Pour ou contre le socialisme. La préparation du congrès socialiste national
POUR ET CONTRE LE SOCIALISME
Anatole France
Texts from the Cahiers de la Quinzaine
FREEDOM THROUGH STUDY
The newspapers of Thursday, November [1899] published the speech delivered by Anatole France at the inauguration of l’Émancipation, a people’s university of the fifteenth arrondissement:
FREEDOM THROUGH STUDY 1
Citizens,
The association we inaugurate today is formed for study. It is a group of men who come together to think in common. You wish to acquire knowledge that will give your ideas exactitude and breadth, and that will thus enrich you with an inner and true wealth. You wish to learn in order to understand and retain — unlike those sons of the rich who study only to pass examinations, and who, once the ordeal is finished, hasten to clear their brains of their learning as of a cumbersome piece of furniture. Your desire is nobler and more disinterested. And as you propose to work toward your own development, you will seek out what is truly useful and what is truly beautiful.
The knowledge useful to life is not limited to that of trades and crafts. If it is necessary that each person know his trade, it is useful to each to interrogate the nature that formed us and the society in which we live. Whatever our station among our fellows, we are above all men, and we have great interest in knowing the conditions necessary to human life. We depend upon the earth and upon society, and it is by investigating the causes of this dependence that we shall be able to imagine the means of making it easier and gentler. It is because the discoveries of the great physical laws that govern the worlds have been slow, belated, long confined within a small number of minds, that a barbarous morality, founded upon a false interpretation of the phenomena of nature, has been able to impose itself upon the mass of men and subject them to imbecile and cruel practices.
Do you believe, for example, citizens, that if scholars had known earlier the true situation of the terrestrial globe, turning in the company of a few other globes, its brothers, around a sun that itself swims in infinite space, peopled by a multitude of other suns — ardent and luminous fathers of a multitude of worlds — do you think that, if in ancient centuries a great number of men had possessed this just idea of the universe and had sufficiently fixed their thought upon it, it would have been possible to frighten them by making them believe that there is beneath the earth a hell and devils? It is science that frees us from these crude imaginings and these vain terrors, which you have certainly cast far from you. And do you not see that from the study of nature you will draw a multitude of moral consequences that will make your thought more assured and more tranquil?
Knowledge of the human being is no less profitable. By following the transformations of man from the epoch when he lived naked, armed with stone arrows, in caves, to the present age of machines, to the reign of steam and electricity, you will embrace the great phases of the evolution of our race.
Knowledge of the progress accomplished will allow you to foresee and to solicit future progress. Perhaps you will wish to remain preferably in times near our own and to seek in a recent past the origin of the current state of society. There too, there above all, study will be of great profit to you. By investigating how capitalist power was formed and increased, you will better judge the means that must be employed to master it — following the example of those great inventors who subjugated nature only after having perfectly observed it.
You will study the facts in good faith, without bias or preconceived system. True scholars — and I see some here — will tell you that science insists on keeping its independence and its freedom, and that it submits to no foreign power. Is this to say that you will pursue your researches without direction or determined aim? No. You are undertaking a vast but defined work, immense but precise. You propose to work mutually to develop your intellectual and moral being, to make yourselves more sure of yourselves and more conscious of your powers through a more exact knowledge of the necessities of life on this planet and of the particular conditions in which each of you finds himself in present-day society. Your association is constituted to encourage one another to think and to reflect in the place of the privileged who no longer trouble themselves to do so, and thus to secure for yourselves a share in the elaboration of a new and better order of things — since, despite all acts of force, it is thought that guides the world, as the compass in the tempest still shows the route to ships.
Your association will seek out what is most useful to know in science. It will reveal to you what is most agreeable to contemplate in art. Do not refuse to mingle the agreeable with the useful in your studies. Besides, how can they be separated, if one has a little philosophy? How can one mark the point where the useful ends and the agreeable begins? A song — does it serve no purpose? The Marseillaise and the Carmagnole overthrew the armies of kings and emperors. Is a smile useless? Is it so little a thing to please and to charm?
You sometimes hear moralists tell you that nothing should be granted to enjoyment in life. Do not listen to them. A long religious tradition, which still weighs upon us, teaches that privation, suffering, and pain are desirable goods, and that there are special merits attached to voluntary privation. What an imposture! It is by telling peoples that one must suffer in this world in order to be happy in the next that a pitiful resignation to all oppressions and all iniquities has been obtained from them. Let us not listen to the priests who teach that suffering is excellent. It is joy that is good!
Our instincts, our organs, our physical and moral nature, our entire being counsels us to seek happiness on earth. It is difficult to encounter. Let us not flee from it. Let us not fear joy; and when a happy form or a smiling thought offers us pleasure, let us not refuse it. Your association is of this opinion. It is ready to offer you, along with useful thoughts, agreeable thoughts — which are also useful. It will make known to you the great poets: Racine, Corneille, Molière, Victor Hugo, Shakespeare. Thus nourished, your minds will grow in strength and in beauty.
And it is time, citizens, that your strength be felt, and that your will, clearer and more beautiful, impose itself to establish a little reason and equity in a world that obeys nothing now but the promptings of selfishness and fear. We have seen in recent times bourgeois society and its leaders incapable of assuring us justice — I do not speak of ideal and future justice, but only the old limping justice, survivor of ruder ages. That justice, which protected them in their folly, they have just dealt a mortal blow. We have seen them triumph in falsehood, aspire to the most brutal of tyrannies, breathe into the streets civil war and hatred of the human race.
It is for you, citizens, for you, workers, to raise up your minds and your hearts, and to render yourselves capable, through study and reflection, of preparing the advent of social justice and universal peace.
From Anatole France’s “Histoire contemporaine”
The Figaro of Wednesday, January [1900] published the following article:
It was New Year’s Day. Through streets blond with fresh mud, between two showers, M. Bergeret and his daughter Pauline were going to carry their good wishes to a maternal aunt who was still living — but for herself alone, and barely — and who dwelt in the rue Rousselet in a little beguine’s lodging, overlooking a vegetable garden, amid the sound of convent bells. Pauline was joyful without reason, and only because these festive days, which mark the course of time, made more sensible to her the charming progress of her youth.
M. Bergeret maintained, on this solemn day, his customary indulgence, expecting no longer any great good from men and from life, but knowing, like M. Fagon, that much must be forgiven to nature. Along the streets, the beggars, erect like candelabra or huddled like wayside shrines, formed the ornament of this social festival. They had all come to adorn the bourgeois quarters, our poor — the vagabonds, the sham cripples, the halt and the lame, the tattered and the shivering, the sham sufferers, the ragged, the dregs of the alehouse. But, submitting to the universal effacement of character and conforming to the general mediocrity of manners, they did not display, as in the days of the Grand Coësre, horrible deformities and frightful wounds. They did not wrap their mutilated limbs in bloody rags. They were simple; they affected only bearable infirmities. One of them followed M. Bergeret for some time, limping, yet with an agile step. Then he stopped and resumed his post as lamppost at the edge of the pavement.
After which M. Bergeret said to his daughter:
“I have just committed a bad action: I have just given alms. In giving two sous to Clopinel, I tasted the shameful joy of humiliating my fellow man; I consented to the odious pact that assures the strong man his power and the weak man his weakness; I set my seal upon the ancient iniquity; I contributed to this man having only half a soul.”
“You did all that, Papa?” asked Pauline incredulously.
“Almost all that,” replied M. Bergeret. “I sold to my brother Clopinel some fraternity at false weight. I humiliated myself in humiliating him. For almsgiving degrades equally him who receives it and him who gives it. I acted badly.”
