Reflections on Violence/Chapter 3

by Georges Sorel

CHAPTER III

PREJUDICES AGAINST VIOLENCE

  I. Old ideas relative to the Revolution—Change resulting from the year of 1870 and from the Parliamentary régime.

 II. Drumont's observations on middle-class ferocity—The judicial Third Estate and the history of the Law Courts—Capitalism against the cult of the State.

III. Attitude of the Dreyfusards—Jaurès's judgments on the Revolution: his adoration of success and his hatred for the vanquished.

 IV. Antimilitarism as a proof of an abandonment of middle-class traditions.

I

The ideas current among the outside public on the subject of proletarian violence are not founded on observation of contemporary facts, and on a rational interpretation of the present Syndicalist movement; they are derived from a comparison of the present with the past—an infinitely simpler mental process; they are shaped by the memories which the word revolution evokes almost automatically. It is supposed that the Syndicalists, merely because they call themselves revolutionaries, wish to reproduce the history of the revolutionaries of '93. The Blanquists, who look upon themselves as the legitimate owners of the Terrorist tradition, consider that for this very reason they are called upon to direct the proletarian movement;^[1] they display much more condescension to the Syndicalists than the other Parliamentary Socialists; they are inclined to assert that the workers' organisations will come to understand in the end that they cannot do better than to put themselves under their tuition. It seems to me that Jaurès himself, when writing the Histoire socialiste of '93, thought more than once of the teachings which this past, a thousand times dead, might yield to him for the conduct of the present.

Proper attention has not always been given to the great changes which have taken place since 1870 in the way people judge the revolution; yet these changes must be considered if we wish to understand contemporary ideas relative to violence.

For a very long time the Revolution appeared to be essentially a succession of glorious wars, which a people famished for liberty and carried away by the noblest passions had maintained against a coalition of all the powers of oppression and error. Riots and coups d'état, the struggles between parties often destitute of any scruple and the banishment of the vanquished, the Parliamentary debates and the adventures of illustrious men, in a word, all the events of its political history were in the eyes of our fathers only very secondary accessories to the wars of liberty.

For about twenty-five years the form of government in France had been at issue; after campaigns before which the memories of Caesar and Alexander paled the charter of 1814 had definitely incorporated in the national tradition, the Parliamentary system, Napoleonic legislation, and the Church established by the Concordat; war had given an irrevocable judgment whose preambles, as Proudhon said, had been dated from Valmy, from Jemmapes, and from fifty other battlefields, and whose conclusions^[2] had been received at Saint-Ouen by Louis XVIII.^[3] Protected by the prestige of the wars of liberty, the new institutions had become inviolable, and the ideology which was built up to explain them became a faith which seemed for a long time to have for the French the value which the revelation of Jesus has for the Catholics.

From time to time eloquent writers have thought that they could set up a current of reaction against these doctrines, and the Church had hopes that it might get the better of what it called the error of liberalism. A long period of admiration for medieval art and of contempt for the period of Voltaire seemed to threaten the new ideology with ruin; but all these attempts to return to the past left no trace except in literary history. There were times when those in power governed in the least liberal manner, but the principles of the modern régime were never seriously threatened. This fact could not be explained by the power of reason and by some law of progress; its cause lies simply in the epic of the wars which had filled the French soul with an enthusiasm analogous to that provoked by religions.

This miltary epic gave an epical colour to all the events of internal politics; party struggles were thus raised to the level of an Iliad; politicians became giants, and the revolution, which Joseph de Maistre had denounced as satanical, was made divine. The bloody scenes of the Terror were episodes without great significance by the side of the enormous hecatombs of war, and means were found to envelop them in a dramatic mythology; riots were elevated to the same rank as illustrious battles; and calmer historians vainly endeavoured to bring the Revolution and the Empire down to the plane of common history. The prodigious triumphs of the revolutionary and imperial arms rendered all criticism impossible.

The war of 1870 changed all that. At the moment of the fall of the Second Empire the immense majority in France still firmly believed the legends which had been spread about regarding the armies of volunteers, the miraculous rôle of the representatives of the people, and the improvised generals; experience produced a cruel disillusion. Tocqueville had written: "The Convention created the policy of the impossible, the theory of furious madness, the cult of blind audacity."^[4] The disasters of 1870 brought the country back to practical, prudent, and prosaic conditions; the first result of these disasters was the development of the conception most opposed to that spoken of by Tocqueville; this was the idea of opportunism, which has now been introduced even into Socialism.

Another consequence was the change that took place in all revolutionary values, and notably the modification in the opinions which were held on the subject of violence.

After 1871 everybody in France thought only of the search for the most suitable means of setting the country on its feet again. Taine endeavoured to apply the methods of the most scientific psychology to this question, and he looked upon the history of the Revolution as a social experiment. He hoped to be able to make quite clear the danger presented in his opinion by the Jacobin spirit, and thus to induce his contemporaries to change the course of French politics by abandoning ideas which had seemed incorporated in the national tradition, and which were all the more solidly rooted in people's minds because nobody had ever discussed their origin. Taine failed in his enterprise, as Le Play and Renan failed, as all those will fail who try to found an intellectual and moral reform on investigations, on scientific syntheses, and on demonstrations.

