Part 2 (1/2)
The present socialist groups and sects of France are all believers in the so-called scientific socialism of Marx and La.s.salle, and the most important of them work for a programme substantially identical with that of Gotha. Marx's ideas were introduced among the French by the International, and they were adopted by a section of the Revolutionary Committee of the Paris Commune, 1871; but after the suppression of the Commune, they made so little stir for some years that Thiers declared, in his last manifesto as President of the Republic, that socialism, which was then busy in Germany, was absolutely dead in France. Its recrudescence was chiefly due to the activity of the Communards. Some of them had escaped to London, where they got into closer communion with Marx and his friends; and in 1874, thirty-four of these refugees, all military or administrative officers of the Commune, and most of them not professed socialists before, issued a manifesto p.r.o.nouncing entirely for socialism, and describing the Commune as ”the militant form of the social revolution”; but it was not till after the amnesty of the Communards, and their return from New Caledonia and elsewhere in 1880, that the first sensible ripple of socialist agitation was felt in France since the downfall of the second Republic. Numbers of socialist journals began to appear, and a general congress of working men, held at Havre in 1880, adopted a programme modelled on the lines of that of the German Social Democrats, and made preparations for an active propaganda and organization.
The adoption of the socialistic programme, however, rent the Congress in three, and the two opposite wings, the Co-operationists and the Anarchists, withdrew and established separate organizations of their own. The co-operationists, believing that the amelioration of the working cla.s.s would only come by the gradual execution of practicable and suitable measures, and that these could only be successfully carried by means of skilful alliances with existing political parties, declared the Havre programme to be a programme for the year 2000, and that the true policy of the working-cla.s.s now was a policy of possibilities. This last word is said to supply the origin of the term Possibilist, which has now come to be applied not to this co-operationist party, but to one of the two divisions into which the third or centre party of the Havre Congress--the socialists--shortly afterwards split up.
The co-operationists formed themselves into a body known as the Republican Socialist Alliance, which, as the name indicates, aims at social reforms under the existing republican form of State. They have held several congresses, their members.h.i.+p includes many well-known and even eminent Radical politicians--M. Clemenceau, for example--and they were supported by leading Radical journals, like _Le Justice_ and _L'Intransigeant_; but their activity and their numbers have both dwindled away, probably because their work was done sufficiently well already by other political or working-cla.s.s organizations.
The anarchists set up not a single organization, but a number of little independent clubs, which agree with one another mainly in their dislike of all const.i.tuted authority. They want to have all things in common, somehow or other; but for master or superior of any sort they will have none, be it king or committee. Their ideas find ready favour in France, because they are near allied with the theory of the Revolutionary Commune cherished among the Communards; and although there is no means of calculating their numbers exactly, they are believed to be pretty strong--at least, in the South of France. At the time of the Lyons Anarchist trial, at which Prince Krapotkin was convicted, they claimed themselves to have 8,000 adherents in Lyons alone. In 1886 the authorities knew of twenty little anarchist clubs in Paris, which had between them, however, only a members.h.i.+p of 1,500; and of these a considerable proportion were foreign immigrants, especially Austrians and Russians, with a few Spaniards. Some of these clubs are mainly convivial, with a dash of treason for pungency; but others have an almost devouring pa.s.sion for ”deeds,” and are ever concerting some new method of waging their strange guerilla against ”princes, proprietors, and parsons.” When a new method is discovered, a new club is sometimes formed to carry it out. For instance, the _Anti-proprietaires_, which is said to be one of the best organized of the anarchist clubs, bind their members (1) to pay no house-rent,--rent, of course, being theft, and theft being really rest.i.tution; and (2) if the landlord at length resorts to law against any of them for this default, to come to their brother's help and remove his furniture to safer quarters before the moment of execution. The group _La Panthere_, to which Louise Michel belongs, and which has 500 members, and the group _Experimental Chemie_, as their names indicate, prefer less jocular methods. The best known of the anarchists are old Communards like Louise Michel herself and elisee Reclus, the geographer.
The third section of the Havre Congress contained the majority of the 119 delegates, and they formed themselves into the Socialist Revolutionary Party of France, with the programme already mentioned, which was carried on the motion of M. Jules Guesde.
This programme sets out with the declaration that all instruments of production must be transferred to the possession of the community, and that this can only result from an act of revolution on the part of the working cla.s.s organized as an independent political party, and then it goes on to say that one of the best means of promoting this end at present was to take part in the elections with the following platform:--
A. _Political._
1. Abolition of all laws restricting freedom of the press, of a.s.sociation, or of meeting, and particularly the law against the International Working Men's a.s.sociation. Abolition of ”work-books.”
2. Abolition of the budget of public wors.h.i.+p, and secularization of ecclesiastical property.
3. Abolition of national debt.
4. Universal military service on the part of the people.
5. Communal independence in police and local affairs.
B. _Economic._
1. One day of rest in the week under legal regulation. Limitation of working day to eight hours for adults. Prohibition of the labour of children under fourteen, and limitation of work hours to six for young persons between fourteen and sixteen.
