SOURCE: "The Legacy of Georges Sorel: Marxism, Violence, Fascism," in Encounter, Vol. XXXIV, No. 2, February, 1970, pp. 47-60.

[In the following excerpt, Talmon examines Sorel's legacy on such European contemporaries as Hulme, Lenin, Wyndham Lewis, Ramon Fernandes, and Benedetto Croce.]

At a time when words like violence, "direct action," "confrontation," "the bourgeois world," "cleansing," "total destruction," etc. are shouted into our ears with obsessive persistence, there is every justification for (and there may even be some intellectual profit in) taking another look at the most famous European apologist of violence—Georges Sorel. The more so, if one wishes to examine the view (which seems to be implied, for instance, in the title, "The Age of Violence," given to the last chapter of the concluding volume of the New Cambridge Modern History) that the terrorist totalitarian régimes of both Left and Right so characteristic of this century, should not be seen as two primary, self-sufficient, and all-embracing alternatives pitted against each other, but as two different versions of the same phenomenon, the urge for violence. And it is surely legitimate to go on asking whether the present wave of defiant and intransigent extremism should not also be classified as the latest variety thereof?

Georges Sorel lived long enough to see and to hail the Bolshevik Revolution as a great fulfilment, and long enough if not to congratulate Mussolini on the accomplished march on Rome, at least to express his fascinated interest in and keen admiration for rising Fascism. There is the story that in the same week, in the late 1920s, the Director of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris was approached by the Ambassadors of Soviet Russia and Fascist Italy, on behalf of their respective governments, with offers of sums of money for the repair of the tombstone on Georges Sorel's grave. True or apocryphal as the story may be, Sorel did utter shortly before his death the prayer to which adherents of either ideology could have responded with a fervent amen—"to be allowed, before descending into the grave, to see the humbling of the proud bourgeois democracies, today so cynically triumphant. .. . "¹

If Benedetto Croce spoke of Georges Sorel as one of "the two sole original thinkers thrown up by socialism" (the other was Karl Marx), Wyndham Lewis, the grim hater of Philistinism and ferocious kill-joy, and one of the first intellectuals in the West to hail Hitler with a special book, saw in Sorel "the key to all contemporary political thinking." Mussolini repeatedly acknowledged Sorel as his master: "What I am, I owe to Sorel."

And Sorel, in turn, called Mussolini "a man no less extraordinary than Lenin .. . of a greater reach than all the statesmen of the day .. . not a socialist à la source bourgeoise; he has never believed in parliamentary socialism."

Notwithstanding Lenin's dismissal of him as a muddlehead and a mischief-maker, Sorel described Lenin as the greatest theorist that socialism had had since Marx and a head of state whose genius recalls that of Peter the Great—in the effort of "orienting Russia towards the constitution of a republic of producers, capable of encompassing an economy as progressive as that of our capitalist democracies." Although he modestly stated that he "had no reason to suppose that Lenin may have accepted my ideas," Sorel was proudly sure that his "syndicalism was a slope inclining toward Bolshevism."²

In the light of these statements, one need not be startled by the opinion of the French Fascist, Ramon Fernandes, expressed in 1937, that "Georges Sorel fut un inspirateur direct des régimes totalitaires. " Recent scholarship has been increasingly more inclined to focus attention on that strange encounter just before 1914 between the ageing Sorel and some of his Syndicalist disciples on the one hand, and, on the other, a few youthful ultra-Rightist nationalists in France and Italy, as a kind of curtain raiser to post-1918 Fascism. And it is impossible not to be struck by similarities of thought and speech between the young New Left radicals of today and the author of the Réflexions sur la violence seventy years ago.

THE HEROIC LEAP

Sorel was a seeker. His restless and easily discouraged quest, his tentative enthusiasms and bitter disillusionments epitomise the spiritual biography of his age, the pathetic pilgrimage of modern man who had lost the certainties and fixities of the early days. Sorel was fascinated by the legend of the Wandering Jew—"the symbol of the highest aspirations of mankind condemned to be forever marching, without knowing any repose." In his vehement rejection of the 18th century's facile and optimistic substitute for the religious Theodicea and in his revulsion from Bourgeois civilisation based on it, Sorel joins the ranks of the 19th century's great prophets of wrath—de Maistre, Carlyle, Schopenhauer, Burckhardt, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Ibsen, among others.

Born in 1847 into a royalist bourgeois family in Normandy (he was a cousin of the historian Albert Sorel, author of the monumental work, L'Europe et la Révolution Française), Georges Sorel was destined to take his first bearings in the world just as France was going through the ordeal of national defeat and civil war—the Commune—in 1870-71, and then to follow the anguished postmortem to which such conservative thinkers as Taine, Renan, Le Play and others had submitted the history of France, making the Revolution of 1789 responsible for that zig-zag course of revolution, anarchy, terror, Bonapartist dictatorship and restoration, vast conquest and terrible defeat, the triumph of liberty and its demise. The arrival of the masses filled these writers with dread. As for the universal suffrage which the Third Republic—a pathetic caricature of the great Revolution—seemed to have enthroned forever, had it not in 1848 swept Louis Napoleon Bonaparte into power, and enabled him, as both the elect of the masses and the defender of bourgeois property against the Red Revolution, to strangle liberty? The vagaries of the blind multitude and its associated demagoguery could no longer be held in check by any of the proposed dams—a restored monarchy, religion, "les autorités sociales. "

Nothing shows better the impact that this national selfquestioning had on Sorel than his frequent reference to Ernest Renan's anguished question—"On what will the future generations live?" after the inherited Christian habits of thought and conservative inhibitions will have lost their grip completely (as they clearly were losing it all the time).

It was in order to sort out to himself these bewildering things that the civil engineer (roads and bridges) left government service at the age of 45 and retired on a small pension with the ribbon of Légion d'honneur, into a Paris banlieue, to study, meditate and write. He frequented intellectual circles composed of very young men, mostly disciples on the Left Bank, attended regularly the lectures of Henri Bergson at the College de France, and worshipped the memory of his deceased (apparently illiterate) wife, who died childless in 1897. Sorel, incidentally, never tired of extolling chastity as the virtue of virtues, as the sign of moral health and social cohesion, and of stigmatising the lack of it as proof of sickness and degeneracy.

The very titles of his earliest books—Contribution à l'étude profane de la Bible (1889),Le proces de Socrate (1889), andLa fin du monde antique (1898)—betray Sorel's preoccupation with the phenomena of integration and disintegration, decadence and rebirth. While the tract on the Bible is an attempt to bring into relief the naively heroic tone of the Biblical life stories, and their educational value as antidotes to utilitarianism and revolutionary ideology,Procès de Socrate is an essay on the freewheeling intellectual who, by questioning and criticising the ways of men from an abstract stand, undermines the instinctive certainties, the massive traditions, the lifesustaining prejudices and the inherited institutional framework of the nation. Socrates stands condemned for arrogantly trying to replace the earthly, concrete, "social" reality of family by the abstract ideal of the "fictitious moral family," the organically and historically structured state with an essentially "ecclesiastic" conception of society, based on pure reason and spiritual values, and for inspiring moods of ecstatic and orgiastic intoxication that invite the imposition of both revolutionary and tyrannical solutions.³

La fin du monde antique is a study in disintegration and decline. The late Roman Empire has its strength, its very life, all the values and institutions which had made it great sapped by too much self-consciousness and by other-worldly spirituality. The victory of Christianity had been prepared by the spread of Oriental cults and introspective philosophies which "sowed everywhere the seeds of despair and death," by putting personal salvation above country, family and social ties, holiness above law, poverty above the productive effort, renunciation above responsibility, contemplation above virile struggle, the heavenly fatherland above the city. "Le moyen âge peut commencer; il n'y a plus de cité, plus de droit. " At a later date Sorel will portray early Christianity as the most powerful impulse towards spiritual and social rebirth in the midst of total decay. A naïve, narrow, but heroic message, it enabled its believers to lift themselves into the highlands of a strenuous, new beginning—the ricorsi of Vico. This juxtaposition of decomposition and reintegration, decadence and rebirth expresses Sorel's deepest and most abiding sentiments: his aggressive and overwhelming pessimism and his yearning for deliverance. "This pessimism is a metaphysic of ethics (moeurs) rather than a theory of the world." It stems from "the experimental knowledge which we have acquired of the obstacles which oppose the satisfaction of our imaginations" and from "the profound conviction of our natural weakness." The pessimist regards the prevailing social conditions as "constituting a system held together by an iron law (loi d'airain)" which must either be supported en bloc as something inevitable, or made to disappear "through a catastrophe carrying all with it." Do not therefore blame any particular persons for the evils that be, and do not engage in partial reforms.