It cannot be said, however, that Taine's immense labour was accomplished to no purpose; the history of the Revolution was thoroughly overhauled; the military epic no longer dominates people's judgments about political events. The life of men, the inner workings of factions, the material needs which determine the tendencies of the great masses have now come into the foreground. In the speech which he made on September 24, 1905, at the inauguration of the monument to Taine at Vouziers, the deputy Hubert, while giving all homage to the great and many-sided talent of his illustrious compatriot, expressed a regret that the epic side of the Revolution had been disregarded by him in a systematic manner. These are superfluous regrets; the epic vision can henceforth no longer govern that political history; an idea of the grotesque effects to which this constant desire to return to the old methods may lead can be obtained by reading Jaurès's Histoire socialiste. In vain does Jaurès revive all the most melodramatic images of the old rhetoric; the only effect he manages to produce is one of absurdity.

The prestige of the great revolutionary days has been directly hit by the comparison with contemporary civil struggles; there was nothing during the Revolution which could bear comparison with the battles which ensanguined Paris in 1848 and in 1871; July 14 and August 10 seem to us now mere scuffles which would not have made an energetic Government tremble.

There is yet another reason, still hardly recognised by professional writers on revolutionary history, which has contributed a great deal towards taking all the romance out of these events. There can be no national epic about things which the people cannot picture to themselves as reproducible in a near future; popular poetry implies the future much more than the past; it is for this reason that the adventures of the Gauls, of Charlemagne, of the Crusades, of Joan of Arc cannot form the subject of a narrative capable of moving any but literary people.^[5] Since the people have become convinced that contemporary Governments cannot be overthrown by riots like those of July 14 and August 10, they have ceased to look upon the events of these days as epical. Parliamentary Socialists, who would like to utilise the memory of the Revolution to excite the ardour of the people, and who ask them at the same time to put all their confidence in Parliamentarism, are very inconsistent, for they are themselves helping to ruin the epic, whose prestige they wish to maintain in their speeches.

But then what remains of the Revolution when we have taken away the epic of the wars against the coalition, and of that of the victories of the populace? What remains is not very savoury: police operations, proscriptions, and sittings of servile courts of law. The employment of the force of the State against the vanquished shocks us all the more because so many of the coryphées of the Revolution were soon to be distinguished among the servants of Napoleon, and to employ the same police zeal on behalf of the Emperor as they did on behalf of the Terror. In a country which had been convulsed by so many changes of Government, and which consequently had known so many recantations, political justice had something particularly odious about it, because the criminal of to-day might become the judge of to-morrow: General Malet could say before the council of war which condemned him in 1812 that had he succeeded he would have had for his accomplices the whole of France and his judges themselves.^[6]

It is useless to carry these reflections any further; the slightest observation will suffice to show that proletarian violence recalls a mass of painful memories of those past times: instinctively, people start thinking of the committees of revolutionary inspection, of the brutalities of suspicious agents, coarsened and frightened by fear, of the tragedies of the guillotine. You understand, therefore, why Parliamentary Socialists make such great efforts to persuade the public that they have the souls of sensitive shepherds, that their hearts are overflowing with good feeling, and that they have only one passion—hatred of violence. They would readily give themselves out to be the protectors of the middle class against proletarian violence; and in order to heighten their prestige as humanitarians they never fail to shun all contact with anarchists; sometimes, even, they shun this contact with an abruptness which is not without a certain mixture of cowardice and hypocrisy.

When Millerand was the unquestioned chief of the Socialist party in Parliament, he advised his party to be afraid to frighten; and, as a matter of fact, Socialist deputies would obtain very few votes if they did not manage to convince the general public that they are very reasonable people, great enemies of the old practices of bloody men, and solely occupied in meditating on the philosophy of future law. In a long speech given on October 8, 1905, at Limoges, Jaurès strove to reassure the middle class much more than had been done hitherto; he informed them that victorious Socialism would show princely generosity, and that he was studying the different ways in which the former holders of property might be indemnified. A few years ago Millerand promised indemnities to the poor (Petite République, March 25, 1898); now everybody will be put on the same footing, and Jaurès assures us that Vandervelde has written things on this subject full of profundity. I am quite willing to take his word for it!

The social revolution is conceived by Jaurès as a kind of bankruptcy; substantial annuities will be given to the middle class of to-day: then from generation to generation these annuities will decrease. These plans must often seem very alluring to financiers accustomed to draw great advantages from bankruptcies; I have no doubt that the shareholders of L'Humanité think these ideas marvellous; they will be made liquidators of the bankruptcy, and will pocket large fees, which will compensate them for the losses which this newspaper has caused them.

