Professor John Merriman:
Well, today I'm going to talk a
little bit about syndicalism,
but mostly about socialism,
and then Monday I'm going to
talk about anarchism.
So, in 1864 the First
International was created,
the First International Working
Man's Association.
It dissolved among great
tension in 1876,
and also under the influence of
the Commune,
because of the repression of
working-class movements in most
places in Europe,
and also in the United States.
Adolph Thiers,
who had crushed the Commune,
as you know,
boasted in 1877,
"nobody talks of socialism
anymore, and rightly so,
we are rid of it."
Nonetheless,
it is in the late part of the
‘80s and above all the
1890s,
the crucial decade that
socialist parties become part of
the political scene in Europe,
above all in Western Europe
because obviously the Mensheviks
and Bolsheviks,
when they are later created,
are quite illegal in Russia;
and the growth of socialist
parties, above all in France,
in Germany, in Spain,
and Italy, are part of the
development of mass politics,
thus closely tied to the
emergence of political
associations of which the
socialist parties would be a
very good example,
and the increased role of
newspapers, party newspapers and
also just in general the penny
press.
In Paris in the 1890s there are
twenty daily newspapers,
maybe even a couple more than
that, which is phenomenal.
Now, there's what?
There's Libé,
there's Figaro and
there's Le Monde,
there are three,
and then there's also,
I guess, the remnants of
France Soir;
but there's just a couple
compared to what there used to
be.
And, so, socialists proclaim
themselves internationalists,
and one of the great questions,
as you see, in 1914 as the
clouds of war gather,
whether socialist workers in
Germany will go fight against
socialist workers in France,
and socialist workers in Vienna
will go to fight the Serbs and
the Russians,
et cetera, et cetera.
Now, you can get most of this
out of Chip Sowerwine's book,
but just to make a few fairly
important points about the
emergence of socialism in
France,
since France is what we're
talking about.
And then I'll break away a
little bit to talk about
syndicalism--which could be
almost better done on Monday,
but that won't work because I
got too much to say on
Monday--and then come back to
socialism and talk a little bit
about Jean Jaurès,
here, who unified the Socialist
Party in 1905.
So, basically,
socialists in France and in
other countries are divided
between revolutionary socialists
and reform socialists.
And revolutionary socialists
were influenced specifically by
Karl Marx;
indeed, Karl Marx's son,
a guy called Paul Lafargue,
whom you can forget,
he introduced Marx's writings
in translation in France.
And, as you know,
Marx believed in scientific
socialism.
It was scientifically clear to
him that inevitably,
following the bourgeois
revolution,
the workers of the world would
throw off their chains,
after having united,
and led by class conscious
leaders seize power.
So, in principle,
revolutionary socialists did
not believe in elections,
nor did they believe in
reforms.
The general attitude of
revolutionary socialists was
that if you encourage workers,
your miners in Germinal,
or whatever,
to push for reforms or to
participate in politics,
in political life,
you're just propping up the
bourgeois republic,
if you do that.
On the other hand,
they get themselves into a bit
of a bind because how do you,
if you want to have a mass
following among workers,
how can you not work for
reforms such as the eight-hour
day,
which was a classic kind of
demand of organized labor,
how can you not participate in
marches on May Day,
the first of which was in 1890,
in France, in order to put
forth demands for reforms?
They also were sort of caught
in a conundrum because they're
arguing that,
following Marx's ideology,
that the situation of workers
was decreasing,
was getting worse in France.
But, in fact,
despite the long depression,
conditions are getting better
for most workers,
even though the gap between the
wealthy and the poor was,
as always, was increasing.
So, they're kind of caught in a
bind.
Their tactics are to organize
workers, to make them aware of
themselves as a class,
and make them aware of
politics, and engage their
revolutionary activity for a
future date when everything
would--when the revolution that
they expected to come would
follow.
And remember,
we live in a time now where you
don't expect revolution to come,
when--people just racing down
to the town hall,
or to the prefecture,
and overthrowing the
government.
But if you had--if you grew up
in a country in France in which
your grandparents could talk--if
you lived in the 1870s,
you could hear your
grandparents talk about stories
they'd heard about the French
Revolution;
you had, depending on how you
count them, a couple of
revolutions during the
revolutionary period.
You had a revolution in 1830,
you had a revolution in 1848,
you had an attempted revolution
in 1851 in response to the coup
d'état,
and, above all,
you had the Commune.
