for the workers to relive the days of 1793, to organize a levée en masse. In time, he
concluded, ‘this war will be regarded as execrable above all because of the reawa-
kening of the Jacobin spirit it promoted’.
164 Sorel, Réflexions sur la violence, 139.
165 Sorel, ‘Lettres à Mario Missiroli’, in Da Proudhon a Lenin e L’Europa sotto la tormenta (Rome,
1974), 500–14.
Insurrection, Utopianism, and Socialism
429
Remarkably, it was within this perspective that Sorel first placed news of the
February Revolution in Russia led by Kerensky.166 The cadets he saw as Girondins,
eager to continue the war. Grand-Duke Nicholas figured as the Duc d’Orléans,
Philippe-Egalité, while the ‘poor Tsar’ seemed condemned to imitate Louis XVI. If
this revolution were to succeed, Sorel commented, the chances were that Europe
would be both Cossack and republican. ‘For a second time’, he wrote, ‘Jacobinism
would govern Europe but this time the Russians would play a leading role, due to
them on account of their inability to understand anything but anarchy and
authority.’
There remained one final episode in Sorel’s battle to sever the connections
between socialism and Jacobinism. Writing in early 1917, Sorel was of the opinion
that Italy alone of the European nations was in a position to defend itself from the
advance of Jacobinism, but subsequently he came to believe that socialism, and
possibly Europe as a whole, could avoid the dire fate threatening to overwhelm it. If
Sorel continued to believe that the most likely outcome of the First World War
would be the triumph of plutocracy, he now became transfixed by the ‘extraordi-
nary events’ of the October Revolution and the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks.
For Sorel, Lenin was the very antithesis of a Russian Jacobin, while the revolution
itself had been carried out according to syndicalist principles. These views were
expressed in articles, letters to numerous friends, and in new sections added to three
of his most important books: Réflexions sur la violence, Les Illusions du progrès, and
Matériaux d’une théorie du prolétariat; but the most significant manifestation came
in the form of an essay which, when published in 1928 after Sorel’s death, bore the
title ‘Ultima meditazione’.
In this text, originally intended as a preface to articles Sorel had published in Italy
between 1910 and 1920, the focus fell upon attempts during the nineteenth
century to free socialism from ‘the prestige of the French Revolution’, and ‘to
efface the Robespierrean tradition’. The first such attempt, according to Sorel, had
been utopian socialism. ‘The utopians’, he wrote, ‘wished to spare the people a
dictatorship of Jacobin charlatans analogous to the one with which they were
themselves acquainted.’ But the decisive break came with the failure of the
Revolution of 1848. After this, Sorel argued, Jacobinism appeared as an ‘archaeo-
logical fantasy’ absolutely incapable of understanding the activity of the proletariat.
This picture, Sorel admitted, was complicated by the fact that Marxism had never
managed entirely to free itself from this pernicious inheritance but the true
interpreter of what Sorel termed ‘the new juridical spirit’ was Pierre-Joseph Proud-
hon. It had been Proudhon who had understood the importance of the workers’
own organizations in fostering the growth within the proletariat of an ethics of
socialism. And, for Sorel, it was the very absence of such an ethic, an absence
embodied and exemplified in the arbitrary actions of the Jacobin tradition, which
opened up the possibility of a return to barbarism. It was Sorel’s view that the
organizations that now best embodied this ‘neo-Proudhonian concern’ with the
166 Ibid. 613–14.
430
Insurrection, Utopianism, and Socialism
development of an ethics of the producers were the soviets brought into existence
by the Russian Revolution.
I V
That Sorel misunderstood the significance of the Russian Revolution and the
meaning of Bolshevism cannot be denied. In this he was by no means alone.
Indeed, the evidence suggests that even the anarchists in France shared similar
feelings of support for the Russian Revolution. As the events of 1917 unfolded and
as more information about the nature of the revolution became available, Sébastien
Faure and his associates behind the principal anarchist wartime publication, Ce
qu’il faut dire, were among the first to defend the Bolsheviks. Whatever might be
the creed of Bolshevism, it was argued, the revolutionary masses were pushing the
Bolsheviks beyond their original programme and towards the implementation of
far-reaching reforms along anarchist lines. A similar stance was taken by Le
Libertaire when it recommenced publication in January 1919. But now the anar-
chists began to grapple with the issue of the role of dictatorship in the revolution.
An article of 8 June 1919 specifically entitled ‘La Dictature du Prolétariat’ set out
the revisionist argument. Before the war, its author argued, anarchists would have
been against such an authoritarian notion as the dictatorship of the proletariat but,
given what now had to be recognized as the likelihood of military opposition to the
revolution, the reliance upon dictatorship was a necessity.
