^{page 81 note 1} Molnar, Miklos, Le Déclin de la Première Internationale. La Conférence de Londres de 1871, Genève: Droz, 1963, p. 158.Google Scholar

^{page 82 note 1} At no time had Marx been able to play the autocrat in the International Workingmen's Association. To the extent that he was in a position of leadership, he kept that position by balancing Proudhonians, Trade Unionists, at times Blanquists, Bakuninists, land reformers and a number of non-descript groups against each other; his role resembled far more that of a diplomat than that of a dictator. However little this role may have suited his temperament, he played it with considerable patience, and merely vented his inner rebellion in letters to Engels. Did he see a chance to change the character of his leadership in 1871–2? Miklos Molnar has advanced the hypothesis that Marx, at the time of the London Conference of the International, planned to turn the organization into a “unified and disciplined Party” (I.e. pp. 133ff., esp. 141). This does not seem convincing to me. To be sure, Marx asked for an extension of the powers of the General Council of the International, to stop the growth of Bakunin's influence and possibly also to meet emergencies arising from the governmental persecution of the International in the wake of the Commune defeat. But the new tactical weapon would not have changed the fundamental dependence of Marx's position on a balance of mutually antagonistic forces which he had to keep with the very limited number of his own convinced followers.

^{page 82 note 2} Bakunin, 's “International Alliance of Social Democracy”, founded in 1868Google Scholar, was a conspiratorial organization. See Braunthal, Julius, Geschichte der Internationale, Hannover: J. H. W. Dietz, 1961, Vol. I, p. 187Google Scholar. Any such organization needs a much stricter discipline than an organization like the International Working-men's Association which is operating in the open, and the structure of the Alliance seems to prove that Bakunin was not unaware of this need.

^{page 82 note 3} Prior to the creation of the Federal Council for Britain at the London Conference of September 1871, the General Council had functioned as the integrating body for the local branches in Britain, thus emphasizing that Britain “cannot be treated as just one country among many; it must be treated as the metropolis of capital.” (Karl Marx in a “Private Communication” of January 1870 to members of the International, reprinted in Molnar, op. cit., p. 122) Marx gave up this position in 1871, probably to gain the support of John Hales and other British trade unionists in his struggle against Bakunin. He did gain their support at the London Conference, but a year later at the Hague the trade unionists had already defected from his camp.

^{page 83 note 1} See Braunthal, Julius, Geschichte der Internationale, Vol. I, p. 198.Google Scholar

^{page 85 note 1} There are of course earlier examples of a division between evolutionary and revolutionary socialists. One may think of the cleavage between Proudhonians and Marxists in the International, or of the antagonism between Gemässigte and Radikale in Austria during the 1870's. Yet from none of these earlier splits leads a direct line to the great rift in the socialist and labor movement during and after the First World War.

^{page 85 note 2} This was the prevailing usage. Some confusion, however, was created by the attempt of the followers of Jean de Colins, who were in the main land reformers and for the rest supporters of limited meliorative legislation, to appropriate the name collectivists. See e.g. Bernstein, Samuel, The Beginnings of Marxian Socialism in France, New York: Social Science Studies, 1933, pp. 105ff.Google Scholar

^{page 86 note 1} This mistrust against intellectuals has perhaps played an even greater role in the labor movement of France than in that of other countries. It was destined to be important in the separation of Jean Allemane and his friends from the Broussists in 1890, as was shown by the words of a delegate to the (Allemanist) Regional Congress of the Union Fédévative du Centre: “We wast neither Guesde nor Brousse; we want only unknown people (que d'obscures)” (L'Egalité, March 16, 1891Google Scholar). The intellectuals, of course, would never be unknowns.

^{page 86 note 2} Malon, Benoît, “Le Programme de 1880 (Suite des Collectivistes français)”, in: Revue Socialiste, Vol. V, 1887, p. 40.Google Scholar

^{page 86 note 3} There remained, however, a considerable element in the French working class which was not carried away by this radical wave. Many trade unionists in the South-West and the North were “anxious for immediate reforms and particularly hostile to extremist statements, to the threats and challenges (sommations) which were the fashion among the men of the Egalité – who carried with them the men of the Proléaire […] – and the anarchists” (Malon, ibid.). L'Egalité was in this period a Marxist paper, Le Prolétaire had a broader ideology and eventually became the main organ of the Fédération des travailleurs socialistes.

^{page 87 note 1} The name of the new party underwent some variations in the 1880's. On many occasions the party publications liked to call it le parti ouvrier, which after the expulsion of the Marxists was confusing since the latter adopted the name of Parti ouvrier français.

