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Anarchy and Culture: Fernand Pelloutier and the Dilemma of Revolutionary Syndicalism1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 December 2008

Alan B. Spitzer
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Advancing under socialist banners, the labor movement in Western Europe won such success by the end of the nineteenth century as to produce a deep moral and intellectual crisis in European socialism. Internecine quarrels over revisionism, participationism, and antipolitical syndicalism reflected the malaise of a “revolutionary” movement that each year bound itself more closely to the system it had vowed to destroy. For socialist theoreticians, the crisis was cognitive or “scientific” – it had to do with issues of adequate historical analysis and prediction – but for the theorists of French revolutionary syndicalism it was essentially a moral crisis. In their eyes the socialist parties had already failed because they were the instruments for manipulation and betrayal of the workers by leaders whose ambitions could be gratified through the capitalist establishment. They identified a practical and moral alternative to political socialism in the revolutionary general strike prepared and carried out by autonomous proletarian organizations. Such organizations were necessary to the idealists of the general strike if their programs were not to degenerate into a strictly verbal revolutionary Couéism and they therefore put great stock in the development of militant working-class associations. Among these, the Bourses du Travail, which flourished from 1895 to 1901 under the dedicated direction of the anarchist intellectual, Fernand Pelloutier, seemed the most promising.

Type
Research Article
Information
International Review of Social History , Volume 8 , Issue 3 , December 1963 , pp. 379 - 388
Copyright
Copyright © Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis 1963

References

page 379 note 2 The only full-scale published biography of Fernand Pelloutier is by his brother Pelloutier, Maurice, Pelloutier, Fernand, sa vie, son œuvre, 1867–1901, (Paris, 1911).Google Scholar

There is an excellent dissertation, as yet unpublished, by Butler, James C., Fernand Pelloutier and the Emergence of the French Syndicalist Movement 1880–1906, Ohio State, PhD Dissertation, 1960.Google Scholar

page 380 note 1 See Chambelland, C., “La Grève générale, thème de la pensée de Fernand Pelloutier et d'Aristide Briand,” L'Actualité de l'Histoire, No 18, (05, 1957)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and No. 19, (Oct., 1957).

page 380 note 2 Pelloutier wrote the classic history of the Bourses du Travail, Pelloutier, Fernand, Histoire des Bourses du Travail, (Paris, 1902).Google Scholar

page 380 note 3 Sorel, Georges, The Decomposition of Marxism. Translated in Horowitz, I. L., Radical-ism and the Revolt against Reason, (New York, 1961), p. 160Google Scholar; Sorel, Georges, Preface to Pelloutier, Histoire des Bourses du Travail, p. 26.Google Scholar

page 381 note 1 Pelloutier's colleague and disciple Paul Delesalle wrote in the anarchist journal Les Temps Nouveaux, Du 23 au 29 Mars, 1901, on the occasion of Pelloutier's death, “Fédéraliste et communiste – anarchiste convaincu, il aimait à citer et à évoquer Proudhon qu'il connaissait à fond.”

page 381 note 2 Dufresne, A. et Pelloutier, F., “Proudhon Philosophe,” La Revue socialiste, Vol. XXX, Oct., 1899, pp. 482–485.Google Scholar

page 382 note 1 Pelloutier, Femand, Les Syndicats en France, (Nancy, 1921), p. 4.Google Scholar

page 382 note 2 Pelloutier, Fernand, L'Organisation corporative et l'anarchie, (Paris, 1896), p. 6.Google Scholar

page 382 note 3 Ibid., p. 7.

page 383 note 1 Nouveaux, Les Temps, Du 14 au 20 Sept., 1895.Google Scholar cf. Pelloutier, Fernand et Pelloutiet, Maurice, La Vie ouvrière en France (Paris, 1900), p. 126FFGoogle Scholar where Proudhon is cited to the effect that the cost of any public amelioration is always born by the consumer.

page 383 note 2 Nouveaux, Les Temps, Du 14 au 20 Sept., 1895.Google Scholar

page 383 note 3 Pelloutier, Fernand, Les Syndicats en France, p. 5.Google Scholar

page 383 note 4 Pelloutier, Fernand, L'Art et la révolte, (Paris, 1896), p. 22.Google Scholar

page 384 note 1 E.g. in Maitron, Jean, Histoire du mouvement anarchiste en France (1880–1914), (Paris, 1955), pp. 281–282Google Scholar; Cole, G. D. H., A History of Socialist Thought, Vol. III, The Second International, Part I, (London, 1960), p. 336Google Scholar; Dolléans, Edouard, Fernand Pelloutier, (Paris, 1937), p. 21Google Scholar; Prugnot, Jean, “Avant Propos,” in Sorel, Georges, Lettres à Paul Delesalle, (Paris, 1947), pp. 87–89.Google Scholar

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page 385 note 2 Pelloutier, Fernand, L'Art et la révolte, p. 8.Google Scholar

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page 386 note 1 Pelloutier, Fernand, Les Syndicats en France, p. 11.Google Scholar As Goetz-Girey observes, Pelloutier, in theory at least, transforms the essentially gradualist notion of workingclass self-education and self-help into a revolutionary mystique. Goetz-Girey, Robert, La Pensée syndicaliste française, (Paris, 1948), p. 56.Google Scholar

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page 386 note 5 Pelloutier conceived of a museum divided into as many sections as there were trade unions, each of which would provide exhaustive information on the materials, techniques, costs, wages, profits in the production of various goods. Absorbing this knowledge, the worker could not but realize that all ameliorative efforts such as strikes, mutual aid societies and labor legislation could no more end pauperisation than a dike of sand could contain the sea. In demonstrating to the workers the impossibility of a peaceable transformation, ”cet muettes leçons ne seraient-elles pas plus éloquentes que les vaines clameurs révolutionnaires à quoi s'essoufflent les orateurs d'estaminet?” Pelloutier, F., Histoire des Bourses du Travail, pp. 114–115.Google Scholar

page 386 note 6 Pelloutier, Fernand, Histoire des Bourses du Travail, pp. 111–113.Google Scholar

page 387 note 1 Pelloutier, Fernand, L'Art et la révolte, p. 26.Google Scholar

page 387 note 2 Pelloutier, Fernand, L'Art et la révolte, p. 26.Google Scholar

page 387 note 3 Hoggart, Richard, The Uses of Literacy, (Boston, 1961) p. 280.Google Scholar

page 388 note 1 He carried on an obscurely heroic struggle to maintain a journal, L'Ouvrier des deux mondes, for the Bourses, but it could not attract sufficient subscribers to survive. He poured his life's blood into the hopeless effort to keep it afloat, not only writing and editing most of every issue, but eventually personally setting it up in type.

page 388 note 2 Orwell, George, The Road to Wigan Pier, (New York, 1958), p. 194.Google Scholar

page 388 note 3 Williams, Raymond, Culture and Society, (New York, 1960), p. 255.Google Scholar

page 388 note 4 Quoted in Dolléans, , Histoire du mouvement ouvrier, Vol. II, p. 52.Google Scholar