In language very reminiscent of de Maistre, Schopenhauer, Burckhardt and Nietzsche, Sorel pours scorn upon all those who promised easy solutions and rapid improvement, and who proclaimed happiness as our right and pleasure as man's legitimate aim. Pain and suffering riveted us to life; its reality, dignity and depth; pleasureseeking marked an escape from it, a gliding away from its inexorable determinations. Decadence fascinated Sorel, as, incidentally, it did so many philosophers of history and culture, from whom the extreme Right derived much of its inspiration. The natural tendency towards dissolution and decay was to him a universal law. Civilisation was a most precarious possession, and was being maintained by the skin of its teeth. Any sign of relenting was soon followed by rot, collapse and ruin. Barbarism was always creeping into the weak ramparts built against it. What gave meaning and grandeur to our life was the state of tension and unyielding struggle to ward off the forces of decay and destruction, and above all the yearning and striving for deliverance. This "deliverance" Sorel did not see in the ease of détente and the repose of relaxed muscles, or in Schopenhauer's loving communion with art in an alldissolving Nirvana; or in Burckhardt's vision of a secular neo-monasticism as a refuge for the chosen few; he saw it rather in the spirit of Nietzsche, in the elation which came from tearing oneself out of the maze of snares and the miasma of feebleness; the heroic leap into a new and immensely strenuous discipline which had been resolutely chosen, without ever looking back or sideways—a monastic order, the early Puritan communities, the Grande Armée.

This faith—pessimism linked to a vision of deliverance—was a doctrine "without which nothing truly great has ever been accomplished in this world." This is clearly a religious frame of mind. Sorel was never a believer; he never used the word God; but he never ceased to be fascinated by religion and to write on religious problems. Sin and purification, guilt and redemption, selfwilled arrogance and objective certainty, right and force, legitimacy and revolution—these speculations are at the source of his quest.⁴

THE REVOLT AGAINST POLITICS

By 1893-1894 Georges Sorel became a full-fledged Marxist. As he writes,

I hold the theory of Marx for the greatest innovation introduced into philosophy for centuries. .. . All our ideas are bound today to congregate around the new principles posed by scientific socialism. . . . The human spirit refuses to be content with old economic scepticism . . . with registering of facts, with reasoning about the balance of profits, with comparing the increase of prosperity in the various countries.⁵

The accent is clearly not upon the evils of capitalism or the sufferings of the poor, but upon objective certainty and impersonal necessity, in contrast to the "subjective personal and crude notions of a philosophy delivered to accident," emotional preferences or speculative conjecture. The Archimedean point of Marxist philosophy was according to Sorel the conception of man as "tout entier comme travailleur, " never separated "from the instruments with which he earns his living," in other words the constant and intimate relationship betwen men and the machine; between the free and creative freedom of the worker as tool-maker, homo faber, manipulator of inert matter on the one hand and the inexorable determinations thrown back by the medium and the tools on the other. In comparison with this, the abstract ideologism of intellectuals and the would-be metaphysical external moral principles of philosophers represented vague conjectures, imaginings or emotional states. Sorel goes so far as to maintain that the great theoretical advances in science had in most cases been nothing but generalisations of technological inventions. This quest for certainty and abhorrence of arbitrariness and vagueness caused Sorel, from the first, to envisage integral Trade Unionism as the expression of all authentic values, and to view Socialist party politics as a sign and a danger of corruption. Sorel expected the syndicats to become a separate and selfsufficient kingdom of God, bearers of a new morality and a new civilisation. The idea of secession, of total separation from the surrounding world, was not yet worked out at this stage by Sorel, but the tutelage exercised by professional politicians at the head of the political labour parties was already bitterly assailed by him.⁶

Before Sorel had an opportunity to develop those ideas, he became deeply involved in the tremendous experience that at the turn of the century shook France to its foundations.

In becoming a Dreyfusard Sorel was not really concerned with destroying the power of the Church, the Army, or militant chauvinism as an end in itself. He gave himself soul and body to a mystique pitted against another mystique: the fight for abstract justice and the pure truth against the supposedly life-giving and powersustaining forces of national myth, prejudice and tradition, represented by "les autorités sociales" of bygone days. In a sense Sorel took the side of the Socratics whom he had earlier so bitterly condemned. Sorel's hopes for a purifying ricorsi soon gave way to disillusionment. In the words of another significant figure who went through a somewhat similar experience, Charles Péguy, the Dreyfus "mystique degenerated into politique. . . . " The Dreyfus affair and its aftermath, says Sorel,

produced an extraordinary accumulation of accidents, very much like those which sometimes enable the physicist in his laboratory to see suddenly in a wholly unexpected manner, and under an almost transparent veil, laws which had escaped long methodological investigation.⁷

The consequences of the affair revealed "the inadequacy of the Socialist teachings of the day." In joining the nonproletarian forces in a struggle for not distinctly proletarian aims, the workers lost their own identity and the clarity of their proletarian purpose. Anti-clericalism proved to be, in fact, only a springboard for power-thirsty demagogues of both varieties, the bourgeois radical and the socialist politicians. The Marxist principle of class war was "definitely submerged in the democratic ocean of the unity of the people."

Sorel goes on to draw a momentous lesson from this failure: "The parliamentary socialists lost a great deal of their prestige, men of violence covered themselves with glory." The affair revealed the vital importance of sustained direct action "with its very frequent accompaniment of acts of violence," as a method distinct from sporadic acts of violence, which were no more than "simple accidents which come to trouble the normal advance" of a movement. This discovery called for a revision of Marxism or, rather, a return to its authentic tradition. Sorel's reappraisal of Socialist teachings was carried out not only under the impression of the Affaire, but not less importantly also under the impact of and in direct reference to the great "Revisionist" controversy, begun by Eduard Bernstein at the turn of the century.

Sorel's reaction to the Revisionist heresy should be considered alongside the violent responses of Lenin, Mussolini (the first Communist in Europe in that he forced the Reformists out of the Party), Rosa Luxemburg and Parvus-Helphand. Theirs was a passionate reassertion of revolutionary voluntarism and élitism, and of the early revolutionary and universalist Messianism of Marx, in opposition to Bernstein's tendency to turn the Socialist parties into a Left-wing of parliamentary democracy and an integral part of the national body politic. The revulsion from the Revisionist renunciation of Revolution propelled others into a quite different direction. One of the Italian theoreticians of Syndicalism (he later became a prophet of the corporate state and a close collaborator of il Duce), Sergio Pannunzio, traces the beginning of his evolution from Socialism to Fascism to the shock administered to him by the "Revisionist heresy." Unlike the above-mentioned anti-Revisionists, Sorel accepted the whole of Bernstein's social-economic critique of Orthodox Marxism, but drew diametrically opposite political conclusions from those of Bernstein.