And the Commune weighed so
heavily as a way of encouraging
a militancy because,
as I said before,
for one brief time people
seemed masters of their own
fate,
and the Commune did initiate,
for all of the quarreling over
politics and over policies,
did initiate a meaningful
reform.
So, this was,
while it was scary for a
conservative elite,
it is energizing for both
people who want to capture
control of the state,
that is, revolutionary
socialists and,
indeed, reform socialists,
as we'll see in a minute,
but their means were different,
and anarchists who wanted to
destroy the state.
So, there's an amnesty for the
communards in 1879,
and so people who were forced
into exile or forced into hiding
come back.
Now, besides this Paul
Lafargue, that is the son-in-law
of--Lafargue is
l-a-f-a-r-g-u-e--Marxism was
introduced into France by Jules
Guesde.
If you're on the Ile
Saint-Louis, which is now this
sort of super chic sort
of tourist trap and has lost
most of its charm,
there's a plaque right on the
corner, at the intersection of
the two main streets of the Ile
Saint-Louis,
that you can hardly see it,
it's up on the second floor,
and it says that Jules Guesde
was born there.
So, he was a Parisian.
He was born in 1845 when the
Ile Saint-Louis was very
different, there weren't all
these Berthillon ice-cream
rip-offs and things like that
there.
He was the son of a
schoolmaster.
He gave up his intellectual
pursuits because of lack of
money.
He worked as a translator in
the Prefecture of the Seine in
Paris, and he became a
journalist.
And like lots of young,
smart people in his--of his
day, he read Victor Hugo,
he read Victor Hugo on Paris
and he became interested in the
plight of the poor.
He became a Republican.
He was sentenced to five years
in jail after the Commune.
He went off to Italy to avoid
serving time in the
slammaire,
and there he read Karl Marx.
In 1877 he created a paper,
L'Egalité,
or Equality,
which had a circulation of
5,000;
and you can multiply by about
twenty or twenty-five the
numbers of readers per each
copy,
because people read newspapers
in cafés,
so the diffusion of newspapers
was greater than circulation
statistics would lead you to
believe.
He wanted to capture the trade
union movement,
which had revived after the
Commune;
again, strikes had been
legalized in 1864 and unions are
legal as of 1881.
He was a very successful,
clever propagandist,
which terrified the middle
classes.
He was called the Red Pope by
his enemies, both outside the
revolutionary socialist groups
and inside.
He was also called the Red
Jesuit because of his
authoritarian personality.
He was tall,
very thin, and he looked
starved, like many militants at
that time because they didn't
have any money,
so they're living from hand to
mouth the whole time.
Somebody described him as
always looking ill and extremely
pale.
Fiery eyes shown from behind
metal-framed glasses,
and when he spoke,
even about ordinary things,
his lips seemed to quiver with
rage.
He was a powerful,
ironic speaker,
but not a spellbinder in the
way Jaurès,
whom I'll discuss in awhile,
was.
And, so, thus his enemies
called him the Red Pope or the
Red Jesuit.
He helps create,
found the first mass political
party in modern France,
which started out after a
different name,
but it becomes known as the
Parti Ouvrier Français,
or the French Worker's Party,
which begins with some
hesitation from Guesde himself
to run candidates in the
elections in 1881,
and they get some votes.
But the goals of creating this
party were revolutionary,
they are not reformist.
They are not to capture the
Chamber of Deputies through
elections, and to make possible
reforms that are promulgated
from the Palais Bourbon,
or where the Chamber of
Deputies met,
but rather to bring about a
revolution.
And his preoccupation with
creating this mass party did
alienate workers,
because they want reforms.
And, again, we talk about
socialist parties,
and what the socialist parties
wanted at this time are
basically what any kind of
conservative Democrat would want
in the U.S.
They're talking about things
like better conditions in the
mines, they're talking about the
eight-hour day,
they're talking about decent
wages and insurance programs,
and that kind of thing.
And one of the interesting
things about the Parti
Ouvrier--just call it the
POF--the Parti,
well just the working class,
the Worker's Party,
French Worker's Party,
is--which also suggests that
the role of personality in all
of this--is they do very well in
specific regions.
But, overall in France they
remain an extremely minority
party, even within the socialist
movement,
particularly because of their
unwillingness to engage in
electoral politics and to be
committed to reform.
