L'amnistie et les socialistes
[English title]
Hubert Lagardelle
The Amnesty and Socialist Politics
The Méline ministry declared: There is no Dreyfus Affair. The Waldeck-Rousseau ministry has just pronounced: There is no longer a Dreyfus Affair. Back to back, General Mercier and Colonel Picquart, Esterhazy and Zola thus find themselves dismissed together: all of them have been “amnestied” — some for having committed crimes, the others for having denounced them.
For the socialists who took part in the Dreyfus Affair, the amnesty is a bankruptcy. The goal they pursued was not achieved — a goal that consisted in dismantling, piece by piece, the entire inner mechanism of the Affair, in exposing to the very end the senior military commanders who were compromised, so as then to turn their scandals and their shames against militarism itself, through living examples that the simple-minded crowd never forgets.
Let us recall: it was on this precise point that the socialists divided. Guesde, Vaillant, and their friends condemned any direct and personal intervention by the socialist party, reserving for themselves only the right to draw from the conflict at hand the appropriate moral. While Jaurès and the great majority of French socialism, strengthened by the moral support of international socialism, rushed to the aid of the liberal bourgeois elements, in order to give the Affair its full development and push it to its ultimate consequences.
Now, it was only the purely individual side of the Affair that received its resolution: the social side has just been obscured forever by the amnesty. The liberal bourgeois have every right to declare themselves satisfied, since, by the effect of the presidential pardon, the individual injustice that so violently moved them has ceased. But the socialists, who, through the punishment of those responsible for the crime, sought to discredit the army and to prevent the recurrence of such abominable violations of legal guarantees and the rights of the human person — they have fewer grounds for satisfaction. Not only has the education of the masses through striking facts not been accomplished, not only has hatred of militarism not been stamped into the mind of the crowd by the fall of a criminal and seditious General Mercier, but the opposite effect will be produced: the moral conscience of the masses will be troubled, disoriented; they will not understand why the accusers and the accused have been placed on the same level, when the whole truth and the whole of justice had been solemnly promised to them.
History has strange ironies. It is the same ministry — that paradoxical product of an hour of turmoil, whose sole mission was to have been, as Bebel remarked in his reply to the International Consultation, the “liquidation of the Affair in the name of justice and the law” — that today revives the ancient politics of Pontius Pilate, and washes its hands. And at this unheard-of contradiction, very few among the socialists engaged in the Dreyfus Affair appear to be stirred.
“Political necessities” have been invoked. The immortal Reason of State, with its retinue of hypocrisies and lies, has reappeared. It seemed that the Dreyfus Affair would kill it, and it is the Reason of State that kills the Dreyfus Affair. It was reasons of “high governmental politics” that secured the vote for the amnesty.
The ministry wished to consolidate its wavering popularity and to reassure, through legal appeasement, the frightened French petite bourgeoisie. It is undeniable that this petite bourgeoisie — the bulk of the country — wants peace and quiet. Its normal state is anxiety, but its constant aspiration is calm. The uncertainty of its economic situation torments it. Fearful, it panics at every crisis and clamors for a “strong government” capable of restoring the peace favorable to its faltering affairs. M. Waldeck-Rousseau wished to give it this “strong government.”
To this desire to satisfy undeniable needs for tranquility was added the fear of further antagonizing the army by prosecuting the guilty senior military commanders, and also of discrediting it too much. In this country of patriotic hysteria, the army remains, despite everything, the sacred idol, “the hope of future revenges.” All the bourgeois democrats raised in the Gambettist school — “Let us think of it always, but never speak of it” — were frightened by the consequences that the normal evolution of the Dreyfus Affair was going to engender. M. Waldeck-Rousseau was perfectly placed to halt the current — as was Millerand, who once so eloquently reproached M. Méline for allowing the army to be attacked with impunity!
The government also hoped to deprive nationalism of all sustenance — at least the clamorous nationalism of the streets and popular demonstrations, which lives only on demagoguery and confusion. It believed it could put an end to the Caesarian agitation, all the more so since it had left Déroulède and his companions in exile to dream upon Spanish soil, far from the Parisian pavement.
All these reasons explain the ministry’s stance, even if they do not excuse it. One understands as well the conduct of the radicals and the governmental moderates who followed it, and whose electoral interests it served perfectly. But how is it that our socialist comrades in the Chamber found themselves nearly all in agreement to vote for the amnesty?