In his Décomposition du Marxisme (1908)⁸ Sorel agrees with the thesis (indeed states it more emphatically than Bernstein himself) that Capitalism had not failed at all. More than that, the progress of capitalist production and of its inevitable concomitant, trade unionism, had not only raised the workers' standard of life but also blunted the edge of Class War, since collective bargaining had turned the workers into partners of management rather than enemies thereof. In the early days of the Industrial Revolution it was the financiers and usurers, totally ignorant of the problems of technology, who laid down the law for industrialists and engineers; while at the same time the workers, stupid brutes, snatched away from the plough or artisan workshop, had to be kept in line with the help of brutal methods. But in the meantime technologically-trained employers had come into their own, and workers had learned to handle the machine and even to like it. Capitalism had evolved sufficient powers of adjustment to cope with passing crises. There were, thus, no technological or social-economic reasons for interfering with the workings of capitalism. Not even in the sphere of salaries and wages, since a rough kind of justice of reward proportionate to contribution was being realised by capitalism. Socialism was not going to change that, because in this respect, Marxism, Sorel claims, was closer to the Manchester School than to the "justice"-obsessed Utopians of the earlier days (who thought in terms of fool-proof blue-prints and perfect egalitarian justice, consciously and artificially contrived, and not of the workings of the mechanism of production).

If this be so, then why Revolution at all? The question is especially insistent as Sorel has no sympathy at all with what he regards as the modern version of a Jacquerie—the envious desire of the poor to redistribute property for the sake of equality? And if the Revolution is an absolute imperative, for moral or other reasons, are we not thrown back upon the idea of a putschist seizure of political power for the purpose of imposing the socialist order by violence and ukase—in a word, "Blanquism"? Sorel will not give up the Revolution, but he will reject Blanquism, and this on quite original (though mistaken) grounds. Blanquism—he claims—did not really envisage the uprising of a class, but the arrogation of the revolutionary mission by a political party, in fact by bourgeois intellectuals, who shared neither the needs and the way of life nor the real aspirations of the genuine workers. We reach here the nodal point already foreshadowed in Sorel's theory of revolutionary syndicalism based on the idea of violence. Sorel sees the proletariat—organised in syndicats—not as paupers fighting for "a larger share of the cake" but as the force predestined by history to enthrone a new civilisation and a heroic morality on the ruins of the decaying bourgeois world. The authenticity of this force and singleness of its purpose were—as said before—vitiated and distorted by professional politicians, intellectuals, and by the corrupting effects of parliamentary party politics. Sorel believes he is fighting for a return to "the true Marx." He tries to depict Marx as a prophet of the embattled class and the enemy of party politics. He fails to mention the relevant passages in the Communist Manifesto as well as the famous article 7a of the general Rules of the International—"the proletariat can act as a class only by constituting itself as a distinct political party." But he quotes with fervent approval the concluding passage in The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx's famous tract against Proudhon,

The antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is a struggle of a class against class, a struggle which carried to its highest expression is a total revolution .. . the clash of body with body, as its final denouement .. . . combat or death: bloody struggle or extinction. ... It is in this form that the question is inexorably put.

Sorel then makes much of the International's Circular (in which Marx's share is rather uncertain) against Bakunin's "Alliance of Socialist Democracy and the International Working Men's Association." This ridicules the idea of putting a "vanguard" of men recruited from the privileged classes above the masses ("cannon fodder"), to act "as intermediaries between the revolutionary idea and the popular instincts," in order to bring to the fore "advocates without a cause, doctors without treatments and without science, students of billiards, shopkeepers and others employed in commerce, and especially journalists of the petty press . . . déclassé . . . who retrieved, in the International, a career and an issue."

Sorel quotes with glee Engels' description of the political struggle in the modern (bourgeois) state in The Origins of the Family: "a body of intellectuals invested with privileges and possessing so-called political means for defending itself against the attacks of other groups of intellectuals and to acquire the profits of public offices. Parties are organised for the acquisition of these public posts." Sorel not only refuses to draw any distinction between bourgeois politicians and socialist politicians; all his scorn is directed against the latter—because of their greater hypocrisy.

These were two entirely different things: the revolutionary élan of a class acting from instinct and in full simplicity, also a class that had accomplished its apprenticeship, evolved a system of ideas and values, a juridical framework of its own, and had reached full awareness of its historic mission to enthrone a new civilisation and a new moral order; and the connivance of professional party politicians, banking on the revolution to deliver to them "the object of their cupidity," the state. Sorel refers also with approval to Bernstein's exposure of the cant which under the guise of formal popular sovereignty makes civil servants, professional politicians, and newspaper owners run the show, and to his definition of the dictatorship of the proletariat as "the dictatorship of club orators and literati."

At bottom, we are faced here with the problem which had never ceased to perplex mankind—the question of the very legitimacy of politics. Its utter vagueness and elusive character, the mixture of abstract principle and crass ambition, of objective goals and sheer histrionics, of rational argument and squalid bamboozling; its seeming remoteness from the concrete, measurable, and truly necessary things—all this leads to the despairing conclusion that whatever the politicians, men of no particular training, ultimately dilettanti, say or do is but a mask and pretence for the will to power, power for its own sake. "Politics!" exclaims Paul Valéry, "at the word I am overcome with silence. .. . I regard the political necessity of exploiting all that is lowest in man's psyche as the greatest danger of the present time." Sorel would add bourgeois politics, but he means democratic politics: the competition for power or rather for the favour of the people who held the prize of power. Politics of this type emerged—Sorel claims—in Europe, more precisely in France, only at the end of the 18th century, as a function of an all-embracing new Weltanschauung. This leads him to undertake a fundamental reckoning with the 18th-century tradition. He rejects it root and branch as a colossal derangement, an alienation, and thus it justifies his prophecy of its imminent demise at the hands of the victorious proletariat.

All our efforts [Sorel writes] should aim at preventing bourgeois ideas from poisoning the class which is arriving; that is why we can never do enough to break every link between the people and the literature of the 18th century .. . to demolish this whole scaffolding of conventional falsehoods and to ruin the prestige still enjoyed by those who vulgarise the vulgarisation of the 18th century.⁹

One is reminded of Mussolini's boast made in 1926 for which many parallels could be found in statements by Fascist and Nazi spokesmen: "We represent a new principle in the world; we represent the exact, categorical, definitive antithesis of the whole world of democracy, plutocracy, freemasonry, in short the whole world of the immortal principles of 1789."

In this utter repudiation of 18th-century values and the conscious endeavour to replace them by different, indeed contrasting principles, Sorel parts company not merely with the liberal-democratic tradition of the modern era, but in the last analysis also with every shade of socialism known hitherto.

