Carthage in the Modern Era

Political references to Carthage did not end with the Revolution. They continued throughout the nineteenth century and afterward, serving, as always, as a rich and compelling symbol of alterity. Allusions to the ancient city continued to deal with the same two themes, commerce and nationalism, that had been explored earlier. However, as the nineteenth century progressed and the ascendancy not just of the Anglosphere but of industrial capitalism became increasingly evident, the rhetorical use of the image of Carthage shifted. Less and less was it invoked against a single national enemy such as Britain; rather, denouncing Carthage became a defensive outcry against the course of a modern world that had, in many ways, become Carthaginian.

This section thus glances beyond the Revolution to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to briefly sketch out how negative views of Carthage have been challenged or sustained in the years after the Revolution. We will look at how individuals have used Carthage as an emblem of predatory capitalism, employed as an outcry against the commercialization of the modern world.

The "New Scipio": Napoleon and Carthage

For a fleeting moment at the turn of the nineteenth century, when hopes for an honorable peace with Britain were at their height, the potency of Carthage as a symbol briefly waned in the political discourse of France. In 1800, delivering the funeral eulogy for Generals Kleber and Desaix, Dominique-Joseph Garat denied the relevance of the Punic city to the modern day and rejected the parallels others had drawn between it and Great Britain:

I distance myself once again from these dated, worn out, and odious comparisons; these connections between the names [of England and France] and their hatred with the hatred and names of Carthage and Rome. These comparisons, for having been repeated ad infinitum, have not become any truer. There is no resemblance nor can there be any resemblance between what Carthage and Rome were to each other, and what France and England are today.

He warned that “the only true resemblance” between Roman-Carthaginian relations and Franco-British ones was that that whichever contemporary rival managed to destroy the other would sow the seeds of its own destruction.  Garat asserted that the two nations were not only capable of cooperating but had a moral obligation to do so, in order to bring peace and prosperity to the peoples of the world. And indeed, with the signing of the Treaty of Amiens in March 1802, France was finally at peace for the first time in a decade. For a brief period, it may have seemed that there could be peace between Carthage and Rome.

But the moment was not to last. Amidst growing distrust and belligerence on both sides, Britain abruptly declared war on May 17, 1803, just over a year after the treaty was signed; the French government responded by ordering all adult British males imprisoned.  The British-Carthaginian comparison returned to public discourse with a vengeance, and throughout the summer of 1803 letters poured in from around France to First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte expressing outrage at British perfidy and barbarism.  In many ways the rhetoric represented a return to the use of Carthage during the Terror and especially the Directory. A letter from the council of the department of Landes proclaimed, “Carthage still exists in our time…. Enemy of all governments and all peoples, it lights the flames of war to diminish the prosperity of nations, and to concentrate within herself all possible means of superiority.”  A pamphlet reprinted in the Moniteur assailed the British in language that would have been at home during the Reign of Terror:

England’s greed and ambitions are finally out in the open. The mask is off…. For the sake of indulging her malignant and all too powerful passions, England disturbs the peace of the world, wantonly violates the rights of nations, tramples underfoot the most solemn treaties, and breaks her pledged faith—that ancient, eternal faith which even hordes of savages acknowledge and religious respect…. But Europe is watching. France is arming. History is recording. Rome destroyed Carthage!

One of the letters made reference to British actions at Toulon, nearly a decade after the original events had occurred.

Such declarations of antagonism to the British Carthage became a way to demonstrate loyalty to the new regime. Carthage was an enemy whose defeat would not only avenge France but would add to the prestige of Bonaparte, the new Scipio. At a speech attended by Bonaparte, the president of the council of Lille addressed the First Consul: “Let this modern Carthage tremble at seeing our victorious battalions arrive beneath her walls! Let it tremble at the appearance of a new Scipio, whose valor and genius can overcome all obstacles!”  The prefecture council of Moselle wrote, “Jealous Albion feared the strivings of your glory…. Destroy another Carthage, return freedom to the seas, peace to the two worlds/hemispheres, and you will be the benefactor of humanity”  At a ceremony in Quimper, the president of the department council exclaimed, “Britain will be punished; New Carthage, it will be vanquished within her own walls. Bonaparte does not arm himself in vain.”

Even after France’s dreams of invading Britain were smashed at Trafalgar, the symbol of Carthage maintained currency to the very end of the Napoleonic regime. At the opening session of the French legislature in 1811, Bonaparte himself pronounced:

This struggle against Carthage, which was to have been decided on the battlefield of the ocean or beyond the seas, will henceforth be decided in the plains of Spain! When England is exhausted, and feels the evils with which it has so cruelly afflicted the Continent for twenty years; when half of its families are covered with mourning, a thunder stroke will put an end to the affairs of the Peninsula, to the destinies of its armies, and will avenge Europe and Asia by ending this second Punic War.

Bonaparte’s prediction failed on both counts. It was on the fields of Russia, Saxony, and finally Belgium that the Napoleonic Wars were ultimately decided. More importantly, in the end it was the French, and not the British, who were ultimately driven to exhaustion. The Second Hundred Years’ War ended, but this time it was Britain that had emerged triumphant, ushering in a nineteenth of century in which Great Britain was unquestionably the world’s supreme power.

