The Virtues of Violence by Duong Kevin;

Author:Duong, Kevin; [Duong, Kevin;]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780190058418
Publisher: OxfordUP
Published: 2020-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Unlikely Bergsonian Alliance

Sorel published Reflections on Violence at an inflection point in oppositional politics under the Third Republic. Since the Third Republic’s origins, socialists and republicans had clashed with their Catholic and royalist counterparts over the proper form of French government. Pope Leo XIII’s 1892 encyclical, “Au milieu des solicitudes,” called for Catholics to reconcile with republicanism, but, even so, the division between the two sides widened.21 These were the years that the Ferry Laws passed, establishing free, compulsory, and secular education in France.22 The traditional study of Latin, Greek, and classical thought was replaced with a new emphasis on science and modern languages.23 These were also the years of the Dreyfus Affair, a watershed controversy concerning a Jewish military captain falsely accused of treason and which exploded into a fundamental dispute over the meaning of France itself. The affair’s fallout culminated in the official separation of church and state in 1905, cementing an equation connecting republicanism, modernization, and anticlericalism.

Increasing anticlericalism coincided with escalating working class radicalism. Waldeck-Rousseau’s government finally repealed the Loi Le Chapelier in 1884, legalizing trade unionism for the first time in almost a century. Working class militancy and anarchist violence swept through Paris, leading to the bombing of several judges and the assassination of President Sadi Carnot in 1894.24 Workers repeatedly went on strike, intensifying anxiety over a revolutionary general strike around the earliest May Days.25 By the early 1900s, when Sorel joined revolutionary syndicalism, working class militancy had been growing for almost two decades. The year that the Reflections came out in Italy—1906—the Confédération générale du travail (CGT) adopted the Charter of Amiens announcing the dominance of revolutionary syndicalism within the workers’ movement.26 Socialism and anticlerical republicanism’s alignment against Catholic and royalist reaction seemed secure.

And yet, almost immediately after publishing Reflections, Sorel and his syndicalist companions began to be solicited by the Catholic right. First George Valois (future founder of the ultra-nationalist Cercle Proudhon and then the Faisceau) and then Maurras (leader of Action française) approached Sorel about the latent filiation they detected between revolutionary syndicalism and the royalist, nationalist movement. Paul Bourget, famed playwright and a member of the Action Française, helped introduce Sorel’s work to the broader right: his 1910 play La Barricade is based on the Reflections. The overtures were not left unreciprocated. In a letter to Maurras on 6 July 1909, Sorel thanked him for a copy of his Enquête sur la monarchie, writing, “It appears to me certain that your critique of contemporary experience well justifies that which you’ve wanted to establish. . . . I have long been struck by the madness of our contemporary authors who ask democracy to do work that none but royalists, full of the sentiment of their mission, could approach.”27

The reasons for this nascent alliance were not reducible to political convenience. To be sure, Maurras and the Catholic right needed labor’s support to continue challenging the liberal republican establishment; for their part, the Sorelian and syndicalist left had adopted a position of irreconcilability with Jaurès’s parliamentary socialism.

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