2. Legal fixing of minimum wages every year in accordance with the price of provisions.
3. Equality of wages of male and female labour.
4. Scientific and technical training for all children, as well as their support at the expense of society as represented by the State and the Communes.
5. Support of the aged and infirm by society.
6. Prohibition of all interference on the part of employers with the management of the relief and sustentation funds of the working cla.s.ses, to whom the sole control of these funds should be left.
7. Employers' liability guaranteed by deposit by employers proportioned to number of workmen.
8. Partic.i.p.ation of the workmen in drawing up factory regulations.
Abolition of employer's claim to punish the labourer by fines and stoppages (according to resolution of the Commune of 27th April, 1871).
9. Revision of all agreements by which public property has been alienated (banks, railways, mines, etc.). The management of all State factories to be committed to the workmen employed in them.
10. Abolition of all indirect taxes, and change of all direct ones into a progressive income tax on all incomes above 3,000 francs.
11. Abolition of the right of inheritance, except in the line of direct descent, and of the latter in the case of fortunes above 20,000 francs.
At the congress of the party held at St. Etienne two years after this programme was adopted, M. Brousse, a medical pract.i.tioner in Paris, and a member of the Town Council, who had already shown signs of disputing the leaders.h.i.+p of M. Guesde, carried by a vote of thirty-six to twenty-seven a motion for introducing some modifications, and the minority seceded and set up a separate organization. In spite of repeated efforts at reconciliation, the two sections of the French socialists have never united again or been able even to work together temporarily at an election. Besides personal jealousies, there are most important differences of tendency keeping them apart. The Guesdists accept the policy of Karl Marx as well as his economic doctrine: the universal revolution, and the centralized socialist State, as well as the theory of surplus value and the right to the full product of labour.
The Broussists, on the other hand, believe in decentralization, and would prefer munic.i.p.alizing industries to nationalizing them. They are for giving the commune control of its own police, its own soldiers, its own civil administration, its own judiciary; and they think the _regime_ of collective property can be best brought in and best carried on by local bodies. They would have the towns take over their own gas, light, and water supply, their omnibus and tramway traffic; but they would have them take over also many of the common industries which never tend towards monopoly or even call for any special control. They would munic.i.p.alize, for example, the bakehouses and the mealshops and the granaries, apparently as supplying the necessaries of life, and they would have various other branches of industry undertaken by the towns to a certain limited extent, in order to provide suitable work for the unemployed. Then in 1887 they added a fresh plank to their platform, and asked for the establishment by munic.i.p.alities, on public money or credit, of productive a.s.sociations to be owned--not, like the other undertakings, by the munic.i.p.ality, but--by the working men employed in them. This is a reappearance of the old policy of La.s.salle, with the difference that the productive a.s.sociations are to be founded on munic.i.p.al and not on State credit; and the reappearance is not surprising in France, because co-operative production has, on the whole, been more successful in that country than in any other. Then another of their demands is, that all public contracts should be subjected to such conditions as to wages and hours of labour as the workmen's syndicates approve; and in Paris they have already succeeded in obtaining this concession from the Town Council so far as munic.i.p.al contracts are concerned. These workmen's syndicates are trade unions, which aim only at bettering the position of their members without theoretical prepossessions, but are quite as bold in their demands on the public powers as the socialists, and apparently more successful. In 1885 their claims included, not only an eight hours' day and a normal rate of fair wages, but the fixing of all salaries under 500 francs, a credit to themselves of 500,000,000 francs, and the gratuitous use of empty houses by their members; and in 1886 they obtained from the Town Council of Paris a furnished room, with free lighting and firing, and a subvention of 20,000 francs, for the establishment of a Labour Bureau, to be a centre for all working-cla.s.s deliberations and intelligence, and a registry for the unemployed.
The socialism of the Broussists is thus practically a munic.i.p.al socialism: munic.i.p.al industries, munic.i.p.al credit for working men's productive a.s.sociations, munic.i.p.al concessions to trade unions; but all this seems to the Guesdists to be mere tinkering, to be no better than the possibilities of the Republican Socialist Alliance, and they have for that reason given their rivals the name of Possibilists, which for distinction's sake they still commonly bear. Neither section had any representative in the Chamber of Deputies till 1889, when the Broussists succeeded in returning M. Joffrin; but the Broussists have nine in the Town Council of Paris. The Guesdists have more men of culture among them; Guesde himself and Lafargue, Karl Marx's son-in-law, are both men of ability and public position; but they have a smaller following, and what they have is on the decline. Their sympathy with the principles of German Socialism, their alliance with the German Socialist party is against them, for the French working men have a very honest hatred of the Germans, both from recollections of the war and from the pressure of German industrial compet.i.tion; and the feeling seems to be returned by the Germans, for it appeared even among the socialists at the recent congress at Halle, international and non-patriotic as socialists often claim to be. One of the personal accusations that disturbed the sittings of that congress was, that the leaders of the party had been discovered in secret conference with the delegates of the French socialists, MM.
Guesde and Ferroul, who had been sent to greet their German comrades.