FORCE, TERROR, & RENEWAL

"Les illusions du progrès" is the central issue on which Sorel takes up his fight against the 18th-century tradition: that belief in some final Salvationist station of the historic process, the preordained dénouement of all contradictions and conflict into a state of concord, harmony, resulting from the final victory of the basic rationality and social nature of man over all the disturbing and corrupting influences of bygone ages—ignorance and selfishness, oppression and evil teachings. The essential features of this religion of progress were its abstract universalism and its humanitarian optimism. Sorel proclaims his bitter enmity for this religion of peace and concord, in the name of a religion of struggle and war. The opposition between the two approaches was to him fundamental and all-embracing. Sorel's most faithful disciple, Edouard Berth, put his finger on it, invoking Nietzsche's uncompromising challenge ("are you pacific, or are you warriorlike?") and Proudhon's famous disquisition on the place of war in the scheme of civilisation (its role as the lever of all the great values). It was either the one or the other. Each of the two basic attitudes determined a system of values, a morality, a pattern of behaviour quite irreconcilable with the ones shaped by the other; in brief, of concord on one side, and violence on the other, of universal reconciliation or the victory of the best. Sorel entirely ignores the 18th-century humanist and universalist ingredients in both the original impulse and the ultimate vision of Socialism.¹⁰

The facile optimism of the rationalists rouses Sorel to a fury of contempt. He takes a malignant pleasure in the resistance, recalcitrance, and intractableness of things; he is hypnotised by insoluble contradictions and conflict. Sorel despises Descartes, the philosopher of clarity and harmony, and adores Pascal, the tormented prophet, weighed down by the mystery of evil and consumed by a yearning for salvation. The former epitomises the "small science" of smug positivism and automatic mechanism, the latter represents the "great science"—true vision suspended over unfathomable abysses. To take a characteristic instance, Sorel is scathing about the social Catholicism of the Modernist movement in the Church of Leo XIII, and its endeavour to explain away the mysteries, "absurdities" and irrationalities of revealed religion as parables and symbols of rational truths and liberal social ethics. Needless to say, he prefers a "tough," wholly "indigestible" religion.

Humanitarian rationalism appears to Sorel a colossal lie which had a most stultifying and corrupting effect, breeding an arrogant and capricious wish to obtain full gratification quickly and cheaply, to make a cowardly escape from the realities of life and the lessons of history. It was a dishonest simplicism that reduces the mysteries of nature and complexities of existence into encyclopaedias and digests, glib rhetoric and castles in the air, and fosters an unprincipled readiness to compromise and bargain. Conflict and War were the fathers of all true morality and manly responsibility.

We need not be detained by Sorel's critique, at times acute, at times quite fanciful, of the roots of the 18thcentury philosophy. More important for us are Sorel's connection with the farreaching and lasting course of the rationalist ideology.

For the French Revolution produced the strange type of the fanatical would-be saviour in a hurry who sees himself justified in forcing everybody to be free. A unanimous happiness would follow the extermination of all evil recalcitrants, in any case deviants who were doomed by History. The more common breed of "the religion of progress," however, has been the professional politician or intellectual in politics who banded together in political parties ostensibly to serve and guide the people in the direction of the desired state of social happiness, but in fact to cajole the people with promises, blandishments, and tricks into giving them power. The progressive ideology had little real relevance. Rhetors, sophists, adventurers, speculators, clowns all rolled into one, neither coping with real problems, nor rooted in any ancient group loyalties, nor part of historic institutions; they were ultimately parasites. They gambled on the frustrations and envious dissatisfactions of men. They encouraged indolent craving for easy gratification. Their weapons were ruse and cunning.

As against "bourgeois deceit and decadence" (of which Socialist politicians had become an integral part), the arrival of the proletariat presages a purifying ricorsi. The proletariat comes to bring war and not peace; to add burdens, not to alleviate them; to heighten tension, and not to offer a détente. It struggles on in the full consciousness of its destiny to inherit the earth: not to come to an accommodation with the existing establishment, but to eradicate it entirely. Its heroes are warriors, and not politicians, diplomats, or negotiators.

A new, revolutionary, and all-transforming principle associated with the modern industrial effort—the communion with the machine—is a lever of creative freedom, a warrant of integrity, an educational discipline, a vantage point for seeing things in their full concreteness and interaction, in contrast to the vagueness, the abstractness, and indeterminacy as well as the moral laxity and selfish arbitrariness of liberal-democratic and socialist politics, indeed of bourgeois society in general.

Sorel's terms of reference, metaphors and simili are all taken from religious movements and war. The abounding words are honour and glory, sublimity, heroism, virility and loftiness. The comparison is between the syndicats and their impending general strike and the early Christians or the extreme Protestant sects waiting for a Second Coming or the monastic orders which arose to purify the Church. Sorel says again and again that the fact that these historic expectations were never fulfilled did not matter. All that mattered was that in each case the myth had enough vitality to sustain the believers' resolve and to turn them into little kingdoms of God, with an ethos, a high morality, indeed a culture of their own, in strenuous opposition to the rotten world around them. The proud self-awareness of representing a higher civilisation and morality was bound to inspire the workers with puritan virtues: love of the job for its own sake, precision and loyalty, care for the heritage of the future heirs of the earth. The redeemed proletariat would be marked above all by the heroic selflessness and disinterestedness peculiar to crusaders and soldiers of liberty.

To keep themselves pure and resolute it was absolutely essential for the workers to cut themselves off entirely from the unregenerate world. This meant in the first place shaking off the tutelage of politicians and intellectuals, with all their machinations and corrupt practices. In the second place, it meant class war à l'outrance: no truck with the employers. The more isolated the syndicats were, the more they would have to fall back upon their own resources: the more intensely would they become aware of their own identity and high calling: the richer and deeper and more authentic would their own values become. In the form of direct action and sporadic strikes (in preparation for the break-through of the great General Strike) the struggle would also gradually shape a new and wholly autonomous juridical system, which would be based on the morality of a confraternity at war. War—as in the Proudhonian vision—would be the begetter of the virtues of heroism, total devotion, sense of solidarity, right, and honour. The strikes were sure to engender and sustain new conceptions and new patterns of relationship between the leaders and the led (the former embodying the true general will, and not the mystical general will of Rousseauist democracy). Occupation of factories would accustom the workers to see themselves as the legitimate owners and managers of social wealth. The physical clash with employers, state authorities, and strike breakers would educate the strikers in the use of violence. Sustained by the spirit of a Revolutionary Army, the workers would not be moved by envy, by a craving for revenge or a vision of spoils, let alone self-pity. They wanted a clean fight—a judgment of God—in the heroic tradition of medieval chivalry. But their campaign was also conceived in the spirit of a Napoleonic resolve utterly to annihilate the enemy.

It was the vision of the General Strike that was to inspire and sustain the proletariat in their heroic struggle.¹¹ The General Strike was the great myth, but it was most emphatically not a vision of Utopia. The Utopia was, according to Sorel, an intellectual proposition, a description of a desirable state of affairs which would be an improvement upon the existing one, thus a contrivance and concoction of intellectuals. Myth, however, was not a truth to be analysed and taken to pieces, but a power that stirs the soul, an ensemble of images that satisfy and propel all our faculties. Upon it are focused all our urges and drives, dreams and hopes. It was a vision of life turned drama, a spasm of final fulfilment, like the revolutionary breakthrough, or the Second Coming, the arrival of the Messiah, or the last war of liberation.

The myth presupposes man to be not a creature of reason, but a suggestible being, whose intuitive grasp of and reaction to an uplifting heroic vision would raise him out of himself into that élan vital which opens to him the domain of creative freedom. He then ceases to be a link in the chain of natural causality, and (in the spirit of Henri Bergson) makes a new beginning towards a unique destiny.

The General Strike signified the triumph of violence at the end of a series of turbulent clashes. Sorel' s eloquent pages on the general strike read like a poetic evocation, a prophecy rather than a prognosis or a blueprint. We are left in the dark as to how the great drama of violence would really unfold. We are told that its essence would not be in much bloodshed or acts of brutality, in a large number of victims or untold destruction. These would be few; they would bear rather the character of a warning. What Sorel seems to have had in mind is the overwhelming will to win, the supreme confidence of conquerors, the iron determination to go to the bitter end, in the face of all which the adversary flinches, reels back, because he lacks the conviction and the self-assurance of those who embody manifest destiny and know it.

