Syndicalism and Its Philosophy

I

The French Syndicat, corresponding as every one knows to the TradeUnion, is an association resting on coöperative interests. Nothing is more familiar, and the legal details varying with the countries matter little. One is not generally so clear about the meaning of the word Syndicalism. Some people take it to denote an industrial organization, others fear that it may mean a rehandling of society, others regard it as a synonym of revolution, or of a dark international conspiracy, every now and then revealing its existence in occurrences of an outrageous character.

The most enlightening introduction to a question is invariably its historical perspective, and the philosophy of Syndicalism is so elemental that it needs little else than its environment to appear perfectly perspicuous. That French Syndicalism should be chosen for such an exposé, rather than any other parallel manifestation, ought not to be thought surprising; physicians have a charming way of speaking of a disease fully answering the classical descriptions as a 4 finely characterized disease,’ une belle maladie, and French Syndicalism, whether one studies it with sympathy or the reverse, is the most complete in development and, if I may so say, the most perfect, in tone.

II

The history of Syndicalism in France is nothing else than the transformation of a political into a social question. It is remarkable that the Revolution of 1789, which had its origin in a literature as antagonistic to economic as to political inequality, had no immediate effects on the situation of the workingclasses.

The Third Estate which, in Sieyès’s famous speech, had so far been nothing, and should be everything, might well harp constantly on the rights, grievances, power, and so forth, of the people; it was not the people. It consisted, as the French parliaments still consist, of leisured or professional men whom little else than social distinctions separated from the aristocracy. Those men were full, indeed, of Rousseau’s ideas on the bettering of the inferior orders, but this bettering ought, to be in their own hands, not in those of the people; and the net result of the Revolution — as it appeared after the tremendous interlude of the Empire — was a constitution and a parliamentary system very similar to those of England, but a complete ignoring of the millions whom nobody had yet had the genius to call — in a phrase charged with significance and possibilities — the Fourth Estate. During the years from 1815 to 1845 the working-classes were as completely ignored in France as under Louis XIV; not being electors they were nil.

The Revolution of 1848 coming after, or simultaneously with, the works of the great Socialists, Saint-Simon, Fourier, Proud’hon, Leroux, and having had for its immediate cause an agitation in the world of labor, with the characteristic motto, 4 Every man entitled to work,’ ought to have changed this state of affairs. In reality it did not. Blanqui, who was the brother of an economist and might have known better, reaped no other fruit from his revolutionary efforts than the formation of a political party, le parti populaire, which the Second Empire was soon to crush, and which only reappeared after fifteen years in the mild, and once more purely political, form of a Republican party. The workman was not taken into account as a working man, but as a voting man. His importance lay in his capacity to support bourgeois deputies possessed of democratic ideas.

The Second Empire was a time of extraordinary prosperity. French commerce and industry increased during those eighteen years in an amazing proportion; the wages rose accordingly, and as the influence of France abroad was also greater than it had been since 1815, one may say that there was general happiness in the country. Yet, with the development of industrialism, soon appeared the inconveniences inherent in it: the feeling — infinitely less sharp in agricultural communities — that the master stands apart from the men; the bondage in which the machine holds t he workman, making it compulsory for him to answer all its motions by corresponding action; the captivity for a certain number of hours in the cheerless precincts of a factory. And the atmosphere peculiar to industrial milieus began to make itself felt. The legislation had not kept up with the speedy development of the mechanical industries. It ignored strikes; and when the first and very rare attempts at striking were made, the authorities found themselves unprepared to deal with them. The consequence was that they enforced the contract binding the men to their employer and made work compulsory. It was not until the very last years of the Second Empire that the right to strike was recognized legally. In the mean time, the workmen had not only developed their class feeling, but they had founded secret societies called Sociétés de Resistance, — half syndicates, half ramifications of the Internationale, — which were their first effort toward self-organization. Shortly after, Karl Marx, inquiring into the moral conditions created by the modern economic development, pointed out in clear language the vital distinction between the class and the party, and stated definitely that the class-fight was the only object that the workmen could propose to themselves.