In the eyes of the contemporary middle class everything is admirable which dispels the idea of violence. Our middle class desire to die in peace—after them the deluge.

II

Let us now examine the violence of '93 a little more closely, and endeavour to see whether it can be identified with that of contemporary Syndicalism.

Fifteen years ago Drumont, speaking of Socialism and of its future, wrote these sentences, which then appeared exceedingly paradoxical to many people: "The historian, who is always somewhat of a prophet, might say to the Conservatives, 'Salute the working-men leaders of the Commune, you will never see their like again! … Those who are to come will be malicious, wicked, and vindictive in a different way from the men of 1871. Henceforward, a new feeling takes possession of the French proletariat: hatred.'"^[7] These were not the airy words of a man of letters: Drumont learned what he knew of the Commune and the Socialist world from Malon, of whom he gave a very appreciative portrait in his book.

This sinister prediction was founded on the idea that the working man was getting farther and farther away from the national tradition, and nearer to the middle class, which is much more accessible than he is to bad feeling. "It was the middle-class element," said Drumont, "which was most ferocious in the Commune, the vicious and bohemian middle class of the Latin Quarter; the popular element, amid this dreadful crisis, remained human, that is French…. Among the internationalists who formed part of the Commune four only pronounced themselves in favour of violent measures."^[8] As will be seen, Drumont has got no farther than that naïve philosophy of the eighteenth century, and of the Utopians prior to 1848, according to which men will follow the injunctions of the moral law all the better for not having been spoiled by civilisation; in descending from the superior classes to the poorer classes a greater number of good qualities are found; good is only natural to individuals who have remained close to a state of nature.

This theory about the nature of the classes led Drumont to a rather curious historical speculation: none of our revolutions was so bloody as the first, because it was conducted by the middle class—"in proportion as the people became more intimately mixed up with revolutions, they became less ferocious"—"the proletariat, when, for the first time, it had acquired an effective share of authority, was infinitely less sanguinary than the middle class."^[9] We cannot remain content with the easy explanations which satisfied Drumont; but it is certain that something has changed since '93. We have to ask ourselves whether the ferocity of the old revolutionaries was not due to reasons depending on the past history of the middle class, so that in confusing the abuses of the revolutionary middle-class force of '93 with the violence of our revolutionary Syndicalists a grave error would be committed: the word revolutionary would, in this case, have two perfectly distinct meanings.

The Third Estate which filled the assemblies in the revolutionary epoch, what may be called the official Third Estate, was not a body of agriculturists and leaders of industry; power was never then in the hands of manufacturers, but in the hands of the lawyers (basochiens).^[10] Taine was very much struck by the fact that out of 577 deputies of the Third Estate in the Constituent Assembly, there were 373 "unknown barristers and lawyers of a minor order, notaries, King's attorneys, court-roll commissioners, judges and recorders of the presidial bench, bailiffs and lieutenants of the bailiwick, simple practitioners shut up since their youth within the narrow circle of a mediocre jurisdiction or the routine of continual scribbling, without any other escape than philosophical wanderings through imaginary spaces under the guidance of Rousseau or of Raynal."^[11] We have some difficulty nowadays in understanding the importance which lawyers possessed in ancient France; but a multitude of jurisdictions existed; property owners were extremely punctilious in going to law about questions which appear to us nowadays as of very minor importance, but which seemed of enormous importance to them on account of the dovetailing of feudal law with the law of property; functionaries of a judicial order were found everywhere, and they enjoyed the greatest prestige with the people.

This class brought to the Revolution a great deal of administrative capacity; it was owing to them that the country was able to pass easily through the crisis which shook it for ten years, and that Napoleon was able to reconstruct regular administrative services so rapidly; but this class also brought a mass of prejudices which caused those of its representatives who occupied high positions to commit grave errors. It is impossible to understand the character of Robespierre, for example, if we compare him to the politicians of to-day; we must always see in him the serious lawyer, taken up with his duties, anxious not to tarnish the professional honour of an orator of the bar; moreover, he had literary leanings and was a disciple of Rousseau. He had scruples about legality which astonish the historians of to-day; when he was obliged to come to supreme resolutions and to defend himself before the Convention, he showed a simplicity which bordered on stupidity. The famous law of the 22nd Prairial, with which he has been so often reproached and which gave so rapid a pace to the revolutionary courts, is the masterpiece of his type of mind; the whole of the Old Régime is found in it, expressed in clear-cut formulas.

One of the fundamental ideas of the Old Régime had been the employment of the penal procedure to ruin any power which was an obstacle to the monarchy. It seems that in all primitive societies the penal law, at its inception, was a protection granted to the chief and to a few privileged persons whom he honoured with special favour; it is only much later that the legal power serves to safeguard, indiscriminately, the persons and goods of all the inhabitants of a country. The Middle Ages being a return to the customs of very ancient times, it was natural that they should reproduce exceedingly archaic ideas about justice, and that the courts of justice should come to be considered as instruments of royal greatness. An historical accident happened to favour the extraordinary development of this theory of criminal administration. The Inquisition furnished a model for courts which, set in motion on very slight pretexts, prosecuted people who embarrassed authority, with great persistence, and made it impossible for them to harm the latter. The monarchy borrowed from the Inquisition many of its procedures, and nearly always followed the same principles.

