One quick parallel, one liberation long in coming

This has not prevented the rise of a class of Boydian true believers, picking over each slide in search of their master’s Original Intent. This is not the Colonel’s fault: as a peddler of interesting stories, he could no more prevent the rise of the Church of St. John the Boyd than Marie could prevent the rise of the Church of St. Carl the Clausewitz. To herd is human, to stand alone is divine. Yet Marie, like the Colonel, and, perhaps, like Carl, left room for the creative spirit to roam in spite of the best efforts of men of the straight path to restrict it to the Wise and Inscrutable Colonel’s Secret Original Recipe. As the Colonel was a Boyd but not a Boydian, Marie was a Clausewitz but not a Clausewitzian.

Liberation, long in coming: 

Marie’s influence manifests itself most strongly in those chapters attributed to the mature Carl. This means Book 1 Chapter 1, whether with its vintage Cold War Howard-Paret gloss or not. The insight, even the phrasing, of Carl’s famous “War is the continuation of politics with the admixture of other means”, may have originated with Marie.

Marie, born Maria Sophie, Countess von Bruhl, came from a higher social class than Carl. By most measures, she was a far better politician than Carl. The progress of Carl’s career depended as much on Marie as it did on more historically prominent patrons like Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. Marie was a lady-in-waiting to multiple Hohenzollern princesses. She was involved and influential in the court politics of Prussia. Such politics may bear a closer resemblance to the social politics portrayed in the novel’s of Marie’s English contemporary Jane Austen than to those portrayed in conventional political history. Yet they may exercise as much, if not more, influence as the brow furrowings of serious statesmen.

Today’s received wisdom is that women were entirely absent from a substantial role in politics until the enlightenment of the late twentieth century gave its institutional validation on the role of women in politics by granting them official line titles. This received wisdom belittles the power that women whose lives or times bore little resemblance to those of a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant-flavored careerist have exercised through the ages. Their politics may seem unimportant, even quaint. Yet they have exercised a sway that has gone largely overlooked by later historians.

In this, 1960s-flavored women’s history ironically often shares the biases of the most male chauvinist historians of the past. Because it was not labelled or institutionalized as capital P politics, it must have been unimportant lower case p politics. Marie knew otherwise and knew otherwise better than Carl. She was established in the highest corridors of power. She knew how the interactions of men and women in high places and high proximity fed the sausage machine that led to war and peace and took lives. She saw how war was the continuation of politics, her politics, capitalized or not, with the addition of other (usually violent) means.

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