They believe that elections and
the propaganda of these big,
big posters that are red
posters and purple posters,
that are still in the Archives,
which are wonderful things to
look at, that these are to be
sources of propaganda,
to make workers think about
their conditions,
to realize that their class
enemy can be defeated in
revolution.
And, so, the places that the
Guesdists do very well are in
the north, where you've got
large textile and mining
industries.
They do very well in a very
different kind of region,
some similar interests,
or industries,
but without the kind of
Catholic fidelity that remains
in parts of the north.
They do well down here in the
Bourbonnais, in the
Nièvre,
in the Allier,
in departments like that;
and there are places in the
south, in the Hérault,
that is the Department of
Béziers and Montpellier.
But, in other places,
like, for example,
Limoges, where the Socialist
Party was and still is very,
very strong,
and remarkable continuity,
they don't do well at all.
So, Guesde is always sort of on
the outside looking in,
even within the context of the
socialist movement.
But, one of the incredible
things about these guys,
about Guesde and Brousse,
whom I'll talk about in a
minute, and above all Jean
Jaurès,
is they're on the road all the
time.
And here's where the railroads
come into play.
The number of speeches that
they give every year is in the
hundreds.
They're constantly
going--showing up in a town.
I once wrote an article called
"De la Gare à
la Conférence
Contradictoire,"
or, "From the Station,
Railroad Station,
to the Great Debate," where
they'd be debating people of
other policies.
And they're on the--they do the
Tour de France,
giving these speeches.
And it's really in the 1880s
and the 1890s that you really do
have this sort of apprenticeship
of the republic,
and the apprenticeship of mass
politics and of socialist
movements through these debates.
And that's what a
conférence
contradictoire is,
in French, or just call it a
debate, a lecture followed by a
debate.
And, for example,
when I was studying porcelain
workers in Limoges a long time
ago,
you'd have these guys like
Brousse and Jaurès and
the others show up,
and they would be taken on a
tour of Limoges.
And they'd start out at the
bourse du travail,
more about that later,
or the maison du peuple,
and then they'd go around and
see the factories and they'd see
the historical monuments.
The same thing happened to me,
I was there for a long time
sleeping in a railroad station
because I didn't have any money,
one day out of--one night out
of seven, because I was so broke
then.
But I was invited back and all
this thing to get an award I
certainly didn't deserve.
And it was the same thing,
it was exactly the same thing.
The tour was the same,
even though I knew the place
very well.
And we started out having
aperitif, drinks at the
maison du peuple,
that is the house of the
people,
at about 10:30 or 11:00 in the
morning, and by the time you
make all these stops--it was a
very long day and the thing went
on until 1:30 in the morning,
literally, till 1:30 or 2:00 in
the morning.
And this is the way it is now,
in these circumstances,
but the way then was much more
interesting,
because what people would do is
they would go,
and you'd have some guy like
Guesde show up,
and he gives this talk,
he's up at the podium and gives
this talk.
And there are hundreds of
people there.
And then the other people take
him on.
Then you got a reform socialist
debating with him and telling
him that he's really flat wrong
about this,
you've got anarchists
inevitably standing on the
outside, passing out leaflets,
as in 1968, and then you had
Social Catholics who were
priests that believed that the
only way you could win back
workers is to believe in reform,
and they would be
putting--they'd be wearing their
cassocks and things like that,
and they'd be making their
cases.
And this was the apprenticeship
of politics, for very ordinary
people.
And it really was great,
actually.
And I mentioned the same thing
happened before the Commune,
between 1868 and before the
Franco-Prussian War in 1870,
after the Law on Associations
was--on people could assemble,
the law of June 18th,
1868.
So, anyway people knew who
Guesde was, but most Socialists
did not believe in Guesde.
Most of the people who
wanted--who supported Guesde
were industrial workers,
though there were many
artisans, of course,
and even some small
shopkeepers.
And I said before he does best
in the Nord, with textile
workers, not with miners.
Now, he was all over the place,
basically.
Now, he found a political rival
in the early 1880s who was Paul
Brousse--I didn't write Paul on
the board,
but b-r-o-u-s-s-e--who started
out as an anarchist,
and who probably coined that
chilling phrase that I'll talk
about on Monday,
"propaganda by the deed," that
spark, that assassination,
that bomb, that would set off
the social revolution--more
about that later.
But he leaves anarchism and he
becomes a reform socialist;
very similar to an important
German socialist,
Eduard Bernstein,
whose name you don't have to
remember,
but was very important in
reform socialism in Europe.