How far this argument could go was illustrated by Victor Serge. Born in Brussels
in 1890 Victor Napoléon Kibaltchitch was the son of Russian émigrés. From 1905
onwards he began to collaborate with a variety of anarchist and insurrectionary
papers in France. These included Gustave Hervé’s La Guerre sociale, Jean Grave’s
Les Temps modernes as well as Le Libertaire. After his move to Paris he acted as editor
of L’Anarchie. Arrested in 1912 he remained in prison until 1917 when, under
threat of extradition, he moved to Spain. It was there that he adopted the name of
Victor Serge. Having returned illegally to France, he was arrested and, in January
1919, was put on board ship at the French port of Dunkirk for Petrograd. In May
of that year he joined the communist party. Serge’s argument—stated most
vigorously in Les Anarchistes et l’expérience de la Révolution russe167—was that the
realities of the revolution in Russia necessitated ‘the complete and methodical
revision’ of anarchist thinking. Above all, Serge argued, the Russian Revolution
should serve to remind the anarchists of something that had been largely forgotten
since France’s own revolution: revolutions were bloody affairs. ‘Who says revolu-
tion’, Serge wrote, ‘says violence, and all violence is dictatorial.’ Upon pain of death,
he continued, ‘the most advanced minority of the proletariat’ had ‘immediately to
take up the task of dictatorship’. No half-measures were possible. Red terror had to
be used to match White terror as a war of revolutionary defence would be
167 Victor Serge, Les Anarchistes et l’expérience de la Révolution russe (1921).
Insurrection, Utopianism, and Socialism
431
unavoidable. It was, he remarked, thanks to the Jacobin clubs that France had
emerged victorious from its battles wit
h Europe’s monarchical coalition and the
same lesson applied to the Bolsheviks in Russia. Moreover, ‘the general lack of
culture in the Russian people’ entailed ‘an inevitable Jacobinism’. Little of this,
Serge believed, need pose any problems for anarchists because the goal of the
Bolsheviks was ‘the complete implementation of the communist programme’,
was ‘libertarian communism’ and ‘anarchy’.
Nevertheless there emerged a consensus among the anarchists that the ‘libertari-
an revolution’ was being betrayed. Disquiet initially took the form of arguing that
the revolution appeared temporarily to be locked into what one writer in Le
Libertaire called its ‘authoritarian stage’, but, with each month, praise for the
courage of the Bolsheviks became increasingly qualified and hedged in by doubts
about their true intentions. The official break—as Faure was later to recount in one
of his most heartfelt articles168—came in January 1921. In that month Le Libertaire
launched a series of articles entitled ‘En Russie Sovietique’, written by the Spanish
anarchist Wilkens and recounting his experiences during his six-month stay in
Russia. The conclusions were damning. The Revolution and Bolshevism were not
one and the same thing. The communist party was quickly moving towards the
creation of ‘a class which has interests opposed to those of the revolutionary masses’.
Dictatorship was ‘an instrument of oppression’ in the hands of this new class. The
Bolsheviks made greater use of terror than had the Tsarist regime. If a break with
capitalism was being made, the proletariat were being placed under ‘a new yoke’.
The true revolutionaries, and specifically the anarchists, were being ‘persecuted,
imprisoned, and shot without trial’. The soviets were being turned into ‘the
instruments of bureaucracy’. The Red Army was but the tool of what increasingly
looked like a militarist regime. The idea of workers’ control of the factories had
already been forgotten.
All of this, it should be noted, was written and published before the brutal
repression of the uprising by sailors and soldiers at Kronstadt in March 1921. These
tragic events were simply added to the picture as ‘the best and the worst illustration’
of Le Libertaire’s thesis that the revolution in Russia had been killed at birth. ‘The
massacre of the proletariat at Kronstadt’, proclaimed one anonymous article, ‘is a
more ignominious crime than that committed by the French bourgeoisie in 1871,
because this crime was committed in the name of a socialist Republic.’ What is
more, for the anarchists of Le Libertaire, the revolution of 1917 had come to
resemble France’s own revolution of 1789. In both cases, ‘the inspired enthusiasm
of the people had been redirected by the bourgeois politicians of the day to their
own advantage and to that of their class’.169
In point of fact, the reality behind the Soviet myth was known almost from the
outset and was certainly not unknown to the most important intellectuals of the
left. As Christian Jelen has shown,170 the newspaper of the then French socialist
168 ‘Il y a un an’, Le Libertaire (13 Jan. 1922).
169 Editorial, Le Libertaire (2 Dec. 1922).
170 Christian Jelen, L’Aveuglement: Les Socialistes et la naissance du mythe soviétique (1984).
432
Insurrection, Utopianism, and Socialism
party, L’Humanité, was fortunate to have had a correspondent, Boris Kritchevski, in
Petrograd at the moment of the October Revolution and his account of what
actually occurred and of what the Bolsheviks believed subsequently proved to have
been remarkably accurate. There was never any intention, Kritchevski argued, of
installing a republic of the soviets; a military plot had brought the Bolsheviks to
power; and there they intended to stay by any means. However, his reports quickly
met with censorship from his colleagues and then the socialist daily decided to
dispense with his services altogether. Similarly, between November 1918 and
March 1919 the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme (an organization founded in 1898
to defend Captain Dreyfus) undertook a public inquiry into the situation in Russia.