A social policy founded on middle-class cowardice, which consists in always surrendering before the threat of violence, cannot fail to engender the idea that the middle class is condemned to death, and that its disappearance is only a matter of time. Thus every conflict which gives rise to violence becomes a vanguard fight, and nobody can foresee what will arise from such engagements. . . . Each time they come to blows the strikers hope that it is the beginning of the great Napoleonic battle. . . . In this way the practice of strikes engenders the notion of a catastrophic revolution.¹²

At a later date Sorel defined violence as

an intellectual doctrine, the will of the powerful minds which know where they are going, the implacable resolve to attain the final goals of Marxism by means of syndicalism. Lenin has furnished us a striking example of that psychological violence.¹³

The determination of the assailants and the faltering of the attacked mutually condition each other.

The capacity and readiness to resort to violence become the test of faith and of belonging to the elect. " . . .en se regardant comme le grand moteur de l'histoire . . . il a le sentiment très net de la gloire. . .son rôle historique et de l'héroïsme. . . . La mesure de sa valeur." Sorel resorts in this connection to nomenclature of stern determinism. The final act of violence in the victorious strike would be "no more than the necessary effort to make the old withered branches fall to the ground." The fall would be like the final crush of the glacier tearing itself away from its old base, "after having been attacked by the sun for many centuries."

An apologia for "violence"? Sorel devotes quite a few pages to the distinction between force and violence, and it is a distinction which later would become a commonplace among ideologists of violence of all kinds, Force was an instrument for maintaining existing power (what would nowadays be called "the establishment").

The object of force is to impose a certain social order in which the minority governs, while violence tends to the destruction of that order. The middle class have used force since the beginning of modern times, while the proletariat now reacts against the middle class and against the State by violence.

It was hidden and camouflaged, operating not so much with weapons of direct coercion as by manipulating the levers of power, blocking insidiously all attempts at change or cunningly denuding them of any real effectiveness, while making much of form and ritual.

Thus we see that economic forces are closely bound up with political power, and capitalism finally perfects itself to the point of being able to dispense with any direct appeal to the public force, except in very exceptional cases. . . .

Sorel gives an interesting slant to the Marxist description of the bourgeois State as the executive of the exploiting classes (and to Engels' denunciation of parliamentary "cretinism") by substituting intellectuals and politicians for capitalists and their stooges:

There is a great resemblance between the electoral democracy and the Stock Exchange; in one case as in the other it is necessary to work upon the simplicity of the masses, to buy the co-operation of the most important papers, and to assist chance by an infinite of trickery. There is not a great deal of difference between a financier who puts big-sounding concerns on the market which come to grief in a few years, and the politician who promises an infinity of reforms to the citizens which he does not know how to bring about, and which resolve themselves simply into an accumulation of Parliamentary papers. . . . Democrats and businessmen have quite a special science for making the deliberative assemblies approve of their swindling; the Parliaments are as packed as shareholders' meetings . . . profound psychological affinities resulting from these methods of operation; democracy is the paradise of which unscrupulous financiers dream.

In brief, the régime of bourgeois liberalism rested on force: on ruse, cunning, and make-believe. Sorel proclaims the violence preached by him to be noble and chivalrous because it was open and direct and constituted a full and unequivocal commitment, without subterfuge, reservations, and convenient avenues of retreat.

As for terror, it is not always to Sorel only a question of inspiring fear or self-confidence by demonstration. Andreu calls "extraordinary" the sentence in which Sorel asks himself "whether in liquidating so large a number of literati and férus d'idéologie the Terror had not rendered a service to France. Perhaps Napoleon would not have so easily consolidated his administration had his régime not been preceded by a great purge. . . . "¹⁴

Violence in effect is the token of authenticity. The revulsion from hypocrisy (which is just another way of putting the quest of "authenticity") leads to the glorification of instinct and force, and to a contempt for devious men, especially intellectuals. The greater the contempt for conventional "falsehood," the greater the glory of violence. Sorel ponders over the difference between the severity with which old heroic societies punished deceit and fraud (while being lenient towards crimes of violence) and the heavy punishments meted out to crimes of violence (coupled with the indulgent treatment of crooks) in modern commercial society. He upbraids the rude justice meted out to offenders by primitive societies in accordance with their ancient notions of honour. Surely a thrust of the knife by an "homme honnête en ses moeurs, mais violent" will have less serious moral consequences than thievery and deceit, or "les débordements de la luxure. " For "old ferocity," Sorel complains, "tends to be replaced by ruse."

On the eve of World War I we find Sorel speculating on the two possible ways of arresting bourgeois decadence and Socialist demoralisation that accompanies it. At the end of the Insegnamenti sociali della economica contemporanea, he writes that "a great international war [which he regards as not very likely] may have as its effect the suppression of the causes which tend today to favour the taste for moderation and the desire for social peace." It would certainly bring to power "men with the will to govern." Sorel's other hope is

a great extension of proletarian violence, which would make the bourgeoisie see the revolutionary reality and fill it with disgust for the humanitarian platitudes with which Jaurès has been lulling them to sleep.

Indeed, Sorel wants the capitalists to fight, to believe in themselves and in their class interests, to be like the early captains of industry or American robber barons. Let them mind their own business, and not act as philanthropists with a social conscience, always ready to conciliate, to give in. This softness was a sign of effeminacy, and it demoralised the workers. By being what history has meant them to be—harsh and ruthless taskmakers—the employers would deploy their potentialities to the full, and keep their workers on their tiptoes as fighters, and thus hasten the Day of Confrontation.

When the governing classes, no longer daring to govern, are ashamed of their privileged situation, are eager to make advances to their enemies, and proclaim their horror of all cleavage in society, it becomes much more difficult to maintain in the minds of the proletariat this idea of cleavage without which Socialism cannot fulfil its historical role.

Reformist socialists who wish to act as conciliating gobetweens, who work for "social peace" and national unity were traitors to the working class, and destroyers of morality. "Finally .. . anti-patriotism becomes an essential element in the Syndicalist programme .. . an inseparable part of socialism."

In words reminiscent of Lenin's élitism, Sorel says that the syndicats must search less for the greatest number of adherents than for the organisation of the vigorous elements; revolutionary strikes are excellent for effecting a solution by weeding out the pacifists who would spoil the best troops, "dedicated to the absolute."

BETWEEN MARX & MUSSOLINI

What will be the state of affairs on the morrow of the victorious General Strike? What kind of society was desirable or likely to emerge? On this Sorel is maddeningly vague, and he has many excuses. He had rejected Utopianism from the start. He believes in the unpredictable Bergsonian creativeness of the élan vital. He was prepared to endorse Mussolini's famous slogan: "Every system is an error, every theory is a prison." But what Sorel does say on the subject reminds one very much of Lenin's Old Left conceptions in State and Revolution and of contemporary New Left notions. Sorel rejects the idea of any guidance, supervision, or control from outside and from above, even if those supervisors are democratically elected (since the supervisors would always be thinking of the next election). And he would not conceive of tribunals or penalties or prisons to coerce the victorious proletarians. There would be no need for anything of that kind. Steeled in revolutionary ideology and having gone through the fire of strikes, the workers would, in the manner of true Soldiers of Liberty (or, perhaps, warriors of God) have developed a superb blend of dignity, pride, individualistic selfreliance, and an enthusiastic readiness and capacity to engage in cooperative effort. They would thus be totally free in their utter unanimity. The key phrases here are "heroic exploits . . . extraordinary enthusiasm . . . ardour takes the place of discipline .. . the greatest possible zeal . . . ," etc.

