4
On 22 January 1914, just months before the onset of the First World War, Jean Jaurès exhorted to an audience of students and workers,
You are told today’s anthem is: let us act! But what is action without thought? It is the brutality of inertia. You are told: brush aside the party of peace which saps your courage! And we, we say today that standing for peace is the greatest battle . . . Be wary of those who warn you against so-called systems, who encourage you to abdicate your intelligence in the name of a philosophy of instinct or intuition!1
Jaurès would spend the next six months organizing to prevent war’s outbreak. He fought a losing battle. Fellow leaders across the political spectrum were increasingly convinced of the virtues of war against the German “hereditary” enemy, with the more bellicose seeking recompense for the Franco-Prussian war. Jaurès could not undo this overwhelming compulsion for revenge: on 31 July, he was assassinated at a cafe by Raoul Villain, a revanchiste (Figure 4.1).2
Figure 4.1 “Jaurès assassiné,” L’Humanité, 1 August 1914.
Source: gallica.bnf.fr / Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
Jaurès was warning students of those who “advise you to abdicate your intelligence” for war, just as leading French intellectuals were encouraging them to do precisely that.3 On the right, Charles Maurras’s royalist Action Française summoned the country to battle in the name of a Catholic “integral nationalism.” Maurice Barrès’s sentimental hymns to “rootedness” and “the soil and the dead” invited young men to vindicate their moral selves in combat. They were joined on the left by the poet Charles Péguy who, having once dismissed the Third Republic in 1910 as incarnating “the sterility of modern times,” enthusiastically volunteered to march for the republic in 1914.4 To the astonishment of many, Gustave Hervé could also be found pleading with authorities to conscript him after 1914. Hervé was the leader of the French antimilitarist movement, the largest and most powerful of its kind in prewar Europe. Yet after defiantly announcing in his 1906 Leur patrie that if faced with war, “we [the working class] shall not march, whoever be the aggressor,” the committed pacifist and socialist was reborn a nationalist, renaming his magazine La Guerre sociale to La Victoire.5
The trouble with “the generation of 1914” went beyond the fact that left and right rallied together in the face of impending war.6 Jaurès was a historian of the French Revolution, and he would have been familiar with the ways war could bridge domestic political cleavages. What alarmed him, instead, was how French intellectuals folded something unusual into their war songs: a preoccupation with irrational “instinct and intuition.” Henri Massis and Alfred de Tarde, writing pseudonymously as “Agathon,” had just called for a rejection of “intellectualism” and “rationalism” in favor of a “cult of action,” “national energy,” and the “classical spirit” in their 1913 pamphlet, “Jeunes gens d’aujourd’hui” (Figure 4.2). Others were contrasting the experience of war with the cowardly self-interest of antimilitarism (Figure 4.3). Péguy gave this generation a voice in his 1913 poem “Ève”: “Blessed are those who die in great battles / Lying beneath the sun in the sight of God’s face. / Blessed are those who die in a high place / Surrounded by the trappings of great funerals.”7
Figure 4.2 Agathon, Les jeunes gens d’aujourdhui, 11th Edition. “Agathon” was the collective pseudonym for Alfred de Tarde and Henri Massis, and this pamphlet, originally published 1913, defended the renascent nationalism and Catholic faith among young men. It stressed a rejection of “rationalism” and offered an ode to Barrès’s cult of “national energy.”
Source: gallica.bnf.fr / Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
Figure 4.3 “L’Antimilitariste et le Tambour-Major,” Le Petit Journal, Supplément illustré. 11 April 1909. The paper depicts an “antimilitarist” mocked by a crowd, a hooligan when compared to the nationalist drum major.
Source: gallica.bnf.fr / Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
What was this image of irrationalist violence that Jaurès observed, and why was it uniting otherwise conflicting political programs on the eve of war? What problems did this violence—imbued with moral, life-affirming qualities—promise to solve? Critics have long observed that the meaning of violence seemed to be evolving in these years. Images of irrationalist violence proliferated, not only among intellectuals in France, but also those in Germany, Italy, and Britain.8 Cold War political theorists interpreted this generational fixation with irrationalist violence as a romantic escape into antidemocratic chauvinism. The “mystique of violence” found in fin de siècle Europe, according to Raymond Aron, amounted to “invectives against democracy” in the name of an “aesthetic of existence” and a “degraded romanticism.”9 Judith Shklar agreed: it was the product of “the romantic mood of that time,” the desperate search for a “substitute religion.”10 Intellectual historians of the period have offered similar lines of interpretation, with some deeming it a “romantic anti-capitalism” and an “alternative political tradition” to republican democracy altogether.11 For this reason, they have often identified in the fin de siècle denigration of reason, especially in France, a seed for twentieth-century fascist political thought. Zeev Sternhell has given this thesis its most forceful articulation: “It was in France that the radical right soonest acquired the essential characteristics of fascism, and it was in France, also, that this process was most rapidly completed—on the eve of the outbreak of the Great War.”12
Undoubtedly, these irrationalist images of violence announced new mutations in European ideas. The prewar years witnessed virtually every major intellectual program on the continent moving to investigate reason’s outer bounds. The study of crowd psychology, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, vitalism, and “collective effervescence” all originated between 1885 and 1914. Intellectuals across the human sciences were rediscovering reason’s insufficiency as a foundation for social order. So widespread was this collective cultural “crisis of reason,” a “revolt against reason,” or an “embrace of unreason,” that one scholar has concluded that, by 1914, “nothing remained of the proud structure of European certainties. The demolition was systematic, and covered almost every field of culture.”13 It was therefore no accident that Jaurès discerned in nationalists’ calls for war an invitation “to abdicate your intelligence in the name of a philosophy of instinct or intuition.” For many French youth and engaged critics, marching for war meant participating in this generational intellectual reorientation. It provided a way of affirming the value of feeling and intuition, everything that had been pathologized by the Third Republic’s culture of rationalism, positivism, secularism, and progress. Romain Rolland was to recall, “do not tell us now that the war of 1914 had been imposed on us against our will. Be honest! Know and dare to admit . . . that a whole young French generation marched joyously.”14
This chapter argues that as much as these images of irrationalist violence after 1900 appeared new, we nevertheless misunderstand them if we characterize them primarily as seeds for forthcoming strands of fascist political theory. We misunderstand them because, however true it is that they anticipate figurations of violence in the interwar period, their appeal lay in the way they echoed a familiar motif of nineteenth-century thought: the language of redemptive violence.15 Appeals to irrationalist violence may have been crafted and credentialed by new philosophical critiques of reason, but their purpose was to answer an enduring problem of French politics, indeed of nineteenth-century modernity: democratization as an experience of social disintegration.
For this reason, despite their apparent antidemocratic cast, these images of irrationalist violence held a more ambivalent and complex relationship to democracy. They did not simply express an illiberal “escapist motivation” whose telos was fascism. Instead, they can and ought to be understood as an attack on the Third Republic’s parliamentary form, the better to revitalize the experiential and moral bases of democratic politics. The Third Republic oversaw the creation of France’s first mass political parties. But, far from hailing the parliamentary party system as an unequivocal step forward for democracy, many thinkers believed it signaled its degeneration. They hoped instead to assert a more concrete and felicitous peoplehood against a corrupt and bureaucratic French state. However perverse, Maurras, Barrès, and Péguy understood the nationalist revival of the 1900s as a continuation of the “populism”—the term is theirs—of the Boulanger Affair of the late 1880s.16 The masses and disinherited, Barrès argued, were “dreaming with melancholy of heroic times.”17 The most conservative of these men aspired for an organic people grounded in tradition and blood against the elitist cosmopolitanism of the Third Republic. Yet even the socialist Péguy pined that theirs was a generation in search of “the marrow” of France, everything that made up “the tissue of the people”—a regenerated social bond.18 Irrationalist violence therefore articulated something else, or something more, than illiberal disaffection from parliamentary democracy. The cathexis of war in 1914 radicalized available arguments about the people’s redemptive violence from the preceding century. Those arguments identified in popular violence something irreducible to utilitarian calculation or raison d’état: a morality. That was why a great war could repair “the tissue of the people” in the face of parliamentary politics and moral entropy.
To make this argument, this chapter analyzes the most visible theorist of violence before the Great War, Georges Sorel. Admired by Carl Schmitt and Benito Mussolini and retroactively mythologized as the “father of fascism,” Sorel moved between the intellectual circles that fostered enthusiasm for irrationalist violence.19 His work particularly influenced intellectuals in France and Italy. In ways that echoed Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1840s and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in the 1850s, Sorel searched for a way to counteract moral decadence, especially as it manifest in French culture’s relentless “positivism” and “scientism.” Like those before him, he would find an answer in redemptive violence.
The chapter focuses on Sorel’s Reflections on Violence (1908) because, more than any of his other texts, it formalized the reasons why Sorel believed proletarian violence could renew the moral bases of society. Leading social theorists of the Third Republic labored under the sign of Emile Durkheim to design statist, technocratic approaches to social progress and moral improvement. Sorel and his friends, however, came together under the sign of Henri Bergson to search for the sources of moral improvement and social regeneration in “immediate experience.” Rather than repudiating the aims of republicanism wholesale, Bergson’s account of immediate experience helped them develop an anti-statist alternative for achieving similar ends: mythic proletarian violence. Workers’ violence was sourced in the preconceptual, mythic dimensions of class struggle. It therefore possessed morally productive powers absent in the instrumental “force” of the state. Indeed, it offered a remedy for familiar problems with French republican citizenship: that it was atomizing rather than associating and that it was leading France into moral decadence. In ways even more forthright than earlier nineteenth-century thinkers, Sorel identified a causal relationship between political violence and moral renewal. With violence, workers could generate a new morality for a world dying from utilitarian reason.
