Revolution and the Republic
Page 89
libertarian who sought a way of adapting the anarchist principles of spontaneous
and decentralized action to the conditions of an industrialized economy.124 How-
ever, it took the political betrayals of the Third Republic to turn irregular protests
into a coherent and articulate stance.
Following the legalization of trade unions in 1884, revolutionary syndicalism
was arguably at its height in the first decade of the twentieth century.125 At the
centre of its doctrine lay the conception of the trade union movement as ‘le parti du
travail’.126 The syndicat united workers according to their economic interests and
these were considered more real and permanent than any other considerations that
123 ‘An Official Programme of the Commune’, in Schulkind, Paris Commune, 149–51.
124 See Jean Maitron, Histoire du mouvement anarchiste en France (1880–1914), 2 vols. (1975). See
also Gaetano Manfredonia, Les Anarchistes et la Révolution française (1996) and Daniel Guérin, La
Révolution française et nous (1976).
125 In addition to my Syndicalism in France, see Jacques Julliard, Autonomie ouvrière: Études sur le
syndicalisme d’Action directe (1988). For a selection of texts see Miguel Chueca (ed.), Déposséder les
possédants: La Grève générale aux ‘temps héroïques’ du syndicalisme révolutionnaire (2008).
126 Émile Pouget, Le Parti du travail (1905).
420
Insurrection, Utopianism, and Socialism
an individual might entertain. ‘The syndicat’, Émile Pouget, one of the leaders of
the movement, wrote, ‘groups together those who work against those who live by
human exploitation: it brings together interests and not opinions.’127 By implica-
tion the syndicats could only be open to members of the proletariat, thus excluding
middle-class politicians and intellectuals whose immediate interests were taken to
be in conflict with those of the workers.
In terms of both membership and organizational structure, the class-based
nature of the syndicat was deemed to be in marked contrast to the political party,
What characterized the political party (including those of the left) was that they
grouped people together in terms of opinions rather than interests and therefore at
best political parties possessed a fragile unity that could be easily broken when
interests collided and personal ambition intervened. Parties, Pouget wrote, ‘are an
incoherent mishmash of men whose interests were in opposition’.128 Stated by the
practitioners of revolutionary syndicalism the point was a simple one: the syndicat,
and not the political party, was the natural expression of the real needs and
aspirations of the working class and for as long as it grouped together only members
of that class it would not be deflected from pursuing the end of the exploitation
created by capitalism. ‘In opposition to the present society which knows only the
citizen’, Pouget wrote, ‘stands from now on the producer.’129
To scorn politics was not only to be committed to the elucidation and employ-
ment of new tactics—in this case, those of direct action—but also to display
contempt for the dominant revolutionary tradition drawing inspiration from the
events of 1789 and the Jacobin experience. To establish the merits of the general
strike, in other words, the French Revolution itself had to undergo a process of
demystification. However, there was no one syndicalist critique of the Revolution
drawing upon a series of set themes. Nor was it the case that only one practical or
strategic conclusion was drawn from a rejection of the 1789 model. Rather, and as
befitted a movement characterized by intellectual diversity, there was something
akin to a continuous debate about the significance of the Revolution, frequently
operating as a backdrop to broader tactical or ideological considerations.
Born in 1867, Fernand Pelloutier came to syndicalism via provincial radical
republicanism and then orthodox Marxism. His break with Guesdism came in
1892 when, with Aristide Briand, he jointly defended the use of the general strike
and thereafter he consistently advocated the organization of society as an associa-
tion of free producers. Moreover, as secretary of the Fédération des Bourses du
Travail from 1895 until his death in 1901, he was instrumental in creating the
institutional basis of an autonomous working-class movement that, in the first
decade of the twentieth century, appeared to threaten the very existence of the
Third Republic.130
127 Émile Pouget, Le Parti du travail (1905), 2.
128 Ibid. 3.
129 Émile Pouget, L’Action directe (1910), 1.
130 See Jacques Julliard, Fernard Pelloutier et les origines du syndicalisme directe (1971). Pelloutier’s
most substantial written work was La Vie ouvrière en France (1900) and his posthumously publ.
Histoire des Bourses du Travail (1902).
Insurrection, Utopianism, and Socialism
421
For Pelloutier, the goal of the proletariat was that ‘of overturning a social
organism which cannot adapt itself to the new morality and that no amount of
modification could sufficiently improve and of substituting an essentially egalitari-
an economic regime’.131 The central question faced by Pelloutier, therefore, was
how such a transformation could be brought about. Even in his earliest writings,
Pelloutier sought to distance the working class from the parliamentary process,
arguing that suffrage was a complete irrelevance, but from this he moved towards a
broader critique of the socialist and republican traditions. In his newspaper articles
written for La Démocratie de l’Ouest, for example, he frequently returned to the
theme that the Republic, for all its democratic façade, had failed to satisfy the hopes
of the working class and this led Pelloutier to ask, in an article entitled ‘L’Oeuvre de
1789’, whether people were more free under the Republic than they had been under
the ancien régime? ‘Free to die of hunger, certainly. . . . Free to resist oppression? Just
let the workers try to make use of their liberty’ was his reply.132 One was led to ask,
Pelloutier concluded, if only the bourgeoisie had benefited from 1789.