He ends up in an asylum,
at the end of his life.
He basically leaves politics
and he becomes quite crazy--not
a very clinical term,
but he ends up in an asylum and
has a very sad end.
And he objected to Guesde's
authoritarianism,
in terms of building a
political party.
And he thought that the program
of a socialist party should
depend upon local circumstances
and should not be merely
imported from,
say, Karl Marx,
or should be imported from
some--one of the many,
many socialist congresses,
wrangling debates between
factions of European socialists
and all of that.
Now, this was kind of an
important comment to make,
and it really--it influences
the evolution of socialism and
communism--not this particular
choice--but,
when even after 1905,
when the revolutionary
socialists and the reform
socialists unite,
under the leadership of Jean
Jaurès,
in 1905, you still have these
tensions that go right through
World War I between the
Guesdists,
who believe in a hierarchically
organized political party,
top down, where the leaders
make the decisions and the
decisions are passed down,
and the reform socialists,
who didn't believe in the kind
of authoritarian hierarchical
organization of a political
party--this tension is still
there.
Jules Guesde,
in World War I,
ends up being Minister of
Transportation,
or Minister of Commerce,
I can't remember which.
So, he joins the Sacred Union
that comes during the First
World War.
But this tension between a way
of organizing socialist parties
is still there,
and it will burst forward again
in 1920, and the Guesdists end
up being the future communists,
with again the same
organization,
top down organization,
in the 1920s and 30s,
so that with the Communist
Party, when the order comes from
Moscow to expel the
intellectuals,
in 1922 and 1923,
they were out of there,
and there's this tension
between the way that--the
Communist Party again,
democratic centralism,
which is leaping way,
way ahead, but that kind of
organization could be
anticipated in the way that
Guesde wanted to--and the other
revolutionary
socialists--believed was the way
to power.
That tension could not be swept
under the rug by this
unification in 1905.
So, what did Brousse want?
Well, he believed that Guesde's
program wants everything at
once, through revolution,
but the result of that
strategy, Brousse and his
colleagues argued,
was that they got nothing,
zero, and therefore "the
ideal," he wrote,
"should be divided into overall
practical stages.
Our aim should be,
as it were, to be immediatized
so as to render them possible."
So, reform socialism was the
politics of the possible and
they damned their revolutionary
socialist rivals as "the
impossiblists,"
because nothing would ever
come, the argument went,
if you just followed them.
And, so, they differ in several
important ways--that is,
the possiblists and those
denigrated as the
impossiblists--that the
Broussists,
the reformists,
said that local conditions
ought to be of paramount
importance.
They wanted a union of all
exploited workers but that local
conditions had to be taken into
consideration;
that is the goals of miners in
Decazeville, or in the north,
are different than the goals of
porcelain workers,
in some cases,
or other workers in other
sectors in the industrial
economy.
Secondly, they abandoned
revolution as a means of
achieving the end,
although many of their faithful
believed that one day there
would be a revolution,
but they are not espousing
revolution because at the moment
it seemed to be impossible.
The State was so powerful,
its armies so large,
and when repressing strikes so
absolutely ruthless,
as in the case of the big wine
strike--wine workers and wine
owners strike,
the property owner's strike in
1907, or in Limoges in 1905,
where they gunned down workers
without the slightest thought.
And third, they concentrated on
winning local power,
because if you were going to do
something for ordinary people,
the way to do it is you elect
Socialist deputies,
to the Chamber of Deputies,
or/and you elect municipal
councils that you have a
majority who are Socialists.
Now, the constraints on
municipal councils,
because of the French State,
which is still the case--we can
go on,
and on, and on about that--was
quite daunting.
But, nonetheless in places
where they do win municipal
power, they are able to take
what funds they have and do
things like create nurseries,
for working women.
And they can give funds to the
labor exchanges--which I'll talk
about in a minute--or these
maisons du peuple,
and these sorts of things.
And, so, in working
class--because it's universal
manhood suffrage--in working
class towns they come to power,
and there's nothing that the
conservative government,
which certainly doesn't want
them in power,
can do about it.
And after the radicals--you can
read about that--in 1898 when
they--they're social
conservatives or social
moderates,
but they're--and they're very
anti-clerical--but when they
come to power they will also
often have alliances on the
local level with these
socialists.
Now, what this does is it
serves to leave the
revolutionary socialists even
further behind,
because their
fidèles,
their faithful,
are going to say,
"of course I'm going to vote
for this socialist candidate.
