SOURCE: "Georges Sorel: On Lenin and Mussolini," in Contemporary French Civilization, Vol. II, No. 2, Winter, 1978, pp. 231-52.

[In the following excerpt, Rot h examines the influence of the writings of Marx, Prudhomme, Vico, and Bergson on Sorel's system of beliefs.]

The noted littérateur Daniel Halévy, for some years a close associate of Georges Sorel, tells a story about Sorel that is too good to be true.¹ In the early 1930s, about a decade after Sorel's death; the ambassadors of Soviet Russia and fascist Italy in Paris, upon hearing that Sorel's grave was in disrepair, independently and almost simultaneously informed the director of the Bibliothèque Nationale of the desire of their respective governments to erect a monument to him. Rolland Marcel, the director of the library who had himself known Sorel, asked Halévy for guidance in this delicate matter. Halévy, somewhat nonplused and not without embarrassment, made inquiries with Sorel's friends and relatives. After some time, he returned to Marcel with the response that Sorel's tomb was a family matter which concerned no one else. And Halévy speculated, "Sorel l'aurait ainsi donné." For Sorel, in truth, there probably was no inconsistency in his common admiration for Lenin and Mussolini while at the same time he would have insisted on a certain detachment with respect to both. The reason is clear enough: the development of his thought is a problem in apocalyptic political conceptions. Since 1886, he had been preoccupied with the problem of decadence. Almost from the start, Sorel's search was for a politico-spiritual conquest which by the 1930s (if not before) had become a quest of considerable relevance to young Frenchmen who came of age during the interwar years.

Sorel had turned initially to a Proudhonian moralism.² It may be that the disasters of 1870-71 which took place in his youth led him to Proudhon, though he rejected the specifics of anarchism. As Proudhon before him, however, he was convinced that France had lost her morals, her sense of the "heroic" and the "sublime." France, in short, was threatened with decadence. By decadence he" meant the growth of a utilitarian and materialistic democracy and the predominance of rationalistic intellectuals. They corrupted bourgeois and proletarian alike. From the start, he wanted a moral transformation, a revival of "pessimistic values essential to Christian morals" and a "society based on work."

With the socialist parliamentary success of 1893, he announced his conversion to Marxism—it was the bourgeoisie who were decadent.³ Though Sorel initially pronounced himself orthodox, he turned shortly to Bernstein's revision of Marx. Then, after his discovery of Bergson, he went radically beyond Bernstein. In the meantime, Sorel had been drawn to the Italian political and intellectual scene. He was attracted by the tradition of political realism and emphasis on the psychology of politics and was soon publishing in Italian as well as French Marxist reviews. He discovered Bergson and Vico almost simultaneously. From an amalgam that also included Proudhon and Marx emerged a unique conception of socialism. There was no determinism in history. But there were periodic "ricorsi" or renewals which arose spontaneously in the masses. Only a ricorso, a return to a primitive state of mind, could create new moral values and restore élan to the historical process. In syndicalism he saw the authentic manifestation of the proletarian movement Marx had written about—Marxism he called "social poetry." He urged French and Italian workers to isolate themselves from the corrupt world of politicians and intellectuals. The trade unions were to work silently at the creation of a proletarian order of the future.

Sorel, however, was among the first to join the Dreyfusards with the opening of the affaire in 1898.⁴ The moral issue, for him, was overriding. The proletariat had to emancipate all who suffered injustice. In an abrupt reversal, he urged the workers to join with the enlightened bourgeoisie in rallying to the defense of Dreyfus and the republic. But after the great Dreyfusard electoral victory of 1899, he had grave misgivings. Once in power the defenders of Dreyfus displayed the same selfish immorality as their opponents. He was repelled by what he thought a vulgar anticlericalism and antimilitarism. He had nothing but contempt for socialist politicians who used proletarian support to win power and once installed became indistinguishable from other politicians. Parliamentary democracy, he was finally convinced, corrupted everything it touched.

By 1903, fortified by studies of such epic themes as the decline of Rome and the rise of Christianity, Sorel had become convinced that only a catastrophic revolution could bring a ricorso. In the decade that followed he reached the height of his career.⁵ He had become a regular Thursday afternoon visitor of the bookshop of the young poet, Charles Péguy, on the rue de la Sorbonne. With a standing-room-only audience firing questions at him, mostly friendly young students, but also French and visiting Italian political and literary figures, he discussed any and all subjects. The "Socrates of the Latin Quarter," he was called. What must have intrigued his audience as well as his readers during these years was his extraordinary political and intellectual transformation.

Sorel turned first to revolutionary syndicalism in France and Italy. The turn of the century was the "heroic" period of syndicalism with the formation of the Confédération générale du travail (CGT) in 1903 and the Confederazione generale del lavoro (CGL) in 1906. These were years of violent strikes, sabotage, and repeated clashes with the police and army. In 1906 the first version of the Reflections on violence appeared.⁶ Here, and in other books and articles, Sorel attempted to explain, primarily to French militants, the historical potential of their movement.⁷ What Sorel saw in syndicalism was something comparable to primitive Christianity. It was impelled by a revolutionary myth—all great movements were impelled by myths. A myth was an expression of the strongest beliefs of a group, born of daily struggle and nourished by the loves, fears, and hatreds of the group. Its adherents felt themselves to be an army of truth fighting an army of evil. The myth of the proletariat was that of the general strike, an apocalyptic vision of the day the rotten and detested bourgeois regime would be destroyed. Moreover, he viewed syndicalists as an elite. The unions did not include all workers, only the most militant. They deliberately isolated themselves from the corrupt world about them. The technique of the movement was violence. Violence was the refusal to compromise in word and deed. Proletarian violence would culminate (he refused to speculate when) with a catastrophic revolution, but he did not rule out the possibility that proletarian violence might restore in the bourgeoisie something of its former vigor. As for the post-revolutionary regime, Sorel saw it impelled by a morale. A new value system would emerge from the revolution. It would inspire the perfection of machinery and the advance of production. Syndicalist society would be a society of producers. There was no need for the apparatus of the state. Politics he likened to friction in a machine. The new order would be dedicated to the creation of a society of heroes, heroes of production.

