Since the Revolution there has been such an upheaval of ideas that we have considerable difficulty in imder- standing correctly the conceptions of our fathers.* The capitalist economic system has thrown full light on the extraordinary power of the individual imaided 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 else- where 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 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."
■ Tocqueville, op. cit. pp. 235-240.
• Tocqueville, op. cit. p. 241.
* 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.
ii6 REFLECTIONS ON VIOLENCE 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 over- hauled 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.^ 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 \actims. The ferocity of the members of the National Convention is easily ex- plained by the influence of the conceptions which the Third Estate derived from the detestable practices of the Old Regime.
1 Sumner Maine, Essais sur le gouvernement populaire, French trauis., p. 20.
PREJUDICES AGAINST VIOLENCE 117 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 Regime and looked upon condemnations for *' State reasons" as quite natural.^ That should not surprise us, for these two t5^es of people, never having had any direct relationship with production, can under- stand 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 wor- shippers even among the Dreyfusards.
The Dreyfus case was scarcely over when the Govern- ment 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 Deroul^de, 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 1 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 weir.
ii8 REFLECTIONS ON VIOLENCE amnesty should not have sufficed: if the Dreyfusards had been sincere they should have demanded a recogni- tion by the Senate of the scandalous error which the Kes 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 condemna- tion founded on the most evident fraud.
Jaures and many other eminent Dreyfusards commended General Andre and Combes for having organised a regular system of secret accusations. Kautsky warmly re- proached him for his conduct; the German writer demanded that Socialists should not continue to repre- sent " 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 in- former is the worst kind of rascal " {Debats, November 13, 1904). The saddest thing about this affair was that Jaures asserted that Colonel Hartmann, who protested against the system of fiches (secret reports), had himself employed similar methods; ^ 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 " {Debats, November 5, 1904). Experience has always shown us hitherto that revolu- tionaries plead ** reasons of State " as soon as they get into power, that they then employ poHce methods and 1 In L'Humanite 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. Jaures 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." Jaures has no suspicion that this com- mentary made his own case much worse, and that it was not unworthy of a disciple of Escobar.
PREJUDICES AGAINST VIOLENCE iig 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 Regime and of the Revolution.
A fine collection of platitudinous political maxims might be composed by going through Jaur^s'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 Jaures would be capable of every ferocity against the van- quished; 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." ^ Why write so much, then, about the in- humanity 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 Vogii^, who, when receiving Hanotaux into the French Academy, called the coup d'etat of 1851 ** a somewhat harsh police exploit." ^ » 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 Vogu6 openly invited the army to begin again the work of 1850 (Histoire de V affaire Dreyfus, tome iii. p. 545).
I 120 REFLECTIONS ON VIOLENCE Jaurds, taught by revolutionary history, now reasons in exactly the same manner as the jovial vicomte; ^ 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." * 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 Jaur^ 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? " ' 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 mis- guided 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 soimding 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, Jaur^s 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. Jaur^s * De Vogu6 has the habit in his polemics of thanking his adversaries for having given him much amusement; that is why I take the Uberty of calling him jovial, although his writings are rather soporific.
PREJUDICES AGAINST VIOLENCE J2i 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." ^ 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 Jaur^s at the time he defended Dreyfus against the great leaders of the army and the Government; how many times has not Jaur^ 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 con- clude 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 Regime, and of Robespierre; political courts will be at work on a large scale, and we may even suppose that the unfortu- nate law of 1848, which abolished the death penalty in poUtical 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; 122 REFLECTIONS ON VIOLENCE 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; ^ force is then displayed according to its own nature, without ever professing to borrow any- thing 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 Regime and from the Church — through the men of letters, pro- fessors 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 Syndicahsm 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 Herve; this is a 1 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 {Mlmoires sur les campagnes de Catalogne de j8o8 d 1814, pp. 164-165).
PREJUDICES AGAINST VIOLENCE 123 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; ^ 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. Sjmdicalists do not propose to reform the State, as the men of the eighteenth century did; they want to destroy it,* 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.^ 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 1 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).
* " 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 SociitS, French trans, p. 281).
* Manifeste communiste, translated, Andler, tome i. p. 39.
124 REFLECTIONS ON VIOLENCE 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 Herv6 and the antimilitarists, the National Coimcil 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 inter- national understanding among the workers, for the sup- pression 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 particu- larly 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 PREJUDICES AGAINST VIOLENCE 125 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,* 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. 2 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 After the trial of Herve, L6on Daudet wrote: " Those who followed this case were thrilled by the testimonies, by no means theatrical, of the trade union secretaries " {JLihre Parole, December 31, 1905).
* Yet Jaur^s had the audacity to declare in the Chamber on May 11, 1907, that there was only " on the surface of the working-class move- ment 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 hke this could only have been used before an assembly which was entirely ignorant of the working-class movement.
CHAPTER IV CHAPTER IV THE PROLETARIAN STRIKE I. The confusion in Parliamentary Socialism and the clearness of the general strike — Myths in history — The value of the general strike proved by experience.
II. Researches made to perfect Marxism — Means of throwing light upon it, starting from the point of view of the general strike: class war; preparation for the revolution and absence of Utopias; irrevocable character of the revolution.
