the expression of that time—which is organised in advance by the side of the legal State, which considers itself a legitimate before it has become a legal power, and which profits by some slight incident to take up the reins of government as they slip from the feeble hands of the constituted authorities.
The adoption of the red flag is one of the most singular and the most characteristic episodes of that time. This signal was used in times of disaffection to give warning that martial law was about to be set up; on August 10, 1792, it became the revolutionary symbol, in order to proclaim "the martial law of the people against rebels to the executive power." Jaurès comments on this incident in these terms: "It is we, the people, who are now the law. … We are not rebels. The rebels are in the Tuileries, and it is against the factions of the court and the party of the constitutional monarchy that we raise, in the name of the country and of liberty, the flag of legal repressions."[1] Thus the insurgents began by proclaiming that they held legitimate authority; they are fighting against a State which has only the appearance of legitimacy, and they take the red flag to symbolise the re-establishment by force of the real order. As conquerors, they will treat the conquered as conspirators, and will demand that their plots be punished. The real conclusion to all these fine ideas was to be the massacre of the prisoners in September.
All this is perfectly simple, and the general political strike would develop in the same way with similar occurrences. In order that this strike should succeed, the greater part of the proletariat must be members of
- ↑ Jaurès, Législative, p. 1288.
terminated by an order which reinstated the council which had just been dismissed. Jaurès is delightful here: the revolutionary committee, he says, "freed (the legal authority) from all the fetters of legality." This happy thought is a reproduction of the well-known phrase of the Bonapartists: "Sortir de la 1égalité pour rentrer dans le droit."