“I do not believe so,” said Pauline.
“You do not believe so,” replied M. Bergeret, “because you have no philosophy and because you do not know how to draw from an action apparently innocent and contemptible the infinite consequences it bears within it. This Clopinel led me into almsgiving. I could not resist the importunity of his plaintive voice. I pitied his thin neck without linen, his knees which his trousers, stretched by too long use, render sadly similar to the knees of a camel, his feet at the end of which his shoes go with beaks open like a pair of ducks. Seducer! O dangerous Clopinel! Delicious Clopinel! Through you, my sou produces a little baseness, a little shame. Through you, I have constituted with a sou a particle of evil and ugliness. In communicating to you this small sign of wealth and power, I have made you a capitalist with irony and invited you without honor to the banquet of society, to the feasts of civilization. And at once I felt that I was one of the mighty of this world, in comparison with you — a rich man beside you, gentle Clopinel, exquisite little beggar, flatterer! I rejoiced, I grew proud, I took pleasure in my opulence and my grandeur. Live, O Clopinel! Pulcher omnis divitiarum pauper immortalis.
“Execrable practice of almsgiving! Barbarous pity of eleemosynary charity! Ancient error of the bourgeois who gives a sou and thinks he does good, and who believes himself quit toward all his brothers by the most miserable, the most clumsy, the most ridiculous, the most foolish, the poorest act of all those that can be accomplished with a view to a better distribution of wealth. This custom of giving alms is contrary to benevolence and an abomination to charity.”
“Is that true?” asked Pauline with good will.
“Almsgiving,” continued M. Bergeret, “is no more comparable to benevolence than the grimace of a monkey resembles the smile of the Mona Lisa. Benevolence is ingenious, whereas almsgiving is inept. It is vigilant; it proportions its effort to the need. This is precisely what I did not do with respect to my brother Clopinel. The very name of benevolence awakened the sweetest ideas in sensitive souls, in the century of the philosophers. It was believed that this name had been created by the good Abbé de Saint-Pierre. But it is older and is already found in the old Balzac. In the sixteenth century, they said bénéficence. It is the same word. I confess that I no longer find in this word ‘benevolence’ its original beauty: it has been spoiled for me by the Pharisees who have used it too much. We have in our society many charitable establishments — pawnshops, provident societies, mutual insurance associations. Some are useful and render services. Their common vice is that they proceed from the social iniquity they are meant to correct, and that they are contaminated medicines. Universal benevolence is that each person live by his own work and not by the work of others. Outside of exchange and solidarity, all is vile, shameful, unfruitful. Human charity is the cooperation of all in production and the sharing of the fruits.
“It is justice; it is love, and the poor are more skilled at it than the rich. What rich men ever exercised as fully as Epictetus or Benoît Malon the charity of the human race? True charity is the gift of each person’s works to all; it is beautiful goodness; it is the harmonious gesture of the soul that bends like a vase full of precious nard and pours itself out in benefits; it is Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel, or the deputies to the National Assembly on the night of the Fourth of August; it is the gift poured out in its happy plenitude, money flowing pell-mell with love and thought. We have nothing truly our own but ourselves. One gives truly only when one gives one’s work, one’s soul, one’s genius. And this magnificent offering of all oneself to all men enriches the giver as much as the community.”
“But,” objected Pauline, “you could not give love and beauty to Clopinel. You gave him what was most suitable for him.”
“It is true that Clopinel has become a brute. Of all the goods that can gratify a man, he relishes only alcohol. I judge this from the fact that he reeked of brandy when he approached me. But such as he is, he is our handiwork. Our pride was his father; our iniquity, his mother. He is the evil fruit of our vices. Every man in society must give and receive. This one has not given enough, no doubt because he has not received enough.”
“He is perhaps a lazybones,” said Pauline. “How shall we manage, my God, so that there shall be no more poor, no more weak, no more lazy? Don’t you believe that men are naturally good and that it is society that makes them wicked?”
“No. I do not believe that men are naturally good,” replied M. Bergeret. “I see rather that they are emerging painfully and little by little from original barbarism and that they are organizing, with great effort, an uncertain justice and a precarious goodness. The time is still far off when they will be gentle and benevolent toward one another. The time is far off when they will no longer make war among themselves, and when paintings that represent battles will be hidden from sight as immoral and offering a shameful spectacle. I believe that the reign of violence will last a long time yet, that for a long time peoples will tear each other apart for frivolous reasons, that for a long time the citizens of a single nation will furiously snatch from one another the goods necessary to life, instead of making an equitable division of them. But I also believe that men are less ferocious when they are less wretched, that the progress of industry determines in the long run some softening of manners, and I have it from a botanist that the hawthorn, transplanted from dry ground to rich soil, there changes its thorns into flowers.”
“You see? You are an optimist, Papa! I knew it well,” cried Pauline, stopping in the middle of the pavement to fix for a moment on her father the gaze of her eyes, gray as dawn, full of soft light and morning freshness. “You are an optimist. You work with a good heart to build the house of the future. That is it. It is beautiful to build, with men of good will, the new republic.”
M. Bergeret smiled at this word of hope and at these eyes of aurora.
“Yes,” he said, “it would be beautiful to establish the new society, where each person would receive the price of his labor.”
“Will it not be done soon?” asked Pauline with candor.
And M. Bergeret replied, not without gentleness or sadness:
“Do not ask me to prophesy, my child. It is not without reason that the ancients considered the power of piercing the future as the most fatal gift a man can receive. If it were possible for us to see what is to come, we would have nothing left but to die, and perhaps we would fall struck down by grief or terror. The future — one must work at it as the weavers of high-loom tapestries work at their hangings, without seeing it.”
Thus conversed father and daughter as they walked. Before the square of the rue de Sèvres, they met a beggar solidly planted on the pavement.
“I have no more change,” said M. Bergeret. “Have you a ten-sou piece to give me, Pauline? This outstretched hand bars my way. Were we on the Place de la Concorde, it would bar the whole square to me. The extended arm of a wretch is a barrier I cannot cross. It is a weakness I cannot overcome. Give to this vagabond. It is pardonable. One must not exaggerate the evil one does.”
Anatole France
The Figaro of Wednesday, January 10 published the following article:
“Papa, I am anxious to know what you will do with Clopinel in your republic. For you do not think he will live by the fruits of his labor?”
“My daughter,” replied M. Bergeret, “I believe he will consent to disappear. He is already much diminished. Laziness, the taste for repose, dispose him to final evanescence. He will return to nothingness with ease.”
“I believe, on the contrary, that he is very content to live.”
“It is true that he has his joys. It is doubtless delightful for him to swallow the vitriol of the gin-shop. He will disappear with the last publican. There will be no more wine merchants in my republic. There will be no more buyers or sellers. There will be no more rich or poor. And each will enjoy the fruits of his labor.”
“We shall all be happy, my father.”
“No. Holy pity, which makes the beauty of souls, would perish at the same time that suffering perished. That will not be. Moral evil and physical evil, ceaselessly combated, will ceaselessly share with happiness and joy the empire of the earth, as night and day will succeed each other there without end. Evil is necessary. It has, like good, its deep source in nature, and the one cannot be dried up without the other. We are happy only because we are unhappy. Suffering is sister to joy, and their twin breaths, passing over our strings, make them resonate harmoniously. The breath of happiness alone would render a monotonous and tedious sound, akin to silence. But to the inevitable evils — those evils at once vulgar and august that result from the human condition — will no longer be added the artificial evils that result from our social condition. Men will no longer be deformed by iniquitous labor, by which they die rather than live. The slave will emerge from the ergastulum, and the factory will no longer devour bodies by the millions.
