Stopping a War/Chapter 16
16. The Imperialists Fight Back
This description of the valiant struggle which the French workers have organized against the Moroccan campaign has been written as though radicals in France were free to speak their minds and carry on their propaganda unhampered by government interference. The case is far otherwise. By June 18
Do as we do! Fraternize!
l'Humanité was able to report 117 arrests with numerous prosecutions instituted against other comrades. These prosecutions had been instituted in cities as widely scattered as Paris, Toulouse, Nancy, Tours, Saint-Etienne, Calais, and Lyons. On July 26 l'Humanité reported three comrades imprisoned for two weeks as the result of the calling of a shop meeting.
"The Republic of bankers, bourgeois, liberals and Socialist leaders, accomplices in Moroccan propaganda, has nothing to learn from the monarchist regime of the middle ages. It allows the big legal thieves to run the roads and throws into its dungeons the sincere workers who are struggling against oppression.
"Since the 10th of July Comrades Raux, Le Troadec and Ringuit have been kept in absolute solitary confinement in the prison of Avesnes (Nord)."
Late in September, the Secretary of the Central Committee of Action estimated that there had been about 400 prosecutions and something over 100 convictions. Leaders in the big cities as well as more obscure workers had been prosecuted, but with this difference: the leaders were ordinarily given suspended sentences, while unknown workers in the smaller towns were sent to prison for as long as six months for posting up bills denouncing the war and advising the soldiers to fraternize with the Riffians.
On Monday, October 12, 1925, the Central Committee of Action called a 24-hour general strike as a protest against the Moroccan War. The strike was particularly successful in Paris where it tied up the transport service and brought tens of thousands of workers to the streets in a vigorous anti-imperialism demonstration.