SOURCE: "Georges Sorel and the Myth of Violence: From Syndicalism to Fascism," in Social Protest, Violence and Terror in Nineteenthand Twentieth-century Europe, edited by Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Gerhard Hirschfeld, Berg Publishers, Ltd., 1982, pp. 246-56.

[In the following excerpt, Rohrich examines French historical events during Sorel's lifetime that influenced his conservative political thinking.]

Wyndham Lewis believed himself to be justified in saying: 'Georges Sorel is the key to all contemporary political thought'.¹ This dictum appears extreme and yet it contains a grain of truth. After all, Sorel did provide very disparate movements of his day with stirring slogans—albeit frequently unintentionally. And it was no accident that prominent leaders of these movements referred to him time and again. What they most often resorted to was his myth of violence. Two historic movements, in particular, made use of this idea, and Sorel's interpreters have dubbed him more than once the metaphysician of revolutionary Syndicalism and the pioneer of Fascism. Yet, possibly the most important trait of his intellectual attitude—his revolutionary conservatism—was brought out only rarely.

What argues for the hypothesis that Sorel's stance was essentially one of revolutionary conservatism is his deeprooted hostility towards the French Republic and the ideology it was founded on, one which Sorel fought against alternately from the Left and the Right. Himself a member of the bourgeoisie, he detested his class, above all because he found it lacked the political energy and moral seriousness which it had once possessed. Sorel's criticism was directed against Liberalism and parliamentary democracy and he was never tired of reproaching the liberal enlightenment for having initiated the process of decay at the end of which there would be nothing but a void, unless some new faith replaced the old. One may see in this the true meaning of Sorel's attempt to secure for the myth of violence its due role in the dawn of a new age. And it was the latter which was the true concern of Georges Sorel, the 'revolutionary conservative'.

While this French thinker thus remained faithful to his cause, his public statements about the issues of his day changed with confusing speed. Let us here retrace some of these issues and Sorel's comments on them: Sorel was born in 1847 and reached the age of 45 before he gave up his profession as a civil engineer in order to devote himself to his private studies. He therefore experienced at first hand the period leading up to the Paris Commune and this no doubt helped to shape his hostility towards liberalism and parliamentary democracy. The June revolution of 1848 and the defeat of the proletariat were followed in 1851 by Bonapartism which, according to Marx's definition, represented 'the only possible form of government at a time, when the bourgeoisie had already lost its capacity to rule the nation, while the working class had not yet acquired that capacity'.² Thus, the bourgeoisie, which Sorel later described as lacking energy, had even at that time relinquished its political role in order to safeguard its social existence. Increasingly, the bourgeoisie longed for a period 'when it could rule without being responsible for its rule; when a bogus power, standing between it and the people, would have to act and at the same time serve as hiding place for it; when it would have a crowned scapegoat, whom the proletariat could hit at whenever it wanted to attack the bourgeoisie, and against whom it might make common cause with the proletariat, whenever the scapegoat became a nuisance or showed signs of establishing itself as a power in its own right'.³

This early observation by Marx characterises the situation of 1850/51 very accurately and at the same time reveals the indecisive attitude of the workers, who, as Marx noted in his 'Eighteenth Brumaire', denied themselves the honour 'of being a conquered force', but instead bowed to their fate and proved 'that the defeat of June 1848 had made them incapable of fighting for years to come'.⁴ Even then that moral decline of the ruling classes, which Sorel later never ceased to deplore, revealed itself. But equally the French labour movement, which Sorel later turned to, was still far from assuming a historically significant role.

It is superfluous here to dwell on the details surrounding the rise of the Paris Commune, which was to weaken the labour movement very much further. As we know, after a siege of almost two months and an eight-day battle on the barricades, the Paris Commune was defeated. In the executions during the 'bloody week' that followed, the labour movement again, as in 1848, lost its most active members and its ablest leaders, not only in Paris, but also in Lyon, St Etienne, Marseilles, Toulouse, Narbonne, Limoges and all other places where the communard movement had awakened proletarian impulses.