Yet many years elapsed before the proletariat, as it began to be called, became sufficiently conscious to think of managing its own affairs. It seems incredible that in a country where the Labor vote was already so considerable it was not until 1884 — fourteen years after the foundation of the Republic — that the Syndicates were made legal, and not until 1901 that a law on Associations — that most urgent of instruments in a republic — was passed. The country was absorbed in mere politics, mostly of an anti-clerical character, which I have not the space to review, but which the reader ought to bear in mind as the background of French history between the years 1877 and 1905. Electioneering rhetoric of the cheapest description was sufficient to keep the workmen away from their own interests during the greatest part of that interval, and when they did begin in earnest to look after themselves they were so used to politicians that they could not help seeking their assisttance to do their thinking for them. This period of the history of labor is called by the Syndicalists of to-day the democratic era.

III

What the Syndicalists mean by the Democracy is nothing else than the action of the Socialist deputies in the French Chamber. It may be as well to say at once that — surprising as it seems at first — they never use the word without a shade of contempt. It was about 1885 that M. Jules Guesde first shocked the country with a popular exposé of the Marxist doctrine, and the avowed intention to change the basis of society by substituting coöperation for capitalism, and the freedom of associations for authority. Some ten years afterward a young deputy, M. Jean Jaurès, who, in a preceding chamber, had been a moderate Republican, was returned on a glaringly Socialistic ticket, and became the centre of a then very small Socialist group in Parliament. His talent as an orator, his power of assimilating the most intricate matters, his remarkable tactics as a parliamentary leader, are well-known and need not be enlarged upon. His success in his new position was immediate. Endowed with prodigious activity and energy, he went all over the country, and addressed large audiences in all the industrial cities of France, with such success that in the Chamber elected in 1902, he and his friends simply became the regulators of the government’s action.

During the Combes ministry, the prime minister made everything subservient to the Socialistic opinion and the Socialist vote, and it can safely be said that during those three years M. Jaurès actually governed France. He was anti-clerical, and the confiscation of church property along with the separation of church and state were accomplished; he was an anti-militarist, and the War and Navy budgets were most unwisely lightened with the complicity of those two extraordinary ministers, General André and M. Pelletan; peace and war were in his hands,—a great deal more than in those of the Foreign Minister, — and as his followers as well as his theories made it imperative for him to be the champion of peace, peaceful the government was until the apparition of the Kaiser off the coast of Morocco on a threatening man-of-war obliged them to make their choice between the risk of standing for French dignity at all costs and the shame of giving up the Foreign Minister, M. Delcassé. The influence of M. Jaurès, as well as the gravity of the situation, decided the matter at once: M. Delcassé was thrown overboard.

Meanwhile, three of M. Jaurès’s political friends, MM. Millerand, Briand, and Viviani, had acquired so much influence in the Chamber, and the Socialist group who backed them was regarded as so formidable, that the gentlemen mentioned were able, one after the other, to seek and take office in various cabinets; and although they were anathematized by some of their friends for so doing, their progress was none the less the Socialist progress.

How is it that this triumph of the Socialist deputies was looked upon as no triumph at all by the Socialist workmen? How is it that the very name Socialist was gradually dropped by them, left exclusively to M. Jaurès and his group, and replaced by the term Syndicalist?

If the reader will look once more over the Socialist achievements as I have just described them, he will notice that they were of a purely political character. From being an unimportant individual, M. Jaurès had risen to the position of a leader, without whom the hypnotized government dared not breathe; from being nothing else than very intelligent Socialists, MM. Millerand, Viviani, and Briand had become State Ministers, had moved into palaces, and had seemed to think it all very natural. In the mean time their notions had undergone a change; they understood what government means, and they advocated the loyalty and order without which no government can be.

What good did it all do to the proletarians who had elected them ? M. Jaurès promised, year after year, to draw up ‘extensive legislative texts, which would prepare the legal transformation of the capitalist into a socialist commonwealth’; but that epic in articles and clauses never was forthcoming, and the most urgent measures — for instance, the Association law, the Income Tax law, the Weekly Rest law, the Old-Age Pension law, and the rest, which were in operation in a backward monarchy like Prussia, — could not be passed by the parliament in which M. Jaurès had for years been cock-of-the-walk.

IV

This state of things could not but be a great disenchantment for the workmen; the more so as there was a great enchantment for them in different quarters. The Syndicates, since the law which had made them legal in 1884, had grown and multiplied. They had promptly ceased — without waiting for any legal permission — to live in isolation. The Syndicates of the same industry in the whole country were bound in federations, some of which — la Fédération du Livre, for instance, and the Mining Federation — already vied with the most prosperous English unions. In the industrial districts, the local Syndicates met inBourses du Travail, which served at the same time as information offices, popular universities, mutual or coöperative societies, and the like, and were of daily use to the workmen. There were yearly congresses, to which foreign syndicalists were soon invited, and which the least effort transformed into international congresses.