^{page 87 note 2} For the text of the program adopted at Paris, see Seilhac, , Les Congrès ouvriers en France (1876–1897), Paris: Colin, 1899, pp. 57ff.Google Scholar; for the text of the Havre resolution, ibid., p. 73.

^{page 87 note 3} L.c, p. 76ff.

^{page 88 note 1} Seilhac, op. cit., p. 62.

^{page 88 note 2} Weill, Georges, Histoire du mouvement social en France 1852–1924, Paris: Alcan, 1924, p. 236.Google Scholar

^{page 88 note 3} Quoted by Zévaès, Alexandre, Le Socialisme en France depuis 1871, Paris: Editions France-Empire, 1947, p. 115.Google Scholar

^{page 89 note 1} Hostetter, Richard, The Italian Socialist Movement, New York: Van Nostrand, 1958, Vol. I, p. 391.Google Scholar

^{page 89 note 2} L.c, pp. 369, 375 and passim.

^{page 89 note 3} L.c, p. 415. Hostetter is quoting from Lilla Liparini, Andrea Costa, Milano: Longanesi, 1952Google Scholar. Georges Weill describes Malon's position, at the time of his return to France, as follows: “Malon was an outspoken revolutionary, who in violent language denounced the misdeeds of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat. But he insisted that one should think of how to achieve practical results: ‘We have been overfed with phraseology and impotent dogmatism; it is necessary to penetrate to the heart of the situation and to see things not as we would wish them to be but as they are.’ Concerning himself more and more with theoretical studies, he taught a doctrine similar to that of Marx in the field of economics but thought of complementing it by an ethical doctrine derived from the ideas of the old French socialists.” (Georges Weill, op. cit., p. 240.)

^{page 90 note 1} Richard Hostetter (op. cit., p. 271) quotes the Italian socialist writer Osvaldo Gnocchi-Viani to the effect that as early as April 1872, Guesde was very success ful as a propagandist in Rome, due to his “stringent and impassioned Marxist dialectic.” On the other hand, Samuel Bernstein (op. cit., p. 102) contends that in his exile period “Guesde was much nearer to anarchism than to socialism” and supports his contention with a good deal of material (pp. 101ff.). Some of the passages quoted by Bernstein show Guesde in opposition to the General Council, but this may have resulted from purely personal reasons, as a consequence of the intrigues of Dentraygues whom the General Council employed as his agent and who turned out to be a police informer. That Guesde, in this period, considered the state useless and its destruction necessary, and regarded universal suffrage as a fraud, would indicate an option for Bakuninism and against Marxism in a person who saw the core of the issues clearly, but not necessarily in one of the uninitiated, and in the early 1870's Guesde certainly was in the latter category. In his address, written for the General Council, on the Commune defeat, Marx himself had proclaimed it as one of the lessons of the Commune that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready made state machinery and use it for the workers' own purposes” (The Civil War in France, London: Martin Lawrence, 1933, p. 37)Google Scholar, but has to destroy a large part of it; Engels later stated that during and immediately after the Second Empire the mistrust against universal suffrage was general among French socialists because of its misuse by Bonapartism. See his introduction to Marx, Karl, The Class Struggle in France (1848–50), ed. Dutt, Palme, London: Martin Lawrence, n.d., p. 20Google Scholar. The thin though vitally important line which separated Marx's and Bakunin's positions in practice – affirmation or rejection of legal and public political action – was probably not always very clear to the soldiers and subalterns of the revolutionary movement in the immediate post-Commune period.

^{page 90 note 2} See Charnay, Maurice, Les Allemanistes, Paris: Marcel Rivière, 1912, pp. 58ff.Google Scholar

^{page 91 note 1} La Propriété Collective et les services publics, Paris: Marcel Rivière, 1883Google Scholar.

^{page 91 note 2} Brousse himself tried to define his attitude toward anarchism in a reply to L. Noterman, who called himself an anarchist although he held no brief for the anarchist “propaganda of the deed”. Brousse wrote: “If one takes the word anarchist in its etymological sense… I would call myself an anarchist, as Noter man does, for my ideal is a society which is not governed. In this sense we, of the Workers' Party, are all or nearly all anarchists.

But if I desire a society which is not governed, I still want a society which is administered. Administration is not government. I want the role of the state to be generalized (je suis pour la généralisation du rôle de l'Etat) because this generalisation is the universalisation of public service, that is scientific communism. The anarchists, however, who were my target and whom I have hit (que j'ai visés et touchés), are on the contrary antistatists and even amorphists.” (Le Prolétaire, July 10, 1883Google Scholar.)

