La Consultation internationale ouverte à la Petite République sur l'affaire Dreyfus et le cas Millerand

The International Consultation opened by La Petite République on the Dreyfus Affair and the Millerand Case

Charles Péguy

The Petite République of Thursday 20 July had published the following communication:

Letter from citizen Anseele

Our comrade Anseele, deputy in the Belgian Chamber and one of the most qualified socialists of international socialism, writes:

CHAMBER OF REPRESENTATIVES

Ghent, 14 July 99.

Let me, my dear Millerand, congratulate you for your courage in having accepted the post of combat at the ministry under the known circumstances.

Fraternal greetings.

Anseele

The same Petite République had given the following citations:

The Vorwaerts

The Vorwaerts publishes the manifesto of the French Workers’ Party and of the Revolutionary Socialist Party and follows it with these comments:

We can only express the hope that our French comrades will draw from this crisis the lesson that unity of action is not possible without unity of organization. And as Jaurès, in the previous number of the Petite République, declares himself in favour of the creation of a single organization that would make impossible in future all incidents such as the entry of Millerand into a ministry without a decision of the party as a whole, we do not lose hope that the antagonisms will be resolved thereby.

L’Avanti

The Avanti of Rome, central organ of the Italian Socialist Party, devotes to the crisis through which French socialism is at present passing a long article that we translate almost in its entirety, leaving aside only the citations borrowed from the first article of Jaurès on the question.

The article of the Avanti, although signed by the citizen Bonomi, must be interpreted as the expression of the thought of the entire editorial staff and above all of the deputy Bissolati, director of the paper, one of the most deserving socialists, both certain and thinker, at the same time a fighter, always ready to pay with his person, to accept battle without counting the dangers, because he thinks as we do that the struggle of every instant is a duty for the Socialist Party.

After having recalled the surprise produced by the publication of the manifesto of Guesde and Vaillant, the Avanti recognizes that the principal accused remains Jaurès, guilty of having undertaken alone the struggle in favour of Dreyfus against all the coalesced reactions.

Who does not understand that the great duper of the proletariat is Jaurès and that the policy of compromises is nothing other than the defence of the Republic and intervention in the struggle between reaction and liberty?

Guesde, Vaillant and Lafargue have this conception of the class struggle that the proletariat must not take part in the struggles of the bourgeois factions without risk of modifying its character and losing sight of its goal. It must remain neutral in the great battles of modern political life, mark the blows of the adversaries with the same impartiality as the witness who attends a duel, draw from the victories and defeats of the adversaries the consequences that serve its goal. But the proletariat must never leave the ivory tower of its ideal to defend liberty threatened by reaction, innocence oppressed by falsehood, the Republic stifled by militarism, truth obscured by darkness.

At the hour of danger, when in the new assemblies of public safety the socialists are called upon to take responsibility for power, one will always have to answer no.

No to the democrats, no to the radicals, no to all those who are not victorious proletarians in the process of establishing the collectivist regime. Have they perhaps the intention of dissolving — Millerand, by participating in a cabinet of republican defence, yielded to a supreme necessity created by events, or did he follow only his ambition? The Guesdists do not trouble to investigate that: they affirm that no socialist may go to power except with a socialist government. And besides, what does a Dreyfus matter to them? He is — wrote Lafargue a few days ago — a son of the bourgeoisie and we must occupy ourselves with the children of the proletariat, many of whom suffer as much as he and more than he. Class struggle in its narrowest sense: let each fight for his own, let each bury his dead.

But this class struggle of Guesde and Vaillant, which appears a war force and seems destined to be carried on without truce or mercy, resolves itself in the end into the most sterile waiting. It resembles our armed peace, during which the generals, when they wish to do something, have no other means than to have men arrested as spies.

The reproach of Jaurès is precisely this: “At the very moment when political struggles were rekindling throughout Europe with a strange frequency and were everywhere pushing forth new forces, even there where the ground seemed most refractory and harshest, it is to make oneself sterile by one’s own will, it is to close off the future to oneself, to cut oneself off from the world to go into ecstasy in the contemplation of the future, while letting fall from time to time from one’s solitary observatory some prophecy on the events of daily life.”

The conflict between the friends of Guesde and those of Jaurès is therefore incontestable: either the French socialists agree to mingle in all the struggles while keeping their ideal, or they desert the field of the true political struggle and shut themselves up in the monotonous affirmation of the ideal. Between the two tendencies there is no middle ground and it is even to be desired that the decision should be clear and unequivocal.

As for our opinion, no doubt is possible. Without wishing to grant ourselves the right to intervene in the capacity of judges in the disputes of the French socialists… we are for the participation of the proletariat in all political struggles, in all the great social conflicts that are preparing in Europe.

A party that wishes to have the future on its side cannot keep aloof from the world and cannot live always in fear that every contact may ruffle its well-combed hair. The old conception — that the class struggle manifests itself by the concentration of all the bourgeois parties into one reactionary bloc, while the proletarians of the entire world will rise with a parallel movement to the assault of all the fortresses of power — is henceforth seriously belied by experience; what could perhaps be realized during the agony of the capitalist regime is not true during the preparation of that distant future.

We socialists have found in this old Europe parties in struggle, revolutions accomplished, revolutions initiated, conquests realized in the name of liberty, ruins carefully guarded by reaction. We have found the remains of several centuries of history… and behind this entanglement of things and ideas a class without aspiration of its own, without a line of conduct of its own, slave of all the conquerors who would have wished to call it forth so that it might weigh with its strength in the combats of human history. Well, we have educated this class of proletarians, we have impressed upon it a direction and given it a goal, we have withdrawn it forever from the deceptions of the dupers.

But must we expect perhaps, because we have accomplished and are still accomplishing this work, that all the passions must fall silent?

Must we expect, because we are preparing in silence this new army, that history must stop?

No, it continues its march. The political passions clash together as much as before, the great national and social conflicts break out as frequently as before.

And we, with our army of proletarians, cannot remain with arms at our feet awaiting the end of the struggle of others and waiting for our enemies, warned of our presence, to contract an alliance among themselves. On the contrary, this alliance must take place very late and, if possible, never. It is necessary, in the interest of civilization, that the bourgeoisie which fights for Dreyfus should not be crushed by the bourgeoisie which demands a soldier dictator. It is necessary that the liberals of Belgium and of Vienna should not be oppressed by the clerical reaction. It is necessary that democratic Italy should not be strangled by the victorious phalanxes of M. Pelloux.

And this is not a policy of compromise. When the proletariat is strong enough not to let itself be absorbed by the parties with which it struggles, it transforms this very struggle, from a combat between different factions of the bourgeoisie, as it was at its origin, into class struggle with all its revolutionary élan.

Look at Belgium. It is not the bourgeoisie that fights for electoral suffrage: it has passed to the last rank. It is on the contrary the proletariat that fights for the defence of its rights. And so likewise in Vienna, in Germany, in Italy.

What would our radicals be, if the Italian Socialist Party had not, before all the others, proposed to itself to reconquer liberty? The bourgeois democracy would have fallen back upon the old party of the Left and would in any case have been crushed by reaction.

The attitude of the French socialists who follow Jaurès is perfectly similar to ours; they fight in favour of an innocent man against the conspiracy of the generals and of the priests. We fight for the liberty of Italy against the oppression of its dominators. There, it is a question of one man; here, of an entire nation. The Italian drama takes on more amplitude, a greater solemnity. That is the only difference.

Consequently, just as we have agreed to bind ourselves with that part of the bourgeoisie which wishes to save Italy from the abyss into which it is rushing, so likewise we wish well to and we applaud him who, after the example of Jaurès, has led the proletariat into combat for justice against the Middle Ages attempting to live again.

The Petite République of Wednesday the 19th had published the following communications:

Letter from Hyndman, general secretary of the Social-Democratic Federation

London, 17 July 1899.

My dear Gérault-Richard,

Present, I beg of you, my warmest congratulations to Jaurès and our comrades of Paris on the victory they have won in the “affair” and in their struggle against reaction.

Believe me yours fraternally.

HYNDMAN

Letter from an Italian democrat

Rome, 27 June 1899.

Citizen Millerand,

From the country of reaction, where both public liberties and the representative regime are dying, permit a word of sincere and warm approval to be addressed to you by a man who loves France as his second homeland and who loves republican institutions — the only ones by which free social development is possible on the European continent — as one loves light, as one loves oxygen.

Citizen, make all the sacrifices, perform all the acts of abnegation, and you will have preserved, despite the intransigent socialists who blame you, the means of realizing gradually what is realizable in their ideal, which is also ours.

I am probably unknown to you, but I have felt the need to make my voice heard. This voice draws its importance not from the personality who writes it to you, but from the fact that it comes from Italy where liberty is in its death-agony.

If the intransigent socialists understood to what treatment the House of Savoy has reduced us, they would change their tactics and they would think above all of preserving the Republic.

In forming the most ardent wishes for the prosperity of France and of your free institutions, I am,

Your very devoted

D. Napoleone COLAJANNI, deputy in the Italian Parliament.

The Petite République of Saturday 22 July published this communication:

The Belgian Socialist Deputies to Jean Jaurès

The Belgian socialist deputies have just sent to Jaurès the following collective letter:

Dear friend,

We have read, with painful emotion, the articles you have just published in the Petite République.

Without intervening in the grave and delicate questions that at this moment divide the French socialists, we would believe, dear friend, that we were failing in a duty of conscience if we did not reiterate to you the testimony of our admiration for the courageous campaign you have been waging for two years, against militarism and for socialist unity.

Members of international socialist democracy, we do not believe we are failing in the reserve that the autonomy of nationalities imposes upon us by making the most ardent wishes that our brothers of France, the Guesdes, the Vaillants, the Lafargues, the Jaurèses and all those who fight beside them, for the same ideal, may form a bloc against reaction and may not give to our adversaries the spectacle of their divisions.

Knowing that this is your dearest wish, we are fraternally yours,

VANDERVELDE, CAVROT, ANSEELE, LAMBILLOTTE, DIXIN, MANSART, BERLOZ, BERTRAND, WETTINCK, BRENEZ, SMEETS, FURNÉMONT, BASTIEN, MAROILLE, L. DEFUISSEAUX, A. DEFUISSEAUX, HECTOR, DEMBLON, PAQUAY, WALTHÉRY, LÉONARD, GRIMARD, DEFNET.

The signatures of five socialist deputies are lacking, as they were not present, on Wednesday, at the session of the Chamber.

The Petite République of Thursday 17 August published the following note:

INTERNATIONAL CONSULTATION

Of Socialist Militants on the Dreyfus Affair and the Participation of Socialists in Power under the Bourgeois Regime

We have opened with the best-known militants of international socialism a consultation on the two points of tactics that at present occupy the French Socialist Party.

Here is the circular letter sent by us and the list of militants to whom we have addressed it:

Dear citizen,

The French National Socialist Congress, which is in preparation, will very probably have to deliberate on questions of method of the highest importance.

1. — Can the socialist proletariat, without failing in the principle of the class struggle, intervene in the conflicts of the various bourgeois factions, either to save political liberty, or, as in the Dreyfus Affair, to defend humanity?

2. — To what extent can the socialist proletariat participate in bourgeois power, and does the principle of the class struggle oppose absolutely and in every case the partial taking of possession of ministerial power by the socialist party?

It seems to us that there is the highest interest in having these questions examined thoroughly by the French proletariat, before the holding of the Congress, and we have projected to open thereupon a free and friendly consultation with our friends of France and of the other countries.

It appears to us, in effect, that the questions posed have an international interest and that it would be good, in order to resolve them, to have the lights of international socialism. We shall therefore be very grateful to you if you will address to us on this subject a letter or an article that we shall publish integrally in the Petite République.

We address our request to our excellent and eminent comrades:

Germany. — Bebel, Schœnlank, Kautsky, Liebknecht, Parvus, Max Schippel, Clara Zetkin, Vollmar, Bernstein, Rosa Luxemburg, Singer. United States. — Sandal. England. — Hyndman, Tom Mann, Blackford, Keir Hardie, Quelch, Sydney Webb, Belfort Bax. Austria-Hungary. — Adler, Daszynski. Belgium. — Vandervelde, de Brouckère, Bertrand, Anseele, Furnémont, Hector Denis, Léon Defuisseaux. Denmark. — Mayer, Knudssen, Olsen. Spain. — Pablo Iglesias. Holland. — Troelstra, Van Kol. Italy. — Enrico Ferri, Bissolati, Turati, Andrea Costa, Pescetti, Antonio Labriola. Portugal. — Graeco. Russia. — Plekhanov, Lavrov, Schiffonski, Kritchewski. Sweden and Norway. — Ludwig Meyer. Switzerland. — Greulich, Otto Lang, Karl Mohr.

Receive, dear citizen, our fraternal salutations.