All this had been accomplished by plain workmen who had seen their work spread under their hands, and had not been afraid of their growing responsibilities. The comparison between their success and the barrenness of their deputies’ action was sure to impose itself sooner or later on their minds, and to result in the split I have spoken of. At the same time, familiar intercourse with sister organizations abroad, just in the years when the Dreyfus Affair had weakened patriotism to an incredible degree, could not fail to lower the barriers which tradition had raised between the workmen of different languages, and make more impassable those between the workmen and the bourgeois and themselves; the class feeling which had long been latent found itself suddenly perfect in an almost perfect class-organization. A class philosophy and a class literature were on the eve of being born, in fact, only needed expression; but before finding expression they found a living embodiment in the General Labor Confederation.

This famous Confédération Générale du Travail — generally called for brevity’s sake the C. G. T. — was founded about 1900 by a young man of thirty who was to die shortly afterwards, Fernand Pelloutier. Judging from the admiration of such a man as M. Sorel, Pelloutier, whom we only know by one little volume, L’Histoire des Bourses du Travail, must have been a genius. At all events this obscure clerk seems to have been the first to arrive at the full conception of a radical severance of the workmen from the rest of society, and of a revolutionary organism whose spirit and working fascinate by their simplicity.

The C. G. T. is nothing else than a federation of the federations and of the Bourses du Travail. Its seat is at the Paris Bourse du Travail, a large building just off the Place de la République. It has no legal recognition, and most jurists even contend that its existence is absolutely illegal and that it is an abuse to tolerate it in a national building. Its expenses are borne by the various federations, and do not exceed fifty thousand francs — ten thousand dollars — a year. Its members are the secretaries of the federations, one of whom is called General Secretary of the C. G. T. It possesses a weekly paper, La Voix du Peuple, in close connection with which is evidently the daily La Bataille Syndicalists.

As to its doctrines, they are found not only in these papers but in a more scientific organ, Le Mouvement Socialiste, — to which I shall have to advert further on, — in a number of pamphlets written mostly by the various secretaries, Griffuelhes, Pouget, Pierro Niel, and others, in the accounts of the yearly congresses, and, night after night, in the addresses delivered in the syndicates, popular universities, and so forth. What these doctrines — the doctrines of Pelloutier — amount to is not difficult to say: they are the plain, undisguised, and almost invariably sober, preaching of the class-fight.

The separate existence of the workmen as a class of pariahs, which underlay the concepts of the preceding generation of French Socialists, and which Marx had once or twice formulated in his books, is dwelt upon as the one great fact on which the workmen’s attention should be fixed. The proletariat has its existence apart in every country, and consequently constitutes on the globe a separate class, not only completely independent of the others, but even free from the traditional restraints embodied in patriotism. On one side are ‘the masters, that is, the robbers: on the other are the slaves, the despoiled.’ What is, in fact, Capital? How is it formed? Is it not by constantly and methodically taking from labor? Syndicalism is only the recognition by the workmen of this extraordinary state of things, on the one hand; and on the other, recognition of the fact that their common spoliation is enough to give them unity.

This, as I said above, was implied in the works of the great Socialists, Proud’hon, for instance. But while the Socialists placed their hopes of seeing all wrongs righted in the enactment of severe laws tending more and more to equalize privileges and duties, the Syndicalists distrust the law and its supporters quite as much as they do capital, and wage the same war against them.

The notion of the state is all very well theoretically, but in reality what is the state? Nothing else than the ruling parties, that is to say, politicians. Wherever there are politicians there is confusion instead of clarity, and the confusion is greater in a democracy like the French Republic than in any other form of government. In a strict monarchy of the German or Russian type the distinction of the classes is obvious, whereas in a democracy the fictitious and perfectly farcical equality of men — considered as citizens and not as economic values — obscures it hopelessly.

Parliamentarianism rests on compromises: the Socialist candidate makes the same promises to his bourgeois electors that the bourgeois candidate makes to his Socialist constituents. Experience shows also that, the political masters act on exactly the same principles as industrial masters, and ought to be treated in the same way. ‘I think it very useful,’ says M. Sorel, ‘to lick the orators of democracy and the representatives of government.’ The so-called social laws on which M. Jaurèsand his friendsplume themselves so much are mostly frauds. What are the Conseils du Travail if not a stratagem to put t he representatives of the workmen under the thumb of those of the capitalists? What are the prospective regulations of strikes if not a roundabout way to get rid of strikes? What good will accrue to the people from the law concerning Old-Age Pensions? The pittance which the workman secures for his old days by contributing all his life to the fund is only a portion of his own money; the rest remains in the treasury of the state to support all sorts of institutions, — an army among the number, — which are simply directed against him.