“This deliverance I expect from the machine itself. The machine that has crushed so many men will come gently, generously to the aid of tender human flesh. The machine, at first cruel and hard, will become good, favorable, friendly. How will it change its soul? Listen. The spark that leaps from the Leyden jar, the subtle little star that revealed itself, in the last century, to the marveling physicist, will accomplish this prodigy. The Unknown One who let herself be conquered without letting herself be known, the mysterious and captive force, the unseizable seized by our hands, the docile thunderbolt, bottled and unwound upon the innumerable wires that cover the earth with their network — electricity will carry its strength, its aid, everywhere it is needed: into houses, into rooms, to the hearth where father and mother and children will no longer be separated. This is not a dream. There are already motors in the home; there are already houses in Paris where this beneficent force is distributed. It is no longer the fierce machine that crushes flesh and souls in the factory. It has become domestic, intimate, familiar. But it is nothing — no, it is nothing — that the pulleys, the gears, the connecting rods, the cranks, the slides, the flywheels become humanized, if men keep souls of iron.
“We await, we call for, a change more marvelous still. A day will come when the employer, rising in moral beauty, will become a worker among emancipated workers; when there will no longer be wages, but exchange of goods. High industry, like the old nobility it replaces and imitates, will have its night of the Fourth of August. It will abandon contested gains and threatened privileges. It will be generous when it feels that the time has come to be so. And what does the employer say today? That he is the soul and the thought, and that without him his army of workers would be like a body deprived of intelligence. Well! If he is thought, let him be content with this honor and this joy. Must one, because one is thought and spirit, gorge oneself with riches? When the great Donatello was casting with his companions a bronze statue, he was the soul of the work. The price he received for it from the prince or the citizens, he put in a basket that was hoisted by a pulley to a beam in the workshop. Each companion pulled the rope in turn and took from the basket according to his needs. Is not the joy of producing by intelligence enough, and does this advantage exempt the master workman from sharing the gain with his humble collaborators? But in my republic there will be no more gains or wages, and all will belong to all.”
“Papa, that is collectivism,” said Pauline tranquilly.
“The precious goods,” replied M. Bergeret, “are common to all men. Air and light belong in common to all that breathes and sees the light of day. After the secular labors of selfishness and avarice, despite the violent efforts of individuals to seize and keep treasures, the individual goods enjoyed by the richest among us are still little in comparison with those that belong indistinctly to all men. And in our very society, do you not see that the sweetest or most splendid goods — roads, rivers, forests once royal, libraries, museums — belong to all? No rich man possesses more than I do that old oak of Fontainebleau or that painting in the Louvre. And they are more mine than the rich man’s if I know how to see them better. The collective property that is dreaded as a distant monster already surrounds us in a thousand familiar forms. It frightens when it is announced, and we already enjoy its presence.
“The positivists who assemble in the house of Auguste Comte around the venerated M. Pierre Laffitte are not in a hurry to become socialists. But one of them made this judicious remark: that property is of social origin. And nothing is more true, since all property, acquired by individual effort, has been able to be born and subsist only through the cooperation of the entire community. And since private property is of social origin, it is not to misunderstand its origin or corrupt its essence to extend it to the community and commit it to the State on which it necessarily depends. And what is the State?…”
Mlle Bergeret hastened to answer this question:
“The State, my father, is a pitiful and graceless gentleman seated behind a window. You understand that one has no desire to strip oneself for him.”
“I understand,” replied M. Bergeret, smiling. “I have always been inclined to understand, and I have lost precious virtues thereby. I discover late in life that it is a great strength not to understand. It sometimes enables one to conquer the world. If Napoleon had been as intelligent as Spinoza, he would have written four volumes in a garret. I understand. But this graceless and pitiful gentleman who is seated behind a window — you entrust your letters to him, Pauline, which you would not entrust to the Tricoche agency. He administers a portion of your goods, and not the least vast nor the least precious. You see in him a morose face. But when he is everything, he will no longer be anything. Or rather, he will be nothing but us. Annihilated by his universality, he will cease to appear meddlesome. One is no longer wicked, my daughter, when one is no longer anyone. What is unpleasant about him at present is that he encroaches upon individual property, going about scraping and filing, biting little on the fat and much on the lean. This makes him insufferable. He is greedy. He has needs. In my republic, he will be without desires, like the gods. He will have everything and he will have nothing. We shall not feel him, since he will be conformed to us, indistinct from us. He will be as if he were not. And when you think that I sacrifice individuals to the State, life to an abstraction, it is on the contrary the abstraction I subordinate to reality, the State I suppress by identifying it with all social activity.
FOR AND AGAINST SOCIALISM
“Even if this republic were never to exist, I would congratulate myself on having conceived the idea of it. It is permitted to build in Utopia. And Auguste Comte himself, who prided himself on building only upon the data of positive science, placed Campanella in the calendar of great men.
“The dreams of philosophers have at all times raised up men of action who have set to work to realize them. Our thought creates the future. Statesmen work upon the plans we leave after our death. They are our masons and our hodmen. No, my daughter, I do not build in Utopia. My dream, which does not belong to me at all and which is, at this very moment, the dream of thousands upon thousands of souls, is true and prophetic. Every society whose organs no longer correspond to the functions for which they were created, and whose members are not nourished in proportion to the useful work they produce, dies. Profound troubles, intimate disorders precede its end and announce it.
“Feudal society was strongly constituted. When the clergy ceased to represent knowledge in it, and the nobility ceased to defend by the sword the laborer and the artisan, when these two orders were nothing more than swollen and harmful members, the whole body perished; an unforeseen and necessary revolution carried off the patient. Who would maintain that, in present-day society, the organs correspond to the functions, and that all the members are nourished in proportion to the useful work they produce? Who would maintain that wealth is justly distributed? Who can believe, in the end, in the duration of iniquity?”
“And how is it to be ended, my father? How can the world be changed?”
“By the word, my child. Nothing is more powerful than the word. The chain of strong reasons and high thoughts is a bond that cannot be broken. The word, like the sling of David, strikes down the violent and makes the strong fall. It is the invincible weapon. Otherwise the world would belong to armed brutes. Who then holds them in check? Alone, without arms and naked, thought.
“I shall not see the new city. All changes in the social order, as in the natural order, are slow and almost imperceptible. A geologist of profound mind, Charles Lyell, demonstrated that those terrifying traces of the glacial period — those enormous rocks dragged into the valleys, that flora of cold countries and those shaggy animals succeeding the fauna and flora of warm lands, those appearances of cataclysms — are, in reality, the effect of multiple and prolonged actions, and that these great changes, produced with the clement slowness of natural forces, were not even suspected by the innumerable generations of animate beings who witnessed them. Social transformations operate, likewise, imperceptibly and ceaselessly. The timid man dreads, as a future cataclysm, a change that began before his birth, that takes place before his eyes without his seeing it, and that will become perceptible only in a century.”
Anatole France
Against Socialism
The Figaro of Friday, January [1900] published an article by M. Jules Roche, entitled: Against Socialism. — I. — The Danger, of which we give the beginning:
At the end of his admirable History of England from the Accession of James II, Macaulay, writing after the events of 1848, said:
“The proudest capitals of Western Europe have streamed with the blood of civil war… Doctrines hostile to the sciences, the arts, industry, domestic virtues — doctrines which, if applied, would destroy in thirty years what thirty centuries have done for the human race and would transform the fairest provinces of France and Germany into lands as savage as the Congo or Patagonia — have been proclaimed from the tribune and defended by the sword. Europe has been threatened with subjugation by barbarians in comparison with whom Attila and Alboin may pass for humane and enlightened. The true friends of the people have confessed with profound sorrow that interests more precious than all political privileges were in peril, and that it would be necessary to sacrifice even liberty in order to save civilization.”