If we win the municipal
council, if the working class
suburbs of x town are able to
elect for the whole town a
working class majority,
a socialist majority,
then we can have concrete
reforms."
And the Guesdists really don't
have an answer for that,
and they find themselves,
despite themselves,
participating in these
elections which--and supporting
some of these candidates.
Just two examples of
towns--well, or three or
four--but the towns that
they--sort of model cities,
that they take over,
Limoges is one where the
socialist mayor is a reformist,
and they do all sorts of
interesting things.
Roubaix is another one here,
a big textile town,
again part of--it's a
conurbation of Lille,
Tourcoing, Roubaix,
right on the Belgian border;
Montluçon is another
one, down in the Cher;
there are all sorts of them.
The examples don't matter.
But, this again is the politics
of the possible,
it's the politics of the
practical.
And, so, municipal socialism is
one of those things that emerges
from these reform socialist
parties.
And then it comes to this sort
of key moment in 1890--is it '98
or '99?
I think it's '99,
where the first socialist
minister is sitting in a cabinet
meeting,
and it's a guy called not
Mitterrand but Millerand--the
name you can read in Sowerwine's
book--and,
of course, the Guesdists go
wild because here you have
at--in a cabinet meeting,
you have a Socialist minister
who's sitting at the same table
with one of the butchers of the
Commune,
with a former general who's the
Minister of War.
And, so, they said,
"well, there you go.
If you believe in reformist
politics what you end up doing
is--talk about propping up your
bourgeois republic--you're
sitting next to one of the
butchers of the Paris Commune.
There's your revolution."
So, this increases the tension;
but, in the end the two parties
unify, though they can't cover
over these big differences,
in 1905.
Well, Brousse,
in any case,
was a most unlikely candidate
to run any kind of a revolution.
He was a wealthy doctor,
and his grandfather had been a
wealthy grain merchant,
and thus, presumably,
for many of his constituents,
an oppressor of the people,
and his father was a professor
of medicine who was related to a
bishop in the Catholic Church.
He somehow ended up marrying
the daughter of a Russian
prefect of police.
And France is a relatively
small country.
In size it's about the size of
Montana, it's slightly bigger
than Montana,
and much smaller than Texas.
He knew Guesde when he had
been--that is Brousse--a medical
student at the University of
Montpellier,
which is the second oldest
medical school,
after Bologna,
in Europe.
And again he was--when he was
an anarchist he was convicted of
a press offence,
and so he flees to Spain,
organizing a small socialist
club.
Now, he accepts class
struggle--again here is this
sort of middle-class guy who is
a leader of a party in which
most of the members,
both activists and simply
people who vote for them,
are workers.
And this too brings out another
kind of tension--and inevitably,
without making this too
confusing,
there's another--oh,
God--there's another party that
is created by this guy,
Jean Allemane.
And we can just deal with this
very briefly,
as Sowerwine does,
he simply says,
"look, how can you have a--?"
You've got your revolutionary
socialists saying,
"how can you have a party
that's reformist,
that's propping up the
bourgeois republic?"
And then Jean Allemane,
he says, "well,
look at the Socialist Party,
look at the leaders of the
Socialist Party,
are they workers from the mines
of Carmaux, or from the mines of
Anzin, or anywhere else?
Are they textile workers or
metallurgical workers outside of
Saint-Etienne?
No, they're bourgeois,
they're comfortable
doctors,"--like Brousse,
or Jean Jaurès,
who I'll come back to in a
minute, who was a prof en
philo, was a philosophy
professor--"and what we need is
a working class party in which
workers will be both the leaders
and the followers."
So, they kind of split off.
And there were other groups
that split off,
too.
But, basically those are the
kind of outlines of all of this.
Now, just to--well,
by the way, Jean Allemane was a
typographer, and he claimed that
Brousse was an opportunist,
and so he was more in tune with
the workers.
But looking ahead you can see
the same thing,
again the expulsion of the
intellectuals from the Communist
Party in the early 1920s,
and this kind of suspicion of
fancy speakers and wealthy,
liberal, radical do-gooders
from the middle classes,
at a time when people took
class differences extremely
seriously.
And if you looked at the
Communist Party in the 1920s,
the Communist Party's leaders
are miners or metallurgical
workers,
and this was a very strong
tradition, to kind of even
reject these intellectuals.