The Syndicalists are violently opposed not only to wars but to the existence of an army. The army in their opinion is the living demonstration of the paradox of a civilization in which those who have every advantage do nothing, and those who bear all the burdens get no reward. An army is useful only in two cases: in time of peace when there is a strike, and then the proletarians in uniform are employed against the proletarians in plain clothes; in time of war, when a few financiers think it necessary to have their interests protected by force, and then again thousands of men are destroyed for a cause not t heir own, and even opposed to it. Whatever the workmen do in support of the state is invariably found ultimately to turn against them.

What then should they do? Resolutely look upon the classes above them as enemies and treat them accordingly. Open warfare being out of the question so long as only about three hundred thousand men are connected with the C. G. T., they must be content for the present with what is feasible. Their first duty is to increase their numbers and strengthen their organization, that is to say, help in bringing over as many as they can to the Syndicates. There is no phrase that the leading Syndicalists repeat so often and in such an earnest tone as, ‘Do the humble and humdrum syndicate work.’ In fact, the day on which the whole world of labor shall be enlisted and disciplined in syndicates will also be that of its absolute supremacy: overpowering numerical superiority is insufficient so long as organization is wanting; but the moment some sort of unity is given to numbers, resistance on the part of the minority becomes impossible.

Syndicates of an aggressive character are not the only form of organization advocated by the C. G. T. The workmen are dupes not only when they work for the bourgeois, but also when they consume and pay for the goods manufactured by the capitalists. All the money they spend foolishly in this way ought to be devoted to the establishment of coöperative societ ies which must become in time formidable rivals of their bourgeois competitors. For the market is, after all, one thing with the proletariat, and it is only because so many poor club together that there are a few rich.

Syndicalists feel convinced that in the long run — no time can be named, as everything depends on the rapidity of the grouping process, and its speed may accelerate in a catastrophic manner — the coöperative movement will suffice to reverse the present economic conditions and bring about the gradual and almost invisible disappearance of capitalism; but their warlike spirit is not content with that. Capitalism ought not only to be undermined, it ought also to be stormed. The great hope, the great vision, which haunts and delights them is that of the final storming, which they call the Great Strike. When all the world of labor has become syndicalist, when there are no fools left to fight against their own interest, one fine evening — le grand soir — a universal strike shall be decreed. Next day there will be no bakers to make bread, no butchers to kill meat, no colliers to dig up coals, no railwaymen to take bourgeois about. In a few days of this awful stagnation, capitalism will realize that gold in itself is nothing while labor is everything, and the machines¹ will be either made over to, or quietly appropriated by, the workmen.

This is the dream. The Syndicalists think it should be made possible, and openly teach the ways and means. The Great Strike must be prepared for by numberless local strikes weakening capital and strengthening the proletariat. The C. G. T. is a school for striking, with professional strikeorganizers called delegates by the Syndicalists and gréviculteurs by the newspapers. The delegate starts strikes where there is no syndicate, as the workmen are infallibly compelled to unite during strikes, and seldom resume work before making their accidental union endurable in the shape of a syndicate. Where there are unions, strikes are made more formidable by coalitions and by the pecuniary assistance which the C. G. T. obtains from the federations. Striking may take various shapes, which the Syndicalist publications detail carefully. Boycotting the industries which refuse to admit syndicate workmen is one variety of strike; sabotage is another: it means the repeated injury to tools and machines, or the deliberate hindrance of work. This was practiced on a large scale during the railway agitation in 1910, and it was thanks to it that the hairdressers’ men could dictate terms to apparently unconquerable masters. In short, the theory and practice of strikes seems to have been brought to perfection by the C. G. T.

As to its effects, you can see them in issue after issue of the Voix du Peuple. About thirty per cent of the strikes seem successful, and they never result in possible damage for the workmen. In September, 1911, a large manufacturer in the north of France stopped work at an hour’s notice, on the mere polite injunction of a C. G. T. delegate. Fighting would have been impossible. Such facts will evidently become more and more numerous as the syndical organization spreads more widely. The syndicalist machinery is perfect, and it requires only initiative enough to put it in operation everywhere.