The king constantly demanded of his courts of justice that they should work for the enlargement of his territories; it seems strange to us nowadays that Louis XIV. should have had annexations proclaimed by commissions of magistrates; but he was following the old tradition; many of his predecessors had used Parliament to confiscate feudal manors for very arbitrary motives. Justice, which seems to us nowadays created to secure the prosperity of production, and to permit its free and constantly widening development, seemed created in former days to secure the greatness of the monarchy: its essential aim was not justice, hut the welfare of the State.

It was very difficult to establish strict discipline in the services set up by royalty for war and administration. Enquiries had continually to be made in order to punish unfaithful or disobedient employees; kings employed, for this purpose, men taken from their courts of law; thus they came to confuse acts of disciplinary surveillance with the repression of crimes. Lawyers must transform everything according to their habits of mind; in this way negligence, ill-will, or carelessness became revolt against authority, crime, or treason.

The Revolution piously gathered up this tradition, gave an importance to imaginary crimes which was all the greater because its political courts of law carried on their operations in the midst of a populace maddened by the seriousness of the peril; it seemed quite natural to explain the defeats of generals by criminal intentions, and to guillotine people who had not been able to realise hopes fostered by a public opinion, that had returned to the superstitions of childhood. Our penal code contains not a few paradoxical articles dating from this time; nowadays it is not easy to understand how a citizen can be seriously accused of plotting or of keeping up a correspondence with foreign powers or their agents in order to induce them to begin hostilities, or to enter into war with France, or to furnish them with the means therefor. Such a crime supposes that the State can be imperilled by the act of one person; this appears scarcely credible to us.^[12]

Actions against enemies of the king were always conducted in an exceptional manner; the procedure was simplified as much as possible; flimsy proofs which would not have sufficed for ordinary crimes were accepted; the endeavour was to make a terrible and profoundly intimidating example. All this is to be found in Robespierre's legislation. The law of the 22nd Prairial lays down rather vague definitions of political crime, so as not to let any enemy of the Revolution escape; and the kind of proofs required are worthy of the purest tradition of the Old Régime and of the Inquisition. "The proof necessary to condemn the enemies of the people is any kind of document, material, moral, verbal or written, which can naturally obtain the assent of any just and reasonable mind. Juries in giving their verdict should be guided solely by what love of their country indicates to their conscience; their aim is the triumph of the republic and, the ruin of its enemies." We have in this celebrated Terrorist law the strongest expression of the theory of the predominance of the State.^[13]

The philosophy of the eighteenth century happened to render these methods still more formidable. It professed, in fact, to formulate a return to natural law; humanity had been till then corrupted by the fault of a small number of people whose interest it had been to deceive it; but the true means of returning to the principles of primitive goodness, of truth, and of justice had at last been discovered; all opposition to so excellent a reform, one so easy to apply and so certain of success, was the most criminal act imaginable; the innovators were resolved to show themselves inexorable in destroying the evil influence which bad citizens might exercise for the purpose of hindering the regeneration of humanity. Indulgence was a culpable weakness, for it amounted to nothing less than the sacrifice of the happiness of multitudes to the caprices of incorrigible people, who gave proof of an incomprehensible obstinacy, who refused to recognise evidence, and only lived on lies.

From the Inquisition to the political justice of the monarchy, and from this to the revolutionary courts of justice, there was a constant progress towards greater severity in laws, the extension of the use of force, and the amplification of authority. For a considerable time the Church had felt doubts about the value of the exceptional methods practised by its inquisitors.^[14] The monarchy, especially when it had reached its full maturity, was troubled with very few scruples about the matter; but the Revolution displayed the scandal of its superstitious cult of the State quite openly, in the full light of day.

A reason of an economical order gave to the State at that time a strength which the Church had never possessed. At the beginning of modern times, Governments, by their maritime expeditions and the encouragement they gave to industry, had played a very great part in production; but in the eighteenth century this part had become exceptionally important in the minds of theorists. People at that time had their heads full of great projects; they conceived kingdoms as vast companies undertaking to colonise and cultivate new lands, and they made efforts to ensure the good working of these companies. Thus the State was the god of the reformers. "They desire," wrote Tocqueville, "to borrow the authority of the central power and to use it to break up and to remake everything according to a new plan which they have themselves conceived; the central power alone appears to them capable of accomplishing such a task. The power of the State must be limitless, as its rights,^[15] they say; all that is necessary is to persuade the State to make a suitable use of this power."^[16] The physiocrats seemed ready to sacrifice individuals to the common weal; they had no great love of liberty, and thought the idea of an equipoise of powers absurd; they hoped to convert the State; their system is defined by Tocqueville as "a democratic despotism"; the Government would have been in theory the representative of everybody, controlled by an enlightened public opinion; practically it was an absolute master.^[17] One of the things which most astonished Tocqueville in the course of his studies of the Old Régime is the admiration felt by the physiocrats for China, which appeared to them as the type of good government, because in that country there were only valets and clerks carefully catalogued and chosen by competition.^[18]