The doctrines of which Macaulay thus spoke, after having retreated for a time, have reappeared, grown little by little; they resound with brilliance; they have given birth to organized parties, striving each day more energetically to transform idea into acts and permanent facts, deploying, for this work, so much perseverance and audacity that the English historian, were he to witness this spectacle, would experience anxieties even more vivid than those he expressed so eloquently more than half a century ago.
Not everyone, however, is of his opinion.
People of infinite wit — beginning with my friend Cornély, who is nonetheless a true conservative — are pleased to regard socialism as scarcely more to be feared than the collision of comets. They see in the revolutionaries most dreaded by the good bourgeois nothing but skillful politicians, “arrivistes” more expert than Béroalde de Verville himself in the Means of Getting On, and not at all disposed to put into practice their programs of social destruction. In that case, why worry about their threatening projects, their furious propaganda? These are but empty words, traps for fools, “things that never happen”! Thus speak today elegant and wise skeptics. Wrongly? Or rightly?
Is socialism or is it not a danger — the deepest, the most immediate danger?
The answer does not seem doubtful to me. Macaulay was right and continues to be right. And he will be more and more right, because the more civilization rises — that is to say, the more the lot of man improves morally and materially, through the development of his independence, his dignity, his power over nature, the ease and security of his life — the more the principles and necessary conditions of this civilization find themselves violently attacked and imperiled by socialism.
A Consoling Spectacle
The Figaro of Wednesday, January 1 published, under the title: Histoire contemporaine. — A Consoling Spectacle, an article by Anatole France of which we give the conclusion:
…”Listening to our friend Paulin Ligier, I thought I was reading an article by Maxime Du Camp on the mechanism of charity in Paris.
“It was beautiful, it was distinguished, but it was old style. It was Napoleon III. Charity in crinolines. Your ‘assistance through emulation’ will not achieve the aim you propose. For we are all agreed on the aim; it is only on the means that we are divided. You want to give a little money in order to be sure of keeping the rest. Very well! Let the little beggars fend for themselves as best they can, and found works for the workers. Teach the people, under the name of socialism, the benefits of individual property, and persuade those who suffer that it is excellent to suffer.
“Go and teach. Your salvation depends on the success of this charitable mission. In Paris, in the provinces, everywhere, people’s universities have been founded, in which odious intellectuals are seeking, together with the workers, the means of emancipating the proletariat. Capitalists and nationalists, let us found everywhere other universities to instruct the people in ignorance, exhort them to resignation, and induce them to content themselves with the happiness that awaits them in the other world. Come! Let us sow the good seed to the four winds! Let us proclaim ourselves socialists, so that the people may have faith in us, and let us go defend capital against its enemies. Against the people’s universities, let us oppose universities. I have found a good name for ours.”
“Which?”
“People’s universities.”
LA PRÉPARATION DU CONGRÈS SOCIALISTE NATIONAL
Charles Péguy
I was so saddened by the confidences that the internationalist moralist revolutionary socialist man had made to me that I could not stop and I painfully wanted to see him again. A friend wanted to correct the last proofs of the second notebook. I took from my briefcase a manuscript that I had, and I returned to the doctor. — Why, he said to me, have you not given yourself the opportunity to collect new information and new documents on the preparation of the National Socialist Congress? — I will collect them tomorrow, citizen doctor, and I will also put them in my third notebook. But I wanted to ask you if we can and if we should make personalities, in the order of action. “Why are you not being sincere,” the doctor replied gently. You are not in an invincible hurry to have this consultation. But you came to me because I was sad and because I hurt you. This rush is dangerous. You go invincibly towards those who are in pain and towards those who cause you pain. This is not healthy. Be careful: this is how we inevitably move from knowledge to action, and how we become charitable socialists, which is not a pure variety of socialism. This is how you will weaken yourself for the action itself and how you will attenuate yourself. The pain suffered in the face of adversaries who act causes weakening, but the pain suffered with comrades and friends who suffer sometimes causes irremediable despair. — Doctor, let’s start at the beginning. Since we can and must make personalities, in the order of knowledge, would you like us to recognize the personal action of Jaurès in recent events. I had prepared a story and a portrait of Jaurès for a German magazine. Do you want me to let you know about it? I took the copy from my briefcase and the doctor patiently read the rather long and heavy study which I submitted to him and which I had entitled: Jean Jaurès: — When he had started, I pointed out to him, in my defense , that this article was from October, and written for a public supposedly unfamiliar with French socialism: The doctor said nothing and continued reading:
Jean Jaurès, born in Castres (Tarn), on September 3, 1859, studied at the Castres college. At seventeen he came to Paris, to the Collège Sainte-Barbe, from where he followed courses at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. He was admitted to the École Normale in 1878 with the number i. He graduated from it with a diploma in philosophy in 1881. He was a philosophy professor for two years at the Lycée d’Albi, in the capital of his native department. Then for two years he was a lecturer in philosophy at the Faculty of Letters in Toulouse, in the capital of all this south. Thus entering the University, he only left his chair to sit for the first time in the Chamber, as deputy for Tarn, in 1885, and he only left his seat, not having been re-elected, to continue, in 1889 , his teaching. He was then given a complementary course in philosophy at the Faculty of Letters in Toulouse. He soon became a municipal councilor of Toulouse, and for three years was deputy mayor for public education. He continued his teaching of philosophy until the day he returned as a socialist deputy to the Chamber, elected by the second constituency of Albi in the general elections of August 1893. He sat there for the entire legislature, until the general elections of 1898, where he was not re-elected. This time he did not return to his teaching: the seriousness of the circumstances demanded all his time and all his strength for public action. An academic, having regularly followed a university career, having progressed regularly, professor of philosophy, doctor of philosophy, how and why did Jaurès become a socialist? He himself gave this simple answer in the Foreword he wrote for his book entitled: Socialist Action. “As soon as I began to write in newspapers and speak in the House, in 1886, socialism possessed me entirely, and I made a profession of it. I do not say this to combat the legend that makes me a converted center-left, but simply because it is the truth. » But it is also true that I adhered to the socialist and collectivist idea before joining the socialist party. I imagined that all Republicans, by pushing to the end of the Republic, had to come to socialism. And it seemed wiser to me not to create a separate socialist grouping. It was a childish illusion, and what life revealed to me was not the socialist idea, it was the necessity of combat. If the following pages could help men of thought to become men of combat, and to understand that the truth, to be the whole truth, must arm itself in battle…” 1 Thus Jaurès did not become a socialist by a stroke of grace, by reading a book, by seeing a man, or by a particular event. Even we can say that he did not become a socialist. He has always been a socialist, in the broad sense of that word. The general culture he had received, the philosophy he taught already enveloped socialism which only had to develop and to arm itself. Just as every harmonious civilization, sincerely achieved, results in the establishment of the socialist city, so every truly human, truly harmonious culture, sincerely achieved, results in the establishment of socialist thought in individual consciousness. So much so that the question that we must ask ourselves with regard to every harmoniously cultivated man is not how and why he can become a socialist, but rather how and why he could well not become a socialist, not having at least socialist thought. And when thought has become socialist, the harshness of events, the harshness of resistance, the insolence of injustice, the incessant insinuation of lies, the rottenness of jealousies and the barbarity of hatreds are responsible for giving who has socialist thought the vigor to act as a socialist. “As soon as I began to write in newspapers and speak in the House, in 1886, socialism possessed me entirely, and I made a profession of it. I do not say this to combat the legend that makes me a converted center-left, but simply because it is the truth. But it is also true that I adhered to the socialist and collectivist idea before joining the socialist party. I imagined that all Republicans, by pushing to the end of the Republic, had to come to socialism. And it seemed wiser to me not to create a separate socialist grouping. It was a childish illusion, and what life revealed to me was not the socialist idea, it was the necessity of combat. If the following pages could help men of thought to become men of combat, and to understand that the truth, to be the whole truth, must arm itself in battle…” 2 Thus Jaurès did not become a socialist by a stroke of grace, by reading a book, by seeing a man, or by a particular event. Even we can say that he did not become a socialist. He has always been a socialist, in the broad sense of that word. The general culture he had received, the philosophy he taught already enveloped socialism which only had to develop and arm itself. Just as every harmonious civilization, sincerely achieved, results in the establishment of the socialist city, so every truly human, truly harmonious culture, sincerely achieved, results in the establishment of socialist thought in the individual consciousness. So much so that the question that we must ask of every harmoniously cultivated man is not how and why he can become a socialist, but rather how and why he might not become a socialist. not having at least socialist thought. And when thought has become socialist, the harshness of events, the harshness of resistance, the insolence of injustice, the incessant insinuation of lies, the rottenness of jealousies and the barbarity of hatreds are responsible for giving who has socialist thought the vigor to act as a socialist.
