To Arms

by Hew Strachan

  In some ways French working-class politics before 1914 were a mirror image of the Germans’. The split between the socialist party and the trades-union movement, the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), was open; the differences between the workers and the state, a republic and the heir of the French Revolution, had less practical justification than in Germany; and Internationalism, rather than widen these two divisions, had the effect of narrowing them. It was this last point, the vitality of French support for Internationalism, expressed above all in the rhetoric and personal commitment of Jean Jaurès, which gave French socialism a significance in July 1914 that its other weaknesses might have appeared to have denied it.

  From its formation in 1895 the CGT rejected parliamentary methods and political parties as means by which to free the working class. Instead, the latter was to liberate itself through strike action. This faith in revolutionary syndicalism was reaffirmed at the CGT conference in Amiens in 1906. But in repelling the more intellectual, theoretical, and bourgeois approaches of political socialism, the CGT increased its dependence on its own resources which were— both in money and in members—slender. Its dilemmas were compounded by its faith in Internationalism. Working-class solidarity across national frontiers might have provided revolutionary syndicalism with the strength that it lacked in any one country. In practice, the CGT had to reckon with the domination of the German trades unions, committed to reformism and to an economic rather than a political programme. Furthermore, in one respect at least France grew more like Germany. Although the CGT did not forget the international aspects of armed force, its anti-militarism focused increasingly on the use of the army to break strikes. These threads—revolutionary action, internationalism, and anti-militarism—were pulled together by the resolution at the CGT congress in Marseilles in 1908: ‘it is necesary, on an international level, to educate workers so that in the event of war between nations the workers will respond to the declaration of war with a declaration of the revolutionary general strike.’ Léon Jouhaux, appointed general secretary of the CGT in the following year, used the occasion of the peace demonstration on 28 July 1911 to affirm this policy.55

  As the rhetoric waxed, effectiveness waned. The call of the 1908 resolution was for education. The 1911 demonstrations encouraged the CGT to believe the working class had indeed been alerted to the dangers of war. Thus, the task of the CGT was to continue its proselytism so that the workers would react spontaneously to the threat of war. Responsibility for the signal for the general strike was passed from the CGT itself to its local branches and to the workers in general. Its own statements on tactics became vague. Instead, it aimed to create a broad front in favour of peace, designed to inhibit the actions of government. On 16 December 1912 it called a general strike as a warning to the state: it claimed 600,000 supporters, but in practice only 30,000 responded in Paris, and a further 50,000 in the rest of France. Furthermore, its continuing international isolation made a mockery of its strategy, as well as tempting it into the sort of attacks on German socialists and trades unionists which were not suggestive of transnational solidarity.

  Its anti-militarism meant that the CGT loomed large in the demonology of the right. The growth in military absenteeism, which accounted for the equivalent of two army corps between 1902 and 1912, was attributed to its influence.56 In 1913 it was blamed for what were largely spontaneous demonstrations within the army against the three-year service law. Its response to these attacks was not greater militancy, but moderation. Revisionism and reformism, already gaining ground from 1908–9, grew in strength as CGT membership fell—by more than half between 1911 and 1914. In the latter year it embraced only about 6 per cent of all employees, and no more than 14 per cent of industrial workers.57 Even those unions still committed to revolution were divided over tactics: Merrheim, the leader of the militant metalworkers’ federation, felt that the CGT’s anti-militarism was weakening it, and that it should focus on economic issues—views which prompted a clash with the hard-line Seine syndicate. The CGT in 1914 might still maintain the semblance of revolutionary anti-militarism, not least thanks to the attacks of its opponents, but beneath that veneer genuine anti-patriotism had declined.