Since the Revolution there has been such an upheaval of ideas that we have considerable difficulty in understanding correctly the conceptions of our fathers.^[19] The capitalist economic system has thrown full light on the extraordinary power of the individual unaided by the State; the confidence which the men of the eighteenth century had in the industrial capacities of the State seems puerile to everybody who has studied production elsewhere than in the insipid books of the sociologists, which still preserve very carefully the cult for the blunders of the past; the law of nature has become an inexhaustible subject of banter for people who have the slightest knowledge of history; the employment of the courts of law as a means of coercing a political adversary arouses universal indignation, and people with ordinary common sense hold that it ruins all judicial conceptions.

Sumner Maine points out that the relationships of governments and citizens have been completely overhauled since the end of the eighteenth century; formerly the State was always supposed to be good and wise, consequently any attempt to hinder its working was looked upon as a grave offence; the Liberal system supposes, on the contrary, that the citizen, left free, chooses the better part, and that he exercises the first of his rights in criticising the Government, which has passed from the position of master to that of servant.^[20] Maine does not say what is the cause of this transformation; the cause seems to me to be above all of an economic order. In the new state of things political crime is an act of simple revolt which cannot carry with it disgrace of any kind, which is combated for reasons of prudence, but which no longer merits the name of crime, for its author in no way resembles a criminal.

We are not perhaps better, more human, more sensitive to the misfortunes of others than were the men of '93; and I should even be rather disposed to assert that the country is probably less moral than it was at that time; but we are no longer dominated to the same extent that our fathers were by this superstition of the God-State, to which they sacrificed so many victims. The ferocity of the members of the National Convention is easily explained by the influence of the conceptions which the Third Estate derived from the detestable practices of the Old Régime.

III

It would be strange if the old ideas were quite dead; the Dreyfus case showed us that the immense majority of the officers and priests still conceived justice in the manner of the Old Régime and looked upon condemnations for "State reasons" as quite natural.^[21] That should not surprise us, for these two types of people, never having had any direct relationship with production, can understand nothing about law. The revolt of the enlightened public against the practices of the Minister of War was so great that for a moment it might have been believed that "reasons of State" would no longer be admitted as a pretext for condemnation (outside the two types mentioned above), except by the readers of the Petit Journal, whose mentality would thus be characterised and shown to be much the same as that which existed a century ago. We know now, alas! by cruel experience, that the State had its high priests and its fervent worshippers even among the Dreyfusards.

The Dreyfus case was scarcely over when the Government of "Republican defence" began another political prosecution, in the name of state policy, and accumulated almost as many lies as the Etat-Major (army council) had accumulated in the Dreyfus trial. No serious person nowadays can doubt that the great plot for which Déroulède, Buffet, and Lur-Saluces were condemned was an invention of the police; the siege of what has been called the Fort Chabrol was arranged in order to make Parisians believe that they had been on the eve of a civil war. The victims of this judicial crime were granted an amnesty, but the amnesty should not have sufficed: if the Dreyfusards had been sincere they should have demanded a recognition by the Senate of the scandalous error which the lies of the police had caused it to commit; on the contrary, they seem to have seen nothing that violated the principles of eternal justice, in their continued support of a condemnation founded on the most evident fraud.

Jaurès and many other eminent Dreyfusards commended General André and Combes for having organised a regular system of secret accusations. Kautsky warmly reproached him for his conduct; the German writer demanded that Socialists should not continue to represent "the wretched practices of the middle-class Republic" as great democratic actions, and that they should remain "faithful to the principle which declares that the informer is the worst kind of rascal" (Débats, November 13, 1904). The saddest thing about this affair was that Jaurès asserted that Colonel Hartmann, who protested against the system of fiches (secret reports), had himself employed similar methods;^[22] the latter wrote to him: "I pity you for this—that you have come to defend to-day, and by such means, the guilty acts which, with us, you condemned a few years ago; I pity you, that you should believe yourself obliged to make the Republican form of Government responsible for the vile proceedings of the police spies who dishonour it" (Débats, November 5, 1904).

Experience has always shown us hitherto that revolutionaries plead "reasons of State" as soon as they get into power, that they then employ police methods and look upon justice as a weapon which they may use unfairly against their enemies. Parliamentary Socialists do not escape the universal rule; they preserve the old cult of the State; they are therefore prepared to commit all the misdeeds of the Old Régime and of the Revolution.

