‘automata’—and how from this a general strike, at first spontaneous, later more
organized, could arise. Demonstrations, electricity black-outs, and acts of sabotage
follow as the strike spreads from Paris to the provinces and the countryside.
Discipline breaks down in the army; troops side with the strikers, leading the
way for a final assault upon parliament and the dissolution of both the State and the
capitalist system.
Yet the constant point of reference was the revolutionary experience of 1789–93
and so much so that the two authors felt able to remark that ‘revolutionary tactics
have a constant identity which recurs in different times modified only by diversity
of place’.148 They also spoke of the people ‘imitating the revolutionaries of the
eighteenth century’.149 Thus, at the decisive moment when hunger threatens to
drive the strikers back to work, they storm the shops, taking the provisions they
require. The workers arm themselves and, like their forebears, keep hold of their
weapons. Rural agitation produces another Jacquerie and ‘a re-edition of the Great
Fear of 1789’. But the most striking dimension of this parallelism is to be found
in the discussion of the international repercussions of the revolution. Events in
France, the account continued, would engender enthusiasm from the peoples of
Europe, but their governments, supported by capitalist émigrés and the forces
of internal reaction, would try to kill the revolution at birth. ‘The bourgeoisie of
the twentieth century’, Pouget and Pataud commented, ‘ape the aristocracy of the
eighteenth century and parody the army of Condé.’150 France is invaded, but the
revolution would be defended not by the formation of a regular army—this would
imply a return to the ancien régime—but by the development and employment of
highly sophisticated weapons which would not only crush the enemy but also
effectively put an end to war.151 Victory, however, recalled the Revolution’s finest
145 Pouget, ‘Les Paysans et la Révolution’, L’Almanach de la Révolution pour 1906, 22–6.
146 Pouget and Émile Pataud, Comment nous ferons la Révolution (1909).
147 Griffuelhes, ‘A propos d’un livre’, La Vie ouvrière, 1 (1909), 274–5; Pouget, ‘L’Élève Pouget au
prof. Jaurès’, La Guerre sociale (1 Dec. 1909). The 2nd edn. of Pataud and Pouget’s book (1911), pp.
v–xi, had a preface by Peter Kropotkin in which he argued that, like Proudhon, the authors had
provided ‘a general idea of the Revolution’.
148 Pouget and Pataud, Comment nous ferons la Révolution, 136.
149 Ibid. 194.
150 Ibid. 245.
151 Ibid. 247–8.
Insurrection, Utopianism, and Socialism
425
hour: ‘Better than on the evening of Valmy did the prophetic words of Goethe suit
the occasion: “Here begins a new epoch of history”.’152
In August 1914, after years of anti-militarist campaigning, the CGT launched
neither a general strike nor an insurrection in the face of the outbreak of war. Léon
Jouhaux, its general secretary, made it clear that France was fighting not a war of
conquest but a war of defence against German imperialism and despotism: it was ‘a
war of revolution and not of reaction, truly in the tradition of 1792’.153 Pouget,
despite having been the most consistent of the syndicalists in his denunciation of
the republican regime, shared these sentiments. His regular mouthpiece, La Guerre
sociale, edited by the most vociferous of anti-patriots, Gustave Hervé, immediately
announced that its title would be changed to La Victoire and declared that it would
not seek to sabotage the defence of ‘the country of Revolution’. For his part, Pouget
wrote a column entitled ‘La Rue’, intended to catch the mood of the people in the
streets. ‘There is’, he wrote, ‘heroism in the air. The populace is saturated with it.’
The people saw that theirs was a war of civilization against barbarism. ‘1914’,
Pouget announced, ‘continues 1792 . . . our year is going to be a harbinger of
liberty’.154
This is not the place to analyse in detail either the reasons for the defeat of the
CGT’s anti-militarist strategy or its capitulation before the wave of nationalist
sentiment unleashed in the summer of 1914, but the inability of the leaders of the
CGT to free themselves entirely from a residual revolutionary patriotism would
seem to have been a contributory factor in both cases. If the Revolution had been
betrayed by the bourgeoisie and the Third Republic was only a fallen woman who
had deceived the people, there remained the experience of the grandes journées, of
popular upheaval and protest against oppression, and, above all, of the people of
France defeating the forces of counter-revolution and carrying the flag of liberty
across the continent of Europe. Here was a door that allowed entry into the union
sacrée.
One supporter of syndicalism for whom the ‘poetry’ of the ‘epic of the wars
against the coalition and that of the journées populaires’155 never held any attraction
was Georges Sorel. He let be known that he had not come to socialism via
Jacobinism, that he did not share the ‘veneration’ for the men who made the
French Revolution, indeed that he loathed those he called ‘the terrorists of 1793’.
