More than the Russian campaign (the scenario for a continuing contest between powers), it is the war in Spain that holds the key (still only partially understood) to Napoleon’s secret, and prefigures the events that wait still to devastate the next chapter of history. The war in Spain is the first, victorious vendetta of weakness against strength. The grim mountain folk, “proud and filthy beggars,” who cruelly bleed the French troops and were the first “to dare to fight as irregulars against the first modern regular armies,”¹⁰⁸ are not only the forebears of those Partisans (later guerrillas, then terrorists) who wreak havoc in every strategic and legal ambit, as Carl Schmitt has shown, but they are the precursors of a dark and terrible figure whose face is beginning to appear only now: ethnic revolt, the rejection of the West as a soft epidermis that covers all lands and is suffocating them.¹⁰⁹ At ever closer intervals, that epidermis is slashed, as happened in Iran with the ousting of the Shah and the murderous fury of the mostazafin, the dispossessed urban poor, who take us back to the Partisans. Behind the Partisan is the Poor Man. And it is the overlapping of these two figures that creates their irresistible capacity to penetrate—as well as their self-deception: because the Partisan will tend (has always tended, without realizing it) to serve a “third interest,” which in the end subtly undermines the rebels, reducing them to its meek agents (but will it always be like this?);¹¹⁰ whereas the Poor Man will tend (has always tended) to seize the arms of the Rich so as to be tyrannized even more severely by other Poor Men. That venomous revolt, that rejection of the West, carried out by exploiting all the detritus of the West, all its words broken down into sharp fragments, is a belated, angry response to the project that Léon Bloy’s theological sarcasm described as “the lofty idea of a general immolation of the destitute.”¹¹¹ Modernity, in its pure form, seeks to wipe out the Poor. Indeed, at its most brazen, it wants the Poor to be wiped out by the Poor themselves. So it seems appropriate that the worst massacres have taken place in Soviet Russia, where, for many years, the Poor have persecuted themselves. But in history this phenomenon—whose rumblings we are only just beginning to recognize today from every point of the horizon and which will soon invade us from within and from without—first emerged during the war in Spain. Napoleon understood the military significance of the Partisan (if only in the words “It is necessary to operate like partisans wherever there are partisans”), but he refused to accept the new power heralded by the merger between Poor Man and Partisan. And this was also why the war in Spain was such a disaster. Napoleon, in that case, was neither able nor willing to understand. He was not willing to understand because he was under the illusion suffered by those who actually know human horror: the belief that such horror is the same everywhere, and therefore that the same cold strategies that had already worked well in Italy and elsewhere should have worked in Spain. As Madame de Rémusat observed: “one of Bonaparte’s great faults … was to mix all men together, holding an equal view of them, and failing to understand the differences that ways and customs bring in their characters.”¹¹² He failed to understand because he was himself the extension of something that, from then on, would continually spread its invulnerable gloss over the earth. The Poor Man who wants to remain as such, the Poor Man who wants just to continue to exist, who prefers his land as it is, rather than having his land developed, the “ungrateful beggar” who insults the hand that is ready to give the money: these people are the scandal, the obstacle (for Napoleon, for the world that followed him); they are the most insolent image of material resistance (therefore of “human material,” which is now the subject par excellence), of opaqueness, of impenetrability, heralding the savage revolt of the land against its swift, impatient surveyor. Napoleon can be accused of one single crime, observed Bloy, who had no fear of risking the blasphemous mixture of Légende and Vulgate: he introduced “a famous code where it is taken for granted that the poor do not exist.”¹¹³ Not only that: he had dared to say: “I consider it of great importance and a great idea of glory to destroy beggary.” The bloody repercussions of that act have not yet ended: “Beggary is forbidden.¹¹⁴ He had canceled out the Poor Man and that was his crime—which was then perpetuated.”