By 1908 Sorel began to doubt the future of syndicalism in France.⁸ The CGT, he observed, had been compromised by turning to the Socialist party for support and protection. Except for a handful of close associates, he appeared to have no serious following. Two years later Sorel broke with Italian syndicalism (where his following was considerably greater) for substantially the same reasons. But by 1910 Sorel was already deeply involved with the monarchist Action française (AF), the exponent of "integral nationalism."⁹ In France a group of young monarchists had seized upon Sorel's notion of a bourgeois revival, declared themselves disciples of both Sorel and the monarchist leader Charles Maurras, and from 1906 to the war attempted a doctrinal and organizational merger of monarchism and syndicalism. In Italy roughly parallel efforts were underway in the nationalist movement. Sorel was obviously flattered by the attention he now received. He noted, moreover, that the Action française with its para-military units, the camelots du roi, was beginning to look like a formidable movement. In 1909 he announced in the monarchist newspaper that he was not in principle opposed to a restoration. In 1910, after a monarchist playwright had produced a play on bourgeois cowardice (based on the Reflections) and Péguy had published his widely acclaimed Jeanne d'Arc, Sorel announced that a patriotic and Catholic renaissance was underway—he had found another ricorso.

From 1910 to 1913 Sorel devoted himself to the cause of integral nationalism. He now inspired or participated in attempts to launch reviews that brought together antidemocrats of left and right.¹⁰ One may be tempted to dismiss what he now wrote as opportunist, but in fact, the basis for his reversal of 1910 was at least partly inherent in the widely quoted passage in the Reflections on bourgeois revival. He saw nationalism, in any case, impelled by a myth compounded of the patriotic and the religious. The myth was rooted in the widespread fear that France was in peril. For France, he argued, there was a way of life whose validity had been established by history: the complex of institutions and values, classical and Catholic, of the Seventeenth century. The myth of nationalism was that of a revitalized nation purged of alien elements (Jews, Protestants, Freemasons) and aberrant institutions (notably, parliamentary democracy). The AF he thought a bourgeois elite, though sorely lacking in revolutionary leadership. The violence of the camelots (which he greatly admired) could lead to a successful coup. As for the order to be established, its morale would be classical and Catholic. A king or dictator would restore the state as the foremost institution, though syndicalist ideas could be incorporated in its structure. The regime would foster a cult of the nation, the perfection of national institutions at home, and the pursuit of "grandeur" abroad. Whatever enthusiasm Sorel may have had for the AF (and it was never without reservation) had vanished, however, by 1913.¹¹ Sorel was excluded from Péguy's shop when Péguy could no longer tolerate Sorel's new anti-Semitism. Provincial monarchist circles would have nothing to do with anything that smacked of proletarian revolutionism. Even Maurras was eventually horrified by Sorel's lack of intellectual discipline. Moreover, Sorel himself had detected flaws in the AF. It was led by intellectuals who seemed interested only in writing about revolution and it ignored the proletariat. By 1914 Sorel was convinced that both the proletariat and the bourgeoisie were, especially in France, "under the direction of Mammon."

When war came in August 1914 Sorel was in despair.¹² He was contemptuous of the "plutocratic Entente." If anything, he wanted a German victory. He wrote to Benedetto Croce, with whom he had corresponded since 1896, that the war would, nevertheless, shake Europe to its foundations. But when he scanned the horizon for a ricorso, he saw nothing: "Whoever believes in the doctrines of Vico looks everywhere in vain . . . for the direction from which rejuvenation may come. . . . [And he added, significantly,] . . . the Slavs are alien to the ideas which have directed our civilization; by succumbing to decadence we become Slavs; we are ripe for Russian domination."¹³ What the world needed, he asserted in 1916, was a "catastrophe" capable of plunging it into a "new Middle Ages"—a "severe medieval penitence."¹⁴ But at no time in 1917 did he exhibit any great interest in Russian events.

The first act of the Bolshevik Revolution to command Sorel's attention was Lenin's dissolution of the Constituent Assembly on January 19, 1918, an act, he thought, of "powerful originality."¹⁵ By degrees, Sorel mobilized his energies. He had meanwhile found another bookshop on the Left Bank where he held court, that of Paul Delesalle, an associate of his syndicalist days. To his death in 1922 it was primarily to Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution that he gave his allegiance.

During the first months of 1918, however, he feared that the regime would not survive: "Everything," he wrote to Delesalle in February, "may end in an immense disaster."¹⁶ From the start he had at least one reservation about the revolution—too many Jews. Trotsky, he speculated, must resemble the Russian Jewish revolutionaries he had encountered in Paris, "talkative, braggarts, halfhallucinated." Trotsky might be in the pay of the Entente. In any case, he noted, events in Russia indicated that European socialism "will go down before Bolshevism." It was not yet clear what bolshevism was or how it could be adapted in the West. But by June he was ready to set aside his faint hopes in syndicalism by publicly supporting the bolsheviks.

