This premonitory story shows one of the possible results of liberal-pacifist cosmopolitism. The eradication of war by a post-conflict liberal polity leads directly to a ‘post-democratic’ regime that, despite having the means to repress opposition and contestation in all their forms, prefers to neutralize them without violence.39 Nonetheless, if this is how inoffensive forms of contestation are treated on the hegemon’s own territory, we shall soon see how, in other parts of the world and other political configurations, far less indulgence is shown.
Aviation thus abolishes borders, establishes political freedom and economic liberalism on the world scale; it makes war impossible and proclaims perpetual peace. At the same time, its enormous destructive power calls for a cosmopolitical framework: the possibility to threaten the lives of millions of people cannot be left to any ‘rogue state’. The legitimate use of air power is conditioned by cosmopolitism, i.e., by ‘humanity’, since absolute destruction presupposes an absolute cause: aviation cannot serve to defend a particular interest, it must be the weapon of universalism, and thus of humanity as a whole. A humanity, therefore, of which those who are bombed do not form part. They are nothing more than a disturbance, an obstacle, a virtual nothing. Hence the necessity to dispatch them in practice, as soon as they rise up, to the nothing that they have always been in moral terms.
Suddenly the guns fell silent. In the trenches, a thousand faces turned hypnotized towards the sky. Two planes, one French and the other German, were clashing in a ferocious aerial duel. Absorbed by the battle in the air, the fighters on the ground seem to have forgotten their role. The French Chaudron rose above the German Rumpler, opposing each of its manoeuvres, turn to turn, plunge to plunge. The German machine-gunner had even stopped firing: was his weapon jammed? For at least twenty minutes, in rotating spirals, the combatants descended to the ground. Finally the German plane landed on a grassy field. Immediately the gunfire started up as fiercely as before.1
René Fonck, who related this scene of one of his victories in his memoir of the war, was the son of an ancient Alsatian family, fiercely anti-German. Having opted for French nationality, they had to leave their homeland annexed after the Franco-Prussian war. René’s father died when he was four years old, and as a young man he learned the trade of mechanic before becoming the ‘ace of aces’ of French aviation in the First World War, with seventy-five confirmed victories.2 In the following years, the aviator’s autobiography became a unique literary genre, and Georges Guynemer, Manfred von Richthofen, Francesco Baracca, and William Bishop would contribute to forging the perception that we have of air operations in the Great War. This established the imagery of the ‘knights of the air’, heroic figures who killed only while braving death themselves, and were imbued with deep respect for their adversaries. This war, in short, was a ‘duel’, a place par excellence for honour and symmetrical battle.
These texts, however, whether autobiographies or hagiographies, were actually governed by a quite different metaphor from that of the duel, in fact that of hunting.3 The airmen, who very often established a connection between their pre-war practice as horsemen and their aeronautical practice of war, constructed for themselves a character endowed with a sang-froid ready for any test, a predator’s instinct, and the patience to await the right moment to attack.4 The hunting metaphor is clearly distinct from the imagery of knighthood, inasmuch as it implies an enemy both inferior and dehumanized. Fonck, for example, wrote,
One day we had the good fortune to surprise a reconnaissance plane. It was above the Somme. The river sparkled in the sun, and clouds formed a screen that hid us from the target. Captain Bosc had compared himself a few minutes before to a fisherman waiting to strike. The Boche was unable to fire a single shot, and was killed like many have been since, without having the time to know what was happening. He fell in a tailspin and was lost among the reeds of a marsh.5
Far from being honoured as justus hostis, a legitimate adversary, the enemy was simply game to be killed. Oswald Boelcke, a German ace in the First World War, spoke of the ‘game of cat and mouse’, emphasizing the macabre pleasure involved in killing at a distance.6 In their autobiographies, the figure of the enemy never acquires an individual character, it is determined simply by belonging to the other side, the enemy nation.7 The airmen of every nation at war describe air warfare as a hunting party, thus a fundamentally asymmetrical relationship, which of course does not exclude the roles of predator and prey being reversed.8
How and why, then, did air war come to be represented as a chivalrous duel? At the start of the First World War, the high commands of the warring powers were very reticent at according airmen any particular recognition. Aviation, seen as a sporting practice, aroused above all the suspicion of an army whose pillars were discipline, camaraderie, and esprit de corps. War was not a game, and aerial combat was simply one form of combat among others.9 But as the Great War was par excellence a confrontation between nations, it was also urgent to offer the population images with whom they could identify, heroic figures who could embody the spirit of the national struggle. This led General Foch, in a communiqué of 4 April 1915, to salute in the aviator Roland Garros ‘a pilot both modest and brilliant, [who] never ceased giving an example of the finest courage’.10
This led to the forging of the mythical figure of the airman in books and newspapers:11 ‘mythical’, as a ‘fable’, plot, or story could be organized around an individual hero, but also emblematic of the nation to which he belonged, for which he fought and sacrificed himself. This figure contrasted all along the line with the ‘tommy’ with his steel helmet and hardened muscles, trudging through the mud with very little heroism to escape the industrialized butchery.12 The airman, for his part, was young, calm, and self-assured, facing with cool irony the mortal dangers to which he was exposed.13 The myth of the airman thus made it possible to render a new experience intelligible, that of a dehumanized field of battle completely governed by technology, by associating it with an older imagery.14
The images of which these aviators’ autobiographies are so full, however, stand in flagrant contradiction with the reality of the Great War, in which individual aerial combat was in fact only a very brief episode. When the war broke out, aviation was a new weapon, and no doctrine for its use had yet been laid down. Nonetheless, it played a remarkable role already in 1914. In September of that year, the crucial point in the war, French reconnaissance aircraft confirmed that German troops had been diverted from their advance towards Paris to engage in the valley of the Ourcq. Thanks to this information, the French high command was able to launch the manoeuvre that would lead to the Battle of the Marne and thus the arrest of the German advance, then to the stabilization of the front and finally, after four years, the exhaustion of the Central Powers’ resources.15 Once the front was stabilized, the belligerents used reconnaissance planes, tactically in this case, to photograph the terrain and map out the front lines, forts, trenches, and barbed wire, and to fine-tune artillery fire.
Given the importance that aerial observation had acquired, the adversary necessarily sought to prevent this. Reconnaissance planes confronted one another with the aid of rifles, pistols, and still more old-fashioned weapons, before a regular system was developed that enabled a machine gun to be placed at the front of the plane, synchronized with the propeller in such a way that bullets passed through the blades without damaging the machine.16 This was the birth of aerial combat: from the need to prevent the enemy conducting information missions. Starting in 1915, the warring armies established aeronautical services, within which they formed chasseur units to combat enemy aviation, though these units still lacked a coherent doctrine. According to Manfred von Richthofen, the words of Oswald Boelcke were ‘gospel’ for the German aviators – which amounts to