A fine collection of platitudinous political maxims might be composed by going through Jaurès's Histoire socialiste. I have never had the patience to read the 1824 pages devoted to the story of the Revolution between August 10, 1792, and the fall of Robespierre; I have simply turned over the leaves of this tedious book, and seen that it contained a mixture of a philosophy worthy of M. Pantalon and a policy fitting a purveyor to the guillotine. For a long time I had reckoned that Jaurès would be capable of every ferocity against the vanquished; I saw that I had not been mistaken; but I should not have thought that he was capable of so much platitude: in his eyes the vanquished are always in the wrong, and victory fascinates our great defender of eternal justice so much that he is ready to consent to every proscription demanded of him: "Revolutions," he says, "claim from a man the most frightful sacrifices, not only of his rest, not only of his life, but of human tenderness and pity."^[23] Why write so much, then, about the inhumanity of the executioners of Dreyfus? They also sacrificed "human tenderness" to what appeared to them to be the safety of the country.

A few years ago the Republicans were extremely indignant with the Vicomte de Vogüé, who, when receiving Hanotaux into the French Academy, called the coup d'état of 1851 "a somewhat harsh police exploit."^[24] Jaurès, taught by revolutionary history, now reasons in exactly the same manner as the jovial vicomte;^[25] he praises, for example, "the policy of vigour and of wisdom" which consisted in forcing the Convention to expel the Girondins" with a certain appearance of legality."^[26]

The massacres of September 1792 embarrass him somewhat; legality is not very apparent here, but he has big words and bad reasons for every ugly cause; Danton's conduct was not very worthy of admiration at the time of these melancholy happenings, but Jaurès must excuse him, since Danton was triumphant during this period. "He did not think it was his duty as a revolutionary and patriotic minister to enter upon a struggle with these misguided popular forces. How can we refine the metal of the bells when they are sounding the alarm of imperilled liberty?"^[27] It seems to me that Cavaignac might have explained his conduct in the Dreyfus case in the same way. To the people who accused him of being hand in hand with the Anti-Semites, he might have answered that his duty as a patriotic minister did not compel him to enter upon a struggle with the misguided populace, and that on the days when the safety of national defence is at stake we cannot refine the metal of the bells which are sounding the alarm of the country in danger.

When he comes to the period when Camille Desmoulins sought to stir up a movement of opinion strong enough to stop the Terror, Jaurès speaks energetically against this attempt. He acknowledges, however, a few pages farther on, that the guillotine system could not last for ever; but Desmoulins, having succumbed, is wrong in the eyes of our humble worshipper of success. Jaurès accuses the author of the Vieux Cordelier of forgetting the conspiracies, the treasons, the corruptions, and all the dreams with which the Terrorists fed their infatuated imaginations; he is even ironical enough to speak of "free France!" and he brings forth this sentence, worthy of a Jacobin pupil of Joseph Prudhomme: "The knife of Desmoulins was chiselled with an incomparable art; but he planted it in the heart of the Revolution."^[28] When Robespierre no longer commands the majority in the Convention he is, as a matter of course, put to death by the other Terrorists, in virtue of the legitimate working of the Parliamentary institutions of that time; but to appeal to mere public opinion against the Government leaders, that was the "crime" of Desmoulins. His crime was also that committed by Jaurès at the time he defended Dreyfus against the great leaders of the army and the Government; how many times has not Jaurès been accused of compromising the national defence? But that time is already a long way off; and our orator at that period, not having yet tasted the advantages of power, did not possess a theory of the State as ferocious as that which he possesses to-day.

I think that I have said sufficient to enable me to conclude that if by chance our Parliamentary Socialists get possession of the reins of Government, they will prove to be worthy successors of the Inquisition, of the Old Régime, and of Robespierre; political courts will be at work on a large scale, and we may even suppose that the unfortunate law of 1848, which abolished the death penalty in political matters, will be repealed. Thanks to this reform, we might again see the State triumphing by the hand of the executioner.

Proletarian acts of violence have no resemblance to these proscriptions; they are purely and simply acts of war; they have the value of military demonstrations, and serve to mark the separation of classes. Everything in war is carried on without hatred and without the spirit of revenge: in war the vanquished are not killed; non-combatants are not made to bear the consequences of the disappointments which the armies may have experienced on the fields of battle;^[29] force is then displayed according to its own nature, without ever professing to borrow anything from the judicial proceedings which society sets up against criminals.

The more Syndicalism develops, by abandoning the old superstitions which come to it from the Old Régime and from the Church—through the men of letters, professors of philosophy, and historians of the Revolution,—the more will social conflicts assume the character of a simple struggle, similar to those of armies on campaign. We cannot censure too severely those who teach the people that they ought to carry out the highly idealistic decrees of a progressive justice. Their efforts will only result in the maintenance of those ideas about the State which provoked the bloody acts of '93, whilst the idea of a class war, on the contrary, tends to refine the conception of violence.