Still preoccupied with the nature of bolshevism, in the latter half of 1918 Sorel grew increasingly bitter at efforts of the Entente to stifle the new regime.¹⁷ Plekhanov who had sided with Kerensky and against Lenin, he speculated, must be a "British agent." Entente diplomacy was behind the Social Revolutionary uprising in July. The entire bourgeoisie, he was convinced, European and American alike, saw in bolshevism the gravest danger yet to the established order. It was "because of . . . [their] . . . hatred," he wrote, "that I have so much sympathy for Lenin and his companions." He was still uncertain, he told Delesalle, of the meaning of the revolution—what could have been said of the French Revolution if it had ended with the Convention? But when he read that the Fifth Congress of Soviets had reserved political rights exclusively to producers, he was elated. And when he heard that the Red Guard shouted "Death to the intellectuals," he was convinced—a society of producers was in the offing. If only the regime could hold on long enough, a socialist renaissance would follow. In a note appended to a collection of prewar articles on syndicalism he asserted that the victory of the Entente in November had been the triumph of a demagogic plutocracy that had now turned on the bolsheviks. "But," he asserted, "what will the plutocracies gain by the extermination of the Russian revolutionaries? Will not the blood of the martyrs once again be fertile .. . ? One must be blind not to see that the Russian Revolution is the dawn of a new era."¹⁸

In 1919 Sorel began to publish regularly once again, notwithstanding his illness. Lenin, he wrote to Croce, had shown himself to be "a really practical man."¹⁹ American journalists had observed a constant improvement in conditions in Russia. He now became a regular contributor to the Resto del Carlino of Bologna and the Tempo of Rome, as well as the Ronda, the Roman literary review. Most of some 60 articles that he was now to publish in Italy were addressed to the new Russian regime. But his most important article of 1919, the "Pour Lénine," was published in France.²⁰ The essay was a response to an article in the Journal de Genève in which the well-known Swiss professor and journalist Paul Seippel had asserted that Lenin and Trotsky must have read Sorel's Reflections during their exile in Switzerland, that the Bolshevik Revolution was a "terrifyingly logical" application of Sorel's doctrine of violence, and that the Bolshevik Revolution was a mere prelude to a great revolutionary wave about to engulf all Europe. Sorel replied to these charges in an essay appended to the fourth edition of the Reflections, though later published in the French and Italian press. He had no reason to believe, Sorel asserted, that Lenin had employed his ideas. But if that were true, he would be uncommonly proud to have contributed to the intellectual formation of a man who seemed to be simultaneously "the greatest theoretician that Socialism has produced since Marx" and "the head of a state whose genius recalls that of Peter the Great." He explained that the Reflections contained no apology for terrorism. He expressly regretted the brutality of the bolsheviks but the number of people shot was considerably smaller than the victims of the Entente blockade. The excesses of the revolution he attributed to its "Muscovite character" and the large number of Jews attracted to the movement. What was transpiring, in any event, transcended these considerations: Russia was "Rome" bringing to the world a new civilization. He concluded on an ecstatic note: "May the plutocratic democracies who are starving Russia be cursed! I am only an old man whose life is at the mercy of trifling accidents; but may I, before descending into the tomb, see the humiliation of the arrogant democracies, today so shamelessly triumphant."²¹

Throughout 1920 Sorel scanned the horizon for a socialist renaissance. He avidly followed the great wave of strikes in France and Italy.²² But when the Quai d'Orsay recognized the Wrangel regime, he charged France with becoming the citadel of reaction. When the strikes came to nothing, he was convinced that European socialist leaders would betray Lenin at the next congress of the Third International. "In a word," he wrote to Croce in August, "everything is rotten in Europe." That year he began to contribute to the new Revue communiste, dedicated to Integral Communism and to the support of the Third International. He had, in fact, been asked to join the staff of Humanité but that, he complained, would have been too arduous. By 1921 Sorel was once again bedridden and was only occasionally able to visit old friends and haunts. In March he met Jean Variot on a Paris street.²³ Variot was a monarchist who had assiduously recorded Sorel's talks since 1908 when he met Sorel at Péguy's. Variot informed him that it was widely bruited about that both Lenin's regime and Mussolini's fascist movement were inspired by his doctrines. Sorel replied that he had heard the same thing and was greatly flattered. He doubted, however, that one individual could be that influential. Besides, he had not invented anything new. His doctrines were "in the air." With regard to Lenin, it was hardly necessary for a man of Lenin's genius to have read his books. Lenin too had taken part in the attempt to restore Marxism to its pure form. Lenin had also become a proponent of violence, that is, of Marxism "to the hilt." That year Sorel's illness reduced the volume of his correspondence dramatically, while he published no more than a half-dozen articles. But among these was "Lénine d'après Gorki," of which he was inordinately proud.²⁴ It appeared in both the Revue communiste and Antonio Gramsci's Ordine Nuovo, organ of the Turinese communists. Sorel took Maxim Gorki's brief study of Lenin as confirmation of views he himself had expressed in "Pour Lénine" on the role of bolshevik myths. He boasted to friends that Bergson had read the article and had commented, "You give the pragmatic criterion a precision and a universality that it has not yet received."²⁵ Briefly, Sorel revived a prewar correspondence with the historian of Rome, Guglielmo Ferrero.²⁶ Ferrero had recently compared the coming of bolshevism with the disasters that shook the Roman Empire in the Third century. At the beginning of 1922 Sorel prepared the second edition of a prewar study of the fall of Rome, adding a forward in which he continued the quarrel with Ferrero.