The French labour movement was to recover only slowly from the defeat of the Paris Commune. Accompanied by heated internal controversies, it began to gain strength again in the period from 1880 to 1900.⁵ Within the organised parties of the labour movement the greatest differences of opinion were provoked by the question as to the wisdom of a policy of electoral alliances with bourgeois democrats and gradual participation in the rule of government. In the somewhat overstated partisan terms of a prominent historian of Anarcho-Syndicalism, which could equally have come from Georges Sorel: 'Everything turned on a few, mostly illusory mandates to the Chamber of Deputies, on municipal mandates, rather agreeable to the incumbents, and on coveted jobs on daily papers, Citoyen-Bataille, etc.'. Only the Anarchists were dedicated to the 'economic struggle' and thus gained the sympathy of many workers; 'slowly there developed that absolute contempt for politicking, which was later, in the heyday of Syndicalism, to break through for a time with such elemental force'.⁶

Increasingly, this tendency was to find its expression in the new Syndicalist movement, which grew much more rapidly than the party organisations. In 1884 there followed the final abolition of the ban on coalitions with the passing of a new law on associations. Two years later, under the aegis of the Parti Ouvrier Français (Guesdists), the Féderation Nationale des Syndicats was formed. This, however, in contrast to the Bourses du Travail established soon thereafter, was to gain no lasting importance.

The Bourses du Travail—the first was created in Paris in 1887 as combined employment agency, assembly point and training centre—were the seat of the local branch offices established by the trade unions, and provided a variety of new impulses. Certainly the most important of these was the suggestion made in 1887 by the Paris labour exchange to create a federation of labour exchanges, a plan that was to be realised that very year at St Etienne. Three years later, the Féderation Nationale des Bourses du Travail was to find in Fernand Pelloutier the organiser and secretary who probably exerted the greatest influence on revolutionary Syndicalism. With him originated the idea of the general strike, which Sorel later adopted. In revolutionary Syndicalism embodying this specific idea, both the democratic and reformist Socialism of Jean Jaurès and the 'orthodox' Marxism of Jules Guesde had acquired a rival that could not be matched by the 'putschism' of a Blanqui or the mere anarchism of a Bakunin.

Especially hostile towards parliamentary Socialism, Pelloutier's main concern—just as very soon thereafter Sorel's—was to disabuse Anarchism of its faith in the persuasive power of dynamite, and the trade-union movement of the hope it vested in social reforms. The tradeunion movement of revolutionary-syndicalist persuasion would have to rethink the direction of its economic-revolutionary thrust. This new thinking was to be provided by the Bourses du Travail, as study centres where, as Pelloutier's brother Maurice noted, 'the proletariat could reflect on its situation and investigate the individual elements of the economic problem, in order to become capable of its own liberation, which is theirs by right'.⁷ Intent on the 'anarchist education of man', the tradeunion movement had to aim at transforming society. Revolutionary Syndicalism had to become the practical training ground for the class war, as Fernand Pelloutier reiterated more than once in his programmatic article 'L'anarchisme et les syndicats ouvriers'.⁸

In the context of this paper it is neither possible nor necessary to trace the phenomenon of revolutionary Syndicalism in France in great detail, since this is in any case the subject of another contribution.⁹ Only certain phases and basic ideas will be briefly sketched in here, so as to bring out Sorel's attitude towards Syndicalism more clearly:

After the organisational accord reached at Montpellier in 1902 (a year after Pelloutier's death), an agreement of views was achieved at the Congress of Amiens (1906), which provided an essential precondition for the strengthening of the Syndicalist movement. The Congress of Amiens confirmed the separation of revolutionary Syndicalism from the Socialist parties and determined that every member of the CGT (Confédération Générale du Travail) was free to 'participate outside his trade organisation in such forms of struggle as correspond to his philosophical and political views', but it also laid down that these views were not to be carried into the trade unions. According to the Charte d'Amiens, the CGT comprised all workers 'who are conscious of the need to fight in order to abolish wage slavery and private enterprise'. It demanded the 'recognition of the class struggle, which on the economic level brings the worker into revolt against all forms of material and moral exploitation and oppression deployed by the capitalist class'.¹⁰

The Charte brought out the concept of the general strike as the syndicalists' guiding principle very clearly indeed: 'Il (le syndicalisme) préconise comme moyen d'action la grève générale'.¹¹ Proletarian solidarity had to develop on the basis of its strongest, i.e. the economic, bond. According to the Congress' resolution already referred to, the class war had to be conducted on the economic plane. It had to stress direct action, as opposed to parliamentary or indirect'actions. This implied what was probably the most significant syndicalist demand, namely that the emancipation of the proletariat would have to be the work of the proletariat itself. In the explanatory words of Victor Griffuelhes, 'direct action means action by the workers themselves, an action carried out directly by the participant himself. It is the worker himself who makes the effort, carrying it out personally against the powers which rule him, in order to gain from them the advantages he claims. By this direct action the worker takes up the fight himself; it is he who carries it out, determined not to leave the concern for his emancipation to anyone but himself.'¹² This direct action, in the form of street demonstrations, sabotage, boycott, union label or strike, implied also an appeal to moral exertion by the individual.