Many of them became very
famous, some of them very famous
poets, and painters,
and things like that--it's,
"you're bourgeois,
we don't want you;
you have your only class
interests in mind,
not the interests of people who
work."
And, so, this is a tension that
comes out again in terms of the
future history of the Communist
Party,
and you can see the sort of
transition from these debates,
before World War I,
to what will come next,
inspired by the Russian
Revolution, the second one of
October of 1971.
So, who are these syndicalists,
and what do they want,
just to complicate things even
more?
Syndicalists,
rather like Jean Allemane,
said, "look,
we don't want your basic
bourgeois leaders but more than
this"--even though one of the
main syndicalists was pretty
bourgeois-- "even more than
this,
we also don't believe in
politics."
The question of how to get from
here, that is the
relatively miserable condition
of workers vis-à-vis
other people,
to there,
that is, a revolution,
like the revolutionary
socialists they say,
"this does not pass through
political engagement,
that that is merely a false
revolution and you'll end up
propping up the bourgeois
republic,
as with Millerand," as the
Minister in the cabinet of 1899.
So, what do they want to do?
Well, what they want to do is
they see the shop floor--and,
again, if you want to think
about this as the mines--they
see this as both the way to get
to revolution and they see it as
the future as well.
And, so, the radical
syndicalists are very involved
in the strike wave,
from 1895 to 1907.
And, so, syndicalism,
sometimes in Spain and in Italy
it's called
anarcho-syndicalism--I'll talk
maybe a little bit about that on
Monday,
or I probably,
I know I won't have time,
so let's do this here.
Because of--again,
the decentralized aspect
of--that from the shop floor you
build the bricks that are going
to overthrow,
on a local level,
capitalism and the State,
and the kind of relationships
that people have in shop floors,
on the shop floor,
are going to make possible the
revolution and they are simply
going to serve to shatter
capitalism.
And, so, one of the
institutions that they see as
fundamental, and which still
exists in France,
are called the bourses du
travail or the labor
exchanges.
And a bourse du travail
was a place where workers who
came into town could go,
in order to find out if there
was any work there,
to maybe get a few cents to
have something to eat.
They would sponsor dances,
they would sponsor May Day
celebrations.
They sponsored civil baptisms,
sort of mocking the church
ceremonies by having civil
baptisms in these labor
exchanges.
And, so, they become part of
the socialist vision of how to
get from here to there--I mean
the syndicalist vision of how to
get from here to there--in that
they are local institutions that
bring together unions,
which become members of these
labor exchanges and serve--offer
militancy, support during
strikes,
and sort of family solidarity
as well.
And they are the idea basically
of a guy called Fernand
Pelloutier there,
and they bore his mark.
Pelloutier was himself
bourgeois, ironically.
He was born in 1868.
He died in 1901,
so he didn't live very long.
He was a son of a civil servant
from a clerical and legitimist,
that is, monarchist family,
educated in a church school.
He was kicked out of his church
school for writing an
anti-clerical novel.
He failed his baccalaureate,
his bac,
that is the big exam that you
take after lycée,
after high school.
And it used to be only
thirty-five percent of the
people passed,
then fifty percent and now it's
up to eighty-five or something
like that,
quatre-vingt-cinq,
or something,
but it's still a huge tension,
a huge,
huge, huge tension when you
take the bac--amazing.
But he failed the bac.
But he'd already contracted
that working class disease that
killed miners,
and porcelain workers,
and all sorts of other people;
he had contracted TB,
tuberculosis.
He was a journalist but he had
to drop out of journalism after
eighteen months,
for medical purposes.
He emerged from all of this a
changed man.
He knew he was dying,
and so when he wrote about the
dying society of capitalism,
he was also obviously writing
about his dying,
his death in this capitalist
society.
And I don't know where he
contracted the disease,
he did not contract--you could
contract it in various ways but
he did not contract it in the
mines.
So, he believed that only the
working class could regenerate
the world, that is not himself,
as a bourgeois,
but only workers--so,
here again, he's very much like
Jean Allemane,
there--and, ultimately,
what you'd have is a free
association of producers that
would rather be like an
extension of the shop floor,
and the bourse du
travail.
And the difference between him
and the anarchists was that he
still believed in class
struggle,
where for the anarchists it was
more--in which the working class
was privileged--but for the
anarchists it was mostly the
poor against the rich,
and also against the State.
The bourse du travail
created libraries,
for example,
for workers who'd come in and
read.