  The retreat of the CGT did not betoken a setback for French working-class politics as a whole. The gradual replacement of anti-patriotic pacifism by anti-militarist defencism opened the way to greater co-operation between it and the French socialist party. The leaders of both organizations, Jouhaux and Jaurès, were anxious to mark out common ground, and the former recognized full well the greater European influence exercised by the latter through the International. The two staged a joint demonstration against war on 24 September 1911. Thereafter, the campaign against the three-year law gave them a common domestic platform. The possibility of collaboration was already evident before July 1914.58

  From 14 to 16 July 1914 the socialist party held an extraordinary meeting in Paris to decide on its attitude to the Vaillant-Hardie proposal. Jules Guesde wished to defuse the issue of pacifism, seeing it as an obstruction to, and distraction from, the broader tasks of socialism in France, and recognizing the practical impossibility of effecting a general strike in the event of war. Opposed to him was Jean Jaurès. Jaurès’s anti-militarism did not constitute anti-patriotism. His objection to the three-year law was the specific one of opposition to a regular, professional army: in L’Armée nouvelle (1911) he presented the classic case for a citizen militia committed to the defence of its own territorial integrity. Jaurès, for all his fervent Internationalism, was a French patriot, fired by an idealized interpretation of the legacy of the French Revolution, and convinced that in 1793 and again in 1871 citizen soldiers had rallied to save republican France from foreign invasion. His support of the Vaillant-Hardie proposal at the Paris congress was not, therefore, a reflection of the CGT’s 1908 resolution: the purpose of a general strike would not be to disrupt mobilization, to sabotage France’s defence. Jaurès wanted a preventive strike, called before the crisis turned to war, internationally organized so that the workers would pressurize their governments into arbitration and away from hostilities. The fact that his support of a general strike as an instrument against war bore a superficial relationship to CGT policy was also not without its attractions. Because such a strike depended on being international, Jaurès believed that a clear decision by the French patriots in Paris would send a signal to socialists elsewhere, and above all in Germany, whose Internationalism he thought to be waxing. Jaurès’s policy was visionary rather than pragmatic: he was seeking a target for the International, not dictating immediate tactics for socialism in France. However, Jaurès’s calculations were not without an element of realism: it found its expression in his conviction that if the strike failed, if arbitration did not lead to conciliation and war was declared, then the proletariat must defend its nation’s independence. The Paris conference approved Jaurès’s motion by the convincing, but significantly not overwhelming, majority of 1,690 to 1,174.59

  Both the CGT and the socialists in France had, therefore, provided sufficient grounds to justify the belief that they would encourage opposition to the war. Their public declarations obscured the fact that they lacked any tactics for immediate implementation—that the CGT would not itself call a strike, and that the socialists needed the CGT’s co-operation to be able to carry a strike through—and also that for neither body did anti-militarism constitute anti-patriotism. Both groups shared the widespread failure to appreciate the gravity of the July crisis. On 26 July, when La Bataille syndicaliste, the CGT’s newspaper, announced that the workers must respond to the declaration of war by striking, Jouhaux was away in Brussels; the summons was that of the paper’s editors rather than of the CGT itself. When the CGT committee did meet, on 28 July, and Jouhaux reported on his disappointing conversation with Legien, it rapidly became clear that most syndicalists were fearful of arrest and of being seen as traitors to France. On 29 July the CGT abandoned first the call for a strike and then Int
ernationalism, blaming Austria-Hungary rather than capitalism for the crisis. In the areas outside Paris a total of ninety-four meetings and demonstrations against the coming war were arranged by both syndicalists and socialists; seventy-nine of them took place, and they peaked between 28 and 31 July. In Paris, a big demonstration was held by the syndicalists on the evening of 27 July, but the majority of protests thereafter (of the total of sixty-seven) were organized by the socialists and, as in the provinces, intensified at the end of the month. In general the protests were calm, and the government’s response—although firmer with syndicalists than socialists— restrained. Indeed, the greater danger of violence could be from neither socialists nor gendarmes but from patriotic crowds incensed by anti-militarism and bent on taking matters into their own hands.60

  Socialist behaviour in late July reflected the lack of urgency felt by Jaurès. His attention was on the efforts of the International; his belief was that the crisis would be protracted. Furthermore, when he met Viviani on 30 July he was convinced that the French government was doing everything possible to maintain peace, and that in the circumstances strike action was not appropriate. Jaurès’s greatest achievement in these last hours of his life was to convince the CGT of his point of view, and so manage the fusion between the two major working-class political groups. A joint socialist and syndicalist demonstration in favour of peace was planned for 9 August. Jouhaux was persuaded by Jaurès that the date should not be brought forward to 2 August, that the emphasis on calm and deliberation should be maintained. So the CGT was persuaded to put a higher premium on the unity of French socialism than on its opposition to war. Thus, while socialism in Germany—despite its apparent unity—began to fragment under the threat of war, in France it coalesced.