News that Sorel was gravely ill early in 1922 prompted the editor of Humanité, the official organ of the French Communist Party since the Congress of Tours in December 1920, to interview Sorel.²⁷ Sorel turned repeatedly to the subject of Russia: "We must go forward! That is the sole objective! We must save her!" On March 22 Roberto Michels, a prewar enthusiast of Sorelian syndicalism now at the University of Basel, met Sorel at Delesalle's bookshop. He recorded that Sorel expressed confidence in the vital energies of the Russian, Italian, and perhaps, the German people. Sorel asked Michels to send as many writings of Lenin and Trotsky as he could obtain in Switzerland. Michels, whose politics had changed, expressed the belief that these might "set the world aflame." When the conversation threatened to become difficult, Michels left the bookshop and never saw him again. The summer of 1922 was Sorel's last. On his deathbed, not surprisingly, he received visits from old friends in the Action française and on the staff of Humanité.²⁸ In a voice that was barely audible he was heard to gasp: "Il faut aider la Russie!"

What clearly emerged from Sorel's work on Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution were the outlines of what Sorel took to be still another ricorso.²⁹ To be sure, as in the case of French revolutionary syndicalism and integral nationalism, Sorel saw in the Bolshevik Revolution a national phenomenon. But the war and postwar era had also given to the revolution a significance of far greater magnitude.

The revolution was impelled, Sorel argued, by bolshevik myths. Though explosive in character, these had a distant and obscure origin in the Russian past. Their rapid appearance had been favored by Russia's conflict with the Entente and her isolation from the bourgeois world. Both the social and national discontents of the masses had shaped these myths: the hatred of the workers for their masters (which had merged with the working class myths of Europe) and the protest of the "real Russia" against ideas and institutions imported from the West. What sustained bolshevism, therefore, was the hatred of the masses for the "rich foreigners" who had succeeded in infiltrating what Gorki called the "Republic of the Poor." The revolution was also sustained, however, by the vision of a new world in formation. The desire was ambivalent and incoherent but Gorki had given brilliant expression to it in "visions worthy of the Hebrew prophets." He quoted Gorki: "It is the Russians who are going into battle for the triumph of Justice, the vanguard of the peoples of the world, . . . Only yesterday the world considered them half-savage and yet today, almost dying of hunger, they are marching to victory or death, ardent and brave like old warriors."³⁰ Gorki's vision, he asserted, was no rhetorical device. It was an expression of "the noblest sentiments . . . in the soul of an oppressed people." Lenin, moreover, knew how to use the desire of the masses for a cataclysmic transformation.

Sorel gave primary attention to the role of charismatic leadership in matters concerning organization. The emphasis on leadership now went far beyond anything developed in his previous work. That Russia patiently endured the revolution was because she felt herself ruled once again by a "true Muscovite." But Lenin, though hard, was a "genius in politics," a "doctrine in action." He possessed, according to Gorki, something of the saint about him. His temperate, almost ascetic life set him apart from the masses. He had already become, according to Gorki, a saint in India—Asia, Sorel noted, was a good judge in matters of sainthood. He served as "l'hommeexemple" of the revolution, providing the masses with "a mystique that gave them the strength to suffer for the sake of a goal." Sorel quoted Gorki on Lenin: "Respect for the ascetic life, disinterested devotion to the cause of the poor, a sincere pity for human misery, .. . the world still wants these heroes to lead the way to liberation."³¹ The elite that served Lenin was to be found in the soviets. The soviets, by assuming the role of educating and disciplining the masses, were not unlike the syndicates to whom he had previously assigned this role. The soviets were, in any event, prepared to accept all the hard and implacable realities of the revolution.

The technique of bolshevism, Sorel argued, was violence, a pragmatic Marxism prepared to "go the limit." The employment of violence could not be determined in advance in accordance with scholastic formulas, as Kautsky had asserted. A revolution is "a storm in which the unforeseen triumphs." The bolsheviks, therefore, could not recoil from the most terrifying severities. He conceded that the design of history which obliged Lenin to kill some for the good of others might "torment the soul." But he quoted Gorki: "One cannot demand of someone who has not known justice that he be just." It was pointless, therefore, to compare bolshevik police and tribunals with European institutions that bore the same names. The Red Army struck Sorel as a unique institution in this regard. It was a revolutionary army to be compared with Cromwell's "Ironsides." The class struggle and the war of liberation had been brilliantly joined in the idea of the worker-soldier. This was a far cry from the bourgeois nation-in-arms that still maintained the military traditions of the old monarchies. The essential purpose of revolutionary violence, in any case, was to maintain the idea of "scission" in the masses. He recalled his writings on primitive Christianity: violence maintained the vision of an army of good facing an army of evil.

Bolshevism, though fighting for its life, was also a functioning revolutionary order. The transformation, he maintained, had already gone well beyond anything achieved by the French Revolution. The bolsheviks had brought about the "greatest revolution that has taken place in two thousand years."

What impelled the new regime was a revolutionary morale, what Sorel called "mass-force"—the tsarist regime, so hard and violent, had none. It was the overnight release of moral energies in the masses that had saved the regime and more than once. The apparatus of constraint did not maintain the regime. Neither were its military and economic achievements to be credited to the exercise of Lenin's absolute authority. What the masses saw in socialism was the hope of a great technological and industrial advance, the first revolution of its kind in history. They knew that the difficulties to be faced were far greater than revolutionaries had ever confronted. They were obliged to destroy and reconstruct in a fashion that eliminated dependence on foreign or domestic capital. The revolutionary morale of the masses, however, would prevent their becoming bourgeois, that is "hallucinated by the mirage of becoming wealthy by a stroke of fortune." This was the "aim of old and decrepit people." The regime's most important "orders of the day" to workers and peasants were: " . . . be honest in money matters, be economical, do not be lazy, do not steal, observe the strictest discipline in work."³² This might appear to be bourgeois advice but these rules, Sorel asserted, were always valid.