Thus, the means for the overthrow of the capitalist social order was the general strike. It implied the rejection of the private annexation of any surplus in nationalised production and therefore represented for the revolutionary Syndicalist movement the means of action par excellence. The refusal to continue production within the framework of capitalism', declared Emile Pouget,

will not be wholly negative. It will go hand in hand with the seizure of the means of production and reorganisation on a communist basis, originating from the trade unions as the social cells. The trade unions, having thus become the focal points of the new life, will supplant and destroy the focal points of the old order—the State and the municipalities.¹³

The CGT thus declared itself a revolutionary organisation, whose aim it was to seize economic and political power by direct action, culminating in a general strike.

The period during which revolutionary Syndicalism developed into unité ouvriere had come to a close—an end which very soon was to be accompanied by a loss of élan. The general strike in particular, which revolutionary Syndicalism had propagated as the signal for revolution, became less an aspect of revolutionary technique and instead increasingly a social myth mobilising the creative forces of the proletariat and implying an irrational ideal of 'perfection'. It gained a more symbolic significance, not least thanks to Sorel's attempt, in his 'Réflexions sur la violence', to provide the Syndicalist movement with a theoretical base. Increasingly out of temper with the bourgeoisie, Georges Sorel had turned to revolutionary Socialism and Syndicalism, prompted not by direct experience of proletarian misery, but by the spectacle of the ruling classes' moral decline. It is important to bear this in mind, since Sorel's stance bespeaks that of a revolutionary conservative who came to Marx by way of Vico.

It is not least this genesis which helps to explain the objectives contained in his Réflexions sur la violence. They embody the philosophy of Sorel the Syndicalist and we must therefore now turn to them in greater detail. The Réflexions, a compilation of several articles previously published in Mouvement Socialiste contain the demand for a creative proletarian élite to grow out of the workers' movement, which would then be able to rise against parliamentary rule and at the same time, in order not to become weakened itself, stir a hostile bourgeoisie into militancy. The determining factor in this was the recognition that the proletariat's revolutionary energy would have to be mobilised by opposition from the bourgeoisie and that the movement could only be driven forward by ricorso to proletarian violence, in the sense of Giambattista Vico's theory of corsie ricorsi. The 'diplomatic alliance' between State and party-socialists would have to be fought. Their amorphousness was to be defeated by the passionate nature of the action. This constituted an appeal to the heroism of the proletariat, combined with an absolute rejection of the 'Optimistic school' of reformism which, as the elitist theoretician Vilfredo Pareto once expressed it, was under the illusion 'that the ruling class, inspired by pure charity', would exert itself 'for the benefit of the oppressed class'.¹⁴

Sorel, then, with the weapon of the general strike sought to counter party-socialism with bellicose proletarian solidarity. 'The syndicalist general strike', he wrote, 'is most closely related to the system of war: the proletariat organises itself for battle . . . by regarding itself as the great driving force of history and by subordinating every social concern to that of the struggle.'¹⁵ For Sorel it was the great battle images which were to fire this struggle, it was the mythos of the grève générale, as the spontaneous expression of group beliefs, representing an intellectually irrefutable 'unity'. Socialist action was to be understood as an inner, spiritual imperative, as a philosophy of action akin to Henri Bergson's.¹⁶ Sorel, who stressed the importance of the élan vital, took up this philosophy of creative evolution, which to him meant proletarian evolution. Socialism, 'une vertu qui naît', had to grow out of the working classes' dynamic impulses of will.

More than by Bergson, however, Sorel was influenced by Proudhon,¹⁷ particularly with regard to the proletarian ethic, and the concept of justice connected with it. To be sure, many ideas of this 'first truly proletarian-socialist theoretician' (Edouard Berth) went unheeded by Sorel. Then, more than in Proudhon's day, the future of Socialism depended on the scala del capitalismo—and from this recognition flowed Sorel's demand, already referred to, to arouse the proletariat to engage as equals in the battle with a strong bourgeoisie.