V

This then, is the history of the past and present of Syndicalism. Before trying to foresee its future, we should say a word about the philosophers who have made it the object of their meditations.

The best known are Lagardelle, Berth, and, above all, Georges Sorel, whose productions have appeared chiefly in the very intellectual review called Le Mouvement Socialiste.

It was inevitable that the contributions of such thinkers — eminently honest, and one of them powerful — should influence the most intelligent Syndicalists, but the common characteristic of these philosophers is that while they take unbounded interest in the organization of labor, they firmly believe in the necessity for it to stand apart and unsophisticated, and would gladly be forever unknown to the very men they are constantly studying. It would take a great deal more space than I have to do them justice and disentangle a somewhat artificial element from their fundamental ideas, but I can indicate a few essential points.

To begin with — and it is one of their aspects I regret the most not to be able to deal with adequately — they are wonderfully solid in appearance and tone, but they have not always been so, and Sorel especially has passed through a number of intellectual phases. One was not born in France with impunity in the days when Renan and Berthelot were at their height. The characteristic of that period was a very unphilosophical belief in science and an accompanying mistrust of metaphysics, resulting in a dangerously narrow art of thinking, and a complete lack of anything like an art of living. All the intellects which grew in that atmosphere and were not hopelessly stunted by it have had to struggle toward a broader, more human logic than that in which they had been educated, and above all, toward a moral doctrine that would steady them through life. This took them years.

Georges Sorel and his friends are often called Bergsonians, and, in fact, the former has made a careful study of Bergson’s books and has many points in common with him; but I imagine that he would have reached his chief positions without him and owes him little more than an occasional confusing terminology. He spent practically all his time until he was fifty doing technical work in a factory, getting used to the realities of economics, and, as he became thus practical and positive, cleansing his mind from the thick dust of fallacies it had accumulated since boyhood. Like everybody else he was full of ideas from outside, of theories built on inadequate historical analyses, especially of the tremendous overgrowth of ideology which the Revolution produced.

He gradually came to mistrust and reconsider all his notions; he went back to history, chiefly in the footsteps of Renan, and learned the influence of pure ideas in the great historical movements, — the transformation of the ancient world through Christianity, for instance, — while he became more and more convinced of the preëminence of materialistic influences in the development of economics. He noticed that all the modern French systems of politics and social philosophy were built on the notion of progress as conceived by D’Alembert and the other Encyclopedists : he tested their apparent clarity, found it wanting, and later gave the results of his inquiry in a most suggestive little book, Les Illusions du Progrès. All his reading and thinking brought him to the conclusion that the logic of social philosophers and politicians was moonshine, misleading inferences with a semblance of solidity which it took ages to expose, and which in the mean time stood in the way of an accurate view of realities. Generalizations were all dangerous; living facts alone were fruitful, and one could never be long enough face to face with them.

The reader must see at once the relationship between these views and the Bergsonian intuition, that is, the effort to understand reality, not by standing apart from it, but by lending one’s self to its flow.

About the time when Sorel reached these conclusions he met Fernand Pelloutier. I have never seen anybody who laid sufficient stress on the influence which this meeting must have had on Sorel. Here was Pelloutier, a young man of twenty-eight, who had never lived apart from the world of labor, had been a stranger to politics, to systems and theories of any kind, yet had been sufficiently intelligent — in the simple and beautiful meaning of this word — to connect the forces of the workmen with the living organism of Syndicalism and could see — rather than deduce—the far-reaching consequences of its existence: its opposition to present society; its goal, the Great Strike; its method, striking and striking again with the heroism of perseverance; and its final success, the substitution of coöperation for capital. The mind of Pelloutier was in itself a demonstration of the superiority of intuition over systems and deductions.

Another conclusion forced itself. As Pelloutier was above philosophers, the world of labor was above the schools of politicians. Jaurès and his friends were mere logicians, clinging like leeches to a reality which had its life apart from them; they played nowadays the part which the Encyclopaedists had played before the Revolution, and their influence was as baleful. This is the intellectual origin of Sorel’s sympathy with the Syndicalist movement.

This sympathy has another aspect, corresponding to the moral development of the philosopher. As I said above, Sorel was bred in the determinism of Renan, Taine, and Berthelot, that is to say, in a distinctly negative system of ethics. His own nature was sufficiently noble to keep him above the materialism which comes too often in its train. But he was not far advanced in life before he saw the terrible effects on society of a doctrine making man the only judge of his own actions.