Gérault-Richard Jaurès

A letter from Bebel

We have already received some replies that we shall publish with faithful servility. Here is in what terms our eminent friend Bebel announces his to us:

Dear comrades,

I shall send Monday my reply to the questions you have put to me. I am not of your opinion on all points, but I agree with you on most and notably on the principal ones. I would have you consider the “Millerand ministry” as an incident that will not be repeated soon.

On the other hand, I sincerely rejoice in your attitude in the Dreyfus Affair. There you have on your side the crushing majority of the socialist party in Germany.

I do not believe there are three persons in our party, apart from Liebknecht, who are not in agreement with you.

I see by the newspapers that you are at Rennes to follow the debates of the Dreyfus Affair.

We hope that the result will answer your wishes and that you will see crowned with success the work for which you have made such sacrifices of every kind — and for which you struggle with such admirable perseverance.

I hope that the National Congress of September will bring about understanding and union.

If agreement is not established, and if on the contrary the scission becomes accentuated, that would be regrettable not only for the internal development of France, but it would also bring into question the next International Congress.

Our French comrades ought to do everything so that the painful incidents of 1889 may not be repeated. That would have a deplorable effect.

Amicably yours,

Auguste BEBEL

The Petite République of Monday 28 August published the following communication:

Address of the Italian socialist deputies to Jean Jaurès

Carpi, 25 August.

The socialist parliamentary group met today for the direction of the party. It sends to you and, through your intermediary, sends also to the comrades of the French Socialist Party the expression of its enthusiastic solidarity in the noble and courageous struggle engaged, with revolutionary conscience, for the defence of justice and of civilization. It wishes that to the latter the definitive victory may be assured.

The secretary of the socialist parliamentary group ALFREDO BERTESI

The Petite République of Thursday 14 September published this reply to the International Consultation:

HENRI VAN KOL (Rienzi)

Our readers know the questionnaire addressed by us to the most authoritative representatives of international socialism. At the present hour we have received almost all the replies that we were expecting. The length of the debates of the Rennes trial obliged us to delay their publication. We shall communicate them today and we shall continue until the National Congress of the French Socialist Party where the questions treated by our correspondents will be discussed.

Today we publish the reply of the citizen Van Kol (Rienzi), deputy in the Dutch Chamber. Van Kol is still young. Engineer of great merit, a brain renowned throughout socialist Europe, he has a number of practical achievements to his credit. With Troelstra and Polling, he is one of the founders of the new democratic socialist party of Holland.

QUESTION I

Can the socialist proletariat, without failing in the principle of the class struggle, intervene in the conflicts of the various bourgeois factions, either to save political liberty, or, as in the Dreyfus Affair, to defend humanity?

To pose the question is to resolve it. The socialist proletariat will not be able to wage the class struggle effectively if it does not know how to save political liberty in danger, and to defend — as in the Dreyfus Affair — outraged humanity. It must in everything and always be the vigilant guardian of democracy, the ardent champion of justice and of truth. While pursuing its ideal with its eyes turned toward the stars, it must place its foot solidly on the ground of reality and clear away all the obstacles that may hinder the march of progress. Socialists can hasten the new era of justice and of liberty by combating every injustice, by shaking off every tyranny, and by unmasking every hypocrisy and every falsehood.

They demand equal rights for all; they must require equal duties of the great and of the small, and refuse all leniency even to the worker if he strays from the right path, the only one that leads to victory.

Jaurès throwing himself into the fray to save an innocent man, victim of clerical encroachments and of militarist demoralization, has saved the honour of French socialism. Later the blind masses will be grateful to him for his glorious campaign in the service of justice, under the banner of truth.

The working mass will possess a powerful lever of agitation and of propaganda when, the confusion having come to an end, it will feel its heart beat for all the great causes.

Let us stir up the masses, but let us also improve them!

Let us raise them to the height of the great task they have to fulfil, of the fine and noble role that history has imposed upon them. Noblesse oblige also for the socialist proletariat! Never must its actions be inspired by a narrow and petty party spirit, instead of being animated by an ideal of goodness, of justice, and of humanity.

QUESTION II

To what extent can the socialist proletariat participate in bourgeois power; and does the principle of the class struggle oppose absolutely and in every case the partial taking of possession of ministerial power by the socialist party?

This grave question, which will each day gain more importance in the struggles of our time, cannot receive a general reply. Each special case would have to be examined, according to the country, the economic development, the parliamentary history and the actual class struggle, in a word according to the forces in conflict.

The question is so complicated and requires the comparison of circumstances so diverse, that in each country where the socialist party is sufficiently organized, it will have to be made to be resolved by a National Congress.

Given the present situation of France, in view of the mortal danger that the Republic and the democratic institutions conquered at the price of so many efforts and so many sacrifices are running, while reaction, clericalism and militarism deliver a furious assault on every velleity of progress, the duty of the socialist is to seize hold of the public powers as far as possible.

The effective reforms of our minimum programme will not be realized until the moment when the socialists shall dispose at least in part of governmental power.

He who wills the end must will the means. In many cases, more and more frequent, it will be our duty not only to enter the communal councils and the Parliaments, but also to send our own to the town halls and to the ministries, the socialist flag in hand.

It will not be at a single stroke that we shall seize power; it is only step by step, by a slow and perpetual replacement of bourgeois elements by working elements, that we shall become the directing class in society and that our ideas shall reign in the State.

We shall first have to give proofs of capacity, to show an honesty above all suspicion, and for this it is necessary that our own should exercise power and share it temporarily with other parties.

If in taking the reins of government we keep faith with the socialist ideal, if we remain faithful to its principles without compromise or accommodation; if then, remaining on the terrain of the class struggle, we show ourselves enemies of the rich and friends of the disinherited; if then we struggle without respite in the name of socialism against the capitalist regime that must slowly disappear… we shall fulfil a great and useful duty.

But this duty, the partial taking of possession of ministerial power, would become a sacred duty in a case such as that of Millerand. When rottenness invades the social and governmental body, when a counter-revolution is preparing, when our most cherished political liberties are at stake, one must be at the post of combat.

One must act, cut with a firm hand the cancer that is gangrening the heart of our institutions and not push aside the knife that chance and unexpected circumstances were placing within reach of our hand.

To combat, to crush the counter-revolution, Millerand had to act, he has acted and he will act still better if he is supported.

Despite the horror inspired by an executioner of the Commune like Gallifet — should occasion arise there will be found others just as ferocious — Millerand had to fulfil the urgent duty that destiny imposed upon him and to help purify France of all the filth accumulated during the years when the people slumbered.

Every socialist must support him in his efforts to combat prejudices, when reaction was raising its head everywhere, and to prevent France from being led to her ruin.

The most sacred rights were being trodden underfoot; the gauntlet had to be taken up in the name of democracy, of progress, and of revolution.

Acts were needed; criticism could no longer suffice, it was urgent to prove that the socialists know not only how to demolish but are also capable of laying the foundations of a new power.

A political and economic reorganization must precede the advent of socialism; the time has come to make the first attempts and to break the chains that might hinder the march forward.

Political power threatening to fall into the hands of its worst enemies, one had to take what one could of it to use in the sense of the economic revolution to which obstacles were being placed.

The greater our power in the State, the greater will be the results obtained.

Still too weak to impose the will of the proletariat, we must accept everything that can improve the situation of the working class, increase its rights, enlarge its power. “Accept the most minimal progress when it alone is possible” (Vaillant) is often our duty.

The anarchist theory of all-or-nothing has had its day; it has held back the workers’ movement on its march toward victory for too long.

And if it is possible, we must avoid violent revolution by favouring through effective and continuous reforms the political and social evolution of the human kind.

And if serious reforms are wanted, it will be necessary, within the measure of our means, to seize power, to perform acts, to show results. The recruiting force of the socialist party will be tenfold, and, having right on our side, we shall little by little dispose of the force necessary to favour the coming of the new era.

We must be the motive force in the street and in the Parliaments, in the factories as in the ministries, to go forward everywhere and always, to put the socialist leaven in every law, in every act of power where we can bring our influence to bear. There is a long road to traverse, and it is step by step that we must advance in enemy terrain, but one must never hesitate to enter full foot into the camp of the adversaries.

It is in spite of themselves that they will endure our presence, certain sign of their weakening, happy presage of our nascent power.

By planting proudly in Parliament the red flag of the proletariat, by causing the proletarian spirit and politics to penetrate the bourgeois palaces, we shall do a difficult, but useful and inevitable work. The combat will be hard and without truce, perhaps we shall succumb in the struggle, but we shall keep intact the socialist spirit and principles in fulfilling our duty.

May the French National Socialist Congress, which will form the supreme court in this question of tactics, support Millerand at his post of combat by taking, in the name of practical socialism, the guarantees necessary and never superfluous!

May all the socialists submit to the resolutions of this Congress, for never, even during the most heated discussions, must any of our brothers of combat forget for a single instant that one may differ as to the means, but the goal is the same, and that we shall arrive at victory only on the day when understanding and freely accepted discipline shall have made us united and strong.

Princenhage, 25 August 1899.

Henri Van Kol (RIENZI)

The Petite République of Saturday 16 September published Bebel’s reply:

AUGUSTE BEBEL

The citizen Bebel, deputy in the German Reichstag, whose reply we publish today, is one of the most authoritative representatives, one of the glories, let us dare to say, of German socialist democracy.

To retrace Bebel’s life is to write the history of the German socialist movement. Having entered the party some thirty-odd years ago, almost at the beginnings of the movement, at the time when socialism counted scarcely a few thousand adherents, he has played there until these last times a considerable role, whether as popular agitator, or as parliamentary orator, or finally as publicist. If there is anyone who can flatter himself with having contributed within the measure of the possible to making of the small grouping of thirty years ago the largest socialist party of the world and the most powerful political party in Germany, it is without any doubt the former wood-turner Auguste Bebel.

Our French militants have read his Woman, the remarkable work which has been translated into almost every language.

Dear comrades,

Berlin, September 1899.

The questions you put to us are keenly preoccupying the socialists of every country.

In Germany we have for a long time been engaged in discussions similar to those that have just been produced in France, with this difference however that in Germany we form a unitary socialist party which resolves with greater facility the divergences of opinion that arise within its bosom, while our French comrades still find themselves divided into several factions, which makes agreement more difficult for them.

But, on the other hand, you have over us the advantage of living in a unified State, where it is easy to embrace at a glance the situation, while the German Empire is composed of twenty-six States and small States, very different as to their extent and their population, and fundamentally dissimilar as to their internal constitution and the laws governing the elections to the legislative assemblies, etc. It is this lamentable state of things due to the multiplicity of States that creates the greatest difficulties for the party.

With the exception of Württemberg, no German State possesses equal and direct universal suffrage; the electoral laws of the German States present a collection of the most absurd and most insensate provisions, all having one goal, that of excluding the working class from all political representation. The same situation that we observe for the legislative assemblies exists also for the communal representation.

*

In their natural tendency to acquire power and influence in these assemblies, the members of the party have concluded, with a view to the elections, in several of these States, transitory conventions with bourgeois parties, and these conventions have provoked lively discussions in the party as a whole. It is probable that they will also be put on the agenda of our next Congress of Hanover.¹

Thus, for example, the manner of proceeding of our comrades of Bavaria on the occasion of the recent elections to the second Chamber of the Bavarian Landtag. And as the question of what tactics the party must adopt in these circumstances and others analogous becomes more and more pressing, it is possible that the Hanover Congress may at last arrive at fixing a general line of conduct.

For the elections to the Reichstag, which are by universal, equal, secret, and direct suffrage — with the condition of twenty-five years of age, it is true — the situation is very simple. Here the old tactic of the party consisted in presenting candidates everywhere it has partisans. When the candidacies presented are not maintained at the second ballot, the party gives its votes to that one of the bourgeois parties which is ready to support certain minimum demands formulated by the party.

This tactic has been followed despite certain hesitations that have arisen, because, as a result of the irritation provoked by the attitude of the closest bourgeois parties on important questions, it had been decided to abstain at the run-off ballot between several bourgeois candidates. But when one came to the combat, practical wisdom always prevailed over animosity and scruples.

*

From this attitude of the party it results that everywhere it is too weak to act with its own forces, it prefers to elect the closest bourgeois candidate in order to keep from Parliament the most dangerous enemy. Between two evils, it chooses the lesser. It will be forced to follow a similar tactic everywhere it takes part in an electoral struggle in which the mode of election will be little favourable to it.

Socialist democracy has two different roles. Its principal role is the realization of its programme, that is to say the transformation of the present organization into socialist society. To gain to this programme adherents, it must make propaganda everywhere the opportunity presents itself.

*

But to attain this final goal with greater ease, it must consider as its most immediate goal to enlarge its terrain of struggle and to give it a more favourable configuration. For this, it needs social reforms which render the working class more apt to action and more resistant in its struggle against the depressive powers of the capitalist economic order; it also needs political rights and liberties, so as to be able to combat with all the greater vigour for the social raising up of the working class and the conquest of political power.