For obviously contrary reasons. The ministry’s stance produced between the two factions of the socialist parliamentary group a crisscross maneuver not lacking in piquancy, at the end of which both found themselves in perfect harmony. The anti-ministerial faction was also the “anti-Dreyfusard,” while the ministerial faction was the “Dreyfusard.” The first let its anti-Dreyfusism take precedence over its anti-ministerialism, and supported the ministry that was putting an end to the execrated Affair — while at the same time amnestying strike-related offenses. The second performed the inverse evolution: it subordinated its Dreyfusism to its ministerialism, and remained faithful to the government. In general, as a consequence of the attacks from the right and from nationalists of the Lasies or Méline variety, the socialists felt that the political situation was grave and that the reaction was going to attempt everything to put the ministry in a bad position.
Caught up in parliamentary preoccupations, they yielded to the ministerial will. And so it was that in the press as in Parliament, those of our comrades who had played a glorious role in the Dreyfus Affair suddenly executed a disconcerting about-face, forgetting their admirable stance of yesterday to remember only the political contingencies of the moment. The bill on Associations was invoked, along with all the other bills of which the Waldeck-Rousseau ministry is the more or less fortunate father! But whatever the marvels glimpsed — whose realization is, moreover, uncertain — nothing will erase the deplorable moral effect produced by the amnesty, nor the discredit that attaches to it.
Whatever the political reasons that explain the defeat of the socialists engaged in the Dreyfus Affair, it was no less a defeat. It is, moreover, naïve to believe that the Dreyfus Affair will end simply because M. Waldeck-Rousseau, doing violence to a compliant Chamber, willed it so: all the Cuignet affairs and others that may arise will nonetheless reopen the debate, which will remain definitively closed only for the Merciers and the du Paty de Clams of the world. Nor will the chronic fever agitating the world of the petite bourgeoisie be “appeased”: its anxiety has causes less momentary and more profound. Finally, from the mere fact that the extravagant nationalism will no longer have old scandals to exploit, nor its bard Déroulède to applaud, it does not follow that the far more dangerous nationalism of Méline, nor the patriotic demagoguery of the radical and radical-socialist parties, are forever annihilated.
We have therefore been defeated. We set aside all the indirect results of this prodigious Affair, which so powerfully laid bare the political and social conditions of present-day France. Those results are the work of no one: they were produced naturally. But for what depended on our specifically own action, it is a setback we have suffered. The liberal bourgeois elements alone have triumphed: they have conquered power, and they mean to keep it. Frightened by the revolutionary consequences the Affair carried within it, they prepared its miscarriage at the precise moment when, having ceased to be useful to them, it became dangerous. M. Cornély, of the Figaro, had long since warned us of what is now befalling us.
And as for the socialists involved in the Affair, if they were beaten it was through their own weakness. Deprived of the support of those who followed Guesde and Vaillant, they were powerless to resist their bourgeois allies, who absorbed them. Moreover, they allowed themselves to be paralyzed by the ministerial obsession, and forgot everything in the face of a fragile government’s instability.
The amnesty thus carries a double significance: it proves, first, that the liberal bourgeoisie in France is less democratic and more reactionary than one might have supposed; it shows, next, that socialism, in its current state of disorganization, is not a decisive social force capable of influencing events in its own direction. And had the elements of the extreme right not found themselves isolated from the elements of the extreme left, perhaps parliamentary intrigues and the momentary demands of politics would not have prevailed over the great élan given at the beginning of the Affair.
From whichever side one turns, whatever point one considers, one always finds, ever more imperious, the necessity of imminent unity. While some exaggerate their revolutionary point of view, others allow themselves to be mesmerized by the ministerial question. It is from this latter side that the danger could come: intransigence lasts only so long — life always wears it down in the end — whereas opportunism is a slippery path.
Marx spoke somewhere of parliamentary cretinism. It was in connection with that extraordinary Frankfurt Parliament, where the German radical bourgeoisie committed suicide so lamentably. Parliamentary cretinism, which Marx defined thus: “A malady that fills its unfortunate victims with the solemn conviction that the entire world, its history and its future, is governed and determined by a majority of votes in the particular body that has the honor of counting them among its members; and that everything that takes place beyond the walls of their Chamber is nothing, compared to the immeasurable events pivoting upon the weighty question — whatever it may be — that at a given moment occupies the attention of the High Assembly.” We must not, however, come to that, nor reduce the broad socialist action to pitiful political combinations.
From the defeat we have just suffered, this conclusion emerges: socialism will triumph only if it remains faithful to itself.
We are pleased to announce to our subscribers that the sixth cahier will be Romain Rolland’s Danton. This drama was performed for the second time at the Civique. Jaurès spoke before the performance. We had his address taken down in shorthand and will publish it in the seventh cahier.
We will publish in the next cahier the first dispatch that our friend Lionel Landry has sent us from China.
To Jaurès, author of the Preuves, we will propose, in the same cahier, a serious contribution to the continuation of those Preuves.