Evidence of this profound distaste for the Revolution can be traced back to the days
prior to 1892 when Sorel was employed as a civil servant in the southern town of
Perpignan. In those writings, most notably Le Procès de Socrate of 1889 but also the
numerous articles of historical analysis devoted to the study of the Revolution in the
152 Ibid. 261.
153 See Jouhaux, ‘Paroles de solidarité’, La Bataille syndicaliste (23 Aug. 1914); ‘Le Prolétariat et la
guerre: Des raisons de notre attitude’, La Bataille syndicaliste (26 Sept. 1914); ‘Le Prolétariat et la guerre:
L’Alliance des peuples’, La Bataille syndicaliste (27 Sept. 1914); ‘A l’Assaut de l’Impérialisme allemand’,
La Bataille syndicaliste (10 Oct. 1914).
154 Pouget’s column ran from 7 Aug. to 6 Sept. 1914. See esp. the articles of 8, 18, and 21 Aug.
155 Sorel, Réflexions sur la violence (1908), 116–17.
426
Insurrection, Utopianism, and Socialism
Pyrénées-Orientales region,156 can be discerned a hatred of the Jacobin tradition,
its bourgeois adherents, and their passion for dictatorial state power. Sorel himself,
writing in Réflexions sur la violence, traced this antipathy towards the Revolution
back to what he saw as the disastrous consequences of the last great upsurge of
Jacobinism, the Paris Commune; the earliest of Sorel’s writings that survives, a
letter written in February 1872, spoke of ‘the crimes of the Commune’ and of ‘la
jésuitière rouge’.157 Sorel’s general point was that, stripped of its unwarranted
prestige, all that remained of the Revolution were ‘police operations, prescriptions,
and the sittings of servile law courts’.158
The mature Sorel concentrated his criticisms of the Revolution upon three
related aspects of its ideology and practice. First, if Sorel recognized that Rousseau
was not responsible for the Terror and for the actions of Robespie
rre, he did believe
that certain key Rousseauian notions had been passed on via the Revolution into
contemporary democratic and republican theory. Specifically, Sorel believed that
the concept of the general will had been used to justify the idea of ‘government by
all the citizens’ despite the fact that the whole thing was nothing but a ‘fiction’.
‘Never’, Sorel wrote, ‘has anyone tried to justify the singular paradox according to
which the vote of a chaotic majority leads to the appearance of what Rousseau
calls a general will that cannot err.’159 Further, a vote was not an indication of a
deliberate and rational choice: it was ‘rather an abdication by people who recog-
nize their own incompetence and incapacity to act’.160 The reality was that,
during the Revolution, every salon, then every Jacobin leader, had come to believe
that they possessed the secret of the general will, while in contemporary France
that conceit was now entertained by a class of intellectuals and politicians who
had turned themselves into the people’s masters.161
The second line of criticism detailed what Sorel took to be a set of attitudes that
contemporary socialism had absorbed either directly or indirectly from the Revolu-
tion.162 Foremost among these was the idea of ‘Parisian dictatorship’, with the
Revolution cast as ‘a school of docility’. ‘Even today’, Sorel wrote, ‘many socialists
believe that if power were to fall into their hands it would be easy to impose their
programme, their new morals, and their new ideas upon France.’ Related to this,
and exemplified in the use by the socialists of the expression ‘féodalité capitaliste’,
156 See ‘Les Représentants du peuple à l’Armée des Pyrénées-Orientales’, Revue de la Révolution, 13
(1888), 68–9, 153–72, and 14 (1889), 40–65; ‘Les Girondins de Roussillon’, Société agricole,
scientifique et littéraire des Pyrénées-Orientales, 30 (1889), 142–224; ‘François Ducroix; Contribution
à la psychologie des Maratistes’, Société agricole, 33 (1892), 387–437. For a discussion of these articles
see the thesis by J.-C. Despax, Georges Sorel: Historien de la Révolution française (Université de
Montpellier III, 1984).
157 Pierre Andreu, ‘Une lettre de Sorel en 1872’, Cahiers Georges Sorel, 2 (1984), 93–107.
158 Sorel, Réflexions sur la violence, 117.
159 Sorel, ‘L’Avenir socialiste des syndicats’ (1898), in Matériaux d’une théorie du prolétariat (1921),
118.
160 Sorel, ‘Les Dissensions de la social-démocratie en Allemagne’, Revue politique et parlementaire,
25 (1900), 49.
161 Sorel, Les Illusions du progrès (1906), 106.
162 Sorel, ‘Le Socialisme et la Révolution française’, Le Pays de France, 1 (1899), 220–8, and
‘Lichtenberger:—Le Socialisme et la Révolution française’, Le Mouvement socialiste, 1 (1899), 122–4.
Insurrection, Utopianism, and Socialism
427
was the belief that capitalism could be decreed out of existence. ‘The creators of this
formula’, Sorel commented, ‘wished simply to let it be known that one could
liquidate the present order by methods as hasty as those employed by the revolu-
tionary assemblies to suppress feudal rights.’ More telling still was Sorel’s conten-
tion that the Revolution had been fundamentally inegalitarian in inspiration and
aspiration. It had sought to bring into existence not what Sorel termed ‘a juridical
idea of equality’ but a purely material conception of a fuller life, and to this had
been added the notion that hidden within the old society were new men of ‘talent’,
capable of directing the new order. Thus, Sorel concluded, it was clear that those
socialist politicians ‘imbued with the spirit of the Revolution’ wished to preserve
‘the spirit of hierarchy’.