In the measure in which our efforts toward improvements in the framework of present society are supported by bourgeois parties, we have no reason to refuse their aid. We must even consider as our duty to spur on the bourgeois parties to support us in these efforts.

All the more so when it is a question not of making progress, but of preventing a retreat, the party is obliged, in its own interest, to march side by side with the bourgeois factions that struggle against the attempts at retreat. This appears so evident a thing that there is no need to discuss it. It is an attitude that is imposed on us at once by tactics and by the instinct of self-preservation.

The same tactic is valid for all the circumstances in which right, justice, and humanity are at stake.

Certainly, we are a proletarian party which must make class politics, but socialist democracy is at the same time the party of all the victims of misfortune and of oppression, for it struggles for liberty and justice in favour of all who bear a human face. Whatever the place where injustice and violence are produced by abuse of authority, socialist democracy must be ready to struggle. This is imposed upon it not only by its programme, but also from a point of view of pure tactics, in this sense that such intervention in favour of right and of justice will be able to neutralize numerous adversaries, indeed even to win them to the party.

*

Thus, for example, from the moment when one had acquired the certainty that Dreyfus had been unjustly condemned, every socialist, merely by placing himself at a simply human point of view, ought to intervene in favour of the revision of the trial. But when, through the linking together of the most diverse circumstances, the Dreyfus trial became an event of the first order, behind which great and powerful parties were sheltering their projects directed against the people and tending to nothing less than the overthrow of the republican Constitution, then it was a duty for the socialist party to intervene as a party in favour of Dreyfus, with all the means and all the forces at its disposal. It is in spite of Dreyfus that his cause has become the cause of justice and of the liberty of the citizen.

I do not conceal that the immense majority of German comrades have not been able to understand, and still do not understand, how in the Dreyfus Affair the French Socialist Party could have divided itself.

Supposing that the Dreyfus case with all its consequences, instead of being produced in France, had been produced in Germany, there is no doubt that in favour of Dreyfus the whole of German socialist democracy would have intervened unanimously, with Liebknecht at its head.

Why must it be otherwise in France than in Germany? That escapes me.

I therefore answer the first of your questions with a “yes”.

II

The second question is not so simple.

All modern States possess as class States institutions that socialism must combat in every circumstance, but which no bourgeois government is capable of abandoning: militarism, “marinism”, indirect taxes, the attitude of the State vis-à-vis the Church, the way in which foreign and colonial affairs are conducted, the use made of the administration, etc.

Then, giving rise to profound divergences, the demands relating to workers’ protection and to incisive social reforms.

The question of whether a socialist can enter a bourgeois government can be taken into consideration only in States that are pure democracies, like Switzerland, or in States that are governed parliamentarily, that is to say in which the head of State is always forced to take his ministers from the parliamentary majority of the moment. Among these States can be counted neither the German Empire, nor the various German States. The latter still, despite the parliamentary popular representation, [obey] the will of the reigning prince, who chooses his ministers according to his own judgment and without taking account of the parliamentary majority.

Let us now admit the case where in a parliamentary State there exists a socialist majority in the Chamber. Then the socialists would naturally be obliged to take the government. Their duty would be to wield power in the sense of the majority of the people they would have behind them and to transform the State and society.

But the question presents itself in a different light: A socialist enters a ministry the great majority of which is the representation of bourgeois parties, because the parliamentary majority is essentially composed of these parties.

A government must be, in principle, composed of homogeneous elements, or it is not a government. A government that is divided on all important questions cannot govern for long. A socialist minister, of whom his comrades of the party must demand that he act according to his own convictions, will enter perforce into conflict with his colleagues and will be unable, apart from small reforms he will be able to realize in his department, to attain anything essential. On all serious questions he will be in permanent war with his colleagues.

For these reasons, a socialist will not be able to become in a bourgeois ministry either minister of war, or minister of the navy, or minister of cults, or minister of the interior or of foreign affairs. He will be given the place in which he will be the least harmful.

**

A consideration must be added. A party that has a minister in a government is bound with respect to the whole of that government. It is impossible for it to limit itself to protecting only the minister who represents it and to persist toward the others in its attitude of opposition and consequently to help one fine day by its vote in the overthrow of the government of which one of its members forms part.

It follows that if the party keeps its attitude of principle as representative of the conscious proletariat, it multiplies the embarrassments for its delegate in the government. It will even be forced, in the case where the latter has declared himself in solidarity with his colleagues, to vote against him. In a word, the socialist minister will be forced to quit his place at the earliest. The beauties and splendours of government will therefore have soon come to an end.

Or the party supports the government to please the socialist who is part of it: then it commits a treason with regard to its principles, it provokes confusion and division in its own ranks and destroys itself.

The question would present itself under a slightly different aspect in the case where the parliamentary majority were composed of socialists and radical bourgeois disposed to march hand in hand to realize the demands we claim from the State and from present society. But such a radical party exists neither in France nor elsewhere, and consequently, we have no need to occupy ourselves with this eventuality. All the more so as it is an acquired fact that the radical bourgeois become everywhere all the more reactionary as socialist democracy becomes more powerful.

*

But one may still imagine the following case. A ministry is formed for the solution of a special question, such as the present ministry, of which the comrade Millerand forms part, and whose task must consist, as is known, in liquidating the Dreyfus Affair in the sense conforming to justice and to law.

It must be recognized that, in this case, the question presents itself a little differently. But could not the same goal be attained without Millerand entering the ministry? When the socialists declared in the Chamber: “We shall support a government that promises to intervene to cause justice and law to be respected in the Dreyfus Affair,” the result sought was fully attained.

It is, certainly, a fine and good thing that Millerand, through the reforms he has realized in his department, has shown to the bourgeois parties that a socialist knows how to govern, and even better than they, but the harm caused to the party by the discussions that have followed his entry into the ministry appears to us greater than the advantages that can be drawn from it. In no case ought he to have accepted his portfolio without the consent of the party.

*

And now how must we envisage the entry of a socialist into the government in a democratic State? It has been pointed out in the German socialist press concerning the Millerand case that our Swiss comrades have already given the example in accepting power, and there has been hitherto no protest on this subject.

In each of the governments of the cantons of Geneva and of Zurich there sits a socialist. Why then should that which is found natural at Geneva and at Zurich be out of place in Paris?

But the situation is essentially different in France and in Switzerland. The Swiss cantons are not, as is known, States governed parliamentarily, but democracies. The legislative power is the people itself, eventually a cantonal council named according to a very democratic electoral law; but, in the last instance, it is always the whole of the people that decides on the laws, each time a determined number of voters proposes it, or when a proposal of a given law coming from the popular initiative is adopted by the majority of the people.

On the other hand, there is in the cantons no upper Chamber (Senate); the cantonal government has not the right of veto either; it has only to execute what the people or eventually its elected representatives have decided: the government of the cantons is not taken from the majority of the cantonal councils, but is elected for a determined time by the people.

Socialist democracy disposes therefore in the government of as much force as it can conquer at the elections. If he who has been elected member of the government does not fulfil his duty and the task expected of him, he will not be re-elected. The conditions are therefore essentially different from those presented by France and the other countries. I am therefore forced to answer your second question as follows:

I consider as an error and a cause of disorganization for the party the entry of a socialist into the government of a parliamentary State.

That for a special task, a socialist should enter a ministry, I consider this as very delicate and only able to be admitted with the consent of the party.

The question presents itself under another aspect in democracies where the ministers are elected and where, consequently, the elected one is the mandatary (Vertrauensmann) of the party.

The Petite République of Thursday 21 September published Vandervelde’s reply:

ÉMILE VANDERVELDE

Émile Vandervelde, lawyer at the Court of Appeal of Brussels, represents the electoral college of Charleroi in the Chamber of Deputies of Belgium.

All the readers of the Petite République know our friend and all are in a position to have savoured what is published, in our columns, of his communications. They would be more frequent if the necessities of propaganda and of struggle did not oblige Vandervelde to carry on at the same time a great number of tasks of which a single one would suffice to fill and to illustrate the life of a militant. Orator and professor of the first order, publicist whose articles and pamphlets are authoritative in the scientific circles of the Old and the New World, Vandervelde is one of the forces of international socialism.

Brussels, September 1899.

Dear comrades,

I hasten to answer the two questions you submit to the militants of the International:

1. — Can the socialist proletariat, without failing in the principle of the class struggle, intervene in the conflicts of the various bourgeois factions, either to save political liberty, or, as in the Dreyfus Affair, to defend humanity?

To this first question, I scarcely conceive how a socialist could reply otherwise than in the affirmative.

“I am a man, and nothing that is human can be foreign to me.”

To claim that the proletariat must remain indifferent to every conflict in which its class interests are not directly engaged, is to diminish socialism and to narrow the concept of the class struggle to the point of disfiguring it.

Such certainly was not the thought of Marx and of Engels, when, in the Manifesto of the Communist Party, they recommended to conscious proletarians to support the other parties, in their struggle for the conquest of modern liberties. And what is true of political liberty is no less so of the other rights of man, threatened by the clerical and militarist reaction.

So I can say to you that, in the Belgian Workers’ Party, we are unanimous in thinking that the French socialists had not only the right but the duty to intervene in the Dreyfus Affair. It would have been a lamentable abdication, I know not what neutrality, disdainful and passive, in this supreme combat for civilization, against barbarism.

Does the principle of the class struggle oppose itself to a proletarian snatching from death a man of another class? Why should it oppose itself to socialist militants snatching an innocent man from the hands of the executioners and the savages?

And this when it is a question of saving, at the same time, all that is worth saving in modern society.

*

2. — To what extent can the socialist proletariat participate in bourgeois power; and does the principle of the class struggle oppose absolutely, and in every case, the partial taking of possession of ministerial power by the socialist party?

I do not wish to enter into the examination of the particular case that leads you to pose this question.

Our friend Millerand, did he do well or ill to enter a bourgeois ministry, under his personal responsibility?

With our habits of discipline and of common action, we can only regret that, in the absence of a unitary organization of the French socialists, a militant should be able to take such grave decisions under his personal responsibility.

So we hope firmly that, from your next congress, Socialist Unity will spring forth.

As to the question of knowing to what extent the socialist proletariat can participate in bourgeois power, that is above all, in my opinion, a question of fact and of circumstances.

Many of our friends make a subtle distinction between the cases in which the representatives of the proletariat penetrate a bourgeois assembly, thanks to their own forces, and those where the bourgeois power spontaneously offers them some parcels of power.

But is it not evident that between these two extremes there are all the gradations, all the possible transitions?

From the moment when one admits that, in certain cases, the interest of socialist democracy requires that one have recourse to compromises, to alliances, to coalitions, it becomes impossible to maintain, a priori, that never, in any case, and whatever may happen, must the socialists take “partial possession of ministerial power”.

Exceptional circumstances may require exceptional acts. Salus populi suprema lex.

But, these reservations made, I must add that as a general rule I am resolutely opposed to the entry of socialist mandataries into a bourgeois government, however democratic it may appear.

The few good things they might do there would not compensate the number of bad things with which they would necessarily be obliged to make themselves solidary.

Supposing that — in a given country — parliamentary sovereignty belonged to a coalition of radicals and socialists, we would be much stronger by conditionally supporting a ministry of radicals than by compromising ourselves with them in the exercise of power.

As long as socialism has not the power necessary to govern, in the name of its principles, it must not — save in exceptional cases — participate in a governmental action that is founded on principles diametrically opposed.

With my most ardent wishes that socialist union may triumph in your next Congress, and assure the success of the International Congress of 1900, I am fraternally yours.

Émile VANDERVELDE

The Petite République of Friday 22 September published three replies:

GEORGE PLEKHANOV

George Plekhanov is the eminent theoretician of Russian social-democracy, who with a writer’s talent of the first rank and an admirable energy has powerfully contributed to the diffusion of Marxist ideas in Russia. By his writings he has won a great place among the theoreticians of international socialism.

Hunted by the Tsar’s police for his participation in the revolutionary movement, he took refuge in Switzerland, where he directs an important review, the Socialdemokrat.

Geneva, September 1899.

Dear citizens,

You do me the honour of wishing to know my opinion on the following questions:

1. — Can the socialist proletariat, without failing in the principle of the class struggle, intervene in the conflicts of the various bourgeois factions, either to save political liberty, or, as in the Dreyfus Affair, to defend humanity?

2. — To what extent can the socialist proletariat participate in bourgeois power; and does the principle of the class struggle oppose absolutely, and in every case, the partial taking of possession of ministerial power by the socialist party?

I reply to you with all the more eagerness as these questions have, as you very rightly say, an international interest. They are so important that on their resolution by the socialists — in one sense or the other — depends the entire future of our party.

Here therefore is what I think on this:

It seems to me that the socialist proletariat has not only the right, but the duty to intervene in the conflicts of the various bourgeois factions, every time that it shall find it useful for the interests of the revolutionary movement.