As early as October 21, 1886, in a speech delivered to the Chamber, Jaurès defended an amendment that he had proposed to the law on the organization of primary education; Through this amendment he asked that municipalities be allowed to found popular schools at their own expense to safeguard all the freedom of philosophy and science in primary education. In his own words, he asked that there be absolute sincerity and frankness everywhere in popular teaching, that nothing be concealed from the people, that where doubt is mixed with faith, doubt should be produced. , and that, when negation dominates, it could occur freely. He asked that the people thus have access to all human philosophy, to all human science. No doubt he thought that of all socializations, the socialization of philosophy, of science, of human culture was the most interesting, the most urgent, the most urgently required. And in the session of December 1, 1888 he strongly insisted on this idea that we must not consider primary education as a small, closed, stopped education, immobilized in immediate utilities: “I do not know by virtue of which prejudice we would deny the children of the people an equivalent culture” 3 to that which the children of the bourgeoisie receive. …“When we see that the education of the children of the bourgeoisie is conducted from the first steps with a view to a very high and very general culture,…we have the right to say that we have not yet does for the children of the people everything to which they are entitled. And yet they will be workers, citizens and men, and, in all these capacities, and for the struggles and for the joys of life, they also have the right to an education which is as full and as complete in its way as the one that is given to the children of the bourgeoisie. »4 — “We still have to teach this young democracy the taste of freedom. She has a passion for equality; she does not have, to the same degree, the notion of freedom, which is much more difficult and takes much longer to acquire. And this is why it is necessary to give to the children of the people, through a sufficiently high exercise of the faculty of thought, the feeling of the value of man and, consequently, of the price of freedom, without which man is not not. »5 To this end, he wanted “to bring together all the forces of secondary education and higher education to what we can call the education of primary education. »6 He wanted secondary school teachers to become teachers of primary teachers. “When you have established this correspondence, this close communication between all levels of education to gradually raise primary education, then you will have assured French democracy an education worthy of it, you will have prepared by coordination and the cooperation of all teachings, from one end of the scale to the other, the unity and continuity of all social classes. »7
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This desire, and this hope of Jaurès, that the coordination and cooperation of all teachings, from one end of the social scale to the other, could prepare the unity and continuity of all classes, should not come true soon. As soon as he returned to Parliament, he had to fight against the resistance of the bourgeois class. But this idea ultimately remained his favorite idea. And this idea, that the socialization of education, that the universalization of a human culture would be enough to reconcile all the old classes in the humanity of the socialist city, does not displease us. We know well that it appears to be in opposition to the formula of class struggle. But we believe that this opposition is only apparent, and that it would only arise if this formula were misunderstood. Because not only does the class struggle have no socialist value, but it does not even have any socialist meaning. All war is bourgeois, because war is based on competition, on rivalry, on competition; every struggle is bourgeois, and the class struggle is bourgeois like other struggles. It is a concession from socialism to the bourgeoisie, just as the armaments of a peaceful people are, in a sense, a concession made to its warlike neighbors. Just as it is not at all certain that international military peace will ever be established by the military crushing of warlike peoples under peaceful peoples, so it is not at all certain that social peace will ever be established by the bourgeois crushing of the bourgeois class under the proletarian class. If the socialist city were one day founded by means of this struggle, it would remain eternally true that the establishment of the socialist city would have been bourgeois; the enduring socialist city would have a bourgeois foundation. In this sense the class struggle is for every socialist a bourgeois stopgap. It is therefore permissible to desire, to hope that the social revolution will not be done like this, that it will be constituted by the universalization of a socialist culture, that is to say harmoniously human. This is why, while we can work with joy to bring about the conversion of consciences, we must participate without any joy in the class struggle: for us it is like military service. This inner sadness from which we must never try to escape when we participate in the class struggle is undoubtedly the main character of Jaurès. Not that I forget the importance and power of its other characteristics. All French socialists and all international socialist activists know the sovereign power of the man who was called in spite of himself the great orator. Those who had once heard it could not forget it. He went up to the podium. He was so full of his thoughts that the first sentences seemed to come out badly, as if they were too stuffed. Then the heavy and robust power of his thought began to move in the strength, at first a little creaking, and in the somewhat dull power of his words, which took hold of his guts. Then he dominated, all the more master as the crowd had been more stormy, all the larger as it unfolded like the sea. And his speech imposed itself, always admirably composed like a classical work, served by a voice suddenly became clear and wonderfully powerful. Nothing artificial, nothing learned in form. The force of thought carried the force of form. Above all, there was nothing artificial about the gesture. He did not have the usual gestures of orators, but the gestures of a manual worker, pushing ideas into the wood of the platform, pressing his thumb for emphasis, rough and heavy gestures instinctively made by his thick Cévennes mountaineer build. But what gave all this incomparable value was the inner feeling that we said. As much as he had exuberant and healthy joy, as much as the flourishing joy escaped from his body, his hands and his eyes when he spoke to convert, those who knew him well divined in him a background of sincere sadness when he spoke to fight. He has never deeply rejoiced at these bourgeois ignominies which seem to illustrate the socialist doctrine and which seem to advance the time of the social revolution. No doubt the surge of indignation that the spectacle of a scandalous bourgeois injustice gives to every just man could seem to him to be half a factor in the social revolution. In this sense he could, in the fever of battle, cry out the bitter joy he felt at seeing the enemy society sinking into its rottenness and precipitating its own ruin. But how clearly we felt that this joy of fever and bitter indignation was not complete, was not its usual and innocent joy as a converter! This same general culture, this same philosophy which had led him to socialism had fortunately protected him against all bad joy. He knew how to discern the evil that hides beneath such semblance of good. He knew that bourgeois ignominies are ultimately carried out against painful humanity, against common humanity, and that what is ultimately compromised is the very heritage of future socialism, of the next socialism. He knew that these ignominies are always exercised on living men, and that, if they seem to justify certain non-living formulas, they risk deteriorating humanity itself without remedy. He knew that it is not with books, with texts, but with men that the socialist city will be created, and that it would not be created if men were irremediably degraded and sterilized in bourgeois society. He knew well that there are not two humanities, the bourgeois and the socialist, but that it is the same humanity, which is now bourgeois, that individuals and socialist parties are striving to make whole. socialist. In a word, he was in no way scholastic, but he had a feeling, an exact and realistic knowledge of living reality. This is why he wanted that while waiting for the social revolution to be perfect, and precisely to carry out this social revolution well, all humanity became and remained beautiful and healthy, and worthy of its next fortune. He was himself a living example of what a socialism thus invigorated, thus humanized by respectful consideration of past humanity, of all present and future humanity, can and is worth. His eloquence, tirelessly fueled with facts, was inexhaustibly aired with broad and free philosophy. Handled by him, the affairs of socialism never ceased to be the affairs of humanity, to be human affairs. Like all true realists, he was profoundly philosophical and deeply poetic and these two great qualities merged in him. Far from this breadth and this universality weakening his revolutionary force, on the contrary he drew from it the primary elements of his conviction, he found there the powerful bases of his assurance, his robustness, his vigorous solidity, thus showing that the narrowness of thought is in no way necessary for the vigor of action, that the smallness of views is not the necessary guarantee of solidity. Vigorous hatreds
What should vice give to virtuous souls, 8
he only retained his vigor. Whatever he sometimes said about it, and whatever he wanted to believe, he was totally unaware of hatred.