Sorel, the anti-parliamentarian, sought to fuse Proudhon's work with that of Marx. Already in his essay Le procès de Socrate (1889) he had begun to think in Proudhonist terms and even in his revolutionary Syndicalist phase he remained faithful to Proudhon's thinking. The idea of justice, just as the idea of the bataille napoléonienne, was an interpretation of Socialism based on Proudhon's concepts—a socialism conceived as a manifestation of the proletarian conscience, in the sense of a rugged, masculine moralism. Both men addressed themselves to the homme révolté, urging him to rise against the authoritarian forces; both emphasised the existential dialectic, in the sense of the anima appassionata. Sorel argued that the revolutionary energy of the proletariat alone 'could demonstrate the revolutionary reality to the bourgeoisie and spoil its pleasure in humanitarian platitudes'.¹⁸ This French theoretician, who claimed to have 'moralised Marx a little',¹⁹ interpreted Socialism as an inner tension, producing a combative spirit. Marx appeared not to have considered 'that there might occur a revolution whose ideal would be regression or at least the preservation of the social status quo'.²⁰ Marx was not able to conceive of such a 'revolution'. However, just such a revolution was now being sought, when the proletariat, originally perceived as a class on its own, began to develop, or rather its party organisation began to develop, into a vague community of interests. And in view of this phenomenon alone, the Reflections on Violence would be heard on the other side of the barricades as well, in their intention to rekindle social antagonism. Not least for this reason, violence, in spontaneous action, was to arouse proletarian impulses of will, conscious that the struggle to come would be the 'most profound and sublime phenomenon of moral existence'.²¹

Violence, growing out of a revolutionary spirit and aiming at a napoleonic battle, was thus sanctioned. The proletarial appeared as the hero of the drama; the grève générale would become an 'accumulation d'exploits héroïques' (Sorel), corresponding to that freedom of will which Proudhon had stressed, providing the 'sentiments of the beautiful and sublime' that went with it.²² In the place of 'force', as the bourgeoisie's instrument of power, 'violence', as the manifestation of the class struggle, indicated the method of the proletarian general strike. This violence, incomprehensible to a bourgeois society, aimed at the real possibility of a struggle, oriented on those great creative elements from which, according to Carlyle, 'truth' springs.

With the myth of the general strike it was intended to separate the classes; yet if it were only to make Syndicalism more heroic, that would already be an achievement of incalculable value. It was here that the significance of the myth of violence lay, and here also that of which Sorel said: 'One must invoke total images, capable in their entirety and by intuition alone .. . of evoking attitudes corresponding to the various manifestations of the war, which Socialism has begun against modern society'.²³

With this I have outlined Georges Sorel's main ideas with regard to revolutionary Syndicalism. This conservative revolutionary entertained them only for a few years before he gradually came to hold the view—expressed on the publication of Croce's essay 'La morte del Socialismo'—that Socialism was dead.²⁴ By 1909, when Mussolini the socialist, in his comprehensive review of Réflexions sur la violence, stressed how much 'contemporary Socialism in Latin countries' owed to Sorel,²⁵ the latter had already completed his turn towards nationalism, which up to 1914 was to become increasingly emphatic. In this he was in harmony with the ideas of his time. The Syndicalist movement, too, had capitulated before the more powerful nationalist impulses. Everywhere, the idea of the nation superseded other hitherto dominant notions of solidarity. Several syndicalists in France turned to the Action française, while in Italy revolutionary socialists and syndicalists had come together with irredentists and nationalists already during the founding congress of the 'Associazione Nazionalista' in Florence (1910). And no less a man than Georges Sorel reached out 'his hand to the Action française, while his work proclaimed . . . the return of the fatherland'.²⁶ Together with Edouard Berth he became editor of Cité Française, a publication founded in 1910, and with the aid of the Cercle Proudhon, inspired by Sorel, the alliance between Sorelians and the Valoi-Group was to become even closer. A synthesis between nationalist and syndicalist ideas came about and it was possible to refer to Sorel, if for no other reason than that his general ideas were sufficiently vague to serve nationalist movements equally well.

