It was not surprising, given this, that the promises of aviation included perpetual peace. Victor Hugo had already formulated this hope. In 1864, from his exile in Guernsey, he wrote an enthusiastic letter to Nadar to congratulate him for his essays on the subject of air travel: ‘Release man. From whom? From his tyrant? Which tyrant? Weight.’19 Aviation meant
the immediate, absolute, instantaneous, universal suppression of borders, everywhere at once, throughout the world … All border posts are abolished. All separation destroyed … All tyranny with no rationale. It means the disappearance of armies, conflicts, wars, exploitation, subjugation, hatred. It means a colossal peaceful revolution … It means the tremendous release of the human race.20
As early as the 1860s, Hugo already reached the conclusion – by an intellectual argument on the philosophical level and a liberal one on the economic and political levels – that aviation was the bearer of universal peace. He was not alone in investing aviation with this power, nor in falling into this technological lyricism. The French astronomer Camille Flammarion said something very similar: ‘When the conquest of the air is achieved, universal fraternity will be established on earth, true peace will descend from the heaven, castes will finally disappear.’21
At the start of the twentieth century, the heroic age of aviation, this conclusion would be reached by a quite different argument. Aviation had the miraculous power to make war impossible, not because it freed men, bringing them together and abolishing borders but, paradoxically, on account of its destructive power.22 The liberal vision of peace was followed by a militarist one. The arrival of flying armies made the art of warfare obsolete: mobilization of men, concentration of troops, marches across the countryside, manoeuvres. At the start of the twentieth century, writers already envisaged the destruction by bombs from the air of industrial centres, capital cities, and military headquarters.
This idea was formulated first of all by Jean de Bloch, a banker and financier of Polish railways, in a book which had tremendous influence, La Guerre future (the book that gave Tsar Nicholas II the idea for an international disarmament conference, leading to the Hague Convention). In Bloch’s well-documented reasoning, the unprecedented increase in firepower had made every kind of classical manoeuvre impossible, inevitably leading to a stabilization on the front. As a consequence, wars would be long, and decided not by victory on the battlefield but by the economic and political collapse of one or more of the warring parties. Bloch was one of the few analysts to foresee the shape of the First World War. Other writers investigated the consequences of aviation for the future of war. In a programmatic work of 1910, La Conquête de l’air et la paix universelle, François Mallet brandished the spectre of the massive destruction of cities. In the face of such a danger, only one outcome was possible: peace, general disarmament, and ‘the solemn reconciliation of peoples as the conclusion’.23
There was thus, on the one hand, the dream of aviation as bearer of perpetual peace, which, by liberating men and bringing them together, prepared the conditions for true freedom and a fully human realm; while, as the converse of this technological idyll, there were warnings against the destructive power of air war and the conclusion that, given that European nations had by and large the same level of technological development and industrial capacity, war would become steadily less likely as it became more risky. What rational government could take the risk of seeing its cities, its industry, and its infrastructure destroyed by bombing in a single night? War could no longer bring any gain, and governments would necessarily end up understanding this.24 We thus see the beginnings, in the discourse on air war of the early twentieth century, of the future doctrine of ‘deterrence’.25 But whether it emphasized this or indeed the rapprochement of peoples, the thesis of a peace-making aviation became a common subject: in France, Paul Painlevé subscribed to it, as did Thomas Edison in the United States.26 Many examples could be given, but the idea remains the same.
Aviation thus sounded the death-knell of war. Perpetual peace could be seen on the horizon and, where this was not the case, the conditions for its advent must be created. And so, after the liberal peace of rapprochement of peoples and free movement of goods, after the armed peace of mutual deterrence, a third idea of peace came into view: cosmopolitan peace. In 1911, the French airman Clément Ader proposed the formation of an air army against Germany. Revanchist nationalism was already coupled with a republican and universalist note: ‘the law of extension of great states at the expense of small ones, which will follow its natural development towards the unification of peoples. Military aviation will crown this great event. Will it be by liberty or by despotism?’27 Combining liberal peace with peace by deterrence, cosmopolitan peace by aviation sought to draw on federative elements to unify the human race. Taking up the famous expression used by Victor Hugo at the Paris Peace congress of September 1849 that he had chaired,28 the Italian Alessandro Masi held that aviation was drawing the contours of the ‘United States of Europe’.29
How could aviation assure world peace and unite the European peoples? Paradoxically, by its power of destruction and its capacity to strike everywhere without being hindered by political or physical borders. The development of aviation thus revived an old idea that had always obsessed pacifist discourse.30 In the fourteenth century, already, Pierre Dubois, ‘advocate of ecclesiastical causes in the bailiwick of Coutance under Philippe the Fair’, had called for a peace-making European alliance in a programmatic text, De recuperatione terre sancte. In order to establish this peace in Europe, Dubois proposed setting up a council of arbiters, endowed with an executive apparatus that would enable them to deploy against any aggressor a ‘remedium manus militaris, tamquam iusticia neccessario complusiva’.31
Henri IV’s famous ‘grand design’ for peace in Europe, which Sully, his main collaborator, speaks of in his Oeconomies Royales, was presented in quite similar terms. The main objective of the ‘grand design’ was to establish an alliance against the hegemony of the house of Habsburg. If it could not be convinced to give up a part of its possessions ‘by the prayers and gentle solicitations of all other potentates of the most-Christian association’, the union would make war on it and subsequently distribute its territories among the conquerors. Once the aspiration of the house of Austria to universal monarchy was broken, a united Christianity would be in a position to make ‘conquests … in the three other parts of the world, that is, Asia, Africa and America’, and above all to ‘sustain a continual war against the infidel enemies of the holy name of Jesus Christ’.32 Later on, such famous pacifists as William Penn33 and the Abbé de Saint-Pierre would express themselves in very similar terms.34 Closer to our own time, President Theodore Roosevelt, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906, reasserted this classic idea in his Nobel Lecture of 5 May 1910, in which he called for the creation of a world ‘league of peace’. The great difficulty of ensuring a lasting peace ‘arises from the absence of an executive power, a police power capable of applying the decrees’ of an international arbitration body.35 Roosevelt’s speech had a great resonance in international public opinion: to establish peace, an international striking force was needed.36
We can see, then, how aviation gave new life to the old idea of a federative cosmopolitanism endowed with an executive power. Rudyard Kipling, a personal friend of Roosevelt and author of ‘The White Man’s Burden’, was the first to develop the idea of a world government founded on air power. In two short stories, ‘With the Night Mail’ (1905) and ‘As Easy as A.B.C.’ (1912), the latter referring to an international ‘Aerial Board of Control’, a body originating in the technical necessity of regulating air traffic becomes a world technocratic government.37 ‘As Easy as A.B.C.’ tells the story of three airmen required to deal with the problem posed by a group of