A few lines later, Sorel drops the very revealing remark that as a result of his farouche individualism on the one hand and his keen sense of responsibility on the other, the soldier of the Revolutionary armies

felt no pity for the generals or officers whom he saw guillotined after a defeat on the charge of dereliction of duty. .. . In his eyes failure could only be explained by some grave error on the part of his leaders . . . made him approve of rigorous measures against men who . . . caused it to lose the fruit of so much heroism.

Obviously, where absolute perfection is postulated as predetermined, any failing is found to appear as the result of ill-will, perversion, and treason. Where unanimity—"l'unanimité qui va se former incessamment"—is expected as inevitable, any dissent must seem an arbitrary and selfish deviation. Unanimity must be made manifest by all means. The road from perfectionist anarchy to democratic centralism (perhaps better called totalitarian democracy) is not a very long one.

And yet, numerous and close as are the points of contact between Sorel and Bolshevism, the spirit and temper that pervade his writings are utterly uncongenial to proletarian mentality, and alien to Marxist philosophy and Socialist values. It was not for nothing that on being asked whether he had been influenced by Sorel's work one Syndicalist leader replied, with a shrug of the shoulders, that he had "read only Alexandre Dumas"! Reality was different. The real workers could hardly have been expected to lend an ear to appeals to heroic self-abnegation in order to enthrone someone else's lofty morality, or to entertain the idea that they should make superhuman efforts on behalf of a proffered mythology.

In spite of Sorel's insistent claim to be remembered as "the faithful servant of the proletariat," he decisively parts company with Socialism and comes close to Fascism. It is true that Lenin, like Marx before him, struck many élitist notes; he belaboured the bourgeoisie (and the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries) for their Philistinism, flabbiness, and hypocrisy, and extolled the resoluteness and determination of his own revolutionary fighters. Yet the heroic qualities to him were never an end in themselves, but only a means of arriving speedily at a terminal régime of social justice; at most, they were tokens of devotion. The display of vitality or the achievement of glory are not values in themselves. The Socialist Revolution is not made to create a superior breed of man. The institutions of the Socialist system are sure to beget better men: better for being, above all, less rapaciously selfish and more cooperative, more rational and more civilised; but certainly not for being inspired by a combative urge for self-expression as members of some superior élite or master race. Nothing is more alien to Socialism than Nietzscheanism. One could thus hardly call the teachings of Sorel "socialism." What they are in fact is a Nietzschean repudiation of bourgeois mediocrity and deceit and a Nietzschean philosophy of élitism applied to the proletariat. Sorel turned the tables on Nietzsche. While the prophet of "the Will to Power" denounced socialist ideology as slave ethics, Sorel expects a revaluation of all values and the enthronement of a heroic civilisation to come from the proletariat. Its syndicats are called upon to play the part of "les autorités sociales" fulfilled in the past by the ruling families of an aristocracy or patriciate. The impulse of both thinkers was (to say it again) the same: revulsion from the shabbiness, the hypocrisy, the meanness and mediocrity of bourgeois society in the 19th century. A resurgence of heroic virtues was an end in itself to both prophets. It is scarcely true to say that Sorel's aim was to replace the political authoritarian state of the bourgeois intellectuals by "a network of the free syndicats." This new type of social organisation had, in his eyes, no value in itself except as a lever for the new heroic morality. In spite of Sorel's preoccupation with juridical concepts and institutions, his concern was really with a "new heart" and not with an new institutional order. Sorel's glorification of the sense of manifest destiny, of the will to conquer and the joy of struggle as the begetters of all heroic virtues, transforms these from means into ends in themselves. Heroic for what? It does not, in the last analysis, much matter for what purpose. After all, Sorel speaks with deep admiration of the heroic qualities of the bourgeoisie in its prime, and he enjoins the proletarians to be fierce and uncompromising so that even their effeminate philanthropic employers might recover the kind of militant virtues which characterised the early captains of industry.

Sorel opts for the heroic proletariat and not for the reborn bourgeoisie—as he might well have, and as indeed some of his followers did—because, it appears, he has the Hegelian sense that the next phase of history belongs to the proletariat. It is not because he wants to redeem the proletariat as an oppressed class. He speaks with the same admiration of the heroism of the Spartans, the early Christians, the apocalyptic Protestant sects, the monastic orders, the soldiers of the Grande Armée, and the Mazzinians.

In the total ruin of institutions and of morals there remains something which is powerful, new, and intact, and it is that which constitutes, properly speaking, the soul of the revolutionary proletariat. Nor will this be swept away in the general decadence of moral values, if the workers have enough energy to bar the road to the middle-class corrupters, answering their advances with the plainest brutality. . . . The bond which I pointed out in the beginning between Socialism and proletarian violence appears to us now in all its strength. It is to violence that Socialism owes those high ethical values by means of which it brings salvation to the modern world.

Proletarian violence . . . appears as a very beautiful and heroic thing . . . in the service of the primordial interests of our civilisation. . . . [It] may save the world from barbarism. . . . Let us salute the revolutionaries just as the Greeks saluted the Spartan heroes who defended Thermopylae and thus contributed to maintaining light in the ancient world.

The turn soon came for Syndicalism to be rejected by Sorel as "hyper-demagoguery"—as Socialism had been before, also for its "demagoguery" and "stupidity." Sorel stumbled upon (or rather was lured into) a new view of historic opportunity: the extreme nationalist Royalist Right as candidates for a revival of virility and heroism. He gave his blessing to a bizarre flirtation between a handful of young enthusiasts of the Syndicalist Left and of the extreme Right. It was not really, as far as Sorel himself was concerned, a joyous espousal of the Royalist-nationalist cause, rather a half-hearted, uneasy relationship, hampered by a certain sense of incongruity. But the young disciples, who came from syndicalism as well as those who came from integral nationalism, and who had as yet no past to live down, were able to enjoy the affaire with undisturbed relish.

A signal event in Sorel's rapprochement with the Right was his article on Charles Péguy under the title "Le Réveil de l'âme francaise, le Mystère de la Charité de Ieanne d'Arc" (1910). In it he hailed the proud and defiant resurgence of traditionalist Catholic French patriotism and militarism as a revanche of the anti-Dreyfusards upon the "dregs of the humanitarianism" of the Sorbonne (and democracy in general). Sorel prophesied that these old-new ideas were destined to "direct contemporary thought."

The programmatic Declaration of the "Cité Française, " the still-born organ of the Syndicalist-Nationalist alliance, was signed by Sorel (who drafted it), his two disciples Georges Valois and Edouard Berth, and the two royalists Pierre Gilbert and Jean Variot (author of the "Propos de Georges Sorel"). The aim of the editors was to "liberate French intelligence from all those ideologies . . . which dominated Europe in the last century." Whatever the differences dividing them, they were perfectly united in the opinion that

for any solution of the problems of the modern world ... it is absolutely necessary to destroy the democratic institutions . . . as the greatest social peril to all classes of the community, in the first place the working classes. Democracy mixes up the classes, in order to enable a few bands of politicians, associated with financiers or dominated by them, to exploit the producers.

The editors pledge themselves to foster the self-awareness of every social class by weaning it away from the stultifying teachings of democracy, and to restore to it its original virility and sense of mission.