Sorel saw in Lenin's dictatorship of the proletariat the emergence of a society of producers. Jacobin methods would not in the long run provide a durable foundation for the regime, nor would the withering away of the state be an easy matter. That Lenin played a preponderant role in the interim disturbed him not at all. He was, after all, to be compared "with tsars and not with presidents of the United States." For Sorel the organization of soviets was ideally suited to facilitate the genesis of law. The juridical development of a society of producers bore the closest relation to the process of production. The soviets could readily determine on the basis of experience which practices were beneficial and which harmful to production. The legal system might center on the basic concept of the right to work, the equivalent to the bourgeois right to property: "The Soviet dictatorship . . . will no longer have any reason for being when the working masses of Russia realize their . . . rights are based on their merits as producers."³³ Though Sorel had initially greeted workers' control as a vindication of prewar syndicalism, he was quick to recognize the superiority of managerial control in largescale industry. He noted that Bertrand Russell, who had visited Russia, had recognized in Lenin a talent for engaging as managers "men of the American type." Such men were far more interested in the satisfactions which derive from power and achievement than they were in the accumulation of personal wealth. Marx, moreover, had clearly indicated that Russia was not obliged to follow in the wake of the more advanced capitalist countries—the manager made this possible. What prevented capitalism from exploiting the full potential of modern industry was its usurious and commercial origins. The removal of the capitalist removed from the economy the element that threatened to limit its progress. By means of managers Russia could skip a full-blown capitalism, avoid its tortures and appropriate its fruits, while developing her own institutions.

What Sorel saw as the technique of the regime was to be found in Lenin's idea of the "general line," that is, a "pragmatic Marxism, exactly informed and free from prejudice," that aimed at conquest at home and abroad. The key to technological and industrial conquest was invention. He noted that the Taylor system, reward and punishment, piece work, and even the payment of capitalist wages to specialists and technicians had been introduced to increase or improve production both in industry and agriculture. That Lenin employed certain bourgeois ideas was all to his credit. The new regime must take over from capitalism its capacity for making constant inroads on the unknown. The worker-inventor, he thought, was on the same level as the artist. Artists and workers in Russia already understood that they were both victims of the bourgeoisie and had come to regard each other as brothers. Conquest of another kind was also foreseen by Sorel—imperialism was fundamental to the Russian spirit. For centuries Russia had looked on Europe as a prey that would someday be hers. The revolution had only reinforced these sentiments. Lenin and his followers in their bitter polemics with Western social democrats had long made clear their hatred of the West. Moreover, the bolsheviks would never forgive the attempt to dismember Russia. Once internal difficulties were overcome, Russia would once again menace Europe. But Europe, Sorel thought, seemed unaware of the danger. The extraordinary longevity of Byzantium had given Europe no reason to despair. The capitalists hoped that they could continue to produce goods in great abundance and thereby last indefinitely. A bolshevik conquest would, in any event, be violent. It would suppress all the conventional lies. Everywhere the Russians would introduce either institutions similar to their own or integral Bolshevism itself. But Russian imperialism would not be limited to Europe. The entire would, under the influence of an effete and decadent West, deserved to be destroyed. The revolution, consequently, was as anti-Western as it was anti-bourgeois. Patriots everywhere already looked to Russia for assistance. The isolation imposed by the Entente only drove Russia closer to them. Bolshevism alone would profit from anti-Western sentiments in Asia and in the Near East. He urged Lenin to seize the opportunity: "If we are grateful to Roman soldiers for having replaced abortive, stray, or impotent civilizations by a civilization whose pupils we are still in law, literature, and monuments, how grateful will the future have to be to Russian soldiers of Socialism! How lightly will historians take the criticism of the orators hired by the democracies to denounce the excesses of the Bolsheviks. New Carthages must not triumph over what is now the Rome of the proletariat."³⁴

Sorel's career appeared to reach its climax with Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution. But there is a complication. After 1919 Sorel became increasingly aware of another revolutionary and another revolution in postwar Europe—Mussolini and the nascent fascist movement.

For at least a decade before the March on Rome, if not earlier, Sorel had followed the career of Mussolini. When Mussolini, who had been an intense admirer of Sorel, was appointed editor of the Avanti! in 1912, becoming virtual head of the Italian Socialist party, Sorel had asserted: "Our Mussolini is no ordinary socialist. Believe me: you will see him one day, perhaps, at the head of a sacred battalion saluting the Italian flag with his sword. He is an Italian of the fifteenth century, a condottiere!"³⁵

During the latter stages of the war and the immediate postwar years Sorel, now completely in despair of France, seemed to be on the lookout for some kind of ricorso in Italy.³⁶ But when the great wave of strikes came in the north in 1919-20, he was mystified by the failure of the socialists to seize power. With Mussolini's revival of the Fasci in 1919 and the beginning of Blackshirt punitive raids, he identified fascism with bourgeois reaction. For some months he genuinely feared that the Blackshirts might become masters of the street. By 1921, however, he was prepared to admit that Mussolini was a "political genius no less extraordinary than Lenin." When Variot had suggested that not only Lenin but Mussolini too was Sorel's disciple, Sorel did not deny the possibility in the latter case. But Mussolini, he said, was the inventor of something that was not in his books, "the union of the national and the social, which I studied but never fathomed."

In his correspondence of 1921 Sorel's alarm gave way to admiration and then conviction that fascism would triumph. "All Europe," he was convinced in April, was "destined to experience" a Thermidorian reaction.³⁷ Moreover, the fascists were "not entirely wrong" by invoking his name—their action demonstrated clearly "the value of triumphant violence." Fascism, he wrote in August, was "the most original social phenomenon in Italy." In September he asserted that the fascists were defending the Italian national heritage. The Italian state had not only failed to protect the bourgeoisie, but had also failed to receive Italy's just demands at the Peace Conference. "We are at the beginning of a movement," he asserted, "that will completely destroy the parliamentary edifice."