Decisive above all was the myth of violence, now no longer implying a general strike, but a nationalist act of supreme solidarity. In the search, then, for revolutionary energy and spontaneous activity, one looked for a new combination of ideas, bearing in mind that, according to Sorel, the idea of the struggle would have to be preserved, if élan and existential impulses were not to be lost. In Italy he was remembered not least in terms of his 'exploits heroiques'. Here if was among the nationalists, as represented by Enrico Corradini, where 'the man of the national struggle . . . could hold out his hand to the man of the class struggle, as Sorel had done'.²⁷ Corradini, whom Mussolini was later to describe as 'the Fascist of the very first hour',²⁸ proclaimed, like Sorel, the myth of the nation. And if one takes a look in isolation at the ideology of big business at that time, close to both nationalism and Fascism, one realises that a considerable step in the direction of Fascism had already been taken.

Here again it would be beyond the scope of this paper to retrace the genesis of Fascism in detail. Without wishing to pre-empt the following contribution, it should nevertheless be borne in mind that Fascism could only acquire political power, because prominent factions within the economically dominant class and their political and ideological representatives desired this. Max Horkheimer's famous remark that those who don't want to talk about capitalism should also keep quiet about Fascism,²⁹ indicates the perhaps most relevant link between the two phenomena, namely of capitalist production and reproduction and the form of rule that goes with it. If one adds to this socio-economic function of Fascism the anti-communist ideology fostered by the revolutionary threat posed by the Italian maximalists, as well as the mass support provided by social groups of middle-class mentality³⁰ even before the Fascist seizure of power, it is possible to make out the historically significant contours of the epochal phenomenon of Fascism. These brief indications must suffice before we return once more to our more restricted subject: Sorel's relation to Fascism.

If Georges Sorel's relation to emergent Fascism—he died shortly before the march on Rome-is to be assessed correctly, it will be necessary to remember not only how dominant for his thinking were his anti-parliamentarian and anti-democratic views, but also his myths—the mythos of violence, of the general strike, of the nationa. In this Sorel comes very close to Vilfredo Pareto's antidemocratic theory of the élite. Long before Sorel turned to politics, Pareto had recognised that parliamentary democracy, or at least the form it took at that time in Italy, was doomed. Already in his Trattato di sociologia generale (1916) Pareto had advocated the energetic rule of the élite and condemned as demagogy any form of democratic government. Thus, in his later writings, we find the close intellectual relationship to Sorel emphasised; just like the latter, Pareto stressed the 'futility of parliamentary and democratic dogmas',³¹ pointed to the 'absurd idea of one half plus one'.³² As Mussolini had jibed: 'Oh, precious naivety of an era that believes in the metà piú uno'.³³ Both thinkers, in their advocacy of the elitist idea, aimed at a trasformazione della democrazia, according to the slogan with which Pareto headed his collection of articles, published in the Rivista di Milano in the historic year of 1920.

In the case of Sorel, his antidemocratic, elitist theory was combined with the element of myth. The characteristic features of this myth have already been referred to in connection with revolutionary Syndicalism and need now only be extended from the proletariat to the entire nation, in order to comprehend their impact. The social myth, directed at the creative proletarian energies and implying, as we have seen, an irrational idea of 'perfection', encapsulated the Socialist movement in images which—en bloc et par la seule intuition—were to stimulate individual acts in the proletarian struggle. The appeal to the heroic spirit of the proletariat needed only to be replaced by an appeal to the power instincts of national élites. These, as history has taught us, were equally able to spur fanaticised masses to unbridled violence by means of a mythos. This interpretation may sound a little harsh, but it pinpoints the constant ambivalence attaching to the mythos of violence, which after all, according to Sorel, could have a positive as well as a negative connotation—it could have revolutionary or reactionary application.

After all that has been said so far, it is hardly surprising that Italian Fascism invoked Sorel, and that he in turn did not hide his sympathy for Mussolini. The fact that Sorel had meanwhile written his Pour Lénine (1918/19) and praised the 'heroic efforts' of the Russian proletariat³⁴ may appear to contradict this. But above all Sorel emphasised that he saw in Russia's national myth 'the heroic rise of a modern nation'; and since Sorel at the same time wished to see Mussolini kindling the national energies, and had become an advocate of Italian interests, he saw the kind of 'heroism' that creates nations equally in the rise of Fascism; in a letter to Benedetto Croce, he called it 'perhaps the most original social phenomenon of contemporary Italy'.³⁵

Thus it was possible to come to Fascism by way of Sorel and even to quote him, if one wished to extend the myth, as the spontaneous expression of group beliefs, to the nation as a whole.