Taken together, these remarks amounted to saying that, from the perspective of a
socialism modelled upon the French Revolution, all social reform could be reduced
to a change of government personnel. There was to be no radical break between the
political structure of the old and the new societies. It was this theme of continuity
between the ancien régime, the Revolution, and contemporary socialism that
underpinned Sorel’s third major criticism of the ideology and practice of 1789–93.
‘One of the fundamental ideas of the ancien régime’, Sorel wrote in a key chapter
of Réflexions sur la violence, ‘had been the employment of penal procedures to ruin
all the powers which acted as obstacles to the monarchy.’163 The aim had not been
to maintain justice but to enhance the strength of the State and in this way it had
become possible to define ‘negligence, ill-will, and carelessness’ as ‘revolts against
authority, attempted crimes, and treason’. The Revolution, Sorel argued, continued
this tradition, giving immense importance to imaginary crimes, guillotining those
who could not satisfy the expectations aroused by public opinion, and producing
the classic piece of ‘Robespierrean legislation’, the law of 22 Prairial, a law whose
definitions of political crime were so vague as to ensure that ‘no enemy of the
Revolution’ could escape. Here, raised to pre-eminence, was ‘the doctrine of
the State’. Yet, according to Sorel, these reprehensible methods had been rendered
even more formidable through the addition of moral justification provided by
natural law theory. Straightforward raison d’état now took on the appearance of
an attempt to restore humankind to the principles of primitive goodness, truth, and
justice through the elimination of those ‘bad citizens’ whose evil influence pre-
vented the regeneration of humanity.
From Sorel’s account it is not clear how this obsession with political justice
migrated through the nineteenth century to find a home in the heart of parliamen-
tary socialism. It would be strange, Sorel remarked, if all the old ideas were quite
dead. He cited the experience of the Dreyfus Affair and of the actions of the
Dreyfusards in power as a contemporary example of these procedures, and added
that experience showed that hitherto all revolutionaries, as soon as they had come to
power, had used the language of raison d’état. Ultimately, one is led to conclude
that for Sorel the clinching piece of evidence was provided by Jaurès’s equivocation
163 Sorel, Réflexions sur la violence, 111–39.
428
Insurrection, Utopianism, and Socialism
in his Histoire socialiste de la Révolution française when faced with the need to
account for the actions of the Jacobins. Whatever the justice of that charge, there
was no doubt about the conclusion that Sorel was to draw. ‘If by chance’, he wrote,
‘our parliamentary socialists get to power they will prove themselves to be worthy
successors of the Inquisition, of the ancien régime, and of Robespierre.’
The point of all this was to establish that syndicalism should not be confused in
any way with parliamentary socialism. Syndicalism sought to demolish the State,
not to raise a ‘cult’ in its honour. It conceived the transmission of power not in
terms of the replacement of one intellectual elite by another but as a process of
displacement, spreading power out
into the workers’ own organizations and
enhancing the capacity of the workers to direct their own affairs. In contrast to a
system of universal suffrage replete with its fictitious Rousseauian baggage, the
syndicats would provide genuine and effective representation. Most importantly of
all, the violence employed by the workers in the course of the general strike, despite
being the most vivid and complete expression of class struggle, would bear no
relationship to the ferocious and bloodthirsty acts of jealousy and revenge asso-
ciated with the massacre of political prisoners in September 1792. With the general
strike, Sorel wrote, the revolution appeared as ‘a revolt, pure and simple’ and as
such it served the ‘interests of civilization’. ‘We have the right to hope’, he
concluded, ‘that a socialist revolution carried out by pure syndicalists would not
be tainted by the abominations which polluted the bourgeois revolutions.’164
It was precisely because, in the years after 1909, the syndicalist movement
appeared to endorse some kind of rapprochement with the forces of parliamentary
socialism that Sorel withdrew his support from it, breaking with former friends and
aiding royalist Jean Variot in the publication of a new periodical entitled L’Indé-
pendance. The latter act in particular, coinciding as it did with attempts by Charles
Maurras and the Action Française movement to gain support among the working
class, was seen by some as an indication of Sorel’s support for the restoration of the
monarchy. In truth, Sorel’s writings in the years immediately prior to the outbreak
of the First World War consisted almost entirely of a series of merciless attacks
upon virtually every aspect of France’s republican regime: its decaying democracy,
corrupt administration, superficial art, lax morals, and shallow religion. No com-
promise was possible with such a decadent system of government and values. Thus,
unlike Pouget and other leading syndicalists, Sorel was from the outset an unremit-
ting opponent of the union sacrée. ‘All socialist thought’, he wrote to Italian
journalist Mario Missiroli in August 1914, ‘has become Jacobin’.165 The recent
dismal events showed that ‘the old Jacobin tradition remained alive, a tradition
formed of frenzied envy, pride and puerile imaginings’. He poured scorn on calls
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