ONE of the plainest after-results of the Dreyfus affair, into which the socialists[50] as well as the anarchists threw themselves with glee for the superb opportunity it offered to undermine patriotism and destroy the army, has been a cleavage between the more conservative and the more radical elements of the socialist party.
The primary cause of this division may be found in the fact that two socialists (one of whom, M. Millerand, had previously been decidedly militant) accepted portfolios in the coalition ministry which supervised the Dreyfus trial at Rennes and which survived it for a time. This official service had such a sobering effect, both upon the ministers themselves and upon their immediate following, that their socialism became frankly opportunist; and the more radical and doctrinaire among their fellow-socialists felt compelled, because of this, to withdraw from them their support. In like manner the socialist deputies who have helped to maintain the Combes ministry have been constrained to a similar opportunism. So it has come about that the French socialists,
M. VAILLANT[52] who formerly were, broadly speaking, all revolutionary, are now divided into the two distinct and even hostile camps[51] of evolutionary socialists and revolutionary socialists.
With the evolutionary socialists—who are, perhaps, for being the less logical only the more philosophical—this book has, from the very nature of its subject, nothing to do. The revolutionary socialists alone concern us.
It is needless to say that doctrinaire socialism and doctrinaire anarchism are at opposite poles of the world of thought. Absolute authority is as much the ideal of the one as absolute liberty is the ideal of the other. For the anarchist the betterment of society depends primarily on the betterment of the individual, while for the socialist the betterment of the individual depends primarily on the betterment of society. The complete realisation of socialism presupposes the perfection of human machinery, and the complete realisation of anarchism the perfection of human nature. The theories of the vicarious atonement and salvation by character present, in another field, a somewhat analogous contrast. Nevertheless, these theoretically antithetical systems find in their antagonism to actual conditions so many points of contact that it is not always easy for an outsider to determine whether a given revolutionist is an anarchist or a revolutionary socialist, and not always easy, one more than half suspects, for a revolutionist to determine himself in which of the two classes he really belongs.
LÉANDRE’S CARICATURE OF PAUL DÉROULÈDE AS DON QUIXOTE