For some years Sorel became a regular contributor to the nationalist L'Indépendance; he also emerges as the somewhat reluctant patron saint of the "Cercle Proudhon," where his disciples and the young Rightist enthusiasts (Henri Lagrange, Gilbert Maire, René de Maranes, André Vincent) were trying with the blessing of Maurras, Barrès, and other nationalist luminaries, to evolve a type of French national socialism—Proudhon against Marx—which would fight democracy, "the stupidest of dreams . . . the mortal error." Capitalism was also the enemy: "the capitalist régime which destroys in the community what the democratic ideas destroy in the domain of the spirit, that is the nation, the family, the moeurs, substituting the law of gold for the law of the blood."¹⁵

NIHILISM: FROM SOREL TO VALOIS

The man who used Sorel as a foundation stone for a genuine and full-blooded Fascist philosophy was Georges Valois. Valois has been called the French Mussolini manqué,¹⁶ who in 1925 tried to emulate the Duce's triumphant march on Rome (but failed to reach Paris). He started out as one of the wildest young Leftists on the Left Bank, and then wandered for years across the globe to South-east Asia, Russia, and other distant places. On his return to Paris Valois was smitten by a revelation—the idea of élitist authority. He writes a book entitled L'Homme qui vient: Philosophie de l'Autorité, and dedicates it to the "young, energetic men, whose intelligence has been stultified and whose muscles had been rendered flabby by voluptuousness," as a result of a philosophy of "moral anarchy" which for generations now had been teaching "the abolition of all restraints." Valois defines his new ideal as "work, and its condition: authority and the State." He intends to confound the "horde juive triomphante" in the Dreyfus affair. Valois proclaims war on the three prophets who

wrought ruin upon the modern world . . . three great criminals, three great impostors, Fathers of the lie . . . J. J. Rousseau, the false man of nature, Immanuel Kant, the false man of duty, and Karl Marx, the false man of necessity.

Valois identifies his own prophets: in the first placel, Sorel; then Charles Maurras, Carlyle, Kipling, H. G. Wells; the now-forgotten scientist René Quinton; the old masters (de Maistre, Bonald, Auguste Comte and Taine), but above all Nietzsche.

I owe to Nietzsche my liberation. At a time when we stuck in the democratic humanitarian swamp . . . wasting our energies in an effort to solve inept problems . . . Nietzsche . . . coup de fouet. . . forced to us consider with true sincerity the real problems . . . to see ourselves without pity . . . the liberator of our energy.¹⁷

In fact, Valois' whole theory is nothing but a smudged, coarse-grained, and petulant variation on Nietzsche and Sorel.

Sorel's élitist conception of the proletarian syndicats and their revivalist mission is transformed by Valois into a vision of the rule of born masters, "holders of the whip" over the slavish, indolent, swinish multitude. The masters are no longer a hereditary social class like ancient aristocracy—something quite impossible in the 20th century—or an élite of brains, but men endowed with the undefinable gifts of leadership who prove themselves in a Darwinian struggle and rivalry. You recognised them when you saw them coming, these men at the top, the successors to the medieval barons, the famous condottieri and the great capitalists. Their success is their title to legitimacy. The "strongest will reveal himself incontestably .. . no one will doubt his qualification, once he has defeated all the others." Never mind the means. Without ruthless, uninhibited urge for power and leadership, those "enthousiastes, des hommes pleins d'appétits, avides de jouissances du commandement et des cruautés" would never get there. It was the impotent but envious and cunning demagogues of democracy who spoke of "rights" and "justice" and flattered the masses.

Sorel's earliest concern was with authenticity, certainty, and social cohesion. He sought them first in the realities of organic historic tradition, then successively in Marxist teaching, in the inexorable determinations of productive effort, in the existential situation of the proletariats, finally in the life-giving collective myth. He never ceased to fear and hate self-willed arbitrariness and intellectual vagrancy. Georges Valois goes far beyond his master when he raises the instinctive will-to-power of the individual and the visceral ties of the community of blood—"la vérité charnelle"—to the dignity of absolutes.

It was the instincts that mattered most, and not the intellect. Man's mission was not to "know the world" or to learn to "know himself," but to fight.

The means which you wish to employ for knowing yourself—intelligence—put it into second place, and do not use it for tasks for which it was not made.... It is a gift which was given to you not that you may know yourself, nor that you may know our raison d'être, but to enable you to understand, with the aid of experience and instinct, in what way the things surrounding you may serve and contribute to your growth. Apart from that, there is for you nothing but doubt, confusion, trouble, and death. . . .

We are faced here with a fear of thought and analysis, a dread of choosing between alternatives, and a craving to be propelled mindlessly by powerful instincts or, for that matter, the force of habit.

"False sages and liars!" exclaims Valois, "to say that one is led by his intelligence is an error or a lie. Man is guided by his instincts. . . . What is the brain? An organ like his foot, his hand, his eye, utilised by his instinct. . . . Who commands in living nature? It is the instinct of life." The power to act was superior to the ability to think. "Intellectuals!" calls Valois, "if you are true hommes de commandement, speak in the name of your energy, do not ask for power, take it. If you are strong, the people will recognise you as leaders." All creative force came from instinct, and this is why "le maître de la vie, the Aristocrat, will never be an intellectual but an Energetic, the one whose life instinct had the greatest strength." The supreme fact of life—of men as well as of nations—was war.

All the things that we call the pacific blessings of civilisation are the creations of war; civilisation itself is the fruit of war. . . . The nations . . . working today to develop a civilisation of peace, had themselves been formed by war and maintain their work of peace, of solidarity and of brotherhood thanks to nothing but war. War is the primary law of life, and it is for the species the only way of achieving the highest elevation of its life instinct. . . .

This situation did not have to express itself in actual fighting. War-like rivalry was also present in an accumulation of so much power that all dangers from within and from without would be staved off without going to war. War is "a happy necessity for civilisation." It was also an instrument for realising social justice among the nations, "by wresting lands and resources which indolent and incompetent nations knew not how to utilise," and thus "abuse their sovereign rights over them."

The democratic politicians—a breed that emerged in the French Revolution—represented a kind of anti-élite of the déclassé of all classes. "The democratic régime is in the full sense an organised, systematic disorganisation of the nation, and carries with it its own ruin. . . . "As for Socialism, it was only a new form of parliamentary exploitation which has simply changed the electoral formulae, but it pursues the same aim as the other parties—"the conquest of power in order to obtain the wealth which that conquest provides. . . . "¹⁸

Behind the anti-élite of democratic and socialist politicians, a loose congerie of adventurers who come and go, there stood an anti-élite acting from behind the scenes, but of the most distinct identity, cohesion, and continuity—the Jews. The politicians were no more than the puppets or agents of that Jewish power. The Jews were an anti-élite par excellence: few and physically weak, with no aristocratic tradition or martial qualities, intellectuals and reasoners, they could succeed and obtain the power that they so craved not by imposing themselves in an elemental irresistible sort of way, but through manipulation and scheming. They represented and embodied everything that was not instinctive and concrete, but was abstract and universal. Cut off from the land and its pursuits for so long, with no country of their own, with no share in the hard productive effort, they had developed two weapons which had no particular home or race: ideas and money. These became the instruments with the help of which those aliens could worm their way into French society and overcome the natural resistance and healthy egoism of a deeply rooted, idiosyncratic nation. Against French instinctive certainties, traditions and customs, the French conception of justice, they proclaimed and fostered an abstract universal natural law, the idea of Man per se, eternal ideal justice. Their "patrie 'idéelle'" was pitted against authentic soil-bound French patriotism: the French were seduced into adopting the abstract ideology of Revolution as their national ideology. The alien Jews could thus appear as most excellent Frenchmen, while remaining themselves a closely knit entity apart. Finance capitalism, laissez-faire, liberalism, rationalism as such, finally socialism founded on class war—all were Jewish devices to sap the self-assurance, the cohesion, the unity, and the authenticity of the French nation.