But this intervention could not be useful to the interests of the revolutionary movement, and ought not to take place, except in the cases where it could render more active and more energetic the struggle between the bourgeoisie — that is to say the possessors of the means of production — on the one side, and the proletariat — that is to say the class exploited by the possessors of these means — on the other.

For the struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat to become more active and more energetic, it is necessary that the proletariat be more and more penetrated by the consciousness of the antagonism of its interests with those of its exploiters. The revolutionary consciousness of the proletariat is the terrible dynamite that will blow up present society.

All that renders this consciousness clearer than it is must be considered as a revolutionary means and consequently accepted by the socialists.

All that renders it less clear than before is anti-revolutionary, and consequently must be condemned and rejected by us. There is the great principle on which our whole tactic must be based.

Placing myself at this point of view, I am very much inclined to say that the participation of the socialists in bourgeois power would cost us more than it would be worth, because it would have for consequence the weakening of the revolutionary consciousness of the proletariat. I am persuaded that there is no rule without exception and that every principle that ceases in an absolute manner becomes by that very fact metaphysical. I admit therefore the possibility of the exceptional cases where the socialist party would see itself forced to cause one of its representatives to enter into a bourgeois ministry, but it is always to the whole party and not to such or such of its members taken individually that belongs the right to pronounce in such cases. It must be added also and well noted that the resolution to participate in bourgeois power could only be taken by the socialists with the immediate and clearly posited aim of accelerating the dissolution of present society.

Accept, dear citizens, the assurance of my friendly consideration.

George PLEKHANOV

PABLO IGLESIAS

Pablo Iglesias has for twenty years been the soul of the Spanish Workers’ Party. It is he who has wrested the socialist workers of the peninsula from the errors and incoherences of anarchist theory and tactics and has led them to group themselves for concerted action on the terrain of the class struggle.

Publicist of the acerbic pen, he wages with vigour in El Socialista the struggle against capitalism and its supports, militarism and clericalism. Orator of a captivating and warm speech, he multiplies meetings and gatherings over the whole surface of Spain.

Madrid, 7 September 1899.

Honourable citizens Gérault-Richard and Jaurès,

I cannot answer with the necessary fullness your enquiry relating to the Dreyfus question and the Millerand case. I have been ill and am now in the period of convalescence.

I shall therefore say briefly, on the first question, that the socialist party must intervene in all that can serve in the defence of political liberties and in the formation within the proletariat of the consciousness of its interests, in all that brings about organization and a greater liberty to work toward the disappearance of the bourgeois regime.

I believe that intervention in the Dreyfus Affair was necessary in order to combat the reactionary currents that were involved in it. However I am also of the opinion that some among the socialists who took part in the agitation went further than they should have, by giving it an importance superior to that which it has in reality for the working class.

The Dreyfus Affair, when one considers it exclusively from the point of view of the injustice committed by the tribunals toward a man, must not assume for the socialists more importance than all the other infamies so often committed toward proletarians.

With regard to the second question, it appears to me that the socialists must accept no responsibility nor any political function in any bourgeois government. The socialist party must not authorize the presence of one or several of its members in governments that have for mission the defence of the wage-earning regime.

The socialists cannot participate in power to have the laws made by the exploiting class executed with the aim of maintaining the producers in slavery, in misery, and in ignorance. They must seize hold of it only to destroy all, absolutely all the capitalist privileges.

Pablo IGLESIAS

ANDREA COSTA

Andrea Costa is a militant par excellence. It is from prison that he addresses to us the lines below, and in fact our valiant comrade has already spent half his existence either on the soil of France, or in the jails of King Humbert.

Eloquent, active, indefatigable, above all a man of organization, Andrea Costa combines the functions of deputy with those of secretary of the Italian socialist party.

Prison of Imola (Italy), September 99.

My dear friends,

It is here, in prison, where I have been since 1 July and where I shall remain about forty days more to fulfil one of those condemnations which are like our honoraria for us, socialist deputies, in Italy; it is here, I say, that I have received your letter; and you understand at once, my dear friends, that, from here, I am not in condition to answer you; first because, lacking our newspapers and everything else, for two months I have been up to date on nothing; then because, even if I had the elements to form a complete judgment, I would not have enough liberty to answer you entirely. À la prison comme à la prison!

I must therefore confine myself, my dear friends, to sending you my cordial greetings and to wishing you, as well as all our friends and companions of France, enough abnegation and constancy to traverse the painful present period.

Andrea COSTA

The Petite République of Monday 25 September published Enrico Ferri’s reply:

ENRICO FERRI

Enrico Ferri is in Italy one of the most authoritative representatives, if not the most authoritative, of scientific socialism. Sociologist of a European reputation, Ferri was professor at the University of Pisa when, in 1893, he publicly adhered to socialism and saw himself for this fact dismissed by the government. Since then, he has not ceased pursuing the struggle on every terrain against the capitalist class. Lecturer, publicist, orator, he is almost as well known in Paris and in Brussels as in Rome and in Florence. Enrico Ferri represents in the Italian Chamber the constituency of Mantua.

To give a reply to the two questions which now agitate the various groups of the French Socialist Party, one must first agree on what socialism is, inasmuch as it is the programme and the compass of a militant political party.

I understand by socialism the doctrine, at once sociological and political, that Marx above all has spread out in its fundamental lines in complete accord (there is its strength) with the experimental and scientific orientation of contemporary thought, which goes from universal transformism (evolution) and biological transformism (Lamarckism and Darwinism) to social transformism (Marxism).

*

The Marxist doctrine is not, naturally, the immutable product of a superhuman intelligence; it is — like every other scientific doctrine — susceptible of development and of correction, while remaining positive and unshakeable in its fundamental lines.

The fact and the induction of surplus labour (wage-earning) as the inseparable effect of the capitalist form of private property, which is the great Marxist discovery on the technical terrain of political economy, necessarily determined the constitution of the proletariat as a class party, fundamentally opposed to all bourgeois parties, whatever their shade.

The inevitability of the socialization of the means of production and of labour — as the natural and evolutionary process of bourgeois society — constitutes the fundamental sociological datum and consequently the compass of the proletariat, inasmuch as it is a political party.

Finally, what is called historical materialism and what I prefer to call economic determinism is the scientific compass for seeing clearly and far in the mêlée of social and political facts, in this sense that — just as in psychological life the sensations are the determining base of every other phenomenon, such as sentiments and ideas — likewise in social life the economic conditions (whose essential poles are the earth and labour and love) constitute the determining base of every other phenomenon, such as customs, beliefs, law, political arrangement.

But with this corollary, that every effect becomes, in its turn, a cause and every determined phenomenon becomes, in its turn, a determining phenomenon. In psychological life the sentiments and ideas determine and modify, in their turn, the sensations; and in social life customs and the juridical and political arrangement have a more or less profound counter-effect on the economic conditions.

So that socialist consciousness — which is, in my opinion, the most revolutionary force of individual and social life — while being the product of the economic conditions of our century (capitalist form of private property and wage-earning proletariat) necessarily comprises all the most advanced evolutionary manifestations of contemporary human consciousness. A conscious socialist who would be, for example, clerical or militarist, or dogmatic, or traditionalist, etc., is not conceivable and would be a living contradiction.

Socialist consciousness — which is therefore the determining factor of the moral, social and political conduct of all those who, even without being true wage-earning proletarians, feel all the thrilling resonances of it in their heart and in their brain — socialist consciousness can repeat in an absolute sense what the Latin poet said: homo sum et nihil humani a me alienum puto.

I am a man, and all that is human — in the most modern and evolved sense of the word — constitutes my essence and my strength: from the economic condition to the social florescences of art, of morals, of law, of politics, of science.

This socialist consciousness comes to complete the circle of the class struggle, for it constitutes by itself a fundamental opposition with the traditionalist or routine consciousness, which comprehends, itself, all that there is of the backward and of the surviving in human consciousness.

Thus, the bourgeoisie, sprung from the great Revolution in the name of the liberty of thought and of acts, and which, to live, has had and has need of liberty, is condemned — in its struggle against the social birth of the proletariat and with it of the new humanity — to lean, with an interior antagonism that marks its death, on the institutions (militarist and clerical) which were proper to that old regime and to that feudalism that the bourgeoisie killed in being born.

*

These general considerations, although formulated quite in haste, appear to me to lead to the positive and logical reply on the two questions that will be posed at the French National Socialist Congress; and at the same time they appear to me to lead evidently to the necessity of the Socialist Unity of the conscious proletariat as well in France as in all other countries.

I. I believe that the socialist party in occupying itself with the Dreyfus Affair has accomplished only a duty of conscience.

The bourgeoisie occupies itself with this affair, as with any judicial error whatever. The socialist proletariat has occupied itself and ought to occupy itself with it, not as Voltaire generously occupied himself with the Calas affair, but in taking the Dreyfus Affair as symbol and symptom of the menacing survival of feudal militarism and clericalism in full bourgeois republican regime.

Captain Dreyfus interests us greatly; but he is only one, and one of the most fortunate, among the innumerable victims of that man-crushing machine that is called “penal justice”.

But his affair interests us and concerns us infinitely more, for it is by it and for it that a battle so noble and decisive has been engaged between the spirit of modern civilization and medieval tyranny (militarism and clericalism) found again beneath the bark of bourgeois and republican institutions.

I can therefore only give my enthusiastic admiration for the work accomplished, under the impulse of Jean Jaurès, by the French Socialist Party in the Dreyfus Affair.

And the effects of this noble and courageous initiative only confirm this conclusion. Who could, in effect, measure the force of sympathetic attraction toward the socialist ideal that this attitude of the socialists has determined in France and in the entire world?

*

II. If the ministry is only the committee of political affairs of the dominant class, I understand very well that the socialist party should strive to seize this powerful instrument of domination, in the gears of contemporary administrative and political arrangement.

But it must seize it as class party, which knows well that society cannot be changed from today to tomorrow by a wave of a magic wand or by barricades, like a stage set (and there is the great scientific truth of Marxism), for every society changes, at every hour, gradually and partially.

And, consequently, the socialists must not count on a total and monolithic revolution, but participate in private administration (cooperatives) and public (communes, charitable works, etc.), in order to learn to know and regulate the reality of social things. But they must always do so in view of and in the name of the socialist ideal (class struggle and collective property). Otherwise they atrophy and degenerate into sterile reformism, losing all revolutionary force of social and human regeneration.

In the face of misery, for example, one can take the attitude of beneficence (reformism) or else of the socialization of the means of production (social revolution).

And in the face of a man who is hungry, the reformist and the revolutionary can accomplish the same act (for example by giving him to eat), but for the reformist this aid is the end of his activity; for the revolutionary it is only the beginning of it.

The socialist party approves and accepts the reforms compatible with the bourgeois regime (for example the eight hours, cooperation, pensions for the invalids of labour, etc.) but always taking them as a departure station toward the socialist ideal, instead of taking them as an arrival station at the improvement of present society, reformed in its details, but preserved on its fundamental bases (private property and, consequently, class domination).

And then: can they, the socialists, go to the government of the State just as they go to the administration of a commune?

Evidently, yes! And there is the Marxist tactic that is called “the conquest of public powers”, that is to say, to come to give, with the economic and political organization as class party, the value of legal majority to the workers (manual and intellectual) who at present are a majority in fact, but a minority in law.

But how can they, the socialists, go to the government?

Evidently, as class party, which comes to conquer the legal majority; that is to say when the chick in the egg is big enough to be able to break the shell.

Could a socialist, as an individual, enter a municipal administration, without being the mandatary of the party? And could he be the mandatary of the party before the party has come to the legal majority in the communal council?

Evidently, no.

In a commune where the electors and the socialist elected are, for example, the twentieth part of the electoral body and of the communal council, what kind of socialist could be the mayor or the assessor, lost in the crowd of bourgeois councillors and assessors?

I believe that one would never admit this, for this participation would be only a personal participation, too dangerous for the party absorbed and, in any case, a tree without roots in the terrain of the socialist collectivity.

*

That is why, to the second question, I answer that when in a Parliament the socialist deputies come to be the majority or even a group preponderant enough to attract into its orbit that fluctuating and colourless mass, which is always with the strongest, then the socialist party can and must go to the government of the State, just as it goes to the administration of a commune.

But when the legal majority of Parliament and, consequently, of its ministerial committee is only bourgeois to the highest degree (for example Waldeck-Rousseau and Gallifet), then an individual socialist, even if he has the skill of a Millerand, ought not — tree without root — participate in bourgeois power, where he will not be able, for the individual cannot act on social and political history except inasmuch as he sums up in himself the energies of a collectivity, he will not be able to force the reality of things, nor to outstrip the historical and political moment, nor realize decisive reforms (which are departure stations toward the socialist ideal) and where therefore he cannot be the mandatary of the socialist party.