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We could follow these characteristics of Jaurès throughout his parliamentary career. From 1893 to 1898 he took part, on behalf of the Socialist Party, on behalf of the Socialist Group of the Chamber, in all important debates. This group was united, and if some of its members had retained some feelings of rivalry within themselves, the general public had no idea of it. The main members of the group and the main speakers therefore shared the work amicably and almost always spoke officially on behalf of the entire group. Jaurès spoke very often in this capacity and always knew how to make himself listened attentively and silently to an often hostile Chamber. But the adversaries themselves and the enemies respected the profound sincerity of this singularly powerful eloquence. They sometimes allowed themselves interruptions; but these interruptions never disorganized the orator’s speech; he responded to the switch stroke for stroke, stroke for stroke, with remarkable ease, timeliness, and, when necessary, with great wit and courtesy; then the classic order of the speech continued until perfect completion. Once, some people had the unfortunate idea of making noise at him. To give the impression of socialism which rises and melts the capitalist bourgeoisie, Jaurès had asked Greek antiquity for the Homeric comparison of the sea which rises and melts the snow; some found the comparison inappropriate, believing it solemn, did not interrupt, but made noise. Jaurès suddenly stopped: — a And it’s us! » he cried, “it is we who are the barbarians! » This word barbarians, thus improvised, thus thrown around, is both accurate in the ancient sense, since they had made noise in Homer, and in the modern sense, since they had made noise in socialism, this word which linked the Social Revolution the first attempts at harmonious humanity had an extraordinary impact, and the barbarians took it for granted. The doctor suspended his reading: — Why didn’t you give the date and name of this session? — Because I didn’t know them. I don’t know them yet. And no longer the comparison in Homer. —Why didn’t you ask for them? — I asked a lot of people for them. I was told: “Perfectly!” Perfectly! Jaurès’ big speech in the Chamber, the barbarians, it is we who are the barbarians, it is us who are… it is very well known. » And when we wanted to clarify, we no longer knew at all. Now these people were citizens who had attentively followed parliamentary action over the last few years. — This proves that your notebooks are not completely useless. But why didn’t you ask Jaurès himself? — I didn’t want to disturb him from his work and his actions for so little. And then probably he himself wouldn’t have known. He is a great sower who sows to the wind, and who leaves it to notaries to record the harvest. We will find this speech again when we have the second and third series of Action Socialiste. The doctor said nothing and continued reading: In the group then formed in the Chamber, the different speakers willingly specialized. Vaillant, for example, spoke willingly about workers’ questions; Guesde spoke about workers’ questions and theoretical questions; Millerand, with his calm and sometimes almost a little opportunistic clarity and often with his appearance of clarity, spoke on governmental questions and on questions of foreign policy; as well as others, and without this specialization, of course, being official and rigorously established. Millerand was most often the one who spoke officially on behalf of the party in difficult circumstances. Jaurès was specialized much less by the subject of his speeches than by the character, by the quality of his interventions. He gave the debates in which he intervened an extraordinary scope, or rather he knew how to find in the different subjects debated the deep interest which really resided there. He intervened in all the major conflicts between capital and labor, in strikes. He himself represented the miners and glassmakers of Carmaux in the Chamber. We know the admirable struggle he waged with the glassmakers against Mr. Rességuier, the big boss in whom, so to speak, personified everything that is most odious about bourgeois brutality, capitalist stubbornness and employer arbitrariness. . Returning to the Chamber after several months of fierce struggle, he nevertheless delivered one of his most beautiful speeches; This speech lasted two days and made such an impression on the Chamber, although it was ill-disposed, that it almost took away enthusiasm from the solution, both simple and daring, that Jaurès was mandated to propose: the arbitration of Mr. Henri Brisson. , then Speaker of the House. Jaurès intervened in major technical debates, for example in the question of sugars; attentive to peasant democracy, so considerable in France and of decisive importance, he delivered one of his longest and most beautiful speeches on the agricultural crisis. He intervened in pure political debates, in ministerial questions, in the discussion of laws, and delivered a very fine speech against the wicked laws. And through him socialism was constantly in motion, constantly in formation, constantly in the making. He intervened in questions of foreign policy. He affirmed from the rostrum of the Chamber the excellence of socialist internationalism. He predicted, he announced the socialist peace, more lasting than the Roman peace, the only lasting and only universal socialist peace: “In this century of limitless competition and overproduction, there is also competition between armies and military overproduction: Industry itself being a battle, war becomes the first, the most excited, the most feverish of industries. ”9 “There is only one way to finally abolish war between peoples, it is to abolish war between individuals, it is to abolish economic war, the disorder of present society, it is to replace the universal struggle for life, which results in the universal struggle on the battlefields, with a regime of social harmony and unity. And this is why, if you look, not at the intentions, which are always vain, but at the effectiveness of the principles and the reality of the consequences, logically, profoundly, the socialist party is in the world today the only party of the peace.”10 He posed and resolved the question of Alsace-Lorraine without any weakness: “We do not forget the deep wound received by the homeland, because it is at the same time a deep wound received by the universal law of peoples. But if we do not recognize the right to forget, we do not recognize ourselves and we do not recognize anyone’s right to hate, because our very country, however noble and good it may be, also had, and it is our honor to be able to say it, he too had in the past, and with regard, even to the people that you know, long hours of brutality and arbitrary domination. And in the faults of other peoples we recognize too much the faults of our own for our very patriotism to allow us to nourish murderous enmities. Neither hatred nor renunciation! This is our motto. ”11 He showed how the development of political freedoms had already begun to repair the inequities committed between people and people: “We are no longer in the time when Ireland listened to all the rumors of war from Europe and awaited the landing from the foreigner who was to free it from the occupier. We are no longer in the time when Mickiewicz ended his _Pilgrims’ Book _with this formidable prayer: “And the universal war for “our liberation, give it to us, Lord”! ” No ! But when Ireland, in the very Parliament of London, makes and breaks majorities, when it gives and withdraws power, when the three masters of Poland, at the same time, to preserve their power over opinion or to their parliamentary combinations, are obliged to caress at the same time the Polish national feeling, when they thus resuscitate, by the forced and strange simultaneity of their approach, the visible unity of the people which they had divided among themselves, I have the right to say that immanent justice has other means and other paths in Europe today than war. The conquering nation can only develop its own freedoms by communicating them to the conquered, to the vanquished themselves; and as these are unpeopled by ideas, by feelings, by traditions and by hopes, by the affinities which connect them to each other and which link them to the historical groups from which they were separated, you always see on the Even in the background of parliamentary struggles, figures of peoples will emerge, and there will be strange and profound rearrangements of nations before any map has indicated them. ”12 And he showed how the development of social justice would complete the repair of inequities committed between people: “Just as we do not reconcile individuals by simply appealing to human fraternity, but by associating them, if it is possible, to a common and noble work, where, forgetting themselves, they forget their meticulousness, in the same way the nations will not abjure the old jealousies, the old quarrels, the old dominating pretensions, all that past bright and sad with pride and hatred, glory and blood, only when they have proposed all together an object superior to themselves, only when they have understood the mission assigned to them by history, that Chateaubriand indicated to them already a century ago, that is to say the definitive liberation of the human race which, after having escaped slavery and serfdom, wants and must escape wage labor. »13
