the proletarian movement;[1] they display much more condescension to the Syndicalists than the other Parliamentary Socialists; they are inclined to assert that the workers' organisations will come to understand in the end that they cannot do better than to put themselves under their tuition. It seems to me that Jaurès himself, when writing the Histoire socialiste of '93, thought more than once of the teachings which this past, a thousand times dead, might yield to him for the conduct of the present.
Proper attention has not always been given to the great changes which have taken place since 1870 in the way people judge the revolution; yet these changes must be considered if we wish to understand contemporary ideas relative to violence.
For a very long time the Revolution appeared to be essentially a succession of glorious wars, which a people famished for liberty and carried away by the noblest passions had maintained against a coalition of all the powers of oppression and error. Riots and coups d'état, the struggles between parties often destitute of any scruple and the banishment of the vanquished, the Parliamentary debates and the adventures of illustrious men, in a word, all the events of its political history were in the eyes of our fathers only very secondary accessories to the wars of liberty.
For about twenty-five years the form of government in France had been at issue; after campaigns before which the memories of Caesar and Alexander paled the
- ↑ The reader may usefully refer to a very interesting chapter of Bernstein's book, Socialisme théorique et socialdémocratie pratique, pp. 47–63. Bernstein, who knows nothing of the aims of our present-day syndicalism, has not, in my opinion, drawn from Marxism all that it contains. His book, moreover, was written at a time when it was impossible still to understand the revolutionary movement, in view of which these reflections are written.