And if, in certain exceptional moments, the socialist party must act as defender of the conquests of civilization against the return of medievalism, it can and must do so (for socialist consciousness is the highest form of human evolution), but always as party, never as individual without mandate from his companions in struggle.

In this case, one has a difficult and delicate position, which in view of certain very restricted and very problematical advantages, carries with it the certainty of enormous disillusionments. These will not prevent, far from it, the march of socialism (since it is the necessary product of social evolution), but they will always have an effect of disarray and of political disorientation in the mass of socialists, who not being able to do philosophy of history are more suggested to by the object-lessons that the daily chronicle puts before their eyes.

Enrico FERRI

The Petite République of Tuesday 26 September published two replies:

WILHELM LIEBKNECHT

Liebknecht symbolizes in his person all the heroic and militant past of German socialist democracy. Always robust, always alert in spite of his years, he still battles in the front ranks of the Germanic proletariat. The Romanian has no more dangerous adversary and today, without tiring, he continues the struggle against the political heirs of the Iron Chancellor.

Deputy of Berlin to the Reichstag, editor-in-chief of Vorwärts, veteran of the international congresses, Liebknecht is as well known to the socialists of France as to the socialists of Germany.

Berlin, September 1899.

My dear friends,

Since the reply to your questions is to be found in my letter to the Congress of Épernay,² I beg you to dispense me from a repetition of the reasons I have given in this letter, intended for publicity.

Even without this letter my thought is known to you, and I have only to express the hope that socialist unity may be made on the basis of the class struggle — the only base on which a socialist movement is possible.

My fraternal greetings to you and to the citizen Jaurès. Wholly yours.

Wilhelm LIEBKNECHT

LOUIS BERTRAND

Louis Bertrand is in Belgium one of the militants of the first hour. He fought from 1886 onwards beside César de Paepe, Brismée, and Volders. To him in part therefore belongs the honour of having constituted that admirable Belgian Workers’ Party, the most coherent and the richest that perhaps exists.

Representative, in the Chamber of Deputies, of the district of Soignies, alderman of Schaerbeek, Louis Bertrand attaches himself above all to the obtaining of immediate reforms that can alleviate the miseries of the proletariat.

Brussels, September 1899.

Dear comrades,

You kindly ask me my opinion on two questions which preoccupy at this moment the French Socialist Party:

1. — Can the socialist proletariat, without failing in the principle of the class struggle, intervene in the conflicts of the various bourgeois factions, either to save political liberty, or, as in the Dreyfus Affair, to defend humanity?

To this first question, I reply in the affirmative for the following reasons:

The bourgeois class, if it has a common interest, is nevertheless divided into various factions.

It counts monarchists and republicans, clericals and free-thinkers, protectionists and free-traders, etc., etc.

When the question of the form of government is at stake, or that of liberty of conscience, why should the socialists not support some to defeat others?

As to what concerns specially the Dreyfus Affair, the intervention of the socialist party was indispensable.

A man is drowning, is about to be devoured by the flames. What must one do? One must run to his rescue, without troubling oneself whether this man is a bourgeois or a worker.

Dreyfus was the victim of an abominable crime against justice and humanity. Should one disinterest oneself from his cause because he is a bourgeois and a Jew? That would be monstrous!

So Jaurès, in taking up the defence of the victim of the General Staff, has rendered an enormous service to the socialist idea; we are all in agreement here on this point, and we congratulate him fraternally.

He has, moreover, made a double stroke: he has posed first an act of humanity and of justice; then, he has made war on clericalism and on militarism, those two sworn enemies of socialist democracy in every country.

*

2. — To what extent can the socialist proletariat participate in bourgeois power; and does the principle of the class struggle oppose absolutely, and in every case, the partial taking of possession of ministerial power by the socialist party?

On this second question, here is what my sentiment is. What goal do we pursue? We wish to realize our socialist, collectivist ideal.

But we know that it will not be the work of a single day; we know that the society of our dreams will not be realized by a wave of a magic wand, that it will be necessary, on the contrary, to struggle without truce, to deliver many battles before triumphing.

There is more: Before arriving at the ideal, we must pass through a period of transition and of preparation. That is why all the socialist parties, alongside their declarations of principles, have drawn up a programme of practical reforms.

The goal is to render men happier, materially, and better, morally.

This result can be obtained, in great part, by the action of government, by a more just and more humane legislation.

And then this question is posed: can this work of material and moral improvement of the condition of the popular masses be undertaken only when the socialist party shall be majority, or must it be seconded and activated by the concurrence of the socialist party, taking part, for a part only, in the constitution of a government?

To refuse to enter a ministry not completely socialist would be, in my opinion, as senseless as to refuse to enter a parliament, or a municipal council before being majority.

My profound conviction is therefore that the interest of the socialist party is to practise everywhere its action can be beneficial, without any sort of abdication, of course.

But I also think that this decision must be concerted. It is the elected who must pronounce, each time, on the solution to intervene. But, for this, it is indispensable that we have a well-united party and not — as is unfortunately the case among you — factions that often divide!

As to what concerns the special case of our friend Millerand, I believe also that he did well to enter the present ministry, especially because of the exceptional situation in which the France of the Revolution found itself and still finds itself.

There, dear comrades, is the humble opinion of your devoted

Louis BERTRAND

The Petite République of Thursday 28 September published Kautsky’s reply:

KARL KAUTSKY

Karl Kautsky, the most authoritative theoretician of scientific socialism, who has created, to sustain the ideas of Marx, the organ die Neue Zeit (the New Era), which he directs since 1883 with an admirable tact and talent. Die Neue Zeit has won a universal notoriety. The socialists of the entire world collaborate there. In his numerous writings he popularizes and develops the ideas of Marx and of Engels. His work on the agrarian question marks a date in socialist literature. His latest book, destined for a great success, combats with vigour the opportunist tendencies of Bernstein.

Berlin-Friedenau, 12/8 1899.

Dear comrades,

Of the two questions to which you have, along with several other members of the party, invited me to reply, the one appears to me extremely simple; it is the question of knowing whether the socialist proletariat violates the principles of the class struggle, when it intervenes in the interest of liberty and of humanity in the conflicts between various factions of the bourgeoisie. I believe that in these cases the proletariat has not only the right, but even the duty to intervene.

One must not forget that for the socialist the class struggle is not a goal in itself, but a means to attain a goal, and this superior goal to which all must be subordinated, is to aid in the development of society to a higher stage. The class struggle is the most powerful means to attain this goal, but we have not yet arrived at that phase where the struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat would fill all political and social life. The class differences and the antagonisms between the various bourgeois classes are still numerous and giving rise to continual political and social struggles, none of which is without importance for the evolution of society, of which each, according to its issue, can activate or hinder social progress. It would be folly on the part of the socialists to content themselves with watching, impassive, these intestine struggles of the bourgeoisie, instead of intervening and supporting the cause of progress.

Marx and Engels are sometimes accused of having taught this narrow conception of the class struggle, according to which the proletariat ought to concern itself only with its particular interests and not also with the general interests of social evolution. But these two thinkers were, on the contrary, of the opinion that the two categories of interests were linked in the most intimate way and that the proletariat ought to participate energetically in every struggle interesting social progress, even in the case where no proletarian interest would be directly at stake.

Already in the Manifesto of the Communist Party they declared: “In France the communists rally to the democratic socialist party against the conservative and radical bourgeoisie, while reserving the right to criticize the phrases and illusions bequeathed by the revolutionary tradition, etc.”

When later Lassalle declared that in the face of the working class the other classes formed only a single reactionary mass and when this phrase was introduced into the programme of German socialist democracy (1875), Marx rose up against this formula which could only too easily lead us to neglect the importance of the antagonisms and of the intestine struggles between the non-proletarian classes.

The International also did not disinterest itself from the internal struggles of the non-proletarian classes; it took part for all the oppressed, for the independence of Poland, for Home Rule in Ireland, for the States of the North against the States of the South during the War of Secession.

The intervention of the socialist parties in the intestine struggles of the bourgeoisie is all the more necessary the more powerful they are, for their apparent neutrality becomes in fact, in the same measure, a protection of the reactionary elements.

It is a disagreeable, but inevitable fact, that the growth of the socialist parties is effected to the detriment of bourgeois radicalism; for it is precisely the popular layers where bourgeois democracy recruits its most energetic elements that are most accessible to socialist propaganda. And, in proportion as the proletarians pass from bourgeois democracy to socialist democracy, the bourgeois, hitherto radicals, lose all taste for bourgeois democracy; they begin to be afraid of the proletariat and become reactionary. At the same time as socialism, reaction grows.

In this way the radical bourgeois parties weaken and crumble on both sides as a result of the progress of socialist propaganda and become more and more incapable of fulfilling their historical role. But, if the socialists weaken by their propaganda bourgeois democracy and at the same time remain aloof in its struggles against the growing reaction, what is that to say, if not to favour the latter? The more we weaken bourgeois democracy by our propaganda and render it incapable of fulfilling its historical mission, the more we are forced to substitute ourselves for it in this mission. It is only on the base of a democratic republic that a socialist republic can rise up.

*

Less simple is the second of the questions that are submitted to us. Can the socialist proletariat, and to what extent, participate in the bourgeois government? It is a question of tactics to which one may give different replies for different epochs and different countries and to which I shall not venture to give an absolute and immediate reply.

In Switzerland and in England such participation appears to me possible; in Germany inadmissible. But precisely because I cannot give an absolute reply, I cannot either claim that the principle of the class struggle forbids a socialist, whatever the circumstances, from entering a bourgeois ministry. In normal conditions, a socialist who places himself on the terrain of the class struggle will have as little desire to enter a bourgeois ministry as an atheist into a clerical ministry or a republican into a Bonapartist ministry.

His activity in such a ministry could not have any result other than to corrupt and to compromise himself, as well as the party that supports him. I would not wish to claim by this that, without violating the principle of the class struggle, the socialists cannot, in exceptional circumstances and for a determined goal, collaborate with bourgeois democrats in the same executive power against a common enemy. Such an act always remains dangerous and risky whatever the circumstances, but one can imagine difficult situations that might at a pinch justify it.

I would therefore not wish to consider the question that occupies us as a question of principle, but as a question of tactics. I have already explained in the Vorwärts what I think of this concrete case of which it is here specially a question. Here I have only to pronounce on the general side of the question, and, on this subject, I can only declare that I do not conceive the class struggle in a sense that would exclude in an absolute manner, whatever the circumstances, the entry of a socialist into a bourgeois ministry, although I judge that such an act is always abnormal, that it raises very great responsibilities, and can only be undertaken in a case of extreme necessity.

But what the principle of the class struggle requires in all circumstances is the organization of the proletariat into an independent and firm party.

This is above all important at the moments which are critical to the point that they bring many members of the party to envisage as opportune the entry of a socialist into a bourgeois cabinet. There where the socialist proletariat is united, strongly organized and independent, it will also best know how to parry the dangers that may arise for it from cooperation with bourgeois democracy.

The socialists outside of France await with impatience the resolution of the National Congress on the Millerand case. But whatever the opinion that each of us may have on this case, we find ourselves unanimous — I can affirm it without fear — in the ardent desire that the Congress may succeed in tightening in the closest way the bonds that unite the proletariat of France so that it may become the most powerful weapon in the great struggle against militarism and clericalism that currently agitates this country.

Karl KAUTSKY

The Petite République of Friday 29 September published two replies:

ÉDOUARD BERNSTEIN

Édouard Bernstein is one of the oldest fighters and one of the best publicists of the German socialist party. When, after the vote of the exceptional law against the socialists, in 1878, the party founded at Zurich the newspaper Sozialdemokrat, which served as its principal organ, it was to Bernstein that it confided its direction. In 1888, Bernstein and his co-editors at the Sozialdemokrat were expelled from Switzerland following the pressure exercised by Bismarck on the federal government. They took refuge in London, where the editorial office of the Sozialdemokrat was also transferred a few months later.

In 1890, year of the failure of the Bismarckian system and of the abolition of the exceptional law, the publication of the Social[democrat], having from then on become useless, ceased. But Bernstein, whom German reaction has never pardoned for his vigorous campaign, could not return to Germany, because condemned to exile, remains in the capital of England. He does not cease for all that to work for the development of the party, as is shown by the numerous and remarkable articles published in die Neue Zeit (the New Era) and his correspondences in the daily press, such as the Vorwärts. In recent times, the doctrinal polemic engaged between Bernstein and Kautsky has made a great stir in Germany and in all the international socialist circles.

London, August 1899.

To the citizens Jean Jaurès and Gérault-Richard

Dear citizens,

Here is my reply to the two questions you have kindly put to me.

In modern society, where the legal privileges of classes, of estates or of castes have disappeared, or are in the process of disappearing, the conflicts of political parties, bourgeois or not, interest almost always the working class.