Sorel argued that proletarians held exclusive possession of redemptive violence, but his argument was reinterpreted in national terms as it travelled from text to context. Hence, Sorel’s writings came to offer a conceptual alibi for the reorganization of strands of socialist and Catholic thought into an irrationalist nationalism by 1914—what Sternhell calls a political synthesis “neither right nor left.” Sorel was not culpable for that synthesis, but his place within the landscape of fin de siècle radicalism makes his writings a unique point of observation with which to bring into focus this wider vision of redemptive violence saturating prewar French political culture. Sorel’s conclusion that a decadent France could only be redeemed by either “a great extension of proletarian violence” or “a great foreign war, which might reinvigorate lost energies” and induce “disgust with the humanitarian platitudes with which Jaurès lulls [the bourgeoisie] to sleep” forecast broader reorientations of French thought at the end of the long nineteenth century.20
What is at stake is showing how neither Sorel nor the vision of irrationalist violence that his Reflections represented should be dismissed as aberrations from the democratic political culture of the Third Republic. Instead, claims to irrational violence responded to a real contradiction contained within the latter’s republicanism: its abstract vision of the social body could not bridge its conflicting commitments to political individualism and social cohesion. If the Third Republic sought to contain that contradiction through a modernizing state and a positivistic belief in progress, it nevertheless opened up the conceptual space for its supposed opposite: a militant nationalism based on a return to “concrete experience,” a “real” non-abstract people, and eventually a one-sided particularism. Irrationalist redemptive violence promised to convey us to the moral society that the French republican tradition had stipulated as a requirement for peoplehood. That was one reason why the leading lights of French thought, like so many in the fall of 1914, could find in world war an occasion for spiritual salvation.
The Unlikely Bergsonian Alliance
Sorel published Reflections on Violence at an inflection point in oppositional politics under the Third Republic. Since the Third Republic’s origins, socialists and republicans had clashed with their Catholic and royalist counterparts over the proper form of French government. Pope Leo XIII’s 1892 encyclical, “Au milieu des solicitudes,” called for Catholics to reconcile with republicanism, but, even so, the division between the two sides widened.21 These were the years that the Ferry Laws passed, establishing free, compulsory, and secular education in France.22 The traditional study of Latin, Greek, and classical thought was replaced with a new emphasis on science and modern languages.23 These were also the years of the Dreyfus Affair, a watershed controversy concerning a Jewish military captain falsely accused of treason and which exploded into a fundamental dispute over the meaning of France itself. The affair’s fallout culminated in the official separation of church and state in 1905, cementing an equation connecting republicanism, modernization, and anticlericalism.
Increasing anticlericalism coincided with escalating working class radicalism. Waldeck-Rousseau’s government finally repealed the Loi Le Chapelier in 1884, legalizing trade unionism for the first time in almost a century. Working class militancy and anarchist violence swept through Paris, leading to the bombing of several judges and the assassination of President Sadi Carnot in 1894.24 Workers repeatedly went on strike, intensifying anxiety over a revolutionary general strike around the earliest May Days.25 By the early 1900s, when Sorel joined revolutionary syndicalism, working class militancy had been growing for almost two decades. The year that the Reflections came out in Italy—1906—the Confédération générale du travail (CGT) adopted the Charter of Amiens announcing the dominance of revolutionary syndicalism within the workers’ movement.26 Socialism and anticlerical republicanism’s alignment against Catholic and royalist reaction seemed secure.
And yet, almost immediately after publishing Reflections, Sorel and his syndicalist companions began to be solicited by the Catholic right. First George Valois (future founder of the ultra-nationalist Cercle Proudhon and then the Faisceau) and then Maurras (leader of Action française) approached Sorel about the latent filiation they detected between revolutionary syndicalism and the royalist, nationalist movement. Paul Bourget, famed playwright and a member of the Action Française, helped introduce Sorel’s work to the broader right: his 1910 play La Barricade is based on the Reflections. The overtures were not left unreciprocated. In a letter to Maurras on 6 July 1909, Sorel thanked him for a copy of his Enquête sur la monarchie, writing, “It appears to me certain that your critique of contemporary experience well justifies that which you’ve wanted to establish. . . . I have long been struck by the madness of our contemporary authors who ask democracy to do work that none but royalists, full of the sentiment of their mission, could approach.”27
The reasons for this nascent alliance were not reducible to political convenience. To be sure, Maurras and the Catholic right needed labor’s support to continue challenging the liberal republican establishment; for their part, the Sorelian and syndicalist left had adopted a position of irreconcilability with Jaurès’s parliamentary socialism. Yet, even if by 1908 the parliamentary left had definitively broken with the revolutionary working class movement, that was by no means an obvious invitation for the far right to court the latter.28 The hinge, rather, was philosophical. It involved shared interest in a new idiom of social criticism, one that critiqued the Third Republic, not only by calling on traditional platitudes of church and family, but also on contemporary work in French philosophy concerned with intuition, immediate experience, and the will.
Observers usually consider these years as the triumphant era of positivism. The Third Republic elevated it to an “underlying philosophical support” and something of its “semiofficial creed.”29 Its emphasis on empirical observation, generalizable laws, scientific progress, and causal analysis dominated the curriculum of France’s elite educational institutions like the École Polytechnique. Positivism’s prestige was well earned. Mathematics and the natural sciences enjoyed extraordinary progress in these decades. Louis Pasteur’s microbacterial revolution, Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory, and the discovery of the laws of thermodynamics coincided with Paris’s electrification and the Eiffel Tower’s construction. Thomas Huxley and Ernest Haeckel were proclaiming a radical materialism which denied the existence of anything that could not be empirically or mathematically described.30 Literary “naturalism” transformed the novelist into the biologist of society. Ernest Renan proclaimed in his 1889 The Future of Science that “Science is a religion, science alone will henceforth make the creeds, science alone can solve for men the eternal problems, the solution of which nature imperatively demands.”31 In this age of positivism, the analytical methods of scientific inquiry promised to reveal the mechanical, materialist bases of all phenomena.
Yet, in the 1900s, French intellectual life was also being swept up in the charismatic influence of a philosopher of intuition, experience, and the will: Henri Bergson. Since the 1880s, Bergson had been developing a powerful critique of just this positivistic intellectual culture. As one historian has put it, Bergson set out to explain “what clocks did not: memories, premonitions, expectations and anticipations.”32 His ambition was to challenge “scientism” and all forms of mechanistic determinism through heightened attention to experience. In his 1889 Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, for example, Bergson argued that our habitual Cartesian modes of perception distorted reality. When we speak about time, we imagine it as a continuous succession of discrete units. Each second follows the next, just as real integers follow one another on a number line. Or, when our hand traces a surface, we reflect upon it as the touching of a succession of elements, a congruent aggregation of discrete points. But, Bergson argued in the Essai, these images are infelicitous to reality. They break up the original unity of immediate perception by retrospectively imposing on it quantitative, spatial categories. In truth, we experience time as a qualitative flow of multiplicitous elements, each of which shades and colors one another; we apprehend time retrospectively with language, as a quantitative sequence of homogenous empty containers like “seconds.” By allowing “the trespassing of the idea of space upon the field of pure consciousness,” by describing in space what is experienced as unfolding in time, the Cartesianism of French thought obscured how “there is no common measure between mind and language.”33 Its ambition may have been to mirror reality, but reality is prelinguistic and dynamic. It can only be arrested in language at the cost of its symbolization in space.
The implications of Bergson’s distinction between two modes of cognitive comportments—intuitive/temporal versus reflective/spatial—went beyond methodological problems in metaphysics. Once we realized that there were “two aspects of conscious life,” once we recalled that “below the numerical multiplicity of conscious states,” there is “qualitative multiplicity,” “a self in which succeeding each other means melting into one another,” and the “forming of an organic whole,” we could grasp that at stake was the structure of the self: Is it unified or fragmented?34
Consciousness, goaded by an insatiable desire to separate, substitutes the symbol for reality, or perceives the reality only through the symbol. As the self thus refracted, and thereby broken to pieces, is much better adapted to the requirements of social life in general and language in particular, consciousness prefers it, and gradually loses sight of the fundamental self.35
In contrast to the self “broken to pieces” by language, the “fundamental self” is an organic whole. By “organic whole,” Bergson meant the opposite of what could be produced from the quantitative aggregation of discrete elements. The unity of ten “seconds” of time is purely formal. It represents no more than an aggregation of discrete containers that do not interpenetrate one another. It therefore does not capture the kind of integral unity Bergson finds specific to the “fundamental self,” what Donna Jones has helpfully described as an “inclusive” unity which “cannot be mathematically represented but only intuited.”36 Unlike the fragmented self we grasp intellectually, this unified self cannot be represented in language, only felt in time.