IV

Syndicalism in France is engaged on an antimilitarist propaganda, which shows clearly the immense distance which separates it from Parliamentary Socialism in its conception of the nature of the State. Many newspapers believe that all this is merely an exaggerated humanitarian movement, provoked by the articles of Hervé; this is a great error. We should be misconceiving the nature of the movement if we supposed that it was merely a protest against harshness of discipline, against the length of military service, or against the presence, in the higher ranks, of officers hostile to the existing institutions of the country;^[30] these are the reasons which led many middle-class people to applaud declamations against the army at the time of the Dreyfus case, but they are not the Syndicalists' reasons.

The army is the clearest and the most tangible of all possible manifestations of the State, and the one which is most firmly connected with its origins and traditions. Syndicalists do not propose to reform the State, as the men of the eighteenth century did; they want to destroy it,^[31] because they wish to realise this idea of Marx's that the Socialist revolution ought not to culminate in the replacement of one governing minority by another minority.^[32] The Syndicalists outline their doctrine still more clearly when they give it a more ideological aspect, and declare themselves antipatriotic—following the example of the Communist Manifesto.

It is impossible that there should be the slightest understanding between Syndicalists and official Socialists on this question; the latter, of course, speak of breaking up everything, but they attack men in power rather than power itself; they hope to possess the State forces, and they are aware that on the day when they control the Government they will have need of an army; they will carry on foreign politics, and consequently they in their turn will have to praise the feeling of devotion to the fatherland.

Parliamentary Socialists perceive that antipatriotism is deeply rooted in the minds of Socialist workmen, and they make great efforts to reconcile the irreconcilable; they are anxious not to oppose too strongly ideas to which the proletariat has become attached, but at the same time they cannot abandon their cherished State, which promises them so many delights. They have stooped to the most comical oratorical acrobatics in order to get over the difficulty. For instance, after the sentence of the Court of Assizes of the Seine, condemning Hervé and the antimilitarists, the National Council of the Socialist party passed a resolution branding this "verdict, due to hatred and fear," declaring that a class justice could not "respect liberty of opinion," protesting against the employment of troops in strikes, and affirming "resolutely the necessity for action, and for an international understanding among the workers, for the suppression of war" (Socialiste, January 20, 1906). All this is very clever, but the fundamental question is avoided.

Thus it cannot any longer be contested that there is an absolute opposition between revolutionary Syndicalism and the State; this opposition takes in France the particularly harsh form of antipatriotism, because the politicians have devoted all their knowledge and ability to the task of spreading confusion in people's minds about the essence of Socialism. On the plane of patriotism there can be no compromises and half-way positions; it is therefore on this plane that the Syndicalists have been forced to take their stand when middle-class people of every description employed all their powers of seduction to corrupt Socialism and to alienate the workers from the revolutionary idea. They have been led to deny the idea of patriotism by one of those necessities which are met with at all times in the course of history,^[33] and which philosophers have sometimes great difficulty in explaining—because the choice is imposed by external conditions, and not freely made for reasons drawn from the nature of things. This character of historical necessity gives to the existing antipatriotic movement a strength which it would be useless to attempt to dissimulate by means of sophistries.^[34]

We have the right to conclude from the preceding analysis that Syndicalist violence, perpetrated in the course of strikes by proletarians who desire the overthrow of the State, must not be confused with those acts of savagery which the superstition of the State suggested to the revolutionaries of '93, when they had power in their hands and were able to oppress the conquered—following the principles which they had received from the Church and from the Monarchy. We have the right to hope that a Socialist revolution carried out by pure Syndicalists would not be defiled by the abominations which sullied the middle-class revolutions.