"The Spirit of the Age":

Britain’s victory marked the triumph not just of arms and warfare, but of trade, manufacturing, and capitalism. Observing the societal transformations brought about by commerce in the eighteenth century, Raynal had noted not only that “everything is changed,” but that everything “must continue to change.”  The transformations continued into the nineteenth century, at an ever-increasing rate. Although the Franco-British rivalry persisted, France commercialized and industrialized just as Great Britain had in the previous decades, and thus in some sense became Carthaginians themselves. Louis Blanc, reflecting on the changes in French society in the early nineteenth century, wrote, “Can a nation be both essentially industrial and essentially martial? Between the destinies of Carthage and those of Rome, we had to choose. Well! Napoleon fell under the efforts of the Carthaginian portion of the French people.”  Even Flaubert’s Carthage in Salammbô, for all its exotic and mystical aspects, was at its heart intended as a parallel to France, an allegorical critique contemporary French social and political life.  Similarly, Benjamin Constant considered the differences between the ancient and modern societies and declared:

We have finally reached the age of commerce, an age which must necessarily replace that of war, as the age of war was bound to precede it…. Carthage, struggling against Rome in antiquity, was bound to succumb: the force of things was against her. But if the war between Rome and Carthage were fought now, Carthage would have the hopes of the entire world on her side; the customs of today and the spirit of the age would be her allies. 

With its emphasis on consumption, production and economic growth rather than agriculture and warfare, modern civilization was a world not of Rome but of Carthage.

Carthage thus remained a lasting symbol of commercialism and capitalistic society, employed especially by those opposed to these features of modernity. Like the term “Jewish,” “Carthaginian” was often used not to describe a historical people, but to pejoratively denote a mentality of greed and self-interest. Jules Michelet’s history of Rome painted Carthaginian society as little more than a cabal of capitalists: “A financial oligarchy thus holding the entire state in its hands, money was the king and god of Carthage.”  In 1841, Victor Hugo went so far as to proclaim, “Carthage is not dead”; though Scipio Aemilianus had defeated Carthage militarily, “the consul’s heel only crushed the walls: the Punic spirit survived.” The spirit of commerce, exploration, and self-interest had lived on, conquering Great Britain and now threatening to take the rest of the world.

The symbol of Carthage found notable use among French liberals and socialists to decry what they saw as the iniquities of contemporary European life. Charles Fourier, decrying modern lionization of “worthless[] merchants” and “commercial depravity,” asserted that “the commercial spirit corrupts people’s politics and morals. Carthage and England furnish the proof: the treachery of their politics, a Punic faith which has become proverbial.”  Michelet vented that “Human pride personified in a people, that is England,” and asked “how many Tyres and Carthages would one have to heap up to arrive at the insolence of titanic England?”  British imperialism was no different from the practices of Carthaginian colonists, who had embarked

to enrich themselves by quick profits of a tyrannical commerce, and … hastened to return to their mother country to enjoy the fruits of their robberies, somewhat like the merchants of Amsterdam formerly did, and as the English nabobs now do. There were rapid and colossal fortunes, unheard of robberies and exactions, there were Clives and Hastings, who might boast also of having exterminated millions of men by a monopoly more destructive war.

Alphonse Toussenel, in his anti-Semitic and anti-capitalist screed of 1847, commented that “there are peoples of prey who live on the flesh of others, and … these are mercantile peoples, those who formerly called themselves the Phoenicians and the Carthaginians, and who today call themselves the English, the Dutch, the Jews.”   The term came to be a shorthand denunciation of predatory capitalism, with Great Britain the main but not the only exemplar.

As a rhetorical device for rejecting the economic structures of the Anglosphere, Carthage would survive into the twentieth century and even to the present. During the German occupation of World War II, various collaborators turned to the British-Carthaginian comparison as a way to turn the French against the Allies. The radio journalist Jean Hérold-Paquis ended his broadcasts on Radio Paris with the declaration that “London, like Carthage, will be destroyed.”  Indeed, the emblem of Carthage has retained currency even to this day. In his 2011 French Melancholy, the popular French polemicist Eric Zemmour used the Carthaginian framework in his argument for the French to reject the globalized world order and reaffirm their national exceptionalism. His French history is the story of the constant frustration of France’s desire, perhaps even destiny, to become a modern Rome, to impose peace and order on the whole of the European continent.  According to Zemmour, two powers have been responsible for this, namely Britain and Germany, but in two entirely different ways. Whereas the Germans copied and in some cases improved upon the French model, the British arrived at world power with an entirely opposite approach, one based on commerce, individualism, and control of the seas — an anti-France. In his mind, this antagonism has never lifted. Speaking of the eclipse of British power in the aftermath of World War II, he declared “Carthage finally collapsed in this Dantean blaze that it had lit itself 140 years earlier, by breaking the Peace of Amiens in 1802.” Yet even this was not the end of Carthage. Echoing Victor Hugo, he suggested that the spirit of Carthage merely moved once more: “The center of the world economy … had in the meantime passed to New York. The new American Carthage took the baton.”  For Zemmour, like his predecessors, the image of Carthage has continued to be relevant as an emblem, to designate a globalized capitalist order he sees as antithetical to French national traditions.