And, so, one of the differences
that it made,
if you had a socialist
municipality,
is that the socialist
municipality would give money to
the bourse du travail,
whereas in reactionary towns or
towns that--dominated by
radicals, or opportunists,
in the political sense,
then they wouldn't give money
to the bourse du travail.
And, so, those are the
syndicalists.
And as far as Georges Sorel,
Sorel, who was an engineer,
his, really,
contribution was to come up
with the idea of the general
strike,
the general strike.
And the general strike,
he calls it a myth,
a myth not in a sense that it
doesn't exist,
but a myth in the sense that
it's a sort of overwhelming,
given of the possible,
that can motivate people to
take militant,
working class action,
and that one day everybody
would simply put down their
tools,
put down their--take off their
work outfit, and shut capitalism
down by simply saying,
"we're not going to work
anymore," and the whole thing
collapsed.
Was it naïve?
Well, obviously it was
naïve;
but, this was Sorel's,
among others,
big contribution to
syndicalism.
And, again, when these strikes
move from factory to factory,
in towns like Limoges,
in towns like Roubaix,
and in other places,
in Saint-Etienne,
there was a sense among
conservatives,
as among working people,
"is this the general strike?
Will everybody shut the place
down?"
And workers during strikes,
they would go from factory to
factory, trying to get other
people to go out.
And who knows if the factories
up the road will go out.
And pretty soon Lyon,
rumors of Lyon going out,
and then it shuts down in
Nantes,
and pretty soon you can bring
capitalism down with the general
strike.
It doesn't really work out that
way, obviously,
and what's called the heroic
age of syndicalism,
that is of strikes,
of strike movements,
goes from 1895 to 1907,
and then it sort of shuts down.
Now, how did the Socialist
Party become unified in 1905?
And, again, all of the tensions
within the Socialist Party are
not eliminated;
but, the French Socialist Party
becomes a major,
major force in French politics,
and that was largely through
the work of Jean Jaurès,
who I want to take a few
minutes to discuss now.
Now, in Germany the SPD,
or the German Social Democratic
Party, is the largest party in
the Reichstag by 1914.
But it doesn't make any
difference, because in 1914
Germany is still an autocracy
run by this sort of madcap,
ridiculous, extraordinarily
stupid--don't get me going--but
extraordinarily stupid Kaiser,
and--but, in France it did make
a difference because France was
a parliamentary regime--well,
you can't call France a
democracy because women didn't
have the right to vote,
but it's a parliamentary regime.
And Jean Jaurès by his
personal charisma and
intellectual energy becomes the
unifying force of the French
Socialist party.
And, again, in 1981 when
Francois Mitterrand was elected
President of France,
the first thing he does,
as the cameras follow him
around the Panthéon,
he goes and to pay homage to
Jean Jaurès.
So, what--his importance is he
creates a unified Socialist
Party out of these various
factions,
and he gives it too an impetus,
and a popularity,
and a wide range that would
carry it basically after his
death,
on the^( )thirty-first of July,
1914, carry it into the 1920s,
and 1930s,
and beyond.
Despite later claims,
he was a bourgeois by birth.
His family had included
merchants and lawyers,
two admirals and a bishop.
His father was the poorest of
the family;
although, he had married the
daughter of a successful cloth
manufacturer.
He ends up having failed at
business with a rather small
farm of fifteen acres in the
south of France.
And Jaurès was born in
1859 in Castres.
Castres is northwest of
Toulouse, it's quite close to
Carmaux, that mine and glass
producing town there on the
Tarn.
It's beautiful.
It's also got some very nice
Gaillac wines,
and they've made great
improvements over the years;
but, it's essentially outside
of the glassworks and the mines.
It's a very rural department.
Of 50,000 people on the farms,
there were 34,000 were small
property owners,
12,000 tenants and
sharecroppers,
and 16,000 day-laborers.
So, it's your basic rural
France in the process of being
slowly depopulated.
He got his education because of
a wealthy uncle,
who gave him the money,
and he won all the first prizes
in school;
and things like that count in
France.
He obtained a scholarship to
Paris--this is rather again like
Maximilien Robespierre,
but they were very,
very different people and
wouldn't have liked each other
at all--and he gets into the
École Normale
Supérieure,
which is one of the grands
écoles,
or the big fancy schools in
Paris.
And he did brilliantly.
He was third behind Henri
Bergson, a famous guy,
and a forgotten school-teacher.
He got his degree in
philo,
in philosophy.
