CHAPTER III
PREJUDICES AGAINST VIOLENCE
I. Old ideas relative to the Revolution—Change resulting from the year of 1870 and from the Parliamentary régime.
II. Drumont's observations on middle-class ferocity—The judicial Third Estate and the history of the Law Courts—Capitalism against the cult of the State.
III. Attitude of the Dreyfusards—Jaurès's judgments on the Revolution: his adoration of success and his hatred for the vanquished.
IV. Antimilitarism as a proof of an abandonment of middle-class traditions.
I
The ideas current among the outside public on the subject of proletarian violence are not founded on observation of contemporary facts, and on a rational interpretation of the present Syndicalist movement; they are derived from a comparison of the present with the past—an infinitely simpler mental process; they are shaped by the memories which the word revolution evokes almost automatically. It is supposed that the Syndicalists, merely because they call themselves revolutionaries, wish to reproduce the history of the revolutionaries of '93. The Blanquists, who look upon themselves as the legitimate owners of the Terrorist tradition, consider that for this very reason they are called upon to direct
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