Parliamentary democracy became the convenient façade for the wire-pullers. Apparently an expression and guarantee of popular sovereignty, it was but a camouflage for the occult but real powers. Sorel had already drawn attention to the close similarity, and indeed the link, between speculators who gambled on the stock exchange and parasitic democratic politicians who gambled for power. He did that without specifically mentioning the Jews. However, the Dreyfusard eventually developed into a bitter anti-Semite, calling upon Europe to defend itself against "the Jewish peril" in the same way as the U.S. fought "the Yellow peril"; he blamed the Chekist terror upon the Jewish members of the Bolshevik Party. The Jews (Valois claims) had their agents in all parties, but they had lately concentrated their attention on the Socialists: for the sake of a better disguise, and in order to make sure that they became the heirs of the expropriated French bourgeoisie on the morrow of the Revolution which they were plotting. Once the revolutionary General Strike succeeded in paralysing all production, the ensuing chaos could be overcome only with the help of ready cash—gold. The Jewish financiers will have kept it in their safes; they will then appear as saviours, offer help, but extort a heavy price, namely complete domination over the economic and political life of the French nation. "It is probable that a terrible anti-Semitic movement will then develop and it will manifest itself through the most beautiful massacre of Jews in history." The Jews would then call in foreign troops to rescue them, in order that Jews and foreigners together share the spoils. Some of the participants in the debate on "The Monarchy and the Working Class" initiated and analysed by Valois see the Jews as working for the enemies of France—for England, Germany, and Italy. Others depict the Jew as the enemy of every authentic nation, and call for an international alliance against the common Jewish danger. Georges Valois himself coined the slogan "L'or juif contre le sang français. "

The Jew thus appears as the lynch-pin of the whole theory, solving the contradiction between socialism and nationalism.¹⁹

A CAUTIONARY TALE

The evolution of syndicalist Sorelism towards pro-fascism is a cautionary tale which our younger as well as our older contemporaries might well take to heart. The revulsion from "hypocrisy" and the resulting quest for "authenticity" very easily evolve into a glorification of instinct and direct action. The condemnation of arbitrariness and the craving for certainty can so rapidly take the form of an apologia for an élite and its cult of violence. The emphasis upon the existential situation or collective myth has as its corollary the denial of individual judgment and personal decision, for it raises abstract sentiments to the level of absolutes. A downward slope leads from a populist apotheosis of primary and all-embracing experience—in contrast to analytical reasoning—to "gut thinking" and Blut und Boden racism. Finally, the idea of a Manichean confrontation between the forces of darkness and of light—both taken to be indivisible totalities and never just human admixtures of good and evil—easily becomes a warrant for violence without end.

¹ Georges Sorel, Réflexions sur la Violence (4th edition, Paris, 1919), Appendix X 3, "Plaidoyer pour Lenine," p. 454; Reflections on Violence (tr. Hulme & Roth, introduction by Edward Shils, 1950), "In Defense of Lenin," p. 311.

²Réflexions, pp. 442, 451. See also G. Sorel, Lettres à Paul Delesalle, 1914-1921 (Paris, 1947), p. 234; Jean Variot, Propos de G. Sorel (Paris, 1935), p. 57; Gaétan Piron, Georges Sorel (Paris, 1927), pp. 53, 55-6; James H. Meisel, The Genesis of Georges Sorel (1951), pp. 219, 226, 230.

³ Michael Freund, Georges Sorel: der revolutionäre Konservatismus (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1932), pp. 17, 34, 69; Georges Goriely, Le pluralisme dramatique de Georges Sorel, (Paris, 1962).

⁴ Richard D. Humphrey, Georges Sorel, a Prophet without Honor: a study in anti-intellectualism (1951).

⁵ Georges Sorel, "Science et socialisme, " in Revue Philosophique (1893), pp. 509-11.

⁶ G. Sorel: Avenir Socialiste des Syndicats (1898); Mes raisons du syndicalisme (1910); both reprinted in Matériaux d'une théorie du prolétariat (Paris, 1919); also Sorel: D'Aristote à Marx (Paris, 1935), pp. 263 ff.

⁷Matériaux, pp. 283-4.

⁸ Translated into English by Irving L. Horowitz as an Appendix to his Radicalism and Revolt against Reason: the Social Theories of Georges Sorel (1961), pp. 207-54.

⁹ G. Sorel, Les Illusions du progrès (5th ed.; Paris, 1947), pp. 275-86.

¹⁰ Edouard Berth: Les Méfaits des intellectuels (1926), pp. 95 ff.; also under the pen-name of Jean Darville, in La Monarchie et la Classe Ouvrière: une Enquéte (ed. Georges Valois, 1914), pp. cxxx ff.

¹¹ The great wave of proletarian militancy of the first decade of the 20th century was accompanied by much violence and bloodshed. It produced the first general strike in history, in Italy in 1904; it saw the revolutionary upheaval in Russia carried by a vast strike movement a year later; it sent hundreds of thousands of workers on to the streets of Paris on the First of May in 1906; it witnessed the bloody clashes between strikers and security forces all over Europe, coming in France to a climax in the terrible battles at Villeneuve-Saint-Georges and Darveil with numerous casualties on both sides; the Belgium Socialist Party resorted successfully to mass strike to obtain universal suffrage. Those were the days of the grand debate on the general strike as the instrument of the "revolutionary breakthrough" and as a means of stopping an international war. It is enough to recall Rosa Luxemburg's pamphlets on the subject.

¹²Reflections, pp. 90-1.

¹³ J. Variot, Propos de G. Sorel, p. 55.

¹⁴ Pierre Andreu, Notre maítre, M. Sorel (1953), p. 192.

¹⁵Cahiers du Cercle Proudhon (I er cahier, Jan.-Feb. 1912); Meisel, op. cit., pp. 183 ff. Edouard Berth will say in years to come that "in forming, together with Georges Valois, the Cercle Proudhon, with the aim of fighting democracy from the dual standpoint, the Nationalist and the Syndicalist, we came close to creating Fascism avant la lettre....." This statement is re-echoed by Valois himself in his post-war book on Fascism, when he says that the Cercle "laid in 1912 the foundations for the Fascist synthesis." Georges Valois, Le Fascisme, p. 29; Freund, p. 231 ; for parallel developments in Italy see John A. Thayer: Italy and the Great War, Politics and Culture (1904); Enzo Santarelli: "Le Socialisme nationale en Italie: Précédents et origines," Le Mouvement Social (Jan.-Mar. 1965. Nr. 50); Jack J. Roth: "The Roots of Italian Fascism: Sorel and Sorelismo," Journal of Modern History (Vol. 39, 1967).

¹⁶ Ernest Nolte: Three Faces of Fascism (1966), p. 473; Eugen Weber, "Nationalism, Socialism and National-Socialism in France,"French Historical Studies, Vol. II. N. 3 (Spring, 1962); Yves Guchet: "Georges Valois ou l'Illusion Fasciste," Revue Française de Science Politique (Vol. XV, 1965).

¹⁷Georges Valois: L'Homme qui vient: Philosophie de l'Autorité (1909), Introduction.

¹⁸G. Valois: La Monarchie et la classe ouvrière (1914), p. 18.

¹⁹To cap it all, Georges Valois died in the Nazi concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen in 1944, having successively fallen out with the Action Française, given up Fascism, renounced anti-Semitism, embraced technocratic planning, invented the term "Libéralisme communautaire," and returned to simple French patriotism. . . . What a comment on the spiritual torment of our century!