  However, the CGT’s abandonment of a revolutionary strike in the event of mobilization, and its espousal of pacifist demonstrations preceding war, was also the product of necessity. On 30 July La Bataille syndicaliste reported the remark to the Council of Ministers of Adolphe Messimy, the minister of war: ‘Laissez-moi la guillotine, et je garantis la victoire.’61 In the following days working-class leaders were to sound the tocsin of 1793, ‘la patrie en danger’: they therefore needed little reminding that the defence of revolutionary France had been accompanied by the drastic domestic measures of the Terror.

  The consequent fear, that outright opposition to mobilization—which the syndicalist press had openly discussed in the past—would invite such government measures as would threaten the survival of the CGT itself, was totally justified. The Ministry of War’s preparatory measures for mobilization included provision for the arrest of spies and, increasingly before 1914, anti-militarists. About 2,500 names figured on the list, carnet B, of whom 710 were associated with anti-militarism and 1,500 were French: thus, the majority of those listed were representative figures of the French working class associated with anti-militarism. The implementation of the arrests was in the hands of the minister of the interior Louis Malvy, a radical. On 30 July Malvy told the departmental prefects that they should act firmly against any syndicalist or anarchist summons to a general strike, but that otherwise they could tolerate socialist meetings in support of peace provided they were well ordered and posed no threat to mobilization. On the following day Malvy suggested to the council of ministers that he need not arrest the militant syndicalists named in carnet B, and the council, on the advice of the director of the Sûreté Générale, agreed. However, before Malvy acted on the council’s decision he was visited by Miguel Almereyda, the editor of Le Bonnet rouge, a newspaper of the militant left, who was himself listed in carnet B. Almereyda, it was subsequently argued, appealed to Malvy’s desire for political support from the left, and urged him to exempt anarchists from arrest. On the evening of 1 August Malvy instructed the prefects of departments that no arrests at all should be made under the provisions of carnet B. In practice a few individuals had already been arrested in response to the earlier order to mobilize. Particularly in the departments of the Nord and Pas-de-Calais the detention of suspected anarchists and anti-militarists was more frequent and more extended. The police, the prefects, and the army, admittedly in a region conscious of its immediate vulnerability to invasion, combined to thwart the government’s wishes. Malvy’s interpretation of his fellow ministers’ views was perhaps more relaxed than they intended. But in the circumstances of 1914, given the position adopted by the CGT, the use of conciliation rather than coercion was totally justified. The threat of the implementation of carnet B had been sufficient to support the syndicalist conversion to the Jaurèsian approach.62

  The realization that the government was not disposed to use repressive measures helped give the CGT committee greater confidence when it met on the evening of 31 July. It resolved to take all possible steps to prevent war, albeit now limited to pacifist demonstrations and short of a general strike. It was too late. Jaurès, the pivot of the French peace movement and hence of the now-united working-class parties, was reported dead as they deliberated. Mobilization was declared a few hours later. On 2 August the CGT could do no more than appeal to the workers of France for co-operation with the government. Revolutionary syndicalism rejected its traditional hostility to the state. On 4 August Jouhaux, standing in front of Jaurès’s coffin, affirmed his faith in the justice of the French cause.