Mussolini himself, who, once he became duce, was to confess that even when still a socialist, touched by the tragic quality of violence, he had been a fascist at heart, never ceased to stress the myth of the nation and to underline the significance of concepts such as azione and sentimento, the latter indicating the dominance of the myth.³⁶ In this no doubt the tactical consideration of a need to nourish idealised hopes predominated, just as his vague programmatic statements were intended to appeal to extremely diverse groups. But independent of such tactical questions, the 'heroic epics' of the author of Réflexions sur la violence remained vivid for Mussolini, and it was no accident that even in his dottrina del fascismo he was to stress the currents in Fascism that had flowed from Sorel: 'Nel grande flume del fascismo troverete i filoni che si dipartirono dal Sorel . . . '.³⁷

The dialectic tension between Mussolini's theory and practice is seen perhaps most clearly in his answer to a question posed by an editor of the Madrid publication ABC, about influences he considered to have been decisive in his life: 'Sorel's. The main thing for me was to act. But I repeat, it is to Sorel that I owe most.'³⁸ There can be no doubt that it was Sorel's myth of violence aimed at arousing national energies, to which Mussolini referred. However careful one ought to be in designating certain thinkers as 'intellectual fathers of Fascism',³⁹ it would nevertheless be impossible to deny that Sorel had opted for Fascism. In several of his post-war articles he welcomed the reawakening of a national conscience in Italy; and when Sorel's friend Robert Michels met him in March 1922 for the last time, he was able to convince himself, as he noted in his diary, of Sorel's 'faith' in the new movement. 'Of Benito Mussolini he spoke with great sympathy. "Do we know", he said, "where he will go? At any rate, he will go far." '⁴⁰ Sorel's remark characterises the hopes he vested in Mussolini. It shows also what he had recognised in Fascism: the will to act which, as Sorel clearly stressed, in contrast to the maximalist's revolutionary experiment, aimed at arousing national energies. Neither in the red signorie nor in the traditional classe dirigente could he, who still hoped to witness the 'humiliation of democracy', detect an awareness of the 'historic hour'. It was no accident that his statement 'le gouvernement par l'ensemble des citoyens n'a jamais été qu'une fiction; mais cette fiction était le dernier mot de la science démocratique'⁴² was time and again used by Fascism as an argument against the 'corrupt parliamentary democracy'.⁴³

NOTES

¹The Art of Being Ruled (London, 1926) p. 128.

² K. Marx, 'Der Bürgerkrieg in Frankreich', Marx-Engels-Werke (MEW), vol. 17 (East Berlin, 1973) p. 338.

³ K. Marx, 'Die Pariser 'Réforme' über die französischen Zustände', MEW, vol. 5 (1973) p. 449.

⁴ K. Marx, 'Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte', MEW, vol. 8 (1973) p. 157.

⁵ This period was characterised by a remarkable development in French industrial production. Increased growth in basic industries and a rapid development of heavy industry determined the economic background. Typical for France remained the large share of agriculture in the overall economic development: it was that branch of the national economy which even at the turn of the century still employed a million more workers than factories, crafts, transport and mining taken together. It was a feature of French economic structure that there existed relatively few monopolies, very little horizontal or vertical concentration and initially also little modernisation, as a result of concentration on the domestic market and of protectionism, providing a shield against foreign competition. Small and medium businesses remained the dominant feature; as late as 1906 60 per cent of all workers were employed by enterprises with less than 10 employees.

⁶ M. Nettlau, 'Fernand Pelloutiers Platz in der Entwicklung des Syndikalismus', Internationale (a publication of revolutionary Syndicalism in Berlin, which appeared for a short time), 1 (1927/28) p. 50.

⁷ M. Pelloutier, Fernand Pelloutier: Sa vie, son oeuvre (1867-1901) (Paris, 1911) p. 62.

⁸ Fernand Pelloutier's programmatic article appeared in: Les Temps Nouveaux, 1 (1895) pp. 2-4; quoted here from the German translation by Ursula Lange, in: E. Oberländer (ed.), Der Anarchismus (Olten, 1972) pp. 316-25.

⁹ See the contribution by F. F. Ridley in this volume; for a detailed description see also W. Röhrich, Revolutionärer Syndikalismus: Ein Beitrag zur Sozialgeschichte der Arbeiterbewegung (Darmstadt, 1977).

¹⁰ Congrès National des Syndicats de France, Comte rendu des travaux du congrès (Amiens, 1906).

¹¹ Ibid.

¹² V. Griffuelhes, L'action syndicaliste (Paris, 1908) p. 23.

