Syndicalism is the extreme pessimism of the laboring class. It reached its height about 1907-1908. Portions of France were terrorized, more by its extravagant language than by its overt acts. There was no limit to their superlatives. "Rip up the bourgeois!" "Turn your rifles on your officers!" "Cut buttonholes in the skins of the bourgeois!" were familiar battle-cries. There was so much talk about putting vitriol into coffee, ground glass into bread, pulling the fire-plug out of engines, that finally language came to mean nothing.
The "new commune" thought it was coming into reality with the post-office and railway strikes. We have seen how these outbreaks were met by a Radical government. Since then their ardor has cooled, and their adjectives grown flabby. They are now devoting themselves to organization.
Anti-militarism does not mean merely opposition to standing armies. All Socialists are opposed to the maintenance of armaments. Anti-militarism is opposition to all force used by the state to assert its sovereignty. This includes the police and constabulary as well as the army, and courts and parliaments as well as the navy. Since soldiers and policemen are servants of the state, and since the state is the expression of nationalism, the anti-militarist concludes that his supreme enemy is the nation, the master of the soldier. Anti-militarism is the forerunner of anti-patriotism.
In 1906 this doctrine was so rampant that, on May Day, an uprising was feared in Paris. A prophet had arisen, proclaiming the most extreme doctrines of anti-patriotism. This was Gustave Hervé, a teacher of history from Auxerre. He had spoken the suitable word, and became famous overnight: "The French flag arose from dirt!"; and to the peasantry he shouted, "Plant your country's flag in the barnyard dung-heaps!" He came to Paris and started a daily paper, La Guerre Sociale. Syndicalists and Socialists flocked to his standard, and even Jaurès was compelled to acknowledge his influence.[31]
Hervé has a simple remedy for militarism: "The way to stop war is to refuse to fight." He exhorts his fellow-Socialists to join the army, but fire on their commanders, not on their comrades. He was arrested several times for these utterances and the overt acts that they aroused. Some years ago a Parisian workingman was arrested for an offense against public morals. He protested his innocence and, when released, in revenge killed a policeman. He was promptly executed. Hervé used the occasion for an onslaught upon the government in his paper. He said: "If the working class would display one-tenth of the energy that this workman displayed, the social revolution would not be long in coming." For his imprudence he was imprisoned for a term of four years.[32] His influence is waning, but the words he and his following have planted in the hearts of the conscripts may bear some strange fruit.[33]
VI
While the French Socialists have been prolific in the developing of factions and theories, they have been slow at achieving practical results. As early as 1887 they acquired considerable power in Paris. They contented themselves with establishing a labor exchange and extending a few municipal charities.
The local program, as outlined at Lyons, included: the feeding of school children; an eight-hour day and a fixed minimum wage for municipal employees; the abolition of the "octroi"; sanitary regulations for workshops and factories; abolition of private employment bureaus; establishment of homes for the aged; maternity hospitals; free medical attendance for the poor; free public baths; sanitaria for children of workmen; free legal advice for workingmen; pensions for municipal employees; and the publication of a municipal bulletin giving record of all the votes cast by the councilors.[34]
In 1892 a number of important cities were won by the Socialists, and in September of that year the first convention of Socialist municipal councilors was held at Saint-Ouen. The discussions were filled with revolutionary phraseology. In a few years the ideas of violence were discarded for more practical issues. In 1895, when the municipal convention met at Paris, the time was largely given over to the question of organizing the municipal public service, public hygiene, etc.
In Lille the Socialists began their administration of local affairs by raising the budget from 740,000 francs in 1897 to 1,019,000 francs in 1899. Free industrial education was established for the working people; a municipal theater was opened; school children were fed and clothed; and an attempt was made to regulate the length of the working day and fix a minimum wage for municipal employees. At Dijon the feeding and clothing of school children was regulated by the amount of wages earned by the parents. Free medical aid was provided, and a drug-store was induced to sell medicines to the poor at reduced cost. The local labor exchange was voted an appropriation from public funds.