Socialism and Democracy in Europe

by Samuel Peter Orth

At the Bordeaux congress, April, 1903, the whole time was given over to this perplexing question. The congress was composed largely of friends of Millerand and Jaurès. By this time the Socialist minister had had three years' experience in the cabinet. The Waldeck-Rousseau premiership had given way to Combes, who was also dependent upon the Socialists for his power.

Millerand had especially offended the Socialists by voting against his party on three separate occasions: first, on a resolution abolishing state support for public worship; second, on a resolution to prosecute certain anti-militarists for publishing a book that tended to destroy military discipline; and, third, on a resolution asking the Minister of Foreign Affairs to invite proposals for international disarmament. He had further offended the Socialists by officially receiving the Czar on his visit to Paris.

The debate, then, was disciplinary rather than doctrinal. But it was political discipline, evidence therefore that a party consciousness of some sort had been achieved. This meeting is significant because it tried to fix definite limits for Socialistic action and committed Jaurès to the narrowing, not to the expanding, policy of the party.

M. Sarrante expressed the Millerand idea when he told the delegates that they were to judge "an entire policy," the policy of "democratic Socialism, which gains ground daily on the revolutionary Socialism, a policy which Citizen Millerand did not start, which he has merely developed and defined, and which forces itself upon us more and more in our republican country." The test of Socialism, he said, was just this "contact of theory with facts."

Jaurès found himself in logical difficulty when he endeavored to reconcile both sides for the sake of party unity. He said that Sarrante was wrong "when he thinks it enough to lay down the principle of democracy in order to resolve, in a sort of automatic fashion, the antagonisms of society.... The enthronement of political democracy and universal suffrage by no means suppresses the profound antagonism of classes.... Sarrante errs in positing democracy without noting that it is modified, adulterated, thwarted by the antagonism of classes and the economic preponderance of one class. Just as Guesde errs in positing the class war apart from democracy."

To Jaurès the problem was to "penetrate" this democracy with the ideas of Socialism until the "proletarian and Socialistic state has replaced the oligarchic and bourgeois state." This can be brought about, he said, by "a policy which consists in at once collaborating with all democrats, yet vigorously distinguishing one's self from them."

Jaurès acknowledged the awkwardness of this policy, which required a superhuman legerdemain never yet accomplished by any party in the history of politics.

Guesde's motion to oust Millerand from the party was lost. And a compromise offered by Jaurès censuring him for his votes, but permitting him to remain in the party fold, was adopted by 109 to 89 votes, fifteen delegates abstaining from voting. This was a very close margin, and in spite of Millerand's promise that he would in the future be more careful of his party allegiance he was expelled the following year from the Federation of the Seine. The stumbling-block was removed.[8]

More important than the party discipline is the question of the economic measures attempted by Millerand. In general he followed the outlines laid down in his Saint-Mandé program.[9] His experience carried him farther away from the Guesdists every year until he repudiated the class war and adhered to social solidarity; substituted the method by evolution for the method by revolution, still espoused by Guesde; and placed the national interests upon as high a plane of duty as the international and the personal. His program of labor legislation was comprehensive, and he succeeded in getting some of it passed into law. These were his leading proposals:

1. Regulating the hours of labor and creating a normal working day of ten hours. He began the reduction at eleven hours, reducing it to ten and a half, and then to ten within three years. In the public works of his own department he reduced the working day at once to eight hours.