Thus, like Cousin decades earlier, Bergson might be said to register in metaphysical terms an anxiety rooted in his specific historical conjuncture; namely, the ongoing disintegration of the self.37 Like Cousin, too, Bergson believed that salvaging modern freedom depended on retrieving this true self. Cartesianism rendered freedom illusory because of its vision of a deterministic world, a world as a Newtonian machine. It could only grasp the experience of our freedom by translating it into a spatial exercise where we “choose” between two paths and yet whose choice was in any case predetermined by the sum of physical and psychic vectors making up the decision situation. In reality, however, Bergson believed “there are not two tendencies, or even two directions, but a self which lives and develops by means of which its very hesitations, until the free action drops from it like an over-ripe fruit.”38 To rediscover the fact of our freedom therefore required returning from the symbolization of reality to reality itself, to delve below the registers of language to the creativity of immediate experience.
Bergson would develop these ideas through the 1890s and 1900s, adding to his critique of positivism ever more sophisticated portraits of reality and “life.” In his 1896 Matière et mémoire, Bergson would show how intuition depended on an immersion into a strata of deep memory at a distance from the practical exigencies of action. In his 1907 L’évolution créatrice, life would be defined, not as a machine governed by Newtonian principles of action and reaction, but as something governed by an élan vital, conceived as a principle of creation transforming and transcending mere matter. In a powerful 1911 lecture “The Perception of Change,” he would show that while practical action requires us to relate the world in static subject–object relations, reality was itself processual and integrated, like a melody. By 1914, he would tether his philosophical vitalism to voluntarism, and the self itself would be defined by its willing activity.39
Figure 4.4 “On écoute aux fenêtres le cours de M. Bergson,” Excelsior 14 February 1914.
Source: gallica.bnf.fr / Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
These elaborations and refinements were not just academic milestones, but achievements of public culture. In 1904, Bergson replaced Gabriel Tarde as the Chair of Modern Philosophy at the Collège de France. His subsequent lectures were popular society events, attracting both professional intellectuals and the educated public.40 He frequently turned out hundreds, sometimes thousands of students at speaking engagements. These lectures appealed to intellectuals of all persuasions intrigued by the limits of reason. Attending them was, Alice Kaplan quips, “the traditional activity of the aspiring French intellectual.”41 R. C. Grogin concludes that, by 1914, Bergson was “the most controversial philosopher in the world and the first in the twentieth century to become an international celebrity” (Figure 4.4).42
Particularly in the Latin Quarter, a critical mass of literary critics, artists, and political thinkers frustrated with the reigning positivism found in Bergson a reprieve and an inspiration. Bourget, the playwright who helped introduced Sorel to the far right, despaired of “the final bankruptcy of hope to which science is leading us.”43 Anatole France lamented, “Why are we sad? . . . We have eaten the fruit of the tree of science and the taste of ashes remains in our mouths.”44 Artists involved with the Symbolists, Cubism, and later Futurism, all of whom were committed to undoing the damage of literary naturalism, avowedly based their aesthetic philosophy on Bergson.45 The popularity of Bergson’s philosophy brought into view, as few events could, the cleavages dividing prewar France: not simply that of left and right, but what François Azouvi has described as “two Frances,” a Cartesian France and a Bergsonian France. The former identified with reason, objectivity, science, republicanism, and anticlericalism; the latter opposed to it unmediated experience, classicism, anti-parliamentarism, and a Catholic spiritualism (if not always official Catholicism).46
Bergson himself did not translate his philosophical critique into a sustained language of social criticism. Hisashi Fujita is right that whether the left or right correctly interpreted Bergson’s philosophy is the wrong question to ask, and Shklar herself suspected that Bergson’s philosophy did “not have any direct political implications.”47 And yet Bergson’s admirers weaponized his arguments for their own purposes. “For the half-decade before the First World War,” H. Stuart Hughes observes, “ ‘Bergsonism’ was living a life of its own, almost independent of its founder.”48 In the distinctions Bergson drew between vitality and inertia, creativity and the “ready-made,” time and space, experience and language, organic and mechanical unity, writers across the spectrum found abundant resources to develop what we might call a “political Bergsonism.” Political Bergsonism questioned whether the Third Republic’s commitments to positivism and abstract universalism could successfully hold together the French social body. It mounted, in the high language of metaphysics, an assault on the emergence of parliamentary democracy and mass party politics. Beyond tactical considerations, it was this Bergsonian idiom of social criticism that helped bridge segments of anarcho-syndicalism with sections of the royalist, nationalist movement.
* * *
Two groups in particular contributed to the development of political Bergsonism: Hubert Lagardelle’s Le Mouvement socialiste and Péguy’s Cahiers de la Quinzaine. In 1899, Lagardelle founded Le Mouvement socialiste, and it served as the premier venue for elaborating revolutionary syndicalism’s political theory in France until it terminated in 1914.49 Its readership was comparatively small, but despite the role its contributors would play in the rise of French fascism in the coming decades, even its scholarly critics admit Le Mouvement socialiste was “one of the best [journals] that had ever existed in Europe, and the influence of its contributors on the development of the syndicalist left was considerable.”50 Sorel joined the journal at the height of the Dreyfus Affair. He saw in the Affair the morality that he believed formed socialism’s essence. However, after Dreyfusards succumbed to petty electoral politics and anticlericalism, especially with “l’affaire des fiches” and the separation of church and state, Sorel abandoned it and parliamentary democracy generally.51
Le Mouvement socialiste’s core included Lagardelle, Sorel, and writers like Daniel Halévy, Marcel Mauss, and Victor Griffuelhes. Together, they became known as the “new school” of socialism. It was in the pages of Le Mouvement socialiste that Sorel first serialized Reflections in French before Halévy encouraged him to assemble it into a book in 1908.52 Under Lagardelle’s direction, the journal called for a rescue of the spirit of Marx from parliamentary socialism and an autonomous workers’ movement independent of the party system.53 Their inaugural declaration in 1899 announced two enemies: on one hand, abstract socialist theoreticians for whom class struggle was “made to appear as facts of abstract formulas, and not as the action of the masses working for their emancipation,” and, on the other hand, the brute empiricists who “disoriented in the face of the complexity of capitalist society, become embroiled in their groping and conservative reformism.” Neither dogmatists nor empiricists, their journal would instead unite the “general tendencies” of socialism grounded in real proletarian militancy.54
Lagardelle and the “new school” sought to intervene in the ongoing “crisis of Marxism” in European thought: Can or should we modify Marx’s arguments in light of present conditions? Is social democracy entailed by or contradictory to Marxism?55 In France, Jules Guesde put forward a positivistic interpretation of Marxian science. Guesde encouraged socialists to find power in the electoral arena in the pages of L’Égalité: a republic in the hands of the bourgeoisie was repressive, but in the hands of workers, it had promise.56 Against Guesde, Lagardelle’s “new school” maintained a position of irreconcilability to the state, emphasizing instead the direct organizational activities of militant workers. Pierre Rosanvallon describes them as endorsing a “sociological socialism, derived directly from the activities of labor groups” distinct from socialisms “founded on a philosophical theory.”57 For his part, Lagardelle debated Durkheim over the compatibility between syndicalism and parliamentary socialism. He insisted that working-class consciousness was incompatible with support for the latter. Durkheim accused Lagardelle and his colleagues of leading an antisocial movement that threatened to abort any gains socialism might gradually achieve through institutional reform.58
The intellectual circle at Le Mouvement socialiste repudiated parliamentary politics, in part because they considered themselves the “ ‘gauche bergsonienne,’ just as Marx and his friends were once the ‘gauche hégélienne.’ ”
Le Mouvement socialiste has a particular reason to be interested in the influence of Bergson’s philosophy. . . . It seems to us that our attitude vis-à-vis the dogmas of traditional socialism are similar to the Bergsonian attitude vis-à-vis the intellectualist philosophy; that we find in both a desire to attend to reality and the same mistrust of formulas.59
Contributors’ critiques of parliamentary democracy indeed reveal a Bergsonian accent. Take Edouard Berth, regular contributor to Le Mouvement socialiste and future co-founder of the Cercle Proudhon. His articles railed against the state “as an immense abstraction,” described parliamentary democracy as “individualist, atomistic,” and that in modern life, “Abstraction has destroyed reality—the abstract State, abstract morals, abstract law, abstract education: everything is abstract in the modern world.”60 Consider, too, Lagardelle’s accusation that parliamentary democracy erred in only seeing “abstract men,” whereas socialism concerned itself with “real men.” (Neither cared much for women.) “The economic organization of the proletariat,” he argued, “knows only real men, workers who group with and consult each other in defense of their material and moral interests.” That is why with socialism, “We are no longer in the presence of abstract notions, but of definite concrete relations. There is nothing in common between the political milieu and the proletarian one.”61 Modern French democracy won its conception of the citizen by abstracting away all social ascriptions. Socialism, in contrast, meant descending from “abstract man” to “real man” as he was embedded in concrete economic arrangements and from which he derived his interests. Hence, as Jeremy Jennings has put it, for Le Mouvement socialiste, “syndicalism represented the victory of l’homme réel over l’homme abstrait of 1789.”62 In fact, Lagardelle later declared the opposition between the abstract and the concrete to be his foremost methodological concern.63
As Sorel was publishing Reflections in Le Mouvement socialiste, he was also holding court as the “Socrates of the Latin Quarter” in the bookstore of the poet and essayist Charles Péguy, editor of the Cahiers de la Quinzaine. The Cahiers was a vibrant, financially precarious publication that gathered together strands of Catholic and socialist thought. Some of its members overlapped with Lagardelle’s journal. Péguy started the Cahiers after failing his agrégation at the École normale supérieure (ENS) and opening up his bookstore on the rue de la Sorbonne. The intellectuals and writers who gathered there—Sorel, Péguy, Halévy, Berth, Rolland, and others—helped formulate an alternative political program to the official parliamentary socialism of Jaurès and Lucien Herr, the influential librarian at the ENS. Halévy joked that Péguy’s bookstore became known as “a haunt of old Normale students more or less denormalized.”64
The Cahiers was more politically heterogeneous than Le Mouvement socialiste. Many involved began as Dreyfusards, but their paths diverged after disillusionment with its parliamentary cooptation. They each resented the anticlerical direction of establishment republicanism, but their relationship with the Catholic right was never straightforward. Péguy’s spiritual conversion to Catholicism after 1908, for example, alienated traditional readers and fellow contributors. His moral Puritanism put him on friendly terms with Catholic intellectuals, including members of Action française. He exchanged books with Maurras out of mutual admiration. And with his subsequent reconciliation with Catholicism, the Cahiers assumed an idiosyncratic place among the French right, a Bergsonian conservatism nudged between the integral nationalism of Maurras’s Action française and the lyrical antimodernism promoted by Barrès in the Echo de Paris.65
Like so many others, Péguy adored Bergson. Each Friday afternoon, he attended Bergson’s lectures together with Sorel.66 “Bergsonism,” Péguy extolled, “is not at all a geography, but a geology.”67 Never content to map out space and surface, Bergson plumbed reality’s depth. The admiration was mutual. “He had a marvelous gift for stepping beyond the materiality of beings . . . and penetrating to the soul,” Bergson wrote of Péguy after the war. “He knew my most secret thought, such as I have never expressed it, such as I would have wished to express it.”68 There is no question that Péguy’s political theory mobilized Bergson to attack the Third Republic’s parliamentary democracy. A master dichotomy between “mystique” and “politique” governed his thought. The distinction reinterpreted Bergson’s contrast between the unified and elevating qualities of “immediate experience” and its deadening by language. All events, Péguy argued, began as “mystique,” spiritually radiant and abundant in significance, and eventually deadened into mere “politique,” which was flat, rationalistic, self-interested, and unexalting.