He becomes a teacher in
Albi--that's what you do when
you get your doctorate,
then you go on to be a school
teacher or a lycée
teacher and then if--now,
it's harder and harder in
France, because there's so few
jobs--but then you go on to
become a professor.
So, he becomes a lecturer,
and then a professor in
philosophy at the University of
Toulouse, which then and now is
a very good place.
He developed a reputation for
being a great teacher and,
in the philosophical sense,
always was trying to reconcile
idealism with realism.
If you've seen photos of him he
gave a rather uncertain
impression.
Someone once dissed him,
saying that,
"he looks like a junior
secondary-school master who will
never get his higher degree and
will never exercise enough;
or, he looks like a fat
merchant who eats too well and
too often.
He's of medium height and
rather square looking.
He's neither ugly nor
beautiful, neither unusual nor
common.
He had a nervous tic of the
right eyelid.
He looked bright and indeed he
was.
And when he started to laugh,
when he told jokes he would
simply shake all the way from
the top, all the way down."
He was first timid in religious
matters but ends up being
anti-clerical,
though not anti-religion in any
sense.
He was always embarrassed when
the subject of religion was
raised.
He would get out of it by
saying, "I assure you it is more
complicated than you think."
He looked like a bourgeois on
holiday in Dieppe,
or some place like that.
He looked untidy, inelegant.
His pockets were always crammed
with papers and indeed with
books--he had rather big
pockets.
But he was a great orator.
People who follow those
things--we don't have films of
him speaking,
that would come later--but
really,
Leon Trotsky,
who was also just a great
orator--they were considered to
be the most magnificent
speakers,
really, of their time;
and there were a lot of good
ones, particularly in Germany,
among all sorts of political
types.
He, unlike one of his friends,
Viviani, who took lessons at
the Comédie-F
rançaise,
and practiced them--there used
to be, one of my colleagues used
to practice his lectures in one
of the parking lots,
and he'd look at himself in the
mirror, these rearview mirrors;
and I don't know why I thought
of that.
But, anyway,
Jaurès was not like
that, he was just a brilliant
speaker, he was born being able
to speak.
And he could take his crowd on
dizzying verbal flights.
And the thing he could do was
he could unite people who would
come into a room and had very
different ideas,
thus unification in 1905.
Just a personal aside,
the person I know that most
reminds me, although his
politics were very different,
was my old, late friend Bart
Giamatti, who was president of
this place long before you guys
were here,
and who died in 1989.
It was the same sort of thing.
You'd come into a room with
Bart Giamatti--and I often
didn't agree with him about some
things,
but almost always did,
and revered him,
and still miss him
terribly--but he could--at the
end of talking to him,
everybody would kind of agree,
at least the momentum to find
conciliation,
and to agree to this common
goal that they all shared was a
fantastic,
fantastic experience.
And when I think of
Jaurès,
I think of Bart.
But Jaurès could do
that, and that's what he did,
that's what he did in 1905.
And, so, he ends up in the
Chamber of Deputies.
He represents the Tarn.
The mining bosses get together
to defeat him once;
but, then he goes back and he's
there for always,
and then--until the^(
)thirty-first of July,
1914.
And when he spoke,
people listened,
and when he spoke in 1905,
and all the years before that,
people listened,
and the Socialist Party
unified.
And when he went on the road,
whether he's in Besançon
or whether he's in Quimper,
people listened.
And he was on the road
constantly, and he became a
voice of progress and reform and
reason in a world increasingly
gone mad.
And the night of the^(
)thirty-first of July,
when he went to write his
famous headline about whether
France--French workers should
follow into the war or not,
it was one of the crucial
moments of the twentieth
century, and it was certainly
his last moments,
that's for sure.
So, he defended the workers and
the strike.
He became a political dynamo,
really, of the Left,
respected even by his enemies
because of his power and his
ability to take the bigger
project that was France,
of course--but,
was the happiness of humanity,
and to see how we could best
arrive at that end.
A most admirable character.
Anyway, 1905,
for all the tensions,
the Socialist Party itself
rév&ea
cute;lateur,
revealing the mass politics of
the new era of the 1890s and the
first decade of the twentieth
century,
right up to 1914,
was essentially his work.
And Monday, people who didn't
want to change the State,
didn't want to capture power in
the state,
but wanted to destroy it,
and these include some of the
more interesting people that
I've known,
at least working on them.
Have a great weekend.