But, for the reasons we have given, a real predilection brought him back to questions of teaching. He defended the freedoms of teaching staff, not only narrowly professional freedoms, but also and above all freedom of thought and freedom to teach, which are also, in a broad sense, professional freedoms for teaching staff. He asked that teachers and professors have the freedom to deal with the social question. “You obliged”, he said to the minister in the great speech he gave during the Thierry Gazes questioning on the freedoms of teaching staff, “you obliged the University itself to enter into this study of the problem social, first of all by the substitution of modern education, to a large extent, for classical education. Yes, classical teaching was the basis of education in our high schools, and as antiquity ignored, despite the foundation of slavery on which it was based, what we call the social problem, because the slave had revolts, but had no doctrine, the poets of that time, instead of soaking up all the emotions of life in societies, lived in the pure contemplation of aesthetic forms. So, yes, as long as ancient literature was the only basis of university education, you could exorcise from your schools, you could drive out of your high schools the concerns of the social problem; but since you have modernized your studies, since you have introduced into your schools all the masterpieces of modern literature, all the concerns of modern thought, since your young schoolchildren are obliged to penetrate and thought of Goethe and that of the great Byron, since you have led minds through the new literature, you can no longer expel from your high schools, from your schools human thought, social thought which, moreover, figures in your programs. ”14 He asked that teachers and professors have the freedom to treat the social question as socialists, if that was their conviction: “Will you, to all these philosophy professors whom you leave free in other questions, are you going to impose a form in terms of political economy or social economy? You allow them to discuss other problems with complete sovereignty: there is no longer today as in the time of Louis-Philippe a sort of philosophical and metaphysical formula; all schools of philosophy are represented in your public education; your teachers are permitted to criticize all traditional proofs, ontological or otherwise, of the existence of God, to deny the transcendent origin of the idea of duty and to associate themselves with evolutionary, criticalist or materialist conceptions. They are absolutely free in discussing God; will they be free in the discussion of capital? »15
Thus spoke Jaurès, and the assent of all those who called themselves socialists followed him. With the gaze of a poet and historian, the speaker traveled through the slow history of peasant patience: “Always, for eighteen centuries, under the discipline of the great Gallo-Roman estates, under the hierarchy of feudal property, under the selfishness of bourgeois and financial property, they have always let flow towards others, towards an idle minority, the sources of wheat and wine, of wealth, of strength and of joy which spring from the earth under their tool , under their effort. » To them the labor of plowing and the worry of sowing, to them the restless work of the pickaxe at the foot of each vine, to them the relentlessness of the ax on the resistant forest, to them the short sleeps in the stable and caring for livestock before daybreak. But always it is towards the noble Gaul, all proud of his recent trip to Rome, it is towards the feudal overlord who harnesses himself for the sumptuous tournament, it is towards the wasteful financier, towards the teasing and miserly bourgeois that goes from century to century the wealth of fields, vineyards and woods. “The peasant sees the strength of summers flee from his hands, the abundance of autumns, and it is always for others that he exhausts himself and suffers…” 16 And this is how he interpreted the usefulness of peasant suffering: “… until now the peasants remain delivered to all the brutalities, to all the hazards of universal competition… “ … I do not claim, because I believe that nothing is lost in the history of men, I do not claim that these long years of suffering were, for the peasants of France, wasted suffering. Yes, it is good, I do not hesitate to say it from this platform, it is good that for years, on their narrow fields, the peasants have suffered due to the effect of distant and vast economic phenomena; for too long the peasant had locked himself into a narrow and blind individualism; he knew his little domain, he loved it with a fierce love, but nothing beyond that. And what did the universe matter to him? It was in vain that above his limited and jealous property, the natural forces moved in the great community of space; it was to his land, nothing but his land, that the peasant related the movement of the sun, the wind and the clouds, all the order and all the disorder of things. He never looked at the horizon except the gap through which the beneficial or murderous breaths came towards him. Even the haughty stars rising and setting behind the next line of hills fit into the cramped framework of his life. And far from vast nature expanding his mind, it was he who on the contrary reduced it to the narrow circle of his vision, to the narrower circle of his thought. And after all, since he could not act on the world, since he could not direct the natural forces according to his harvest, why would he have lost himself in sterile worries? » But now on his wheat field no longer pass natural forces, but economic forces, social forces, human forces. He plows, he sows, he reaps and takes his harvest to the nearby market. But from harvest to harvest, his labor remaining the same, the price of his wheat declines almost constantly and also the price of his cattle, his wine, his hemp, his olives and his milk. And the peasant no longer bows here as before the fate of hail or storm, drought or frost. He has the obscure feeling that this variation in prices is a social fact, a human fact, modifiable perhaps, and he asks why, yes, why. From all sides, statesmen, financiers, economists, deputies, candidates answer him that over the last half century especially humanity has transformed the earth, that in the great diverse plains of India, from southern Russia, from the American West, other men work like him, but at less expense, and all this production, suddenly brought together by the speed of the large ships, constantly weighs on him. » So now the distant peoples and continents emerge for him from the mist, no longer like vague ghosts of school geography, but like harsh and massive realities, and we add, in answering him, that it is the quantity of wheat sown by a farmer in the American West, the quantity of gold and silver extracted from the mines of South Africa or Australia, the wages distributed to the poor day laborers of India, and again customs, tax and currency laws promulgated in all parts of the world that will perhaps depend tomorrow, on the market of the neighboring town, the price of his wheat, the price of his work, his freedom may -being and its property. » Then the peasant, for the first time, senses the strange solidarity of the human world, and he, whom ignorance, jealousy, selfishness isolated on his mound of earth, behind the boundary stone, whose shadow short story hid the rest of the world from him, he feels for the first time his life linked to the lives of other men. They are no longer atmospheric currents, they are economic currents coming from the depths, they are human currents which pass over his field, lowering and raising the ears; it is a breath of humanity, still disordered and brutal, which fills the space, and the astonished peasant listens and meditates; for the first time he, the selfish and isolated, it was through the long suffering of crises that he entered into living communion with the human race. No ! all his suffering was not wasted! »17 Jaurès thus achieved supreme eloquence; and the admiration of his very adversaries accompanied him with the assent of all his comrades and the friendship of all his friends, when the Dreyfus affair came to offer him a rarer and more difficult duty, and to truly reveal in him a new man.