Pelloutier specifically extended his criticisms to include the tactic, still prevalent
as part of Guesdist rhetoric, of the insurrectionary seizure of state power. Pellou-
tier’s objections to this strategy were based upon two considerations. First, the
beneficiaries of past revolutions had never included the proletariat. ‘The people’, he
wrote, ‘have attempted on many occasions since the French Revolution to complete
the work of 1793 and with each of these attempts we have seen politicians, profiting
from the blood that has been spilt, climb over the corpses towards an assault on
power.’ Second, the advance of military technology, the improvement in commu-
nications, the rebuilding and modernization of cities, had turned the seizure
of power by a determined revolutionary minority into an impossibility: all the
advantages, most notably fire power, now lay with the State.133
Having belittled the achievements of the Revolution and rejected the tactics
bequeathed by it to the French left, Pelloutier next commenced the formulation of
what he hoped would be an alternative and also more effective means of proletarian
emancipation: the general strike.134 Conceived initially as a peaceful event which
would require only a ‘coalition du repos’ of two weeks’ duration, Pelloutier
subsequently conceded that a general strike could not be confined to a passive
refusal to work on the part of the proletariat. The main attraction of the general
strike, however, always remained that it avoided the pitfalls of a revolutionary
insurrection on the Jacobin model. While the army could be deployed against
30,000 insurgents, it was ineffective against a rebellion that was both ‘everywhere
and nowhere’. The army could not protect every factory and every railway line.
131 Pelloutier, ‘De la Révolution par la grève générale’, unpubl. manuscript, 1892, in Julliard,
Fernard Pelloutier, 280.
132 Pelloutier, ‘L’Oeuvre de 1789’, La Démocratie de l’Ouest (24 Sept. 1892).
133 See esp. ‘De la Révolution par la grève générale’, 285–95; ‘La Motion de Tours’, La Démocratie
de l’Ouest (9 Sept. 1892), in Julliard, Fernard Pelloutier, 306–7; ‘Réplique au “Temps”’, ibid. 307–8;
‘La semaine politique’, L’Avenir social (19 Nov. 1893); ‘Qu’est-ce que la grève générale?’ (1895), in
Julliard, Fernard Pelloutier, 326.
134 See esp. ‘Qu’est-ce que la grève générale?’, 319–33.
422
Insurrection, Utopianism, and Socialism
Debate about the precise nature and detail of the tactics to be employed by the
syndicalist movement continued into the first decade of the twentieth century,
but the focus remained the worker as producer and not as a citizen. Combined
with a recognition of the primacy of class interests this pushed the leadership of
the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) towards the advocacy of new
strategies involving sabotage,135 strike action, consumer boycotts, go-slows,
and walk-outs and away from a republican regime drawing inspiration from the
principles of 1789, a process formalized in 1906 with the endorsement of the
Charte d’Amiens.136 Anti-republican sentiment permeated syndicalist propagan-
da. Marianne, the female symbol of republican virtue, was described by Pouget as
une salope. ‘In place of the Marianne of their dreams’, he wrote, ‘the people have
seen a horrible seductress saving her embraces for upper-class swine.’137 Victor
Griffuelhes, another of the movement’s principal figures, argued that the workers
wanted the substance of emancipation and not its hollow form, the bourgeois
Republic.138 Alphonse Merrheim, recounting details of a lengthy strike in Henne-
bont, described how the authorities had placed the Breton town under virtual
military occupation. The workers, he argued, had understood that ‘the priest, the
owner of the château, the director of the factory, the Republic, in their mutual
complicity, were in equal measure the Masters that must be removed’.139 A full-page
cartoon printed on the front cover of the CGT’s official organ, La Voix du Peuple,
showing Georges Clemenceau, Prime Minister of the day, balancing two scales of
blood and which read ‘Last year I massacred the peasants of Narbonne with cavalry
from Paris! This year I’m massacring the workers of Paris with cavalry from the
Midi. That’s Equality’, perfectly encapsulated the deep antipathy felt by revolu-
tionary syndicalists towards what they saw as the empty principles of the Republic
and of 1789.140 Pouget, pressing home the case against the use of the army to
intimidate striking workers, vilified the description of conscription, the ‘blood tax’,
as an achievement of the Revolution. ‘The bourgeois revolutionaries’, he wrote,
‘gave the name of right to that which under the ancien régime was always called
slavery.’141
After the army came a rejection of the very idea of the nation and of what was
contemptuously characterized as ‘le préjugé patriotard’. For the vast majority of
syndicalist leaders—as an Enquête sur l‘Idée de Patrie et la Classe ouvrière
organized by Hubert Lagardelle’s Le Mouvement socialiste revealed—talk of the
superior virtues of the French nation and of the duty of all Frenchmen to defend
the cultural patrimony of France was gibberish. ‘I am a stranger’, Griffuelhes wrote,
135 See Pouget, Le Sabotage (1910).
136 On the Charte d’Amiens see ‘Le Syndicalisme révolutionnaire: La Charte d’Amiens a cent ans’,
special issue, Mil Neuf Cent, 24 (2006); Michel Pigenet and Pierre Robin (eds.), Victor, Emile, Georges,
Fernand et les autres . . . Regards sur le syndicalisme révolutionnaire (Bouloc, 2007).
