was supposed to have suppressed class distinction," wrote Joseph Reinach sadly in the Matin of April 19, 1895; "but they spring up again at every step. … It is necessary to point out these aggressive returns of the past, but they must not be allowed to pass unchallenged; they must be resisted."[1]
Electoral dealing led many Republicans to recognise that the Socialists obtain great successes by utilising the passions of jealousy, of deception, or of hate, which exist in the world; thenceforward they became aware of the class war, and many have borrowed the jargon of the Parliamentary Socialists: in this way the party that is called Radical Socialist came into being. Clémenceau asserts even that he knows moderates who became Socialists in twenty-four hours. "In France," he says, "the Socialists that I know[2] are excellent Radicals who, thinking that social reforms do not advance quickly enough to please them, conceive that it would be good tactics to claim the greater in order to get the less. How many names and how many secret avowals I could quote to support what I say! But that would be useless, for nothing could be less mysterious" (Aurore, August 14, 1905).
Léon Bourgeois—who was not willing to adapt himself completely to the new methods, and who, for that reason perhaps, left the Chamber of Deputies for the Senate—said, at the congress of his party in July 1905: "The class war is a fact, but a cruel fact. I do not believe that it is by prolonging this war that the solution of the problem will be attained; I believe that the solution rather lies in its suppression; men must be brought to look upon themselves as partners in the same work." It would therefore seem to be a question of creating social peace by legislation, thus