Everything begins as a mystique and ends as a politique. Everything begins with la mystique, in mysticism, with its own mystique, and everything ends in politics, in la politique, in a policy. The important point is not that such and such a politique should triumph. . . . The whole point (what matters), the essential thing, is that in each order, in each system, the mystique should not be devoured by the politique to which it gave birth.69
This dichotomy empowered Péguy to criticize the exploitation of the Dreyfus Affair: its original “mystique,” its spiritual struggle for justice, had been cheapened, “devoured,” by petty parliamentary maneuvering for anticlerical ambitions.70 Péguy, in other words, adapted Bergson’s metaphysical distinctions between reality and language, the vital and the inert, into a political theory of decadence and degeneration.71
This point is important. Between Le Mouvement socialiste and the Cahiers de la Quinzaine, the extraparliamentary left was creatively reimagining Bergson’s philosophy into a political theory. In Lagardelle’s hatred of “merely political” democracy’s “abstract man,” in Péguy’s protest against the deadening of “mystique” into “politique,” we can hear echoes of Bergson’s dogged belief—so at odds with Hegel—that abstraction impoverished rather than enriched reality. We hear, too, Bergson’s metaphysical critique of linguistic or quantitative representation reinvented into a critique of political representation and the quantitative atomism of political citizenship.
For this “Bergsonian left,” Guesde’s positivistic Marxism and Jaurès’s parliamentary socialism shared something fundamental: a vision of politics as a machine, a game of balancing and calculation, an activity deprived of moral aspect. In this way, they, too, were symptomatic of Cartesianism and its decadence. After all, Sorel argued, Cartesianism was antithetical to the moral and epistemic worldview of producers. Like the bourgeois intellectuals who promulgated it, Cartesianism could reduce the world to an object of rational contemplation because it knew no pain. The lived experiences of workers, however, entailed pain and forbearance. For that reason, a contemplative stance toward the world was out of the question. Workers were instead inclined toward philosophical naturalism.72 It would never occur to a worker to wonder aloud whether the external world “really” existed—the givenness of labor’s pain proved that beyond doubt. The fact that Cartesians wondered about such questions proved their decadence. It was the historical mission of the productive classes to clear this ideological clutter away, to furnish a new value system for a modern industrial France. By embodying the virtues of men living “concretely” and involved in “industry,” Sorel believed producers provided a superior template for republican citizenship.73
In short, many intellectuals of the extraparliamentary left opposed parliamentary socialism and a deterministic Marxism, and not only because they each tended to reformism. Both were also symptoms of a moral and experiential depletion in modern life. Socialism, in turn, had to involve more than the socialization of the means of production and exchange. It had to also furnish a morality, one rooted in deep conviction and the concrete experiences of producers. Le Mouvement socialiste was clear on this point: socialism was both an “economic and moral necessity,” it involved both “economic development and moral evolution,” and its end was “to activate this evolution towards organic unity” within the proletarian struggle.74 Lagardelle, Sorel, and Péguy concluded that not only the terms of economic arrangement, but also the proper moral bases for a modernizing industrial society were at stake. Positivism could not provide them. “In vain are these philosophies adorned with a grand scientific apparatus,” Sorel wrote, “for they offer no help in constituting the morals of society.”75
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Lagardelle, Péguy, Sorel, and the extraparliamentary left came to hate the Third Republic. That did not mean, however, that they were straightforwardly antidemocratic. Undoubtedly, they despised parliamentary politics after the Dreyfus Affair, and some briefly allied with conservative royalists after 1907. Closer examination, however, helps us see that their political itinerary was the outcome of an immanent critique: these critics denounced the “democracy” of the Third Republic because its republican interpretation of “abstract” or “political” democracy betrayed democracy as a moral and spiritual principle.
Péguy, for example, despised the Third Republic because it betrayed the mystique of republicanism. “The Republic, it was not always a pack of politicians,” Péguy bemoaned in his 1910 Notre jeunesse. “Behind it there is a mystique . . . behind it lies a glorious past, an honourable past, and what is more important still, nearer the essence, there is a whole race behind it, heroism and perhaps sanctity.” Before the Third Republic, “Republicans were republicans, and the Republic was the republic.” Alas, the parliamentary and secular form of the Republic robbed it of its essence. “Today, we prove and demonstrate the Republic” as if it were a math equation. Yet “when [the republic] was alive no one proved it. One lived it.” The true meaning of the republic lay not in its institutional rules, but in its reality as a type of lived experience. Hence, “the de-republicanization of France is essentially the same movement as the de-Christianization of France. Both together are one and the same movement, a profound de-mystification.” Péguy believed that French youth needed to rediscover the sacred mystique of the Republic which its parliamentary form murdered. “What we want to know is the tissue of the people in that heroic age . . . the marrow of our race, the cellular tissue. . . . All that we no longer see, all that we don’t see nowadays.” “There are,” Péguy believed, “deeper forces and realities” to which we moderns have lost access.76
Lagardelle was even more explicit. On one hand, his criticisms of republican democracy were unsparing. “Political democracy only considers the abstract man, the citizen,” Lagardelle argued. It focused its attention exclusively on “the citizen, the ‘political’ man, detached from the social category to which he belongs.” In so doing, actually existing French democracy “ignores the differentiations that material life introduces among men and groups of men.” It obscured class conflict. This was deliberate: rather than “pronouncing the words ‘class struggle,’ ” republican politicians “profusely replace it with the word ‘democracy’ ” to insist on class reconciliation instead.77
On the other hand, Lagardelle argued that we can distinguish between democracy as a principle and as an institution. “What does democracy mean? It is both a principle and a form of government.” As a principle, it “proclaims the equal rights of all citizens” and expresses “spiritual ends.” That is why there can be “both agreement and contradiction between socialism and democracy.” They contradict each other economically, but they are “on the spiritual side of social life in agreement.” That is also why Lagardelle conceded that no matter how counterproductive political democracy was in practice, “the democratic principle—even more than democratic government—is dear to the socialist proletariat.” “It has rightly been said,” he admitted, “that the democratic atmosphere is the only one wherein socialist lungs can breathe.”78
Like Péguy and Lagardelle, Sorel attacked “democracy” in the Reflections and elsewhere. As Richard Vernon has argued, however, that did not mean he abandoned democratic citizenship altogether. Instead, he transposed it to industrial organization and the syndicates.79 It would be in organized, militant workshops, and not in the parliamentary arena, that ordinary workers enjoyed something like collective autonomy. “Law, as it is formulated by liberal codes, hardly recognizes anyone but the isolated worker,” Sorel complained. It was abstract and atomizing. But “For syndicalists these propositions are false. The sum of workers forms a body,” and, through their own agitation, they engaged in the “transformation of the people by itself.” Syndicates were spaces where ordinary people self-reflexively transformed who they were by taking themselves as the object of deliberate craftsmanship. Hence “the whole future of socialism rests on the autonomous development of the workers’ syndicates.”80
Sorel even hoped that syndicates could become crucibles of a future self-governing society. In the syndicates, solidarity overcame social isolation and pointed the way to “the formation of a new juridical philosophy,” including a new understanding of freedom. “Our century has acquired the true meaning of liberty . . . it is the activity of producing useful things in a purpose chosen by ourselves.” This is real, concrete autonomy. “There is nothing less abstract than that.”81 For all of Sorel’s hatred of “democracy,” he was committed to a vision of self-governance made concrete in everyday productive life.
