make it accessible to all those who have thus far followed the difficult discussion of the concept of the political.

Carl Schmitt, February 1963

The starting point for our reflections on the problem of the partisan is the guerrilla war waged by the Spanish people between 1808 and 1813 against the army of a foreign conqueror. In this war, for the first time, the peoplepre-bourgeois, pre-industrial, pre-conventional peoplefaced a modern, well-organized, regular army, born of the experience of the French Revolution. This opened up new spaces of war, developed new concepts of warfare, and gave rise to a new doctrine of war and politics.

The partisan fights irregularly. But the difference between regular and irregular warfare lies in the precision of the regular, and it is only in modern forms of organization, which emerged from the wars of the French Revolution, that it finds its concrete opposition, and thus its conception. In all ages of mankind and its many wars and battles, there have been rules of war and combat, and consequently, transgressions and disregard of the rules. In particular, in all times of dissolution, e.g. during the Thirty Years' War on German soil (1618-48), as well as in all civil wars and all colonial wars in world history, phenomena have repeatedly appeared which can be called partisan. But it must be noted that, for a theory of the partisan as a whole, the force and significance of his irregularity is determined by the force and significance of the regularity that he challenges. It is precisely this regularity of both the state and the army that receives a new, precise determination in both the French state and the French army through Napoleon. The countless Indian wars of the white conquerors against the American redskins from the 17th to the 19th century, but also the methods of the riflemen in the American war of independence against the regular English army (1774-83), and the civil war in the Vende between Chouans and Jacobins (1793-96) all still belong to the pre-Napoleonic stage. The new art of war Napoleon's regular armies had emerged from the new, revolutionary way of fighting. To a Prussian officer of that time, Napoleon's entire 1806 campaign against Prussia seemed like nothing more than large-scale partisanship.

The partisan of the Spanish guerrilla war of 1808 was the first who dared to fight irregularly against the first modern regular armies. In autumn 1808, Napoleon had defeated the regular Spanish army; the actual Spanish guerrilla warfare only started after this defeat of the regular army. There is still no complete, documented history of the Spanish partisan war. This partisan war was conducted with the most horrible cruelty on both sides, and it is no wonder that more contemporary historical material was printed by the educated Afrancesados, the Francophiles who wrote books and memoirs, than by the guerrillas. But however myth and legend on the one side and documented history on the other side may behave here, our starting position is clear in any case. According to Clausewitz, half of the entire French army often stood in Spain and half of it, namely 250-260,000 men, were held up by guerrillas, whose number is estimated by Gomez de Arteche at 50,000, and much lower by others.

The unique aspect of the situation of the Spanish partisan of 1808 is that he took the risk of fighting on his own home soil, while his own king and his royal family did not yet know exactly who the real enemy was. In this respect, the legitimate authorities in Spain at that time behaved no differently than in Germany. It is also pertinent to the Spanish situation that the educated classes of the nobility, high clergy, and bourgeoisie were largely Afrancesados, i.e. sympathetic to the foreign conquerors. In this respect, too, there are parallels with Germany, where the great German poet Goethe composed hymns to the glory of Napoleon, and German education was never fully clear where it's allegiance actually lay. In Spain, the guerrillero dared the hopeless fight, a poor devil, the first archetypal case of the irregular cannon fodder of international political disputes. All this is an overture towards a theory of the partisan.

A spark flew at that time from Spain to the north. It did not ignite the same fire there that gave the Spanish guerrilla war its historical significance. But it did trigger an effect there whose continuation today, in the second half of the 20th century, is changing the face of the earth and its inhabitants. It brought about a theory of war and enmity that logically culminated in the theory of the partisan.

In 1809, during the brief war that the Austrian Empire waged against Napoleon, the first systematic attempt was made to imitate the Spanish model. The Austrian government in Vienna staged a national propaganda campaign against Napoleon with the help of famous publicists, including Friedrich Gentz and Friedrich Schlegel. Spanish writings were distributed in German. The fact that the reformers in the Prussian general staff, especially Gneisenau and Scharnhorst, were deeply impressed and influenced by the Spanish example is well known and will be discussed further. In the world of thought of these Prussian general staff officers from 1808-1813 lies the seed of the book Vom Kriege (On War), through which the name Clausewitz has acquired an almost mythical status. His formula of war as the continuation of politics already is the theory of the partisan in a nutshell, which has been taken to its logical conclusion by Lenin and Mao Zedong, as we shall show later.

A true popular guerrilla war, which should be mentioned in connection with our partisan question, only took place in Tyrol, where Andreas Hofer, Speckbacher and the Capuchin Father Haspinger were active. The Tyroleans became a powerful torch, as Clausewitz put it. That aside, this episode of 1809 was quickly over. No more did the rest of Germany experience a partisan war against the French. The strong national impulse, which manifested in isolated uprisings and bands of skirmishers, was channeled very quickly and completely into the thrust of the regular war. The battles of the spring and summer of 1813 took place on the battlefield, and were decided in open battle in October 1813 near Leipzig.