137 Pouget, ‘Marianne la salope’, in Roger Langlais (ed.), Le Père Peinard (1976), 194–6.
138 Griffuelhes, ‘Le Fond et la forme’, La Voix du Peuple (29 Mar. 1903).
139 Merrheim, ‘Un grand conflit social: La Grève d’Hennebont’, Le Mouvement socialiste, 20
(1906), 378–9.
140 Special issue, ‘L’Appel de la classe’, La Voix du Peuple (Sept. 1908).
141 Pouget, ‘La Conscription’, special issue, La Voix du Peuple (Jan. 1904).
Insurrection, Utopianism, and Socialism
423
‘to everything that constitutes the moral dimension of our nation. I possess
nothing: I must sell my labour in order to satisfy even my smallest needs. Therefore
nothing which for some people forms a homeland exists for me. I cannot be a
patriot.’142
Syndicalists, in brief, did not merely question the substance of the democratic
liberties as they had come to be expressed in the Third Republic; they went further,
rejecting the rhetoric, imagery, and symbolism of the Revolution itself. But was
their break with the Revolution complete? The evidence would seem to suggest that
it was not. An intriguing example is provided by Émile Pouget. Not only was
Pouget the editor of La Voix du Peuple from 1900 to 1908 but his career, first as
anarchist and then as syndicalist activist, stretched back to 1882. In 1889 he
established a paper entitled Le Père Peinard, subtitled Réflecs d’un gniaff and written
in Parisian argot. It was specifically modelled on Jacques Hébert’s inflammatory and
obscene Le Père Duchesne, mouthpiece of the sans-culottes during the Revolution.
The standard fare of Le Père Peinard was anticlericalism, anti-parliamentarianism,
and anti-militarism, and to this was added support for feminism and educational
reform. However, the year of its launch provided Pouget with an ideal opportunity
to berate the Revolution for its failures at the very moment of its centenary
celebrations.
What the people of 1789 had wanted, Pouget wrote, was to live better than they
had done under the ancien régime. They wanted to sit on their backsides; to fill their
bellies; and ‘no more be under the thumb of nobles, priests and the bourgeois’.143
Alas, they had been ‘conned’ by the politicians, ‘the filthy good-for-nothings’ who,
from Mirabeau to Robespierre, were excellent at making speeches but ‘lacked
courage’: the Revolution had been side-tracked by ‘vermin’. But it was clear how
‘le populo’ intended to get what they wanted. ‘The burning of toll-gates’, Pouget
wrote, ‘blazing torches t
hrown at sweatshops, a convent sacked and pillaged, the
houses of the wealthy put under threat, all this indicates better than the storming of
the Bastille what the Revolution should have been.’
Pouget’s line on the Revolution did not alter significantly over the next decade.
His L’Almanach du Père Peinard, published in 1894 and from 1896 to 1899,
utilized the revolutionary calendar, its first number boldly dated as ‘An 102’. An
article entitled ‘Ce que je vous souhaite? La Liberté!’, which appeared in the 1898
issue, proclaimed in Pouget’s typically vivid style: ‘Whereas the framers of laws
churned out a Déclaration des droits that was bloody nonsensical, [Le Père Duch-
esne] didn’t mince words and gave birth to a tip-top Déclaration that boils down to
this—“Don’t shit on me!”’ The sentiment still applied, Pouget maintained, and
nothing needed to be added to it.144 Likewise, when faced with divisions between
rural and industrial workers in the first decade of the twentieth century, Pouget
142 Griffuelhes, ‘Enquête sur l‘idée de patrie et la classe ouvrière’, Le Mouvement socialiste, 16
(1905), 443.
143 Pouget, ‘La Prise de la Bastille’, in Langlais, Le Père Peinard, 83–7.
144 L’Almanach du Père Peinard pour 1898, 2.
424
Insurrection, Utopianism, and Socialism
appealed to the example of 1789–93 to show that if the Revolution had only been
the work of city-dwellers it would have been no more than a riot or insurrection.145
These ambiguities of response towards the Revolution of 1789 were best seen in
Comment nous ferons la Révolution, written by Pouget in collaboration with elec-
tricians’ leader Émile Pataud and published in 1909.146 Pouget and Pataud’s text
offered a fictional account of what its authors presumed a revolution based upon
syndicalist principles would look like. Griffuelhes, a close associate of Pouget for
many years, dismissed it as a piece of ‘literary and imaginative fantasy’ but Pouget,
in reply to similar criticisms voiced by Jean Jaurès, suggested that even the most
far-fetched aspects of the tale should be taken seriously.147 Emphasized was the
manner in which a revolutionary situation could be generated out of one inci-
dent—in this case, the ‘massacre’ of a group of workers by soldiers reduced to