Interpreting these criticisms as a type of immanent critique underscores how their hatred was directed not at democracy or the Republic as such, but at the Third Republic’s statist and rationalist vision of democratic modernization. In pinpointing the conflict this way, we also bring back into view the important theoretical proximity these critics shared with their erstwhile opponents like Durkheim. As Eric Brandom has demonstrated, however sharply syndicalists disagreed with establishment republicans, the two camps actually had “a great deal in common, particularly concerning the generation of la morale from social practice.”82 It was Durkheim, after all, who argued that society was a moral phenomenon. It was he who tabulated in Suicide modernity’s anemic spiritual condition, its proliferating anomie. Establishment republicans fully agreed with the extraparliamentary left that democratization in France required the regeneration of the moral bases of society. Morality regulated men in society, not man in nature, and to engineer a new society, they had to engineer a new morality, too.
The crux of the disagreement between the extraparliamentary left and establishment republicans lay elsewhere: in their relative assessments of the value of social conflict and, in particular, the state’s role in moral improvement. Theorists like Durkheim, Frederic Le Play, and Hippolyte Taine gravitated toward state leadership in reconstructing morality for a democratizing France. They endorsed “top-down” instruments of integration like education, civic nationalism, the standardization of a common language, and the creation of social security.83 These new architects of liberal republicanism reconceptualized the state as an agent of progress in the name of which it could “produce the social.” “Established elites, steeped in a liberalism that counted Tocqueville and Guizot among its progenitors,” Philip Nord explains, had finally “shucked off the Jacobin legacy,” its moral naturalism.84 They forged in its place a republicanism that viewed “the social” as an artifact of state-sponsored instruments of cohesion, cementing together discrete social formations and transforming the state from a site of political sovereignty into an instrument of economic improvement and social harmony. The effect was that, as Jacques Donzelot has argued, the state was gradually redefined in terms of its role as guardian of social progress rather than an expression of popular sovereignty.85
Lagardelle, Péguy, and Sorel pressed back. The society these social theorists manufactured was mechanical and superficial. Its approach to “producing the social” actually magnified atomization and statism. As Tocqueville and Proudhon both argued, state centralization and the atomization of society went hand in hand. Sorel cited both writers repeatedly to complain of the “egoism” that the Third Republic had unleashed: “Egoism of the basest kind shamelessly breaks the sacred bonds of the family and friendship in every case in which these oppose its desire” (RV 188). Indeed, because of that egoism, Sorel feared that “France has lost its morals” (RV 216).
No wonder that some writers involved with Le Mouvement socialiste and the Cahiers affiliated with the Catholic right. The latter, too, found its pulse quickened by an apocalyptic view of a morally emaciated France. Barrès’s Les Déracinés or “The Uprooted” (1897), part of a trilogy on “national energy,” related the story of young Frenchmen from Alsace and Lorraine alienated from the patrie by the pernicious influence of a Kantian professor. Kant was a convenient stand-in for the political culture of the Third Republic: rational, cosmopolitan, universalistic, homogenous, an allergic-reaction—so Barrès thought—to life, instinct, immediate experience, individuality, and everything “lived” and “concrete”: namely, la France profonde.86 Péguy was equally melodramatic. Influenced by Sorel’s studies on the social origins of morality, he ached for a return to French republicanism “before the professors crushed it,” to recover “what a people was like before it was obliterated” by positivism.87 The republican mystique (Péguy), the lived experience of the patrie (Barrès), the “most noble sentiments” of concrete morality (Sorel): each thinker in his own way related a story of morality driven toward egoism and utilitarianism by the regime’s positivistic intellectual culture. Hence why Sorel asserted with confidence that socialism would counteract these trends by “recognizing the necessity of the improvement of morals” (RV 223).
Looking back at the eve of world war, what stands out now is how the pursuit of moral regeneration lurked beneath the surface of vicious political antagonisms. No ideological camp, no tradition of political thought monopolized that concern, for it was rooted in the conflictual experience of democratization they all shared. Revolutionary syndicalists, Catholic royalists, and republican elites all struggled to find moral bases adequate to their historical conjuncture. If royalists did so by turning backward to corporatism and Catholicism, syndicalists turned to the lived experience of producers and proletarian struggle. Both disputed the Third Republic’s claim to have found a statist, scientific answer to it. It is the peculiar mark of these prewar years that virtually every ideological current found itself increasingly compressed into the same conceptual field, the same problem-space. The experiential bases of modern France needed to be reinvented. Modern men and women could not live by clocks, cogs, and conveyor belts alone. And if a potent “anti-materialist” intellectual synthesis was becoming viable, it was because a common culprit for moral degeneration had been found: the parliamentary form of democracy.88
What remained to be determined was how the moral foundations of society could be reconstructed. All of this diagnostic work did not yet offer an ameliorative practice that could enact and bring forth morality from within a relativistic, Cartesian, and utilitarian political culture. The political thinker who most vigorously worked out a solution was Sorel. His Reflections on Violence, which finally appeared in book form in 1908, was to make the case that proletarian violence, organized by syndicates, could produce a new morality precisely when it was sourced in registers of consciousness below that of reason and language. “The danger which threatens the future of the world may be avoided”; indeed, proletarian redemptive violence “may save the world from barbarism” (RV 85).
The Cunning of Violence
The world needed a new system of moral valuation. Socialism’s future depended on it: “revolutionary syndicalism would be impossible if the world of the workers were under the influence of such a morality of the weak,” namely “an ethic adapted to consumers” inherited “from those of Greece in its time of decadence.” This decadent ethics prioritized philosophy over war, cleverness over violence, and social conciliation over revolution. It was the ethics of parliamentary socialism (RV 236, 238).
Sorel sought this new morality through proletarian violence. Despite the fact that Reflections aimed to reconceive proletarian violence, however, there are few in-depth analyses of what Sorel meant by it. The Reflections’s canonical stature has led recent scholars to focus on his minor writings, particularly in the philosophy of science, to provide a more global portrait of his thought.89 These studies have rectified one-sided interpretations of Sorel as a protofascist, but they have deflected exegetical attention from his conceptualization of violence. Its meaning seems settled: violence, it is assumed, is something Sorel valued for its own sake. We see this classic interpretation in Hannah Arendt. She concedes that Sorel’s readers exaggerate the scale of violence he endorsed, but she nevertheless considers him among “the authors of rank” who “glorified violence for violence’s sake.”90 Dominick LaCapra describes Sorelian violence “as a regenerative or redemptive force that will transfigure civilization” because its power comes from being “utterly void of content,” even a “blank utopia.”91 Judith Shklar spoke for an entire generation when she concluded that “what distinguishes [Sorel] from most other revolutionaries was that he was not at all concerned with a better future, or indeed with improving society in any way.”92 His violence was apolitical and pointless. This view persists among contemporary readers.93
George Ciccariello-Maher has recently resisted these canonical interpretations of Sorelian violence as “for its own sake” by successfully drawing out its latent dialectical character.94 Ciccariello-Maher argues that Sorel was hostile to the teleological versions of dialectics articulated by parliamentary socialists because those versions aimed at social consensus. Yet Sorel remained a dialectician in practice. He underscored the productive role of conflict rather than consensus in revolutionary social transformation. Even so, Ciccariello-Maher’s recovery of Sorel’s dialectics insists on a substantial break between the Reflections and Sorel’s earlier work. Where Sorel once concerned himself with social harmony, in the Reflections he defends the productivity of social antagonism.
Reflections did, indeed, break in many respects with Sorel’s earlier work, but he never forfeited his fixation on moral regeneration. This underlying continuity comes into focus if we highlight his remarks on the conjugal couple. The conjugal couple, Judith Surkis shows, offered the exemplary model for “the social” in the Third Republic. In marriage, individuals were “theoretically independent and articulated to the social order.”95 Surkis stresses conjugality’s importance to Durkheim, but the same applies to Sorel as well. In his conservative 1889 The Trial of Socrates, Sorel blames Athenian decline on the attenuation of its culture of war and its homosexuality.96 In an 1898 lecture on the ethics of socialism, Sorel argued that Marxists needed to study the family more closely because conjugal love proves “the deep separation between law and morality,” that society is more than a cheap contract or a set of legal agreements. It teaches us “that the notion of virtue is identified with the absolute submission to free engagements.”97 For its part, Reflections contains scores of passages that croon how “Love, by the enthusiasm it begets, can produce that sublimity without which there would be no effective morality” (RV 236). Conjugal love is “the obscure part of morality . . . not easily expressed in formulas,” yet “the fundamental part” for “when it is known, the whole psychology of a people is understood.” Indeed, “The mysterious region” of morality “is the family, whose organization influences all social relationships.” That is what the “little science” of positivism obsessed with “logical simplicity” will never understand, tending as it does to reduce sexual morality “to the equitable relations between contracting parties” (RV 136–39).