Now, what is to be thought of a principle that forbids the latter to intervene in these conflicts at the moment when they cease to be simple intimate shop-quarrels and become battles having for stake political liberty or humanity? That would amount for the proletariat to a prohibition of defending its own interests and its humanitarian ideas. One would then find oneself in the face of a principle of imbecility, but not of a principle of class struggle.

Non-intervention can be defended by basing oneself on the weakness or inexperience of a party, or on the futility of the object in question, but never in the name of the principle of the class struggle. On the contrary, as soon as a vital interest of political liberty is in question, it would be to fail in the principle of the class struggle not to intervene.

As to humanitarian questions, the simple fact that the socialist workers’ party is the party of the oppressed already indicates that none of these questions can be foreign to it. It suffices here to recall the attitude of the International in face of the civil war of the United States, that sole grandiose event of modern history, as Marx called it in Capital. Although the Yankees of the North were bourgeois, the International pronounced itself in their favour.

Those who deny the interest of the socialist party in the Dreyfus Affair, because Dreyfus is a bourgeois, seem to confuse the class struggle in modern society with the class struggle in the Middle Ages. For serfs, the violation of the code of the nobles could indeed be a thing very indifferent, but the modern worker is not a serf and cannot have the narrow conception of a villein.

*

These considerations lead me to the second question. In principle, I have already replied to it by the declarations made above.

When one admits the necessity of political action in general and when one recognizes that a society can neither leap over the obligatory stages of its evolution nor eliminate them by decrees (Marx), one must recognize also that, in the evolution of modern nations, phases can present themselves where the partial taking of possession of ministerial power can, for the socialist workers’ party, become more than a thing permitted, but a duty of the first importance.

To what extent can or must this participation in power take place? That depends on the respective situation of the parties and on the nature of the political constitution of a country. To dogmatize in advance on this point would be to wish to try in advance all the possible combinations in the future. Each new case offers to our discernment matter for appreciation as to whether the given conditions admit or require the entry of the party or of some of its members into a ministerial combination. In principle, it appears to me that every combination should be regarded as admissible which does not weaken the general situation of the working class and does not sacrifice to a passing or subordinate advantage the permanent or superior interests of its emancipatory work.

In this regard there will almost always be difficulties and discussions arising from differences of temperament, of judgment, and of experience, but this is not a sufficient reason to escape the embarrassment of choice by an abstract declaration of abstention. I know nothing more useless in politics than general renunciations. They almost always end in infractions of the promise given and necessitate, in order to pass beyond, the employment of a casuistic chicanery, whether it be a question of the Act of Remonstrances of a Cromwell or of analogous engagements taken by socialism at its cradle.

For a party that knows what it wants and that considers itself as the guardian of the interests of a class, it is more worthy to declare itself resolved to act according to the exigencies of the moment and to assume all the responsibilities that result from it.

Cordial and fraternal greeting.

Your very devoted

Édouard BERNSTEIN

LÉON DEFUISSEAUX

Léon Defuisseaux descends from an old family of Belgian democrats and republicans.

His father gave, in 1848, hospitality to numerous French proscribed and protested, in the Belgian Senate, against the law on foreigners, imposed on Belgium by the Second Empire.

Léon Defuisseaux was elected for the first time deputy in 1870, by the electors of the district of Mons. It was under the cens regime. After having sat for ten years in the Belgian Chamber and there defended the principles of democracy, among which figured in the first rank universal suffrage, he gave, in 1883, on this question, his resignation, which had enormous repercussion and prepared the ways for universal suffrage.

Re-elected to the cens Chamber, he announced his coming re-entry to Parliament with his socialist friends. This prophecy has been fully realized.

Léon Defuisseaux then wrote a book that had in Belgium a considerable success, The Shames of the Cens Regime. He collaborated on the National, the first republican newspaper of Belgium. He still collaborates today on the Peuple, daily organ of the Belgian Workers’ Party.

Léon Defuisseaux is a brilliant orator. He enjoys in the ranks of the opposition a great authority. All the Belgian socialists, Walloons and Flemings, surround with the most lively affection this man of all goodness and generosity, who was in Belgium the precursor and the apostle of universal suffrage and of the republican idea.

Brussels, August 1899.

Dear citizens,

You ask me if I believe that the socialist proletariat can, without failing in the principle of the class struggle, intervene in the conflicts of the various bourgeois factions, either to save political liberty, or, as in the Dreyfus Affair, to defend humanity.

I judge that not only can the socialist proletariat intervene in such conflicts, but further that it is its most sacred duty.

Justice is above everything.

Socialism itself is only a ray of justice that lights the economic, political, and social question of humanity.

Those who with a courage equal only to their talent, have, in the Dreyfus Affair, defended the cause of Justice and of Truth have therefore deserved the admiration and the recognition of all socialists.

You ask me next to what extent I think the socialist proletariat can participate in bourgeois power, and whether the principle of the class struggle opposes absolutely and in every case the partial taking of possession of ministerial power by the socialist party.

I think that the proletariat has the right and in certain cases the duty to participate in bourgeois power, since every socialist who accepts a mandate accepts by this very fact to exercise a part of the power.

I judge therefore that in accepting a ministry with the aim of saving the threatened Republic, the citizen Millerand has done his socialist duty. He has not only rendered a great service to France, but has given a great example to the socialists of every country.

I write you these lines with a profound conviction, and give you from afar my fraternal handshake.

Léon DEFUISSEAUX

The Petite République of Tuesday 3 October published the reply of Pierre Lavrov:

PIERRE LAVROV³

One of the purest glories of Russian socialism. Profound and original thinker, indefatigable fighter, the famous Russian proscribed has been on the breach for fifty years; irreducible enemy of absolutism and of capitalism, he has inspired a whole succession of socialist generations whom he has charmed by the example of a life without stain and by an encyclopedic erudition without equal.

In exile since 1876, Lavrov was the founder and editor-in-chief of the review Vperiod (Forward, 1874, London), one of the directors of the Messenger of the People’s Will (1883, Geneva), and the most active collaborator of Materials, a publication having for goal the documentary exposition of the history of the socialist movement in Russia (1893, Geneva).

In Russia, Pierre Lavrov has published, under different assumed names, his celebrated Historical Letters and an immense number of articles on various philosophical and sociological questions. Among his most recent publications we have to point out especially the two volumes, published at Geneva, of his History of Human Thought, a veritable monument of philosophical erudition.

Intimate friend of Karl Marx, Lavrov was always partisan of the theory of the class struggle, and he even calls himself very modestly a pupil of the great thinker, in political economy; but he has always refused the narrow interpretation of the philosophy of his ingenious friend, opposing to the Russian adepts of this interpretation a philosophy broader, more solid, and no less scientific.

Dear comrades,

The editorial staff of the Petite République asks my opinion on two questions that are going to be the object of a deliberation at the French National Socialist Congress:

1. — Can the socialist proletariat, without failing in the principle of the class struggle, intervene in the conflicts of the various bourgeois factions, either to save political liberty, or, as in the Dreyfus Affair, to defend humanity?

2. — To what extent can the socialist proletariat participate in bourgeois power; and does the principle of the class struggle oppose absolutely, and in every case, the partial taking of possession of ministerial power by the socialist party?

Even the most grave questions of socialist theory and politics present themselves under a more or less different aspect in different countries, and this is above all the case for Russian socialists, placed by history in the face of an absolute power, remaining alone of its kind in contemporary Europe. So I am not certain that we, Russian revolutionary socialists, are entirely competent to emit a more or less definitive opinion on the questions of socialist politics, which are at present posed before the socialist proletariat of any other country of Europe, fighting for the triumph of the social revolution on the terrain of certain acquired liberties that do not exist in Russia. But the questions that are addressed to me contain, as it appears to me, a rather important element of more or less general socialist theories, and it is this element alone that I shall permit myself to treat in this letter, taking as point of departure the socialist principles that I believe to be the most fundamental.

**

The scientific socialism of today is, in fact, a class struggle, where the socialist proletariat organizes itself on an international basis to destroy the capitalist regime that serves as foundation for the present social state and dominates it. I believe this is admitted by all socialists of our epoch.

But if one considers attentively the course of human history in its ensemble, one finds, as it appears to me, in the first place, that the struggle of the proletariat against capitalism is only the present form of a very ancient and very general tendency to transform a given social state into a better state, or, as I would wish to formulate it, to draw nearer more or less to the reign of justice in a solidary humanity.

In the second place, I believe that most socialists of our epoch admit that socialism is not and could not be a miraculous fact, transforming in a radical manner one social state into another: this new social state is preparing itself automatically in the evolution of the capitalist party, but at the same time present socialists prepare it and it is their duty to prepare it by a conscious activity, and by pursuing a goal defined by an equally defined plan of action.

This point of departure once admitted, it seems to me useful, in every problem somewhat doubtful of socialist politics, to go back to the fundamental questions: is such or such other plan of action in harmony with the humanitarian tendency of socialism considered as having for goal to found the reign of justice on the basis of the international solidarity of the workers? Can this plan of action serve to prepare in a useful manner the advent of the socialist regime?

At the appearance of the International one could believe that the organization of the proletariat into sections, into federal councils, and into international workers’ congresses, with the permanent organism of a General Council, could become immediately the basis and the preparation of a social state realizing the international union of the workers, a union which would stifle in the unfailing meshes of this network the present elements of the capitalist world, which has for base the competition of individuals, the struggle of groups, the hatred of nations and of States. But the current of events has proven that the advent of the socialist regime still requires a period of preparation; it is still a question at present of preparing the proletariat of the various countries for the socialist conception of social relations, for one is still very far from the moment when all the workers of the nations that have assumed the right to call themselves civilized nations will form part of the great union of the socialist proletariat; it is still a question of preparing in each country the terrain that would render possible either the union and legal development of the socialist proletariat, or its triumph by revolutionary ways.

We are at the moment of this preparatory action and it is in the clear and defined conception of this preparation that we must seek the solution of a thousand particular problems, whether theoretical or political, which arise necessarily in different countries under the influence not only of their economic state, but above all of their legal and political state.

If it were only a question of the class struggle, of a partial victory or defeat in this struggle, one would too often find oneself in the face of insoluble questions, for many momentary victories result only in a state of things which determines the demoralization of the combatants and even a series of the most grave defeats. But when one takes into consideration the great goal of the international solidarity of the workers and the advent of the reign of social justice, and when one clearly represents to oneself the consequences of such or such other manner of acting for the preparation of the future social revolution, the particular questions present, it seems to me, often less difficulty.

If socialism is at bottom the present form which the struggle for universal solidarity and for social justice takes on, one could not doubt that every humanitarian question is at the same time a socialist question in the strictest sense of the term. This once admitted, immediately disappears the difficulty of resolving the question of knowing whether the organized socialist proletariat has to take part in a social struggle — whatever may be the parties most immediately interested in it — where it is a question of humanitarian questions. As soon as we have noted in it a strictly socialist element we can study the conception that the duty of socialists is to take part in it. But there is still something else. It appears to me evident that, to prepare its historical advent, socialism has the duty, in a case of struggle for a question of this order, to place itself at the head of such a movement, to take the initiative there, to make it its own.

For it is in this manner — and perhaps even uniquely in this one — that the socialists will accustom the masses to see that it is their party that was forming the most advanced fighters in all the combinations of historical events. And, consequently, it is one of the most effective preparations for the advent of socialism. Starting from this point of view, it appears to me evident, for example, that the struggle against the absurd and criminal antisemitism (of which the Dreyfus Affair has been one of the most revolting manifestations) is a strictly socialist question for the international proletariat. So it has appeared to me very regrettable that it was not the socialist party that took immediately the initiative of the great French social movement concerning the events of the last two years, and I have been very happy to see that thereafter it has played there so fine a role.

*

But this is a case too simple and, as it appears to me, too evident. There are some more difficult or, at least, more complicated. In such country, there is a struggle between a bourgeois or agrarian parliament and a militarist semi-absolutism. The one and the other are enemies of socialism. An alliance with the one or with the other would be a betrayal, not only of the principle of the class struggle, but further of the principle of proletarian socialism. However, it seems to me that the socialist party has not to disinterest itself from this struggle and to let triumph indifferently, according to the occasion, the one or the other political party. Every opposition to absolutism, even mitigated, is a better preparation for the advent of socialism than the triumph of absolutism.

Therefore, in the name of socialist interests, there is not to abstain, but to vote, in the sense of an opposition to the most dangerous party. It is still more evident, as it appears to me, that in a frankly absolute and reactionary empire the socialists not only have not the right, in the name of their principles, to ignore the political question and to occupy themselves uniquely with the struggle against capitalism, but that it is their socialist duty to take the initiative of the political and revolutionary movement against absolutism.

**

I come to the most complicated case, and it is that of which the questions proposed to me by the editorial staff of the Petite République particularly treat. Do the principles of socialism permit the participation of a socialist in a ministry, as by a bourgeois Parliament, which possesses — at least officially — the supreme power in the State, and, by that very fact, represents no element of opposition to the direction of affairs in the sense of capitalist interests?