Though he had not quite called the fascist movement a ricorso, it is likely that by 1922 Sorel was close to it. Michels recalled that when on March 22 Sorel spoke highly of Lenin at Delesalle's bookshop, he also exhibited great sympathy for Mussolini.³⁸ Variot noted that at Delesalle's Sorel had said: " . . . the two capital facts of the postwar era are: the action of Lenin, which I believe lasting, and that of Mussolini, who will certainly triumph in Italy, notwithstanding the coalition of the left and the revolutionaries."³⁹ Within two months after Sorel's death on August 29, Mussolini was named prime minister after armed Blackshirts staged the March on Rome.

One must resist the temptation to dismiss Sorel's career as politically irresponsible or opportunist. Moreover, no part of it may be viewed in isolation. The essentials in apocalyptic politics are not political but religious and his views on Lenin and Mussolini assume meaningful perspective only against the entire sweep of his career.

Sorel's search was always"for a ricorso for which primitive Christianity was the prototype. A ricorso was a movement impelled by a charismatic excitement. Though it arose out of decadence, it strove for a sublime end. His search led him always, therefore, to the political extremes, among those who seemed most eager for drastic and total renovation. But Sorel was no mere observer. He was also a believer. So deeply did he believe that he frequently saw in a movement what in reality was not there. His career, therefore, was almost necessarily a succession of hopes and deceptions. What facilitated his movement among the extremes was his essential pragmatism. To be sure, he most desired a ricorso on the "left." The break would be more dramatic, the transformation more complete. But he found in the extremes alternatives which, apparently, were personally acceptable. The extremes were for him aspects of a single system of thought, a single mood of revolt. Though the basic pattern of his ideas was apparently repeated for each of the movements to which he was attracted, his views nonetheless underwent important evolution. The movements were impelled by revolutionary myths, led by elites, and dedicated to violence. They were capable of creating a new order, each with its own morale, its own organization, its own technique. But they were all "totalist," that is, permeated by the myth that brought them to power and a revolutionary morale that sustained their purity of purpose once in power. They all aimed at the establishment of a society of heroes. The ricorsi he anticipated, nevertheless, changed progressively in character. Until the war he was thinking largely in terms of a French or possibly, an Italian national revival. But the Bolshevik Revolution had for him a "civilizational" significance and so too the Italian fascist movement, though less clearly so. Sorel's conception of revolutionary syndicalism appeared to be dominated by the idea of class. But the class idea was obscured in his later work. Though he saw in the AF a bourgeois elite, what he described seemed more like a self-constituted national elite. Neither bolshevism nor fascism, in any case, was exclusively a class movement but compounded of both the social and the national. And finally, Sorel's ricorsi changed in quality. The apocalyptic idea was always in evidence in his work, but it tended to deteriorate. Though never vulgarized, it nevertheless lost much of its initial subtlety. The ricorso became less an essay in Christian pessimism and more a problem in social engineering.

Sorel's argument in support of Lennin's revolution was unique. It was not a Marxist argument. Indeed, there is some question if Sorel ever was a Marxist except for a brief period during his formative years. Quite apart from the overall development of his thought, which can hardly be called Marxist, was the centrality of his notion of myth. Sorel saw movements impelled by a variety of myths throughout history. To be sure, in describing contemporary movements he used such terms as "proletarian" and "bourgeois" and rather freely. But these were not so much class designations as states of mind. For Sorel what impelled the historical process was the struggle of a revolutionary sect animated by a value system containing expectations of apocalyptic success. But nothing required the myth to be based on class grievances or class grievances alone. Sorel's argument was designed to fit pre-existing notions regarding ricorsi in general and revolutionary syndicalism in particular. Lenin's revolution had come as the vindication of a frustrated old man who had given up all hope of a ricorso. It is significant that Sorel appended the "Pour Lénine" to the Reflections, written on behalf of revolutionary syndicalism. But in doing so, Sorel did not become a bolshevik. Lenin was made out to be a Sorelian. Indeed, what one sees in Sorel's conception of the soviets was his prewar idea of a self-governing elite of producers but with Lenin as their chief. So great was his aversion to políticos and intellectuals that Sorel did not see or refused to see the Bolshevik party, the reality behind the soviets. His interpretation of bolshevism, therefore, was not only in conflict with Marxism but also with Leninism. The argument Sorel presented was his own. It assumed implicitly, if not explicitly, a complex of postwar revolutionary possibilities that included both bolshevism and fascism. Some such complex had been implied in his prewar move from revolutionary syndicalism to the AF. Sorel was drawn to bolshevism and fascism (and almost concurrently) not so much because he thought them similar but because he saw them as alternatives. To posit, as he did, the "decline of the West" was to raise the possibility of at least two revolutionary choices: one could be on the side of the barbarians and start all over again, or on the side of an equally barbaric reaction that would initiate the rejuvenation of an aging civilization. One could, conceivably, be enthusiastic about either ricorso or even both. It was unfortunate that Sorel's comments on fascism were fragmentary, that he never explicitly endorsed it, and that he never quite clarified its "European" significance. But others were to fill these gaps. During the 1920s and '30s Sorel's vision, that the choice for Europe lay between communism and fascism, became a commonplace in many revolutionary quarters.