Ciccariello-Maher is right that Sorel abandons social harmony for violent conflict because he saw violence as productive rather than aimless or therapeutic. Yet that shift unfolded against the backdrop of his continuous fixation on morality and its sources.98 And it was to rekindle morality that Sorel not only turned from harmony to conflict, but also, as Jeremy Jennings argues, after 1900, from a “deterministic notion of the economic collapse of capitalism” to a “voluntaristic conception of a moral catastrophe facing bourgeois society.”99 To understand the power of the Reflections in its historical conjuncture, in other words, we need to understand how Sorel’s discontinuous political commitments served an unbroken, continuous commitment to moral regeneration.
To link voluntaristic proletarian violence and moral regeneration, Sorel formulates what I call the “cunning of violence” as a motor for historical and moral development. Reflections describes violence from two perspectives. Violence, for Sorel, can be choiceworthy in itself but only when viewed first personally. For violence can also be grasped from a functionalist, third-personal perspective. From that latter perspective, proletarian violence redraws lines of class conflict at a time when parliamentary democracy is mixing everything into a “democratic morass” through “social legislation” (RV 78). Into that morass, proletarian violence injects social differentiation, for only through intractable conflict can a new morality be born. This is proletarian violence’s objective function. Yet for violence to accomplish this objective task, those who engage in it must do so in subjective ignorance of its overall purpose. They cannot hold in their mind’s eye this instrumental goal. To engage in violence for calculated reasons would debase their morality by falling into the same utilitarian reasoning that characterizes raison d’état, or what Sorel calls “force.” Rather than differentiating the classes, calculated proletarian violence would simply remake proletarians into the image of their bourgeois enemies. Neither class would be morally generative.
Sorel therefore theorizes in redemptive proletarian violence a distinction between its subjective and objective aspects. Disavowing its function is how it fulfills its function: “the striving towards excellence, which exists in the absence of any personal, immediate or proportional reward, constitutes the secret virtue that assures the continued progress of the world” (RV 248). Like Hegel’s “cunning of reason,” this “cunning of violence” connects the subjectivism of violence to the objective development of morality. Social conflict does not weaken the social body, but saves it. Sorel identifies the cunning of violence in light of his own diagnosis of France’s political situation, which also consists in an “objective” and “subjective” aspect: it tended toward decadence, and it extinguished the will. Formalizing Sorel’s cunning of violence helps us see why proletarian violence was capable of “the birth of a virtue . . . a virtue which has the power to save civilization” (RV 228).
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Viewed objectively, proletarian violence counteracts the decadence that parliamentary democracy brings about. Traditionally, Sorel claims, French republicanism has been hostile to class struggle because of the rights of man: “Judging all things from the abstract point of view of the Déclaration des droits de l’homme, they said that the legislation of 1789 had been created in order to abolish all distinction of class in law.” For this reason, many republicans opposed “social legislation” tailored to the working class because it enshrined in law an illegitimate sociological distinction. Under the Third Republic, however, progressive politicians made social legislation palatable by recasting it as republican, a means of integrating disenfranchised classes into modern citizenship and resolving “the social question” in universal terms. In particular, Léon Bourgeois’s “solidarism” helped create a state-run system of social security and insurance that could fulfill the demands of “social right,” enact a “social economics,” and secure cross-class solidarity in the name of progress while regulating anomie via the family and the workplace.100
Sorel criticizes these efforts to republicanize class conflict as a misguided pursuit of “social peace.” For one, the pursuit of social peace recapitulates asymmetries of power. This point is important, for Sorel is arguing that what we understand to be rational deliberation aimed at generating consensus on questions of public good can, in practice, rarely realize the political freedom of the dispossessed. Liberal democratic politics, in a situation of unequal social relations, will stage social conflict as tacitly organized by the question of what concessions are needed from the bourgeoisie: “Such a discussion presupposes that it is possible to ascertain the exact extent of social duty and what sacrifices an employer must continue to make in order to maintain his position” (RV 56). It is thus reformist in essence. Negotiations turn on questions of social “duty,” where fulfillment of duty allows bourgeois benefactors to feel a “supposed heroism,” one that is identified more accurately by its beneficiaries as barely concealed “shameful exploitation.” By making the class struggle a question of the proper relation between the classes, of what the ruling class owes the poor and what social legislation is therefore required by the state, class struggle is reduced to special pleading. At its worst, the pursuit of social peace moralizes reformist politics so that its revolutionary counterpart appears not only practically unfeasible but morally repugnant, a violation of one’s duty to cultivate a national consensus enjoyable by all democratic citizens. Hence why “parliamentary socialists no longer believe in insurrection . . . they teach that the ballot-box has replaced the gun” (RV 49–50). By framing class struggle around civic harmony and duty, parliamentary socialism has affirmed exploitative social relations and is to be rejected as counter-revolutionary (RV 55–62, 107).
Above all, Sorel believes that violent class warfare’s displacement by the pursuit of social peace is not only counter-revolutionary, but decadent. Remade as realists, parliamentarians subject their moral convictions to strategic calculations. They no longer even fight for what they believe in. “Parliamentary socialism,” Sorel observes with loathing, “feels a certain embarrassment from the fact that, at its origin, socialism took its stand on absolute principles” (RV 68). Undoubtedly, his claims about decadence were not new. The concern with decline and decadence was a fixture of late nineteenth-century European intellectual culture. Between conservative disciplines like crowd psychology and criminal anthropology, “decadence” and “degeneration” were concepts in widespread use, organizing an array of social ills like the declining birth rate, alcohol consumption, criminality, and sexual pathology within a common framework that analogized the compulsive repetition of France’s revolutionary history to the intergenerational reproduction of the social body.101 Decadence linked biology and history together in a common national narrative of depletion, of vital life thwarted or suppressed.
Sorel was intimately familiar with this discourse.102 Yet, like Tocqueville, his understanding of decadence was psychosocial, not physiological. Drawing on Vico and Proudhon, Reflections portrays decadence as a moral condition whose outstanding symptom is heroism’s degeneration into intellectualism, physical violence into cleverness (RV 184–89, 211–12).103 The ruling classes in France were once like the captains of industry in America, muscular in their pursuit of collective self-interest. But now there is only “bourgeois cowardice” (RV 62). The ruling classes have surrendered their historical mission as “creators of productive forces” for the pacific “noble profession of educators of the proletariat.” The result is state-sanctioned social peace and the devaluation of moral conviction. In the pursuit of social equilibrium, balance, and compromise, parliamentary democracy has demoralized democratic politics itself.
Subjectively, this decadent condition is experienced as an amputation of our faculty of willing (RV 25). Rationalism and its belief in progress, born in the Enlightenment and now the credo of the Republic, denigrates the practical bases of knowledge and privileges abstract reasoning. Like Péguy’s claim that all things begin as a “mystique” and are debased into a “politique,” Sorel sees political modernity as a fall from intuition into prediction, passion into reasonableness. It amounts to “probabilism,” a people’s habituation into utilitarianism. This degeneration of the will—its deformity into prediction and calculation—disempowers actors because it substitutes for the unconditional will a form of cognitive and moral reasoning fit for deadened workers in capitalism, not citizens in a free society. Why would people participate in a revolution if they predicted their actions would probably fail, particularly if their opponent held the might of the state? Success was unlikely. “Theoreticians of democracy,” with their subsequent calls for reasonable and calculated action, “greatly restricted the field upon which this absolute man may extend the action of his free will” (RV 262).
According to Sorel, Marx already grasped the consequences of this degeneration. A collection of free individuals maximizing self-interest will produce, in the aggregate, laws of social tendency, thereby dialectically transforming the sum of free actions into a determinate system governed by social compulsion. As Marx teaches us,
When we reach the last historical stage, the action of independent wills disappears and the whole of society resembles an organized body, working automatically; observers can then establish an economic science which appears to them as exact as the sciences of physical nature. The error of many economists consisted in their ignorance of the fact that this system, which seemed natural and primitive to them, is the result of a series of transformations that might not have taken place, and which always remains a very unstable structure, for it could be destroyed by force, as it had been created by the intervention of force. 104 (RV 168)
Nineteenth-century thinkers were familiar enough with this phenomenon, but at the end of the century it stirred profound anxiety over human alienation. Sorel wrote Reflections as Weber was formulating his “iron cage” thesis. “The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so,” he lamented in 1905, for the desire for economic well-being was “now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism . . . with irresistible force.”105 The disenchantment of the world, Weber and Marx understood, went hand-in-hand with the dialectical reversal of individual freedom into structural compulsion.
For all of his dissatisfaction with French republicanism, Sorel is at his most republican when he defines decadence as a disease of the will. Sorel’s work in the philosophy of science once led him to understand determinism as something distinct from fatalism. Determinism was a simple statement about the regularity of natural phenomena under conditions held constant. It therefore expanded the jurisdiction of man’s will: determinism guaranteed the natural world’s experimental manipulability by industry and technology.106 The more we understood the determinate regularity of natural phenomena, the more we could subject nature to our will. But in modern democracies populated with deadened citizens predicting rather than willing, humans resemble automatons rather than creative experimentalists. They behave like spineless politicians rather than heroic engineers or producers manufacturing a world for themselves. In the end, parliamentary democracy transforms democratic politics into another version of the Stock Exchange (RV 221–22).