For those who see in present socialism uniquely the class struggle, the problem admits of different solutions according to entirely contingent circumstances. It is a question of appreciating the combinations that would permit a socialist individuality — and that I suppose completely sincere in his convictions — to give to the legislation of the country a push in a sense favourable to socialism as principle and to the proletariat as social class. To a question posed in so particular a sense it is almost impossible to reply in a more or less general manner. Wishing, as I have said, to remain in the generalities (especially as a foreigner), I abstain from replying to it.

Even by placing oneself at a broader point of view on socialism, one finds oneself in the presence of great complications. Let us admit that it is a question of an historical moment where the struggle of the parties is very ardent, where the reactionary parties are grouped in a rather menacing opposition, while the ministry is momentarily — perhaps uniquely until the next meeting of the Chambers — the representative of more liberal tendencies. What is the line of action that the socialist party can accept, in the name of socialism considered as tending to universal solidarity and in the name of its duty to prepare the advent of the social revolution? Would it be useful, in this case, that an eminent personality of the socialist party should accept a ministerial role to prepare the future revolution?

To the first of these two questions I believe I can reply in the affirmative. To prepare a better future the socialist party seems to me to have to aid the relatively more liberal government that is seriously threatened with being replaced by a frankly reactionary government. I will even say that, in this case, as in many others, the socialists, far from disinteresting themselves from this struggle, should perhaps place themselves at the head of a liberal movement so that this movement may keep the direction least dangerous for the proletariat.

But it is perhaps another matter for the personal action of a member of the Socialist Party, whose talents and energetic activity have drawn upon him the sympathetic attention of his coreligionists and whose conduct in doubtful cases can serve them as example. What is above all grave here is not the immediate results of the accomplished fact; it is, for a more or less near future, the admission of a dangerous compromise. A fighter sure of himself cannot fear being obliged to compromises shaking the moral bases of the party to which he belongs; but he could never be certain that other personalities less strong may not recommend themselves, in more doubtful cases, by his example and that this example — which would in fact have nothing attractive about it, according to my supposition, no dangerous result — might not bring at a more dangerous political moment a demoralizing element into socialist politics. An example given by an influential personality is always a very grave fact, especially in the measure of the influence that the personality has acquired, and he who resolves on so rash an act takes upon himself a very great responsibility from the point of view of the preparation of a better future. Here again it is very difficult to emit a general rule, especially for a foreigner, and every particular case requires to be analyzed and appreciated by taking into consideration all the complications of circumstances. But the danger for the future is always great, and it would perhaps be better not to risk the future of a great party that is at the head of a humanitarian movement for a more or less precarious victory in a struggle that absorbs and that will perhaps still absorb the forces of more than one generation. I do not wish to speak of the possibility of deplorable promiscuities with personalities whose very name has passed to the state of symbol.

*

I know that my arguments have not great value for those socialists who admit, as principle, only the class struggle, denying that at the bottom of this struggle it is a question of the reign of justice and of humanitarian solidarity, but for those any victory in the struggle, whatever the means employed, is a goal to be attained by that very fact, and replies even somewhat general to the questions posed, from this point of view, as I have said, appear to me completely impossible.

Accept, dear comrades, my best socialist sentiments.

Paris, 14 September 1899

Pierre LAVROV

The Petite République of Wednesday 4 October published Hyndman’s reply:

HENRY HYNDMAN

Henry Hyndman, the founder and principal leader of the Social Democratic Federation, belongs to an opulent family of the English aristocracy.

He made brilliant studies at the University of Cambridge and then devoted some fifteen years to roaming the world from the Indies to Canada. At first a radical, he then passed to socialism under the influence of the writings of Marx.

Brilliant writer, learned economist, orator of great bearing, full of ardour, Hyndman is a superior man as much from the moral point of view as from the intellectual point of view.

His principal work, The Ideal of a Socialist Democrat, has made an epoch in England.

Endowed with a remarkable activity, Hyndman spends himself without counting, writing pamphlets, tracts, articles in the periodical of the party, Justice, giving six meetings or conferences a week. But the objective of our comrade is above all to bring to socialism the powerful trade-unions across the Channel, in order to accelerate the march of the proletarian movement and to render it irresistible.

London, September 1899.

Dear citizens,

It is very difficult to resolve in a purely abstract way the two problems on which you ask my opinion. My friend Belfort Bax, the man best gifted that I know for abstract analysis, will perhaps be able to treat the question from the point of view of pure theory; as for me, I do not believe I can answer it except by leaning on actual events. In any case, the replies to be made depend necessarily on the situation of the socialist party in the country in which the problem is posed to it. Otherwise, would not a discussion of this nature be a little “the search for the absolute” in the political domain?

I shall therefore endeavour to give you my opinion, nothing but my personal opinion, moreover.

I

It is evident to me that from the moment the socialist proletariat takes part in the political struggle, it must inevitably intervene in the conflicts that arise between the various factions of the dominant class, without any need for it to fail in the principle of the class struggle. In England, for example, imperialism and the various questions of foreign policy constitute at the present hour the essential questions of the day. The abominable diplomacy of British India which is in process of completely ruining it, for generations no doubt, does not directly concern the English socialists and has nothing to do with the class struggle. We have, however, resolutely taken the side of the oppressed and famished natives; we have welcomed with joy the support of many non-socialists: landed proprietors, capitalists, persons of various professions, as well as wage-earning proletarians, in our struggle to obtain reparation of the evils caused by the present economic and political system, although we know well that socialism, as such, cannot have influence in India for a very long time.

Likewise we are at this moment struggling with a fraction of the liberal party against the whole of the conservative party and the greater part of the liberals in the Transvaal question. Here also it is in no way a question of the class struggle. It is simply a question of obtaining respect for justice toward a small, ignorant, bigoted, cruel people, perhaps not exempt from all corruption, but who is threatened with war by the immense British empire, if it does not consent to let itself be over-ruled by a certain number of interloping filibusters who will drive it from the country that all the treaties recognize to it. To remain silent at this moment, to refuse to act, in such circumstances, in accord with people who have been in truth almost always in complete opposition with us, would be to show that we are not very sure of our own principles.

Likewise, although the Irish are almost all fanatical Catholics and completely in disagreement with us on questions that we consider as primordial, we have nevertheless not hesitated to agitate with the Irish party, although purely bourgeois, in Parliament as in the country, in order to obtain for them this political and social justice that we demand for ourselves.

The religious question cannot be considered, as well in our country as in the others, as having any relation with the class struggle. However the socialists see themselves obliged, even in England, to declare themselves against the high clergy, both Anglican and Catholic, and in acting thus we find ourselves more or less on common ground with the dissident Protestants and other non-conformists, of whom we are on other points the resolute adversaries.

Assuredly if a case like that of Captain Dreyfus had been produced in England, we, the English socialists, would have demanded justice for the innocent, and I hope we would have shown in such circumstances a courage and devotion as great as our French comrades. Needless to say we would have welcomed on this ground, as they have done, men with whom we are usually in disagreement at every point of view.

I would therefore reply to your first question that as far as tactics and the daily struggle are concerned, it is absolutely impossible for socialism, as a militant political party, not to take account of events that interest the whole of society, even if their action were to bring them into contact and make them struggle in accord, temporarily, with other parties. This does not seem to me to have to compromise in the least the principle of the antagonism of classes on the economic or even political terrain. It is thus for example that socialists and liberals make common cause in Belgium concerning universal suffrage. But the day they shall have obtained political equality, they will be as antagonistic as before. They are agreed only to attain a clearly defined goal.

II

It is much more difficult to reply to the second question than to the first. No one disputes, except the anarchists, that one must penetrate where it is possible into the municipal councils. Once there, the socialists cannot but take part in the administrative work, side by side with their bourgeois enemies. Socialist town-hall administrations, even of the French Workers’ Party, are not, so far as I know, unknown in France. In England, we have aldermen (mayors), socialist municipal councillors of conviction. Their duty is evidently to use the powers at their disposal to improve, within the limits of the possible, the present conditions of existence of the workers, while preparing the complete reconstruction of tomorrow, without forgetting that, representatives of the oppressed class, they must make every effort to obtain all that will be useful for the ulterior pursuit of the class struggle.

I do not believe that any English socialist would make the least objection to our having, if we could, a social-democrat appointed as Lord Mayor of London. We would understand that he would conserve himself exclusively, as long as he was in office, to the improvement of the lot of the workers of London and to the diffusion of the principles of socialism.

But, in all these cases, there is no question of a malfeasant situation. For example M. Asquith (radical minister in 1895) took upon himself to have the striking miners of Featherstone fired upon and wished afterwards to justify this murder, energetically supported, moreover, by John Burns. Could we have brought Quelch, Bax, Cunningham, Graham, Lansbury, Thorn, Burrows or myself, into a cabinet of which M. Asquith would have been a member? Certainly not. Unless the entire socialist party, by a general referendum or by the voice of its delegates, had declared itself by an enormous majority in favour of our entry into such a government.

I recognize perfectly that in a period of transition we have every interest, that we may be judged that it is necessary for us to act in accord with the adversaries of militarism, of imperialism, of clericalism and that this can even go so far as to oblige us to enter a radical ministry in France, in Belgium, in Italy or even in Protestant countries like England. But I do not believe that the right to decide in a case as grave, of which the counter-blow is felt indifferently on international socialism, can be left to the chiefs of the party, however esteemed and eminent they may be.

It seems to me, in effect, that the duty of men to whom their intelligence and their moral qualities have given an exceptional influence is to give the example of submission to the majority of their comrades in struggle. That there is danger that this opinion may be erroneous, I do not doubt — to count the number of votes for and against does not infallibly furnish the criterion of truth — but it is a much lesser danger than to leave to a few the care of resolving a question as important. Democracies, and above all socialist democracies, are often in error and victims of prejudices, but they become gradually conscious and intelligent organisms. That is why every act that goes against their sentiment has much chance of doing more harm in the future than it can do good from the point of view of immediate tactics.

In the meantime, and whatever the disagreeable impression caused me by the presence of Millerand in the same cabinet as Gallifet and Waldeck-Rousseau, I hope that the next National Congress of the French Socialist Party will recognize your absolute devotion and that of your collaborators to the cause of justice and of liberty, and will declare clearly that you have never wished to subordinate the great cause of international socialism to passing advantages of tactics.

Henry HYNDMAN

The Petite République of Thursday 5 October published this triple reply:

THE DANISH SOCIALISTS

The socialist party of Denmark is one of the most strongly organized in Europe. Thanks to the suppleness of its method, thanks also to the practical sense characteristic of the race, it has realized in a few years considerable progress. It counts today close to 80,000 adherents grouped in their syndicates and acting with an admirable discipline on the economic terrain and on the political terrain.

This has been well seen at the lock-out which has just come to an end. In this gigantic struggle engaged by the whole of the employers against the whole of the working class, socialism, after a heroic resistance of six months, has won a memorable victory.

The consultation we give below emanates from three of the best militants of the party, the citizens Sigvald Olsen, P. Knudsen and A.-C. Meyer.

Working Class and Bourgeoisie

Copenhagen, September 1899.

The editors of the Petite République have invited us to furnish replies to some questions which, despite the entirely special importance they present for the present situation of France, interest the workers of every country.

We Danish socialist-democrats are in the fortunate case of being able to give a collective reply representing our general opinion on the relations of the working class with the bourgeoisie. We can all the more easily pronounce ourselves in unison on this subject, as, on our side, we had, years ago already, controversies on the political tactic to be followed by socialist democracy.

By the first question, as it is put to us by our confrères Gérault-Richard and Jean Jaurès, it is asked:

1. — Can the socialist proletariat, without failing in the principle of the class struggle, intervene in the conflicts of the various bourgeois factions, either to save political liberty, or, as in the Dreyfus Affair, to defend humanity?

We judge that the workers’ parties not only can mingle in the conflicts of the bourgeois factions, but that they are charged to do so. And here are the reasons for which:

Socialist democracy is not a sect whose adepts are clothed in a red uniform to distinguish themselves from the other parties. Its task consists in using every situation in favour of the material, political and moral progress of the working class. Consequently, in its struggle against the black reaction, socialist democracy will range itself on the side of liberalism, that is to say of the bourgeoisie, while, in the struggle against conservative politics, it will hold itself on the radical side.

Our adversaries resemble each other only insofar as they are not socialist democrats. In their mutual relations they are often divided and combat each other relentlessly. In no country, it appears to us, has this fact been observed in a more striking manner than in France, whose proud history is known in Denmark better than that of any other nation. The defeats the proletariat has suffered have only hardened it, and have taught it, instead of falling into the dependence of the oppositional bourgeoisie, to force the latter to regulate its tactic on the politics of socialist democracy.