This was especially the case in France among the young "non-conformists" of the 1930s described by Loubet del Bayle.⁴⁰ Many sought inspiration in Sorel's work, though some were perceptive enough to sense the dangers in the quest for renewal and the heroic. Sorel's search for the Apocalypse and those who continued the pursuit during the interwar years come close to revealing the character of the crisis among intellectuals in the Twentieth century. Their work was symptomatic of a profound intellectual and moral disturbance—the desertion by intellectuals of the democratic idea. And their story was something of a tragedy. They sought to evoke the sublime, but helped, rather, to unleash the beast.

NOTES

¹ Daniel Halévy, "Préface," in Pierre Andreu, Notre maitre: M. Sorel (Paris, 1953), pp. 19-20; Andreu is possibly the best single source on the biographical aspects of Sorel's career.

² See especially, Contribution à l'étude profane de la Bible (Paris, 1889); Le procès de Socrate (Paris, 1889); and "Essai sur la philosophie de Proudhon," Revue philosophique, XXXIII-XXXIV (June-July 1892), 622-638 and 41-68.

³ "Science et socialisme," Revue philosophique, XXXV (1893), 509-511; "Lettere de Georges Sorel a Benedetto Croce" (hereafter cited Sorel to Croce), June 2, 1897, Critica, XXV (1927), 45; "Préface pour Colajanni," Matériaux d'une théorie du prolétariat (hereafter cited Matériaux)(3d ed.; Paris, 1929), pp. 175-200; "Études sur Vico," Devenir social, II (October-December 1896), 786, 796-809, 934-935, and 1046. The argument concerning a syndicalist ricorso was best presented during these years in L'Avenir socialiste des syndicats (Paris, 1898).

⁴ "Lettere di Giorgio Sorel a Uberto Lagardelle" (hereafter cited Sorel to Lagardelle), August 10 and 15, 1898 and August 21 and September 14, 1901, Educazione fascista, XI (March-November 1933), 239-242, 242-243, and 328-330. See also "De l'église et de l'état," Cahiers de la quinzaine, III (1901), 55-58 and 61-64; and "Préface pour Gatti," Matériaux, pp. 201-237.

⁵ Sorel's interest in these themes were in evidence from the beginning of his career but especially in an extended series of articles on "La fin du paganisme" which appeared in the Marxist periodical Ere nouvelle in 1894 and revised several years later as La ruine du monde antique (Paris, 1901). Five years later came Le système historique de Renan (hereafter cited Le système) (Paris, 1905-06) where he developed the idea of the rise of Christianity as the classic example of a ricorso. For "Thursday afternoon's" at Péguy's see Halévy, Péguy and les Cahiers de la quinzaine (New York, 1947), pp. 71-74.

⁶ The Réflexions sur la violence (hereafter cited Réflexions) first appeared in article form in the Mouvement socialiste and the Divenire sociale (Rome) in 1906 and in book form (with the editorial aid of Halévy) in 1908 published by the Librairie Pages Libres.

⁷ For matters cited in the text, see especially: Introduction à l'économie moderne (2d ed.; Paris, 1922), pp. 131 and 137; Le système, pp. 198-208 and 377; Insegnamenti sociali della economia contemporanea (Milan, 1907), pp. 38, 53-55, 172-173, 278n, and 389-398; "Préface de 1905," Matériaux, p. 70; Réflexions (10th ed.; Paris, 1946), pp. 35-36, 44, 50, 110, and 434; Les illusions du progrès (hereafter cited Illusions) (4th ed.; Paris, 1927), pp. 12, 136, and 385; and La décomposition du Marxisme (Paris, 1908), p. 50. To these may be added articles published in the Mouvement socialiste and the Divenire sociale.

⁸ See especially Sorel's letters to Croce and Lagardelle in 1908-09; also Lettres à Paul Delesalle (hereafter cited Sorel to Delesalle) (Paris, 1947), November 2, 1908, p. 108. On Sorel's break with Italian syndicalism see: A. Pezzotti, "Une partie syndicaliste en Italie," Mouvement socialiste, XIII (March 1911), 184-185.

⁹ "Socialistes antiparlementaires," Action Française, August 22, 1909; also "Giorgio Sorel e i monarchici francesi," Giornale d'Italia, November 20, 1910. On Péguy's Jeanne d'Arc, see especially Sorel's "Le réveil de l'âme française," Action Française, April 14, 1910, published on the same day in the Florentine review the Voce. For Sorel and the AF generally during this period see Eugen Weber, Action française: royalism and reaction in twentieth-century France (Stanford, 1962), pp. 7385; for Sorel and Italian nationalism see Gian Biagio Furiozzi, Sorel e l'Italia (Florence, 1975), pp. 237-264.

¹⁰ The reviews were the Cité française, Indépendance, and the Cahiers du Cercle Proudhon. The ideas developed below are to be found largely in the Indépendance which Sorel directed from 1911 to 1913; the Cité française (except for a brochure announcing its publication) never saw the light of day and the Cahiers was the work of monarchist disciples to which Sorel did not contribute. Other sources include: Propos de Georges Sorel (hereafter cited Propos), ed. Jean Variot (Paris, 1935), "Grandeur et décadence," appended to the Illusions, and several articles which appeared in the Resto del Carlino of Bologna in 1910.

¹¹ On the break with Péguy, see Marcel Péguy, La rupture de Charles Péguy et de Georges Sorel, d'après des documents inédits (Paris, 1930), pp. 14, 19, 38, and 58; see also Sorel's letters to Croce from September to November 1912. As for Sorel and his relations with the AF, see Sorel to Croce, November 20, 1912, January 12 and June 22, 1913, and March 20, 1914, XXVI, 438-439, 440 and 442. On Sorel's views on the eve of the war see, "Préface," to Edouard Berth, Les méfaits des intellectuels (Paris, 1914), p. xxix.