Modern citizens therefore need to rekindle their collective faculty of willing, something prior to both language and utilitarian reasoning. They need a will so primordial that it cannot be captured by the utilitarian morality of bourgeois society. Man “must have in himself a powerful motive, a conviction which must dominate his whole consciousness, and act before the calculations of reflection have time to enter his mind” (RV 206). Or, as Sorel put it in the preface to Ferdinand Pelloutier’s Histoire des bourses du travail (1902), “Teaching the proletariat to will, instructing it by action—this is the whole secret of the socialist education of the people.”107
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“It is here,” Sorel announces, “that the role of violence in history appears as of utmost importance.” Proletarian violence, “a very fine and heroic thing,” something “at the service of the immemorial interests of civilization,” appears “upon the scene at the very moment when the conception of social peace claims to moderate disputes” (RV 77–78, 85).
Sorel presents his turn to violence as an empirical discovery. The second half of the Reflections “tests” whether proletarian violence, an accomplished fact, can ameliorate France’s moral crisis. In fact, Sorel rewrites proletarian violence into a type of redemptive violence. For Sorel agrees with Durkheim, whom he cites time and again, that society cannot cohere through reason alone. It is a moral, customary achievement. Like Durkheim, too, Sorel is convinced that contractual solidarity is an impoverished vision of the social bond. It is morally emaciated.
Sorel differs from Durkheim in seeing, with Bergson, liberty in ineffably voluntarist terms. Indeed, Bergson’s quiet presence in Reflections helps us account for the way Reflections departs from Durkheim’s framework. Citing Bergson’s Essai, Sorel writes,
Bergson, on the contrary, invites us to consider the inner depths of the mind and what happens during a creative moment. “There are,” he says, “two different selves, one which is, as it were, the external projection of the other, its spatial and, so to speak, social representation. We reach the former by deep introspection, which leads us to grasp our inner states as living things, constantly in a process of becoming, as states not amenable to measure. . . . But the moments when we grasp ourselves are rare, and this is why we are rarely free. . . . To act freely is to recover possession of oneself, and to get back into pure duration.” (RV 26)
Sorel weaponizes this argument for politics. If proletarian violence could draw upon a “myth,” a powerful visual memory, it could reactivate our shared powers of self-compulsion. For Sorel, these myths are “a body of images capable of evoking instinctively all the sentiments” of “war . . . against modern society.” They visualize an “artificial world” that is irrefutable, not because there is no evidence against it, but because it is not something to which epistemic procedures of refutation are relevant: “A myth cannot be refuted since it is, at bottom, identical to the convictions of a group . . . unanalysable into parts which could be placed on the plane of historical descriptions.” Sorel therefore claims that “People who are living in this world of myths are secure from all refutation.” That is because myths are not “descriptions of things,” like historical and sociological theses, “but expressions of a will to act.” It was as Péguy said: when the republic was a mystique, it was something to be experienced rather than proved. After all, the falsity of myths “does not prevent us from continuing to make resolutions,” to revolt on their behalf (RV 28–30, 116–18).
According to Sorel, myths have long empowered French socialism. Its reliance on myths has “led many to assert that socialism is a kind of religion” (RV 30). Myths do not have to be religious, but Sorel believes they remind us of the unbridgeable chasm separating religion and science. The mythic element gives religion its unconditional quality, its capacity for inspiring greatness and heroic action. Modern positivistic reasoning and its withering skepticism will never have that. Nobody stakes their life for social science. Nobody dies for a hypothesis. This was something neither Durkheim nor Renan seemed to grasp, no matter how much they sought to demystify and humble religion by studying it positively. “The poetic fictions that we substitute for reality exert a much greater influence on our mind than does scientific knowledge,” Sorel wrote elsewhere. “If scientific truths hardly affect men, we have the faculty of substituting for them an imaginary world that we populate with plastic creations. . . . It is these idols that are penetrated by our wills and are the sisters of our souls.”108 Marxism contains a mythic aspect, too. Because creative production is a mystery of the interior life, it makes sense that socialism has mythic elements since it is a doctrine of producers and creators (RV 139–40). In Sorel’s view, Marxist revisionism needs to recover this mythic core from its disenchantment by the “scientific” Marxists of his day (RV 122-9). The souls of workers are set ablaze not by a deterministic science of history but by Marxism’s mythic heart.
What is important to Sorel is not the true but banal claim that humans can be motivated by the irrational or the fictitious. At stake is the more fundamental issue of knowing whether we are free at all. When we act on mythic grounds, “our freedom becomes perfectly intelligible” (RV 27). To act independently of utilitarian considerations is to come to know the deep psychology of our inner life, “our willing activity” and its “creative moment” that rationalist sciences obscure by viewing our actions retrospectively from the standpoint of completion (RV 25–27). Violence in the name of absolute values, visualized as myth, engenders the “sublime,” the moral and aesthetic quality of action that is proof of our freedom. As he put it elsewhere, “to organize does not consist in placing automatons on boxes! Organization is the passage from order which is mechanical, blind and determined from the outside, to organic, intelligent and fully accepted differentiation; in a word, it is a moral development.”109 The moral regeneration of society requires wrestling a politics of will out of a utilitarian social order striving towards equilibrium.
The classic myths, according to Sorel, were the myths of deliverance that motivated Greek soldiers, the Jews and Christians of antiquity, and the leaders of the Protestant reformation (RV 115–16). In each case, images of imminent catastrophe and redemption motivated the will of the persecuted, and no amount of empirical and worldly persuasion could touch their conviction. These myths exaggerated every conflict, so that every struggle bore world-historic weight (RV 58–63). The history of social movements teaches that all great historical transformations are motivated by such myths, and, even if no myth has been realized to its detail, it does not alter the fact that, moved by such myths, political actors have reshaped the world.
It is no accident that Sorel finds Christian martyrs as paradigmatic. Not any memory or motivating image becomes mythic. What makes a memory mythic is that action in its name produces a morality. If it were simply a matter of motivating men beyond their reason, then we would have to agree with Hobbes that “the Passion to be reckoned upon, is Fear.”110 Turning from Bergson to Nietzsche and Proudhon, Sorel puts the problem thus:
At the beginning of any enquiry on modern ethics this question must be asked: under what conditions is regeneration possible? . . . And if the contemporary world does not contain the roots of a new ethic, what will happen to it? The sighs of a whimpering bourgeoisie will not save it if it has forever lost its morality. (RV 224)
If political actors are not only to regain their “willing activity,” but also ameliorate degeneration and decline, they must be guided by myths which can furnish the world a new system of valuation. They need myths that can let them act in ways exonerated from the demands of base self-interest or instrumental necessity. They need myths that can inspire “sublime” action, for “When working-class circles are reasonable, as the professional sociologists wish them to be,” Sorel scornfully remarks, “there is no more opportunity for the sublime than when agricultural unions discuss the subject of the price of guano with manure merchants” (RV 210). Indeed, Sorel chokes with rage at the prospect of politicians joining a social movement, as happened in the Dreyfusard movement: “no more heroic characters, no more sublimity, no more convictions!” (RV 213). Sublime violence is morally generative, guided by myths of catastrophe and redemption. It is everything opposite to what parliamentary democracy encourages on behalf of “social peace,” realism, compromise, and reasonable debate.
During the nineteenth century, Sorel believed that the revolutionary wars of liberty offered the most powerful myth. That myth, a memory of a newly sovereign people resisting the persecution of a jealous Europe, emboldened generations of soldiers and protected them from petty utilitarian considerations. Indeed, Sorel was struck by the contrast between the “automatons of the royal armies” and the revolutionary army, a “collection of heroic exploits by individuals who drew the motives of their conduct from their enthusiasm” (RV 240–41). The soldat-citoyen was not a machine following orders. He was not a utilitarian, a rational skeptic, a positivist, or an intellectual. Instead, he was empowered by absolute moral conviction. And, like the Christians of antiquity, he fought and died independently of the outcome: win or lose, his soul would be saved. It was as Jules Vallès said of the Paris Commune: “No matter what happens, even if we are to be conquered once more, even if we die tomorrow, our generation will have been consoled.”111 But, alas, the historians of the Third Republic—especially Jaurès and Taine—have disenchanted the French Revolution. By writing its history in positive terms, by rendering the Revolution as if it were any other event, they have abolished its mythic element, revealing the revolution for what it was in fact: a “superstitious cult of the State” (RV 99). These historians have “contributed a great deal to taking all the romance out of these events.” “The prestige of the revolutionary days” has been badly damaged (RV 91). Its myth can no longer sustain free action.
With the revolutionary mythology disenchanted, contemporary French workers needed a new myth to reignite their collective volition. That myth, Sorel argues, can be the catastrophic general strike, the modern heir to the mystique of the French Revolution (RV 243). For modern workers, “the war of conquest interests them no longer. Instead of thinking of battles, they now think of strikes; instead of setting up their ideal as a battle against the armies of Europe, they now set it up as the general strike in which the capitalist regime will be destroyed” (RV 63). The myth of the general strike “awakens in the depth of the soul a sentiment of the sublime,” it inspires action undaunted by victory’s implausibility and thus “brings to the fore the pride of free men” (RV 159). It brings together the need for a collective will with a new system of values that repudiates the intellectualism and decadence of a dying France.112 From its violence will arise an “ethic of the producers for the future” (RV 224).