1. The reader may usefully refer to a very interesting chapter of Bernstein's book, Socialisme théorique et socialdémocratie pratique, pp. 47–63. Bernstein, who knows nothing of the aims of our present-day syndicalism, has not, in my opinion, drawn from Marxism all that it contains. His book, moreover, was written at a time when it was impossible still to understand the revolutionary movement, in view of which these reflections are written.
2. [The word "conclusions" is employed in two senses in civil proceedings. Each counsel presents his claims and arguments to the court in writing in a document which is called "conclusion." On the other hand, at the end of the case the ministre public states what, in his opinion, is the decision the court ought to make for the best administration of Justice; these are the "conclusions" of the ministre public. The judgment always declares that the ministre public has been heard in his "conclusion." Proudhon uses the word in the second sense. On the return of the Bourbons, Louis XVIII. issued a proclamation in which he stated the principles on which it seemed to him the government of the country must henceforth rest.—Trans. Note.]
3. Proudhon, La Guerre et la paix, livre v. chap. iii.
4. Tocqueville, Mélanges, p. 189.
5. It is very remarkable that in the seventeenth century Boileau had already pronounced against the supernatural Christian epic; this was because his contemporaries, however religious they might have been, did not expect that angels would come to help Vauban to capture fortresses; they did not doubt what was related in the Bible, but they did not see matter in it for epics, because these marvels were not destined to be reproduced.
6. Ernest Hamel, Histoire de la conspiration du général Malet, p. 241. According to some newspapers, Jaurès, in his evidence before the Court of Assizes of the Seine on June 5, 1907, in the Bousquet-Lévy trial, said that the police officers would show more consideration for the accused, Bousquet, when he had become a legislator. [Bousquet was the secretary of the bakers' syndicate, with whom the police dealt rather harshly. As he was a good orator Jaurès looked upon him as a future deputy.—Trans. Note.]
7. Drumont, La Fin d'un monde, pp. 137–138.
8. Drumont, op. cit. p. 128.
9. Drumont, op. cit. p. 136.
10. Basoche was a name given somewhat ironically to all the people employed in the law courts—principally solicitors and ushers.
11. Taine, La Révolution, tome i. p. 155.
12. Yet this was the article which was applied to Dreyfus, without anybody, moreover, having attempted to prove that France had been in danger.
13. The details themselves of this law can only be explained by comparing them with the rules of the old penal law.
14. Modern authors, by taking literally certain instructions of the papacy, have been able to maintain that the Inquisition had been relatively indulgent, having regard to the customs of the time.
15. Tocqueville is probably alluding here to the maxims of Blackstone on the unlimited power of the English Parliament. The economists of the eighteenth century thought that the State had the right to do everything, since it was the expression of "reason," and no single force could oppose the action of this "reason."
16. Tocqueville, L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution, p. 100.
17. Tocqueville, op. cit. pp. 235–240.
18. Tocqueville, op. cit. p. 241.
19. In the history of judicial ideas in France, full consideration must be given to the dividing up of landed property, which, by multiplying the independent heads of productive units, contributed more to the spread of judicial ideas among the masses than was ever done among the literate classes by the finest treatises on philosophy.
20. Sumner Maine, Essais sur le gouvernement populaire, French trans., p. 20.
21. The extraordinary and illegal severity which was brought to bear in the application of the penalty is explained by the fact that the aim of the trial was to terrify certain spies who, by their situation, were out of reach; whether Dreyfus was guilty or innocent troubled his accusers little; the essential thing was to protect the State from treachery and to reassure the French people, who were maddened by the fear of war.
22. In L'Humanité of November 17, 1904, there is a letter from Paul Guieysse and from Vazeilles, declaring that nothing of this kind can be imputed to Colonel Hartmann. Jaurès follows this letter with a strange commentary; he considers that the informers acted in perfect good faith, and he regrets that the colonel should have furnished "imprudently, further matter for the systematic campaign of the reactionary newspapers." Jaurès has no suspicion that this commentary made his own case much worse, and that it was not unworthy of a disciple of Escobar.
23. J. Jaurès, La Convention, p. 1732.
24. This was on March 24, 1898, at a particularly critical moment of the Dreyfus case, when the Nationalists were asking that agitators and enemies of the army should be swept away. J. Reinach says that De Vogüé openly invited the army to begin again the work of 1850 (Histoire de l'affaire Dreyfus, tome iii. p. 545).
25. De Vogüé has the habit in his polemics of thanking his adversaries for having given him much amusement; that is why I take the liberty of calling him jovial, although his writings are rather soporific.
26. J. Jaurès, op. cit. p. 1434.
27. J. Jaurès, op. cit. p. 77.
28. J. Jaurès, op. cit. p. 1731.
29. I bring to notice here a fact which is perhaps not very well known: the Spanish war in the time of Napoleon was the occasion of innumerable atrocities, but Colonel Lafaille says that in Catalonia the murders and cruelties were never committed by Spanish soldiers who had been enlisted for some time and had become familiar with the usages of war (Mémoires sur les campagnes de Catalogne de 1808 à 1814, pp. 164–165).
30. According to Joseph Reinach, an error was committed after the war in choosing as generals former pupils of the military schools (Saint-Cyr and the Polytechnique). He said that the Jesuit colleges had sent many clericals to the School, and it would have been better to choose instead officers who had risen from the ranks; the generals would have then been less clerical. Loc. cit. pp. 555−556 (I believe that his system would not have had the result he imagined it would).
31. "The society which will organise production on the basis of a free and equal association of producers will transport the whole machinery of State to where its place will be henceforward—in the museum of antiquities, by the side of the spinning wheel and the bronze axe" (Engels, Les Origines de la Société, French trans, p. 281).
32. Manifeste communiste, translated, Andler, tome i. p. 39.
33. After the trial of Hervé, Léon Daudet wrote: "Those who followed this case were thrilled by the testimonies, by no means theatrical, of the trade union secretaries" (Libre Parole, December 31, 1905).
34. Yet Jaurès had the audacity to declare in the Chamber on May 11, 1907, that there was only "on the surface of the working-class movement a few paradoxical and outrageous formulas, which originated, not from the negation of the fatherland, but from condemnation of the abuse to which word and idea were so often put." Language like this could only have been used before an assembly which was entirely ignorant of the working-class movement.