The generation of M. Sorel — the men who are now sixty — has been the prey of all that awaits moral, even more than intellectual, uncertainty. The indifference to motives, the ignorance of a rule of life, the good-humored condoning of deliberate indulgence, the skepticism even of the naturally good, making them almost ashamed to be good, the complicity of millions of readers with a host of immoral writers, the careless admission of national decadence consequent on depopulation and enervation, have all been rife until a very recent period, and have all been produced by philosophical doubt succeeding religious conviction.

The only remedy must be some sort of intellectual basis, an idea strong enough not to be undermined by the low modern infiltrations. M. Sorel himself needed no personal prop; he was naturally above compromises. In default of a philosophy he had character. His poet was Corneille; his heroes were the Catholic saints, or even the Jansenists, with their purity and obstinacy; his Socialist was Proud’hon, because Proud’hon built society on love, but the love of one woman; but neither Proud’hon nor the Catholic doctrine of sacrifice, nor the idealism of Corneille, was likely to appeal to the modern man and transform his materialism. Socialism — the Socialism of Jaurès which he was to treat later on with such contempt — for a time attracted him, but it was because of its apparent interest in the humble and persecuted and its corresponding apparent self-denial. The moment he found that the Dreyfusist movement was in reality a conspiracy of greed and ambition, and that the Socialist doctrine rested ultimately on what he calls a ‘belly philosophy,’ he withdrew.

Here again his acquaintance with Pelloutier was an illumination. The young clerk had nothing but scorn for politics and the politicians, he never gave a thought to the possibility of his rising above his sphere and becoming a bourgeois deputy; his lifewas consumed in an obscure work of organization which precluded brilliant speeches, the empty but pleasant activity of electioneering, the long periods of rest after partial success.

Pelloutier knew that he was working for an ideal which he would never see realized. Not only was he consumptive and doomed to speedy death, but the object he had been the first to conceive was beyond the span of even the longest life; no man of his generation, or even of the next, would see the Great Evening and the Great Strike. All they could hope was to see the Syndicalists’ net gradually spread in their hands, and the great Syndicalist weapon — strike — become more familiar to the workmen.

But this daily routine was fruitful in positive results, and these results were not merely the success of a propaganda. Pelloutier and Sorel saw that by persuading the workmen to band together with a view to a final and decisive, if far-away, action, they called forth the noblest energies latent in the people, and long extinguished among the bourgeoisie. Poor laborers gladly gave of their own for the support of the Syndicates, or joined in strikes which apparently had no immediate interest for them, out of mere love for their class, and supported by the hope — perhaps the mirage of its final victory. M. Sorel has often likened this state of mind to that of the early Christians when their great hope was the Advent of Christ and the Establishment of his Kingdom. But as the primitive church had lost by becoming protected instead of persecuted, Sorel realized that, if ever the syndicates grew rich and powerful they would probably become infected with the faults of power and wealth — selfishness and indolence — and lose their original virtue. A long series of articles in Le Mouvement Socialiste, reprinted since under the title of Réflexions sur la Violence, was a defense of the warlike virtues called forth by the pregnant idea of the Great Strike. Since the days of 1790 when the French armies marched, full of the revolutionary ideal, no mass of men had appeared possessed of such a noble spirit as the Syndicalists.

This spirit, in Sorel’s opinion, was evidently what mattered the most. In the same book he confessed openly that he did not believe in the possibility of the Great Strike, and looked upon it as a myth. He treated at great length of the nature and influence of myths: they were half ideas, half images, and as such partook of the power of both the reason and the imagination, and imposed themselves on the minds of even the simplest; but after a time their purely imaginative aspect lost its brilliance and they were gradually forgotten. So the very basis of Syndicalism was in one respect only a fascinating illusion.

The frankness of this analysis showed obviously that Sorel was more interested in Syndicalism than he expected the Syndicalists to become interested in him. In other words, he was less a man of action than a philosopher curious of the motives of action, and he no more believed in Syndicalism than in Christianity: both doctrines attracted him by the purity of their spirit, by the heroism they entailed, not at all by their future. After all, he was litt le more than a sort of Nietzschean seeking the rarity of an aristocratic attitude where it was likely to be found.