The dialectical structure of Sorelian violence comes into focus when we formalize the argument this way. Proletarian redemptive violence possesses an instrumental aim: the moral development of France. It is useful because of the decadent condition in which the French find themselves. But that aim cannot be realized if those who engage in violence do so for that reason because it would make their violence a strategic calculation rather than a spontaneous expression of absolute moral belief. Above all else, Sorel wrote the Reflections in the conviction that instrumental activity could not yield genuine conviction. Imposing a uniform language on the provinces, abolishing local traditions, separating church and state, fostering a national culture obsessed with Paris—all of that modernization by the Third Republic could create social cohesion, but only a mechanical type. Instrumental moral engineering from on high did not foster deep conviction, but cynicism. That is what republican politicians seemed incapable of understanding. They could never manufacture a new morality for a democratizing France because they did not understand the nature of morality in the first place.
Sorel hoped that by delving beneath instrumental considerations, proletarian violence motivated by myths could introduce behind its back a new morality for a decadent bourgeois society. This violence was moral, not because it was justified, but because it produced a morality. The normative content of morality was unimportant to Sorel compared to the fact of its emergence. “It is not a matter of knowing what is the best morality,” Sorel explained, “but only of determining if there exists a mechanism capable of guaranteeing the development of morality.”113 In the 1900s, proletarian redemptive violence seemed to be that mechanism. It emancipated men from utilitarian calculations to pursue convictions as ends in themselves. Citing Nietzsche and Renan freely, Sorel believed his Reflections had exposed the true value of violence. No longer destructive, violence could be productive; not nihilistic, it could be value creating; the opposite of selfishness, it was a means of suppressing egoism for collective moral improvement. “The strike is a phenomenon of war . . . in undertaking a serious, formidable, and sublime work, the socialists raise themselves above our frivolous society and make themselves worthy of pointing out new roads to the world” (RV 279–81).
For a generation of Frenchmen in search of a new moral basis for a democratizing society, this vision of redemptive violence was more than an idiosyncratic intellectual synthesis. It provided the most sophisticated argument for why popular, proletarian violence could be a fountain of “concrete” or communal values with which to repair a mechanical society dying from abstractions.
Conclusion
Sorel articulated proletarian violence with the latest philosophical theories of the day, but no matter how new that patina was, its essence was older and familiar. Sorel never concealed that fact. Besides Bergson and Marx, Reflections cited Tocqueville and Proudhon repeatedly. In the end, Sorel was still solving a problem that all his sources tried to resolve: From what was the social bond to be made in an age of democracy? Sorel was always clear, in Reflections and elsewhere, that democratic modernity was an age of social disintegration. “Once again,” Sorel complained, “ideologues set to work to destroy all social relationships; once again, they made use of a dry and erroneous logic in dissolving ideas which could only be given a mythical expression; in this manner, they paved the way . . . for the death of society and for anarchy.”114
Sorel’s reconceptualization of proletarian violence as a mythic, war-like activity impressed readers within and outside of France. Among enthusiasts, however, there was a clear pattern of displacing the revolutionary role of the working class with that of “the nation”—by Sorel himself included. Members of Action française, for example, invited Sorel and Berth to create the magazine La Cité française. Its opening declaration called for men to “liberate French intelligence” from the “ideologies which have taken over in Europe for the past century.” To combat France’s democratic malaise, “It is necessary to awaken the proper virtues of each class, and without which each will not be able to accomplish its historical mission.”115 Sorel signed the manifesto, adding a personal addendum that asked men “to restore to the French a spirit of independence” by taking the “noble paths opened by the great figures of national thought.”116
La Cité française floundered, but its participants took their “Sorelian royalism” into several splinter tendencies.117 Berth would help found the Cercle Proudhon. Founded by Valois of Action française’s Sorelian and Bergsonian factions, the Cercle was an ultra-nationalist league whose 1912 manifesto declared democracy the greatest threat to the modern world. Democracy, the Cercle claimed, substituted “abstract” liberties for “concrete” ones. In doing so, it endangered the individual, the family, and society. The group was charged with “reawakening the spirit,” to defeat “the false science” underlying democracy and capitalism, and to resuscitate the patrie and its “laws of blood.”118 In its pages and in Valois’s speeches, Sorel was repeatedly referred to as “our master.” Sorel, for his part, moved on to Jean Variot’s L’Independence, where he published anti-Semitic essays that alienated many of his former allies on the left while winning him new followers on the right.119 The former Dreyfusard now suggested the whole thing was a Jewish conspiracy, repeating xenophobic platitudes long associated with the French right. He even contributed two essays to L’Action française. His review of Péguy’s book on Joan of Arc praised it for its nationalism.120
Sorel’s friends shared this move toward nationalism. Lagardelle, disillusioned by revolutionary syndicalism’s failures, abandoned his antipatriotism and eventually became the minister of labor under Petain’s Vichy. Hervé gave up his antimilitarism, discovered in nationalism a remedy for social fragmentation, and became a Mussolini enthusiast. Péguy’s fate was short-lived. As literary types are wont to do, he performed his own theory. Increasingly enchanted with death as a form of spiritual redemption, he rushed into war in August 1914 only to die on 4 September from a bullet to the head.
Bergson provides the most shocking example. On 12 December 1914, Bergson explained the war’s philosophical meaning at the annual public meeting of the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques. His lecture weaponized his own philosophy to justify the war in epic, vitalist terms. German political development, Bergson argued, had once pursued “organic self-development.” But Prussian influence—“a people with whom every process tended to take a mechanical form”—perverted its spirit. Under Bismarck’s tutelage, Germany came to incarnate every type of modern barbaric mechanism.
Prussian militarism, now turned into German militarism, had become one with industrialism. . . . Such is the explanation of the spectacle before us. “Scientific barbarism,” “systematic barbarism,” are phrases we have heard. Yes, barbarism reinforced by the capture of civilization. Throughout the course of [German] history we have been following there is, as it were, the continuous clang of militarism and industrialism, of machinery and mechanism, of debased moral materialism.121
Thus Germans had become a people working “to produce the mechanization of spirit instead of the spiritualization of matter . . . marching forward in mechanical order.”122 They had become the dupes of their own industrial development.
Bergson called on his audience to see that life and creativity themselves were at stake in the Great War. “On one side,” there was Germany, avatar of “mechanism, the manufactured article which cannot repair its own injuries.” “On the other,” there stood heroic France, manifestation of “life, the power of creation which makes and remakes itself at every instant.” France had become the manifestation of the élan vital itself. Thus it was no surprise to Bergson that “in a nation thought to be mortally divided against itself, all became brothers in the space of a day” when war broke out. The French instinctively understood the war’s stakes: the triumph of life, will, creativity, organic development, everything opposed to “debased moral materialism.”123
Outside of France, the same nationalistic reinterpretations occurred. In Italy, “Sorelismo” encouraged the reorganization of working class energy into nationalist forms of collectivism. Filippo Marinetti, who also called Sorel “our master,” published his infamous “The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism” in Le Figaro on 20 February 1909. It was a screed against history and the past, both deeply anti-establishment and ultranationalist. It exalted the existential rebirth of the “new man” into the rebellious masses: “We shall sing of the great multitudes who are roused up by work, by pleasure, or by rebellion; of the many-hued, many-voiced tides of revolution in our modern capitals.”124 Touched by Sorelismo, he would later claim that war was “the sole cleanser of the world” and that “I believe that a people has to pursue a continuous hygiene of heroism and every century take a glorious shower of blood.”125 Marinetti was only the most bombastic of those influenced by Sorelismo.126 As Shlomo Sand explains, “Sorel’s presence in Italian culture from the end of the nineteenth century onward was too important to be ignored. The French friend of [leading Italian intellectuals] was known as an important philosopher, not only in syndicalist circles and not just on the political fringes, but also among an entire generation of university graduates in the second decade of the twentieth century.”127 Sorel’s canonization as a member of fascism’s intellectual pantheon was assured with Mussolini’s proclamation that “Who I am, I owe to Georges Sorel.” Finally, despite the fact that Sorel’s engagement with the far right actually only lasted a few years, he was nevertheless mythologized as one of the intellectual forebears of fascism in France, too. Sorel was included by Vichy’s Information Services in a 1941 list of the political thinkers who constituted its pedigree: Sorel and Péguy stood beside Barrès, Maurras, and Joseph de Maistre.128
The easy displacement of the working class by the nation helps bring into view how, rather than representing incommensurate programs, the irrationalist antirepublicanism of the mid-1900s and the nationalist republicanism on the eve of war might be theoretically continuous. They shared a common way of thinking about how violence might inspire men to transcend their decadent, narrow self-interests and reach toward values as ends in themselves. Sorel himself approved of this “discovery” of the exchangeability between the social and the national. An early enthusiast for Mussolini, Sorel wrote that the latter’s genius consisted in discovering “the union of the national and the social, which I studied but which I never fathomed.”129 War’s reconceptualization as an answer to French republicanism’s contradictions transformed the meaning of the Republic. No longer the guardian of social harmony and economic progress, it could now become a mythic source of authority, in the name of which a higher (and inward) freedom could be experienced. In obedience to the myth of the Nation, men would fight not for instrumental considerations, but for civilization, morality, and “life” itself.
For those swayed by Sorel’s arguments, to defend mythologized authority in war was the condition of modern freedom. It was as if, for Sorel and his generation, the Third Republic had suffocated the freedom of the will at the moment that republicanism had finally triumphed over monarchism. If only the utilitarianism of French political culture could be overcome, we could finally have in our possession the proof of our freedom. That was the desire that the turn to violent self-renewal intended to gratify. What violence supplied was not factual datum but psychological conviction in our freedom that the empirical world refused to yield through “rational” reflection.