Yves Guyot, the distinguished French publicist, told the writer that there was only one compact, disciplined political party in France, the United Socialists. Other than the Socialists, there is no well-organized group in the Chamber of Deputies. The Right, Center, and Left coalesce almost insensibly into each other. Party platforms and party loyalty are replaced by a political individualism that to an American politician would seem like political anarchy.
The Chamber of Deputies is supreme—the ministry stands or falls upon its majority's behest. This gives to the deputy a peculiar personal power. He is only loosely affiliated with his group, is a powerful factor in the government of the Republic, and is directly dependent upon his constituents for his tenure in office. The result is a personal, rather then a party, system of politics.
This remarkably decentralized system of representative governance is counterbalanced by a highly efficient and completely centralized system of administration, which is based on civil service, and outlives all the mutations of ministries and shifting of deputies. The ministry, naturally, has theoretical control over the administrative officials. During the campaign for reorganizing the army and navy, and the disestablishment of the Church, under the Radical-Socialist bloc, a few years ago, General André, acting for the ministry, resorted to a comprehensive system of espionage to ferret out the undesirable officers. Every commune has its official scrutinizer, who reports the doings of the employees to the government.
This, in turn, has created a clientilism. The deputy is needed by the ministry, the deputy needs the votes of his constituency, the local officials need the good will of the deputy. The result is a fawning favoritism that has taken the place of party servitude as we know it in America.
The Socialists have precipitated a serious problem in this relation of the government employee to the state: Can the state employees form a union? There are nearly 1,000,000 state employees. This includes not only all the functionaries, but all the workmen in the match factories, the mint, the national porcelain factory and tobacco plants, and the navy yards. In 1885 and again in 1902 the Court of Cassation decided that "the right of forming a union (syndicat) is confined to those who, whether as employers or as workmen or employed, are engaged in industry, agriculture, or commerce, to the exclusion of all other persons and all other occupations."
The government has, however, countenanced some infringements. A few syndicates of municipal and departmental employees are allowed; but they are mostly workmen, not strictly functionaries. There are several syndicates of elementary school teachers. But they have not been allowed to federate their unions. At Lyons the teachers formed a union and, according to law, filed their rules and regulations with the proper official, who turned them over to the Minister of Justice, and after a cabinet consultation it was decided that the union was illegal, but would be ignored. They then joined the local Bourse du Travail (federation of labor), and Briand, then Minister of Education, vetoed their action. Then a number of branches in the public service, including post-office and customs-house employees, teachers, etc., united in forming a committee "pour la défense du droit syndical des salaries de l'état, des départements et du commerce." This "Committee of Defense" petitioned Clémenceau on the right to organize, and intimated that the great and only difference between the state and the private employer is that the former adds political to economic oppression. This is pure Syndicalism. Under the individual political jugglery that takes the place of the party system in France, the problem is not made any the easier.
2. PROGRAM OF THE LIBERAL WING OF THE FRENCH SOCIALISTS,
ADOPTED AT TOURS, 1902, UNDER THE LEADERSHIP OF JAURÈS
I.—Declaration of Principles
Socialism proceeds simultaneously from the movement of democracy and from the new forms of production. In history, from the very morrow of the French Revolution, the proletarians perceived that the Declaration of the Rights of Man would remain an illusion unless society transformed ownership.
How, indeed, could freedom, ownership, security, be guaranteed to all, in a society where millions of workers have no property but their muscles, and are obliged, in order to live, to sell their power of work to the propertied minority?