¹³ E. Pouget, La C. G. T. (Paris, 1907) p. 47f.

¹⁴ V. Pareto, Les systèmes socialistes (1902-03) (Paris, 1926) p. 421.

¹⁵ G. Sorel, Über die Gewalt (Réflexions sur la violence) (Innsbruck, 1928) p. 198.

¹⁶ Cf. H. Bergson, 'Sur les données immédiates de la conscience' in Oeuvre (Paris, 1959) p. 151.

¹⁷ 'Si l'on veut indiquer les inspirateurs véritables de Sorel, c'est Proudhon et Marx qu'il faut citer. Et, des deux, il me paraît incontestable que c'est Proudhon qui a été son plus authentique maître', G. Pirou, Georges Sorel (Paris, 1925) p. 56f.

¹⁸ Sorel, Über die Gewalt, p. 87.

¹⁹ Georges Sorel's letter to Benedetto Croce, dated 27/5/1899, La Critica, 25 (1927) p. 304.

²⁰ Sorel, Über die Gewalt, p. 96.

²¹ P.-J. Proudhon, 'La guerre et la paix', in: Oeuvres complètes, vol. 13 (Paris, 1869) p. 38.

²² Ibid., 'De la justice dans la révolution et dans l' lise', Oeuvres complètes.

²³ Sorel, Über die Gewalt, pp. 136-7.

²⁴ 'J'ai grand peur que vous n'ayez trop raison dans ce que vous avez dit sur la mort du socialisme', was what Sorel wrote about Croce's essay, in a letter to him, dated 19/2/1911, in La Critica 26 (1928) p. 347.

²⁵ B. Mussolini, 'Lo sciopero generale e la violenza' (review), Opera Omnia, vol. 2 p. 167. Typical of Sorel's influence on Mussolini, the Socialist, were also remarks such as: 'We have to accomplish a work of great magnitude—the creation of a new world! As Sorel has emphasised, our mission is awesome, serious and sublime!'—B. Mussolini, 'Ai compagni', in: Opera Omnia, vol. 2 (1951) p. 255.

²⁶ M. Freund, Georges Sorel: Der revolutionäre Konservativismus (Frankfurt/M, 1932) p. 220.

²⁷ Ibid., p. 256.

²⁸ B. Mussolini, 'Enrico Corradini', in: Opera Omnia, vol. 25 (1958) p.69f.

²⁹ M. Horkheimer, 'Die Juden und Europa', Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 8 (1939) p. 115.

³⁰ These social groups of middle-class mentality consisted of small property owners (artisans, small traders and peasants) and groups conscious of upward mobility (office employees, civil servants), who were determined to defend their 'middle-class' position against the lower social classes.

³¹ V. Pareto, 'Georges Sorel', La Ronda 4 (1922) p. 542.

³² Ibid., p. 546f.

³³ B. Mussolini, 'Quando il mito tramonta', in: Opera Omnia, vol. 17 (1955) p. 323.

³⁴ G. Sorel, 'Pour Lénine' in Über die Gewalt, p. 349-361.

³⁵ Sorel's letter to Benedetto Croce, dated 26/8/1921, La Critica, 28 (1930) p. 195.

³⁶ B. Mussolini, 'discorso a Trieste (20/10/1920)', Opera Omnia, vol. 15 (1954) p. 218.

³⁷ B. Mussolini, 'La Dottrina del Fascismo (1932)', Opera Omnia, vol. 34 (1961) p. 122.

³⁸ According to Pirou, Georges Sorel, p. 53.

³⁹ Such an interpretation, with Sorel in mind, was made by Georges Valois: 'Le père intellectuel du fascisme, c'est Georges Sorel.' G. Valois, Le Fascisme (Paris, 1927) p. 5.

⁴⁰ Entry in Robert Michels' diary on 22/3/1922, in: 'Lettere di Georges Sorel a Roberto Michels', Nuovi Studi di Diritto, Economia e Politica, 2 (1969) p. 293.

⁴¹ Thus the closing words in Sorel's 'Pour Lénine,' Über die Gewalt, p. 361.

⁴² Georges Sorel, 'Avenir socialiste des syndicats et annexes (1914)' in Matériaux d' une théorie du prolétariat (1919) (Paris, 1921) p. 118.

⁴³ B. Mussolini, 'Ne fasto! (10/6/1920)', Opera Omnia, vol. 15 (1954) p. 26.