A Socialist Bookshelf
One of the plainest after-results of the Dreyfus affair, into which the socialists50 as well as the anarchists threw themselves with glee for the superb opportunity it offered to undermine patriotism and destroy the army, has been a cleavage between the more conservative and the more radical elements of the socialist party.
The primary cause of this division may be found in the fact that two socialists (one of whom, M. Millerand, had previously been decidedly militant) accepted portfolios in the coalition ministry which supervised the Dreyfus trial at Rennes and which survived it for a time. This official service had such a sobering effect, both upon the ministers themselves and upon their immediate following, that their socialism became frankly opportunist; and the more radical and doctrinaire among their fellow-socialists felt compelled, because of this, to withdraw from them their support. In like manner the socialist deputies who have helped to maintain the Combes ministry have been constrained to a similar opportunism. So it has come about that the French socialists, M. VAILLANT M. VAILLANT52 who formerly were, broadly speaking, all revolutionary, are now divided into the two distinct and even hostile camps51 of evolutionary socialists and revolutionary socialists.
With the evolutionary socialists—who are, perhaps, for being the less logical only the more philosophical—this book has, from the very nature of its subject, nothing to do. The revolutionary socialists alone concern us.
It is needless to say that doctrinaire socialism and doctrinaire anarchism are at opposite poles of the world of thought. Absolute authority is as much the ideal of the one as absolute liberty is the ideal of the other. For the anarchist the betterment of society depends primarily on the betterment of the individual, while for the socialist the betterment of the individual depends primarily on the betterment of society. The complete realisation of socialism presupposes the perfection of human machinery, and the complete realisation of anarchism the perfection of human nature. The theories of the vicarious atonement and salvation by character present, in another field, a somewhat analogous contrast. Nevertheless, these theoretically antithetical systems find in their antagonism to actual conditions so many points of contact that it is not always easy for an outsider to determine whether a given revolutionist is an anarchist or a revolutionary socialist, and not always easy, one more than half suspects, for a revolutionist to determine himself in which of the two classes he really belongs.
The revolutionary socialists, like the anarchists, are high-minded dreamers, who are bent on procuring happiness for the human kind. Unlike the anarchists, they participate in elections, and do not desire the abolition of the state (as is indicated by their use of the word citoyen, which the anarchists abhor); but they do wish for the downfall of the present state (with whose bad faith and impotence they are thoroughly disgusted) as the first step towards setting up the socialistic state, and they hold collective revolt the most likely means of effecting this downfall; all of which, in troubled periods, amounts to very much the same thing practically as if they abjured the state altogether. Like the anarchists, they demand the abolition of private property, and they are opposed, like them, to charity (as the term is popularly understood), to patriotism, and to armies. Like the anarchists, furthermore (though this does not seem to be a logical necessity for either), they are violently opposed to the church; and they are (with less inevitableness than the anarchists in the same matter) more or less hostile to marriage.
They do not advocate the individual overt act of violence (though they often sympathise with it when committed), and, hoping for social salvation from social machinery, neglect the propaganda par l’exemple. With these exceptions their methods of propaganda are identical with those of the anarchists. They dispense the word orally, as the anarchists dispense it by means of mass meetings, punchs-conférences, soupes-conférences, matinées-conférences, ballades propagandistes, soirées familiales, and amateur theatricals, and have a similar penchant for the chanson populaire.
The socialists have their special books and brochures and ingenious methods of circulating them and their special propagandist press, which includes several dailies, as well as weeklies and monthlies,54 and serves as a bond of union and a means of communication between individuals and groups; and they make a copious use of placards, manifestos, pictures, artistic posters, and souvenir postal cards.55
Anarchists and socialists unite in anti-clerical and anti-militarist mass meetings, in interfering riotously with public worship, in shouting, A bas l’Armée! and A bas la Patrie! They also unite in distributing to the conscripts manuals reciting their duties in the regiments, chief of which are disobedience and desertion; and they commemorate together many of the same anniversaries, especially those of the Mur des Fédérés57 (May) and of Etienne Dolet58 (August). It is at election times mainly that they try conclusions fiercely with each other, because of their antagonistic sentiments towards the exercise of the vote.
The revolutionary socialists esteem lightly trade-unions, except as a means of coercing ministries to paternalism, and take little interest in co-operation59 as practised at present; but they have something of the same faith as the anarchists that la grève générale, which several of their congresses have indorsed, and la pan-coopération will coincide with the revolution.
In a certain sense—and not so very far-fetched a sense, either—every political party in Paris is revolutionary, inasmuch as all the “outs” are willing to resort to revolutionary methods to overturn the statu quo and all the “ins” would be willing to resort to revolutionary methods to restore their respective dispensations if, by a turn of the wheel of fortune, they should become the “outs.”
The anarchists and the socialists are by no means the only bodies who find the Third Republic detestable, and who, to make way with it, would gladly descend into the street. The royalists and imperialists are reactionary revolutionists, only deterred from insurrection and a coup d’état by the absence of the magnetic man and the propitious occasion. The nationalists would pause at nothing that would enable them to substitute a plebiscitary for the present parliamentary republic, and the anti-Semites at nothing that would expel or dispossess the Jews. Rochefort and Drumont call themselves socialists; and Guérin’s organ, L’Anti-Juif, regularly carries this head-line, “Défendre tous les travailleurs, Combattre tous les spéculateurs.” L’Autorité, L’Intransigeant, La Libre Parole, and La Patrie are as truly revolutionary sheets as are Les Temps Nouveaux and Le Libertaire; while Paul de Cassagnac, Baron Legoux, Lur-Saluces, the gilded youth of the “Œillet Blanc” (“White Carnation”) who battered the President’s hat at Auteuil, Rochefort, Drumont, Guérin, Régis, and Déroulède are as much revolutionists as the socialist Jules Guesde or the anarchist Jean Grave.
Some time before his expulsion Déroulède said to his electors: “There is no other means of safety than a revolution at once popular and military, having at its head a civilian and a soldier, both loyally resolved to maintain the republic. To deliver France and the republic, there are three methods possible: the will of a man (that is, the coup d’état); the will of the people (that is, revolution); the will of the representative assembly (that is, parliament). I will do all in my power to make the last method—the most peaceable—effective; but I do not greatly count on it, and I declare myself determined to venture everything for the triumph of the other two.”
Déroulède and Guérin are both in banishment at this moment for overt acts against the state. And, while the strict legality of the forms of the high court trial that condemned them is more than dubious, there is no doubt possible as to their essential guilt.
While Guérin was holding Fort Chabrol, the Dreyfusard anarchists were exhorted by the anarchist leader, Sébastien Faure, to change their cries of A bas Guérin! to Vive Guérin! since, whatever the anti-Dreyfusard, anti-Semite rebel might have been before the siege or might be after it, he was logically one of them as long as he was defying the authority of the state.
The fact is that Paris, in spite of her excessive conservatism in certain directions, has, and ever since the Great Revolution has had, an état d’esprit révolutionnaire. Paris revolutionists and Parisians, then, are, in the last analysis, pretty nearly one and the same thing.
“The man
Of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys.
Power, like a desolating pestilence,
Pollutes whate’er it touches; and obedience,
Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,
Makes slaves of men and, of the human frame,
A mechanized automaton.”
Shelley.