III. Scientific prejudices against the general strike; doubts about science — The clear and the obscure parts in thought — Economic incompetence of Parliaments.
Every time that we attempt to obtain an exact conception of the ideas behind proletarian violence we are forced to go back to the notion of the general strike; and this same conception may render many other services, and throw an miexpected Hght on all the obscure parts of Sociahsm. In the last pages of the first chapter I compared the general strike to the Napoleonic battle which definitely crushes an adversary; this comparison will help us to imderstand the part played by the general strike in the world of ideas.
Mihtary writers of to-day, when discussing the new methods of wau: necessitated by the employment of troops infinitely more numerous than those of Napoleon, equipped with arms much more deadly than those of his time, do THE PROLETARIAN STRIKE 127 not for all that imagine that wars will be decided in any other way than that of the Napoleonic battle. The new tactics proposed must fit into the drama Napoleon had conceived; the detailed development of the combat will doubtless be quite different from what it used to be, but the end must always be the catastrophic defeat of the enemy. The methods of military instruction are intended to prepare the soldier for thi& great and terrible action, in which everybody must be ready to take part at the first signal. From the highest to the lowest, the members of a really solid army have always in mind this catastrophic issue of international conflicts.
The revolutionary Syndicates argue about Socialist action exactly in the same manner as military writers argue about war; they restrict the whole of Socialism to the general strike; they look upon every combination as one that should culminate in this catastrophe; they see in each strike a reduced facsimile, an essay, a prepara- tion for the great final upheaval.
The new school, which calls itself Marxist, Syndicahst, and revolutionary, declared in favoiu: of the idea of the general strike as soon as it became clearly conscious of the true sense of its own doctrine, of the consequences of its activity, and of its own originality. It was thus led to leave the old official, Utopian, and political tabernacles, which hold the general strike in horror, and to laimch itself into the true current of the proletarian revolutionary movement; for a long time past the proletariat had made adherence to the principle of the general strike the test by means of which the Socialism of the workers was distinguished from that of the amateur revolutionaries.
Parliamentary Socialists can only obtain great influence if they can manage, by the use of a very confused language, to impose themselves on very diverse groups; for example, they must have working-men constituents simple enough to allow themselves to be duped by high-sovmding phrases i^S REFLECTIONS ON VIOLENCE about future collectivism; they are compelled to repre- sent themselves as profound philosophers to stupid middle- class people who wish to appear to be well informed about social questions; it is very necessary also for them to be able to exploit rich people who think that they are earning the gratitude of humanity by taking shares in the enterprises of Socialist politicians. This influence is founded on balderdash, and our bigwigs endeavour — sometimes only too successfully — to spread confusion among the ideas of their readers; they detest the general strike because all propaganda carried on from that point of view is too sociaUstic to please philanthropists.
In the mouths of these self-styled representatives of the proletariat all socialistic formulas lose their real sense. The class war still remains the great principle, but it must be subordinated to national solidarity.* IntemationaUsm is an article of faith about which the most moderate declare themselves ready to take the most solenm oaths; but patriotism also imposes sacred duties.* The emancipa- tion of the workers must be the work of the workers them- selves— their newspapers repeat this every day, — but real emancipation consists in voting for a professional poli- tician, in securing for him the means of obtaining a comfortable situation in the world, in subjecting oneself to a leader. In the end the State must disappear — and * The Petit Parisien, which makes a specialty of Socialist and working-class questions, warned strikers on March 31, 1907, that they " must never imagine that they are absolved from the observance of the ordinary social duties and responsibilities."
* At the time when the antimilitarists were beginning to occupy public attention, the Petit Parisien was distinguished by its patriotism: on October 8, 1905, it published an article on " The Sacred Duty " and on " The Worship of this Tricolor Flag which has carried all over the World our Glories and our Liberties "; on January i, 1906, it con- gratulated the Jury de la Seine: " The flag has been avenged for the insults flung by its detractors on this noble emblem. When it is carried through the streets it is saluted. The juries have done more than bow to it; they have gathered round it with respect." This is certainly very cautious Socialism.
THE PROLETARIAN STRIKE i^p they are very careful not to dispute what Engels has written on this subject — but this disappearance will take place only in a future so far distant that you must prepare yourself for it by using the State meanwhile as a means of providing the politicians with titbits; and the best means of bringing about the disappearance of the State consists in strengthening meanwhile the Governmental machine. This method of reasoning resembles that of Gribouille, who threw himself into the water in order to escape getting wet in the rain.
Whole pages could be filled with the bare outUnes of the contradictory, comical, and quack arguments which form the substance of the harangues of our great men; nothing embarrasses them, and they know how to combine, in pompous, impetuous, and nebulous speeches, the most absolute irreconcilabihty with the most supple opportun- ism. A learned exponent of Sociahsm has said that the art of reconciling opposites by means of nonsense is the most obvious result which he had got from the study of the works of Marx.i I confess my extreme incompetence in these difficult matters; moreover, I make no claim whatever to be counted among the people upon whom politicians confer the title of learned; yet I cannot easily bring myself to admit that this is the sum and substance of the Marxian philosophy.
The controversy between Jaur^sand Clemenceau demon- strated quite clearly that our Parliamentary Socialists can succeed in deceiving the pubhc only by their equivocation;