^{page 92 note 1} Malon, Benoît, Le Socialisme rélormiste, Paris: Derveaux, 1886, p. 25Google Scholar. This remarkable pamphlet, which aside from comments on the thoughts and actions on Malon's socialist contemporaries also contains interesting and original ideas on utopian socialism, has not received much attention, probably because it does not seem available anywhere except in the Bibliothéque Nationale. This rarity is apparently the result of confiscation in consequence of a lawsuit which the publisher of the first edition brought against Malon when the latter arranged for a reprint. See rapport of the Préfecture de police, contrôle générale of March 23, 1886, and contrefaçon of March 24, file no. 67471 at the Préfecture de police, Paris.

^{page 92 note 2} Malon, op. cit., p. 33. In its specific meaning, the term libertaire signifies an anarchist or, in reference to a later period, a revolutionary syndicalist. But the term can also be used in a somewhat broader sense, indicating a tendency of thinking rather than a dogmatic position, and therefore including persons who do not want to abolish the state but to deprive it of all or most of its coercive functions.

^{page 92 note 3} L.c, p. 49.

^{page 93 note 1} As late as 1889, Friedrich Engels, whose views on this point were undoubtedly-identical with those of Marx, wrote in a letter to Friedrich Sorge that the conflict between Guesdists and Broussists was “again the old rift which split the International”. See Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich, Selected Correspondence, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1956, p. 486Google Scholar. Wilhelm Liebknecht, in quoting this statement, adds the comment that Engels considered Brousse “still the old anarchist” (Wilhelm Liebknecht, Briefwechsel mit Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels, ed. Eckert, Georg, The Hague: Mouton, 1963, p. 313)Google Scholar. This would have been less of a mistake in 1882 than in 1889.

^{page 93 note 2} Humbert, Sylvain, Les Possibilistes, Paris: Rivière, 1911, p. 9.Google Scholar

^{page 94 note 1} In the following passage from the “acte d'accusation”, which the Comité de national had drawn up to prepare the case for the expulsion of the Guesdists, the Marxist influence appears as the main charge: “A reconciliation is impossible. One cannot reconcile water and fire. … They are the ultramontanes of socialism. The ultramontanes cannot obey the law of their country because their chief is in Rome. The Marxists cannot obey the decisions of the party, because their chief is in London. – One cannot reconcile the Workers' Party with Marxist fanaticism any more than in the liberal world (dans le monde bourgeois) it is possible to reconcile clericalism with the state. There is only one solution: Separation of church and state, and the exodus, either voluntary (raisonnable) or forced, of the Marxist capuchins from the state of the socialist workers.” (Seilhac, op. cit., p. 106.)

^{page 94 note 2} See for instance the following statement by Jules Guesde: “There are noxious ideas (idées ennemies) which under their ancient name of ‘federalism’ and under their new names of ‘communalism’ and ‘autonomy’ still are an obsession in the brains of a number of workers and which tend to make any revolutionary action of the proletariat impossible by their disintegrating effect (en l'émiettant). L'Egalité, frankly and scientifically committed to centralization, sets itself the task of demolishing these ideas.” (L'Egalité, December 11, 1881Google Scholar.)

^{page 94 note 3} Le Prolétaire, November 12, 1881Google Scholar.

^{page 95 note 1} Le Prolétaire, November 19, 1881Google Scholar.

^{page 95 note 2} L'Egalité, December 11, 1881, quoted by Sylvain Humbert, op. cit., p. 6.

^{page 96 note 1} In the next decade, Guesde himself was to supply a striking example of deviation from dialectics, when he proposed a program destined to protect the property of the French small agriculturist, and thereby to prevent that concentrattion of property which in Marx's opinion was the first prerequisite of the growth of social tension. See Landauer, Carl, “Early Erosion of French Marxism”, in: International Review of Social History, VI, 1961.Google Scholar

^{page 96 note 2} Another difference between Broussists and Marxists, which however played no direct role in the controversies, was brought out by an intelligently written police report in 1887; it would be equally valid for the period immediately before or after Saint-Etienne. “The two schools”, wrote the police officer, “although in agreement about the final goal, the revolution, differ in regard to the means. The doctrinaires of the Parisian group [the Guesdists] think only of overthrowing the institutions now in existence (l'état des choses actuelles), leaving for a later date the determination of what they want to put in their place, whereas the members of the Union fédérative [the Broussists] want to study in advance the social organization which they wish to create on the day after the revolution.” Report of the Préfet de police of Paris to the Minister of the Interior of September 9, 1887, (Préfecture file Carton 31, 177300 – A-17.) Indeed, the Broussists not only refused to wait until the day after the revolution before beginning to put their théorie des services publics into effect, but this theory was also presumed to determine the character of the future society with much more detail than had ever been given in the Communist Manifesto or the Anti-Dühring, and consequently violated the Marxist ban on “utopianism”.