¹² See Sorel's letters to Croce from September 1914 to May 1915.

¹³ Sorel to Croce, December 5, 1915, XXVII, 295-296.

¹⁴ Jean Labadie (ed.), L'Allemagne a-t-elle le secret de l'organisation? (Paris, 1916), pp. 11-19. See brief references to Lenin in Lettere a un amico d'Italia (hereafter cited Sorel to Missiroli), ed. Mario Missiroli (San Casciano, 1963), May 15 and 28, 1917, pp. 220-221.

¹⁵ Sorel to Delesalle, February 6, 1918, pp. 127-128; Halévy, Péguy and les Cahiers de la quinzaine, pp. 222-223.

¹⁶ See Sorel to Delesalle, February 6, March 14, and June 23, 1918 and Sorel to Croce, March 15, 1918, XXVIII, p. 45.

¹⁷ Sorel to Delesalle, July 10, August 1, 18 and 26, 1918, pp. 155, 165-167, and 168-170.

¹⁸ "Post-scriptum," Matériaux, p. 53.

¹⁹ Sorel to Croce, February 1, 1919, XXVIII, p. 50; Sorel to Delesalle, February 20, 1919, p. 177.

²⁰ "Pour Lénine," Réflexions, pp. 437-454; see Paul Seippel, "L'autre danger," Journal de Genève, February 4, 1918. Lenin, incidentally, expressed his opinion of Sorel in a brief passage in his Materialism and emperio-criticism, a vigorous polemic against revisionism written in 1909. Addressing himself to the mathematician Henri Poincaré, Lenin wrote, "Your works prove that there are people who can give thought to absurdity. To that category belongs the notorious muddlehead, Georges Sorel." This is the only reference to Sorel in N. Lenin, Collected works, XVIII (New York, 1930), p. 58.

²¹Ibid., pp. 453-454.

²² See Sorel's letters to Delesalle in 1920, pp. 189-193; and Sorel to Croce, August 13, 1920, XXVIII, p. 193.

²³Propos, March n.d., 1921, pp. 53-55.

²⁴ "Lénine d'après Gorki," Revue communiste, II (January 1921), 401-413; and "Lenin secondo Gorki," Ordine Nuovo, February 27, 1921. Gorki's brochure on Lenin was published by Humanité.

²⁵ Quoted in Edouard Dolléans, Proudhon (3d ed.; Paris, 1948), p. 507.

²⁶ M. Simonetti, "Georges Sorel e Guglielmo Ferrero fra "cesarismo' borghese e socialismo (con 27 lettere di Sorel a Ferrero, 1896-1921)," Pensiero politico, V (1972), pp. 102-151; see especially, letters dated February 24, March 5 and 13, and June 26, 1921, pp. 147-151.

²⁷ Bernard Lecache, "Chez Georges Sorel, apôtre du syndicalisme révolutionnaire, ami de la Russie des Soviets," Humanité, March 9, 1922; "Lettere di Georges Sorel a Roberto Michels" (hereafter cited Sorel to Michels), Nuovi studi di diritto, economia e politica, II (September-October 1929), 293n (from a note in Michels' diary dated March 22, 1922).

²⁸ René Johannet, "Un précurseur de la Révolution nationale: Georges Sorel," Candide; XVII (July 16, 1940), p. 5.

²⁹ The presentation which follows is based largely on Sorel's articles in the Resto del Carlino, Tempo, Ronda, Revue communiste, his comments in the Propos, and the work previously cited in the text written in support of the new regime in Russia. Many of the articles in the Resto del Carlino and the Tempo are included in the following collections edited by Mario Missiroli: L'Europe sotto la tormenta (Milan, 1932) and Da Proudhon a Lenin (Florence, 1949).

³⁰ "Lénine d'après Gorki," p. 408.

³¹Ibid., pp. 412-413.

³² "Chiarimenti su Lenin," Resto del Carlino, July 23, 1919.

³³ "Le travail dans la Grèce ancienne," Revue communiste, II (November 1920), pp. 221-222.

³⁴ "Pour Lénine," p. 453. The "Roman model" was sometimes reversed as in the following: "Just as ancient Rome merited its fall, so the crimes of the contemporary world justify the necessity of its destruction" ("Lénine d'après Gorki," p. 409).

³⁵ Jean Variot, "Quelques souvenirs: le père Sorel," Éclair, September 11, 1922.

³⁶ Sorel to Delesalle, September 6, 1919 and March 19, 1921, pp. 186 and 215; Sorel to Croce, July 30, 1920, XXVIII, p. 192; and Propos, March n.d., 1921, pp. 53-56.

³⁷ Sorel to Delesalle, April 9, 1921, p. 219; Sorel to Missiroli, April 16, 1921, pp. 306-307; Sorel to Croce, August 26, 1921, XXVIII, p. 195; and especially, Sorel to Missiroli, September n.d., 1921, quoted in Missiroli, "Prefazione," L'Europa sotto la tormenta, pp. xxxii-xxxiii (for unexplained reasons Missiroli did not include this letter in the collection of 1963).

³⁸ Sorel to Michels, March 22, 1922, 293 n.

³⁹Propos, n.d., 1922, p. 66.

⁴⁰ Jean-Louis Loubet del Bayle, Les non-conformistes des années 30 (Paris, 1969). See also Jean Touchard, "L'esprit des années 1930," Tendances politiques, ed. Guy Michaud (Paris, 1960), pp. 89-138. Both studies make much of the period 1930-34 as a "tentative de renouvellement" in French political thought and emphasize the role of the February 1934 riots in re-establishing a deadly polarization.