When the present writer first made a careful inquiry into the philosophy of Sorel,² he wondered why such tendencies did not turn him toward a political doctrine widely different from Syndicalism in object, but strikingly similar in spirit. The school known as the Neo-Royalists had their myth, which was the restoration of the pre-revolutionary Monarchy; they stood for violence, and lost no occasion to say that they would seize the first opportunity to make a coup d’état; their intellectual training was practical, historical, and positivist like his own; finally they had in common with him a speculative attachment to Christianity which, however, left their chief leaders in religious unbelief. There was in them all there was in the Syndicalists, and less chance of losing sight of their aim. Everything must appeal to him in those quarters. These previsions have been confirmed. M. Sorel may not be more of a Royalist than he was a Syndicalist, but his sympathies have gone that way, and his name is frequently mentioned in the Neo-Royalist publications, as it used to be, and even still is, every now and then, in the Syndicalist periodicals. Meanwhile, he superintends the publication of a series for the defense of higher culture, in which both his former and his recent tendencies are easily reconciled.

VI

Little space remains for the last part of this exposition, in which we ought not to prophesy, or even to state the probable destinies of Syndicalism, but merely to describe its chances as they appear from the relation between its present, conditions and the evolution of the public spirit in France.

In 1908, when the postal strike led men to realize the formidable power of association, the C. G. T., or at any rate, the more revolutionary elements in the C. G. T., seemed to be at their highest. Nobody who followed that brief drama will ever forget how not only the government, — which till then had been uniformly weak, — but even the Parliament,— so far respected,— fell at once into insignificance. The distinction between the Democracy and the proletariat, on which Sorel lays so much stress, was made tangible at a meeting of the strikers at which the well-known M. Buisson, and a few other Socialist deputies, had thought they would be welcomed as usual. They were simply hooted off the platform, and the meeting was conducted, as well as the strike itself, by a few delegates of the C. G. T., among whom was the famous Pataud. It appeared clearly, not only that the government was defenseless against one single syndicate, but that the Socialist members of the Chamber, who had been so far a sort of very useful buffer between the workmen and their political masters, had been definitely thrown back among the bourgeoisie. Pataud and his friends, workmen as they were, negotiated with the government on equal terms, and would have dictated to them if M. Clemenceau, who was then prime minister, had not cleverly put them off, or, as they said, taken them in.

The experience produced a tremendous sensation, to be compared only to the shock received two or three years earlier on the dismissal of M. Delcassé from the Cabinet, and the revelation of the havoc made in the Army and Navy by M. Pel let an and General André. The country realized the weakness of parliamentarianism, and knew that it had been leaning for years on a woefully broken reed. The Chamber itself lost at once all of the superb pride which thirty years’ absolute power in a country republican only in appearance had given it, and declared itself content with legislating instead of governing.

Meanwhile the members of the government which had never been trained to govern were bethinking themselves, and M. Briand gave the result of their meditations in a celebrated address at Lisieux. Modern nations, he said, had to confront the new fact of association. Association was the feature of the day, and could not be disregarded. The Syndicates, in very few years, had prospered so that nobody could ignore them, and the best policy was to give them their share. What the share was, he pointed out in general terms, but sufficiently clearly for anybody to understand that he was ready to give them the right to legal possession, and the right to say something in the debates concerning their professional interests. All this meant the beginning, or at any rate the dawn, of the decentralization for which the best intellects had prayed so many years, but it might mean also the preliminaries of surrender to the C. G. T.

Many people believed this. Day after day the conservative papers pointed out that the strong, united, intelligent government which had been so long desired, actually existed in France, but sat at the Bourse du Travail and not at the Elysée. A combination of the railwaymen, the postal clerks, and the electricians would suffice to switch authority from one place to the other. No revolution could be easier. The Syndicalists believed it, too. Their decision turned quickly into arrogance, and Pataud stopped the electricity in Paris three or four times in one winter, just as the Negro band-master stopped the music ‘ for to show his authority.’ It is only when one studies the history of Syndicalism in detail that the difference between the intimidating sobriety of the theories, — as set forth not only by Sorel or Lagardelle, but even by Griffuelhes,—and the raw violence of inferior Syndicalists, appears. La Bataille Syndicalists is as near mere anarchy as Les Réflexions sur la Violence is near true philosophy.