Under the flags of the Workers’ Party, there exists only one policy, that is to say that of the socialist proletariat; it has for goal to reunite all that is not capitalist and to profit from the divergences existing, from the economic and moral point of view, between the various factions of the bourgeoisie. Every uprising occurring in the capitalist camp is a gain for the working class. When free-trade is at grips with protectionism, the socialist regime with the Manchester system, free thought with orthodoxy, these are so many chances for socialist democracy and from which it will have to draw advantage, not at the prejudice of its programme, but at the expense of the other political parties.

The socialist democracy of Denmark has fought beside liberalism against reaction, and beside radicalism against moderation: in the one and the other case, it has succeeded in consolidating or extending the political rights of the worker, which form its best weapon for obtaining power and improving the conditions of the proletariat.

Our heart-sympathies are with our French comrades in the struggle they wage to save a martyr; for us, as for them, it is less a question of the person of Dreyfus than of the triumph of humanity; for this will also be that of social justice: humanity is a tributary of socialism, whose current it will reinforce.

But if we follow this affair with an altogether particular interest, it is because it constitutes a combat between the friends of civilization and the chauvinists, between socialist democracy and the dictatorship of the General Staff.

In the brotherhood of peoples we see the most powerful lever of international peace and of the organization of social labour. Everywhere the standard of militarism is given, liberty is in danger. For our part, we hope that in a country that has bitterly expiated the follies committed by chauvinism; thus one of our first tasks has been always to make front against militarism, whether it manifested itself in trumpet-blasts for war, or whether it was a question of yielding to the reiterated appeals in favour of the ever-growing demands of defence. The projects of revenge and the accommodations with the militarists are in our eyes irreconcilable with socialist-democratic politics and the international brotherhood of the workers. We desire therefore to see crumble the oligarchy exercised by the General Staff of France, and hope that no means will be neglected to obtain this goal.

**

2. — To what extent can the socialist proletariat participate in bourgeois power; and does the principle of the class struggle oppose absolutely, and in every case, the partial taking of possession of ministerial power by the socialist party?

In continuation of what we have alleged above, we allow ourselves to observe that the resistance opposed to socialist democracy renouncing its negative maintenance conceals the fear that it may let itself be drawn outside its programme. Now we do not share this fear. For if there were any danger in a socialist-democrat being incorporated into a ministry, the danger would already be there from the moment when representatives of the working class sit in the legislative assemblies, where the bourgeoisie is always in absolute majority.

But socialist politics requires precisely that its representatives enter as well into the legislative Chambers as into the Municipal Councils; it wishes to penetrate everywhere where the least breach is observed in the social construction of the bourgeoisie, in order to operate the explosion there, which will cause the old laws and institutions to crumble. There is the parliamentary revolution, less violent, but more radical than the combats in the street and the conspiracies in the cellars.

The French workers have caused to enter into the ministry one of their representatives, socialist and democrat. The question is now to know whether the conduct or the terrain of the struggle, beside the murderer of the Commune, beside Gallifet. But even if Gallifet is Lucifer in person, it is for the socialist Millerand to justify his role with the very energy of Lucifer to strangle Jesuitism and dethrone militarism. Should the attempt fail, Millerand will none the less remain a socialist. But if it succeeds, it will be a great step forward for the proletariat; new coalitions will form against the principles of which Gallifet is the symbol, and the working class, encouraged by its successes, will move with rapid steps toward power, toward the realization of its noble aspirations.

We accompany with our best wishes our valiant comrades of France in the struggle they have undertaken for the conquest of political liberty, of the rights of humanity and of social equity; and we pronounce the hope that you will know how to safeguard the union of the proletariat, for union makes strength.

The Petite République of Friday 6 October published this reply:

HENRY QUELCH

Henry Quelch is, with William Thorne, Tom Mann and a few others, one of those admirable manual workers who, by their sole inclination, their clear and clean intelligence, render today such great services to the cause of the emancipation of the working class across the Channel.

Editor-in-chief of Justice, the central organ of the Social Democratic Federation, Quelch is in this socialist organization a militant, one of the most devoted, the most energetic militants. He is at the same time at the head of the cooperative enterprise “The Twentieth Century”, to which we owe among others a magnificent edition of the Economics of Socialism, by Hyndman, of whom he is the friend and esteemed companion in struggle.

London, September.

Dear comrades,

The two questions you put to me are of so capital an interest for the socialists of every country, that I believe there could be no excess in taking the time to reply.

I believe that it is not only possible for the Socialist Party to take part in the conflicts that are periodically produced between the bourgeois parties, without violating in any way the principle of the class struggle, but I further believe that it is its absolute duty to do so, in the interest of socialism itself as well as for the cause of justice, of liberty and of humanity.

It is thus that in the Social Democratic Federation, which has often been reproached with being too exclusive and too doctrinaire, we have joined with the liberals and some other non-socialists to condemn the evictions in Ireland, the Soudan war, the aggressions against the Boers, the deplorable government of India. And that is why I congratulate you with all my heart for your action in the Dreyfus Affair, for justice and for humanity.

This action will benefit in an incredible way the cause of socialism not only in France, but in the entire world.

As to your second question, it appears to me that the principle of the class struggle, that the class character of socialism is in absolute opposition with the participation of socialists in a bourgeois government and with the acceptance of a portfolio in a capitalist ministry. It is difficult to conceive that a socialist could take his share of responsibility in the acts of a government whose aim is the defence and the maintenance of capitalist society.

I am however ready to admit that it is possible for a political crisis to be produced such that political liberties being in danger or a coup d’État being to be feared, the gravity of the situation justifies the entry of socialists into power. But a political act as grave could only be possible after it has been expressly approved by the socialist party. Whatever the case, the post should be quitted as soon as the crisis would be over.

The French nation has traversed a great and formidable crisis. It is thanks to the devotion of the French socialists to the cause of public liberties and of justice, it is thanks to the services they have rendered to this cause that terrible disasters have been able to be hitherto avoided. If therefore, in this admirable and grandiose struggle, some partial errors have been committed, if political acts have been committed that some socialists may not approve, this disapproval could not be a condemnation, nor this criticism a blame. Above all, it is necessary that all the difficulties that have been able to arise be resolved by the Congress that will be held next month, that from this Congress may come forth the union and the perfect accord of all French socialists, in order that it may be a unified French socialist party that shall receive, in 1900, the delegates of the great International Socialist Congress.

Henry QUELCH

The Petite République of Wednesday 11 October published Labriola’s reply:

ANTONIO LABRIOLA

Antonio Labriola, professor of philosophy at the University of Rome, is one of the most distinguished theoreticians of international socialism. Everyone knows his essays on the materialist conception of history and on the communist manifesto, which have had the honour of pleasing translations. They have appeared also in French at Giard and Brière, soon followed by a second volume, a collection of spiritual letters addressed to the citizen Sorel on questions of philosophy and of Italy.

Antonio Labriola collaborates on all the socialist periodicals of his country and on a great number of learned reviews. The Italian socialist party knows itself grateful to him for having cooperated in its brilliant and rapid successes by enlightened as much as disinterested counsels, by his profound science, and by his devotion to the cause of the proletariat.

Portici (Naples), September 1899.

Excusing myself for the delay due to the slowness with which the post came to find me outside my ordinary residence — that is to say Rome — I hasten to reply to your circular of the 10th of last month.

As it appears to me that this is not the case for occupying the columns of the Petite République with an article composed in the manner of argumentations, I shall reply without detours and with frankness and concision.

I take up the pen to write to you precisely at the moment when there reaches me the certain announcement of the new shame of Rennes, on the occasion of which one sees the infamy of militarism finally laid bare and shame redoubled by mental restrictions and Jesuitic cowardice. Naples — quite near here — which, moreover, is far from being in intimate contact with France, as is proper to Turin and to Milan, has been keenly touched by it as if it were a national disaster.

It is in consideration of this intuitive sense of the great “Affair”, that I would believe I was failing in the most elementary principles of duty and of propriety, by setting myself to dissert in favour of the brave, the courageous, the eloquent, the indefatigable Jaurès. He has no need to ask the comrades for a “bill of indemnity”, and the socialists who would have the intention of according it to him would only do harm to themselves, thus accusing their lack of good sense.

Those who enter into struggle — one knows it well — cannot always choose the field where they descend to combat bravely. It is for this reason that for us socialists, who up to this moment are not the masters of the world, the happy hazards of life fall as upon the other mortals. But could there befall a party a better fortune than to be able to strike, at the same time, as at a single point, militarism which unveils with so little restraint its shames and its blemishes, Jesuitism which raises its head in the name of the fatherland, and capitalism which is incapable of sustaining France without falling into the ambushes of a new League?

But, say some, is it not dangerous for our cause to have almost confounded Dreyfusism and socialism? Distant as I am I could not say if truly this danger exists, nor certify its existence, nor appreciate its bearing. But, granted its existence, it is necessary to conjure it immediately, in the facts as in opinion. The present conditions of French socialism, and the necessity of agreement between the various factions, which has subsisted for some time already, and which I hope is the presage of the true definitive union, will not suffer, in any case, that such a peril — probable result of a simple misunderstanding — should persist long. Jaurès will be the first who will find the manner and the occasion to demonstrate with evidence, by the facts and by his powerful eloquence, that what may be called the occasion or opportunity of struggle is never its goal.

*

As to the second question, I cannot reply in an affirmative manner.

To save the Republic, to make socialism penetrate into the government of the bourgeoisie — Millerand becoming minister with our agreement — and finally to admit the thesis that socialists may at present participate in the government, I do not feel myself strong enough to follow the doubtful and dangerous traces of such propositions.

As a foreigner and far from the Parisian scene I am truly not in a position to descend to the anecdotic entry of Millerand into the government; all the more so as here the opinions of the French comrades appear very discordant on this point and the account of Rouanet in the Revue socialiste has come to render still more difficult the exact appreciation of the case in its minutiae. In the face of the optimists who already foresee the beginning of the Socialist Republic, in the face of the pessimists, who denounce the corruptions of ambition, I for my part see in the act of Millerand nothing other than a simple error. I do not speak in the personal sense of the case of conscience, all the more so as I do not have entirely precise and well-defined before me the personality of Millerand, but I speak of the error in the real and positive sense of what is politically useless or harmful.

The mechanism of the modern bourgeois and capitalist State, above all in France, where to the disappearance of every trace of self-government corresponds an intense centralization, does not give facility to the socialist, who arrives all alone at the government, to do anything that goes beyond the platonic decree, or the order… that is not executed.

But it was a question of saving the Republic! one repeats. Certainly socialists can, and according to the case must be the natural allies of the factions of the bourgeoisie that find themselves combating, in different countries, either the remains of feudalism, or the Catholic reaction, or the empire of the sabre, in short all the other forms of reaction. But they must be and remain allies with clean hands. They must be allies as political organization of the proletariat, which by the fact of its independence preserves its own initiative and the liberty of its movements. In every case they must be allies without any of those connivances which resolve themselves, in the end, into dangerous responsibilities and into vain promises, while they bring into the ranks of the proletariat the sentiment of uncertainty and of mistrust.

Millerand will be able to ask for a bill of indemnity, and I believe that the socialists will have shortly the occasion of according it to him, because he will demand it as a disabused minister and as a disabused comrade.

In this reply I draw near, as you see, as to the conclusions, but not as to the tone, the colouring and the motives, to the opinion of Kautsky, which I find reproduced in the Mouvement socialiste. But I for my part shall not ask pardon, as my friend Kautsky does, for pronouncing in a thorough manner on French events. You French, you are so near to us, by ancient and by recent commerce! Is it not that, for example, when I read the novels of Anatole France, I do not say continually: there, I am at home?

Accept my wishes for the next constitution of the French socialist party one and indivisible.

Antonio Labriola

[To be concluded in the next cahier]

---

We shall finish in the next cahier publishing the international consultations given to the Petite République on the Dreyfus Affair and the Millerand case.

There has just appeared from the Société Nouvelle de Librairie et d’Édition, 17, rue Cujas, Paris: The Question of Secondary Education in France and Abroad, by Ch.-V. Langlois, a volume of 150 pages, small in-18, at 1 franc 50, a book which we shall no doubt have to cite when we present the reasons for and against the liberty of education.

There has just appeared from the same publisher: Military Reform. Long Live the Militia, by Gaston Moch, former captain of artillery: M. Gaston Moch has gathered and composed the articles he had given to the Petite République; a substantial brochure of 64 pages, in-8°, at 0 fr. 50; for propaganda, 50 copies, 12 fr. 50, and 100 copies 20 francs.

At the moment when we are going to press, our comrade Charles Péguy telephones us that he has just had a slight relapse of the flu. He therefore begins again to excuse himself to his correspondents.

Footnotes

1. In the Mouvement Socialiste, Karl Meyer and Paul Fauconnet have particularly informed our readers about this congress of Hanover. ↩

2. As an exception we do not give this letter: our readers are amply informed on the sentiments of the citizen Liebknecht. ↩

3. Our readers know that Pierre Lavrov died on 6 February 1900. ↩