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The Dreyfus affair, which was to modify so profoundly the situation and the appearance of political parties in France, which was to so profoundly modify the dispositions of so many minds and so many hearts in France and in the world, began, known it was natural, to exert its action precisely on the men who did it, on the men who worked and fought for justice and for the truth. The grandeur and beauty of the work still unfinished today were first reflected on the workers of this work. It is certain that since the beginning of the Dreyfus affair, or rather since they began the Dreyfus affair, Colonel Picquart, Zola, Clemenceau, Francis de Pressensé, so many others, have become new men, not not new in the sense that they would have become different from what they were before, but new in the sense that entire parts of their talent, their genius, their character, their soul, unsuspected until then, and which could always remain unsuspected, suddenly revealed themselves with incomparable brilliance.
Jaurès was one of these men. Barely engaged in the Dreyfus affair, he felt that new trials and new revelations were going to begin for all the Dreyfusards, as they were disdainfully called, and in particular for him. The acclamation of the crowds, the sympathy of all the comrades, the ratification of all the theorists had followed, in the face of the hesitation of many, the bitter and at first almost solitary struggle for the almost universally unknown truth. Jaurès did not hesitate.
It was not the first time that he thus put the constant concern he had for the known truth before the concern that theorists quite often have for the truth as they would like it to be. Theorists had made some reservations and some even made some criticisms of the great speech he had given on the agricultural crisis. Earlier there had even been quite strong criticism of the solution which was adopted by the glassmakers of Carmaux after the failure of the strike. We know that, to give asylum and bread to the militants who had fought so stubbornly, so admirably to safeguard their political and trade union freedoms and thus the political and trade union freedoms of the entire French proletariat, a workers’ glassworks, common property, had been established. of all the unions and corporate groups in France which have purchased shares. It seems that this foundation presented some difficulties with regard to formulas and received habits. But from then on Jaurès undoubtedly thought that if the principles and the socialist ideal have a sovereign value in that they command duty, the formulas which summarize the facts are on the contrary incessantly commanded by the facts themselves. No doubt he thought that, if men must sacrifice themselves to the realization of the socialist ideal, on the contrary it would be immoral to sacrifice living men to the vain justification of de facto formulas. The best way to prepare for the birth and life of the socialist city was not to give to the factual formulas which govern or do not govern present society an authenticity, artificial in fact, but first of all to keep safe the men who will have to become citizens of the socialist city, and who are qualified to become these citizens.
Not only men, individuals, but peoples. This is why Jaurès had intervened so passionately in the discussion of questions relating to Eastern affairs, and this is why he himself had questioned. Some of the European socialists were already preaching abstention, this abstention which has since been made the purest form of an action which calls itself purely socialist. Were we not going to play into the hands of Russia, of the Russian autocracy? Were we not going to contribute to Europe becoming Cossack? These considerations and these combinations did not stop the French socialists, in no way stopped Jaurès. When an entire people of three hundred thousand people is not only murdered but tormented with the most terrible torments by the order of a tyrant, it is idle, and even it is criminal to spend one’s time trying to find out whose responsibility it is. could well play the game by coming to the aid of these people. Besides the fact that these combinations and these more or less diplomatic forecasts are always uncertain, while the massacre is certain, it is permissible to say that if the happy success of the social revolution rigorously demanded that the socialist world allow torment and massacre with impunity and coldly a whole people of martyrs, the social revolution would not only be a bourgeois operation; it would undoubtedly be the most ignominious bourgeois operation that the history of the world has so far recorded.
I do not know if all these reasons became clear to Jaurès from then on, or if he did not rather feel a burst of immense human solidarity when these terrible inhumanities came to the attention of Western Europe. Still, he intervened with all his force, with a passionately painful force, in the debates which did not fail to take place: “What matters, what is serious, is not just the human brute was unleashed there; it’s not that she woke up. What is serious is that she did not wake up spontaneously; it was that it was excited, encouraged and nourished in its most ferocious appetites by a regular government with which Europe had more than once, gravely, exchanged its signature. ”18 And he boldly concluded that European socialism would immediately take over from the unworthy bourgeoisie: ”… There is something more serious and more significant, which is that it is precisely about this Orient where Christianity emerged eighteen centuries ago announcing a sort of universal sweetness and universal peace, whether it is precisely about this Orient and the questions that are agitated there, from Trebizond to Jerusalem, let the moral bankruptcy of old Christian and capitalist Europe burst forth! And then, since the governments, since the nations led astray by them have become incapable of establishing an elementary agreement to prevent acts of barbarism from being committed in the name and under the responsibility of Europe, the European proletariat must everywhere take this very cause in hand. It must everywhere manifest its indignation and its will, and thus oblige the wretched powers, who, in order not to devour each other, allow an entire people to be murdered, to fulfill their duty of elementary humanity with an ensemble which will eliminate all possibility of resistance and conflict, and which will reconcile the work of peace and the work of justice. »19 He had defended Cretan independence, and consequently Greek independence, against the same Sultan. He had defended these independences not only against the tyranny of the Red Sultan, but also against the accomplices of the Red Sultan, against the harmful policy of Mr. Hanotaux, against German violence, against Russian duplicities, against the oppression of cosmopolitan finance. : “I have every right to say that the weight of financial interests has weighed and still weighs in an abusive manner on the conduct of our policy in Eastern affairs. »20
But if these interventions by Jaurès had given rise to a few incidents, they had not yet raised any scandal. For the first time over the Dreyfus affair there was a scandal, and as the affair became immense, the scandal was great. Jaurès was not one of those who, strictly speaking, began the Dreyfus affair. But as soon as it was begun, his discerning attention naturally fell upon it. With this certainty of outlook which is essential to the true man of action, he sensed its full importance. Accustomed as he was by his very culture to criticize monuments and testimonies, he had no difficulty in discerning where the truth was. He simply informed the public of this discovery: thus were born these immortal Proofs, regularly produced to the readers of the Petite République and then published in one volume. The man who until then had almost involuntarily been nicknamed the great orator appeared in a new light. Not that he had ceased to be a poet and half philosopher. But, moreover, he appeared to be a marvelous dialectician, like him an impeccable logician, with an incomparably sure method. These articles will remain as one of the most beautiful scientific monuments, a triumph of method, a monument of reason, a model of applied method, a model of proof. The conclusions reached by Jaurès, knowing only part of the elements, were almost all ratified by the magistrates of the Court of Cassation, when they had in hand all the elements of their investigation. These conclusions therefore established the innocence of Dreyfus and the guilt of Esterhazy. The culmination of the demonstration was reached, the most striking justification of the proofs, their most striking verification was obtained the day when the readers of la Petite République found in the same issue of the newspaper one of Jaurès’ articles and a press release from the ‘Agence Havas: Jaurès’ article, Les Faussaires, written at least the day before, of course, demonstrated that the war offices were at least complicit in the forgeries fabricated for the defense of Esterhazy, forgeries of which Jaurès had, in his previous articles, demonstrated the falsity; the press release from Agence Havas was as follows: “Today, in the office of the Minister of War, Lieutenant-Colonel Henry was recognized and recognized himself as the author of the letter dated October 1896 in which Dreyfus is named.”21
Footnotes
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Voltaire, _ Le Misanthrope I_, act i scene i. ↩
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Speech delivered to the Chamber of Deputies on the agricultural crisis, its causes and its remedies; first part, delivered on June 19, 1897: Peasant distress. ↩
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Same speech; second part, pronounced on June 26, 1897: Bourgeois bankruptcy. The third part: _The Socialist Solution _was pronounced on July 3. ↩
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This note, communicated quite late in the evening of August 30, 1898, was not generally known until the following morning. ↩