For some time after the Lisieux speech the Syndicalists affected to treat the overtures of M. Briand as the treachery of a turn-coat, and they vaunted their anti-patriotism more openly than ever. But the ringleaders who harped on this high string were no more the whole of Syndicalism than Syndicalism is the whole of the labor world. A warning came to them first from Germany, where the C. G. T. was excluded from the international congresses on account of its anti-patriotic attitude. Then some powerful syndicates, which so far had kept away from the C. G. T. (the Book Syndicate and the Miners’ Unions among the number), joined it, but being experienced and rich, infused wisdom into it. Then it appeared that if materialism can occasionally nerve itself for a violent action its natural bent is much more toward a diminution of effort, and that Briand had seen the disposition of the Syndicates pretty accurately when he had come toward them with an olivebranch at Lisieux. In most workmen the wish to become a bourgeois lives more or less dormant. The truth of this appeared glaringly in the conversion of no less a person than Pataud, who, after finding some resistance among his brethren and some on the part of the police, gave up agitating, first for lecturing, and finally for a most unromantic situation in the champagne trade. In short, what with excessive violence on the part of some Syndicalists, and a return to balance on the part of some others, the C. G. T. does not appear to-day nearly so formidable in its unity, or so full of belief in the Great Strike, as it was four years ago.

As these transformations took place among Syndicalists, another was noticeable in the public spirit of t he French nation at large. The danger from the strikes and the danger from Germany combined to awaken people to the necessity of a stronger national attitude. Energy in the resistance both to agitators like Pataud and to browbeaters abroad, after seeming long impossible, suddenly became the order of the day. Anti-militarism, which had been rampant in the last ten years, positively vanished. Its manifestations are now confined to the lowest anarchist organs. In the summer of 1911, when a war with Germany was regarded as almost inevitable, the prospect was viewed without any reluctance, even in industrial districts ’where a few years ago it would have caused furious protests.

This decision could not exist without an accompanying change in the current principles. It would take a volume to describe the rapid modification, but it is a fact that the return to a saner view of authority, of the subordination of the individual to collective interests, of the necessity of self-sacrifice, etcetera, has been so marked as to nullify the logic of Socialist materialism, strong as it might still appear to crude intellects. The France of to-day is completely different from the disorganized country which saw the Dreyfusist disruption, and apparently never minded; and the change is the more striking from being especially noticeable among the rising generation. An hour’s conversation with any intelligent young man belonging to the classes in which skepticism and dilettantism used to be strongest, leaves no doubt that a new public spirit has made its reappearance in a new and bracing atmosphere.

In these conditions, the element of disorder inseparable from the motion of the C. G. T. is not likely to find favor, even with the average workman. The fact that all the bandits who, for several weeks, scoured the environs of Paris, waylaying motorists, plundering banks and massacring police were either members of the C. G. T., — one of them even a delegate, — or were found in possession of Syndicalist literature, acted as a revelation. The violent agitators whom Sorel admired so much seem bound to be thrown back into the mere anarchical milieus, while the bulk of Syndicalists will turn more and more toward Reformism. Meanwhile, strong governments, gaining where the now despised Chamber loses, will probably find themselves in a position to pass effective legislation about the Syndicates. The dangers to society arising from the existence of mortmain are universally known, and no outcry will follow their removal. It will seem incredible to people born and brought up in a period less troubled than ours that corporations professedly professional ever boasted openly about treating the rest of the world as enemies, and actually prepared war against it.

In conclusion, we may say that all that Sorel detested — which is all that M. Briand hoped for when he delivered his Lisieux address — is likely to happen. Nothing can break the impulse which the Syndicalist movement has now taken, and nobody with a sense of fairness can be sorry for it. There will be more and more syndicates, and it is inevitable that their development will in time largely modify the economic and — to a certain extent — the present political conditions. But the Syndicates, growing in an atmosphere very different from that in which they were born, will also be different. They will forget the mythical and at present violent aspect of their creed; they will strive after immediate improvement; they will be peace-loving and matter-of-fact.

Sorel says that if it is so, they will only create a variety of the very uninteresting bourgeois whom he hates: materialistic, self-indulgent, and cowardly. But this conclusion is not at all certain. The transformation in the public spirit which I mentioned above may be deep enough to restore idealism in spite of peace. The logic of such movements in Catholic countries invariably points to religious renovation. And what would be Catholicism galvanized once more into a social force in a society based on authority on the one hand and on a coöperation organization on the other? The answer may be startling, but I think it is inevitable.

Catholicism plus coöperative institutions — that, is, after all, an idealist spirit united to the most effective means of social and material improvement — amounts to a repetition of the mediæval experiment coming round in undoubtedly favorable conditions. Will this be? Nobody knows; but I would not leave the reader with a pessimistic conclusion when a totally different one appears more likely. In France, at least, the crisis in the growth of Syndicalism is over, and the materialism which made it formidable is speedily losing its venom.