Anne-Louise Germaine de Stael-Holstein (1766-1817), known as Madame de Stael (commonly pronounced “de Stall”), was a French writer and political theorist whose writings were widely read in her lifetime and long after. She was alarmed at Napoleon’s belligerent adventures in Europe and wrote to him aggressively about it, which prompted Bonaparte to demand of his servants that they bring him no more of her writings. This led to the often-repeated quip that “there are three great powers struggling against Napoleon for the soul of Europe: England, Russia, and Madame de Stael.” In her book Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution, de Stael wrote the following influential paragraph.

Liberty is ancient; despotism is modern. This observation, Madame de Stael insists, is true not because people have somehow grown coarser over time, but because Europe in her time was losing the intermediary institutions between government and the individual that limited the power of rulers to control the lives of their subjects. Historians report, for example, that throughout the Middle Ages, rulers could rarely manage to take more than 7% of their subjects’ wealth. In the Middle Ages, the intermediary institutions included a class of nobles who checked the actions of kings in defense of their own social prerogatives, an international Church with a powerful pope who could challenge wayward kings and princes, and independent cities and districts that kept political power diffuse, resisting the tendency toward centralization. With so many independent jurisdictions in Europe, a ruler who became greedy for power could find himself in a difficult stand-off with the pope while his tax base moved down river to neighboring jurisdictions. The tyrannical designs of Napoleon that animated Madame de Stael were part of a movement particularly strong in the 18th and 19^th centuries to consolidate the many independent jurisdictions of Europe, usually by force, into centralized national states in which power that was once diffused came to be held in one place by only a few hands. This is how the modern national state developed in Europe, and it did so by destroying the power of intermediary institutions, leaving the individual alone before the largely unchecked power of the state. This is what Madame de Stael means by saying that despotism is modern. While governments have always acted despotically, their power to oppress was limited by the intermediary institutions that were neutralized by the consolidating aggression of the emergent modern national states, and so in the political order, the ability of states to oppress their citizens is practically unrestrained.[i]

The British who settled Jamestown, Virginia in 1607 were inheritors of a monarchical legal order transplanted into a world that was foreign to them, having none of the physical and political advantages that characterized life in the Mother Country. Yet theirs was a tradition in which developed the idea of rights that human beings hold by nature, independent of any grant from government, and so serving to limit state power. However, rights may be exercised properly only within a living cultural tradition because they serve to regulate our relations one with another in a social bond of ordered liberty. Rights may be understood to be acts which are in themselves good, and which it would be unjust for others to prohibit. Thus in the theory of rights, one cannot morally possess a right to do what is wrong, and this insight lies at the heart of the ideal of “ordered liberty.” Here we find a cause of variety among communities that recognize and protect natural rights. Rights are expressed and exercised in the community of others and for this reason, communities must engage in ongoing discussions of which acts to protect and how, which acts to forbid, and which to allow even if there is no right to them. The various ways in which communities do this will give to each its own kind of character. This practice took an American shape by the fact that the first settlers from Britain politically were monarchists in a land without a king. This compelled them to develop institutions of self-government that were certainly guided by British law, but could be, owing to their new situation, given uniquely American forms. In this way, the American colonies developed into states through peaceful processes and not through acts of military force. In short, American states grew “organically,” and this resulted in the people of each state coming to see themselves as one people, and their state as their country, the place where they live out in an ordered way the blessings of liberty. The late, and brilliant, political theorist Willmoore Kendall stated this succinctly writing: “No one understands America, and the meaning of America, unless he understands that it was conceived in liberty—nay, born in liberty, nurtured in liberty, and grown to fullness and maturity in liberty.”[ii]

The idea that sovereignty rests in the people of a state and not in a national government derives from the view that each individual owns him- or herself (John Locke). A better way to say this is that no human being has a natural proprietary interest in any other human being. So, while an individual may not own himself as property, it remains true that as between one human being and another, I own me, and you own you. For this reason, no human being is available to the use of another human being without his consent. But, as we have already observed, there must be a balance of interests between the individual and the community. May an individual assert rights the enjoyment of which is detrimental to the community? May the community justifiably regulate rights the unrestrained expression of which undermines it? These are not trivial questions but rather among the very questions people must confront if they are to establish and maintain a political order that at once preserves union and liberty. In the next issue of “Front and Center,” we will consider how Americans in our early history addressed this important question of the proper relation of union and liberty among the states.

[i] One might object to the idea that the state is a modern phenomenon by pointing to the ancient Greek city-states. “City-state” is an unfortunate translation of the word polis which was understood to be the home of the politeia, or the social and governing order of the society. Plato’s famous dialog “Republic” is actually titled “Politeia.” So while the ancient Greek cities were independent and self-governing, they were not states as we have them today. The first appearance of the word “state” as a political unit is found in The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli, written in 1513.

[ii] Willmoore Kendall, “Equality: Commitment or Ideal?,” Intercollegiate Review, volume 24, Spring 1989, 25-33.

The Marine Corps pioneered in the 1930s what is considered to be the greatest tactical innovation of the 20th century, the amphibious warfare doctrine that would take Allied forces victoriously over every beachhead in WW ll. Camp Lejeune, the Marine Corps’ largest amphibious training base, was instrumental in developing, testing and refining that doctrine. Elements of five Marine divisions would train here during the war, as well as tens of thousands of other Marines, whose storied and heroic battles in the Pacific are well documented. Of particular interest to the date being commemorated, however, is that Camp Lejeune trained the U.S. Army’s 1^st and 9^th Infantry Divisions in amphibious warfare.

On 6 June 1944, D-Day at Normandy, France, Allied forces stormed onto the continent of Europe in a victorious and decisive assault that would precipitate the downfall of Nazi Germany. Spearheading that assault across Omaha Beach was the Army’s oldest division, the 1^st Infantry Division, the “Big Red One,” which was accompanied by the 9^th Infantry Division in the subsequent breakout from the coast.

The 1st Infantry Division began its training at Camp Lejeune with the 1^st Marine Division during the summer of 1941, only a month after base’s beginning. The 1^st Inf Div was followed by the 9^th, which trained here for two months. Both Army divisions later used their Camp Lejeune-taught amphibious skills in the landings at North Africa and Italy. Their major test, though, was at Normandy on D-day, where their success was in no small part due to the training they received here.

It should additionally be noted that the training of the Army’s 1^st and 9^th Inf Divs wasn’t Camp Lejeune’s only contribution to D-Day. The U.S. Coast Guard, which arrived at Camp Lejeune with the 1^st Marine Division in 1941, established its only landing craft school here, eventually at Courthouse Bay, where it stayed for five years, training landing craft crewmen in the most difficult and dangerous phase of an amphibious assault, the actual projection of the landing force on a hostile shore. Coastguardsmen manned more than 2000 landing craft in every major operation, both in the Atlantic and Pacific, and were significantly present at Normandy.

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In 1915, Parris Island became the Marine Corps Recruit Depot, which it has remained ever since. Approximately 20,000 recruits come to Parris Island each year, experiencing 13 weeks of rigorous, transformational training and beginning their lives as United States Marines.

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CAPT Pat Alford, USN (Ret) - Treasurer

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Col Bruce Gombar, USMC (Ret)

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CWO5 Lisa Potts, USMC (Ret)

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