The unambiguous conclusion was that the Bolshevik regime paid scant attention to
the rights of man, was undemocratic, and was a travesty of socialism. A party
dictatorship, it concluded, was being established. But here, as was so often to be the
case, there was an unwillingness to acknowledge that the faults were inherent to the
Bolshevik model and accordingly due homage was paid to the great ideals that had
inspired the revolution. Later, with the rise to power of Hitler, the Ligue des Droits
de l’Homme hid behind the casuistic argument that, whereas under fascism the
rights of man were denied out of conviction, under Bolshevism they were denied
only out of necessity.171
Nonetheless, in the years that followed the USSR was not without its critics,
many of them drawn from the left.172 In 1935, former communist Boris Souvarine
published his monumental and deeply critical study of Stalin173—arguably one of
the most important books of the twentieth century—and a year later André Gide
published his Retour de l’URSS,174 an account that mixed admiration with a sense
of the all-pervasive conformism being imposed upon Soviet society. Not even in
Hitler’s Germany, Gide wrote, was thought less free and more terrorized. Nor were
the melons available for purchase in the shops of good quality! From within
France’s own dissident Marxist tradition, the Soviet Union was subsequently
characterized as a ‘degenerate workers’ state’ and then, much later, by Cornelius
Castoriadis and his group Socialisme ou barbarie, as a form of ‘total bureaucratic
capitalism’.175 State socialism and party capitalism were also contenders as descrip-
tions of the reality of the Soviet Union and to this, although somewhat belatedly,
was added totalitarian.176
The fact of the matter was that among wide sections of opinion—stretching
from the far left until well into the middle of the political spectrum—the Russian
Revolution enjoyed an almost immediate respect and adulation. Romain Rolland,
Anatole France, and Henri Barbusse were just three of the well-known literary
figures prepared to voice their support for the Bolsheviks and for what they took to
171 Christian Jelen, Hitler ou Staline: Le Prix de la paix (1984).
172 See Sophie Curé, ‘Communisme et anticommunisme’, in Becker and Candar, Histoire des
gauches, ii. 487–506.
173 Staline, Aperçu historique du bolchévisme (1935).
174 André Gide, Retour de l’URSS (1936).
175 See Robert Desjardins, The Soviet Union through French Eyes (London, 1988).
176 See Jeannine Verdès-Leroux, Le Reveil des somnambules, 1956–1985 (1987).
Insurrection, Utopianism, and Socialism
433
be their goals of peace and liberty. Several factors were at play here. The first, and
probably the most powerful, was opposition to the carnage of the First World War,
a sentiment which in many cases led to an identification with pacifism.177 In this
context, the Bolsheviks appeared to represent the hope of a new internation
al order
and it was undoubtedly the case that many of those who were among the first to
rally to the PCF did so with this in mind and with scant concern for the canons of
Marxism. The second consideration had even less to do with the realities of the
situation in Russia. The policy of support for the national war effort had entailed
collaboration with those formerly regarded as class enemies. Support for the
Russian Revolution—albeit that it was someone else’s revolution and on the
other side of Europe—allowed for a sense of reidentification with the original
principles of socialism and with the working class in general. Thus, for example, a
yet-to-be-disillusioned Boris Souvarine could pen an Éloge des Bolsheviks in 1919
and there write: ‘Let us further the superhuman effort of the heroic pioneers of the
social revolution, let us glorify the courageous and intelligent innovators who have
sacrificed themselves for socialism and the emancipation of the people, in the hope
that we may show ourselves to be worthy of them. Let us not limit ourselves to
saluting the creators of the new world but let their example inspire us.’178
The third motive for support of the Bolsheviks had a decidedly French angle.
Lenin and his comrades were not just demonstrating that a revolution was possible
but were also doing so in a manner that recalled the revolutionary experience of the
French people. The problem here was that among the French left there was no
agreed interpretation of the French Revolution or of the revolutionary tradition it
had spawned and thus the Bolsheviks could be seen as doing a variety of different
things, praiseworthy or otherwise. However, it was as early as 1920 that the socialist
historian Albert Mathiez sought to portray what he saw as the resemblance between
Bolshevism and Jacobinism, between Lenin and Robespierre. His Le Bolchévisme et
le Jacobinisme179 affirmed unequivocally that ‘Jacobinism and Bolshevism are
dictatorships of the same kind; both are born out of civil and foreign war; both
are class dictatorships, using the same means: terror, requisitioning and price
controls; and both ultimately pursue the same goal, the transformation of society,
and not just the transformation of Russian and French society but of society in
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