  Thus, when later the same day Poincaré called on the chamber of deputies for a union sacrée, he was formalizing what was already a fait accompli. Indeed, Poincaré’s speech was simply read out on his behalf, as the constitution forbade the president from directly addressing the chamber. All ninety-eight socialist deputies supported the vote for war credits. The decision not to implement carnet B had sent the first signal for fusion, and it had been reciprocated in the CGT’s acceptance of collaboration rather than segregation. But the really potent symbol of national unity was the death of Jaurès.

  In mid-July, after the socialists’ meeting in Paris, journalists on the right had threatened to shoot Jaurès: Jaurès, ‘C’est l’Allemagne’, wrote Charles Maurras in Action française.63 The left could therefore easily have held the right responsible for Jaurès’s death, and so made it the flashpoint for the divisions of the Third Republic. Instead, the man who had symbolized internationalism and pacifism before the war became the focus for defencism and patriotism at its outbreak. The betrayal of his hopes of socialist solidarity by the vote of the SDP in Germany consolidated and deepened this mood, but did not initiate it. Gustav Hervé, who had initially favoured revolution as the proper response to war, had already begun to moderate his position by 1912. On 1 August 1914 he wrote in La Guerre sociale : ‘They have assasinated Jaurès; we shall not assassinate France. ‘64 He enlisted the next day. More importantly, the grief of the left was affirmed by the outrage of the right: recognition of the man’s worth embraced the entire political spectrum. Therefore the union sacrée reflected not a nationalism that suppressed political divergences, but one that embraced the full range of a liberal society. Many Frenchmen went to war specifically for Jaurès’s ideals: they were fighting a war of defence, the successful conclusion to which would lay the foundation for truly lasting Internationalism and even for a republican Germany. On the right the war was a vindication of their virulent nationalism and of the three-year law. The union sacrée was thus an entirely utilitarian formulation, with the single objective of defending France. Only as the war lengthened would the ideological differences underpinning it become evident.65

  Efforts to give immediate political expression to the union sacrée showed that in practice, as in Germany, the war gave strength to the political status quo rather than to change. However, in France, as opposed to Germany, the existing government rested on the radicals and on the centre-right, and thus represented a wider cross-section of opinion. On the most vital issue before the war, the three-year law, the 1914 elections had produced no clear mandate. Viviani’s cabinet contained only five ministers opposed to the law and ten who favoured it. When Vivia
ni reshuffled his ministry on 26 August he continued to exclude the clerical and nationalist right, and the two socialists who now entered the government (Guesde and Sembat) were balanced by the inclusion of Delcassé (foreign office), Millerand (war ministry), Briand, and Ribot. These four appointments were justified—and generally accepted—by the wartime need for energy and expertise, but they also signified a consolidation of the centre and of the influence of the president, Poincaré, rather than that of the prime minister, Viviani. Even radical socialism, which provided four ministers, and which in 1913 had threatened to form a left-wing bloc with the socialists in opposition to the three-year law, was subsumed by this drift to the right. Its leader, Caillaux, his credit forfeit to his pursuit of detente in 1911, found no place. Clemenceau, the maverick but Germanophobe spokesman of radicalism, refused to serve.66 Political opposition was recognized, not by the formation of a true coalition, but by the creation of innumerable committees, which gave parliamentary figures a role in the war effort without entrusting them with ministerial responsibility. Viviani’s governmental reshuffle was, therefore, among the most tardy and incomplete reflections of the union sacrée. More symbolic was the committee of national security, formed on 6 August to undertake relief work, and which included a cardinal, a Protestant pastor, the chief rabbi, a freethinker, a royalist, a bourgeois, a socialist, and a syndicalist.

  The hopes of Jaurès and his fellow Internationalists on 29 July rested in large measure on Grey’s offer of arbitration. The fact that the British government had so obviously agonized over its decision for war, and had in the process made the only significant bid for peace, is perhaps a major contribution in understanding what is otherwise a somewhat bizarre phenomenon. In both France and Germany the left justified its eventual support of the war by the need for national defence against a reactionary enemy. Britain faced no direct danger to its territorial integrity or to its domestic political institutions; and yet not only was the left effectively unanimous in its support of the war, it also gave that support with barely a whimper.