War & Peace Quote by Julien Benda

Benda’s line is a rebuke to a very modern fantasy: that you can frighten humanity into behaving. “Fear of war” names the logic of deterrence, balance-of-power diplomacy, and the grim hope that enough corpses will finally teach the living a lesson. He treats that hope as not just naive but structurally unstable. Fear is reactive; it spikes under threat, fades with distance, and can be redirected into paranoia, arms races, or preemptive violence. A peace built on fear is really a truce maintained by anxiety.

The turn to “love of peace” is doing more than offering a feel-good alternative. Benda is arguing that durable peace requires a positive attachment: a culture that values restraint, compromise, and the dignity of strangers as goods in themselves, not as emergency measures. Love here isn’t romance; it’s a civic commitment, a practiced taste. That’s the subtextual challenge: peace can’t be outsourced to generals, treaties, or “rational” self-interest alone. It has to be wanted, taught, and defended as a moral identity.

Context matters. Writing in the shadow of European nationalism and the catastrophes bookending his lifetime, Benda was obsessed with how intellectuals and elites rationalized tribal passions. The quote reads like a warning shot across the bow of “peace through strength” rhetoric: when peace is merely what happens between wars, the next war is already being prepared. Real peace, he implies, is a value system, not a ceasefire.