^{page 97 note 1} Italics in the original.

^{page 97 note 2} Le Prolétaire, September 23, 1882Google Scholar.

^{page 97 note 3} This is true although the Arbeiterbildungsvereine, which represented most of the politically conscious workers, had emerged from the tradition of an autonomous working class movement: the Arbeiterverbrüderung of 1848–9. See Balser, Frolinde, Sozial-Demokratie 1848/49, Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1962, Vol. I, pp. 487f.Google Scholar

^{page 98 note 1} Up to one or two years before the scission between the Allemanists and the Broussists, there is hardly any evidence of dissension over issues within the Fédération des travailleurs socialistes. When Georges Weill maintains that the majority at Saint-Etienne was “united less by belief in a new kind of tactics than by antipathy to the arrogance of the Guesdists” (op. cit., p. 243), he probably judged the events of 1882 too much in the light of later developments. The majority seems to have agreed on the principle of Possibilism, as formulated by Brousse, with the understanding that this did not detract from the will to wage the class struggle ultimately with revolutionary means.

^{page 98 note 2} Le Prolétaire, November 25, 1882Google Scholar. The address was published as a bilingual pronouncement. The English version, however, is a rather poor translation, and it has therefore been necessary to use primarily the French text.

^{page 99 note 1} Here it is important to remember that the French term droit, like the German term Recht, means right as well as law.

^{page 99 note 2} Le Prolétaire, January 12, 1884Google Scholar.

^{page 99 note 3} Le Prolétaire, January 5, 1884Google Scholar. The reason for the reference to Ireland was the case of the Irish patriotic terrorist O'Donnell whose case was discussed in the same article. Although criticising the British trade unionist Shipton and the German Social Democrats for their attitudes toward these terrorists, Le Prolétaire emphasized that the French party would continue its friendly relations with the British labor unions and the German Social Democratic Party.

^{page 100 note 1} Le Prolétariat, January 1–8, 1887Google Scholar.

^{page 100 note 2} In 1880, he had already attempted to found a magazin under that name, which, however, soon ceased publication.

^{page 101 note 1} The title alone would not show the change conclusively. Although a true revolutionary would not have identified himself with anything he called reformism, the term, as understood shortly after Saint-Etienne, might not have implied more than a will to introduce or demand reforms here and now.

^{page 101 note 2} Malon, , Le Socialisme réformiste, p. 52Google Scholar. The drive for reforms had received a strong impulse from the realization that France was lagging behind Germany in meliorative social legislation, and that the bourgeois parties were in no great hurry to remedy the deficiency. “Prior to 1889, the republican party had redeemed its two promises to the workers: It had organized elementary instruction and assured liberty to labor unions. But the laws for the protection of workers had hardly advanced beyond the state of 1874. This lack of progress is in part explained by the overshadowing importance of political, religious and colonial questions, but the prevailing ideas about the limited role that the state could legitimately assume were also a factor…” (Georges Weill, op. cit., p. 430). The socialists had good reason to consider this backwardness not only a grave injustice but also a danger for the republic, since it made the workers susceptible to the promises of anti-democratic groups, as became particularly evident in the Boulanger crisis. In Malon's booklet, the passage quoted in the text is preceded by the following sentences: “If the republic has lost the magic of its name, if a part of the French people, after having suffered so much for the republic, seems for a moment to question its capability (efficacité), this is not only due to the colonial expeditions (expéditions lointaines), to the deficits, to the squandering of funds, but also to the absence of all reforms.” (Malon, , Socialisme réiormiste, p. 51.)Google Scholar

^{page 102 note 1} Quoted in Dixneuvième Siècle, June 19, 1887Google Scholar. Malon's condition was first accepted, but he felt that the promise was not kept, therefore he resigned.

^{page 102 note 2} This Egalité had hardly more than the name in common with the journal which at various times was the principal organ of Guesdism.

^{page 103 note 1} L'Egalité', February 15, 1889Google Scholar.

^{page 104 note 1} La Justice, October 10, 1890Google Scholar.

^{page 104 note 2} See for instance a report in Le Cri du Peuple of October 9, 1887Google Scholar, about an anti-Boulanger meeting at which Brousse bitterly attacked Rochefort.

^{page 104 note 3} La Petite République, September 17, 1893Google Scholar.

^{page 105 note 1} L'Humanité, October 11, 1913Google Scholar.